After the nearly 300,000-acre Whitewater-Baldy fire tore through the Gila Wilderness last summer, biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service geared up for a trek into the freshly burnt mountains. The team traveled to remote tributaries of the Gila River to collect any Gila trout, one of New Mexico’s […]
Blog Post
Posted inGoat
Craft beer brewers test the waters of environmental activism
Policy analyst Karen Hobbs of the Natural Resource Defense Council has been on a mission to repeal Bush-era changes to the Clean Water Act for years. But she was looking for a popular ally to help get the word out. Then she discovered beer. Although the original 1972 Clean Water Act left little ambiguity about […]
Posted inGoat
BP’s annual review paints a grim picture of global energy use
It’s a bit like Christmas time for energy geeks, and Halloween for environmentalists. Every summer, bp, née British Petroleum, releases its Statistical Review of World Energy, a big fat pile of data detailing the world’s energy production, consumption and trade. Energy geeks revel in it. Nowhere else can one find so much up-to-date information in […]
Posted inGoat
Legislation aims to help natural resources agencies adapt to climate change
U.S. Geological Survey ecologist Dan Fagre is standing behind an interpretive sign that says “Going, going, gone,” as he describes how Glacier National Park’s glaciers have been wasting away over the past century. Each year, when he visits them, Fagre finds newly exposed rock that was once buried under ice. His research predicts that the […]
Posted inRange
How the BLM’s communication style can backfire
Land managers have a hard enough job without the repercussions of using words that leave the public confused and misled. The latest example comes out of southwestern Idaho, a modest parcel of public land called Big Willow near the town of Payette. There, off-road vehicle riders were running roughshod on both public land and adjoining […]
Posted inGoat
Glen Canyon Dam’s evaporating hydropower
Ever since water levels in Lake Powell started dropping in 1999, the last time the reservoir was near full, I’d heard a lot about the infamous bathtub ring—the white band of minerals and salts that separates the current lake level from the high water mark. So I was looking forward to seeing it for myself […]
Posted inRange
Are You Strong? Remembering Randy Udall
The following was previously published at Think Progress. Please also check out a list of links to Randy’s essays for HCN, located below the post. I’ll keep movin’ through the dark with you in my heart my blood brother. —Bruce Springsteen I think we will solve climate change, but to do it we will need […]
Posted inGoat
The American West and the Energiewende: Part II
Peter Stehr is an apple farmer. But when he had a heart attack in 2002, he decided he needed to diversify his income, so he and some associates got a loan and put up a few .6 megawatt wind turbines in his orchard. Today, one of them still spins over a row of apple trees, […]
Posted inGoat
Climate change: moving from science to policy
Last Tuesday I was speeding through the electric-green Montana landscape and hoping for radio or digital cellular reception to tap into the news about President Obama’s climate plan. I was frustrated that I couldn’t hear the story, much less write about it. But it was more than enough consolation to be heading to Missoula to […]
Posted inGoat
Behind the fire headlines
With firefighter safety and the West’s changing fire ecology on everyone’s mind right now, it’s a good time to broaden our view with a trip into the HCN archives. Below are links to some of the in-depth stories we’ve done on these issues. Firefighter fatalities and safety The Fiery Touch: Wildfire arsonists burn forests, grasslands […]
Posted inGoat
Yarnell Hill fire fatalities, in context
A good friend of mine who is a wildfire medic was in the airport yesterday, en route to his next assignment, when I called to ask him, in that helpless way we do, to be safe, and to see how he was handling the tragic news from Arizona, where 19 hotshots lost their lives Sunday fighting […]
Posted inGoat
A man needs a parade
On a bat-streaked evening in April, I found myself on a bridge over the Colorado River, just outside Moab, holding a bright sign, contemplating the twilight of the fossil fuel age and the darkness of celebrity environmentalism. I was tired and sunburned, having arrived there after an eight-day float trip through Desolation Canyon with the […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Time for a Tree House
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. I should admit straightaway that my young daughters never actually asked me to build them a tree house. I came up with the idea myself, got them attached to it, and then pretended that […]
Posted inGoat
What’s the matter with Colorado Springs?
When the so-called Black Forest Fire ignited near Colorado Springs on June 11 and quickly spread across 14,000 acres of forested neighborhoods — destroying more than 500 houses, killing two people and forcing thousands to evacuate — it was an obvious tragedy draped in orange flame retardant. But let’s keep in mind, a political disconnect […]
Posted inGoat
EPA drops study linking fracking to Pavillion pollution
To environmentalists, it must have looked, at last, like progress. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was finally getting serious about the potential risks posed by hydraulic fracturing — wherein pressurized water, chemicals and sand are fired into rock formations to release natural gas or oil. Residents of Pavillion, Wyoming, had been complaining for years that […]
Posted inGoat
Massive California water transfer to continue
Ah, San Diego: great weather, a zoo with adorable panda bears, sandy beaches, turquoise swimming pools — and very little water. Unlike other arid Southwestern cities, San Diego doesn’t have an aquifer to draw its drinking water from, so it imports about 80 percent of it. For many years, L.A.’s Metropolitan Water District supplied most […]
Posted inGoat
Plugging in
Cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing, a blog about science Two weeks ago, for the first time in 15 years, I flushed the toilet inside my house. This — and by “this” I mean the 15 years of non-flushing — was not quite as gross as it might sound. Until very recently, my family […]
Posted inGoat
The summer of our discontent
Confession: While my homeland dries, and pillars of smoke pour out of some of my favorite places, I am far, far away in a place where I must jump over puddles in the park and almost swim my way through air thick with oxygen and humidity. I’ve moved my mobile office to Manhattan for a […]
Posted inGoat
Death in the desert
Updated 6/24/13 Two weekends ago I traveled to Mesa Verde National Park in southern Colorado to do some reporting for a future story on diversity in the parks system. On Monday morning, the 10th, I was waiting in the administration office for my appointment with Cliff Spencer, the park’s black superintendent, to begin. I heard […]
Posted inGoat
The blue window
“Buy this book and read it on the plane (!)” This was David’s advice to me for our upcoming expedition to Alaska’s Harding Icefield, sent with a link to Glacier Mountaineering: An Illustrated Guide to Glacier Travel and Crevasse Rescue. I am no stranger to mountains, having grown up in Colorado and spent several seasons […]