For 15 days last year, Renee Seidler, a scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, sat in a truck near a highway and watched the fall migration of Wyoming’s pronghorn. It was the first time since the construction of Highway 191 that the 300-head Teton herd had an alternative to dodging cars and trucks to get […]
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Dead Southern California puma would have spread genetic diversity
As I wrote in High Country News last spring, the pumas of Southern California’s Santa Monica Mountains are dying — slowly, but quite literally — for lack of genetic diversity. Blocked from migration by freeways, development and the Pacific Ocean, the lions have begun to inbreed; researchers studying the lions have, through DNA tests, found […]
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Salt Lake City water managers troubleshoot climate change with local data
In many Western cities, municipal water management is a job tied to the mountains. In Salt Lake City, for example, 80 percent of the city’s water supply comes from snowpack in seven Uinta and Wasatch Mountain watersheds. Yet it’s becoming all too clear that the mountains’ water yield will decrease, come earlier in the year, […]
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New anti-wolf, anti-fed film features “wolf cages” to protect kids
Driving through southwestern New Mexico this summer, I passed one of the area’s wolf-proof school bus stops. I’d heard about the enclosures for years and couldn’t resist pulling off Highway 180 onto State Road 32 to check one out in person. More recently, the cages have been featured in a new documentary film, “Wolves in […]
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The long and winding (and dangerous) road: Car crashes and the rural West
It was almost a normal drive home. In the nearly 10 years I’ve lived in the Colorado Rockies, I’ve completed variations on the same 4.5-or-so-hour route dozens of times on my way down to the plains and my hometown, Boulder, Colo., without major incident: Highway 24 from Leadville to I-70; Highway 82 from Aspen to […]
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Pro-coal arguments win the day at Denver EPA hearing on CO2 regulations
At 5 a.m. on Oct. 30, coal miners and residents of Moffat County, Colorado, gathered at a McDonald’s in Craig for a pancake breakfast before boarding buses to Denver chartered by Peabody Coal. They were headed to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s listening tour, in which the agency travels around the country seeking input on […]
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Rants from the Hill: Towering Cell Phone Trees
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. For a couple of years back in the 1970s, when I was a little kid, my family had an artificial Christmas tree that I thought was incredibly cool. It was fun to put together, […]
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Americans are driving less, but Westerners still love their cars
Fellow Westerners: We are pathetic! Sure, we’ve got our redeeming qualities, I guess, but one of them is not our ability to mitigate the environmental impact of our commute. We Westerners are a tribe of steering-wheel-gripped, fossil-fuel-burning, trapped-in-a-tin-can-in-traffic creatures, guided along highways not by eyes and mind, but by the tinny, seductive voice of our […]
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Will stricter emissions limits mean stranded assets for investors?
Forty-five of the world’s top oil and gas producers received a letter, released at the end of October, that must have come as something of a wake-up call. Seventy investors that control a total of $3 trillion of those companies’ assets sent off the missive with one question in mind: What’s going to happen to […]
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Does reality TV change the reality of Alaska?
Four years ago, when I was 25, I went to Alaska to work as a wilderness guide. I bought my first pair of XtraTuf boots and my first set of head-to-toe rubber rain gear, and between seven-week trips in the backcountry, lived above a Laundromat that smelled perpetually of halibut. The first spring, my boyfriend […]
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NPS Director Jon Jarvis on shutdown rage and funding needs for the service
National Parks Service Director Jon Jarvis had not come to Rubén Salazar Park in East Los Angeles on October 24 to talk about government shutdowns, Tea Partiers in Congress or the privatization of public lands. He had come instead to promote the park service’s American Latino Heritage initiative, a prototype of a new kind of […]
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Why the farm bill’s crop insurance is a missed opportunity for reducing climate risk
This week, Congress is getting back to the big issues haunting the public, including the farm bill, which expired amid the government shutdown. Since the House and Senate have already passed two separate versions, select lawmakers are meeting today to try to reconcile their differences. The division between the two chambers centers on, you guessed […]
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A new history of redwoods, eucalypts, citrus and palms in California: Conversation with an author
Jared Farmer, Utah native and associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, released his third book this week: Trees in Paradise: A California History. The book traces the history of redwoods, eucalyptus, citrus and palms in the Golden State from 1848 to today. Farmer takes a unique approach […]
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What’s at stake in this November’s off-year elections
Next week’s elections will come and go relatively peacefully. And for that we can be thankful. To simultaneously endure the hyperbolic screeching of political mailers and television ads, along with the federal government’s self-implosion, would have broken even the most committed of citizens. Then again, a high-stakes election season probably would’ve saved the federal government […]
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Wonderful, gritty ‘Indian Relay’ documentary airs on PBS
If you have access to a TV on November 18, I recommend that you tune in for the nationwide debut of a new documentary about Indians in the West devoting themselves to a zany kind of horse racing. If you’re in Montana, catch the local debut on Montana PBS on October 31. They call their […]
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New satellite technology to detect wildfires an acre in size
What started as a small blaze in the backcountry of central California this summer became the 250,000-acre Yosemite Rim Fire that forced thousands of nearby residents out of their homes. The tab at the end of the fire fighting efforts tallied over $100 million, and that’s not including lost revenue, damaged structures or the tens […]
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“Idiot-proof” citizen science results in 16 new diatom species
Loren Bahls is not your typical retiree. After stepping down as head of water quality management for the state of Montana in 1996 – then retiring again from private consulting in 2009 – Bahls finally found time to pursue his real passion: Tiny, glass-walled microbes called diatoms that practically cover the surface of the Earth. […]
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Immigration reform bills still give feds rein to trample border ecology
The environmental onslaught caused by the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border fence may have started with a mouse. When the federal government first built a section of border fence south of San Diego in 1990, it left nearby grasses – habitat to an imperiled mouse – to grow long to comply with the Endangered Species […]
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California’s energy storage requirement may revolutionize the grid
The spring of 2011 was wetter than usual in the Pacific Northwest. A huge snow year was followed by rain, and during the peak runoff water was ripping through the hydroelectric turbines on Bonneville Power Administration’s dams. Spring is also the windy season, and hundreds of new turbines in the region were also pumping juice […]
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Forest Service rules catch up with the growth of year-round activities at ski resorts
After spending a day of mountain biking on the Colorado Trail this summer, I stopped near my car to watch the tourist season circus at Copper Mountain’s base area. The crowd milled around a bungee-and-trampoline contraption, a mini golf course and a concert stage that blared mediocre funk music. Signs along the trail pointed “mountain […]