North Dakota’s Three Affiliated Tribes are struggling with living in the heart of the Bakken Formation, North Dakota’s gigantic oil play; an “all of the above” renewable bill; extreme cartography; how Peter Gleick’s fall hurts California water policy, and more.
When Peter Gleick fell, California’s water world lost big
updated 4/17/2012 On Feb. 14, an anonymous source released internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a conservative Chicago-based nonprofit that casts doubt on global warming science, to more than a dozen climate bloggers. The documents revealed Heartland’s major funders, including the Charles Koch Foundation and many large corporations, detailed a nearly $1.6 million program to…
The Other Bakken Boom: America’s biggest oil rush brings tribal conflict
Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, a lilting swath of prairie in western North Dakota, was once a quiet place. Though thrice the area of Los Angeles, it had only 5,000 residents. Even New Town, a more populous district east of a reservoir called Lake Sakakawea, looked sparse and ephemeral. There was a granary, a fire station,…
Librotraficantes smuggle controversial books to Arizona
Outside Casa Ramirez, a Houston, Texas, cultural center, a group of friends feasted giddily on pan dulce and café. It was the morning of March 12, a Monday. Nothing about the assembly seemed subversive. Yet 28 of them would soon cram a commuter bus with boxes of prohibited books and drive toward Tucson, Ariz., calling…
Braving landfills, dodging avalanches, all for the sake of geoscience
On a chilly October morning, Fred Jenkins strides across the West Garfield County landfill. Past hunkered-down dumptrucks and mountains of appliances alive with chattering magpies, he stops at what appears to be a tripodal alien spore. It’s a global positioning system (GPS) monument that Jenkins helped install in this sage-speckled swath of western Colorado five…
Big game tag auctions raise big bucks for Western states
In the West, big game hunting can be big business. In January, a New York man shelled out $300,000 at auction for a tag to hunt Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep in Montana this fall — almost equaling the 1994 bid record of $310,000 for a bighorn tag. All Western states have similar auction programs for…
Diverters be damned
HCN‘s story about Bob Rawlings is a classic tale of one influential man’s moral conflict and hubris, yet the story is incomplete (HCN, 3/19/12, “Water Warrior”). Like Rawlings, the author disregards the damaging consequences of the original water diversion. Rawlings will be remembered for maintaining a distinct tribal myopia for decades, and perhaps for overlooking…
Living on faith: A review of The Man Who Quit Money
The Man Who Quit MoneyMark Sundeen272 pages,softcover: $15.Riverhead Trade, 2012. The title grabs your attention: The Man Who Quit Money. Intrigued, you open the book and read: “In the first year of the twenty-first century, a man standing by a highway in the middle of America pulled from his pocket his life savings — thirty…
New books from friends of High Country News
In mid-March, former intern Jeff Chen (winter 2009) came by our Paonia, Colo., office to say hello. After his stint at HCN, Jeff founded Pick Up America — a “youth-inspired nonprofit conducting the nation’s first coast-to-coast roadside litter pickup to encourage a transition toward zero waste.” So far, Jeff and his team have walked over…
Redefining “renewable” to get a clean energy bill through Congress
Seven times since the 101st Congressional session in 1989, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., has sponsored or co-sponsored some bill establishing a national energy policy to reduce global warming. Each in some way called for U.S. utilities to get a certain percentage of electricity from renewable sources by a certain year; a few had bipartisan support.…
Tales from the Edge: A review of Extremophilia
Extremophilia, River Rats, Timber Tramps, Biker Trash, and Realtors: New and Selected WritingsFred Haefele145 pages, softcover: $16.95.Bangtail Press, 2011. If you’re not familiar with the term extremophilia, don’t worry. As Missoula, Mont., author Fred Haefele explains: “It’s a genuine neologism. A freshly minted word. It refers to someone with an intemperate love of extremophiles, those…
When a boom is not a boon
Dark nights have long been a hallmark of the West’s vast rural High Plains. But a 2010 nighttime satellite photo from the National Geophysical Data Center reveals a striking change in the arid, once-empty sweep of western North Dakota — a smear of light that spreads far wider than any of the state’s cities. This…
A headstrong hero
It was a great pleasure to read the article in the Feb. 20 edition of High Country News on Martin Litton (“A restless giant”). He is one of the heroes of the American West: passionate, headstrong, principled. The photo of him rowing the dory in the Grand Canyon should one day make its way to…
A lament for open range
Thanks to Jonathan Thompson for pointing out that there is more nastiness involved in the drilling and production of natural gas than fracking (HCN, 3/19/12, “A fresh focus on frack attacks”). Once-open Western rangelands have been transformed into industrial slums, complete with contaminated water and air. Habitats have been destroyed and wildlife populations displaced or…
At the boiling point
Thanks for Matt Jenkins’ article on the “water warrior” and the woes of interbasin water transfers that affect so many regions of Colorado and the West (HCN, 3/19/12, “Water Warrior”). It is also time to think about how we are boiling our water away in order to create electricity in the steam-generating plants that dominate…