Can ‘hamster power’ — distributed generation and small-scale renewable energy projects — save the West, and the world?
Northward
Birds try to escape climate change.
The Renewable Energy Landscape
A look at renewable energy in the West
Renewables: The Final Frontier
Why historian Vaclav Smil thinks there are no easy solutions to our energy problems
From Pickups to PV
Utility brings solar power to far-flung Navajos
Thinking Past the Moment
An interview with Sierra Club renewable energy expert Carl Zichella
Growing Away from Big Coal
Rural electric co-ops make a slow push back toward community energy
We’re Listening
Below are some of the comments you sent us on the most recent reader survey. Thanks for taking the time to let us know what you think. We’ll be mulling over your responses during the coming weeks, and using them to help chart our course. Keep the mag as it is with stories like “My…
Modern-day La Mancha
Are environmentalists re-enacting Don Quixote’s crusade against windmills — while ignoring the real monster of climate change?
Let’s Get Small
Can ‘hamster power’ help save the West’s landscapes — and the world?
And you think times are tough
At a yard sale, I bought several boxes containing nearly a half-century’s worth of American Heritage magazines, that richly illustrated compendium of the nation’s history through good times and bad, with special attention paid to the droughts, downturns and disasters that tried the souls of our forebears. I paid $10 for more than 600 magazines.…
See you in July
This will be the last issue you receive for a month; we skip an issue four times a year. Look for the next HCN to hit your mailbox around July 20, and in the meantime, visit hcn.org for fresh blog posts, new Writers on the Range columns and other exciting content. VISITORSOn her only day…
The other Trail of Tears
Selling Your Father’s Bones: America’s 140-Year War Against the Nez Perce TribeBrian Schofield 368 pages, hardcover: $26.00.Simon & Schuster, 2009. A white 30-something British guy might not seem like the obvious source to turn to for a definitive history of the persecution and flight of the Nez Perce — one of the most complex, tragic…
Catching the sun
This March, a massive photovoltaic panel at SunEdison’s Alamosa solar power plant broke loose in a strong wind and began to spin atop its pillar. So plant service technician Joe Valdez, a thick-armed 36-year-old with an easy grin and expertise in everything from alfalfa farming to hydraulics, got creative. He lassoed the sun-sucking device and…