Tony Hillerman died at age 83 in an Albuquerque hospital this week, succumbing to pulmonary failure after surviving two heart attacks, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis – none of which stopped him from writing (his last novel was published in 2006). His mysteries portrayed the beauty and desolation of the Four Corners area and featured two […]
Goodbye, Tony Hillerman
Posted inWotr
Think again before going nuclear
Both major candidates for president are effusive in their praise of alternative ways of producing energy, and their lists of how to go green usually include nuclear power. John McCain’s energy plan calls for 45 new nuclear power plants. Barack Obama is less enthused; he says he’d go forward only if the problems of nuclear […]
Posted inGoat
Obama gun ban redux
Barack Obama may not be the most pro-gun candidate ever to run for president, but he’s not a raging gun-control fanatic, either. His official website states that “Barack Obama believes the Second Amendment creates an individual right, and he respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms.” Even if he were anti-gun, his sway […]
Posted inGoat
Repub rift deepens
Back when he was a Colorado congressman, we thought Republican Scott McInnis was pretty darned conservative. And he was. But it turns out he’s still more moderate than the folks that are taking over his party. He recently said that, had he stayed in the race for Colorado’s open U.S. Senate seat, he could have […]
Posted inWotr
Pushed to the wall, we can power down
We seem to learn hard lessons about energy scarcity only when something big and unexpected happens. That was definitely the case this summer in Juneau, Alaska, when avalanches suddenly destroyed our power supply and threw our community headlong into an experiment in conservation. The avalanches, released 40 miles south of Juneau on April 16, were […]
Posted inGoat
Vote early, if not often
For quite a while, I resisted the temptations of “early voting” or “voting by mail,” and remained steadfast in my preference for voting the old-fashioned way: at my precinct on Election Day. It made me feel something like the way I felt when I attended church as a kid, that I was joining others in […]
Posted inWotr
Homecoming
On the wall of our cow camp bunkhouse in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming hangs a little board on which somebody scratched the words: “If you’re lucky enough to be in the mountains, you’re lucky enough.” This week, I’m lucky enough to be among the West’s ranchers whose fall calendar includes gathering cattle from high […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2008: Prophets and politics
Living with trees
Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connections to TreesNalini M. Nadkarni336 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of California, 2008. Between Earth and Sky sets out to describe the many ways in which trees sustain us. When author Nalini Nadkarni was a girl in suburban Maryland, after school she would climb one of the eight maples in her […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2008: Prophets and politics
Liquid assets
‘Water banks’ help cities weather drought
Posted inOctober 27, 2008: Prophets and politics
Tales from the heartwood
Working the Woods, Working the Sea: An Anthology of Northwest WritingEdited by Finn Wilcox and Jerry Gorsline400 pages, softcover, $22.Empty Bowl, 2008. The second edition of Working the Woods, Working the Sea — the first was published in 1986 — contains a lot of new material, but its core is still fiction, nonfiction and poetry […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2008: Prophets and politics
Midnight in Montana
On a cold night that should have been warm, I pulled off the highway and headed for an historic gentleman’s club to hear the Doug Turman Sextet, a band of no particular renown. This was mining country in northwestern Montana, where unpredictable, bitter weather is a fact of life, outdoors and in. Next to me […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2008: Prophets and politics
Why we all need the Democrats to abandon gun control
At this year’s annual Gun Rights Policy Conference in September, National Rifle Association President Sandy Froman endorsed Arizona Sen. John McCain in the upcoming presidential election. This came as no surprise; the Democrats have long been denounced by the NRA as the anti-Second Amendment party — Nanny-State know-it-alls, Big-Government gun-controllers out of touch with the […]
Posted inGoat
Why is “The Environment” not on the ballot?
In the October 13th edition HCN reviewed western ballot measures. This year there apparently are only a few “environmental” measures on western ballots and at least one of these – the California initiative on “green measures” – is actually anti-environmental. I don’t know about you but I find this troubling. In a national election year […]
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Mormons for Marriage
As noted in Ray Ring’s recent HCN feature, the Mormon church is throwing its impressive institutional — and financial — weight behind the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California. But like any religious group, the Latter-Day Saints are hardly monolithic. The Salt Lake Tribune is reporting (and further reporting) that a growing number of Mormons […]
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Is the Colorado Senate race over?
The National Republican Senatorial Committee will not be buying ads to support Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer during the last week of his campaign in Colorado, presumably because they’ve given up hope for a win. This decision comes after the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee withdrew their funding from the Colorado race, presumably because they don’t […]
Posted inGoat
Energy future: geothermal
Calling it “a model for working together to make decisions about our energy future,” Department of Interior secretary Dirk Kempthorne yesterday unveiled the agency’s plan to open 190 million federally-managed acres to geothermal energy development. Managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the National Forest System, the land sprawls across 12 Western states and […]
Posted inGoat
The polls on Prop 8
Ray Ring’s story on Rexburg, Idaho and how the Mormon Church is throwing huge amounts of money into the campaign to pass the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California is fast on its way to becoming the most commented-upon article in the history of hcn.org. Meanwhile, Proposition 8 is fast on its way to becoming […]
Posted inGoat
Crypto-Jews real?
I first heard of the concept of Crypto-Jews back when I was a college student in Santa Fe during the late 1980s. New Mexico Hispanos had noticed their supposedly Catholic neighbors and relatives engaging in rituals that, it turned out, resembled Jewish religious practices. Some scholars — most notably Stanley Hordes, who was New Mexico’s […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2008: Prophets and politics
Scrimpfest in the West
The posh St. Regis Resort at Monarch Beach in Southern California offers pregnant couples a lavish package vacation called the “Last Hurrah.” But in late September, that moniker might have been better applied to the $440,000 weeklong retreat American International Group held there for some of its top sales agents — less than a week […]