The Magazine

Earlier this year the Sierra Club won a major victory for air quality based on the Clean Air Act of 1970, but ambiguities in the ruling leave open the possibility of worsening air pollution.

The Bureau of Land Management has pleased conservationists by enacting management policies that will protect many of the natural resources of Wyoming’s Red Desert, a unique geologic area.

The chairman of the Wilderness Committee of the Idaho Environmental Council addresses the Forest Service. “At this time we do not have all, or even a significant part, of the needed information concerning our future wilderness recreational needs, our future timber needs …”

Nebraska Public Power District’s proposed 600-megawatt coal-fired power plant is another example of proliferating energy demands upon a land unmarked and unsullied by the march of “progress.”

Montana’s Middle Fork Flathead River flows through the proposed Great Bear Wilderness, but a Wild and Scenic designation for the river itself may be needed to stave off future dam construction.

Private property land reforms in Maine may hold lessons for the Nature Conservancy and other groups that approach the West’s environmental issues from a principle of private ownership.

When the history of the environmental movement is written, it will be found that a small band of unpaid, unsung volunteers blazed the trail. Imbued with little more than clear vision, bulldog tenacity, and a thick skin, they have taken unpopular stands in the causes loosely termed “the environment.”

From the top of Granite Peak, Montana’s highest point, the author surveys the vast rugged country that may soon be designated the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.

Condemning current environmental regulations as “slow, costly, and tortuous,” University of Minnesota economist Walter Heller has advocated a strong tax on sulfur emissions.

As Wyoming Senator Clifford Hansen pushes legislation to construct an aqueduct system that would divert water for industrial use in the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, plans for escalating extraction of coal are coming out into public view.

The Bureau of Reclamation faces off with local opponents over a proposed dam that would inundate China Meadows, a choice spot in Utah’s Uinta Mountains.

The centennial of the establishment of Yellowstone National Park is a time to assess how the national parks can be made an even more meaningful part of our personal lives, especially because they are today under siege from various quarters.

Reynolds Metals Co. has announced a proposal to build a uranium enrichment plant near Buffalo, Wyo., that would cost at least $2.2 billion.

The portion of the Logan River in Utah’s Cache Valley was a brown trout haven — until the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the stream for flood control, removing much of the vegetation that provided ideal habitat.

The Wilderness Act set a 1974 deadline for considering all remaining primitive and roadless areas for wilderness designation, and as that deadline approaches, controversy is stirring in the Rocky Mountains about how to treat those wild lands.

It has now been seven months since helicopter pilot James Vogan went before a Senate subcommittee and revealed the illegal deaths of hundreds of eagles on Herman Werners’s Wyoming ranch — what has happened to justice?

Montana Governor Forrest Anderson effectively sabotaged that state’s air pollution program by refusing to sign the proposed implementation of federal standards.

Big game herds, hit with the harsh winter of 1971-72 and faced with steady shrinkage of winter range, continue to decline.

Senator Gale McGee, D-Wyo., responding to news that President Nixon has killed a proposed executive order aimed at tighter regulation of clear cutting on public lands, has charged that “large timber interests continue to call the shots for the Nixon Administration on national forest management policies.”

The power industry could build at least five 10,000-megawatt coal-fired power plants in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, with staggering social, economic and environmental implications.