The Magazine

In what appears to be an about-face, the U.S. departments of energy and agriculture and several major oil companies are beginning to embrace that notion that alcohol production can play a role in solving the country’s energy problems.

As mining companies sniff around a huge platinum deposit along Montana’s Beartooth Mountain front, locals and state wildlife officials are wondering whether the ranching, hunting, fishing and scenery will be displaced by tunnels, roads and smelters.

The 1,500-mile Northern Tier pipeline, which would transport Alaskan crude oil from Port Angeles, Wash. to Clearbrook, Minn., is expected to be approved by Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus and President Carter.

Although Boulder, Colorado’s growth-limiting ordinance passed nearly three years ago, there has been no cooling of the controversy about its philosophy and consequences.

The Three Mile Island nuclear accident has only added to the uranium industry’s troubles, which include the erratic price of uranium and pending political decisions.

Utah environmentalists are up in arms over the closing of the Utah office of The Wilderness Society and the firing of field representative Dick Carter.

The Clark Fork of the Yellowstone in northwestern Wyoming has inspired plans for railroads, highways and dams, but the most recent proposal is to designate 22 miles of the river’s rugged canyon as Wild and Scenic.

Rarely in the history of the country has there been a relationship as close and as symbiotic — and as effective for conservation — as existed between President Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the newly formed U.S. Forest Service.

Despite a resurgence of enthusiasm for wind power, expensive new wind turbines — many of which are proving unreliable — are undermining widespread adoption.

Targhee National Forest officials, who manage nearly all of the Island Park Geothermal Area adjacent to Yellowstone National Park, are being pressured by more than 70 parties who want to drill for hot water that would be used to generate electricity.

Out of necessity, many residents in and around sunny but cold Taos, N. Mex., have turned to passive solar technology to heat their homes.

To try and bring the elusive black-footed ferret back from the brink of extinction, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will conduct stealthy inventories of the the animal’s habitat.

As nuclear waste piles up, environmentalists predict that the West will bear the main burden of a mounting federal effort to dispose of the waste.

New coal slurry pipeline proposals are raising major regional questions concerning water use priorities, Indian water rights, interstate cooperation and competition, and perhaps even the scale of future Western coal development.

With varying degrees of success, mediation has been substituted for legal or political confrontation in a number of recent environmental battles.

When Congress passed the Clean Air Act amendments in 1977, it didn’t approve federal funds for the studies necessary for air quality classification, meaning that most states have trouble accessing the law’s protections.

President Jimmy Carter has taken the first step toward establishing a national Indian water policy, which has been defined de facto by large water projects that flood Indian lands while not providing a proportional share of the water.

In Colorado, the public has rallied to the defense of “nongame” wildlife — animals that are deemed to have no commercial value, and have tended to be overlooked in management — but the effort may be undermined by the state legislature.

The Bureau of Land Management, the least known and most maligned public land agency, oversees more than 350 million acres of lands that are increasingly valuable and cherished despite being handed down from the failed policies of Western settlement.

As the 96th Congress convenes, the gains of the past decade and a half may be sorely tested by legislators well-tuned to demands for fiscal conservatism.