It’s a sweet-voiced, normal-looking middle-aged woman who looks sincerely at the camera and tells us that she’s one of millions of Californians who want to pay taxes on marijuana, legalizing her drug of choice and helping to refill the state’s empty coffers (the taxes could fund 20,000 teacher salaries, she says). This is an ad […]
Will money talk?
Posted inGoat
Duwamish not dead
Next week, Cecile Hansen, a direct descendant of Seattle’s namesake Chief Sealth, will travel from one Washington to another. Hansen, the chairwoman of the Duwamish tribe, has been invited to testify in D.C. at an upcoming hearing on H.R. 2678, a bill introduced in the House that would grant the Western Washington tribe the federal […]
Posted inWotr
Riding the rails — upscale
“You been ridin’ the rails?” The man had an old green duffel bag slung over his shoulder. I could tell he’d checked us out as we stood on the lush lawn by the courthouse in Missoula, Mont. On my back I wore a faded red pack, and across my front I’d strapped my 6-month-old son. […]
Posted inGoat
6,000 years without enviro laws
See, we need to mine uranium because there were no environmental laws around 6,000 years ago, when the earth was created. At least I think that’s what Arizona State Sen. Sylvia Allen, R, is saying in this video clip. Huh?
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Of moose and mandolins
AGE 30HOMETOWN Broadview Heights, OhioOCCUPATION Environmental scientist with the EPAHCN READER SINCE 2002 Elaine Lai stopped by High Country News on a sunny day in early May. She works for the wastewater unit of the Environmental Protection Agency, and had driven over from her Denver office to write a permit for the federal fish hatchery […]
Posted inGoat
Condor quandary
A prominent group of biologists and scientists is strongly criticizing conservation plans for Tejon Ranch, a 270,000-acre property north of LA. The ranch is slated for 30,000 acres of housing, industrial and resort projects — which will sprawl across roughly 20,000 acres of critical habitat for the endangered California condor. Tejon’s developers have asked the […]
Posted inGoat
Roughing it the easy way
Summer is officially upon us and for many that means camping, often in the company of family or friends. This summer is an especially good time to get outside to spend a few nights under the stars, sing off-key by the campfire and roast all manner of food on a stick, because the National Park […]
Posted inWotr
Wyoming continues its state of denial
Packs of hungry wolves are decimating Wyoming’s 35 herds of elk — right? Wrong. And yet that’s what some people continue to claim, even as studies repeatedly disprove the accusation. Nearly three decades of the data displayed in Wyoming’s annual reports show that elk numbers, elk harvests and hunter success rates have steadily increased in […]
Posted inGoat
Blue horses: riding on moonlight
I step out of my shack beneath a waxing half moon. Milky light pours down on northern Arizona. Scattered ponderosas march across the bunchgrasses of Government Prairie, casting oval shadows to the west of each tree. As usual, my walk takes me along the fence line. A cloud shutters the moon. Across the barb-wire, two huge silhouettes emerge […]
Posted inArticles
The Hungry Intern: Lunch
Jeff’s zany local food adventure continues with his second meal of the day
Posted inWotr
Go beyond dams to save salmon
Amid the drumbeat of litigation that surrounds Columbia River salmon and the ever-present debate over dam-breaching, it’s easy to miss one remarkable achievement: We now have a salmon-protection strategy that most of the region agrees on. That has never happened before. Most of the affected Native American tribes support it. Three of the four Northwest […]
Posted inWotr
The salmon’s last best hope
If ever there were a news story that supported physicist Hugh Everett’s theory of parallel universes, surely the debacle over the looming extinction of Columbia and Snake river salmon is just that story. While Everett was a doctoral student at Princeton University, in 1957, he devised an elaborate mathematical proof for the premise that an […]
Posted inGoat
The glorious Fourth
Like hundreds of small towns around the West, Paonia will celebrate the Fourth of July with a parade down the main drag (Grand Avenue, in our case) and festivities in the park. It’s the annual Cherry Days event, some 62 years old, awash in tradition and punctuated by occasional sparks of innovation. There will be […]
Posted inGoat
Three strikes for the Forest Service
Yesterday, a federal judge once again struck down an attempt to revise the rules governing national forest planning (see our story “The End of Analysis Paralysis“). Environmentalists had filed suit, charging that the changes would weaken protections for wildlife (by getting rid of the viability requirement) and exempt national forest plans from formal review under […]
Posted inWotr
The battle against beetles
Four summers ago, I enlisted in the war against the pine bark beetle raging on Wyoming’s Togwotee Pass. I started to fight by inspecting every pine on the two-acre lot where my partner and I spend much of the summer. Sawdust at the base of one tall lodgepole indicated that the humpbacked killers had already […]
Posted inArticles
The Hungry Intern: Breakfast
A zany attempt to eat locally, on a starving journalist’s budget. Episode 1.
Posted inGoat
Alternative alternative energy in the West
The West’s renewable energy resources — especially the wind, solar and geothermal energy concentrated on our vast public lands — are in the limelight a lot these days. With that in mind, HCN put together this summer’s special issue around the concept of alternative alternative energy — as in, not just those big solar and […]
Posted inGoat
Catch a falling drop
Who owns the rain? In Colorado, you generally didn’t have any right to use the rain that fell on your property. But that’s changing, as the New York Times explained in a recent article. Now some property owners will be able to use rain barrels legally. Colorado’s water laws are arcane […]
Posted inJune 15, 2009: Let's Get Small
The Renewable Energy Landscape
A look at renewable energy in the West