By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House When the 20-year withdrawal of nearly one million acres of public land from uranium development near the Grand Canyon was finalized last month, reaction was mixed. Conservationists, who’d been warning of contamination of surface and groundwater flowing into the Colorado River from mining activity, mostly exhaled in relief. (Never mind the […]
Climate change
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: reporter spies and Bryce Canyon coal mine
Annals of paranoia Vigilantes in Nevada cracked an alleged Los Angeles Times spy network last weekend, revealing the identity of an undercover ‘reporter,’ Ashley Powers. Disguised beneath her press pass issued by the Clark County GOP and madly scratching words in a suspicious yellow notepad, the proud, alert citizens of Nevada precinct #1721 properly “uncovered” […]
Posted inWotr
Your trash is my treasure
It’s garbage day as the new year moves along, and the streets of Crested Butte in western Colorado are lined with black plastic bags filled with kitchen gadgets, coffee pots and designer bedding. Last year’s unwanted items sit abandoned at the curb to make way for this year’s must-haves. You can tell a lot about […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Beauty and the Beast
It is a dead place — boned with black, sentinel tree trunks, veined with unspeakably polluted water, laid bare under a paste-white sky. There is no sense of space or time, only pure, absolute quiet. It is one of my favorite images — Uranium Tailings No. 12, taken at Ontario’s Elliot Lake in 1995, part […]
Posted inGoat
Coal: curbed but not crushed
updated Dec. 29, 2011 For many Christmases to come, we Westerners are likely to have coal in our stockings. Or at least in our power plants. About 45 percent of our electricity is produced by burning coal. And even if our own demand dropped drastically, China is an emerging market for Western coal. Nonetheless, several […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
The year 2011, in apocalyptic weather events
Worried that the world may end in 2012 à la the alleged Mayan prophecies? You might want to get your head out of those New Age clouds and look around: 2011 was plenty apocalyptic worldwide and in the West. Here’s a month-by-month roundup of the region’s freakiest climate and weather events. January 2011 is ushered […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
Polluted air, coming soon to Glacier National Park
Glacier National Park is next in line for hazy, polluted air (HCN, 11/14/11, “Out of the haze”). Oil and gas development along Glacier’s eastern border with the Blackfeet Reservation is increasing drastically. Nearly all of the Blackfeet land is leased to oil and gas companies. Park officials and Superintendent Chas Cartwright are concerned with potential […]
Posted inGoat
The bright side of the Berkeley Pit
Updated Jan. 5, 2012 It is a dead place. Stitched with skeletal plants and sentinel tree trunks, riven by rills of cloudy, unspeakably polluted water, laid bare against a paste sky. There is no sense of space or time here; only pure, absolute quiet. It is one of my favorite images — “Uranium Tailings No. […]
Posted inGoat
The age of disturbance
When my East Coast-based family rented a condo in Breckenridge, Colo. for our family vacation in June this year, my dad couldn’t stop exclaiming over the dead trees. Scores of lodgepole pines, killed by the bark beetle epidemic, lined pretty much every road we drove down or bike path we pedaled on. A recent report […]
Posted inRange
Helping prepare the West for harder, drier times
They don’t call it the Wild West for nothing. From crippling droughts to raging fires, the region is no stranger to natural disasters. But will it be able to weather the storm ahead? And natural disasters aren’t the only way climate change is leaving its mark in the West. Rising temperatures are allowing pests like the […]
Posted inWotr
Breathing clean air comes in second in Congress
Even in these politically polarized times, one might think that breathing clean air could muster some bipartisan support in Congress. A quick look at the bills the House of Representatives has been passing lately should dispel that naïve notion. Three bills aimed at delaying new air pollution rules on coal-fired power plants, cement kilns and […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: After 10,000 years
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Wanting to climb one last mountain before winter shuts down the high country until June, on Veteran’s Day I headed with my buddy Steve to Mount Augusta, a 10,000-foot peak in the remote Clan […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Clean air regulations protect park views by targeting coal plants
An interpretive plaque at the Park Point overlook in southwest Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park identifies the landscape’s near and distant features. Sleeping Ute Mountain frames Montezuma Valley to the west. Farther east rise the Carrizo Mountains, then the Chuska Range near the Arizona-New Mexico border. In the foreground, a volcanic relic called Shiprock juts […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Montana’s dirty underbelly
What an outstanding story (HCN, 9/19/11, “Lost Opportunity”). I moved to Montana eight years ago and have seen only snapshots of the full picture. This story is a well-balanced portrayal of a rarely seen, dirty underbelly here in Montana. It avoids the simple sound-bite friendly rhetoric that too often dominates discussion of environmental issues in […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: Sulfide statutes and Jesus statues
EPA reinstates reporting requirements for a poisonous gas To the relief of citizen advocacy groups (and the irritation of industry), the Environmental Protection Agency finalized its decision last week to lift a 17-year-long Administrative Stay on Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) reporting requirements for hydrogen sulfide — a poisonous gas that smells like rotten eggs and […]
Posted inGoat
Mapping the West … in air polluters
If you happen to glance over the fantastic air pollution investigation jointly released by National Public Radio and the Center for Public Integrity this week (along with a handful of other cooperating media outlets that did regional stories), you might think to yourself: “Thank (insert deity here) I don’t live in the Midwest, East or […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Utah’s ancient Lake Bonneville holds clues to the West’s changing climate
A curious horizontal line runs across the range — a notch cut into the mountains like a railroad bed, visible from many miles away. It snakes around every gully and ridge, 600 feet above the playa where the Donners hauled their wagons. Floating Island Mountain, visible to the east above a perpetual mirage, also shows […]
Posted inGoat
Why 7 billion isn’t as scary as you think
On October 31, the human population officially hit 7 billion. Since humans have a thing for nice big round numbers, the occasion was marked with a great deal of fretting about overpopulation. And the UN’s choice of Halloween as the official date of 7 billion gave all kinds of alarmists the opportunity to declare that […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Lake Bonneville
The lake covered most of northwest Utah — and some parts of Idaho and Nevada — 15,000 years ago. Today, all that remains of Bonneville is the Great Salt Lake.
Posted inRange
How coal is already congesting Washington’s railways
By Eric de Place, Sightline.org This post is part of the research project: The Dirt on Coal Washington’s rail system is congested in places. Adding dozens of coal trains each day, without also big new capacity improvements, could cripple the system with gridlock. All that is common knowledge. Less well-known is this: coal shipments are […]