Life in the West can be pretty confusing. Poaching is always a serious crime, unless you’re a non-Native hunter on the Wind River Reservation. Salmon tastes great, but it’s not all that healthy when farmed fish escape in a fragile ecosystem. Do you know what color your hydrogen is? It’s hard to fish on the Arkansas River when wealthy landowners and the state of Colorado keep yelling, “Get the hell off my lawn!” Raising healthy families isn’t easy in West Eugene, Oregon, when you live next door to a toxic industry. Tribes have a chance to reclaim Willamette Falls — *if* they can somehow work together. LiDAR, a laser mapping technique, teaches researchers about deadly landslides and inspires Daniel Coe to create extraordinary art. The U.S. will never heal its relationship with the land until it heals its relationship with the land’s Indigenous people. Elsewhere in this issue, we listen to new podcasts, read Elvia Wilk’s Death by Landscape, and wander around Wyoming in search of meadowlarks.

An image of the Willamette River created using LiDAR data. “Human beings like to engineer rivers for various reasons. … But this really gives you the sense that the river doesn’t care. The river is going to go where it needs to go eventually, whether that be 100 years or 1,000 years from now — it’s going to find a way to move.” Credit: Daniel Coe, Washington Geological Survey

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