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 […]
Book Notes
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 […]
Posted inWotr
Female farmworkers are the most vulnerable
Under a scorching heat, a group of farmworkers harvests melons from a vast field near Huron, Calif. There is only one woman among the dozen or so workers; she leans into the task, her arms outstretched, her body itself a tool. The bandana around her face and her baggy long-sleeved T-shirt offer a thin protection […]
Posted inGoat
Lipstick on a Cheney
One needn’t go far to find mention of how the gun-slingin’, moose-eatin’ vice presidential pick of John McCain is going to snowmobile to victory this November on the backs of rural Western voters. Because she’s from the West (Alaska via Idaho), and because she’s been mayor of a small town (a suburb, actually), and because […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Leaky border
Efforts to stop the flow of pollution from Tijuana have bogged down in a mess
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
A Western primer
The Rocky Mountain Land Library asked a panel of Western writers a simple question: What books would you recommend to the next president? What does the next administration need to know about the American West? Our respondents were both generous and inspired with their suggestions. Although I’m sure they would all agree with author Rick […]
Posted inGoat
The Palin Effect
A couple of weeks ago, New Mexico traded its “toss up” status in the presidential election for “leaning Democrat.” And as of yesterday, the Rasmussen prediction market showed a 58% chance of an Obama/Biden victory in the Land of Enchantment. After many near-too-close-to-call election years, political winds seemed to be blowing moderately leftish. Tom Udall […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
The deja-vu of ‘Drill here, drill now’
Perhaps it is telling that when it comes to energy policy, President George W. Bush has inspired nostalgia for Jimmy Carter. “If we had only followed Carter’s energy plan,” people say, “we wouldn’t be in this fix now.” For Westerners, though, that’s a big mistake. Granted, there were some sensible aspects to Carter’s energy policies, […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Reclaiming the low country
Look at a map of the original “New West” — the transcontinental West of the post-Civil War period. It’s easy to fixate on what we don’t see. Big dams, open-pit mines, metropolises, freeways — none yet exist. National forests and parks and bombing ranges — not there. On closer inspection, the outdated maps show something […]
Posted inGoat
MMS does Denver
In the hours since the Interior Department released its report on sex, drugs, and multi-million-dollar corruption in the Minerals Management Service, news of the scandal has gone viral in the blogosphere, which means that every possible joke about drilling here, drilling now, the lubrication of government, and/or bureaucrats getting probed has already been made, repeatedly. […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
On the ballot: “Clean” coal and moose stew
“In 30 seconds, I can have one of those cut out of a 4Runner and get a couple hundred bucks.” —Josh Sorenson, an Ogden, Utah, junked-auto dealer, on turning over a catalytic converter (which contains palladium and platinum) in this age of sky-high metal prices and rising metal theft. From the Salt Lake Tribune. Updated […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
A river runs near it
Western water developers push for kinder, gentler ‘off-channel’ reservoirs