by Lisa Jones

Posted 7 years, 5 months ago It started out as a simple item on a regional planning commission agenda in remote Delta County, Colo.

But since that meeting on April 9, the possibility that up to 600 coal bed methane wells could be drilled here has whipped up a firestorm of dissent in this quiet western Colorado valley. It has flushed hundreds of ranchers, fruit farmers, housewives, realtors, and environmentalists to public hearings, where they speak out against an economic, social, and environmental threat… Read More

Posted 7 years, 7 months ago "We had to build a city not for businesses or automobiles, but for children and thus for people," said a man in a speech last year. "Instead of building highways, we restricted car use. ... We invested in high-quality sidewalks, pedestrian streets, parks, bicycle paths, libraries; we got rid of thousands of cluttering commercial signs and planted trees. ... All our everyday efforts have one objective: Happiness."

Did the voters of Boulder, Colo. write in the Dalai Lama as… Read More

Posted 8 years, 10 months ago Outfitted in moccasins and traditional dresses, the four contestants in the 49th Miss Navajo Nation Pageant -- held this past September in Window Rock, Ariz. -- demonstrated a dazzling array of cultural skills. They discussed, in Navajo, the Treaty of 1868. They carded and spun wool, and they displayed rugs they had woven. They prepared fry bread from scratch over an open fire of their own making. Just about the only things the contestants didn't do were to butcher sheep (that popular event was cancelled this year) and to exhibit their bodies in bikinis and evening gowns.

Posted 9 years, 1 month ago Dev Carey is a tall, handsome man with a Ph.D. in ecology. He can swing dance like a pro, identify every plant in the meadow outside his house, and talk nervous youths into rappelling off cliffs. He can do many things, but one thing he can't do is separate himself from the morality of any given situation. Especially the environmental morality of any given situation.

This is something of a curse. Like Cassandra in Greek mythology, he stares unblinking at the writing on the… Read More

Posted 9 years, 3 months ago I am in the local coffee shop in Paonia, Colo., drinking a cup of joe and pleasantly anticipating its effects on my brain. My companion, Eli Wolcott, isn't drinking a drop. He doesn't ask what coffee can do for him; he asks what he can do for coffee.

Specifically, Eli wonders whether he can help coffee workers in the remote hills of southern Mexico improve their quality of life and cause less environmental damage. He's working with them to revamp their… Read More

Posted 9 years, 5 months ago As far as the North Fork of the Gunnison River in western Colorado is concerned, there's good news and there's bad news.

On one hand, it drains one of the most beautiful valleys on the planet -- its headwaters tumble from the Ragged and West Elk mountains into the broad, gentle North Fork Valley.

On the other hand, the river has been used hard for decades. Coal mines, ranches, and orchards dot the valley, each of them diverting water, often with… Read More

Posted 9 years, 7 months ago Why would Dale Murphy, a senior geologist with Enserch Exploration, leave a $58,000-a-year job in Dallas and take his family to a remote town in Colorado where the employment opportunities range from sorting cherries to working a supermarket cash register?

Sanity. He and his wife Sheryl didn't want to raise four-year-old Hayden and seven-year-old Ginger in suburban Dallas.

Dale had a key experience one day while walking across a bridge on a job near Great Falls, Mont. A truckful of teenagers drove by… Read More

Posted 9 years, 7 months ago The Western U.S. has many well-known problems -- overgrazing, rampant development, Garth Brooks look-alikes. But one troublesome issue that hasn't gotten much attention is cheatgrass, an exotic weed that arrived here in the 1890s and has since taken over an area the size of Montana.

Because cheatgrass (aka: downy brome, junegrass, and broncograss -- it's the stuff that gets stuck in your socks when you walk in the desert) provides some forage early in the spring, most ranchers haven't recognized it… Read More

Posted 9 years, 8 months ago Costas Christ has a knack for handling sticky situations. I got a glimpse of this as I was making my way home from an ecotourism conference in Senegal in the early 1990s. Along with a number of other conference participants, I was stuck in the airport in the capital city of Dakar. For some unknown reason, the ticket agents had stalled us, so we were doing what American ecotourists often do when the Third World reveals itself as more than rainforests and beaches -- we were freaking out. What kind of government did Senegal have, anyway? Were there jails under… Read More

Posted 9 years, 10 months ago O, environmental writers. The religious scribes of our day. I love them but I fear them too, because of the way self-righteousness can rear up like some suddenly animated pond scum in a Stephen King movie and cover the picnic, the teenagers, everything that was ever fun and alive and moving around. Wait, it's not that bad. It's just that I find my environmental angst a lot easier to take when it's served up with a dose of humor.

So when I had… Read More