This is an amazing intrusion by one religion into a White House family. Or add your own description of its significance. The Salt Lake Tribune reports: President Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who died in 1995, was baptized posthumously into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints last year during her son’s campaign, […]
Some Mormons baptized Obama’s dead mother
Posted inGoat
Deadly efficiency
Since the 1940’s, farmers in the Mexicali Valley in Baja California have relied on leakage from the All-American Canal to irrigate their fields. The 80 mile-long channel runs from the Imperial Dam, north of Yuma, Ariz., along the U.S./Mexico border, ending near Calexico. It diverts about 3.1 million acre-feet of Colorado River water to nine Southern Calif. cities […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Déjà poo
Oh, the irony. For 13 years, the state environmental agency in Vancouver, Wash., searched in vain for the source of pollution in Burnt Bridge Creek and Vancouver Lake. During the last two and a half years, the investigation became intensive, with workers using “a probe mounted with a small television camera to survey 300 miles […]
Posted inGoat
Kickstarting salmon salvation?
After years of legal deadlock over the federal government’s inadequate attempts to recover Columbia Basin salmon devastated by dams, the Obama administration appears to be steering a new course. Ken Olsen just wrote High Country News an extensive analysis of how this new political order — combined with the efforts of a diligent federal judge, […]
Posted inGoat
Blocked by concrete or killed by climate?
In the context of climate change, our energy appetite has shoved us into a corner. We’ve gotten used to a diet of cheap, energy-packed fossil fuels, and it will probably be impossible to find an alternative that doesn’t bring along its own set of environmental impacts: Solar arrays will damage deserts, wind farms decimate birds […]
Posted inMay 4, 2009: Salmon Salvation
Salmon Salvation
Will a new political order be enough to finally bring the dams down?
Posted inMay 4, 2009: Salmon Salvation
The West dissected
Oil and gas companies — despite the efforts of “obstructionist” environmentalists — managed to drill at least 117,339 new wells in 12 Western states (including South Dakota) in the last eight years alone. That drilling rush often skirted regulations and caused significant air and water pollution. That’s according to the Environmental Working Group, which recently […]
Posted inMay 4, 2009: Salmon Salvation
For the love of wasteland
When I was a kid, my parents would load my brother, my sisters and me into our van and haul us off to the buttes and flats of eastern Wyoming and Montana, to search for fossils left by ancient inland seas. I remember those places as all openness, meadowlark song and dusty two-lane highways that […]
Posted inArticles
Put your money where your mouth is
It’s time for environmentalists to fund predators in the same way that hunters and anglers do.
Posted inGoat
Water world
Imagine a water conference focused not on fluvial geomorphology, hydraulics, creek restoration, riparian grazing management, stream bank erosion, non-point source pollution, cumulative water resource impact assessment and the like, but instead on water as a mysterious, magical, extraordinary substance. That’s what former Hopi chairman Vernon Masayevsa had in mind when he conceived “Braiding Through Water: […]
Posted inWotr
To fight fire, fight forest development
Spring is here, and the forest fire season will soon be upon us. Every year,the cost of fighting forest fires increases so that now, firefighting accounts for close to half the Forest Service’s budget. The cost to tax payers has risen to the billions of dollars. How do federal agencies handle this burden? The Forest […]
Posted inGoat
Desert disappearances
In mid-April, writer Laura Paskus told us of a dozen murdered women whose remains were found in the New Mexico desert. This week, the desert has given up additional bodies — one an explorer who disappeared 75 years ago, the other a hiker missing only since November. Everett Ruess, artist, poet and aesthete, was 20 […]
Posted inRay
Watch falcons nesting high in downtown Boise
This is a cool window into the wild — make that, the downtown wild. Two peregrine falcons are trying to hatch four eggs on the 14th story of a bank building in downtown Boise. The Peregrine Fund and Fiberpipe have set up a webcam so we can all watch the falcons. The camera provides a […]
Posted inWotr
Garbage grows well on the border
Another couple of steps, and it would have hit the jogger in the head. A thick nylon rope sailed over the wall separating Arizona from Mexico as if it had wings. A white lifeline with a knot at the end, it hung from the top and dangled to within three feet of the ground. I […]
Posted inGoat
Camelina, Montana’s wonder crop?
Just last September, the FDA granted permission to include two percent camelina meal — a byproduct of producing the fuel — in the mix given to feedlot beef cattle and swine. The meal has protein levels of 40 percent or more, and is also high in Omega-3 fatty acids. Camelina is well suited to Montana […]
Posted inArticles
Wind River revelations
To listen to the audio interview you need to have the Adobe Flash Player installed and Javascript enabled. Lisa Jones talks about Northern Arapaho horse whisperer and healer Stanford Addison, the subject of her book, Broken.
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
Got warriors?
A quadriplegic horse gentler helps reservation boys through their dangerous teens
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
A conflict of values
Yellowstone and the Snowmobile: Locking Horns over National Park UseMichael J. Yochim328 pages, hardcover: $34.95.University Press of Kansas, 2009. Even as another winter recedes, Mike Yochim’s new book on snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park will remain in season. It’s an instant classic — the first comprehensive examination of a notorious nationwide controversy, packed with facts […]