All of the top emitters listed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s inventory of greenhouse gas producers, released early this year, are coal-fired power plants. Western coal, in particular from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, contributes significantly to those emissions. And though our region’s inhabitants feel fewer of the impacts of burning it, we’re not in the […]
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Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
A forbidden road trip: A review of Lamb
LambBonnie Nadzam275 pages, softcover: $15.95.Other Press, 2011. After his marriage dissolves over an affair with a coworker and his father dies, David Lamb drives to a parking lot near his Chicago home to think. “Nothing before him but the filthy street and bright signs announcing the limits of his world: Transmission Masters and Drive Time […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
A needed hard line
In his article about the reconstruction of Green Mountain Lookout in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, Nathan Rice categorizes Wilderness Watch as “a small, hard-line Montana group” (HCN, 1/23/12, “The law, the lookout and the logging town”). That’s like calling the Sierra Club “a California environmental group.” Wilderness Watch was founded in Missoula, Mont., and is […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
Searching for the truth about American Indians: A review of All Indians Do Not Live in Teepees (or Casinos)
All Indians Do Not Live In Teepees (or Casinos)Catherine C. Robbins408 pages, softcover: $26.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2011. “This is a personal book,” Catherine C. Robbins writes in the preface to All Indians Do Not Live In Teepees (or Casinos), a collection of her journalistic essays. Robbins is not Indian, but she is also “not […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
Can animals evolve quickly enough to survive global warming?
In recent years, Westerners have seen and heard a great deal about the effects of climate change on wildlife. Pikas are increasingly isolated on shrinking islands of mountaintop habitat in the Great Basin; mice, chipmunks and squirrels are retreating toward the ridgelines of Yosemite National Park; and numerous species, from butterflies and hummingbirds to an […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
A transplant at home in rural Utah
I happen to live in a tiny Utah town, population approximately 175, with plenty of “move-ins.” I’ve yet to meet a “move-in” who wants to create massive changes there (HCN, 12/16/11 & 1/9/12, “Stranger in these parts”). In fact, the majority of them moved there precisely for what the place offers: community, beauty, and a […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
Captivity, clarified
We would like to provide a more thorough insight into our facility, the Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center, than was presented in “Possessing the Wild” (HCN, 11/14/11). The author’s description of our tour guides “tossing treats into wolves’ enclosures to hear their jaws snap shut” was a misinterpretation. We do not put our animals on […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Residents of Montana’s High Plains are angry – but not at the real threats
I was born in eastern Montana, on a dusty stretch of nearly riverless high plains north of the Bull Mountains. I came of age there, in a country that has never not been true frontier, in the late ’80s — during the farm crisis, that notoriously bad old time in rural America. In much of […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
The warming properties of greenbacks
WASHINGTONMoney may not buy you happiness, but burning it might help keep you from freezing to death. A snowshoer who became lost in a blizzard on Mount Rainier told The Seattle Times that he survived by digging a snow tunnel and then burning everything he could find, from socks and Band-Aids to his toothbrush “and […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
A mom-and-pop oil company prospects for gas in central Wyoming
In 1954, the Empire State Oil Company drilled a gas well in central Wyoming. The well turned out dry but showed some gas in an unexpected shallow formation. It wasn’t worth much at the time, so Empire plugged the well and abandoned it. A geologist named John Wold, however, believed the area merited further exploration. […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Salt Lake City, UtahDriving around Salt Lake City on a pleasant day last June in a plain white city government car, Doug Dansie pauses at the corner of two streets, 1300 South and 300 East. This is a residential neighborhood where old trees tower over the houses. But there’s no house on this particular corner […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Richard West Sellars’ distinguished National Park Service career
On a late October afternoon, Richard West Sellars orders a bowl of black bean soup at Harry’s Roadhouse in Santa Fe, N.M. At least twice a week, he has lunch here with other former and current National Park Service employees. Today, Dan Lenihan, a retired underwater archaeologist, describes diving to survey sunken ships at Bikini […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
No ski for you
MONTANAThe owners of Montana Snowbowl near Missoula really, really don’t like criticism. So after a skier complained, they refused to sell him a season ski pass, or even daily tickets at a reduced rate during the pre-season. Jim Sylvester says that he put a comment in a handy suggestion box at the ski area, noting […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
The logging town of Darrington, Wash., fights to save a fire lookout
On a blustery summer night, the Red Top Tavern in Darrington, Wash., is nearly empty. A neon Hamm’s beer sign illuminates a picture of a local logger reclining in the bucket of an excavator with the caption “Redneck Hot Tub.” Above it hangs a crosscut saw, just like in every bar in every other Northwest […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Move over, Ed Abbey
Craig Childs is a treasure, and his essay in the last issue is but another jewel (HCN, 12/26/11 & 1/09/12, “Stranger in these parts”). I have been enjoying his words for a decade and have now come to realize that he is my favorite Southwestern writer since Ed Abbey. I think that Ed, whom I […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Shadow Wolves track down smugglers on the Arizona-Mexico border
The technologies border police use to protect our boundaries range from the historic (mustangs trained for mounted patrols) to the futuristic. (The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency plans to nearly triple its fleet of unmanned surveillance Predator B aircraft.) But nothing can track a smuggler quite like a human being. The Shadow Wolves, a […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
No more stopgap solutions
The dispute between the Environmental Protection Agency and Mora Mutual Domestic Water and Sewer Association brings to the fore an issue that plagues many poor rural communities (HCN, 12/12/11, “Clean Water Conundrum”). Both septic systems and treatment plants distract from the real issue of human waste removal at the point of disposal — the household. […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Small dairies raise big questions
In the article “Milk and Water Don’t Mix” by Stephanie Paige Ogburn (HCN, 11/28/11), the dairy industry was made out to be the bad guy, which it is in its present form as a huge, polluting concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO. But a combination of trends has created a monster from what used to […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
A second chance at love: A review of Liberty Lanes
Liberty LanesRobin Troy192 pages, softcover: $22.University of Nevada Press, 2011. Robin Troy’s second novel, Liberty Lanes, is a big-hearted story of ordinary people, their hopes, secrets and longings. It begins quietly in a bowling alley in a small Montana town, where Nelson Moore, a 74-year-old stalwart of the senior bowling league, waits for an early […]