Writers on the Range
The West is an exploiter’s paradise
High on a mesa where everyone can see it, a trophy house is going up in the northern Colorado valley where I live. Some...
Who calls the shots on the Colorado River?
If there’s a dominant force in the Colorado River Basin these days, it’s the Walton Family Foundation, flush with close to $5 billion to...
Restoring the land can feel like a lot of fun
Driving back to Colorado State University with a van full of students after a day of work- ing to heal some beat-up land north...
Fired up
At any given moment during this smoky summer of 2023, hundreds of wildfires were blazing in the United States — more than 850 as...
The ‘energy gap’ nobody wants to tussle with
Many Western states have declared they will achieve all-renewable electrical goals in just two decades. Call me naïve, but haven’t energy experts predicted that...
The Colorado River is sending a message
It feels like an apocalypse in the Southwest — wildfires, floods, drought, heat, smoke. This was not the norm when I moved to Colorado...
A dogged reporter covers our roiling world
Usually seen with a camera slung around his neck, Allen Best edits a one-man online journalism shop he calls Big Pivots. Its beat is...
Colorado is conflicted about cutting its water use
In Colorado, farmers were required to enroll in a four-state program by March 1 if they want to get paid for fallowing their fields,...
Fear and the depleted Colorado River
Some Colorado River tribulations today remind me of a folk story: A young man went to visit his fiancée and found the family trembling...
Let’s tell the truth about those big, bad wolves
The return of wolves to the West has always been contentious, and the deaths last fall of more than 40 cattle in western Colorado...
The West badly needs a restoration economy
Farmington, a city of 45,000 in the northwestern corner of New Mexico, has run on a fossil fuel economy for a century. It is...
When no home is affordable, where do you live?
It’s a common story: Candace McNatt of Durango, in southern Colorado, kept losing bidding wars to buy a house. She finally settled on a...
