IN THE SPRING OF 2020, FIS Worldpay, a payment-processing company, sent more than 200 of its Durango, Colorado-based employees home to work remotely, in order to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus. Even when pandemic-avoidance measures were loo

APRIL 2020, AND THE NOVEL CORONAVIRUS was spreading through the United States. As businesses closed and hospitals filled, Jim Moran found himself sheltering in place in Colorado, at his second home. His mansion has dark wood siding and a jutting pati

AFTER HER MOTHER DIED, Danielle Geller defaulted to what she knew. Tucked away in her Boston apartment, she spent entire days writing about her life — her earliest memories of her mother, sister and father; her childhood and the grandmother who raise

I WRITE THIS ON OCT. 25, as another fire-weather watch is declared over Northern California. I can hear the wind screaming past the windows, straining the trees. I know from experience that this wind can make a spark rip through dried grass and brush

ON A WARM NOVEMBER AFTERNOON, Kristen Randall, a red-haired woman in a blue button-down shirt, knocked at the door of a rundown apartment in Tucson’s east midtown. After three rounds of patient knocking, a woman named Angie Bevins opened the door. Ra

When you’re called out for smearing Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on social media as a “hoe,” you ought to apologize. But after Montana Rep. Kerry White, R, an advisor to Montana Republican Gov.-elect Greg Gianforte, called Joe Biden and Kamala

JUST BEFORE 7 on a cool, misty Seattle morning, Jacqueline Peltier stands alone on the University of Washington campus. Nearby, squirrels and rabbits frolic in the morning dew. Peltier, part of a National Science Foundation-funded research team, will

Community activist, LA Más Los Angeles, California I am a child of Chinese immigrants who met in California, and I grew up in the Elysian Valley, nicknamed “Frogtown,” which, in the ’80s, was a primarily Latino and Asian working-class neighborhood. I

A CAP-AND-TRADE system to cut toxic air emissions; a bipartisan agreement to strengthen the Clean Air Act; a federal program to ease the unjust burden of pollution in minority communities: All this sounds like an environmental to-do-list for Presiden

WHEN HIGH COUNTRY NEWS published “Land-Grab Universities” last April, the two-year-long investigation shed new light on a dark open secret: One of the largest transfers of land and capital in the country’s history had masqueraded as a donation for un

FROM A DISTANCE, the green pines and the blue-gray haze that gently hug the valleys of the Black Hills merge into a deep black. The Lakota name “He Sapa” — meaning “black ridge” — describes this visual phenomenon. This is a place of origin for dozens

RED FLAGS FLUTTER outside the schools in Salton City, California, when the air quality is dangerous. Dust billows across the desert, blanketing playgrounds and baseball diamonds, the swirling grit canceling recess and forcing students indoors. Visibi

THE LUMBERMAN, a 107-foot World War II-era steel-hull tugboat, has been floating at the quiet cruise ship dock in Juneau for months, awaiting a watery grave. Abandoned for nearly a decade, the Lumberman was moored in Juneau’s Gastineau Channel in the

IN MID-JUNE, THE RURAL COASTAL towns in Lincoln County, Oregon, experienced a COVID-19 outbreak. In a week, the county’s cases went from five to at least 124, all of them linked to a seafood-processing warehouse in Newport. It quickly became Oregon’s

It’s fitting that a year that has lasted decades should culminate in a weeks-long Election Day. Perhaps the only truly bright spot was the political engagement: Over 150 million voters turned out in 2020, the highest percentage of the electorate in m

THE ONLY PERSON I’ve ever buried was a stranger. It was a chilly afternoon in mid-November, the kind of weather you’d expect at a funeral. Crisp oak leaves rattled softly in a steady breeze. It wasn’t raining, but the ground was damp, the air thick w

WHEN SARA GALLEGO* turns on her faucet, she’s never sure what will come out. “In the mornings, it’s the color of coffee,” she said. At other times, “It’s super yellow.” Gallego is one of the roughly 1,900 residents of the Oasis Mobile Home Park, a co

Mike Healy of Hailey, Idaho, says the semi-weekly Idaho Mountain Express runs a “Miscellany” section in its classifieds that’s eagerly scoured by connoisseurs of local oddities. People give shout-outs or complain about everything from a braying donke

IN 2009, WHILE EXCAVATING prehistoric artifacts in California, graduate student archaeologists from the University of California-Davis found Indigenous funerary objects and fragments of human bone. But despite what the law requires, according to inte

Artist Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico We grow our food in the Earth. We build our homes with the Earth. We build our art with the Earth. Other places, you don’t have this direct relationship to dirt — to the actual ground. I’ve traveled a lot, but I