Paul Larmer

Remember Guy Pence? Pence — as Jeff Ruch, director of the nonprofit group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, reminded me during a recent phone interview with four public-lands veterans — was a district ranger on Nevada’s Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in 1995 when someone firebombed his office in Carson City and then dynamited his van in […]

In 2013, the U.S. Forest Service thinned and intentionally burned more than 2 million acres of the nation’s public land, which is largely in the West, in order to improve forest health and reduce the risk of destructive wildfires near houses and towns. That’s an impressive figure, until you consider that the agency itself acknowledges […]

I first encountered wilderness in the early ’80s, when many of the law’s backers and I were purists. I was backpacking for the first time, exploring West Virginia’s Cranberry Wilderness. I have always used crutches to get around and had never carried a pack for any distance. The experience was more difficult than I anticipated. […]

My mom spent part of her childhood in a tiny Illinois town along the Mississippi River. During spring, as the upper Midwest’s snowmelt collided with drenching rains, the river often jumped its banks, flooding cornfields with silty waters and thrashing catfish, and turning the town into a sort of Huck Finn-style Venice, its few houses […]

(This is the editor’s note accompanying an HCN magazine cover story, Border out of Control: Fear and anxiety over national security run roughshod on the Arizona wild.) In 1987, my brother, Brook, landed his first international reporting job in Mexico City. He took a crash course in Spanish and, following his editors’ advice, drove from […]

(This is an editor’s note accompanying an HCN magazine cover story, The Great Gun-rights Divide.) When federal land managers confronted by armed protesters abandoned their latest inept attempt to remove Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s illegally grazing cows in April, the rest of the world wondered, not for the first time, “What is up with the […]

What will happen to Paonia, Colo., when our three coal mines close? That’s a question almost everyone in this rural valley has asked at one time or another. But ever since the Elk Creek Mine, which is owned by billionaire Bill Koch, laid off more than 300 employees last year, our musings have taken on […]

I first heard of WildEarth Guardians’ quiet effort to buy out grazing permits in New Mexico’s Gila country more than two years ago. Headlines instantly blared in my head:  “Anti-grazing enviros pay off anti-enviro ranchers to make way for wolves!” What a great story, I thought: It would show enemies becoming if not friends, then […]

I recently sat at a table at the Power House, the coolest brew and bike shop in Hailey, Idaho, talking with three ambitious conservationists. Over dark stouts and savory burgers and fries, Merrill Beyeler, who runs a family ranch in Leadore, Tom Page, who ranches with his brother in the Pahsimeroi Valley, and Mark Davidson […]

When the Endangered Species Act passed 40 years ago, I was a nerdy 13-year-old who subscribed to Audubon magazine. In my suburban Midwestern bedroom, I devoured pictures and stories of species that had gone extinct or were headed that way — the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, and my favorite, the mighty ivory-billed woodpecker. What […]

In the late 1980s, Western wilderness activists began changing their tactics: Stymied by increasingly anti-environmental elected officials opposed to any new wilderness, they decided to bypass local politicians and “nationalize” the issue. In Utah, led by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, they pushed “America’s Redrock Wilderness Act,” a bill that would protect a whopping 9.4 […]

The environment might seem like a confining beat for a publication whose mission statement promises to serve everybody who cares about the American West. But it’s actually pretty roomy. As naturalist John Muir famously said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” That’s […]

When I moved to the rural West, I found myself curious — in a way I never was while living in an urban area — about the infrastructure that makes civilization possible. Who built all those ditches that carry brown waters to the hayfields and homes, and how is the water parceled out? Where do […]

It’s hard to imagine anything like it happening today: An American president and members of his Cabinet fly into a Western city to broker a deal over the use of public lands. With a small group of stakeholders, they quickly craft a scientifically defensible plan that serves as the regional decision-making framework for another generation. […]

This winter, our usually quiet Colorado valley — so quiet that you can hear the wingbeats of the eagles and ravens that pass overhead — has reverberated with the growls of trackhoes digging trenches across hillsides and irrigated pastures. The activity has nothing to do with oil and gas development, though a proposed sale of […]