Western and Mexican conservationists race to save grasslands — and the species that depend on them. Plus, Idaho’s power struggle, community-driven efforts to regulate fracking, and more.
The story of Gimpy
An injured black bear draws sympathy from the community.
New musical celebrates the nation’s first openly transgender mayor
‘Stu for Silverton’ debuted this summer in Seattle.
Of Sparrows and Sodbusters
Western and Mexican conservationists race against time to save grasslands — and the species that depend on them
Joshua Zaffos on the Front Range fracking wars
The debate over the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing is heating up this fall, as several cities along Colorado’s Front Range prepare to vote on fracking bans or moratoriums. In a story in the current issue of High Country News, Joshua Zaffos documents the groundswell of Front Range opposition to fracking, and he also describes…
Front Range drilldown
In the fight over oil and gas regulation, local control gains ground.
Idaho Power is waging war on renewable energy. Is it winning?
One of the West’s great old-school monopolies and its multi-pronged attack on wind and solar.
Summer Visitors
Here in HCN’s hometown of Paonia, Colo., the peaches and sweet corn are ripening, and we’ve been welcoming lots of visitors from around the West. Longtime subscribers Phyllis Hasheider and Jim McKee of Longmont, Colo., stopped by on their way home after a drive on the San Juan Skyway, a scenic route that passes through…
The elephant in the water world: agriculture
As a polar oceanographer long involved in climate research and a resident of the Yakima River Basin, I have followed closely the development of the Integrated Plan described in Sarah Jane Keller’s article (“Climate-forced water planning,” HCN, 8/5/13). There are a few points in her description that need clarification. First, a major portion of the $5…
The endangered species industrial complex
I started my tortoise career in 1990 at the Nevada Test Site for the Yucca Mountain Project and remember a concerted effort to look for a proper translocation site for tortoise (“Mojave Squeeze,” HCN, 7/5/13). Dr. Kristin Berry accompanied my husband and me on our survey transect in 2001 for the Fort Irwin expansion area.…
The Green Tea Party?
“Clean energy does not need to be a partisan issue. In fact, it’s really bad if it is,” said Amanda Ormand, a renewable energy consultant and expert on solar energy issues. “Making energy political is not in our best interest.” Ormand told me this in a bustling coffee shop in Tempe, Ariz., this past spring.…
The Latest: Megaloads to Alberta incite protests
BackstorySouth Korean-made mining equipment destined for Alberta’s tar sands is too massive to squeeze under interstate overpasses. So energy companies propose to float it up the Columbia and Snake Rivers to Lewiston, Idaho, and then haul it up narrow Highway 12, which winds along federally protected rivers and over the Continental Divide into Montana. That…
A President in Yellowstone
A President in Yellowstone: The F. Jay Haynes Photographic Album of Chester Arthur’s 1883 Expedition, Frank H. Goodyear III, 192 pages, hardcover: $36.95. University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. No sitting president had traveled so far west before President Chester A. Arthur joined an expedition to Yellowstone National Park in 1883. Frank Jay Haynes, a young…
The Latest: Mt. Taylor uranium mines still haunt Navajo communities
BackstoryThe controversy surrounding Mount Taylor — a volcano in northwest New Mexico sacred to several tribes — began in 2008, when the tribes sought to protect it from further uranium mining (“Dueling Claims,” HCN, 12/7/09). After contamination from the mines sickened workers, they fought to have 400,000 acres of federal, state and private lands designated…
A world of hunger and desire
A Guide to Being BornRamona Ausubel195 pages, hardcover, $26.95.Riverhead, 2013. When an innovative style is a writer’s main goal, emotional subtleties tend to fall by the wayside. Ramona Ausubel, raised in New Mexico and now based in California, crafts literary fiction that manages to keep out the chill. The stories in A Guide to Being…
Conservation fund turns 50
Friends and foes agree: The 50-year-old Land and Water Conservation Fund needs a facelift. Created to bankroll conservation projects with royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling, the Fund has long been plagued by political wrangling. Congress is authorized to put in $900 million a year, but often appropriates far less. In 2015, the Fund’s…
Exceptional accounts of the ordinary
Middle Men Jim Gavin240 pages, hardcover: $23. Simon & Schuster, 2013. The stories in Jim Gavin’s debut collection, Middle Men, are darkly comedic accounts of defeat. A second-rate teenage basketball player, a Meals-on-Wheels driver, and a toilet salesman, among others, aspire to reach beyond mediocrity in love and work and play. But failure, that great…
What’s the nerdiest roadtrip you can think of?
ARIZONAComing back to Las Vegas from the Grand Canyon Skywalk on Arizona’s Hualapai Reservation, 32 Chinese tourists and their guide got more adventure than they planned for. Their driver, Joseph Razon, suddenly — and unintentionally — morphed into the captain of a floating barge when his bus was engulfed in a flash flood estimated at…
When turtles and national security collide
Your article about desert tortoises was well researched and written (“Mojave Squeeze,” HCN, 8/5/13). I’m concerned about the U.S. Army’s unsuccessful efforts with tortoise translocation at Fort Irwin as part of its land expansion authorized by Congress in 2001. Similar land-acquisition efforts are underway by the U.S. Marine Corps in Twentynine Palms, Calif., where the military…
Greed overtakes common sense on the Klamath
Your article “Severe Drought forces a moment of truth on the Klamath,” (HCN, 08/19/13) fails to mention that many Basin irrigators brought this situation upon themselves through egregious water use. Around 2000, I was the northwest director for the American Land Conservancy. We had painstakingly put together a package of willing seller buyouts on the…
A war for a dollar
An energy war is sizzling in Arizona, with utilities pitted against the solar industry, environmentalists and even some free-market Republicans. The fight basically boils down to dollars: How much can an Arizonan with a solar system save on his electricity bill, and what will those savings cost other ratepayers? The savings are currently sizable, thanks…
Moving on up in the oil patch
Are the West’s energy fields the last bastion of the American Dream?
Brewers sparrows on the move
This time-lapse video shows how Brewer’s sparrows spread north from their winter habitat in the Southwest and Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert Grasslands to their summer range in the American West. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology produced the maps with computer models that used recorded sightings and habitat data to predict where the birds were likeliest to…