Every winter in Quartzsite, Ariz., tens of thousands of RVers form an impromptu community in the desert.

When you carry your home with you, when are you home?

At High Country News, we think a lot about that overused but still relevant term, “a sense of place.” I don’t know exactly what it means, either. But I think it involves knowing that we’re here, rather than, well, over there. And that we understand at least some of the characteristics that make this place…

by Jonathan Thompson

Mobile Nation

A motorhome metropolis blooms each year in the Arizona desert.

by Nate Berg

Ewe-haul

About 50 years ago, state wildlife officials decided to try to restore bighorn sheep to Wyoming’s Seminoe Mountains. Between 1958 and 1985, they brought in six new batches — 236 total — from the more prolific Whiskey Mountain herd to the northwest. But the Seminoe herd failed to sustain itself, and by last fall, there…

by Sarah Gilman

More DNA debunking

Kevin Jones was certainly the first person with any kind of authority to step forward and dispute the claim that Everett Ruess’ bones had been found, but Paul Leatherbury should get a bit of credit, too, for locating Ruess’ dental records, which David Roberts of National Geographic Adventure overlooked at the University of Utah special…

by Morgan Tyre

Nano-scale activism

Regarding Ray Ring’s article about executive change at large environmental organizations, I understand the “frustration with boards of directors, low pay and constant fund-raising pressure” (HCN, 3/1/10). That’s why I started Community for Sustainable Energy (www.cforse.org) in 2006. I worked with Clean Water Action and an affiliated national network for six years. I started CFORSE…

by Fred Kirsch

See you in Spring

In our 22-issue-per-year publishing schedule, we’ll be skipping the next issue. Look for HCN in your mailbox again around April 12, and in the meantime check our Web site, hcn.org, for news and commentary. SMALL-TOWN DISCOVERIESIntern Nick Neely had only been working at High Country News for three weeks when he happened to stroll past…

by Betsy Marston, Jonathan Thompson and Rachel Waldholz

‘Tyranny of the turbine’

I am a farmer in southwest Minnesota, and live very near an intersection of the Northern Border natural gas pipeline and a major electricity transmission line. Three hundred megawatts’-worth of wind turbines have already been installed here, and at least 300 MW more are in the permitting and development stage (HCN, 12/21/09 & 1/4/10). I…

by James A. Thompson

War on people

Prohibition is a sickening horror and the ocean of human wreckage it has left in its wake is almost endless (HCN, 3/1/10). Based on the unalterable proviso that drug use is essentially an unstoppable and ongoing human behavior that has been with us since the dawn of time, any serious reading on the subject of…

by Malcolm Kyle

Will the wolf survive?

My joy at reading of the wolf’s likely return to Colorado is tempered by the knowledge that the future does not bode well for wildlife in the Southwest: the fastest-growing region of the world’s fourth-fastest-growing nation (HCN, 2/15/10). I remember the melancholy autumn howls of some of the last wolves in Colorado when I was…

by Kathleene Parker

Pulp friction

Crossers Philip Caputo 480 pages, hardcover: $27.95.Knopf, 2009. The personal and political tensions surrounding the U.S.-Mexico border seem like ideal topics for renowned war correspondent, veteran novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Philip Caputo. His seventh novel, however, is the literary equivalent of a popcorn flick. As a meditation on post-9/11 border relations, Crossers relies heavily…

by Brian Kevin