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OUR MISSION:
The High Country Foundation is a nonprofit media organization whose mission is to inform and inspire people to act on behalf of the West's land, air, water and inhabitants. We work to create what Wallace Stegner called a society to match the scenery.
High Country News is a bi-weekly newspaper that reports on the West's natural resources, public lands, and changing communities. Covering 11 western states, from the Great Plains to the Northwest, and from the Northern Rockies to the desert Southwest, High Country News is a respected source for environmental news, analysis and commentary on water, logging, wildlife, grazing, wilderness, growth and other issues changing the face of the West.
High Country News has been interpreting the West since its founding in Wyoming 30 years ago by a rancher and environmentalist, Tom Bell. Now published from Paonia, Colorado, High Country News is the primary project of the non-profit High Country Foundation.
High Country News' independent research and voice is supported by contributions from its readers - 60 percent of HCN's income comes from subscription fees; another 30 percent comes as gifts to the High Country News Research Fund - the fund that pays its writers, artists and photographers.
High Country News has 23,000 subscribers nationwide, and in several foreign countries. It is read by policymakers, educators, public land managers, and thousands of "people who care about the West." HCN has received several journalism and environmental awards and has been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Utne Reader, the Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, and the USA Today.
The Vision of High Country News
1999 Annual Report to Subscribers
High Country News was born on January 30, 1970, in Lander, Wyoming. A framed copy of its front page hangs in our office. The headline reads: "Hells Canyon Still Threatened."
That headline and the proposed dams it referred to were typical of the next two decades, as HCN chronicled a series of threats to the West's natural world. Many of those threats were realized. Today, for example, most of the West's streams and rivers are dammed and diverted. In fact, dam building stopped largely because there were no more sites on which to build new dams.
Now dams are back on the front pages of Western newspapers as the West debates whether to demolish some of them in order to restore various rivers and their associated fisheries. The change symbolized by the plummeting status of dams is part of a larger transformation that has taken the region from an outpost of the developed world into something we call the New West.
We both despise and celebrate what we are becoming. We despise the sprawl that destroys landscape and wildlife, as well as the growing economic divisions between the well-to-do and the servant class. We worry about the fees we must pay to use formerly free public land. And we worry about the transformation of small towns into Disneyworld-like playgrounds.
But we also understand that in one way this New West has changed the region for the better. We are no longer the helpless, exploited supplier of beef and trees and metals and coal to the industrialized world. Thanks to the West's landscape, to the still relatively small scale of most of our cities, to a rising environmental consciousness, and to telecommunications, the West is beginning to steer its own course.
That does not mean the landscape is no longer threatened, or that wildlife will automatically thrive, or that the dams will come tumbling down. It does mean we are no longer helpless before outside economic and governmental forces.
In fact, the biggest hurdle we face is our own learned, historic sense of helplessness. High Country News has printed as much bad news about the West as anyone, and yet this newspaper and those associated with it are optimistic. Today, more than ever, we believe in the West and its possibilities. We believe there is more to the region's future than an unending series of battles to protect a patch of land here or a species there. We believe a much larger and more generous and hopeful vision is possible. We believe we can come together to tame the violent force of the global economy, to create a more just and equitable society, and to protect the landscape and wildlife everyone treasures.
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Sustainable
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