Innholdsfortegnelse for February Vol. 55, No. 02 i High Country News

High Country News is an independent, reader-supported nonprofit 501(c)(3) media organization that covers the important issues and stories that define the Western U.S. Our mission is to inform and inspire people to act on behalf of the West’s diverse natural and human communities. High Country News (ISSN/0191/5657) publishes monthly, 12 issues per year, from 119 Grand Ave., Paonia, CO 81428. Periodicals, postage paid at Paonia, CO, and other post offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to High Country News, Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428. All rights to publication of articles in this issue are reserved. See hcn.org for submission guidelines. Subscriptions to HCN are $37 a year, $47 for institutions: 800-905-1155, hcn.org. For editorial comments or questions, write High Country News, P.O. Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428 or editor@hcn.org, or call…

SINCE THE START of his administration, President Joe Biden has taken significant actions that have resonated in Indian Country: restoring Bears Ears National Monument; nominating the first Indigenous Cabinet member, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo); investing billions in tribal water-rights settlements and infrastructure. In 2021, his administration took a historic step when it committed to a policy of restoring tribal oversight of ancestral lands and of working with tribes in co-stewardship to manage public lands. Since then, a flurry of agency memos and reports have filled out more details of what these co-stewardship arrangements might look like. But what do all these statements amount to in practical terms? Tribes across the country are seeking the return of lands that were illegally or forcibly taken by the United States.…

CALIFORNIA The “City of Love” — San Francisco — seems like the last place you’d expect to find “killer police robots” surveilling the streets. Yet, in December, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to allow armed bots to join the police department’s bomb disposal arsenal. Not surprisingly, everyone who has ever watched Black Mirror — or any of a hundred other dystopian sci-fi movies — objected. Ars Technica reports that 44 community and civil rights groups, including the ACLU, signed a letter saying: “There is no basis to believe that robots toting explosives might be an exception to police overuse of deadly force. Using bombs that are designed to disarm bombs to instead deliver them is a perfect example of this pattern of escalation, and of the militarization of…

IN THE SPRING OF 1848, shortly after the first Latter-day Saints settled in the Salt Lake Valley in what later became known as the Territory of Utah, a plague of crickets swarmed their crops. As the tale goes, they prayed, and God sent seagulls from the nearby Great Salt Lake, whose existence reminded the settlers of Israel and the Dead Sea. “By thousands and tens of thousands, (the seagulls) began to devour them up … until the land was cleared of crickets, and our crops were saved,” a church elder recalled in an 1880 sermon. By saving the crops, the gulls saved the thousands of settlers. Today, the Salt Lake Valley remains the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But now it’s the Great Salt Lake…

DAVID COTTRELL stood on what used to be a 14-foot-high cliff at the crumbled end of Blue Pacific Drive. Just a few years ago, this was the fastest-eroding shoreline on the U.S. Pacific Coast; locals here in North Cove, Washington, dubbed it “Washaway Beach.” But as Cottrell walked toward the water on a sunny November morning, he stepped not off a cliff but onto soft, dry sand. Thigh-high dune grasses sprawled in all directions. The low tide lapped at a flock of sandpipers a few hundred feet away. Cottrell, a cranberry farmer and local drainage commissioner, held up a laminated map, pointing to our location. During his childhood, this was part of a dense beachside neighborhood, but the tides have swept most of it away — a complex phenomenon related…

ON A SUNNY DAY in early December, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland stood on a dais outside the Phoenix exurb of Buckeye, Arizona, where about 3,000 acres of desert had been scraped clean and leveled to make way for the Sonoran Solar Project, which will soon provide power to some 91,000 homes. Haaland came with good news for utility-scale solar and climate hawks: The Bureau of Land Management would review three massive solar projects proposed in Arizona and hoped to expedite permitting for solar energy on federal lands in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. “Solar energy projects on public lands will help communities across the country be a part of the climate solution, while creating good-paying jobs,” Haaland said. But these projects could also potentially uproot imperiled Joshua trees…

