Utah
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The Icky 500
New EPA Chief Calls for Cleaner Air in 500 Days Newly minted U.S. EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt gave his first major speech yesterday, promising to embark on the “most productive period of air-quality improvement in American history.” The former Utah governor spoke of a 500-day plan for cleaner air but offered no details on it. […]
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You’re Out of the Club?
A Utah chapter of the Sierra Club has been threatened with disbandment because of its decision to speak out against the possibility of a U.S. war against Iraq. The development may bring to a head a discussion that has been going on within the club throughout the fall. In October, 13 former national board members […]
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Keep the Pedal From the Metal
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is barring off-road enthusiasts from one of their favorite playgrounds in Utah — but this time, it’s to safeguard their own health, not that of the environment. At Manning Canyon, a recreation area near Salt Lake City, the soil is contaminated with arsenic, lead, mercury, and other heavy metals […]
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Utah residents fight back against toxic contamination
With its red rock canyons, snow covered peaks, alkali plains, slickrock, and Great Salt Lake, the varied terrain of Utah forms strikingly beautiful landscapes. This arresting scenery drew Chip Ward and family to the state in the 1970s, and persuaded them to settle in the seemingly placid town of Grantsville on the edge of Utah's West Desert.
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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 scientist fights back against exotics
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. Cheatgrass never prospers? Photo: Russel Stevens/Chuck Coffey, Noble Foundation. Because […]
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Higher prices at the pumps are a good thing — really
That whining sound you hear is American consumers (formerly known as American citizens) fretting over the rising cost of gasoline. Pump and circumstance. The current national average price of gas — $1.41 per gallon — is a full 25 cents higher than it was merely four months ago, and analysts predict that the price could […]
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This scientist is making quite a buzz
The San Rafael Desert — 500 square miles of rolling gravel broken by an occasional butte or sandstone formation — certainly isn’t the prettiest place in eastern Utah. Dotted with cattle and exploratory oil rigs, it is a living example of the federal government’s policy of multiple use on public lands. For just about anybody […]
