This February in Salt Lake City, Amy Meyer stood on the street and used her cell phone to record what was happening outside a slaughterhouse. She then became the first person charged under one of the new so-called “ag-gag” laws. Six states currently have such Farm Protection laws, deliberately designed to stop video recording at […]
It’s time to see exactly how the sausage gets made
Posted inGoat
A win for Monsanto on GMO crops
As genetically-modified food crops speed inexorably across the land, the U.S. government is doing little more than occasionally tapping the brakes a bit. The Department of Agriculture gave one such tap last week, reported The New York Times, when it decided to delay the release of two engineered crops that could result in much higher […]
Posted inGoat
What’s killing bees?
Normally, the Colorado bee swarm hotline starts ringing in mid-April. By May 1, a call is coming in every other day. And by the 15th, “somebody opens up the bee floodgates and they start swarming like the devil,” says Beth Conrey, president of the Colorado Beekeepers Association, who fields the calls on her cell phone. […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Token protection?
It’s wonderful that people from many cultures in northern New Mexico recognized the economic benefits from heightened federal recognition of the Río Grande Gorge near Taos. National monuments are powerful economic drivers, and we welcome President Obama’s action. Yet the language of the Río Grande del Norte proclamation offers little additional environmental protection beyond status […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
The trouble with original claims
I am excited about the Río Grande del Norte National Monument. However, I work for one of the tribes in New Mexico, and given my familiarity with Native issues, I always find the position of the Hispanic community in New Mexico to be rather hypocritical. When they state that they have a claim to the […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
The Latest: Pumping Arizona’s rivers dry?
BackstoryLast July, Arizona’s state water board approved a large new development in Sierra Vista that would pump 3,300 acre feet of groundwater per year — despite evidence that such pumping could decrease flow in the San Pedro River, one of the West’s healthiest desert rivers. Environmentalists appealed the decision; so did the Bureau of Land […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
The artist and his patron: A review of “The Inventor and the Tycoon”
The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving PicturesEdward Ball447 pages, hardcover: $29.95.Doubleday, 2013. Leland Stanford appeared to have it all: As president of the Big Four Associates, who built the Western half of the transcontinental railroad, the tycoon became one of 19th century San Francisco’s most influential entrepreneurs, […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Sacrifice zones: A regrettable inevitability
I earn my living protecting undeveloped natural ecosystems and restoring degraded landscapes, and I visit Western deserts as frequently as I can. So I sympathize with the residents and stewards of the Mojave Desert confronted by the reality of industrial energy development profiled in Judith Lewis Mernit’s “Sacrificial Land” (HCN, 4/15/13). However, these people’s complaints, […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Reflected glory
We are delighted to announce that Boston-based journalist Lisa Song (an HCN intern in 2010) has won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, along with her InsideClimate News colleagues Elizabeth McGowan and David Hasemyer. They received journalism’s premier award for “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of.” “The story […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Put the public before profits
If California’s three largest utilities are owned by investors who expect a return (Sacrificial Land, HCN 4/15/13), then we need to devise a way to buy out or replace those investors with public-owned cooperatives. Putting solar panels on rooftops in our cities seems more practical than transporting electricity from remote areas via power lines. I […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Other voices: the debate on wolf hunting from both sides
“Overall, they’re making it too easy to kill wolves. (It’s) persecution of wolves on a huge level. … I think we’re on the road to re-listing wolves in the Rocky Mountains.” — Marc Cooke, president of Wolves of the Rockies “The hunting has put such intense pressure on the packs, they’re dispersing, they’re disrupted; the […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
How technology detected a huge mine landslide before it happened
A 165-million-ton landslide rocked Kennecott Utah Copper’s Bingham Canyon Mine on April 10, registering as a 2.4-magnitude earthquake in nearby Salt Lake City. The cascade of rock damaged giant trucks and digger machines, but not one of the 500 people who work the 2.75-mile-wide, 0.75-mile-deep pit was injured. That’s because Kennecott employees expected a slide […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
California cap and trade’s dirty secret
It is too bad that this otherwise insightful article overlooked a key flaw and dirty secret embodied in the California Air Resources Board’s cap-and-trade law (“A better cap-and-trade?” HCN, 4/15/13). As part of the carbon-trading scheme the ARB launched, the board adopted forest carbon protocols that allow timber companies in California and elsewhere to market […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Book review: “Canvas of Clay: Seven Centuries of Hopi Ceramic Art”
Canvas of Clay: Seven Centuries of Hopi Ceramic Art. Edwin L. Wade and Allan Cooke, 248 pages, softcover: $40. El Otro Lado, 2012. In Canvas of Clay, the authors explore the evolution of Hopi pottery from the 14th century until recent times. Pairing full-page color prints with scholarly narrative, historical photographs with schematic drawings, the […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Another water-short year in the Southwest is taking its toll
On April 14, a Sunday, the Colorado ski resort Vail Mountain celebrated closing day in the invariable way: Skiers and boarders sported neon onesies and mullet wigs. The less modest squeezed into denim short shorts to flaunt calves and quads sculpted over a winter on the slopes. Alcohol was overconsumed and confiscated in lift lines. […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
A tireless documenter of Native America: A review of “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher”
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward CurtisTimothy Egan412 pages, hardcover: $28.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. In Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Timothy Egan, who also won the National Book Award in 2006 for The Worst Hard Times, chronicles the life story of photographer Edward […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
A hard right in Idaho
(This editor’s note accompanies an HCN magazine cover story on how right-wing emigrants took over North Idaho politics.) In my 18 years in the Northern Rockies, I’ve visited Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, several times and watched it change. The town — draped along the shore of huge Lake Coeur d’Alene — has been dramatically resort-ified, in […]
Posted inGoat
Grizzlies back from the brink?
Grizzly bears in the lower 48 were put on the endangered species list as threatened in 1975, a time when the survival of six bear populations in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington seemed tenuous. But thanks to decades of vigilance, the bears are doing much better, with about 1,400 to 1,700 in the lower 48, […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
The gray area: a conversation with artist Renee Couture
We recommend you use the “View Gallery” option to enjoy these images. A Q&A with Renee Couture follows this introduction. Forestry, as a science, is both tangible and abstract. Behind the flagging and cores and calipers is the weighing of value, the ecological against the material, the measurable against the immeasurable. Such tensions are reflected […]
Posted inWotr
Winter: an encore edition
On April 21, a surprise snowstorm blew into western Montana. Small by any standards, it was one of those peaceful, quiet snows, without any wind, as if Mother Nature was feeling nostalgic and had ordered it up out of a Robert Frost poem. I say “surprise” because I was working inside that day; at 3:00 […]