By Tara Opsal and Stephanie Malin Coloradans will vote on a ballot initiative in November that requires new oil and gas projects to be set back at least 2,500 feet from occupied buildings. If approved, the measure—known as both Initiative 97 and Proposition 112—would mark a major change from their state’s current limits: 500 feet […]
By Isabelle Morrison Public spaces are for everyone, but how we perceive them and interact with them is contextual. Some activists are making their statements on the public canvas all around the world. And it’s catching on. Len Necefer fell in love with mountain climbing after moving to Colorado, but he noticed that information about […]
Conservation groups on Thursday sued Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and the Bureau of Land Management for approving new leases to allow fracking on more than 45,000 acres in western Colorado, including within communities and within a half-mile of a K-12 public school, without analyzing or disclosing environmental and public health threats as required by federal […]
By Elliott Negin Two Colorado counties and the city of Boulder are suing ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy, Canada’s largest oil company, to hold them responsible for climate change-related damage to their communities. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in a state district court by Boulder, Boulder County and San Miguel County, is seeking compensation for damage and […]
Conservation groups are calling on the Trump administration to cancel plans to lease thousands of acres of federal public lands for oil and gas development near western Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes National Park and Blanca Peak without fully analyzing environmental or cultural harms. WildEarth Guardians, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, Rocky […]
Three conservation and animal-protection organizations sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Thursday for funding a Colorado Parks and Wildlife plan to kill hundreds of mountain lions and dozens of black bears without analyzing the risks to the state’s environment. The multi-year plan to kill black bears and mountain lions in the Piceance Basin and […]
By Sabine Bergmann For millennia, human beings have gazed into the firmament and been awed by the thousands of stars, galaxies, nebulae and other cosmic wonders visible to the naked eye. But in recent generations, much of humanity has become divorced from these marvels. Today, at least 80 percent of people living in the United […]
You’d have thought the earth moved exactly two years ago with all the ballyhoo at the State Capitol when Gov. John Hickenlooper unveiled the final Colorado Water Plan. I stood in the west foyer of the Capitol as every TV camera in the city pointed at Hickenlooper and his then-Colorado Water Conservation Board director, James […]
billy barr of Gothic, Colorado wears a lot of hats—literally and figuratively. Sure, the reclusive mountain man (who prefers his name spelled in lowercase) has an impressive hat collection, but he’s also a legendary citizen scientist who has been collecting a trove of invaluable data from his remote home in the Colorado Rockies for more […]