The Magazine

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.

A pastoral letter being prepared by the Catholic bishops of the Northwest calls Catholics and others to a new environmental, economic and spiritual relationship with a sacred river – the Columbia.

Though the economic future of the area is uncertain, activists welcome a possible Superfund listing for the huge Molycorp molybdenum mine in Questa, N.M., as a way to save the town and the Red River from yet more mine-waste pollution.

As methamphetamine moves into the small, isolated towns of the rural West, the waste left by its manufacture pollutes the environment while the drug’s abuse and the traffic in it strain the resources of local law enforcement and social services.

When Paonia, Colo., resident Richard Rudin challenged a local mine’s plans for expansion, the town was painfully divided, until the efforts of the North Fork Coal Working Group brought miners, environmentalists and agencies together for a solution.