There was a time when environmentalists were all googly-eyed about natural gas, primarily because the cleaner-burning fossil fuel was far more climate-friendly than coal – or so it seemed. The Sierra Club and Chesapeake Energy even became allies in the fight to phase out coal. But as tales of tainted water and polluted air emerged […]
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Posted inRange
Congress quickly fixes the wrong problem
Last week was a perfect illustration of the broken structure that is the United States government. Congress cannot pass a budget. It can barely pass a law to pay bills already incurred and owed. And its best “deficit” cutting attempt is the decade-long sequester, across-the-board cuts that hit the wrong programs, at the wrong times, […]
Posted inGoat
Everett Ruess redux
A new documentary on Everett Ruess is out, the latest manifestation of an ongoing cultural obsession with the young artist who vanished in the desert Southwest nearly 80 years ago. Filmmaker Corey Robinson’s “Nemo 1934: Searching for Everett Ruess” is a 38-minute documentary that “tells the story of the life and afterlife of everyone’s favorite […]
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Living on borrowed water
Last June, poor runoff from an abysmal snowpack was turning Colorado’s Yampa River into a hot cesspool, pushing trout and mountain whitefish to the margins of survival. Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the city of Steamboat asked anglers and flotillas of tubing tourists to stay away, to avoid stressing the Yampa’s overheating and oxygen-deprived fish. […]
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Mapping your way to better health
There’s a new tool in California that can tell you how dirty your neighborhood is compared to the rest of the state. It’s called Cal EnviroScreen, and zip codes with the worst ozone, particulate matter, diesel exhaust and other contamination are shaded a deep indigo on a state map, where as the cleanest are white […]
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Could California lead the West on regulating fracking?
Until relatively recently, California didn’t often come up in discussions about booming oil and gas development. Wyoming, New Mexico and Colorado have been much more at the forefront of the media fray, joined by New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Dakota in the last decade. But ever since a pair of unsuccessful gold prospectors first […]
Posted inRange
Two tales of one river
As Earth Day passed with little fanfare this week, news was mixed for the Colorado River. American Rivers, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy organization, released its annual list of the nation’s most endangered waterways. Half of them are in the West, and the Colorado has the dubious distinction of landing the number one spot. The group […]
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Climate change, not terrorists, is the real threat to the power grid
Early in the morning on April 16, someone fired shots at a Pacific Gas & Electric substation near San Jose, Calif. A transformer bank was the primary victim, and it ended up losing thousands of gallons of oil. The secondary victim was the electrical grid: The power company urged residents to cut back on their […]
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Pumping the San Pedro dry?
Arizona’s San Pedro River has been called the most studied river in the world, attracting scientists, birders, and anyone wanting to observe the region’s healthiest desert river. But all that research doesn’t seem to have affected an April decision by the Arizona Department of Water Resources to approve groundwater pumping that could deplete the river’s […]
Posted inRange
Uranium is no good for the Navajo
A recent post on the High Country News website advocates the position that the Navajo Nation should eventually drop its 2005 uranium ban so that it can get a better deal on uranium development, which the author, Jonathan Thompson, sees as inevitable. The post holds up the example of the Ute Tribe as an example […]
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High-tech canary in the copper mine
On the night of April 10, 165 million tons of rock — equivalent in volume to 735,000 school buses — ripped down the northeast face of Kennecott Utah Copper’s Bingham Canyon mine near Salt Lake City, damaging giant shoveling machines, haul trucks and other mining equipment. The cascade of earth swept away roads and left […]
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In the ozone
In 2005, smog levels in Wyoming’s Upper Green River Basin surprised even the scientists who study one of smog’s primary components, ground level ozone. Ground level ozone is typically a summertime air pollution problem in traffic-ridden urban areas, like L.A., Salt Lake City and Denver. But in sparsely populated Sublette County, ozone that winter was […]
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The companies behind the curtain
Ever since the Bureau of Land Management announced more than a year ago that some 30,000 acres surrounding the towns of Colorado’s North Fork Valley like a necklace had been nominated for oil and gas development, wild rumors have flown about who did the nominating. (Nominating leases prompts the BLM to review whether the parcels are […]
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The river and the drought
“We’re geniuses!” bellowed my good friend, G, as we embarked on a rafting tour of the San Juan River in southeastern Utah. The temperature was nearing 80 under a cloudless sky, only a slight breeze blew upriver and the water was unusually clear. The ranger had just told us we’d have the place pretty much […]
Posted inRange
Real bears get a helping hand from Hollywood
It’s a long way from the cold, rainy valleys of northwestern Montana’s Cabinet Mountains to the bright lights of Hollywood. But they are both bear country, in very different ways. Hollywood is about myths — taking old myths and digging them deeper. Grafting on new, odd branches to existing myths. Hollywood plays to the mythology […]
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Black-backed woodpeckers and severe fire
A charred forest is an eerie place, even years after a wildfire. I discovered this last summer while backpacking through Northern California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. Dead trunks creaked as they swayed in the wind, their branches clacking against each other like bones. We moved quickly, as if walking past an avalanche-prone slope. Had we […]
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Changing of the guard at the Department of Interior
Monday was Sally Jewell‘s first day on the job as the nation’s new Secretary of Interior. She replaces Ken Salazar, Obama’s first-term choice. The second woman ever to serve as the head of Interior (Gale Norton, considered a nemesis of conservationists, was the first), Jewell is now in charge of 70,000 employees and 500 million […]
Posted inRange
Pipeline paradox
Despite many high-profile protests and acts of civil disobedience focused on the adverse effects of extracting and burning the fossil fuels the Keystone XL pipeline would transport, Americans have curious, if not contradictory, views of climate and the pipeline. The KXL, if constructed by TransCanada, would move up to 830,000 barrels per day of tar sands (which […]
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The who, what, where and why of letting it burn
A dusting of new snow here in Paonia, Colo., HCN’s home base, is making it difficult to imagine the fast-approaching fire season. But it won’t be long before the walkie-talkies crackle to life and giant tanker aircraft are dusting the mountains with red fire-suppressant. 1) Was the fire human-caused? If so, the Forest Service will […]
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Return to the bat cave
Since 2006, a powdery white fungus has killed at least five and half million bats that would otherwise be eating insects, pollinating flowers and hanging out in caves. But as far as scientists know, the disease called white-nose syndrome, which grows on bat snouts and wings, hasn’t infected a single bat in the Western United […]