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 […]
Pulp friction
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
Posted inGoat
Ladybugs and Lear
I ran into an article today about “a harbinger of bad insulation . . . good fortune and an early spring,” which stirred a memory from a few years ago, an episode out of doors. On a Friday in September, three friends and I drove east from Reno on I-80 into the Nevada desert to […]
Posted inBlog
The Front Line of Climate Justice
Last December in Copenhagen, corporate heads of state failed to make the necessary agreements to save us from ourselves by agreeing to cap greenhouse gas emissions. If we learned anything from the recent national healthcare reform debate, it’s that we can’t count on the U.S. Congress either given the tens of millions of dollars and […]
Posted inWotr
When a scientist becomes an activist
In my office, I have a picture of a man testifying to Congress. He is haggard, with the look of someone under great strain. Behind him, engraved on the wall, is a quote from the book of Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” The man in the picture is NASA climatologist James […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2010: Mobile Nation
East to the West
A writer contemplates the beginning of the West
Posted inBlog
The Crusade Continues
“Dear Mr. Bell: “I travel so much that I’m always behind in my reading. So you can well have imagined my surprise when I found out you were going to fold the paper. Well, Hell man, I don’t always agree with you, but for God’s sake let’s keep the paper going for awhile yet. Enclosed […]
Posted inGoat
All aboard the coal train
Very little is certain for ol’ King Coal these days. The numbers weren’t pretty last year. Coal production was down almost 8 percent in 2009, and consumption fell even further. Environmentalists are still fighting new coal-fired power plants tooth and nail—and winning. And the future of federal carbon regulation, which could have major implications for […]
Posted inRange
Sage Grouse Must Wait
Ever spent hours waiting for assistance in a doctor’s office while other, more urgent patients were seen first? Then you can imagine how some of us feel about Friday’s decision to leave the sage grouse hanging about in the waiting room. On March 5, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) concluded that the sage grouse, […]
Posted inBlog
Tackling environmental justice on the Front Range
Two years ago I relocated to Denver and inherited from a friend what might possibly be the best job in the world – the directorship of the University of Denver’s Environmental Law Clinic. In the two decades before my arrival, the clinic had established an impeccable reputation for its work fighting to protect endangered species […]
Posted inGoat
Politics and currency
H.L. Mencken once observed that it would have been worth losing the Civil War in order not to have Ulysses S. Grant as president. The reputation of Grant’s presidency, 1869-77, has improved since Mencken’s day, but apparently not enough. Now there’s a bill introduced in Congress to replace his picture on the $50 bill, a […]
Posted inRange
Feinstein and Westlands – who’s running whom?
There has been an interesting development in the ongoing story of Big Ag v fish in the Great Central Valley of California. Back in January HCN featured an article by Matt Jenkins on that conflict and in particular on the part played by the powerful corporate farmers of the Westlands Water District on the West […]
Posted inGoat
No ESA for sage grouse
You might be all in a tizzy about whether Avatar or Hurt Locker will win the big Oscar on Sunday. But a lot of folks in the Interior West — and enviro wonks from all over — were focused this week on a much bigger announcement: Will the greater sage grouse get federal protection under […]
Posted inBlog
What Tom Bell Had to Say
Passionate, feisty, courageous, “just another nutty prophet of doom” — all have been used to describe Tom Bell, the Wyoming rancher and wildlife biologist who founded High Country News in 1970. High Country News’ first years were tumultuous as Bell struggled to keep it alive. Twice, he threw away the paste-up sheets for the next […]
