Innholdsfortegnelse for August Vol. 55, No. 08 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 $45 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…

IN OCTOBER 2022, Canada based Atomic Minerals Corporation announced it had “acquired by staking” more than 6,500 acres of public land on Harts Point in southeastern Utah, a sandstone mesa just outside Bears Ears National Monument that’s bordered on one side by Indian Creek, a popular rock-climbing area. The company’s word choice was a bit off: It didn’t actually acquire the land, it merely secured the right to exploit it: to mine it by locating — or staking — 324 lode claims. Atomic Minerals didn’t need to get a permit from regulators or inform the public in order to do this. Nor did it have to consult with the tribal nations that had unsuccessfully urged the Obama administration to include Harts Point in Bears Ears. Nope; the uranium mining company’s…

ABQ New Mexico’s celebrity environment reporter Laura Paskus — who is also a PBS producer and a former HCN staffer — moderated a panel about environmental justice in the state. We were astonished by the massive scale of oil and gas drilling in New Mexico; it’s currently second only to Texas in terms of annual oil production. Unfortunately, the energy companies are polluting air and water with little oversight from the state, according to Samantha Ruscavage-Barz, WildEarth Guardians’ legal director. But local people are finding creative ways to hold the industry accountable. Kayley Shoup, of Citizens Caring for the Future, spoke about working to bring community members together to defend public health, something that can be challenging in company towns in the oil-drenched Permian Basin. Now, a group of young…

SOME YEARS AGO, when I was an aid worker, I lived in Uganda, a landlocked country in East Africa. On paper, the nation was decidedly poor, with an average annual income of only $884 per person. But it showed surprising generosity towards people in need, including people who were not technically its own. Refugees not only enjoyed the right to work, they received free plots of land to live on and farm. During my first month there, I met a Rwandan refugee. We stood on her small farm in the shadow of the Kiyebe Mountains, surrounded by rows of onions, corn, heads of cabbage. Her life had been shattered by the 1994 genocide, but Uganda gave her a chance to rebuild from the wreckage. Maybe it should come as no…

TONIA TEWELL Founder of Holding Out Help, which supports people that leave polygamous communities Salt Lake City, Utah There is no free choice in most polygamous communities. I didn’t grow up in polygamy, but what prepared me to run Holding Out Hope was my abusive childhood. At 12, I had total strangers take me in and raise me. They were religious but loved me without religious expectations, and that helped me understand the importance of not pushing your beliefs onto someone else. I learned quickly — by having people in my home who came from religious abuse — that if you bring up God and they sense an ulterior motive, they will run 100 mph in the other direction. You need to create a neutral safe place so they can…

EARLY ONE MORNING this spring, veterinary techs at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo bundled a litter of 9-day-old Mexican wolf pups (Canis lupus baileyi) — each weighing just under two pounds — into a cloth carrier. The sleeping pups were then loaded onto a small private plane: Three would go to southeast Arizona, and three to New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, where U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists had recently located the den of AF1578, a 6-year-old female lobo they identified as an ideal foster mother. Just days earlier, AF1578 had given birth to a wild litter. Now, deep in the Gila, scientists carrying three pups approached her den, and their sounds were enough to spook AF1578 into temporarily fleeing. The scientists moved in, wearing gloves and long-sleeves to minimize the chance that…

MATT BISHOP AND STEVE COOPER grabbed exposed roots and mossy rocks for balance as they climbed up a steep hillside. It was just after 7 a.m. on Sept. 10, 2022, and the two friends were headed up Baring Mountain, on the edge of the Wild Sky Wilderness in Washington’s Cascade Range. Silver firs, cedars and hemlocks encroached on the unmaintained trail, and although the sun was still low in the sky, the morning was hot and sweat clung to the back of their necks. Bishop, an engineering manager for an aerospace company, and Cooper, a commercial electrician, had met five years earlier and started hiking together almost every weekend during the height of the pandemic. They shared a love of solitude and summits that made them excellent companions, in sync…

