Viva Farms is a “farm incubator” in Washington’s Skagit Valley, helping aspiring cash-poor farmers like Nelida Martinez start and successfully operate their own businesses.
Hersh Saunders’ transformation from prosthodontist to kosher slaughterer
In a barn on his 400-acre ranch south of Pueblo, Colo., Hersh Saunders sharpens a long blunt-end knife called a halaf. A blue crocheted kippah, a Jewish skullcap, covers the bearded rabbi’s silver hair. Outside the barn, sheep graze and chickens peck near a small synagogue and rows of organic vegetables. Saunders has spent the…
A citizen activist forces New Mexico’s dairies to clean up their act
Jerry Nivens lives in a trailer in Caballo, N.M., 165 miles south of Albuquerque. A bulky Texas transplant who chain-smokes American Spirits, Nivens cares as deeply for his mesquite-speckled patch of ground as any rural New Mexican. He enjoys driving into the mountains, where he used to while away afternoons panning for gold. He goes…
Can an old mine become a work of art?
As I wander past a scrawled “NO TRESSPASSING: SHOTGUN ENFORCED” sign, I can’t help but recoil and glance around. I am, after all, on private property, and instinct is instinct. My safety at this particular mining site, however, is assured: I’m with a bunch of internationally acclaimed artists and a slew of locals. Even the…
The Southwest’s population and housing booms bite the dust
If you want to see the dried-up husk of the New West’s latest incarnation, just go to Maricopa, Ariz., and visit one of the half-built suburbs on its fringe. You’ll see earth scraped bare and a tumbleweed or two, and even a few ghosts: The phantoms of streets mapped but never built, lots subdivided but…
Dealt a bad hand: A review of Doc
Doc Mary Doria Russell 394 pages, hardcover: $26. Random House, 2011. Versatile novelist Mary Doria Rusell’s captivating reimagining of the life of Doc Holliday ends before the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral, that eternal wellspring for Western novels and movies. In her new book, Doc, Russell sees Holliday as more than a gambler and…
Farm incubators help would-be farmers succeed on their own
Four years ago, Nelida Martinez’s teenaged son got sick. The herbal remedies she’d learned from her grandmother in Oaxaca, Mexico, didn’t help, so she took him to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with leukemia. Martinez, a 38-year-old farmworker with a shy smile and laugh lines from a life spent in the sun, had followed…
Fighting the wind on a Montana camping trip
My wife does not like the wind. I know this because she says so. “I hate the wind!” Crissie hollers, doing her best to be heard above it. It’s late June, 7 p.m., the first night of a three-day float down the Marias River in northern Montana, 40-some miles from the Canadian border. We woke…
Parsing ‘Pristine’
The thing that bothered me most about Emma Marris’ essay was the suggestion toward the end that we should “look to the future and create more nature instead of clinging to disappearing scraps of seemingly untouched land” (HCN, 10/6/2011, “The mirage of the pristine”). How exactly does she propose that we go about creating nature?…
The burial of Elouise Cobell
Elouise Cobell filed her class action suit in 1996 and originally thought it would take only three years to resolve the issues. She joined Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Attorney General Eric Holder in making the settlement announcement. Tami A. Heilemann-DOI On Oct. 22, Elouise Cobell was buried on the Blacktail Ranch where she and…
Western game wardens go after poachers
A thick autumn snowfall still carpeted the ground when Colorado district wildlife manager Tom Knowles got the tip that put him on the trail of the “Missouri boys.” The informant, a hunter named Michael Xavier, said that three men who had licenses only for cow elk had killed at least one bull elk in Rio…
Western Watersheds’ collateral damage
You presented Laird Lucas as a dedicated and talented environmental lawyer fighting big corporations and corrupt government (HCN, 10/31/11, “The people v. the agency”). That makes his close association with Western Watersheds Project (WWP) puzzling. For 10 years, I have volunteered to represent environmental ethics on a cooperative management team for a family-owned and -operated…
A Texas town welcomes dairies; a New Mexico activist fights them
Stephanie Paige Ogburn interviews an activist in New Mexico who worked with the state to regulate pollution from groundwater, then speaks with an economic development director in Muleshoe, Texas — just across the border — who has actively recruited dairies to her town.
An unexpected L.A. story: A review of The Barbarian Nurseries
The Barbarian Nurseries: A NovelHéctor Tobar422 pages, hardcover: $27.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Los Angeles Times columnist Héctor Tobar’s ferocious new novel, The Barbarian Nurseries, deftly and convincingly plunges us into the heated national debate on undocumented immigration. Araceli Ramirez, a single woman from Mexico City, works as the live-in housekeeper for Maureen Thompson and…
And now, a message from our sponsors …
In this issue, along with our regular ad pages, you will find the holiday Green Gift Guide. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to all of our generous advertising sponsors for their support. It takes readers like you and sponsors like them to make HCN’s work possible. Please help us thank them by supporting…
Aspiring farmers find creative ways to succeed
Not long ago, a college classmate of mine named Sarahlee Lawrence was splitting her time between raft guiding and river conservation, traveling as far as Ethiopia and Chile. But the world’s water problems are huge, she says. “I was struggling to feel like I was actually making a difference.” Then she discovered a startling statistic:…
Beware the leftward tilt
I really like your stories of people coming together to solve gnarly problems, and exposés of environmental abuses. But your uber-liberal ideology is extremely irritating, as in Ray Ring’s article, “Citizen democracy staggers onward” (HCN, 10/31/11). I give Ring credit for quoting a source who even-handedly criticizes big business and big labor unions for corrupting…
California’s high-speed rail is slow to gain speed
Fourteen countries have high-speed rail networks; in just a few years, 10 more will. Yet America’s primary bullet-train attempt is faltering in California, a state that will add 20 million people in the next two decades and needs to find a way to schlep them around. Estimated costs for the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s plan…