Feature

Two decades of hard work, plowed under

The Bush administration opens up wild lands to oil and gas drilling, pulling the rug out from under two decades of citizen wilderness activism

Editor's Note

Lost in the wilderness of power politics

The kind of democratic dialogue that creates viable wilderness proposals is impossible in the current wilderness of power politics

Dear Friends

Dear Friends

Many thanks for the inspirational Ed Abbey quote; Sedona board meeting and potluck coming up; How the West works; response to Robyn Morrison’s rock-climbing story; and corrections

Uncommon Westerners

Getting under the desert’s skin: Biologist Jayne Belnap

News

Yellowstone snowmobilers suffer whiplash

Judge Emmet Sullivan reinstates a Clinton-era ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks

Follow-up

Bush administration backs off on removing "isolated wetlands" from Clean Water Act protection; EPA’s Bruce Buckheit and J.P. Suarez leave for different reasons; Wal-Mart cracks down on protest; New Mexico vs. Los Alamos National Laboratory

A moment of truth for user fees

The Recreation Fee Demonstration Program is renewed until January 2006, despite mounting criticism of the program

Can skiers and snowmobilers coexist?

Dutchman Flat outside Bend, Ore., is becoming tense as snowmobilers and backcountry skiers argue over winter recreation

Book Reviews

Voices rising from the desert

In Writing the Southwest, editors David King Dunaway and Sara Spurgeon collect interviews with 14 Southwestern writers, and provide a CD of their voices as well

Calendar

Warm-water native fish are left out in the cold

A new study by a team of biologists shows little is being done to save a dozen of the Southwest’s threatened and endangered native fish species

Essays

Have another pig-brain/beef-blood/chicken-spine hamburger

Now that mad cow disease is here, even carnivores have to think twice before biting into a hamburger, because the odds are that it’s not really a hamburger after all

Heard Around the West

Heard Around the West

Cloning trophy bucks; glove kills polar bear; Grand Tetons in Colorado?; potato chip bombs; Monticello, Utah’s "citizens of the year"; rural Wyoming in The New York Times; Bureau of Penis Enlargement?; Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal is humble; and mother c

Letters

Ranchers hijacking public lands

Interior supports collaboration

Owyhee initiative ignores majority interest

Owyhee Initiative brings hope

HCN still mired in cowboy myth

HCN is a sop to the cowboys

Related Stories

Energy bill would pry open public lands

If Bush’s energy bill passes, it will put major emphasis on public-lands energy development with a number of its provisions

In New Mexico, a homegrown wilderness bill makes headway

In northwestern New Mexico, the Coalition for New Mexico Wilderness is working with Zia Pueblo to preserve a rugged patch of the state as the Ojito Wilderness Area

Proposed wilderness on the auction block

A list of the wilderness inventory areas and citizens’ wilderness proposal areas being offered for oil and gas leasing by the BLM includes lands in New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah