The Magazine

The author reflects on childhood visits to Utah, the history of the Mormons and the National Miners Union, and the state’s perhaps bleak future.

Even as strip mines multiply throughout the Rocky Mountain states, the federal agency responsible for overseeing reclamation of mined lands — the Office of Surface Mining — is reeling under a series of blows.

Public officials’ response to a spill of toxic water at the Alumet phosphate mine is stoking criticism of the expanding phosphate industry in southeastern Idaho.

Western states band together to open the door to mammoth coal exports to Pacific Basin countries, a trend driven by federal trade policies.

For more than 25 Western tribes that hold vast quantities of coal and uranium, the energy crisis is another source of pressure to abandon their cultural identity.

More than 174 million obscure acres in the West have been spotlighted by the Bureau of Land Management’s wilderness inventory, which is now the subject of public scrutiny.

In a move enveloped by political controversy, Secretary of Interior Cecil Andrus has fired the director of the National Park Service, William Whalen.

That’s what a sheepherder lives with, 365 days a year. The life requires a special kind of person, and there are fewer of them around. The sheep industry, too, is best by special problems.

Proponents and critics jostle over the Central Utah Project, which would bring water from Utah’s Bonneville Basin to the bustling Wasatch Front.

The Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, a group of game experts from state and federal agencies, may determine the future of the grizzly.

States apply a variety of severance taxes to non-renewable resources such as coal, defying efforts to create a unified, national approach.

Uravan, Colorado, wholly owned by the metals division of Union Carbide, faces serious pollution problems caused by operation one of the oldest uranium mills in America.

Rising fuels costs mean higher heating bills for homeowners and businesses, with no relief in sight.

A study, initiated by the Environmental Protection Agency but never released to the public, documents high radioactivity in more than a hundred communities where uranium tailings were used as construction fill material.

Although Denver-based Mountain States Legal Foundation describes itself as a public interest legal group, it advocates for private property rights and free enterprise.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood stewardship — understood the significance of an America overgrazed, overfarmed and carelessly logged.

Despite its problems and dissidents, the Council of Energy Resource Tribes — comprising 25 tribes who own one-third of the low sulfur coal west of the Mississippi and as much as half the privately owned uranium in the country — is emerging as a serious player in the energy development game.

Some conservationists trying to increase the amount of designated wilderness object to the regulations that the Wilderness Act places on grazing because those regulations draw opposition from ranchers.

The future of agriculture in the Rocky Mountain states may hinge on a trade-off with energy development spurred by the energy crisis.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management are cutting back on grazing permits in Montana’s Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, angering ranchers.