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 […]
What the Crandall Canyon mine disaster tells us
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 […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Today, Bozeman; tomorrow, Billings
Some folks just don’t want to see past the stereotypes. Regarding “The Aroma Of Tacoma” by Karen Mockler, how would Ms. Mockler like it if I advertised via a syndicated column in over 40 newspapers across the West that her town of choice, Billings, Mont., suffered perpetual Missoula insecurity syndrome and was populated by nothing […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Give Arnie and diesel their due
Things are slanty all over. It’s no secret that my fellow granola leftys don’t like Hummer-driving meatheads (and John Mecklin really doesn’t) (HCN, 7/23/07). While it’s true that hydrogen is a sham, Schwarzenegger deserves a little more credit than HCN seems willing to give. Your article somehow omitted that the MTV episode that he appeared […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Old West meets Old World in Big Horn
Shane Winkler pops open a can of Bud Light and stuffs a wad of Copenhagen into his mouth before turning on the sound system at the Big Horn Equestrian Center just outside Sheridan in northern Wyoming. It’s a hot July afternoon. The only shade is in the top rows of the small set of bleachers […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Testing the waters
Waves and tides may one day provide electricity to homes – but a backlash is building
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Scientists and the city
Urban ecology studies in Phoenix teach lessons for the West’s arid metropolises
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
The Sultans of Spuds
Battered by their own success, farmers form the ‘OPEC of Potatoes’
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Two weeks in the West
“I pray that this power plant won’t be built,” Louise Benally told the crowd in the Burnham Chapter House – a sort of Navajo version of a town hall – on July 24. Benally and more than two dozen others, mostly Navajo men in big cowboy hats and older women in velveteen dresses and turquoise, […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Fire: Friend and foe
Thirteen years ago, I witnessed a new, hard-edged ecology that operates in the West. I was sitting in the stands of our small rodeo arena, watching irritated bulls throw off a succession of young men like so many rag dolls, when a bolt of lightning ripped the sky, striking the juniper-clad ridge across the valley. […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
The Weed-wackers
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Bonfire of the Superweeds.” Sue Rutman had been warned: Buffelgrass, she’d been told, loved disturbance. Pulling up the weed would only overturn more desert soil, spread seeds, and encourage its expansion. But as the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument botanist watched buffelgrass cover longer […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Dear friends
AMERICAN BIKERS, IRISH DOGS, BRITISH WALKERS Jay Bagley came to town for the “Top of the Rockies” BMW motorcycle rally, held in Paonia every year. Jay says he’s fallen in love with this part of Colorado and might move here from Sacramento, Calif., where he works in Medicaid fraud reduction. Another biker, Vern Holm of […]
Posted inWotr
Wind power will blow your mind
Wind power has all the ingredients of a good brain-buster. The energy that windmills produce helps to preserve the environment, but the giant wind generators themselves have to be added to the environment. Wind power is making us redefine what we consider pollution. Windmills may not billow black smoke that require scrubbing or leak hazardous […]