Innholdsfortegnelse for April Vol. 56, No. 04 i High Country News

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…

BEFORE JON EAGLE SR. began working for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, he was an equine therapist for over 36 years, linking horses with and providing support to children, families and communities both on his ranch and on the road. The work reinforced his familiarity with the land and allowed him to explore the rolling hills, plains and buttes of the sixth-largest reservation in the United States. But when he became Standing Rock’s tribal historic preservation officer, he learned that the land still held surprises, the biggest one being that much of it didn’t belong to the tribe: Standing Rock straddles North and South Dakota, and both states own thousands of acres within the tribe’s reservation boundaries. “They don’t talk to us at all about it,” Eagle said. “I wasn’t…

THIS JANUARY, AFTER the Biden administration said it would temporarily pause new natural gas export permitting, climate advocate Bill McKibben wrote: “Um, I think we all just won. … This is the biggest thing a U.S. president has ever done to stand up to the fossil fuel industry.” The news came as the feds debated whether to permit a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Louisiana. The facility, called CP2, would expand the nation’s capacity to send natural gas to Europe, where demand has soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it’s also regarded as a climate-heating “carbon bomb” — an expansion of the fossil fuel industry precisely when the opposite is needed. For many activists, a green light for CP2 would be the final straw that dashed hopes that…

At HCN, she found a job — and a community In early March, HCN’s director of philanthropy, Alyssa Pinkerton, told the staff and board that, after 15 years with the organization, she’s moving on. With her youngest kiddo about to graduate from high school, she plans to return to her career in art. Alyssa is a gifted painter and illustrator, as well as a self-described thespian. “It’s a terrifying leap,” she said, “and I’m just so excited.” In her travels, Alyssa loved to ask people about their HCN stories. Many of us talk about how a friend or a mentor introduced us to the magazine, or how we stopped by the office in Paonia, Colorado, or attended a gathering of readers, and realized that we’d found not just a magazine,…

BARRY LOPEZ ONCE SHOWED ME how to drive the back roads of Oregon near Finn Rock at night with no headlights. Why? I asked. “So you can learn to see in the dark like animals do and not be afraid.” He was disarming. Playful. Beyond serious. Demanding. At times, exhausting. Always, illuminating. And like all writers, sometimes self-absorbed. I loved him. He taught me to not only see the world differently, but to feel it more fully. I cannot believe he is gone. Now where do I look? Before he was a writer, he was a photographer. A good one. In fact, the cover image of River Notes, his collection of short fictions based on his own experience of living along the McKenzie River, was taken by him. It is…

WHEN I WAS 20, my friends and I reenacted The Lady of Shalott on the Cherwell River in Oxford. We rented a punt, bought a loaf of crusty bread and a bottle of Buck’s Fizz, made flower crowns and began a faltering cruise down the river, crashing into the banks and stopping at intervals to read the Tennyson poem aloud. “Willows whiten, aspens shiver. /The sunbeam showers break and quiver.” The line about aspens thrilled me; I hadn’t seen any since landing in England. I had been at Oxford for the year, and I missed my Wyoming home. I found all the green and the trees claustrophobic. I had never been any kind of athlete, but that year I took to running around the University Parks, as that was the…

119 Grand Avenue PO Box 1090 Paonia, CO 81428 U.S. $5 | Canada$6 The sustainability of the Southwest’s water and energy, and the difficulties we now face, rely on our diverse people and our students’ education. Education can lead to better ideas, more sustainable practices with less waste, and help create systems compatible with the environment. I am very hopeful for the future. The younger generation I am working with now, the students who graduated in the last two or three years, are more conscious and less selfish. They want to do something for other people, not just themselves. It’s surprising how socially conscious they are. Students want a job they like that uses their knowledge, contributes to the community, and creates an impact that affects all of us. @highcountrynews…

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…

WHEN JUSTIN REICHERT was 18, he caught a ride with a friend from his family’s farm in McPherson, Kansas, to Elko, Nevada, 1,200 miles away. It was 1992, the seventh year of Elko’s National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a series of readings and musical performances created to celebrate all the Westerners whose lives revolve around raising cattle. Reichert had never been to the event, which its fans call, simply, “the gathering,” but he’d heard a lot about it. The son of a horse trader, Reichert competed in rodeos — he could, he said, “ride anything with hair” — but he wanted out of Kansas. He wanted to live and work as a cowboy out West. Reichert arrived in Elko, a cow town in the sagebrush flats at the foot of the…

Growing up in a very rural community in southern Arizona, I have always felt most at home in wild places. Now, as a busy professional (and mom) with a career centered around stewarding public lands, spending my limited time volunteering as president of this organization is one of the most effective ways to amplify my passion for protecting the ecology of the American West. The stories empower communities to act on behalf of their environments, while also training generations of journalists to continue doing high-impact work nationally and globally.- Estee Rivera HCN board president Our journalism — the powerful stories, analysis, investigations, photos and artwork on these very pages — is made possible because of funding from readers just like you and me. A whopping 76% of our entire budget comes…

THE FIRST MULE DEER to become famous was named Jet, after the University of Wyoming graduate student who MacGyvered her tracking collar. The name fit an animal that walked, bounded and sometimes ran 150 miles north every spring, chasing greener pastures, and then trekked 150 miles south each fall to escape deep snow. Thousands of people followed Jet’s seasonal journeys on Facebook and Twitter, and mourned when she died of exposure in December 2016. The following year, a deer that researchers named Mo for her momentum caught the public’s attention. Julie Legg, a 49-year-old woman living in the almost-ghost town of Superior, Wyoming, was so inspired by Mo’s long migration that she’s spent the last seven years driving two-track roads and hiking hillsides and creek bottoms, photographing and videoing deer for…

I LIKE BORDERS. Borders are places of connection, clash, and blend. They define cultures — languages, arts, cuisines, habits — by exhibiting, testing, mingling and breaking their distinctiveness and insularity. Borders are where humans trade in goods, ideas and beliefs. They are places of ingenuity, mezcla, neologism and entrepôt. Borders mark difference and possibility: As sites of beauty and definition, alloy and creation, they spark vibrant and unexpected harmony. “Something only is what it is,” as the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel put it, “in its limit and through its limit.” Infamously, however, regimes of crushing violence and dispiriting exploitation sully the creative and polyphonic potential of borders. As we deny, cast out and crack down, we have turned our thresholds into barricades. Given the proliferation of such walling off…