I was recently invited to a seminar at a university whose thesis might be considered insulting. The American West, said the invitation, “lacks an intellectual, cultural or social presence within either the country or the continent. Eastern publishers, Eastern intellectual centers and agencies, public and private, based in Washington, D.C., still provide the authoritative voices […]
It’s the West’s turn to call the shots
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Glaciers offer a glimpse of the distant past
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Written in the Rings.” Inside one particular warehouse in suburban Denver, it feels like Antarctica. In a sense, it is. Within the cavernous walls of polystyrene foam lies an 80,000-cubic-foot deep freeze, filled with columns of ice: a few from Wyoming’s Wind River Range, […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Tree rings reveal a fiery past — and future
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Written in the Rings.” Tom Swetnam, the director of the Arizona tree-ring lab, grew up with wildfire. His father was a forest ranger in northern New Mexico, and after Swetnam graduated from college in the late 1970s, he spent two years as a seasonal […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
So, you want to be a dendrochronologist?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Written in the Rings.” Sure, counting tree rings might sound like a cushy job. But before you set out into the bristlecone pines, make sure you know what you’re in for. A few of the basic requirements: Strong legs. Since the clearest records of […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Wyoming wildlife faces twin threats
Drill rigs and houses gobble habitat and sever migration routes
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Butterfly escapes endangered species net
New Mexico community creates its own conservation plan
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
The Utah backcountry gets crowded
And a chance for change in the Wasatch comes and goes
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Feds to hand wolves to states
Idaho and Montana are poised to take greater control of gray wolves, but the Nez Perce Tribe, and some environmentalists, are resisting
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
A crisis brews on the Colorado
With water supplies dwindling, states getan order to share the pain
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Dear friends
WELCOME, JODI! It takes an adventurous — and dedicated — person to leave behind a bustling urban center and a corporate paycheck to work for nonprofit wages in a small town like Paonia, Colo. But we found just such a person in Jodi Peterson, who started work in January as HCN’s news editor. She comes […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Who’ll stop the rain?
Since Christmas, an almost continuous stream of Pacific moisture has raced over Colorado and much of the West, dumping rain in the valleys and heavy snows in the mountains. The sun and crystalline blue skies I brag about to my non-Western friends and relatives have made only rare appearances in the narrow seams between storms. […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Written in the Rings
Tree rings reveal the climate of the past— and help foretell the future. Their message? Get ready for hot, dry times.
Posted inJanuary 23, 2006: Timberlands up for grabs
After dollars are spent, destruction remains
Regarding Paul Larmer’s editorial “Storing fat from the feeding frenzy” (HCN, 11/28/05: Storing fat from the feeding frenzy): Wyoming may be doing a better job of managing oil and gas revenues; however, that revenue hardly compensates for the destruction of frenzied and uncontrolled development. Qwest, EnCana and coalbed methane drillers have the Bureau of Logging […]
Posted inWotr
Wolf opponents just don’t get it
Time flies when the sky is falling. At least, we were told to expect the sky to fall in 1995. That’s when federal biologists snatched a bunch of Canadian wolves, hustled them south of the border and cut them loose in central Idaho and Yellowstone. Ten years sped by in a flash. But when I […]
Posted inWotr
Here’s hoping the drought is not over
Since Christmas, an almost continuous stream of Pacific moisture has raced over Colorado and much of the West, dumping rain in the valleys and heavy snows in the mountains. The sun and crystalline blue skies I brag about to my non-Western friends and relatives have only made rare appearances in the narrow seams between storms. […]
Posted inWotr
A little-known clause can be a killer
Few people know about Section 9528 of the No Child Left Behind Act, but it can be a killer. Known as the Military Recruitment Clause, it requires public schools to give information about students to military recruiters. Schools, of course, are eager to perform this service to the armed forces since failure to comply carries […]
Posted inWotr
One West
Looking back over the past century, the greatest shortcoming of the conservation movement in the American West has been its near-total failure to devise a strategy for privately owned land in the region. By any yardstick — watershed acres, animal species, ecological processes — conservation success on private land has been small. While many environmentalists […]
Posted inWotr
Soaking in Idaho in the healing waters
The early Shoshone called this the land of healing waters. Soaking here with my 9-year-old twins beneath gray skies at the Lava Hot Springs in eastern Idaho, I try to imagine the earth opening, get flashes of my children running, terrified; I am terrified as well. The death toll from the tsunami had risen to […]
Posted inWotr
The BLM wields fork and spatula over the West’s wildlands
To my jaundiced and hungry eye, the federal Bureau of Land Management, which manages oil and gas development on public lands in the West, is looking more and more like a McDonald’s franchise. I first noticed it last January during a trip to Denver. At the McDonald’s in Glenwood Springs, Colo., the sign under the […]
Posted inFebruary 7, 2005: The Asphalt Graveyard
Dear friends
NEW INTERNS “This is surreal,” says new High Country News intern Julie McCord of HCN’s hometown, the coal miner’s haven of Paonia, Colo., pop. 1,500. Julie was born in Jamaica and has lived in Chicago, Toronto, Panama, Mexico, Japan and Washington, D.C. She comes to us from Manhattan, where she earned her master’s degree in […]