HARMONIES VS. HATRED
Jaclyn Moyer’s piece “The Sound of Black History in Portland” (February 2026) resonated with me. As a white high school band member in Detroit in 1949-1951, I remember taking the streetcar and transferring to a bus, trombone case in hand, to a Black neighborhood to jam with Black band members in their homes.
Redlining and destructive urban renewal were just as destructive of a vital Black community in Roanoke, Virginia, where I now live, as they were in Portland. Some themes — great Black music and destroying Black communities — seem to be universal.
Rupert Cutler
Roanoke, Virginia
OVERGRAZING YET AGAIN
“The Bird & The Herd” (February 2026) was a good article — another case of overgrazing damaging wildlife. Government agencies fail to follow their own standards. Cattlemen rule, and wildlife suffer!
Max Johnson
Via email
BEARING WITNESS
I’m a longtime subscriber to HCN and fan of Ansel Adams. I want to compliment your Editor’s Note in the February issue. It’s spot-on and a wonderful amalgam of history, art, justice and injustice.
Thank you for the admonition to bear witness and to respond.
Ken Lavine
Portola Valley, California
DEEP LOVE FOR DEEP TIME
Brilliant job on the “Deep Time in the West” special issue (January 2026). From the deepest of deep time to “time immemorial” to pronghorns: Pleistocene survivors, just as we are. This set of articles, all so well chosen and crafted, provide marvelous depth and context on today’s West. Some argue that the Earth continually reshapes itself; ergo, we can extract resources and endlessly alter the air, water, soil and land. A fatally misguided viewpoint. Understanding geologic time helps us to realize, deeply, the intrinsic value of nature, our duty to intergenerational equity, and the disproportionate harm that unthinking resource extraction visits on vulnerable populations, now and in the future. Geology — and contemplation of geologic time — teaches us that we have a moral duty to manage our impacts responsibly.
Eric Harmon
Lakewood, Colorado
I was extremely pleased with your issue on deep time. This was the first time in a number of years that I read everything in the issue, and this was because you returned to characteristics that caused me to start subscribing to HCN many years ago: focus on the land, editors and authors who actually live in the high country, and minimal political commentary.
In two different articles, you highlighted the fact that a reader needs to be cautious when reading about scientific “consensus” viewpoints — one article on early human settlement of this hemisphere and the other on continental drift. In my experience, these consensus positions can be biased by things like ensuring continued research funding, ideology or sometimes just a researcher’s professional ego. It’s important for the public to understand this.
Neil Snyder
Evergreen, Colorado
TECTONIC TRAILBLAZER
Your excellent article “Continental shift” (January 2026) reminded me of a series of lectures I attended in a class in the environmental sciences department at the University of Virginia about 1975. The department chair (male, of course) presented his argument that the plate tectonics hypothesis was false. I wonder if, and when, he came around.
Deep appreciation for Tanya Atwater and others like her who kicked the doors open for others to follow.
Bruce Daggy
Washington Grove, Maryland
ROCKIN’ AROUND THE WEST
I just finished reading Marcia Bjornerud’s conversations with some of Wyoming’s finest, and certainly most vocal, lithologic representatives, part of your entertaining and enlightening series highlighting geology in the West (“10 Wyomings,” January 2026). Most visitors to Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and other icons of our national park system have some introduction to the rocks and formations that explains their unique development. But the Western U.S. is filled with many such places, from designated but poorly protected national monuments to backroads outcrops, and all of them are increasingly vulnerable to damage and exploitation, if not outright destruction.
We know the oligarchs running and ruining this country have made it clear that they appreciate formation-of-Earth stories so long as profits can be rung from the rocks holding fossil fuels, lithium, rare earth elements, copper, phosphates and so much more.
Ken Wallace
Via email
INVASION OF THE DATA CENTERS
Belated thank-you for Jonathan Thompson’s article about data center proposals springing up all over the West (“The big data center buildup,” Nov. 25, 2025). This is essential context for everyone here in Utah, where the media often write as if our own proposals are unique.
Dan Schroeder
Ogden, Utah
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