Little more than a year after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, 4 dollar-a-gallon gas has prompted a bout of political amnesia. Despite various moratoriums on offshore drilling, the House of Representatives passed three separate bills last week that would hasten and expand domestic oil production. Then a Senate bill that had gained considerable momentum […]
Sierra Crane-Murdoch
Posted inGoat
Water Sharing in the Over-shared West
If you were to trace the dips and rises in water sales across the American West onto a graph, the line would fall in synch with basic economics. In a recession, when dollars are scarce, water transactions are few and far between. But when a region booms, freeing up cash for all kinds of development, […]
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New Mexico Exhibit Redefines Landscape Photography
If gallery goers at the opening of Earth Now: American Photographers and the Environment expected mantel-ready frames of distant peaks and sinuous canyons, they would have been surprised by a collection that stands nearly in defiance of traditional landscape photography. “Landscapes can be boring,” said Kate Ware, the exhibition’s curator at the New Mexico Museum […]
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Photographer Sharon Stewart on the acequia tradition
This April, as the communal irrigation ditches known as acequias run with spring melt and farmers carve new furrows into their fields, many northern New Mexico villages will celebrate their annual homecoming. This is the time of the limpia –– the cleaning of the acequia, when water-rights holders and their families gather to haul rocks, […]
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On Navajo Nation, Power Authority slips away
On April 8, a week after Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly testified before Congress on the immense energy potential in Indian Country, the Nation’s energy development enterprise, Dine Power Authority, will shut its doors, laying-off all but two of its staff. In operation since 1985, the DPA has yet to lift one major electric energy […]
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This Week in Toxics
Despite recent wrangling over the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, agency officials and congressmen are crowding the political aisle this week to agree on one particular thing: pollutants that threaten human health should be regulated, or at the very least, disclosed. Pinning health problems on specific chemicals like the ones EPA […]
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Megaload Magnetism
Last spring, when I saw my first megaload, I thought July 4th had come early. Football dads flipped burgers in the lot where the rig had parked. Hundreds of people crowded the ditches and dangled off guardrails to get a look at the machine. Newspapermen snapped cameras from the center of the road, and sheriffs, […]
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Nuclear Disaster Reverberates in the West
When the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded on April 26, 1986 and heaved plumes of radioactive dust across the Soviet Union and Europe, the United States’ domestic uranium market slumped into hibernation for nearly two decades. It should come as no surprise, then, that uranium stocks are falling rapidly as Japan’s own nuclear disaster unfolds. […]
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How better science could help solve environmental justice problems
In the world of public health research and environmental monitoring, “cumulative impacts” are edging toward conventional wisdom–but at EPA headquarters, the phrase is just becoming hip. This week, the agency doled out $32 million dollars to study the health impacts of exposure to multiple pollutants at once. That’s on top of the $7 million granted […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
Crowdsourcing helps tackle environmental injustice in California’s Imperial Valley
The border city of Calexico, Calif. — population 27,000; 95 percent Latino; 25 percent poverty rate — is the kind of place where environmental laws are enforced last, if at all. But a local task force of residents, academics, and environment and health officials hope to change that. Last year, they launched the Imperial Visions […]
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Top-Down Land Management
Those who saw the March 1 hearing on Interior Secretary Salazar’s “Wild Lands” order may not have learned much about wilderness preservation’s impact on Western jobs — as the hearing’s title suggested — but they did, at least, witness a brilliant display of congressional snark. “The reality is,” said Congressman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) addressing his state’s […]
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Even Tea Partiers are Conservationists
New Mexico’s new governor, Republican Susana Martinez, may have gotten right down to business last month by putting a hold on a rule that would require large polluters to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But if new data on Western public opinion is accurate, then it wasn’t the state’s voters who gave her that mandate. According […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
Unpacking health hazards in fracking’s chemical cocktail
Meet the Master Well Formula — the chemical cocktail that Encana Corp. will use to hydraulically fracture every natural gas well it drills in Wyoming’s Jonah Field. Drillers mix 11,800 gallons of this solution with over a million gallons of water and a heavy dose of sand, inject it underground to release gas deposits, and […]
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Teaching climate change in coal country
In the Powder River Basin, on a vast, grassy plain between the Big Horn Mountains and the Black Hills, the city of Gillette, Wyoming sits on top of America’s largest coal deposit. So close is the city to the strip mines that students at Campbell County High School can look out the window and see […]
Posted inFebruary 7, 2011: Obama and the West
Welcome, new interns
Two more interns have joined us for six months of “journalism boot camp.” We’re also delighted to announce that Emilene Ostlind, intern extraordinaire from the Summer/Fall 2010 session, is staying on as an Editorial Fellow. When Sierra Crane-Murdoch was tagging birds in Vermont in 2007 to monitor their migration, she found herself more interested in […]
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From science to action in environmental justice
On the east side of Houston, Texas is the Ship Channel, a narrow vein that gapes into the bay just north of the Gulf of Mexico. Through this waterway, freighters carry Western oil to sea. The banks are tangled with refineries, docks, pipelines, and rails. Fuel tanks stack the shore like poker chips, and when […]
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A “New Era” for Indian Country?
“The Indian Nations can do the work–if the federal government will clear the way for us to exercise our liberty and thus make a new era and a more perfect union.” That was Jefferson Keel yesterday, President of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), in his State of Indian Nations Address. His point, very […]
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Bad Omens for Arch Coal
State officials in Montana and Washington are cracking down on projects that could expand coal production and trade in several Western states. Arch Coal Inc., a St. Louis-based company with a major stake in the expansion, doesn’t seem the least bit daunted–though maybe they should be. On January 12, the company paid $25 million for […]
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In Western water law, “first come, first serve” has limits
Three miles south of the Tongue and Yellowstone Rivers’ confluence near Miles City, Montana, an oxbow parts Roger Muggli’s alfalfa fields from the rough gray hills on the other side. Most days, Muggli walks the diversion dam from the Tongue through ditches that feed water to his flood-irrigated crops. He works the old-fashioned way: no […]