This happens all too often in the rugged backcountry of the West: A hiker goes out for a day, or an afternoon, and never returns. A search is launched, and eventually the person is found safe — or it ends less happily, and a body is recovered. This time it happened at Mesa Verde National […]
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My public land pup
My dog is the best dog in the world. Now, he hasn’t always been that way. He’s a springer spaniel-Labrador or a “springador,” and he was the puppy from hell. He chewed up three pairs of reading glasses and nibbled the top off of one of my cowboy boots. He didn’t do too well in […]
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Five windshield visions
One: Nevada. A few miles from the California line, heading into the setting sun, I have to put my hand up to shade my eyes, so bright is the starflash on the windshield. Signs have warned, in wordless silhouette, of horses on the highway, and in fact I have seen two small herds of wild […]
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Clinging to coal on the reservation is looking backward
“Courageous,” “an opportunity,” “a venture into a new era,” “a vision for the future.” To hear glowing words like these from some leaders of the Navajo Nation, you might think the tribe had decided to head boldly into renewable energy or some other modern economic model. But no, the officials were describing the tribe’s desire […]
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Hard choices for an uncertain future
Stepping onto the stage of the Sheridan Opera House in Telluride, Colo., his biceps bulging after chopping vegetables six hours a day for 21 months while in prison, Tim DeChristopher got a standing ovation for an act of insurrection. DeChristopher became the public face of climate-change activism in 2008 with an audacious act of principled […]
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Wild, free and out of control
“In my world, everyone’s a pony, and they all eat rainbows and poop butterflies.” So proclaims cat-like creature Katie in the movie version of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who. Sharing Katie’s world are feral-horse support groups — whose members number in the millions — and NBC, which regularly recycles their fantasies. For example, on May […]
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It’s too soon to end Arizona’s solar incentives
There may be no better place on the planet to generate solar electricity than Arizona. The entire state shows up as a big red stain on solar radiation maps, and the state’s numerous canals, fallow fields, zombie subdivisions and parking lots — not to mention its nearly 3 million rooftops — are like a big blank […]
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Made in the American West, consumed in China
This spring, the Gulf of California’s shores near the mouth of the Colorado River were littered with dead bodies. They weren’t casualties of the drug trade; instead, they were victims of another international market — the Asian desire for wildlife. Chinese demand for the swim bladders of the giant totoaba fish, thought to aid fertility, […]
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Two blocks from the Mexican border
Every weekend at daybreak, the neighborhood dogs begin to bark. I open my blinds to see what’s up, and it’s almost always the same: a Mexican teenager in a dark hoodie running down the abandoned railroad track followed by several others just like him, spaced every few minutes. Sometimes they’re barefoot. They disappear into a […]
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Elwha, a story of today’s West
The heart of the new book, Elwha: A River Reborn, is a photograph of Elwha Dam taken in 2010, one year before it came down. Framed by canyon walls and a mossy rock garden, two thin cascades, leaking through the dam, join and fall down into the Elwha River, to embrace a dark pool just below […]
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Bighorn needn’t lose out to oil and gas trucks
It slips into the realm of offensive when a resource management agency is forced to undo its own hard work. The North Dakota Game and Fish Agency recently did just that by helicoptering 26 of 28 bighorn sheep out of the habitat it had carefully helicoptered the animals into in 2006. The herd, near Theodore Roosevelt National […]
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No thanks, Estonia
At any given moment, 20 million people are video chatting with friends and relatives in distant lands. Skype, the ingenious software that makes this possible, was developed in Estonia, a tiny nation in northern Europe, hard on the Baltic Sea. Ocean-going tribes, sometimes called “pagan raiders,” have lived in Estonia for thousands of years. During World […]
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All it takes is somebody with conviction
Once in a while, a principled person can make all the difference. This is how it began for me: I host Home Ground, a weekly public radio program, and a year ago, Montana’s U.S. attorney invited me to attend a law enforcement conference of about 130 officials, ranging from city and county police to state attorneys […]
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Once there was an effective governor and a middle ground
It’s sobering to recall that, not that long ago, the West wasn’t labeled Blue or Red, but rather a shade of beige. Just a generation ago, centrists like Mike Mansfield, Cecil Andrus, Frank Church, Scoop Jackson, John Melcher and progressives like the cousins Morris and Stewart Udall represented Westerners in Washington. Today, if a Western […]
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Hispanics flex some environmental muscle
The 1906 Antiquities Act, which grants the president unilateral authority to protect broad swaths of land as monuments, has long stirred controversy in the West, where we don’t like the feds overstepping. The 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, designated by Bill Clinton in 1996, is still a sore point because Utah’s congressmen and governor were […]
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A lesson from a pig called Eddie
I love animals and always have, but I am also a meat eater. In my early 20s, I tried a short stint as a vegetarian, but jumped off the meat-free wagon after a happy encounter with bacon. At the time I felt a twinge of guilt, but the truth is I never gave vegetarianism a […]
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It’s time to see exactly how the sausage gets made
This February in Salt Lake City, Amy Meyer stood on the street and used her cell phone to record what was happening outside a slaughterhouse. She then became the first person charged under one of the new so-called “ag-gag” laws. Six states currently have such Farm Protection laws, deliberately designed to stop video recording at […]
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Winter: an encore edition
On April 21, a surprise snowstorm blew into western Montana. Small by any standards, it was one of those peaceful, quiet snows, without any wind, as if Mother Nature was feeling nostalgic and had ordered it up out of a Robert Frost poem. I say “surprise” because I was working inside that day; at 3:00 […]
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A fine day in the classroom
My daughter, Maria, teaches third grade in the border town of Deming, N.M., where every child in the school qualifies for free breakfast and lunch, test scores are chronically low, and science is a neglected subject. Eager to help out, I discover the Mastodon Matrix Project, which is run by the Museum of the Earth. […]
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Frontier anxiety for the 21st century
Frederick Jackson Turner’s classic 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” argued that the frontier experience — the opportunity for unlimited expansion into “uninhabited” lands — shaped the country’s entrepreneurial spirit. Turner’s essay took on added significance because three years earlier, the Census Bureau had declared the frontier closed. The line that separated […]