“Exempt well” laws in most Western states allow domestic wells to be drilled without water rights.
Cally Carswell
Posted inNovember 10, 2014: Fallout
The desert-friendly cow
A rancher and a researcher search for a better bovine — and think they’ve found one.
Posted inOctober 27, 2014: Defuse the West
Midterm races to watch
Only a handful of seats are truly up for grabs, including two in the West, and they’re being fiercely contested.
Posted inArticles
Climate change found to have spurred worldwide heatwaves
But floods and droughts have less certain links to planetary warming.
Posted inArticles
Faces of the grassroots climate movement: rowdy and rowdier
Marches around the country this week show ideological diversity among a new cohort of activists.
Posted inArticles
Hurdles mount for Northwest coal exports
How high are the stakes for Western coal producers?
Posted inGoat
Summer rains in a drought-plagued state
How much does a monsoon season relieve drought?
Posted inGoat
Imminent tar sands mine incites civil disobedience in Utah
Two years ago, HCN contributing editor Jeremy Miller asked if Utah’s tar sands deposits could transform the Beehive State into the Alberta of the high desert. Jeremy’s story focused on a mine proposed by U.S. Oil Sands, a Canadian company, in the Book Cliffs south of Vernal. It’s long been known that eastern Utah’s geological […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
A historic moment for the Clean Air Act
How it arrived and how much it matters for the climate.
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
Is coal dead?
Which plants are slated for closure or switches to natural gas.
Posted inArticles
The privatization of public campground management
All the info you need to decide whether you love or hate that the Forest Service uses concessionaires.
Posted inArticles
Concessionaire Campgrounds: An Explainer
The Privatization of public campgrounds | Create Infographics
Posted inGoat
New Mexico is getting lucky so far this fire season
Southern Californians are currently experiencing a phenomenon they call June Gloom, when the humid, hazy air that usually hangs out just above the ocean blows inland and lingers, trapped by a warm layer above it. Oh, what the good people of New Mexico would have given in recent years for that brand of gloom. Instead, […]
Posted inGoat
The West’s crucial 2014 U.S. Senate races
The big question of the 2014 midterm elections — other than, “Eric Cantor lost?!” — is which party will emerge with control of the U.S. Senate. A number of Western states will host Senate races this year – Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Alaska – but only three will be hotly contested, […]
Posted inGoat
Against all odds, wolf OR7 may have found a mate
On May 3, a wolf slipped through the frame of a remote camera in southwestern Oregon, a blur of black and brown. The next day, under the cover of darkness, it stared directly at a camera, eyes aglow, and did something ordinary that, under the circumstances, was an extraordinary sight: It squatted and peed. This […]
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 inGoat
Joshua trees may be migrating north in response to climate change
Last spring, Joshua trees put on a magnificent show in the Mojave Desert. Nearly all at once nearly all of them bloomed, sprouting dense bouquets of waxy, creamy-green flowers from their Seussian tufts of spiky leaves. The bloom was so sweeping and abundant — and such a contrast to the typical pattern, where only a […]
Posted inGoat
Don’t teach climate change. It’ll hurt the economy.
In the summer of 1925, John Scopes, a 24-year-old high school science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, became one of most infamous defendants in U.S. legal history. In March of that year, Tennessee passed a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. A month or so later, the American Civil Liberties Union placed a newspaper ad offering […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
Looking after we leap
In early January, the Elk River near Charleston, W.V., began to smell of licorice. The source of the strange odor was a steel tank with a small hole that leaked thousands of gallons of crude 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, a chemical used in coal processing, into the river, just upstream of an intake for Charleston’s municipal water […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
The little fish that could
An endangered Oregon minnow recovers, while many native fish still struggle.