Paul Larmer

Out here in the wide-open West, it seems like there ought to be plenty of room for everyone, including all the wild creatures that were here first. But we know better: The conversion of wild lands into human habitat — not to mention space for our domesticated plants and animals — has pushed dozens of […]

The last time I knocked on Luis Torres’ front door in San Pedro, N.M., he was inside on the phone, talking and joking in a rapid-fire combination of Spanish and English that made my head spin. On the other end of the phone was Alfonso Chacon, a forest contractor featured in this issue’s cover story. […]

In the interest of full disclosure, I must make a confession: High Country News owes its existence, in part, to the nuclear industry. I learned of this a couple of years ago at a High Country News board meeting in Jackson, Wyo. I was sharing a rustic cabin at the Murie Center with Tom Bell, […]

One of my favorite refrigerator pictures is a shot of my father-in-law, Bob Cook. He’s seated atop a brand-new John Deere mowing machine, wearing a grin that could outshine any kid’s on Christmas morning. Why is this man so happy? It’s partly the machine, which is one of those fancy, hand-controlled models that can spin […]

In his most recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond examines the rise and fall of civilizations ranging from Easter Island in Polynesia to the pre-Columbian Mayan and Anasazi. All of them faced a similar combination of problems: climate change, rapid population growth and resource depletion among them. And all […]

I recently realized that my kids have become old enough to be nostalgic. It was a strange feeling. We were driving past the old brick house we lived in five years ago, when my 16-year-old daughter said: “Remember when we used to swing under the old maple tree and see how far we could jump […]

The Interior West has long regarded California as the sort of rich eccentric uncle whose peculiar behavior is an embarrassment to the rest of the family. I have some firsthand knowledge of this attitude, because I am a fourth-generation Californian, who moved to rural western Colorado back in 1992. The sidelong glances I received from […]

Way back in 1973, when I was a pimply middle schooler living in a Chicago suburb, President Richard M. Nixon signed into law a bill that embodied America’s noblest conservation intentions. The Endangered Species Act set an amazingly ambitious goal: to conserve all of the imperiled plant and animal species in the country. The act’s […]

It’s a little disconcerting to look at the ads in the local newspaper these days. I’m bound to recognize the mug of someone I know who has just cast in his or her lot with Re/Max, Coldwell Banker or another of the multitude of agencies now playing the West’s biggest gambling game: Real Estate Roulette. […]

Every fall, black bears enter a ravenous state in which they will do almost anything for food. Biologists call it hyperphagia — the time of super eating. Bears in hyperphagia can get into trouble if the search for calories leads them astray — to the greasy garbage cans behind the local diner, or to a […]

My minuscule slice of the Colorado River Basin’s flow dried up yesterday. When I opened the plug on our 6-inch pipe, a trickle of brown water dribbled out, followed by a black glob of sediment, writhing with a half-dozen crawdads. And that was it. The local ditch company usually stops delivering water in mid-August, when […]