“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. I’ve never liked cows one bit. I know they come off looking pretty good in Hollywood glamorizations of life on the trail, and they’re supposed to be cute when they appear in the form […]
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Bugs abound at summer’s end
_____________________________________________________________________________ Colorado’s summer is drawing to a close. But the season’s remaining dog days still hum with the coda of hungry insects rushing to fill up before the coming fall. The other weekend, I happened upon one such bug, the pleasing fungus beetle (Gibbifer californicus), as it searched the hilly forests south of Denver for […]
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Billion dollar baby: Why the Flaming Gorge pipeline is bad for the West
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House A series of billboards were unveiled in western Colorado yesterday, opposing a proposed water pipeline. Overlaying the image of a desiccated river bed is the phrase, “This’ll only cost you $9 billion.” The placards were funded by some non-profits that are fighting the “Regional Watershed Supply Project,” which would […]
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Economy vs. environment?
The state legislative universe is famously sluggish. Moves toward significant change tend to ooze at the pace of cold honey while lawmakers waste time bickering over bills that everyone knows won’t go anywhere. CEQA — which was inspired by the National Environmental Policy Act and itself inspired similar laws in other states — requires state […]
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Gay Interior Dept. employees share their experiences
When I was preparing to move to the Four Corners town of Cortez, Colo., to take a job as a newspaper reporter, I did some background research to learn more about my future home. I’m well connected with the gay and lesbian community, so one of the first stories I heard was the tragic tale […]
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Friday News Roundup: Wolf hunts and Wyoming refinery woes
Idaho and Montana’s wolf hunting seasons kicked off without much of a howl last week. This is the second year of hunting; the 2009-2010, was held after the Rocky Mountain gray wolf’s removal from the endangered species list. Idaho and Montana have wolf hunting seasons that last four and 10 months, respectively — part of […]
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The other Sept. 11 tragedy
Long before 2001, Sept. 11 marked the anniversary of a date when Americans going about their business were killed in cold blood by religious zealots. It was the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 near Cedar City, Utah. Just about everything except the date and location remain subject to dispute. Mormons had been persecuted in […]
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Industry Pot Calls Enviro Kettle Black
Environmental groups like the Center for Biological Diversity and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation are notorious targets for media label makers that live to pigeonhole with prose. But if the USFWS is the enviros’ legal whipping boy, then the Environmental Protection Agency is industry’s. A report released this week from the Government Accountability Office — a […]
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Hummer Syndrome
A few months ago, while scouring Wyoming’s Powder River Basin for evidence that the West had gone global, I drove my little rental car into Gillette, a once humble little burg that has ridden a coal mining and methane boom to become one of the state’s biggest cities. I saw my share of strip malls […]
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Let it smog
“Mush from the wimp.” That’s how Paul Krugman summed up President Obama’s recent decision not to set tougher ozone standards, which would have helped force places like gas fields and cities nationwide to de-smog. In HCN‘s editorial bullpen, we too were scratching our heads when we heard the news last Friday. EPA scientists have recommended […]
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Environmental privilege
By now most of us have heard of “environmental racism,” which involves actions like putting toxic facilities in minority neighborhoods. The opposite, “environmental privilege” is explored in a book due out this month, The Slums of Aspen, Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden by David Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, both professors of sociology […]
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Mega myths of the Keystone XL pipeline
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Among hundreds of protestors who spent three days in jail in Washington D.C. for publicly opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, a 1,700-mile-long conduit planned to carry crude oil from Canada’s tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries, was Bill McKibben, author and founder of 350.org. When he was released from the […]
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The Visual West: Last Flight of the Insects
Dozens of dragonflies zoom through my vegetable garden this time of year. Like hunchbacked sprites, they perch on the hog wire holding up the ever-heavier tomato plants, waiting for an unsuspecting fly or a particularly attractive mate to zip by. In the shallows of mountain lakes and irrigation ponds, blue damselflies, wings folded behind (unlike […]
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This is your brain on climate change
By Anne Fahey, Sightline.org Remember those old anti-drug television commercials with an egg sizzling in a frying pan? Here’s a new twist: This is your brain. This is your brain on climate change. I’ve written before that with or without multimillion dollar campaigns to discredit climate science (and scientists), our brains don’t seem very well equipped to fathom the scope […]
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Friday News Roundup: Of Fuel and Frogs
TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline — the world’s largest — has dominated the news this past week. Last Friday, the State Department issued a final Environmental Impact Statement for the pipeline — which would run oil from the Alberta tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries — that concluded the project would not significantly impact the […]
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Beware of wolves cloaked in “access”
America’s national forests and our fish and wildlife belong to everyone. Americans rightfully demand access to this national birthright. Access is like oxygen for hunters and anglers. But beware. Industry barracudas are trying to hoodwink sportsmen into supporting bad legislation by promising “access.” Take HR 1581, the Wilderness and Roadless Release Act. It’s sponsored by […]
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Illegal trailblazing as negotiation tool?
If you build it, the federal land agencies will include it. That’s what Montana mountain biking enthusiast Ron Cron counted on when he embarked on a three-day, illegal trail-making frenzy in the Flathead National Forest in May 2009, complete with jumps and other technical features. Illegal trail building is ubiquitous on Western public lands, plaguing […]
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Extreme weather makes us pay attention to climate
This seems to be one of those times of the year when the weather forces us to pay it some special attention. It’s hurricane season, for one, and as I wrote this Irene was threatening the Caribbean and the U.S. mid-Atlantic region. Here in the low desert of Arizona we’re enduring what is likely to […]
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Speculating on solar
When the Bureau of Land Management’s Southern Nevada office sent out a letter last week rejecting Goldman Sachs’ applications to develop renewable energy on public land, you had to wonder: What was an investment bank doing in the Nevada desert? And you wouldn’t be the only one asking. The Associated Press reporter who broke the […]
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Why rural education is failing
By Zach Wilson, The Daily Yonder The greatest challenge in rural education is the utter disregard for place. State and national governments pursue economic growth at the cost of communities, and such disregard is reflected in the way the state approaches public schooling. One of the most ugly and expedient trends in education is the […]