Departments

Thank you for the August article about the mega-dairy coming to Arizona and its impact on our water supply. This installation is representative of the larger problem of corporate agricultural interests exporting our resources. The political powers are reluctant to do anything about it because the industry promises jobs and revenues. It can’t go on […]

“Sucked Dry” provides an important and powerful look at the mega-dairy industry. The repeated disregard by Riverview LLP for people, water and climate is telling. The company is destroying water supplies across the states it operates in, leaving thousands of people with dry wells. The carbon and methane emissions from these mega-dairies is, arguably, immoral, […]

HCN’s writers frequently pound on “mega corporations,” perhaps because its audience, over time, has self-selected to people who like that sort of thing. The concerns about water use are legitimate, but corporate farms do not emit, overall, more pollution than the aggregate of family farms. They may produce more waste in fewer locations, but smaller farms, […]

Sadly, removal of Washington’s Gorge Dam will not slow, let alone reverse, the declining native salmon populations that once thrived in the magnificent 160-plus-mile Skagit-Cascade-Sauk-Suiattle Wild and Scenic River System (“Reassessing the dams,” August 2021). It’s true that “the licensing process has triggered different conversations on the Skagit’s future.” Unfortunately, the author focused on a tiny, […]

I lived in prime Sonoran Desert Toad habitat from 1989-2019 and read “A hallucinogenic toad in peril” (July 2021) with interest, especially since I know people who occasionally harvested the toad’s hallucinogenic secretions. The habitat I refer to is a facility built on abandoned cotton fields in Pinal County, Arizona. Nightly watering of the grass […]

Thank you for your editor’s note “Keeping up with the changing West” (June 2021). As the editor of a regional weekly focused on agriculture, farming life and related politics in Southern and Western Norway, your words confirm to me what also our magazine Bondevennen (“Farmer’s Friend”) really is and should be all about: celebrating our […]

Wufei Yu’s excellent reporting “A reality check on Biden’s ‘30 by 30’ conservation plan” (hcn.org, June 23, 2021) springs open the conversation for the nation to digest and design a better 30×30. I am inspired to study the report. Elaine JeffersonNew York, New York This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with […]

Thanks to Maya Kapoor for her excellent series on lithium mines (“When Indigenous religious freedom and public-lands management clash,” July 2021, and “The next mining boom?” March 2021). Cultural and environmental damage worldwide weigh heavily on us already. I, for one, can’t wait for a better alternative fuel. Valerie McBrideBoulder, Colorado This article appeared in […]