Last week, Western conservative congressmen found a great excuse to get all worked up, apoplectic, and downright angry in the gleeful way that Western conservatives seem to have a premium on. President Obama, they said, was ready to make a massive land grab that would turn huge swaths of Western states into federal fiefdoms, off-limits […]
The trouble with monuments
Posted inMarch 1, 2010: The War Next Door
Good night, sweet trees
Sudden Aspen Decline is like a Shakespearean tragedy
Posted inGoat
This’ll buoy your day
A bevy of bright-yellow buoys may soon bob off the coast of Reedsport, Oreg. With each rise and fall of an ocean swell, the flotilla of giant, robotic, $4 million duckies will generate electrons to power TVs and industries. The electricity will travel to an underwater substation, then by cable to shore. What impact will […]
Posted inGoat
The Illusory Cowboy Way
It stands to reason that a state that features a cowboy riding a bronco on its license plate would be partial to “the cowboy way.” And the Wyoming legislature is trying to make it official with a code derived from the 2004 book Cowboy Ethics, by James P. Owen. The proposed code […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
How much does that canyon weigh?
ARIZONA If you don’t laugh or gasp with amazement at least once while reading the boatman’s quarterly review, the off-and-on-again magazine published by the nonprofit Grand Canyon River Guides in Flagstaff, Ariz., you’re way too serious. A recent profile of teacher and guide Steve Lonie, 61, included these tidbits: Asked about the craziest question he’d […]
Posted inGoat
Thumbs up for Wyo’s wind tax
Wyoming has some of the world’s best winds for generating power. And wind energy developers salivate over all those big, wide-open, unpeopled spaces. It’s no surprise then that turbines have been sprouting in those spaces at a rapid rate over the past year or so, upping the state’s total wind generating capacity by more than […]
Posted inGoat
Sam Hamilton’s Vision
Sam Hamilton, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, died last Saturday after suffering chest pains while skiing with friends outside Frisco, Colo. He was just 54. Hamilton had been on the job only five and a half months, but he’d laid out an ambitious new agenda for the agency, pushing it to […]
Posted inGoat
Balancing Nevada
Nevada’s special legislative session, currently in its second day, has been described by many as a dog-and-pony show effort to balance the state budget – most of the real negotiations to extract money from the private sector and cut state spending has been going on behind the scenes in closed-door sessions. But listening to the […]
Posted inMarch 1, 2010: The War Next Door
Down the wormhole
A Colorado cave might hold a key to extraterrestrial life forms
Posted inWotr
Thank you, Utah, for leading the way
Utah’s Legislature has an undeserved reputation for being reactionary. Yet state Sen. Chris Buttars of West Jordan, Utah, was definitely onto something when he proposed dropping 12th grade in order to alleviate the state’s budget crunch and reduce the cost of public education. Buttars’ proposal, combined with the Utah Senate’s recently passed bill to exempt […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Think a shock collar’s cruel?
COLORADO/DOWN UNDER Don’t like your dog chasing wildlife, but think a shock collar is cruel? A trip to Australia just might teach him a lesson. A Jack Russell terrier, owned by a Colorado couple on work assignment Down Under, tangled with a giant lizard. The lizard was fine; the dog was a bloody mess. But […]
Posted inRange
Rolling Boulder up the mountain
“It is now abundantly clear that we have at our fingertips all of the tools we need to solve the climate crisis. The only missing ingredient is collective will.” If any place on the planet has the collective will to put those tools to use, it’s Boulder, Colorado — a city that is probably home […]
Posted inMarch 1, 2010: The War Next Door
Water fallout
Utah’s first nuclear plant won’t float without water rights
Posted inMarch 1, 2010: The War Next Door
Turnover at the top
“Attention, Home Depot shoppers! Aisle 12 has lumber ripped from the heart of old-growth forests!” California environmentalist Mike Brune got the idea to make shocking announcements like that during what he calls his “intercom campaign.” He and his operatives acquired the access code to Home Depot’s intercom systems — punch *80 — and pulled it […]
Posted inGoat
Mules making a comeback
The mule, a sterile cross between a jackass and a mare, is a creature “without pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity.” And it’s also the subject of an article in the current edition (Feb. 15-22) of The New Yorker. The full text is available only to subscribers, although an abstract is available […]
Posted inRange
Tribes and Enviros mixed on Klamath Agreement
In a refreshingly cordial ceremony on February 18, three Native American tribes, the federal government, the states of Oregon and California, and an electric utility signed two agreements that promise to restore the Klamath Basin to health and end decades of rancor among the region’s stakeholders. The documents were signed in the echoing rotunda of […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
Skeletons in the closet
Utah State Archaeologist Kevin Jones knows his bones
Posted inGoat
The scope of a pipeline
Water entrepreneur Aaron Million’s world may course with “Wild Turkey, fast horses and gunfire.” But his proposed Regional Watershed Supply Project — a massive pipeline that would dogleg 250,00 acre feet of water from Wyoming’s Green River across the Rockies, and south to Pueblo, Colorado — may not be flowing toward completion at quite the […]
Posted inGoat
“Green fees”
Conservative groups have often accused environmentalists of being lawsuit-happy, and of making big bucks off their court cases. Wyoming attorney Karen Budd-Falen took that claim even further this fall, asserting that green groups who win or settle federal suits get billions of taxpayer dollars to cover their legal fees — and that many of them […]