The charges include criminal conspiracy and trespass.
Matt Jenkins
Posted inOctober 31, 2016: A Monumental Divide
War and peace on the Colorado River
A new book makes a case for optimism in the basin, but the threat of water battles will always be around.
Posted inArticles
At Malheur, Sally Jewell was missing in action
The secretary of the Interior instead took a trip to Africa to combat wildlife poaching.
Posted inNovember 23, 2015: Water Hustle
Water hustle
Did one of Nevada’s top water regulators try to cash in on the drought?
Posted inArticles
The desert doesn’t need this “City”
When President Obama announced central Nevada’s new Basin and Range National Monument July 10, the White House described the area as “one the most undisturbed corners of the broader Great Basin region.” That’s ironic, given that the monument includes a parcel of private ranchland where, for more than four decades, a man named Michael Heizer has […]
Posted inMarch 2, 2015: Unite and Conquer
The water czar who reshaped Colorado River politics
Las Vegas’ Pat Mulroy initiated an era of deal-making that may buffer against catastrophic drought.
Posted inArticles
Cities look to farms for help in Colorado River drought
West’s biggest water agencies finalize a major agreement to boost Lake Mead levels.
Posted inGoat
Dispatch from Mexico: a historic pulse of water to restore the delta
Just south of the Mexican border town of Los Algodones, last Thursday dawned with a whipping breeze. Maintenance workers hustled to sweep, shovel dust and repaint the yellow speed bumps in the road alongside Mexico’s main Colorado River dam, named for the patriot José María Morelos, who was executed by Spain in 1815 for his […]
Posted inOctober 28, 2013: Lifeblood of the Delta
New Hope for the Delta
During the worst drought in more than a century, the Colorado River may flow to the sea once more.
Posted inOctober 28, 2013: Lifeblood of the Delta
How does the Colorado River drought stack up?
It’s one of the worst of the millennium.
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
On the hunt for abalone poachers in Northern California
Last spring, Don Powers steered his government-issue pickup down Highway 1, the thin ribbon of blacktop that hugs California’s North Coast. The sun shone bright, the scent of salt hung on the wind, and the world felt rapturous. In fact, a crackpot preacher Harold Camping had prophesied that the Rapture would actually take place then […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
When Peter Gleick fell, California’s water world lost big
updated 4/17/2012 On Feb. 14, an anonymous source released internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a conservative Chicago-based nonprofit that casts doubt on global warming science, to more than a dozen climate bloggers. The documents revealed Heartland’s major funders, including the Charles Koch Foundation and many large corporations, detailed a nearly $1.6 million program to […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
A Colorado newspaperman fights for his valley’s water
Updated 3/20/12 Out east of Pueblo, Colo., where juniper, sage and bitterbrush melt into the wide-open shortgrass prairie, towns with names like Manzanola, Ordway, Rocky Ford, Swink and La Junta dot the Lower Arkansas River Valley. These were the kinds of agricultural settlements celebrated by William Ellison Smythe, an early-20th-century champion of filling the West […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
Colorado’s only full-time water reporter
In 2004, Pueblo Chieftain publisher Bob Rawlings, assisted by his daughter, Jane, was running full-throated editorials against water transfers and occasionally making news himself. The not-exactly-impartial coverage of the controversy bothered Chris Woodka, then a managing editor. So he asked to be assigned to the water beat. “I said, ‘OK: I’m going to do it […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
California dings homeowners for wildfire protection
As taxpayers across the country cover the multimillion-dollar costs of protecting private residences from wildfires, subsidizing people who choose to live near combustible wildlands, California has begun to try to shift more of those costs to the homeowners. In 2003, the California Legislature passed — but then quickly repealed — a bill that would have […]
Posted inAugust 8, 2011: Ganjanomics
Ganjanomics: bringing Humboldt’s shadow economy into the light
One evening last October, I met with Anna Hamilton in the Northern California town of Garberville. A singer-songwriter with a barbwire voice, Hamilton is known locally for her radio show, Rant and Rave, Lock and Load and Shoot Your Mouth Off — which, it turns out, is a pretty good description of her approach to […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Wild lands by any other name
The quarter-billion acres of mostly arid territory overseen by the federal Bureau of Land Management have become an unlikely battleground in the war over wilderness. Last December, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ordered the BLM to identify any “lands with wilderness characteristics,” and, when appropriate, protect them as designated “wild lands.” Salazar’s order in full is […]
Posted inArticles
Can bandits: Recycling fraud hits California
In February 2010, criminal investigators tailed a pair of Penske rental trucks more than 300 miles, from a self-storage facility in Phoenix, Ariz., to a small house on the outskirts of Perris, Calif. They watched as the drivers transferred their loads to two handyman’s vans. Then they drove the vans across town to a set […]
Posted inArticles
California crab-boat captain powers through tsunami to safety
Alan Mello got a call at 3 a.m. last Friday about the tsunami on its way from Japan. The 57-year-old started fishing from Crescent City, on California’s northern coast, in 1973. He’s had to motor out to sea three times to keep his commercial fishing boat from being damaged by tsunamis. Crescent City has the […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
In Navajoland, a contentious water deal divides the tribe
The Navajo Nation sprawls across about one-tenth of the nearly quarter-million-square-mile Colorado River drainage. But ever since the seven states that depend on the river met to divide its water 88 years ago, the tribe has been pushed into the shadows of river politics. About 40 percent of the reservation’s roughly 170,000 residents still don’t […]