Julie Smith

Thank you for the amazing analysis of income disparity by Jonathan Thompson (“The wealth abyss,” December 2021). More unequal countries tend to have more teenage pregnancy, mental illness, drug use, obesity, prisoners, school dropouts, lower life expectancy and lower status for women. The more unequal a country is, the more likely the biodiversity of its […]

Big cheers for Michael Parks, HCN and the passionate Westerners who are working hard to remove the barriers to wildlife (“Behind the wire with a fence ecologist,” October 2021). I am really excited to see a hopeful tale of desperately needed action to give wildlife back their land. If this is the beginning of a greater […]

Kudos to the citizens of McCall, Idaho, for pushing back on the development swap (“Growing pains,” April 2021). We have already lost more than half our wildlife in the past few decades, and one of the many ways we’re killing them is by developing more and more of their habitat to accommodate our continuous population […]

In response to “High and Dry” (March 2021), I agree, our water crisis in the West is terrifying.  However, to me, what’s truly terrifying, is that we’ve known this for decades. HCN does a wonderful job of reporting on the crisis, yet we never change. We continue to use far too much water, mainly because we are […]

Regarding microplastics in “Welcome to the Plastocene,” (HCN, 11/26/18) and the letter “Patagonia’s plastics” (HCN, 12/24/18), it feels like we’re continuing to jump on the last thing we heard, like it’s our biggest issue, while forgetting about the bigger underlying reasons for the problem. Plastics in outdoor clothing is certainly a concern, but it’s dwarfed […]