“Ecosystems 101” was full of exceptional details (HCN, 11/25/13). It is quite true that long-term field monitoring has until recently been the hardest research to keep funded. Thirty consecutive field seasons on glaciers in the North Cascades – which feed less-than-pristine salmon streams – and the ongoing but not particularly successful salmon restoration programs indicate […]
Studying – and saving – ecosystems
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Outlaws on the river
There are excellent reasons why paddling is not permitted in most streams in Yellowstone (“Forbidden waters,” HCN, 11/11/13). Many streams meander through large meadows replete with grazing bison and elk. Paddlers would not only disrupt wildlife feeding along the steams, but the visual pollution caused by a parade of boats would spoil the magnificent scenes visitors presently enjoy. As […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Not all kayakers oppose limitations
As an avid kayaker in Grand Teton National Park, I was surprised to see it lumped with Yellowstone in “Forbidden waters” (HCN, 11/11/13). Grand Teton does not have a “blanket ban” on kayaking. To the contrary, 36.6 miles of the Snake River in the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway and Grand Teton National Park are […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Moving words and sacred salmon
Ray Ring’s article on the Alaska salmon ecosystem was the most moving thing I’ve ever read in HCN (“Ecosystems 101,” HCN, 11/25/13). I worked on a commercial salmon-fishing boat in Alaska one summer and have since considered these species to be absolutely sacred. It seems developers always have a price tag to put on the […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
HCN takes a holiday break
With sub-zero lows and nearly a foot of fresh snow outside our Paonia, Colo., offices, it’s finally looking – and feeling – like wintertime. That means it’s time for another publishing break in our 22-issue-per-year schedule. The next HCN appears Jan. 20, but meanwhile, you can visit hcn.org for fresh news, features and opinion. Here’s […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
A native butterfly finds merit in a nonnative tree
Every fall, starting around October, tens of thousands of monarch butterflies from across the West make their way to eucalyptus groves along the California coast. There, in a quasi-torpid state, they clump together in clusters, dangling from high branches like living chandeliers. Early in the new year, they once again take wing, sailing inland to […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
A forester searches for a kinder, gentler eucalyptus
On a drizzly winter day in San Francisco, a pickup truck loaded with eucalyptus seedlings pulls up to a bare hillside in the Presidio, a former U.S. Army base turned national park. A crew of shovel-wielding men starts moving across the slope, planting knee-high trees in tight formation. Dressed in a bright red rain suit, […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Environmentalists without borders
Two winters ago, I visited California’s central coast for the first time since I was a teenager. Back then, I paid little attention to botany or landscaping. But this time, I spent the trip gripped by plant envy. In Santa Cruz, lemon trees littered yards with ripe fruit, and multi-colored aloes with fleshy leaves as […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
An unvarnished view of America’s best idea
To Conserve Unimpaired: The Evolution of the National Park IdeaRobert B. Keiter368 pages, hardcover: $35.Island Press, 2013. In To Conserve Unimpaired, Professor Robert Keiter provides an unvarnished view of “America’s best idea”: the National Park System. Keiter, the country’s pre-eminent legal expert on the subject, tackles the question: Why does the park idea still evoke […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
A bighorn sheep comes through the window, $500K left in airport change buckets, and more.
MONTANAMaybe blind belligerence is just “a guy thing,” or so Lori Silcher concluded after a male bighorn sheep crashed through windows of her rural home in Hamilton, Mont. “All of a sudden, we all felt the house shake and there was a resounding thud,” recalls her husband, Peter, who at first thought someone in his […]
Posted inGoat
2013 in environmental news, from the darkest to the most hopeful
A few weeks ago, High Country News contributing editor Craig Childs dropped me a note asking for some help with his annual winter solstice production, Dark Night. Would I write and read a series of poems about descending into darkness – specifically “death, ice, fear, what is inside the deep, blue, scarier crevasses of your […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2013: The Tree Coroners
In defense of bibliopedestrianism
A writer’s love of reading while walking in Nevada’s Great Basin desert.
Posted inGoat
Peabody mine expansion coincides with Navajo and Hopi artifacts battle
Ten years ago, Jennafer Yellowhorse picked up an out-of-print archeology book titled A View from Black Mesa and read about a vast trove of artifacts unearthed on a lonesome plateau of Navajo land near the Four Corners. “Right in my backyard,” as she says, “but I’d never heard of it; no one had. So I […]
Posted inGoat
A report aims to change the way we think about Native justice
In 1881, a Brulé Lakota man in South Dakota who shot and killed another member of his tribe was sentenced to death by federal officials who thought the tribal punishment of eight horses, $600 and a blanket was too lenient. The case set a precedent that certain crimes committed on tribal lands are to be […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2013: The Tree Coroners
Inside the BLM’s abrupt decision not to ban shooting in an Arizona national monument
Why guns, politics and saguaros don’t mix.
Posted inWotr
Uranium belt towns face bleak economics
A new documentary gets a good reception from both sides of the issue.
Posted inGoat
Research shows oil booms can yield long term socioeconomic decline
If an old-timer Denver wildcatter named James K. Munn has his way, there’s going to be an oil drilling boom in Escalante, Utah. Escalante’s a small town in the southern part of the state, placed right smack dab in the center of some of the most spectacular landscape in the West. Naturally, many residents, especially […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2013: The Tree Coroners
The Tree Coroners
To save the West’s forests, scientists must first learn how trees die.
Posted inGoat
States test a new prairie dog plague vaccine
Dressed in long pants, long-sleeve shirts and closed-toed shoes, a team of researchers from Colorado Parks and Wildlife gathered in a sagebrush-grass meadow near Gunnison, Colo. this summer, each with a GPS in hand. Lining up 10 meters apart along the border of a virtual grid, they walked straight lines over a Gunnison’s prairie dog […]