Editor’s note: This is the fourth blog in a series by contributor Wendy Beye, chronicling a restoration effort on Montana’s Musselshell River. Floodwaters dallied in Musselshell River’s floodplain for months, precluding any attempts at damage assessment or repair. The first priority was to restore community water systems and roads. Dump trucks, excavators, and graders were tied […]
Water
Posted inFebruary 20, 2012: How Arizona's culture helped shape the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords
Communities help pay for ecosystem services provided by forests
Strontia Springs Reservoir, 30 miles south of Denver, Colo., looks like water you’d want to scoop up in your dipper. Sunshine and pine reflect off its aqua-blue surface. But 16 years ago, it looked more like a latte clogged with cinnamon bark. In 1996 and 2002, major forest fires scorched the Upper South Platte River […]
Posted inRange
Lessons From the Musselshell: The Flood
Editor’s note: This is the third blog in a series by contributor Wendy Beye, chronicling a restoration effort on Montana’s Musselshell River. Montana’s 2010-2011 winter was a skier’s delight. Snow began piling up early, and continued to fall in record amounts through March. In April, when the expectation at this latitude is that snow will […]
Posted inWotr
Pity the Sacketts? Not much
It’s hard not to feel for Mike and Chantell Sackett, the Idaho couple who saw their plans for a dream home on a remote Idaho lake kiboshed by the EPA in 2007. In early January, when their case against the federal agency went before the U.S. Supreme Court, their lawyer, Damien Schiff, told a story […]
Posted inGoat
Snow fight on the slopes
A tussle over water rights has broken out between the ski industry and the U.S. Forest Service. And, like the conditions this winter, things are a bit nasty. The dispute is over a new clause in ski area permits that prohibits ski companies from selling or transferring some water rights to cities, farms or other […]
Posted inRange
A Great Aridity
There’s an old Doors song which tells us that “The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.” That pretty well sums up the message I got from the new book by William deBuys, A Great Aridity: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest. He takes us around the region — its heart, […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
No more stopgap solutions
The dispute between the Environmental Protection Agency and Mora Mutual Domestic Water and Sewer Association brings to the fore an issue that plagues many poor rural communities (HCN, 12/12/11, “Clean Water Conundrum”). Both septic systems and treatment plants distract from the real issue of human waste removal at the point of disposal — the household. […]
Posted inRange
Lessons From the Musselshell: The Careless Creek Experiment
Editor’s note: This is the second blog in a series by contributor Wendy Beye, chronicling a restoration effort on Montana’s Musselshell River. Careless Creek is one of the main tributaries feeding the Musselshell River. Its flow begins in the Big Snowy Mountains and is augmented by Swimming Woman Creek as well as by a canal […]
Posted inGoat
The Sackett Saga
It’s hard not to feel for Mike and Chantell Sackett, the Idaho couple who in 2007 saw their plans for a dream home on a remote Idaho lake kiboshed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Last week, when their case against the agency became the first case of 2012 to go before the U.S. Supreme […]
Posted inGoat
Groundwater (mis)management
A few years ago, Easterday Ranches, one of the largest feedlot operators in the Northwest, began planning a new 30,000-head facility in eastern Washington’s Franklin County. Easterday purchased some water rights from a nearby farm entitling it to withdraw 282,106 gallons of groundwater per day, 58,921 of which could be used for drinking water for […]
Posted inRange
Lessons Learned From the Musselshell: River History
Editor’s note: This is the first blog in a series by contributor Wendy Beye, chronicling a restoration effort on Montana’s Musselshell River. The waters of the Musselshell River originate in the Little Belt, Crazy, and Castle Mountains in central Montana. Several small creeks join forces west of Martinsdale and gather momentum as they flow east […]
Posted inRange
Tribes could turn the tables on water control
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House It seems like every week there’s another article about the future of western water—how much we’ll have, where it will come from, and who will get it. Since it’s key to our sustainability and growth, it’s something we ought to be talking about. But there’s a key element that […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
Water-quality standards unfairly burden rural communities
Updated 12/14/11 When Clarence Aragon began managing the half-century-old Mora Mutual Water and Sewer Association 12 years ago, he thought he was helping the environment. Hundreds of households around Mora, N.M. — a small river-valley community on the eastern slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains — flush wastewater through subpar septic systems, sending trickles […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Chickenfeathers strikes water
For well over 500 years people have engaged in “dowsing,” an activity that is also known by a variety of vernacular terms including “witching,” “divining,” and, my young daughters’ favorite, “doodlebugging.” Dowsing is the activity of attempting to locate — without the use of scientific equipment — something valuable that lies beneath the ground. While […]
Posted inGoat
Renting a riverbed
A land ownership case is in deep water, bringing property rights, public domain and commerce into question. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in PPL Montana vs. Montana yesterday, in a fight over who owns title to riverbeds in the state. In 2010, the Montana Supreme Court ruled the state held title to land beneath […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Western Watersheds’ collateral damage
You presented Laird Lucas as a dedicated and talented environmental lawyer fighting big corporations and corrupt government (HCN, 10/31/11, “The people v. the agency”). That makes his close association with Western Watersheds Project (WWP) puzzling. For 10 years, I have volunteered to represent environmental ethics on a cooperative management team for a family-owned and -operated […]
Posted inGoat
A Flood of Fault
—John McPhee, Atchafalaya, 1987 The Army Corps of Engineers’ Missouri River Division is not the place to work if you have a pathological need to be liked. That’s because the Corp’s water management priorities on the Big Muddy involve a crazy-making number of stakeholders, each with different and often conflicting interests. There are downstream barge […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Wrestling with a destiny of dryness
When I was a teenager, I asked my father why we wasted our lives irrigating the desert. He wept because his only son didn’t get it. My father inherited his love of the desert from his father, who homesteaded in western Utah and once dug a two-mile ditch from a spring on Indian Mountain to […]
Posted inGoat
Weighing water
Updated 10-19-2011 For the past 20 years, U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger was a chief arbiter of many California water disputes, parceling water to farmers, urbanites and sensitive fish species. Appointed in 1991 by President George H. W. Bush, Wanger made more than 90 decisions in regard to California’s water before stepping down Sept. […]
Posted inRange
Breaching the Elwha dams: A time lapse video
By Alan Durning, Sightline.org My hobby this week has been watching the demolition of the two dams on the Elwha River via webcams. The long awaited dam removal is opening the pristine waters of the Elwha inside Olympic National Park to wild salmon for the first time in a century. I cobbled together video of […]