The Biden Administration has approved a somewhat scaled back version of ConocoPhillips Willow oil drilling prospect in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The Willow oil field, over the 30 years of its production, will add about half a billion tons of carbon dioxide to the greenhouse gases already baking our planet. The Alaska Congressional delegation was…
The King Cove BUCIP is tangled. It’s not possible to even briefly summarize it in a single post, or at least not in a post that’s short enough that readers would be willing to plow through it. This is the second part of a two-parter. Recap: Why should anyone outside of Alaska care about the…
The King Cove BUCIP is tangled. It’s not possible to even briefly summarize it in a single post, or at least not in a post that’s short enough that readers would be willing to plow through it. So this is a two-parter. Why should anyone outside of Alaska care about the King Cove Road? The…
WC is being deliberately vague in this post about where and when the events reported here occurred, and has altered the facts slightly to make the players difficult to identify. Their identities aren’t the point of the post. It wasn’t baby seals; it was baby sea otters, not that that’s any better. But, yes, an…
The Thacker Pass Lithium Mine would be located in north central Nevada, the largest lithium mine in the United States, and would produce about a quarter of the lithium that the United States needs. The entirety of the mine is on federal land administered by the Bureau of Land Management. It’s undeniably big: when fully…
Sometimes it seems to WC he has been fighting Pebble Mine forever. But it’s only been 21 years. As has been reported here before, it’s the wrong mine, in the wrong kind of ore in the wrong place. It also seems to WC that the mine project has been “killed” at least ten times, but…
WC has written about TANSTAAFL before. The acronym stands for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch,” and is a reference to the bars and taverns that used to offer a “free lunch,” where, for the cost of two over-priced beers, you could have an over-salted, thirst-inducing lunch. The price of the lunch,…
WC has fought the Pebble Mine Project since it was first proposed. It the wrong location, the wrong kind of ore and the wrong size of mine. It’s also a gold mine, and the world really, really doesn’t need any more gold mines. If you are looking for objectivity in this post, you are reading…
Readers may remember the ongoing BUCIP – WC’s term for a Big, Ugly, Complicated, Intractable Problem – involving road access between the Alaska communities of King Cove and Cold Bay. It takes a thousand words just to provide an oversimplified summary of the long-running dispute. Readers who are curious should take a refresher course in…
On the long list of things you need to worry about is the problem of PFAS. “PFAS” is an acronym for perfluoroalkyl or polyfluoroalkyl substances. It’s a class of chemicals composed of long chains of carbon molecules very strongly bonded with fluorine atoms, and they are damned near indestructible. Other chemicals break down by bacterial…
At the Bonnie Raitt concert WC attended recently, Raitt lamented the loss of John Prine, her friend, co-performer and colleague. “Hold John close to your heart,” she urged us, before performing “Angel from Montgomery,” the Prine song she has sung most often. It’s on Prine’s astonishing first album, along with other unforgettable songs like “Sam…
WC recognizes that long blog posts about mining law aren’t exactly light reading, and that, rightly or wrongly, most readers aren’t all that interested in the arcana. But Center for Biological Diversity v. Davis might be one of the most important mining law decisions in the last half century, and merits at least a brief…
Oh people, look around you The signs are everywhereYou’ve left it for somebody other than youTo be the one to careYou’re lost inside your housesThere’s no time to find you nowYour walls are burning and your towers are turningI’m going to leave you here and try to get down to the sea somehow Jackson Brown, “Rock…
BUCIP is the acronym for Big, Ugly, Complicated and Intractable Problem. One of Alaska’s BUCIPs is northwest Alaska’s Red Dog Mine. Most readers will have never heard of Red Dog Mine, but it’s the largest zinc mine in North America, as well as a very significant source of lead, silver and cadmium. It’s located in…
WC has only seen three wolverines the wild. And none of them resulted in a photo. WC saw the first on the third day of a torrential rainstorm, washed out of an attempt to climb Scott Peak, hiking out down Sunset Creek in Denali National Park. That wolverine was loping steadily upstream – the gait…
