Waiting with bated breath
We're pleased to announce that High Country News has been nominated for the 2013 Utne Media Award in the Environmental Coverage category. (The other finalists are Grist, OnEarth and Resurgence/Ecologist.) Presented by Utne Reader, a digest of independent media, the awards "publicly celebrate the (media outlets) which consistently impress us with the high quality of their content." Winners will be announced in late May; stay tuned.
HCN contributing editor Craig Childs is up for the Orion Book Award, an annual prize for a book "that addresses the human relationship with the natural world in a fresh, thought provoking and engaging manner." Craig was nominated for his latest title, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth (Pantheon), "a combination of science and adventure that reveals the ways in which our world is constantly moving toward its end and how we can change our place within the cycles and episodes that rule it."
Florence Williams, HCN board member, is a finalist for the 2013 National Magazine Awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors. She was nominated in the Personal Service category for her story about Japanese research in "forest-therapy science," the therapeutic properties of time spent in the woods. Called "Take Two Hours of Pine Forest and Call Me in the Morning," the story ran in the December issue of Outside magazine.
Good reads for Spring
HCN contributing editor Michelle Nijhuis is always busy; she's just co-edited The Science Writers' Handbook, which will be published in late April by Da Capo Press. Drawing on the experience of some three dozen science journalists, the book is a comprehensive guide to the craft and commerce of professional science writing. "We cover all aspects of the business -- from interviewing skills to contracts to dealing with rejection and envy," says Michelle. For more information, see www.pitchpublishprosper.com.
Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape, by HCN contributor Brad Tyer, is now available from Beacon Press. Tyer says his nonfiction book is about "destroying a river with copper and rebuilding it with bulldozers. It's about economic power and political powerlessness. It's also about a vexed relationship between a father (mine) and a son (me), the pleasures of canoeing rivers wild and otherwise, and the responsibility of acknowledging buried pasts." We ran an early excerpt called "Lost Opportunity" in the Sept. 19, 2011, issue.
Corrections
In our March 18 story on changing demands for public lands recreation, the chart of national park visits indicated a "gasoline crisis" in 1971, but the shortage actually occurred in 1973 during the Arab oil embargo.
Alert reader Bill Wolverton, former backcountry ranger in the Escalante District, pointed out a goof. "The photo on page 32 of the March 18 issue of the lizard sunning itself on a cairn clearly shows Stevens Arch in the background, albeit out of focus, which is located on the Escalante River a short distance above Coyote Gulch, within Glen Canyon National Recreation Area," writes Bill, rather than within the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument as the caption had indicated. HCN regrets the errors.
