Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Written in the Rings.” Tom Swetnam, the director of the Arizona tree-ring lab, grew up with wildfire. His father was a forest ranger in northern New Mexico, and after Swetnam graduated from college in the late 1970s, he spent two years as a seasonal […]
Michelle Nijhuis
Michelle Nijhuis is a contributing editor of HCN and the author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction. Follow @nijhuism.
Posted inWotr
Send the coyotes to Congress
At last, there are coyotes in the capital. The first confirmed sighting of a coyote in Washington, D.C., was reported in September, and rumors of new sightings have circulated briskly ever since. What a relief. All we Westerners have to do is get the critters elected. These adventuresome D.C. coyotes, first spotted in the relative […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2004: Keepers of the Flame
Think global (warming,) act local
The Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, a new nonprofit in Colorado, is taking a backyard approach to the global problem of climate change. “Our main thrust is what (global warming) can mean right here, and that is more drought, more fire, and less biodiversity,” says founder Stephen Saunders, a 30-year Colorado resident. “It’s threatening what makes […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2004: Keepers of the Flame
Judge vaporizes Yellowstone snowmobile ban
A second judge will likely demand some limits on winter traffic
Posted inOctober 25, 2004: Window Shopping: Part-Time Paradise
BLM’s crown jewels go begging
National Landscape Conservation System remains underfunded even as visitors increase
Posted inOctober 11, 2004: The First Family of Western Conservation
Wandering into wolf territory
The long-running political battles over wolf reintroduction in the West can seem fixed in amber: Environmentalists usually stand on one side and cattle growers on another, with the state and federal governments suspended somewhere in between. But as historian Jon Coleman makes clear in Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, these positions solidified only recently. […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 2004: Life After Old Growth
In a warming West, expect more fire
Overall wildfire size likely to double by 2100, new study concludes
Posted inJuly 19, 2004: They're Here: Global Warming's Unlikely Harbingers
Global Warming’s Unlikely Harbingers
The West is heating up — and bark beetles are moving in for the kill
Posted inJuly 19, 2004: They're Here: Global Warming's Unlikely Harbingers
Hot Times – Global Warming in the West
Note: this editor’s note introduces this issue’s feature story, “Global Warming’s Unlikely Harbingers.” The weather always gets the last laugh. It’s the rowdy guest at weddings, the unwelcome visitor at planting time, the cruel joker on the fire crew. It defeats our most dedicated efforts to plan ahead, rudely announcing that the climate is in […]
Posted inJune 21, 2004: A Walk Between Worlds
Perspectives on change — climate change
On the northern edge of Alaska, says journalist Charles Wohlforth, the impacts of human-caused climate change have become part of daily life. Spring is coming earlier, and Iñupiaq whaling crews are making ever-narrower escapes from cracking sea ice. In The Whale and the Supercomputer, Wohlforth looks at such changes from the perspectives of two very […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 2004: Two decades of hard work, plowed under
Getting under the desert’s skin: Biologist Jayne Belnap
The scenery of southeastern Utah is hard to miss. Steep redrock canyons plunge into long and lazy riverbends; wind-sculpted stone arches glow pinkly at sunset. But when biologist Jayne Belnap hikes through this famous landscape, it’s not the show-stopping rocks that draw her attention. It’s the algae. “This is not a rocky landscape, this is […]
Posted inDecember 8, 2003: Riding the middle path
As Congress adjourns, the environment is left in limbo
As Congress wraps up its business for the year, Western lawmakers will be heading home with a little bit of pork and a whole lot of change. That’s not pocket change, however: New laws passed this year could mean some big changes across the Western landscape. The 108th Congress has passed a significant number of […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
A mountain town considers going ‘micropolitan’
An airport expansion could forever change an out-of-the-way ski town
Posted inWotr
Trying out for the new sport of Extreme Canning
It’s getting harder and harder to be an “extreme” athlete. The ultra-fit among us aren’t just climbing all Western peaks over 14,000 feet; they’re climbing them in less than 10 days and doing it on snowboards, skis, bikes and in-line skates. All this requires thousands of dollars’ worth of gear and years of training. And […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Digging through the dust of Libby
For decades, the best jobs in Libby, Mont., were to be found at the local vermiculite mine. The work was tough and dusty, but it paid better than anything else in northern Montana. In the 1970s, however, mine workers, their families, and their neighbors started dying of respiratory diseases and rare, painful cancers. Libbyites didn’t […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Courting the Bomb
The Bush administration’s new nuclear bomb factory is looking for a home — and the leaders of Carlsbad, New Mexico, are determined to give it one.
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Building a new bomb factory could cause global aftershocks
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Courting the Bomb.” Building a new factory for nuclear bomb triggers could spark another arms race, say opponents of the Department of Energy’s proposed “modern pit facility.” They argue that the facility would violate the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which went into effect in 1970 […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Rocky Flats, the sequel?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Courting the Bomb.” During public hearings this summer, Department of Energy officials repeatedly stated that nuclear bomb triggers could be built safely. Their “modern pit facility” would be, as its name suggests, fully modernized and superior to the department’s previous pit-manufacturing projects. Their insistence […]
Posted inAugust 18, 2003: Where the Antelope (and the Oil Companies) Play
A tale of tough women walks out of the past
Why do we take this trip? Well, to make money … I have simply got to make a stake some way, for I don’t want to lose the farm and it is the only way I can see of saving it. — Helga Estby, quoted in the Spokane Spokesman-Review, May 5, 1896 In 1896, when […]
Posted inJune 23, 2003: 'Sound science' goes sour
Is it a farm – or is it a pharmacy?
Western farmers consider the risks and benefits of ‘biopharming’