If you're a Westerner - and what American isn't, really? -- Colorado College's State of the Rockies Project is a must-read, must-bookmark web destination.

The project's mission -- to conduct "state-of-the-art research to help Rockies residents clearly see their communities, environment and economy, so they can better shape their own future" -- is strikingly like Environmental Working Group's detailed, hyper-local data and analysis.

This year: Food & Ag
This year's topic, food and agriculture, is a natural fit with EWG's work. CC students, guided by economics professor Walter E. Hecox, an economics professor, are using EWG's farm subsidy database to help document how the economics and demography of farming are changing the physical and cultural landscape -- and how its traditions and economic and demographic pressures are shaping agriculture and ranching.

Last week, I traveled to the CC campus to preview EWG's new AgMag for a State of the Rockies symposium on the politics of agriculture. (Full disclosure: my son Shannon Morgan, a CC sophomore contemplating a major in an environmental field, was in the audience. It was great to see him and enjoy a few moments at an historic campus where Katherine Lee Bates, a visiting teacher, was inspired to compose America the Beautiful. But he's not one of the privileged few upperclassmen tapped each year for the project team.)

Students find complicated agricultural picture
The student researchers have already dug up some facts that make for a complicated picture. On one hand, farmland acreage is shrinking and the number of farming and ranching operations is growing. That could suggest more family and small-business farms profiting from rapidly expanding demand for locally-grown food. On the other hand, "mega-agricultural enterprises" are major factors in the regional agricultural economy.

Upcoming speakers: Stanford professor Rosamond Naylor, an expert on trade-offs between grass-fed and industrial livestock, journalist and author Richard Manning, author of Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape,"and Dr. Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, associate professor of history at Kansas State University and author of Red Earth: Race and Agriculture in Oklahoma Territory.

If you can't make the lectures, no worries - you can download past report cards and sign up for the agriculture edition, due in March.

Meanwhile, there's a wealth of information in previous years' report cards.

The most recent, published last spring, focuses on incarceration, historic preservation and protection of wildlife in a region whose population is increasing 2.6 times faster than that of the U.S. The CC Rockies project is aimed at helping the West's people manage that tumultuous change.

You can still see the wilderness as it was, and still is, and should remain, in the State of the Rockies photo gallery.

About bats, mosquitoes and encephalitis, "Carnac the Magnificent" (the Johnny Carson character) might say: "What are three things that are affecting my property value?"

Last summer, my wife, son and I liked to sit on my deck at sunset to watch the bright orange sun filter through the lush green canopy of the protected forest.  It was SPECTACULAR.

SPECTACULAR.

We'd have dinner out there and then sit back for the show.  It was great.  And no one had to wear any bug repellent because there weren't very many mosquitoes.  Instead of mosquitoes, we'd stare up at the bats swooping  around the yard.  It was fun to see them narrowly miss the house, a tree, or even one another.  Those bats looked like they were having a great time.

BTW, did I mention that it was spectacular?

Pretty sunset.
Entertaining bats.
No mosquitoes.
Good company.

But those days have ended. 

The bats are gone.

After inspecting some important hibernation locations, the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection revealed that 80 to 90 percent of the bats have died this past winter from White Nose Syndrome. [CT DEP]

Now we have mosquitoes.  LOTS of mosquitoes.

And all those mosquitoes make me worry about encephalitis.  I have a four year old son and now a 3 month old baby that could be especially susceptible to "triple E" or West Nile Virus.

So we'll be eating dinner inside this year. 

Learn more about white nose syndrome from the US Forest Service.

[Thanks to baskyes on Flickr for the terrific pic]

There's an old joke that asks, "Who's buried in Grant's tomb?"

The answer, of course, is President Grant himself (and, google reveals, his wife), but soon they may have some company. The House voted yesterday in favor of legislation that will reform a mining law that's been on the books since Grant's presidency in 1872. The old law is woefully inadequate when it comes to protecting public lands, and too often lets mining companies off the hook for cleanup -- leaving taxpayers to foot the bill.

According to EWG's own Dusty Horwitt,

“Our research shows that mining claims in the West increased more than 80 percent between January 2003 and July 2007. The mining bill would give land managers the authority to balance mining with other resources such as parks and water supplies just as they can with oil and gas drilling,”

There's a good chance that the Senate's reform bill won't be quite so strong, and President Bush has threatened a veto but appears to be willing to compromise. Hopefully the spirit of the House's bill will stick, because it's time to lay the 1872 mining law to rest.

Well, it’s finally happened. The out-of-control explosion of oil and gas drilling in the Mountain West has started to claim other victims besides the environment. Politicians who were early supporters of the federal government’s plans to dramatically increase its search for domestic sources of energy may pay for it come the next election.

It has also made for some strange bedfellows, with environmentalists and sportsmen (not always allies) just as upset over what has been happening throughout the west as more drilling rigs are going up. Not only is the environment being put through the ringer as more an more pollution is released as a result of increased drilling, but big game are disappearing from areas where they traditionally could be found in abundance.

A similar thing is happening on public lands as well as mining claims are at record levels right near some of the country’s most well-known national parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon.

Some members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) are furious with President Bush and “Dead-Eye” Dick Cheney. At first I thought ‘how could this be?’ Vice President Cheney, while not the best of shots, often speaks at NRA annual meetings, and President Bush had NRA Chief Wayne LaPierre down to the ranch in Crawford for a little R and R.

But the problem isn’t rifles, it’s drill rigs. The Washington Post reported that NRA members including Ronald L. Schmeits, second vice president of the NRA, a member of its board of directors and a bank president in Raton, N.M., are angry that the two oilmen have encouraged energy companies to overrun hunting areas with roads and rigs.

"The Bush administration has placed more emphasis on oil and gas than access rights for hunters," Schmeits said. "We find that our members are having a harder time finding access to public land."

For a respite from the mainstream media's celebrity-focused environmental coverage, check out the Earth Day edition of Quest from KQED-TV, San Francisco's PBS station. It's an inspiring look back at the "everyday people who helped rescue the Bay Area from environmental disaster." These are the pioneering activists – "environmentalist" wasn't even a word yet – who introduced curbside recycling, halted plans to fill in 70% of the Bay and kept beachfront condos out of West Marin. Notably, many of them were women, the suburban moms once known as "homemakers." Save the Bay's Sylvia McLaughlin talks about how she came to see in that term a responsibility to make the Earth a better home. Their legacy lives on in people like Denny Larson of Global Community Monitor, who is seen giving inner-city kids a toxic tour of their own neighborhood.

It's all fair enough. Some of these environmental terms sound like we should all know what they are, but in fact have precise technical definitions: watershed, wetland, sediment to name just three. So Interior Secretary Norton is just making things simpler by making a wetland something we can all understand. Apparently, manmade things, such as manmade ponds and golf course water hazards are now wetlands. When we open up the category to include land that receives water that didn't occur naturally, well, we find that we have more wetlands now than we did in 1997.

Read the Field & Stream piece, or watch Comedy Central's "Colbert Report" on the good news (the clip is called "Birdie"). Or watch the same clip at Youtube.

So does this mean the Department of Interior is going to water my lawn for me?