How the movement at Standing Rock and its protestors’ efforts extended well beyond North Dakota. While the pipeline is stalled (for now), its impacts are planting seeds, however small, within social and environmental movements and for tribal sovereignty across the country.
Industrial solar shortcomings
“So Shines a Good Deed” gives incomplete coverage to solar energy development and presents only one view of a rather complicated situation (HCN, 12/26/16). Both the federal government and the article cited are avid promoters of industrial-scale solar development on public lands. In California, the total solar energy produced from installations on parking lot structures,…
What Standing Rock meant for those who took part
Protesters from afar didn’t just take a stand in North Dakota — they brought the movement back home.
Latest: Another attempt to open Arctic drilling
The legislation is Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s ninth such try.
Why OR7 is a celebrity
Once wolf populations fully recover, we’ll no longer know the story of individual animals.
Latest: GOP House rules loosen land transfer regs
The rule would let the feds transfer land without accounting for costs.
Nature’s disappearing vocabulary; bobcat decoys; setting the “barr” for climate data
Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.
Regulations rejected
“Will a twice-burned county change its ways?” (HCN, 12/26/16) details how residents of Montana’s Bitterroot Valley block efforts by their state and county governments to require homeowners in the fire zone to prepare for -inevitable wildfires. Residents reject county regulation and demand private-property rights. These Bitterroot Valley conservatives can teach us a great deal about…
The story behind New Mexico’s lowriders
A new collection examines the elaborate cars and their place in Mexican-American culture.
Shades of what’s to come?
I thoroughly appreciated, although was equally saddened by, “How the Park Service is Failing Women” (HCN, 12/12/16). It does not surprise me that women — and most likely people of color, of Hispanic or Muslim backgrounds, and others who are not white males — are treated in this manner throughout multiple government organizations and business…
Standing Rock and beyond
Earlier this month, a group of protesters calling themselves “water protectors” set up a camp to stop the imminent construction of a controversial pipeline. This was not in North Dakota, however; it was in Texas. The Two Rivers camp, established by activists who were also part of the opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, or…
Standing Rock’s men at war
By challenging our myths of the West and its warriors, Native men find their voice.
The dark side of the Park Service
Please give Lyndsey Gilpin my congratulations on her great investigative reporting for “How the Park Service is Failing Women” (HCN, 12/12/16). I am in my 23rd year of retirement after wearing the National Park Service ranger uniform for more than 30 years. I can validate and corroborate every point that Lyndsey writes in her article. That traditional flat…
The Forest Service relaxes restrictions on recreation
The permitting change could give guided groups more access.
The heartache of Montana’s solitude
Two new fiction works from Big Sky Country crave human connectivity.
An exception, not a ‘loophole’
Elizabeth Shogren’s “Latest” column in the Dec. 12 issue grossly mischaracterized the North Fork coal-mining exception to the Colorado roadless rule, as a “loophole.” The state of Colorado was never ambiguous with its intent to make provisions for the $1 billion-dollar coal-mining industry in the North Fork coal-mining area with its own roadless rule, and…
The threatened ESA; Canada’s contradicting climate goals; revolutionary consumers
HCN.org news in brief
Was the Bears Ears designation a victory?
Despite compromise, the controversial monument’s opposition is riled up.
How Standing Rock blew up
In a short time, a tribal concern became a massive movement.
Welcome Maya L. Kapoor
New faces at the headquarters; catching up on old errors.
Bedrooms for burrowing owls
In Oregon, the Global Owl Project builds artificial burrows to help owls recover.
We talked to protesters at Standing Rock. Here’s what they learned.
What protesters are thinking as crowds dissipate and cold seizes camp.