http://www.newwest.net/index.php/city/main/C101/L101/ New West Network: The Voice of the Rocky Mountains en info@newwest.net Copyright 2009 Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:00:37 MST Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:00:37 MST http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/newwest/city/jacksonhole/~3/VUHudHg9kIA/ Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:13:22 MST The American Medical Association this month passed a resolution that recognizes a host of problems with light pollution, including health issues -- such as breast cancer -- that are "associated with human eye exposure to light at night." The AMA resolution (view it in full here) explains that the increasing amount of light in the world, including streetlight glare and intrusive light that "trespasses" into bedroom windows and homes, is linked to higher rates of cancer and other health woes. It harms wildlife as well, the medical group says. As the AMA puts it: "Light trespass has been implicated in disruption of the human and animal circadian rhythm, and strongly suspected as an etiology of suppressed melatonin production, depressed immune systems, and increase in cancer rates such as breast cancers." In addition, it "disrupts nocturnal animal activity and results in diminished various animal populations' survival and health," the group says. http://www.newwest.net/city/article/ama_links_light_pollution_to_cancer_health_woes/C101/L101/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/newwest/city/jacksonhole/~3/wl0GnImLlt8/ Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:43:38 MST Revolution rages in Tehran and the world is transfixed by millions of Iranians demanding free speech. Laramie, Wyoming is light years away from the Islamic world, but amid charges of repression of free speech and totalitarian decisions, a revolt is gaining momentum against the University of Wyoming (UW) trustees -- and its emblematic martyr is Big Al, the Allosaurus. Facing an $18.3 million budget shortfall, UW decided to close the school's Geological Museum in response to the state of Wyoming's mandated 10 percent budget cuts. The museum will close to the public July 1; its director and assistant are among the people who will lose their jobs as a result. Big Al -- whose incredibly-preserved bones greet museum visitors -- will become a recluse. Some researchers may be able to see him, but not the public. The same goes for other museum prizes, including one of the only mounted skeletons of an Apatosaurus (or Brontosaurus, as it was formerly called). http://www.newwest.net/city/article/dino_museum_to_close_its_doors_shutting_down_the_public/C101/L101/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/newwest/city/jacksonhole/~3/ukibypR1jo4/ Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:42:21 MST A grim future is predicted for the 25,000-acre National Elk Refuge in Wyoming unless the sprawling home to elk and bison gets an infusion of new policies and resources, according to a new report from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The group ranks the wildlife sanctuary -- which has one of the largest concentrations of elk in the world -- as one of America's Ten Most Imperiled Refuges. The refuge was established in 1912 in the wilderness south of Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks in an effort to resuscitate elk herds, which had faced mass starvation after bitterly cold winters and human encroachment, PEER notes. The results have not been good. http://www.newwest.net/city/article/wyomings_national_elk_refuge_on_ten_most_imperiled_list/C101/L101/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/newwest/city/jacksonhole/~3/2Vuu58b_whM/ Sun, 14 Jun 2009 08:00:18 MST Falconer on the Edge: A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West by Rachel Dickinson Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 220 pages, $24 In Falconer on the Edge, Rachel Dickinson gives readers an in-depth look at a subculture that many people may not be aware existed. Falconers are an intense, passionate, tight-knit group of bird-loving hunters, and they subdivide themselves according to the type of bird they fly, from those who favor hunting sage grouse with gyrfalcon-peregrine hybrids ("an überbird [with] stamina and speed and beauty") to those who fly hawks to catch squirrels and jackrabbits. The falconers Dickinson depicts remind me of a more athletic and outdoorsy version of Trekkies, with their conventions, cliques, private jargon derived from Norman French, and the way they are often misunderstood by outsiders. Although falconry ("a loose term [that] refers to flying any kind of raptor or bird of prey") originated perhaps 3,500 years ago in the Middle East, spread through Asia and Europe, and didn't catch on in North America until the twentieth century, it seems a pastime tailor-made for the American West, as it requires a lot of open space and abundant game. With all the care and training that a bird of prey demands, not to mention the need for the falconer to be in top condition to run through fields after his bird, it might be the most labor and time-intensive variety of hunting, which is why so few practice it. Dickinson writes, "Today there are approximately forty-five