Yesterday, the BLM issued leases for natural gas drilling on the Roan Plateau. The leases were auctioned off about six weeks ago for a record-breaking $114 million. Environmental groups, hunters, anglers and Colorado politicians, including Governor Bill Ritter, opposed the BLM’s management plans, advocating for stronger protections on the unique and beautiful sanctuary in western […]
Roan battle rages on
Posted inGoat
Ground gaming the system
The latest Colorado poll, conducted by Rasmmussen on September 28, has Obama up by one point. But is the race as close as it seems? Maybe not. There’s been some recent speculation, of course, that the the polls are skewing Republican because pollsters can’t get in contact with young voters who don’t have landlines. But […]
Posted inWotr
Wyoming should take the lead in using CNG
Wyoming is one of the largest natural-gas producing states, so why isn’t the state leading the nation in powering vehicles with this abundant fuel? If the price of gasoline stays high and a natural gas-powered car can run on $1-to-$1.25 per gallon-equivalent cost, however, I think we’ll see the light: We’ll understand that it makes […]
Posted inGoat
The bailout
In an election year already filled with topsy-turvy events and serial comeuppance, the stock market yesterday lost an average of $3 million per minute and chickens came home to roost on their dwindling 401K nest eggs. The headlines were screaming: Massive credit contraction…worst drop in U.S. stock market since 911…strangled economy…serious recession looming. But despite […]
Posted inArticles
One species versus 1.8 million others
I’m a student of roadkill. I keep an informal tally of the carcasses I spot on the roadside – what kind, how many and where — and I note the splatters that accumulate on our car windshield. They’re an indication of the diversity and abundance of animal and insect lives along the unnatural transects we […]
Posted inGoat
Palin the hostile
A recent piece by native rights attorneys Lloyd Miller and Heather Kendall-Miller — getting wide play in Native and alternative media — indicts Sarah Palin on Native issues in her home state. Alaskan Native villages are spread across 375 million acres, many of them roadless. Subsistence foods — fish and game — still comprise 60 […]
Posted inArticles
Clean coal is an oxymoron
After Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer made a fiery speech at the Democratic Convention, some people suggested that he’d make a fine secretary of Energy, no matter who wins the election. But although Schweitzer, a Democrat, may give a good speech, his near-fanatic promotion of coal should give one pause. The West has long suffered the […]
Posted inWotr
Confessions of a former Hillary supporter
It’s true: I’m a recovering Hillary supporter. A part of me felt I owed it to Hillary as a fellow product of an all-female education. When anyone bashed on the pantsuits, I called them “practical.” When they said she was cold, I said she was “objective.” Another part of me just wanted to see a […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Mr. Toad’s wild ride
Tiny toads, each only as big as a nickel, got a little help negotiating a bike trail at the Sunriver Resort in central Oregon. The Western toads were migrating from a man-made pond to a pine forest behind a line of condos. But first the little guys had to hop across an asphalt bike lane, […]
Posted inWotr
Trapped by fire on a mountain lookout
Updated September 29, 2008 The fire season of 2008 will long be remembered as the most destructive ever recorded in New Mexico’s Manzano Mountains. The human-caused Trigo Fire destroyed 59 homes after erratic winds pushed it from the west to the east side of the mountain range some 70 miles southeast of Albuquerque. Lightning ignited […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
All in a day’s work
It was Aug. 8, 2008, in high-altitude Evergreen, Colo., and Mike Speck was in a hurry because — at 8:08 that evening — he was going to be married. Speck, a 54-year-old contractor, was filling a camper with water and didn’t notice the black clouds building above him, until, wham! Lightning struck, the charge going […]
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Diamonds in the Rockies
Molybdenum. Uranium. Silver, gold, copper, coal. You name it and Colorado has probably mined it. Now a company called DiamonEx wants to exploit those mineral-rich mountains for diamonds. The Australia-based company is seeking a permit for exploratory drilling in Larimer County, along the Front Range. DiamonEx says they hope to mine as many diamonds as […]
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Keeping wolves out of trouble
It sounds like common sense — require ranchers in wolf-recovery areas to clean up their dead cattle, so that the predators don’t develop a taste for livestock. Now, that may happen in eastern Arizona’s Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. The forest is included in the struggling Mexican wolf reintroduction program. Only about 50 Mexican wolves now roam […]
Posted inWotr
The roadless issue rambles on through the courts
President Bill Clinton sought to end the debate over 58 million acres of roadless national forests with a rule published in the last days of his administration. But because he issued his rule in the face of the outright anger of some Western governors and with little pretext of engaging his opponents, the roadless issue […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Heretic? You got that right.
A Republican businessman from the town of Scapoose in northern Oregon is running an unorthodox campaign for Congress: He’s publicly backing Democrat Barack Obama for president as well as Democratic Senate candidate Jeff Merkley. “I’m sure I’ve been branded by the GOP base as some sort of heretic,” says Joel Haugen. “He’s got that right,” […]
Posted inGoat
Late aspen, early melting
Despite the best efforts of many concerned friends, I remain something of an agnostic on whether climate change is caused by humans or is part of a natural cycle. After all, on my daily walks with the dog along the Arkansas River, I can gaze across our wide valley and stare up the narrow valley […]
Posted inArticles
Audio: A conversation with Alexandra Fuller
To listen to the audio interview you need to have the Adobe Flash Player installed and Javascript enabled. Alexandra Fuller, whose recent book The Legend of Colton H. Bryant is a portrait of a worker who died in Wyoming’s energy fields, talks about the connection between people and land; about why she left her native […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Lest we forget…
Lest we forget, as the feisty environmental writer Michael Frome reminds us in his book, Rebel on the Road: And Why I Was Never Neutral, environmental reporting was sparse back in the early 1960s. Turner Catledge, then managing editor of the New York Times, was urged by one of his editors to create an environmental […]
Posted inWotr
Republican ticket is just more of the same
One needn’t go far to hear how the gun-slingin’ and moose-eatin’ vice presidential pick of John McCain is going to snowmobile to victory this November on the backs of rural Western voters. She is a member of the National Rifle Association, grew up in the West and likes to fish and hunt. So, a lot […]
Posted inGoat
The East is fracked
The interior West has long been a source of raw materials for the rest of the nation. Copper mines gauge the hills of Arizona; long trains run day and night hauling low-sulfur coal from the massive mines of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin and Colorado’s West Elk Mountains to the East Coast; gasfields on the Pinedale […]