Innholdsfortegnelse for December Vol. 54, No. 12 i High Country News

JIM ELSER SCANNED THE SNOWFIELDS clinging to the lower slopes of Clements Mountain in Montana’s Glacier National Park. While nearby tourists snapped pictures of soaring rock faces and searched for wildlife, Elser, an ecologist at the University of Montana and the director of the Flathead Lake Biological Station, concentrated on just one thing: finding snow algae. Elser and his research team tramped past flourishing purple asters and yellow arnica wildflowers, gaining elevation until they crested a ridge above a small basin. Marmot chirps replaced the sound of idling car engines at the Logan Pass parking lot, which swarmed with August visitors. A soft hum came from the bulky rectangular device strapped to the back of his colleague, Joe Giersch, an aquatic entomologist at the University of Montana; the device, a light-measuring…

IT WAS A HOT SUNDAY MORNING in June, a typical summer’s day for St. George, Utah. The sun beamed through the east-facing cathedral windows of DeDe’s, the beloved restaurant where co-owners Kirk and DeDe Orton have served Washington County residents for the past decade. Link Feesago leaned back in his seat with a satisfied sigh, having just finished a plate of Kirk’s chicken-fried steak, eggs, potatoes and toast. “This is a tradition I wanted to pass down to my sons,” he said. “Twice a month, we’d play nine holes of golf and have breakfast at DeDe’s café.” That tradition began years ago, when Feesago’s mom treated him to lunch there. But she suffered a stroke a year ago and hadn’t been able to visit. “When DeDe found out, she made…

CARBON CAPTURE AND SEQUESTRATION sounds like a bit of a no-brainer. I mean, carbon emitted from industrial facilities’ smokestacks is bad, right? So why not just put a big vacuum thing on the stacks, capture the bad stuff and blow it back into the ground where it originally came from? Simple, right? Not really. Capturing and sequestering carbon, especially from coal plants, is complicated, convoluted, energy-intensive and rather expensive. And the technology has yet to be proven on a large scale. Still, it may be fossil fuel companies’ best bet for continuing to rake in a profit while doing something about climate change — or at least appearing to do something. So, corporations have asked the federal government for help, and Congress and various presidential administrations have responded, offering subsidies…

THIS ISSUE MARKS THE END of a busy year here at High Country News. Back in February, the page you’re reading, Dear Friends, got an inviting new look — a sign of our desire to use this space to find new ways of building relationships with readers. So far, we’ve shared a lot of news from our end. We’ve introduced you to staff members, shared survey results, touted special events and even launched our first-ever summer reading contest. The reading program was especially fulfilling. Dozens of folks sent in bingo cards, recommended favorite books and shared their thoughts, ideas and suggestions. This year also marked HCN’s active return to the outside world. We were once again able to meet with readers in person and trade stories in cafés and breweries,…

EVERY YEAR, THE WEST loses 1.3 million acres of its iconic sagebrush steppe, according to the newest report from a multiagency group working to conserve this important ecosystem. That’s roughly 2,000 square miles — an area about the size of Grand Canyon National Park, or four times the sprawl of Los Angeles. The largest terrestrial biome in the Lower 48, sagebrush rangeland spans 13 states and once covered a third of the continental U.S. Now, roughly half of it is gone. The report, released in September, includes maps that show the full scale of the loss since 2001 and identify its causes. It’s the latest step in an effort by 94 scientists and specialists from 34 government agencies, universities and nonprofits to catalog large-scale threats to the sagebrush biome. Later this…

THEY TOLD Willie Grayeyes (Diné) to sleep in his clothes — to not even take off his black shoes. At any moment, the Tuba City Boarding School staff members said, the 7-year-old would be called upon. Not knowing what that meant, he obeyed. “We were treated in Tuba City like we were in the military,” Grayeyes said, remembering the boarding school system that tried to assimilate him and many thousands of other Indigenous children. “We were marched; we were physically abused by being kicked. I did not know anything at the time of the decree.” The decree in question was the compulsory attendance mandate employed by the federal boarding school system, which often resulted in the physical, emotional, sexual and spiritual abuse of Indigenous children. Any parents, guardians or clan…

WHEN MY PARTNER, T, AND I pulled into the parking lot near Pillar Point on the California coast, the sky was still midnight blue. I was surprised to see we were alone; I’d expected the parking lot to be swarmed already, a squeaking flurry of rainboots and aurora of headlamps as other visitors hurried out to the rocky shore near the end of December, during an unusually low tide. But it was just the two of us amid daybreak’s unspooling fog, which blurred the hard edges of the horizon. The lot was so resolutely empty that I peed in the port-a-potty with the door wide open, afraid of being trapped inside the squelching dark. I watched T adjust the plastic bags knotted around their feet and under their shoes, and…

AS THE YELLOWSTONE RIVER rose in June, sandbag walls sprouted like Lego sets throughout the city of Livingston, Montana, population about 8,000. People moved valuables into their cars, ready to hit the road. Hundreds of structures in town were evacuated, including my house, which is located in a so-called 500-year floodplain — a zone with a .2% annual risk of flooding. The high muddy water, later deemed a 500-year flood, caused millions of dollars of damage in the region. Waiting it out at a friend’s place on higher ground, uncertain about the fate of my own home, I realized that the map lines that inform official thinking about flood risk had abruptly become tangible to me. For most people, floodplain maps are difficult to find and even tougher to understand.…

MY HUSBAND ASKS what I plan to do with my placenta. It is spring, and we have been unexpectedly gifted some elk meat. He removes all the contents of our freezer to make room for portions of another animal’s body. Parts of its shoulder, its haunches, and pieces of its belly line our counter, wrapped and packed into neat blocks of meat. My placenta has been in the freezer for months, and now it is sitting on the counter, too, frozen like a steak in a biohazard bucket. I insisted this part of my body come home with us to Wyoming after I gave birth, and now I can’t decide what to do with it. The word “placenta” is derived from the Latin word for cake. Most mammals eat their…

CALIFORNIA A middle school in Jurupa Valley reported a coyote running around the school and entering a restroom without a hall pass. The coyote, dubbed “Wile E.,” after the Looney Tunes cartoon character, had been spotted near the campus before, but until now, he’d never entered the school. Officer Will Luna of the Riverside Department of Animal Services cornered the coyote next to the toilet, according to the Palm Springs Desert Sun, and successfully captured him. Luna also filmed and narrated the encounter, which concluded with Wile E.’s release some distance away from school property. A spokescanine for the coyote community blamed the entire incident on “the road runner problem,” adding that a lawsuit had been filed against ACME Co. for selling faulty dynamite. UTAH AND ALASKA We’ve all put…