Tamarisk, a feathery green Eurasian shrub with pink flowers, was brought to the West a century ago to control erosion. It quickly became a pest along desert rivers from California to Colorado, sucking up water and choking out native willows and cottonwood. To get rid of it, federal agencies use herbicides, backhoes and chainsaws. But […]
File under Unintended Consequences
Posted inGoat
U.S.-Mexico border arrests sharply down in 2008
Mexico-U.S. border arrests have fluctuated widely in the past 30-plus years, from 675,000 in 1976 to 1.7 million in the mid-1980s, down to a million in the late-’80s, back up to 1.6 million in 2000. In 2008, the Border Patrol caught 705,000 people trying to enter the U.S. illegally, down 44 percent from 2006. Officials […]
Posted inWotr
Obama picks a moderate
It’s not surprising that Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity and Jon Marvel of the Western Watersheds Project are disappointed in Barack Obama’s choice for Interior secretary, Colorado Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar. The two activists have tapped the federal courts for the last two decades in their efforts to stop overgrazing, logging and […]
Posted inWotr
The only thing we have to fear …
Maybe because Christmas and the New Year are traditional times for celebrating a sense of community, it’s also a good time to acknowledge some of the rough patches in the rural Shangri-La where I live: the growing demands at the local food bank, dissension in the town of Joseph, Ore., over our governance, the 23 […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
Life during wartime
Refresh, RefreshBenjamin Percy256 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, 2007. In Refresh, Refresh, his second collection of short stories, Benjamin Percy examines the fallout of the Iraq war on the people at home. Set on Oregon’s high plateau, these tales are shaped by the tension between the banal and the bizarre. The collection’s eponymous knockout story describes […]
Posted inWotr
You better watch out, that’s for sure
I’m as sentimental about Christmas as the next guy, but after years of listening to the holiday carols and Christmas standards, I find some troubling messages embedded in those songs. At the heart of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, for instance, is a small herd of really nasty reindeer. The song was written by an advertising […]
Posted inGoat
Dreaming of an oily (and gassy) Christmas
Check out this scorching Mother Jones blog post from HCN freelancer Keith Kloor. Keith talked to a senior BLM official about the Bush administration’s energy free-for-all in Utah: Also see Keith’s HCN stories about more Utah shenanigans from the BLM, Dust on the Rocks and (Un)clearing the Air. And these other articles: Trashing the earth, […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
For the love of stuff
I don’t find most theistic versions of the afterlife compelling, but over the last few weeks I have become convinced that if there is a hell, it surely involves shopping for a car. After an epic quest, my wife and I finally decided on a 2-year-old Subaru, which will allow us to travel Wyoming’s wintry […]
Posted inGoat
What goes around comes around
When the Bureau of Land Management announced last month that hundreds of thousands of acres of Utah’s redrock country would be up for oil and gas leasing, the agency made something of an end-run around public process. It announced the sale on Nov. 4, when everyone was distracted by the presidential election, and it failed […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
A blaze of bullets
Twice a year or so, says a fire chief in Medford, Ore., a blaze breaks out in somebody’s house and bullets start banging as well. “Actually, it’s not uncommon for us to deal with ammunition during fires,” says Medford Battalion Chief Ken Goodson. A recent Jacksonville fire was a doozy, though, because James Frings sold […]
Posted inGoat
Real ecoterrorism
Back in 1998, the group Earth Liberation Front (a.k.a. ELF) set a series of fires at Vail ski resort in Colorado and caused $12 million in damage. Authorities at the time called it the most expensive “ecoterrorism” to date. Burning stuff down is not an activity I personally condone (unless we’re talking about Burning Man), […]
Posted inWotr
This is the time to make land management make sense
The federal deficit is already gigantic, and it keeps getting bigger in order to stimulate the plummeting economy. But times of crisis are also times of opportunity. This is the perfect chance for the Obama administration to improve the way the federal lands are managed. Consider the big three land agencies: the Forest Service, the […]
Posted inWotr
Forest Service morale sinks to a new low
When Dave Iverson first came to the U.S. Forest Service’s regional office in Ogden, Utah, in 1980, he was drawn by a love for the outdoors and a desire to do good work on the public lands. But after spending almost three decades on planning and policy, he quit last year just shy of retirement. […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
Change we could believe in
The federal deficit is already gigantic, and there’s serious talk of making it even bigger in order to stimulate the plummeting economy. But times of crisis are also times of opportunity. This is the perfect chance for the Obama administration to improve the way the federal lands are managed. At the moment, increased budgets for […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
(Un)clearing the air
Westerners will breathe the legacy of Bush’s BLM
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
Trashing the earth, and the truth
This is the last time I will ever tell this story. For an environmental reporter, the past eight years have produced a jungle of topics to explore at will, but the lessons learned there could not have been more unpleasant. This is the story of one of those lessons. In April of 2004, Field and […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
As Interior Turns
An eight-year soap opera in which federal officials screwed the environment, the taxpayers, and each other.
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
Fighting for forests
Arthur Carhart: Wilderness ProphetTom Wolf294 pages, hardcover: $34.95.University Press of Colorado, 2008. A fiery conservationist who came of age in the late 1910s, Arthur Carhart had a penchant for highlighting the contradictions in the environmental movement, not to mention the conflicts of interest at the U.S. Forest Service, which employed him at a young age. […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
Western wish list for Obama
The hopes and worries of 11 key Westerners
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
Fa-la-la-la
We’re taking a two-week publishing hiatus in late December, like we do every year. We’ll be working on new stories, saying farewell to our latest excellent crop of interns, and singing carols. Our traditional Open House won’t be held this year, though — another victim of the economic meltdown. Enjoy the holidays and look for […]