Mountain West

By almost any measure, Kara Choquette’s hometown of Kearney, Nebraska, is windy, particularly where it meets Interstate 80. But a drive 450 miles west, and over 4,000 feet higher, leads to an even windier place: Carbon County, Wyoming.  In 2009, Choquette leaned into that wind, moving west and taking a job as communications director with […]

Lawmakers in Utah are advancing legislation aimed at stopping a growing “rights of nature” movement that has coalesced around efforts in the state to save the Great Salt Lake, which is drying up as a combination of climate change, development and agriculture drain on its freshwater sources.  With activists promoting legislation recognizing that the Great […]

The Nevada Supreme Court unanimously ruled last week that the state can restrict new groundwater pumping if it will impact other users and wildlife, a decision that strikes a blow to the plan of a developer that at one time hoped to build a new city of 250,000 people in the Mojave Desert and could […]

The Biden administration has outlined how it could dramatically expand the public lands available to streamline solar development in the Western U.S., a major step that could help sustain the surge in solar energy projects across the country. The Bureau of Land Management last week released a proposal to update its 2012 Western Solar Plan […]