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Jackson Hole environmentalists and local government suffered two big defeats recently in the ongoing war over oil and gas leasing on Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.23/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E

Statewide, conservation and outdoor issues played a key role only in the race won by Rep. Richard Stallings. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.22/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E

The mining industry trumped a citizens’ action group on initiatives that would have forced tougher reclamation and water protection standards and raised state taxes on gold mined by heap leaching or in open pits. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.22/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E

Mining is being shoved off the West’s center stage and into a smaller and smaller corner. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.20/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E

A combination of technological change and free market ideology has led the nation to abandon not just railroad and bus lines but its long-held commitment to universal transportation and communication. The article describes the Balkanization process and its consequences for the rural West. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.20/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E

Until the early 1980s, southern Utah was a battleground between extraction and preservation. Now, Ray Wheeler writes in the conclusion of his four-part series, the struggle is between industrial tourism, typified by Lake Powell and its several million annual visitors, and the more modest home-grown tourism centered on the region’s beauty and its small communities. (To […]

In theory, wild, beautiful and lightly populated Idaho should be bursting with national parks. In fact, its ranching, logging and mining roots have kept it totally free of parks. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.19/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E

Ray Wheeler wanders across southeastern Utah, attempting to discover why the area is so bound to extraction, even against its own economic interest, and whether change is possible. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.19/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E

In theory, every U.S. citizen has an equal say in the management of public lands. In fact, residents of small towns dotted across the rural West exert a disproportionate control over those lands. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.19/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E

Butte, Montana is finding, under the leadership of an energetic chief executive, that there is life after mining. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.19/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E

Miles City, a community of 10,000 which has spent 100 years living and breathing ranching, is experiencing traumatic change as economic and other forces shove the family ranch off the Western stage. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.18/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E

The rural West believes all wealth comes out of the ground as food, as logs or as mined ore. Now comes noted writer Peter F. Drucker to say that the land’s commodities are increasingly irrelevant to the production of wealth. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.18/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E

When the thermometer drops to 35 degrees below zero and winds whip off the Sweetgrass Hills to sift snow through the cracks of his homestead shack near the Canadian border, Lloyd Oswood turns up the fuel oil burner in his converted wood stove. “It’s not the best goddamn thing,” he said as he took another […]

Despite its posturing as the helpless colonial victim of powerful corporations and the federal government, the West isn’t so much weak as it is passive. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.18/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E

Lest you think that the entire West succumbed to the hypnotic beat of boom, boom, boom, here is an account of how the conservative state of Idaho behaved conservatively — resisting the lure of a coal-fired power plant that was to carry the state to the land of milk and honey. Download entire issue to […]

To an economist, this is a subversive piece because it talks about the meaning of work, rather than about the price of labor and material. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.17/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E

Thanks to a mixture of geography, climate and natural resources, the rural West became the domain of a particular way of life that has lasted for 100 years. But today its economies are in retreat, and the Western frontier is reopening. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/20.17/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E