Gila Bend, Arizona: Crumbling remnant of the Old West or the perfect place for utility-scale solar to finally take off?; also, selenium’s problems, hunter-run Super PACS, do conservation-minded subdivisions work?; voluntary endangered species conservation agreements, and more
Dancing with wolverines
When a wolverine splayed his huge clawed paw onto my shoulder, the tip of each powerful nail pressing firmly, I was filled with a reckless elation. But I remained still, because I recalled that wolverines have a special molar angled sharply inward that allows them to tear muscle and hide from carrion, pulverize bone. A…
Do subdivisions designed for conservation actually help wildlife?
For millennia, Colorado’s Yampa River Valley has followed the rhythms of wildlife mating and migration, the habits of elk and grouse and bear. The arrival of ranching in the 1880s altered the pattern a little, but radical change didn’t occur until the last half of the 20th century. That’s when the big ranches began to…
The fading Arizona town of Gila Bend bets big on solar
One afternoon last April, I took a walk down Pima Street, the main drag that runs through Gila Bend, Ariz., linking the state highway from Phoenix with Interstate 8 to Yuma and beyond. It had been an unusual spring in the Southwestern deserts; abundant late-season rains spread carpets of green across rocky hillsides in the…
Conservation agreements try to head off endangered species listings
With the arrival of spring in western Colorado’s Gunnison River Basin comes the bizarre mating ritual of the Gunnison sage grouse. In clearings called leks, males gather to show off extravagant courtship dances, slapping their wings against their bodies and filling and popping the two air sacs on their breasts. Spring also heralds another local…
Coping with two-headed fish and other effects of selenium
Muddy Creek is nondescript, a narrow stream trickling through the sagebrush steppe of southern Wyoming. But like many Western waterways, it carries selenium, a natural poison that seeps from rocks and dirt and accumulates in the food chain much as mercury does. Both humans and animals need tiny amounts for good health, but too much…
Rowing to Yap
Michelle Nijhuis’ essay in the April 30, 2012, issue, “The row to nowhere,” was delightful. I lived on Yap, or more accurately, I spent several weeks there several times. The island is beautiful and traditional. Most amazing is that part of the islanders’ own “rowing history” involves rowing, or, rather, sailing, to the sort-of-nearby island…
Secretly funded Montana sportsmen dive into political fray
The images are arresting: An ATV stops in a sunny meadow filled with knee-high grasses. Its driver, a young woman, removes her helmet and looks directly into the camera, a strip of black duct tape stretched across her mouth. A bird hunter in full camouflage is likewise muzzled by tape, as is a fisherman on…
Something in the desert water?
While Arizona’s homegrown political traditions tend more toward a conservative Blue Dog Democrat, moderate stance, there has, since Goldwater, arisen in Phoenix and the Valley a somewhat hard-core Republican population of voters (HCN, 4/30/12, “Money talks — and votes”). For some reason, when voters retire and move to Phoenix or Scottsdale from the East Coast,…
Student visitors from near and far
As their foreign exchange program at Paonia High School came to a close, Henna Reinhardt, from Germany, and Gabby Moet, from Holland, stopped by to see how HCN operates. They sat in on our fast-paced weekly story meeting, in which the editorial staff huddles in a tiny, sweltering conference room to discuss (and argue passionately…
California clean energy rules may impede imports from rest of West
When a group of Pacific Northwestern utilities teamed up to build a $580 million pair of wind farms in the Columbia Gorge a few years ago, they planned to help pay for the projects by selling excess generation and renewable energy credits to a California utility. Selling some or all of a project’s power to…
Can solar produce long-lasting jobs?
Climbing to the top of the observation tower above the Agua Caliente Solar Project takes some nerve. Wind gusts up to 35 miles per hour challenge white-knuckle grips on the railing; the grated steel landings shudder underfoot. At three stories, the tower is just high enough to set off alarms in the acrophobic brain. It…
Choosing between solar and soil in California
California farmer Michael Robinson’s 120 acres in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta might seem like the perfect site for a 20-megawatt solar array to power thousands of homes. It’s near transmission lines and lacks the endangered tortoises, long waits for federal permits and other obstacles that have tripped up larger solar projects in the Mojave…
Dead trees, biodiversity, and the black-backed woodpecker
The ruins of scorched or beetle-killed forests may not seem like ecological havens. But myriad species depend on standing dead or dying trees, including the black-backed woodpecker, which haunts skeletal forests in the West, Alaska and Canada. Its ebony dorsal plumage blends in with the charred tree trunks on which the bird rummages for juicy…
What’s the best place for Big Solar?
In spring 2008, reporter Judith Lewis Mernit followed desert activists through Southern California’s Big Morongo Canyon Preserve. They were tracing a proposed route for the Green Path North, a power line that would carry geothermal electricity to Los Angeles to help wean it off of coal. It wasn’t the Mojave Desert’s best wildflower year, but…
Fighting billboards in Missouri
Congratulations on your incredible article “Billboards vs. Democracy” in the Jan. 23, 2012, issue. My neighbor brought me the issue, knowing my dislike for billboards. Your research for the article was amazing — so thorough and comprehensive. The only detail I would add is that digital billboards are energy hogs. Our Kansas City neighborhoods were…
Filling empty pages: A review of When Women Were Birds
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on VoiceTerry Tempest Williams224 pages, hardcover: $24.Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Sarah Crichton Books), 2012. Terry Tempest Williams’ new book, When Women Were Birds, resonates with her signature gift — the ability to salvage beauty from great heartbreak. Like her acclaimed memoir Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,…
In the desert, questions without answers: A review of Gods Without Men
Gods Without MenHari Kunzru384 pages, hardcover: $26.95.Knopf, 2012. The setup to Gods Without Men may sound like the beginning of a bad joke: “A Sikh, a hippie, and a monk walk out to the desert. …” But there’s nothing clichéd about British novelist Hari Kunzru’s latest work. Kunzru’s mosaic of a story envisions history lapping…
Learning from the opposition
Ed Marston’s tribute to pioneering rancher Doc Hatfield was fitting; Hatfield had a major hand in promoting responsible use of Western rangelands. He helped start a movement of responsible ranchers operating in all corners of the West (HCN, 4/15/12, “Goodbye, Doc”). The less-responsible ranchers are still out there, too, and, from what I see here…
Libro-tempest in a teacup
I live in sight of Tucson Unified School District’s ground zero, and this controversy is a storm in a teacup (HCN, 4/16/12, “The book smugglers”). Tucson is a multi-ethnic community, but this controversy seems to have only two cultural dimensions, Latinos and everybody else, with “everybody else” wearing the bad, black cowboy hat these days.…
Selenium concentrations
Selenium concentrations, in milligrams per kilogram, detected in stream bed sediment samples collected from Muddy Creek and tributaries in Carbon County, Wyoming.