The National Park Service already has an environmental assessment out for the proposed repairs to the Denali National Park Road at Polychrome Pass. Readers may recall the existing road crosses a rock glacier and climate change has accelerated the glacial flow, carrying off the road. The Park Road is closed east of Polychrome Pass. You…
Alaska decided a long time ago the best way to deal with an oil spill was not to have one. As a result, Alaska, like many – but by no means all – states has a fairly rigorous body of laws and regulations aimed at spill prevention. One important part of those laws is a…
It’s been too long since WC has offered a really radical suggestions here at Wickersham’s Conscience. That’s about to change. We don’t need any more gold mines. The chief problem with gold mining is that all the rich deposits of gold have been exhausted. During the early days of the California Gold Rush, miners picked…
Boise, Idaho is officially classified as having the Køppen Climate Classification subtype “Csb,” Mediterranean Climate. That means there’s not a lot of rain, although it isn’t a desert landscape. In fact, it’s raining as WC writes this blog post. And one of the delights of rain here in the North End of Boise is that it…
There are events in your life that can dramatically change your view of the world. For WC, one of those events was the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil spill. An oil well-drilling effort on Union Oil’s Platform A suffered a blowout on January 28, 1969, and Union’s initial efforts to stop the blowout seriously worsened the…
Wood Bison – bison that live in forested areas, as opposed to the more famous Plains Bison – very nearly went extinct. Overhunting, introduced diseases and hybridization with Plains Bison had devastated the Wood Bison populations. The species vanished from Alaska in the early 1900s. They very nearly vanished entirely. A small herd of 23…
WC has written before about the looming crises in public use of recreational lands. Those crises will worsen as the rest of the Boomer Generation retires and seeks to recreate. National Parks and Wilderness Areas, in particular, are starting to suffer damage from the sheer number of visitors who are flocking to them. Yellowstone National…
Several readers took WC to task for his Lincoln City Syndrome post. The Oregon Coast, they said, is still beautiful, is still relatively undisturbed, is still a wonderful place to visit. WC, they said, is a cranky old man. Yes, but. The sea wrack is laced with plastic fragments. This is not healthy, normal or…
WC understands that Earth Day is supposed to be aspirational, that we should be positive, focused on making the environment better. WC has been mostly focused on that task his entire adult life. As a board member of Alaska Conservation Foundation and now Idaho Conservation League, WC has invested a lot of time, money and…
You’ve probably never heard of the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). It’s a Cold War-era research facility that’s still active today, located on 890 square miles of sage brush steppe in eastern Idaho, on a chunk of the Eastern Snake River Plain, about 50 miles west of Idaho Falls. Located in the high desert, surrounded by…
On the North Slope of Alaska, between Prudhoe Bay and Utquiagvik (the village formerly known as “Barrow”) lies Teshekpuk Lake, the largest fresh water lake on the North Slope and the third largest lake in Alaska. At 3.65 million acres, it’s big by anyone’s standards. Most Americans have never heard of it. “Teshekpuk” is Inupiat,…
As we emerge from the environmental nightmare of the Trump Administration, WC wants to thank some folks who are largely responsible for minimizing the damage done: the nonprofit law firms that litigated against the madness. They didn’t win all of the lawsuits, but they won most of them and the result is that, as bad…
The EPA estimates there are more than 15,000 abandoned mines across the West that are leaching dangerous chemicals into the environment. Sometimes it’s windblown dust, laced with arsenic, cadmium lead and other toxic heavy metals. More often it’s groundwater discharging from mining adits and shafts, laced with dangerously high levels of dissolved heavy metals, running…
The U.S. Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia – the D.C. Circuit – issued a decision last week on the Trump Administration’s attempts to throw out the Obama Administration’s Clear Power Plan. As you might expect, there were lots of lawyers involved. Platoons, companies, entire brigades of lawyers. The list of lawyers in…
U.S. District Judge David Barlow – a Trump-appointed federal judge – killed the Bureau of Land Management’s plan to lease 59 parcels in Utah’s Uinta Basin for oil and gas development. His December 10 decision was a very near thing, and serves as a lesson in both the consequences of greed and the serious deficiencies…
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