High Country News May 26, 2008
Feature
On Cancer’s Trail
The women in Stefanie Raymond-Whish’s family have a history of breast cancer, and the young Navajo biologist wants to know whether the uranium on the reservation might have something to do with it.
Editor's Note
Uranium: It’s worse than you think
Westerners in towns like Durango, Colo., and Monticello, Utah, have been exposed to mine tailings for years, unaware that uranium might be even more dangerous than scientists used to believe.
Dear Friends
Dear friends
Fellow newspaper people come to visit; nice words from a reader; Welcome, Chloe Hanscom (AKA Yoda Jr.); and correction.
Uncommon Westerners
Population’s Paul Revere?
Frosty Wooldridge sees himself as a kind of Paul Revere, tirelessly warning the West about overpopulation – especially in the form of illegal immigrants.
News
Climate cash-in
Western farmers and ranchers using progressive land-management techniques can make a few bucks from the new carbon market – but some critics say it won’t lead to any real reduction in carbon emissions.
Fields of overkill
In response to recent E. coli outbreaks, corporate buyers are pushing California farmers to rid their fields of all wildlife and wild vegetation – despite the fact that this could make the food supply even less safe.
Rural West going to the dogs
Despite all the fuss about wolves and other wild predators, feral and free-roaming dogs in the West may actually pose a greater danger to livestock, wildlife and people.
Book Reviews
The (non)idiot’s guide to energy
In Power of the People: America’s New Electricity Choices, energy specialist Carol Sue Tombari has written a concise and remarkably readable book about the best way to tackle our nation’s energy problems.
Cowgirl meets lawsuit
In her first novel, Jackalope Dreams, Western writer Mary Clearman Blew gives us a tale of the contemporary West that rings both sad and true.
Essays
Too many elk and not enough tough love
Jeff Welsch decries the “ungulate welfare” on display in the overcrowded winter feeding grounds of Wyoming’s National Elk Refuge.
The amphibian heart
Aaron Gilbreath rescues red-spotted toads and wishes he could preserve the unraveling strands of his grandmother’s memory.
Heard Around the West
Heard Around the West
The boatmen’s quarterly review revisits the wet spring of 1983 and the terrifying whitewater the rafters encountered deep in the Grand Canyon; “Smart fortwo” car coming to town; the wit & wisdom of Ted Turner.
Letters
Not so fine a line
Buy a t-shirt instead
Art with a conscience
'Shooting ourselves in the head'
Two Weeks in the West
Two weeks in the West
Western communities get their hands dirty, growing food and pushing for local production; growers deal with frosts and costs; bees still in trouble; action on Farm Bill but not on immigration; and California’s Tejon Ranch is more or less preserved.
Winning the West
Green and mean
The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund is building on the strategy it used to boot anti-environmental Republican Congressman Richard Pombo out of office in 2006.
Related Stories
A patient
Kathleen Tsosie, who has devoted her life to helping others, now faces the frightening possibility that her breast cancer has returned.
A well
Glenda Rangel and her family grew up drinking from and swimming in water tanks dangerously polluted with uranium.
An activist
Nellie Sandoval, the mother of scientist Stefanie Raymond-Whish, has become an outspoken activist as a result of her own struggle with breast cancer.
High Country News in your inbox!