The EPA’s “self-inflicted lobotomy” is about to be reversed — at least partially. More than a year ago, in response to Bush budget cuts, the agency began dismantling its network of 26 technical libraries, a crucial repository of scientific information for the agency’s own researchers and the public. It closed several regional libraries and moved […]
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Nothing left to lose
Renewable energy sources may not belch carbon dioxide or other nasty gasses into the atmosphere, but that doesn’t mean they’re impact-free. Solar power, if done on the scale necessary to replace coal, would take up huge swaths of desert land. Wind turbines kill birds and bats and, to some people’s eyes, just aren’t very pretty. […]
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Drilling setback in Nine Mile Canyon
This week, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation sent letters to the Bureau of Land Management raising concerns about plans to open Nine Mile Canyon for new energy development. The canyon, situated in eastern Utah’s Tavaputs Plateau, is home to ancient rock art, which has already endured damage due to increased truck traffic from the […]
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How the federal election could impact public lands
The September 15th edition’s Snapshot focused on the high cost of restoring the Going to the Sun road in Glacier National Park. The Snapshot reports restoration which is now underway will cost $240 million to complete. I found this price tag for “restoring” only one Glacier NP road curious. I live near Redwood National Park […]
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Oil shale moratorium expires
At the moment this post goes live — 12 am, October 1, 2008 — the West will be one step closer to commercial-scale oil shale development. That’s because the provision that Ken Salazar inserted into last year’s Interior Department appropriations bill forbidding the BLM from issuing final regulations for granting oil shale leases will have […]
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Do you live in a small town?
We’ve been hearing a lot about small towns during the campaigns this year, ranging from Barack Obama’s comment about bitter residents to Sarah Palin’s service as a small-town mayor. That means it might be a good time to find out whether you live in one. Community size is a consideration, of course, but these factors […]
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Roan battle rages on
Yesterday, the BLM issued leases for natural gas drilling on the Roan Plateau. The leases were auctioned off about six weeks ago for a record-breaking $114 million. Environmental groups, hunters, anglers and Colorado politicians, including Governor Bill Ritter, opposed the BLM’s management plans, advocating for stronger protections on the unique and beautiful sanctuary in western […]
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Ground gaming the system
The latest Colorado poll, conducted by Rasmmussen on September 28, has Obama up by one point. But is the race as close as it seems? Maybe not. There’s been some recent speculation, of course, that the the polls are skewing Republican because pollsters can’t get in contact with young voters who don’t have landlines. But […]
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The bailout
In an election year already filled with topsy-turvy events and serial comeuppance, the stock market yesterday lost an average of $3 million per minute and chickens came home to roost on their dwindling 401K nest eggs. The headlines were screaming: Massive credit contraction…worst drop in U.S. stock market since 911…strangled economy…serious recession looming. But despite […]
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Palin the hostile
A recent piece by native rights attorneys Lloyd Miller and Heather Kendall-Miller — getting wide play in Native and alternative media — indicts Sarah Palin on Native issues in her home state. Alaskan Native villages are spread across 375 million acres, many of them roadless. Subsistence foods — fish and game — still comprise 60 […]
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Diamonds in the Rockies
Molybdenum. Uranium. Silver, gold, copper, coal. You name it and Colorado has probably mined it. Now a company called DiamonEx wants to exploit those mineral-rich mountains for diamonds. The Australia-based company is seeking a permit for exploratory drilling in Larimer County, along the Front Range. DiamonEx says they hope to mine as many diamonds as […]
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Keeping wolves out of trouble
It sounds like common sense — require ranchers in wolf-recovery areas to clean up their dead cattle, so that the predators don’t develop a taste for livestock. Now, that may happen in eastern Arizona’s Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. The forest is included in the struggling Mexican wolf reintroduction program. Only about 50 Mexican wolves now roam […]
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Late aspen, early melting
Despite the best efforts of many concerned friends, I remain something of an agnostic on whether climate change is caused by humans or is part of a natural cycle. After all, on my daily walks with the dog along the Arkansas River, I can gaze across our wide valley and stare up the narrow valley […]
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The East is fracked
The interior West has long been a source of raw materials for the rest of the nation. Copper mines gauge the hills of Arizona; long trains run day and night hauling low-sulfur coal from the massive mines of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin and Colorado’s West Elk Mountains to the East Coast; gasfields on the Pinedale […]
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Out of the woods?
The Senate Finance Committee has come up with a new bill which would extend the Secure Rural Schools Act. Secure Rural Schools, enacted in 2000, was a response to the decline in logging in the 1990s. Counties that once depended on a share of the timber profits from their federal lands saw their budgets plummet […]
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As goes the Red Planet, so goes the West?
NASA just gave the University of Colorado at Boulder its largest research contract ever – to lead the mission that will launch an orbiting probe to Mars in 2013. The benefits of the nearly half-billion-dollar project are many: Every dollar spent on space exploration has an eightfold economic benefit; studying other planets helps us better […]
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Indentured servitude in the pines
Managing America’s national forests for commercial timber production involves a lot of hard, dirty work — clearing brush, thinning small trees, and replanting areas that have been harvested. It’s work that native-born Americans aren’t exactly lining up to do. And so the Forest Service, like so many other organizations, has found itself relying on immigrant […]
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Palin the predator
“The more voters learn about Sarah Palin…the less there is to like,” the female voice intones ominously in a new ad by the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund. The political message goes on to show graphic footage of wolves being gunned down from an airplane, and piles on more evidence of the Alaska governor’s aggressive […]
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Pigs and politics
In recent days, American political discourse has not been dominated by the Republican elephant, nor by the Democratic donkey, but instead by the humblest of barnyard livestock — the pig, as in “You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.” Does anyone actually put lipstick on a pig? The swine I see […]
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Lipstick on a Cheney
One needn’t go far to find mention of how the gun-slingin’, moose-eatin’ vice presidential pick of John McCain is going to snowmobile to victory this November on the backs of rural Western voters. Because she’s from the West (Alaska via Idaho), and because she’s been mayor of a small town (a suburb, actually), and because […]