New West Feature
BLM Hopes to Increase Wild Horse Birth Control
With the estimated 38,400 wild horses reproducing faster than the BLM can remove them, the BLM is looking to quadruple the use of another option it’s been using since 2004: the fertility control drug PZP.
A horse sperm has proteins that fit protein receptors on a horse egg. PZP is made up of sperm proteins, but from a pig. Once the vaccine is injected into a horse the horse’s body will create antibodies, which will attack the pig protein, said Jay Kirkpatrick, director of the Science and Conservation Center at ZooMontana in Billings, Montana. Those same antibodies will attach to the sperm receptors on the horse egg and cause them to change so they can no longer receive the proteins from the horse sperm. The Science and Conservation center is one of the largest producers and distributors of the PZP vaccine.
After the mares are injected with the $24 PZP pellet they become infertile for 22 months, but in order to apply the fertility drug, the horses still have to be corralled by a helicopter.
[more]New West Book Review
Wyoming’s Wind Farms Stir the Plot in C.J. Box’s New Novel
Cold Wind
by C.J. Box
Putnam, 400 pages, $25.95
Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett’s long-simmering resentment against his intolerable mother-in-law, the notorious gold digger Missy Vankueren Longbrake Alden, comes to a boil in Cold Wind, the eleventh novel in C.J. Box‘s popular mystery series. Pickett is too much of a chivalrous, white-hat-wearing cowboy type to ever retaliate against his mother-in-law for her years of belittlement—but in Cold Wind, he is seriously tempted to. As Cold Wind opens, Missy’s fifth husband turns up murdered in a spectacular fashion: shot and hanging from one of the 250-foot turbines on his wind farm. When police discover the murder weapon in Missy’s car and she is arrested for the crime, Pickett is inclined to stay out of the case.
Box’s Joe Pickett novels often open with a description of a dead game animal, illegally poached, that Pickett must trace to a culprit and beyond that to further misdeeds. Cold Wind‘s introduction of a human body instead at the beginning sets the tone for the plot, which won’t involve much game warden action from Pickett.
[more]New West Feature
Uranium, the Front End of Nuclear Power: Abundant in Wyoming But With an Uncertain Future
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean from our position in the Rocky Mountain West, an earthquake and tsunami have triggered a catastrophe in Japan that officials say is the worst event in that country since World War II. In the last week, it has been impossible to miss seeing images of black water flashing lava-like onto the coast, taking villages out to sea and returning fishing boats and human bodies and sundry detritus back to shore in a stingy trickle.
Hard to believe any images could seem worse. But among the most chilling images from these recent days are of smoke billowing from a nuclear plant along Japan’s coast, and helicopters trying to dump sea water on overheating nuclear reactors.
Japanese officials are describing as a “nuclear emergency” the so far partial meltdowns or threat of same to up to four nuclear reactors at the plant. When the earthquake knocked out electrical power, operators were not able to pump water into the reactor to cool the fuel. Now workers are struggling valiantly to set up a new transmission line to the plant, but several reactors are now permanently disabled. On the news show comparisons to the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear accidents abound. So far the score is: Three Mile Island not as bad, Chernobyl worse.
Nuclear power isn’t a prevalent form of energy in our water-parched West. But these plants are common in the Midwest and East, with 104 reactors currently in operation around the contiguous U.S.
[more]WyoFile Feature
Wyoming to Become Fourth State Allowing Concealed Guns Without Permit
In what may be a growing trend in states around the country, Wyoming will soon join Alaska, Arizona and Vermont in allowing residents to carry concealed guns without a permit.
Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead last week signed into law a so-called “constitutional carry” bill that won wide approval in the Legislature, calling it “an appropriate law for Wyoming” during a signing ceremony.
“I think this is a historic bill, and several states will follow us. As always, Wyoming is a trendsetter,” said sponsor Sen. Kit Jennings (R-Casper).
Legislatures in at least a half-dozen other states are considering similar bills. Wyoming’s new law takes effect July 1.
[more]New West Feature
Yellowstone Elk Study Points to Lasting Effects of a Hotter, Longer Summer
The shorter season gives ungulates less time to build the necessary fat reserves that get them through harsh winters. Additionally, it may help to explain why elk numbers are sagging in the area, says Arthur Middleton, a Ph.D. student based in the Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Wyoming and coordinator of the Absaroka Elk Ecology Project.
“The way I think about it,” Middleton says, “and maybe the best way to put it pretty bluntly, is summer is when these animals make their living. That’s when they gain all the fat that we’re worried about them losing too quickly in the winter. If they’re not gaining as much as they need or could, (winter) doesn’t matter. The relative importance of what goes on in winter is lessened.”
Western Book Roundup
Rocky Mountain Writers Score The Story Prize, NAACP Image Award, and a PEN/Faulkner Nomination
Listen up: Western writers kicked butt last week.
