There are some places I don’t like to write about, since in my experience, that’s a quick way to trash the scenery. People read about it, decide to visit for themselves, and whatever solitude and splendor the spot offered has vanished. That’s one reason I seldom mention an arid valley named Castle Gardens or Castle […]
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Nuclear Disaster Reverberates in the West
When the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded on April 26, 1986 and heaved plumes of radioactive dust across the Soviet Union and Europe, the United States’ domestic uranium market slumped into hibernation for nearly two decades. It should come as no surprise, then, that uranium stocks are falling rapidly as Japan’s own nuclear disaster unfolds. […]
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The Visual West – Image 9
In March, the first flowers of the year can often be found above your head rather than below your feet. Here, a silver maple planted in a cemetery outside Paonia, Colorado, shows off its stuff only a few days after the snow has melted off. The swelling elm buds, below, will soon follow suit. For […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Running into winter
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. When my father-in-law’s sixtieth rolled around we got together as a family and asked him what he wanted for his birthday. Without hesitating he replied, “I want you all to run a half marathon […]
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Rare earth, indeed
In 2009, Backpacker magazine’s risk meter — rating the status of threatened wild places along a spectrum of “saved” to “doomed” — placed Otero Mesa in southern New Mexico about three-quarters of the way to “doomed.” Nudging it to the edge of the proverbial cliff, according to Backpacker, was a singular threat: oil and gas […]
Posted inRange
The myth of rural subsidies
By Brian Depew Living in cities makes us smarter, more efficient and more innovative and rural life would not be possible without a “raft of subsidies devoted to sustaining it.” That is the claim made by Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein in a series of posts last week (one, two, three and four). Klein was […]
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Utah lawmakers cut off public access to information
Okay, I admit it. At times, I’m a Tea-Party sympathizer. I’ve been glad to hear voices like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s calling to eliminate wasteful price-gouging military contracts. And having spent too much of my lifetime struggling to extract information from recalcitrant government officials, I can see where people get the idea that inside federal […]
Posted inRange
The McClintock Factor
When Republican Congressman John Doolittle was implicated in the Abramowitz Scandals and forced to retire from Congress, California Democrats figured they had a good chance to win the 4th US Congressional District for the first time in modern history. The sprawling 4th district extends along the eastern side of northern California. Lead by growth in […]
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‘Managed retreat’
Sea level rise is real, and it’s coming to a coastal city near you. Research published last month from the University of Arizona finds that hundreds of coastal cities in the lower 48 will lose an average of 9 percent of their land area as climate change causes seas to rise about one meter by […]
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America’s Great Outdoors Diversity Initiative
Protecting the environment for future generations is great idea. In fact it’s a notion so simple that you might wonder why it took a White House committee ten months, 52 public listening sessions and a 116-page document to express what any lover of nature knows by heart. Unveiled in February by President Obama, America’s Great […]
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How better science could help solve environmental justice problems
In the world of public health research and environmental monitoring, “cumulative impacts” are edging toward conventional wisdom–but at EPA headquarters, the phrase is just becoming hip. This week, the agency doled out $32 million dollars to study the health impacts of exposure to multiple pollutants at once. That’s on top of the $7 million granted […]
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It’s not climate change, it’s ocean change
We tend to think of nature as a bulwark against change. We spell it with a capital “N” and imagine it to be a timeless rock of stability against a sea of discontinuity. It should not surprise us that Europeans and North Americans turned nature into refuge from modernity a full century before John Muir […]
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Superfund sludges on
Superfund. The word, at least for me, conjures up images an empty warehouse filled with metal drums leaking toxic sludge, dirt barely covering a hazardous waste sites, maybe some illegal dumping. This Tuesday, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency added 10 sites to its “Superfund” priority cleanup list, and proposed 15 more for consideration. One of the […]
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Learning from a book on California’s ag-emperor Boswell
Editor’s note: David Zetland, a Western water economist, offers an insider’s perspective into water politics and economics. We will be cross-posting occasional posts and content from his blog, Aguanomics, here on the Range. In this book, Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman illustrate the fascinating details behind a family that combined hard work, farming wisdom and […]
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Tumbling along
What smashes into cars on the highway, spreads wildfire and causes painful weltering scratches? It’s Russian thistle Salsola spp., more commonly known as tumbleweed, a hard-to-control invasive species that grows in disturbed soil and spreads quickly when the thorny plants break off from the ground and roll along dispersing seeds and piling up along fences […]
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The cute calamity
First, the cuteness, because I know everyone spends at least some portion of their day watching Youtube videos of cute animals doing droolingly hypnotic cute things (cat riding a Roomba, anyone? Or how about a slow loris with a very tiny umbrella?) See? This is a pika — a diminutive rabbit-relative which makes its home […]
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The Visual West — Image 8
This male American Kestrel took off before I could take a decent shot — but I love the blurred movement anyway. It reminds me of how mercurial a March day can be, when a sunny morning gives way to afternoon snow showers, which clears to a star-studded night. The birds and other wildlife are as […]
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Does natural gas drilling make people sick?
By David Frey, 3-08-2011 Residents of Battlement Mesa, a sprawling housing development in western Colorado, are used to seeing the golf course from their windows, not gas rigs. But when an energy company announced plans to start drilling inside the subdivision, residents became concerned not just about the noise and the traffic, but the health […]
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Deflation Nation
Finally the economy seems to be creating jobs again. Last week a federal jobs survey showed an increase in 222,000 private sector jobs, a full year of growth that added 1.5 million jobs at companies and small businesses. As Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers put it in his White House blog: […]
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Wrestling with wolves
The U.S. Senate last Friday proposed a 350-page budget bill with one particularly furry paragraph: Section 1709. Before the end of the 60-day period beginning on the date of enactment of this division, the Secretary of the Interior shall reissue the final rule published on April 2, 2009 (74 Fed. Reg. 15123 et seq.) without […]