Back in December, when temperatures at HCN-HQ in Paonia plummeted regularly into face-shattering freezingness and the high country softened under pillows, featherbeds, jumpy-castles of snow, it was easy to imagine Colorado’s immediate future rife with moisture. Maybe even a mild spring on the high plains, piled with wildflowers and lushly green around the edges and […]
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Eagle Mountain: Still Not Safe From Los Angeles Garbage
Environmentalists and activists touted it as a victory last week when the U.S. Supreme Court decided it would not hear Kaiser Eagle Mountain v. National Parks Conservation Association et al, the decades-old legal battle over a landfill slated for a spit of land on the southern boundary of Joshua Tree National Park. But after reading […]
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Foal control
Nevada hosts more than half — about 17,700 — of the 33,700 wild horses that roam around federal lands. But Bureau of Land Management rangeland scientists estimate the state can support only 12,700 horses and burros. And if left alone, wild horse herds typically grow 20 percent annually, doubling in size every four years. “We […]
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A new brand of trust land?
Over the last 20 years, timberlands around the West have been falling fast to development. In Washington State, one sixth of commercial forests have been converted to other uses in that time, according to the state Department of Natural Resources (WDNR). Some 1.2 million acres of forest are converted to development and other uses each […]
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Organic farmers prepare to ward off genetic trespassers
In early February, I wrote about the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s decision to fully deregulate the planting of genetically-modified alfalfa, and partially deregulate the planting of genetically-modified beets. These decisions allowed modified alfalfa to be planted anywhere, without restriction, and modified sugar beets to be planted in many locations, with some restrictions — despite a […]
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The Visual West – Image 10
As temperatures climb in late March, the heavy snowpack on Colorado’s Western Slope start its inexorable journey to the sea, carrying with it a heavy load of silt. This shot of the aptly named Muddy Creek was taken just above Paonia Reservoir. Just below the dam, these waters join the much clearer flows of Anthracite […]
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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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Strawberry scrutiny
Methyl iodide is a chemical used to create cancer cells in the laboratory. It’s also a substance that California farmers hope to use to grow those big and beautiful supermarket strawberries. By killing most everything in the soil to clear the way for food crops, the pesticide helps fragile strawberries thrive. But methyl iodide’s toxicity […]
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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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The incredible growing shrinking ski resort!
Do you remember those little packets of gel-cap pills? The ones that would, when submerged in water, swell to become little sponge dinosaurs? Only the little sponge dinosaurs were tiny and flat and lame and never came close to the awesomeness promised by the full-sized dinosaurs rampaging across the label? Seems that could be the […]
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Coal still king
When the BLM schedules the sale of coal leases, which give companies the right to mine federal coal, it rarely does so with great fanfare. But this time was different. This time, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar traveled all the way to a high school in Cheyenne, Wyo., and with Gov. Matt Mead by his side, […]
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Human health v. economic health
Twenty years after amendments to the Clean Air Act authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate additional toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants, the agency is finally flexing its muscle. New rules proposed this month would cut mercury emissions along with other dangerous metals like arsenic, chromium and nickel and particulate matter from oil- and […]
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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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The Visual West – Image 9
In March, the first flowers of the year can often be found above your head rather than below your feet. Here, a silver maple planted in a cemetery outside Paonia, Colorado, shows off its stuff only a few days after the snow has melted off. The swelling elm buds, below, will soon follow suit. For […]
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Rare earth, indeed
In 2009, Backpacker magazine’s risk meter — rating the status of threatened wild places along a spectrum of “saved” to “doomed” — placed Otero Mesa in southern New Mexico about three-quarters of the way to “doomed.” Nudging it to the edge of the proverbial cliff, according to Backpacker, was a singular threat: oil and gas […]
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Utah lawmakers cut off public access to information
Okay, I admit it. At times, I’m a Tea-Party sympathizer. I’ve been glad to hear voices like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s calling to eliminate wasteful price-gouging military contracts. And having spent too much of my lifetime struggling to extract information from recalcitrant government officials, I can see where people get the idea that inside federal […]
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‘Managed retreat’
Sea level rise is real, and it’s coming to a coastal city near you. Research published last month from the University of Arizona finds that hundreds of coastal cities in the lower 48 will lose an average of 9 percent of their land area as climate change causes seas to rise about one meter by […]
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Superfund sludges on
Superfund. The word, at least for me, conjures up images an empty warehouse filled with metal drums leaking toxic sludge, dirt barely covering a hazardous waste sites, maybe some illegal dumping. This Tuesday, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency added 10 sites to its “Superfund” priority cleanup list, and proposed 15 more for consideration. One of the […]
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Tumbling along
What smashes into cars on the highway, spreads wildfire and causes painful weltering scratches? It’s Russian thistle Salsola spp., more commonly known as tumbleweed, a hard-to-control invasive species that grows in disturbed soil and spreads quickly when the thorny plants break off from the ground and roll along dispersing seeds and piling up along fences […]
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The cute calamity
First, the cuteness, because I know everyone spends at least some portion of their day watching Youtube videos of cute animals doing droolingly hypnotic cute things (cat riding a Roomba, anyone? Or how about a slow loris with a very tiny umbrella?) See? This is a pika — a diminutive rabbit-relative which makes its home […]