The work of Omer C. Stewart reminds us just how far we’ve come in our thinking about fire. In Forgotten Fires, Henry T. Lewis and M. Kat Anderson have resurrected Stewart’s 1954 manuscript, outlined the events of his life, and critiqued his research based on current knowledge of fire. Stewart wrote at a time when […]
Books
Posted inAugust 4, 2003: Pipe Dreams
Red Earth: desert poems resurrected
I’ve seen her pass with eyes upon the road — An old bent woman in a bronze black shawl, With skin as dried and wrinkled as a mummy’s, As brown as a cigar-box, and her voice Like the low vibrant strings of a guitar. And I have fancied from the girls about What she was […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2003: Pipe Dreams
Project puts tribal lands back on the map
Speak of maps, and most people think of lines drawn on paper. But American Indians have navigated the land for thousands of years using mental maps created from generations of stories and oral history. For them, the landscape is a fusion of familiar landmarks and mythical or real events that happened there. Since 1999, the […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2003: Pipe Dreams
Sustainable forestry for beginners
While most how-to forestry guides are tailored for Eastern landowners, former HCN intern Bryan Foster has brought the issue west in his new book, Wild Logging. Foster introduces readers to Western landowners, foresters and loggers, describing the physical work of marking timber sales, cutting trees, performing prescribed burns and removing felled timber. As he tells […]
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
Westerners must be fire-starters as well as firefighters
There is no better guide to fire in the West than Stephen Pyne, who spent 15 years fighting fires on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and has written 16 books on fire. The 32 essays in his most recent book, Smokechasing, are a mixed, uncoordinated group, but so brilliant and thoughtful that they […]
Posted inJune 23, 2003: 'Sound science' goes sour
Have no doubts, go higher
To have lived in the highlands has rendered the lowlands incomplete. My intellect rebels at such thoughts, but in my heart I feel it to be true. I am inflated by the mountain. Tendrils of perfection reach out from my past, usurping the present. Randy LaChapelle When In Doubt, Go Higher I opened When In […]
Posted inJune 23, 2003: 'Sound science' goes sour
An inside look at the hardscrabble plains
An image comes to mind at the mention of the High Plains: an empty but picturesque farmhouse, roof sagging like the back of an old horse, porch falling off the foundation, and screen door swaying in the wind. There’s a wide, exposing sky, and an old windmill tilting toward the West. But what happens when […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Women take the wheel
In the 1990s, the bumper sticker “Thelma and Louise Live!” sprouted on mini-vans driven by mothers in suburbs across America, proclaiming a craving for a journey beyond the kids’ soccer fields. The 19 women writers who contributed to A Road of Her Own: Women’s Journeys in the West have peeled out of the daily commute, […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Look before you eat
Surely, we would feel better if we knew that food companies were doing everything possible to minimize food hazards, and that the government was looking out for our interests and making sure food companies were doing what they were supposed to. In the absence of such reassurance, we lose trust. — Marion Nestle, Safe Food […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Inside HCN
New from Writers on the Range “The jacket of a popular author’s book says that she lives on a ‘40-acre ranch.’ No real rancher would care to make that statement. Similarly, only uninformed journalists could write, ‘Sen. Jones lives on his 10-acre emu ranch.’ The correct way to write that sentence would be, ‘Mr. Jones […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Gulf of California Dreamin’
No river in the United States has been as aggressively seized for human use as the Colorado — and shelves of books have been written to tell the story. But what becomes of the river once it flows out of the U.S. and into Mexico has received considerably less print. Now, Defenders of Wildlife has […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Barren, wild and worthless? Anything but
For naturalist Susan Tweit, moving to New Mexico meant learning to love the harsh beauty of a landscape that one haggard 19th century surveyor dismissed as “barren, wild, and worthless.” That bitter phrase became the title of Tweit’s eloquent 1995 memoir on life in the Chihuahuan Desert. Taken in by her masterful prose, readers, too, […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Glen Canyon Voices
Glen Canyon is such a compelling intellectual topic because it is full of contradictions: It has been destroyed, and yet a movement is afoot to bring it back … it was a place perhaps equal in grandeur to Grand Canyon, and yet it was dammed and inundated with only the faintest puff of dissent; it […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
A book big enough to make waves
Northern Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is a big place with big oil reserves. And now it has a big photographic book that explores the collision of conservation and development there — a book that has created quite a stir in Washington, D.C. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land, A Photographic […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Looking out for the little guys
From its roots as a scrappy, garage-band-style environmental group, the Paonia, Colorado-based Center for Native Ecosystems has become a voice for the kind of endangered species often overlooked by other conservation groups. The center has championed such unlikely species as Graham’s penstemon, a wildflower threatened by oil and gas development, the boreal toad and the […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Inside HCN
Radio High Country News has released the first of a three-part series on fire in the West. The series includes on-the-ground reports and interviews with the scientists, managers policy-makers and writers who are framing today’s debate over fire policy. Listen online at www.hcn.org/radio. Are animal-rights activists leading the environmental movement astray? Arizona writer Dave Gowdey […]
Posted inMay 12, 2003: Planting time
Nevada: A diamond in the rough
Our country’s driest state does not treat humans gently. “The desert was one prodigious graveyard,” wrote Mark Twain about his arrival in Nevada in the 1860s. “And the log chains, wagon tires, and rotting wrecks of vehicles were almost as thick as the bones.” Today, many people perceive Nevada as a gambling mecca surrounded by […]
Posted inMay 12, 2003: Planting time
Healthy energy on public lands
Wind turbines and solar panels may be coming soon to a national forest near you. According to a new report, there are plenty of opportunities to develop renewable energy on millions of acres of federal land in the West. In Assessing the Potential for Renewable Energy on Public Lands, the Bureau of Land Management and […]
Posted inMay 12, 2003: Planting time
Hiking toward healing
Maybe it sounds crazy for us to have spent years getting me well from cancer, only to go out into grizzly bear country. But we wanted to be back in the wild country that I dreamed of when things were at their worst. Diagnosed with cervical cancer at 30, Katie Gibson of Bozeman, Mont., craved […]
Posted inMay 12, 2003: Planting time
How safe is that fillet?
Most Americans — even those fanatical about eating only organic foods — assume that eating fish raised in the ocean is a healthy act that does no harm to the environment. Not necessarily. Some seafood varieties are overfished, and some are caught and farmed in ways that damage ocean ecosystems (HCN, 3/17/03: Bracing against the […]