How it arrived and how much it matters for the climate.
Pollution
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
On booms and their remains
Click here to see a full gallery of Sarah Christianson’s photographs of the Bakken oil boom. In 1973, during North Dakota’s second oil boom, then-Gov. Art Link declared, “When we are through with that and the landscape is quiet again … let those who follow and repopulate the land be able to say our grandparents […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
Is coal dead?
Which plants are slated for closure or switches to natural gas.
Posted inGoat
Washington’s new clean-water plan is a mixed bag
Washington’s governor last week announced a bold approach for creating cleaner, safer waters for fish and the people who eat them. Unless he didn’t. Every day, the state’s Department of Health releases a map of waterways so polluted that restrictions are placed on the amount and types of fish people should eat. Washington has many […]
Posted inArticles
North Dakota wrestles with radioactive oilfield waste
Regulators look at raising the limit for radiation amid a rash of illegal dumping.
Posted inArticles
What’s killing the Yukon’s salmon?
An ecological mystery in Alaska has scientists and fishermen baffled and alarmed.
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
River of no return
Seattle’s Duwamish has been straightened, dredged and heavily polluted. Can a Superfund cleanup bring it back to life?
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
Duwamish sludge, from source to sink
A little over three miles from the mouth of the Lower Duwamish Waterway (once known as the Duwamish River), there is a small piece of property wreathed with chain-link fence and signs that warn in various languages of various threats to life and limb. This is Terminal 117, or T-117, former home of roofing material […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
The leak heard ‘round the nuclear industry
A radioactive leak in New Mexico will make solutions to our waste problem even more elusive.
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
The Big Nasty
On garbage and tolerance in the wilderness.
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
The Latest: Changes afoot for oil and gas “trade secrets”
BackstoryEnergy companies have long enjoyed secrecy when it comes to the chemical makeup of the fluids they inject underground to release oil and gas. In the late 2000s, Western states like Wyoming and Colorado passed rules requiring some public disclosure, but broad exemptions for “trade secrets” remained common (“Frack forward,” HCN, 10/1/10). As hydraulic fracturing […]
Posted inGoat
A new era of clean air regulation is dawning
Court rulings are not typically repositories of poetic prose. But they occasionally contain beautiful little gems, like this quote from the King James Bible, embedded in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion in a clean air case the Supreme Court ruled on this week: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
The Latest: Two energy giants forced to clean up uranium mess
Kerr-McGee and Anadarko to put billions into detoxing.
Posted inGoat
In an era of light pollution, the darkest skies in the West
Here are some of the region’s best stargazing spots.
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
The toxic legacy of Exxon Valdez
We are just beginning to understand the true cost of one of America’s worst ecological disasters.
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
Geoduck fishermen switch to urchins off Washington’s coast
China banned West Coast shellfish after finding traces of toxins.
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
Fallon, Nevada’s deadly legacy
In a small town once plagued by childhood cancer, some families still search for answers.
Posted inFebruary 3, 2014: The Hanford Whistleblowers
The Hanford Whistleblowers
For decades, insiders have reported problems in the cleanup of our worst nuclear mess — but is anyone listening?
Posted inFebruary 3, 2014: The Hanford Whistleblowers
The Latest: EPA released a final assessment of Pebble Mine impacts
BackstoryThe proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region could yield $300 billion in copper, gold and molybdenum, but also harm the world’s largest sockeye salmon runs, a vibrant fishing industry and some of North America’s last salmon-based cultures (“Worst place for a major mine?” HCN, 11/25/13). In 2010, nine Native tribes asked the U.S. […]