Researchers are sifting through the impacts of last spring’s release.
Tay Wiles
Posted inDecember 8, 2014: The Great Salmon Compromise
Range report
What the BLM can (and can’t) tell us about the state of rangeland health.
Posted inArticles
What 4-H teaches 7 million kids about food
A new book explores what the century-old organization looks like today.
Posted inArticles
A new map shows rangeland health West-wide
Searchable BLM reports and satellite images for 20,000 grazing allotments.
Posted inOctober 27, 2014: Defuse the West
Roots of rebellion: A forum
Four experts discuss threats to federal public-lands employees and where we go from here.
Posted inOctober 13, 2014: Charles Bowden's Fury
Flash flood chaser
One man’s obsession improves forecasting in southern Utah.
Posted inGoat
Sons of Wichita: understanding the enigmatic Koch brothers
The Koch brothers have become a household names in the past decade. Three out of four brothers are major players in energy development in the West and across the country. Two are powerbrokers for the conservative right and have been at the forefront of bringing libertarianism into the political mainstream. In the energy and political […]
Posted inGoat
Is immigration reform an environmental issue?
The question of whether humanity can expand indefinitely without running roughshod over the very environment it depends on once stood at the center of the American environmental movement. Public concern reached a fever pitch after the Sierra Club published Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling The Population Bomb in 1968. Within that debate quietly lurked questions about how […]
Posted inGoat
Bark beetle video series says there’s hope amid the carnage
The mountain pine beetle is perhaps the most infamous creepy-crawly in the Western United States. No larger than a grain of rice, the bug drills into trees and infects them with a blue fungus that makes them die of thirst. They’ve bored and left for dead millions of trees and affected 30 million acres in […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Drought watch
Drought is dehydrating much of the West, with several states in their third or fourth consecutive year. Southern Oregon, California, southern Utah and western Nevada already have extremely low streamflows and will likely get drier in coming months. Nevada and New Mexico reservoirs were at less than a quarter of their normal levels for early […]
Posted inGoat
Use well water in oil & gas territory? There’s a guide for that
As oil and gas development in Western states continues to increase, from Green River, Utah to North Dakota’s Bakken, so do public fears of water contamination from spills and hydraulic fracturing. Although fracking (pumping water and chemicals underground to release oil or gas trapped within rock) has been used for decades, there’s still no conclusive […]
Posted inArticles
Map of Colorado River pulse moving toward Sea of Cortez
Update May 16: The Colorado River has now reached the delta for the first time since the 1990s. Conservationists will study environmental effects of the pulse for years to come. Update May 13 from Karl Flessa: “Image taken Monday May 12. Tidal waters in foreground, Colorado River in background. Connection will likely take place on […]
Posted inGoat
Drought gives one of the West’s thirstiest crops an ironic boost
“We farmers here in the United States might as well recognize that we are a minority group, and that the prevailing interest of the nation as a whole is no longer agricultural,” wrote Dust Bowl farmer Caroline Henderson in a letter to a friend later published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1936. She lived in […]
Posted inGoat
Rate of undocumented immigrants winning deportation cases is on the rise, many still detained
It’s an interesting moment for immigration reform in the United States. The very phrase has come to symbolize the failure of the Obama Administration to push much meaningful change through Congress, since the Senate bill to create a 13-year path to citizenship for undocumented migrants floundered amongst GOP opposition last year. Perhaps it was the […]
Posted inGoat
Owls react to megafire and climate trends in central Colorado
In the 1980s, when ecologist Brian Linkhart first started digging around in old woodpecker holes in Colorado for flammulated owls – fuzzy, black-eyed creatures weighing just one to two ounces – his research was all about the birds. He wanted to understand if and where the secretive little animals were breeding – questions he pursued […]
Posted inGoat
49-million-year-old cockroach fossils discovered in Colorado
Three years ago, Slovakian paleontologist Peter Vrsansky found a surprise in a shipment of fossils from Rifle, Colo. Hidden in the collection was an unexpected new peek into the insect world during the Eocene epoch, 50 million years ago. Vrsansky discovered four new species of Ectobius cockroach that are five million years older – and […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Art and the atomic age
Radioactive disposal sites and other residuals of the bomb era.
Posted inArticles
Bison roundup at Rocky Mountain Arsenal refuge
At least 20 animals were removed from the herd to let habitat recover.
Posted inDecember 9, 2013: The Tree Coroners
The Latest: Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site looks more distant than ever
BackstoryAfter decades of indecision about where to store nuclear waste, in 2002 President George W. Bush approved building a permanent repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. In 2009, under political pressure, President Obama halted construction plans. Still, the U.S. Department of Energy continued collecting fees from nuclear power plants for […]