In my bluish precinct in thoroughly red Idaho, we vote at the dump. We troop to a doublewide manufactured home that serves as the landfill office, out by the edge of the Caribou National Forest. “Saves the middleman,” my late husband liked to say. Our whole county makes a blue showing in most elections, thanks […]
Voting at the dump
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
A house like a buffalo
A carpenter muses on dismantling and recycling tumbledown buildings
Posted inWotr
When voting, listen to the grass
When I say I’m from the High Plains, people often tell me how bored they were on their last drive through eastern Colorado or Kansas. I agree. The Plains are boring now that most of the land has been farmed into a drab patchwork of corn, soybeans and wheat. But no land was ever as […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Once I caught a fish thi-i-i-i-i-s big
UTAH There he was, an eight-point buck, stranded on a narrow ledge five feet above Lake Powell. What could two law enforcement officers — one from Utah, the other from the Glen Canyon National Monument — do? They didn’t want to tranquilize the mule deer, so after making it leap into the water, the two […]
Posted inRange
Denver mayor accused of trashing rural residents
The Colorado governor’s race took another twist last week with the front-runner and Democratic candidate, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, getting accused of “trashing” rural residents. The accusation came from his principal challenger, former GOP congressman Tom Tancredo, who entered the race in August as the nominee of the American Constitution Party. The Republican candidate, Dan […]
Posted inBlog
Obama admin speaks on diversifying the NPS
Boldness hasn’t been an appropriate adjective for the Obama Admistration’s approach on environmental issues. The White House seems better known in green circles for allowing Van Jones to be squeezed out of a job, failing to take aggressive strides on passing a climate bill, lifting a moratorium on oil drilling, lowballing information about the extent […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
How I ran for a U.S. Senate seat, and what I learned
Investigative reporter John Dougherty writes about his surprising Arizona campaign
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Writing in tradition
From the HilltopToni Jensen179 pages, softcover: $19.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2010. In From the Hilltop, her first short story collection, Toni Jensen relies on her Métis heritage (a mixed Indian and European cultural group from Canada and the Northern U.S.) to explore contemporary Indian life off the reservation. It is not surprising that her writing […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Solar spree
In early October, the Interior Department gave its blessing to three solar energy projects in California’s sun-saturated Mojave Desert and Imperial Valley, and one in the Nevada desert. The approvals — the first ever on federal public land — came five years after the agency opened public deserts in the Southwest to solar development. A […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Hello, and goodbye
High Country News welcomes new assistant editor Cally Carswell. Cally has spent the last nine months here as a multimedia fellow after completing an internship; now, she’ll continue her excellent work reporting and writing stories, editing articles, and producing video and audio as a permanent staff member. Born in New Mexico but raised in Chicago, […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
A raw-edged memoir
Raw Edges: A MemoirPhyllis Barber280 pages, hardcover: $26.95.University of Nevada Press, 2010. All memoirs risk provoking the reader’s question: What’s so important about your life, anyway? Why should we bother to read a whole book about it? Nevada author Phyllis Barber tries to answer that question in her second autobiography, Raw Edges: “While this search […]
Posted inBlog
Journo conference highlights Native American issues
Editors Note: This piece is cross posted from Mother Earth Journal, where reporter Terri Hansen writes about indigenous people and the environment. A drive from Portland’s emerald green landscape took me into the Columbia River Gorge and the reds, golds and browns of autumn in eastern Oregon and Washington, through the panhandle of Idaho then […]
Posted inGoat
Squeezing trees
The new data show forest carbon storage by region, with forests in the 11 Western states accounting for almost a third of the nation’s total. Forests in the West reach two extremes. Oregon, Washington, and southeast Alaska forests store the most carbon per acre of anywhere in the U.S., while those in Arizona, Nevada, New […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Microclimates, macro problem
Ideas for coping with climate change are becoming ever more creative. This summer, a group of Peruvian villagers began painting their local mountain peaks white. The glaciers that once covered the peaks have melted, taking with them the villagers’ water supply. In response, Peruvian inventor Eduardo Gold came up with a plan to slop a […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Love thy neighbor
ARIZONA You know times are tough in Phoenix when more than 15,000 people cram into McDonald’s restaurants to apply for one of 800 to 1,000 jobs, all of them part-time and most of them minimum wage. The Arizona Republic says the success of McDonald’s new McCafe line of smoothies and frappés has spurred the restaurant […]
Posted inBlog
Mining in the modern West
As I began writing this blog post, headlines were proclaiming the triumphant rescue of the thirty three Chilean miners who were trapped in the San Jose mine for seventy days. While the men are sure to experience after-effects of their traumatic ordeal in the weeks and months to come, they are far luckier than the […]
Posted inBlog
First nations continue tar sands pushback
George Poitras of the Mikisew Cree First Nation – a tribal nation whose traditional homeland lies downstream from Canada’s Athabascan tar sands – articulated the devastating impacts of oil development on traditional peoples when he said, “if we don’t have land and we don’t have anywhere to carry out our traditional lifestyles, we lose who […]
Posted inRange
Dredging Western rivers for gold
An item in the October 11th edition’s “Heard around the West” reported on an influx of “gold miners” on Southern Oregon’s Rogue River. But the article did not explain why so many miners are on the Rogue now. The vast majority of these “miners” do not make a living mining. Rather they dredge in the […]