Continental Divide: Wildlife, People and the Border Wall, Krista Schlyer, 292 pages. Softcover: $30, Texas A&M University Press, 2012 Walls do not solve problems; they make them. That is the simple, elegant premise of writer and photographer Krista Schlyer’s book Continental Divide, which chronicles the unintended ecological and social consequences of the wall along the […]
Staff
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
A snapshot of the 2012 election, by the numbers
84.1 Percent of population that is Native American in Sioux County, N.D. 83.9 Percent of Sioux County votes cast for pro-oil Democratic Senate candidate Heidi Heitkamp 1 Percent by which Heitkamp won North Dakota’s open Senate seat 10 Number of Utah’s 29 counties in which Obama received 10 percent or less of the vote 100 […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
A review of On Arctic Ground
On Arctic Ground: Tracking Time Through Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve,Debbie S. Miller,142 pages, hardcover:$29.95.Braided River, 2012. The National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska is the largest single chunk of public land in the country — more than 10 times the size of Yellowstone National Park and home to caribou, polar bears and large populations of migratory […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Book note: Valley of Shadows and Dreams
Valley of Shadows and Dreams Ken Light and Melanie Light, Foreword by Thomas Steinbeck 176 pages, hardcover: $40. Heyday Books, 2012. ‘Except for the perimeter, every single living thing had been placed where someone had planned it to be and placed it just so,’ writes Melanie Light, describing her first experience flying over California’s Central […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2012: Troubled Taos
Atlas of Yellowstone
Atlas of YellowstoneW. Andrew Marcus, James E. Meacham, Ann W. Rodman and Alethea Y. Steingisser274 pages, hardcover: $65University of California Press, 2012. The Atlas of Yellowstone details the Greater Yellowstone Area from A to Z. It goes beyond the region’s iconic geysers, wildlife and vegetation, with charts and maps that cover subjects ranging from the […]
Posted inAugust 6, 2012: Of Birds and Men
Arapaho Journeys: Photographs and Stories from the Wind River Reservation
Arapaho Journeys: Photographs and Stories from the Wind River ReservationSara Wiles262 pages, hardcover: $35.University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. For more than 30 years, Sara Wiles has photographed life on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, a community she first encountered as a social worker in 1973. Wiles, who was adopted by Arapaho elder Frances C’Hair, is clearly […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Faraway, favorite and less-than-famous places
We asked our readers and staff to send in some of their favorite places in the West. Here’s a sampling of their responses. Add your own in the comments! California’s Alabama Hills — Not only was this rolling desert stippled with boulder outcrops the setting for Tremors, my family’s favorite cult film, in which giant […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Western travel tips
If you decide to go running on a BLM backroad near Bisbee, Ariz., consider taking a couple of large friends or some dogs as insurance against getting chased (twice) by emaciated-yet-speedy longhorn Mexican bulls. —Sarah Gilman, associate editor Park the car and take public/mass transit. I know this sounds crazy, as we’re talking about the land […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Lake Bonneville
The lake covered most of northwest Utah — and some parts of Idaho and Nevada — 15,000 years ago. Today, all that remains of Bonneville is the Great Salt Lake.
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
Our dirty past, our dirty present
Between 1972 and 1977, some 70 photographers set about documenting the American landscape, its environmental problems and its people for the then brand-new Environmental Protection Agency. Last summer, the National Archives and Records Administration began posting those Documerica Project images on Flickr.com in what will be a 15,000-shot collection. But 40 years after the EPA’s […]
Posted inJanuary 11, 2010: Breakdown
Urban oilscape
One of the West’s most car-happy places sprawls across some of its oldest and most productive oilfields. About 28 million barrels are pumped annually from 5,000 wells in the Los Angeles Basin and just offshore, according to the Center for Land Use Interpretation. These photos were drawn from the organization’s recent L.A. exhibit, “Urban Crude.” […]
Posted inAugust 17, 2009: From Corn to Cabernet
But is it any good?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “From Corn to Cabernet.” Colorado wines are higher in acid than the California wines that Westerners are most familiar with. They bear more resemblance to the wines of central mountainous Europe, such as Austria and northern Italy, than to West Coast wines, says Kansas […]
Posted inDecember 8, 2008: Out in the cold
Congratulations, Theo
HCN‘s most famous hometown scientist, Dr. Theo Colborn, just received a prestigious international prize, the 2008 Goteborg Award for Sustainable Development. Theo is the founder and president of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange, which studies how industrial toxins affect the health of humans and the environment (www.endocrinedisruption.com). The prize, awarded by the city of Goteborg, Sweden, […]
Posted inPolitics map 2008
Battleground: an interactive map
No matter who wins in November, one thing is certain: the West has arrived.
Posted inOctober 13, 2008: Back to the future
Battleground!
No matter who wins in November, one thing is certain about this year’s election: the Interior West has finally arrived. For the last 40 years, campaigns generally flew right over the eight states in the interior. Their sparse populations, relative handful of electoral votes and status as Republican strongholds meant they just weren’t worth fighting […]