A timber company tries to do the right thing as a tribe fights for its ancestral lands. Also, enviros buy out oil and gas leases in forests, unusual bedfellows support state-run banks, genetically modified seeds take the next step forward, a climate artist, and more.
The right tributary
Yesterday I took a long walk up a cold stream in search of bull trout. I didn’t really expect to see fish. Instead, I’d come to see redds — the gravel nests in which fish lay eggs — because I’d been trying to write a story about salmon and realized I knew nothing whatsoever about…
State-run banks: a movement driven by unusual politics
During Tea Party champion Joe Read’s first session in the Montana Legislature, in 2011, he drew widespread ridicule for introducing a bill that declared global warming “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana.” With another anti-science bill, Rep. Read called for Montana’s government to overrule federal regulations on greenhouse gases. He also passed…
A Washington tribe and a timber company wrestle over a forest’s future
Updated 11/30/12 The Indian chief and the timber agent meet near the shores of Port Gamble Bay. The spring air is cool and breezy along this small and sheltered nook of northwest Washington’s Puget Sound. Inside the room where the two men sit side-by-side, the atmosphere is civil, yet tense, as they discuss their separate…
Seattle-based artist paints portraits of a melting world
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. — John Berger, Ways of Seeing Maria Coryell-Martin wants us to dance the horizon. We are in the Seattle Art Museum’s sculpture park, beneath a hunk of orange steel (The Eagle, by Alexander Calder), but she is looking past the art,…
Protecting the forests, and maybe the deserts, too
At an emotional press conference in Jackson a few weeks ago, Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead expounded on his love for Wyoming, recalling how his family taught him to revere “the beauty … the open space, the clean air, the wildlife, the recreational opportunity” found in the state’s mountain forests. He reminisced about the trips that…
Taking it to extremes: A review of Salt to Summit
Daniel Arnold breathes new life into the fabled Wild West as he takes readers on a journey of extremes in Salt to Summit: A Vagabond Journey from Death Valley to Mount Whitney. Arnold blends history and adventure recounting his expedition from Badwater Basin in Death Valley to the summit of Mount Whitney. With a distance…
A review of Continental Divide: Wildlife, People and the Border Wall
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…
The truths that matter: A review of Truth Like the Sun
In Truth Like the Sun, Washington novelist Jim Lynch straddles two Seattles: the little-known Western town in the 1960s, on the brink of exploding into a world-class city, and the modern Seattle of four decades later, at the height of the dot-com boom. He braids these incarnations of the city into an intricate narrative of…
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…
Tilting the balance of power
Ten years ago, I gathered with 22 other undergraduates on the shady side of a prefab building, sheltered from the glare of a Death Valley autumn day. We were there to talk with activists from the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, who had recently won a 7,750-acre reservation, only a small fraction of it in the national…
Agrichemical companies power up genetically modified seeds
One sunny afternoon, Andy Nagy and Donald Shouse drove past apple trees, plum orchards and sugar beet fields to a farm north of Twin Falls, Idaho. The late August setting was one of pastoral beauty, but the two researchers concentrated on the dirt underfoot. A farmer had asked them to come investigate some problem weeds.…
Another win for the pronghorns
We’re delighted to announce that High Country News has won the prestigious 2012 Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism for “Perilous Passages,” a Dec. 26, 2011, package of stories on wildlife migration, by former editorial fellow Emilene Ostlind, assistant editor Cally Carswell and Mary Ellen Hannibal, with photos by Joe Riis. “Passages” also recently won…
Cowtowing to ranchers
While this article was informative and generally balanced, it only hinted at the intensity of cattle grazing and how it compares to the wild horse population (“Nowhere to Run,” HCN, 11/12/12). The BLM factsheet on grazing states that in 2011, BLM lands were authorized to support 8.3 million animal unit months (AUMs). The BLM estimates…
Extra! Extra! Beer in Utah!
Congratulations on the excellent article, “Red State Rising” (HCN, 10/29/12). It was great to see a positive story about Utah. The Air Force moved me here 36 years ago, and for many of those years the state received more than its share of negative stories, usually focused on the failure of business and government leadership to…
Keep the political stories coming
I was disappointed in the Nov. 12 letter, “Enough (political stories) already,” which berated HCN for covering “electoral politics.” All politics are “electoral politics.” This year, it has been unusually disgusting, and, yes, divisive, thanks to ideologues and Big Money. The answer is to fix the system, not to encourage ignorance. If HCN is to…
Political paradox
Jonathan Thompson’s brilliant article, “Red State Rising,” shines some much-needed light on the paradox of politics in Utah, where government officials routinely manage economic growth and funnel subsidies to businesses — even while professing to hate big government and love free markets (HCN, 10/29/12). In putting a human face on this story, though, Thompson went…