Call me humorless, but I was disturbed when I read Michael Branch’s essay about the boulder he and his buddies sent smashing downhill (HCN, 5/2/11). His joyous description of the event, in which he channels Ed Abbey’s ribald style perfectly, strikes my sober ear as just another chapter of the bad old story of humans […]
Idolizing Ed
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
An interview with Carter Niemeyer, author of “Wolfer: A Memoir”
Carter Niemeyer is a wildlife biologist who started his career doing predator control and ended it working on wolf recovery in the northern Rockies. His new book, Wolfer: A Memoir, chronicles his years capturing, tracking, relocating and killing wolves for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Idaho Department of Game. The gray wolf’s […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
Did I mention she can cook?
Debbie Sease was a welcome face on the cover of High Country News (5/2/11). The story didn’t mention two singular aspects of her career. She and the other graying conservationists in the story have all have been extraordinary mentors for many, many others. I got to know Debbie working at the Sierra Club many years […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
Chill out with HCN and some chili
We’d like to invite our Colorado Western Slope readers and friends to a potluck chili feast following our late-spring board meeting. Come meet other HCN fans and our staff and board members. The fun starts at 6 p.m. on Friday, June 10, at the Town Park here in Paonia. We’ll provide the chili — hot, […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
The endless atlas: A review of Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas Rebecca Solnit167 pages, softcover: $24.95.University of California Press, 2010. San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit’s latest release, Infinite City, can be loosely described as an atlas of her hometown. But Solnit is interested in far more than geographical representation, as she writes in the book’s foreword: “An atlas is a […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
A Gem City Atlas: Novel maps of Laramie, Wyoming
What is Laramie? This winter, creative writing graduate students at the University of Wyoming teamed with Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas author Rebecca Solnit and cartographers Ben Pease and Shizue Seigel to answer that question. The series of maps and essays that resulted provide a nuanced portrait of place — one that pairs missile […]
Posted inBlog
The mixed blessings of extra water
A new addition to the “mixed blessings” file: The town of Payson, Arizona, will soon get relief from its perennial water shortage, having cut a deal with utility power-broker Salt River Project for a share of the water from the nearby C.C. Cragin Reservoir (formerly known as the Blue Ridge Reservoir). You can’t blame Payson […]
Posted inWotr
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, its a contrail
When we moved to the Colorado Plateau 20 years ago, I thought I’d be trading an ocean coast for a pristine Western sky. Instead, I was greeted by a nonstop parade of thundering jets roaring along one of the main air-transportation routes in the country, linking the East Coast to San Francisco. Congratulations, I told […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Walking in the body of being
In 1656, 23-year-old Baruch Spinoza, a Portuguese Jew in Amsterdam, was excommunicated by his community and formally cursed to the end of his days. The young man’s supposed heresies were likely related to a burgeoning pantheism, which he would later develop more fully — the idea of God as an infinite being who contains everything […]
Posted inGoat
Will genetically modified salmon be labelled?
Care to know whose genes are hidden in your salmon fillet? If the federal government approves genetically modified salmon for public consumption, there will be no telling if your seafood dinner’s DNA has been doctored — unless states demand it. Four states — California, Oregon, Vermont and Alaska — are preparing for a federal approval […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Lady Liberty v the Statue of Libertines
MONTANA So far in the West, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer is the only one who kills bad bills by whipping out his custom branding iron, which spells out VETO. The latest Tea Party proposals that have flamed out include a bill making it harder for people to register to vote, another to permit the use […]
Posted inWotr
Anatomy of a disaster
The hydrologic havoc playing out in the Mississippi Delta is not a freak of nature. This slow-motion, manmade disaster is our inheritance from a previous generation of politicians, farmers and ranchers, who made bad decisions to correct short-term problems even as the best available science warned of long-term consequences. Like it or not, we will […]
Posted inRange
Water scarcity makes some types of energy less appealing
By Jeff Thomas Water and energy have been inexorably linked in human history at least back to ancient Babylonia, where windmills helped power irrigation as early as 1700 BC. Since then, that relationship has become one of the great axioms of the industrial age – that is, it takes great volumes of water to extract […]
Posted inGoat
Uranium cleanup begins on Navajo Nation
On top of Oljato Mesa on the Navajo Nation, these days the sound of wind and birdsong has been replaced by the snarl of heavy machinery. And to many residents the cacophony is welcome – because of what it represents. The Environmental Protection Agency is finally starting to haul away the toxic remnants of decades […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Doctor’s Orders: Undam the Klamath
In recent years, I witnessed the battle over re-licensing of four dams on the Klamath River, which runs from Oregon’s high desert country to the redwood and Doug fir forests of the California coast. This watershed is my home, and it filled me with hope that dam removal could bring salmon to reaches of river […]
Posted inBlog
Freedom Ride West
Editor’s note: James Mills is journeying around the West, exploring issues of diversity in Western national parks. In 1961, a long bus ride from Washington D.C. to New Orleans changed the world forever. The PBS American Experience documentary “The Freedom Riders” documents this journey. As you watch it, I hope that it will open As […]
Posted inGoat
While Non-Believers Punked the Rapture, the West was Punked
When Christian fundamentalists opened their eyes last Saturday evening, only to find that nothing, (at least there in their living rooms,) had changed, non-believers felt suddenly and gleefully exalted. In an unexpected twist, the sinners had been enraptured — at least metaphorically speaking — while their devout counterparts had kept their feet planted firmly on […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
Respect for our (female) elders
Thanks for the article on the inspirational and tenacious Debbie Sease (HCN, 5/2/11). I work for The Wilderness Society and elders like Debbie, Johanna Wald of the Natural Resources Defense Council and volunteer Marge Sill with the Sierra Club in Reno are the inspiration for me and so many other women in the movement. While […]