In 1976, when the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) passed Congress and grandfathered-in some 60,000 untested chemicals, any regulatory hold the EPA could have had on manufacturers slipped quickly from their fingers. Simply by the sheer volume of substances already used in the United States, the agency fell far behind on reviewing the chemical inventory […]
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Here comes Huntsman
Updated 6-21-11 Courtesy Twitter and the Huffington Post, we’d already heard former Utah governor, ambassador to China, fluent Mandarin speaker, businessman, climate change moderate and Mormon extraordinaire Jon Huntsman Jr. was going to throw his hat in the Republican presidential ring. And on Tuesday he did just that. Slate has the story on how the […]
Posted inRange
Montana has West’s least-populated counties
Recently I had occasion to write about a proposed 65th county for Colorado, and observed that California, with seven times as many people and half again as much area, manages with a mere 58 counties. I also speculated that Iowa might be America’s leader in “counties per capita,” since it had 99 counties for about […]
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Rants from the Hill: Lucy the Desert Cat
Among my most sulfurous and vitriolic Rants–those far too profane to grace this page–are those inspired by my family’s housecat, Lucy. Those of you who follow these Rants know that I live in wild country, at high elevation, with terrible weather, and surrounded by a spate of voracious predators of every stripe. This is hardly […]
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The pulse of the river
For a journalist, sitting through last week’s conference on the Colorado River, hosted by the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado, was a great way to take the river’s pulse — to get a sense of how the river’s water czars, academic wonks, scientists and other minders are thinking about the basin’s […]
Posted inRange
Peak and Ecological Flows in Oregon
As western states face proposals to divert and allocate the last available surface water – winter and wet season water – a debate is raging over how much of that water must be left instream to keep our rivers and their tributaries ecologically dynamic and alive. The recognition that rivers need “peak flows” is a […]
Posted inRange
Are Indians and Westerners halfway to a lost decade?
Last week I wrote about how this economic crisis will impact Indian Country through the loss of government-funded jobs. Indeed, readers reacted to my commentary with two basic responses. One group said it’s time for Native Americans to get off the dole; another asked why tribes aren’t solving this problem on their own? But Indian […]
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Where’s the conservation?
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House “Navigating the Future of the Colorado River,” a conference held at the University of Colorado Law School last week, was filled with folks who have spent decades studying the river, interpreting the Law of the River (as the Compact of 1922 and many subsequent agreements are called) and […]
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Antelope as indicators
When the first winter storms buried northeast Montana last November, the thousands of pronghorn antelope that spent the summer around the state’s border with Alberta and Saskatchewan started making their way south. Normally, they move into the north side of the state’s Milk River valley and find enough sagebrush sticking out of the snow to […]
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Why Babbitt’s advice to Obama doesn’t quite hit the mark
It was constructed as some advice for President Obama, a call to action for the executive branch, “the best, and likely only hope for meaningful progress” on the environment. But former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s speech to the National Press Club on June 8 seemed to serve a higher purpose: To educate the press and […]
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Rare accord marks opening of Colorado River conference
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing HouseDespite its reputation as the “most legislated, most debated, and most litigated river in the entire world” – as Marc Reiser put it in Cadillac Desert – there was a cooperative air at the start of “Navigating the Future of the Colorado River,” a conference being held at the […]
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Paving over an ancient burial ground
15-acres of undeveloped landscape sits as an oasis among the undulating, cookie cutter housing developments that crowd the edges of the Carquinez Strait, a natural tidal channel in Vallejo, California. At this spot, known as Glen Cove Waterfront Park, a swath of yellow grass, dappled with the woody stems of wild fennel, leads to the […]
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Northwest coal port ignites controversy
Bellingham, Washington is no stranger to industry. The seaside college town in the northwesternmost corner of the country was founded on coal and timber in the 1800s. But after the downtown Georgia-Pacific pulp mill shut down in 2007, the city has been more focused on cleaning up the toxic mess left behind than bringing big […]
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Fire and ice
Some say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice. Those opening lines of the old Robert Frost poem seem to apply to the West’s public lands this spring. As out-of-control wildfires scorch the Southwest, more northerly regions are still waiting for the snow to finish melting; both problems are shutting down forest access. […]
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A toothless watchdog
Since the elections last November, I (like a lot of people, I suspect) started to ruminate about the nature of our government – both state and federal – and corporatism. Governor Susana Martinez’s election in New Mexico and the tsunami of other corporate-sponsored candidates elected to Congress made me fear that corporate interests would gain […]
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Where are the jobs in Indian country?
Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics started a frenzy when it released its latest job report, showing that only 54,000 jobs were added to the economy in May. That’s true. And, I think the White House ought to get more credit for keeping the economy from falling off the cliff. But at the same […]
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Why don’t we teach environmental justice in the rural West?
I just returned from a three-day trip to the 15th Annual Institute for Natural Resources Law Teachers, held in Stevenson, Wash. along the scenic and culturally rich, Columbia River Gorge. In addition to learning about the distressing influence that European settlers have had on this part of the planet, and indulging in the fantastic research […]
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Gold dredging conflict heats up
Back in April, HCN managing editor Jodi Peterson wrote about efforts by the State of California to come up with regulations governing suction dredge mining. The regulation rewrite is required by court order. The Karuk Tribe, Klamath Riverkeeper and others won the order by challenging whether the environmental impacts of vacuuming streambeds for gold had […]
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A Westerner too reasonable for the White House?
Why would a two-term former governor of Utah, the third most conservative state in the Union, be viewed as too liberal for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination? In the state’s legislature, Republicans in the House outnumber Democrats 2-1. Its Senate is even more lopsided, with a 3-1 ratio. Yet despite former governor Jon Huntsman Jr.’s […]
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The past and future of Western dams
The turbines have stilled on the Elwha. Upstream from Port Angeles on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, we are finally seeing the material effects of a very long campaign to tear down the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams. These aging structures, which are part of a broader infrastructural crisis around the West, have blocked storied salmon […]