Wild Comfort: The Solace of NatureKathleen Dean Moore256 pages,softcover: $15.95.Trumpeter Books, 2010. Writer, editor and activist Kathleen Dean Moore was settling in to write her next book when a series of personal tragedies changed everything. After several people close to her died within a few months, Moore abandoned her plans to create a book about […]
Finding reassurance in change: a review of Wild Comfort
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
The Big Four Meatpackers
Related story: Cattlemen struggle against giant meatpackers and economic squeezes About 35 million cattle are slaughtered in the U.S. annually by 60 major beef-packing operations processing around 26 billion pounds of beef. Four firms control over 80 percent of all the beef slaughtered. [NEWSLETTER] **** Tyson Foods Springdale, Ark. Daily slaughter capacity 28,700 U.S. market […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Cattlemen struggle against giant meatpackers and economic squeezes
‘This situation is what I call economic waterboarding.’
Posted inRange
Wyoming uranium has uncertain future
By Julianne Couch, 3-18-2011 On the other side of the Pacific Ocean from our position in the Rocky Mountain West, an earthquake and tsunami have triggered a catastrophe in Japan that officials say is the worst event in that country since World War II. In the last week, it has been impossible to miss seeing […]
Posted inWotr
Marry me, marry my town
I am not just marrying a man; I am marrying a town. In my first, brief marriage, my husband and I were both newcomers to the Alaskan town where we spent our married life. The locals weren’t particularly invested in us. Instead, they waited with the patience of the seasoned to see if we could […]
Posted inApril 18, 2011: Muddy Waters
Unheard stories, unseen lives: A review of Southern Paiute, A Portrait
Southern Paiute: A PortraitWilliam Logan Hebner and Michael L. Plyler208 pages, hardcover: $34.95.Utah State University Press, 2010. In all of Native America, few people have been less understood or more maligned than the Southern Paiute Indians and their desert cousins. Mark Twain denounced them as “inferior to even the despised digger Indians of California.” Except […]
Posted inApril 18, 2011: Muddy Waters
The power of the lowly dirt particle
Soon after I moved to western Colorado from the humid Midwest 20 years ago, I learned that a reservoir is not a lake. My family and I were eager to test our new canoe on the local reservoir, which I’d driven by a month earlier. Its dark waters beckoned to me, lapping against a thick […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
Montana transmission lines draw opposition from all sides
Whitehall, MontanaGeologist Debra Hanneman lives with her husband, geophysicist Chuck Wideman, in a modest, rambling house on the outskirts of town, a mile or so off Interstate 90. On a blustery morning in mid-January, the view through her glassed front door takes in an expanse of private and federal land, with dun-colored foothills rising toward […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Are you on the endangered species list?
THE SOUTHWEST Nikki Cooley is a Colorado River guide for Arizona Raft Adventures who also “happens to be Navajo,” reports the boatman’s quarterly review. So it must have struck her as particularly odd when a tourist on one of her Grand Canyon trips casually asked, “Are Indians extinct?” No word on her reply. THE BORDER […]
Posted inWotr
Christo can wrap anything, but why bother?
The debate over the artist Christo’s latest scheme – he wants to canopy part of the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado in 2014 — shouldn’t simply be about art. Rather, it should be viewed as a jobs proposal, and on that ground I’d say, Why not? Certainly, Christo is an artist, maybe even the century’s […]
Posted inRange
Confronting scofflaws
There are some places I don’t like to write about, since in my experience, that’s a quick way to trash the scenery. People read about it, decide to visit for themselves, and whatever solitude and splendor the spot offered has vanished. That’s one reason I seldom mention an arid valley named Castle Gardens or Castle […]
Posted inGoat
Nuclear Disaster Reverberates in the West
When the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded on April 26, 1986 and heaved plumes of radioactive dust across the Soviet Union and Europe, the United States’ domestic uranium market slumped into hibernation for nearly two decades. It should come as no surprise, then, that uranium stocks are falling rapidly as Japan’s own nuclear disaster unfolds. […]
Posted inArticles
California crab-boat captain powers through tsunami to safety
Alan Mello got a call at 3 a.m. last Friday about the tsunami on its way from Japan. The 57-year-old started fishing from Crescent City, on California’s northern coast, in 1973. He’s had to motor out to sea three times to keep his commercial fishing boat from being damaged by tsunamis. Crescent City has the […]
Posted inGoat
The Visual West – Image 9
In March, the first flowers of the year can often be found above your head rather than below your feet. Here, a silver maple planted in a cemetery outside Paonia, Colorado, shows off its stuff only a few days after the snow has melted off. The swelling elm buds, below, will soon follow suit. For […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Complexities tackled
The Alaska predator control issue was an excellent one (HCN, 2/21/11). It offered information that I likely wouldn’t come across in the newspapers or journals I read — about the possible relationship between increasing salmon runs and declining ungulate populations, for example. It tackled complex matters in a way this non-wildlife biologist could grasp. And […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Hook-and-bullet journalism
The scientific bankruptcy of hook-and-bullet journalism by “outdoor” writers was on display in Craig Medred’s essay, “How my thoughts on wolves have changed” (HCN, 2/21/11). In his defense of the lethal manipulation of wolf populations, Medred uses the word “artificial” only once: to describe an “artificially high” wolf population resulting from “recent high salmon runs.” […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Who’s squeezing whom?
Craig Medred’s recent article on Alaska’s wolf dilemma raises some valid points (HCN, 2/21/11). Yes, wolves are carnivorous predators that can present a danger to humans. But it is worthwhile to consider why wolf attacks are becoming more common. One must ask whose territory is being invaded and squeezed into ever decreasing parameters. As biologist […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
The rules of intrusion
I have enjoyed reading HCN and Craig Childs’ writing over the years — until now (HCN, 2/21/11). As a high school librarian in Kayenta, Ariz., on the Navajo Nation, I often reach for an issue of HCN when a student isn’t reading. Students are proud to see tribal topics being covered and discussed in such […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Kudos, times two
Thanks for two superb articles: Craig Childs’ essay, “Ghosts, walking,” and Jim Stiles’ opinion piece, “Words that reverberate, words of hate” (HCN, 2/21/11). The former elegantly evokes the emotions canyon country kindles, while Stiles reminds us that it takes two poles to create polarization. We all need to be able to sit in between and […]