In Alaska, it’s once again time for one of the state’s major rites of spring — the aerial shooting of wolves. In five management areas around the state, Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game has decided that there aren’t enough moose and caribou, and that the answer is to shoot more wolves. In the Fortymile […]
Predator control, Alaska-style
Posted inGoat
Wheatpastin’ the Rez
During the last year or so, a new kind of “graffiti” has been showing up on abandoned buildings, old billboards and rusted out oil tanks on the Navajo Nation. A street artist who goes by the name of Jetsonorama (who sometimes works with another artist, Yote, and No Reservation Required) has been plastering these places […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
Untold tales of the American frontier
Images of the black experience in the West
Posted inGoat
Name that fish
Quah-rah, Ulken, Anchovies, Olthen’, All-Can, Uth-le-chan, Uthulhuns, othlecan, ulichan, fathom-fish, Oulachan, “those little finny swarming beings of the deep,” Oolá-han, uthlecan, ulluchans, Ulachans, oolachan, Hoolakans, Hooligan . . . If this list is any indication, frontiersmen had a hell of a time figuring out what, precisely, to call this thing. In 1856, when Dr. William […]
Posted inBlog
Forged on a Rough Frontier
One thing is certain: High Country News founder Tom Bell wasn’t afraid of poking a finger in someone’s chest. He openly criticized Wyoming’s ranchers and industry and the politicians that looked after them. The state’s pro-development governor, Stanley K. Hathaway, was a frequent target, as were a pair of Casper-area ranchers who shot and poisoned […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
Cutting away from the pack
Keith Allred chats about his run for governor in uber-Republican Idaho … as a Democrat
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
When you carry your home with you, when are you home?
At High Country News, we think a lot about that overused but still relevant term, “a sense of place.” I don’t know exactly what it means, either. But I think it involves knowing that we’re here, rather than, well, over there. And that we understand at least some of the characteristics that make this place […]
Posted inBlog
Location, location, location
Last week, Colorado Governor Bill Ritter announced a preliminary agreement between the state, Xcel Energy, and some of the region’s traditional environmental groups over a plan to reduce air pollution along the Front Range by retrofitting, repowering (with natural gas), and even possibility retiring a number of urban coal-fired power plants. Although we have to […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
Mobile Nation
A motorhome metropolis blooms each year in the Arizona desert.
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
Ewe-haul
About 50 years ago, state wildlife officials decided to try to restore bighorn sheep to Wyoming’s Seminoe Mountains. Between 1958 and 1985, they brought in six new batches — 236 total — from the more prolific Whiskey Mountain herd to the northwest. But the Seminoe herd failed to sustain itself, and by last fall, there […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
Will the wolf survive?
My joy at reading of the wolf’s likely return to Colorado is tempered by the knowledge that the future does not bode well for wildlife in the Southwest: the fastest-growing region of the world’s fourth-fastest-growing nation (HCN, 2/15/10). I remember the melancholy autumn howls of some of the last wolves in Colorado when I was […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
War on people
Prohibition is a sickening horror and the ocean of human wreckage it has left in its wake is almost endless (HCN, 3/1/10). Based on the unalterable proviso that drug use is essentially an unstoppable and ongoing human behavior that has been with us since the dawn of time, any serious reading on the subject of […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
‘Tyranny of the turbine’
I am a farmer in southwest Minnesota, and live very near an intersection of the Northern Border natural gas pipeline and a major electricity transmission line. Three hundred megawatts’-worth of wind turbines have already been installed here, and at least 300 MW more are in the permitting and development stage (HCN, 12/21/09 & 1/4/10). I […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
See you in Spring
In our 22-issue-per-year publishing schedule, we’ll be skipping the next issue. Look for HCN in your mailbox again around April 12, and in the meantime check our Web site, hcn.org, for news and commentary. SMALL-TOWN DISCOVERIESIntern Nick Neely had only been working at High Country News for three weeks when he happened to stroll past […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
Nano-scale activism
Regarding Ray Ring’s article about executive change at large environmental organizations, I understand the “frustration with boards of directors, low pay and constant fund-raising pressure” (HCN, 3/1/10). That’s why I started Community for Sustainable Energy (www.cforse.org) in 2006. I worked with Clean Water Action and an affiliated national network for six years. I started CFORSE […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
More DNA debunking
Kevin Jones was certainly the first person with any kind of authority to step forward and dispute the claim that Everett Ruess’ bones had been found, but Paul Leatherbury should get a bit of credit, too, for locating Ruess’ dental records, which David Roberts of National Geographic Adventure overlooked at the University of Utah special […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
Pulp friction
Crossers Philip Caputo 480 pages, hardcover: $27.95.Knopf, 2009. The personal and political tensions surrounding the U.S.-Mexico border seem like ideal topics for renowned war correspondent, veteran novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Philip Caputo. His seventh novel, however, is the literary equivalent of a popcorn flick. As a meditation on post-9/11 border relations, Crossers relies heavily […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Blazing guns and trails
MONTANAHubris doesn’t begin to define the Livingston, Mont., man who chain-sawed a trail more than a mile long through the Gallatin National Forest. “It became a project,” said Francis Leroy McLain, 60, who also ripped down a fence separating his property from U.S. Forest Service land. “I enjoyed it.” McLain’s illegal trail was more than […]
Posted inGoat
The accidental highway
Glenwood Canyon on the Western Slope of Colorado has been in the news lately, thanks to a big rockslide that happened just after midnight on March 9. The tumbling boulders blocked and damaged a stretch of Interstate 70. It took four days to get the highway open again, just on a limited basis. During the […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
Inspired by nature
Biomimicry inventors tackle environmental problems