In response to youth suicides, teachers show students the power of headbanging at Fire in the Mountains festival.
Features
Posted inNovember 2025: Precious Metalheads
For rural Californians, unreliable power has become the norm
Years ago, the state’s largest utility rolled out a power outage program designed to reduce wildfires. Customers now experience thousands of outages a year.
Posted inOctober 2025: Limits to Growth
Watching the Oregon ash vanish
The emerald ash borer is killing the native tree. How do we make the most of the time while it’s still here?
Posted inOctober 2025: Limits to Growth
The dried-out subdivisions of Phoenix
A groundwater crisis halted the construction of thousands of homes and pitted affordability against environmental concerns.
Posted inSeptember 2025: Who Controls Our Food?
How an immigration raid reshaped meatpacking — and America
In 2006, large-scale ICE raids in Greeley, Colorado, and elsewhere, triggered changes to the center of the country that fed today’s nativist politics.
Posted inAugust 2025: Fire Culture
A hotshot’s search for belonging among the flames
A wildland firefighter reckons with the male-dominated culture found on the fireline.
Posted inJuly 2025: Seeds as Sustenance
Beneath the blazing sun, Black Phoenix sows community
Climate change is creating a mental health crisis in Phoenix. A budding movement in the desert might solve it.
Posted inJuly 2025: Seeds as Sustenance
The seeds remember
Reclaiming Chinese culture through cultivation.
Posted inJune 2025: The Promised Land
Where the garbage goes
Amid massive rollbacks of federal environmental protections, a community battling the expansion of a local landfill seeks to safeguard its own backyard – and everyone else’s.
Posted inJune 2025: The Promised Land
The promised land remains elusive for asylum seekers
Some people stuck at the U.S.-Mexico border are forced to risk their lives attempting to cross the desert.
Posted inMay 2025: The Art of the Cruise
The toll of Bozeman’s housing crisis
At the small city’s only emergency shelter, demand is higher and the work is harder than ever.
Posted inMay 2025: The Art of the Cruise
An intimate look at New Mexico’s lowrider culture
Photographer Gabriela Campos takes you on a ride showing the scene as poetry in motion.
Posted inApril 2025: A Monumental Reckoning
The murder, the museum and the monument
How the discovery of a long-lost monument shattered the trust between a Japanese American community and the museum built to preserve their history.
Posted inMarch 2025: The Berry Pickers
As the Great Salt Lake recedes, industry rises
Utah’s Inland Port Authority works with local officials to boost development, but residents feel ignored.
Posted inMarch 2025: The Berry Pickers
The true cost of the huckleberry industry
The Ḱamíłpa Band of the Yakama Nation has wanted an end to commercial picking of a critical cultural resource for years. Finally, the Forest Service is expected to make a decision.
Posted inFebruary 2025: Immigrant Stories
Reenvisioning the image of immigration
Artist and refugee Papay Solomon juxtaposes European painting with African ancestry.
Posted inFebruary 2025: Immigrant Stories
A veteran transforms a legacy of violence into a campaign for restoration
How a former Marine found a road to repair.
Posted inJanuary 2025: The West's Most Wanted
Why the West needs prairie dogs
They’re among the region’s most despised species, but some tribes, researchers and landowners are racing to save them.
Posted inJanuary 2025: The West's Most Wanted
Legal weed entrepreneurs promised a windfall from tribal lands. Then it fell apart.
The Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone are still picking up the pieces from the failed cannabis cultivation venture.
Posted inDecember 2024: Land as Reparations
Can land repair the nation’s racist past?
California’s approach to Black reparations shifts toward land access, ownership and stewardship.