Yellowstone

This tree thinks you should vote.

Yosemite Falls. Photo by Terry Chay, used under Creative Commons licensing.

This Friday, get some history about the 1988 fires that devastated Yellowstone. Rocky Barker, environmental reporter for the Idaho Statesman, takes us on a journey The Washington Post calls, "part policy treatise, part history, and part adventure story."

A reporter recently called me, asking what changes in environmental policy I hoped to see in an Obama Administration. I immediately thought of the specific issues that have troubled me over the past eight years: unregulated oil and gas exploration in the West, too few species protected under the Endangered Species Act, too many snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park, the reckless quest to drill, baby, drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, etc., etc. And then it struck me that there was something far more fundamental that President Obama needs to do.