Whither the Colorado Plateau?

Until the early 1980s, southern Utah was a battleground between extraction and preservation. Now, Ray Wheeler writes in the conclusion of his four-part series, the struggle is between industrial tourism, typified by Lake Powell and its several million annual visitors, and the more modest home-grown tourism centered on the region’s beauty and its small communities. (To […]

A combination of technological change and free market ideology has led the nation to abandon not just railroad and bus lines but its long-held commitment to universal transportation and communication. The article describes the Balkanization process and its consequences for the rural West. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.20/download-entire-issue

In theory, every U.S. citizen has an equal say in the management of public lands. In fact, residents of small towns dotted across the rural West exert a disproportionate control over those lands. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.19/download-entire-issue

Ray Wheeler wanders across southeastern Utah, attempting to discover why the area is so bound to extraction, even against its own economic interest, and whether change is possible. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.19/download-entire-issue

In theory, wild, beautiful and lightly populated Idaho should be bursting with national parks. In fact, its ranching, logging and mining roots have kept it totally free of parks. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.19/download-entire-issue

Butte, Montana is finding, under the leadership of an energetic chief executive, that there is life after mining. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.19/download-entire-issue

When the thermometer drops to 35 degrees below zero and winds whip off the Sweetgrass Hills to sift snow through the cracks of his homestead shack near the Canadian border, Lloyd Oswood turns up the fuel oil burner in his converted wood stove. “It’s not the best goddamn thing,” he said as he took another […]

The rural West believes all wealth comes out of the ground as food, as logs or as mined ore. Now comes noted writer Peter F. Drucker to say that the land’s commodities are increasingly irrelevant to the production of wealth. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.18/download-entire-issue

Miles City, a community of 10,000 which has spent 100 years living and breathing ranching, is experiencing traumatic change as economic and other forces shove the family ranch off the Western stage. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.18/download-entire-issue

Despite its posturing as the helpless colonial victim of powerful corporations and the federal government, the West isn’t so much weak as it is passive. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.18/download-entire-issue

Lest you think that the entire West succumbed to the hypnotic beat of boom, boom, boom, here is an account of how the conservative state of Idaho behaved conservatively — resisting the lure of a coal-fired power plant that was to carry the state to the land of milk and honey. Download entire issue to […]

The West is empty, but it’s not rural. In fact, it is the most urban of all regions, with most of its population living in a few large metropolitan areas. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.17/download-entire-issue

This essay examines the blend of economic and social defenses that has kept the West on its own track for the past century. To read this article, click the “View a PDF from the original” link below, or download the entire issue: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.17/download-entire-issue This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the […]

Thanks to a mixture of geography, climate and natural resources, the rural West became the domain of a particular way of life that has lasted for 100 years. But today its economies are in retreat, and the Western frontier is reopening. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.17/download-entire-issue

To an economist, this is a subversive piece because it talks about the meaning of work, rather than about the price of labor and material. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.17/download-entire-issue

After nearly a century of neglect and vandalism, an area called Fourmile Ruin near Taylor, Ariz., is being excavated, not in a search for information about its original inhabitants but for its valuable pottery. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.16/download-entire-issue