Maybe it’s because my meteorologist mom used to load our family into our old Dodge van to venture forth onto the flats east of Boulder, Colo., every time there was a severe nighttime thunderstorm to park beneath and ogle (a van, she and my dad reassured my brother and I, makes a pretty good Faraday […]
Sarah Gilman
Sarah Gilman is an independent writer, illustrator and editor based in Washington state. Her work covers the environment, natural history, science and place. She served as a staff and contributing editor at High Country News for 11 years.
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
Street artist Jetsonorama tries a new kind of healing in Navajoland
In 1991, a young doctor delivered a baby Navajo girl in his backseat. A man had pounded on his door earlier that evening, his girlfriend in labor and his truck too slow for the 50-mile trip to the Tuba City, Ariz., hospital. The doctor loaded the woman into his own car, thinking they could make […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
Colorado water diversions, urban and rural
I was born in Boulder, Colo., just long enough ago to witness the merging of the state’s Front Range communities into a megalopolis at the eastern foot of the Rockies. In my early 20s, I moved to the more sparsely populated Western Slope, spending time in Gothic, Leadville and Aspen before finally ending up in […]
Posted inGoat
That old Bakken forth
There’s an ongoing, half-bitter joke at High Country News that nothing we cover ever reaches true resolution. Flip through newsprint HCN papers from the 1990s and you’re bound to see headlines you could very well read on our blog or in our now-glossy pages today: “Las Vegas seeks watery jackpot,” “Conservatism still reigns in Idaho,” […]
Posted inGoat
Uncontrolled release
This scintillating-looking snippet of paperwork was pulled from the PR portion of a materials containment plan filed with the state of Colorado by Suncor Energy’s oil refinery in Commerce City, which produces about 90,000 barrels a day of gasoline, diesel and asphalt. It was supplied to High Country News by Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians, […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 2012: How Arizona's culture helped shape the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords
Growing grizzly population conflicts with USDA sheep research station
The recovery of Yellowstone’s grizzly bears has been remarkable. When the species was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1975, there were just 136 wandering in and around the national park. Now, there are more than 600. And though a federal court confirmed in November that the population should remain protected, it’s […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Beauty and the Beast
It is a dead place — boned with black, sentinel tree trunks, veined with unspeakably polluted water, laid bare under a paste-white sky. There is no sense of space or time, only pure, absolute quiet. It is one of my favorite images — Uranium Tailings No. 12, taken at Ontario’s Elliot Lake in 1995, part […]
Posted inGoat
Sheep vs. bear, agency vs. agency
In many ways, the tale of Yellowstone’s grizzly bears is one of remarkable success. When the species was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1975, there may have been as few as 136 of the bruins wandering in and around Yellowstone National Park. By 2006, there were more than 500, and in […]
Posted inGoat
Waking up from the holiday food coma
If you were watching TV news over Christmas weekend, you likely saw weather forecasts mapping Santa’s position over the U.S., a few feel-good stories about hard-case animals finding happy homes, and a report or two about how on Dec. 26, gift-recipients thunder back into the malls to return what they got for what they REALLLY […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
Holiday break
While you snuggle up with your last issue of High Country News for 2011, our editorial staff will be taking a two-week publishing break to catch up on editing, writing, reporting and other projects, and, of course, spend time with family and friends. Expect your first issue of 2012 around Jan. 25. We wish you […]
Posted inGoat
What Joe Arapaio’s legacy means
The Arizona sheriff’s shocking legacy should force change in the immigration debate.
Posted inGoat
The bright side of the Berkeley Pit
Updated Jan. 5, 2012 It is a dead place. Stitched with skeletal plants and sentinel tree trunks, riven by rills of cloudy, unspeakably polluted water, laid bare against a paste sky. There is no sense of space or time here; only pure, absolute quiet. It is one of my favorite images — “Uranium Tailings No. […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Aspiring farmers find creative ways to succeed
Not long ago, a college classmate of mine named Sarahlee Lawrence was splitting her time between raft guiding and river conservation, traveling as far as Ethiopia and Chile. But the world’s water problems are huge, she says. “I was struggling to feel like I was actually making a difference.” Then she discovered a startling statistic: […]
Posted inGoat
Trampled by tourists
In the five years I’ve been an environmental journalist, and during the previous several seasons I worked in conservation, helping manage and mitigate recreational impacts on public trails in Colorado, I’ve often heard the argument that maintaining a constituency for environmental protection depends on getting as many folks as possible out into the places most […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Feds attempt to speed complicated process of building power lines
On a brisk October day, Paul Christensen is helping harvest sugar beets on his southern Idaho farm. His work as a Cassia County commissioner keeps him busy, he says, but he still enjoys “playing in the dirt.” He’s not the only one: Cassia is among Idaho’s most productive agricultural counties. That’s partly why it has […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Energy succeeds where housing developers can’t
If you’re looking for a parable of the post-housing-bust West — where the real estate economy appears to have crumbled while the extraction industry roars back with a vengeance — you might find one in the troubled Banning-Lewis Ranch on Colorado’s sprawling Front Range. The city of Colorado Springs annexed the more than 21,000-acre property, […]
Posted inGoat
Mapping the West … in air polluters
If you happen to glance over the fantastic air pollution investigation jointly released by National Public Radio and the Center for Public Integrity this week (along with a handful of other cooperating media outlets that did regional stories), you might think to yourself: “Thank (insert deity here) I don’t live in the Midwest, East or […]
Posted inGoat
‘Wilderness Lite’ wins the day
One of the last decades’ most scintillating (that is, in the headachey confusing sense evoked by scintillating scotoma) enviro-legal ping-pong matches may finally be drawing to a close. On Friday, a three-judge panel at the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver effectively reinstated the Clinton-era Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which banned new road […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
A lovely and restless autumn
Art Director Cindy Wehling is taking a much-deserved sabbatical through the end of the year, after more than 20 years of HCN deadlines. (That’s more than 500 issues!) While Cindy’s traveling the West and working on an addition to the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house she and husband Don Olsen built, Denver freelance designer and editor […]
Posted inGoat
Feds crack down on “new California gold rush”
If you live in one of the 9 Western states where marijuana has been legalized for medical use, you may have noticed that there suddenly seem to be an awful lot of bright-faced, completely healthy twenty-somethings who claim to have chronic pain or glaucoma. While many people use the drug to help deal with real, […]