The people of Salmon, Idaho, may have reclaimed their namesake river this spring. It happened during Riverfest 2011, a fund-raising event created to help build a kayak park downtown, where the Salmon River splits into two channels. The event attracted a lot of the 20-something boater crowd of river guides and semi-obsessive kayakers, many of […]
Communities
Posted inRange
The diabetes industry
High Country News recently reported on an epidemic of diabetes among Native Americans who have, over the years, switched from traditional diets to mainstream processed food. And I can personally attest that this chronic disease can strike someone of Scotch-Irish-German ancestry — like me. In the fall of 2009, my vision was getting blurry, so […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Back on your feet
NEVADA What helps someone survive an ordeal that would most likely kill anyone else? Rita Chretien, 56, should know. She and her husband, Albert, 59, who own an excavating company, were on their way from British Columbia to a trade show in Las Vegas when they lost their way in the mountains of northeastern Nevada […]
Posted inWotr
Local food, local loans
I just loaned $3,000 to a small business in my western Colorado town of Paonia, and I’m looking forward to getting the first installment on the 6 percent interest. I haven’t decided, though, if I want it in the form of a box of fresh-picked veggies or as a gourmet dinner. In six years, provided […]
Posted inBlog
A slice of life for the average EJ organizer
Many people wonder what keeps a Sierra Club environmental justice organizer busy. We could ask my fellow EJ organizers around the country and most would tell you that the times around and after Earth Day are frequently the busiest. As spring melts the last of the snows (it snowed in Flagstaff just recently), and flowers […]
Posted inWotr
Extreme Green
It has taken me decades to be recognized as an environmental extremist. My “attack” on Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young, a National Rifle Association board member, in Sierra magazine fomented a mass exodus from the Outdoor Writers Association of America, including 79 members and 22 supporting organizations. I serve on two foundations that award major […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
A Gem City Atlas: Novel maps of Laramie, Wyoming
What is Laramie? This winter, creative writing graduate students at the University of Wyoming teamed with Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas author Rebecca Solnit and cartographers Ben Pease and Shizue Seigel to answer that question. The series of maps and essays that resulted provide a nuanced portrait of place — one that pairs missile […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
The endless atlas: A review of Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas Rebecca Solnit167 pages, softcover: $24.95.University of California Press, 2010. San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit’s latest release, Infinite City, can be loosely described as an atlas of her hometown. But Solnit is interested in far more than geographical representation, as she writes in the book’s foreword: “An atlas is a […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
Chill out with HCN and some chili
We’d like to invite our Colorado Western Slope readers and friends to a potluck chili feast following our late-spring board meeting. Come meet other HCN fans and our staff and board members. The fun starts at 6 p.m. on Friday, June 10, at the Town Park here in Paonia. We’ll provide the chili — hot, […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
Did I mention she can cook?
Debbie Sease was a welcome face on the cover of High Country News (5/2/11). The story didn’t mention two singular aspects of her career. She and the other graying conservationists in the story have all have been extraordinary mentors for many, many others. I got to know Debbie working at the Sierra Club many years […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
Idolizing Ed
Call me humorless, but I was disturbed when I read Michael Branch’s essay about the boulder he and his buddies sent smashing downhill (HCN, 5/2/11). His joyous description of the event, in which he channels Ed Abbey’s ribald style perfectly, strikes my sober ear as just another chapter of the bad old story of humans […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
Watts of memories
Paul Larmer’s comments about his early years in D.C., and how many lobbyists stayed connected with the West through High Country News, brought to mind my early years with the Bureau of Land Management (HCN, 5/2/11). In the early ’80s, as James Watt ascended to the position of Interior secretary, I got my first taste […]
Posted inWotr
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, its a contrail
When we moved to the Colorado Plateau 20 years ago, I thought I’d be trading an ocean coast for a pristine Western sky. Instead, I was greeted by a nonstop parade of thundering jets roaring along one of the main air-transportation routes in the country, linking the East Coast to San Francisco. Congratulations, I told […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Walking in the body of being
In 1656, 23-year-old Baruch Spinoza, a Portuguese Jew in Amsterdam, was excommunicated by his community and formally cursed to the end of his days. The young man’s supposed heresies were likely related to a burgeoning pantheism, which he would later develop more fully — the idea of God as an infinite being who contains everything […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Lady Liberty v the Statue of Libertines
MONTANA So far in the West, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer is the only one who kills bad bills by whipping out his custom branding iron, which spells out VETO. The latest Tea Party proposals that have flamed out include a bill making it harder for people to register to vote, another to permit the use […]
Posted inBlog
Freedom Ride West
Editor’s note: James Mills is journeying around the West, exploring issues of diversity in Western national parks. In 1961, a long bus ride from Washington D.C. to New Orleans changed the world forever. The PBS American Experience documentary “The Freedom Riders” documents this journey. As you watch it, I hope that it will open As […]
Posted inGoat
While Non-Believers Punked the Rapture, the West was Punked
When Christian fundamentalists opened their eyes last Saturday evening, only to find that nothing, (at least there in their living rooms,) had changed, non-believers felt suddenly and gleefully exalted. In an unexpected twist, the sinners had been enraptured — at least metaphorically speaking — while their devout counterparts had kept their feet planted firmly on […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
All in not-so-good taste
This is my first time writing in to comment on an HCN story and what finally prompted me was not the contentious, passionate piece that I figured would inspire me to put fingers to keyboard. Instead, it was the slightly naughty, indulgent, but thoroughly invigorating essay about rock rolling (HCN, 5/2/11). I read the story […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Three Tribes, a Dam and a Diabetes Epidemic
Herbert Wilson came to North Dakota’s Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in 1954, to a tiny town called Elbowoods, tucked above the Missouri River in a bucolic patchwork of riverside willows, cottonwoods and fields. A Vermont-bred 33-year-old, fresh from Harvard and a tour as a WWII bombardier, Wilson was the new, sole doctor for the reservation’s […]