Do you remember those little packets of gel-cap pills? The ones that would, when submerged in water, swell to become little sponge dinosaurs? Only the little sponge dinosaurs were tiny and flat and lame and never came close to the awesomeness promised by the full-sized dinosaurs rampaging across the label? Seems that could be the […]
Growth & Sustainability
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
Evolution not revolution
I appreciate your highlighting the Bureau of Land Management’s efforts to invigorate its National Landscape Conservation System (HCN, 12/20/10). After 10 years, there have certainly been mixed results, as you pointed out in your reference to the Canyon of the Ancients National Monument and its fluid mineral leasing program. But I think it’s important to […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2011: Serendipity in the Desert
State and municipal governments fertilize local food craze
Over the last 80 years, federal policy has increasingly put small farmers at a disadvantage by massively subsidizing a centralized, industrial agriculture system that produces cheap food. Activists have spent decades pushing federal reforms, such as organic standards, with incremental success. Now, a surge of state and local government policies that promote local food and […]
Posted inRange
Road rage on the Front Range
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Momentum is building for the construction of a controversial, 10-mile toll road through a wildlife refuge outside of Denver. Embroiled in the road row are warring counties, a powerful mining company and one man obsessed with asphalt. Now that it seems the road may become a reality, the […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2011: Serendipity in the Desert
Rethinking national parks and wilderness
Review of Uncertain Path: A Search for the Future of National Parks
Posted inBlog
Tree equity
The Los Angeles community Sherman Oaks sounds like a place that should be verdant and laden with leafy trees. Not surprisingly, the students of Arbol University found that to be exactly true. Yet the students, who were using trigonometry and other tools to collect data about Los Angeles’s urban tree canopy, were shocked at the […]
Posted inBlog
The age of loudness
“No age is louder than ours,” Ken McAlpine writes in his book, “Islands Apart.” “We have reached a crescendo of clamor, and it is both curse and comfort,” he continues. “Solitude, in our times, is rare and, for many, profoundly unnerving.” What might solitude offer those who never have a chance to experience it? Can […]
Posted inRange
Public transportation systems come at a high price
Last weekend the New York Times reported on efforts to develop a fast train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Being a rider myself—I am writing this on the Cascades run south—and knowing how appealing European trains are and how outdated, inefficient, and unreliable North American trains are, I read the article with a sinking […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Cock-a-doodle-brouhaha
COLORADO Don’t even think of toting roosters along if you’re moving to Ridgway in western Colorado. The birds are unwanted, and not just because they tend to cock-a-doodle-doo at the crack of dawn. They’ve become the symbol of a town that’s no longer rural, relaxed and live and let-live. For proof, just ask resident Janet […]
Posted inGoat
Snowbound? Take a virtual tour of the West
If you live in the mountains, or near them, or you have to fly over them, you know that the holidays aren’t just about visiting family, stuffing your face, or dropping into a prolonged eggnog coma (IMHO, that must be why the stuff is called “nog” in the first place). They’re also about not being […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2010: California Dreamin'
State trust lands serve public
What’s equivalent in area to Washington state, lies mostly west of the Mississippi, and raises well over a billion dollars for public education each year? State trust lands. These unique “public” lands were granted by the federal government to every state that joined the Union, starting with Ohio in 1803, in the belief that townships […]
Posted inBlog
A tale of two cities
“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once wrote. This can be interpreted to mean that justice is subjective, shaped and reshaped over the years by social norms, by evolving moral priorities and shifting power structures. Even under the rule of law its application differs […]
Posted inDecember 6, 2010: Toxic Past, Toxic Present
Farming’s Toxic Legacy
Banned ag chemicals linger in neighborhoods that swallowed up former farms and orchards
Posted inRange
Is high speed rail becoming more viable in the Intermountain West?
By Allan Best If you look at a map showing federally designated high-speed rail corridors in the United States, the Great Plains and intermountain West look like some kind of giant inland sea. From Kansas City to Sacramento, it’s all blank. But representatives from several of the West’s metropolitan areas – Denver, Salt Lake City, […]
Posted inDecember 6, 2010: Toxic Past, Toxic Present
Backyard poisons?
This is a sidebar to the feature story, Pesticides from Old Farmland Leave Toxic Legacy. Amanda Ryder and her family live two blocks from Robertson Elementary, one of many Yakima schools that required cleanup due to the high levels of lead and arsenic in its soil. The orchard that contaminated the school’s playground once extended […]
Posted inDecember 6, 2010: Toxic Past, Toxic Present
How to Play Safely in the Soil
A few suggestions to dramatically reduce exposure to possible contaminants — without breaking the bank
Posted inHeard Around the West
The color-shifting skink
COLORADO Thanks to Colorado Outdoors, the magazine of the state’s Department of Natural Resources, we have a new favorite wild animal — the color-shifting skink. It resembles a stocky snake with lizard-like legs. And like many lizards, it has the wonderful ability to discard and then regenerate its tail any time a predator pounces on […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
That bites!
ARIZONA As foreclosures increase throughout the West, ex-homeowners slamming the door on the way out sometimes abandon cats, dogs and other pets, including exotic snakes. And then there are the native snakes that slither back to reclaim their turf once the humans are gone. The variety of poisonous and non-poisonous snakes co-existing with subdivisions can […]
Posted inGoat
Pop quiz: What national conservation land is nearest you?
The National Landscape Conservation System — America’s youngest permanently protected collection of public lands — celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, and grassroots organizers and BLM managers are meeting in Nevada to plan for the next 10 years in the “sportsman’s park service.” Before the upcoming meetings in Nevada, you might brush up on the […]
Posted inBlog
Where should green planning efforts come from?
Hundreds of urban planners, architects, developers, environmentalists, entrepreneurs and policymakers danced around this question last week as they convened on Portland for the second annual Ecodistricts Summit. Hosted by the Portland Sustainability Institute (PoSI), the event complements a maturing experiment to make five of the Oregon metropolis’s neighborhoods into “Ecodistricts,” neighborhoods designed to be more […]