Category: Natural resources

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In Baku, Azerbaijan, the oil industry is the ball and chain of the city’s environment.

Letter from Baku, Azerbaijan

On the farthest eastern reaches of Europe lies the Caspian Sea, a milky green land-locked sea that hides many treasures. In Baku, Azerbaijan, the oil industry is the ball and chain of the city’s environment. Traveling in the Caucasus is quite dangerous, especially by train.

A barge in the Snake River, near Lewiston, Idaho.

Slackwater

Photos and article by APF Fellow Blaine Harden   LEWISTON, Idaho — We sailed west at sunset on water the color of dark chocolate. The sun disappeared slowly into the downstream distance, notching itself between knobby, bald hills and burning out in a long tomato-red

Elvin Eldorado Harden, the author's great-grandfather.

Saved by the River

Arno Harden sneaked aboard a boxcar in Great Falls, Montana, in the late summer of 1932. He was twenty-one, fresh out of work, alone, and heading West. Everything he owned he carried with him. He had a bedroll and a pillowcase half-stuffed with clothes and

A Colville Indian chief stands with government engineers on March 22, 1941 as the switch is turned at the opening of the Grand Coulee Dam. Department of the Interior U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Grand Coulee Project

The Grand Coulee: Savior for Whites, Disaster for Indians

COULEE DAM, WASHINGTON – Halfway across a narrow steel bridge over America’s most powerful river, a sign announces the entrance to the Colville Indian Reservation. The sign is small and easily missed in the vast gorge that cradles the roiling Columbia River. The modest sign

At Chimbai, in the delta of the Amu River, the plentiful fish from the nearby Aral Sea used to be part of the daily diet. Now the market offers only a handful of fish from local canals.

How the Soviets Destroyed a Sea in Thirty Years

Muynak, Uzbekistan – In this frightened town, life has always meant fishing. Men’s faces are leathered by lifetimes on the Aral Sea; their arms thickened by the weight of countless nets hauled from the waters. The women’s hands are scarred from millions of the slices