In 1995, during one of the never-ending controversies about federal management of oil and gas drilling, a prominent Western industry group made a radical suggestion. The group — the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States or IPAMS for short — called for the end of federal land. Diemer True, a Wyoming oil baron representing IPAMS, […]
Understanding an oil group
Posted inHeard Around the West
AZ End-o’-days
The Divine Administration’s headquarters sits on 165 acres in the Santa Cruz River valley south of Tucson. There, according to the Arizona Republic, Gabriel of Urantia oversees a religious order of about 100 followers, who believe that Adam and Eve were aliens placed on Earth – or Urantia – 38,000 years ago to help earthlings […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
Supreme beings
After gutting campaign finance, the high court may go after the Commerce Clause
Posted inBlog
Wilderness environmentalism
The environmental movement’s most singular and stunning achievement is the introduction into human history of an awareness of and care for other animals and ecosystems beyond human needs. The refusal to reduce the earth to a storehouse of resources, the insistence on the value of whales beyond meat and redwoods beyond lumber, the love of […]
Posted inBlog
“Messy and unstructured, relentless and global”
Environmental justice law is unlike most other areas of the law. It may not even be amenable to definition as a single, discrete field of practice. Instead, environmental justice lawyering is as close as we come to modern-day alchemy: lawyers work in alliance with communities to summon forth justice from a shifting patchwork of unfavorable […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
The paradoxical call of the wild
Dogs Vamped by She Wolves Are Leaving Homes. This was a headline that ran — not on the cover of Cosmo, describing some new coupling trend between more-than-foxy older women and ugly younger guys — but in Western newspapers in 1924. It was meant literally, and it gives insight into the battle against wolves that […]
Posted inGoat
Rubber Slugs and iPhones
Big news for anyone who’s ever gone sprinting and hollering through the woods after the disappearing rear of an enterprising black bear: We’ve now got a scientific assessment of bear hazing. Rachel Mazur, of Sequoia National Park, has a paper in last month’s Journal of Wildlife Management on what the National Park Service likes to […]
Posted inRange
It’s time to put aside the fairytales
It’s tough being a wolf these days. Despite barely having recovered from being indiscriminately hunted to near extinction during the last century, wolves continue to face the rampant persecution and vitriol of yesteryear from legislators, corporations, citizens and even state and federal governments. Most recently, Utah’s Senate has passed a bill that (if enacted) would make […]
Posted inBlog
Tom Bell, Spaghetti Westerns and HCN
“Once upon a time” is a better start to a bedtime story than it is to a retrospective of 40 years of High Country News. But have you ever watched the old movie “Once Upon a Time in the West?” It’s Italian director Sergio Leone’s best spaghetti western, a three hour epic about the struggle […]
Posted inArticles
The Forgotten Mesa
Without basic services, life on Pajarito Mesa is all about surviving.
Posted inWotr
Without big government, where would we be?
Like most people who use email, I get an extraordinary amount of SPAM, plus a large volume of canned messages from both sides of the political spectrum, forwarded by well-meaning friends who think I will agree or who think I should agree with the e-mail’s premise. Most of these messages get a quick hit on […]
Posted inRange
The 2008 Farm and Ranch Survey is out!
The USDA has released the results of the 2008 Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey. The survey is taken every five years nationwide. Much of the regional information below is based on comparison of the 2003 and 2008 surveys. Nationwide the number of irrigated acres increased over the five year period from 52.5 million acres in […]
Posted inGoat
Beanstalk 2013
WANTED: thrill-seeking gardeners with a love of heights. Experience washing skyscraper windows a plus. Such an ad might appear in Portland, Oreg., by 2013. Thanks to government stimulus funds, the city’s main federal building will be renovated with giant plant-bearing trellises down its western side. These “vegetated fins” will shade the building in summer and […]
Posted inRange
Wolverines, snowmobilers, and the ESA
Last week, the Idaho Statesman newspaper published an article about recreational vehicle impacts on wolverines in the Payette, Boise, and Sawtooth National Forests. The piece focused on a study investigating questions about the extent to which snowmobilers and Snowmobilers, backcountry skiers, and advocacy groups all have a stake in the outcome of this study. The […]
Posted inWotr
Bear witness to climate change
One thing I love about the West is that so many people know their elevations. I doubt that many citizens of Atlanta take pride in their thousand-foot-high city. But everyone knows that Denver is a mile high, and most of us are well aware of the elevation of whatever high pass we have to cross […]
Posted inGoat
Green energy isn’t always popular
My part of the world gets way too much wind along with plenty of sunshine. It also has some unusual geology which allows the earth’s inner heat to come closer to the surface. Our wind, despite the window-rattling power of its gusts, is too sporadic to attract much commercial interest in developing this […]
Posted inWotr
How to play the gardening game
In his book “Jaguars Ripped my Flesh,” Tim Cahill tells us that he “sits around at home reading wilderness survival books the way some people peruse seed catalogs or accounts of classic chess games.” As a seed-catalog peruser, I took offense at first at being lumped in with the chess nerds. But after giving it […]
Posted inGoat
Is this the nuclear renaissance?
It’s been a big week for nuclear power. First there was the conspicuous nuclear shout-out in the State of the Union last Wednesday, followed by the White House announcement, on Friday, that the Energy Department will explore new solutions for coping with nuclear waste. Then, yesterday, the administration released its budget proposal, with a plan […]
Posted inGoat
Less parking, better air — a la carte
I salivate over wide-open spaces. Bliss, for me, is a sprawling view of distant ranges and crisp horizons—or a free, fortuitous curbside parking spot five minutes before a crowded event. Yet my environmental better half knows that “free parking” isn’t free, and that there are plenty of other types of euphoria to be had, like […]