Back when I was a High Country News intern, one of our contributing editors gave me and my comrades this bit of wisdom about our profession: Environmental news doesn’t break, it oozes. Looking back at HCN‘s year-in-stories, this truism resonates. The intractable issues that have defined our region for years — whether people and wolves can peacefully coexist in the […]
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Posted inRange
Colorado ski industry wary of wolverine
By David Frey, 12-28-10 In October 1998, the Two Elk ski lodge atop the Vail ski area erupted in flames so big witnesses said it looked like a volcano. In the highly-publicized eco-terrorist attack, the secretive Earth Liberation Front struck against Vail Associates for its plan to expand the ski area into what was considered […]
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Merry Christmas, small farmers and all eaters
The U.S. Congress gave the American public — and small farmers and ranchers — a bit more than a lump of E. coli-tainted coal this year. Their 2010 stocking stuffer is a freshly-passed food safety bill that gives the Food and Drug Administration additional powers to help keep our food supply safer. One important provision […]
Posted inRange
Tribal recognition
When President Obama recently announced that the U.S. would finally endorse the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN DRIP), he was immediately heaped with effusive praise from tribal and human rights groups alike. There have been unrelenting references to the Crow Nation giving Obama the Indian name, “One Who Helps People […]
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Wilderness creates jobs too!
If you were to submit today’s Department of Interior press conference to a Facebook word ranking game, it would probably look something like this: JOBSECONOMYBILLIONDOLLARSWILDERNESS The conference, which took place at an REI store in Denver, was called to announce that the Bureau of Land Management would once again start taking inventory of lands in […]
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California’s tribal harvesting imbroglio
Frankie Myers’s tribe, the Yuroks, have gathered and harvested everything from mussels to seaweed on the Northern California coast since “the beginning of time,” as he puts it. The myriad coastal resources are of important cultural value to many Pacific tribes, and recent studies have shown that pre-contact hunter-gatherers were extremely adept at harvesting in […]
Posted inRange
When tumbleweeds quit tumbling
I’ve written before about the access issues of one of my favorite dog-walking routes before, and lately there’s been something new in the way: tumbleweeds. They’re three or four feet deep along about a hundred yards of the path. They arrived about a month ago, seemingly overnight. I’ve been walking the dog down there for […]
Posted inGoat
Snowbound? Take a virtual tour of the West
If you live in the mountains, or near them, or you have to fly over them, you know that the holidays aren’t just about visiting family, stuffing your face, or dropping into a prolonged eggnog coma (IMHO, that must be why the stuff is called “nog” in the first place). They’re also about not being […]
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A new standard for tribal and U.S. relations
WASHINGTON, D.C. — What’s my take away from the White House Tribal Nations Conference? Easy. This is an administration that actually believes the United States government must represent all of the people, including American Indians and Alaska Natives. Make no mistake: Everything is not perfect between Indian Country and the United States as we close […]
Posted inRange
Climate change’s threat to the wolverine
The word “imminent” conjures images of an onrushing tidal wave, something unstoppable and certain, an action or event on the verge of bursting into reality. The Dec. 13 decision that the wolverine was warranted but precluded for protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) hinged on a different definition of this word: to the US […]
Posted inRange
The start of the sesquicentennial
Dec. 20 marks the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession, which ignited the Civil War — and so this year, Dec. 20 starts the sesquicentennial observance. There were a few Civil War battles in the West — most notably at Glorietta Pass east of Santa Fe, where an invading […]
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Super mouse to the rescue
What’s three inches long and can leap tall buildings in a single bound? It’s a bird. It’s a really, really small plane. No! It’s the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse! Well, maybe it can’t leap over a building, but the little rodent can jump a foot and a half up in the air, cover twice that […]
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In the zones
You’ve got to hand it to Ken Salazar: Never before has an Interior Secretary been so methodically driven to make U.S. public lands safe for renewable energy development. Unlike the men and women who have held his position in previous administrations, especially the last one, Salazar has put solar, wind and their attendant transmission needs […]
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The price of green
This holiday, the spouse and I have decided to use some of our days off work to catch up on long-overdue home maintenance projects. For us, as for most other people, money is tighter this year, and we’re looking for ways to save on the supplies we’ll need. However, we’re also hoping to be as […]
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A tale of two cities
“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once wrote. This can be interpreted to mean that justice is subjective, shaped and reshaped over the years by social norms, by evolving moral priorities and shifting power structures. Even under the rule of law its application differs […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Walking to California
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. If you’ve ever driven I-5 through northern California and up into southern Oregon, you may have seen the memorable bumper sticker that Oregonians use to welcome their California neighbors over the state line: “Welcome […]
Posted inRange
Oh give us a home…
Sixty-three bison sit in limbo just outside Yellowstone National Park, waiting for a new place to call home. The Yellowstone bison are some of the only genetically pure bison remaining in the United States, a small remnant of the historic herds that thundered across the Great Plains by the millions just a few centuries ago. […]
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No place for hate
At Wheatland High and West Elementary schools in eastern Wyoming, banners that declared the schools “no place for hate” raised a stir among parents early this year because the banners were sponsored in part by the Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado as part of a national Anti-Defamation League campaign. The Platte County School District […]
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“Warranted, but precluded”
Polar bears. Walrus. Ringed and bearded seals. And now wolverines have joined the list of northern animals threatened by warming winters and shrinking snow and ice packs. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the bear in 2008 and is considering adding the walrus and the seals. This week, the agency announced that while listing […]
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Compromise in the Wyoming Range
Three days after my recent story about a proposed energy development in the Wyoming Range’s Noble Basin rolled off the presses, the Forest Service released their much-anticipated draft environmental impact statement for the project. The Forest Service’s “preferred alternative” would let Plains Exploration and Production (or PXP) develop the necessary roads and infrastructure to drill […]