This March, a massive photovoltaic panel at SunEdison’s Alamosa solar power plant broke loose in a strong wind and began to spin atop its pillar. So plant service technician Joe Valdez, a thick-armed 36-year-old with an easy grin and expertise in everything from alfalfa farming to hydraulics, got creative. He lassoed the sun-sucking device and […]
Sarah Gilman
Sarah Gilman is an independent writer, illustrator and editor based in Washington state. Her work covers the environment, natural history, science and place. She served as a staff and contributing editor at High Country News for 11 years.
Posted inGoat
Salmon scuffle
If you’ve been following the comment stream on High Country News‘ recent two part series on salmon (“Columbia Basin (Political) Science,” by Steve Hawley, and “Salmon Salvation,” by Ken Olsen), then you know how fired up people can get about fish. That includes, of course, the authors of the articles and the primary agencies involved. […]
Posted inWotr
For the love of wastelands
Every summer when I was a kid, my parents would load my brother, my sisters and me into our van and haul us from Colorado to eastern Wyoming and Montana, where we searched for fossils left by ancient inland seas. We drove to places with names like Froze to Death and Dead Horse Point, broke […]
Posted inGoat
Pika power-downer
You could say I’m pika-obsessed. I’ve sat in many a talus field until my butt went numb, watching the diminutive rabbit-relatives ferry mouthfuls of wildflowers. I’ve spent collective hours trying to mimic their squeeze-toy call (without success) while I built trails on Mount Massive, outside of Leadville, Colo. I even sharpied myself a “Pika Power” […]
Posted inGoat
Kickstarting salmon salvation?
After years of legal deadlock over the federal government’s inadequate attempts to recover Columbia Basin salmon devastated by dams, the Obama administration appears to be steering a new course. Ken Olsen just wrote High Country News an extensive analysis of how this new political order — combined with the efforts of a diligent federal judge, […]
Posted inMay 4, 2009: Salmon Salvation
For the love of wasteland
When I was a kid, my parents would load my brother, my sisters and me into our van and haul us off to the buttes and flats of eastern Wyoming and Montana, to search for fossils left by ancient inland seas. I remember those places as all openness, meadowlark song and dusty two-lane highways that […]
Posted inGoat
If you can’t beat ’em, shoot ’em.
Idaho is not exactly known for its wolf tolerance, so it’s not surprising that the state is again proposing to kill wolves in an effort to boost elk numbers on the eastern side of the panhandle. The Ravalli Republic reports: In the next few weeks, the Idaho Fish and Game Department will ask the federal […]
Posted inGoat
Revving the “engine”
It’s become something of an Obama administration mantra: The latest economic stimulus package will help jumpstart the U.S.’s green economy. And at a press conference Feb. 20, Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar repeated it yet again, as he spoke on how the Department of Interior, which oversees agencies like the National Park Service and the […]
Posted inGoat
Mule deer anti-decline?
A few years ago, an industry-funded study indicated that prolific natural gas development on Wyoming’s sagebrush-dotted Pinedale Anticline was hammering the massive mule deer herd that forages there in the winter. The herd, some 6,000 strong, had declined 46 percent between 2000 and 2004. A government-commissioned citizen oversight group pushed the Bureau of Land Management, […]
Posted inGoat
Move over Yucca Mountain…
Construction is underway on a hush-hush repository deep beneath Wyoming’s Sweetwater County. What will it hold? Well, it’s not nuclear waste or a germ warfare facility. I’ll give you a hint: It involves a somewhat notorious science fiction author and, tangentially, Tom Cruise. From the Casper Star-Tribune (via the AP): Public planners . . .say […]
Posted inGoat
Hard left turn
Every day, it seems, I turn around and some big Bush-era decision governing public land has been tweaked, reversed, or otherwise flambeed. Today (Feb. 4), President Obama’s new Interior Secretary Ken Salazar canceled 77 controversial oil and gas leases near national parks and on wilderness quality lands in Utah. “In its last weeks in office, […]
Posted inGoat
Bust! Bust!
Last summer, it seemed Colorado might take decades to descend from the staggering height of its natural gas boom. High-paying jobs out on the drill rigs were drawing everyone from heavy equipment operators to senior center chefs to unskilled laborers who might otherwise work in a grocery checkout line or the local 7-11. As a […]
Posted inGoat
Solar sense
As of last June, the Bureau of Land Management had a backlog of 125 proposed solar projects covering nearly 1 million acres. And this month, the Interior Department ordered the BLM to create special offices in Wyoming, California, Nevada, and Arizona to speed permitting for those and other renewable energy projects on public lands. But […]
Posted inGoat
BLM’s Utah plans on shaky legal ground
It’s amazing how quickly things can change. In the last week, we’ve watched Barack Obama take his (slightly bungled) presidential oath of office and George W. Bush helicopter back to Crawford, Tex. In the last month, we High Country News-ers were busy reporting on all the speedy and sweeping changes that Bush made on his […]
Posted inGoat
Gearing up for another energy rush?
On Jan. 16, outgoing Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne authorized the Bureau of Land Management to create renewable energy offices in Wyoming, Arizona, California and Nevada. The offices are meant to speed permitting for wind, solar, biomass and geothermal projects, as well as transmission lines. The feds are acting on a 2005 directive to develop 10,000 […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 2009: Blood Quantum
The return of Colorado’s missing lynx
Cat’s saga highlights the challenges wandering wildlife face in a growing West
Posted inGoat
EPA botched perchlorate analysis, report says
The Environmental Protection Agency apparently erred in its analysis of the potential human health impacts of perchlorate, according to a draft report by the agency’s inspector general. Perchlorate is a major element of rocket fuel that has contaminated drinking water in dozens of states. The chemical acts in concert with a handful of other chemicals […]
Posted inGoat
Another public lands giveaway?
Energy companies will be able to drill 18,000 new natural gas wells on 1.5 million federal acres in southeastern Montana’s remote Powder River Basin over the next 20 years, thanks an amendment to the area’s Resource Management Plan released by the Bureau of Land Management in the waning days of the Bush administration. The basin, […]