Today, Coloradans have a chance today to shape the future of America’s National System of Forests, some 193 million acres of mountains, grasslands, rivers and lakes all across the country. The U.S. Forest Service is hosting more than 30 national town hall meetings to hear, straight from the people who use these lands, why our […]
Hey forest lovers – time to make your voices heard!
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
The Butterfly Sting
How a federal wildlife agent brought down one of the world’s most notorious insect thieves.
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
Our dirty past, our dirty present
Between 1972 and 1977, some 70 photographers set about documenting the American landscape, its environmental problems and its people for the then brand-new Environmental Protection Agency. Last summer, the National Archives and Records Administration began posting those Documerica Project images on Flickr.com in what will be a 15,000-shot collection. But 40 years after the EPA’s […]
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
Nature-for-profit
In the market for a Siberian weasel fur coat? A pair of eel-skin cowboy boots? A Louis Vuitton purse made from ostrich and monitor lizard skin? Look no further than lonestaronline.com. In February, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began an eBay-style rolling auction of some 300,000 (HOT! NEW!) items from its National Wildlife Property […]
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
A poacher’s menagerie
Highlights from wildlife busts on the Western front
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
The harsh truths of Bowden
Charles Bowden is a wonderful, as well as provocative, writer (HCN, 3/1/10). He has a way of serving up the truth so it slaps you in the face. I’m not sure any magazine but High Country News would have the guts to print this story as is. Maybe you would be willing to reprint something […]
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
Spring visitors
Here in Paonia, Colo., March brought us 60-degree days and 20-degree days, glorious sunshine and freezing sleet — sometimes during the same half-hour. Zac and Lisa Tuthill stopped by on one of the wet, snowy days, on their way home from Moab to Laramie, Wyo., where she’s a psychotherapist and he’s studying civil engineering. A […]
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
Saving the U.S. Forest Service
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & the Fire That Saved AmericaTimothy Egan336 pages, hardcover: $27. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. The United States of America leaped into the 20th century with a surfeit of natural resources and a flamboyant leader. Early in his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt proposed a radical idea: Set aside and protect certain parts […]
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
Out of the cubicle, into the canyon
Wilderness provides consolation after a layoff.
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
“Just journalism or hegemonic narrative?”
Thank you for doing a series on environmental justice (HCN, 2/1/10). The successes of the environmental justice movement stand undeniably. After reading the first article in the “Green Justice” series, though, I felt confused and puzzled by your framing of the EJ movement, one of its national leaders, and those who have worked and continue […]
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
It’s the population, stupid — part II
I am sorry that Charles Bowden, in “The War Next Door,” does not mention Mexico’s population growth among the causes of Mexican migration into the United States (HCN, 3/1/10). It is, he says, “a natural shift of a species.” Perhaps, but it is also a case of the mushrooming of a people. Since I was […]
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
It’s the population, stupid — part I
Thanks for Charles Bowden’s grim but clear-eyed view of events along the border and Jonathan Thompson’s editorial relating them to too many people and too much consumption (HCN, 3/1/10). There’s no doubt that our addiction to consumption creates social and environmental costs, but I have a quibble regarding Thompson’s statement that it is “the most […]
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
A once and future abundance
The Living Shore: Rediscovering a Lost World Rowan Jacobsen 176 pages, hardcover: $20. Bloomsbury USA, 2009. The Olympia oyster — small, slow-growing, sensitive to heat and cold, copper in color and taste — is a rarity among shellfish. Yet this fussy bivalve, the West Coast’s only native oyster, once carpeted intertidal areas from Alaska to […]
Posted inRange
Climate Friendly National Parks
National parks across the country, including California’s desert national parks like the Mojave National Preserve, Joshua Tree National Park, and Death Valley National Park have begun developing action plans to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as part of the National Park Service Climate Friendly Parks Program. The Climate Friendly Parks Program helps individual parks reduce […]
Posted inRange
HCN Reader Photo: Hopeful
When I first saw this image thumbnail in our Flickr pool, I couldn’t really tell what it was. I enlarged it for further examination, and found a beautifully-composed image with a strong message and a lovely title: “Hopeful.” Add your photos to our Flickr group and be sure to check out our upcoming photo contests.
Posted inBlog
An age-old story of the high cost of coal
The news from Appalachia coal country, where at least 25 miners died and four more remain missing in a huge underground coalmine explosion earlier this week, is unimaginably grim. Not since 1984, when 27 perished in a fire at Emery Mining Corporation’s Orangeville, Utah, mine have so many died in a mine accident. It’s even […]
Posted inGoat
The Trouble with Wilbur
There’s nothing like a feral pig to blur the line between free food and pest management. Days after the Arizona Daily Star published a map showing feral pig populations around the state (along with a note that Arizona doesn’t require licenses for hunting feral pigs), a dozen hunting parties converged on one of the hot […]
Posted inWotr
Sometimes water can cost way too much
The multibillion dollar proposal by the aptly named Aaron Million to pump water from the Green River in Wyoming, and then pipe it to the Front Range of Colorado by way of a privately funded project he calls the Regional Watershed Supply Project, may never overcome the many objections to it. But if it does, […]
