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.