Since last year’s presidential campaign and election, I’ve received a number of letters from readers angered by what they call the “political” content in the magazine. Stick to the West’s core issues, they say, topics like timber and grazing, and leave our nation’s divisive politics out. Unfortunately, that just isn’t possible. The American West has had a complicated relationship with politics and the federal government from the get-go, and under the current administration, that relationship is feeling a new strain.
National politics play out in other stories, too. Correspondent Krista Langlois describes the problem of aging dams, like California’s Oroville, as researchers warn of potential super-floods. And correspondent Josh Zaffos describes the anxieties of refugees and undocumented workers in northern Colorado — people who are as much a part of our region as our loggers and ranchers. The West is as bound to national politics as anywhere else. There is no way to separate the defunding of science from the xenophobic policies of our current president, nor those policies from the ecological destruction we continue to inflict on the region. For readers who wish it were otherwise, I apologize. But if you see these issues as part of a larger story, the story of the West, and thereby of the United States, then read on.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline You can’t take politics out of the West.
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