Murphy Woodhouse
Mountain West News Bureau Boise ReporterHey everyone! I’m Murphy Woodhouse, Boise State Public Radio’s Mountain West News Bureau reporter.
I grew up in Pocatello, got my undergraduate journalism degree at the University of Montana and now I’m back home in the West after a long stretch on both sides of the Arizona-Sonora border. Most recently I was at the Phoenix NPR affiliate KJZZ’s office in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, Mexico, where I reported for nearly five years.
Outside of work, I’m learning to be a good uncle and looking forward to getting to know every piece of singletrack near Boise. Trail tips? Story tips? Know a secret the public ought to hear? Drop me a line! Si prefiere hablar en español, ¡no se preocupe!
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It’s something many current and former wildland firefighters ask themselves: what does all this smoke, dust and ash I’ve been breathing for months on end mean for my health? A new national registry for all firefighters could eventually shed a great deal more light on that largely unanswered question. -
A new report from Climate Central - based on 50 years of weather data across the country - finds that the number of hot, dry and windy fire weather days have increased, particularly in the American West.
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Late last week, Arizona Congressman Raúl Grijalva and New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich introduced the Clean Energy Minerals Reform Act. It would make a number of changes to the Mining Law of 1872, including the collection of royalties from hardrock mining.
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Currently such firefighters are facing an Oct. 1 end to temporary pay raises that were a part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
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The Bureau of Land Management is proposing a new Public Lands Rule that would - among other things - clarify that "conservation is a use on par with other uses of federal public lands."
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The National Fire Registry, which seeks to better understand the link between firefighting and serious diseases like cancer, recently launched its online enrollment system. Wildland firefighters, who have proven more challenging research subjects than structure firefighters, are being encouraged to enroll.
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The COVID-19 public health emergency is set to lift this Thursday. Over more than three years of pandemic, Native American communities were particularly hard hit.
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The most recent wildfire potential outlook report from the National Interagency Fire Center shows that much of the West will likely see normal or below normal wildfire seasons this year. However, a large swath of southwest Idaho, northwest Nevada and central Oregon and Washington could see above average wildfire.
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Headwaters Economics recently released an updated analysis of federal data on the economic impact of the recreation economy, whose scale rivals or exceeds that of many sectors that get a lot more attention, like car manufacturing and air transportation. Those impacts are on the whole even more significant in much of the West.
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As a part of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, the Department of Interior and the National Endowment for the Humanities will be digitizing records that document the experiences of those who survived such schools, as well as their descendants. $4 million from the NEH will also support an oral history project with those people.
