Half Broke Horses: A True-Life NovelJeannette Walls288 pages,hardcover: $26.Scribner, 2009. In some respects, Lily Casey Smith, the heroine of Jeannette Walls’ Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, is a classic example of an independent, hardworking Western woman: a rancher, schoolteacher, businesswoman, wife and mother. Lily, however, is in the unique position of being both the […]
Communities
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
Learning to live landlocked
When I lived in southern Alaska, everything revolved around the ocean. Our island was reachable only by plane or boat, and you couldn’t get anywhere dry or metropolitan without hopping an Alaska Airlines jet. The sea was the only constant in a place that seemed beset by continual change — people moving in and out […]
Posted inBlog
Environmental harmony
“Environmental justice” is a pleasant euphemism for racism. Just as we couched the fight for racial equality during the 1960s comfortably under the guise of civil rights, today we continue to deny our culpability in a bad situation with semantics. In 1988 when a Harlem neighborhood was targeted for the ill-advised location of a sewage […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Witches and rifles
COLORADO Should the Urantians face persecution for their religious beliefs, they could always consider buying real estate in another part of the West, namely Colorado Springs. There, the U.S. Air Force Academy has set aside an outdoor worshipping area for “Pagans, Wiccans, Druids and other Earth-centered believers,” according to the Associated Press. The academy has […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 2010: Prodigal Dogs
The squeal of silence
Alone in a cabin, a writer finds that silence is more than the absence of noise
Posted inBlog
Wilderness environmentalism
The environmental movement’s most singular and stunning achievement is the introduction into human history of an awareness of and care for other animals and ecosystems beyond human needs. The refusal to reduce the earth to a storehouse of resources, the insistence on the value of whales beyond meat and redwoods beyond lumber, the love of […]
Posted inBlog
“Messy and unstructured, relentless and global”
Environmental justice law is unlike most other areas of the law. It may not even be amenable to definition as a single, discrete field of practice. Instead, environmental justice lawyering is as close as we come to modern-day alchemy: lawyers work in alliance with communities to summon forth justice from a shifting patchwork of unfavorable […]
Posted inBlog
Tom Bell, Spaghetti Westerns and HCN
“Once upon a time” is a better start to a bedtime story than it is to a retrospective of 40 years of High Country News. But have you ever watched the old movie “Once Upon a Time in the West?” It’s Italian director Sergio Leone’s best spaghetti western, a three hour epic about the struggle […]
Posted inArticles
The Forgotten Mesa
Without basic services, life on Pajarito Mesa is all about surviving.
Posted inWotr
Without big government, where would we be?
Like most people who use email, I get an extraordinary amount of SPAM, plus a large volume of canned messages from both sides of the political spectrum, forwarded by well-meaning friends who think I will agree or who think I should agree with the e-mail’s premise. Most of these messages get a quick hit on […]
Posted inWotr
Bear witness to climate change
One thing I love about the West is that so many people know their elevations. I doubt that many citizens of Atlanta take pride in their thousand-foot-high city. But everyone knows that Denver is a mile high, and most of us are well aware of the elevation of whatever high pass we have to cross […]
Posted inWotr
How to play the gardening game
In his book “Jaguars Ripped my Flesh,” Tim Cahill tells us that he “sits around at home reading wilderness survival books the way some people peruse seed catalogs or accounts of classic chess games.” As a seed-catalog peruser, I took offense at first at being lumped in with the chess nerds. But after giving it […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 2010: 'The environment ... is where we live'
How the West was really won
Savages & Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian TerritoryPaul VanDevelder 352 pages, hardcover: $26.Yale University Press, 2009. Paul VanDevelder, author of Coyote Warrior, digs deeper into the rotten core of the American experience in his new book, Savages & Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 2010: 'The environment ... is where we live'
Sticks, stones, and enviros
The term “environmentalist,” or its more derogatory abbreviation “enviros” (HCN, 11/09/09), and — most derogatory of all — “en-varmint-alist” (HCN, 11/23/09) is used far too often in HCN without a counterpoint term for those who would place their own economic gain over the good of all. So I’d like to introduce a term for those […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 2010: 'The environment ... is where we live'
Catch-and-release at HCN
A new and very talented crop of interns has just joined HCN. They’ll be here for the next six months, learning how a nonprofit media outlet works, and researching, interviewing and writing stories for us. A recipient of the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, Nicholas Neely arrived in Paonia after six months in a remote Oregon […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 2010: 'The environment ... is where we live'
Finding freedom in Yosemite
GlorylandShelton Johnson278 pages, hardcover: $25.Sierra Club Books, 2009. Like its protagonist, Gloryland is a medley. In a novel that is part memoir, part historical fiction, and part poetry, Shelton Johnson tells the story of Elijah Yancy, a young man with African, Seminole and Cherokee bloodlines. Born in South Carolina on Emancipation Day, 1863, Yancy is […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 2010: 'The environment ... is where we live'
Fire and brimstone
Can it really be 20 years since Kierán Suckling, Gina Trott, Todd Schulke and Dan Moore descended on Albuquerque like a chapter out of the Old Testament? I remember them showing up, then marching out of, the slow-boat Wolf Coalition meetings. They looked like wild-eyed college kids. But their hastily assembled Wolf Action Group soon […]
Posted inBlog
EPA, Black Caucus announce environmental justice tour
“All environmental protection, like all politics, is quite local,” Environmental Protection Agency director Lisa Jackson told her staff this month. “Very few people come to environmental protection because they wake up one morning and read a book about it. They come to environmental protection because it touches them — the lack of that protection, a […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 2010: 'The environment ... is where we live'
The Group of 10 respond
The big greens grade themselves
Posted inFebruary 1, 2010: 'The environment ... is where we live'
The Shot Heard Round the West
What resulted from activists’ 1990 challenge to the big greens