A group of determined activists in Mountain View, N.M., fights for environmental justice in a poor and polluted neighborhood.
The SWOP letter
Signed by 100 people of color, charging racism in the environmental movement
Catch-and-release at HCN
A new and very talented crop of interns has just joined HCN. They’ll be here for the next six months, learning how a nonprofit media outlet works, and researching, interviewing and writing stories for us. A recipient of the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, Nicholas Neely arrived in Paonia after six months in a remote Oregon…
Dangerous game
Western game wardens are hindered by huge territories, budget cuts
Finding freedom in Yosemite
GlorylandShelton Johnson278 pages, hardcover: $25.Sierra Club Books, 2009. Like its protagonist, Gloryland is a medley. In a novel that is part memoir, part historical fiction, and part poetry, Shelton Johnson tells the story of Elijah Yancy, a young man with African, Seminole and Cherokee bloodlines. Born in South Carolina on Emancipation Day, 1863, Yancy is…
Fire and brimstone
Can it really be 20 years since Kierán Suckling, Gina Trott, Todd Schulke and Dan Moore descended on Albuquerque like a chapter out of the Old Testament? I remember them showing up, then marching out of, the slow-boat Wolf Coalition meetings. They looked like wild-eyed college kids. But their hastily assembled Wolf Action Group soon…
How the West was really won
Savages & Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian TerritoryPaul VanDevelder 352 pages, hardcover: $26.Yale University Press, 2009. Paul VanDevelder, author of Coyote Warrior, digs deeper into the rotten core of the American experience in his new book, Savages & Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian…
Sticks, stones, and enviros
The term “environmentalist,” or its more derogatory abbreviation “enviros” (HCN, 11/09/09), and — most derogatory of all — “en-varmint-alist” (HCN, 11/23/09) is used far too often in HCN without a counterpoint term for those who would place their own economic gain over the good of all. So I’d like to introduce a term for those…
Still evolving 40 years later
“The Shame of It!” That was the front-page headline of High Country News on Nov. 24, 1972. It was accompanied by a grim photo of a golden eagle that had been killed by sheep carcasses laced with poison by a rancher who was after coyotes. The stark headline proclaimed HCN founder Tom Bell’s unabashed alliance…
The Group of 10 respond
The big greens grade themselves
The Shot Heard Round the West
What resulted from activists’ 1990 challenge to the big greens
The grammar of picture writing
Explaining the “locator symbols” in petroglyphs
The easy way to purify our geography
If it’s named for a scoundrel, change the namesake
Drive that Hummer
Is it a car or a statement?
‘The environment … is where we live’
A New Mexico neighborhood offers a case study in the successes, and failures, of the environmental justice movement
Poltertics, 2010
Will this fall’s election chronicle a Republican resurrection in the West?
Ancient conversations
Interpreting the enigmatic patterns of Southwestern rock art.