The years-in-the-making Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 finally became law last month. The act designates more than 2 million acres of new wilderness, plus 1,100 miles of new wild and scenic rivers, and it also includes an increasingly popular model for resolving grazing conflicts on public lands. In two Western states — Oregon […]
Ranchers now have a way out
Posted inWotr
A poisoned Montana town gets its shot at justice
I got goose bumps recently, when Judge Donald Molloy read the charges against W.R. Grace & Co. and five of its former executives in a Missoula courtroom. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. For the first time since 1999, when the news broke that hundreds of people had died from asbestos-contaminated vermiculite mined in […]
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
A ghost of the 1970s
Bipartisan politics reappeared in Washington, D.C., in March. It felt like a ghost from the golden age of the environmental movement, the 1970s, when Republicans and Democrats worked together to pass major environmental laws. The new Omnibus Public Land Management Act assembles 166 deals related to conservation and natural resources (plus an unrelated 167th for […]
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
Go Sell It On The Mountain
Will the down economy help Crested Butte’s owners end a 30-some year controversy and expand the ski resort?
Posted inWotr
Let’s remember the children
As dollars from the Economic Stimulus Act arrive here in the eight Rocky Mountain states, most Westerners seem to be talking about spending that money on shovel-ready jobs. The projects we hear about are intended to repair our crumbling schools, bridges, roads and sewers, or to restore our abused landscape. We know, too, that money […]
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
More than you think?
How much water is left in the Colorado River to develop? Few questions are as complex — or as important to Colorado and its Western Slope. Matt Jenkins’ recent article, “How Low Will It Go” contains a pair of mischaracterizations that need to be corrected (HCN, 3/02/09). First, the implication that the Colorado Water Conservation […]
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
Golly, nukes for everybody!
The “innovative” proposal for many small “pocket” nuclear reactors sounds like the gee-whiz propaganda from the 1950s that every modern family would own a personal atomic car and reactors would produce power “too cheap to meter” (HCN, 3/16 & 3/30/09). In reality, it is an attempt to greenwash a failed technology. One lesson I have […]
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
Apparently Schwarzenegger wouldn’t agree
I found it interesting that “Tarp Nation” followed so closely on the heels of your article about Amtrak (HCN, 3/16 & 3/30/09). I often ride the Denver-Sacramento and Bakersfield-Sacramento routes when visiting family. Whenever the train enters the outskirts of any sizeable town, observant riders can see slum settlements at regular intervals along the tracks, […]
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
“The officially sanctioned helpless”
Your story “Tarp Nation” seems to condone living in squalor, while trying to convince the reader that the plucky residents of these communities are creative, self-reliant and just happen to suffer because of the government’s harshness, the mainstream’s condemnation and society’s refusal to embrace the positive potential of this new social movement, “informal urbanism” (HCN, […]
Posted inGoat
The Water Theft Bill
This week, the Montana Senate is voting on legislation that could give gas companies much more control over water pumped out of coalbed methane wells in the Powder River Basin. Senate Bill 505, if passed, will legitimize what many Montanans consider “water theft.” A single coalbed methane well can produce around 16,800 gallons of water every day. Water […]
Posted inArticles
Invading the silence
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Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
The desert that breaks Annie Proulx’s heart
Wyoming storyteller gives an unvarnished view of the Red Desert
Posted inHeard Around the West
Kraut, morels and moose
Writer Ari LeVaux went to an unusual swap meet in Missoula recently, only he called it a “meat swap.” Here were the rules: Any food that was acquired or “put away personally” was fair game. Deer steak, moose meat, dried morel mushrooms, organ-meat sausage, pickled peppers and sauerkraut were some of the food stuffs on […]
Posted inRay
Montana wrestles nation’s boldest gun-rights bill
If you have a taste for irony and political dilemmas, this is delicious. We all know how Western Democratic politicians get more popular by coming out for gun rights. They’re packing guns and twirlin’ and shootin’ … partly because some are gun folks, and mainly because it’s good for the image. It differentiates them from […]
Posted inGoat
A fine feathered re-do
Over the years, we’ve run a lot of stories about the spotted owl (most recently, Spotted owl or red herring? and Hostile Takeover). The threatened raptor, which depends on old growth forests, was blamed for the decline of logging in the 90s, and timber companies have continually pushed to reduce the bird’s protection. Both enviros […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Kills the Unconventional
Facebook just doesn’t get it: Native Americans don’t always have names like Dick Jones or Jane Smith. In fact, something like Robin Kills the Enemy is not only OK, it’s traditional. Not understanding that, Facebook disabled the site account of 28-year-old Robin Kills the Enemy, a Lakota woman from the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South […]
Posted inGoat
The whites are back in town
Whites are moving back into the city of Denver, and people of color are sprawling into suburbia, according to a case study in the Sunday edition of The Denver Post. Hey, that’s the same story in Washington, D.C. Dubbed “Chocolate City,” D.C. is due to transition from majority black to majority white in 2014, according […]
Posted inGoat
The irony of home brew
At first glance, I thought it was an April Fool’s Day joke, the front-page headline in the Denver Post which announced that “Utah to ease liquor laws.” But upon further reading, I discovered that it was no joke. As of July 1, Utah’s liquor laws will resemble those of most other states. You’ll be able […]
Posted inWotr
Must our water always flow uphill toward money?
I’ve given up drinking bottled water. It’s so wasteful: Up to three quarts of water are used for each quart bottled. Also, it consumes 67 million barrels of oil annually on its journey from source to consumer, and sends 2 million tons of plastic bottles to landfills. It’s especially wasteful in arid country like the […]
Posted inRay
Sage grouse robot video!
Even though today is April Fool’s Day, I think this is not made up. Scientists studying sage grouse behavior in Wyoming have built an amusing but useful grouse robot. The robot looks like a grouse, if you have bad eyesight. It runs on a little railroad track that goes into a lek (mating ground). The […]