With President Obama authorizing $105 billion for transportation spending this July, you might wonder: Just how does that federal dough get spent? Turns out about 80 percent is funneled into highways. Given the West’s size and far-apart cities, you might also expect this road-centricity to be more pronounced here, with spending on public transit and […]
Growth & Sustainability
Posted inAugust 6, 2012: Of Birds and Men
What the High Park wildfire can teach us about protecting homes
RIST CANYON, Colorado Dave Cantor’s house in the hills outside Fort Collins usually draws friends for barbecue, horseshoes and recreational shooting on July 4. This July 3, though, Cantor sifts through its ashy remains, tripping over a downed power line and catching rotten whiffs from a freezer pried open by black bears. Cantor, who co-owns […]
Posted inGoat
Talking mean with Hugh B. McKeen
While on assignment for a story on wildfire in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, I called up Catron County commissioner Hugh B. McKeen to see if he’d meet up and discuss the recent 297,000-acre Whitewater Baldy Fire that burned through the wilderness and forestland nearby. I had heard a bit about Catron County’s anti-government charm, […]
Posted inArticles
Beyond the politics of no: Luther Propst and collaborative conservation
More than two decades ago, Luther Propst jumped away from a law career back East to found the Sonoran Institute in Tucson, Ariz. Since then, the nonprofit has helped dozens of Western communities — from Driggs, Idaho, to Rifle, Colo., to Tucson itself — grapple with growth while incorporating conservation goals into their plans for […]
Posted inWotr
The Forest Service faces a test in Arizona
Arizona’s flammable ponderosa pine forests stretch from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon above the Mogollon Rim to the White Mountains in the east. Most of that land — glory country for recreationists, as well as the watershed for the Grand Canyon, the Phoenix area and many nearby towns — lies within four national […]
Posted inRange
Don’t be too self-righteous
Many years ago, in an interesting turn of events, I found myself in the same truck (mine) as a famous environmental writer. I can take no personal credit for her presence there; she was speaking that evening at a literary event sponsored by a local college. A good friend of mine was organizing the event […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Do subdivisions designed for conservation actually help wildlife?
For millennia, Colorado’s Yampa River Valley has followed the rhythms of wildlife mating and migration, the habits of elk and grouse and bear. The arrival of ranching in the 1880s altered the pattern a little, but radical change didn’t occur until the last half of the 20th century. That’s when the big ranches began to […]
Posted inApril 30, 2012: A Mexican rancher struggles to shift from cattle to conservation
Same church, different pew
As a Floridian with a second home in Teton County, Idaho — we bought an existing home — I read your words with interest (HCN, 3/5/12, “The Zombies of Teton County”). In my “real life” in Florida, I am a land-use activist. What does that mean? Our county council members would probably say it means […]
Posted inGoat
Exchanging for public good
A 20-acre parcel of Forest Service land has been managed with special use permits at the base of Mammoth Mountain since 1954. It’s more a forest of development than a forest of conifers and aspen. There are two ski lifts, a snowmobile and snowcat rental service, parking lots, the Mammoth Mountain Inn and a hokey […]
Posted inMarch 5, 2012: The Zombies of Teton County
Unfinished zombie housing developments haunt the rural West
Matt Hail grew up in sweltering metropolitan Phoenix and spent 11 years selling women’s clothing, mostly wholesaling to department stores on the West Coast and across the Southwest. The job was boring, but he enjoyed vacationing at ski resorts, including Colorado’s Vail and Breckenridge. Like many other people, he imagined changing his life by moving […]
Posted inMarch 5, 2012: The Zombies of Teton County
Goliath vs. Goliath
Your story “Anatomy of a conspiracy theory” suggests that opposition to zoning, planning and conservation as a U.N.-sponsored sovereignty grab is genuinely grassroots (HCN, 2/6/12). We can just as easily see this opposition to regulation as corporate pushback, motivated and underwritten by the energy industry and large agricultural interests. What’s still missing is a documented […]
Posted inMarch 5, 2012: The Zombies of Teton County
Teton County subdivisions
Distressed subdivisions (shown in red, above) have little or no infrastructure. Many more subdivisions, though empty or nearly so, aren’t called “distressed,” because they have completed infrastructure.
Posted inMarch 5, 2012: The Zombies of Teton County
Weekend reading
I just spent my Saturday morning reading the Feb. 6 issue cover to cover. I appreciated every aspect of it, from the Agenda 21 buzzwords, to the “uncommon Westerner” in search of Sasquatch, to the fantastic conveyance of climate change research for a broad audience, to the classic struggle between local residents and the federal […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
A needed hard line
In his article about the reconstruction of Green Mountain Lookout in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, Nathan Rice categorizes Wilderness Watch as “a small, hard-line Montana group” (HCN, 1/23/12, “The law, the lookout and the logging town”). That’s like calling the Sierra Club “a California environmental group.” Wilderness Watch was founded in Missoula, Mont., and is […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
Fearful of Agenda 21, an alleged U.N. plot, activists derail land-use planning
In November, La Plata County Commissioner Kellie Hotter called local land-use planning “a blood sport.” She wasn’t kidding. Since last spring, as this southwestern Colorado county considered a new comprehensive land-use plan, carnage has piled up. By mid-December, casualties included a fired planning commissioner, a resigned county planning director and the plan itself — a […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Salt Lake City, UtahDriving around Salt Lake City on a pleasant day last June in a plain white city government car, Doug Dansie pauses at the corner of two streets, 1300 South and 300 East. This is a residential neighborhood where old trees tower over the houses. But there’s no house on this particular corner […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
Is Colorado Springs the new Babylon?
“Is Phoenix the new Babylon?” resonates in Colorado Springs (HCN, 11/28/11). Colorado Springs Utilities, a city-owned full-service utility — gas, sewer, electricity and water — has committed $2.1 billion to build a pipeline to bring water to the city from Pueblo Reservoir, a project known as the Southern Delivery System. That amount does not include […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
Land trusts thrive despite, and because of, the Great Recession
The Great Recession, it turns out, may have been good for one thing in the West: private land conservation. From the tiny Orient Land Trust in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, which has nearly doubled its holdings to 2,260 acres, to the 138,041 acres of ranchland protected by the California Rangeland Trust over the last five […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
How private efforts and economic troubles have combined to support conservation
Produced in collaboration with the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
The Southwest’s population and housing booms bite the dust
If you want to see the dried-up husk of the New West’s latest incarnation, just go to Maricopa, Ariz., and visit one of the half-built suburbs on its fringe. You’ll see earth scraped bare and a tumbleweed or two, and even a few ghosts: The phantoms of streets mapped but never built, lots subdivided but […]