Ahem. The Eagle has landed. At approximately fourteen hundred hours today, an eighteen-wheeler rolled through town here in Paonia, Colorado, right past the front windows of High Country News, on a curious mission. Naturally, we went out to investigate. And so we discovered … the ConferenceBike. Pause, please, and meditate on this photo.
rachelw
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Frack-O-Rama
It’s been a hot week in the tug-of-war over how – or whether – the government will regulate hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”), the drilling method used to extract oil and natural gas, with almost daily headlines coming out of the EPA, Wyoming and Congress. First, the big news: last Thursday, the EPA finally announced it […]
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Sam Hamilton’s Vision
Sam Hamilton, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, died last Saturday after suffering chest pains while skiing with friends outside Frisco, Colo. He was just 54. Hamilton had been on the job only five and a half months, but he’d laid out an ambitious new agenda for the agency, pushing it to […]
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Rubber Slugs and iPhones
Big news for anyone who’s ever gone sprinting and hollering through the woods after the disappearing rear of an enterprising black bear: We’ve now got a scientific assessment of bear hazing. Rachel Mazur, of Sequoia National Park, has a paper in last month’s Journal of Wildlife Management on what the National Park Service likes to […]
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Is this the nuclear renaissance?
It’s been a big week for nuclear power. First there was the conspicuous nuclear shout-out in the State of the Union last Wednesday, followed by the White House announcement, on Friday, that the Energy Department will explore new solutions for coping with nuclear waste. Then, yesterday, the administration released its budget proposal, with a plan […]
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Frackin’ Fears
Yet another group is demanding that the federal government regulate hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”), the process used to extract oil and natural gas, because it threatens human health. In a report released yesterday, Drilling Around the Law, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) argues that fracking could contaminate drinking water supplies “from Pennsylvania to Wyoming,” but […]
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Water Bargain
It’s one more step in what’s been a long, slow trudge. But this step’s a big one. Last Thursday, negotiators released a final agreement on water rights in the Klamath River, moving closer to a settlement of the long-running water wars in the Klamath Basin. The Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement sets the terms for divvying […]