Nancy Sienko became Colorado’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission field office director three years ago, in the middle of a surge of discrimination charges. While job-based discrimination complaints grew by 17 percent in the United States in the past five years, the caseload in Colorado exploded by 46 percent in the same time period. Sienko, with […]
Colorado’s job bias complaints soar
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
The Universe on Blacktop
A family dumpster-dives for cash and satisfaction.
Posted inWotr
Let them eat copper
I am sitting on the sun-blasted South Rim of the Grand Canyon, tracking condors through binoculars and trying to read the numbers on their wing tags as they dip and wobble above and below me. Next to me is Elaine Leslie, the heroic National Park Service biologist who never gave up on condors, even when […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
Changeable weather
The West’s environmental movement got buffeted by strong late-winter winds, both good and ill. First, President Barack Obama has targeted the federal government’s 22-year-old multibillion-dollar effort to bury nuclear waste in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. He vowed to devise “a new strategy” on dealing with nuclear waste, while seeking little money for Yucca Mountain in his […]
Posted inWotr
Calling Hollywood to run the West
Macho Hollywood actor Val Kilmer has starred in more than 40 movies, often playing tough cops and Western gunfighters. He’s probably best known for playing the 1995 Batman and punching out a villain called The Riddler. Now Kilmer wants to become a political hero by running for the governorship of New Mexico. Don’t laugh too […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
Slumdog U.S.A.
In recent months, the big-screen blockbuster love story, Slumdog Millionaire, has brought images of a ramshackle Mumbai slum to millions of American viewers. Although the slum may have been a bit prettified, it did the trick: Moviegoers were shocked, offended and deeply moved by how the poor of other nations live. The movie’s popularity has […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
Raising cows — and kids — in the West
The Family Ranch: Land, Children, and Tradition in the American WestLinda Hussa, photographs by Madeleine Graham Blake272 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of Nevada Press, 2009. The families described in The Family Ranch: Land, Children, and Tradition in the American West are traditional in that they are not “traditional” at all: One mother is single, and […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
History viewed through gunsights
Famous Firearms of the Old West: From Wild Bill Hickok’s Colt Revolvers to Geronimo’s Winchester, Twelve Guns That Shaped Our HistoryHal Herring189 pages, hardcover: $24.95. TwoDot/Globe Pequot Press, 2008. Chief Joseph was carrying a lever-action Model 1866 Winchester rifle that fired .44 Rimfire cartridges when he led the Nez Perce against the U.S. Cavalry […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
Tarp Nation
Squatter villages arise from the ashes of the West’s booms and busts
Posted inGoat
Paper exercise or real progress?
In words typical of claims by environmental organizations, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) recently trumpeted “a big step forward for polar bear protection” when the Bush Administration agreed to designate critical habitat for the Polar Bear as part of a settlement with the group and its allies (Nature’s Voice, Jan/Feb 2009). Based on my […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
See you in April!
Last summer, we switched to a 22-issue-per-year publishing schedule; that means we skip an issue four times a year. Look for the next HCN to hit your mailbox around April 13 — now you’ll have more spare time to work on your taxes. Water on the BrainFor all of you folks who love to speculate […]
Posted inRay
Enviros suffer first major setback in Obama era
The environmental movement has just fallen short of a major goal, for the first time in the new green-trending era of President Barack Obama and the ramped-up Democrats in Congress. The stakes of this national battle are mostly on Western ground. It’s the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 — the biggest public lands […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
7-Eleven: the Final Frontier
Who was that masked man? Wearing a black mask, a black jacket and jeans, a man wielding what appeared to be a Klingon sword held up two convenience stores in Colorado Springs recently. According to a surveillance camera, the first 7-Eleven clerk handed over some money at 1:50 a.m. A half-hour later, the clerk at […]
Posted inGoat
Restorationists gather in Santa Cruz
Last week I attended the 27th annual conference of the Salmonid Restoration Federation. Restoration scientists, restoration technicians and young people enrolled in the California Conservation Corps gathered in Santa Cruz, California for four days of field trips, plenary addresses and workshops which showcased watershed and salmon restoration programs and projects from throughout California. You can […]
Posted inGoat
The Native health gap
Despite the skyrocketing cost of healthcare, Americans are enjoying longer lifespans, and fewer children are dying in infancy. Unless they’re Native American, that is. The numbers for Washington state, as reported in the Seattle P-I, are shocking: A recent state Department of Health report showed that the march against cancer, heart disease and infant mortality […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bullets, bomb threats, cowgirls and the blues
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which may soon be mourned as a shuttered daily, attracted top-drawer talent in the mid-’70s, writes Jean Godden in Crosscut.com. Novelist Tom Robbins was on staff, as was legendary science-fiction writer Frank Herbert, creator of the Dune series. During that tumultuous decade, bomb threats became routine and there were regular anti-war demonstrations […]
Posted inWotr
Would you want to live near a wind farm?
If there’s an iconic image of the new push for domestic green energy, it’s the wind turbine photographed against a luminous horizon. Its sleek aerodynamic blades turn silently and steadily, providing happy Americans with clean, dependable energy. But there’s another image that’s becoming increasingly associated with wind power, and that’s its angry next-door neighbors. In […]
