Wild Comfort: The Solace of NatureKathleen Dean Moore256 pages,softcover: $15.95.Trumpeter Books, 2010. Writer, editor and activist Kathleen Dean Moore was settling in to write her next book when a series of personal tragedies changed everything. After several people close to her died within a few months, Moore abandoned her plans to create a book about […]
Communities
Posted inWotr
Marry me, marry my town
I am not just marrying a man; I am marrying a town. In my first, brief marriage, my husband and I were both newcomers to the Alaskan town where we spent our married life. The locals weren’t particularly invested in us. Instead, they waited with the patience of the seasoned to see if we could […]
Posted inApril 18, 2011: Muddy Waters
Unheard stories, unseen lives: A review of Southern Paiute, A Portrait
Southern Paiute: A PortraitWilliam Logan Hebner and Michael L. Plyler208 pages, hardcover: $34.95.Utah State University Press, 2010. In all of Native America, few people have been less understood or more maligned than the Southern Paiute Indians and their desert cousins. Mark Twain denounced them as “inferior to even the despised digger Indians of California.” Except […]
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Christo can wrap anything, but why bother?
The debate over the artist Christo’s latest scheme – he wants to canopy part of the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado in 2014 — shouldn’t simply be about art. Rather, it should be viewed as a jobs proposal, and on that ground I’d say, Why not? Certainly, Christo is an artist, maybe even the century’s […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
The rules of intrusion
I have enjoyed reading HCN and Craig Childs’ writing over the years — until now (HCN, 2/21/11). As a high school librarian in Kayenta, Ariz., on the Navajo Nation, I often reach for an issue of HCN when a student isn’t reading. Students are proud to see tribal topics being covered and discussed in such […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Kudos, times two
Thanks for two superb articles: Craig Childs’ essay, “Ghosts, walking,” and Jim Stiles’ opinion piece, “Words that reverberate, words of hate” (HCN, 2/21/11). The former elegantly evokes the emotions canyon country kindles, while Stiles reminds us that it takes two poles to create polarization. We all need to be able to sit in between and […]
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It’s March and all is well, right?
As I write this in March, it’s raining. A moist flow has set in, and we’re looking forward to a spring full of wildflowers: Indian paint brush, sego lilies, penstemon. It’s a wet cycle in the high desert of southern Utah. Not only is it raining, we’ve had more snow this winter than we’ve seen […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Running into winter
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. When my father-in-law’s sixtieth rolled around we got together as a family and asked him what he wanted for his birthday. Without hesitating he replied, “I want you all to run a half marathon […]
Posted inRange
The myth of rural subsidies
By Brian Depew Living in cities makes us smarter, more efficient and more innovative and rural life would not be possible without a “raft of subsidies devoted to sustaining it.” That is the claim made by Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein in a series of posts last week (one, two, three and four). Klein was […]
Posted inBlog
America’s Great Outdoors Diversity Initiative
Protecting the environment for future generations is great idea. In fact it’s a notion so simple that you might wonder why it took a White House committee ten months, 52 public listening sessions and a 116-page document to express what any lover of nature knows by heart. Unveiled in February by President Obama, America’s Great […]
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A prodigal son is honored by his hometown
It’s not only war heroes who get honored in the West with lasting memorials. When prodigal son Dalton Trumbo finally returned to his hometown of Grand Junction, Colo., he arrived on Main Street in a bronze bathtub. After four years, despite rain and snow, he’s still there, and some residents still can’t figure out if […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
New national forest rule lacks rigor
If you had come upon the U.S. Forest Service’s new draft planning rule in the second week of February and, unable to contain your curiosity, given it a hasty read, you might have come away impressed. Since 1982, the forest planning rule has provided the blueprint for managing 155 national forests and 20 national grasslands; […]
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Finding place
For 14 years, I’ve been a wilderness ranger in a remote corner of southeast Alaska. What started as a summer job, something to fund my Western travel adventures, somehow turned into a career. Just as unexpectedly, I’ve learned about the powerful bond that can form between people and a place. This wilderness I’ve come to […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
An Unusual Miss Navajo
Grand Falls, ArizonaRadmilla Cody knows the way home. It’s not an easy journey. The dirt roads are canoe-shaped and gouged by rain. They curl around hills and plunge into deep draws, finally bringing us to the family homestead near Grand Falls, on the Navajo Reservation. Cody grew up on these lonesome sage flats. Her Navajo […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
Domestic violence on the rez
Radmilla Cody and Geraldine Laughter discuss domestic violence and the challenges for enforcement and victim support services on the Navajo Nation. Last year, President Obama signed the Tribal Law and Order Act, which could help improve enforcement and support for domestic violence victims on reservations around the country.
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
Grant received, grant given
The Fund for Investigative Journalism recently awarded a $5,000 grant to HCN Contributing Editor Matt Jenkins, to support a reporting project over the next several months. Since 1969, the Fund has given out more than $1.5 million in grants to freelance reporters, book authors and small publications. They say ’tis better to give than to […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
Thirteen ways of looking at a mushroom cloud
Friendly Fallout 1953Ann Ronald248 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of Nevada Press, 2010.Friendly Fallout 1953, Nevada writer Ann Ronald’s latest exploration of place, is itself an experiment in fission — the literary kind. Set at Nevada’s Proving Ground, the book splits the telling of history among 12 fictional characters — plus Ronald herself — who witness the […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
Regaining identity through restoration
Charles Wilkinson’s new book describes how a tribe “terminated” by the federal government fought to regain its identity.
Posted inWotr
A fish tale in the land of Oz
The most expensive and protracted battle over an endangered species is at last approaching its day of reckoning in Portland, Ore. Sometime this spring, federal District Court Judge James Redden will decide the terms of a recovery plan for some two dozen endangered salmon stocks in the Columbia River Basin. Like the famous Boldt Decision […]
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A uranium mill makes no sense in western Colorado
I drink water straight from the tap. Generally, if someone tells me something is safe, I accept that it probably is. So I’d love to be relaxed about the proposed Piñon Ridge uranium mill just outside of Naturita, Colo., but I can’t. The mill, whose permit was recently approved by the state’s health department, is […]