High Country News April Vol. 56, No. 04

IT’S RIDICULOUS how great we have it here on the central coast of California when it comes to local food. The farmers market this morning was brimming with enormous strawberries. I kid you not, these berries were so big there were a dozen per pint container. There were several varieties of mandarin oranges, including my favorite, the Ojai pixie, and little gem lettuce as far as the eye could see. (It appears to be the year of the little gem.) There’s always an incredible array of produce in season. I couldn’t help thinking that all the winter rain we had is coming back to us in the form of delicious food. And flowers: The deserts are abloom as I type this, beckoning visitors from near and far. Gardens are going…

Kazim Ali has published books of poetry, fiction, essays and crossgenre work. “Crumpled Up” was part of “The Gifts,” a project by artists Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis. The project can be viewed at www.lenkaclayton.com/thegifts. Meg Bernhard is a freelance writer based in Las Vegas, Nevada. She’s reported for The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Guernica, Hazlitt, The Virginia Quarterly Review and others. Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton is an award-winning reporter covering Denver’s neighborhoods for The Denver Post. She writes for Smithsonian Magazine, Better Homes & Gardens, Delish and other publications. Megan identifies as Kanaka ‘Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian). Ryan Dorgan is a photographer who has spent the last decade covering Wyoming stories for local, regional, national and international publications. He moonlights as a house…

High Country News is dedicated to independent journalism, informed debate and discourse in the public interest. We welcome letters through digital media and the post. Send us a letter, find us on social media, or email us at editor@hcn.org. SOURCING SAGEBRUSH SEEDS I read the “Sagebrush Steppe” segment of Josephine Woolington’s “Regeneration Underground” (March 2024) with keen interest. What was missing is what has been learned and accomplished during the eight years since the Soda Fire. All sagebrush (and other) seed collected by Fish and Game volunteers is carefully labeled with GPS data that identifies the specific microclimate it came from so that stock grown from it can be used in burns with similar environmental specifications. I would have appreciated the added perspective of a Fish and Game habitat specialist…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2022, several researchers with USDA Wildlife Services held their breath as a drone pilot flew a large drone, equipped with a camera, toward a wolf standing in a pasture in southwestern Oregon. The team members, watching from a distance, expected the wolf to freeze or run away the minute the whirring rotors approached it. But to their disbelief, it did neither. Instead, the wolf wagged its tail, stretched out its front legs, lowered its head and lifted its butt — a classic canine invitation to play and precisely the opposite of the response researchers were hoping for. The project, led by Paul Wolf, the Southwest Oregon District supervisor for Wildlife Services, was designed to find ways to use drones to scare wolves away from livestock, not…

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THE WESTERN U.S. IS HOME to some of the most abundant solar energy in the world. The Southwest region, from California to New Mexico, receives on average more solar radiation per day than anywhere else in the country. In January, the Bureau of Land Management released a draft environmental analysis of the updated Western Solar Plan, a federal blueprint that shows where developers can apply for permits to build solar projects on BLM-administered public lands in the West. The new version revises a 2012 plan, adding more states and redrawing the lines around which areas should be protected from and which should be open to large-scale solar development. The agency has proposed five alternatives for where to draw those lines. The plan is focused on utility-scale solar projects that sell…