THERE IS THE CRUMPLING, the mess. A marina that once floated in a cove has been towed out of the shrinking lake and dropped in a field of Russian thistle, its metal pontoons partially sunk into dry, crack-crazed soil. Cooler doors stand open — the marina was once known for its ice cream — and conduits hang from ceilings, wires stripped. Any restoration might look like this at the start, might exude the strange ugliness of decay. Dangling Rope Marina, the size of a couple of convenience stores, once sold 1.5 million gallons of gas every year, powering the hundreds of boats that, on any given summer day, plied the watery pleasure garden of Lake Powell. Now, its outer doors hang half-open; the interpretive displays bleach in the sun. The…

JOAN DIDION DESCRIBED her creative process as an attempt to paint pictures with words. In her 1976 essay “Why I Write,” the journalist, essayist, novelist, playwright and screenwriter said that she saw “pictures in my mind … images that shimmer around the edges.” Her goal was to decipher and document the object in the mist, as if pinning a moth to cardboard: “You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.” The exhibit “What She Means,” which occupies several rooms at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, tries to recreate the world as the doyenne of California literature saw it — to reconstitute the pictures in her mind. The…

ECOSYSTEMS aren’t landscape paintings so much as mosaics, with different pieces that grow and change over time. In healthy forests, patches of recent disturbance, such as fire or logging, sit alongside patches of grasses and shrubs, fast-growing trees and centuries-old mature forests. But these ecological patterns require a climate stability that no longer exists. Due to human-caused climate change, California’s forest mosaics are vanishing. According to a study published in AGU Advances last July, the state’s forests lost almost 7%, or just over 1,700 square miles, of tree cover since 1985. That’s an area larger than Yosemite National Park. In particular, forests in California’s southwestern mountains lost 14% of tree cover. Jon Wang, the study’s lead author and an Earth systems scientist at the University of Utah, said that at…

YOUNG EVERGREEN TREES are reclaiming the formerly groomed ski runs at Marshall Mountain, just outside Missoula, Montana. In the winter, back-country skiers descend its slopes, donning headlamps to earn turns in the dark before or after work. In the summer, mountain bikers let out shouts of jubilee as they whiz down the maze of trails, and the base area bustles with kids’ camp groups. A rust-speckled Pepto Bismol-pink chairlift dangles unmoving behind a clock tower whose hands haven’t budged for over two decades, but this ski hill is far from abandoned. All that almost changed during the summer of 2021, when a dramatic property sale nearly went through, one that might have closed the bottom half of the mountain. But two local couples who hoped to preserve access made a…

An exploration of living in direct relationship with the land, water, plants and animals in and around Uŋalaqłiq. ANY TIME I ask Timm, my husband, if he wants nikipiaq for supper, he says yes. On a recent Sunday, the northeast wind blew cold Arctic air against our home, the woodstove crackled steady all day, and I wanted Native food. The entire spread, shared with my Dad and my brother’s family, is a meal made up of fare gathered, plucked or hunted throughout the year, and harvested for nights like this. Timm was at the kitchen island, cutting clean the surface of a block of beluga maktak the size of his hand. We saw the motion-sensing light turn on outside. It was Dad showing up for supper, his footsteps crunching loud…

YASSINE DIBOUN Business owner and endurance athlete Portland, Oregon 119 Grand Avenue PO Box 1090 Paonia, CO 81428 U.S. $5 | Canada$6 I’ve been sober for 18 years now, but I always try to stay on the front lines so I don’t get complacent. I try to help folks who struggle with substance addiction redirect that energy into something positive, like movement, running and fitness. Getting outside and getting moving on a regular basis should be a regular part of your life for as long as you live. Cultivating a community is like a garden: Year after year, if you keep adding things and taking care of it, eventually the soil is going to become really healthy, and you’re going to have animals and insects coming in, and it’s going…