Timberland herbicide spraying sickens a community in Oregon, a look at why the current drilling boom is more sensitive to price fluctuations than its predecessors, California’s sweeping new groundwater regulations, a desert-friendly cow and more.
‘Poverty with a view,’ in the rearview
I spent my 20s in some of the most beautiful towns in the West.
Review of “The Memory of Stone: Meditations on the Canyons of the West”
Photographs from Utah’s Monument Valley to the Petrified Forest.
Rocky Mountain sawmills rebound
But the industry says it needs more timber.
Sage grouse found walking through Wyoming underpass
Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.
Speaking art to power
Review of ‘Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and And Art in the Changing West’ by Lucy R. Lippard
A young mule stringer helps keep a dying profession alive
Mules are still needed to carry supplies in wild, roadless mountains.
Stirring up the dangerous fringe
I would like to thank High Country News for “Defuse the West” (10/27/14). I retired after serving for 30 years with both the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management and can attest to the ugliness that has crept into the public discourse regarding public lands and forests. I have been on the…
Photographs of the Gold Beach community
The people affected by this timberland herbicide cocktail.
The bounds of reasonable action
I found “Defuse the West” to be quite one-sided. To add balance, it would have been good to include events such as the BLM’s commando-type raid on several citizens in southeastern Utah on June 10, 2009. This event has received much media attention and has still not seen resolution. I would have liked to have…
California’s sweeping new groundwater regulations
Will the law finally mean better aquifer management for the drought-stricken state?
The desert-friendly cow
A rancher and a researcher search for a better bovine — and think they’ve found one.
Dear Forest Service: Today’s John Muir shoots video
Let people take all the images they want in wilderness areas.
Timberland herbicide spraying sickens a community
Companies deposit thousands of pounds of herbicides each year on Oregon forests.
Fast currents
In the summer of 1969, my then-husband and I, in our mid-20s, enjoyed a refreshing swim in the Snake River after a hiking trip into the Bridger Wilderness Area. The current was fast, so we cooled ourselves off near shore, blissfully unaware that future generations might be denied this experience if they valued their good…
USGS launches a billion-dollar initiative to map the West in 3D
LIDAR is about to become more widespread — helping agriculture, pilots and homeowners.
Hope and futility on the Great Plains
Review of ‘Wild Idea: Buffalo and Family in a Difficult Land’ by Dan O’Brien.
Will falling oil prices kill the shale revolution?
The current drilling boom is more sensitive to price fluctuations than its predecessors.
Keep the spray out of the oatmeal
One advertisement urged housewives to “MURDER Flying Pests” with the Black Flag bomb, which basically consisted of aerosol DDT. Another exhorted parents to cover the walls of their kids’ rooms with Trimz DDT, “a children’s room wallpaper” infused with pesticide to protect babies from flies, mosquitoes and ants. Parents Magazine said the wallpaper was perfectly…
Latest: Montana judge rules groups of wells illegal
“Exempt well” laws in most Western states allow domestic wells to be drilled without water rights.
Love and cynicism
Chuck Bowden smoldered. He was a volcano, and he bled for us. Pure courage, he never wavered, shifting from his earlier genre of Thoreau-esque, outdoor meditation to hard-boiled organized crime coverage of a horrific and dangerous nature. His style was elemental, raw, alternating between a love of the region and its people, and a healthy…
New HCN board members, Part II
Welcome three new members, and farewell to naturalist Ann Zwinger.
Our national denial
So he had literary flair and put himself at real personal risk — all very admirable — but if Charles Bowden produced anything in any way helpful to understanding and dealing with the Mexican border crisis and migration, it is nowhere evident in the pieces by or about him that have appeared in HCN (“Charles Bowden’s Fury,” 10/13/14). None…