Regarding “Two-Wheel Revolution” (HCN, 4/28/14), I was amused by your comparison of Gallup to Santa Fe as to the prevalence of “small loan companies.” The problems in Gallup are symptoms of problems in Santa Fe: elite concentrations of wealth and unsustainable consumption. As Voltaire wrote hundreds of years ago: “The wealth of the rich is […]
Inexhaustible supply
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
Federal generosity
With the U.S. District Court of Nevada giving Cliven Bundy 45 days to remove his cattle from federal grazing land, land the Bundy family had occupied for nearly six decades, it came to mind that Gen. O.O. Howard didn’t give the Nez Perce such a generous amount of time back in 1877. They had just 30 […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
Crazed ‘patriotism’
Concerning the Sagebrush Rebellion timeline, (“The BLM vs. Cliven Bundy, HCN, 5/12/14), et tu, High Country News? “After a tense standoff between armed militiamen and federal agents …” Somehow these bullying military-armed lawbreakers have convinced the media, including HCN, to associate them with the Second Amendment and the “well-regulated militia” delineated there. These confused and […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
Consider the sparrow
The Urban BestiaryLyanda Lynn Haupt337 pages, hardcover: $27.Little Brown, 2013. Most communities across the West, urban and rural, are home to the animals in Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s new book, The Urban Bestiary, a collection of joyful meditations on the fauna that scamper over our lawns and roost on our power poles. While eastern gray squirrels, […]
Posted inGoat
Booms have a lasting impact on towns’ architectural fabric
On a trans-Wyoming reporting trip several years ago, I pulled off the interstate to check out the little town of Rawlins in the southern part of the state. I made my way past the industrial sprawl towards whatever kind of “downtown” I could find. When I finally arrived at the historic core, I was struck […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
The Latest: Kill invasive lake trout to save native bull trout?
State and tribes disagree.
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
The Latest: Obama designated his largest national monument yet
BackstorySince 2009, Congress has grid-locked around three dozen bills that would protect new acres of public land. Even locally grown, something-for-everyone wilderness bills, like Montana’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, are rotting in a legislature plagued by dysfunction and public-lands phobia (“Wilderness bills languish in legislative limbo,” HCN, 3/5/12). Public-land advocates are turning to President […]
Posted inGoat
Bark beetle video series says there’s hope amid the carnage
The mountain pine beetle is perhaps the most infamous creepy-crawly in the Western United States. No larger than a grain of rice, the bug drills into trees and infects them with a blue fungus that makes them die of thirst. They’ve bored and left for dead millions of trees and affected 30 million acres in […]
Posted inGoat
Climate change expedites hybrid trout takeover
When two species mate, their offspring end up with undignified new names like ‘pizzly’ (a grizzly and polar bear pairing) or ‘sparred owl’ (for barred owl and spotted owl hybrids). But the more rare species in such couplings face a far worse fate – hybridization can be a path to extinction. That’s why hybridization is […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
The Big Nasty
On garbage and tolerance in the wilderness.
Posted inGoat
Congress considers largest dam removal in U.S. history
This week, Congress is looking at a bill that even a few years ago seemed wildly, laughably improbable: an authorization to spend $250 million to implement a reworked version of the historic 2010 Klamath River agreements. The Senate bill is a mere 42 words long, but it seeks nothing less than to seal the fate […]
Posted inWotr
Los Angeles needs to leave a rural valley alone
If we’re going to limit the coming climate change impacts, we surely need to harness a lot of solar electricity. But proposals from Los Angeles to spread four square miles of solar panels across rural Owens Valley have local people saying: “Whoa! Doesn’t the sun shine in L.A.?” Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power […]
Posted inGoat
Are invasive species really that terrible?
The West’s approach to managing invasive species has, for the most part, been a straightforward one: eradicate them swiftly and at all costs. Spray ‘em, poison ‘em, net ‘em, douse ‘em with fungus, and, when all else fails, eat ‘em – whatever the method, the important thing is that the invader is sent packing. But […]
Posted inWotr
You can still get your kicks on Route 66
I had the ride but not the road. I was a Westerner living in Tennessee and I’d bought my dream car, a 1963 pearl-white Thunderbird complete with a 390 cubic-inch Ford V-8 engine and black leather bucket seats. But what I missed was the Mother Road, Route 66. I had the car but not the […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Archaeology’s poisonous past
Most U.S. ethnographic collections are contaminated with toxins. Will new cleaning methods help tribes reclaim artifacts?
Posted inGoat
How to cut carbon: Change the way utilities make money
State renewable energy standards, imposed on “investor-owned” utilities that supply 75 percent of the power in the United States, have long stood stalwart in the space left empty by the absence of a federal energy or climate policy. They have devalued climate-changing coal and encouraged wind and solar, particularly in the West, where the kind […]
Posted inWotr
A protected river is still vulnerable to oil spills
In every stage of life, I’ve lived near railroad tracks. The haunting sounds of night trains with their short-blast-long-howl whistles and steady rumble have always been grounding and comforting to me. I used to love watching gritty, graffiti-clad train cars pushing forward to get an important job done somewhere to my east or west. The […]
Posted inGoat
EPA’s first CO2 emissions regs for existing power plants
While President Barack Obama’s landmark CO2 emissions regulations for existing power plants will certainly have its losers, in the long-run, the winners are in the majority. Dubbed the Clean Power Plan, drawn up by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act, the regulations mark the first time the government has imposed national-scale […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Excerpt from “The Ogallala Road”
An author returns to a family farm in Kansas to explore drought and depletion.