High Country News

High Country News is a non-profit news organization that produces a magazine, website, and various other publications. Their focus is on the challenges and topics relevant to the Western United States. Established in 1970 by rancher and environmental advocate Tom Bell in Wyoming, High Country News operates as a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation based in Paonia, Colorado.

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When we harm wolves, we harm ourselves

5 days ago | hcn.org | Clark Tenakhongva |Gretchen King

The hysteria around gray wolves across the United States, and Mexican wolves in particular, needs to be addressed urgently. First, the wolf named Ella was found murdered on ancestral Hopi lands, near Mount Taylor. A few weeks later, a collared wolf, Asiza, likely pregnant, was “mistakenly” murdered by Arizona Fish and Game in Greenlee County, also ancestral Hopi lands.
Trump quits deal with Northwest tribes to restore salmon

1 week ago | hcn.org | Tony Schick |Gretchen King

This story was originally published by ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting, and is republished here by permission. Less than two years ago, the administration of President Joe Biden announced what tribal leaders hailed as an unprecedented commitment to the Native tribes whose ways of life had been devastated by federal dam-building along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.
DOJ says presidents can revoke monuments, not just create them

2 weeks ago | hcn.org | Chris D’Angelo |Jimmy Tobias |Roque Planas |Gretchen King

This story was originally published by Public Domain and is republished here by permission. A legal official at the Department of Justice has concluded that President Donald Trump has the authority to not only shrink but completely abolish areas protected as national monuments. The memo provides the legal framework for a broad reduction of federal land protections that Trump officials have alluded to for months.
Senate Republicans want to sell 3 million acres of public land

2 weeks ago | hcn.org | Kylie Mohr

Over 3 million acres of public land could be sold in the next five years, after Senate Republicans on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee reintroduced land sales into the party’s major spending bill. Released on Wednesday night, the megabill text includes a proposal for extensive transfers of U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands, supposedly for housing but with leeway for other uses. The new bill text escalates a recent GOP push to sell federal land.
Indigenous filmmakers get support from Sundance

3 weeks ago | hcn.org | Jason Asenap |Gretchen King

Evening on the Mescalero Reservation in southern New Mexico, at the 2011 Sundance Institute Native Lab. I took a walk in the dark, and a small fire burned in the distance, where a ceremony was occurring. It all felt familiar, like being back in southern Oklahoma at the Comanche Homecoming Powwow. But I was in New Mexico, workshopping my screenplay, a romantic comedy called Rugged Guy.
Supreme Court puts Utah’s oil train back on the rails

3 weeks ago | hcn.org | Lisa Sorg |Gretchen King

This article was originally published by Inside Climate News and is republished here through a partnership with Climate Desk. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a controversial Utah railway project that critics say erodes the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a bedrock of environmental law for the past half century.
Can this Washington member of Congress turn the Democratic Party around?

3 weeks ago | hcn.org | Joseph O’Sullivan |Gretchen King

This story was originally published by Cascade PBS and is republished here by permission. Standing beneath towering shelves of kegs in the back of Vancouver’s Loowit Brewing, U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has just given a thank-you talk to her supporters after squeaking through another tight election.
Sea otters to get another chance in Oregon and Northern California

3 weeks ago | hcn.org | Anna V. Smith

If you could walk the ocean floor off the coast of Cape Arago in Oregon in the summer, you’d find yourself in the mysterious green depths of a forest of kelp. Look up, and you’d see sunlight filtering through the fronds waving in the current; look down, and you’d see the plants anchored to an ocean floor covered with life.
Wolves return to the West

3 weeks ago | hcn.org | Jonathan Thompson

“Avintaquint is dead!May he never have a successor,” Utah’s Duchesne Record proclaimed in September 1910. “The crafty leader of one of the wiliest bands of pillagers of the cattle range that ever roamed the west” had finally met his end. Avintaquint was not a human outlaw, but a canine one — a giant gray wolf that gained notoriety by feasting on sheep and cattle throughout eastern Utah, stubbornly eluding traps, bullets and poisons for well over a decade.
The enduring appeal of nude desert self-portraits

3 weeks ago | hcn.org | Miles Griffis

The igneous dike cut through the enormous monzogranite boulder gleaming in golden hour rays. I followed the neat geologic line in the Jumbo Rocks area of Joshua Tree National Park, thinking about the late photographer Laura Aguilar. The quartz intrusion sent me 20 yards up a wash into the sweet and spicy needles of a piñon pine tree before it vanished underground.