The Magazine

The unexpected power shift in the U.S. Senate raises environmentalists’ hopes that the high-level nuclear waste dump proposed for Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which once seemed unstoppable, may not be a “done deal” after all.

The Bonneville Power Administration has long provided the Northwest — especially its aluminum industry — with some of the cheapest public power, but drought, endangered salmon and the deregulated electricity market may just change all that.

In New Mexico, some Indian reservations are jumping on a surprising new economic bandwagon, making use of their land and water rights to build golf courses and resorts to attract golf-playing tourists.

Under the “4.4 Plan,” California will begin a water diet, designed to reduce the state’s use of Colorado River water over the next 15 years to the 4.4 million acre-feet it has long been allocated, but always exceeded.

In the wake of last summer’s devastating Western wildfires, the Forest Service is trying to figure out how to restore the unhealthy, doghair, fire-prone forests created by a century of fire suppression and indiscriminate logging.

A historian of fire recalls the “Big Blowup” of 1910, an explosion of wildfire in Idaho that took 78 lives, made a hero of ranger Ed Pulaski, and helped to share a century of fire policy on the national forests.

Patricia Mulroy, general manager of Las Vegas Valley Water District and Southern Nevada, Water Authority, has kept water coming to her booming desert city, but environmental concerns and water-quality problems are signs that her water empire can’t last forever.

In the West’s public schools, corporations and conservationists quietly compete to control what students will learn in the largely unregulated field of environmental education.

El Paso, Texas, is dependent on the underground waters of the Hueco Bolson, but as the population grows and the bolson declines, both the city and its sister across the border, Ciudad Juarez, are turning to the already overtaxed Rio Grande.

In Idaho, the Nez Perce have become the first tribe to oversee the statewide recovery of an endangered species, the gray wolf, an experience that is energizing the tribe’s own political and spiritual recovery.

In eight years as Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbitt has known some failures but more successes: reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone, halting the New World gold mine, and creating many national monuments, starting with the Grand Staircase-Escalante.

Electric utility deregulation and California’s energy crisis hold promise and peril for the rest of the West, as conservationists seek to ensure that new energy systems are both efficient and easy on the land and water and air.

Ten years after Frank and Deborah Popper first proposed turning depopulated Great Plains counties into a ‘Buffalo Commons,’ their once-controversial ideas are getting more respect in the region as the population continues to decline.

A writer considers the philosophical questions that underlie endangered species protection, and how it is that one predator – the human kind – now finds itself assisting other predators, and also trying to help their prey.

When residents of the village of Tome, N.M., challenged plans for a nearby four-lane highway and bridge to facilitate the commute from Albuquerque to the suburbs, they took on New Mexico’s huge “sprawl machine” – and won.

At the 10-year anniversary of William Reilly’s veto of Colorado’s proposed Two Forks dam, the continuing growth of Denver’s sprawling suburbs leads some to worry that the dam might well be brought back to life.

The environmental and community challenges brought to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula by runaway sprawl and development have some ‘re-inhabiting locals’ almost nostalgic for the clear-cut timber companies of 30 years ago.

An unprecedented, informal coalition of angry Indian tribes, environmentalists and Democrats are going after Washington Republican Sen. Slade Gorton’s seat in November, and Gorton’s opponent – Democrat Maria Cantwell – may have a chance for victory.

As illegal immigration from Mexico increases, more people risk their lives crossing the desert into Arizona, while government agencies, anti-immigration vigilantes and human rights activists argue over how to handle the influx.

Clean, ‘green’ gas burns its neighbors as methane wells dominate the land.