High Country News May 14, 2007
Feature
The Battle for the Verde
The Verde River is one of Arizona’s last free-flowing stream, but environmental and local activists fear an ambitious planned pipeline, designed to bring groundwater to the growing Prescott area, will end up sucking the river dry
Editor's Note
When the going gets tough, the tough collaborate
Sometimes it seems that only the impact of a severe drought can get Westerners to work together on water issues
Dear Friends
Dear friends
HCN board meeting, potluck and intern reunion in Paonia; visitors; postage increase unfair to small publications; farewell to activist Jim Jontz
Two Weeks in the West
Two weeks in the West
James M. Doohan heads to final frontier (briefly) from New Mexico’s spaceport; northern spotted owls in trouble again; Veterans Conservation Corps; drugged up and rehabbing in the West
Uncommon Westerners
Saving the Sierra, tale by tale
Independent radio producers Catherine Stifter and jesikah maria ross are trying to help the Sierra Nevada by preserving the stories of the people who live there
News
Mirroring the maquila boom
Santa Teresa, N.M., hopes to build its sluggish economy by attracting industrial suppliers for the factories just across the border in Mexico
Cow power
In Idaho’s Magic Valley, cow capital of the fourth-largest milk-producing state in the U.S., entrepreneurs are hoping to cash in on all that manure by using anaerobic digesters to convert it into energy
Book Reviews
Tipping the scales towards native species
In Unnatural Landscapes, Ceiridwin Terrill travels to four arid sites to show how scientists fight to protect indigenous organisms from invasive species
British writer tackles border politics
British author Bella Pollen’s new novel, Midnight Cactus, looks at Arizona’s border issues through the eyes of an upper-class English newcomer who has left her executive husband and sought refuge in a ghost town.
Essays
The challenge of climate-change denial
Skeptics, even irrational ones, probably once had a useful evolutionary role to play in human communities, but in the face of rapid climate change, they are becoming a fatal obstacle
The need to remember Black Sunday
As western Colorado begins to dance to the tune of a brand-new energy boom, it’s good to remember that the last one ended in a total bust
Wilderness Lost
Rebecca Stanfel always planned to take her young son Andrew on wilderness expeditions, but the onslaught of illness has taught her that nature can also be found much closer to home.
Heard Around the West
Heard Around the West
Library book sale gets ugly in Eugene; Satan is the problem in Utah; advice on daffodils; nude man creates brief havoc in McMinnville, Ore.; car theft thrives in the West; Snowmass Mountain’s “smoke shacks” have to go
