Rexburg, Idaho, may be the most Mormon of any town in the nation. HCN Senior Editor Ray Ring spent time in Rexburg, getting to know the place, and trying to understand what happens when religion completely saturates a community. He wrote about it in his story, Prophets and Politics, in the Oct. 27 issue of […]
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The fruits of their labor
A guard, a vineyard owner and prisoners talk about a new farm worker program
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Video: Still howling wolf
The passionate and complicated feelings people have about living with wolves in the Northern Rockies
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One species versus 1.8 million others
I’m a student of roadkill. I keep an informal tally of the carcasses I spot on the roadside – what kind, how many and where — and I note the splatters that accumulate on our car windshield. They’re an indication of the diversity and abundance of animal and insect lives along the unnatural transects we […]
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Clean coal is an oxymoron
After Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer made a fiery speech at the Democratic Convention, some people suggested that he’d make a fine secretary of Energy, no matter who wins the election. But although Schweitzer, a Democrat, may give a good speech, his near-fanatic promotion of coal should give one pause. The West has long suffered the […]
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Audio: A conversation with Alexandra Fuller
To listen to the audio interview you need to have the Adobe Flash Player installed and Javascript enabled. Alexandra Fuller, whose recent book The Legend of Colton H. Bryant is a portrait of a worker who died in Wyoming’s energy fields, talks about the connection between people and land; about why she left her native […]
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Braving the political winds
EPA official Robbie Roberts took a stand against unbridled energy development
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Roan on the auction block
BLM set to open Colorado plateau to gas drilling despite broad opposition
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War of Fog
Fighting the West Nile Virus and a culture war in a small Colorado town
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Taxed off the farm
New Mexico’s rural property tax laws could price out longtime residents
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We thought we were safe
I live close to tall trees in Northern California, and on the afternoon of June 12, I held our mare, Millie, and watched wildfire advance toward the draw not 1,000 away where my wife and I had almost finished building our home. We’d been working on the house for almost four years. The wind pushed […]
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Don’t call plugging wolves hunting
It’s been about three months since wolves in the Northern Rockies were removed from the protection of the Endangered Species Act. To date, at least 20 wolves have been reported killed in Wyoming, where they may legally be shot on sight. That’s an average of one wolf killed every four and half days. Five of […]
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An ancient place to wonder about our survival
I’ll never forget losing two clients somewhere in the 164,000-acre Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in southern Colorado. On a glorious May morning, the two friends walked too fast ahead of the group I was leading for the Smithsonian Associates Program. The couple disappeared, and the other members of the tour were worried. Anxiously, […]
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Taos’ return to the acequias
Patricia Quintana takes a break from irrigating and leans on her shovel, watching water from the Acequia Madre del Sur del Rio Fernando flow across her newly planted pasture. Two young men from Taos Pueblo patiently guide the water with intuitive skill, using a gentle pull of the shovel here, a small plug of mud […]
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We thought we were safe
Editor’s note: On July 9, Gordon Gregory reports that he and his family were forced to move again. The house they’d found to rent after wildfire destroyed their home on the southern edge of Paradise turned out to be in the path of a new advancing fire. I live close to tall trees in Northern […]
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Primer 6: Immigration
To get a glimpse of the complexity of the issues surrounding immigration in the United States, one need only watch the peculiar dances of this year’s presidential candidates, and the way a few of them stumbled and lost the beat and fell to the ground at the end. Somewhere, somehow, someone in the ranks of […]