A former Wyoming sheep rancher looks back.
When Mary had a lot of lambs
Posted inGoat
Is the San Andreas slipping?
Fill the water jugs and put the wrench back near the gas valve, Southern Californians, the Big One’s about to blow! Or not. You never can tell with these things. But geologists are watching closely a “swarm” of recent earthquakes on the Southern San Andreas Fault, the largest of which logged in at 4.8 on […]
Posted inGoat
Slums and tent cities
Urban planners love the fact that slums are “walkable, high-density, and mixed-use,” as The Boston Globe recently reported about Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums. In the article, reporter Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow says many governments are beginning to “mitigate the problems with slums rather than eliminate the slums themselves.” The general consensus is that informal communities (read: […]
Posted inGoat
Salmon and pesticides
Research conducted by NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and Washington State University has discovered that common agricultural pesticides which attack the nervous systems of salmon can turn more deadly when they combine with other pesticides. This development is likely to underscore requirements for no spray buffer zones along salmon waterways – a requirement which agricultural […]
Posted inRay
Newsitos for 3/23/09
Who’s the most reasonable Republican in the Interior West? The latest evidence is here and here. Obama’s Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, is this unique: He has “a Nobel Prize, a YouTube following (for his lectures on climate change) and an unofficial theme song (Dr. Wu by Steely Dan.)” For a glance at the nuclear waste […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
The burning billboard
Grand Junction in western Colorado has long had a problem separating state from Christian church. County commissioners keep trying to pray before public meetings, and public officials approve of nativity displays on public property. Now, a Wisconsin-based organization, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, is striking back with an in-your-face message for drivers. The Associated Press […]
Posted inGoat
“Suns and pulsing moons” of content
Paolo Bacigalupi, formerly the online editor of HCN and now a rising star in science fiction, was just nominated for the 2009 Hugo award (he’s been a Hugo finalist in past years, and has won other sci-fi prizes as well). His story “The Gambler“, in the Novelette category, is a tale about the sordid future […]
Posted inRay
Newsitos for 3/20/09
Birds are in trouble. Pretty much everywhere. Largely thanks to our appetite for energy. “In the last 40 years,” reports AP, “populations of birds living on prairies, deserts and at sea have declined between 30 percent and 40 percent.“ The biggest bundle of federal-lands deals in decades (the Omnibus Lands Bill) — which died last […]
Posted inRay
Western states flex various Congressional muscles
Keep in mind the famous line: “There are three kinds of lies — lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Roll Call, a 54-year-old Washington, D.C. insider magazine, has announced its latest ranking of the political clout of each state’s Congressional delegation. The Western states are ranked: California has the most influential delegation of all the states, […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Cactus carnage
YouTube.com recently fired up people who love the Southwest’s iconic saguaro cactus. All it took was a startling video of a tractor chowing down on a 15-foot-tall plant in the desert near Phoenix, reports the Arizona Republic. Within seconds after the tractor’s mower grabs the cactus at the top, it smashes it down until nothing […]
Posted inWotr
Dust off your survival skills
These are good days for survivalists, those dour predictors of dire times who’ve said all along that we’d better prepare for the worst. With people losing jobs, homes and life savings through no fault of their own, and with natural disasters, oil shortages and terrorists in the news, those long-predicted grim times may have arrived. […]
Posted inGoat
Thank you, BLM
Our dog Bodie, a collie-shepherd rez-mutt mix, may make it to his fifth birthday in October. Or maybe not. He’s a car-chasing idiot and nothing we’ve tried, including a shock collar with five settings that range from tickle to Ted Bundy, has prevented him from racing off after anything on wheels. We all need some […]
Posted inGoat
Salvaging the “Fire Service”
Lawmakers are trying, for a second time, to toss a lifeline to the Forest Service. Ballooning fire-fighting costs and constrictive Bush-era budgets have been squeezing the soul (read: expenses other than fire retardant, hoses and helicopters) out of the agency. But last week, 12 senators and five U.S. reps, most of them from western states, […]
Posted inGoat
Colorado’s job bias complaints soar
Nancy Sienko became Colorado’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission field office director three years ago, in the middle of a surge of discrimination charges. While job-based discrimination complaints grew by 17 percent in the United States in the past five years, the caseload in Colorado exploded by 46 percent in the same time period. Sienko, with […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
The Universe on Blacktop
A family dumpster-dives for cash and satisfaction.
Posted inWotr
Let them eat copper
I am sitting on the sun-blasted South Rim of the Grand Canyon, tracking condors through binoculars and trying to read the numbers on their wing tags as they dip and wobble above and below me. Next to me is Elaine Leslie, the heroic National Park Service biologist who never gave up on condors, even when […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
Changeable weather
The West’s environmental movement got buffeted by strong late-winter winds, both good and ill. First, President Barack Obama has targeted the federal government’s 22-year-old multibillion-dollar effort to bury nuclear waste in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. He vowed to devise “a new strategy” on dealing with nuclear waste, while seeking little money for Yucca Mountain in his […]
Posted inWotr
Calling Hollywood to run the West
Macho Hollywood actor Val Kilmer has starred in more than 40 movies, often playing tough cops and Western gunfighters. He’s probably best known for playing the 1995 Batman and punching out a villain called The Riddler. Now Kilmer wants to become a political hero by running for the governorship of New Mexico. Don’t laugh too […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
Slumdog U.S.A.
In recent months, the big-screen blockbuster love story, Slumdog Millionaire, has brought images of a ramshackle Mumbai slum to millions of American viewers. Although the slum may have been a bit prettified, it did the trick: Moviegoers were shocked, offended and deeply moved by how the poor of other nations live. The movie’s popularity has […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
Raising cows — and kids — in the West
The Family Ranch: Land, Children, and Tradition in the American WestLinda Hussa, photographs by Madeleine Graham Blake272 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of Nevada Press, 2009. The families described in The Family Ranch: Land, Children, and Tradition in the American West are traditional in that they are not “traditional” at all: One mother is single, and […]