PERSPECTIVE AND PERSEVERANCE
I just finished reading the section of Origin Stories (October 2026) about Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by Paul Larmer (“Beauty and the Beast”). It offered some great perspective related to this issue and how it is playing out now. It was difficult to read because the visual quality was not great, but I persevered, and the information I took in was worth the (temporary) toll it took on my eyes. Thanks for the innovative issue and the insights it provided!
Faith Gregor
Denver, Colorado
ALL CRITTERS GREAT AND SMALL
Thank you for this thoughtful and engaging piece (“Room to roost,” October 2026)! I agree that we owe urban animals more respect, compassion and empathy, and we should do whatever we can to coexist with them.
Jacqueline Emery
Via social
We owe urban animals so much. Plant more trees, more native plants for food and shelter, stop poisoning everything, reduce the noise, dim the lights, offer clean water, space and habitat!
Stacy Alaimo
Via social
THE PUBLIC-LANDS SHUFFLE
This is happening on many U.S. Forest Service-owned properties (“The Forest Service is poised to hand off one of the West’s most visited landscapes,” Sept. 29, 2026). The Mount Blue Sky Scenic Byway in Colorado is also being handed over to another local government entity. Funding for a lot of federal programs is being pulled, and other government entities are picking up the slack to keep public places running and open to public.
Coleman B. Loughery
Via social
It doesn’t have me ringing the alarm bell. But it has made me wonder how other states would handle this — like Utah and Sen. Mike Lee, R, who loves to sell off public lands — and what it means for public lands.
Kat Zale
Via social
The current MAGA/Project 2025 movement against public lands is basically operating a policy-making laboratory to figure out how to undermine current public-lands protections with an end goal of either privatizing land or making it available for leased/licensed uses that would spoil it. It would be the first step in a laundering scheme, where this management arrangement is approved and then the county in question could take additional actions that wouldn’t be as high-profile as if a federal agency did them. The drivers of these plans could also disavow any responsibility or knowledge, just like a business scheme with shell companies. The only saving grace here is that Pitkin County, Colorado, is likely to do things in a sane and productive manner, but if they export this to, say, Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument or a not-so-popular public lands unit in Nevada, then the outcomes could become scary for conservation and normal recreation.
Kyle Alcorn
Via social
A DEPARTMENT’S DOWNFALL
Thank you for your stellar reporting (“How the Interior secretary has let down public lands and the nation,” Sept. 24, 2026), which is often very sad news for us who care about our environment — sad but critically necessary!
Please keep up your wonderful dedication.
Peter Slattery
Salinas, California
I appreciate the exposé on Interior Secretary Doug Burgum highlighting the complete damage he’s doing to the country’s most precious resources, our national parks and open lands. Where is Burgum’s integrity and conscience? Is this all feeding an ego?
Michael Inserra
Rancho Mirage, California
HOPE FOR THE FLOWERS
We loved that HCN’s August 2026 Conversations issue opened with Kylie Mohr’s story “When wildflowers speak” on the secret dialogues happening underfoot between soil fungi and plants.
It is possible that desert-adapted plants like sagebrush will move upslope in a warming world and come to dominate Colorado’s wildflower-rich montane meadows. But, as two of the three scientists who designed the study at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in the first place, we are not convinced that experimental heating caused sagebrush to take over the warmed plots.
The recent claim of “accelerated” sagebrush increase at the end of the 29-year experiment is based on a single final snapshot of a small area of each plot that shows approximately the same proportional difference among treatments as existed in 1990, before heaters were activated.
If change is happening, it is slow indeed. Do not yet despair for the wildflowers, fellow HCN readers!
Mary Price and Nick Waser
Gunnison, Colorado, and Tucson, Arizona
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