I knew it was going to be an interesting evening when the folks in the audience began bending my ear before the event got started. On May 15, High Country News convened a panel discussion on western Colorado’s red-hot energy economy. Shirley Adams told me point-blank that she had come because she had “something to […]
Paul Larmer
Posted inArticles
Primer 5: Wildlife
Wild animals are as much a part of the American West’s mystique and grandeur as its mountains, canyons and plains. Nowhere else in the United States can you encounter wolves, grizzlies, buffalo, elk, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, golden and bald eagles, condors, mountain goats, and moose, wandering more or less at will across a varied landscape. […]
Posted inApril 14, 2008: Taking to the Trees
The hazards of the leasing game
Driving over our local mountain pass these days is a bit like playing that video game where you, as the driver, have to navigate a course full of hazards that appear out of nowhere. Around every hairpin turn on the narrow highway, you’re likely to steer into a minefield of rocks, ranging from a scattering […]
Posted inArticles
Primer 2: Energy
For more than a century, the Interior West has been the nation’s domestic energy supplier. Factories and power plants across the country have long made use of the abundant, high-quality coal reserves in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado and Utah. After World War II, the fledgling nuclear power industry created a rush for the region’s uranium deposits. […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2008: The People of the Sea
Don’t write off this story yet
You know you have been working somewhere for a long time when your colleagues start coming to you for “institutional knowledge.” On the one hand, it’s kind of flattering to be the person who knows why the toilet sometimes clogs up (our connection to the sewer line has always been susceptible to debris dams), and […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2008: Unnatural Preservation
Planning for uncertainty
On an unseasonably cold night in late January, more than 250 Phoenix-area residents packed the Arizona State University Kerr Cultural Center in Scottsdale. There, they found more than just physical warmth: High Country News was sponsoring a heated conversation on the uncertain future of their desert kingdom. Author and moderator Craig Childs posed the central […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2007: Rebels with a Lost Cause
The Sagebrush Rebels ride again — and again
A decade ago, I caught a scene in one of the West’s longest-running political melodramas: The Sagebrush Rebels Ride Again. I was in a dingy hotel room in Denver, surfing the television for something worthwhile to watch, when I stumbled upon C-SPAN. There was my congressman, Republican Scott McInnis, standing on the floor of the […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2007: Beetle Warfare
Becoming a native
There’s nothing like spending time in New Mexico to make you contemplate the West’s long and tumultuous history and confront the thorny question: Just who is a native? William “Sonny” Weahkee qualifies. He’s a Pueblo Indian and Albuquerque activist who directs the SAGE Council, which fought for a decade alongside Anglo environmentalists against a proposed […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2007: L.A. Bets on the Farm
Dear friends
THE CHANGING EDITORIAL GUARD With this issue, we bid a fond farewell to Editor John Mecklin, who is headed to California and the challenge of starting up a new, policy-focused magazine. Since coming to HCN a year ago, John has implemented a long-needed revamp of our editorial and copy-flow processes, significantly broadened the scope of […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
Loosening the grazing knot
For much of the past two decades, High Country News has tried to wrap its head around one of the most vexing subjects in the West: livestock grazing on the public lands. We have talked with angry environmentalists and scientists who can’t understand why public-land managers ignore the ecological damage caused by cattle and sheep, […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2007: A Climate Change Solution?
Dear friends
MEET US IN SALT LAKE HCN invites Salt Lake City area readers to join us for a dialogue on Thursday, Sept. 13. We’ll help the Utah Science Center kick off a series of discussions on “Choices.” Several panelists, including David Nimkin, National Parks Conservation Association chair; Dianne Nielson, energy advisor to Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman; […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Fire: Friend and foe
Thirteen years ago, I witnessed a new, hard-edged ecology that operates in the West. I was sitting in the stands of our small rodeo arena, watching irritated bulls throw off a succession of young men like so many rag dolls, when a bolt of lightning ripped the sky, striking the juniper-clad ridge across the valley. […]
Posted inJune 25, 2007: Predator hunters for the environment
The resurgence of hook-and-bullet conservation
When mule deer populations plummeted across much of the West in the 1990s, some sportsmen took aim at a familiar target. Kill the coyotes, which are adept at finding fawns in the grass, they said, and the herds will rebound. Here in western Colorado, the state Division of Wildlife responded with a five-year study on […]
Posted inMay 14, 2007: Two Views of the Verde
When the going gets tough, the tough collaborate
A few years ago, the walls of our brown-bricked town hall reverberated with the voices of citizens engaged in two of the region’s most constantly contentious issues: water and growth. A proposed subdivision promised to stretch Paonia’s water supply to the limit, and many folks thought that the town should not sell new water taps […]
Posted inArticles
One of Interior’s departed returns to D.C. (for a short while)
On April 17, 2007, Ann Morgan got to do something that few Western conservationists have done since 2001: testify before a congressional committee. The subject before the Energy and Minerals Subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee was the BLM’s ongoing push to open up as much of the public domain as possible to oil […]
Posted inApril 30, 2007: Rural Education 2.0
The granddaddy of all collaboration groups
One thing you quickly learn in the rural West is that ranchers come in all shapes and sizes. There are the fourth-generation ranchers hanging on by their toenails with overextended credit and the eternal hope that cattle prices will rebound, the drought will break, and most of their cows will be found on the mountain […]
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
Dry to the bone
It was hard to get very excited about global warming this winter. Despite record warm temperatures in the East and a steady diet of dire reports from scientists, here in western Colorado the snow and cold started in October and kept up through February, without so much as a hint of a January thaw. “We […]
Posted inWotr
March madness trims the herd
The yearling cow elk started showing up in the yard the first week of March, and at first nothing seemed wrong. During the day she fed along the back fence; as evening approached, she came in closer to the house, nibbling on the first green sprouts of lawn before bedding down under the ash trees. […]
Posted inMarch 5, 2007: Wish You Weren’t Here
Welcome to the Homogocene
The snow has started to melt off the pasture behind our house, revealing an emerald-green carpet of grass. It’s a welcome sight, but how, you might wonder, could the grass already be green in mid-February? Because it is cheatgrass, an exotic Eurasian species that springs up and matures faster than any of the West’s native […]
Posted inDecember 25, 2006: Confessions of a Methane Floozy
Slipping into the holidays
More than a foot of snow fell in our hometown of Paonia the week after Thanksgiving. It was fluffy, “powder dry” stuff to begin with, but after a week of sub-freezing temperatures, not to mention sub-par snow removal efforts, it turned into dense sheets of ice on the town’s sidewalks and streets. Geology students from […]