The Colorado River flows through the town of Rifle in Garfield County, Colorado. Photo (taken 1972) by David Hiser, courtesy of U.S. National Archives, Flickr/Creative Commons. Original article by Sandra Postel, National Geographic This week, more evidence came in that hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) poses potentially serious risks to drinking water quality and human health. ...
This is a pond on the Goshute Reservation, below the Deep Creek Mountains. This place will be turned to barren desert if the SNWA pipeline project goes through. Photo via Stop the SNWA Water Grab. ...
The Film Our Land, Our Life presents the struggle of Carrie and Mary Dann, two Western Shoshone elders, to address the threat mining development poses to the sacred and environmentally sensitive lands of Crescent Valley, Nevada. From film transcript: Now you may ask yourself why the US government would come in and raid a ranch that is owned and operated by two Western Shoshone grandmothers who have lived there on this land since time immemorial? Well, as it turns out, the ranch in Crescent Valley sits on top of one of the largest gold finds in the history of the United States. Just two or three months after the horse roundup in February of 2003, Cortez Gold…was claiming that it had found one of the most significant deposit of gold. Where? Right there where those animals had been removed. If you want to look at degradation of the range, go look over the top of this mountain down into those roads that the mine has been putting in to do their exploration, or go look into one of these pits, or go look at all the water they’ve been pumping. And yet, that is not considered degradation of the range? Shoshone land right now is the second largest gold producing area in the world. This microscopic gold is underneath the water table, so they are having to pump the water out to get to the earth underneath. The mines are pumping anywhere from 20,000 gallons of water per minute to 70,000 gallons of water per minute, for one mine alone, every day, 365 days a year. …they are killing the earth.
Waste land: large-scale irrigation strips nutrients from the soil, scars the landscape and could alter climatic conditions beyond repair. Image: Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto/ Flowers, London, Pivot Irrigation #11 High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA (2011) ...
Excerpt from the presentation, Tactics and Talking Points: Re-Radicalizing the Fight for Abortion Access, given July 5, 2013 at the Radfem RiseUp conference in Toronto, ON: Mainstream reproductive rights activists in the United States are currently accepting a fictional story about why abortion restrictions are being enacted. A recent article by Andrea Ayres-Deets on the popular liberal website Policy Mic contained a common assumption: “To Republicans, abortion is about a deeply held moral belief concerning the sanctity of life which propels them to legislate against half of the U.S. Population.” ...
The high water mark for Lake Mead is seen on Hoover Dam and its spillway near Boulder City, Nev. After back-to-back driest years in a century on the Colorado River, federal water managers are announcing a historic step to slow the flow of water from a massive reservoir upstream of the Grand Canyon to the huge Lake Mead reservoir behind Hoover Dam near Las Vegas. (Julie Jacobson / Associated Press / April 15, 2013) ...
A big win for two cool salamanders: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today protected the Austin blind salamander and the Jollyville Plateau salamander under the Endangered Species Act and designated 4,451 acres as critical habitat for the rare amphibians. ...
Original post by Evan Bell, Cronkite News Service WASHINGTON – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Gierisch mallow endangered Tuesday, and proposed more than 12,000 acres in Arizona and Utah as critical habitat for the desert wildflower. The orange perennial flower is found only in Mohave County, Arizona, and Washington County, Utah, and can only grow in “gypsum soil” found in those counties. ...
Original Post by Vernon Robison, Moapa Valley Progress It has been another good year for the Moapa dace. The population of the endangered fish has more than doubled over the past two years, according to a survey conducted last week by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). ...
Original post by Stina Sieg, KJZZ 08/13/2013 The Gierish mallow, found only in Arizona and Utah, is now protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. It’s estimated that only 18 groups of mallows remain in the Southwest. (Photo courtesy of Lee Hughes-Bureau of Land Management) ...