Take a moment to consider the greats: The world’s largest ketchup bottle in Collinsville, Illinois. (Photo courtesy of Max Stahl) Carhenge in Alliance, Nebraska. (Photo courtesy of Ian, a.k.a. Sandstep).
Blog Post
Posted inGoat
Roadless redux
Been wondering what’s new with the Clinton-era Roadless Area Conservation Rule? Well, being the inveterate wonks we are, we’ve got an update for you on the latest with this 2001 rule that banned most logging and road building (but not off-roading or mining) on 58.5 million acres of national forest. But first, a bit of […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: What would Edward Abbey do?
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. One crisp, blue day late last fall I dodged work in order to climb my home mountain with three friends who were also shirking their adult responsibilities that day. My Silver Hills buddy Steve […]
Posted inBlog
Jobs vs. the environment?
A few weeks ago in this space, I bemoaned the slow pace of green energy development in the face of nuclear disaster in Japan and oil-spill devastation in the Gulf of Mexico. As a consumer of both these dirty fuels, I feel complicit in and mostly helpless to change this unsustainable state. I have steadfastly […]
Posted inGoat
Rid(er)ing into the sunset
Last week’s heavily wrangled 2011 federal spending deal brought with it some unexpected baggage. Along with $38 billion in budget cuts, unrelated riders attached to the bill derailed the controversial Bureau of Land Management Wild Lands order and yanked Northern Rockies gray wolves from the endangered species list. Deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency […]
Posted inRange
The hard drinkers aren’t in the West
The West has the two-fisted image as a land of hard drinking, but it may not deserve that reputation, according to statistics compiled by America’s Health Rankings. The survey looked at “binge drinking,” defined as the percentage of population over 18 years old which has, in the preceding 30 days, had more than five drinks […]
Posted inGoat
Bison back-and-forth
A century ago, the federal government took a tribal bison herd and a chunk of tribal land and created the National Bison Range. Roughly 350-500 bison still roam 18,000 acres north of Missoula, Mont., and after years of negotiation, in 2005 the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes finally won back the right to share management […]
Posted inGoat
New Mexico Exhibit Redefines Landscape Photography
If gallery goers at the opening of Earth Now: American Photographers and the Environment expected mantel-ready frames of distant peaks and sinuous canyons, they would have been surprised by a collection that stands nearly in defiance of traditional landscape photography. “Landscapes can be boring,” said Kate Ware, the exhibition’s curator at the New Mexico Museum […]
Posted inRange
Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf?
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House As darkness blanketed the land, two cunning predators made their move. Their thirst for blood was intense and, when the opportunity presented itself, they sunk their canines into the soft underbelly of their prey. This eager hunting pair–Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) and Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID)–have doggedly pursued […]
Posted inGoat
Environmental bargaining chips
In the fall of 2009, billionaire Ed Roski Jr. went to the California Legislature looking for a deal. Roski wanted to build a football stadium in the Los Angeles suburb City of Industry, but the California Environmental Quality Act was getting in his way, and Roski thought lawmakers should exempt his project from the act. […]
Posted inRange
A stand against racing in Colorado National Monument
I hold with Wallace Stegner that “national parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, the 95-year old park system reflects us at our best rather than our worst.” The purpose of the national parks (and really, it is a system of diverse natural cultural recreational and historic areas) have always […]
Posted inGoat
Sea lions to the slaughter?
Every spring, hungry California sea lions rendezvous in the Columbia River at the base of the Bonneville Dam for an endangered salmon smorgasbord. After swimming 140 miles up river to the dam, some 100 sea lions munched over 6,000 salmon at the dam last year, about 2 percent of salmon and steelhead runs going through […]
Posted inGoat
The Visual West – Image 11
Spring storms have kept the mountains in Western Colorado clad in winter white into early April, but they have not deterred the apricot trees in the valley below to burst out in flower. These blossoms adorn an old, gnarled specimen behind the High Country News office.
Posted inBlog
Fish and Wildlife Service denies an Indian her feathers
Marine Sisk-Franco has been a Winnemem Wintu Indian for all of her years, and the Northern California tribe’s way of life is all she knows. She’s the daughter of the tribe’s chief and their headman, she’s danced and sung at their ceremonies, and, in 2006, she bravely endured racial taunts and threats from drunken power […]
Posted inGoat
On Navajo Nation, Power Authority slips away
On April 8, a week after Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly testified before Congress on the immense energy potential in Indian Country, the Nation’s energy development enterprise, Dine Power Authority, will shut its doors, laying-off all but two of its staff. In operation since 1985, the DPA has yet to lift one major electric energy […]
Posted inRange
Dam removal and salmon science
Pacific salmon face grim times. The plight of Canada’s Fraser River sockeye has fixated fishers, scientists, and the state for decades. Concern has grown since the 1990s as annual runs went from bad to frightening, but then last summer’s run was bafflingly great. The Canadian government federal government in Ottawa formed the Cohen Commission in […]
Posted inGoat
Idaho eases the way for factory farms
Idaho counties have fought hard in the past for the right to regulate mega-animal operations; Gooding County, which has some of the highest concentrations of dairies in the state, won a lawsuit in the Idaho Supreme Court in Feb. 2010 upholding its ability to regulate water and the number of animals per acre. But the […]
Posted inRange
Keeping the wild in National Wildlife Refuges
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House I’ve never thought much about this country’s National Wildlife Refuges (NWR). With the exception of controversial ones like the “drill, baby, drill” Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, they’re stealthy public lands that don’t get the airtime our national parks and monuments do. It wasn’t until recently, when I learned […]
Posted inGoat
Out like a lion, in like a wildfire
Back in December, when temperatures at HCN-HQ in Paonia plummeted regularly into face-shattering freezingness and the high country softened under pillows, featherbeds, jumpy-castles of snow, it was easy to imagine Colorado’s immediate future rife with moisture. Maybe even a mild spring on the high plains, piled with wildflowers and lushly green around the edges and […]
Posted inBlog
Using Japan to discuss energy at home
I noticed this week that I’ve been writing and thinking about energy almost constantly. Obviously I’m not the only non-expert who has become obsessed with this subject, but it is interesting to me how something that used to seem so technical and dispassionate now churns the emotions so powerfully. Perhaps it is the very mysteries […]