Browse High Country News issues

California's Westlands irrigation district wants to blame a tiny endangered fish for its water troubles, but the real culprit is simply long-term drought.

When wind turbines threaten his ranch in the Laramie Range, Wyoming oilman Diemer True becomes a born-again conservationist.

A tribal attempt to protect New Mexico’s Mount Taylor spawns a bitter struggle over uranium mining, religious differences and dueling historical claims to an ancient landscape.

Thousands of years ago, the Ice Age Floods reshaped the landscape of eastern Washington, along with our knowledge of geology.

Judge Clarence Brimmer is determined to bring down Clinton's roadless forest rule, which has been mired in lawsuits ever since its controversial birth.

Refugees struggle to find a home in an unfamiliar land.

A controversial water project planned by Las Vegas threatens the tiny inhabitants of many remote Great Basin springs.

How we find it; how we understand it; how we care for it.

Milk may have a wholesome image, but the West’s big dairies are not a healthy place for immigrants to work.

A burgeoning wine industry could provide a welcome economic boost to farmers on Colorado's Western Slope.

A "cap-and-trade" program for Alaskan and West Coast fisheries could save fish and take the edge off the dangerous multimillion-dollar fishing derby of the sea.

Loggers and environmental activists are determined to restore Montana’s Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, with or without the help of the Forest Service.

Can 'hamster power' -- distributed generation and small-scale renewable energy projects -- save the West, and the world?

A small band of enthusiasts wants to re-engineer Western waterways with the help of a humble, hardworking professional: the beaver.

Bull riding explodes from its rural Western roots to become a modern spectacle along the lines of NASCAR.

Obama’s new political order, backed by the legal acumen of Judge James Redden, may help the Northwest’s salmon survive and end the era of the Lower Snake River dams.

On Wyoming's Wind River Reservation, Stanford Addison – a quadriplegic Northern Arapaho horse gentler – helps Indian boys through their difficult teenage years.

Writer Annie Proulx takes an unsentimental view of Wyoming’s little-known and somewhat scarred Red Desert.

Westerners have a knack for new and innovative thinking, as this special issue of HCN shows.

If Eric Kuhn is right about the Colorado River, then the state faces a dry and difficult future of fighting for water.

A writer tries to dig up the buried history of Colorado’s Rocky Flats weapons plant, now home to a controversial wildlife refuge.

An obscure legal ruling muddied U.S. water-protection standards, leaving Western intermittent streams and rivers unprotected.

Blood quantum – the complicated system that determines membership in most American Indian tribes – could threaten the future survival of those tribes.

High Country News examines the Bush administration's effects on the Western environment and considers what can be done to heal the damage.

When Julene Bair sold the family farm, she severed her lifelong connections with a sense of place and her own childhood.