Wotr

Salmon, once a delicacy, is now cheap and fresh and available year-round, appearing the embodiment of all that is good about progress. But behind that cheap price tag are costs — to our oceans, wild salmon and native cultures and economies. Off the coast of British Columbia, Atlantic salmon are raised in net pens dropped […]

Last summer, my wife, Katie Gibson, and I travelled the length of the Yellowstone River, 678 miles from its source on Yount’s Peak in Wyoming’s Teton Wilderness, to its confluence with the Missouri River, just inside North Dakota. We walked through the wild headwaters country and Yellowstone Park, then paddled over 500 miles from the […]

We watched the steady stream of tourists snake its way toward Spruce Tree House, the only Anasazi cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde in southern Colorado where the federal agency allows visitors to guide themselves. It had been single file since leaving the museum, so we heaved a collective sigh. Petroglyph Trail, which runs one and […]

From the mothers in my family I learned what poverty and drought were like during the 1930s. To them, these were experiences so profound they became proper nouns: the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl. Not quite 30 years later, when I was a boy verging on gangly teenager, a thunderstorm of unusual menace advanced one […]

Gold has long been advertised as the “gift that lasts a lifetime.” True to the slogan, gold does last a lifetime, as demonstrated by the enduring shine that gold jewelry and coins display even after thousands of years of being buried or lost at sea. Unfortunately, gold’s shine isn’t the only thing that lasts a […]

Thick weeds, old lumber, and brush surround our house, about a mile of dirt road from St. Ignatius, Mont., and about 45 miles north of Missoula. Neighbors and friends, accustomed to rural ways, suggested a fire to clean things up a bit. Despite childhood stints in the country, I am a Montana city person adjusting […]

The company that powers the computer I write on is getting the kind of attention corporations loathe. Idaho Power Co. and its three Hells Canyon dams on the Snake River have been thrust into the center of a controversy over a provision of the energy bill that would give power companies more control over the […]

I hope no one yanks my green card for this admission, but I’m beginning to hate the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It’s not that I’m for drilling. There’s no reason to drill in a place set aside for wildlife when more efficient vehicles could eliminate demand for the oil. But as a Westerner newly relocated […]

In the 1870s, a Salish Indian brave named Walking Coyote led a handful of bison calves from the Great Plains westward to the home of his people in Montana’s Mission Valley. Some traditions say he did so because he saw that Europeans were hunting the beast to extinction. Bison proliferated in the lush valley, which […]

By the end of the year, only $28 million will be left in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund account. Superfund pays for the reclamation of abandoned toxic waste sites, and $28 million barely affords a study just to figure out how to clean up one of the 1,200 deserted dumps wasting away in American […]

The successful effort by Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano to rename a Phoenix mountain after an American Indian woman killed in Iraq needn’t have turned into a nasty fight. Gov. Napolitano wanted to honor an Arizona citizen, Pfc. Lori Piestewa, a member of the Hopi Nation, because she was the first American woman to die in […]

I may not be a fan of George Bush’s foreign policy, but I fully agree with one point the president repeatedly made in the months before the Iraq war. The president told us that “sometimes you have to fight.” As Mr. Bush explained, when the other guy just doesn’t get it, he needs a punch […]