Laramie - A new report on climate change, one of twenty being produced by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), describes effects on land, water, agriculture, and biodiversity that are expected over the next 25 to 50 years. The West and Southwest will see drier conditions, with runoff starting and ending sooner. Longer growing seasons will likely be offset by limited water and nutrients. In arid regions erosion and wildfire will increase, to the detriment of native species, water and air quality, and private property.

Lander - I called Habitat for Humanity the other day about an old house in Riverton which was being offered virtually free to anyone who would move it. After 15 years of swearing I was about to start building a cabin in the country, maybe I could sneak this old building onto my land under cover of night. 

   The landowner needed it out of the way so he could expand his business. Erin Shirley, of Habitat, didn't want to see the house torn down – it was a beat up but stylish 1930s bungalow with a porch and a hipped roof. But months of advertising around Riverton had gotten little response, and the wrecking ball was about to swing.

 

Lander Talk: Have Chair, Will Sell

Then she sent an email to "Lander-Talk", an internet list-serve that originated in Riverton's neighbor-town about 25 miles to the west. (A list-serve is essentially an internet mailing list – you send something to it, and it gets distributed to a group with common interests that has signed on to receive emails.) That's what prompted me to call Habitat about the house. So, apparently, and suddenly, did a lot of other folks. "Now I've got a bunch of people to call back," Erin said when I got through on her busy phone. "It's unbelievable. I wish Riverton had something like the Lander list."

 

   The apparent front-runner in the race for the GOP nomination

It was built in 1924, a time when economic depression cast a pall over Sheridan. Builders didn't exactly subscribe to excess in constructing a weatherproof

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department offers $5000 for information leading to the arrest of persons poaching moose or elk. A Wyoming game warden, describing an incident last fall

You're running out of time to phase out and shut down the 22 elk feedgrounds in western Wyoming.

Bryant's preventable death working for a company that the same year netted $673-million in profit was documented in Montana journalist Ray Ring's award-winning article, "Disposable Workers of the Oil and Gas Fields" in the April 2, 2007, edition of the regional bi-weekly High Country News. Now, acclaimed African-Wyomingite author Alexandra Fuller (see interview) has written a moving account of Colton Bryant's life and tragic death amid the frenzied, dangerous drilling spree in southeast Wyoming. Here, with special permission of the author and her publisher, Penguin Press, are the first two chapters of "The Legend of Colton H. Bryant: The Story of a Wyoming Boy," and an excerpt from later in the book when young Colton decides to follow his father into work in the oil fields...

 

   What the governor says he

Casper - Presidential candidate Barack Obama was challenged last month to explain his tolerance of the polarizing racial rhetoric in his Chicago church. He did more than that - rather than merely rejecting Reverend Jeremiah Wright and changing the subject, he invited Americans to go deeper, exploring together our ethnic/cultural differences and commonalities. And he acknowledged our constitutional Xeno’s paradox: we must strive for a "more perfect union" knowing perfection is beyond any nation's reach.

 

   Is this a conversation that engages Wyoming? Sitting around a table recently with a group of people from all corners of the state, an acquaintance from Worland pointed out that

 

SHERIDAN - When it comes to laying down a carbon footprint, Wyoming is the nation’s Big Foot. A carbon footprint measures human activities in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, primarily CO2. By this yardstick, Wyoming ranks as worst in the nation - on a per capita basis.

   Our geography and geology conspire to give us a bad rap. It’s a

   Many blame laws that exempt “ranchettes” (parcels larger than 35 or 40 acres) from subdivision rules. Figures on the total land in Wyoming caught up in these large-tract developments are not available, but according to Albany

   

   Vast stands of mountain pine beetle-killed forests make people, including me,

CHEYENNE - After watching a certain amount of legislative action on the large-acre subdivision reform bill, one stops counting all the ironies. But a few of the richer ones still linger a week after the 59th Legislature sent the final draft to the governor.

   Such as, it took a debate over cutting up land into ranchettes and hobby farms to bring land stewardship interests together.

(Correction: The initial release of this column contained an error - that 18,000 people had died in the gas incident in Africa. The actual number was closer to 1,800.) 
   LARAMIE - Twenty years ago a huge explosion of gas from Lake Nyos in the central Africa Republic of Cameroon killed nearly 1,800 people and untold livestock up to 15 miles away. The naturally occurring gas was carbon dioxide (CO2). A year later, the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce decided that, “since CO2 is deadly, CO2 pipelines should have appropriate federal safety

SHERIDAN - I am a recycling fool, but recently I've been pondering the petro-wisdom of schlepping a flattened tuna fish can from Sheridan to Portland. Recycling has always been a problem in the land of long haulage.

It takes a lot of diesel to haul paper, cardboard, cans, and glass from Wyoming to various paper or steel mills or scrap exporters on the west coast. If you’re not careful, you'll burn as much