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Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
California’s high-speed rail is slow to gain speed
Fourteen countries have high-speed rail networks; in just a few years, 10 more will. Yet America’s primary bullet-train attempt is faltering in California, a state that will add 20 million people in the next two decades and needs to find a way to schlep them around. Estimated costs for the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s plan […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Western game wardens go after poachers
A thick autumn snowfall still carpeted the ground when Colorado district wildlife manager Tom Knowles got the tip that put him on the trail of the “Missouri boys.” The informant, a hunter named Michael Xavier, said that three men who had licenses only for cow elk had killed at least one bull elk in Rio […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
A Texas town welcomes dairies; a New Mexico activist fights them
Stephanie Paige Ogburn interviews an activist in New Mexico who worked with the state to regulate pollution from groundwater, then speaks with an economic development director in Muleshoe, Texas — just across the border — who has actively recruited dairies to her town.
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
The burial of Elouise Cobell
Elouise Cobell filed her class action suit in 1996 and originally thought it would take only three years to resolve the issues. She joined Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Attorney General Eric Holder in making the settlement announcement. Tami A. Heilemann-DOI On Oct. 22, Elouise Cobell was buried on the Blacktail Ranch where she and […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Fighting the wind on a Montana camping trip
My wife does not like the wind. I know this because she says so. “I hate the wind!” Crissie hollers, doing her best to be heard above it. It’s late June, 7 p.m., the first night of a three-day float down the Marias River in northern Montana, 40-some miles from the Canadian border. We woke […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
An unexpected L.A. story: A review of The Barbarian Nurseries
The Barbarian Nurseries: A NovelHéctor Tobar422 pages, hardcover: $27.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Los Angeles Times columnist Héctor Tobar’s ferocious new novel, The Barbarian Nurseries, deftly and convincingly plunges us into the heated national debate on undocumented immigration. Araceli Ramirez, a single woman from Mexico City, works as the live-in housekeeper for Maureen Thompson and […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Beware the leftward tilt
I really like your stories of people coming together to solve gnarly problems, and exposés of environmental abuses. But your uber-liberal ideology is extremely irritating, as in Ray Ring’s article, “Citizen democracy staggers onward” (HCN, 10/31/11). I give Ring credit for quoting a source who even-handedly criticizes big business and big labor unions for corrupting […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Dealt a bad hand: A review of Doc
Doc Mary Doria Russell 394 pages, hardcover: $26. Random House, 2011. Versatile novelist Mary Doria Rusell’s captivating reimagining of the life of Doc Holliday ends before the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral, that eternal wellspring for Western novels and movies. In her new book, Doc, Russell sees Holliday as more than a gambler and […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Parsing ‘Pristine’
The thing that bothered me most about Emma Marris’ essay was the suggestion toward the end that we should “look to the future and create more nature instead of clinging to disappearing scraps of seemingly untouched land” (HCN, 10/6/2011, “The mirage of the pristine”). How exactly does she propose that we go about creating nature? […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Aspiring farmers find creative ways to succeed
Not long ago, a college classmate of mine named Sarahlee Lawrence was splitting her time between raft guiding and river conservation, traveling as far as Ethiopia and Chile. But the world’s water problems are huge, she says. “I was struggling to feel like I was actually making a difference.” Then she discovered a startling statistic: […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Western Watersheds’ collateral damage
You presented Laird Lucas as a dedicated and talented environmental lawyer fighting big corporations and corrupt government (HCN, 10/31/11, “The people v. the agency”). That makes his close association with Western Watersheds Project (WWP) puzzling. For 10 years, I have volunteered to represent environmental ethics on a cooperative management team for a family-owned and -operated […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Farm incubators help would-be farmers succeed on their own
Four years ago, Nelida Martinez’s teenaged son got sick. The herbal remedies she’d learned from her grandmother in Oaxaca, Mexico, didn’t help, so she took him to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with leukemia. Martinez, a 38-year-old farmworker with a shy smile and laugh lines from a life spent in the sun, had followed […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Hunting deer on a mountain bike
In the tangle of gear in my daypack, the phone started ringing. It was a wholly inappropriate moment: My phone is pink, and its jaunty notes clashed with the traditional hunter’s world of blaze orange and camouflage. I sat on a rock by the trail and cringed. Everything about this — my first hunting trip […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bringing it home, keeping it wild
IDAHOYou might call it a minor movement, but “reshoring” — a new word that means bringing offshore jobs back home — is buoying some residents of rural Idaho. About 12 years ago, Buck Knives sent up to half its production to China, thinking it would save money. Unfortunately, many customers were steamed by that decision. […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
The forgotten North Cascades grizzly bear
Scott Fitkin started his career chasing ghost bears. As a biologist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife in the late ’80s, he stalked grizzly bear sightings in the Cascade Mountains. Over two decades, he verified a few tracks but never glimpsed a grizzly or even a photograph of one. Until this June. That’s […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Behind the scenes in the lives of captive wolves
When we started the 2 o’clock tour at the Colorado Wolf & Wildlife Center in the mountains above Colorado Springs, the wolves were napping, just as wild wolves do in the middle of the day. A woman in jeans and cowboy boots served as guide for our group — eight random travelers, most of whom […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Daniel Marlos shares his knowledge and love of the insect world
In early June, Daniel Marlos, an eccentric, cherubic-faced Los Angeleno, received an intriguing message from a friend: “If there weren’t two little, scrawny legs, I wouldn’t think it was a living thing!” she said, describing a creature loitering on her porch. She emailed Marlos a photo of a tawny, wingless insect, its legs cartoonishly splayed […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Of things falling
WYOMING Marvin Bass, a Florida man who hadn’t taken a vacation in five years, didn’t get to enjoy his visit to Yellowstone National Park as planned. He was driving a borrowed 42-foot motor home up 8,431-foot-high Teton Pass when he realized how much it was laboring on the 10 percent grade. So Bass parked the […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Feds attempt to speed complicated process of building power lines
On a brisk October day, Paul Christensen is helping harvest sugar beets on his southern Idaho farm. His work as a Cassia County commissioner keeps him busy, he says, but he still enjoys “playing in the dirt.” He’s not the only one: Cassia is among Idaho’s most productive agricultural counties. That’s partly why it has […]