Jonathan Thompson’s graphic report on methane is excellent and should be widely shared (“What you can’t see can hurt,” November 2021). One subtext of his reporting is that cattle production produces more methane than the oil and gas industry — 36% (digestion plus manure) versus 30%. When you consider livestock industry methane pollution, along with […]
Tom Ribe
Posted inMarch 1, 2020: Predator (Mis)perceptions
More science, please
As a reader and contributor since the 1980s, I’ve noticed a trend in the reporting. HCN used to be a paper about the Rocky Mountains, public lands and related issues. Now I see the paper becoming a periodical largely about social justice. The ultimate environmental issue — climate change — is presented as “climate justice” […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2018: The Pioneer of Ruin
A fire deficit
Cally Carswell’s piece on life in the Southwest during aridification hit home with me, living as I do on the edge of the national forest near Santa Fe. The town sits at the base of two large national forest watersheds, both of which are heavily forested and choked with thickets of decadent trees born of […]
Posted inArticles
Politics are behind a plan to prop up coal and nuclear
Discussion of a ‘grid emergency’ ignores cheaper alternatives like solar and wind.
Posted inApril 30, 2018: Celebrity Scofflaw
An industrialized Chaco
Thank you for focusing on the Chaco Canyon area and the rapid pollution and industrialization of this internationally important area (“Drilling Chaco,” HCN, 3/5/18). I have watched this area closely for decades and have seen the incredible beauty of the area trashed by boom-and-bust oil development that scars the land permanently and pollutes the water […]
Posted inArticles
Utah’s approach to public lands won’t work
New Mexico exemplifies the risk of managing lands at the whim of local interests.
Posted inArticles
Congress has rejected many of Trump’s budget cuts
Congress has pushed back on repeated efforts to ax environmental programs.
Posted inArticles
Trump is dangerously beyond climate denial
He and his administration are dismantling the tools for studying climate change.
Posted inArticles
It’s wrong to blame the EPA for the Gold King spill
Without the private sector, neither the mine nor its toxic legacy would exist.
Posted inJanuary 23, 2017: For Which it Stands
Regulations rejected
“Will a twice-burned county change its ways?” (HCN, 12/26/16) details how residents of Montana’s Bitterroot Valley block efforts by their state and county governments to require homeowners in the fire zone to prepare for -inevitable wildfires. Residents reject county regulation and demand private-property rights. These Bitterroot Valley conservatives can teach us a great deal about […]
Posted inArticles
The Park Service doesn’t need corporate sponsorship. It needs proper funding.
When I was a child, I remember passing through any number of national park entrance stations in our family station wagon. I remember the historic stone kiosks where the rangers greeted us, and my excitement as we began the slow drive toward the greatest wonders of nature. Visiting a national park felt a little like […]
Posted inJune 27, 2016: The New Advocates
Silverton needs a new vision
Jonathan Thompson’s otherwise excellent article about Silverton, Colorado’s environmental and economic woes missed a key point about the town’s economic problems (“The Gold King Reckoning,” HCN, 5/02/16). All tourist economies are not created equal, and Silverton, for whatever reason, has failed to develop tourism that can sustain the town as an alternative to past mining. […]
Posted inArticles
In Idaho, rancher buyouts take a big step forward
Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains seem like an unlikely place for the beginning of a positive shift in public-land management. They gleam high and cold above the seemingly endless sagebrush plains of southern Idaho, one of the most conservative states in the West. Yet it was here last year that Republicans worked with environmentalists to plant […]
Posted inAugust 17, 2015: Little Big Bird
How Utah benefits from the national parks it neglects
Sometimes you get your heart’s desire, and it’s too much. On May 23, the Utah Highway Patrol had to close the entrance to Arches National Park after traffic got backed up for five miles on the highway into nearby Moab. Southwest of Arches, Zion National Park and its gateway town of Springdale also suffer from […]
Posted inArticles
Are cows drinking the West dry?
On a recent trip to California, I visited the North Coast, where spring usually means green hills with deep grass strewn with lupine and bright orange poppies bobbing in sea breezes. This year, we found stunted grass, browning hills and the local news obsessing on the worst drought in California’s recorded history. Suddenly, the most […]
Posted inArticles
An experiment in privatizing public land fails after 14 years
It is no secret that some state legislators in the West want to boot federal land management agencies from their states. They argue that agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service cost too much and are too detached from local values, and that states could make money by running our vast open […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
Parks deserve robust budgets
Thank you for your article on the national parks and cultural diversity (“Parks For All?” HCN, 5/12/14). However, it contained a critical error about the government shutdown and the Utah national parks. You wrote, “During last fall’s federal shutdown, states like Utah took over some national parks, fueling calls from some locals for permanent control.” […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Token protection?
It’s wonderful that people from many cultures in northern New Mexico recognized the economic benefits from heightened federal recognition of the Río Grande Gorge near Taos. National monuments are powerful economic drivers, and we welcome President Obama’s action. Yet the language of the Río Grande del Norte proclamation offers little additional environmental protection beyond status […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2011: Serendipity in the Desert
Monument, schmonument
It’s refreshing to see the Obama administration take some protective steps on the National Landscape Conservation System lands (HCN, 12/20/10). Unfortunately, telling an agency with a tradition of neglect and exploitation to focus on conservation may be optimistic, especially when federal lands will face hostility and budget cuts from conservatives in the new Congress. President […]
Posted inJune 7, 2010: One Tough Sucker
Did you get your cow?
Your article on wolf hunting in Montana was certainly written from a hunter’s perspective (given that the writer is a Field & Stream contributing editor), and I respected his take on the issue, complete with those hunter magazine close-ups of people “bagging” a wolf (HCN, 5/10/10). I did find the article wanting from two other […]