Updated Jan. 5, 2012 It is a dead place. Stitched with skeletal plants and sentinel tree trunks, riven by rills of cloudy, unspeakably polluted water, laid bare against a paste sky. There is no sense of space or time here; only pure, absolute quiet. It is one of my favorite images — “Uranium Tailings No. […]
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The Estonian connection: Or how I started worrying about oil shale
The last big oil shale* boom in the West busted on “Black Sunday” 1982. I was 11 years old, then, living in Western Colorado, and I can still remember my dad explaining the boom, the bust and the process necessary to get the “oil” out of the shale. Here’s a primer: Underground room and pillar […]
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The age of disturbance
When my East Coast-based family rented a condo in Breckenridge, Colo. for our family vacation in June this year, my dad couldn’t stop exclaiming over the dead trees. Scores of lodgepole pines, killed by the bark beetle epidemic, lined pretty much every road we drove down or bike path we pedaled on. A recent report […]
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Friday news roundup: speeding renewable projects on tribal lands
Recent efforts to speed the process of approving surface leases on tribal lands have moved slower than a Mojave Desert tortoise. But regulations proposed by the Interior Department Monday could help tribes more quickly gain Bureau of Indian Affairs approval for renewable energy, residential, or business leases on some of the 56 million acres of […]
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Travel planning theatrics
Currently, Koch’s ranch is split by a slim Bureau of Land Management parcel. That parcel contains a public access road into the Gunnison National Forest. In return for eliminating this forest access, and gaining a few other parcels in the same area (totaling about 1800 acres), Koch is offering the federal government a pair of […]
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The Visual West: Adobe sunrise
On a cold morning two days after Thanksgiving, I drove up into the ‘dobes north of Delta, Colorado. Here is what I saw: Shards of glass, clay skeet and shotgun shells imbedded in the cracked soil, the site where the locals hold thousands of shoot-outs in the apparent wasteland. As the first sun of the […]
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Don’t drink the (benzene) water
In 2005, Louis Meeks’ water well in Pavillion, Wyo., which had reliably supplied his family for decades, suddenly turned brown and filmy, and smelled like gasoline. When he tried to drill a new domestic well, water, steam and natural gas exploded some 200 feet into the air. Meeks and some of his neighbors, whose well water […]
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Making memories, one stock tank at a time
This year, I was lucky enough to spend Thanksgiving back home with my parents in central Montana. Holidays at home are plenty stuffed with the traditional trappings: board games, gravy boats, hungry pups making cute under the table, food-induced snooze fests in the living room. But what I most look forward to when I’m home […]
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Mining claim markers kill thousands of Nevada birds
From the unintended consequences department comes a sad tale of dying birds in Nevada mining country. Across the Silver State, hundreds of thousands of plastic pipes used to mark mining claims kill untold thousands of birds, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Birds fly into the pipes looking for a place to nest and, unable […]
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Landing a land transaction
A Wyoming congressional representative is trying to resurrect a federal land sale act to reduce the budget deficit and help the National Park Service end a long quest to capture a Grand Teton inholding. The Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act (pronounced “flit-fah”) was enacted in July 2000 to allow federal agencies to sell off disposable […]
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Trampled by tourists
In the five years I’ve been an environmental journalist, and during the previous several seasons I worked in conservation, helping manage and mitigate recreational impacts on public trails in Colorado, I’ve often heard the argument that maintaining a constituency for environmental protection depends on getting as many folks as possible out into the places most […]
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Obama sides with big business over small cattlemen
When four companies control 80 percent of the supply in a marketplace, even the most conservative economists would likely admit the potential is high for market manipulation. This is the case in the world of meatpacking, where four packers — Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef — rule the scene. That’s why, last year, the […]
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Friday news roundup: Road rage and a wild lands successor
Several Utah counties and the state think the Bureau of Land Management is playing troll in a billy goat saga by limiting access to several hundred road segments that cross public lands. County and state officials want to wrest road control from the BLM, and hope U.S. District Court Magistrate Brooke Wells will grant them […]
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A Flood of Fault
—John McPhee, Atchafalaya, 1987 The Army Corps of Engineers’ Missouri River Division is not the place to work if you have a pathological need to be liked. That’s because the Corp’s water management priorities on the Big Muddy involve a crazy-making number of stakeholders, each with different and often conflicting interests. There are downstream barge […]
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The (slowly) changing face of energy country
Change often comes quickly to energy country. Take Williston, N.D., at the heart of an oil boom which has more than doubled the state’s oil production since 2008. Williston mayor Ward Koeser recently told NPR that in just a few years’ time, the town’s population has grown from 12,000 to an estimated 20,000. And he […]
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Spotty enforcement in the gas patch
Multiple choice question: Last year, Colorado collected $1.2 million, Wyoming $15,500, California $13,123 and New Mexico $0, for fines associated with what activity? A. Poaching of big game animals B. Misleading labeling of food items C. Oil and gas drilling D. Late returns of library books Unless you’ve been in solitary confinement for the last […]
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Friday news roundup: Sulfide statutes and Jesus statues
EPA reinstates reporting requirements for a poisonous gas To the relief of citizen advocacy groups (and the irritation of industry), the Environmental Protection Agency finalized its decision last week to lift a 17-year-long Administrative Stay on Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) reporting requirements for hydrogen sulfide — a poisonous gas that smells like rotten eggs and […]
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Big money bill could restrict bighorn management
Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson isn’t sheepish about legislative appendages. First it was a grazing rider that would allow the Bureau of Land Management to transfer permits without environmental review. His latest — also tacked to the House’s 2012 Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Appropriations bill — could decide the fate of a wooly battle […]
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What would John McPhee do?
Cross posted from The Last Word on Nothing When I’m thrashing through the brambles of a first draft, no story in sight, I have one reliable lifeline. WWJMD? What would John McPhee do to get himself out of this #%&! mess? This, after all, is the guy who found fascinating stories in Alaskan placer mining. And the […]
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Mapping the West … in air polluters
If you happen to glance over the fantastic air pollution investigation jointly released by National Public Radio and the Center for Public Integrity this week (along with a handful of other cooperating media outlets that did regional stories), you might think to yourself: “Thank (insert deity here) I don’t live in the Midwest, East or […]