The Magazine

It’s hard to find prime grassland where you don’t see signs of grazing. This is what makes the National Audubon Society’s Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch near Elgin, Ariz., so valuable.

For the second time in four years, a Montana wilderness bill has been defeated in the closing moments of a Congress, and it wasn’t alone.

Chaco Canyon is a battleground, with tourists, environmentalists, business interests and Navajos jousting over whether to build a paved road to a park now served only by dirt roads.

The West has come late and gradually to the experience of cultural diversity and aggressive minorities. But the 1992 election tells us that the region is finally experiencing what it means to be part of America in the late 20th century.

The atomic age began with a big bang. The buildup to the Cold War took place in a few short years. But the struggle over its legacy and lessons for humanity have just begun.

Fear of the Supreme Court leads tribes to accept an adverse decision, while a new electric power technology could help the Grand Canyon and salmon.

A primer on Election 1992 in ten Western states.

Today, across the West, scientists, rockhounds and those who collect for profit are battling over the bones of the 100-million-year-old wildlife of the Mesozoic.

Pulling his horse up short, U.S. Forest Service District Ranger Steve Posey turns to
watch a helicopter fly overhead with another load of concrete and building materials dangling from its belly …

Beavers on a ranch in Idaho have turned a previously gouged creek bottom into a wetland brimming with wildlife and produced a new pasture for the ranch’s livestock.

The $4 billion Central Arizona Project provides water, but few can afford to buy it.

Dams and coal hit the age of limits.

Conservation comes of age.

A century-long battle for water rights waged by the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in Arizona ended as Western film rarely do: The Indians won.

Two Idaho and Montana studies by the Forest Service represent the first full-scale efforts by the agency to control damage caused by grazing, but substantial improvements on the range may be a long way off.

For more than 100 years, the last thing the people of Victor, Colo., would think of doing is to say “no” to gold mining. Now they are saying “whoa.”

Politicians, environmentalists and business leaders agree, the 1992 congressional campaign in Montana (between Pat Williams, a Democrat, and Ron Marlenee, a Republican) is likely to result in the most important — and interesting — election in perhaps a generation.

The General Accounting Office (GAO) repeatedly criticizes the BLM for mismanaging livestock on public lands.