“To feel at home, stay at home.”– Clifton Fadiman, writer and radio personality Simple words, but I’ve taken them to heart. So have a lot of Westerners. The crummy economy and the “keep-it-local” movement have kept many of us from roaming as much as we usually do. One friend of mine went so far as […]
“To feel at home, stay at home.”
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Confronting life’s essentials
Every so often, I long to relocate to a metropolis far from my sleepy Oregon hometown and my third of an acre of Douglas firs and screech owls. “Oh, Melissa,” chides a friend used to these yearnings. “Just take a vacation and move your couch.” The desire for change entices us. Those who live in […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Bordering on injustice
A Glass of WaterJimmy Santiago Baca240 pages, hardcover: $23.Grove Press, 2009. The largest kindnesses sometimes come in the smallest forms. The title of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s first novel, A Glass of Water, is a nod to one such kindness. “Thirst (is) master,” he writes of the parching conditions migrant farmworkers endure. Baca, an Apache/Chicano memoirist, […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Book lust, Western-style
This fall looks to be one of the best in a while for new book releases. 2008 was a disastrous year for the publishing industry (as it was for many others), and publishers are now hoping for redemption with a strong fall lineup. Big-hit writers like Pat Conroy, J.M. Coetzee, Alice Munro, Wally Lamb, Richard […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Beef: It (should be) what’s for dinner
The reference in Andrea Appleton’s review of Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (HCN, 8/03/09) to the “soil erosion and desertification intensive grazing can cause” is technically and ecologically incorrect. Modern, progressive ranchers follow a management scheme called intensive grazing that results in increasing the organic content of the soil, […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
A win for the gipper?
Though there has been widespread praise in some quarters, I find it difficult to muster much enthusiasm for Sen. Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act described in “Taking Control of the Machine” (HCN, 7/20/09). Perhaps a historical anecdote will help explain. In 1988, both houses of Congress passed a Montana wilderness bill that protected 1.4 […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
A life unwound
Blame By Michelle Huneven 304 pages, hardcover: $25.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Patsy MacLemoore is a hard-partying 28-year-old who managed to earn a Ph.D. from Berkeley but drank herself out of the running for the most prestigious jobs, landing at a middling college in Pasadena, Calif. It’s the spring of 1981 in Michelle Huneven’s latest […]
Posted inRange
Vilsack calls for “change”
In his first major speech on forest policy, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack laid out the Obama Administration’s plans for managing national forests and grasslands that total 193 million acres (an area the size of Texas!) much of it in the West. Vilsack also emphasized wildfire management in an era when the size of wildfires and […]
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Indian Country & health care reform
Will ‘poor old grandma’ redefine this debate? You hear a lot about grandma now that Congress is back to work on health care reform legislation. “Poor old grandma” is a reason opponents say they will fight health care reform. Grandma will lose services, her Medicare will be less than it is, and some bureaucrat far […]
Posted inGoat
The Cheney International Center
Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne donated about $3.5 million to the University of Wyoming, and in return UW named a 20,000-square-foot center in Cheney’s honor. The Cheney International Center will house the university’s international programs, which include the study of global economic systems, international culture and social issues, international development and […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Timothy Egan’s Western odyssey
A talk with the author of five books about the West
Posted inRay
Obama enviros now total 34
The Obama administration has now enlisted at least 34 people who have direct ties to environmental groups or clear leanings in that direction. That’s my running count of the enviros nominated or appointed to top jobs in federal agencies and the White House. The latest is Harris Sherman, executive director of the Colorado Department of […]
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Victorious in Victor
Students and teachers at the Teton Valley Community School in Victor, Idaho, are heading back to school with a new spring in their step. That’s because their design won the 2009 Open Architecture Challenge: Classroom–a competition hosted by Architecture for Humanity, selected from more than 400 qualified entries from over 65 countries, which I blogged […]
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Phenology and the Mojave Desert
Last spring I found myself transfixed by the brilliant crimson petals of a Mojave mound cactus and the seemingly endless procession of bee pollinators that crept into its petals. Flowers and fruit are pleasing to the eye, so it’s no wonder that in the Mojave Desert they attract bees and also many wildflower enthusiasts. But […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Coming home to the cosmos
A wandering meteor-chaser puts down roots
Posted inGoat
Medic!
Picture yourself on the front lines of a massive wildfire — soot smeared into the creases of your face, your clothes stiff and itchy with days-old sweat, your palms blistered from grubbing a fire line through duff and brush with a Pulaski. What dangers might you face? Falling snags? A fire sweeping uphill faster than […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
A conversation with Michelle Nijhuis
Photos and an interview with the author of “Township 13 South, Range 92 West, Section 35”
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Township 13 South, Range 92 West, Section 35
A home of mysteries and restless souls
Posted inGoat
It Happened in the Shrubbery
Last weekend, as the Station wildfire on the northern edge of urban Los Angeles doubled, and doubled, and then doubled again – it has now grown to 250 square miles in the Angeles National Forest – I sat down to re-read “Fire Management of California Shrubland Landscapes” by Jon E. Keeley of the U.S. Geological […]