Environment

Every old T-shirt or toy you throw out sits in landfills forever. This spring, be wise about your waste.

Forget sci-fi movies: For a real surreal experience, look no further than Golden. Colorado’s first capital is now the capital of the green movement and home to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is celebrating its fortieth anniversary in July. NREL, which started out as the Solar Energy Research Institute…

This month, an environmental group called Colorado Moms Know Best (no, seriously) and the Girl Scouts teamed up to school the State Legislature and lieutenant governor on climate change challenges facing the 21st century. For doing this, they got not only a little experience in talking with our state’s elected officials — but also earned a new Climate Change patch.

By the end of 2017, the City of Denver will have completely phased out dumpsters in favor of cart-based trash service. Charlotte Pitt, manager of Denver Recycles and Solid Waste Management, understands that that’s a controversial statement.

Clarke lives in the Altogether Recycling plant in unincorporated Adams County. His operators are on a fifteen-minute break; when they return, Clarke will eat. He has a strict diet of empty cartons: milk, juice, etc. Clarke is hungry. He also thinks and learns. Clarke could be the future of recycling.

Three Denver-based environmental groups are suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services branch, challenging two plans approved by Colorado Parks and Wildlife that together would kill up to 120 mountain lions and bears to protect declining mule deer populations. The Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians and the Western…

On Wednesday, a state Senate committee killed a Democratic-sponsored bill that would have required a distance of at least 1,000 feet between oil and gas drilling sites and school property lines. Two weeks after passing the state House, which is controlled by Democrats, the bill lost in a 6-5 vote…

David Owen’s new book, Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River, handles its sprawling subject with deftness and quirkiness.

As Boulder County prepares to end its moratorium on fracking, its officials are wondering why a two-month-old lawsuit against the moratorium filed by the Colorado Attorney General is still in the works. The suit is the last in a line of legal challenges to Boulder County’s temporary ban on new…

Denver has cracked the top ten list for smoggiest cities in the United States, according to a report by the Frontier Group and the Environment America Research & Policy Center that was released today, April 11. The Denver-Aurora-Lakewood area came in at sixth place on the ominous list, with…

The Denver-based Center for Western Priorities has launched a national ad campaign aimed at preventing national monuments from being stripped of their protected status by the Trump administration. The threat is exemplified by the efforts of numerous Utah legislators, who are currently lobbying Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to wipe out Bear Ears National Monument — a prospect that recently led Boulder’s Outdoor Retailer Association to announce that its annual Outdoor Retailer shows will pull out of Salt Lake City and seek a new home, perhaps in Colorado.

Denver has significant ties to Standing Rock and the resistance movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Many people, including members of indigenous groups in Denver like the American Indian Movement of Colorado (AIM) and delegations from non-native groups like Black Lives Matter 5280, traveled the hundreds of miles from Colorado to the…

Forget warmer weather, longer days and leaves and flowers returning. For anyone who parks on the streets in Denver, the months from April through November are known for one thing: street sweeping, which resumes on Tuesday, April 4. Cities around the world use street sweeping to keep dirt and debris…

A Colorado Court of Appeals decision issued on Thursday, finding that state law requires oil and gas regulators to place greater priority on protection of public health and the environment in issuing drilling permits, may prove to be a shot in the arm for beleaguered anti-fracking groups.

In Colorado, we tend to hear about avalanches when they have fatal consequences, as was the case with a Garfield County slide caused by snow bikers in February that overtook two people, killing one of them. But at this time of year, when winter is transitioning into spring, avalanches that don’t get media attention are happening all the time, and many, if not most, of them could have deadly consequences if folks are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Denver protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline started over six month ago. And although most of the campers have left the banks of the river, the protests aren’t about to stop. On March 10, Native Americans and their allies will rally in Denver.

Last week’s 6-3 vote by the Broomfield City Council to “postpone indefinitely” any action on a proposed moratorium on oil and gas drilling, despite widespread support for such a measure, has left neighborhood organizers puzzling over their next move in the local fracking wars.

Over a hundred people gathered at the Broomfield Community Center on February 22 for the third in a series of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service meetings on plans for what’s now the 5,000-acre Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.

A court document expected to be filed today seeks to add several Denver residents to a lawsuit against the city, challenging its plans to convert City Park Golf Course into a “detention area” for stormwater runoff — including Denver City Council maverick Rafael Espinoza, who’s raised several questions about the city’s $300 million drainage project.

On Tuesday afternoon, attorneys for six underage plaintiffs will be arguing that the state’s oil-and-gas regulators should be doing more — a hell of a lot more — to protect Colorado’s children from the real and potential ill effects of the fracking industry.

Hiking in Colorado during the winter can be absolutely spectacular, but unexpected events that take place in a challenging, high-altitude environment can have dangerous or even deadly consequences. Here are seven tips to avoid making fatal mistakes at this time of year.

Just days after Colorado Department of Transportation officials received a long-awaited final okay to proceed with a $1.8-billion makeover of I-70 through north Denver and Aurora, opponents of the highway expansion are holding a “community town hall event” tonight to discuss what options remain for putting the brakes on the project.