The 300-square-mile Pinedale Anticline in western Wyoming has been called America’s Serengeti. It’s crucial winter range for mule deer and pronghorn antelope, and is a sage grouse stronghold. But it’s got riches below ground too – the third largest natural gas reserve in the United States. Development of the gas reserve has been underway for […]
Energy & Industry
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Small Nevada tribe sues BLM over coal ash landfill
At a Southern Nevada Health District public hearing this October, farmer Norm Tom said that he and his tribe had “seen a lot of death” in the last 35 years, and he placed the blame squarely on the neighboring Reid Gardner coal-fueled power plant, run by Nevada’s primary power company, NV Energy. “Every time we […]
Posted inDecember 6, 2010: Toxic Past, Toxic Present
The supposedly protected Wyoming Range faces new energy development
Legacy energy leases remain in prime hunting lands
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 […]
Posted inRange
Weighing the costs of unobtainium
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]