The Magazine

Few environmental challenges seem as stark as the threat to dam a stretch of wild river like Montana’s Upper Missouri. But the heyday of big dam building may be nearing an end.

Montana Gov. Thomas Judge has notified Interior Secretary Rogers Morton that the state will take the lead in regulating coal-fired power plants, rather than waiting for federal environmental impact statements for plants like Colstrip.

As independent, idealistic inventors forge ahead with plans to heat buildings with the sun, traditional institutions and businesses are taking cautious steps in the same direction.

The blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the Hawaiian hoary bat and the light-footed clapper — all endangered species — don’t receive the attention they deserve.

North Dakota landowners and policy makers are weighing the “one-time harvest” of strippable lignite coal against the productivity of agricultural land that would be sacrificed.

Arnold Miller, the leader of the United Mine Workers of America, discusses the energy crisis and the coal industry.

Even as 146 nuclear power plants are under construction or on order — on top of 36 nuclear power plants already operating — public understanding of peaceful use of atomic energy has been inhibited by the Atomic Energy Commission.

With the present shortage of crude oil, industry is bidding hundreds of millions of dollars on leases to tap shale oil on public lands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

Even though President Richard Nixon didn’t mention solar energy once in his outline of “Project Independence,” there’s a lot of solar energy around, and working solar equipment exists today. If the U.S. were really determined to introduce solar energy in the 1970s, it could be done.

We have been enjoying an energy “high” for as long as most Americans can remember. And the most remarkable thing about the energy crisis is not that it came so fast or that is may have been contrived, but that we lack specific information about the energy we depend on.

Faced with growing volumes of trash, states like Connecticut and Oregon are leading the way with programs to reuse and recycle solid waste.

In Wyoming and eastern Montana, plans for harnessing the Powder River Basin’s coal to ease the energy crisis are running into the realities of limited water supply.

Can citizens reduce demand by managing their energy more wisely? Experts believe they can, without greatly changing their lifestyles, if they wish.

As the energy crisis deepens, the clear skies of Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains are threatened by the extraction of vast deposits of coal.

The Department of Interior is on the eve of releasing the shackles on oil shale development in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming — but conservation organizations are worried that the cost to the environment will be too high.

Little known or understood by the average American is his prodigious use — and waste — of all forms of energy. So wasteful have Americans been that we now find ourselves on the brink of energy disaster.

Viewed in historical perspective, the disruption of our western landscape by second home developments may be of far greater importance than any other factor — more even than strip mining for coal, oil shale and uranium.

For the past year and a half, development near Cody, Wyo., has been stalled while the county writes and adopts comprehensive zoning regulations. But developers have plans for turning a narrow strip of land abutting the Shoshone National Forest into recreational homes, condominiums, and golf courses.

For years, Streamboat Springs, Colo., showed the normal, orderly growth expected in a prosperous rural community that also caters to tourists. Now, a rush of growth has pushed condos up the sides of the mountains and transformed the community.

The users of more than five million off-road recreational vehicles (ORVs) — motorcycles, four-wheelers, campers, and snowmobiles — are having difficulty sharing the public lands with those who favor traditional forms of locomotion — hikers, skiers, and showshoers.