This summer, Forest Service firefighters are stomping out wildfires they might have let burn in other years. A ‘temporary’ policy change requires local foresters to get permission from their regional supervisors for anything but full suppression, owing to fears that the current hot, dry conditions could cause remote fires to rage out of control. And […]
(Don’t) Let it burn
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Adopt a biologist
One way outdoor-gear companies could help improve their image and be more effective would be to put some of the millions spent on advertising and sponsorships into conservation organizations (HCN, 7/23/12, ‘The Hardest Climb‘). Sponsor field biologists, conservation groups and field stations rather than athletes. Biologists use these companies’ equipment just as much, and often […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
A way out of California’s water morass?
This well-written piece accurately portrays the problems and solutions facing California’s beleaguered Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (HCN, 8/20/12, ‘Tunneling under California’s water wars‘). Current operations in the Delta have failed to provide water to family farmers and 25 million Californians, and failed to protect the region’s ecosystem. Doing nothing to improve this situation means more of […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Return to innocence: A review of Queen of America
Queen of AmericaLuis Alberto Urrea492 pages, softcover:$14.99.Little, Brown and Company, 2011. It’s hard to be a saint, but being a saint’s father, husband or friend can’t be easy, either. ‘Not all crosses are made of wood,’ as Luis Alberto Urrea observes in his novel Queen of America. It’s a sequel to his 2005 book, […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
High Country News hires an associate designer
Andy Cullen, HCN‘s new associate designer, drove more than 2,000 miles to get to our office in Paonia, Colo., for his first day on the job. Andy, who earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism, with a concentration in photojournalism, in 2005 at Boston University, spent four years in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh and Mongolia […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Beyond ozone
Wintertime ozone is just one surprising air-quality problem that has appeared as gas fields balloon in size and creep closer to communities. “It’s possible that emissions have been there all along,” since the industry isn’t new, says Ramón Alvarez, an Environmental Defense Fund air-quality expert. But with drilling under increasing scrutiny, he says, “People are […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Book note: Valley of Shadows and Dreams
Valley of Shadows and Dreams Ken Light and Melanie Light, Foreword by Thomas Steinbeck 176 pages, hardcover: $40. Heyday Books, 2012. ‘Except for the perimeter, every single living thing had been placed where someone had planned it to be and placed it just so,’ writes Melanie Light, describing her first experience flying over California’s Central […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
A parent lost and found: A review of Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life
Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a LifeBy Harrison Candelaria Fletcher147 pages, softcover: $14.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2012. When Colorado writer Harrison Candelaria Fletcher was almost 2 years old, his father, a pharmacist, died, leaving behind a wife and five children. His mother, who was 29 years younger than her husband, grew up in a […]
Posted inArticles
Rantcast: Bringing back the mammoths
Rants from the Hill are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in rural Nevada. They are posted at the beginning of each month at www.hcn.org. You can subscribe to the podcast for free in iTunes, or through Feedburner if you use other podcast readers. Each month’s rant is also available in written form. Musical credits for Rantcast: Bumper sticker sloganeering, licensed under […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
For Western politicians, roots matter
It’s election season, and our rural Colorado valley bears the signs of it — many signs, actually, plastered on hills, planted in farmer’s fields, or stuck in front yards like seasonal lawn ornaments. Some have generic messages like “Vote Republican.” Others are more specific, like the signs supporting longtime rancher Mark Roeber, a Republican running […]
Posted inGoat
That sweet autumn air
As darkness comes earlier to western Colorado, summer’s stillness gives way to a restless fall. The skunks start chemical wars, mountain lions assassinate kids (of the caprine variety) and bears burglarize fruit trees in our own backyards. These are signs of a changing season, one where my colleagues are all victims or gleeful voyeurs of […]
Posted inRange
Hope on eight legs
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Sometimes when I grow weary of news of natural disasters, wars and political squabbling, I flirt with the idea of creating a Great News Network (GNN) which only reports positive events. Effervescent anchorpeople with gleaming smiles would talk of ceasefires, people and pets rescued from peril, Rover landings, that […]
Posted inWotr
A once-proud conservation group has lost its way
Recently, the family of Olaus J. Murie demanded that the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation cancel the organization’s Olaus J. Murie Award. The surprising reason? The foundation’s “all-out war against wolves is anathema to the entire Murie family.” I sympathize with the family’s position for several reasons. In 1999, while working for the Elk Foundation, I […]
Posted inWotr
Start a wildfire, go to jail – or worse
For many decades, the practice of lighting fires in wildlands to clear brush, improve browse, or to create jobs for fire crews was virtually a prerogative of rural living. For the most part, nobody got hurt and nobody went to jail. In the past decade, however, as a more urban-oriented population has spread into previously […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Wildlife-tracking drones
THE WEST Ah, technology, isn’t it wonderful? Drones aren’t just useful for targeting suspected terrorists in far-off countries; unmanned aircraft can also be used to photograph birds roosting on cliffs high above the Pacific Ocean. Or so thinks the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which plans to send a 6-pound drone with a 54-inch […]
Posted inGoat
Chinook salmon come home to Elwha River
Five months ago contractors ripped down the final remnants of the Elwha Dam, which along with its upstream counterpart, Glines Canyon Dam, has for a century been blocking the paths of salmon up the Elwha River, which winds through Washington State’s Olympic National Park and empties into the Pacific at the Strait of Juan de […]
Posted inGoat
New podcast, all about drought
The latest edition of HCN‘s monthly podcast, West of 100, is now available for your listening pleasure, and it covers something that’s on everyone’s mind this summer: drought. As of August, more than half of the country was experiencing at least moderate drought — and in many places it was worse than that, with drought conditions that are […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2012: Troubled Taos
Saving threatened Utah prairie dogs — on private property
When Curt Bagley learned he could get paid for the prairie dogs digging up his land, he had a change of heart toward the varmints he’d grown up shooting. On his family’s cattle ranch in Greenwich, Utah, they’d had to learn to live with the destructive rodents since 1973, when Utah prairie dogs were federally […]
Posted inArticles
West of 100: Droughts past, present and future
Of course, drought has always been a fact of Western life. But with the specter of climate change hanging over every extreme weather event these days, this year’s drought, and the dry years that have preceded it, have people wondering: Is this normal? Is this the new normal? So for this edition of West of […]