Let’s get this one thing straight: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s plan for regulating greenhouse-gas emissions from stationary sources under the Clean Air Act — a “tailoring rule,” which goes into effect January 2, 2011 — is nothing radical. States may be suing, a bipartisan swarm of senators may be politicking to stop it, energy […]
Goat
Posted inGoat
How Big Oil won California
Count these among the things that will get more difficult after the midterm elections: passing a federal energy bill, being openly gay in the military, and governing California. It’s already hard enough. This is the state that has been pronounced “ungovernable” almost since its inception, and has been confirmed so in recent years by Forbes, […]
Posted inGoat
Mer-cow-ski?
The Anchorage Daily News has been gamely reporting on the Great Alaska Senate Race Write-in Campaign Spelling Snafu with updates on challenges to poorly-penned appellations inscribed in the blank space on the state’s ballots, mostly in favor of write-in Senate candidate Lisa Murkowsi. Huffpo riffed on the many misspellings, and we thought we’d jump into […]
Posted inGoat
Canyoneering, four ways
Ever wondered what it’s like to don harness and wetsuit and delve into one of southern Utah’s deep, cold, water-filled slot canyons? A new documentary called Gorging, due out next summer from DFS Films, follows notorious guidebook author Michael Kelsey and three other canyoneers (a photographer, a guru, and a weekend warrior) into the twisting, […]
Posted inGoat
Pop quiz: What national conservation land is nearest you?
The National Landscape Conservation System — America’s youngest permanently protected collection of public lands — celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, and grassroots organizers and BLM managers are meeting in Nevada to plan for the next 10 years in the “sportsman’s park service.” Before the upcoming meetings in Nevada, you might brush up on the […]
Posted inGoat
Sharing the (reduced) bounty
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hasn’t made a secret of its preference for catch shares as a management tool for the nation’s fisheries. And Friday, the agency, which is headed by marine biologist and fishing quota proponent Jane Lubchenco, released a formal policy that pushes catch shares as the primary management tool for America’s […]
Posted inGoat
The morning after
The Tea Party didn’t take the West Tuesday night. Power did shift to the right, as it did nationwide, but not dramatically. In New Mexico, Republican Steve Pearce took his House seat back from Harry Teague, but the state’s other two Democratic congressional incumbents held on. The GOP gained two seats in the House in […]
Posted inGoat
Oh deer
For the last 10 years, Western Ecosystems Technology, Inc. — an environmental and statistical consulting group — has been studying the mule deer that winter on the Pinedale Anticline. Over the first four years of the study, But the latest data, just released in a new report [pdf], makes those increases look like a temporary […]
Posted inGoat
Squeezing trees
The new data show forest carbon storage by region, with forests in the 11 Western states accounting for almost a third of the nation’s total. Forests in the West reach two extremes. Oregon, Washington, and southeast Alaska forests store the most carbon per acre of anywhere in the U.S., while those in Arizona, Nevada, New […]
Posted inGoat
Shale games
Between 1.2 and 1.8 trillion barrels of oil sit in shale deposits in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. For years oil companies have been looking for a commercially viable way to unlock all that petroleum, to no avail. “No matter how high the price of crude oil went,” Hal Clifford reported for HCN in 2002, “shale […]
Posted inGoat
Fortification or sacrifice?
The Fortification elk herd, which lives in what some call “the wildest country remaining in the Powder River Basin,” is one of the only plains elk populations in the continental US. After reintroduction to the Fortification Creek watershed of northeast Wyoming in the 1950s the herd now numbers around 250 animals. Hunters covet licenses for […]
Posted inGoat
The woodpecker and the owl
How is a black-backed woodpecker like a spotted owl? Well, if an environmental group has its way, the woodpecker will join the owl as a species whose protection changes forest management on a broad scale. The spotted owl, which depends on old-growth forests, was federally listed as threatened in 1990. Subsequently, logging across the Northwest […]
Posted inGoat
A Wyoming wonder
In 1999, we published a feature story that followed biologist Jonathan Proctor around the northern Great Plains as he tried to convince ranchers that prairie dogs are beneficial for their land. Proctor’s a tall guy, but his task was undoubtedly taller, if not colossally unrealistic. Affectionately termed “range rats” by some, prairie dogs are one […]
Posted inGoat
Utahns tar the tar sands
Mining of tar sands in Alberta Canada has left a landscape of razed boreal forest dotted with pools of toxic wastewater. It also produced 1.49 million barrels of crude oil last year – every day. Now, the first-ever commercial tar sands mine proposed in the United States is facing its second legal challenge from Western […]
Posted inGoat
Who’s terrorizing who?
Attention citizens of Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming: get ready for new neighbors in your skies as the U.S. Air Force plans to train pilots over far-reaching swaths of the West. The Air Force’s existing training areas, developed during the Cold War, are too small and flat to prepare pilots […]
Posted inGoat
Grazing takes the heat
Climate change. Severe wildfires. Invasive species. A booming human population. The Bureau of Land Management identifies these as four key threats to Western public lands. Stick conventional and renewable energy development, endangered species protection, and recreation in the mix, and there’s less room each year for a past widespread use of public lands: livestock grazing. […]
Posted inGoat
Telemocracy #4
As if you needed more evidence. It is now undeniably clear: John Hickenlooper is Satan, and hates America. As I mentioned in the first installment of Telemocracy, the negative campaign ad is a proud American tradition. Since John Hickenlooper – Denver mayor and current Democratic candidate for governor of Colorado – apparently has no respect for the American Way, […]
Posted inGoat
Full frackin’ disclosure
New regulations in Wyoming requiring gas companies to disclose chemicals used in fracking go a long way toward addressing a rising chorus of health and environmental concerns. But, like a wholesome, Wyoming first date, it’s just a start, and they don’t go all the way. Drillers have long contended that the chemical cocktails they use […]
Posted inGoat
More surprises flow from Ruby Pipeline
Last month the HCN magazine ran a story on the furor over a conservation deal meant to keep two environmental groups from suing to stop construction of the Ruby Pipeline, a 675-mile-long natural gas pipe stretching from Opal, Wyo., to Malin, Ore. Western Watersheds Project and the Oregon Natural Desert Association opposed fragmentation and destruction […]
Posted inGoat
Out of breath
A dry cough rattles the throat of 63-year-old John Mionczynski, who is sun-tanned, fit and active and should be one of the healthiest people in Wyoming. He’s spent his life goat packing through the Wind River Mountains and living off wild plants in the Red Desert. An ethnobotanist and wildlife biologist, he calls high, dry […]