The heat is rising on the National Park Service. In our special report: How climate change is altering the country’s beloved parks and the agency’s centennial has brought with it harsh scrutiny on issues of race and gender. Plus, nuclear power divides CA and a trip down the Grand.
Inside a park succeeding at recruiting diverse employees
Antonio Solorio helps national park reach L.A.’s Latino majority.
Meet the aspiring ranger locked out by National Park Service practices
The Park Service has seemed to get in its own way when it comes to hiring more diverse applicants.
What climate change is doing to the parks
A sample of the shifts already underway due to a warming climate.
Nuclear power divides California’s environmentalists
Is the closure of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant good or bad for the climate?
The Bundy battle continues, the Airbnb squeeze, and an unusual gun sale
Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.
A visit to the Grand Canyon, without handrails
A wild river is “a necessity of the human spirit.”
The Park Service’s befuddled funding
The cash-strapped agency wrestles with corporate sponsorships and budget shortfalls.
Collaboration? Not so much.
I read your article on the Bureau of Land Management’s new collaborative approach to planning with skepticism (“BLM rethinks land-use planning,” HCN, 5/30/16). In this same region of western Montana, the U.S Forest Service has been applying the word “collaborative” to its timber sales because the Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA) requires “public collaboration.” However,…
Why has the National Park Service gotten whiter?
The agency is trying to hire more racially diverse staff — but can’t seem to make headway.
Delta flood’s carbon footprint, floodplain fallout and purple fungi fighters
HCN.org news in brief.
William Henry Jackson’s history-making photos
See these rare color photographs of the early West.
Desert rising?
The map showing the counties in Western states that support the American Lands Council makes it look like a Mormon conspiracy to re-create the State of Deseret (“Land transfer support, county by county,” HCN, 7/25/16). Add to this House Bill 4751 (the Local Enforcement for Local Lands Act, which would shift law enforcement functions from…
Farewell to a senior editor
This issue we’re saying goodbye, in a way, to longtime High Country News writer and old friend Jonathan Thompson, who is leaving his post as senior editor in Durango, Colorado, to move to Bulgaria with his family. There he’ll be hard at work turning his extensive reporting on Colorado’s Gold King Mine spill into his…
For the Park Service, an uncomfortable birthday
For most of us, birthdays are happy occasions, when friends and family pay fond attention, lavishing us with gifts to prove that we are loved and valued. For one day, at least, our foibles are accepted with a smile, or at least diplomatically ignored. The National Park Service’s 100th birthday has been less joyful, however.…
HCN as travel guide
Hillary Rosner’s excellent article “When Water Turns to Dust” in the June 13, 2016, issue became a surprise travel guide of sorts on our recent trip across the Great Desert. On our return from Tahoe and Yosemite, we made a point to stop at Mono Lake, in part because in was mentioned in Hillary’s article. Plus,…
How the Park Service is planning for climate change
The agency is forging ahead despite meager help from Congress.
Immigrants and jobs
In “Love and Death on the Border” in the July 25, 2016, issue, Jon M. Shumaker ends a paragraph about the risks immigrants take in illegally crossing the border with “All this in order to take dangerous, crappy jobs no one in this country wants.” With this seemingly trivial comment, he perpetuates a false assumption…
Meet the man helping the Park Service prepare for a hotter future
Patrick Gonzalez walks the walk when it comes to climate action.
Latest: Officials open a criminal investigation of EPA’s role in the Animas river spill
Agency contractors were excavating debris at the old mining site when the river flooded with wastewater.