Innholdsfortegnelse for February Vol. 57, No. 2 i High Country News

IN 2018, an Indigenous woman identified as C.M. and her 5-year-old son crossed the U.S.-Mexico border near San Luis, Arizona, seeking asylum. C.M., a Maya Mam native to Guatemala, told the border agents who apprehended her that she was fleeing life-threatening violence. But instead of asylum, the U.S. government — under secret policies enacted by the first Trump administration — forcibly separated the pair. C.M. was sent to two detention centers in Arizona and then Nevada while her son, who spoke only Mam, was taken to a facility in New York. After 76 days and threats of deportation they were reunited. Traumatized by the experience, C.M. and four other parents affected by the policy sued in 2019 and last July reached a settlement with the Biden administration. The family separation…

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, Jade Powell uttered the word “transition” to a county commissioner at a local government meeting in the heart of Utah’s coalfields. The commissioner jumped out of his chair, grabbed Powell and shook him. “He was jokeful,” Powell said. “But you could tell he did not like that word.” Fast forward to last summer, in another meeting, and that same commissioner, now out of office, offhandedly used the word himself. Powell stopped him mid-sentence and asked, “Did you just say what I think you said?” The commissioner laughed. “I count that as one of our biggest wins,” Powell told High Country News. Powell, deputy director of Utah’s Southeastern Regional Development Agency (SERDA), said that the moment was only possible thanks to years of trust building. The energy transition…

PAPAY SOLOMON KNEW the mutability of borders even before he was born. Carried out of Liberia by his pregnant mother during that country’s calamitous civil war, he spent the majority of his childhood in a refugee camp in nearby Guinea, where many Liberians spent the 1990s navigating between a fractured past and an uncertain future. It was in the camp that he first learned to paint, inspired by a baroque collection of donated illustrated children’s Bibles and burned DVDs of American Christmas films. The material deficiencies made him unusually sensitive to the power of visual art: When you’re allotted no more than a single piece of paper, it becomes startlingly clear that a picture can indeed be worth a thousand words. The challenges Solomon faced in the camp were horrible,…

IN HER NEW POETRY collection, Smother, Rachel Richardson depicts her daughters through their elementary school years, intermittently living amid the smoke of Northern California’s wildfires. In one poem, she studies an air-quality map as the Tamarack Fire approaches the forest where they’re attending summer camp. In another, her daughters hang from the ceiling, learning to be circus performers, while the Caldor Fire surrounds the buildings in the same beloved camp, and a network of parents remains glued to the news. When Richardson herself was her children’s age, fog used to seep over the hills of Berkeley, covering the trees in moisture. Now, the summers are filled with smoke. The air isn’t the only thing that’s changing: The world moves at the pace of breaking news, technology has transformed our relationships…

What it’s like to be an incarcerated firefighter Eddie Herrera, a formerly incarcerated firefighter, talks about the job and how he sees the Los Angeles wildfires. By Natalia Mesa Outgoing Bureau of Land Management director optimistic about public lands Tracy Stone-Manning discusses the BLM’s achievements and talks about the future as we enter a new political era. By Kylie Mohr Scan to read these stories and all our web-exclusive content. Follow us @highcountrynews…

Note: This story was reported before the Palisades Fire destroyed part of the Malibu area and displaced many residents. THE PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY winds between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains in Malibu, California, with restaurants, stores and multimillion-dollar homes dotting both sides of this 21-mile section within city limits. The six-lane road, though technically a highway, also serves as the Southern California town’s main street. Pedestrians frequently cross the highway or walk along its shoulders, darting across in places without crosswalks or sidewalks. Heavy traffic and lack of pedestrian infrastructure have made the Pacific Coast Highway — partofCalifornia’siconicState Route 1 — deadly for the beach community. Since 2010, 61 people, many of them pedestrians, have been killed along this stretch of the highway, and many more have…

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP openly disdains any effort to fight what he calls the “big hoax” — climate change. During his first term, he eviscerated environmental regulations and yanked the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. On the campaign trail, he vowed to slash climate spending and increase domestic oil and gas production, even though it had already reached record high levels under President Joe Biden. He despises wind power and dislikes electric vehicles — unless they’re made by his new buddy, Elon Musk. None of this bodes well for plans to ditch fossil fuels in order to slow climate change, or for communities and ecosystems facing global warming-exacerbated disaster, whether through extreme heat, destructive wildfires or devastating flooding. With a GOP-dominated Congress and a Supreme Court hostile to environmental…

ON A COOL OCTOBER DAY, the wind whipped around Nathaniel Fletcher as he bear-crawled his way along a rocky reef in the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve, a protected area on California’s central coast. He reached into cracks and peered into crevices with a flashlight, hoping to find an endangered marine snail whose shell recently has become California’s state seashell: the black abalone. Seven species of abalone were once abundant along the California coast. Now, climate change and overfishing have driven all seven to the edge of extinction. The black abalone’s road to recovery is particularly challenging: Unlike other abalone species, researchers have not yet been able to grow it in captivity. But new efforts may give this iconic gastropod a fighting chance. A group of scientists have successfully translocated…

SWEAT DRIPPED DOWN my spine as I hefted a heavy drip torch with gloved hands. Everything was hot — the sun filtering through the ponderosa pines, the fire at my feet, the long-sleeved shirt and long pants I wore to protect myself from burns. I dipped the tip of the torch downward, splashing a few drops of flaming fuel onto bone-dry grass and snowberry bushes. Flames sprang up immediately, their hot tendrils nibbling at the brush under my boots. I slowly walked down a small rise, slinging more fuel and counting paces under my breath to evenly space the drops. One, two, three, four. Light the earth on fire. One, two, three, four. Do it again. I paused to catch my breath at the bottom of the hill, panting from…

119 Grand Avenue PO Box 1090 Paonia, CO 81428 U.S. $5 | Canada$6 Mother, birthworker, farmer, poet and organizational director at Breath of my Heart Birthplace Kha’p’o Owingeh, New Mexico We live next to nuclear weapons production, so we worry about the multitude of chemical combinations released on a daily basis. We’re dealing with some of the only toxins that can cross placental boundaries — tritium water, for example — and there’s proposed tritium venting coming up in our community. Breath of My Heart and Tewa Women United advocate for centering “Nava T’o i Yiya,” which translates in our Tewa language to “Land Worker Mother,” as the standard for protections. If we center Indigenous birthing people as the standard for protection, then everybody’s protected, right? Because for so long we’ve…