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 […]
Growth & Sustainability
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 […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Love thy neighbor
ARIZONA You know times are tough in Phoenix when more than 15,000 people cram into McDonald’s restaurants to apply for one of 800 to 1,000 jobs, all of them part-time and most of them minimum wage. The Arizona Republic says the success of McDonald’s new McCafe line of smoothies and frappés has spurred the restaurant […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Tough job, but someone’s gotta do it
UTAH Baptizing stand-ins for dead people doesn’t seem like a hazardous activity, but Daniel Dastrup of Las Vegas recently sued The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for medical expenses after injuring his back performing about 200 baptisms on Aug. 25, 2007. Lowering volunteers into a pool all day apparently became arduous: “The then […]
Posted inGoat
Who’s terrorizing who?
Attention citizens of Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming: get ready for new neighbors in your skies as the U.S. Air Force plans to train pilots over far-reaching swaths of the West. The Air Force’s existing training areas, developed during the Cold War, are too small and flat to prepare pilots […]
Posted inArticles
High Country Views: Fire in the foothills
HCN’s podcast looks at the aftermath of Colorado’s most destructive wildfire
Posted inRange
The organic growth of Portland’s green roofs
By Lisa Stiffler Portland’s ecoroof program is enough to turn other sustainability-striving cities green with envy. The City of Roses boasts 351 green roofs and rooftop gardens covering more than 26 acres.* By comparison, Seattle has 62 vegetated roofs totaling about 9 acres. How’d they do it? I had the opportunity to talk to Amy […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Milk and cookies
ARIZONA A McDonald’s restaurant in Phoenix learned a valuable lesson recently, but only after an assistant manager ordered a breastfeeding mother — and her 6-month-old baby — to leave. The lesson: Don’t mess with moms! As TV reporters flocked to the restaurant, dozens of nursing mothers converged inside it to protest what they called discrimination, […]
Posted inBlog
At what price aesthetics?
Last weekend I sat outside Los Angeles’ Union Station, the last of the great train stations,waiting as two of my closest friends prepared to marry one another in the station’s sunlit courtyard. They finally arrived, along with their chuppah, by way of the Red Line subway and the station’s main passenger hall. As they joined […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2010: Migration
Lumbering along, barely
Linking beetle-killed trees to viable markets proves difficult
Posted inAugust 20, 2010: A Hell of an Anniversary
Parting the Redwood Curtain
A one-mile highway project could change an entire region
Posted inBlog
Transportation policy’s third rails
We live in a society of backseat drivers. Or backseat urban planners. Or train engineers. But often, no matter how loudly we clamor, we’re not as right as we think. And that costs all of us, even if our convictions rely heavily on rational critiques of public policy. Think of transportation policy in Los Angeles […]
Posted inBlog
Growth, economics and justice
As I fretted over what to write in my debut post for A Just West, my mind kept returning to a controversy I used to follow in my first two professional journalism jobs. At both the Pacific Coast Business Times and the Ventura County Reporter, I covered the story of truck traffic from rock aggregate mines in the Los Padres National […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Health studies gas up
Colorado launches one of the nation’s first health assessments of gas-drilling impacts
Posted inJune 7, 2010: One Tough Sucker
Limbo land: Brownfields for green energy
Renewable energy projects planned for contaminated lands
Posted inHeard Around the West
Gettin’ skunked
IDAHOIn April, staffers at the Idaho Department of Fish and Game decided to correct what they perceived as nature gone awry by sprinkling a handful of hungry predators around an island swarming with birds. The agency introduced three badgers and two skunks to 6-acre Gull Island in the Blackfoot Reservoir in hopes the animals would […]
Posted inGoat
Wildfire costs rising
There’s an old saying that “Floods are acts of God. Flood damage is an act of man.” That is, we mortals don’t control rainfall, but we can decide not to build in flood plains. A similar argument might apply to wildfires, according to a recent report from Headwaters Economics, which describes itself as an “independent, […]
Posted inGoat
More than a starter castle
Tom Chapman, the land developer whom just about everybody loves to hate, is at it again. Chapman’s specialty is buying inholdings — private land surrounded by public land — and then either developing them, or threatening to develop them until he gets a good deal. He’s been the subject of many articles in […]