"DENVER -- Crews in northern Colorado are facing powerful winds as they battle a blaze that has scorched about 86 square miles of mountainous forest land and destroyed at least 181 homes, the most in state history. Meanwhile, local authorities are focusing on another concern -- looting."
Brandon Loomis, The Salt Lake Tribune public lands reporter, has just won the 2012 Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment for "Our Dying Forests." Brandon and his colleagues will receive the US$75,000 award for this "measured and exhaustive series about the causes of the decline of ancient conifer forests stretching from New Mexico northward to the Canadian border."
"BELLVUE, Colo. -- Massive wildfires in drought-parched Colorado and New Mexico tested the resources of state and federal crews Monday and underscored the need to replenish an aging U.S. aerial firefighting fleet needed to combat a year-round fire season."
"They gathered in airboats off the northeastern corner of the Great Salt Lake shoreline. Above, clouds jostled in the vast Utah sky."
McKay Jenkins has been writing about people and the natural world for 25 years. He is the director of journalism at the University of Delaware, and the author of numerous books, including What’s Gotten into Us: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World, which chronicles his investigation into the myriad synthetic chemicals we encounter in our daily lives, and the growing body of evidence about the harm these chemicals do to our bodies and the environment.
"The Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai and Pen d'Oreilles tribes consider Montana's National Bison Range part of their heritage, a link to the animals their ancestors once hunted and worshipped."
"CHEYENNE, Wyo. -- Wyoming's governor persuaded the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to postpone an announcement linking hydraulic fracturing to groundwater contamination, giving state officials -- whom the EPA had privately briefed on the study -- time to attempt to debunk the finding before it rocked the oil and gas industry more than a month later, an investigation by The Associated Press has found."
"Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Tuesday signed -- and hailed -- Utah’s latest natural-gas drilling plan as an environmentally sensitive leap toward energy security."
"The effects of global warming are making it more difficult for reservoir managers to control floods and manage flows for irrigation, recreation and fisheries."
"U.S. officials are expected Tuesday to approve a plan by Anadarko Petroleum Corp. to drill 3,700 natural-gas wells in eastern Utah, capping a yearslong review of a project that will be one of the largest in the region."
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