Ever since the scraggly mountain-roaming John Muir joined other Californians to found the Sierra Club in 1892, that state has led the country in protecting the environment. California began regulating pesticides back in the horse-and-buggy era. Beginning in the 1950s, it passed comprehensive laws for air and water quality, regulation of toxic substances, tougher emissions […]
Communities
Posted inJuly 20, 2009: Thinking Outside the Timber Box
Welcome, new interns!
Three new interns have arrived for six months of “journalism boot camp” at our Paonia, Colo., office. (For more on the internship program, see hcn.org/about/internships.) Editorial intern Ariana Brocious is thrilled to be embarking on her first full-time journalism job. Last year, she reported on climate change in Argentina for the Arizona Daily Star. A […]
Posted inGoat
End of an exodus?
As the debate rages on over border fence construction and the environmental and population impacts of immigration, a report released yesterday by the Pew Hispanic Center showed a marked decrease in Mexican migrants entering the U.S. Migration rates into the U.S. from Mexico dropped almost 40 percent between 2006 and 2009, while migration back to […]
Posted inGoat
Twilight bites into Forks
Forks, Wash., just isn’t what it used to be. I have fond memories of the once-sleepy little town. When I was a child, my family would camp out on the Pacific Coast and then make a leisurely stop in Forks to eat and shower. Restaurants like Sully’s Drive-In and the Smokehouse have been around forever. […]
Posted inJuly 20, 2009: Thinking Outside the Timber Box
The stories we believe
Madewell BrownRick Collignon213 pages, hardcover: $23.95.Unbridled Books, 2009. Madewell Brown is the fourth novel in Rick Collignon’s “Guadalupe” series, which is set in an imaginary village in northern New Mexico. But it reads as a stand-alone, even while spiraling back to explore the fate of a character introduced in Perdido, the second in the series. […]
Posted inGoat
A dismal future for tourism?
Back in 1997, I ventured to Boulder for a conference about tourism put on by the Center of the American West. Easily the most provocative speaker was the late Hal Rothman, professor of history at the University of Las Vegas. It’s easy to bash Vegas as a greedy place of contrived attractions, he […]
Posted inWotr
Great Old Broads celebrate 20 years of hiking and advocacy
Where in Durango, in southern Colorado, can you spot a lavender size-40D bra hanging in an office window? Why, the national office of a group called the Great Old Broads for Wilderness, of course. It’s one sign that this organization, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, is not an ordinary organization. “We’re the junkyard […]
Posted inJuly 20, 2009: Thinking Outside the Timber Box
A tenderfoot in Taos
An exhausted mother. A lively baby. A compassionate drunkard.
Posted inWotr
Nostalgia for the front lines
This spring on a warm May afternoon, an electric line went down a few miles east of where I live in Homer, Alaska. Sparks from the live wire ignited dry grasses, and the flames, fanned by wind, traveled quickly to a forest of beetle-killed trees. In two days, the Seventeen Mile Fire, named for its […]
Posted inJuly 20, 2009: Thinking Outside the Timber Box
Cultural blight
Plant disease threatens traditions of California tribes.
Posted inWotr
How a small town resembles Facebook
“I’m looking for a crib,” I said, and my friends reacted predictably. “I’m so out of touch!” lamented one, while another asked if I had an announcement to make, then raced over to my wife’s spot to ask if she was pregnant. The unusual aspect of this small-town rumor-mongering was its location. We weren’t in […]
Posted inGoat
Will money talk?
It’s a sweet-voiced, normal-looking middle-aged woman who looks sincerely at the camera and tells us that she’s one of millions of Californians who want to pay taxes on marijuana, legalizing her drug of choice and helping to refill the state’s empty coffers (the taxes could fund 20,000 teacher salaries, she says). This is an ad […]
Posted inGoat
Duwamish not dead
Next week, Cecile Hansen, a direct descendant of Seattle’s namesake Chief Sealth, will travel from one Washington to another. Hansen, the chairwoman of the Duwamish tribe, has been invited to testify in D.C. at an upcoming hearing on H.R. 2678, a bill introduced in the House that would grant the Western Washington tribe the federal […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Of moose and mandolins
AGE 30HOMETOWN Broadview Heights, OhioOCCUPATION Environmental scientist with the EPAHCN READER SINCE 2002 Elaine Lai stopped by High Country News on a sunny day in early May. She works for the wastewater unit of the Environmental Protection Agency, and had driven over from her Denver office to write a permit for the federal fish hatchery […]
Posted inGoat
Blue horses: riding on moonlight
I step out of my shack beneath a waxing half moon. Milky light pours down on northern Arizona. Scattered ponderosas march across the bunchgrasses of Government Prairie, casting oval shadows to the west of each tree. As usual, my walk takes me along the fence line. A cloud shutters the moon. Across the barb-wire, two huge silhouettes emerge […]
Posted inGoat
The glorious Fourth
Like hundreds of small towns around the West, Paonia will celebrate the Fourth of July with a parade down the main drag (Grand Avenue, in our case) and festivities in the park. It’s the annual Cherry Days event, some 62 years old, awash in tradition and punctuated by occasional sparks of innovation. There will be […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
“God ain’t a great co-pilot”
Christopher Hitchens and his godless views attracted only a dozen cadets from the Air Force Academy recently, probably because the get-together, which took place at a Colorado Springs restaurant, was forbidden on campus. An Academy spokesman said Hitchens was not welcome because he’d made comments that were “degrading to others,” reports the Colorado Springs Independent. […]
Posted inGoat
Mountain people
Let’s start with this: mountain people do not curse the weather. They have slept out in the rain and know that the weather will change. They know that just to be around—under any sort of sky—is good luck enough. Mountain people have crooked grins and broken hearts and dirt under their fingernails. They are unimpressed […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Scrounging in Seattle
A 2-year-old black bear, sympathetically described by wildlife experts as lonely, scared and kicked out of home by his mother, raced around Seattle backyards recently, for days eluding police, who dubbed him the “urban phantom.” Kim Chandler, a Washington state Fish and Wildlife officer, told the Seattle Times that the 125-pound bear was as wily […]
Posted inWotr
And you think times are tough
At a yard sale, I bought several boxes containing nearly a half-century’s worth of American Heritage magazines, that richly illustrated compendium of the nation’s history through good times and bad, with special attention paid to the droughts, downturns and disasters that tried the souls of our forebears. I paid $10 for more than 600 magazines. […]