Brian Calvert is the managing editor of High Country News. He grew up in Pinedale, Wyoming, at the foot of
the Wind River Mountains. Calvert studied English at the University of Colorado
before starting his career as a freelance foreign correspondent. He has lived
extensively in Cambodia and China, as well as in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. In
2011, Calvert moved back to the United States, spending a year and a half
writing and producing radio from Southern California. In 2013, he was awarded
the Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism, at the University of
Colorado – Boulder, where he studied climate change and the American West. Calvert
was hired by High Country News in May
2014. He now lives in Paonia, Colorado, where High Country News is
headquartered, with his dog, Perle Haggard, and cat, Luna.
Calvert reached out to me because he has a desire to explore the “hidden and
under-reported connections between the natural world and under-represented
communities.” I asked if he would be interested in a La Bloga interview, and he kindly agreed.
OLIVAS: For those who
are not too familiar with High Country
News, could you give a brief description of the publication’s origins and
mandate?
CALVERT: High Country News is a non-profit magazine
that covers the environmental issues, natural resources and communities of the
American West. We publish 22 issues per year in print and have a vibrant
website with daily content. We have a small budget, but a lot of heart, and we
punch well above our weight. We’ve been around since 1970, and were started in
Lander, Wyoming, by a rancher who was concerned about the environmental
despoilment of the region, and we hew to those roots, on one hand, while being
the voice of the West overall, on the other.
Our
approach is journalistic, which is to say that fairness and accuracy in our
reporting is our top priority, though we do try to take the extra step of
providing meaning from that reporting. We write with authority on a broad
number of issues, and we devote a lot of ink to nuance, so that someone walking
away from one of our stories will have a pretty good grasp of any number of
complex issues. We’re a magazine for people really want to understand the West
and all its facets.
In
many ways, we work to conserve the environments of the region, and in other
ways, we seek to report on issues that could use some improvement. So you might
see in the same issue one story on fish conservation and another on which
Western states are leading the way on higher minimum wage. We’ve won awards for
reporting on deaths in the oil fields, and are currently running a feature on
the war on coal. We’re just as likely to cover elections in Navajo Nation as we
are to cover a mainstream politics. We cover energy—both extractives and
renewables; drought and water; agriculture and farming; the recreation
industry; the National Parks and other the public lands; wildlife; climate
change; pollution; and a great many other issues that define the American West,
sometimes through essay, sometimes through deep-dive analysis and sometimes
through good old-fashioned narrative storytelling.
The
American West has a diverse, yet distinct, geography, driven very much by
ecological relationships between a lot of different people and cultures and a
lot of different landscapes and resources. High
Country News tries to make sense of that geography and of those ecologies,
from Los Angeles to Portland, Yellowstone to the Rockies, Denver, the Grand
Canyon, the Great Basin, Albuquerque, the Mojave, and on and on.
OLIVAS: You have
mentioned to me that as the new managing editor, you are interested in the “hidden
and under-reported connections between the natural world and under-represented
communities.” How did you develop this interest and what are some examples of
what you are looking for?
CALVERT: I grew up in a small
town in western Wyoming, but through journalism I became a foreign
correspondent. So I know what it’s like to live in the isolated West, but I
also have had exposure to a lot of different cultures in my career. I’ve spent
significant time abroad, and have lived in Cambodia, China, Sri Lanka and
Afghanistan, and traveled to many places in between. I would say that most of
my life I’ve spent looking at the way people are the same, and understanding
where they are different. Ultimately, though, I came to realize that some of
the biggest questions of our age had to do with our environment and our
resources, and so I ultimately came back to the West, where I think they come
into sharp relief. High Country News
offers a great vantage from which to ask these questions, and figure out these
relationships—and I’d like to take the magazine further into that space. But I
know there’s a ton that I don’t understand, or can’t even see, and I’m always
looking for other perspectives and vantage points.
The
West is a huge place, and it would be hubris to think I understand it even a
little bit.
As
the managing editor, I want my writers to help our readers understand the
relationship different people have with the places they live. What kind of
pressure will booming demographics in the Southwest put on the region’s
resources? What kind of solutions to environmental problems can new and old
Western cultures provide? What does “wild” mean to someone who lives in Los
Angeles? Phoenix? What is life like for a Vietnamese community that lives along
a polluted river in Seattle? What is it like for a family from Nepal running an
ice cream store and gas station in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming? I’m
interested in finding these “new” places that many of our readers may be
unfamiliar with, old wisdom, fresh perspectives. I’m interested in finding new
readers, by asking new questions. And I’m especially interested in learning
what I don’t know about the West’s many dimensions.
At
the heart of all these questions again are these ecological relationships, and
I think High Country News is devoted
to exploring them and very open to new ways of seeing things.
OLIVAS: If writers are
interested in pitching ideas to you, how may they contact you and what should
the pitch include?
CALVERT: We have fairly
extensive submission guidelines on our website at http://hcn.org/about/submissions.
Writers can send me their ideas directly: brianc@hcn.org.
Deeply reported stories, powerful narratives, thought-provoking essays, quick
scenes or short profiles all have a place in the magazine, along with news and
analysis. We’re always trying to figure out what’s new about the West, so we
often pass on stories that reinforce the stereotypes or mythologies of the region.
We wouldn’t really write about a cattle drive, for example; but we recently ran
a story about an abbey of nuns who make a living ranching.
I’m
really interested in pushing the magazine into areas we haven’t been in before,
particularly the urban wild, coastal economies, and diverse cultures and
communities (again, though, with the focus on these ecological relationships).
We’re also interested in multimedia storytelling online, and in opinion and
personal essays, as well. High Country News
is really in a period of expansion and experimentation, and I think our content
reflects that, so I would love to hear out-of-the box ideas. Our focus will
always be on solid reporting and good writing, but beyond that, I’d like to be
surprised.
I
should also say that we are developing a prize for journalists of color
reporting on under-represented communities of the region. We’ll be announcing
the details of that in January. And we also run a very well-respected, rigorous
internship and fellowship program, six months to a year, respectively, that
help writers really understand what High
Country News is about and gives them the skills and training they need to
continue writing (or editing) for us and shaping our future.
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