Writers on the Range
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
We need to act now to fight wildfires
For the 2021 fire season, the writing is on the wall. The West, despite a few days of intense winter, is far drier than...
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...
Atmospheric rivers endanger the West
Moab, Utah, gets just eight inches of rain per year, yet rainwater flooded John Weisheit’s basement last summer. Extremes are common in a desert:...
It all began with pizza
In the mid-1960s, my dad served on the school board in Cortez, in rural southern Colorado. He recalled that at one meeting he said...
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 a skunk goes after your garden
Skunks love autumn as our backyard gardens fill up with ripe vegetables. But in my northern New Mexico corn patch, that meant a determined...
