Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Out of the Four Corners.” A thousand years ago, when their civilization arose in the Southwest, the people who built these great stone structures did not call themselves Anasazi. The word did not even exist: It was created, centuries later, by Navajo workers who […]
Anasazi: What’s in a name?
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
Contaminated water can’t stop California sprawl
Rocket fuel ingredient and other pollutants now commonplace in groundwater
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
Strange bedfellows make a grazing deal in Idaho
And influential Sen. Larry Craig is odd man out
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
Methamphetamine fuels the West’s oil and gas boom
Long the drug of choice for rural down-and-out youth, crank becomes commonplace among drill-rig roughnecks.
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
A smart-growth bulldog
Albuquerque city councilman goes head-to-head with the incumbent mayor, and the developers who have long ruled here
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
Dear friends
HELP! SEND BOOKS! Our hearts go out to all those suffering from the effects of Hurricane Katrina. We’ve recently learned about an unusual — and imaginative — way to assist the hard-hit region: Former New Orleans resident and author Janis Owens has created Books for Folks to send books to relief centers, libraries and schools […]
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
Exodus
Imagine that, aside from a few wanderers and pilgrims, no one ever returned to New Orleans. Imagine that the thousands of people who fled the French Quarter, the Ninth Ward and other neighborhoods in the face of Hurricane Katrina turned their backs on their homes, on the shops and the bars, and let them sink […]
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
Out of the Four Corners
A young archaeologist searches for clues to what drove a mass exodus from southwestern Colorado more than 700 years ago
Posted inWotr
Lessons from the mountains to the stormy seas
Ten months ago, I was in the Indian Himalayas, cut off from the media connections most Americans take for granted. On Christmas Day, a young neighbor from the village, who taught math and spoke limited English, stopped by to ask if I’d heard the news: A huge wave had slammed many parts of Southeast Asia, […]
Posted inWotr
One man’s grisly encounter with a grizzly
It’s easy to come away from the new Werner Herzog documentary, Grizzly Man, persuaded that its subject was a delusional crackpot who deserved his fate: to be killed and eaten by a bear. That certainly is the popular impression of Timothy Treadwell, who died in Alaska nearly two years ago at the claws and fangs […]
Posted inWotr
Lions and cheetahs and elephants, yippee
In a recentNature magazine article, scientists suggest that threatened African wildlife can be saved by moving the animals to the American Great Plains. What a great way to restore our faith in cowboys! Many have forgotten that cowboys with broken bones regularly compete in bronc and bull riding, and all have survived lousy prices and […]
Posted inWotr
Fear in the fields
Farmworker Olivia Tamayo’s fingers are crooked from over 30 years of picking and weeding vegetables in California’s hot sun. Sitting in her home in this cramped farming town of Huron, she talks in low tones about the reality of farmwork for many female migrants. In 1975, Tamayo arrived in California’s Central Valley from Mexico, newly […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t be fooled: Our southern border is as porous as ever
Not long ago, my morning walk in Arizona’s Santa Cruz River Valley was rudely interrupted. I’d been walking my dogs in the usually silent valley. Suddenly, I heard the drone of an airplane. Irritated, I looked up to see a Border Patrol airplane drop down to circle just south of Palo Parado Road. Since my […]
Posted inWotr
Illegal immigration tarnishes America
As a Canyon County commissioner in rural Idaho, I live every day with the consequences of our hypocritical immigration policy. Federal officials say it is our policy to block illegal immigration, but our southern border is so open that millions of people manage to come through, overcoming the desert’s hazards of killing heat and rapacious […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Wounded
Wounded Percival Everett 256 pages, hardcover: $23 Graywolf Press, 2005. Set in the Red Desert of Wyoming, this novel is a modern-day Western with a twist. John Hunt, a black horse trainer, gets pulled into the dark currents of hate crimes when an Indian friend’s cows are killed by racists and a friend’s gay son […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
To Save the Wild Bison
To Save the Wild Bison Mary Ann Franke309 pages, hardcover: $29.95University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Mary Ann Franke traces the controversial history of Yellowstone National Park’s bison, the only wild bison herd that’s persisted since pre-Columbus days. Praised as a potent restorer of biodiversity, the animals have also been persecuted as transmitters of disease; dozens […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
The Boys of Winter
The Boys of Winter Charles Sanders257 pages, softcover: $19.95University Press of Colorado, 2005. Charles Sanders, an avid skier himself, tells the true stories of three champion skiers who joined the Army’s 10th Mountain Division during World War II. After training on the West’s snowy peaks, they went off to fight — and die — in […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
The grasslands — humanity’s big backyard
“We live in grasslands, and we live off them,” write biologists Carl and Jane Bock. “They are our backyards, in an evolutionary if no longer always in a literal sense.” For more than three decades, the Bocks have studied humanity’s backyard, mostly in the form of an 8,000-acre former cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona. On […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
An honest take on a tough land
In his debut novel, Ordinary Wolves, Seth Kantner has woven a world where hunger, death and beauty go hand-in-hand. The book is set almost entirely on Kantner’s native Alaskan tundra, but don’t expect naturalist hyperbole. There are no splendid sweeping landscapes, big animals are either food or a threat, and cold is a given. Consider […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Conservative legislator takes on Wal-Mart
Bruce Newcomb, the powerful Republican speaker of Idaho’s House of Representatives, has a radical idea for the conservative, business-friendly state: He’s threatening to draft a law that would require Wal-Mart to either provide health insurance for its Idaho employees, or pay the state for providing coverage through the Medicaid program. Around the country, several studies […]