A few weeks ago, I mused that the American Southwest may be on borrowed time. Forget that. The Southwest is toast. A new paper in Nature spells doom. From the abstract: The potential for increased drought frequency and severity linked to anthropogenic climate change in the semi-arid regions of the southwestern United States is a…Continue Reading…
Living in a marginal (but stunning) landscape with obvious constraints has its drawbacks when too many people move there and the natural resources become depleted. In the American Southwest, those drawbacks are not really being felt by the hordes who live there now. Yet. But based on my own knowledge of the drought history of…Continue Reading…
Here’s a great post at Climate Progress on solar power and the Southwest. I was all set to laud Joe Romm, too, until I read further and discovered it’s not from him, but a colleague of his cross-posting from another site. Oh well.
A story I’ve been writing about and following closely since last summer has taken another odd and tragic turn. Here’s a can of worms that’s bound to be pried open: Ted Gardiner, who had many off-the-record and deep background conversations with The Salt Lake Tribune during the past eight months, insisted he had come to…Continue Reading…
It’s out there, lurking. Here’s something warm and fuzzy for Westerners to wake up to this morning: Now before I get into the piece that follows I should explain that I don’t hold any particular animus towards the states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming or Idaho, and so when I start talking about disposing of nuclear…Continue Reading…
That’s the title of this counterintuitive post from Jonathan Thompson, the editor-in-chief of an environmental magazine. He riffs off a brewing controversy over spectacular places in the Southwest that might soon be nominated as National Monuments. Except it’s not some off-the-cuff riff. Thompson writes a poignant meditation on the complicated feelings he has about a…Continue Reading…
The pothunting story in Utah that has captured my attention is actually just one tentacle of a sprawling illegal antiquities investigation across the Southwest. I’ve known this for some time, having talked to various dealers snared in the federal sting operation. None of them have been arrested so their role has gone largely unmentioned in…Continue Reading…
Here’s the understated yet majestic lede in this poignant essay by Laura Paskus in the current issue of High Country News: On the outskirts of Albuquerque, the desert has surrendered the bones of 12 young women. I’m a little uneasy with the larger theme of the piece, though, mainly because I think violence to women…Continue Reading…