After 85 years, Luis Torres still has answers to our many challenges.
Laura Paskus
Posted inApril 1, 2020: Land-Grab Universities
The endless search for Charles Bowden
A longtime Bowden reader remembers the complicated author through two new books.
Posted inArticles
New Mexico grapples with its ‘forever’ chemicals
The City of Clovis has a water contamination problem but no easy way to fix it.
Posted inNovember 11, 2019: Storied Landscapes
Humans are great at giving real problems the side-eye
Two new titles provide insight on the willful ignorance that lead to the West’s water woes.
Posted inArticles
Climate report details deep hits to the Southwest
Climate change will impact economy, infrastructure and more.
Posted inSeptember 14, 2015: Close Ties in Big Landscapes
A visual artist finds her literary voice in New Mexico
Bev Magennis once covered houses in colorful tiles. Now she writes novels about murder in the rural West.
Posted inAugust 3, 2015: Outflanked
Does the fate of the silvery minnow foretell the Rio Grande’s future?
Biologists go to great lengths to keep the fish alive, but it’s nearly extinct in the wild.
Posted inArticles
Not another “ghost river,” please
I’m biased in favor of flowing rivers, yet my favorite, the Rio Grande, has been anything but flowing lately. Over the past few years, it’s been drying up downstream of Albuquerque every irrigation season between mid-June and Halloween. It seems odd to say it, but the river hasn’t the right to its own water. Instead, […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Backcountry memoir
Yellowstone Has TeethMarjane Ambler223 pages, $16.95.Riverbend Publishing, 2013. Cindy Mernin puts it bluntly: “Paradise isn’t for sissies!” she says, recalling the 14 years she spent as a ranger’s wife at Yellowstone National Park. In particular, as she tells author Marjane Ambler, the winters weren’t for sissies. The couple had moved there in the early 1970s, […]
Posted inGoat
New anti-wolf, anti-fed film features “wolf cages” to protect kids
Driving through southwestern New Mexico this summer, I passed one of the area’s wolf-proof school bus stops. I’d heard about the enclosures for years and couldn’t resist pulling off Highway 180 onto State Road 32 to check one out in person. More recently, the cages have been featured in a new documentary film, “Wolves in […]
Posted inArticles
Protecting culture in the ancient Sky City
About an hour west of Albuquerque, N.M., a sandstone bluff rises above the high desert floor. For more than 800 years, the people of Acoma Pueblo have lived there, protecting their culture, language and many traditional ways. Archaeologist Theresa Pasqual, the director of the Acoma Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Office, works with state and federal agencies […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Already gone: a profile of Muscogee (Creek) poet Joy Harjo
The author of She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love and War discusses her new memoir, Crazy Brave.
Posted inMarch 5, 2012: The Zombies of Teton County
Two degrees warmer and rising: A review of A Great Aridness
A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American SouthwestWilliam deBuys384 pages, hardcover: $27.95.Oxford University Press, 2011. Cracking open yet another book about climate change requires a certain amount of resolve. Most readers already know the facts: In the past 50 years, average temperatures in the United States have risen 2 degrees […]
Posted inWotr
Bullies get their way in New Mexico’s wolf recovery program
There’s a sign near my house that reads, “Don’t just stand there, Stop Bullying!” I remember being teased by the cool girls in middle school during the 1980s. Having survived adolescence, I naively assumed that pint-sized tormenters mature before reaching adulthood. But not always: Adult bullies employing the tactics of gossip, misinformation and fear have […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2010: California Dreamin'
Sportsmen protest New Mexico antelope hunting system
Program gets poor marks from local hunters
Posted inSeptember 3, 2010: Migration
Of history and home
The Turquoise Ledge: A MemoirLeslie Marmon Silko336 pages, hardcover: $25.95.Viking, October. The big arroyo has no attachment to the way things are. The arroyo is the space the water and the boulders and other debris pass through in floods, the space that desert animals and I move through. The space that is the arroyo changes […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2010: A Hell of an Anniversary
Breath by breath
Drowning TucsonAaron Michael Morales330 pages, softcover: $15.95.Coffee House Press, 2010. “He’d felt safer in the desert than he ever had in his life, as if some outside force were protecting him. But now, in the bowels of the city, he was a stationary target.” That’s Tucson in the 1980s, a city of snowbirds, developers and […]
Posted inArticles
The life and death of Desert Rock
The Navajo Nation’s proposed coal plant always rested on shaky ground. Now, it may collapse entirely.
Posted inDecember 7, 2009: Dueling Claims
Dueling Claims
A tribal attempt to protect Mount Taylor sparks a battle over ancient claims to the land
Posted inNovember 9, 2009: Roadless-less
‘Yes’ to desire and an end to fear
Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the FutureCharles Bowden243 pages, hardcover, $24.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. But as a desert man, I can only say yes to rain. — Charles Bowden Mulling over decades spent reporting on everything from border crimes to environmental destruction to post-Katrina New Orleans, journalist Charles Bowden declares an […]