On January 25, Jacque Buchanan, the supervisor of the Bridger-Teton National Forest, made a somewhat unusual decision when she told the Bureau of Land Management to buy back 44,720 acres (roughly 70 square miles) worth of gas leases — called 44-7 for short — that the agency sold at auction in 2005 and 2006. Environmental […]
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Posted inRange
Official State Guns
As Betsy Marston noted in Heard Around the West recently, Utah lawmakers are considering an Official State Gun: the .45-caliber M1911 semi-automatic pistol, designed a century ago for the U.S. Army and still in use by some American military personnel. It’s also a popular pistol for target-shooting and concealed-carry. The Utah connection is that the […]
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Does the California constitution hold the key to solving the state’s “water crisis”?
Western watermasters are the folks who make sure all water right holders on an irrigation system get a fair share of available water. Usually they like to maintain low profiles. That helps with a job which has potential to engender conflict, lawsuits and even violence. Watermaster Craig Wilson recently raised his profile when he spoke […]
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Tricking beetles and protecting whitebark pine – a video
Whitebark pine are an important forage species for grizzly bear, as we — and others — have written. They’re also a species that writers and nature lovers seem to specially connect with; our own Ed Marston and Earthjustice’s Doug Honnold have written odes to them in these pages. Writer and photographer David Gonzales has founded […]
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Ethical metalsmiths
Around here, one sort of business seems to be surviving the Great Recession just fine: those “We Buy Gold!” places. Most seem to be sidelines of related outfits, such as independent jewelers and pawnshops, but I’ve also seen them cropping up in such surprising locations as tire repair shops and convenience stores. Another variant is […]
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Another round against hardrock handouts
The frontier days are long gone, but hardrock mining companies still do business like it’s the Wild West, with big government handouts and few taxes on spoils reaped from public lands. Back in the day, generous subsidies were used to boost mining in remote parts of the West. Today many of those old-fangled policies, including […]
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Washington’s bill of (coal-free) health
By Jennifer Langston Under a bill introduced today, Washington State would stop burning dirty coal for electricity within its borders. But aside from healthier air and clearer views of Mt Rainier, would the state’s electricity customers notice any difference? Probably not. Washington’s only coal-fired power plant – located n Centralia and owned by the Canadian […]
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Young, All-American, Deported
(David) Morales graduated from Granite Peaks High in South Salt Lake last spring with high grades and hopes. He wanted to become a Christian pastor and start Utah’s “biggest church.” … As a high school student, Morales raised money to help homeless teens. He volunteered as a Spanish interpreter at Woodrow Wilson Elementary during parent-teacher […]
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Road rage on the Front Range
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Momentum is building for the construction of a controversial, 10-mile toll road through a wildlife refuge outside of Denver. Embroiled in the road row are warring counties, a powerful mining company and one man obsessed with asphalt. Now that it seems the road may become a reality, the […]
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From science to action in environmental justice
On the east side of Houston, Texas is the Ship Channel, a narrow vein that gapes into the bay just north of the Gulf of Mexico. Through this waterway, freighters carry Western oil to sea. The banks are tangled with refineries, docks, pipelines, and rails. Fuel tanks stack the shore like poker chips, and when […]
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Sittin’ pretty in energy country
There’s a whole lot of oil coming out of North Dakota these days — so much that pipelines can’t handle it all. This August, production in the Bakken Shale was 83 percent above 2008 levels, and the boom times aren’t expected to ebb anytime soon. One oil executive recently crowed that the Bakken’s recoverable reserves […]
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The buffer battle
Back in 2009, I reported on new research indicating that “pesticide cocktails” — mixtures of common agricultural pesticides, including common off-the-shelf herbicides, and so-called “inert” ingredients — are more deadly to salmon than they are when used separately. That finding came about as part of a larger effort by the US EPA, the National Marine […]
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The peculiar geography of tragedy
Within hours of the Jan. 8 shopping-mall shooting spree in Arizona, there was already a journalistic term for it: Tucson, as in “How can we prevent another Tucson?” Tucson is a city with 544,000 residents where lots of things happen besides 19 people getting wounded, six of them fatally. People live, work, play and worship […]
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The Visual West — Image 4
Though the days are slowly lengthening, the orchards in Western Colorado still sleep under a blanket of snow. In this shot, two kids on the way home from school cut through a pear orchard outside Paonia, Colorado. Hard to imagine that in just a couple of months this scene will be awash in white petals […]
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A “New Era” for Indian Country?
“The Indian Nations can do the work–if the federal government will clear the way for us to exercise our liberty and thus make a new era and a more perfect union.” That was Jefferson Keel yesterday, President of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), in his State of Indian Nations Address. His point, very […]
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When emotion drives the wolf debate, research suffers
By Steve Bunk, 1-27-11 All the information out there, informed and uninformed, surely has raised awareness that wolves are important to many of us, whether by their presence or absence. But how good are we at recognizing and using accurate information to shape our opinions? As a former science journalist, what’s become clear in the […]
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Of beetles and borders
The mountain pine beetle’s red hand of death (see photo below) continues to plunder Rocky Mountain forests, according to a report released last week by the U.S. and Colorado forest services. The rampant pest chomped through another 400,000 acres of pines in Colorado and southern Wyoming last year, for a grand total of four million […]
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HCN reader photo – chariot racing!
This week’s stunning image comes from photographer Daryl Hunter. It’s from a horse-drawn chariot race (the horses pull a cutter) in Jackson, Wyo.
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Sexual assault on the rez
Will the Obama administration’s efforts in Indian Country help end a decades-long epidemic of sexual violence and abuse against women on reservations? One can only hope that the momentum spurred by the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 and the work of a new Department of Justice task force to streamline prosecution of violent […]
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When deer mice attack
Graying, skeletal aspens and fluid-filled lungs. No connection, right? Wrong. This little guy is a deer mouse. Cute, sure. But deer mice are the primary vectors for the “sin nombre” form of hantavirus — a nasty bug transmitted primarily through the rodent’s feces and urine which causes flu-like symptoms and, in later stages of infection, […]