Republicans in the U.S. Senate today stood up for a downtrodden victim — the oil and gas industry. That’s how they described it anyway. Really a lot more is at stake. The superficial news: On behalf of their chosen industry, using classic Senate martial arts, the Republicans blocked the Obama administration’s nominee for the Number […]
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Gratuitous displays of ignorance
Yesterday morning I got sucked into a vortex of reader comments on several articles about Native American issues. One story by NPR echoed our January feature story by Andrea Appleton, “Blood Quantum,” describing the controversy over what percentage of Indian blood is required to enroll in a tribe. The second, from the Great Falls Tribune, described the Little Shell […]
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Western Imagery
When we look out our windows, do we always see the real West out there, or do we often perceive what photographers have taught us to to see? The question comes up with an exhibit of 120 photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Called “Into the Sunset, Photography’s […]
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Notes from el Mundo Nuevo
We are not talking about border policy here. This is about Planet Desert. The hungers grow. Fewer crumbs reach the global economy’s bottom-dwellers, so they abandon the slums and failing campos to take their best shots at something more. For this, they must be hunted. I am in the Altar Valley to look at the […]
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No conspiracy in Libby, despite hundreds of deaths
Maybe it’s more incompetence by U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors — kind of a holdover from the Bush era. Maybe it’s because a criminal conspiracy charge is always difficult to prove. Or maybe it’s a form of justice. A jury in Missoula, Montana, just decided that the W.R. Grace corporation and some former Grace executives […]
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The cost of progress
The Environmental Working Group just released a two-year study focusing on the toxins found in five minority women at the forefront of environmental justice battles. Within each community, these women work tirelessly to protect citizens from various forms of pollution. And within each of these women, scientists found significantly higher amounts of toxins than other […]
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Obama’s Forest Service nominee is a surprise
The Obama administration just nominated the next direct political boss of the U.S. Forest Service — a job with huge importance around the West. And behold, the Obamanites didn’t pick the environmental movement’s candidate — Chris Wood, a Trout Unlimited leader who helped run the Forest Service during the Clinton Administration. They also didn’t pick […]
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Pika power-downer
You could say I’m pika-obsessed. I’ve sat in many a talus field until my butt went numb, watching the diminutive rabbit-relatives ferry mouthfuls of wildflowers. I’ve spent collective hours trying to mimic their squeeze-toy call (without success) while I built trails on Mount Massive, outside of Leadville, Colo. I even sharpied myself a “Pika Power” […]
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Portland’s crystal ball
For three decades, Oregon has been a leader among Western states with its progressive planning for growth. Now the city of Portland is looking into the future, staking out land for farms and homes for the coming decades. After the state passed landmark land-use planning rules in 1973, Portland decided to protect the open space […]
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Special Interest or Public Interest ?
Ray Ring’s HCN report “Champions Go Both Ways – Two Weeks in the West” in the April 27th edition was sure to spur debate. The report focused on Obama Administration appointments at the Interior Department which were described as plums and pay backs which have been handed out to members of the environmental establishment in […]
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Some Mormons baptized Obama’s dead mother
This is an amazing intrusion by one religion into a White House family. Or add your own description of its significance. The Salt Lake Tribune reports: President Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who died in 1995, was baptized posthumously into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints last year during her son’s campaign, […]
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Deadly efficiency
Since the 1940’s, farmers in the Mexicali Valley in Baja California have relied on leakage from the All-American Canal to irrigate their fields. The 80 mile-long channel runs from the Imperial Dam, north of Yuma, Ariz., along the U.S./Mexico border, ending near Calexico. It diverts about 3.1 million acre-feet of Colorado River water to nine Southern Calif. cities […]
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Kickstarting salmon salvation?
After years of legal deadlock over the federal government’s inadequate attempts to recover Columbia Basin salmon devastated by dams, the Obama administration appears to be steering a new course. Ken Olsen just wrote High Country News an extensive analysis of how this new political order — combined with the efforts of a diligent federal judge, […]
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Blocked by concrete or killed by climate?
In the context of climate change, our energy appetite has shoved us into a corner. We’ve gotten used to a diet of cheap, energy-packed fossil fuels, and it will probably be impossible to find an alternative that doesn’t bring along its own set of environmental impacts: Solar arrays will damage deserts, wind farms decimate birds […]
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Water world
Imagine a water conference focused not on fluvial geomorphology, hydraulics, creek restoration, riparian grazing management, stream bank erosion, non-point source pollution, cumulative water resource impact assessment and the like, but instead on water as a mysterious, magical, extraordinary substance. That’s what former Hopi chairman Vernon Masayevsa had in mind when he conceived “Braiding Through Water: […]
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Desert disappearances
In mid-April, writer Laura Paskus told us of a dozen murdered women whose remains were found in the New Mexico desert. This week, the desert has given up additional bodies — one an explorer who disappeared 75 years ago, the other a hiker missing only since November. Everett Ruess, artist, poet and aesthete, was 20 […]
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Watch falcons nesting high in downtown Boise
This is a cool window into the wild — make that, the downtown wild. Two peregrine falcons are trying to hatch four eggs on the 14th story of a bank building in downtown Boise. The Peregrine Fund and Fiberpipe have set up a webcam so we can all watch the falcons. The camera provides a […]
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Camelina, Montana’s wonder crop?
Just last September, the FDA granted permission to include two percent camelina meal — a byproduct of producing the fuel — in the mix given to feedlot beef cattle and swine. The meal has protein levels of 40 percent or more, and is also high in Omega-3 fatty acids. Camelina is well suited to Montana […]
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Despite vandalism, road stays closed
Back in mid-March, I wrote about a wonderful development on one of my favorite local dog-walking routes. The federal Bureau of Land Management had blocked motor vehicles from this half-mile stretch of old bad road along the Arkansas River just east of Salida. I predicted that the closure sign would get knocked down, the blocking […]
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When it blows, the snow goes
Last night, I flew home to Colorado to find that my car had changed color. During my weekend away, a wild dust-and-rain storm had rolled over Grand Junction, covering my car — and the rest of town, it seemed — with bright orange splotches of desert dirt. “Yep, half of Utah blew through here,” said […]