Normally, the Colorado bee swarm hotline starts ringing in mid-April. By May 1, a call is coming in every other day. And by the 15th, “somebody opens up the bee floodgates and they start swarming like the devil,” says Beth Conrey, president of the Colorado Beekeepers Association, who fields the calls on her cell phone. […]
Emily Guerin
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
The Latest: Pumping Arizona’s rivers dry?
BackstoryLast July, Arizona’s state water board approved a large new development in Sierra Vista that would pump 3,300 acre feet of groundwater per year — despite evidence that such pumping could decrease flow in the San Pedro River, one of the West’s healthiest desert rivers. Environmentalists appealed the decision; so did the Bureau of Land […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
A new collaboration has Idaho ranchers and the BLM fighting fire together
On a hot day in August 2011, lightning sparked a fire in the rocky bluffs outside Glenns Ferry, Idaho. With the Bureau of Land Management’s fire crews tied up on the other 16 or so fires burning in the area, a few local ranchers, some of whom had grazing allotments on the land, rushed in […]
Posted inGoat
Navajos double-down on coal
Coal is always a hot topic on the Colorado Plateau, home to many of the mines and power plants that feed electricity-hungry Southwestern cities hundreds of miles away. But in the past few weeks, black gold has been in the news even more than normal as the Navajo Nation has weighed a new lease for […]
Posted inGoat
Mapping your way to better health
There’s a new tool in California that can tell you how dirty your neighborhood is compared to the rest of the state. It’s called Cal EnviroScreen, and zip codes with the worst ozone, particulate matter, diesel exhaust and other contamination are shaded a deep indigo on a state map, where as the cleanest are white […]
Posted inGoat
Pumping the San Pedro dry?
Arizona’s San Pedro River has been called the most studied river in the world, attracting scientists, birders, and anyone wanting to observe the region’s healthiest desert river. But all that research doesn’t seem to have affected an April decision by the Arizona Department of Water Resources to approve groundwater pumping that could deplete the river’s […]
Posted inGoat
Black-backed woodpeckers and severe fire
A charred forest is an eerie place, even years after a wildfire. I discovered this last summer while backpacking through Northern California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. Dead trunks creaked as they swayed in the wind, their branches clacking against each other like bones. We moved quickly, as if walking past an avalanche-prone slope. Had we […]
Posted inArticles
A long-time defender talks grizzly conservation
A Q&A with Louisa Willcox, who has spent 30 years fighting for grizzly protections.
Posted inGoat
The legacy of Documerica
Here at High Country News, we’ve been reading and writinga lot about how the federal funding cuts from sequestration will hit home in the West. But as usual, it takes a personal experience to make things real. For me, it came while sitting on a pit toilet at a Bureau of Land Management trailhead outside […]
Posted inGoat
Does oil and gas drilling cause earthquakes?
Just before 11 p.m. on November 5, 2011, the biggest earthquake in Oklahoma’s history hit the small town of Prague. It buckled a highway, exploded windows, collapsed homes and left terrified residents clutching their beds as they waited for the shaking to stop. Ripples from the 5.7 magnitude quake were felt as far as 800 […]
Posted inGoat
Good news for people who love bad news
In 2008, Canadian researchers made a scary prediction: In our warming world, boreal forests would stop absorbing excess carbon and start contributing to climate change as soon as 2020. What would cause this switch? The mountain pine beetles that have been eating their way though tens of millions of acres of alpine forests, leaving swaths […]
Posted inGoat
Sovereignty and the Skywalk
At the Grand Canyon Skywalk, tourists can pay about $90 to shuffle along a horseshoe of glass that extends over the rim’s edge, wearing special booties to avoid scratching the surface as they peer 4,000 vertical feet down at the Colorado River. For such a snazzy feat of engineering, you would expect an equally fancy […]
Posted inGoat
USFS vs. your ability to sue them
In 2001, a week before George W. Bush took the oath of office, the Forest Service dropped a bombshell. It released the 1,800 page Sierra Nevada Framework, a plan for how to manage 11.5 million acres of Sierra Nevada forests to protect the California spotted owl, reduce wildfires and protect habitat. Unlike previous plans, which […]
Posted inGoat
To kill or not to kill?
Recently, it seems people on both sides of the pond have horse slaughter on the brain. In Europe, the discovery of horsemeat in Ikea’s purportedly all-beef meatballs has countries pointing fingers at each other, trying pin the blame for mislabeled meat on someone else. Ultimately, the issue seems to boil down to different degrees of […]
Posted inGoat
Are tree-sitters felons?
Recently, civil disobedience has been making a comeback. From 2011’s scruffy Occupy movement to the Sierra Club’s coat-and-tie White House protest of the Keystone XL pipeline last month, risking arrest to make a statement hasn’t been this high profile in a long time. In Oregon, environmentalists have a long history of getting arrested and putting […]
Posted inGoat
Fire suppression flip-flop
Last May, the Forest Service made news by announcing it was going to suppress all fires burning on its lands. The memo, issued by James Hubbard, Deputy Chief of State and Private Forestry, instructed fire-line officers to get approval from their supervisors before doing anything but full suppression—effectively discouraging the practice of letting some fires […]
Posted inGoat
Moose in need of a boost
A few years ago, I was driving through Northern Maine on my way to hike Mt. Katahdin, the state’s highest peak and terminus of the Appalachian Trail. A small crowd of hunters had gathered outside a game inspection station, and I stopped to see what they’d shot. A jolly man in an orange vest was […]
Posted inGoat
The timber-payment blues
Inmates accused of homicide allowed to walk free. Paved roads reverting to gravel. Local libraries closed. These are some of the results of hard choices Oregon’s rural, timber-dependent counties have had to make in recent years, as their federal timber payments have dried up. Now a slew of state bills in Salem seek to give […]
Posted inGoat
How much would you pay for clean water?
Would you be willing to pay up to $10 per month to have your drinking water free of a suspected carcinogen? That’s the question that city councilors in Woods Cross, Utah, are asking residents to answer. In the late 1980s, residents of this Salt Lake City suburb learned that a chemical called tetrachloroethylene (or PCE) […]
Posted inGoat
Of cows and climate
One needs only to look at the coffee-table book Welfare Ranching’s full page pictures of muddy streams and packed dirt ground to know that cattle grazing can have a negative impact on rangelands. While its specific effects are harder to pinpoint, climate change, too, affects hydrology, native plants and wildlife. Add climate change and cows […]