First, Boise’s Anthony Doerr won The Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall. The Story Prize awards $20,000 annually to one writer of an outstanding collection of fiction in English published during the prior year.
Next, the finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction were announced, and the shortlist includes--straight out of Laramie--Brad Watson’s Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives.
Then, Denver novelist Carleen Brice traveled to Los Angeles Friday for the NAACP Image Awards, where Sins of the Mother, a Lifetime original movie based on Brice’s first novel Orange, Mint and Honey, was nominated for Outstanding Television Movie, Mini-Series or Dramatic Special. Did she win? You bet your Rocky Mountain oysters she did. (Visit her fabulous blog, White Readers Meet Black Authors, why don’t you?)
Meanwhile, The Weird Sisters by Denver’s Eleanor Brown and West of Here by Washington state novelist Jonathan Evison are hanging out together on the New York Times Best-Seller List for Hardcover Fiction. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Montana’s Jaime Ford has been on the paperback fiction list for forty weeks now.
See? It’s all about training at altitude.
Also in the Roundup: A reading to commemorate the six-month anniversary of the Fourmile Canyon fire in Boulder, and the Tuscon Festival of Books.
[more]New West Feature
The Land Trust Alternative: For Wyoming’s Endangered Ranchers, It’s a Future
In north central Wyoming, seven miles east of the Big Horn National Forest, Catherine Kusel and her brother Fred, two siblings well into retirement age, still run cattle on land purchased by their father in 1920. Their land has an undisturbed beauty typical of Wyoming. It is the dry, high desert steppe of open sage and grass juxtaposed with the rising forms of the Big Horn Mountains at its edge.
The Kusel Ranch is an ideal place to raise a small herd of cattle, ideal, too, for people craving the aesthetic of the open west or for the second-home buyer wanting a private getaway.
That’s why, since last summer, Catherine and Fred Kusel’s newest neighbor is not another rancher, but a new subdivision.
Statistics presented by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association indicate that by the middle of this century, an additional 48 million people are expected to live in the West. This population boom will put 26 million acres of open space at risk of residential and commercial development. Expected to have the third-highest growth rate, Wyoming will feel much of this coming change.
[more]Buried Secrets, A ProPublica Series
One Man in Wyoming’s Gas Fields Becomes an Unintentional Fighter in the National Fracking Debate
There are few things a family needs to survive more than fresh drinking water. And Louis Meeks, a burly, jowled Vietnam War hero who had long ago planted his roots on these sparse eastern Wyoming grasslands, was drilling a new well in search of it.
The drill bit spun, whining against the alluvial mud and rock that folds beneath the Wind River Range foothills. It ploughed to 160 feet, but the water that spurted to the surface smelled foul, like a parking lot puddle drenched in motor oil. It was no better — yet — than the water Meeks needed to replace.
Meeks used to have abundant water on his small alfalfa ranch, a 40-acre plot speckled with apple and plum trees northeast of the Wind River Mountains and about five miles outside the town of Pavillion. For 35 years he drew it clear and sweet from a well just steps from the front door of the plain, eight-room ranch house that he owns with his wife, Donna. Neighbors would stop off the rural dirt road on their way to or from work in the gas fields to fill plastic jugs; the water was better than at their own homes.
New West Feature
Poll: Rockies Voters Want Stronger Economy, Environmental Protections
Voters in five Rocky Mountain states say state and federal leaders should still fund programs that protect land, air and wildlife despite budget woes, according to the results of a recent survey titled “Conservation in the West.”
Pollsters called 2,200 voters throughout Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming in late January and asked them questions to create a snapshot of how Westerners viewed conservation and environmental issues.
“Residents reject the concept that the economy and environment are in conflict,” said Walt Hecox, a professor of environmental science at Colorado College and director of their State of the Rockies project. “In this trying economic time that’s really interesting.”
[more]WyoFile Feature
Fuel Factories: Wyoming Communities at Risk?
Wyoming Refining Co.’s oil refinery is situated literally on Main Street in Newcastle, Wyoming, and a mere half-mile away from Newcastle High School. The school is equipped with a “panic button” that shuts off all ventilation in the building in the event of a toxic spill.
Given its close proximity, refinery officials are required to share with school board officials their Risk Management Plan detailing the potential human toll should there be a major leak of hydrofluoric acid, a highly toxic and potentially deadly chemical.
The plan includes several scenarios and maps with circles drawn around the refinery, representing miles-wide areas where a hydrofluoric acid vapor cloud could injure or kill as it moves.
“People call them ‘circles of death,’” said Bob Neufeld, vice president of environment and government relations. “If local people want to know about the Risk Management Plan, we will talk to them about it. But we don’t hand out copies to people in the press.”
