High Country News subscribers should be aware that an Oregon company is mailing unauthorized offers for HCN subscriptions and renewals. Please note: These are not authentic solicitations from High Country News. The company name on these solicitations is Publishers Billing Emporium. The solicitation we have seen offers a renewal for $85.95 and includes a lot of […]
Communities
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
The West’s Big Data colonies
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The West’s Big Data colonies.
Posted inWotr
All it takes is somebody with conviction
Once in a while, a principled person can make all the difference. This is how it began for me: I host Home Ground, a weekly public radio program, and a year ago, Montana’s U.S. attorney invited me to attend a law enforcement conference of about 130 officials, ranging from city and county police to state attorneys […]
Posted inWotr
Hispanics flex some environmental muscle
The 1906 Antiquities Act, which grants the president unilateral authority to protect broad swaths of land as monuments, has long stirred controversy in the West, where we don’t like the feds overstepping. The 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, designated by Bill Clinton in 1996, is still a sore point because Utah’s congressmen and governor were […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
How right-wing emigrants conquered North Idaho
If anyone in Kootenai County could have predicted the Democrats’ downfall, it was Dan English. He had spent most of his life in the Idaho Panhandle and monitored more than 100 local elections in his 15 years as county clerk. The first ballots he counted, in 1996, revealed tight contests between Republicans and Democrats, but […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Have a ponytail? Watch out for owls!
MONTANA AND COLORADO As the Missoulian puts it, “There’s rotten cellphone service, there’s nonexistent cellphone service, and then there’s what’s happening just a few miles east of Ovando.” Which is exactly nothing, because a 195-foot-tall cell phone tower near this tiny western Montana town has never connected a call to anybody. Clearview, a Florida-based company, […]
Posted inWotr
A lesson from a pig called Eddie
I love animals and always have, but I am also a meat eater. In my early 20s, I tried a short stint as a vegetarian, but jumped off the meat-free wagon after a happy encounter with bacon. At the time I felt a twinge of guilt, but the truth is I never gave vegetarianism a […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
A tireless documenter of Native America: A review of “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher”
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward CurtisTimothy Egan412 pages, hardcover: $28.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. In Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Timothy Egan, who also won the National Book Award in 2006 for The Worst Hard Times, chronicles the life story of photographer Edward […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Book review: “Canvas of Clay: Seven Centuries of Hopi Ceramic Art”
Canvas of Clay: Seven Centuries of Hopi Ceramic Art. Edwin L. Wade and Allan Cooke, 248 pages, softcover: $40. El Otro Lado, 2012. In Canvas of Clay, the authors explore the evolution of Hopi pottery from the 14th century until recent times. Pairing full-page color prints with scholarly narrative, historical photographs with schematic drawings, the […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Reflected glory
We are delighted to announce that Boston-based journalist Lisa Song (an HCN intern in 2010) has won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, along with her InsideClimate News colleagues Elizabeth McGowan and David Hasemyer. They received journalism’s premier award for “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of.” “The story […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
The artist and his patron: A review of “The Inventor and the Tycoon”
The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving PicturesEdward Ball447 pages, hardcover: $29.95.Doubleday, 2013. Leland Stanford appeared to have it all: As president of the Big Four Associates, who built the Western half of the transcontinental railroad, the tycoon became one of 19th century San Francisco’s most influential entrepreneurs, […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
The gray area: a conversation with artist Renee Couture
We recommend you use the “View Gallery” option to enjoy these images. A Q&A with Renee Couture follows this introduction. Forestry, as a science, is both tangible and abstract. Behind the flagging and cores and calipers is the weighing of value, the ecological against the material, the measurable against the immeasurable. Such tensions are reflected […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
The coming Hairpocalypse
COLORADO It’s been a century or so since anyone definitely saw a North American river otter in Boulder, Colo., so the town’s wildlife staffers were excited recently when a motion-activated camera showed one of the animals — very much alive — on the banks of Boulder Creek, reports the Boulder Daily Camera. For some minutes, […]
Posted inGoat
Drones are not just for killing
I like drones. There, I said it, and in doing so I have made myself a pariah to many of my liberal friends. Because to them, a drone is a sinister, cowardly killing machine, buzzing around the skies of Pakistan sans pilot, just waiting to rain death from the sky. It is horrible. But then, […]
Posted inWotr
A fine day in the classroom
My daughter, Maria, teaches third grade in the border town of Deming, N.M., where every child in the school qualifies for free breakfast and lunch, test scores are chronically low, and science is a neglected subject. Eager to help out, I discover the Mastodon Matrix Project, which is run by the Museum of the Earth. […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
A new collaboration has Idaho ranchers and the BLM fighting fire together
On a hot day in August 2011, lightning sparked a fire in the rocky bluffs outside Glenns Ferry, Idaho. With the Bureau of Land Management’s fire crews tied up on the other 16 or so fires burning in the area, a few local ranchers, some of whom had grazing allotments on the land, rushed in […]
Posted inGoat
Big Data colonizes the West
For evidence that a new kind of information economy has come to the West, look not to San Francisco or Seattle, but south-central Wyoming. On the outskirts of Cheyenne, an Air Force town of 60,000 residents, Microsoft is building a massive, $158 million data center, a high-tech warehouse packed with computer servers that will store […]
Posted inWotr
Frontier anxiety for the 21st century
Frederick Jackson Turner’s classic 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” argued that the frontier experience — the opportunity for unlimited expansion into “uninhabited” lands — shaped the country’s entrepreneurial spirit. Turner’s essay took on added significance because three years earlier, the Census Bureau had declared the frontier closed. The line that separated […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Seeking Ben Kennedy: a quest to find a mysterious Montana philanthropist
Ben Kennedy didn’t talk a lot. He was never a family man. He liked having a beer or a cup of tea with his soup and seldom got around to bathing. He died essentially alone, a man without means and with few close friends. He was born in 1922 in rural Belt, Mont., about 100 […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
A goat walks into a bar…
MONTANA A pygmy goat walks into a bar on a Sunday afternoon — and no, this isn’t the setup to one of those jokes; this really happened in Butte, Mont. The little goat seemed to enjoy the outing until a public-health-conscious patron called the police, who came and took the animal to a shelter. As […]