From the Stacks: February 17, 2006

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Utne receives some 1,200 magazines, newsletters, journals, weeklies, and zines. Add in hundreds of books, CDs, and DVDs, and it's a flood of media that lines the walls of our library and piles high on our desks. All the ideas, people, and stories inspire lively daily chatter, but can't all fit into our bimonthly magazine. So we've decided to share the gems here: Welcome to the fourth edition of "From the Stacks," a new weekly feature on Utne.com. Check in every Friday for the freshest highlights of the independent and alternative media.

The February 6 issue of High Country News, a nonprofit biweekly "for people who care about the West," features a compelling cover story titled "The Killing Fields," by hunter Hal Herring. This report on the slaughter of bison on the border of Yellowstone National Park illustrates many of the things wrong with the idea that humans should attempt to manage the population of other species. "The killing of the buffalo by hunters right now feels ugly," Herring writes. "The 'hunt' feels controversial because the quarry as a whole is being treated with a combination of contempt, cruelty, and worst of all, indifference." Also notable in this issue: An essay by Mary Zeiss Stange about living amidst a landscape of towns named after generals who enforced the federal government's war policy against Native Americans. -- Chris Dodge

A refreshing breeze just blew in from the Iowa prairie in the form of Fishwrap, a small quarterly published by the Institute for Small Town Studies. Just like the vibrant small towns that dot the Iowa countryside, this unassuming journal is packed with diverse nuggets of wisdom. The newest issue (Fall 2005) touches on game theory, argues that small towns are good analogies for computer operating systems, and urges us to look to cities instead of nation-states for economic scale models. Also buried within the journal's pages is a short meditation on what makes small towns survive rather than fail. Bucking the idea that small towns are going under because of external economic factors, Milan Wall argues that they are thriving because they refuse to let despair and decay set in. These small towns, Wall suggests, have only lost as much as they think they've lost. -- Nick Rose

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