High Country News March 02, 2009
Feature
How low will it go?
If Eric Kuhn is right about the Colorado River, then the state faces a dry and difficult future of fighting for water.
Editor's Note
Welcome to the era of scarcity
Arguing about water is a beloved Western pastime, but as the snowpack shrinks, Coloradoans are going to find themselves seriously fighting over what’s left in the Colorado River.
Dear Friends
HCN board meeting – in cyberspace
High Country News holds its first-ever board meeting via telephone and Internet; Marty Durlin becomes new culture editor.
Two Weeks in the West
True tests of 'Stay and Defend'
Australia’s recent fires may have scorched “Stay and Defend,” a firefighting strategy American Westerners had thought of emulating. Also: Birds are shifting their winter range.
Uncommon Westerners
A desert poet takes his work inside
Poet Richard Shelton has run writing workshops in Arizona prisons for more than 30 years.
Lessons of habitat
Nancy Eastman created her own "habitat sculptures" modeled after fake cholla built as nesting habitat for endangered birds.
Book Reviews
An underground uprising
In his new book, Killing for Coal, Thomas G. Andrews looks at the Colorado labor wars that erupted into violence at the 1914 Ludlow Massacre.
Of flotsam and jetsam
In Strand: An Odyssey of Pacific Island Debris, naturalist Bonnie Henderson traces the origins of the strange things she finds on the Oregon seashore.
Essays
Crown of horns
Unexpected encounters with an injured bull elk and a couple of teenage boys lead a writer to consider the meaning of fatherhood.
Letters
Long day's journey
Stewardship, not politics
Political Sabotage
Remembering Rocky Flats
Train in vain
Let Cody pay
Perspective
The little island that could
The small Danish island of Samso runs entirely on renewable energy. The West could do the same.
Current
Security vs. sovereignty
American Indians who use tribal I.D. cards face harassment when they try to cross the border between the U.S. and Canada.
Closing in
One of the greatest challenges facing Western military bases comes from the growth of urban sprawl.
