NAME Brian Moore AGE 50 KNOWN FOR Conserving water by watering his garden with a homemade backyard shower and simple “gray water” plumbing. HE SAYS “We think of the countryside as (the place to live) off the grid, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. I’d like to demonstrate that it is possible […]
Hilary Watts
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Judge leaves Front Range cities mile-high and dry
For more than 20 years, a private company has wanted to move water from Colorado’s Western Slope to sprawling Front Range cities hundreds of miles to the east. Now, a judge has put a kink in those transmountain water diversion plans. In 1984, a state water court granted Natural Energy Resources Company conditional rights to […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2005: A Military Town Fights for its Life
Super-sized dam could be a cash register for California farmers
New federal contracts give water districts more than they need
Posted inAugust 8, 2005: The Gangs of Zion
Crazy like a fox, or a fish, or a bat…
Field biologists are a rare breed. If you have any doubt about this, Jennifer Bové’s book, The Back Road to Crazy, will change your mind. Field biologists find pleasure in wading, chest-deep, against a fast current of sub-zero water before the sun has even considered rising — all to net and count tiny fish no […]
Posted inJune 27, 2005: Reflections on a Divided Land
Suburbia blasts through a national monument
With a road headed its way, a new development takes root on Albuquerque’s West side
Posted inMay 16, 2005: Unsalvageable
Former refuge manager takes heat for saving frogs
A federal biologist who was trying to save an Arizona frog from extinction recently found himself facing criminal charges. The Chiricahua leopard frog once hopped from central Arizona to western New Mexico. But habitat loss, predation by exotic bullfrogs and fishes, and drought had reduced the population to a few small ponds in the Altar […]
Posted inMay 2, 2005: The Great Energy Divide
Blades, birds and bats: Wind energy and wildlife not a cut-and-dried issue
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The Winds of Change.” If you think wind energy is a good alternative to fossil fuels, but you also care about wildlife, you’ve probably worried about the possible “lawnmower” effect of spinning wind turbines on birds and bats. At least some of that concern […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Climate model may help farmers know what to grow
What farmer hasn’t wished for a weather-predicting crystal ball? Now, growers in the Yakima Valley have the next best thing: a high-tech climate model that may benefit the entire West. The climate model is adapted from a West-wide model developed by the Department of Energy, which predicts that, over the next 50 years, Western snowpack […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Farmers and ranchers say city is stealing water
Steel pumps and filter towers may soon rise from the Chihuahuan Desert in southern New Mexico — and that has a small agricultural community seriously concerned. The growing city of Alamogordo wants to draw water from deep within the Tularosa Basin aquifer. But that water is salty. To make it drinkable, the city plans to […]
Posted inApril 4, 2005: Calling It Quits
Rock jocks fight a mining company
Land swap would undo a presidential order for land protection
Posted inMarch 21, 2005: An Empire Built on Sand
Indian tribe to share refuge with feds
At a time when Indian tribes are making headlines for taking control of their ancestral lands, the Nisqually Tribe plans to share some of its land with the federal government (HCN, 3/7/05: Tribe close to sharing federal bison refuge). In 1996, the tribe worked out a deal to buy a 310-acre inholding in Nisqually National […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2005: Anarchy in the Gas Fields
Is Preble’s just another meadow mouse?
After finally scoring a place on the endangered species list, the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse may have to hop back off it. Nine inches long, the Preble’s mouse inhabits streamside meadows along the rapidly developing urban corridor from Colorado Springs to Cheyenne (HCN, 8/30/99: Can the Preble’s mouse trap growth on Colorado’s Front Range?). In […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 2005: Have Environmentalists Failed the West?
Coal company takes refuge in a blind spot
Last spring, the government of British Columbia allowed Montanans only four days to comment on plans for an open-pit coal mine six miles north of Glacier National Park. To environmentalists on both sides of the border, who have fought similar mine proposals for three decades, the hurry seemed suspicious. Montana’s congressional delegation, along with many […]
Posted inFebruary 7, 2005: The Asphalt Graveyard
Locals flush proposed kitty litter mine
A recent court ruling could give local communities more control over mining projects on federal land. On Dec. 30, a Nevada district court judge ruled that Washoe County has the authority to deny a company’s proposal to mine clay for cat litter near the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. In 1999, the Chicago-based Oil-Dri Corporation announced plans […]
Posted inFebruary 7, 2005: The Asphalt Graveyard
Dear friends
NEW INTERNS “This is surreal,” says new High Country News intern Julie McCord of HCN’s hometown, the coal miner’s haven of Paonia, Colo., pop. 1,500. Julie was born in Jamaica and has lived in Chicago, Toronto, Panama, Mexico, Japan and Washington, D.C. She comes to us from Manhattan, where she earned her master’s degree in […]