Essays

“What I didn’t know about then was the peculiar world of bureaucracy. It thinks even nature must bend to what bureaucrats decide is best.” Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/22.2/download-entire-issue

Even as McClure stood firm on his values, he tried to work with his adversaries, and for that reason he was effective on many issues. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/22.2/download-entire-issue

Those of us who are still here — the survivors in the wake of the Bust — share a bond we may not realize: We have paid a price to be able to remain. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.21/download-entire-issue

Most of the region’s needs, including protection of its scenic grandeur from regional haze, acid pollution damage to high country lakes and streams, and urban carbon monoxide and particulate pollution, draw little attention in Washington. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.19/download-entire-issue

Once, when America was young, we knew why we had public lands. Now that America is mature, few of us even know we have them. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.16/download-entire-issue

The notion of the physical world as a web of interrelationships, of interpenetration and interdependency, is not at all congenial to the theory of property. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.15/download-entire-issue

My theories of education begin with the principle that learning derives from life, all of life, as an unending process from birth to death. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.8/download-entire-issue

Writer Edward Abbey’s sudden death on March 14th left the nation’s environmental movement and lovers of wild and untrammeled land everywhere stunned and grieving. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.6/download-entire-issue

The West was saved from the wrath of the energy industry by the genius of a free market, even though that market was far from perfect. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.5/download-entire-issue

The war for surface water in the intermountain West will likely be won or lost in battles before a single federal agency — the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.1/download-entire-issue

The geographic removal of Stegner from the inland Western landscape he helps us see says a great deal about the past state of this region. But we do not yet know whether the forces that led him out of the region are artifacts or persisting conditions. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.23/download-entire-issue

This is a practical survival guide to the national parks, with down-to-earth advice on how to co-exist with park rangers. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.14/download-entire-issue

We need to expand our view of time, give natural events more space and look for the heartbeats that keep it all running. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.13/download-entire-issue

From the outside, to a casual observer, Two Forks is inexplicable. From the inside, Two Forks is the only solution to the Denver metro area’s — and the West’s — dilemma that existing leadership can conceive of. Understand Two Forks, and understand the West. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.9/download-entire-issue

Above, there once was a mountain; below, a new one is rising, a jumbled mound of steaming magma. Surrounding it, striped spires of rock shoot 2,000 feet straight up from the bottom of North America’s most famous volcano. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.1/download-entire-issue

Argue with radio preachers. Sing hymns with Jimmy Joe Bobby and his Swinging Salvationeers. Defend secular humanism as a religion. And more … Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/19.14/download-entire-issue

There is a quickening in the land. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/19.7/download-entire-issue

Although we are now in a transition stage, forces are in motion that will bring to an end the domination of national forests by timber harvesting. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/19.6/download-entire-issue

The great wilderness experience, at times, becomes a continuing obsession with inappropriately placed pop-tops, cigarette butts and Jiffy Pop tins. I am hopelessly addicted to collecting wilderness trash. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/19.4/download-entire-issue