I CAN’T REMEMBER WHEN I first learned about it; it was just something in the collective of our family history, something in the air the Nakadas breathed. There were books with photos on the living room bookshelf, and Dad spoke casually about life in “camp.” Whenever his sisters and brothers were around, if there were questions about when something occurred, it was either before or after camp, this bookmark in their lives of the war and of removal. I bore witness directly from the generation who lived the experience of incarceration. But now, a generation later, I wondered how my kids would learn about this scar that marked our family and our country’s past. Last October, I heard about a new display at the Japanese American National Museum in Los…

THE SEASONS OF UŊALAQŁIQ An exploration of living in direct relationship with the land, water, plants and animals in and around Uŋalaqłiq (Unalakleet), on the west coast of what’s now called Alaska. ONE LATE-SUMMER DAY, a day so hot the mosquitoes weren’t flying, my brother and his wife and I traveled nine miles up the Unalakleet River to seine for humpies, or pink salmon. We laughed and hollered while pulling the net to a flat, wide bar made of perfect skipping and throwing stones at the inside of a meander. Hundreds of humpies danced in the shallow, cold river, their flapping tails and heads splashing us, the sound of gallons of muscle and slime slapping against the water filling the air. “Holllly cooow!” I can hear my brother Fred Jay…

ON A SWELTERING LATE APRIL DAY, a flock of middle-aged men strolled in athleisure, practicing their backswings and rifling balls into the azure sky above the Green Springs golf community just outside St. George, a ballooning city of 100,000 in southwestern Utah. Some 2,000 homes, mostly single-family — many with RV garages — orbit the fairway, like rings around Planet Golf, and more are on their way. As in so many cities in the desert West, golf in St. George is a thirsty business, with a powerful lobby and a relationship with water painted in green on the landscape. Among its peers, however, St. George is in a league of its own. Few cities in the Southwest use more water per person: nearly 300 gallons a day. And a hefty…

IN JUNE, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a decisive victory for tribal nations. In a 7-2 ruling in Haaland v. Brackeen, the court upheld the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act, rejecting a challenge that University of Michigan law professor Matthew Fletcher described to High Country News as “a broadside against virtually (all) of federal Indian law.” Passed in 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was a response to decades of federal and state policies designed to remove Native kids from their families and cultures. ICWA was built on the principle that tribal nations exist as political sovereigns and that therefore child welfare cases involving Native children should prioritize their placement with Native families, in particular families within the child’s own tribe. The law stands as a distinct marker,…

IN THE 164 YEARS since Oregon became a state, many people have tried to redraw its wide rectangular boundaries. Secession movements punctuate its history, spearheaded by groups promising that by breaking away or creating new states, they would be making life better. Safer. Less infringed-upon. More free. So far, none have succeeded. The latest movement, Greater Idaho, seeks to slice off almost everything east of the Cascade Mountains and add it to Idaho, uniting the right-leaning portions of the Beaver State with its more conservative neighbor. Nearly two dozen people conceived the idea over pizza and soft drinks in a La Pine, Oregon, restaurant in 2019. Organizers frame Greater Idaho as a natural byproduct of Oregon’s “urban/rural divide” — shorthand for how populous cities can sway a state’s politics. The…

ONE AFTERNOON, when she was around 12 years old, Antoinette rode a tractor through the town of Aromas, California. Her father had told her not to use the vehicle. Men drove tractors; women carried out other farming tasks. That day, however, Antoinette ignored the social rules. Her older sister, Veronica, sometimes goaded her into mischief; the two had previously swiped the keys to a Jeep for a quick drive during a quiet moment in the fields. As Antoinette lurched over berry plots and dusty roads, she delivered a pageant wave from her seat, declaring herself, at least for that moment, the Tractor Princess. Antoinette is one of thousands of children of the “manong generation” (manong means “older brother” in Tagalog/Ilokano), Filipino migrants who came to the Western Seaboard and Hawai’i…