Four years ago, Nelida Martinez’s teenaged son got sick. The herbal remedies she’d learned from her grandmother in Oaxaca, Mexico, didn’t help, so she took him to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with leukemia. Martinez, a 38-year-old farmworker with a shy smile and laugh lines from a life spent in the sun, had followed […]
Farm incubators help would-be farmers succeed on their own
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Dealt a bad hand: A review of Doc
Doc Mary Doria Russell 394 pages, hardcover: $26. Random House, 2011. Versatile novelist Mary Doria Rusell’s captivating reimagining of the life of Doc Holliday ends before the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral, that eternal wellspring for Western novels and movies. In her new book, Doc, Russell sees Holliday as more than a gambler and […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
California’s high-speed rail is slow to gain speed
Fourteen countries have high-speed rail networks; in just a few years, 10 more will. Yet America’s primary bullet-train attempt is faltering in California, a state that will add 20 million people in the next two decades and needs to find a way to schlep them around. Estimated costs for the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s plan […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Beware the leftward tilt
I really like your stories of people coming together to solve gnarly problems, and exposés of environmental abuses. But your uber-liberal ideology is extremely irritating, as in Ray Ring’s article, “Citizen democracy staggers onward” (HCN, 10/31/11). I give Ring credit for quoting a source who even-handedly criticizes big business and big labor unions for corrupting […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Aspiring farmers find creative ways to succeed
Not long ago, a college classmate of mine named Sarahlee Lawrence was splitting her time between raft guiding and river conservation, traveling as far as Ethiopia and Chile. But the world’s water problems are huge, she says. “I was struggling to feel like I was actually making a difference.” Then she discovered a startling statistic: […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
And now, a message from our sponsors …
In this issue, along with our regular ad pages, you will find the holiday Green Gift Guide. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to all of our generous advertising sponsors for their support. It takes readers like you and sponsors like them to make HCN‘s work possible. Please help us thank them by supporting […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
An unexpected L.A. story: A review of The Barbarian Nurseries
The Barbarian Nurseries: A NovelHéctor Tobar422 pages, hardcover: $27.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Los Angeles Times columnist Héctor Tobar’s ferocious new novel, The Barbarian Nurseries, deftly and convincingly plunges us into the heated national debate on undocumented immigration. Araceli Ramirez, a single woman from Mexico City, works as the live-in housekeeper for Maureen Thompson and […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
A Texas town welcomes dairies; a New Mexico activist fights them
Stephanie Paige Ogburn interviews an activist in New Mexico who worked with the state to regulate pollution from groundwater, then speaks with an economic development director in Muleshoe, Texas — just across the border — who has actively recruited dairies to her town.
Posted inRange
The ranchers who turned the tide against the XL pipeline
By Lisa Song, InsideClimate News Connie and Leon Weichman had just finished branding some calves Monday when Connie’s niece texted her the news: TransCanada, the Alberta-based company that wants to build an oil pipeline through the middle of the United States, had finally agreed to reroute it away from the Nebraska Sandhills where the Weichmans live […]
Posted inWotr
How Christo’s opponents can change your mind
Early in November, the Bureau of Land Management approved plans for an immense art installation called “Over the River,” which involves suspending translucent fabric panels across 5.9 miles of the Arkansas River in central Colorado. The artist behind Over the River’s two-week existence in 2014 is Christo and his late wife Jeanne-Claude. They specialize in […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Hunting deer on a mountain bike
In the tangle of gear in my daypack, the phone started ringing. It was a wholly inappropriate moment: My phone is pink, and its jaunty notes clashed with the traditional hunter’s world of blaze orange and camouflage. I sat on a rock by the trail and cringed. Everything about this — my first hunting trip […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bringing it home, keeping it wild
IDAHOYou might call it a minor movement, but “reshoring” — a new word that means bringing offshore jobs back home — is buoying some residents of rural Idaho. About 12 years ago, Buck Knives sent up to half its production to China, thinking it would save money. Unfortunately, many customers were steamed by that decision. […]
Posted inGoat
Landing a land transaction
A Wyoming congressional representative is trying to resurrect a federal land sale act to reduce the budget deficit and help the National Park Service end a long quest to capture a Grand Teton inholding. The Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act (pronounced “flit-fah”) was enacted in July 2000 to allow federal agencies to sell off disposable […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
The forgotten North Cascades grizzly bear
Scott Fitkin started his career chasing ghost bears. As a biologist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife in the late ’80s, he stalked grizzly bear sightings in the Cascade Mountains. Over two decades, he verified a few tracks but never glimpsed a grizzly or even a photograph of one. Until this June. That’s […]
Posted inGoat
Trampled by tourists
In the five years I’ve been an environmental journalist, and during the previous several seasons I worked in conservation, helping manage and mitigate recreational impacts on public trails in Colorado, I’ve often heard the argument that maintaining a constituency for environmental protection depends on getting as many folks as possible out into the places most […]
Posted inWotr
Thanks to Obama, cattlemen lose out
When four companies control 80 percent of the supply in a marketplace, even the most conservative economists would admit there’s a high potential for market manipulation. This is the case in the world of meatpacking today, where four giant packers — Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef — rule the market. And that is why, […]
Posted inRange
Does Pew’s ad on the roadless rule get it right?
Editor’s note: Sharon Friedman blogs on forest policy at “A New Century of Forest Planning” and will be posting occasionally on the Range blog. In the Denver Post this morning, I saw the full page ad you see here below. I couldn’t figure out how to link to it, since it was an advertisement, but […]
Posted inGoat
Obama sides with big business over small cattlemen
When four companies control 80 percent of the supply in a marketplace, even the most conservative economists would likely admit the potential is high for market manipulation. This is the case in the world of meatpacking, where four packers — Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef — rule the scene. That’s why, last year, the […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Behind the scenes in the lives of captive wolves
When we started the 2 o’clock tour at the Colorado Wolf & Wildlife Center in the mountains above Colorado Springs, the wolves were napping, just as wild wolves do in the middle of the day. A woman in jeans and cowboy boots served as guide for our group — eight random travelers, most of whom […]
Posted inRange
Changing the way renewables are funded
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House In the months since Solyndra’s collapse, there have been many inquiries into who knew what and when, and why this particular company was chosen to receive $528 million in loan guarantees. Did the White House hand-pick Solyndra as a quid pro quo for campaign contributions? Did the Department of Energy […]