The Magazine

President Jimmy Carter’s national energy plan calls for a heavy reliance on coal to bridge the gap between today’s oil- and gas-fueled society and the renewable resource-based society of the future.

In the wake of the defeated plans for the giant Kaiparowits power plant, another coal-fired power plant is planned for the canyon country of southern Utah — the 3,000 megawatt Intermountain Power Project, to be located 10 miles east of Capitol Reef National Park.

For the Shoshone and Arapahoe Indian tribes, everything is at stake in a suit filed by the state of Wyoming requiring more than 20,000 water users in the Bighorn River basin to defend their water rights.

Proposed water projects and uncontrolled pumping of groundwater for irrigation threaten the wide-flowing, flooding, living oasis that sandhill cranes call home on Nebraska’s Platte River.

Although Utah is one of the first Western states to require all new buildings to meet energy conservation standards, it has also been instrumental in pushing the controversial Intermountain Power Project coal-fired power plant.

Using geothermal energy to warm your home and heat your water may sound like a far-fetched idea, but some residents of Warm Springs Avenue in Boise, Idaho, have been doing it for 85 years.

Today, with rising energy costs, wood burning is probably the fastest growing form of alternative renewable energy use.

The forced resignation of Earl Adams, the director of Idaho’s Office of Energy, was the coup de grace in a long line of attacks by a hostile Republican-controlled legislature against efforts to set up a state energy conservation policy.

The Missouri Basin Power Project, a consortium of utilities, hopes to use construction of a 1,500 megawatt coal-fired power plant in Wheatland, Wyoming, as an example of industry turning a rural community into a lively place to live.

Both critics and advocates are weighing in on the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s drive to improve deteriorating range conditions on public lands in the West through a grazing system known as rest-rotation.

At a time when energy prices are making it increasingly difficult for people to make ends meet, Malcolm Lillywhite shows people simple technology that they can use to produce quality food and shelter at low cost.

Unknowns are plaguing oil shale development southwest of Vernal, Utah, but the burst of optimism for oil shale in the early 1970s has many local residents saying that extraction of oil from their abundant rock is inevitable.

Boulder, Colorado, has become the first community in the Rocky Mountain West to attempt to slow down its growth rate by city ordinance, which will limit the amount of new housing.

Residents of Weld County, Colorado, are worried that proposed uranium mining in the area will destroy farmland.

Telluride, Colorado, formerly an honest, decayed little mining town of about 300 souls, is now a bustling whore of a ski resort with a population of 1,500 and many more to come.

Two spectacular river gorges in southwest Idaho — the Owyhee and the Bruneau — are being considered for study as possible national wild and scenic rivers, with surrounding primitive areas.

Excerpts from a speech delivered by Edward Abbey at a conference in Vail, Colorado. “I say the industrialization of the Rocky Mountain West is not inevitable and that to plan for such a catastrophe is to invite it …”

In remote Jeffrey City, Wyoming, owned and operated by Western Nuclear, some women are determined to get out and participate in activities while others prefer the refuge of their homes.

John Wesley Powell told the hard truth about the West, but his advice for a more considerate approach to westward expansion was widely scorned and largely rejected.

Residents of the tiny mountain community of Shell, Wyoming, emerged from an unlikely planning meeting with smiles on their faces, having created a land-use plan that apparently satisfied even those who were most opposed.