Muddy Creek is nondescript, a narrow stream trickling through the sagebrush steppe of southern Wyoming. But like many Western waterways, it carries selenium, a natural poison that seeps from rocks and dirt and accumulates in the food chain much as mercury does. Both humans and animals need tiny amounts for good health, but too much […]
Climate change
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Something in the desert water?
While Arizona’s homegrown political traditions tend more toward a conservative Blue Dog Democrat, moderate stance, there has, since Goldwater, arisen in Phoenix and the Valley a somewhat hard-core Republican population of voters (HCN, 4/30/12, “Money talks — and votes”). For some reason, when voters retire and move to Phoenix or Scottsdale from the East Coast, […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Selenium concentrations
Selenium concentrations, in milligrams per kilogram, detected in stream bed sediment samples collected from Muddy Creek and tributaries in Carbon County, Wyoming.
Posted inWotr
Rachel Carson’s redwood dreams, and 50 years of “Silent Spring”
As a child of the 1950s, I remember hot summer nights that were only relieved when a truck came by spraying a cool mist that would kill mosquitoes. We kids ran after that mist like it was the ice cream truck. Several years later, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962, parents […]
Posted inGoat
The time for oysters
Next time you find yourself in the San Francisco Bay Area, which for your own sake will be soon, I hope, there are a few things you ought to do. Walk across the Golden Gate, go one of the Thursday “NightLife” events at the Academy of Sciences and drive north to Tomales Bay and feast […]
Posted inApril 30, 2012: A Mexican rancher struggles to shift from cattle to conservation
Low snowpack means a dry summer for the West
The winter of 2012 produced more apocalyptic records than hip-hop MCs on the eve of Y2K. March was the warmest on record for the Lower 48, averaging 8.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average. In the West, La Niña predictably soaked and chilled the Northwest while leaving the Southwest warm and dry. The positive […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
When Peter Gleick fell, California’s water world lost big
updated 4/17/2012 On Feb. 14, an anonymous source released internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a conservative Chicago-based nonprofit that casts doubt on global warming science, to more than a dozen climate bloggers. The documents revealed Heartland’s major funders, including the Charles Koch Foundation and many large corporations, detailed a nearly $1.6 million program to […]
Posted inWotr
A future of big fires and tiny bugs
My dad was a Forest Service ranger, one of the battle-hardened generation just stepping back into real life from World War II. Rangers like him moved to tiny little towns like Luna, N.M., and Custer, S.D., to work 24-hour days, and their wives were often their chief assistants and sometimes even served as firefighters. The […]
Posted inGoat
The unbearable lightness of winter
Maybe it’s because my meteorologist mom used to load our family into our old Dodge van to venture forth onto the flats east of Boulder, Colo., every time there was a severe nighttime thunderstorm to park beneath and ogle (a van, she and my dad reassured my brother and I, makes a pretty good Faraday […]
Posted inRange
A toxic cocktail runs through it
The Yakama Nation calls for additional remediation of the Willamette River.
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: climate action and water wars
Not all environmentalists have recognized their starvation for fiction depicting climate doom, but when they do, Paolo Bacigalupi has a book for them, “The Drowned Cities.” Bacigalupi told his friend and former High Country News editor in chief Greg Hanscom, in a recent Q&A, about his befuddlement regarding the lack of “ecocollapse” parables in popular […]
Posted inArticles
Margaret Hiza Redsteer uses Navajo memories to track climate change
Margaret Hiza Redsteer has long known the Navajo Nation. Of Crow descent, she grew up near the Montana-Wyoming border, and in the 1970s moved to an area of Arizona then shared by the Navajo and Hopi tribes. She married a Navajo man and they had three children. While living on the reservation, she often heard […]
Posted inGoat
The burning begins
It’s the beginning of April, and fire season in the West has started early, thanks to a warm, dry winter. The Lower North Fork fire south of Denver, Colo. is now about 90 percent contained; so far it’s burned more than 4,000 acres and killed three residents. The state’s Front Range is suffering through one […]
Posted inRange
Should a Washington utility prop up a polluting Montana power plant?
By Jennifer Langston, Sightline.org Attention Puget Sound Energy customers: Don’t feel bad if you missed the connection between your electricity bills and today’s headlines about reducing air pollution in scenic Montana. It’s not obvious. But news that the federal government wants owners of the Colstrip coal plant to invest in expensive new equipment to reduce […]
Posted inGoat
Swiss, salt flats and the sublime
Crown Burgers’ parking lot, in downtown Salt Lake City, is filled at lunchtime with the smoky aroma of burgers and grease and exhaust pouring out of the long line of cars waiting for some grub. It was not my choice for dining, but it seemed like the appropriate place to go given the company: A […]
Posted inGoat
Bark beetles in double-time
Bark beetles have always been part of Western forests, cycling from massive outbreaks into periods of low activity. But the current beetle outbreak is unprecedented – it has killed 30 million acres of lodgepole, ponderosa, jack pine and whitebark so far, in a swath from New Mexico up into Canada and even Alaska. Now, scientists […]
Posted inGoat
Catching up on carbon capture projects
On a recent bike ride home from Paonia’s Paradise Theater, where the evening film was Melancholia, Lars Von Trier’s surreal goodbye to planet Earth, I observed the starry Colorado sky like a born-again tramp and only slightly avoided succumbing to the dolor from the film’s creeping commentary on humanity’s desperate plight against a doomed existence. […]
Posted inMarch 5, 2012: The Zombies of Teton County
Two degrees warmer and rising: A review of A Great Aridness
A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American SouthwestWilliam deBuys384 pages, hardcover: $27.95.Oxford University Press, 2011. Cracking open yet another book about climate change requires a certain amount of resolve. Most readers already know the facts: In the past 50 years, average temperatures in the United States have risen 2 degrees […]
Posted inRange
Climate debate hearkens back to days of the bison
An old bison bone on my desk has me thinking about air pollution, climate change and the American mind. You remember the basics from history class: Tens of millions of bison roamed the Great Plains. Along came Manifest Destiny and market hunters shot them for hides, tongues and just to get the great beasts out […]
Posted inGoat
Uncontrolled release
This scintillating-looking snippet of paperwork was pulled from the PR portion of a materials containment plan filed with the state of Colorado by Suncor Energy’s oil refinery in Commerce City, which produces about 90,000 barrels a day of gasoline, diesel and asphalt. It was supplied to High Country News by Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians, […]