Outside June 2019

When Outside contributing editor Kyle Dickman’s curiosity gets fixed on a particular subject matter, he tends to get a little obsessed. In 2012, for his first feature in the magazine, Dickman spent a season embedded with the Tahoe Hotshots, profiling the men and women on the front lines of America’s war against wildfire. A few months after that story was published, he reported on the deaths of 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshot team in the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona, a piece that was nominated for a National Magazine Award for reporting. He followed that up with an award-winning book on the event, On the Burning Edge, and has since written dozens of wildfire stories for various publications, including Bloomberg Businessweek, Rolling Stone, and The Washington Post. In…

Sit Up Straight! In her recent online opinion piece “Stop Reclining Your Seat on Airplanes,” editorial assistant Abbey Gingras tackled one of travel’s hot-button issues. “All you’re doing is encroaching upon the person behind you,” she wrote. “You didn’t think to check before you reclined onto their warm Diet Coke, did you?” Readers chimed in on social media to second her argument and call us out. I recline because I have extensive past injuries that make it very uncomfortable for me to sit for long periods. That three-degree incline makes a huge difference. Carmen Hobson Whitefish, Montana I don’t recline. It is called courtesy. Phil Hemenway Facebook This is laughably ridiculous. I hope you don’t get upset knowing I read my Outside in the reclining position while flying. @kiphtaylor Twitter Role Model Many thanks for the dispatch on Barry Lopez and his…

BURN WE MUST. One hundred–plus years of wildland fire suppression and an ever hotter planet make this an ineluctable truth in the American West. From the shrublands to the subalpine forests, fire—an integral part of any healthy landscape—is now acting as an adaptation catalyst that’s rapidly reshaping entire ecosystems. That adaptation is essential. Thanks to climate change, we are seeing record high temperatures and record low moisture levels in vegetation. Add the increasingly popular dream of owning a home in the woods (the fastest-growing land-use type in the country is the so-called wildland-urban interface), plus infrastructure risk factors like balky power lines, and we’re looking at a dire future of frequent catastrophic megafires from New Mexico north to Alberta and west to the Pacific. Some of us can remember the great…

Each year, somewhere between 4.8 and 12.7 million tons of plastic ends up in the sea, to say nothing of the vast amounts of agricultural runoff, untreated sewage, and by-products of coastal development that also make their way into our oceans. Alarmingly, one 2006 study predicted that by 2048, every species currently fished by humans will have collapsed. Still, it seems that no amount of imagery depicting endless offshore garbage patches or sea turtles choked by plastic bags has made any difference. “We are not stopping. Our consumption has gone up. We are continuing the same destructive path,” says photographer Christian Vizl. To counter the sense of hopelessness, the 46-year-old has chosen to highlight the beauty of what’s being lost with a new book called Silent Kingdom: A World Beneath…

IF YOU WANT TO CHILL WITH FAR-FLUNG EXPLORERS: The Ice at the End of the World, by Jon Gertner (June 11; $28, Random House) This captivating book tells the story of Greenland’s 1,500-mile-long ice sheet through a succession of 19th- and 20th-century explorers who first aimed to cross the forbidding expanse and then sought to understand it. Early calculations of the sheet’s size and movement allowed scientists to infer by the 1930s that the melting of Greenland’s ice would be catastrophic for the world. Gertner goes on to chronicle how ice-core and satellite discoveries have confirmed that changes to Greenland’s ice sheet “were no longer in the realm of geological time. The ice was being transformed in human time, too.” —LUKE WHELAN IF YOU SEEK RADICAL REINVENTION: Hungry, by Jeff Gordinier (July 9; $26,…

Maiden, a riveting documentary from director Alex Holmes about the first all-women sailing team to race around the world, opens with a somber voice-over from protagonist Tracy Edwards: “The ocean is always trying to kill you.” In fact, the mighty seas were just one obstacle that the young skipper—then just 27—and her crewmates faced in the 1989–90 Whitbread Round the World Race (which later became the Volvo Ocean Race). During the nine-month, 33,000-mile voyage, the crew also had to courageously overcome skepticism and sexism. We spoke with Edwards ahead of the film’s June 28 theatrical release. ON REFURBISHING THEIR SECONDHAND BOAT, THE MAIDEN: “We had to literally take her apart and redesign her to make her more effective for women to sail, strength-wise. We opened up the interior, removed all the heavy…