Michele Barlow Elected to High Country Foundation Board

by Michele Barlow

It was during the impressionable days of my youth that I was first made aware of High Country News. From what I gathered of the kitchen-table banter, in the late 1970s HCN was a regional voice for conservationists. While my parents and local environmental organizers jabbered about the coal mining boom near Gillette, I tuned one ear in to their conversation. (The other ear monitored my sister's plea for the last helping of rhubarb cake and homemade ice cream.)

High Country News was created in 1970 by Tom Bell, a Lander rancher and biologist, who had founded WOC three years earlier. In its early days, when it was published in Lander, HCN concentrated on stopping inappropriate industrial development. A headline in the newspaper's first issue reads, "Hell's Canyon Still Threatened." Striving to focus public attention on proposed dams and other threats to western landscapes, HCN united a small audience with an environmental vision. Today, many more people are receptive to that vision.

To reach its growing audience, HCN has changed and diversified, exploring controversial urban and rural issues about the West that most media barely mention. In addition to the biweekly newspaper, HCN now produces a weekly radio show for public radio stations, the Writers on the Range op-ed syndicate for the region's newspapers, a resource-rich website and a news syndicate that feeds HCN stories to western newspapers.

I'm pleased as punch that I've recently been elected to the Board of the High Country Foundation, joining former WOC staff attorney Caroline Byrd. My sister, Nicole, is also pleased. (While I was distracted by adult chatter many years ago, she scored the last serving of dessert.)