For any scientist, publishing in Science magazine marks a giant success. It’s one of the world’s premier scientific journals, and only about 7 percent of submitted manuscripts are accepted. But Dan Donato, a second-year graduate student at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, overcame the odds. Donato was lead author of a study on the […]
Gutsy science wins the day
Posted inWotr
California steps up to lead the nation
Despite vociferous opposition from the California Chamber of Commerce, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R, and Democrat state legislators cemented a deal on Aug. 30 to pass the much-heralded Global Warming Solutions Act. California is the world’s twelfth-largest producer of global-warming causing greenhouse gases, and the bill commits the state to cutting its greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
‘Big Daddy Drought’ will be a complicated matter
I enjoyed Paolo Bacigalupi’s story, “The Tamarisk Hunter.” (HCN, 6/26/06: The Tamarisk Hunter) It was a good piece of science fiction and intriguing thinking as well. But I need to make a correction to Greg Hanscom’s thinking in his editorial. The Upper Basin states are NOT obligated to deliver an average of 7.5 million acre-feet of […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
A life of brutal grace
Montana writer Swain Wolfe’s memoir, The Boy Who Invented Skiing, might be more aptly titled The Writer on His Way to Being An Alchemical Cartographer. Wolfe’s writing maps transformations, in a style both gritty and magical. Wolfe was born in the hardscrabble West of the late 1930s. His boyhood was spent in the Colorado Springs […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Destroyer of worlds
A group of scientists, a secret city and a weapon of unimaginable power: The story of the creation of the atomic bomb is straight out of a spy novel, but its impacts are all too real. After the weapon was tested at the Trinity site in New Mexico, Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “I […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Endangered Species 101 — in poetry
Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson, father of sociobiology and a relentless biodiversity advocate, once estimated that human gluttony helps exterminate species at the rate of one every 20 minutes. The Dire Elegies laments the plight of North America’s endangered wildlife in poetic detail — but this is more than a disgruntled ode to dying species […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Heard around the West
OREGON Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne recently visited a factory that makes luxury recreational vehicles, those behemoths that look like city buses and sport monikers like Inspire, Allure and Intrigue. In a press release, Country Coach Inc. president Jay Howard said he was pleased with the secretary’s support for his company’s high-end mobile homes, and added […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Underworld
It was August 1997, and I stood beside a manhole cover at Ninth Avenue and F Street in the border town of Douglas, Ariz., with a small gathering of police detectives, firefighters, and city workers. Cones diverted traffic around us. Frank Garcia, a hazardous-materials technician, knelt and ran a tube through one of the silver-dollar-sized […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
The green Republican: back from the dead?
WASHINGTON, D.C. — It looks as though the Endangered Species Act is not going to be eviscerated this year. Neither will the National Environmental Policy Act. On second thought, the government will not sell off millions of acres of the public domain for as little as a thousand dollars an acre. For the nonce, at […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Waste disposal the industry’s Achilles’ heel
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, “Retooling a Leviathan.” The first nuclear reactor in the United States went online at Shippingport, Pa., in 1956. Since then, the nation’s nuclear power industry has generated at least a few hundred tons of spent fuel per year. The highly radioactive waste […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Retooling a Leviathan
The challenges of keeping an aging nuclear infrastructure alive
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
The Hot West
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, “The Fourth Wave,” in a special issue about the West’s resurgent uranium economy. THE NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE MINING AND MILLING In 1983, mining ceased at Kennecott Energy’s Sweetwater open-pit uranium mine (at right) near Rawlins, Wyo. Uranium ore from traditional open-pit or […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Navajo Windfall
Uranium companies anticipate tomorrow’s profits, while yesterday’s workers await compensation
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
The Fourth Wave
Can the West’s uranium towns rise once more?
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
The rural West’s pragmatic booster
Name Larry Swanson Vocation Economist and demographer Age 55 Home Base Center for the Rocky Mountain West, Missoula, Mont. Known for Hair-raising presentations about dramatic shifts in Mountain West demography and economics. He says “We can’t successfully adapt to change without a fuller understanding of it. Good people with good information make good decisions.” Larry […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
States crack down on illegal immigrants
Congress punts until after the elections; states turn ‘nativist’
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Anti-government attack has many fronts
Out-of-state activists mastermind assault on government spending and judiciary
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
When can the BLM say ‘no’?
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “The anatomy of an energy lease.” If a BLM or Forest Service management plan OKs an area for leasing, BLM officials say they have little power to prevent drilling. “The bar (for withholding land from leasing) is […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
The anatomy of an energy lease
How a city’s watershed was opened for natural gas development
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Two weeks in the West
“They’ve had so many C’s I can’t keep track anymore.” — John Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation, commenting to Greenwire on the Interior Department’s announcement that it will add “community” to the “Four C’s” touted by former Interior Secretary Gale Norton. Environmentalists have widely criticized Norton for making a mockery of the original four: […]