Utah needs help understanding its elusive river otters. The state’s Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) put out a call Monday asking Utah residents to report any sightings of the animals whose numbers in the state are still unknown. “River otters are important because they are an indicator of how healthy the aquatic environment is around […]
By Zoe Woodcraft The sound is like a low, steady rumble, soothing yet powerful. Imperceptible to the human ear, the hums of red rock arches in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase National Monuments carry with them the deep patterns of the earth’s plates sparked by events like ocean currents colliding in the open Pacific that […]
By Rosalyn R. LaPier Forty years ago the U.S. Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act so that Native Americans could practice their faith freely and that access to their sacred sites would be protected. This came after a 500-year-long history of conquest and coercive conversion to Christianity had forced Native Americans from their […]
Twenty-nine uncontained wildfires are blazing in the Western U.S. right now, raising concerns that 2018’s fire season could rival 2017’s record-breaking season for devastation, The New York Times reported Monday. The fast-moving County Fire in Northern California, which started Saturday and has burnt more than 60,000 acres of land as of late Monday, has belched […]
By Sam Schipani With rainfall at record lows, water is an increasingly precious commodity in the deserts of southern Utah. But in the driest reaches of redrock country, one long-waged water war thunders even louder than the rest. Utah legislators and water managers have spent nearly a decade trying to break ground on the 140-mile-long […]
By Sam Schipani While the Ancestral Puebloan people of the Southwest were building citadels like Chaco Canyon, the Fremont people were carving mysterious petroglyphs depicting horned, broad-shouldered triangular men and sweeping carvings of desert snakes. Nowhere is their legacy more apparent than in eastern Utah’s Molen Reef. Fremont artifacts dominate this cultural heritage site, but […]
Utah’s state lawmakers aren’t exactly friendly to climate change legislation. Their Republican governor said in 2015 that man-made climate change is “a little debatable.” In 2010, the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a resolution that implied global warming is a conspiracy and urged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to stop all carbon dioxide reduction policies and […]
The Interior Department on Tuesday is auctioning off 32 parcels of public lands in southeastern Utah for oil and gas development. The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) lease sale includes more than 51,000 acres of land near Bears Ears—the national monument significantly scaled back by the Trump administration last year—as well as the Hovenweep and […]
Even though Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke insisted “this is not about energy,” environmentalists and public lands advocates have long suspected the Trump administration’s cuts to national monuments were driven by its push for more drilling, mining and other development. Now, internal Interior Department documents obtained by the New York Times show that gaining access to […]