The Senate Finance Committee has come up with a new bill which would extend the Secure Rural Schools Act. Secure Rural Schools, enacted in 2000, was a response to the decline in logging in the 1990s. Counties that once depended on a share of the timber profits from their federal lands saw their budgets plummet […]
Out of the woods?
Posted inGoat
As goes the Red Planet, so goes the West?
NASA just gave the University of Colorado at Boulder its largest research contract ever – to lead the mission that will launch an orbiting probe to Mars in 2013. The benefits of the nearly half-billion-dollar project are many: Every dollar spent on space exploration has an eightfold economic benefit; studying other planets helps us better […]
Posted inGoat
Indentured servitude in the pines
Managing America’s national forests for commercial timber production involves a lot of hard, dirty work — clearing brush, thinning small trees, and replanting areas that have been harvested. It’s work that native-born Americans aren’t exactly lining up to do. And so the Forest Service, like so many other organizations, has found itself relying on immigrant […]
Posted inWotr
Nailing down the heart of Montana
Everyone in Lewistown, Mont., used to know that the heart of the state was under Mrs. Dockery’s kitchen sink. The prairie town’s claim to host Montana’s geographic center has been unabashedly celebrated, debated and defended since 1912. That was the year the Akins family moved into their stately home, newly built atop a hill on […]
Posted inGoat
Palin the predator
“The more voters learn about Sarah Palin…the less there is to like,” the female voice intones ominously in a new ad by the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund. The political message goes on to show graphic footage of wolves being gunned down from an airplane, and piles on more evidence of the Alaska governor’s aggressive […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
The creation of wholeness
Finding Beauty in a Broken WorldTerry Tempest Williams416 pages, $26.Pantheon Books, 2008. When asked to accompany artist Lily Yeh to Rwanda to help create a memorial to the country’s genocide victims, author Terry Tempest Williams initially refused. Perhaps best known for her book Refuge, which draws a profound emotional parallel between her mother’s losing bout […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
When war came home
The Eleventh ManIvan Doig416 pages, hardcover: $26.Harcourt, 2008. In our collective memory, World War II happened “over there.” But of course it also happened here — to soldiers’ families, to women who went to work for the first time outside their homes, to the planters of victory gardens. The war hit home particularly hard in […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Only the scared survive
The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal WorldJoel Berger304 pages, hardcover: $29.University of Chicago Press, 2008. Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing PredatorsWilliam Stolzenburg288 pages, hardcover: $24.99.Bloomsbury, 2008. A world without fear sounds nice, doesn’t it? Liberated from our dread of nosy bosses, […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Searching for something to search for
Roads to Quoz: An American MoseyWilliam Least Heat-Moon592 pages, hardcover: $27.99.Little, Brown and Company, 2008. It’s been a big year for aging adventurers; first, Rambo comes out of retirement, then Indiana Jones takes up another crusade. Now, road warrior William Least Heat-Moon returns to the nation’s back roads, seeking out the hidden histories, chitchat memoirs […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Book Notes
Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His GirlStacey O’Brien, Free Press, August What a hoot! (Pun intended.) A fun and enlightening book about the fascinating world of owls and the humans who study them. Stacey O’Brien was a young biologist working in the Hogwarts-like atmosphere of the owl lab at […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Cheewa James: Chronicler of the ‘Tribe That Wouldn’t Die’
Modoc: The Tribe That Wouldn’t DieCheewa James352 pages, softcover: $19.95.Naturegraph, 2008. With song and prayer, soil and prairie grass, Native American author Cheewa James recently honored the memory of her long-lost great-great uncle. Frank Modoc left his Oklahoma reservation for a Quaker seminary over 120 years ago, fell victim to tuberculosis and never returned. While […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Alexandra Fuller: A fine line between protest and profession
Listen to an exclusive, web-only interview with Alexandra Fuller. On a chilly Sunday morning in August, a group of protesters gathers outside the new Bureau of Land Management office at the north end of town. ExxonMobil has just announced the biggest quarterly profits in U.S. history, and heads are shaking unhappily over the rapid pace […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
River and Vision: Kim Barnes and the story of loss
To Willa Cather’s Great Plains, Ivan Doig’s Montana, and Cormac McCarthy’s borderlands, you can add Kim Barnes’s Clearwater River. Barnes’s first three books, the critically acclaimed memoirs In the Wilderness and Hungry for the World and her powerful debut novel, Finding Caruso, all take place along Idaho’s Clearwater River. Her soon-to-be-released second novel, A Country […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
A photographic life
NAME Grant HeilmanHOME Buena Vista, ColoradoVOCATION Professional photographerSUBSCRIBER SINCE 1988 When photographer Grant Heilman came home from World War II, he got in touch with some of his mentors at Pennsylva-nia’s Swarthmore College, from which he’d graduated shortly before being drafted. One of them, Bob Read, was the editor of Country Gentlemen magazine. He’d used […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Dear friends
Kirk Crawford, of nearby Crawford, dropped by during a hike of the Continental Divide Trail. He had one message to share: STOP. As in Stop Trashing Our Planet, Start Telling Our Politicians, and Start Thinking Of Peace. Good thoughts, Kirk. Judy Muller, an associate journalism professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
The street hierarchy
“She’s got legs / She knows how to use them.”
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Evolution of a magazine
Is High Country News a newspaper or a magazine? For the past decade, our staff and board have wrestled with this question. In a sense, the wrestling was unnecessary. Long ago (if you consider 1970 long ago) the question was answered when our founder, Tom Bell, decided that HCN would come out every two weeks, […]
Posted inGoat
Pigs and politics
In recent days, American political discourse has not been dominated by the Republican elephant, nor by the Democratic donkey, but instead by the humblest of barnyard livestock — the pig, as in “You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.” Does anyone actually put lipstick on a pig? The swine I see […]