Goat

One needs only to look at the coffee-table book Welfare Ranching’s full page pictures of muddy streams and packed dirt ground to know that cattle grazing can have a negative impact on rangelands. While its specific effects are harder to pinpoint, climate change, too, affects hydrology, native plants and wildlife. Add climate change and cows […]

Colorado’s North Fork Valley – where High Country News makes its home– recently received news that had many residents cheering and hugging on Paonia’s three-block main drag and at the local brewery. On Feb. 6, the Bureau of Land Management announced it would defer the sale of more than 20,000 acres of controversial oil and […]

Viewed from space at night, North Dakota’s sparsely populated Northern Plains appear to harbor a mysterious mega-city. But really, the burst of lights on the prairie is natural gas burning in the state’s oil patch. Enough energy is wasted through natural gas flaring each day to heat half a million homes daily. Flaring is not […]

If you want to know why the biggest electricity supplier in Montana, Pennsylvania Power and Light (PPL), is trying to sell off its 15 power plants, you have to go back in time — back before 2001, when California had rolling blackouts and Enron was pulling the strings of a shaky electricity market. You have […]

If perchance you are a Westerner and you find yourself rushing across the German countryside in a train one day, there are a few things that are so unlike the West that they are likely to catch your attention: *The fact that you are indeed rushing smoothly across the countryside in a train, not a […]

How cool would it be if we could turn wood trimmings, straw, or other common plant products into gasoline?  It’s possible — the technology to produce cellulosic ethanol has been proven, but scaling it up commercially hasn’t happened yet, in large part because we haven’t figured out how to create large quantities of the stuff […]

The Mining Law of 1872 is famously generous to miners when it comes to granting them rights to the riches on public lands. But in northern Idaho, a scuffle between miners and the Forest Service hinges on a related, but lesser-known law: the Mining Claims Rights Restoration Act of 1955. And unlike the 1872 law, […]

So you finally went out and got a “smart” phone, figured out how to check your email, ask it inane questions and get even more inane answers and got the “app” that turns your phone’s screen into a beer mug that “empties” when you tip it. Maybe you’ve even discovered one of the applications that […]

There is no shortage of Wyoming wind jokes. Google Wyoming wind, and you’ll likely stumble across an image of a “Wyoming windsock”: a length of iron chain on a post, with a sign explaining that, if said chain is cocked at a 75 degree angle, you ought to “beware of low-flying trains.” This is perhaps […]

I’ve covered a lot of public meetings as a reporter, but I’ve never been to one quite like the one at Paonia, Colo.’s town hall on Jan. 15. More than 200 residents packed the stuffy council chambers, sitting on the floor and spilling out into the hall. They were there to hear the Bureau of […]

You want to cut carbon to the levels recommended by the International Panel on Climate Change? Then you’ll need 100,000 Megawatts of new renewable power integrated into the electrical grid. And in order to get that, you’ll need a lot — try 25,000 miles — of new high voltage transmission lines. That was the message […]