Nothing new

Since the acquittal of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupiers in October 2016, HCN Associate Editor Tay Wiles has suggested that extremists on the radical right — bent on privatizing federal lands in the American West — have made great headway in rallying rural Westerners to their cause. “A Separatist State of Mind” (HCN, 1/22/18) argues that right-wing troubadours […]

I find the update on the Kilauea Volcano (HCN, 6/11/18) puzzling in the extreme. First of all, it describes the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens as the backstory to Kilauea’s current eruption, claiming that “Lessons from Mount St. Helens are proving useful in understanding Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano.” The two volcanoes are entirely different with […]

While the serious potential economic (and other) costs of genetically engineered/genetically modified plants escaping into natural and agricultural landscapes (“Little Weed, Big Problem,” HCN, 6/25/18) are only beginning to be realized, they as yet pale in comparison to the massive and well-documented costs of the myriad non-genetically engineered/genetically modified plants that have escaped to invade […]

I always appreciate Jonathan Thompson’s excellent journalism, but I didn’t quite get the point of his recent essay on air travel (“Jet Lag,” HCN, 5/14/18). I just returned from a multi-week cross-country trip myself, which is why I only now got around to reading it. Certainly air travel is uncomfortable and at times dehumanizing, but far […]