Elsewhere, CaliforniaDana Johnson276 pages, softcover: $15.95.Counterpoint, 2012. Dana Johnson’s thoughtful and affecting first novel, Elsewhere, California, is narrated by a girl named Avery, whom we first meet as a child growing up in South Central Los Angeles in the ’70s and ’80s. When her brother is threatened by gangs, their parents decide to move to […]
Communities
Posted inDecember 10, 2012: The Evolution of Wildlife Tech
Weird and wacky White House petitions
Last month, when the Bureau of Land Management announced the proposed lease of over 20,000 acres for gas development in Colorado’s North Fork Valley, locals took their displeasure straight to the top: They petitioned President Obama to make the BLM take the leases off the table until it’s done updating its 23-year-old land management plan. […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2012: The Evolution of Wildlife Tech
Will Navajos approve a Grand Canyon megadevelopment?
GAP, Arizona — For over 50 years, residents of this western sliver of the Navajo Nation have watched tourist traffic zoom by on Highway 89, headed for the Grand Canyon, Lake Powell and southern Utah’s national parks. Except for a single gas station and a few ramshackle jewelry stands, there’s little here to attract vacationers’ […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2012: The Evolution of Wildlife Tech
A new measure of poverty shifts rankings in the West
Thumbnail photo CC via Flickr user Palmspringsdude. This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A new measure of poverty shifts rankings in the West.
Posted inWotr
How, 150 years ago, the Homestead Act transformed the West
All across forests of the West, 10-by-12-foot cabins stand forlorn and forgotten, many with tumbledown roofs and gaping doors. Yet these modest homesteads represent a revolution in public-land policy: They were the culmination of an American dream born of Thomas Jefferson’s belief that at our best, we would become a nation of independent farmers. This […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Pussycat kill kill!
THE NATION Forget denouncing wind turbines as bird Cuisinarts; lovable pussycats rank as the true killing machines. Housecats wipe out some 4 billion animals every year, including at least 500 million birds, reports Wyoming Wildlife. The magazine cites a novel new study by two groups, the National Geographic Society and the University of Georgia, that […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
State-run banks: a movement driven by unusual politics
During Tea Party champion Joe Read’s first session in the Montana Legislature, in 2011, he drew widespread ridicule for introducing a bill that declared global warming “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana.” With another anti-science bill, Rep. Read called for Montana’s government to overrule federal regulations on greenhouse gases. He also passed […]
Posted inGoat
A river of rain
Five days before the rain started in Sacramento on November 28, Marty Ralph knew what was coming: an “atmospheric river” was about to hit the West Coast of the United States. On satellite imagery, “ARs,” which carry warm water vapor up from the tropics on a mile-high current, “have a characteristic long and narrow look […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Trial by jury
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert, published the first Monday of each month. Whenever I receive a summons to jury duty I respond to it truthfully — which is to say, I respond to it in ways that would appear […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
A Washington tribe and a timber company wrestle over a forest’s future
Updated 11/30/12 The Indian chief and the timber agent meet near the shores of Port Gamble Bay. The spring air is cool and breezy along this small and sheltered nook of northwest Washington’s Puget Sound. Inside the room where the two men sit side-by-side, the atmosphere is civil, yet tense, as they discuss their separate […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Seattle-based artist paints portraits of a melting world
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. — John Berger, Ways of Seeing Maria Coryell-Martin wants us to dance the horizon. We are in the Seattle Art Museum’s sculpture park, beneath a hunk of orange steel (The Eagle, by Alexander Calder), but she is looking past the art, […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Western Colorado wingnuts?
COLORADO: Hey, nice rack! Courtesy Dennis Slifer NORTH DAKOTA A woman named Donna recently called Fargo, N.D., radio station Y94 to air a problem so bizarre, the station’s hosts were almost speechless. Her complaint? Deer-crossing signs placed along busy highways were “irresponsible” because they simply encouraged the animals to cross there, and that was why […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
China and coal
THE WEST Now that China’s decided to build one coal-fired power plant every week, corporations like Goldman Sachs have become highly interested in helping the country find black rocks to burn. The Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana produces what seems an inexhaustible amount, but there’s a hitch (isn’t there always?): The coal would have […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
A review of Continental Divide: Wildlife, People and the Border Wall
Continental Divide: Wildlife, People and the Border Wall, Krista Schlyer, 292 pages. Softcover: $30, Texas A&M University Press, 2012 Walls do not solve problems; they make them. That is the simple, elegant premise of writer and photographer Krista Schlyer’s book Continental Divide, which chronicles the unintended ecological and social consequences of the wall along the […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Another win for the pronghorns
We’re delighted to announce that High Country News has won the prestigious 2012 Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism for “Perilous Passages,” a Dec. 26, 2011, package of stories on wildlife migration, by former editorial fellow Emilene Ostlind, assistant editor Cally Carswell and Mary Ellen Hannibal, with photos by Joe Riis. “Passages” also recently won […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
The truths that matter: A review of Truth Like the Sun
In Truth Like the Sun, Washington novelist Jim Lynch straddles two Seattles: the little-known Western town in the 1960s, on the brink of exploding into a world-class city, and the modern Seattle of four decades later, at the height of the dot-com boom. He braids these incarnations of the city into an intricate narrative of […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Zombies and zombees
COLORADO AND WASHINGTON Zombies must be a little too much in movie news these days. Maureen Briggs of Montrose, Colo., was fishing at Lost Lake on the Gunnison National Forest when a man and his two sons hiked by, with the younger boy asking: “Have you seen any zombies here?” Her reply, “Not yet.” But in […]
Posted inRange
Instagram gratification
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House It’s hard enough to stayed focused during a holiday week but, leave it to the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) to create a truly spectacular distraction. If you’re looking for a time suck, read on. If not, get out before scrolling down. Introducing the DOI’s Instagram page. It features […]
Posted inArticles
West of 100: Goodbye, listeners
We hope the seven episodes of West of 100 we’ve produced this year have stimulated your curiosity and warmed your ears. Unfortunately, we’ve decided to discontinue the podcast. We’ve concluded that our small staff can better serve our audience by concentrating our resources on conducting the best in-depth reporting on the American West that you […]