hundred licensed falconers in the United States, and two to three thousand of them belong to [the North American Falconers Association]." Judging from the portraits in Dickinson's book, there are no casual falconers. http://www.newwest.net/city/article/birdman_rachel_dickinsons_falconer_on_the_edge/C101/L101/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/newwest/city/jacksonhole/~3/ar7zmg-SPgA/ Sat, 13 Jun 2009 03:00:02 MST Utah native Ron Carlson has been publishing acclaimed novels and short stories for over three decades, and in recent years he's hit a stride, with two novels, Five Skies and the new The Signal back-to-back. Carlson directed the Creative Writing program at Arizona State University for many years and three years ago became the Creative Writing program director at the University of California at Irvine. The Signal, which Carlson wrote at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, is the action-packed tale of a divorced couple who go backpacking in the Wind River Mountains and run into all sorts of trouble, including some unfriendly meth-runners who poach elk on the side. I recently spoke with Carlson about his new novel, which he started because he "wanted to stand up behind [his] goddamn pickup truck again," and about how "camping is essentially about when things go wrong." New West: Is The Signal just an elaborate way for you to scare other potential campers off of your favorite hiking trail? Ron Carlson: You know, it has that. I didn't mean to scare everybody. NW: In the front of the book, you advise people, "If I was going to go into the Wind Rivers today, I would use the Bears Ears trailhead and I would go before September 10." But after reading about all the perils that Mack and Vonnie face, nobody is going to want to go on this trail. RC: I just wanted to make sure that no one went after then, because you can run into snow. NW: I think I'd rather run into snow than some of the things that Mack and Vonnie run into. RC: I don't want anybody to get snowed in the way I did, and I've written about that. What I really wanted to do was have my vicarious experience and write a little love letter to the mountains, which I'm not in enough. I just got on fire for that and wrote this outdoor book. http://www.newwest.net/city/article/an_interview_with_ron_carlson_about_the_signal/C101/L101/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/newwest/city/jacksonhole/~3/aQ3-wgyRXuE/ Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:00:33 MST Broken: A Love Story by Lisa Jones Scribner, 275 pages, $25 Colorado writer Lisa Jones was a freelance journalist on assignment for Smithsonian magazine when she first met Stanford Addison, a charismatic horse trainer on the Wind River Arapaho reservation near Lander, Wyoming. Addison doesn't match the typical image of a horse trainer: he is a quadriplegic who has been confined to a wheelchair for over twenty years following a car accident. Addison "gentles" horses rather than breaks them, offering instructions from outside the corral, and even working with the horses himself. And Addison is also an Arapaho healer, hosting regular sweat lodges, praying for those who ask it of him, and communicating with spirits, good and bad. Jones began her friendship with Addison as a skeptic about the spirit world, but she never doubted his healing powers. Spiritually adrift in mid-life, she returned frequently to the Addison ranch, where Addison served as the center of a complicated family. In Broken: A Love Story, Jones tells the remarkable tale of Stan Addison's life and work, investing it with detail that brings his world to vivid life for the reader. Through Jones' hard-earned understanding of one Northern Arapaho family, the reader is given an inside glimpse into this culture. Despite their poverty, they lavish love on one another, others taking care of children when a parent dies or leaves, and pulling together in difficult times, which are heartbreakingly frequent. Lisa Jones will appear at the Center for The Arts in Jackson, Wyoming, on June 12 at 7 p.m. http://www.newwest.net/city/article/lisa_jones_broken_a_love_story/C101/L101/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/newwest/city/jacksonhole/~3/P2oLM1hhkNg/ Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:14:10 MST If life is a highway, we're in trouble--unless we start making highways safer for wildlife, wildlands and the planet. Simply put, America's ever-expanding web of streets and freeways is a noxious force that threatens to "pave over the landscape." So says Division Street, a beautifully filmed and notable new documentary premiering Thursday, June 11, at the Roxy Theater in Missoula. The 7 p.m. showing will be followed by a panel discussion featuring filmmaker-producer Eric Bendick and officials from Transportation for America and American Wildlands. http://www.newwest.net/city/article/the_travel_less_roaded/C101/L101/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/newwest/city/jacksonhole/~3/074ot0VqJRg/ Mon, 25 May 2009 08:30:20 MST The Signal By Ron Carlson Viking, 184 pages, $25.95 Ron Carlson's new The Signal is a taut and suspenseful novel written with beauty and precision, centered around a camping trip in Wyoming's Wind River Range. For ten years, Mack and his wife Vonnie