One of coal’s big messes is transformed
into building blocks
Climate change
Posted inWotr
Western water is petering out
Gerald Spangler needs no statistics or charts to tell him what he already knows: We are running out of water. Spangler is a semi-retired farmer who has lived in southwest Nebraska, 15 miles east of the Colorado border, since the Dust Bowl days. In 1 979, he drilled his first groundwater well to a depth […]
Posted inWotr
When smoke gets in your life
On the way to Gardiner, Mont., the sunrise was a surreal red. All day, smoke squatted in town. Walking around on the eve of my writing class, seeing people through the haze, felt vaguely apocalyptic; what I imagined nuclear fallout might be like, or Pompeii after the eruption of Vesuvius. Ash landed on parked cars […]
Posted inWotr
The inevitable fires next time
Welcome to the West’s new world of fire. With six out of the last eight years among the worst 10 fire seasons since 1960, it is a world where every year is what we call a “bad” fire season. Or maybe it’s the “indefinitely bad” season, as Tom Boatner, the BLM’s chief of fire operations […]
Posted inWotr
A Wyoming forest yearns to burn
Gorgeous red sunsets and haze in the air scare the heck out of people in my part of Wyoming. We live next to the Shoshone National Forest. It is a jewel, and so remarkable that it was the first national forest created by Congress. The mountains in this 2.4 million-acre reserve in west-central Wyoming are […]
Posted inWotr
The caveguy within holds us back
I’ve been puzzled by people I know to be intelligent who nonetheless find it inconceivable that the earth’s climate could be affected by human activity. Then I saw one of those “cavedude” commercials on television, and a glimmer of insight began to flicker. In the commercial, a Neandertal in modern dress is talking to a […]
Posted inWotr
The clock is ticking
Last month, we both received the Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Protection Award. The EPA awards are meant to encourage individuals and institutions leading in the fight against global warming, which has emerged as the greatest threat to planetary security that we face. Selected by an international panel of judges, our fellow awardees included the Rev. […]
Posted inWotr
Global climate change? Let’s go shopping
Out of nowhere, it almost seems, everyone is talking about global warming. Presidential candidates, corporate moguls, media pundits — the news is saturated with the latest climate-change buzzwords. My current favorite is “carbon footprint,” which made me wonder what I’d stepped in….what we’ve all stepped in. It’s a lot messier and more insidious than you […]
Posted inMay 14, 2007: Two Views of the Verde
The challenge of climate-change denial
Reading the newspapers lately, you might get the impression that the once-strident climate-change deniers, doubters and skeptics are slowly becoming extinct. The New York Times recently called Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., the most strident of Al Gore’s critics, “a dinosaur,” and few in the House or Senate even tried to counter Gore’s recent testimony on […]
Posted inWotr
Why are there still climate-change deniers?
Reading the newspapers lately, you might get the impression that the once strident climate-change deniers, doubters and skeptics are slowly becoming extinct. The New York Times recently called Sen. James Inhofe, the most strident of Al Gore’s critics, “a dinosaur,” and few in the House or Senate even tried to counter Gore’s recent testimony on […]
Posted inApril 30, 2007: Rural Education 2.0
Market cooling
Will California and the West knock down global warming by buying and selling carbon?
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
Two weeks in the West
“We’re not out to destroy the universe. We’re here to make money. And if we can do that with minimal impact, that’s my job.” —New Mexico State Land Office Archaeologist David Eck on a proposal to drill for natural gas just outside Chaco Culture National Historic Park. Down in the Sonoran Desert, the blue-flowered lupines […]
Posted inWotr
Why would a federal agency trash itslibraries?
It takes a special talent to make the topic of library management controversial, but the Environmental Protection Agency seems to have a real knack for self-inflicted wounds. EPA gave itself a black eye and enraged librarians throughout the country last year, when, without public notice or congressional consultation, it began the process of dismantling its […]
Posted inDecember 25, 2006: Confessions of a Methane Floozy
Excremental gains?
A stink over ‘sludge’ raises larger questions
Posted inNovember 13, 2006: Bred for success
Trees — A different shade of green
Cities look to urban forests as a natural utility
Posted inNovember 13, 2006: Bred for success
A whole lot of shaking
Simon Winchester’s latest book, A Crack in the Edge of the World, takes a comprehensive look at the country’s worst earthquake: San Francisco, 1906. The quake, he writes, “came thundering in on what looked like huge undulating waves … the whole street and all its great buildings rose and fell, rose and fell, on what […]
Posted inWotr
Fire and the warming West
An Associated Press story that ran recently above the page one fold in Billings and Butte, Mont., didn’t qualify even as a brief in Baltimore, Md. No surprise, there. More people live in public housing in Baltimore than populate the states of North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming, combined. But it was big news on the […]
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
Reborn
The West casts a wary eye on the latest nuclear craze