The Magazine

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.

As giant energy companies obtain federal leases to mine coal over vast areas of the West, Senator Gaylord Nelson is leading an effort to halt stripmining’s “environmental warfare on our own country.”

Conservationists are hailing the release of the Bureau of Land Management’s recommendations for management in central Wyoming’s Red Desert, which include limiting mining and fencing and establishing a new primitive area.

The Bureau of Land Management is systematically thinning wild horses from the Pryor Mountains of Montana and Wyoming to provide more food and space for those that remain.

Sen. Gaylord Nelson is pressing for a moratorium on federal permits and leases for coal strip mining on public lands until environmental reviews have been made.

Wyoming’s Diamond Ring Ranch has again made the news for illegal activity, this time for unauthorized spraying of sagebrush on some 4,000 acres of public land.

The sure, incisive pen of one of America’s foremost conservation writers has been censored from the pages of American Forests, the official magazine of the American Forestry Association.