By now, we’ve all read and heard the tragic and horrifying accounts of the attempted assassination of three-term Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), which resulted in 6 dead and 14 injured, including the Congresswoman. It’s not clear if the mentally-ill shooter also had political motivations. Giffords is known as a moderate and has voiced strong criticism […]
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Happy New Year, pronghorn!
At a site called Trapper’s Point about six miles west of Pinedale, Wyo., the New Fork and Green rivers sweep toward one another and then away, creating an hourglass shaped strip of land. Every spring and fall more than 3,000 pronghorn and mule deer pass through this bottleneck as they travel between winter range in […]
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Proposed Colorado uranium mill gets key state go-ahead
Web only: Watch an audio slideshow about the proposed Piñon Ridge uranium mill. Colorado took one step closer to kickstarting a new Western uranium boom this Wednesday, when state regulators approved a license for the Piñon Ridge uranium mill. The western Colorado mill — which could be the first in the nation in over HCN […]
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The Visual West – Image 1
Drive the back roads of Delta County, Colorado, these days and you have a good chance of spotting a bald eagle atop some old cottonwood tree, or sometimes on the ground in a pasture of cows, tearing into some nutrient rich afterbirth. Baldies show up every winter here, and seem to be increasing in numbers. […]
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The best of the Top 10s
Here at HCN, we’ve scoured the Internet to bring you some of the most noteworthy Top Ten lists of the year, for your edification and amusement. In no particular order, and mostly from Western media outlets: Come across any good Top 10 lists to share? Or do you have your own? Post ’em below (as […]
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2010: The year that was
Back when I was a High Country News intern, one of our contributing editors gave me and my comrades this bit of wisdom about our profession: Environmental news doesn’t break, it oozes. Looking back at HCN‘s year-in-stories, this truism resonates. The intractable issues that have defined our region for years — whether people and wolves can peacefully coexist in the […]
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Merry Christmas, small farmers and all eaters
The U.S. Congress gave the American public — and small farmers and ranchers — a bit more than a lump of E. coli-tainted coal this year. Their 2010 stocking stuffer is a freshly-passed food safety bill that gives the Food and Drug Administration additional powers to help keep our food supply safer. One important provision […]
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Wilderness creates jobs too!
If you were to submit today’s Department of Interior press conference to a Facebook word ranking game, it would probably look something like this: JOBSECONOMYBILLIONDOLLARSWILDERNESS The conference, which took place at an REI store in Denver, was called to announce that the Bureau of Land Management would once again start taking inventory of lands in […]
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Snowbound? Take a virtual tour of the West
If you live in the mountains, or near them, or you have to fly over them, you know that the holidays aren’t just about visiting family, stuffing your face, or dropping into a prolonged eggnog coma (IMHO, that must be why the stuff is called “nog” in the first place). They’re also about not being […]
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Super mouse to the rescue
What’s three inches long and can leap tall buildings in a single bound? It’s a bird. It’s a really, really small plane. No! It’s the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse! Well, maybe it can’t leap over a building, but the little rodent can jump a foot and a half up in the air, cover twice that […]
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In the zones
You’ve got to hand it to Ken Salazar: Never before has an Interior Secretary been so methodically driven to make U.S. public lands safe for renewable energy development. Unlike the men and women who have held his position in previous administrations, especially the last one, Salazar has put solar, wind and their attendant transmission needs […]
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“Warranted, but precluded”
Polar bears. Walrus. Ringed and bearded seals. And now wolverines have joined the list of northern animals threatened by warming winters and shrinking snow and ice packs. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the bear in 2008 and is considering adding the walrus and the seals. This week, the agency announced that while listing […]
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Compromise in the Wyoming Range
Three days after my recent story about a proposed energy development in the Wyoming Range’s Noble Basin rolled off the presses, the Forest Service released their much-anticipated draft environmental impact statement for the project. The Forest Service’s “preferred alternative” would let Plains Exploration and Production (or PXP) develop the necessary roads and infrastructure to drill […]
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New Mexico caps again
A New Mexico regulatory board took another stand against climate change last week, approving its second set of greenhouse gas rules in just over a month. The first round, OK’d by the state’s Environmental Improvement Board in November, laid the groundwork for New Mexico’s participation in the Western Climate Initiative, a regional cap-and-trade program, and […]
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Solar setbacks
On Thursday morning, San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), finally sunk a shovel into the ground for the transmission project every enviro loves to hate: The 100-mile, $1.9 billion, 500-kilovolt Sunrise Powerlink, slated to skim across desert-and-forest wilderness as it carries power to the hamlet sprawl along California’s southernmost coast. Arnold Schwarzenegger, ever more flamboyantly […]
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Would you like some DDT with that organic cucumber?
Consumers might assume that buying organic means the produce they purchase lacks chemical residues and the farmers and farm workers growing organic crops aren’t exposed to toxic chemicals. This may not always be the case. Organic farmers across the nation must contend with the possibility that the land they farm has some of the very […]
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It’s not all lights and sirens
It wasn’t an abnormal day in most respects. No wreck-causing foul weather slicked the winding mountain roads. There hadn’t been an accident at any of the three underground coal mines just upvalley, where a steep canyon cradles the sinuous North Fork River. Even so, both of the ambulances that serve tiny Paonia, Colo. were out […]
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Goldilocks and the three bears
Once upon a time Goldilocks was hiking across northwest Wyoming and she met a big fierce grizzly bear. Grizzlies were once severely endangered throughout this part of the West, down to just over 100 bears in the 1970’s. But today more than 600 of these hostile bruins haunt the Yellowstone area. And this summer in […]
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Fun with factory farms!
Mooooove over, Wisconsin. You’re quickly losing your dairy state cred to the West. Unfortunately for those of us who live beyond the 100th meridian, though, the usurped title of America’s Dairyland comes at a price. As factory-sized dairies colonize the West, they have significant effects on water and air quality, as well as quality of […]
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What to do with all that carbon?
Capturing carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and factories and storing it in deep geologic formations could prove a critical arrow in the quiver of efforts to combat climate change. Plus there’s a bonus: it makes coal and natural gas — and the reliable energy they produce — a whole lot cleaner, protecting them from […]