Former Reclamation Commissioner Daniel Beard tells how defunct water policy, and the bureau itself, contribute to drought.
Should the Bureau of Reclamation be abolished?
Posted inArticles
California state parks’ blueprint for a more diverse future
Plans to overhaul park system, appeal to communities of color.
Posted inArticles
A manifesto can set you free
This past fall, my friend Lauren asked me to speak to an English class she teaches at a small alternative school in western Colorado. She was encouraging these juniors and seniors to write a personal manifesto, and after hearing that I had created one myself a few years ago, she thought I’d be a perfect guest lecturer. […]
Posted inArticles
California has one year of water left: Hype or reality?
When a NASA scientist speaks in blunt terms about water supply, other scientists take notice.
Posted inArticles
Jewell vows to make energy development on public lands cleaner
A long-delayed fracking rule will be announced within days.
Posted inArticles
Chaco: A World Heritage site faces fracking
Across the nation there are many places to drill for oil and gas, but there is only one center for the ancient Ancestral Puebloan culture. That is Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico, a World Heritage site that is threatened by encroaching oil and gas development. How unfortunate that just as oil […]
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This just happened: Alaska’s warm winter
It might seem like the big weather story this winter was the spate of snow and cold that hit the East Coast. But a more prolonged and sobering story was all the snow and cold that did not hit large parts of the West, and especially Alaska. Today, the Sierra Nevada’s snowpack hovers at around […]
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How ‘amenity migrants’ push out locals
Communities once sustained by local labor now rely on stock market dividends.
Posted inMarch 16, 2015: Wild Ride
Wilderness vets
In May of 1966, I returned from a combat tour in Southeast Asia. It was a return full of challenges (“Wilderness as therapist,” HCN, 2/16/15). For two years, I had been surrounded by the noise and smell of war and had been trying to survive day to day. How was I going to cope? I […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2015: Wild Ride
The woman who brings drinking water to remote Navajo homes
In the parched countryside, delivery means community.
Posted inMarch 16, 2015: Wild Ride
The quietest and noisiest spots in the West
Some places are 20 decibels or less, similar to levels in pre-Colonial times.
Posted inMarch 16, 2015: Wild Ride
The case of the snotty streams
A mysterious algae known as “rock snot” is smothering wild rivers — and may hold clues to their future.
Posted inMarch 16, 2015: Wild Ride
See you in April!
HCN takes a printing break, and welcomes DC correspondent Elizabeth Shogren.
Posted inMarch 16, 2015: Wild Ride
Rural communities in the West need a fair shake
The failure to include the Secure Rural Schools program in this year’s budget puts a spotlight on a public-lands identity crisis that has been simmering, and sometimes boiling over, for decades. President Theodore Roosevelt got it right in 1908. Roosevelt understood that his big vision of creating a national forest system would have enormous financial […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2015: Wild Ride
Please, Lord, send us another boom
I’m always inspired by the stories of the little old lady or gentleman who spends 50 years in a blue-collar job and somehow squirrels away millions of dollars. Like Robert Read, the Vermont mechanic and part-time J.C. Penney janitor, who was found, upon his death, to possess a deposit box crammed with stock certificates worth […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2015: Wild Ride
Photographs and writing on Yellowstone wildlife
Review of “Yellowstone Wildlife: Ecology and Natural History of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.”
Posted inMarch 16, 2015: Wild Ride
Ownership?
There is so much talk about who should own public lands and how they should be managed (“This Land Is Their Land,” HCN, 2/2/15). I recommend a great book, The Big Burn, by Timothy Egan. In it, Egan outlines how Teddy Roosevelt was farsighted enough to see that all Americans deserve access to certain lands. […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2015: Wild Ride
No empathy for traumatized men
Review of “The Brightwood Stillness” by Mark Pomeroy.
Posted inMarch 16, 2015: Wild Ride
Like water for traffic
I found an interesting parallel in the March 2, 2015, issue of High Country News between our use of roads and our use of water. In “Big dig, big disgrace,” the trials and tribulations of Bertha’s attempt to dig a highway tunnel under the Seattle waterfront point to a counterintuitive reality, that more roads might […]