The eyes of the world — or at least the NBC prime-time audience — are on Vancouver as that Canadian city hosts the Winter Olympics. For Coloradans, it’s a reminder of our state’s peculiar status as the only world’s only place that was awarded the Winter Olympics, but turned them down . […]
When Colorado just said No
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
Cross(border) winds
California looks to Mexico for renewable energy projects
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
Water is for fighting
The article on the Westlands Water District is on the whole a good review of the problems arising from conflicting demands on a limited resource (HCN, 1/18/10). However, the balance between viewpoints is skewed in favor of agricultural interests by omitting the role of the Bureau of Reclamation, which encouraged agribusiness by failing to enforce […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
Visitors, after hours
It’s been cold, snowy and oddly humid here in Paonia, Colo., but a few intrepid souls still ventured out to visit us. Longtime subscribers Dave Morgan and Bobbie Sumberg dropped by our office while on a trip from their home in Santa Fe, N.M. Unfortunately, by the time they reached HCN, we’d already closed for […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
Quicksilver questions
The subject of mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants and cement plants has always been fraught with uncertainties (HCN, 1/18/10). Industry influence at the congressional level often got transferred down as pressure on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Stephen Johnson, Bush’s administrator of the EPA, and his deputy, Marcus Peacock, seemed intent on reducing EPA’s […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
One long haul
On Jan. 7, a train hauled 136 containers of uranium tailings away from the old Atlas mill site along the Colorado River just north of Moab, Utah — the biggest load since the colossal cleanup effort began last May. Twice a day, locomotives chug off from a siding near the 439-acre site (130 acres of […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
Fast and loose with facts
Ed Marston’s piece on Douglas Brinkley’s The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America can hardly be called a “review” (HCN, 1/18/10). Marston’s article simply rehearses — much more succinctly than Brinkley’s 900-plus pages — the life and political accomplishments of an amazing American leader. What Marston fails to do, is to evaluate […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
A dark and disjointed journey
Day out of DaysSam Shepard304 pages, hardcover: $24.95.Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. The short stories in Day out of Days, Sam Shepard’s new collection, have an unhinged, out-there appeal, reflecting their eclectic, mostly Western settings. Some individual stories are even named after their locations: “Williams, Arizona,” for one, and “Cracker Barrel Men’s Room (Highway 90 West).” […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
A nature lover’s bucket list
Lately, I’ve been struggling to stay positive about the climate. It’s not easy. The 190 nations at the November summit in Copenhagen failed to reach agreement on greenhouse gases, and Congress seems determined to avoid the issue. Worst of all, polls show cooling anxiety about climate change among Americans; these days, we are too consumed […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
Learning to live landlocked
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 […]
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. […]