Editor’s note: Our cover stories often elicit a lively response from readers, but Matt Jenkins’ story about Navajo water rights really got people riled up in both positive and negative ways. The strongest reaction — and certainly the longest — came from some of the main characters in the story, primarily Ron Milford, who was […]
Navajo water rights: Truths and betrayals
Posted inHeard Around the West
Snarling from the front seat
“Here we go,” said Arco attendant Austin Egland, 20, as a swarm of vehicles pulled up to the pumps at one of southeast Portland’s busiest gas stations. “It’s going to get nuts.” Oregon mandates full-service gas stations, and until recently, nobody snarled at the gas jockey who did the honors at the pump. But with prices […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2008: A fractured party
Home is where the guilt is
Sitting here in the stingy shade of a pinon pine, a few hundred feet from a two-lane road on the outskirts of Santa Fe, I can almost picture the house that will soon be built here — my house. It will be smallish but comfortable, faux adobe (a given in “the City Different”), with two […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2008: A fractured party
Dreaming of a New Deal for nature
Sometimes it’s easier to understand why things are the way they are today by looking back to the past. That’s one common reason to study history; another is to see the possibilities in the past that are no longer present today. And then there are those moments when the past illuminates the present and suggests […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2008: A fractured party
Manufactured homes for the birds
In California, frequent wildfires force conservationists to get creative
Posted inJuly 21, 2008: A fractured party
Watch the river flow
In Colorado, a national park wins a water claim
Posted inJuly 21, 2008: A fractured party
‘Si, se puede’
Activist continues to inspire after 50 years
Posted inJuly 21, 2008: A fractured party
Bears saved from the ‘burbs
Grizzly bears often wander through Montana’s Swan River Valley, as is shown in this satellite map tracking 10 grizzlies’ movements from 2000 to 2004. The bruins, increasingly threatened by development, are expected to benefit from “The Montana Legacy Project” — billed as the biggest private land-conservation deal ever put together. The Nature Conservancy and the […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2008: A fractured party
Solar flip-flops and fish stories
Summer in the West’s deserts always feels a bit chaotic. This summer, it’s more than just the seasonal wildfires and strange cactus blooms — it’s also obvious in the federal government’s waffling on energy policy. Clean-energy advocates were stunned on May 29, when the Bureau of Land Management announced that it would not accept any […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2008: A fractured party
Don’t fence Western Republicans in
Just over two years ago, in a political race that only folks in Colorado noticed, something remarkable happened. State Rep. Mark Larson, the Republican candidate to represent southwestern Colorado in the state Senate, abandoned the race. It wasn’t because he couldn’t win; he had at least a 50 percent chance, maybe more, of beating his […]
Posted inGoat
Why Bush promotes drilling ANWR
This morning on the news show Democracy Now! Amy Goodman asked energy guru Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute why the Bush Administration continues to push drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The question was in response to Lovins’ assertion that oil corporations don’t want to drill in ANWR because […]
Posted inArticles
An ancient place to wonder about our survival
I’ll never forget losing two clients somewhere in the 164,000-acre Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in southern Colorado. On a glorious May morning, the two friends walked too fast ahead of the group I was leading for the Smithsonian Associates Program. The couple disappeared, and the other members of the tour were worried. Anxiously, […]
Posted inArticles
Don’t call plugging wolves hunting
It’s been about three months since wolves in the Northern Rockies were removed from the protection of the Endangered Species Act. To date, at least 20 wolves have been reported killed in Wyoming, where they may legally be shot on sight. That’s an average of one wolf killed every four and half days. Five of […]
Posted inArticles
We thought we were safe
I live close to tall trees in Northern California, and on the afternoon of June 12, I held our mare, Millie, and watched wildfire advance toward the draw not 1,000 away where my wife and I had almost finished building our home. We’d been working on the house for almost four years. The wind pushed […]
Posted inGoat
One way to look at $4 gas
I just endured the most expensive tank of gas I’ve ever bought in my life, and the next one certainly won’t be any cheaper. Like most Americans, I’m not fond of paying $4 a gallon for gasoline. But while I was watching the pump numbers climb at astonishing rate, and remembering the days of my […]
Posted inGoat
Enviros go to court in a last-ditch effort to save the Roan
Cataloguing the wildlife and habitat on the gas-rich Roan Plateau and listing the history of public input asking that it be saved, a coalition of 10 conservation and wildlife groups filed suit today in Denver District Court to halt the Bureau of Land Management’s August 14 auction of 55,000 acres on the plateau west of […]
Posted inGoat
A mouse divided
The twisting tale of the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse took another turn yesterday as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the Wyoming populations of the rodent had become adequately viable to warrant their removal from Endangered Species Act protection. This rather protracted controversy has historically centered around the question of whether or not […]
Posted inArticles
We thought we were safe
Editor’s note: On July 9, Gordon Gregory reports that he and his family were forced to move again. The house they’d found to rent after wildfire destroyed their home on the southern edge of Paradise turned out to be in the path of a new advancing fire. I live close to tall trees in Northern […]
Posted inArticles
Taos’ return to the acequias
Patricia Quintana takes a break from irrigating and leans on her shovel, watching water from the Acequia Madre del Sur del Rio Fernando flow across her newly planted pasture. Two young men from Taos Pueblo patiently guide the water with intuitive skill, using a gentle pull of the shovel here, a small plug of mud […]