High Country News

By 2050, the ocean is expected to consistently flood Imperial Beach, California, but in recent years, high tides have already flooded many streets. The town is now discussing how to confront rising sea levels. One tactic is called a managed retreat, and the discussion alone has many property owners trying to sell.

Cisco, Utah isn’t a ghost town. Thirty-four year old Eileen Muza lives there, for now.

Outdoorsy types may love recreating in nature, but that doesn’t make them conservationists.

Veterans Stand for Standing Rock, a self-described “peaceful, unarmed militia,” was established in 2016 to help protect Indigenous opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. High Country News finds that the $1.4 million they raised on GoFundMe during the confrontation was “at best, squandered and at worst, egregiously misspent.”

Downtown Tucson’s redevelopment efforts are pitting property owners against each other and driving out renters. It has hit long-time Latino renters especially hard. Redevelopment will also mean more residents but not more postal carriers. Here’s how gentrification looks along one long-time carrier’s route, and what continuity means in a community.

For a teenager in the Siberian Yupik village of Gambell, killing a whale would be a rite of passage, and entry into manhood. But then, Chris Apassingok, age 16, was targeted with online harassment for his kill, and the town of 700 felt the weight of an internet-pile on tear through the community.

They don’t have their own Law & Order spin off yet, but they should. These are the men and women of law enforcement who investigate certain strains of agricultural crime. These are their stories.

Traditional banks won’t deal with money from California’s $7 billion legal weed industry, so some people in Oakland are rallying to create the first new public bank in a century. So what’s a public bank exactly?

Southwestern Oregon’s Kalmiopsis Wilderness is rugged, burned and way out of your way, and its inexplicable magnetism, self-governance and biodiversity embody the very reasons modern Americans need wilderness at all.

Tay Wiles reports on how the Dakota Access Pipeline protests have spread greater understanding of environmental issues among Natives and non-Natives alike, and how they’ve inspired a new generation of protesters who are collaborating to raise awareness of and oppose other projects that impact Indigenous people, their rights, and their land.