Jonathan Thompson’s terrific piece about the payday loan business (“A pimp in the family,” HCN, 6/23/14) spotlights some of the ugliest elements of the financial services business. Predatory lenders have found a lucrative niche in the largely unregulated world that flourishes in poor communities with immediate cash needs – like Native American reservations. Indeed, as […]
Communities
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
Visitors from Maine to Montana
Summer’s in full swing in Paonia, Colorado, our tiny hometown. The North Fork Valley’s sunny weather, scrumptious fruit and fine wines draw lots of visitors, and we’re always delighted when friends old and new drop by our office. Andreas (Andy) Mink, who reports for the Sunday edition of Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Switzerland’s leading paper, spent […]
Posted inGoat
Washington’s new clean-water plan is a mixed bag
Washington’s governor last week announced a bold approach for creating cleaner, safer waters for fish and the people who eat them. Unless he didn’t. Every day, the state’s Department of Health releases a map of waterways so polluted that restrictions are placed on the amount and types of fish people should eat. Washington has many […]
Posted inGoat
California gears up to fine water wasters: Should we turn our neighbors in?
Five years ago, when south-central Texas was suffering through its driest year in more than a century, public officials in the city of San Antonio turned in desperation to a new tactic to enforce water conservation: They dispatched the police. From April of 2009 and on through the rest of the year, off-duty officers and […]
Posted inWotr
How Amazon taught Grand Junction a valuable lesson
Small businesses and nonprofits have a lot in common: They operate on thin margins, develop strong local ties and support their communities’ economic and social wellbeing. But what happens to those strong bonds when an online retailing giant comes in with a deal that benefits one side and threatens the other? That was the question […]
Posted inWotr
Boise may be low profile, but we’re high-tech
Over the years, whenever I’ve tried to calculate the cost-benefit analysis of living in a small town rather than a metropolis, the small town has always looked like the better choice. It used to be that cultural amenities and cosmopolitanism gave big cities significant boosts in this either/or match-up, but developments in technology have changed […]
Posted inWotr
What makes America unique is its public lands
As Independence Day approaches, let’s take a moment to celebrate our nation’s natural wonders. In this country we have the freedom to explore approximately 618 million acres of publicly owned federal lands, from the tundra of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the cliffs of the newly-created Sleeping Bear Dunes Wilderness on Lake Michigan and […]
Posted inArticles
Jonathan Thompson on payday lending
It may not come as a surprise that many Native Americans living on mostly poor, remote reservations in the American West have come to rely heavily on payday loan companies offering cash at high interest rates when money is tight. Yet as Jonathan Thompson reveals in the current issue of High Country News, some tribes […]
Posted inGoat
Nuclear Los Alamos, America’s best place to live?
We all love contemplating what makes a place worth living in. For some, it’s jobs and schools. For others, it’s recreation or the environment, or a reasonable cost of living. But whatever your criteria, one thing’s certain: In the transient, often rootless culture of the American West, the search for the Big Rock Candy Mountain is […]
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
Divers explore national parks’ underwater treasures
The last frontier of the national parks lies underwater.
Posted inWotr
This July 4th, take a gander at the phone book
Like most Americans, I’m a mutt, and proud of it.
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
‘A pimp in the family’
Tribes get into the payday lending game.
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
River of no return
Seattle’s Duwamish has been straightened, dredged and heavily polluted. Can a Superfund cleanup bring it back to life?
Posted inGoat
Want a walkable community? Start with the main drag
At first glance, I suppose nothing appears to be amiss with the scene in this photograph. It’s Main Ave., the primary business and tourist district of Durango, Colorado. But it could be any number of mid-sized Western towns. The town has done an admirable job retaining its historic integrity and aesthetics of the architecture and […]
Posted inWotr
About those gay loggers for Jesus and July 4th
A town’s July 4th celebration says a lot about a community, and this holiday in Bozeman, Montana, promises to be relatively laid-back, with locals typically heading for nearby Livingston or Ennis to catch their parades, then back home for stirring music and fireworks at the fairgrounds. Just five years ago, however, Bozeman woke up to controversy when […]
Posted inWotr
Reflections on the fire that killed 19 firefighters a year ago
The terms fire control and fire management are really just euphemisms for firefighting. Think tornado control or the impossibility of tornado management. We can prepare for fires, we can study them and even learn how to dance with them, but controlling fires is always a gamble. And sometimes we lose. Last year, on June 30, we […]
Posted inGoat
A 700,000-gallon replica of the Sea of Cortez in the Arizona desert
The coral reef that once lived in the 700,000-gallon tank of ocean water in the Arizona desert, hauled in from Belize after breaking off in a storm in the late 1980s, is now pretty much dead. It met the same fate as another Biosphere 2 experiment, which involved eight men and women living off their […]
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
Summer publishing break
In our 22-issue-per-year publishing schedule, we’ll be skipping the next issue. Look for High Country News in your mailbox again around July 21. You can keep up with Western news and views on our website, hcn.org, for fresh articles, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. June board meetingAt the tail end of May, 10 […]
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
Woven Identities: Basketry Art of Western North America by Valerie K. Verzuh
Woven Identities: Basketry Art of Western North America Valerie K. Verzuh, 219 pages, hardcover: $34.95, Museum of New Mexico Press, 2013 Few Native American languages have a word for “art.” Basket-weaving is not considered art, in the sense of work made for display; rather, as one Apache elder says, it is the creation of “pieces […]
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
A Refugee in Her Own Land
Katie Gale: A Coast Salish Woman’s Life on Oyster BayLlyn De Danaan336 pages, hardcover: $29.95.Bison Books, 2013. In Katie Gale, anthropologist Llyn De Danaan chronicles the life of a 19th century Salish woman who married a white man, gave birth to four children, became a successful oysterwoman, suffered greatly in a divorce settlement, and watched […]