The Los Angeles community Sherman Oaks sounds like a place that should be verdant and laden with leafy trees. Not surprisingly, the students of Arbol University found that to be exactly true. Yet the students, who were using trigonometry and other tools to collect data about Los Angeles’s urban tree canopy, were shocked at the […]
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Posted inRange
New hope for old mines
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House For all their knowledge of the land, miners, whose legacy lives long in Colorado, had little thought of the long-term environmental consequences of their work. For over 150 years, coal, gold, silver, uranium, gypsum and limestone, among other resources, have been drilled, blasted and hauled from their hiding […]
Posted inGoat
New Mexico governor sucker-punches enviro regs
On January 1, 2011, New Mexico’s new governor, Republican Susana Martinez, took office. Nine minutes into her first day, she got right down to business with executive order 2011-001 [PDF], the innocently-titled “Formation of a small business tax force,” which not only created said task force but, more importantly, placed a 90-day hold on most […]
Posted inGoat
La Nina vs. Western Snowmaggedon
Walking my dog at 6 a.m. this morning in Paonia, I could sense a presence in that exposed-fingers-will-break-off-any-minute-cuz-it’s-so-friggin’-cold feeling: Winter. A brutal minus-10-degrees-Fahrenheit kind of winter. A snow-makes-creepy-banshee-squeals-under-your-feet kind of winter. And it’s a lot of snow for Paonia, HCN‘s home base in western Colorado, with more than a foot on the ground and the […]
Posted inRange
A Moment of Opportunity for Counties with Public Lands
By Mark Haggerty, 1-11-11 U.S. Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack just announced that this year’s “transition” payments to counties from the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act (SRS) will again “contribute to rural communities becoming self-sustaining and prosperous.” The Secretary stressed that these payments ($389 million) fund local roads and schools—important for communities still feeling […]
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The age of loudness
“No age is louder than ours,” Ken McAlpine writes in his book, “Islands Apart.” “We have reached a crescendo of clamor, and it is both curse and comfort,” he continues. “Solitude, in our times, is rare and, for many, profoundly unnerving.” What might solitude offer those who never have a chance to experience it? Can […]
Posted inGoat
Rep. Giffords — moderate, and green
By now, we’ve all read and heard the tragic and horrifying accounts of the attempted assassination of three-term Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), which resulted in 6 dead and 14 injured, including the Congresswoman. It’s not clear if the mentally-ill shooter also had political motivations. Giffords is known as a moderate and has voiced strong criticism […]
Posted inGoat
Happy New Year, pronghorn!
At a site called Trapper’s Point about six miles west of Pinedale, Wyo., the New Fork and Green rivers sweep toward one another and then away, creating an hourglass shaped strip of land. Every spring and fall more than 3,000 pronghorn and mule deer pass through this bottleneck as they travel between winter range in […]
Posted inRange
Arizona shooting poses another threat to democracy
There’s already been ample commentary about the Jan. 8 horror in Tucson, Ariz. Six people, ranging from a 9-year-old girl to a federal judge, were killed, and 14 were wounded, among them Gabrielle Giffords, who represents that part of Arizona in the U.S. Congress. The suspect, 22-year-old Jared Loughner, was captured at the scene. Responses have […]
Posted inRange
Public transportation systems come at a high price
Last weekend the New York Times reported on efforts to develop a fast train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Being a rider myself—I am writing this on the Cascades run south—and knowing how appealing European trains are and how outdated, inefficient, and unreliable North American trains are, I read the article with a sinking […]
Posted inGoat
Proposed Colorado uranium mill gets key state go-ahead
Web only: Watch an audio slideshow about the proposed Piñon Ridge uranium mill. Colorado took one step closer to kickstarting a new Western uranium boom this Wednesday, when state regulators approved a license for the Piñon Ridge uranium mill. The western Colorado mill — which could be the first in the nation in over HCN […]
Posted inRange
Klamath River clean-up takes a step forward
On January 4th the EPA announced that it had adopted a clean-up plan for the California portion of the Klamath River Basin. Known officially as a TMDL (an acronym for total maximum daily load, or the total amount of pollution a water body can handle in one day without exceeding legal limits), the clean-up plan […]
Posted inGoat
The Visual West – Image 1
Drive the back roads of Delta County, Colorado, these days and you have a good chance of spotting a bald eagle atop some old cottonwood tree, or sometimes on the ground in a pasture of cows, tearing into some nutrient rich afterbirth. Baldies show up every winter here, and seem to be increasing in numbers. […]
Posted inRange
Taking storms in stride
The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude. It means something like “joy in the sorrow of others.” And I confess that it sometimes strikes me. But that’s not quite how I felt after watching accounts of the big blizzard at the end of 2010 in the Northeast that paralyzed cities, disrupted transportation and stranded […]
Posted inGoat
The best of the Top 10s
Here at HCN, we’ve scoured the Internet to bring you some of the most noteworthy Top Ten lists of the year, for your edification and amusement. In no particular order, and mostly from Western media outlets: Come across any good Top 10 lists to share? Or do you have your own? Post ’em below (as […]
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Extracting the West
As another year begins, extractive industries continue to mine the West for opportunity, even when the economic activity they promise has little to do with the American West. Now it’s increasingly clear that battles that seem localized to the West have far-reaching impacts. The West has long been treated as a transitional zone, as if […]
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Not so simple living
What was your first exposure to ideas of environmental justice? Mine, I’m ashamed to say, was very low-key: I saw a bumper sticker. It was affixed to a co-worker’s car, back in the early 1980s, and it said, “Live Simply, That Others May Simply Live.” I was in college at the time, in a town […]
Posted inRange
HCN reader photo – goats!
This week’s reader photo of foraging goats in Alpine, Wyoming, must have been a fun early Christmas present for photographer Daryl L. Hunter, who took it on Christmas Eve. Submit your photos to our Flickr pool; we post one a week.
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Not in my backyard?
The New York Times reporter Kirk Johnson gave the NIMBY question some thought in a story and blog post this week profiling the political tug of war between anti-uranium milling NIMBYs in Telluride, Colo., and those who live in Naturita, Nucla and nearby towns around Colorado’s Paradox Valley. Many residents in those towns see the […]
Posted inRange
National Geographic and water lobbyists release advertorial
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. A few weeks ago, water blogger aquadoc mentioned that the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) was co-publishing a magazine with the […]