Writer Annie Proulx takes an unsentimental view of Wyoming’s little-known and somewhat scarred Red Desert.
The call of the semi-wild
The cars head slowly up the mesa through a patchwork of open fields and cedar woodlands. Binoculars around my neck, I sit in the backseat of the lead vehicle, a well-used Subaru station wagon. Jason Beason, a young father and biologist who works for the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory, is our driver and expedition leader.…
Why I ride the Greyhound
Bus passengers become citizens of the world.
Conservation or cop-out?
Lack of participation could scuttle voluntary efforts to protect species
Fishing for solace
Yellowstone Autumn: A Season of Discovery in a Wondrous LandW.D. Wetherell166 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2009. An engaging blend of history lesson, fly-fishing essay and philosophical treatise, Yellowstone Autumn describes a veteran writer’s three weeks of solitude in Yellowstone National Park. Walter Wetherell makes the trip from New England to commemorate his 55th…
Wanted: your support and ideas
By now, you should have received our reader survey and spring fund-raising appeal for the Research Fund, which helps to pay our writers, photographers and artists, among other things. Please complete the survey (and return it to us in the postage-paid envelope). And please consider including a donation to support our work – we need…
Nonprofits reap the profits
Green, Inc. – An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone BadChristine MacDonald288 pages, hardcover: $24.95.The Lyons Press, 2008. Inflated executive salaries. Top brass hobnobbing at expensive getaways. Questionable side deals negotiated with no concern for the everyday folks affected by them. These problems aren’t just native to Wall Street. They also occur…
Avalanches for dummies
NameHomer HometownBozeman, Mont. OccupationExtreme-sports guinea pig Best LookPowder beard A man leans on a bamboo pole high above the slopes at Bridger Bowl near Bozeman, Mont. From a distance, he appears remarkably calm, even as ski patrollers throw explosives onto the snow-loaded slope directly above him. There’s a loud blast and a fracture forms in…
Columbia Basin (Political) Science
An investigation into the Bonneville Power Administration’s influence on salmon research
Last rites and forgotten landscapes
The murders of 12 young women, and what they tell us.
A ghost of the 1970s
Bipartisan politics reappeared in Washington, D.C., in March. It felt like a ghost from the golden age of the environmental movement, the 1970s, when Republicans and Democrats worked together to pass major environmental laws. The new Omnibus Public Land Management Act assembles 166 deals related to conservation and natural resources (plus an unrelated 167th for…
Go Sell It On The Mountain
Will the down economy help Crested Butte’s owners end a 30-some year controversy and expand the ski resort?
Golly, nukes for everybody!
The “innovative” proposal for many small “pocket” nuclear reactors sounds like the gee-whiz propaganda from the 1950s that every modern family would own a personal atomic car and reactors would produce power “too cheap to meter” (HCN, 3/16 & 3/30/09). In reality, it is an attempt to greenwash a failed technology. One lesson I have…
More than you think?
How much water is left in the Colorado River to develop? Few questions are as complex — or as important to Colorado and its Western Slope. Matt Jenkins’ recent article, “How Low Will It Go” contains a pair of mischaracterizations that need to be corrected (HCN, 3/02/09). First, the implication that the Colorado Water Conservation…
Apparently Schwarzenegger wouldn’t agree
I found it interesting that “Tarp Nation” followed so closely on the heels of your article about Amtrak (HCN, 3/16 & 3/30/09). I often ride the Denver-Sacramento and Bakersfield-Sacramento routes when visiting family. Whenever the train enters the outskirts of any sizeable town, observant riders can see slum settlements at regular intervals along the tracks,…
“The officially sanctioned helpless”
Your story “Tarp Nation” seems to condone living in squalor, while trying to convince the reader that the plucky residents of these communities are creative, self-reliant and just happen to suffer because of the government’s harshness, the mainstream’s condemnation and society’s refusal to embrace the positive potential of this new social movement, “informal urbanism” (HCN,…
The desert that breaks Annie Proulx’s heart
Wyoming storyteller gives an unvarnished view of the Red Desert