Recently, the New York Times reported on immigration and drug traffic across the U.S.-Mexico border where it crosscuts the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona, a story HCN covered in-depth in 2007. The situation is horrific: strangers knock on doors to entice and scare tribal members into smuggling, while pervasive Border Patrol inconvenience and intimidate the […]
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Of routes and rotors
Before migrating to Paonia, I spent time in the backwoods of southwestern Oregon, occasionally on the porch of a cabin with a colony of bats living under its shingles. Each afternoon, the walls began to creak and moan like old floorboards. Then the bats — hundreds of furry clamshell bodies — would slip out, unfurl, […]
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The Bighorn-Butterfly Effect
Little wings can compel broad change, but it certainly doesn’t hurt when they are backed up by the possibility of a head-butt, litigious or otherwise. The presence of endangered Quino checkerspot butterflies and Peninsular bighorn sheep on 51,000 acres of the San Jacinto Mountains–and the appeals of several prominent conservation groups–has prompted the U.S. Forest […]
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Unobtainium
In Avatar, there’s an economic reason, of course, that humans have traveled to Pandora. Early on in the movie, we’re shown the temptation: a sample of the element levitates in midair, silver, alluring—and apparently worth $20 million a kilogram. Considering the production expenses for Avatar were an estimated $230 million, it would take only 12 […]
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Avatar: an allegory of the West?
For better or worse, one of the most significant environmental events of the holiday season may have been James Cameron’s Avatar. The blockbuster, which tells the story of an alien tribe beset by big business and their mercenaries on the intergalactic frontier, has captured this planet’s imagination. Avatar has been praised by some as a […]