We recommend you use the “View Gallery” option to enjoy these images. A Q&A with Renee Couture follows this introduction. Forestry, as a science, is both tangible and abstract. Behind the flagging and cores and calipers is the weighing of value, the ecological against the material, the measurable against the immeasurable. Such tensions are reflected […]
Communities
Posted inHeard Around the West
The coming Hairpocalypse
COLORADO It’s been a century or so since anyone definitely saw a North American river otter in Boulder, Colo., so the town’s wildlife staffers were excited recently when a motion-activated camera showed one of the animals — very much alive — on the banks of Boulder Creek, reports the Boulder Daily Camera. For some minutes, […]
Posted inGoat
Drones are not just for killing
I like drones. There, I said it, and in doing so I have made myself a pariah to many of my liberal friends. Because to them, a drone is a sinister, cowardly killing machine, buzzing around the skies of Pakistan sans pilot, just waiting to rain death from the sky. It is horrible. But then, […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
A new collaboration has Idaho ranchers and the BLM fighting fire together
On a hot day in August 2011, lightning sparked a fire in the rocky bluffs outside Glenns Ferry, Idaho. With the Bureau of Land Management’s fire crews tied up on the other 16 or so fires burning in the area, a few local ranchers, some of whom had grazing allotments on the land, rushed in […]
Posted inWotr
A fine day in the classroom
My daughter, Maria, teaches third grade in the border town of Deming, N.M., where every child in the school qualifies for free breakfast and lunch, test scores are chronically low, and science is a neglected subject. Eager to help out, I discover the Mastodon Matrix Project, which is run by the Museum of the Earth. […]
Posted inGoat
Big Data colonizes the West
For evidence that a new kind of information economy has come to the West, look not to San Francisco or Seattle, but south-central Wyoming. On the outskirts of Cheyenne, an Air Force town of 60,000 residents, Microsoft is building a massive, $158 million data center, a high-tech warehouse packed with computer servers that will store […]
Posted inWotr
Frontier anxiety for the 21st century
Frederick Jackson Turner’s classic 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” argued that the frontier experience — the opportunity for unlimited expansion into “uninhabited” lands — shaped the country’s entrepreneurial spirit. Turner’s essay took on added significance because three years earlier, the Census Bureau had declared the frontier closed. The line that separated […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Seeking Ben Kennedy: a quest to find a mysterious Montana philanthropist
Ben Kennedy didn’t talk a lot. He was never a family man. He liked having a beer or a cup of tea with his soup and seldom got around to bathing. He died essentially alone, a man without means and with few close friends. He was born in 1922 in rural Belt, Mont., about 100 […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
A goat walks into a bar…
MONTANA A pygmy goat walks into a bar on a Sunday afternoon — and no, this isn’t the setup to one of those jokes; this really happened in Butte, Mont. The little goat seemed to enjoy the outing until a public-health-conscious patron called the police, who came and took the animal to a shelter. As […]
Posted inGoat
Everett Ruess redux
A new documentary on Everett Ruess is out, the latest manifestation of an ongoing cultural obsession with the young artist who vanished in the desert Southwest nearly 80 years ago. Filmmaker Corey Robinson’s “Nemo 1934: Searching for Everett Ruess” is a 38-minute documentary that “tells the story of the life and afterlife of everyone’s favorite […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
A review of Passage to Wonderland
Passage to Wonderland. Michael A. Amundson, 208 pages, hardcover: $35. University Press of Colorado, 2012. In 1903, photographer Joseph Stimson rode in a horse-drawn buggy along a new 50-mile route leading from Cody, Wyo., to the east entrance of Yellowstone National Park. He stopped periodically to take pictures for a display at the 1904 World’s […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Spread the word and get an exclusive HCN poster
High Country News launched its first “friends” referral subscription campaign on April 11. And, so far, several of you have stepped up to spread the word about HCN to your friends, family and colleagues. Participating subscribers who recruit two people to subscribe (or give gift subscriptions) will get a top-notch poster of a graphic that […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
River home: an essay on life on the Arkansas River
Dad didn’t like it when I moved here. Nine years before, I’d left Texas. Now here I was, leaving Colorado Springs for a town with 1 percent of its population and, Dad believed, 1 percent of its opportunities, if that. There are three of us kids, and I’m the nearest to his heart — and […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Billionaires for energy conservation
MONTANA “If Montana residents can scrape it up, they can eat it,” said The Associated Press, about a roadkill-salvage bill signed by the governor April 4. “It really is a sin to waste good meat,” is how Democratic state Sen. Larry Jent of Bozeman put it. Elk, deer, antelope and moose are all fair game […]
Posted inRange
Uranium is no good for the Navajo
A recent post on the High Country News website advocates the position that the Navajo Nation should eventually drop its 2005 uranium ban so that it can get a better deal on uranium development, which the author, Jonathan Thompson, sees as inevitable. The post holds up the example of the Ute Tribe as an example […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Do spoons make you fat?
UTAH If you want to watch the latest death-defying sport in the red-rock outback of southeastern Utah, check out “World’s largest rope swing” on YouTube, which has racked up more than 17 million views, according to TheSalt Lake Tribune. The video shows roped climbers leaping off the top of an arch and then swinging back […]
Posted inWotr
The Hopi and eagle share a long relationship
Understanding another religion is no easy business. Americans nowadays often fool ourselves that religions can be put on or off like a suit of clothes, and that our own world-view is not religious unless we say so. We — especially secular humanists — also claim superiority for our idea of “nature,” an abstract space separate […]
Posted inWotr
Citing religious freedom is no excuse
Among the “cool facts” about golden eagles listed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is this: “Members of the Hopi tribe remove nestlings, raise them in captivity, and sacrifice them.” “Cool” is not a word the Eagle Defense Network and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) would use. For the last 12 years, they’ve frightened […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
A fresh take on an old crime: A review of The Case of D.B. Cooper’s Parachute
The Case of D.B. Cooper’s ParachuteWilliam L. Sullivan411 pages, paperback: $14.95.Navillus Press, 2012. In November 1971, a man traveling under the name “Dan Cooper” hijacked a Boeing 727 flying between Portland and Seattle, demanded $200,000 from the FBI, then parachuted from the plane into history, somewhere in the Northwestern wilds. The FBI has searched unsuccessfully […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
Beatification of a sinner: a review of The Soledad Crucifixion
The Soledad CrucifixionNancy Wood336 pages, paperback: $21.95.University of New Mexico Press, 2012. In Nancy Wood’s newest novel, The Soledad Crucifixion, we find ourselves in Camposanto in the Territory of New Mexico, in the year 1897. Lorenzo Soledad has just been nailed to a cross. “On this, the last day of his life, the priest found […]