I recently took a little unscientific field trip to a Walmart Supercenter near my home in Mesa, Arizona. I chose Walmart partly because of its prices but also because it is widely available in rural areas in the West, where shopping choices are often limited. My “research” questions: Would the prices for ‘greener’ products be […]
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Posted inRange
Of grizzlies and tortoises
The towering grizzly bear and diminutive desert tortoise have something in common, and it’s not good: both animals are struggling for survival. “The population of grizzlies in the continental United States was 50,000 at time of Lewis and Clark, and it’s down to 1600 animals today for some of the same reasons the desert tortoise […]
Posted inRange
Denver mayor accused of trashing rural residents
The Colorado governor’s race took another twist last week with the front-runner and Democratic candidate, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, getting accused of “trashing” rural residents. The accusation came from his principal challenger, former GOP congressman Tom Tancredo, who entered the race in August as the nominee of the American Constitution Party. The Republican candidate, Dan […]
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Obama admin speaks on diversifying the NPS
Boldness hasn’t been an appropriate adjective for the Obama Admistration’s approach on environmental issues. The White House seems better known in green circles for allowing Van Jones to be squeezed out of a job, failing to take aggressive strides on passing a climate bill, lifting a moratorium on oil drilling, lowballing information about the extent […]
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Journo conference highlights Native American issues
Editors Note: This piece is cross posted from Mother Earth Journal, where reporter Terri Hansen writes about indigenous people and the environment. A drive from Portland’s emerald green landscape took me into the Columbia River Gorge and the reds, golds and browns of autumn in eastern Oregon and Washington, through the panhandle of Idaho then […]
Posted inGoat
Squeezing trees
The new data show forest carbon storage by region, with forests in the 11 Western states accounting for almost a third of the nation’s total. Forests in the West reach two extremes. Oregon, Washington, and southeast Alaska forests store the most carbon per acre of anywhere in the U.S., while those in Arizona, Nevada, New […]
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Mining in the modern West
As I began writing this blog post, headlines were proclaiming the triumphant rescue of the thirty three Chilean miners who were trapped in the San Jose mine for seventy days. While the men are sure to experience after-effects of their traumatic ordeal in the weeks and months to come, they are far luckier than the […]
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First nations continue tar sands pushback
George Poitras of the Mikisew Cree First Nation – a tribal nation whose traditional homeland lies downstream from Canada’s Athabascan tar sands – articulated the devastating impacts of oil development on traditional peoples when he said, “if we don’t have land and we don’t have anywhere to carry out our traditional lifestyles, we lose who […]
Posted inRange
Dredging Western rivers for gold
An item in the October 11th edition’s “Heard around the West” reported on an influx of “gold miners” on Southern Oregon’s Rogue River. But the article did not explain why so many miners are on the Rogue now. The vast majority of these “miners” do not make a living mining. Rather they dredge in the […]
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(Re)naming mountains
I having been using Tim Egan’ s book The Big Burn about the fires of 1910 that changed fire policy in the United States in my public land policy class this semester. A key part of his book is about the early days of the U.S. Forest Service, its Chief Gifford Pinchot, and the forest […]
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Special Treatment for Ag
Farmers and ranchers across the West like to complain about the Endangered Species Act. To hear them and their Farm Bureau lobbyists talk, you would expect that the ESA has put nearly every western farmer and rancher into the poor house. Verifiable cases of farmers or ranchers actually being put out of business by the […]
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La Niña winter expected
The weather experts who look at the big picture say we’re facing a “La Niña winter” this time around. For the West, this means it will be wet in the north and dry in the south. But the moisture won’t arrive for a while. The La Niña pattern includes relatively warm, dry days well into […]
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Shale games
Between 1.2 and 1.8 trillion barrels of oil sit in shale deposits in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. For years oil companies have been looking for a commercially viable way to unlock all that petroleum, to no avail. “No matter how high the price of crude oil went,” Hal Clifford reported for HCN in 2002, “shale […]
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Rants from the Hill: Them! and Us
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Some of you may be fortunate—or perhaps unfortunate—enough to recall the 1954 science fiction film Them!, which, much like Earth First!, had the audacity to include the exclamation point in its title. A classic […]
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Fortification or sacrifice?
The Fortification elk herd, which lives in what some call “the wildest country remaining in the Powder River Basin,” is one of the only plains elk populations in the continental US. After reintroduction to the Fortification Creek watershed of northeast Wyoming in the 1950s the herd now numbers around 250 animals. Hunters covet licenses for […]
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350 Miles Through Utah: A Pilgrimage for Hope
Editor’s Note: Utahns Jamie and Ryan Pleume are walking 350 miles across Utah to raise awareness about climate change. They started their journey today. We will be posting periodic updates from their journey on this blog. “Hope is an action not an emotion.” A rabbi spoke these words in the sweltering heat, standing on a […]
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Western states seem typical in new study
When it comes to economic performance and financial management, states in the West are fairly typical. Or so says a study whose results were recently published on the Atlantic magazine’s website. Factors considered ranged from violent crime rates and median income to employment trends. To quote from the article, “well-run states have a great deal […]
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News of a parched West continues to flow
How many times must it be written that in the West, the story is water, and how many times must the story of the West’s dependence on the Colorado River for its water be told? Many readers probably know by now, but it bears repeating. The current running beneath many environmental justice stories is water. […]
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Coming home?
A favorite quotation of my early twenties was by none other than the archdruid himself, David Brower, from an essay he wrote for the Sierra Club Bulletin in 1935. Having spent the previous summer wandering around and over the high peaks, Brower wondered whether his adventure was “the limit? Could the Sierra offer only transitory […]
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Feline justice
Life is full of many painful decisions, but ending a beloved pet’s life has got to be right up there among the worst. Last Saturday morning saw us staring at x-rays on a monitor in our vet’s office, dutifully listening to her description of the effects of fluid on the lungs and dreading where all […]