The idea of home plays a major role in this issue. Our feature examines the struggles and triumphs of one woman building a life in a hardscrabble corner of the Utah desert, while another story profiles a community whose members have taken it upon themselves to fight the fires threatening their homes. This issue also digs into one family’s unlikely turn toward hemp to save their ranch, and an opera giving voice to people who lived downwind of the 1945 Trinity atomic bomb test.
An end of the line for the kings of the Yukon?
A writer visits Alaska and finds a fishing culture in slow collapse, fading with its most important resource.
A dispersed staff and a tied knot
Editorial staffers relocate, HCN receives an award and an editor gets married!
In a desolate place, will a modern pioneer last?
There are many ways a determined outsider can transform a place.
The pioneer of ruin
Amid a desolate mess in Cisco, Utah, a young woman resurrects a home.
A toilet project; carpet-bombing trout; the ick factor
Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.
Latest: County campaign promotes monuments on the chopping block
San Juan County says ‘Make it Monumental’ while asking for exemption from the Antiquities Act.
Latest: Forest Service report calls for changes in wildfire management
Increases in timber sales, prescribed burns and thinning projects are needed to save life and property.
A fire deficit
Cally Carswell’s piece on life in the Southwest during aridification hit home with me, living as I do on the edge of the national forest near Santa Fe. The town sits at the base of two large national forest watersheds, both of which are heavily forested and choked with thickets of decadent trees born of…
Human rehabilitation
“Restoration’s crisis in confidence” (HCN, 8/6/18) is a breath of fresh air. For far too long not only restoration’s promoters but also the media, foundations and government agencies that fund restoration projects have ignored the movement’s inherent contradictions, as well as its failure to deliver the “restoration” that has been promised. The problem, however, is…
Shifting baselines
In “Restoration’s crisis of confidence” (HCN, 8/6/18), Maya Kapoor offers a thoughtful summary of current debates about the role of history in ecological restoration. Kapoor correctly describes how restorationists in the Southwest are moving away from their traditional focus on recovering historic baseline, or “reference,” conditions. Baselines have always been arbitrary and difficult to describe,…
Photos: Above a Western waste land
A photo collection of 67 Superfund sites shows landscapes vandalized by mines and nuclear plants.
Relittering: Take your trash and show it in the sun
Philosophy teaches us little more than how to confuse our settled opinions.
As the West burns, a town fields its own amateur firefighters
The community of Dufur, Oregon, bands together to douse the flames.
We should all be more like ‘the bluebird man’
Meet Al Larsen, a citizen scientist with decades of meticulous records of the West’s bluebirds.
The West’s atomic past, in opera halls
On stage and in Congress, Trinity test downwinders fight for recognition.
Republicans tout hemp’s potential
The crop could be a lifeline for struggling agricultural communities.
How Native filmmakers are restoring cinematic narratives
Indigenous film festivals showcase Native stories, but more support is needed to reach mainstream audiences.