A new buzzword phrase appears to making the rounds in the natural resource policy world. The phrase is “social license”. I wasn’t sure what the phrase meant, so I looked it up on where else…Google. Here is what I found. Apparently it originally came to mean the unwritten approval that a corporation needed to gain […]
Politics
Posted inGoat
Taking back the country
Colorado’s political season got off to its official start on March 16 with precinct caucuses, but even before those gatherings, some candidates had ads on TV. Among them was Jane Norton, former lieutenant governor and one of several candidates for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. The seat was won by Democrat […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
Cutting away from the pack
Keith Allred chats about his run for governor in uber-Republican Idaho … as a Democrat
Posted inGoat
Who’s grabbin’ who?
A few days ago, Editor Jonathan Thompson posted “The trouble with monuments“, describing his reaction to the news that the Department of Interior has its eye on some potential new national monuments in the West. Utah politicians, unsurprisingly, have been quick to decry what they see as an unilateral “federal land grab” (despite the fact […]
Posted inGoat
Sick by Sippy Cup
Beware the smiling creature in your bathtub: it’s yellow, it squeaks, your kids love it, and it gets into your bloodstream—literally. The average rubber duck is covered in phthalates, industrial chemicals that make plastics more flexible. While that’s good for the rubber bounciness of bath toys, some phthalates have proven to be endocrine disruptors that […]
Posted inMarch 1, 2010: The War Next Door
Chuck Bowden’s border war
Nearly a decade on, a writer’s look at the futility of the war on drugs still matters.
Posted inGoat
The trouble with monuments
Last week, Western conservative congressmen found a great excuse to get all worked up, apoplectic, and downright angry in the gleeful way that Western conservatives seem to have a premium on. President Obama, they said, was ready to make a massive land grab that would turn huge swaths of Western states into federal fiefdoms, off-limits […]
Posted inGoat
Sam Hamilton’s Vision
Sam Hamilton, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, died last Saturday after suffering chest pains while skiing with friends outside Frisco, Colo. He was just 54. Hamilton had been on the job only five and a half months, but he’d laid out an ambitious new agenda for the agency, pushing it to […]
Posted inGoat
Balancing Nevada
Nevada’s special legislative session, currently in its second day, has been described by many as a dog-and-pony show effort to balance the state budget – most of the real negotiations to extract money from the private sector and cut state spending has been going on behind the scenes in closed-door sessions. But listening to the […]
Posted inWotr
Thank you, Utah, for leading the way
Utah’s Legislature has an undeserved reputation for being reactionary. Yet state Sen. Chris Buttars of West Jordan, Utah, was definitely onto something when he proposed dropping 12th grade in order to alleviate the state’s budget crunch and reduce the cost of public education. Buttars’ proposal, combined with the Utah Senate’s recently passed bill to exempt […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
Skeletons in the closet
Utah State Archaeologist Kevin Jones knows his bones
Posted inGoat
“Green fees”
Conservative groups have often accused environmentalists of being lawsuit-happy, and of making big bucks off their court cases. Wyoming attorney Karen Budd-Falen took that claim even further this fall, asserting that green groups who win or settle federal suits get billions of taxpayer dollars to cover their legal fees — and that many of them […]
Posted inGoat
When Colorado just said No
The eyes of the world — or at least the NBC prime-time audience — are on Vancouver as that Canadian city hosts the Winter Olympics. For Coloradans, it’s a reminder of our state’s peculiar status as the only world’s only place that was awarded the Winter Olympics, but turned them down . […]
Posted inRay
Understanding an oil group
In 1995, during one of the never-ending controversies about federal management of oil and gas drilling, a prominent Western industry group made a radical suggestion. The group — the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States or IPAMS for short — called for the end of federal land. Diemer True, a Wyoming oil baron representing IPAMS, […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
Supreme beings
After gutting campaign finance, the high court may go after the Commerce Clause
Posted inBlog
Environmental justice: A vision for change
“The environment for us is where we live, work and play.” Jeanne Gauna, the SouthWest Organizing Project’s co-founder and longtime co-director, crystallized the inspiration and sentiment of the environmental justice movement with this simple yet profound idea. In addition to transforming and reinvigorating the environmental, labor, indigenous and civil rights movements, environmental justice established a […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 2010: 'The environment ... is where we live'
Dangerous game
Western game wardens are hindered by huge territories, budget cuts