Politics

A native Nevadan is expected to become the next overseer of much of the West’s public lands. Neil Kornze is President Obama’s nominee to head the Bureau of Land Management, which manages 245 million acres, mostly in Western states. Kornze joined the agency in 2011, and has been its principal deputy director since March. He […]

It’s been over a month since rain-swollen creeks tore through roads and flooded homes in Colorado’s Front Range. While the camera crews have long since gone home, the disaster isn’t over for families who suffered property damage. Of the 20,000 single-family homes in the Boulder area, only 3,504 had flood insurance – one of the […]

National Parks Service Director Jon Jarvis had not come to Rubén Salazar Park in East Los Angeles on October 24 to talk about government shutdowns, Tea Partiers in Congress or the privatization of public lands. He had come instead to promote the park service’s American Latino Heritage initiative, a prototype of a new kind of […]

This week, Congress is getting back to the big issues haunting the public, including the farm bill, which expired amid the government shutdown. Since the House and Senate have already passed two separate versions, select lawmakers are meeting today to try to reconcile their differences. The division between the two chambers centers on, you guessed […]

Next week’s elections will come and go relatively peacefully. And for that we can be thankful. To simultaneously endure the hyperbolic screeching of political mailers and television ads, along with the federal government’s self-implosion, would have broken even the most committed of citizens. Then again, a high-stakes election season probably would’ve saved the federal government […]

The environmental onslaught caused by the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border fence may have started with a mouse. When the federal government first built a section of border fence south of San Diego in 1990, it left nearby grasses – habitat to an imperiled mouse – to grow long to comply with the Endangered Species […]

The shutdown is over. Federal employees are going back to work, with back pay. Journalists and data geeks can access information on census.gov and usgs.gov. Tourists are once again able to see national parks. And the National Zoo’s Panda Cam – praise be! – has returned to the air. Maybe we can just chalk all […]

We’re now on Day 15 of the shutdown. The consequences of suspending so many of the government’s daily operations continue to ripple outward (a few of the odder side effects: new beers can’t be approved; Alaskan fishermen can’t catch crabs; furloughed federal workers are growing #shutdownbeards). The closures have, of course, affected access to the […]

Last Thursday, the complaints of business owners and restaurant workers in national park gateway towns around the West hit home when my boyfriend’s parents, who were about to embark on the Southwestern leg of their once-in-a-lifetime cross-country road trip, realized the shutdown had foiled their entire itinerary for the region. Instead of snapping pictures from […]

Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., might have known that his proposal to salvage burned timber from Yosemite’s Rim Fire would not go over smoothly. Not only is he trying to auction off logging contracts in a national park while his own party’s antics have kept that park closed to citizens, he wants to sidestep the whole […]

Hotels, raft guiding outfits and other tourism-dependent businesses in and around Western national parks have collectively lost millions of dollars each day that the government has been in partial shutdown. According to the Arizona Republic, the biggest hotel near Grand Canyon National Park had about half the occupancy it normally does this time of year, […]