Norris Hundley’s book Water and the West has long stood as the classic account of the epic negotiations to divide up the Colorado River’s water. First published in 1975, the book quickly went out of print. Yet it is such an essential history of the river’s politics that, for the last several years, it’s been [...]
Biotech beet-down
Some 95 percent of U.S. sugar beets are Roundup Ready, developed and planted largely under the public radar since the U.S. Department of Agriculture quietly “deregulated” the crop in 2005.
On Sept. 21, though, a U.S. district judge in California hobbled the Roundup Ready revolution.
Vegas forges ahead on pipeline plan
Las Vegas-based Southern Nevada Water Authority manager Pat Mulroy understandably bristles at any reference to Chinatown. Yet she has achieved a degree of power that might even make Mulholland envious. Mulroy has largely set the terms of Western water over the past two decades. She has challenged what she calls the conservative “belt-and-suspenders” mindset that [...]
The Most Cooked-Up Catch
In the Bering Sea today, the race for crab is now over. But the fishery there is just one ripple in the tide of a revolution that has swept the fishing world over the past 20 years. Today, fisheries for everything from fish-stick staples like whiting and pollock to high-end delicacies like halibut and sablefish operate under “catch share” programs.
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New York Times: Following the Wagon Wheels of the Latter-Day Saints
Maps, guidebooks and trail enthusiasts have made it possible to trace the journey made by Brigham Young and more than 70,000 church members.
The Source: An Alaska Gold Mine Could Spell the End of the World’s Biggest Sockeye Salmon Run
Carol Ann Woody is hip deep in an Alaska stream, and beeping. She and biologist Daniel Chythlook, a Native Yup’ik, work their way up a tangle of creeks so small that the two of them can barely fit in the water together. For the better part of a week, Woody’s team of six biologists has been helicoptering in and out of the headwaters of the Nushagak and Kvichak (kwee-jack) rivers in search of juvenile salmon.
As Woody thrashes through a thicket of willows, the strobe light on a boxy contraption strapped to her back flashes red, and the unit beeps like a backhoe moving in reverse. The device is an electroshocker, which mildly stuns fish so that Chythlook, following close behind with a net at the ready, can scoop them up for measurement.
Woody nudges the shocker’s business end — an elongated wand that looks like a clunky World War II land-mine detector — under an overhang on the stream’s edge. Then she cackles like the Wicked Witch of the West: “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Suddenly she begins yelling like a maniac.