High Country News December Vol. 56, No. 12

I’M LOOKING AT A PHOTO of someone’s house going up in flames. It’s one of a number of iconic images taken during the Mountain Fire, which broke out in early November and swept through suburban neighborhoods in Ventura County, California. The image is horrific. And it is also metaphorical: As Greta Thunberg says about planet Earth, “Our house is on fire.” This really should concern more people. Statistically speaking, we are all at risk. And yet our former president and now president-elect promised fossil fuel industry leaders nearly everything they wished for if they would help him get elected. It’s just one of many all-but-guaranteed assaults on the land, on public health and on the most vulnerable in our communities. Meanwhile, I’ve been holed up in Joshua Tree, experiencing over…

REPLANTING THE PRAIRIE If you want to maximize biodiversity — now recognized as intimately connected to climate warming — you need to preserve and increase your native grasslands (“Prairie Revival,” November 2024). That’s where the insects are, and foragers after the insects pass that energy up the long food chain. Jake Sigg San  Francisco, California I have been a lover of prairies for years. Is there a nonprofit that could receive donations to buy swaths of land to plant prairie? Or help pay for seed? Or dig up poison hemlock? I am not a big donor, but this seems like a wonderful way to heal after this terrible election. Maybe we could create a National Prairie Organization. Jane Martin Whidbey Island, Washington MORE TRANSLATIONS I just finished the “Latino Vote…

ONE AFTERNOON IN JUNE of 2022, Mohammed Ishag, a Sudanese immigrant who drove for Uber and Lyft, was killing time in the Denver International Airport rideshare lot, listening to a pulpy and popular audiobook called Insta Empire. Ishag, a 32-year-old native Arabic speaker who had been in the United States for about five years, found the story amusing and an excellent tool for learning English. He was absorbed in the adventures of the protagonist, a young American billionaire, when a middle-aged Asian woman knocked on the window of his 2011 Toyota Highlander. She told him that her name was Minsun Ji and that she worked for an organization in Denver called the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center (RMEOC). The group was starting a driver-owned rideshare cooperative as an alternative to…

One week in May, we wakeeach day to sirens. Branches shaking,snapped. We aren’t lulled back to dreams by the wailing,the rhythmic pelting of hail. Take shelter, our phones tell us.We descend to our underground havens as the heavens seekan axis around which to wheel. Clouds the color of slatesteel themselves against the other, weaponless air.The wind makes itself a drill bit spinning over still-greencornfields, and I wish a religion would whirl through my brain—raze my sense that we deserve the skies turning on us.Let me find mercy in this scene: the gods coveting a passagewayfrom sky to ground— a funnel-shaped tunnel to pull usthrough to another world. WEB EXTRA Listen to Carolina Hotchandani read her poem at hcn.org/whirling-omens…

Note: This story includes details about lethal hate crimes. OIL. THEN SETTLERS. Then violence. Then protests, tensions and more violence, in a cycle of conquest and dispossession. “Those are structural issues that are baked into the psyche of Farmington,” said Melanie K. Yazzie (Diné), assistant professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota. Yazzie co-authored Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation, which examines anti-Indigenous violence in towns abutting reservations—places like Gallup, Albuquerque and Farmington, where Natives buy groceries and building supplies, work, go dancing, or just hang out. “Border towns are places that really help us to see how settler order operates,” she said. Farmington, New Mexico, a town of 46,000 about 30 miles from the Shiprock community on the Navajo Nation’s eastern border, is…

EVERY YEAR AROUND November, flocks of one of North America’s tiniest geese leave Alaska’s Izembek Lagoon, launching an epic migration up to 3,000 miles long. In flights that can last 60 hours, Pacific brant head for eelgrass tidelands that stretch from British Columbia to Baja. Many humans along the way consider these distinctive birds — black, with mottled flanks and a necklace of twisting white stripes — North America’s “best goose.” Uncommon and beautiful, they’re beloved by birders. Subsistence and recreational hunters prize them, too: They’re particularly delicious. But much of their habitat is degraded, and their size and habits make them harder to study than other geese. As technology progresses, however — from tinier trackers to more powerful computing tools — researchers are learning more about what this species…