Ever wanted to tour a wind farm, a giant dam or an oil and gas field? This map will help. Click on the icon of the industrial site nearest you for a bit about the site and tours, if offered, along with a link to more information. Purple = oil & gas; Aqua = dams […]
Jonathan Thompson
Jonathan Thompson is a contributing editor at High Country News. He is the author of Sagebrush Empire: How a Remote Utah County Became the Battlefront of American Public Lands. Follow him @LandDesk
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Exploring the West’s land sculptures — made by artists and industry
“Art erodes whatever seeks to contain it and inevitably seeps into the most contrary recesses, touches the most repressed nerve, finds and sustains the contradictory without effort.” — Robert Morris in a 1979 essay in which he suggested hiring land artists to reclaim spent industrial sites and open-pit mines. When I first see them, fuzzy […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Land art of the West: An interactive map
Land art is not by any means a purely Western phenomenon. Big, monumental sculptures, along with smaller, more ephemeral works, can be found throughout the world. But the big land art movement really was born in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the West, when Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Walter DeMaria and others came […]
Posted inGoat
Got the gold bug? Tour a mine.
All of us know at least one person who, as a hedge against imminent financial collapse, is stockpiling gold (not to mention Dinty Moore stew and guns). The idea is to have some kind of solid form of currency when the dollar and Euro go up in smoke, whether brought on by Obama, big banks […]
Posted inGoat
Swiss, salt flats and the sublime
Crown Burgers’ parking lot, in downtown Salt Lake City, is filled at lunchtime with the smoky aroma of burgers and grease and exhaust pouring out of the long line of cars waiting for some grub. It was not my choice for dining, but it seemed like the appropriate place to go given the company: A […]
Posted inGoat
U.S. is net energy exporter! (Psych!)
By now you’ve surely read the headlines that proclaim, “US Nears Milestone: Net Fuel Exporter” or “US Becomes Net Oil-Product Exporter” or, the most ambitious and egregious, “U.S. Becomes Net Energy Exporter.” The stories affixed to the headlines certainly have a triumphant air to them, and why shouldn’t they? After four decades of our leaders […]
Posted inWotr
A fresh focus on frack attacks
A widely reprinted AP story recently broke the stunning news that the energy industry doesn’t like “fracking.” They like fracking itself — injecting water, chemicals and sand into wells to break hydrocarbons free of tight rock formations. What they hate is the word: Fracking sounds just plain nasty. “It’s Madison Avenue hell,” says Dave McMurdy, […]
Posted inGoat
Oil and gas water use: the real issues
When I read Tasha Eichenseher’s recent Land Letter article (sub reqd) about fracking’s use of water, I was alarmed by the numbers. In Colorado, alone, hydraulic fracturing operations use about 4.5 billion gallons of water per year. That’s expected to increase to more than 6 billion gallons over the next few years. The takeaway is […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
Fearful of Agenda 21, an alleged U.N. plot, activists derail land-use planning
In November, La Plata County Commissioner Kellie Hotter called local land-use planning “a blood sport.” She wasn’t kidding. Since last spring, as this southwestern Colorado county considered a new comprehensive land-use plan, carnage has piled up. By mid-December, casualties included a fired planning commissioner, a resigned county planning director and the plan itself — a […]
Posted inGoat
Why industry doesn’t like “fracking” and neither do I
(updated 1/30/2011) I recently read that the energy industry hates fracking. Of course, they actually love fracking — as in hydraulic fracturing to crack rock and release all those juicy hydrocarbons. What they hate is the word itself: “fracking.” I hate it, too, though I suspect for very different reasons. Energy flacks abhor “fracking,” according […]
Posted inGoat
The circular logic of energy independence
“From its beginning 200 years ago, throughout its history, America has made great sacrifices of blood and also of treasure to achieve and maintain its independence. In the last third of this century, our independence will depend on maintaining and achieving self-sufficiency in energy.” President Richard Nixon said this back in 1973, after oil producers […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
The year 2011, in apocalyptic weather events
Worried that the world may end in 2012 à la the alleged Mayan prophecies? You might want to get your head out of those New Age clouds and look around: 2011 was plenty apocalyptic worldwide and in the West. Here’s a month-by-month roundup of the region’s freakiest climate and weather events. January 2011 is ushered […]
Posted inGoat
The Estonian connection: Or how I started worrying about oil shale
The last big oil shale* boom in the West busted on “Black Sunday” 1982. I was 11 years old, then, living in Western Colorado, and I can still remember my dad explaining the boom, the bust and the process necessary to get the “oil” out of the shale. Here’s a primer: Underground room and pillar […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
The Southwest’s population and housing booms bite the dust
If you want to see the dried-up husk of the New West’s latest incarnation, just go to Maricopa, Ariz., and visit one of the half-built suburbs on its fringe. You’ll see earth scraped bare and a tumbleweed or two, and even a few ghosts: The phantoms of streets mapped but never built, lots subdivided but […]
Posted inGoat
Why 7 billion isn’t as scary as you think
On October 31, the human population officially hit 7 billion. Since humans have a thing for nice big round numbers, the occasion was marked with a great deal of fretting about overpopulation. And the UN’s choice of Halloween as the official date of 7 billion gave all kinds of alarmists the opportunity to declare that […]
Posted inGoat
Return of the corn
The roads that wind across the Taos Pueblo reservation pass through a cultural and environmental mosaic of a type common in the rural West, where natural beauty and human poverty overlap and sometimes blend. Here is a thicket of wild plums growing up along a lush irrigation ditch, the Sangre de Cristo mountains rising up […]
Posted inGoat
Demise of the housing growth machine
In 2008, the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University released a report called Megapolitan: Arizona’s Sun Corridor. It predicted that the corridor, stretching from Nogales in the south to Prescott in the north, with Phoenix and Tucson at its heart, would more than double its population by 2040, requiring some 3.7 million […]
Posted inGoat
The urban wild
In the beginning was the bat. Roger, Isolde,* and I sipped margaritas on a warm August evening in their Boulder condo. Suddenly, Roger slammed down his drink, pointed to the ceiling and screamed, “Look out!” As a black, papery blur fluttered around the living room, I dived to the floor and slithered under the table. […]
Posted inGoat
Bill Koch, coal, and political cash
The cynic in me hardly batted an eye when I read recently that Republican House Speaker John Boehner is raking in coal-stained cash. Nor did I spill my coffee when I noticed that one of Boehner’s big new donors is a Koch brother. My interest was piqued, however, when I saw that it wasn’t David […]
Posted inGoat
Hummer Syndrome
A few months ago, while scouring Wyoming’s Powder River Basin for evidence that the West had gone global, I drove my little rental car into Gillette, a once humble little burg that has ridden a coal mining and methane boom to become one of the state’s biggest cities. I saw my share of strip malls […]