The agency is trying to hire more racially diverse staff — but can’t seem to make headway.
Why has the National Park Service gotten whiter?
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
The Park Service’s befuddled funding
The cash-strapped agency wrestles with corporate sponsorships and budget shortfalls.
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
The Bundy battle continues, the Airbnb squeeze, and an unusual gun sale
Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
Nuclear power divides California’s environmentalists
Is the closure of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant good or bad for the climate?
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
What climate change is doing to the parks
A sample of the shifts already underway due to a warming climate.
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
Meet the man helping the Park Service prepare for a hotter future
Patrick Gonzalez walks the walk when it comes to climate action.
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
Immigrants and jobs
In “Love and Death on the Border” in the July 25, 2016, issue, Jon M. Shumaker ends a paragraph about the risks immigrants take in illegally crossing the border with “All this in order to take dangerous, crappy jobs no one in this country wants.” With this seemingly trivial comment, he perpetuates a false assumption […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
How the Park Service is planning for climate change
The agency is forging ahead despite meager help from Congress.
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
HCN as travel guide
Hillary Rosner’s excellent article “When Water Turns to Dust” in the June 13, 2016, issue became a surprise travel guide of sorts on our recent trip across the Great Desert. On our return from Tahoe and Yosemite, we made a point to stop at Mono Lake, in part because in was mentioned in Hillary’s article. Plus, […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
For the Park Service, an uncomfortable birthday
For most of us, birthdays are happy occasions, when friends and family pay fond attention, lavishing us with gifts to prove that we are loved and valued. For one day, at least, our foibles are accepted with a smile, or at least diplomatically ignored. The National Park Service’s 100th birthday has been less joyful, however. […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
Farewell to a senior editor
This issue we’re saying goodbye, in a way, to longtime High Country News writer and old friend Jonathan Thompson, who is leaving his post as senior editor in Durango, Colorado, to move to Bulgaria with his family. There he’ll be hard at work turning his extensive reporting on Colorado’s Gold King Mine spill into his […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
Desert rising?
The map showing the counties in Western states that support the American Lands Council makes it look like a Mormon conspiracy to re-create the State of Deseret (“Land transfer support, county by county,” HCN, 7/25/16). Add to this House Bill 4751 (the Local Enforcement for Local Lands Act, which would shift law enforcement functions from […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
Delta flood’s carbon footprint, floodplain fallout and purple fungi fighters
HCN.org news in brief.
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
Collaboration? Not so much.
I read your article on the Bureau of Land Management’s new collaborative approach to planning with skepticism (“BLM rethinks land-use planning,” HCN, 5/30/16). In this same region of western Montana, the U.S Forest Service has been applying the word “collaborative” to its timber sales because the Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA) requires “public collaboration.” However, […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
A visit to the Grand Canyon, without handrails
A wild river is “a necessity of the human spirit.”
Posted inArticles
Podcast: The cult of Tesla
What is it about Tesla and Elon Musk that has attracted such fierce devotion from so many people?
Posted inAugust 22, 2016: 100
Latest: Officials open a criminal investigation of EPA’s role in the Animas river spill
Agency contractors were excavating debris at the old mining site when the river flooded with wastewater.
Posted inArticles
Border wall divides lands, but not culture
A wall bars the physical passage of people in a park near San Diego— but music scales that barrier.
Posted inArticles
West Obsessed: Genetics and the plight of Mexican wolves
Turf wars and management missteps have hurt the recovery of Arizona and New Mexico’s remaining wolf packs, leaving them dangerously inbred.
Posted inArticles
Consider the vole, endangered and adorable
How a collective effort is protecting one of the most endangered mammals in the nation.