Colorado
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Aspen, Colo., taxes its way to a healthier climate
Randy Udall charges more for a ton of carbon dioxide than anybody else in the world. Udall runs a unique, two-and-a-half-year-old program in Aspen and surrounding Pitkin County, Colo., that charges new homeowners up to $100,000 if they exceed the “energy budget” allotted to their property by the local building code. The money collected under […]
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Citizens battle to keep Delta County from becoming the coal bed methane capital of Colorado
It started out as a simple item on a regional planning commission agenda in remote Delta County, Colo. A recently reworked natural gas well in Delta County. Photo: Jeremy Puckett, WSERC. But since that meeting on April 9, the possibility that up to 600 coal bed methane wells could be drilled here has whipped up […]
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Colorado man cleans up war-game carnage
The war is over and Dan Sharps is doing a body count. In a thicket of pinyon and juniper trees, something big and violent has cleared a path. Dan Sharps as a tack. Photo: David Mayfield. “Lost arm,” Sharps says, gesturing toward one tree clipped of a big branch. “Lost leg,” he says, pointing to […]
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A review of Powder Burn
A little over two years ago, fire swept through five buildings and four ski lifts in Vail, Colo., causing more than $12 million in damage, upending a small town already reeling from enormous change, and eventually introducing the word ecoterrorism into the mainstream lexicon.
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Can laws be written that inspire reverence for the land?
As usual, Charles Wilkinson is pacing. Hands stuffed in the front pockets of his Levi’s, head down, he paces the lecture hall, up one stairway and down the other, his students’ heads swiveling to follow him. Charles Wilkinson, law man. Photo: Larry Harwood, University of Colorado at Boulder. But on this December morning, during the […]
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A Colorado family welcomes the simple life
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? The Murphy family, home on the range. Photo: Lisa Jones. Sanity. He and his wife […]
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Fire on the Mountain
Enviros in Washington are apoplectic over what they fear will be a pre-Earth Day cave-in by the Clinton administration over mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia. This used to be a mountain. Photo: David Miller, www.mountaintopmining.org. Readers may recall this battle from last year’s appropriations season, when powerful Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) introduced a rider that […]
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A Republican berates his party for abandoning the environment
Republicans are handing Democrats a green Y2K. So far, GOP presidential contenders have all but conceded the environmental issue to Al Gore and Bill Bradley. Rather than fight for the conservation mantle that was once the GOP’s, they seem content to not ask and not tell when it comes to the nation’s land, air, water, […]
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An Iowan causes growing pains for agro-industry
Kamyar Enshayan is a folk music aficionado and a lifelong soccer fan. He lives in a comfortable house on a shady street in Cedar Falls, Iowa, with his four-year-old daughter, Nettie, and his wife, Laura Jackson, a biology professor at the University of Northern Iowa. They have a large vegetable garden. Laura is expecting their […]
