In May’s Rantcast, also available in written form at our community blog, the Range, Mike wonders why he and his fellow desert dwellers tend to be so laconic. He recounts three different interactions he has had with others living in the desert; each of which casts a light onto the nature of those who choose […]
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Lost and found waterways
How is it that, in a region where we allocate and litigate many rivers down to their last drops, others are entirely forgotten? In this episode of West of 100, we explore waterways in Los Angeles and Tucson that have fallen into obscurity, despite the fact that they’re largely responsible for those cities existing where […]
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The itch that riles Frontera author Denise Chavez
Year after year, artists and authors, wrestlers and dancers, mariachis and chefs and people of all ethnicities have gathered in the tiny town of Mesilla, N.M., for the Border Book Festival, an unusual celebration of Frontera art and literature. The festival, which attracts internationally known writers and publishers to this impoverished region, features Latino-centric craft […]
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Could doing chores save the world?
A version of this essay originally ran in Sage Magazine, a publication run by students at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. On the day I arrive at Lama, N.M., it takes me a few minutes to find the people. When I find them, they are all holding hands around a large octagonal […]
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Margaret Hiza Redsteer uses Navajo memories to track climate change
Margaret Hiza Redsteer has long known the Navajo Nation. Of Crow descent, she grew up near the Montana-Wyoming border, and in the 1970s moved to an area of Arizona then shared by the Navajo and Hopi tribes. She married a Navajo man and they had three children. While living on the reservation, she often heard […]
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Rantcast: The leprechaun trap
In April’s Rantcast, also available in written form at our community blog, the Range, Mike mistakenly thinks a garden gnome is a good Mother’s Day gift, and then creates an elaborate leprechaun trap with his two daughters. If you like this podcast, you might also enjoy West of 100, our mid-month podcast covering nature and […]
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The sound of silence
There are few places left in the world where you can experience the sounds of nature uninterrupted by planes, cars, off-road vehicles. Scientists are now working to quantify the impact of all that noise on the natural world, and to monitor how soundscapes — the collection of sounds in a landscape made by critters, wind, […]
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The postal service is slipping away
On many days, it seems as though the things I like best about our country are all under attack: public lands, the Bill of Rights, passenger trains and the U.S. Postal Service. Especially if you live in the boondocks of the West, the Postal Service means more to you than it does to most urban […]
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Picking ranchers’ brains, from Colorado to Mongolia
As a college student in the mid-1980s, Maria Fernandez-Gimenez worked as a seasonal interpreter for the National Park Service. That’s when she was first exposed to the great Western debate over public-lands ranching. She soon became familiar with environmentalists’ gripes about grazing impacts, but realized she knew nothing about the ranchers’ point of view. So […]
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On Keystone XL route, states allow different risks, reap different benefits
This article was first published by InsideClimate News. If the Keystone XL oil pipeline were approved today, residents in the six states along its route would not receive equal treatment from TransCanada, the company that wants to build the project. The differences are particularly striking when it comes to tax revenue and environmental protection. States […]
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Feds Link Water Contamination to Fracking for the First Time
In a first, federal environment officials today scientifically linked underground water pollution with hydraulic fracturing, concluding that contaminants found in central Wyoming were likely caused by the gas drilling process. The findings by the Environmental Protection Agency come partway through a separate national study by the agency to determine whether fracking presents a risk to […]
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The times, they are a changin’
Dear Friend: Evolution happens. For the first 25 years of its existence, High Country News delivered its unique blend of in-depth reporting, essays and humor via a black-and-white tabloid printed on newspaper stock. Sometimes the ink got smeared and stained your fingers. In 1995, the “paper” was joined by a website, hcn.org, that served primarily […]
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Presidential candidates are missing the Western issues
What if the Western Republican Leadership Conference sponsored a debate in the West for Republican presidential candidates, with audience members all from the West, and they never got around to talking about Western issues? That’s pretty much what happened on Oct. 18 in Las Vegas in a contenders’ debate co-sponsored by CNN, which also broadcast […]
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What we take and leave when wildfire comes
She had three dogs at her feet, and her girlfriend sat beside her on a motel lobby couch. The two cats were at a kennel. Their VW van was full of climbing gear, and their motel room had a couple changes of clothes. “I’ve been thinking a lot about impermanence,” Ashley Woods told me. That […]
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Lessons for the Colorado River from drought-stricken Australia
This spring, Brad Udall, director of the Western Water Assessment, spent four months in Australia working with its Department of Water. Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin has seen remarkable water reform in recent years in response to a long and devastating drought. Udall believes those reforms hold important lessons for the Colorado River Basin. HCN assistant editor […]
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In search of diversity in our national parks
In the crowd of tourists on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, the Griffin family immediately caught my eye. Allen, Hashmareen and their two small boys were surrounded by thousands of other visitors, but the Griffins stood out because they were among only a handful of African-Americans I encountered in my travels. People of […]
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Rocky Mountain wolf recovery leader was not your average bureaucrat
Ed Bangs has long been a lightning rod for the controversy around the return of wolves to the U.S. Northern Rockies. Based in Helena, Mont., he led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s wolf-recovery effort from 1988, when the region had only a few naturally occurring wolves, through the reintroduction of Canadian wolves in 1995 […]
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Leadville, an old Colorado mining town, may resume mining
For more than a century, Leadville was to Western mining towns what the Rolling Stones were to rock ‘n’ rollers: the biggest, richest, wickedest and longest-lasting act around. It’s also among the highest, nearly two miles above sea level at the headwaters of the Arkansas River in central Colorado. Now, after an absence of a […]