Feature

Town Shopping

With all the formerly cool, "undiscovered" small towns now caught up in the New West’s booming real estate frenzy, it’s getting hard to find an affordable place to call home

Editor's Note

The next boomtown

The discovery of heretofore "undiscovered" small towns, and their invasion by wealthy second-homeowners, brings money, problems and often disillusionment to much of the West

Dear Friends

Dear friends

HCN wins design awards; Matthew Lewis visits; Black Mesa Trust closes Flagstaff office; Dennis Weaver dies; new comment deadline for public-land sales

Uncommon Westerners

Painting for progress

Artist Joan Hoffman pours her love of wilderness into her paintings, and uses her art as a way to fight for the environment

News

ESA talks end in stalemate

A working group of 23 experts convened by the nonprofit Keystone Center could not reach consensus over how to reform the Endangered Species Act’s critical habitat provisions

The Latest Bounce

EPA abandons attempt to regulate hydraulic fracturing; BLM briefly cuts forestry school funding and Republican Rep. Greg Walden grills logging critic Dan Donato; California regulator tries to stop ecological crash in San Francisco Bay-Delta

Reality Check

Misinformation and exaggeration abound in the debate over the Endangered Species Act’s critical habitat provisions

Spotted owl or red herring?

Although logging has declined drastically in the Pacific Northwest, it’s not necessarily the fault of the Endangered Species Act or the northern spotted owl.

U.S. Department of Energy elbows in on Clean Water Act

The federal Energy Department and the state of Wyoming have challenged Montana’s plan to establish pollution controls for coalbed methane wells

Book Reviews

At home in the valley

In The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes, Susan Tweit explores a remarkable Colorado landscape

With liberty, justice, and locally produced food for all

In Fields That Dream: A Journey to the Roots of Our Food, Jenny Kurzweil illustrates how agricultural injustices can be combated by purchasing food from socially conscious local producers

Skinny Streets and Green Neighborhoods

In Skinny Streets and Green Neighborhoods, writers Cynthia Girling and Ronald Kellett examine ecologically sound communities

National Parks and the Woman's Voice

National Parks and the Woman’s Voice by Polly Welts Kaufman examines the role of women in the National Park Service

Essays

The trouble with the Endangered Species Act is us

The Endangered Species Act isn’t broken; we just don’t like to enforce it

Resurrecting J. Thomas

The crumbling remains of a man named J. Thomas have a story to tell about life and death in the northern Colorado in the 1870s

Heard Around the West

Heard around the West

San Francisco puts dog poop to work; stupid motorists’ tricks; warning to Mr. Cheney; Vogue tackles global warming; Alaska retools its image

Letters

Activists are not terrorists

Terrorism cannot be justified

Good hunting requires wild places

History isn't black and white

Place names help us remember our past

Hualapai horror

Related Stories

Blowing bubbles

In the West, the real estate market is the new gold rush

Is everyone a Realtor?

Realtors seem to be everywhere in the West today – including community politics