Inmates accused of homicide allowed to walk free. Paved roads reverting to gravel. Local libraries closed. These are some of the results of hard choices Oregon’s rural, timber-dependent counties have had to make in recent years, as their federal timber payments have dried up. Now a slew of state bills in Salem seek to give […]
Blog Post
Posted inGoat
Counting–and counting on–visitors
If you’re weary of modern ills like private companies collecting your information in the name of the almighty dollar, maybe you’ll want to escape to a wilderness area for the weekend. There’s no barcode scanner, and no one to meddle in your business. You are free to move about undetected and get messed-up 127 Hours-style […]
Posted inGoat
Side effects
In a video released last fall by the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research, Google Earth zooms in on Humboldt County, Calif.’s forested hills. Cruising the ridges from one watershed of this virtual landscape to the next, one gets a bird’s-eye view of the hundreds of new roads, out-buildings, and even the tall, leafy pot […]
Posted inGoat
Coal’s gasping on the Colorado Plateau
“Here in the U.S., I’m happy to say, the king is dead,” said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg this week. “Coal is a dead man walking.” While the statistics seem to back up Bloomberg’s statements — coal production is in decline, and natural gas is taking up an ever growing slice of the electricity […]
Posted inGoat
How much would you pay for clean water?
Would you be willing to pay up to $10 per month to have your drinking water free of a suspected carcinogen? That’s the question that city councilors in Woods Cross, Utah, are asking residents to answer. In the late 1980s, residents of this Salt Lake City suburb learned that a chemical called tetrachloroethylene (or PCE) […]
Posted inRange
Man’s (and livestock’s) best friend
It’s always fascinated me that domestic dogs are widely embraced as “man’s best friends,” while wild dogs like coyotes and wolves often elicit deep-seated animosity. So I was particularly taken by this video of livestock guard dogs by the Montana-based conservation group, People & Carnivores. The good folks at People & Carnivores work to resolve […]
Posted inGoat
Signs of a strong environmental agenda?
Greens weren’t exactly thrilled with Obama’s environmental performance in his first term, especially with regard to climate change. One of the brightest spots in his administration was Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson. Under her watch, the EPA moved toward regulating greenhouse gases, developed key emissions rules for power plants, made a valiant attempt at […]
Posted inRange
The future of wolverines
By Kylie Paul, Defenders of Wildlife After more than a decade of legal hand-wringing, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) finally proposed on Feb. 1 to protect wolverines in the lower 48 states as a threatened species. But invoking the Endangered Species Act alone is not going to save wolverines from looming threats on […]
Posted inRange
A new vision for public lands
In 2012, the seemingly endless argument over what level of government ought to be the manager over part of the federal land estate flared up again, led by individuals in Utah and Arizona. In Arizona, in March, the state legislature passed a bill that called for federal land agencies to give up title to roughly […]
Posted inGoat
The endangered species to-do list
One summer, I spent so much time fishing the stocked pond behind my parent’s house that middle-school boys called me “bass-master.” Most of my 14th birthday presents were lures. I grew up near the headwaters of the Potomac River in western Maryland, and my dad used to hike into those streams to tempt wily brook […]
Posted inGoat
Delayed gratification
Back in July 2011, a Montana judge prohibited Imperial Oil, a subsidiary of ExxonMobile, from trucking 200 “megaloads” of tar sands mining equipment over the company’s preferred rural highway route. Even though Montana and Idaho state officials had backed the plan, and Imperial had secured the necessary permits, local governments and conservation groups had taken […]
Posted inGoat
The sad tale of Shiprock South
Residents of northwestern New Mexico may by now be numbed by the almost surreal, ongoing saga of the busted housing development in Shiprock. But to those unfamiliar with the tale, it’s downright heartbreaking. “Navajo housing project could waste millions,” reads the headline in the Farmington Daily Times, and “be forever incomplete.” The story opens: SHIPROCK […]
Posted inGoat
Want to put Western weather on the map?
Some of the earliest weather forecasts began with people scattered across the country who regularly telegraphed observations back to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. as part of a mid-1800s program to solve “the problem of American storms.” Though scientific tools have advanced far beyond the telegraph, the challenge of forecasting small-scale, fast-acting weather events, […]
Posted inRange
Western States Survey says
Colorado College’s 2013 Western States Survey report is out. This year pollsters grilled 2,400 voters in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming on energy, conservation and the role of government in both, and it yielded some fascinating results. Westerners’ views of natural resources and public lands, and the roles they play in our […]
Posted inGoat
Spending money to save money
Say you’re a struggling Western freelance writer. In a quest for some dependable cash, you apply to work on trail crew for a summer with the Forest Service — a great way to be in the mountains and make money. You call up the local USFS office and get assurance that yes, you’re qualified, and […]
Posted inGoat
Managing Western water from space
Over the last 40 years, images from space have shown us a lot about the changing West. Data beamed down from NASA’s Landsat satellites have revealed how cities like Las Vegas are oozing into the desert, how bark beetles are spreading through and killing Colorado’s forests and how ecosystems recover from wildfires. Besides wowing us […]
Posted inRange
The state of Indian nations
National Congress of American Indians President Jefferson Keel began his annual report, State of Indian Nations, with a simple exclamation. “Indian Country is strong!” That statement, he added, is something he hasn’t always been able to say. He then described this as “a moment of real possibility.” And why not? There is a long list […]
Posted inGoat
The life of brine
Here in Paonia, Colo., late on January 23rd, I was lying in bed when my house started to tremble. It felt like the whole structure was perched on a pad of Jell-O. There was one short round of shaking, and then another. But before I could become anything more than startled, it stopped. Local news […]
Posted inGoat
Of cows and climate
One needs only to look at the coffee-table book Welfare Ranching’s full page pictures of muddy streams and packed dirt ground to know that cattle grazing can have a negative impact on rangelands. While its specific effects are harder to pinpoint, climate change, too, affects hydrology, native plants and wildlife. Add climate change and cows […]
Posted inGoat
Where the wealth is
If you live in, say, Boulder, Napa or San Jose, and you feel like your neighbors are wealthier than you are, it’s probably not paranoia. They really do have more money than you. That’s the takeaway from the map of the week, released Feb. 11 by the U.S. Census Bureau, that shows which counties have […]