When I lived in southern Alaska, everything revolved around the ocean. Our island was reachable only by plane or boat, and you couldn’t get anywhere dry or metropolitan without hopping an Alaska Airlines jet. The sea was the only constant in a place that seemed beset by continual change — people moving in and out […]
Learning to live landlocked
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
The limits of memory
Half Broke Horses: A True-Life NovelJeannette Walls288 pages,hardcover: $26.Scribner, 2009. In some respects, Lily Casey Smith, the heroine of Jeannette Walls’ Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, is a classic example of an independent, hardworking Western woman: a rancher, schoolteacher, businesswoman, wife and mother. Lily, however, is in the unique position of being both the […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
The road to community
My husband came in this morning and gave me our latest copy of HCN and said “read this article (‘Ending Hunger’)” (HCN, 1/18/10). I read about Silver City, the backpack program to end hunger and how it evolved, and just marveled at it all. “Yes” to standing at our local food bank and packing bags […]
Posted inRange
Native Farmers and Ranchers
In my last post, I reported some of the results of the USDA’s 2008 Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey which is part of the 2007 Census of Agriculture. The 2007 Census has given us the first good data on Native American farmers. That’s because in prior surveys the USDA treated reservations as if they were […]
Posted inBlog
Environmental harmony
“Environmental justice” is a pleasant euphemism for racism. Just as we couched the fight for racial equality during the 1960s comfortably under the guise of civil rights, today we continue to deny our culpability in a bad situation with semantics. In 1988 when a Harlem neighborhood was targeted for the ill-advised location of a sewage […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Witches and rifles
COLORADO Should the Urantians face persecution for their religious beliefs, they could always consider buying real estate in another part of the West, namely Colorado Springs. There, the U.S. Air Force Academy has set aside an outdoor worshipping area for “Pagans, Wiccans, Druids and other Earth-centered believers,” according to the Associated Press. The academy has […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
The squeal of silence
Alone in a cabin, a writer finds that silence is more than the absence of noise
Posted inWotr
Those are our buffalo, pardner (CON)
The buffalo skull that adorns the Montana state quarter is supposed to honor a majestic animal. In truth, it more accurately stands for the state’s abysmal treatment of these icons of the West. Over the years, thousands of bison leaving Yellowstone National Park have been hazed and killed on the grounds they might be diseased […]
Posted inWotr
Yellowstone bison win a temporary home (PRO)
Sometime soon, a stock truck will pull alongside a prison-like fence in the upper Yellowstone River valley of Montana. Moments later, a gate will open and dozens of Yellowstone National Park bison will be herded like cattle onto the truck, just like some 1,400 of their wild brethren back in the bleak winter of 2007-08. […]
Posted inRay
Understanding an oil group
In 1995, during one of the never-ending controversies about federal management of oil and gas drilling, a prominent Western industry group made a radical suggestion. The group — the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States or IPAMS for short — called for the end of federal land. Diemer True, a Wyoming oil baron representing IPAMS, […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
AZ End-o’-days
The Divine Administration’s headquarters sits on 165 acres in the Santa Cruz River valley south of Tucson. There, according to the Arizona Republic, Gabriel of Urantia oversees a religious order of about 100 followers, who believe that Adam and Eve were aliens placed on Earth – or Urantia – 38,000 years ago to help earthlings […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
Supreme beings
After gutting campaign finance, the high court may go after the Commerce Clause
Posted inBlog
Wilderness environmentalism
The environmental movement’s most singular and stunning achievement is the introduction into human history of an awareness of and care for other animals and ecosystems beyond human needs. The refusal to reduce the earth to a storehouse of resources, the insistence on the value of whales beyond meat and redwoods beyond lumber, the love of […]
Posted inBlog
“Messy and unstructured, relentless and global”
Environmental justice law is unlike most other areas of the law. It may not even be amenable to definition as a single, discrete field of practice. Instead, environmental justice lawyering is as close as we come to modern-day alchemy: lawyers work in alliance with communities to summon forth justice from a shifting patchwork of unfavorable […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
The paradoxical call of the wild
Dogs Vamped by She Wolves Are Leaving Homes. This was a headline that ran — not on the cover of Cosmo, describing some new coupling trend between more-than-foxy older women and ugly younger guys — but in Western newspapers in 1924. It was meant literally, and it gives insight into the battle against wolves that […]
Posted inGoat
Rubber Slugs and iPhones
Big news for anyone who’s ever gone sprinting and hollering through the woods after the disappearing rear of an enterprising black bear: We’ve now got a scientific assessment of bear hazing. Rachel Mazur, of Sequoia National Park, has a paper in last month’s Journal of Wildlife Management on what the National Park Service likes to […]
Posted inRange
It’s time to put aside the fairytales
It’s tough being a wolf these days. Despite barely having recovered from being indiscriminately hunted to near extinction during the last century, wolves continue to face the rampant persecution and vitriol of yesteryear from legislators, corporations, citizens and even state and federal governments. Most recently, Utah’s Senate has passed a bill that (if enacted) would make […]