But not all conservation groups think the gains are worth the losses.
Wilderness
Posted inNovember 10, 2014: Fallout
Dear Forest Service: Today’s John Muir shoots video
Let people take all the images they want in wilderness areas.
Posted inOctober 27, 2014: Defuse the West
The Latest: Sustainable seafood advocates vs. wilderness purists
After years of court battles, an oyster company in a national park agrees to shut down.
Posted inArticles
How to pass a wilderness bill in 2014
Lessons from southwest Colorado’s Hermosa Creek.
Posted inArticles
Obama declares new national monument in the mountains above Los Angeles
Trails, campgrounds and wildlands will qualify for federal funding for improvements.
Posted inSeptember 15, 2014: Books & Essays
Beauty and chaos, standing together
Review of ‘The Carry Home; Lessons from the American Wilderness’ by Gary Ferguson.
Posted inArticles
Celebrating the birth of the Wilderness Act
High Country News coverage of the evolution of wilderness since 1970.
Posted inArticles
New Mexico delays controversial Gila vote
Many unanswered questions remain about proposals to divert the state’s last undammed major river.
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
The Ansel Adams Wilderness
The Ansel Adams WildernessPeter Essick, foreward by Jamie Williams112 pages, hardcover:$22.95.National Geographic Society, 2014. For 25 years, Peter Essick traveled the globe as a National Geographic photographer, and recently he was named one of the world’s 40 most influential nature photographers. In 2010, Essick began “a potentially controversial” project in his native California: shooting in […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
The Latest: 20,000 Utah acres protected from drilling
BackstoryFor years, Utah conservationists struggled to protect sensitive environments from four-wheeling, oil and gas and other development – until conservative lawmakers like Republican Rep. Rob Bishop realized that state-held lands with wilderness characteristics could be used to bargain for mineral-rich, federally owned tracts. In 2013, Bishop began negotiating a compromise with wilderness advocates, off-roaders and […]
Posted inGoat
On the Wilderness Act’s 50th, a backpack into the Weminuche
Author ponders Wilderness Act on its 50th birthday.
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
Reflections on the Wilderness Act at 50
The concept may need some rethinking, but it’s still an important way to preserve some of our most treasured land.
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
Motorheads gone wild
An off-roading conservationist navigates some gnarly landscape on the road to more protection for the Utah desert.
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
The Latest: Obama designated his largest national monument yet
BackstorySince 2009, Congress has grid-locked around three dozen bills that would protect new acres of public land. Even locally grown, something-for-everyone wilderness bills, like Montana’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, are rotting in a legislature plagued by dysfunction and public-lands phobia (“Wilderness bills languish in legislative limbo,” HCN, 3/5/12). Public-land advocates are turning to President […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
The Big Nasty
On garbage and tolerance in the wilderness.
Posted inFebruary 3, 2014: The Hanford Whistleblowers
Wilderness therapy redefines itself
But the irresponsible caregivers and tragedies of the past prove hard to shake.
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Heart-Shaped River: Craig Childs finds his center in Canyonlands
“Not all maps are made of paper. The best ones are spooled in memory.”
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Craig Childs narrates a Canyonlands adventure
Images from a month-long trip with friends in 1999.
Posted inJuly 22, 2013: Red Rock Resolution?
New route to end Utah’s wilderness stalemate
Can one of the West’s most anti-federal lands lawmakers broker a mega-wilderness deal in the Beehive state?
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
Sacrificial Land: Will renewable energy devour the Mojave Desert?
Over breakfast at the Crowbar Café in Shoshone, Calif., Brian Brown explains to me how he makes a living. Shoshone is a town of 31 in the Mojave Desert near the Nevada border; Brown runs his own business here, the China Ranch Date Farm. In the late summer, he strips offshoots from unproductive palm trees […]