Communities

I live in the flat, scruffy desert of southwestern New Mexico, a half-hour from the Mexican border town of Palomas. There’s been a war going on in Palomas for over two years. A dusty town of 5,000 people, Palomas has more murders per capita than any city in the world, some say. I talked recently […]

It’s been a good year for wilderness. In March, the Omnibus Lands Bill designated over 2 million acres of wilderness in nine states. In September, President Obama declared a month-long celebration of the Wilderness Act, and this November, the United States, Canada and Mexico signed the world’s first international agreement on wilderness conservation. Perhaps because […]

One morning, my wife told me she’d seen a rattlesnake on a knoll behind our house in southern Utah. Nestled under a bush just 25 yards up the hill, it didn’t look aggressive. It lay circled in the shade as if taking a nap, its diamond pattern strangely enhancing the scene. We decided to leave […]

The farm equipment graveyard — a row of horse-drawn plows and mowers overgrown with prairie grass — is a common sight at the edge of rural fields in the West. Collapsing hay wagons, disemboweled tractor hulls and other antique machinery sinking into the earth tell a story of farming, past and future. Each item was […]

This cold-weather week, I’ve seen two pickup trucks parked in town, each stacked high with firewood. This may be a sure sign of the coming of winter in rural towns across the nation, but it’s become an uncommon sight in downtown Telluride these days. When I moved to Telluride in the 1980s, almost every house […]

Environmentalists are “green Nazis … pure, unadulterated satanic evil … vile vomit.” Does that hateful tone sound familiar? Radio and TV commentary tycoons — Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and their ilk — often use that kind of language against their targets, including not only environmentalists, but also liberals and gay people. Their broadcasts encourage destructive […]