The Magazine

With 15 runs of salmon federally listed as threatened or endangered, a conservation group, Long Live the Kings, hopes hatchery reform can help save wild stocks of fish.

Wolves have been restored in the Northern Rockies, but their conflict with civilization now prompts wildlife managers to face some agonizing decisions about the animal’s future.

Inhabiting a parcel of land in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley demands a specific responsibility, according to the writer, who attempts ecological restoration on his piece of ground, to help bring back the West’s rich biological diversity.

The brine-shrimp industry of Great Salt Lake has helped put that misunderstood ecosystem under a microscope; can the lake be saved from its history of abuse and a rapidly increasing population around it?

When the dairy industry invades rural Idaho, communities face the dilemma of what to do with the waste cows produce. The huge dairy operations are contaminating local air and water.

In West Yellowstone, Mont., where snowmobile tourism is a mainstay of the economy, locals are split between fierce supporters of the industry and those who favor a little more quiet and a measure of control.

The author remembers his early days in a small Colorado mountain town, and ponders the economic and social changes that have slowly turned “Mendicant Mountain” into a bustling, expensive ski resort.

On South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, some Oglala Lakota are defying the federal government to grow industrial hemp, hoping that it can help to revitalize both the tribe’s economy and its government.

The last issue of the “Imagine a River” series on the Rio Grande examines how the river has become the “Rio Wimpy,” running out of water twice before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico.

Across the Interior West, as the sagebrush sea recedes under the environmental stress of human impacts, its emblematic bird, the sage grouse, is also in decline, and no one seems to know what to do about it.

Across the West, Native Americans are working to revive vanishing tribal languages, using their elders and language-immersion schools to try to gain fluent speakers.

Back in the ’70s, Montana led the way in progressive environmental legislation, but now with its economy faltering, those laws are being eviscerated, and environmentalists need to find a new strategy.

If the 1993 New Mexico Mining Act is allowed to work, it could usher in a new era of mine reclamation in which mines actually have to clean up and pay for the messes they leave behind.

Along New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, pueblo tribes are working to bring back the disappearing bosque – the cottonwood gallery forest that once lined the river, offering habitat, shade and leafy bounty to a dry landscape.

In Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, the coming energy boom in coalbed methane gas has local ranchers and environmentalists worried.

Three years after cows were banned from some Southwestern rivers, the San Francisco River in the Gila National Forest shows signs of recovery, but struggling ranchers and uneven wildlife numbers prove that the struggle over desert grazing is still alive.

Canadian activists trying to save Alberta’s Castle-Crown wildlands from rapid oil and gas development are frustrated by their nation’s lack of effective environmental protection laws.

For 30 years, activists have been working to remove two dams and restore salmon runs on Washington’s Elwha River, and now the goal is in sight — if the money comes through from Congress.

In Arizona’s Galiuro Mountains, desert streams appear and disappear during the course of a day, and the native fish that have adapted to this complex ecosystem face extinction due to introduced non-natives.

In California, the Forest Service issues a revolutionary management plan for the Sierra Nevada’s forests, putting the health of trees and wildlife before that of the timber industry.