Water entrepreneur Aaron Million’s world may course with “Wild Turkey, fast horses and gunfire.” But his proposed Regional Watershed Supply Project — a massive pipeline that would dogleg 250,00 acre feet of water from Wyoming’s Green River across the Rockies, and south to Pueblo, Colorado — may not be flowing toward completion at quite the […]
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“Green fees”
Conservative groups have often accused environmentalists of being lawsuit-happy, and of making big bucks off their court cases. Wyoming attorney Karen Budd-Falen took that claim even further this fall, asserting that green groups who win or settle federal suits get billions of taxpayer dollars to cover their legal fees — and that many of them […]
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The First Scrappy Years
“Americans are great people. But I think the readers of High Country News are the greatest,” wrote Tom Bell in the March 5, 1971, issue. He was responding to the letters and donations that readers and subscribers had sent following a grim assessment of the paper’s future. Click for larger version Bell had been at […]
Posted inRange
In Alaska, a health care model for the nation
It takes about 30 seconds of walking around the campus of the Alaska Native Medical Center to see that this is what the Indian Health system should look like across the country. “No,” a friend corrected me, “this is what the U.S. health care system should look like.” The Alaska Native Medical Center is two […]
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Environmental justice, one neighborhood at a time
With the exception of vocal critics who deny the science behind climate change, most of the world is painfully aware that our industrial activities over recent decades have raised the earth’s average temperature. Our warming atmosphere is putting at risk life as we know it, prompting the people of the world to action. But long-standing […]
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Charismatic pest control
First, check out Michelle Nijhuis’ new HCN story “Prodigal Dogs”, about the likelihood that gray wolves have returned to Colorado of their own volition, finding space to exist, or even breed, on a private ranch in the northwest part of the state. Then, get a load of this lupine scenario: In the February issue of […]
Posted inRange
Booms, Busts, and B.S.
I’d have to look at 60+ years of calendars, but suffice it to say this Grand Junction native has lived through his share of hometown booms and busts. Off the top of my head, there’ve been a couple of uranium booms and the oil shale boom that infamously ended with a Black Sunday in May […]
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When Colorado just said No
The eyes of the world — or at least the NBC prime-time audience — are on Vancouver as that Canadian city hosts the Winter Olympics. For Coloradans, it’s a reminder of our state’s peculiar status as the only world’s only place that was awarded the Winter Olympics, but turned them down . […]
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Native Farmers and Ranchers
In my last post, I reported some of the results of the USDA’s 2008 Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey which is part of the 2007 Census of Agriculture. The 2007 Census has given us the first good data on Native American farmers. That’s because in prior surveys the USDA treated reservations as if they were […]
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Environmental harmony
“Environmental justice” is a pleasant euphemism for racism. Just as we couched the fight for racial equality during the 1960s comfortably under the guise of civil rights, today we continue to deny our culpability in a bad situation with semantics. In 1988 when a Harlem neighborhood was targeted for the ill-advised location of a sewage […]
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Understanding an oil group
In 1995, during one of the never-ending controversies about federal management of oil and gas drilling, a prominent Western industry group made a radical suggestion. The group — the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States or IPAMS for short — called for the end of federal land. Diemer True, a Wyoming oil baron representing IPAMS, […]
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“Messy and unstructured, relentless and global”
Environmental justice law is unlike most other areas of the law. It may not even be amenable to definition as a single, discrete field of practice. Instead, environmental justice lawyering is as close as we come to modern-day alchemy: lawyers work in alliance with communities to summon forth justice from a shifting patchwork of unfavorable […]
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Wilderness environmentalism
The environmental movement’s most singular and stunning achievement is the introduction into human history of an awareness of and care for other animals and ecosystems beyond human needs. The refusal to reduce the earth to a storehouse of resources, the insistence on the value of whales beyond meat and redwoods beyond lumber, the love of […]
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Rubber Slugs and iPhones
Big news for anyone who’s ever gone sprinting and hollering through the woods after the disappearing rear of an enterprising black bear: We’ve now got a scientific assessment of bear hazing. Rachel Mazur, of Sequoia National Park, has a paper in last month’s Journal of Wildlife Management on what the National Park Service likes to […]
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It’s time to put aside the fairytales
It’s tough being a wolf these days. Despite barely having recovered from being indiscriminately hunted to near extinction during the last century, wolves continue to face the rampant persecution and vitriol of yesteryear from legislators, corporations, citizens and even state and federal governments. Most recently, Utah’s Senate has passed a bill that (if enacted) would make […]
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Tom Bell, Spaghetti Westerns and HCN
“Once upon a time” is a better start to a bedtime story than it is to a retrospective of 40 years of High Country News. But have you ever watched the old movie “Once Upon a Time in the West?” It’s Italian director Sergio Leone’s best spaghetti western, a three hour epic about the struggle […]
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The 2008 Farm and Ranch Survey is out!
The USDA has released the results of the 2008 Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey. The survey is taken every five years nationwide. Much of the regional information below is based on comparison of the 2003 and 2008 surveys. Nationwide the number of irrigated acres increased over the five year period from 52.5 million acres in […]
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Beanstalk 2013
WANTED: thrill-seeking gardeners with a love of heights. Experience washing skyscraper windows a plus. Such an ad might appear in Portland, Oreg., by 2013. Thanks to government stimulus funds, the city’s main federal building will be renovated with giant plant-bearing trellises down its western side. These “vegetated fins” will shade the building in summer and […]
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Wolverines, snowmobilers, and the ESA
Last week, the Idaho Statesman newspaper published an article about recreational vehicle impacts on wolverines in the Payette, Boise, and Sawtooth National Forests. The piece focused on a study investigating questions about the extent to which snowmobilers and Snowmobilers, backcountry skiers, and advocacy groups all have a stake in the outcome of this study. The […]
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Green energy isn’t always popular
My part of the world gets way too much wind along with plenty of sunshine. It also has some unusual geology which allows the earth’s inner heat to come closer to the surface. Our wind, despite the window-rattling power of its gusts, is too sporadic to attract much commercial interest in developing this […]