IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE that in the late 1880s, Bannock, Mont., was one of the fastest-growing, most wildly energetic communities in the West. The mining town was even proposed as the territorial capital. Today, it is a ramshackle collection of abandoned buildings surrounded by mine tailings and open only as a quiet tourist attraction. It […]
Are tomorrow’s ghost towns sprouting today?
Posted inSeptember 3, 2007: A Climate Change Solution?
The good and bad of peak-bagging
“Above this memorable spot, the face of the mountain is … a maze of yawning chasms and gullies, in the angles of which rise beetling crags and piles of detached boulders that seem to have been gotten ready to be launched below. But the strange influx of strength I had received seemed inexhaustible. I found […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2007: A Climate Change Solution?
Clean energy activist reflects on corporate influence in New Mexico legislation
NAME: Ben Luce AGE: 44 Resume: Ten years at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on nonlinear dynamics; co-founder and former director of the New Mexico Coalition for Clean Affordable Energy; founder, Break The Grip. Minimum number of Task Force seats Governor Richardson appointed him to: Five (all relating to energy.) Minimum number of harmonicas carried […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2007: A Climate Change Solution?
Border restoration’s odd couple
Law enforcement and environmentalists are working together to save southwestern Arizona wetlands
Posted inSeptember 3, 2007: A Climate Change Solution?
The new land rush
In the West’s mountains, old mining claims are the latest real estate hotspots
Posted inSeptember 3, 2007: A Climate Change Solution?
A dustup over weed control
The BLM’s plans to spray nearly a million acres with herbicides have some environmentalists fuming, but many biologists and land managers welcome the policy
Posted inSeptember 3, 2007: A Climate Change Solution?
Dear friends
MEET US IN SALT LAKE HCN invites Salt Lake City area readers to join us for a dialogue on Thursday, Sept. 13. We’ll help the Utah Science Center kick off a series of discussions on “Choices.” Several panelists, including David Nimkin, National Parks Conservation Association chair; Dianne Nielson, energy advisor to Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman; […]
Posted inWotr
When smoke gets in your life
On the way to Gardiner, Mont., the sunrise was a surreal red. All day, smoke squatted in town. Walking around on the eve of my writing class, seeing people through the haze, felt vaguely apocalyptic; what I imagined nuclear fallout might be like, or Pompeii after the eruption of Vesuvius. Ash landed on parked cars […]
Posted inWotr
The inevitable fires next time
Welcome to the West’s new world of fire. With six out of the last eight years among the worst 10 fire seasons since 1960, it is a world where every year is what we call a “bad” fire season. Or maybe it’s the “indefinitely bad” season, as Tom Boatner, the BLM’s chief of fire operations […]
Posted inArticles
The great American cat fight
Phantom cat of forest and desert, the jaguar slinks through its surroundings, an optical illusion of tawny, sun-dappled fur. It manifests and evaporates with hardly a trace amid the darkness of South American rainforests and the shattered canyons of the arid Southwest. By the 1980s, however, a century of predator control, hunting and habitat loss […]
Posted inWotr
It’s time to break the silence on the Iraq War
Forty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: “A time comes when silence is betrayal. And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.” King’s opposition to the war in Asia was immediately denounced as “demagogic slander” by Time magazine. But others also spoke out. George W. Ball, undersecretary of State, told […]
Posted inWotr
What the Crandall Canyon mine disaster tells us
In March, I testified before a House subcommittee on energy and mineral resources about the impact of climate change on public lands. There were seven witnesses, and one was Robert Murray, founder of Murray Energy and owner of the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah. This, as everyone knows, is the mine that recently collapsed, burying […]
Posted inWotr
Just put an asterisk on the whole region
I wrote this column in 2 minutes and 17 seconds. I typed more than 300 words per minute, including the time spent getting the ideas out of thin air and editing myself, running the spell-check, and the ultimate writer’s reward, patting myself on the back. It’s a new world record for column writing. How can […]
Posted inWotr
Tomorrow’s ghost towns are sprouting today
It’s hard to believe that in the late 1880s, Bannock, Mont., not far from present-day Dillon, was one of the fastest-growing, most wildly energetic communities in the West. The mining town was even proposed as the territorial capital. Today, it is a ramshackle collection of abandoned buildings surrounded by mine tailings, and open only as […]
Posted inWotr
Why bad people do good things for our public lands
There I was out on the high prairie that angles up to the mountains of the Front Range of Colorado, digging out Mediterranean sage with a tool of torture called the pick-mattock. I couldn’t have been paid to do this. Not only was I there, but over 100 other people were there, too. The weather […]
Posted inWotr
Peak bagging and how to avoid it
“I could not rest until the topmost stone was beneath my feet,” said John Muir. That’s right, nature-loving boys and girls: John Muir was a peak bagger. Long celebrated for his founding of the modern environmental movement and his exuberant love for the small wonders of nature — “not a sparrow falls to the ground […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Heard Around the West
ARIZONA Paradise Valley, a posh town of 14,500 people in the Phoenix area, boasts houses that cost more than $20 million, and it’s nothing if not persnickety about urban necessities such as cell-phone towers. The town’s planning commission recently ruled that the first tower to be erected must wear a disguise as a palm tree […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Sculpting a reason to love the wind
NAME Gary Bates AGE 61 HOMETOWN Amsterdam, Montana OCCUPATION Sculptor, former farmboy KNOWN FOR Creating huge kinetic sculptures SAYS “I don’t know if these pieces are going to work. I hope they are. But you never know for sure.” WHAT THE HECK DOES “KETCHERSCHMITT” MEAN, ANYWAY? It’s a made-up word combining “catcher’s mitt” and “Messerschmitt” […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Living precariously with wolves and cattle
Through the end of June last year, we got along fine with the wolves. I was working on a ranch in Montana’s Madison Valley, where the wolves ran elk to exhaustion in the high country while yearling cattle fattened on the lower pastures of the ranch. Peaceful coexistence with predators seemed within our grasp, and […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Keeping up with the Joneses
Isabelle Groc’s article, “When the Joneses go solar,” would have been more properly titled “When the Joneses build an 8,000-square-foot monument to excess consumption on five acres, they go solar to make the neighbors think they give a hoot about the environment” (HCN, 7/23/07). Couldn’t Ms. Groc have found a home that reflected consideration for […]