have gone hiking in that area every September, but this year is starkly different. Since the last trip, Mack has been "running in low-rent behavior for almost a year, scrambling for money, crossing the line when it worked for him, drinking too much because it didn't matter and the company he kept drank." In the face of his financial troubles, with his ranch in danger of foreclosure, Mack got involved with some meth runners. Vonnie left Mack when his behavior became unacceptable and probably divorced him, though he doesn't know that for certain, as he never opened the letters from her lawyer, "golden envelopes with return addresses pretty as wedding invitations." Mack recently finished a stint in jail for busting the windshield of Vonnie's new beau's fancy vehicle. Feeling sorry for Mack, Vonnie agreed to complete their annual camping trip one last time. This backstory is delivered cleverly amid the present action of the six-day camping trip. The caustic barbs in the dialogue between Mack and Vonnie reveal their complicated past. ("Somebody's been to REI," the perpetually broke Mack comments when Vonnie brings out a new pair of binoculars.) Mystery drives the first part of the book, as Carlson metes out the details of Mack and Vonnie's past, while suspense powers the second part of the book, as new dangers face the couple. http://www.newwest.net/city/article/into_the_woods_ron_carlsons_the_signal/C101/L101/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/newwest/city/jacksonhole/~3/Tp-3mKpymig/ Wed, 20 May 2009 08:00:11 MST Tipped off by the Wyoming Arts Blog about Wyoming novelist Craig Johnson's imminent book tour in France, I decided to investigate his Gallic appeal. On his blog for Penguin, Johnson reports that the French edition of The Cold Dish will be published by Éditions Gallmeister this month (he also recounts "one of the most embarrassing moments [his] life," when a beautiful French woman caught him looking at her twice). Gallmeister specializes in the literature of the American West, and is the French publisher of Rick Bass and Edward Abbey, among others. Let's look at what the Éditions Gallmeister website has to say about the last Johnson book the company published in translation, Little Bird: "Go West ! Cette fois c'est dans le Wyoming que nous vous emmenons de voyager en compagnie de Walt Longmire, shé;rif mé;lancolique du comté; d'Absaroka." This is great. So jaunty and breezy--I am not a real translator, but basically: "Go West! This time it's to Wyoming that we whisk you to travel in the company of Walt Longmire, the melancholic sheriff of Absaroka county." The French word for county is comté;, which suggests the sort of place presided over by a count. Also I like the way the state is called "le Wyoming." Next I traveled over to the French side of the web through the portal of Google.fr to see what people were saying about Mr. Johnson--I found Yann Le Tumelin's blog, Moisson Noire ("Black Harvest"). He appears to be especially interested in noirish tales set in the great outdoors. http://www.newwest.net/city/article/the_count_of_le_wyoming_craig_johnson_heads_to_france/C101/L101/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/newwest/city/jacksonhole/~3/PqF6eoJIOc0/ Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:00:24 MST Vice President Dick Cheney will be doing more than hunting and fishing when he moves back to Wyoming from Washington--he recently told Sean Hannity that he is considering writing a book about his time in office. Cheney said, "My family has been bugging me about [writing a book]. I've got 40 years since I came to town to stay 12 months. I've got a lot of stories to tell. And a few scores to settle." (Via LA Times & Galleycat). Perhaps Cheney's future tome will join the shortlist of Wyoming classic books. Perhaps not. Tom Nissley recently shared his opinions of the best Wyoming books for the blog Omnivoracious, for its "Books of the States" series. Nissley writes: "Jack Schaefer, author of Shane and over a dozen more Westerns, was an Oberlin grad and an Eastern newspaperman who fell in love with the Old West but only moved out to New Mexico later in life (and, as far as I can tell, hadn't even set foot in Wyoming when he wrote Shane). Wyoming, as a literary state, seems to exist mostly as an idea in the head of writers from the East: the best-known classic Wyoming book, The Virginian, was written by a friend of Theodore Roosevelt who prepped at St. Paul's [edited per O'Connor's comment below] and had two Harvard degrees, while the best-known modern Wyoming book (or at least story), "Brokeback Mountain," is by a woman who lived in Vermont for decades and moved out to Wyoming a few years before her story first appeared." In addition to the three works mentioned above, Nissley added Mark Spragg's Where Rivers Change Direction to his list of essential Wyoming books, and notes that "I was so happy to find a promising book by someone born and bred in the state." Also in the Roundup: Colorado authors on NPR's Fresh Air, a good review for Kim Barnes in the New York Times, the Tattered Cover lays off some workers, and a tribute to Creede author and outdoorsman Greg Coln. http://www.newwest.net/city/article/dick_cheneys_forthcoming_literary_debut_and_more_wyoming_books/C101/L101/