When the California High-Speed Rail Authority released its revised business plan last week, headlines in the state and nation screamed gleefully about the project’s ballooning costs. “More grim news on $99 billion high-speed rail plan, as showdown looms,” lowed the Mercury News. “High-speed rail costs balloon to nearly $100B,” reveled the gotcha-happy investigative outfit California […]
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Friday news roundup: ESA sees another day
The U.S. Supreme Court just waived its chance to rule on a constitutional challenge to the Endangered Species Act, the sixth time it’s refused to hear cases that might limit the bedrock law. The fish, endemic to the state, is two to three inches in length and resides in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The Delta’s […]
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In the rush for uranium, cooler heads prevail — for now
Updated 11/7/2011 By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Greens got what seemed like a rare bit of good news when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) last week released their Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Northern Arizona Proposed Withdrawal. The report looks at the potential impacts of removing federal lands near the Grand Canyon […]
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Bugs in the plan
Despite the opposition of myriad conservation organizations, lawmakers, activists, and celebrities like Darryl Hannah, the Keystone XL pipeline has seemed well on its way to federal approval. Where star power has failed, however, an inch-long, carrion-dependent beetle might succeed. TransCanada conducted surveys on the beetle in 2009 and 2010, but they also trapped and moved […]
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At Drake’s Bay, real heroes have long term vision
Politicians rarely think beyond the next election and corporate leaders beyond the quarterly report – but National Park rangers make America stronger when they think about generations to come. A case in point is playing out today on the coast of California at Pt. Reyes National Seashore, a modern twist on an old story. That […]
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A fatal fungus, revealed
The death toll continues to mount in Eastern caves: Since the winter of 2007, when bat behavior turned erratic in upstate New York and state wildlife officials discovered thousands of bats dead in a cave near Albany, their noses smudged with a curious white substance, a million more have succumbed to a disease called white […]
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Nibbled to death by neighbors: the future of public lands?
Editor’s note: Sharon Friedman blogs on forest policy at “A New Century of Forest Planning” and will be posting occasionally on the Range blog. Some of the “public lands issues” that you usually don’t hear much about in the press are what we call “lands” issues. These have to do with infringements on public land […]
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Why 7 billion isn’t as scary as you think
On October 31, the human population officially hit 7 billion. Since humans have a thing for nice big round numbers, the occasion was marked with a great deal of fretting about overpopulation. And the UN’s choice of Halloween as the official date of 7 billion gave all kinds of alarmists the opportunity to declare that […]
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Locavorism seems harder in the desert West
It’s been a few years now since I read Barbara Kingsolver’s popular book Animal Vegetable Miracle, which chronicles her family’s yearlong experiment with locavorism (spouse Steven Hopp and daughter Camille Kingsolver contributed sidebars and are listed as co-authors). I’ve been thinking about it again recently, though. While not the first or the last to discuss […]
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Coal consolidation
A just-announced federal plan to merge the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement into the much-larger Bureau of Land Management is drawing mixed reactions. Some environmental groups wonder if changing the agency’s bureaucratic home will end its long-running coziness with industry. Yet critics of the proposal view it as one more attempt from the […]
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Boulder’s energy future on the ballot
Glossy propaganda has been piling up in my mailbox for months in the lead up to Election Day in Boulder, Colo. Next to a frowney-faced electrical outlet, an ad warns of rate hikes and other terrors: “Municipalization means serious risks to rates and our community’s energy goals.” The slick, full-color fliers come from the Boulder Smart Energy Coalition, […]
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Occupation in the boondocks
It started with “Occupy Wall Street” on Sept. 17, and the movement has since spread to more than 1,000 cities in 82 countries. So it didn’t come as a major suprise that my town was home to an “Occupy Salida” protest early in the afternoon of Oct. 29. About 50 people showed up at the […]
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Solar energy on public lands: The 80,000 have spoken
If the bumpy mountains that rise up between the California desert city of Twentynine Palms and the western flood plain of the Colorado River don’t look like anything else on this earth, it’s because they aren’t: The living things that flourish here can’t get a toehold anywhere else; once they’re gone from here, they’re gone […]
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Friday news roundup: Uranium — To mine or not to mine?
Though not as movie villain-worthy as its cousin plutonium, uranium, the naturally occurring element used to make nuclear weapons and fuel nuke plants, is just as contentious, as illustrated in this week’s headlines. On Wednesday, the Obama administration released a plan for a 20-year ban on uranium mining within a million acres of public land […]
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Will Valles Caldera become a national park?
Around 3,000 elk, the second largest herd in New Mexico, spent the summer munching on Valles Caldera National Preserve grasslands before migrating to nearby Bandelier National Monument for the winter. A menagerie of other wildlife also stake claim to the collapsed volcano’s mountain forests: black bear, mountain lion, bobcat and 60 species of birds. A […]
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How coal is already congesting Washington’s railways
By Eric de Place, Sightline.org This post is part of the research project: The Dirt on Coal Washington’s rail system is congested in places. Adding dozens of coal trains each day, without also big new capacity improvements, could cripple the system with gridlock. All that is common knowledge. Less well-known is this: coal shipments are […]
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‘Wilderness Lite’ wins the day
One of the last decades’ most scintillating (that is, in the headachey confusing sense evoked by scintillating scotoma) enviro-legal ping-pong matches may finally be drawing to a close. On Friday, a three-judge panel at the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver effectively reinstated the Clinton-era Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which banned new road […]
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The hazards of nonhazardous coal ash
The morning of December 22, 2008, is etched into my journalistic memory. I was visiting my family back East and, with little to do other than surf the Interwebs, I had decided to join a new microblogging site called Twitter. I started following a number of environmental journalists and soon noticed that my feed was […]
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Friday news roundup: Pipeline of political posturing
Letters are flying as congressional lawmakers look to send a persuasive final word to the State Department on the Keystone XL Pipeline project in its final hour of debate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., spoke for the first time against the project in an Oct. 5 missive, but 22 House Democrats signed a letter […]
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Colorado ski town zombification
In the last two months, I have been to three different “ski towns” in Western Colorado: Crested Butte, Vail, and Aspen. Each visit was my first and I approached the towns not with delusions of community-rich grandeur but with half-formed preconceptions based on my experiences in Montana’s resort communities, which tend to embrace the summer with […]