You walk past a wrecking yard and see, on the other side of a high chain-link fence, not a pit bull with a mouth full of teeth, but a goldfish in a tank. That’s the image called up by Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt’s nomination as head of the Environmental Protection Administration. It’s a nomination that […]
Climate change
Posted inApril 14, 2003: Change comes slowly to Escalante county
Of avalanche forecasting and snow haiku
Last winter in southwestern Colorado, on the kind of bluebird day when a ski-toting fellow endowed with more bravado than avalanche acumen could be seduced into believing the whole world was a benign winter playground, I found myself in good company in tricky terrain. The day began on a sub-zero morning before dawn in the […]
Posted inWotr
We need a shoe to drop on climate change
In 1999, Hurricane Mitch, which had lost most of its kick by the time it reached Honduras, still killed more than 10,000 people as a result of intense flooding, making it the biggest storm-related disaster in Central American history. A year later, 25,000 people died in Venezuelan rainstorms, the greatest such disaster in South America, […]
Posted inWotr
For wet or for dry
I was pushed out of New York 30 years ago. I couldn’t take the city as it was, and I couldn’t change to meet New York on its terms. We moved to Colorado, where a mountain loomed in our backyard. There were challenges, of course. A tiny coal-mining town is alien to someone raised on […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 2003: The death of the Super Hopper
Hispanic community takes on polluters
Hodgepodge zoning puts chrome-plating plants next to homes
Posted inWotr
Like Butte, Montana, an old dog hangs on
(Note: a longer version of this essay is here.) On the dust-blown fringe of Butte, Mont., at the core of one of the nation’s largest Superfund sites, lives an amazing paradox. Its genus is Canus, but its species would have to be called extraordinarius. I doubt there’s another mutt like this on the planet. The […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
Administration, industry stamp out clean airregs
California has long been a trendsetter. Since 1967, the smog-ridden state has set clean air standards that are stricter than federal laws require. But now, the auto industry, backed by the Bush administration, is trying to halt the California Air Resources Board’s progressive auto-emissions regulations. In 1990, the state required that 10 percent of cars […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
Life in the wasteland
A small Utah town unearths a toxic legacy just as its only hope for rescue, the federal Superfund cleanup program, blows away
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
Superfund: On the Hill… on the ground
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. ON THE HILL: 1980 President Carter signs the Superfund bill into law, funded by $1.6 billion from an excise tax on the chemical and petroleum industries. The newly created Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry assesses the health effects of more than 65,000 […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
Brownfields program makes cleanup profitable
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. While Congress and President Bush allow the Superfund cleanup program to bleed out, they’re pumping money into a related program called “Brownfields.” In January, President Bush approved $250 million for Brownfields, and is now asking Congress to double the program’s funding over the next […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2002: Planning's poster child grows up
Colorado community battles a toxic shipment
Locals confront the state’s first import of radioactive waste
Posted inAugust 19, 2002: The Great Western Apocalypse
The Great Western Apocalypse
The drought of 2002 has left the West blistered and burnt, and scientists predict worse to come. Have we learned anything yet?
Posted inAugust 19, 2002: The Great Western Apocalypse
Hot town, summer in the city
Flash! “Did you see that?” She didn’t. Instead, my wife rolled over atop the sheets, too deep in half-sleep to witness the lightning ripping through the blinds. Lightning. Seems like years since we’ve seen any over downtown Denver. But sure enough, a third of the way into Colorado’s Summer of Fire, it might be working […]
Posted inJune 24, 2002: The buzz business
Is this wilderness perverted?
UTAH Create a wilderness, stop a nuclear waste dump: It sounds like a crowd pleaser. Utah Rep. Jim Hansen’s amendment to the Defense Authorization Act would establish about half a million acres of wilderness in western Utah, much of it near an active testing range for military aircraft (HCN, 5/27/02: Hansen pops a wheelie). It […]
Posted inMay 27, 2002: Wolf at the door
In the West, drought is a native
“You have to get over the color green,” wrote the late historian and novelist Wallace Stegner in Thoughts on a Dry Land, his treatise on living in the West. I’ve remembered Stegner’s words frequently this brown spring, as gusty winds smudge the air over my valley with clouds of dry soil. Green appears only along […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Fateful harvest a scary read
Sometimes recycling is more pernicious than we’ve all been taught to believe. In 1997, Patty Martin, mayor of the small town of Quincy, Wash., discovered that the local agricultural chemicals provider had been mixing leftover pesticides with other chemicals and passing the “recycled” mixture off to farmers as a beneficial soil additive. The crusading mayor […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Wilted West staggers into summer
Meager snow pack leaves reservoirs low, fire danger high
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Saving tired tires
Ernest Cordova is “burning rubber” to come up with new ways to put old tires to use. His family-owned business, Cordova and Sons of Cuba, N.M., collects and recycles used tires to make bales for landscaping and building projects. Americans discard 270 million tires each year, says the Department of Environmental Quality, a huge burden […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2002: Here lies the Rio Grande
What is poisoning border babies?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. BROWNSVILLE, Texas – In April 1991, health care workers in this border town were brought up short. In a matter of hours, three babies were born at the Community Health Clinic with anencephaly, a rare birth defect marked by the failure of the fetus […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Trash talk
It would be a blessing if it were possible to study garbage in the abstract, to study garbage without having to handle it physically. But that is not possible. Garbage is not mathematics. To understand garbage you have to touch it, to feel it , to sort it, to smell it. You have to pick […]