Plastic, Plastic Everywhere — Even at the UN's "Plastic Free" Conference. From the moment I landed in Ottawa, the counter-argument of the plastics industry was inescapable, from wall-sized ads at the airport to billboards on trucks that cruised around the downtown convention center. Their message? Curtailing plastic production would spell literal doom. "These plastics deliver water" on an ad depicting a girl drinking from a bottle in what was implied to be a disaster zone.

How we heal. "First out was a rust-red calf, legs unsure against the solid ground of a Rocky Mountains meadow. Then in an instant a whole herd of shaggy bison surged, hooves flashing, tails up, eyes wide, a long-awaited storm of buffalo power thundering into the wild... the first free-roaming bison ever to be unleashed onto the North American prairie by a sovereign Tribal government."
More on tribal/federal collaborations and tensions from National Parks magazine: an innovative archaeological field school; freeing the lands between Badger Creek and the Two Medicine River from oil leases; a Blackfeet-run tour company in Glacier National Park, over a century after Native Americans were displaced to create the park.

"This mountain front may be someone's park, or someone's vacation but this is our cultural homeland. This is where we were given the gifts of life itself." If every national park sits on ancestral lands, what does it mean to be a Native American working for the Park Service today? A recorded discussion and screening of Paving Tundra.