John Mecklin

I’m not going to enter the dispute about whether it was Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin or someone else who first defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. I’ll just suggest that the U.S. government’s program to build miles – and then more miles – of fences along the […]

Even here in the mountain valley splendor of Paonia, Colo., where the people are pleasant, the summers fine, the winters mild and the autumns spectacular, things go wrong sometimes. A few weeks back, everyone in town came home to find a piece of colored paper taped to his or her front door. The door-postings announced, […]

It’s not often that I’ll start off an editor’s letter by writing about letters to the editor, but it’s not often that we get the deluge of correspondence spawned by Ray Ring’s cover package on firearms in the West, “Guns R Us.” You’ll see a selection of the missives in this issue; you can see […]

“I want to say those fighting words, to hear and to heed, and especially to you, Mr. Gore: From my cold, dead hands.” -Charlton Heston in May 2000, waving a rifle above his head at an NRA annual meeting. “The NRA is opposed to common-sense gun reform, and they have George Bush in their hip […]

In England to meet with erstwhile British Prime Minister Tony Blair last month, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke optimistically about solutions to global warming. Business opportunities, he said, could make clean technology the “new gold rush,” according to the Sunday Telegraph of London. “Technology in the end is going to save the day. Technology is […]

In Hollywood science fiction, genetic modification leads to monsters with extensible jaws and rampaging epidemics that threaten mankind’s existence. In real-world science fact, altered DNA usually expresses itself more mundanely. Until recently, for instance, it was hard to think of a reason to fear a pasture. But as Matt Jenkins found while reporting this issue’s […]

It may sound odd to some ears, but it’s accurate to say American Indians are diverse. One small example: Although high-desert reservations are an enduring image in the popular mind, only about one-eighth of Native Americans live on reservations, with roughly two-thirds inhabiting urban areas. Still, some social trends spread widely enough across Native American […]

Because of the Bush administration’s poor environmental performance, and because High Country News reports regularly on the environment, we are occasionally accused of having it in for the president. That’s not true, of course; the Bush environmental record just isn’t very pretty. It’s darn difficult to put a positive gloss on, for example, a Clear […]

One of my High Country News colleagues was proofreading a chart that’s part of this issue’s cover package. From deep concentration, she looked up to note that it had the same impact as the lists of Iraq War fatalities that the New York Times has been publishing of late. She wasn’t making chitchat, either; her […]

For our cover stories, we generally try to look where other journalists do not, so we can tell important and interesting stories that have been ignored, underreported, misreported, hidden or hidden in plain sight. Hannah Nordhaus’ “The Silence of the Bees,” on the other hand, might seem to have been ripped from the headlines. Of […]

If you believe that political calculation can’t trump reason indefinitely, you haven’t been paying attention to the illegal immigration debate in the United States, which hasn’t, actually, been a debate. It’s been a disingenuous shouting match, something like the banter between competing barkers at the county fair as they tout the relative virtues of the […]

When I moved to Phoenix in the early 1990s, my first home was an apartment in a complex with a courtyard dominated by what seemed to be a football-field’s worth of vigorously green lawn. That lawn was no anomaly. The neighborhood I lived in over the next four years had a Leave It to Beaver […]

Before I came to work at High Country News, I lived in San Francisco, a beautiful city of sometimes ugly contrasts, one involving education. In wealthy, cosmopolitan San Francisco, public schools are a horror. There are many reasons why S.F. schools have largely stunk for three decades, but one of them involves settlement of a […]

Thanks largely to Bob Woodward and his trusty Deep Throat, whistleblowing is a vastly overromanticized endeavor. Government professionals who wish to publicize, and thereby alter, official behavior that they find unethical or illegal actually have few attractive options. Speaking openly about the problems of the agency that employs you is apt to be extremely unhealthy […]

As Democrats rode a multidimensional wave of voter anger to congressional dominance last week, I began to worry. After all, I was the new guy in the editor’s chair; I’d barely had time to find my computer, much less write any of the nuanced election analysis you expect from High Country News. Then I relaxed, […]