How we find it; how we understand it; how we care for it.
When reverence isn’t enough
A visit with philosopher and writer Kathleen Dean Moore
Fall break
We publish 22 issues a year, and our next publishing break is in mid-September. Look for the next installment of HCN around Oct. 12. ROMPIN’ READER POTLUCK… in Paonia. We’re bringing back an old favorite: the High Country News community potluck at Paonia Town Park! This year, our fall board meeting takes place in HCN’s…
Bicycles, books and beer
How a man with no plan built a community around literature and social activism
The sky is a crowded attic
An interview with novelist Andrew Sean Greer
Peril in the parks
Early August: A woman and her young son are stranded for five days in a remote corner of Death Valley National Park in 117 degree-average heat; the boy doesn’t survive. Late August: Two climbers fall in Grand Teton; one is airlifted from a ledge by helicopter. The National Park Service is involved in thousands of…
Bordering on injustice
A Glass of WaterJimmy Santiago Baca240 pages, hardcover: $23.Grove Press, 2009. The largest kindnesses sometimes come in the smallest forms. The title of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s first novel, A Glass of Water, is a nod to one such kindness. “Thirst (is) master,” he writes of the parching conditions migrant farmworkers endure. Baca, an Apache/Chicano memoirist,…
Why some men are the way they are
Nine Ten AgainPhil Condon200 pages, softcover: $17.Elixir Press, 2009. Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want ItMaile Meloy240 pages, hardcover: $25.95.Riverhead, 2009. Where The Money WentKevin Canty208 pages, hardcover: $25.Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009. Three recent books of short stories feature complex but credible characters in relationships tingling with tension. Even as they play on…
Confronting life’s essentials
Every so often, I long to relocate to a metropolis far from my sleepy Oregon hometown and my third of an acre of Douglas firs and screech owls. “Oh, Melissa,” chides a friend used to these yearnings. “Just take a vacation and move your couch.” The desire for change entices us. Those who live in…
“To feel at home, stay at home.”
“To feel at home, stay at home.”- Clifton Fadiman, writer and radio personality Simple words, but I’ve taken them to heart. So have a lot of Westerners. The crummy economy and the “keep-it-local” movement have kept many of us from roaming as much as we usually do. One friend of mine went so far as…
Lawsuits of last resort
“Thinking Outside the Timber Box” discussed the Center for Biological Diversity’s efforts to restore northern Arizona’s once-stately ponderosa pine forests (HCN, 7/20/09). Our memo of understanding with Arizona Forest Restoration Products does not waive the Center’s right to appeal or litigate Forest Service decisions. It instead promotes high-quality ecological restoration projects to preclude the need…
Living on Glacial Time
The places we love are changing fast
Our best idea
Dayton Duncan was an impressionable 9-year-old when he made his first journey into the West’s national parks. He had the kind of life-changing experience that many people have enjoyed in the parks. Beginning Sept. 27, it will pay off in 12 hours of evocative public television, exploring how land conservation is often inspired by personal…
Parks Climate Challenge: North Cascades 2009
High school students learn about climate change
Pass on gas
I find it unfortunate that Randy Udall has suggested that natural gas, a fossil fuel, can save the world (HCN, 8/17/09). The implication is that the relatively recent discoveries about how to better exploit shale gas will be sufficient to meet a substantial part of our energy needs. The article gives citizens a false sense…
A life unwound
Blame By Michelle Huneven 304 pages, hardcover: $25.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Patsy MacLemoore is a hard-partying 28-year-old who managed to earn a Ph.D. from Berkeley but drank herself out of the running for the most prestigious jobs, landing at a middling college in Pasadena, Calif. It’s the spring of 1981 in Michelle Huneven’s latest…
A win for the gipper?
Though there has been widespread praise in some quarters, I find it difficult to muster much enthusiasm for Sen. Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act described in “Taking Control of the Machine” (HCN, 7/20/09). Perhaps a historical anecdote will help explain. In 1988, both houses of Congress passed a Montana wilderness bill that protected 1.4…
The lodgepole hegemony
Hillary Rosner’s article puts undue emphasis on the negative aspects of the pine-bark beetle infestation affecting forests around the West (HCN, 8/17/2009). While it is a difficult adjustment for many of the area’s residents and the cause of a few tragic deaths, this event has many positive aspects as well. In my view, it is…
Beef: It (should be) what’s for dinner
The reference in Andrea Appleton’s review of Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (HCN, 8/03/09) to the “soil erosion and desertification intensive grazing can cause” is technically and ecologically incorrect. Modern, progressive ranchers follow a management scheme called intensive grazing that results in increasing the organic content of the soil,…
The unbearable lightness of baby feet
Michelle Nijhuis’s essay “A Tenderfoot in Taos,” about the mom, the baby and the concerned drunk in the park, made that issue more human (HCN, 7/20/09). Thomas Merton wrote: “I think the chief reason we have so little joy is that we take ourselves too seriously.” People who are really concerned about what happens to…
Book lust, Western-style
This fall looks to be one of the best in a while for new book releases. 2008 was a disastrous year for the publishing industry (as it was for many others), and publishers are now hoping for redemption with a strong fall lineup. Big-hit writers like Pat Conroy, J.M. Coetzee, Alice Munro, Wally Lamb, Richard…
Books for lonely times
What to read when you’re alone in a tent
Timothy Egan’s Western odyssey
A talk with the author of five books about the West
Coming home to the cosmos
A wandering meteor-chaser puts down roots
A conversation with Michelle Nijhuis
Photos and an interview with the author of “Township 13 South, Range 92 West, Section 35”
Township 13 South, Range 92 West, Section 35
A home of mysteries and restless souls