THE WEST Sizzling, blistering, brutal: Whatever adjective you use to describe the West’s recent heat wave, it’s not strong enough. Normally cool places like Portland and Seattle hit the 90s. Phoenix soared above 104 every day in June, reaching 119 once, and a few nights the low was a baking 91 degrees. Rattlesnakes huddled in […]
Departments
Posted inJuly 22, 2013: Red Rock Resolution?
Report from the summer HCN board meeting
High Country News‘ board of directors met in our hometown of Paonia, Colo. at the end of May, to assess the nonprofit’s health, discuss our prospects, and savor the Western Slope’s beauty. The news was good: HCN continues to expand its reach — our website, hcn.org, saw one-third more visitors in the first quarter of […]
Posted inJuly 22, 2013: Red Rock Resolution?
A half-empty future
I agree with the author’s pessimism (“The Rocky Mountain Front blues,” HCN, 6/24/13). Improvements in energy efficiency alone aren’t enough. What can help is to leave the oil, gas and coal in the ground and to permanently protect the associated lands from development. However, I wonder if any form of “permanent protection” will be able […]
Posted inJuly 22, 2013: Red Rock Resolution?
Frontier Justice: A review of Little Century
Little CenturyAnna Keesey336 pages, paperback:$16.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. When Esther Chambers moves to central Oregon from Chicago in 1896, she finds herself caught in a range war between cattle ranchers and sheepherders. Anna Keesey’s elegant debut novel, Little Century, resurrects the complex West of those early days, in prose that captures the rhythms and […]
Posted inJuly 22, 2013: Red Rock Resolution?
Stakeholders
Ashley KorenblatMoab mountain-bike outfitter and public-lands consultant “Folks in the rural West see kids in Grand Junction driving trucks for Halliburton making $80,000 a year. They see these jobs as good jobs, but they aren’t going to last. (Utah Republican Rep. Jason) Chaffetz has said, ‘We wouldn’t want to do anything now that would prevent […]
Posted inJuly 22, 2013: Red Rock Resolution?
Let them play … Somewhere else
As a cyclist, hiker and returnee to Colorado after a 30-year absence, I was surprised at the level of mayhem that piston-head vehicles have inflicted on the Front Range (“Western kids have fun — and die — motoring off-road,” HCN, 6/24/13). It’s a disappointment. Rather than sacrifice a beautiful state like Colorado, maybe we should […]
Posted inJuly 22, 2013: Red Rock Resolution?
Gold and Silver in the Mojave: Images of a Last Frontier: A review
Gold and Silver in the Mojave: Images of a Last Frontier Nicholas Clapp 187 pages, paperback: $24.95. Sunbelt Publications, 2013. It’s a book of contrasts — a Las Vegas in the days before electricity. A vibrant mining town where today stands only desert. Grizzled prospectors next to voluptuous women. Unimaginable riches in an arid, empty […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
My solar panel is bigger than yours
ARIZONA AND THE NATION It is puzzling, perhaps, that solar power accounts for less than 1 percent of the electricity generated in the United States. The cost of solar panels continues to drop, and canny utilities have begun to welcome the new power source as a way to stave off building astronomically expensive new power […]
Posted inJune 24, 2013: Water Rights
The Latest: A New Mexico county is first in the nation to ban fracking
BackstoryThe tiny town of Pavillion, Wyo., sits in the middle of the state’s gas patch, and in the midst of the heated national debate over the risks hydraulic fracturing poses to water quality. Residents complained about well water turning brown after drillers fracked nearby gas wells. In 2011, the EPA released a draft report linking […]
Posted inJune 24, 2013: Water Rights
The Rocky Mountain Front blues
Augusta, Montana Nine years ago this May, my wife, Holly, and I bought an old house in Augusta, aiming to live and raise our children in a landscape and a culture — the two are inseparable — that we respect. About 20 miles west of town, the fierce wall of geology known as the Rocky […]
Posted inJune 24, 2013: Water Rights
California farm communities suffer tainted drinking water
In California’s agricultural hub, the Central Valley, Latino communities fight for clean water.
Posted inJune 24, 2013: Water Rights
People are very much a part of HCN’s environmental coverage
The environment might seem like a confining beat for a publication whose mission statement promises to serve everybody who cares about the American West. But it’s actually pretty roomy. As naturalist John Muir famously said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” That’s […]
Posted inJune 24, 2013: Water Rights
Becoming pronghorn: an essay
Remembering wildlife biologist James Yoakum
Posted inJune 24, 2013: Water Rights
Big eyesore on the prairie
The plain fact regarding wind farms is that they are terrible in and for the environment (“Haywired,” HCN, 5/27/13). One day, on a beautiful plateau or prairie, there are small and large game, wild birds of all types and little human interference. The next day, there are large white windmills, roads, fences, people, pickup trucks, neatly groomed pasture, and all the game is gone. A complete […]
Posted inJune 24, 2013: Water Rights
If a tree falls in the forest, who talks about it?
As a fourth-generation Oregonian whose family has only minimally depended on the forest-products industry, I often find myself drifting far from zero-cut environmentalists on the one hand and industry cheerleaders on the other (“A New Forest Paradigm,” HCN, 4/29/13). It’s all too obvious to me how the industry and its dependent towns got into the current […]
Posted inJune 24, 2013: Water Rights
If we build it, rain will come — right?
In the midst of the drought, here in Arizona, the rah-rah development conferences go on, with smooth-talking hucksters claiming that we need to prepare for millions more people who will be moving here (“Dry new world,” HCN, 5/13/13). I’m not sure what will start the inevitable exodus from the Phoenix metro, but the combination of […]
Posted inJune 24, 2013: Water Rights
Acting the part
The Five Acts of Diego LeónAlex Espinoza304 pages, hardcover: $26.Random House, 2013. Diego León, the protagonist of Alex Espinoza’s second novel, makes his way to the U.S. during the turmoil of the Mexican revolution, hoping to achieve stardom at a time when Hollywood’s major studios each “had a Latin actor under contract.” Espinoza, who was […]
Posted inJune 24, 2013: Water Rights
Crossing the border gets deadlier
Between October 2011 and September 2012, 463 people died in the desert after slipping across the U.S.-Mexico border – the most since 2005, when about three times as many entered the country illegally. Today, migrants are eight times more likely to die than a decade ago, according to the National Foundation for American Policy. Most […]