To prepare for combat halfway around the world, the military looks to Yuma’s desert laboratory
Politics
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Native Intelligence
Lili Singer turns Californians on to backyard bounty
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Wyoming’s day in the spin
Talk about surprising: The Democratic presidential candidates actually paid some attention to Wyoming. With only 522,830 residents, according to last summer’s Census Bureau estimate, Wyoming has the smallest population of all 50 states. Furthermore, no Democratic presidential candidate has carried the Equality State in 44 years, not since the Lyndon B. Johnson landslide of 1964, […]
Posted inMarch 17, 2008: Seeking the Water Jackpot
Bush brings more green into the green movement
“Bush has been good to us,” says Kevin Lind, director of the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a small Wyoming environmental group that pressures coalbed-methane drillers to behave responsibly. Lind doesn’t mean that President George W. Bush has suddenly become benevolent or relaxed his hard-line anti-green stance. Rather, he means that during Bush’s reign in […]
Posted inMarch 17, 2008: Seeking the Water Jackpot
Stay in the Hunt
Jim Posewitz believes the hunters’ nose-to-the-ground ethic can save the planet
Posted inArticles
Primer 2: Energy
For more than a century, the Interior West has been the nation’s domestic energy supplier. Factories and power plants across the country have long made use of the abundant, high-quality coal reserves in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado and Utah. After World War II, the fledgling nuclear power industry created a rush for the region’s uranium deposits. […]
Posted inArticles
Dems reach out to Native Americans
Women and African-Americans aren’t the only demographics receiving extra attention from Democrats this year. The party has also been reaching out to Native Americans. “In the past, Native American voters have been ignored, or thought of in the last minute,” says Laura Harris of the Comanche Tribe. “What (Democratic National Committee Chairman) Howard Dean has […]
Posted inWotr
In Wyoming, caucusing gets personal
Participating in politics doesn’t usually seem all that inviting in Wyoming, with its one congressional representative and part-time citizen Legislature. That’s especially true for Democrats in this state that is as red as it is square. Non-Republicans in Wyoming can be akin to a rare species of toad — a curiosity that is easily squashed […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t starve the Forest Service
A whole lot of Rocky Mountain Westerners are concerned about President Bush’s recent proposal to cut the U.S. Forest Service budget. Out our way, the land is not an abstraction. The numbers in the Forest Service budget aren’t abstractions, either. They mean something real to our land and to our lives, and a cut of […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2008: The People of the Sea
I was a closet environmentalist
NAME Roger Muggli Age 59 Vocation Farmer/Feed Plant Operator Elected Position Secretary of the Tongue and Yellowstone Irrigation District (third generation) Handle Water Dog (H2OK9) Home Base Family farm east of Miles City, Montana Life Passion Water He Says “Wouldn’t it be grand if our kids and grandkids could float down the Yellowstone and still […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2008: The People of the Sea
We’re in a land of Lincoln
The bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth isn’t until Feb. 12, 2009, but we could easily spend the next year considering how our 16th president defined the American West. Lincoln, who was born in Kentucky, never traveled west of his adopted state of Illinois. Yet he, and the Republican Party he helped found, took a deep […]
Posted inArticles
Primer 1: Politics
From the outside – and even for many in the West – the West’s politics are usually seen as swaths of unbroken primary colors. The coast is blue (which in today’s color coding means Democratic) and the interior is Republican red, dotted here and there with liberal bastions such as Aspen, Boulder and Santa Fe. […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2008: Unnatural Preservation
The Chaparralian
California’s raging fires fuel one man’s fight for the much-maligned “elfin forest”
Posted inJanuary 21, 2008: An energy oasis in the political desert
Where do you draw the line?
As a journalist, I’ve watched many forms of civil disobedience in the West. I’ve known EarthFirst! tree-spikers and interviewed armed, tax-evading Freemen. I’ve seen “green” grandmothers lie down before bulldozers to stop the blazing of new logging roads across public land, viewed the carcasses of dead grizzly bears and wolves shot down by opponents of […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2008: An energy oasis in the political desert
Tackling Utah’s trash
NAME Issa Hamud AGE 48 HOME LIFE Married, eight kids. DRIVES 2004 Ford F-150. HOBBY Four-wheeling with friends. NEXT PROJECT Hamud hopes to build an Environmental Education Center on the site of the current landfill once it closes. It will feature a glass wall exposing a cross section of the landfill to its 30-foot depths, […]
Posted inArticles
The Year of Ignorance about the West
This was supposed to be “the year of the West” in national politics. States that had been reliably Republican were suddenly competitive. Two Westerners — Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Republican, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat — were credible candidates for the presidency. The Democrats are holding their national convention in Denver […]
Posted inWotr
Idealism wakes up in America
I am one of the thousands of returned Peace Corps volunteers that Chris Matthews of MSNBC predicted would support Barack Obama after he lit the fuse in Iowa. But I had already been tapped by Harris Wofford, a Kennedy-era warhorse and director of the Peace Corps program in Ethiopia, who is now stumping college campuses […]
Posted inWotr
The West remains a mysterious region
This was supposed to be “the year of the West” in national politics. States that had been reliably Republican were suddenly competitive. Two Westerners — Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Republican, and, until he dropped out, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat — were credible candidates for the presidency. The Democrats will hold their […]
Posted inWotr
Where do you draw the line?
As a journalist, I’ve watched many forms of civil disobedience in the West. I’ve known EarthFirst! tree-spikers and interviewed armed, tax-evading Freemen. I’ve seen “green” grandmothers lie down before bulldozers to stop the blazing of new logging roads across public land, viewed the carcasses of dead grizzly bears and wolves shot down by opponents of […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2007: Last chance for the Lobo
Tireless and tenacious storytelling
NAME: Lori Edmo-Suppah AGE: 48 HOME BASE: Shoshone-Bannock Tribes’ Fort Hall Reservation, Idaho DESCRIBING HERSELF IN A NEWS STORY: “She enjoys her job even though she gets grouchy at her computer when fonts don’t work or files get corrupt. Her camera was stolen at the Festival last year … However, she says life goes on and she’ll eventually […]