Tremors in Colorado and New Mexico linked to coalbed methane extraction.
New Mexico
Posted inArticles
Diversion plans for the Gila would have major impact, critics say
Small and medium-sized flows could be most affected.
Posted inArticles
Fracking Georgia O’Keeffe Country
Drill rigs pop up near Navajo communities, Chaco Canyon and the iconic Black Place.
Posted inArticles
Two political elites prevail in Navajo primary melee
Shirley and Deschene pull ahead of 15 other candidates.
Posted inArticles
New Mexico delays controversial Gila vote
Many unanswered questions remain about proposals to divert the state’s last undammed major river.
Posted inArticles
Rural cops get militarized
Pentagon gives guns, armored vehicles and battlefield gear to rural Western counties.
Posted inGoat
Summer rains in a drought-plagued state
How much does a monsoon season relieve drought?
Posted inAugust 18, 2014: Alaska's Uncertain Food Future
The Latest: Wild Mexican wolf pups born in Sierra Madre
The species still struggles on both sides of the border.
Posted inGoat
Is Canada’s massive mine waste spill a sign of things to come?
From behind a screen of trees, it comes as a dull roar: A gray churn of water and debris that overtops roads, snaps trunks, carves chunks of earth from banks as if they were butter. It looks like a flash flood, something you’d see coursing from the mouth of a redrock wash in Utah, a […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
The bomb builders’ wives
The Wives of Los AlamosTaraShea Nesbit233 pages, hardcover: $25.Bloomsbury, 2014. In her deft debut novel, Colorado writer TaraShea Nesbit imagines the lives of the wives of the men who were stationed in New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, working on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Nesbit writes in the collective voice of the […]
Posted inGoat
The work of a Wall Street wrangler
Jay Ellis will consider buying scenic ranchland across the West on two conditions. First, the acreage needs to be close enough to towns with “amenities” — entertainment, places to eat, and an airport or landing strip. The parcel also needs to contain “live water,” or some combination of lakes, rivers and streams. Then, after spending […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
An artist’s road to redemption
The PainterPeter Heller288 pages, hardcover:$24.95.Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. If it’s possible to paint in words alone, to create a wildly colorful story of grief in sentences layered like one of van Gogh’s swirling night scenes, Colorado author Peter Heller accomplishes it in his second novel, The Painter, narrated by artist Jim Stegner. A fly fisherman […]
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
‘A pimp in the family’
Tribes get into the payday lending game.
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
The man behind a New Mexico county’s fracking ban
Last year Mora became the first county in the nation to permanently ban oil and gas development.
Posted inGoat
New Mexico is getting lucky so far this fire season
Southern Californians are currently experiencing a phenomenon they call June Gloom, when the humid, hazy air that usually hangs out just above the ocean blows inland and lingers, trapped by a warm layer above it. Oh, what the good people of New Mexico would have given in recent years for that brand of gloom. Instead, […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
The leak heard ‘round the nuclear industry
A radioactive leak in New Mexico will make solutions to our waste problem even more elusive.
Posted inGoat
Booms have a lasting impact on towns’ architectural fabric
On a trans-Wyoming reporting trip several years ago, I pulled off the interstate to check out the little town of Rawlins in the southern part of the state. I made my way past the industrial sprawl towards whatever kind of “downtown” I could find. When I finally arrived at the historic core, I was struck […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
The Latest: Obama designated his largest national monument yet
BackstorySince 2009, Congress has grid-locked around three dozen bills that would protect new acres of public land. Even locally grown, something-for-everyone wilderness bills, like Montana’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, are rotting in a legislature plagued by dysfunction and public-lands phobia (“Wilderness bills languish in legislative limbo,” HCN, 3/5/12). Public-land advocates are turning to President […]
Posted inGoat
The suburbs didn’t die — just short-circuited
Wasn’t it just a few months ago that we were all celebrating the death of the suburbs? Both Millennials and Boomers, and perhaps many of those in between, were headed for the walkable, vibrant urban core. We would bulldoze no more desert for McMansions; sunflowers would invade exurban golf courses; and the expressways built to […]