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

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

Writers on the Range

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

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

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

Letters

A global warming reality check

Keep up with the buzz

"An iconoclastic sociologist"

Imagine there's no terrorists

Riveting and harrowing

The truth of Ring

"The Jungle" of the West

Dropping the ball on the Snowbowl

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