Writers on the Range
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...
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:...
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...
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 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...
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 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...
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...
Wildlife watching has been getting a free ride
There’s a new initiative in Wyoming that’s changing the face of wildlife conservation funding, and it’s already seen huge success in its first year.
It’s...
Old bones can be a small town’s movie stars
The prehistoric past can perk up the present. When woolly mammoth bones were found in my hometown in Wisconsin years ago, they became the...
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...
Gun nut has a warning
When I was a young man growing up in rural Oregon, there was a term for people like me: “gun nut.”
By my 20s I...
