Los Angeles commuters don’t so much drive to work as creep—slowly, very slowly. So slowly, in fact, that each L.A. driver wasted an average 70 hours stuck in traffic in 2007, which was actually a slight improvement over the 72 hours they squandered in 2006, according to a study released last week by the Texas […]
Growth & Sustainability
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
Old trees, new ideas, and humility
Old Growth in a New World:A Pacific Northwest Icon ReexaminedThomas A. Spies and Sally L. Duncan, eds.344 pages, softcover, $32.00.Island Press, 2009. Many of this book’s 28 authors are the usual suspects — Jerry Franklin, Jack Ward Thomas, Tom Spies and other experts on the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. In Old Growth in […]
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
California prepares for the next burn
Officials — and homeowners — start to accept the inevitability of wildfire
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Gimme wheels
It’s about time someone talked about how the snowmobile issue in Yellowstone National Park has been defined by two opponents that don’t really represent the public at large (HCN, 4/27/09). Fall and winter travel is mostly regional, a large group of people who truly love the park and visit often. Over-snow travel has effectively locked […]
Posted inWotr
For the love of wastelands
Every summer when I was a kid, my parents would load my brother, my sisters and me into our van and haul us from Colorado to eastern Wyoming and Montana, where we searched for fossils left by ancient inland seas. We drove to places with names like Froze to Death and Dead Horse Point, broke […]
Posted inWotr
Flagstaff harnesses the forces of darkness
It was back in the 1950s, a bustling time when searchlights stabbed the sky to ballyhoo the opening of a new store. But while additional businesses were welcome in Flagstaff, local astronomers noticed a problem: Their chances to see the heavens were getting dimmer. The Flagstaff astronomers were people well connected to the stars, who […]
Posted inGoat
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 […]
Posted inMay 4, 2009: Salmon Salvation
Ski in, ski out, make money
Rachel Walker’s story “Go Sell it On the Mountain” about Crested Butte Mountain Resort’s proposed expansion onto Snodgrass Mountain totally missed the point (HCN, 4/13/09). Colorado’s ski areas have gained approval for dozens of terrain expansions by claiming that more terrain would attract more skiers who would spend more money and boost local economies. However, […]
Posted inMay 4, 2009: Salmon Salvation
Swindle-ition vistas
Proposing “smart growth” for a city as bloated as Phoenix makes no more sense than a doctor prescribing smart weight gain for a morbidly obese patient (HCN, 4/27/09). One might as well advocate socially conscious prostitution or ethical money laundering. Oxymoronic or not, a shuck is a shuck. The cabal of promoters, land agents, politicians, […]
Posted inWotr
To fight fire, fight forest development
Spring is here, and the forest fire season will soon be upon us. Every year,the cost of fighting forest fires increases so that now, firefighting accounts for close to half the Forest Service’s budget. The cost to tax payers has risen to the billions of dollars. How do federal agencies handle this burden? The Forest […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
The Growth Machine is Broken
On Phoenix’s fringe, a huge piece of state land could become a smart-growth playground, or the same old sprawl.
Posted inGoat
After the crash
The housing/growth boom of the last decade was a wild ride for the West, feeling a bit like a euphoric all-night meth binge. Only the drug in this case was easy credit and an unshakable belief that the good times could never end. Nearly three years after the housing bubble reached its bursting point — […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
Conservation before compromise
Jonathan Parkinson’s “Compromise is better than nothing” is long on provocation and short on facts (HCN, 4/13/09). He writes, “You can’t conserve your way out of a drought.” A good sound bite, but it’s flat wrong. In fact, Southern California did conserve its way out of a drought in the late ’80s and early ’90s. […]
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
Go Sell It On The Mountain
Will the down economy help Crested Butte’s owners end a 30-some year controversy and expand the ski resort?
Posted inGoat
The whites are back in town
Whites are moving back into the city of Denver, and people of color are sprawling into suburbia, according to a case study in the Sunday edition of The Denver Post. Hey, that’s the same story in Washington, D.C. Dubbed “Chocolate City,” D.C. is due to transition from majority black to majority white in 2014, according […]
Posted inGoat
Slums and tent cities
Urban planners love the fact that slums are “walkable, high-density, and mixed-use,” as The Boston Globe recently reported about Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums. In the article, reporter Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow says many governments are beginning to “mitigate the problems with slums rather than eliminate the slums themselves.” The general consensus is that informal communities (read: […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
Scattered to the winds
I am one of the residents of the San Miguel valley in New Mexico where the company Invenergy is looking into locating industrial-size turbines (HCN, 2/16/09). My neighbors and I have been researching the impact of the wind industry, and many of us are concluding that in the push for renewables, it is preferable to […]
Posted inMarch 2, 2009: How low will it go?
Closing in
Western military bases are getting squeezed by sprawl
Posted inWotr
The very worst thing about hard times
Studs Terkel died as last year drew to a close. He was one of the great chroniclers of life in the 20th century, gathering the oral histories of hundreds of Americans. Most were the people historians don’t trouble themselves with — people who pay the price when the historical figures bungle the task of running […]