Paul Larmer

Flood and drought have shaped the West, and humans are often unprepared.

The complex layers of history that underlie our region include both ugliness and beauty.

Western mythology still holds tremendous sway.

From the Bundys to #NoDAPL, protest movements in the West thrive.

The blood-orange January sun is just dipping below the Uncompaghre Plateau as I pull up to a stoplight in Delta, Colorado. On the shoulder, a bearded man about my age dances a little jig in the cold, holding a cardboard sign that reads: “Homeless, anything will help.” He is one of a half-dozen people I’ve […]

The 2017 fire season has made it clear our current policies don’t work.

The budget-starved Forest Service gives jobs to the lowest bidder instead of local communities.

Humans have always trekked paths to new places.

A solar eclipse comes to the West as solar energy surges past coal.

On getting past fear and toward a philosophy more useful.

On the kinship between walkers.

Whenever I feel a bit down about the fact that, after electing a billionaire president who campaigned on promises to help the working class, we are now fighting a breathtakingly brazen attempt to enact the agenda of corporate America, I find it helpful to remember that we’ve seen all of this — or at least […]

It may be gone by the time you read this, but a compelling historic photograph was still posted on Obamawhitehouse.gov in mid-January: 11-year-old Barack Obama, his face turned from the camera, standing with his grandmother at a scenic overlook in Yellowstone National Park. Below the picture, Obama writes: “I still remember traveling up to Yellowstone […]

In the dark days of early December, just a month after the election of President-elect Donald Trump, Idaho Conservation League Director Rick Johnson and Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson joined a couple of hundred folks at Boise’s City Club for a nostalgic celebration. They were being lauded for the passage of the Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness bill, […]

A few weeks ago, I heard author Terry Tempest Williams deliver the keynote address at the annual SHIFT conference in Jackson, Wyoming. The conference, which High Country News sponsors, deals with the interesting, and at times messy, intersection of the West’s conservation and recreation communities. It’s messy because the people who recreate on our public […]

Ten months ago, when a small group of anti-federal agitators occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon, HCN produced a package of stories about the seemingly revitalized Sagebrush Rebellion. Armed with guns and cellphones and backed by political forces eager to put federal lands in the hands of state and private interests, these […]

For most of us, birthdays are happy occasions, when friends and family pay fond attention, lavishing us with gifts to prove that we are loved and valued.  For one day, at least, our foibles are accepted with a smile, or at least diplomatically ignored. The National Park Service’s 100th birthday has been less joyful, however. […]

You don’t expect a report from the Interior Department’s inspector general to be interesting, let alone insightful, but the newly released Investigative Report of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Mexican Wolf Program manages to be both. The 17-page report was ordered by U.S. Rep. Steven Pearce, R-N.M., on behalf of Catron County, to investigate […]