Rocket fuel ingredient and other pollutants now commonplace in groundwater
Communities
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
Anasazi: What’s in a name?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Out of the Four Corners.” A thousand years ago, when their civilization arose in the Southwest, the people who built these great stone structures did not call themselves Anasazi. The word did not even exist: It was created, centuries later, by Navajo workers who […]
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
Heard Around the West
WASHINGTON A duck named Gooey has brought Diane Erdmann, a manager for Northwest Territorial Mint, a whole lot of attention, along with a possible charge of illegally harboring wildlife. The mallard had been attacked by a crow, and Erdmann took over its care from a friend, nursing the bird back to health and consulting a […]
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
Out of the Four Corners
A young archaeologist searches for clues to what drove a mass exodus from southwestern Colorado more than 700 years ago
Posted inWotr
Illegal immigration tarnishes America
As a Canyon County commissioner in rural Idaho, I live every day with the consequences of our hypocritical immigration policy. Federal officials say it is our policy to block illegal immigration, but our southern border is so open that millions of people manage to come through, overcoming the desert’s hazards of killing heat and rapacious […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t be fooled: Our southern border is as porous as ever
Not long ago, my morning walk in Arizona’s Santa Cruz River Valley was rudely interrupted. I’d been walking my dogs in the usually silent valley. Suddenly, I heard the drone of an airplane. Irritated, I looked up to see a Border Patrol airplane drop down to circle just south of Palo Parado Road. Since my […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Conservative legislator takes on Wal-Mart
Bruce Newcomb, the powerful Republican speaker of Idaho’s House of Representatives, has a radical idea for the conservative, business-friendly state: He’s threatening to draft a law that would require Wal-Mart to either provide health insurance for its Idaho employees, or pay the state for providing coverage through the Medicaid program. Around the country, several studies […]
Posted inWotr
Fear in the fields
Farmworker Olivia Tamayo’s fingers are crooked from over 30 years of picking and weeding vegetables in California’s hot sun. Sitting in her home in this cramped farming town of Huron, she talks in low tones about the reality of farmwork for many female migrants. In 1975, Tamayo arrived in California’s Central Valley from Mexico, newly […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
An honest take on a tough land
In his debut novel, Ordinary Wolves, Seth Kantner has woven a world where hunger, death and beauty go hand-in-hand. The book is set almost entirely on Kantner’s native Alaskan tundra, but don’t expect naturalist hyperbole. There are no splendid sweeping landscapes, big animals are either food or a threat, and cold is a given. Consider […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
The grasslands — humanity’s big backyard
“We live in grasslands, and we live off them,” write biologists Carl and Jane Bock. “They are our backyards, in an evolutionary if no longer always in a literal sense.” For more than three decades, the Bocks have studied humanity’s backyard, mostly in the form of an 8,000-acre former cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona. On […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
The Boys of Winter
The Boys of Winter Charles Sanders257 pages, softcover: $19.95University Press of Colorado, 2005. Charles Sanders, an avid skier himself, tells the true stories of three champion skiers who joined the Army’s 10th Mountain Division during World War II. After training on the West’s snowy peaks, they went off to fight — and die — in […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Wounded
Wounded Percival Everett 256 pages, hardcover: $23 Graywolf Press, 2005. Set in the Red Desert of Wyoming, this novel is a modern-day Western with a twist. John Hunt, a black horse trainer, gets pulled into the dark currents of hate crimes when an Indian friend’s cows are killed by racists and a friend’s gay son […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
In the orchards, questions about immigration reform
Washington state offers a cautionary tale for would-be reformers in Washington, D.C.
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Heard around the West
MONTANA Fourteen intrepid ranch women of Big Timber, Mont., ranging in age from 45 to 77, posed semi-dressed for a 2006 calendar called “I See By Your Outfit.” The women don’t take it all off, though sometimes their chaps lack jeans underneath; they mostly tease by standing in front of strategically placed hay bales or […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2005: Rangeland Revival
Out of the video arcade and into the woods
For the first time in history, the bond between children and nature has been broken, writes child advocate and journalist Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods. The culprits are many: Kids prefer to play inside where the electrical outlets are, instead of outdoors where the wild birds sing. Computers, TV and video games […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2005: Rangeland Revival
Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West, 1900-1936
Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West, 1900-1936 Cathryn Halverson 230 pages, hardcover: $45 The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Probably you’ve never heard of the three Western women featured in this book. But if you’re not put off by literary criticism or footnotes, you’ll meet Mary MacLane, who lived in Butte, Mont., and […]
Posted inWotr
What’s at stake in the evolution debate
On my desk is the fragment of a tooth from an ancient camel that roamed the area around Fossil, Ore., 40 million years ago. My kids and I unearthed it on a summer camping trip, and today I found myself fingering it as I read yet another story about the evolution “debate.” This controversy pits […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2005: Rangeland Revival
Rangeland Revival
The Quivira Coalition prophesies a new era of peace and prosperity on the West’s rangelands, but is the group bold enough to make that vision real?
Posted inSeptember 5, 2005: Rangeland Revival
The ‘New Ranch’ poster child hangs on by a thread
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Rangeland Revival.” Jim Williams steps out of his small, brown, wooden ranch house, and glances out over the shrub-dotted grasslands he has called home for all of his 61 years. Despite the pelting early-spring snow, the land looks sparse. Short and scraggly clumps of […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2005: Rangeland Revival
The meeting of heaven and earth
In the dog days of August, Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes were blasted from a custom-made cannon at the top of a 150-foot tower on his land near Woody Creek, Colo. A lot of people were on hand, including former Sen. George McGovern and actor Johnny Depp, when the “gonzo” writer’s cremated remains, encased with fireworks […]