Green energy isn’t always popular
Still snowed in
An editorial in last weekend’s Arizona Daily Sun described the paper’s “awe” at emergency response to the epic storm that dumped more than four feet of snow on Flagstaff. But while life in the city goes back to normal, stranded residents in Indian country are still digging out. The West’s recent rash of apocalyptic weather […]
Borderline environmental justice
Recently, the New York Times reported on immigration and drug traffic across the U.S.-Mexico border where it crosscuts the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona, a story HCN covered in-depth in 2007. The situation is horrific: strangers knock on doors to entice and scare tribal members into smuggling, while pervasive Border Patrol inconvenience and intimidate the […]
The grammar of picture writing
Explaining the “locator symbols” in petroglyphs
They say it’s your birthday
Two years ago I celebrated my 40th birthday. I wasn’t thrilled about turning 40 (who is?) and couldn’t convince myself that a celebratory shindig was a good idea (all that attention). But in her quiet way, a close friend convinced me it needed to happen. On an April evening, friends filled the upstairs of the […]
Marijuana stores get no respect
Cimarron, a ranching town of 1,000 in New Mexico, says it does not want a marijuana store. Residents cite the seaside town of Arcata in California where the Arcata Eye says people have finally had it because over 1,000 homes there have turned into “grow houses.” Crime has spiked, newcomers are protecting their stash with […]
The easy way to purify our geography
If it’s named for a scoundrel, change the namesake
Western resource extraction, now and then
For four years Boston-based photographer Eirik Johnson, a Seattle native, travelled around Washington, Oregon, and northern California taking pictures of loggers and fishermen. His photographs, collected into the series “Sawdust Mountain,” are on display at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington until this Sunday. The series depicts the visual impact of natural […]
A cheer for Interior Secretary Salazar’s new approach
As an economist, it startles me when representatives of the business community ignore basic economic relationships such as supply and demand. Yet oil and gas interests have been doing exactly that recently. It is hard to believe that there is anyone in the country who does not know that we are in a deep recession. […]
Drive that Hummer
Is it a car or a statement?
Big cat boondoggle?
Alan Rabinowitz might be the last person you’d expect to denounce the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s recent decision to designate critical habitat for jaguars. Rabinowitz was instrumental in creating the world’s first jaguar preserve in Belize in the eighties. He’s the head honcho of Panthera, an organization with the “sole mission” of protecting wild […]
‘The environment … is where we live’
A New Mexico neighborhood offers a case study in the successes, and failures, of the environmental justice movement
Poltertics, 2010
Will this fall’s election chronicle a Republican resurrection in the West?
Counties take steps to build a new energy economy
The November elections came and went without the hoopla of a year ago, but voters in western Colorado quietly approved measures that could set the stage for a clean energy revolution. Rural mountain communities in Gunnison, Eagle and Pitkin counties voted to support clean, homegrown energy and energy efficiency. These clean energy investments are a […]
Ancient conversations
Interpreting the enigmatic patterns of Southwestern rock art.
Sundance, Redford and Obama
The Sundance Film Festival is underway at Park City, Utah. This year the annual event is being covered by the alternative media news program Democracy Now!. Today, Democracy Now aired an interview with Sundance founder and LA native Robert Redford. Redford was asked to describe Utah where he owns land and a home. He did […]
The costs of coal
A controversial new report on the economics of Powder River Basin coal was written by a University of Wyoming economist — and paid for by the Wyoming Mining Association. As you might expect, the report provides some boosterish facts about coal:
Of routes and rotors
Before migrating to Paonia, I spent time in the backwoods of southwestern Oregon, occasionally on the porch of a cabin with a colony of bats living under its shingles. Each afternoon, the walls began to creak and moan like old floorboards. Then the bats — hundreds of furry clamshell bodies — would slip out, unfurl, […]
It may be the apocalypse. . .
2012? Whatever. Clearly the apocalypse is nigh-er than that. First, there’s the weather to consider. Wave after wave of Pacific storms have left Southern California’s beaches a creepy Mad-Maxian mess of shopping carts, plastic toys and other manmade flotsam that’s washed down from various megalopoli. It’s been the worst series of storms in five years, […]