High Country News April 16, 2007
Feature
Phoenix Falling?
Craig Childs lifts the rug of modern-day Phoenix, Ariz., to examine the remnants of the civilization that preceded it – the Hohokam people, who also built a great city in the middle of the desert, and flourished until the day they ran out of water.
Editor's Note
Dry to the bone
Despite a relatively snowy winter here in western Colorado, the season itself seems to have shrunk, with spring arriving weeks earlier than it once did in a trend with ominous consequences for the desert Southwest, particularly Phoenix.
Uncommon Westerners
Bay bags his way to the top
Brian Bay of Sandy, Utah, is the world champion of grocery-store baggers, following his triumph at the National Grocers Association Best Bagger Competition.
Writers on the Range
Montana puts limits on national Trout Unlimited
When national Trout Unlimited tried to get its Montana branch to stay out of state stream-access issues, the Montanans rebelled dramatically, much to Pat Munday’s delight.
Wealthy landowners and locals wade into the ditch
Jack Wright thinks Montanans are over-reacting to stream-access issues; after all, from the point of view of a fish, it’s a good thing when a rich man restores a stream, even if he locks out trespassers.
News
The sacred and the toxic
Just over the Arizona-Sonora border, Tohono O’odham traditionalists have joined environmental groups in fighting a proposed Mexican hazardous waste landfill.
An endangered Endangered Species Act?
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tries an end-run around the Endangered Species Act; a leaked draft would weaken the bedrock law by changing the regulations that implement it rather than the law itself.
Book Reviews
You ain’t from around here, are you?
In Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed, Jim Stiles rips into the amenity-oriented tourist economy that has transformed his once-beloved Moab, but he offers little in the way of useful alternatives.
The hidden costs of our coal habit
In Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future, Jeff Goodell reveals how the sausage is made when it comes to the primary source of America’s electricity.
Essays
Imagine
A teacher asks his students and the rest of us to imagine: What would the world be like if we had the courage to use our imaginations?
Heard Around the West
Heard Around the West
Squirrels vs. Santa Monica; Baby goes to rehab; crows and carriers; Maricopa County is booming big-time; Julie MacDonald vs. the Interior Department; boat horns vs. coyotes in Oxnard.
Letters
Death on the road
The rough lives of roughnecks
Hold the bullet
Three decades of BLM inaction
Bee Anatomy 101
The enemy is us
Two Weeks in the West
Two weeks in the West
Death (and life) in the Sonoran Desert; fire and drought in the Southwest; courts rule against Bush on environmental issues.
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