Addicts get back to the land in northern New Mexico
Digging deep
Posted inArticles
Slideshow: Back to the garden
Recovering addicts find roots in the soil of New Mexico
Posted inGoat
Grabbed my shovel and I went to the mine
Here’s one more addition to the list of Western industries being affected by the economic downturn: coal. Peabody Energy — the world’s biggest coal company, made famous as the villain in the John Prine song “Paradise” — has announced that it is freezing all hiring at its three Wyoming coal mines. The company said in […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bicyclists get a bailout break.
Starting in January, you can get paid to ride your bicycle to work. It’s all thanks to the $700 billion bailout passed by Congress to goose our failing economy back to productivity. Workers who use their bikes as primary transportation to and from their jobs will be eligible for $20 a month from their employers. […]
Posted inWotr
How to survive the lean times
In 1976, circumstances beyond my control forced me into temporary homelessness. For six months, I alternated between relying on the couches of friends and camping out in my car. With the proper gear, it’s surprising how well you can fend for yourself. Of course, it helps to live in a region of the country with […]
Posted inNovember 21, 2008: Ultimate solution?
Real work
Depending on your perspective, my partner Laurie’s resume is either impressive or disturbing. In her 20s, she worked as a wilderness ranger, hiking miles with a too-heavy pack, digging drain dips and toilet holes. In her 30s, she worked on a trail crew, chopping roots, sawing logs, clearing brush. Nowadays she works in an historic […]
Posted inGoat
Dirt poor, dirt rich
When I was in high school, my history teacher assigned each member of my class to interview someone who had lived through the Great Depression to better understand how life had changed during that time. I chose to interview my grandmother, who was 20 in 1929 when the stock market crashed. I anticipated tales of […]
Posted inWotr
A chance to do it right in the West
The 2008 election took the West another big step down the path of political realignment that has been underway since the turn of the century. By 2000, the Rocky Mountain West had become essentially a one-party region. All eight of its governors were Republicans, as were 13 of its 16 senators. In the 2000 election, […]
Posted inWotr
The persistence of bigotry, Western-style
Q: What’s Barack Obama’s new Chinese name?A: Coon Soon Die. Work on it a little bit. You’ll get it. I got it while I was eating eggs over-medium, hashbrowns and bacon at a restaurant in Hotchkiss, a town of less than 2,000 people in western Colorado. The waitress who was pouring coffee asked who we […]
Posted inDecember 8, 2008: Out in the cold
Burn it, bit by bit
In recent years, we have watched the lodgepole pines of the Fraser Valley and many other parts of Colorado succumb to the pine beetle’s voracious appetite (HCN, 11/10/08). This has resulted in a tinderbox, just waiting for the right conditions to all go up in flames. I have no faith that timber companies would do […]
Posted inDecember 8, 2008: Out in the cold
The carbon-go-round
I have a hard time believing that industrial logging practices will combat global warming, as Tom Bonnicksen is so fond of advocating (HCN, 11/10/08). In order to seriously and honestly consider such a proposal, one needs to have a full and accurate accounting of the tremendous amount of carbon that is released by the entire […]
Posted inDecember 8, 2008: Out in the cold
Awww …
The only reason that cattle and sheep producers can really use to justify their position –– that the only good wolf is a dead one –– is that the wolf and other large predators endanger a traditional way of life in the West (HCN, 11/10/08). The actual contribution of the Rocky Mountain area to national […]
Posted inDecember 8, 2008: Out in the cold
Wolves, ranchers and public lands
The recovery of the gray wolf is clearly a political issue, not a biological issue. Given this fact, how can Daniel Glick write nearly 4,000 words on the relationship of Westerners with Canis lupus without mentioning the words “public lands” (HCN, 11/10/08)? The cattle ranchers, sheep ranchers and outfitters highlighted in this article all make […]
Posted inDecember 8, 2008: Out in the cold
Kitsching the West
Regarding the “Weekend Westerner” article, the hyper-romanticized version of the American West’s history by Germans is well known (HCN, 11/24/08). Being Arthur Kruse’s age, I well remember my older brother reading Karl May novels, and playing Indians-and-Cowboys in the mid-’40s. We grew up during the war near Darmstadt, Germany, a city 85 percent destroyed during […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Outdoor slacking still takes work
Back-of-the-beyond recreation was recently celebrated by a magazine called InsideOutside in its 10-year anniversary issue. The southwestern Colorado publication featured dozens of grassroots writers who shared stories about how they worked as little as possible in order to ski, snowboard, hike, fish, hunt, bike, climb or otherwise hang out. But as Luke Auld-Thomas recalled, living […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
A new definition of pluck
A woman in Prescott, Ariz., deserves a prize for pluck: She ran a mile with a fox firmly fastened to her arm. The fox had run out and bitten the jogger in the foot, reports the Associated Press, and when the woman grabbed it by the neck, it squirmed and bit her arm. Wanting the […]
Posted inWotr
We’re in this together
There is a house in Rawlins, Wyo., that won’t sell. It’s a bargain, too, at $135,000. In fact, there are 43 houses in Rawlins selling for under $150,000. This is a booming energy town with a housing shortage. People in Rawlins have money. Wyoming has, in fact, the fastest growing median household income of any […]
Posted inGoat
Obama and public lands
Even though the West was a key battleground in the 2008 presidential election, our issues — public lands, water, endangered species, etc. — didn’t get a lot of attention from either candidate. And for the past three months, the economy has dominated the news. But our issues do appear in this interesting piece by Les […]
Posted inGoat
Look on the bright side
We have the technology to generate electricity from renewable resources, but most of our machines, from blow driers to conveyor belts, continue to run on coal. That’s because it is easier to create renewable energy than to transport it. Rigging a new power line from, say, a remote Nevada wind farm to a population center […]
Posted inNovember 21, 2008: Ultimate solution?
Desperate measures
With water shortages a constant, Westerners are looking at wacky (and not so wacky) ways to squeeze more water out of the sky and land.