New report highlights lack of preparation and gaps in understanding impacts.
Climate change
Posted inGoat
Joshua trees may be migrating north in response to climate change
Last spring, Joshua trees put on a magnificent show in the Mojave Desert. Nearly all at once nearly all of them bloomed, sprouting dense bouquets of waxy, creamy-green flowers from their Seussian tufts of spiky leaves. The bloom was so sweeping and abundant — and such a contrast to the typical pattern, where only a […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Shilling for Big Oil?
In 1993, the mayor of Cordova, Alaska, committed suicide. In his final note, he mentioned Exxon. This tragedy represents the lasting shocks that continue to ripple through many communities still affected by the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill 25 years later. While Krista Langlois’ story was focused on the ecological aspects of the […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
The Latest: Two energy giants forced to clean up uranium mess
Kerr-McGee and Anadarko to put billions into detoxing.
Posted inGoat
Escalante oil spill raises questions about remote clean-ups
After four dusty days spent slithering through slot canyons and scrambling over boulders in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, this morning’s walk is notably refreshing. Steve Defa, a 59-year-old psychotherapist from Escalante, Utah, is leading me up a sandy wash shaded by big ponderosa pines and smaller pinyons. The air is fragrant with pine needles and […]
Posted inGoat
Mojave Desert is an amazing carbon storehouse
Add this to the list of why deserts are awesome: they can suck a bunch of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. For ten years, researchers in southern Nevada piped extra carbon dioxide into the Mojave Desert’s air. Their goal was to learn about the capacity of arid ecosystems to absorb carbon dioxide as we […]
Posted inGoat
New Drought Risk Atlas gives real context to extreme weather
Maybe it’s the grey creeping into my hair, or the lines around my eyes. For whatever reason, whenever the weather gets a little bit weird — maybe it doesn’t snow in December or gets really sunny in January — people ask me if it’s “normal for these parts.” No, I’m not a climate scientist or […]
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
The toxic legacy of Exxon Valdez
We are just beginning to understand the true cost of one of America’s worst ecological disasters.
Posted inGoat
EPA may finally look at coal ash regulation, much needed in Montana
When rancher Clint McRae first saw the swirling green and white ponds of arsenic, boron, mercury and lead-containing sludge 10 miles from his property, it was in a photography show at the Montana statehouse. He first thought they were abstract art, but quickly realized some were aerial photos of the ash slurry left over from […]
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
The Latest: Colorado first state to regulate methane emissions
BackstoryFrom diesel exhaust to leaking pipelines and other infrastructure, oil and natural gas development releases methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO2, sulfur and nitrogen compounds and toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) like benzene. The latter two help form lung-damaging ozone. As drilling booms, Western gaspatch pollution sometimes rivals that of major […]
Posted inGoat
Illegal marijuana cultivation is devastating California’s public lands
Scattered throughout California’s public forests, authorities found 315,000 feet of plastic hose, 19,000 pounds of fertilizer and 180,000 pounds of trash on more than 300 illegal marijuana plantations in 2012 alone. The tally comes from a new video by the U.S. Forest Service, describing the extensive and alarming damage caused by “trespass grows” hidden within […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art: 1775-2012
Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1775-2012Barbara C. Matilsky, 144 pages, paperback: $39.95. Whatcom Museum, 2013 When intrepid artists first ventured to the poles two centuries ago, they returned with paintings and sketches that made the region’s otherworldly starkness seem elegant and timeless. More recently, artists portray a landscape that is running out […]
Posted inGoat
Groundbreaking “Sea Ice Atlas” aids Arctic planning and is really cool to boot
Back in the dark ages of the 1960s, the science of ice forecasting – predicting how much ice will be choking Arctic seas in a given month – was based more on intuition than science. Forecasters relied largely on memory and anecdotal observations, with results about as fallible as you’d expect. Sometimes, the dearth of […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 2014: The Hanford Whistleblowers
Tax carbon, save trees
Thanks for the excellent research and report on “The Tree Coroners” (HCN, 12/9/13). We cannot continue to base our energy policies on fairy tales. It is time to put a carbon tax on oil, coal and natural gas to gradually reduce investment in these dangerous, polluting fuels. With revenue from the tax returned to households, […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 2014: The Hanford Whistleblowers
Drought brings new dust storms to the geographic heart of the Dust Bowl
A dust storm hit, an’ it hit like thunder;It dusted us over, an’ it covered us under;Blocked out the traffic an’ blocked out the sun,Straight for home all the people did run… That’s how folksinger Woody Guthrie described the walls of airborne earth that rolled across the Texas Panhandle during the drought-ravaged 1930s. But he […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t forget what the Exxon Valdez taught us
On the regulatory laxness that led to the spilling of 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound 25 years ago.
Posted inJanuary 20, 2014: Building a More Sustainable West, One City at a Time
Brave new L.A.
Los Angeles is an unlikely model of urban sustainability for the West and the world.
Posted inGoat
Dust-on-snow update: 2013 moisture could mean a dusty spring
Dust has become a major concern for climatologists – and anyone who drinks water that comes from mountain runoff – in recent years. Yet while dust storms are cropping up in the eastern parts of the state this winter, the Colorado Dust-on-Snow Program (CODOS) on the Western Slope has yet to report any dust-on-snow events […]
Posted inGoat
Ocean acidification is already driving changes in Northwestern marine ecology
For a time, Pseudolithophyllum muricatum was king of the kelp forest understory around Tatoosh Island, a rocky blip of land off the northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula. In experimental “bouts” staged there by famed ecologist Bob Paine that pitted the crusty, milky red algae against other species of coralline algae it lived amongst, P. muricatum […]
Posted inWotr
Between a rock and a dry place
How the “mega-drought” facing the region got its start.