A handy pamphlet on how to dig out from a tumbleweed takeover of sci-fi proportions.
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 inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
The Latest: Colorado first state to regulate methane emissions
BackstoryFrom diesel exhaust to leaking pipelines and other infrastructure, oil and natural gas development releases methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO2, sulfur and nitrogen compounds and toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) like benzene. The latter two help form lung-damaging ozone. As drilling booms, Western gaspatch pollution sometimes rivals that of major […]
Posted inGoat
Avalanches weren’t – and aren’t – only a backcountry threat
In the handful of times I’ve visited Missoula, Montana, the grassy slopes of neighboring L- and M-emblazoned Mounts Jumbo and Sentinel have never looked any more threatening to me than the hogbacked foothills that yaw out of the ground west of Boulder, Colorado, my hometown. Velvety, yes. Curved like a set of relaxed shoulders, yes. […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
Goodbye, Hello
In January, our board of directors gathered by phone and Web to talk with staff about High Country News‘ progress over the last four months. There’s good news: Print and digital subscriptions are up 1,000 from last year, our coffers are bursting with end-of-year donations (thanks to all who contributed!), and our redesigned website should […]
Posted inGoat
Colorado first in the nation to regulate oil and gas industry’s methane emissions
The home of the West’s most pitched battles over oil and gas development is once more in the news for major energy policy reforms. On February 23, Colorado’s Air Quality Control Commission voted in significantly stricter statewide rules governing air pollution from oil and gas development, including the nation’s first state-level controls on the industry’s […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 2014: The Gila $olution
Ranchers, enviros and officials seek a middle path on public-land grazing
Moving beyond stalemate to meaningful reform in Utah.
Posted inGoat
Troubleweeds: Russian thistle buries roads and homes in southeastern Colorado
J.D. Wright pauses to check in with his wife of 51 years. “Do you remember, Mama, when that wind was?” After a few minutes perusing her cellphone photos, she reports back: Tumbleweeds first buried the house on November 17. The gusts screamed up and there they were, piled so deep over the doors and windows […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 2014: The Hanford Whistleblowers
Drought brings new dust storms to the geographic heart of the Dust Bowl
A dust storm hit, an’ it hit like thunder;It dusted us over, an’ it covered us under;Blocked out the traffic an’ blocked out the sun,Straight for home all the people did run… That’s how folksinger Woody Guthrie described the walls of airborne earth that rolled across the Texas Panhandle during the drought-ravaged 1930s. But he […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 2014: Building a More Sustainable West, One City at a Time
L.A. is here to stay
Paul set his mug of wine down and glowered at me over his glasses. Los Angeles? Why would any magazine editor include Los Angeles in a special issue on environmental sustainability? My friend and former professor had good reason to ask. The camper Paul calls home, where I had stopped for dinner that October night, […]
Posted inGoat
If the gas industry wants enviro cred, it should embrace methane regulation
Shift more of the nation off coal-powered electricity and onto that supplied by natural gas, and what do you get? A significant reduction in the carbon emissions driving the alarming climatic shifts we already experience in our daily lives. That’s the theory anyway, based on the fact that natural gas produces about half the carbon […]
Posted inGoat
2013 in environmental news, from the darkest to the most hopeful
A few weeks ago, High Country News contributing editor Craig Childs dropped me a note asking for some help with his annual winter solstice production, Dark Night. Would I write and read a series of poems about descending into darkness – specifically “death, ice, fear, what is inside the deep, blue, scarier crevasses of your […]
Posted inGoat
Will drilling cost the Arctic its wildness?
In the dark of a far-north winter night, amidst 70-mph winds, the nine-member crew of the tugboat Alert released its towline and set the Kulluk oilrig adrift on heaving seas. Loaded with about 139,000 gallons of diesel and 12,000 gallons of combined lubrication oil and hydraulic fluid, the Kulluk ran aground off uninhabited Sitkalidak Island […]
Posted inGoat
Why it doesn’t matter whether Colorado’s fracking bans hold up in court
If anything illustrates just how contentious fracking has become on Colorado’s urban Front Range, it’s the closeness of the vote on a Broomfield ballot measure to ban the practice for five years. When results came in after the Nov. 5 election, it had lost by a mere 13 votes, triggering a mandatory recount. Last Thursday, […]
Posted inNovember 11, 2013: Cosmic Prospecting
Mailbox surprise
The staff and board were surprised and deeply humbled by the generous check that arrived in our mailbox last month, a bequest from the late Gerald Hollingworth of Steamboat Springs, Colo. Gerald was a longtime reader who shared High Country News articles with his friends and engaged them in long conversations on many Western subjects, including […]
Posted inGoat
The long and winding (and dangerous) road: Car crashes and the rural West
It was almost a normal drive home. In the nearly 10 years I’ve lived in the Colorado Rockies, I’ve completed variations on the same 4.5-or-so-hour route dozens of times on my way down to the plains and my hometown, Boulder, Colo., without major incident: Highway 24 from Leadville to I-70; Highway 82 from Aspen to […]
Posted inOctober 28, 2013: Lifeblood of the Delta
A delta reborn in drought
K-K-KKSSSSCH. It was the noise we all dreaded aboard the Rusty Pickle, one of three rafts floating down the muddy San Juan River in southeast Utah. The gravelly grind – felt in the teeth as much as heard by the ears – became a regular feature as our boats beached on sandbar after sandbar, forcing […]
Posted inGoat
After South Dakota’s deadly whiteout, a look at blizzards past
It began as unseasonably warm weather – 80-degree temperatures edging into the last couple of weeks before western South Dakota ranchers were to round up their summer-fat cattle, bring some to market and move the rest to closer-to-home pastures with gullies and trees for shelter against the brutal winter months ahead. The cows perhaps didn’t […]
Posted inGoat
Oregon study confirms that cutting conifers can help sage grouse
I must have looked like an idiot to the folks watching me from the big diesel pickup. It was a scorching day in July of 2012, and I had been ushered out in front of the rig to toddle down a dusty, high-desert two track behind a line of greater sage grouse hens like a […]
Posted inGoat
House Republicans give ground on immigration reform a bit too late
Last fall, many read Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney – who, according to Reuters, had advocated “ ‘self-deportation,’ … essentially call(ing) on the government to make life so miserable for the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, most of whom are Hispanics, that many would leave on their own” – as a sort of mandate […]
Posted inGoat
As Rim Fire scorches Yosemite, Forest Service cuts restoration funding
It started small enough, on Aug. 17 – a 200-acre blaze burning towards a place called Jawbone Ridge from a north-facing slope in the rugged Clavey River canyon, west of California’s Yosemite National Park. The area was isolated, and no structures were immediately threatened. By the 19th, local news sites were reporting 2,500 acres burned […]