The Oxford Dictionaries Online last year added the word “locavore,” defined as someone who eats mostly locally produced food. The word’s acceptance reflects the success of a movement that seeks to make a dent in global climate change by encouraging people to purchase food close to home. It’s just one part of an ongoing health […]
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No more gold giveaways on our public lands
Since 1872, mining interests have made billions of dollars by removing and selling valuable minerals from our public lands without having to pay a cent to the American taxpayer. This is one of the biggest budget loopholes of the modern economy, and it needs to change — especially now — as Congress tries to address […]
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Mammoth Hot Springs and the question of density
Most Americans know about the geothermal extravaganza called Mammoth Hot Springs, nestled in a spectacular landscape in Yellowstone National Park. It is also a place that must serve visitors as they enjoy this exceptional place and its amazing sights: A male bison weighing well over half a ton, with a toss of his head and […]
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Two legs good, eight legs fascinating
The author learned to love the spiders she used to kill
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The education of Dr. Jane Lubchenco
When renowned zoologist Jane Lubchenco was sworn in as President Obama’s director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2009, she declared: “Science will be respected at NOAA; science will not be muzzled.” Lubchenco’s doctrine signaled a new day. Today, four years later, she would be the first to admit that her edict was […]
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Water is life for the Navajo Nation
Growing up on Black Mesa in northeast Arizona on the Navajo Nation, we often lived like nomads, following our sheep. As a child, I wasn’t aware that other people in America stayed put, living in one place. Whenever I returned home from boarding school during a break, I’d often find my family living somewhere new […]
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The more we drill, the more vulnerable we become
Although some small town residents see oil and gas drilling as destructive to their rural way of life, others welcome the most recent oil and gas boom for its promised benefits for the local economy. Here in Moab, Utah, for example, civic leaders like to say that extraction in the Canyonlands region will provide future […]
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Thoughts on Presidents’ Day
Abraham Lincoln was among my earliest heroes as a kid. I grew up in Illinois, a state that inculcated a love of the 16th president from the first days of school. My hometown was the site of one of the most famous of his pre-presidential debates with Stephen Douglas, and I often ate an ice […]
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When frontier socialism thrived in Wyoming
The last name of a man in the dues ledger of the South Slavic Socialist Organization, No. 136, startled me — “Putz.” I glimpsed it not long ago in old documents at the “Slovenski Dom” in Rock Springs, Wyo., a town where politics once mingled with lodge fraternalism in the Old West. It’s because my […]
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Living in a caboose, supporting the railroad
I’ve lived for close on 20 years in an old heavyweight Burlington Railroad caboose. It’s grounded in Gilpin County, Colo., close to the Continental Divide, near milepost 41.77 on the Union Pacific Railroad’s Moffat tunnel sub –a subsidiary line leading up to the tunnel and through it. I may have slept in that old baby […]
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Never underestimate the power of prejudice
Last year, both New Mexico and Arizona celebrated the centennial anniversaries of their becoming states. But why did it take them until 1912 to join the Union? The answer isn’t pretty; it reveals a pattern of racism and discrimination against Native Americans, Hispanics and Catholics in the West. For New Mexico, the long road to […]
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Killing wolves is part of the bargain
On Dec. 6, a Wyoming hunter killed one of Yellowstone’s most famous wolves, 832F, outside the park’s boundaries. It was a legal kill, yet within 48 hours, news organizations across the country ran stories mourning the wolf’s death and treating it like, well, the loss of a family friend. Wolf advocate Marc Cooke of Montana’s […]
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Letting go of the comfortable
In central Washington’s Douglas County you can find ghost houses worn by wind and marooned on small islands of untilled dirt. Their inhabitants once gazed out at the easternmost Cascade Mountains, their peaks just above eye level from the county’s 3,000-foot high plain. My mother’s family lived in one of those houses surrounded by wheat […]
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Our national parks need room to breathe
In just three short years, the National Park Service will celebrate its 100th birthday. In anticipation, on Aug.25 of last year, the agency released a report prepared by a special advisory committee on the role of science in the parks. That report called for more support of science, more scientists on park staffs and a […]
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The beauty of the wood pile
The six-and-a-half pound maul making its way around my head travels through the October sunshine: dull gray, blunt, serious as an elk in rut. It windmills beneath the yellow larch needles and outstretched arms of evergreens, their fall odors incensing an already heady mix of dried grass, wood smoke, and sun-warmed bark. A wedge of […]
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Big water projects should make Westerners nervous
Across maps of the arid West, expensive water pipelines are being plotted to meet the region’s profound need for water. Among those under serious consideration are a 263-mile pipeline to bring eastern Nevada water to Las Vegas, southwestern Utah’s 139-mile Lake Powell pipeline, and the 500-mile Flaming Gorge pipeline from Wyoming to Colorado. Each would cost […]
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Guns are different for women in the West
“In Montana, women go around with a baby bottle in one hand and a gun in the other,” quipped a man recently as he sat at the bar in Happy’s Road House, outside of Libby. Unlike the rural Montana women to whom he referred, my introduction to guns didn’t come about because I was surrounded by […]
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When road hogs get really, really big
I love living in rural Montana, where every census confirms out-migration. But much as I enjoy it, there are a few disadvantages, such as spotty cell phone service, access to only two free television stations, wilted produce at the grocery store, and lately, incredibly huge loads of equipment that clog our narrow, two-lane highways. Recently, […]
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The Wild and not so gun-loving West
On summer evenings in the former mining town of Silverton, Colo., the staccato sound of gunshots used to echo through otherwise quiet streets. A cast of stereotypical Old West characters riddled one another with bullets, as the legendary gunfighters did once upon a time in the West. Except that those kind of shoot-‘em-ups didn’t happen […]