It’s official: The Tea Party toppled Lisa Murkowski. On Tuesday, the Alaska incumbent conceded the state’s Republican U.S. Senate primary to staunch anti-government challenger Joe Miller, the state’s newest overnight political sensation. (Take note, Harry Reid.) Murkowski was the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Her loss will shake-up that important […]
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Land trade angers locals
A land swap between the feds and the most generous campaign contributor to a Colorado congressman is stirring up controversy on the state’s Western Slope. If the plan goes through, the National Park Service will gain two valuable inholdings, and, proponents say, the traded federal land will be even better protected than it is now […]
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The ethics of wildcrafting
Thoreau once said, “The woods and fields are a table always spread.” Apparently the National Park Service agrees. In blatant noncompliance (or perhaps misinterpretation) of its own leave no trace policy, national park managers have been allowing Native Americans to harvest wild plants and roots from parks, according to a letter from the Public Employees […]
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On the radio
Laura Paskus was recently interviewed about her story “The life and death of Desert Rock” on KVNF, Paonia’s community radio station, by former HCN intern Ariana Brocious. Take a listen below, or check out an interview Laura did with KUNM in Albuquerque. Listen here!
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One step forward, one step back
“We suck at managing exempt wells,” Michael ‘Aquadoc’ Campana bluntly declared on his blog late last year. Water experts across the West likely nodded in agreement. And last week, even Montana regulators owned up to this shortcoming. The state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation acknowledged that subdivision developers were exploiting a loophole in state […]
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“Lines Across the Sand”
Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang opened with a definition: sabotage … n. [Fr. < sabot, wooden shoe + -age: from damage done to machinery by sabots]…. From this subtle introduction, the book grew beyond its covers, even beyond the reach of its cantankerous author, and led a whole generation of upset desert […]
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Telemocracy #3
You thought he had receded into the bowels of history, relegated to the proverbial footnotes of our politics. Indeed, Dan, of “potatoe” fame, has passed into the relative obscurity of Phoenix sprawlurbia – and yet, the Quayle name lives on … Behold, the second iteration, Ben Quayle. Quayle 2.0 is honoring the spirit of his father’s […]
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Uranium pullback
It looks like Colorado won’t have a functioning uranium mill anytime soon – to the relief of anti-nuclear advocates. We reported in July that Cotter Corp. was planning to reopen its Canon City site by 2014. Legislation passed this spring means that Cotter would have to clean up prior contamination before starting to process uranium […]
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Quarry quandary
The limestone that comes from quarries near Durkee, Ore., has more mercury in it than average. As Jeremy Miller reported for HCN last January, when that limestone gets cooked in giant kilns to make cement, the mercury lifts into the air along with other dangerous pollutants like soot, hydrogen chloride, and hydrocarbons. From there, it […]
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Telemocracy # 2
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” –Hunter S. Thompson, in Rolling Stone, 1974 Who knew that the home of a gigantic desert lake that is mercilessly full of salt could get even weirder? Utahn politics have begotten some truly magnificent works of campaign art this cycle – let’s get right to it.
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New law empowers tribal justice systems
In late July, President Obama, an adopted member of the Crow Tribe of southern Montana, signed the Tribal Law and Order Act. The measure, introduced by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) in 2008, aims to smooth out the “jurisdictional maze” of law enforcement on reservations in order to empower tribal communities to better confront crime. Many […]
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Rain rights
Let the water wars commence – or not. Douglas County will soon be the site of Colorado’s first large-scale rainwater harvesting project — an important step away from a more than century old state policy that made the practice illegal, perhaps without good reason. The Colorado Water Conservation Board voted unanimously last month to make Sterling Ranch, a […]
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Insect to Injury?
With plenty of doomsday hysteria circulating about the destruction of western forests from the mountain pine beetle epidemic, the U.S. Forest Service is attempting to allay fears about another beetle on the rise – a 2mm-long twig beetle, Pityogenes plagiatus knechteli, that’s killing younger trees in mountain pine beetle-affected areas throughout Colorado and Wyoming. First […]
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Telemocracy #1
Greetings, earthlings, and other denizens of the West. This is the first installment of what will be an ongoing High Country News roundup of Western campaign commercials. I have scoured the interwebs, and picked out a few that are particularly great in their own special ways. In today’s episode, “If you can’t say something nice, put it […]
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Encounters with the Ex-Secretary
In two appearances at the Aspen Environment Forum this week, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior and ex-Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt seemed to revel in the impolitic. Offshore drilling is an “unregulated frontier culture full of cowboy operators,” he said during a panel discussion with Shell VP Libby Cheney, Consortium for Ocean Leadership president Robert […]
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One tough trout
Here’s the bad news: No fish has ever made it off the endangered species list without going extinct. And the good news: the Apache trout, an Arizona native, may soon become the first. Soon, in this case, is a relative term. The trout’s imminent delisting has been reported since at least 2007, but before it […]
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The Heart of the Beast
As a kid in northern Wyoming, I watched my dad dump a five-gallon bucket of Powder River Basin coal into the heater in our living room every winter night before bed. I’d lean against the stove in my jammies, enjoying its warmth while a blizzard rattled the chimney pipe. Though most Americans never hear coal […]
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It’s getting warmer in here – and drier
A new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) offers a mixed picture of how climate change will affect Western water supplies. Some places will see more moisture, most will see less. For the majority of the region, sustainability of water resources is set to become a serious problem. The study was conducted by […]
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We’ve got hot dates
Here at High Country News, we’re proud of the fact that we’ve got all of our stories from 1993 on available online, in a free searchable archive. But over the last few years, a bug worked its way into the system. You may have noticed that when you did a search, most older stories showed […]
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In defense of a rock
When I was in the fourth grade south of San Francisco, I squirted a glob of Elmers glue onto an index card, pressed a rock into it, and used a black felt tip pen to write a pretty cool sounding word beneath my specimen: Serpentine. Then, I added a brief description on the card in […]