Drilling holes into the earth is an audacious act with an ancient history. Many centuries ago, the Chinese were drilling wells 1,000 feet deep. In the 1860s, as the giant marine mammals grew scarce, American whalers came ashore and began harpooning the planet, hoping to strike “rock oil.” Earth may resemble a big rock, but […]
Drilling with Charlie
Posted inAugust 4, 2008: Hostile Takeover
Catastrophe or nature’s process
In The Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens Edited by Charles Goodrich, Kathleen Dean Moore, and Frederick Swanson124 pages, softcover: $15.95. Oregon State University Press, 2008. Twenty-five years after Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, Oregon State University sponsored a four-day trip into the blast zone. Scientists, writers, artists and academics came […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2008: Hostile Takeover
Advice from a rancher: The risks make it fun
The other day I heard a newsman refer to “these perilous times” for businesspeople. No kidding, I thought. The gloomy picture featured rising costs, increased property taxes, deepening recession, employee demands for more insurance and benefits, market risk — the list went on. I thought of the risks we’ve faced in ranching, with more to […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2008: Hostile Takeover
The wandering lepidopterist
It’s a sadly typical spring day in Seattle, all scudding clouds and spitting rain even though the forecast promised sun. On top of that, Dr. Robert Michael Pyle has some bad news. “Marsha won’t be joining us,” he says. I’m sorry to hear it. Marsha has been at Pyle’s side for more than 30 years, […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2008: Hostile Takeover
Drilling, wolves, guns and plutonium
“Drill here, drill now,” has become something of a political mantra in this election-year summer of high gasoline prices and frustrated consumers. Tack on “pay less,” and it’s the bumper-sticker slogan for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s national campaign to expand domestic energy production. Many Republicans now running for Congress hope their enthusiasm for drilling […]
Posted inGoat
Agricultural water pollution on the line
The Bush Administration has been trying since 2005 to change Clean Water Act rules so that agricultural interests can dump polluted water into public lakes and streams without obtaining a permit. Each step of the way, Florida environmentalists represented by Earthjustice lawyers have filed lawsuits to block the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) from implementing the […]
Posted inGoat
Denver to vote on impounding immigrants’ cars
The text of Denver Initiative 100, which goes before voters on August 12, uses the phrase “illegal alien” four times. Still, supporters insist it has nothing to do with immigration. The initiative would require Denver police to impound the car of anyone caught driving without a license, unless they believe the driver simply left his […]
Posted inGoat
Senate Dems call for resignation of EPA’s Johnson
Back in 2005, the Senate withheld its confirmation of Stephen Johnson as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency when he refused to cancel the Children’s Environmental Exposure Research Study, which proposed using human subjects to examine the effects of pesticides on children from infancy to age 3. When he agreed to cancel the study, the […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2008: Hostile Takeover
Hostile takeover and a conservation quandary
Barred owls are driving threatened spotted owls out of their territory. Is it time to shoot them?
Posted inGoat
Survival or bust
The Quino checkerspot, a pretty patchwork butterfly native to the scrubland of southern California, is not doing so well. The butterfly has been listed as endangered since 1997 and only a few small populations remain. But a group of biologists have a suggestion for how the Quino—and other organisms on the brink of extinction—might be […]
Posted inWotr
The next fires will be anytime, all the time
The warm wind of July 14, 1988, signaled the beginning of a remarkable series of fires that burned into Americans’ consciousness. Before that day, the managers of Yellowstone National Park and nearby national forests were confident that their efforts to restore natural fire were a success. After that day, the concept of the natural would […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2008: Hostile Takeover
Measuring Tahoe’s blues
Sediment and pollution obscure lake and light
Posted inWotr
Gas industry secrets and a nurse’s story
This July, an emergency room nurse named Cathy Behr wanted to tell Colorado’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission the story of how she nearly died after being exposed to a mystery chemical from a gas-patch accident. Regulators said she wasn’t scheduled to testify and they didn’t want to hear it. But anyone concerned about natural […]
Posted inWotr
Saddling up for a good cause – at last
I accidentally set my brother, Walt, on fire when I was 3. In fifth-grade, I swiped his buffalo-head nickel collection, blowing it on candy and RC colas. During college, I unintentionally sank a drill bit into his thumb, sending him to the emergency room. After 50 years of my shenanigans, you’d wonder why he still […]
Posted inGoat
Utah fishermen no longer required to levitate
In Utah, as in many states, the public has a right to use the water in rivers for recreation. But the land underneath the state’s rivers is often privately owned. So what happens when someone touches the bottom? The question floated all the way to the Utah Supreme Court thanks to Kevin and Jodi Conatser, […]
Posted inGoat
Las Vegas offers rural Nevada the dry end of the straw
Las Vegas is a thirsty city in a state that’s entitled to a measly four percent of the Colorado River’s annual in flow. That means that it’s had to be at turns creative and bare-knuckled in getting the water it needs to keep up with explosive population growth. Lately it’s been leaning towards the bare-knuckled […]
Posted inGoat
New hcn.org
For the past 9 months I have been working with the wonderful folks over at ONE/Northwest and the Web Collective, both out of Seattle, on the new hcn.org. Built on the powerful open-source platform Plone, the new site gives us greater control over our content, more flexibility, and simply put, the ability to do more […]
Posted inArticles
Taxed off the farm
New Mexico’s rural property tax laws could price out longtime residents