A play-by-play of an election that poses big questions about fluency.
Arizona
Posted inNovember 10, 2014: Fallout
Review of “The Memory of Stone: Meditations on the Canyons of the West”
Photographs from Utah’s Monument Valley to the Petrified Forest.
Posted inArticles
Navajo language threatens candidate’s presidential bid
Chris Deschene faces disqualification over lack of fluency.
Posted inArticles
After 11 years, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument reopens
Increased border security means that all 517 square miles are again open to the public.
Posted inSeptember 15, 2014: Books & Essays
Forgetting we live in the desert
Rafael de Grenade on tough landscapes, writing as inquiry and climate change.
Posted inSeptember 1, 2014: Lost in the Woods
Lost in the woods
How the Forest Service is botching its biggest restoration project.
Posted inArticles
Two political elites prevail in Navajo primary melee
Shirley and Deschene pull ahead of 15 other candidates.
Posted inArticles
Rural cops get militarized
Pentagon gives guns, armored vehicles and battlefield gear to rural Western counties.
Posted inAugust 18, 2014: Alaska's Uncertain Food Future
The Latest: EPA cuts pollution at the Navajo Generating Station
BackstoryBad air from coal-fired power plants not only causes health problems for the locals; it also ruins the scenery. In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency began addressing the visual impacts of air pollution from power plants, developing plans to reduce haze around national parks and wilderness areas. (“Clean air regulations protect views by targeting coal […]
Posted inGoat
Recreational deaths soar this summer
Grand Canyon and Colorado rivers have record year for deaths.
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
Border out of control
National security runs roughshod over the Arizona wild.
Posted inGoat
The suburbs didn’t die — just short-circuited
Wasn’t it just a few months ago that we were all celebrating the death of the suburbs? Both Millennials and Boomers, and perhaps many of those in between, were headed for the walkable, vibrant urban core. We would bulldoze no more desert for McMansions; sunflowers would invade exurban golf courses; and the expressways built to […]
Posted inGoat
Google’s time machine will show changes in development and nature
I like to play the “used to be” game. While walking around my hometown with friends, I point to a storefront — one of the snazzier restaurants in town, say — and say, “That used to be this weird little store that carried everything from comic books to frogs in formaldehyde, all left over from […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Shady dealings in the desert
SunlandDon Waters200 pages, hardcover:$25.95.University of Nevada Press, 2013. Sid Dulaney leaves his cheating girlfriend behind in Massachusetts and returns home to Tucson in Sunland, Oregon writer Don Waters’ hilarious first novel. Sid had worked as an itinerant teacher, but finds himself jobless in Tucson, where he spends his time looking after his beloved grandmother, Nana. […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Touring Indian Country via footrace
How to run in a reservation race that’s both sport and cultural tradition.
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
How to save your town from the interstate
Tourists flocked to Winslow, Ariz., back in the golden era of cross-country rail travel, and later along the classic two-lane highway, Route 66. But now the old Valentine Diner sits empty and rusting, having long given up on luring customers off Interstate 40, which sidestepped the town in the 1970s. It’s a symbol of all […]
Posted inGoat
Four women joyride the flood that will revive the Colorado River Delta
The guides warned us, of course. Or they sort of did. It was sometime after the river outfitter’s shuttle van had passed through the latticework of gates and fences that guards the steep, hairpinned road to the boat-launch at the base of the Hoover Dam, and possibly right before we realized that we had left […]