How the movement at Standing Rock and its protestors’ efforts extended well beyond North Dakota. While the pipeline is stalled (for now), its impacts are planting seeds, however small, within social and environmental movements and for tribal sovereignty across the country.

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Regulations rejected

“Will a twice-burned county change its ways?” (HCN, 12/26/16) details how residents of Montana’s Bitterroot Valley block efforts by their state and county governments to require homeowners in the fire zone to prepare for -inevitable wildfires. Residents reject county regulation and demand private-property rights. These Bitterroot Valley conservatives can teach us a great deal about…

by Tom Ribe

Shades of what’s to come?

I thoroughly appreciated, although was equally saddened by,  “How the Park Service is Failing Women” (HCN, 12/12/16). It does not surprise me that women — and most likely people of color, of Hispanic or Muslim backgrounds, and others who are not white males — are treated in this manner throughout multiple government organizations and business…

by Don Hagedorn

Standing Rock and beyond

Earlier this month, a group of protesters calling themselves “water protectors” set up a camp to stop the imminent construction of a controversial pipeline. This was not in North Dakota, however; it was in Texas. The Two Rivers camp, established by activists who were also part of the opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, or…

by Brian Calvert

The dark side of the Park Service

Please give Lyndsey Gilpin my congratulations on her great investigative reporting for “How the Park Service is Failing Women” (HCN, 12/12/16). I am in my 23rd year of retirement after wearing the National Park Service ranger uniform for more than 30 years. I can validate and corroborate every point that Lyndsey writes in her article. That traditional flat…

by Alden L. Nash

An exception, not a ‘loophole’

Elizabeth Shogren’s “Latest” column in the Dec. 12 issue grossly mischaracterized the North Fork coal-mining exception to the Colorado roadless rule, as a “loophole.” The state of Colorado was never ambiguous with its intent to make provisions for the $1 billion-dollar coal-mining industry in the North Fork coal-mining area with its own roadless rule, and…

by Ben Graves

Industrial solar shortcomings

“So Shines a Good Deed” gives incomplete coverage to solar energy development and presents only one view of a rather complicated situation (HCN, 12/26/16). Both the federal government and the article cited are avid promoters of industrial-scale solar development on public lands. In California, the total solar energy produced from installations on parking lot structures,…

by Craig Deutsche