The news from Appalachia coal country, where at least 25 miners died and four more remain missing in a huge underground coalmine explosion earlier this week, is unimaginably grim. Not since 1984, when 27 perished in a fire at Emery Mining Corporation’s Orangeville, Utah, mine have so many died in a mine accident. It’s even […]
An age-old story of the high cost of coal
Posted inGoat
The Trouble with Wilbur
There’s nothing like a feral pig to blur the line between free food and pest management. Days after the Arizona Daily Star published a map showing feral pig populations around the state (along with a note that Arizona doesn’t require licenses for hunting feral pigs), a dozen hunting parties converged on one of the hot […]
Posted inWotr
Sometimes water can cost way too much
The multibillion dollar proposal by the aptly named Aaron Million to pump water from the Green River in Wyoming, and then pipe it to the Front Range of Colorado by way of a privately funded project he calls the Regional Watershed Supply Project, may never overcome the many objections to it. But if it does, […]
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
Pioneer stock
Finding the ivory-billed woodpecker of the plant world
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
More grousing
Greater sage grouse — whose numbers have declined by 90 percent over the past century — deserve federal protection under the Endangered Species Act, said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on March 5. For now, though, they won’t get it: The feds say they have to deal with other species first. As non-decisive as it was, […]
Posted inGoat
Best. Conference. Ever.
Ahem. The Eagle has landed. At approximately fourteen hundred hours today, an eighteen-wheeler rolled through town here in Paonia, Colorado, right past the front windows of High Country News, on a curious mission. Naturally, we went out to investigate. And so we discovered … the ConferenceBike. Pause, please, and meditate on this photo.
Posted inGoat
Oh, deer
Living where “the deer and the antelope roam” may be fine in theory, but I’d prefer that the roaming happen somewhere besides my small back yard. Alas, this winter and spring, muley doe and two fawns appear back there with some regularity — two or three times a week. It’s not as though […]
Posted inWotr
Winterkill
Not far from where I live, in northwestern Montana, the land opens up and the people disappear. Skiing through tall trees toward a ridge, we see two ravens chasing a magpie through a glade up ahead. A moment later, three bald eagles appear, all sitting at the very top of trees. These normally quiet woods […]
Posted inRange
Privatizing conservation
The State of California is in the middle of a process that will result in the state’s Fish and Game Commission designating an array of near shore marine reserves along the length of California’s coast. The reserves are intended to preserve and restore marine resources including commercially valuable fisheries. The California Department of Fish and […]
Posted inGoat
Public lands “blackmailer” returns
Loathed by government officials, recreationists and environmentalists alike, Colorado developer Tom Chapman is at it again. His latest deal exemplifies his typical modus operandi: buy inholdings in remote backcountry, threaten to develop them, and get big payouts from federal agencies desperate to protect pristine public lands. Now he’s purchased 103 acres of mining claims in […]
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
March Madness in Indian Country
Wyoming Indian High School dominates the basketball court
Posted inGoat
Voyage of the Plastiki
Two weeks have passed since 12,000 plastic bottles began riding the waves from San Francisco to Sydney. This is no mini Pacific Garbage Patch–the bottles form the bulk of the Plastiki, a 60-foot sailing boat built from recycled materials. Its big, flashy journey is intended to raise awareness about manmade pollution in the ocean. Perhaps […]
Posted inGoat
Big cats come and go
In early March, a mountain lion chased a Jack Russell terrier into a house near Salida, Colo., surprising a woman and her five-year-old son, who sat coloring with crayons at the kitchen table. Luckily, they were able to dash into a bedroom. When Division of Wildlife officials arrived and subdued the lion, they found the […]
Posted inBlog
Un-stimulated
It didn’t take a recession to bring hard times to California’s San Joaquin Valley. Consider these sobering statistics courtesy of the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley, a group convened by the governor in 2005 to bring the Valley’s limping economy up to speed: *Average per capita incomes are 32.2 percent lower than the […]
Posted inWotr
A devotee of a new kind of retail therapy
My daughter and I found the perfect sofa on the way to school today. It was just the size and color I was looking to add to the living room. Unfortunately, someone had dumped it upside down in the mud of my neighbor’s front yard. Apparently it took too much energy to have a garage […]
Posted inGoat
Not so CX-y now
A 2008 lawsuit filed to protect Utah petroglyphs from oil and gas drilling has just been resolved — and the settlement has big implications for the West’s public lands. Announced Wednesday, the decision means that the Bureau of Land Management can no longer fast-track energy development in cases where there are “extraordinary circumstances” — environmental, […]
Posted inRange
Hunting season may be over but wolves are hardly in the clear
Yesterday marked the close of the first official hunting season for wolves ever to take place in America’s lower 48 states. More than 250 wolves were killed as a result of Montana and Idaho’s hunting seasons and more than twice that number have been killed overall since wolves lost federal protections in May of 2009. […]