The long-running political battles over wolf reintroduction in the West can seem fixed in amber: Environmentalists usually stand on one side and cattle growers on another, with the state and federal governments suspended somewhere in between. But as historian Jon Coleman makes clear in Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, these positions solidified only recently. […]
Book Reviews
Posted inSeptember 27, 2004: Life After Old Growth
Forgotten borderland
From space, the Black Hills of South Dakota take the unmistakable shape of a heart, marking a region that some consider the spiritual center of the world. But driving into Bennett County, S.D., is more like entering a legal Twilight Zone. This checkerboard of private, tribal and federal land seems to belong to everyone — […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 2004: Life After Old Growth
Dang crazy women
Like the two previous anthologies created by editors Linda Hasselstrom, Gaydell Collier and Nancy Curtis, Leaning into the Wind and Woven on the Wind, Crazy Woman Creek gathers hundreds of poems, stories and memories from women all across the West. This latest anthology’s theme is how Western women create and sustain the connections that define […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 2004: When a Boom is a Bust
A thin, dry border between heaven and hell
“The first impression of the country — one that does not wear off — is that of magnificent confusion,” writes Walter Webb of the southwestern corner of Texas, also known as Big Bend country. Some visitors feel as though they’ve discovered hell on earth. Other people find that this region of vast open spaces, colorful […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 2004: When a Boom is a Bust
The wages of sprawl
A new documentary, Making Sense of Place: Phoenix, the Urban Desert, uses the Arizona megalopolis to illustrate what happens when suburban sprawl goes unchecked. Historical and current footage shows how cheap land and even cheaper water have encouraged Phoenix to sprawl over more than 1,700 square miles of Sonoran desert. But the resulting generic suburbs, […]
Posted inAugust 30, 2004: How Long Will it Flow?
Remembering those forgotten in the desert
Every year, hundreds of Mexican immigrants die in the Arizona desert. This year will be no different. Their deaths generally receive little more then a mention in some local papers. But author and poet Luis Alberto Urrea is trying to change that. In The Devil’s Highway, Urrea chronicles the ill-fated journey of a group of […]
Posted inAugust 30, 2004: How Long Will it Flow?
Mining research tool debuts on Web
A new Web site provides a comprehensive look at who owns mining claims on public lands in the West, along with a scathing analysis of the legacy of the 1872 Mining Law in 12 Western states. Produced by the Environmental Working Group, “Who Owns the West,” allows the user to scroll through regional, state and […]
Posted inAugust 30, 2004: How Long Will it Flow?
Public lands lifeline
Wading through the vast web of laws and policies that govern our public lands can be confusing even for lawyers, let alone for ordinary citizens. Even commenting on a Bureau of Land Management resource management plan, which guides grazing, mining, oil and gas drilling, and off-road vehicle use, can be daunting. But The Wilderness Society […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2004: The Greening of the Plains
A new twist on urbanism
Few people would connect “New Urbanism” — dense, mixed-use buildings and public transit in pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods — with the Latino barrios of Western cities. One Southern California-based group, however, sees this planning movement and Latino culture as nothing but simpatico. The Transportation and Land Use Collaborative has organized an annual conference and a series of […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2004: The Greening of the Plains
An antidote to despair
Chip Ward’s first book, Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West, was decidedly grim, detailing his fight to keep the deserts of Utah from becoming a dump for toxins ranging from radioactive waste to defunct biochemical weapons. His new book, Hope’s Horizon, gives us a brighter view of recent environmental battles, taking an […]
Posted inJuly 19, 2004: They're Here: Global Warming's Unlikely Harbingers
King of Fish, Slave to Man
In his new book, David R. Montgomery wants Northwesterners lamenting the decline of wild Pacific salmon to know they’re not alone. King of Fish documents the death of Atlantic salmon, while pointing out that the same threats — and similar challenges — face salmon recovery around the world. Today, one-third of Pacific salmon stocks are […]
Posted inJuly 19, 2004: They're Here: Global Warming's Unlikely Harbingers
Oceans need a sea change
It’s time to wake up and smell the salt water. According to a recent report from the United States Commission on Ocean Policy, America’s oceans are overfished, polluted and in desperate need of new management policies. After three years of study, the President Bush-appointed commission came up with more than 200 preliminary recommendations aimed at […]
Posted inJune 21, 2004: A Walk Between Worlds
How agriculture ate the earth
The next time you drink a Coke, take a second to consider that you’re suckling from the teat of evil. The culprit is not, despite what you’ve been taught to think, a soft-drink-peddling Fortune 500 company, but agriculture itself. And Richard Manning goes after it with a vengeance in his book Against the Grain: How […]
Posted inJune 21, 2004: A Walk Between Worlds
Avedon at Work in the American West
For six summers, from 1979 to 1984, Laura Wilson accompanied the New York-based photographer Richard Avedon throughout the rural West. Her job: Find beekeepers, oil-well drillers, vagrants, religious zealots, ranchers, coal miners and other iconic Westerners. One at a time, she’d line up these chosen people before a white backdrop and ask them to stand […]
Posted inJune 21, 2004: A Walk Between Worlds
Perspectives on change — climate change
On the northern edge of Alaska, says journalist Charles Wohlforth, the impacts of human-caused climate change have become part of daily life. Spring is coming earlier, and Iñupiaq whaling crews are making ever-narrower escapes from cracking sea ice. In The Whale and the Supercomputer, Wohlforth looks at such changes from the perspectives of two very […]
Posted inJune 21, 2004: A Walk Between Worlds
Food on every plate, art on every wall
If I were asked to state the great objective which Church and State are both demanding for the sake of every man and woman and child in this country, I would say that that great objective is “a more abundant life.” —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933 What would New Mexico be without its wind-worn mesas, without […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Hidden Waters resurfaces
These days, Charles Bowden is known as a grizzled, pistol-packing scout of the Southwest’s dark side, a man who chronicles the lives and deaths of the border’s most infamous drug runners. A quarter century ago, however, Bowden wrote an unpretentious book, Killing the Hidden Waters, that was equal parts ethnography, mysticism, hydrology and thermodynamics. That […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Journal of the Dead
The open roads and big spaces of the West have always called young men and women from the cities and suburbs of the East. So it was with David Coughlin and Raffi Kodikian, both in their 20s, who, in 1999, headed from Boston to California. Inspired by Jack Kerouac, the nascent literati took along a […]
Posted inMay 24, 2004: In Search of Solidarity
The grizzly’s in the house — or at least, the yard
To make it in the wild as a grizzly in the Lower 48, you need an education. But mom may be teaching you some questionable survival skills: how to raid garbage cans, pilfer grain from barns and scavenge birdseed from backyard feeders. As humans spread into prime bruin habitat, some bears are becoming “suburban guerrillas.” […]
Posted inMay 24, 2004: In Search of Solidarity
Souvenir or sacred artifact?
Stealing from Indians didn’t end in the 19th century: Many sacred American Indian masks, pipes and other ceremonial artifacts still find their way into private collections. However, according to the American Indian Ritual Object Repatriation Foundation, most of these items properly belong to Indian tribes. The Repatriation Foundation got its start in 1992, after an […]