Innholdsfortegnelse for June Vol. 56, No. 06 i High Country News

IN 2016, A COALITION of tribal nations persuaded President Barack Obama to not only establish Bears Ears National Monument but stipulate that it would be co-managed by tribes and federal agencies. Since then, triballed campaigns have strategically — and successfully — sought Antiquities Act protections for ancestral lands from Avi Kwa Ame in the Mojave Desert to Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni near the Grand Canyon. Tribes are currently leading or involved in campaigns to establish the recently proposed Kw’ts’án, Chuckwalla and Sáttítla national monuments in California and Bahsahwahbee in Nevada. On May 2, the Biden administration expanded Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument in California, directing the Department of Interior to work with tribes on co-stewardship of the monument. Like previous national monuments, some of these designations have faced political backlash.…

KURT MARTHALLER, who oversees school food programs in Butte, Montana, faces many cafeteria-related challenges: children skipping the lunch line because they fear being judged, parents fuming about surprise bills they can’t afford, unpaid meal debts of $70,000 districtwide. But at nearly half of Marthaller’s schools, these concerns have vanished. At those schools, all students get free breakfast and lunch, regardless of their family’s income. At one school, West Elementary, children grab milk cartons, cereal bars and bananas from folding tables on their way to class, with almost 80% of students eating breakfast there each school day. “We’ve done a lot of good things to feed kids here in Butte,” Marthaller said. But introducing universal free meals, he added, was “probably the best thing we ever did.” Child nutrition advocates have…

IT WASN’T IMMEDIATELY CLEAR who challenged whom to a push-up contest at the Lewis County Pride festival in Centralia last June — the white supremacist or the Pride celebrant. It was a bright Saturday in the small southwestern Washington city, and the festival was in full swing at a brick plaza on Tower Avenue, the main street. Music blasted, people danced in rainbow tutus and rainbow hats and rainbow face paint; there was a drag performance, and across the plaza, large yellow umbrellas shaded tables. The theme was “Bee Yourself.” Kyle Wheeler, one of the festival’s coorganizers, wore an oversized straw hat with antennas on top. Someone pulled him aside and told him a group dressed in black was headed toward the festival. Wheeler looked down Tower: White supremacists were…

I LOVE WALKING, whether it’s on a well-traveled trail or finding my own path in nature, if I can, wondering what things might have looked like 50 or 500 years ago. The Catalina Mountains in Coronado National Forest are only a 10-minute drive from my home but a world away. Whenever I set out, determined to finish the 8.2 mile there-and-back-again trail — I never do — my mind starts speculating. I wonder: What would the vegetation have looked like in the past? Would there have been any roads nearby, or traffic, or as many people passing through? I never do find solid answers, even if I remember to search for my exact location on Google Maps afterward. Most satellite images go back only about 40 years and aren’t high-definition enough…

TASHA ELIZARDE (SHE/HER) Co-founder of Mana Alaska, a media collective; executive producer of Mga Kuwento, an oral history project Juneau, Alaska Filipinos have been in Alaska for 236 years. I grew up in Juneau, and it wasn’t until I learned about our history that I understood my connection to Alaska. We are the state’s largest immigrant minority, but there are few records for us to learn from. It’s an uphill battle, trying to share our community’s stories the way we feel is right. Sometimes the institutions we work with don’t understand what we’re trying to do. They push back. But we choose to do things our way: We spend hours engaging with people; we eat with our interviewees and show up for their birthdays. What makes everything worth the challenges…

Two activists, using the pseudonyms Salal Golden and Rat Daddy, sit in the canopy of the tree where they and others protested for three weeks. On April 1, activists from the group Pacific Northwest Forest Defense ascended into the upper most branches of a ponderosa pine in southern Oregon. Nearby, they said, road construction for the Poor Windy Forest Management Project, operated by wood-products manufacturer Boise Cascade and approved by the Bureau of Land Management, had already begun. This particular pine was not part of the timber sale, but it stood in the path of a planned road, in danger of becoming collateral damage. A handful of activists took turns in the tree, sitting on a wooden platform 120 feet in the air. By April 23, the BLM had amended…

On March 31, in Glen Oak, California, Bradon Schwarz, HCN’s charitable gifts advisor, married the love of his life, Andrew Barmann. Bradon popped the question late last summer near his family home on Grand Mesa, not far from HCN’s headquarters in western Colorado. It didn’t take them long to tie the knot, and we can’t say we’re really surprised by the pace: Andrew was a competitive collegiate swimmer at UC Santa Barbara and has coached swim teams since then. Bradon and Andrew (now Barmann-Schwarz Inc.) live in Bakersfield with their two huskies, Mowgley and Manning. And just over a week later, HCN’s science and climate editor, Emily Benson, and her partner, Erika Rader, welcomed a beautiful baby boy into the world. Emily wrote to us a few days later to…

THE HEADY SCENT OF WET CREOSOTE hung in the air the morning we skirted impossible alluvial fans on our way to the lowest point in North America. Since the Pleistocene, Badwater Basin, 236 feet below sea level, has primarily been a salt flat, but deluges from Hurricane Hilary and a recent atmospheric river had filled the pan with billions of gallons of water. Lake Manly was a zombie, back from the dead. Many said it was the largest it had been for decades. Pushed by strong winds in March, it even drifted two miles north, like some kind of restless soul. In the towering shade of the Funeral Range, my boyfriend and I blew up our rafts as our friend made roadside coffee. The ephemeral lake was so calm that…

AROUND 9 A.M. on Nov. 8, 2022, Quentin Fears noticed a small amount of water in the drainage tunnel he called home. This was unusual, so he emerged, only to find that the larger flood-control channel just outside his tunnel was filled with a violent, fast-rising torrent of water. One of his friends — perched on a bed that was now a raft — was being swept away. For over a decade, Fears, a soft-spoken 51-year-old, has lived in and around the flood control channel that runs under Interstate 10 in the Southern California suburb of Ontario. After storms, a little water often runs down the center of the concrete channel. But Fears had never seen a flood like this one. “It was raging,” he said. Ultimately, a record breaking…

FROM A BLUFF over looking a sunbaked valley outside Farmington, New Mexico, Aaron Facka and Michael Dax watched a black helicopter soar, thrumming loudly as it swooped low over the landscape. Inside, three men searched the grasslands for the white specks of pronghorn, the antelope-like creatures that inhabit the Western plains of North America. It was early March, cloudless and warm, but Facka and Dax, who both work for the Wildlands Network, an environmental nonprofit, were nervous. The men in the helicopter worked for a company that specializes in capturing wildlife for biological research. Each time they spotted a pronghorn, the pilot flew close enough for a colleague to fire a gun that released a net, trapping the animal so that it could be fitted with a GPS collar. The collars…

IDAHO Here’s some (hard-to-digest) food for thought. Idaho Republican Rep. Heather Scott introduced legislation to expand the parameters of a pre-existing anti-cannibalism law, ktvb.com reported. Apparently, the current Idaho law, made official in 1990 and establishing Idaho as the only state where cannibalism is officially illegal, failed to satisfy the anthropophagist-fearing Scott and her supporters, not with standing the fact that it clearly outlaws “willfully (ingesting) the flesh or blood of a human being.” House Bill 522, complete with Scott’s additions — which are rather too gruesome to repeat here and, yes, you’re welcome —was introduced back in February and passed in early March. Scott had begun to worry that the green burial business, aka “human composting,” might contaminate the food supply — or something — perhaps encouraging the proliferation…