An ode to airport-dwelling birds.
Renee Guillory
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
For the love of a river
“Welcome to a way of life”: With these words, Christa Sadler invites readers to sit down by her literary campfire on the banks of the Colorado River. There’s This River is a gathering of rambunctious tattletales: often-hilarious accounts of river guides’ (mis)adventures herding tourists through the Grand Canyon. The anthology includes a glossary of river […]
Posted inJuly 24, 2006: Taking Liberties
Raul Grijalva relishes a good fight
NAME Raúl M. Grijalva HOMETOWN Tucson, Arizona AGE 58 VOCATION Serving the U.S. House of Representatives for Arizona’s 7th District HE SAYS “The environment is connected entirely to time: The more time you lose or waste, the less protection you have.” Congressman Raúl Grijalva is a different kind of politician. Plain-spoken and refreshingly unguarded, he […]
Posted inApril 17, 2006: The War on Wildfire
A law born from the ashes
California’s devastating fires of 2003 gave rise to the Healthy Forests Restoration Act — the business end of the Bush administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative, itself introduced in Oregon after the 2002 fire season. George W. Bush’s Healthy Forests, by Jacqueline Vaughn and Hanna J. Cortner, is the story of a legislative moment in time — […]
Posted inMarch 20, 2006: Town Shopping
At home in the valley
In The San Luis Valley, Susan Tweit takes us on an extraordinary spring journey through a place her heart knows as home. It’s a joy to read her keen observations about wild territory — in the outback, in our hearts — and the many ways it feeds the soul. In the tepee-shaped slice of south […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 2006: High Noon for Habitat
Stalking the boojum in the Sonoran Desert
From afar, the Sonoran Desert is a stonewashed, monochromatic expanse. Look closer, and you’ll swear that fantasy writer Lewis Carroll did the landscaping. Two rainy seasons each year give the Sonoran Desert stunning biodiversity and some pretty quirky plant species — many so specialized to a particular place that budding naturalists are likely to need […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Seeking peace in nuclear times
In Folding Paper Cranes: An Atomic Memoir, former U.S. Marine Leonard Bird offers a personal account of nuclear war. His story shifts between Japan — the only place atomic bombs have been used in combat — to the pockmarked Nevada deserts that for 40 years were ground zero for the U.S. nuclear test program. Nearly […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2006: Timberlands up for grabs
Eight decades of magic and beauty at Ghost Ranch
New Mexico’s most famous resort, Ghost Ranch, has charmed many visitors. One overwhelmed admirer proclaimed that any description of the place amounted to “an advertisement for God and New Mexico.” Area historian Lesley Poling-Kempes tells the story of Ghost Ranch and its lovers in her absorbing new book, Ghost Ranch. Ghost Ranch covers 20,000 acres […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2005: The Ghosts of Yosemite
His photographs trace the passage of time
NAME Mark Klett VOCATION Photographer and regents’ professor of art at Arizona State University AGE 53 KNOWN FOR Documenting our changing relationship with Western landscapes HE SAYS “Photos always seem to exist as sort of stuffy, unnecessary antiques that we put in a drawer — unless we take them out, put them in current dialogue, […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Barren, wild and worthless? Anything but
For naturalist Susan Tweit, moving to New Mexico meant learning to love the harsh beauty of a landscape that one haggard 19th century surveyor dismissed as “barren, wild, and worthless.” That bitter phrase became the title of Tweit’s eloquent 1995 memoir on life in the Chihuahuan Desert. Taken in by her masterful prose, readers, too, […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Bonelight: Ruin and Grace
Bonelight: Ruin and Grace in the New Southwest is Mary Sojourner’s timely and occasionally quirky reckoning of loss and resilience. Throughout these 50 vignettes, some new, some previously published, the Flagstaff, Ariz., author and High Country News contributor weaves personal stories into a compelling history of her hometown’s growing pains. Bonelight’s intimate musings on environmental […]
Posted inSeptember 10, 2001: The rise and fall of a desert stream
Voice of the Butterfly
Change can be as miraculous as a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis … or as surreal as a wild landscape sprouting highways and leapfrog subdivisions. John Nichols’ newest work of fiction, The Voice of the Butterfly, is a hyperactive meditation on transformation in our post-modern, uber-consumption world. Full of gritty slapstick zen, Nichols’ morality play […]
Posted inJune 18, 2001: Transforming powers
Soul food on the range
Researchers at Northern Arizona University’s Center for Sustainable Environments have some bad news about the average American diet: A typical meal’s ingredients travel 2,000 miles from farm to fork, amassing huge environmental and economic costs along the way. The costs are cultural, too, says NAU professor and noted author Gary Nabhan. While Westerners can instantly […]
Posted inApril 23, 2001: The Big Blowup
Fool’s Gold: Telluride’s ‘magical realism’
Rob Schultheis moved to Colorado in 1973, when pop stars began singing about the Rocky Mountains and asking whether you’d ever been “mellow.” His newest book, Fool’s Gold, zooms in on his home turf of Telluride, where “summer is briefer than a butterfly’s dream … autumn an afterthought, and winter rules.” When Schultheis arrived, Telluride […]