In a long, nerve-racking undercover operation, a federal wildlife agent brought down one of the world’s most notorious rare-insect traffickers.

Horses running wild

$118.2 millionBLM wild horse and burro program budget request, 2011 $2.5 millionU.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wolf management budget request, 2011 (Northern Rockies) 26,600Number of wild horses and burros Western public lands can sustain (BLM estimate) 32,000Number of wild horses and burros now held in corrals and pastures (after being removed from public lands), up…

by Rachel Waldholz

The Butterfly Sting

How a federal wildlife agent brought down one of the world’s most notorious insect thieves.

by Craig Welch

Nature-for-profit

In the market for a Siberian weasel fur coat? A pair of eel-skin cowboy boots? A Louis Vuitton purse made from ostrich and monitor lizard skin? Look no further than lonestaronline.com. In February, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began an eBay-style rolling auction of some 300,000 (HOT! NEW!) items from its National Wildlife Property…

by Sarah Gilman

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…

by Staff

The harsh truths of Bowden

Charles Bowden is a wonderful, as well as provocative, writer (HCN, 3/1/10). He has a way of serving up the truth so it slaps you in the face. I’m not sure any magazine but High Country News would have the guts to print this story as is. Maybe you would be willing to reprint something…

by Crista Worthy

Spring visitors

Here in Paonia, Colo., March brought us 60-degree days and 20-degree days, glorious sunshine and freezing sleet — sometimes during the same half-hour. Zac and Lisa Tuthill stopped by on one of the wet, snowy days, on their way home from Moab to Laramie, Wyo., where she’s a psychotherapist and he’s studying civil engineering. A…

by Jodi Peterson

A once and future abundance

The Living Shore: Rediscovering a Lost World Rowan Jacobsen 176 pages, hardcover: $20. Bloomsbury USA, 2009. The Olympia oyster — small, slow-growing, sensitive to heat and cold, copper in color and taste — is a rarity among shellfish. Yet this fussy bivalve, the West Coast’s only native oyster, once carpeted intertidal areas from Alaska to…

by A.E. Smith

It’s the population, stupid — part I

Thanks for Charles Bowden’s grim but clear-eyed view of events along the border and Jonathan Thompson’s editorial relating them to too many people and too much consumption (HCN, 3/1/10). There’s no doubt that our addiction to consumption creates social and environmental costs, but I have a quibble regarding Thompson’s statement that it is “the most…

by Peter Waser

It’s the population, stupid — part II

I am sorry that Charles Bowden, in “The War Next Door,” does not mention Mexico’s population growth among the causes of Mexican migration into the United States (HCN, 3/1/10). It is, he says, “a natural shift of a species.”  Perhaps, but it is also a case of the mushrooming of a people. Since I was…

by Peter Bridges

“Just journalism or hegemonic narrative?”

Thank you for doing a series on environmental justice (HCN, 2/1/10). The successes of the environmental justice movement stand undeniably. After reading the first article in the “Green Justice” series, though, I felt confused and puzzled by your framing of the EJ movement, one of its national leaders, and those who have worked and continue…

by Sofia Martinez

Saving the U.S. Forest Service

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & the Fire That Saved AmericaTimothy Egan336 pages, hardcover: $27. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. The United States of America leaped into the 20th century with a surfeit of natural resources and a flamboyant leader. Early in his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt proposed a radical idea: Set aside and protect certain parts…

by Cherie Newman

More grousing

Greater sage grouse — whose numbers have declined by 90 percent over the past century — deserve federal protection under the Endangered Species Act, said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on March 5. For now, though, they won’t get it: The feds say they have to deal with other species first. As non-decisive as it was,…

by Jonathan Thompson