By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House As this year comes to a close, anxiety continues to mount on how public and private interests in the US are going to get their hands on enough rare earth elements (REE) to maintain and grow the industries that rely on them. The race is on to strategize […]
Energy & Industry
Posted inArticles
Mixing oil and water in California
This video accompanies the story, “Oil and Water Mix in California.” Please wait while the player loads. Note: you must have Javascript enabled and the Adobe Flash Player installed. Produced in association with This American Land.
Posted inArticles
Our forest
This video accompanies the story: The supposedly-protected Wyoming Range faces new energy development. Please wait while the player loads. Note: you must have Javascript enabled and the Adobe Flash Player installed. Learn more about the pending natural gas development at the Wyoming Range website. The Forest Service’s environmental analysis will be posted for public […]
Posted inDecember 6, 2010: Toxic Past, Toxic Present
All hopped up
Chinook, Magnum and American Fuggle — these are just some of the Pacific Northwest’s many organic hop varieties. But despite rapid growth in organic craft beer production, they’re hardly flying off the shelves. That’s because, until recently, USDA rules allowed organic brewers to use much cheaper conventional hops. In 2007, the National Organic Standards Board […]
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Pondering palm oil
On the surface, it seems that environmental justice should be one of those no-brainer, win-win concepts that everyone can support. Look a little deeper, however, and enacting environmental justice can become impossibly complicated and divisive. Few things exemplify this paradox more than the case of palm oil. In recent years this seemingly innocuous, rather boring-sounding […]
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Drill the parks
Flanked by fast food joints on its south side, the St. Vrain River on its north, residential development on the west and Interstate 25 on the east, St. Vrain State Park isn’t a reason for tourists to make a trip to Colorado. Its flat fields and cluster of ponds offer residents of Denver and its […]
Posted inGoat
Fun with factory farms!
Mooooove over, Wisconsin. You’re quickly losing your dairy state cred to the West. Unfortunately for those of us who live beyond the 100th meridian, though, the usurped title of America’s Dairyland comes at a price. As factory-sized dairies colonize the West, they have significant effects on water and air quality, as well as quality of […]
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What’s old is new again
Two stories about mining projects in California that crossed my path last week remind me that some narratives just don’t seem to go away. Whether it’s taking advantage of gold’s record high prices or carving away at river-side hills for rock and stone, it seems a given that economic boons obscure questions about associated environmental […]
Posted inRange
Sunshine and transmission lines
Colorado’s San Luis Valley sits high (average elevation 7,500 feet) and dry (less than a foot of annual precipitation on the valley floor). It also gets ample sunshine, which inspires plenty of interest in solar energy, especially to generate electricity. But no matter how “green” the energy source, it’s a subject of contention in two […]
Posted inNovember 22, 2010: Hardrock Showdown
Hardrock Mining Showdown
For background on previous coverage and history on the 1872 mining law, read our Editor’s Note Geologist Jeff Cornoyer steers a Ford van over a rocky, rutted, winding dirt road, climbing the foothills of the Santa Rita Mountains on a toasty August morning. The desert here, about 30 miles southeast of Tucson, is dotted with […]
Posted inRange
Another Tesoro Flare-Up
By Eric De Place Earlier this week we learned that Tesoro — an oil refiner with nasty politics and a rap sheet a mile long — will be facing a criminal investigation for the April explosion at its Anacortes, Washington facility that killed seven workers and earned it the largest L&I fine in state history for “willful disregard of safety […]
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A just transition to a clean energy future off coal can happen
In my first opportunity to join the blogosphere of High Country News, I wish to extend a big thanks to all those who have come before and are currently working towards achieving environmental justice (EJ) in the west. Many EJ struggles are a real challenge, rooted in a complex history with timelines and landscapes that cross vast […]
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 […]
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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 […]
Posted inGoat
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 […]
Posted inGoat
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 […]
Posted inGoat
Utahns tar the tar sands
Mining of tar sands in Alberta Canada has left a landscape of razed boreal forest dotted with pools of toxic wastewater. It also produced 1.49 million barrels of crude oil last year – every day. Now, the first-ever commercial tar sands mine proposed in the United States is facing its second legal challenge from Western […]
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A tiny energy revolution
We’ve come to the point where community gardening is well understood – could community energy be far behind? Just as many people don’t know how their food reaches their plate, many aren’t plugged into where their power and heating originates. “We have been completely disconnected as consumers from our sources,” says John Sorenson, the executive […]