Backstory In the remote northwestern corner of British Columbia, next to Alaska, plans for large mining and hydropower projects have sounded alarm bells on both sides of the border. Critics, mostly environmentalists and tribes, warned that Canada’s resource rush threatens rivers that support a vital wild salmon fishery in both countries, and that the race […]
Pollution
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
Idaho’s sewer system is the Snake River
As Big Ag flourishes, this massive waterway suffers.
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
Fracking without fresh water
A Texas oil company looks for other ways to supply its water needs.
Posted inGoat
Imminent tar sands mine incites civil disobedience in Utah
Two years ago, HCN contributing editor Jeremy Miller asked if Utah’s tar sands deposits could transform the Beehive State into the Alberta of the high desert. Jeremy’s story focused on a mine proposed by U.S. Oil Sands, a Canadian company, in the Book Cliffs south of Vernal. It’s long been known that eastern Utah’s geological […]
Posted inGoat
‘Lucking out’ for Wyoming’s winter smog
Air quality gets a boost from the state’s infamous sagebrush and wind.
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
A historic moment for the Clean Air Act
How it arrived and how much it matters for the climate.
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
On booms and their remains
Click here to see a full gallery of Sarah Christianson’s photographs of the Bakken oil boom. In 1973, during North Dakota’s second oil boom, then-Gov. Art Link declared, “When we are through with that and the landscape is quiet again … let those who follow and repopulate the land be able to say our grandparents […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
Is coal dead?
Which plants are slated for closure or switches to natural gas.
Posted inGoat
Washington’s new clean-water plan is a mixed bag
Washington’s governor last week announced a bold approach for creating cleaner, safer waters for fish and the people who eat them. Unless he didn’t. Every day, the state’s Department of Health releases a map of waterways so polluted that restrictions are placed on the amount and types of fish people should eat. Washington has many […]
Posted inArticles
North Dakota wrestles with radioactive oilfield waste
Regulators look at raising the limit for radiation amid a rash of illegal dumping.
Posted inArticles
What’s killing the Yukon’s salmon?
An ecological mystery in Alaska has scientists and fishermen baffled and alarmed.
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
River of no return
Seattle’s Duwamish has been straightened, dredged and heavily polluted. Can a Superfund cleanup bring it back to life?
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
Duwamish sludge, from source to sink
A little over three miles from the mouth of the Lower Duwamish Waterway (once known as the Duwamish River), there is a small piece of property wreathed with chain-link fence and signs that warn in various languages of various threats to life and limb. This is Terminal 117, or T-117, former home of roofing material […]
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 inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
The Big Nasty
On garbage and tolerance in the wilderness.
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
The Latest: Changes afoot for oil and gas “trade secrets”
BackstoryEnergy companies have long enjoyed secrecy when it comes to the chemical makeup of the fluids they inject underground to release oil and gas. In the late 2000s, Western states like Wyoming and Colorado passed rules requiring some public disclosure, but broad exemptions for “trade secrets” remained common (“Frack forward,” HCN, 10/1/10). As hydraulic fracturing […]
Posted inGoat
A new era of clean air regulation is dawning
Court rulings are not typically repositories of poetic prose. But they occasionally contain beautiful little gems, like this quote from the King James Bible, embedded in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion in a clean air case the Supreme Court ruled on this week: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
The Latest: Two energy giants forced to clean up uranium mess
Kerr-McGee and Anadarko to put billions into detoxing.
Posted inGoat
In an era of light pollution, the darkest skies in the West
Here are some of the region’s best stargazing spots.