Latino communities in California’s Central Valley struggle with water pollution, plus the West’s rising importance as a helium producer, Hal Herring’s take on oil and gas exploitation along Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, and more.
Helium rising in the West
Near the middle of the Utah-Colorado line, a two-track winds into dry hills where rusty pipes poke from the sagebrush, marking cement-capped natural gas wells. Wildcatters drilled here in the 1920s, but abandoned the holes after striking mostly nitrogen and helium instead of hydrocarbons. Now, Denver-based oil and gas company Flatirons Resources wants to tap…
If a tree falls in the forest, who talks about it?
As a fourth-generation Oregonian whose family has only minimally depended on the forest-products industry, I often find myself drifting far from zero-cut environmentalists on the one hand and industry cheerleaders on the other (“A New Forest Paradigm,” HCN, 4/29/13). It’s all too obvious to me how the industry and its dependent towns got into the current…
If we build it, rain will come — right?
In the midst of the drought, here in Arizona, the rah-rah development conferences go on, with smooth-talking hucksters claiming that we need to prepare for millions more people who will be moving here (“Dry new world,” HCN, 5/13/13). I’m not sure what will start the inevitable exodus from the Phoenix metro, but the combination of…
Investigating an epic war of populations
The Searchers: The Making of an American LegendGlenn Frankel405 pages,hardcover: $28.Bloomsbury, 2013. In a memorable scene in John Ford’s 1956 Western, The Searchers, gun-toting cowboys ride through Utah’s stark red landscape, flanked by war-painted Native Americans. “At the heart of the matter … was land,” writes Glenn Frankel, director of the School of Journalism at…
People are very much a part of HCN’s environmental coverage
The environment might seem like a confining beat for a publication whose mission statement promises to serve everybody who cares about the American West. But it’s actually pretty roomy. As naturalist John Muir famously said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” That’s…
Saving Alaska from itself
When will it end (“Trouble in the valley of the eagles,” HCN, 5/27/13)? Always more mines, more development, more human impact, less habitat. For every new mine, and new gas or oil well, how about a new protected reserve to mitigate all the “take,” so we humans do not impact every place? Alaska is called…
Sequestration sinks stream gauges
Hydrologist David Evetts drove north from his office in Boise, Idaho, to the former prospecting town of Elk City on May 2. Fifty miles down a dead-end mountain road, he stopped at a gray metal box on a bridge over the South Fork Clearwater River. Reaching inside, he turned off the satellite feed that once…
The ATV culture includes loose regulations — and kids’ funerals
Diezel De Rupp “enjoyed doing his little dance to the Dubstep” — electronic music propelled by drumbeats and heavy bass. In a photo, the 5-year-old looks delighted, his hair brushed upward in a peak and his shirtfront covered by the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s TapouT logo, celebrating martial arts. The boy lived in the Denver area,…
The grid in the spotlight, where it belongs
I want to thank Jonathan Thompson for his very informative, well-researched and well-written article on the electrical grid (“Haywired,” HCN, 5/27/13). This is certainly a growing problem in this country and one that is not receiving the attention from utility companies and government agencies that it should. I suppose there will have to be some really…
Acting the part
The Five Acts of Diego LeónAlex Espinoza304 pages, hardcover: $26.Random House, 2013. Diego León, the protagonist of Alex Espinoza’s second novel, makes his way to the U.S. during the turmoil of the Mexican revolution, hoping to achieve stardom at a time when Hollywood’s major studios each “had a Latin actor under contract.” Espinoza, who was…
The Latest: A gold tax in the Silver State?
BackstoryNevada’s tax on mining was set in its 1864 Constitution at “a rate not to exceed 5 percent of the net proceeds,” and never fundamentally changed — even with recently skyrocketing gold prices in a state desperate for revenue. Advocates for a higher mining tax have for years been frustrated by legislators unwilling to go…
Becoming pronghorn: an essay
Remembering wildlife biologist James Yoakum
The Latest: A New Mexico county is first in the nation to ban fracking
BackstoryThe tiny town of Pavillion, Wyo., sits in the middle of the state’s gas patch, and in the midst of the heated national debate over the risks hydraulic fracturing poses to water quality. Residents complained about well water turning brown after drillers fracked nearby gas wells. In 2011, the EPA released a draft report linking…
Big eyesore on the prairie
The plain fact regarding wind farms is that they are terrible in and for the environment (“Haywired,” HCN, 5/27/13). One day, on a beautiful plateau or prairie, there are small and large game, wild birds of all types and little human interference. The next day, there are large white windmills, roads, fences, people, pickup trucks, neatly groomed pasture, and all the game is gone. A complete…
The Rocky Mountain Front blues
Augusta, Montana Nine years ago this May, my wife, Holly, and I bought an old house in Augusta, aiming to live and raise our children in a landscape and a culture — the two are inseparable — that we respect. About 20 miles west of town, the fierce wall of geology known as the Rocky…
Book review: A Natural History of the Santa Catalinas, Arizona
A Natural History of the Santa Catalinas, Arizona. Richard C. Brusca and Wendy Moore, 232 pages, softcover: $24.95. Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum Press, 2013. The Santa Catalina Mountains in southeast Arizona “easily become a good friend,” writes philosopher Bill Broyles in the introduction to this new book by two Southwest naturalists. A Natural History explores the…
Hal Herring on the Rocky Mountain Front
KDNK, a public radio station in Carbondale, Colo., regularly interviews High Country News writers and editors, in a feature they call “Sounds of the High Country.” Here, Nelson Harvey speaks with Hal Herring about his recent essay on looming energy development on the Rocky Mountain Front, where Herring lives. Thumbnail photo courtesy of Sam Beebe, Ecotrust,…
California farm communities suffer tainted drinking water
In California’s agricultural hub, the Central Valley, Latino communities fight for clean water.
Time is running out to get the poster!
We’re in the home stretch of our special referral promotion to enlist friends, family and colleagues to join the HCN community of people serious about the West. More than 125 new readers have stepped up to subscribe and support the work we do here. And their reward? Besides the high-quality journalism we’re known for, they’ll…
Crossing the border gets deadlier
Between October 2011 and September 2012, 463 people died in the desert after slipping across the U.S.-Mexico border – the most since 2005, when about three times as many entered the country illegally. Today, migrants are eight times more likely to die than a decade ago, according to the National Foundation for American Policy. Most…