Basin states have had 2 years to figure out how to share the shrinking river. Will they get there before the feds step in?
Deserts
Posted inSeptember 2025: Who Controls Our Food?
The Rio Grande’s pecan problem
How Big Ag is threatening New Mexico’s water supply.
Posted inArticles
Counting flowers to read the saguaro’s future
Saguaros are struggling to cope with extreme weather, monitoring studies reveal.
Posted inJuly 2025: Seeds as Sustenance
Beneath the blazing sun, Black Phoenix sows community
Climate change is creating a mental health crisis in Phoenix. A budding movement in the desert might solve it.
Posted inArticles
What Sonoran Desert fungi are teaching scientists
The understudied mycorrhizal fungi are vital to ecosystems and may prove critical to the survival of fragile deserts stressed by climate change.
Posted inArticles
Hunting for dark nights and wishing on stars
A bike ride into the desert and an author in search of darkness.
Posted inArticles
Artist Cecilia Vicuña’s Sonoran Quipu reassembles the desert
The installation at Tucson’s Museum of Contemporary Art is made from the landscape.
Posted inArticles
The recipe for restoring damaged lands is missing one key ingredient: seeds
A new report highlights recovery solutions to fires, droughts and other climate catastrophes.
Posted inMay 1, 2022: New Ways of Seeing the West
There are millions of acres of ‘failing’ rangelands, data shows
54 million acres of federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management aren’t meeting the agency’s own land-health standards.
Posted inArticles
Border wall scars: ‘It feels like if someone got a knife and dragged it across my heart.’
Tribal leaders and Borderlands communities reflect on their fruitless struggle to stop the wall.
Posted inArticles
The Border Patrol is leaving migrants to die
A new report shows that the agency systematically ignores emergencies — neglecting thousands of lives.
Posted inArticles
Can we write our way out of catastrophe?
In Ben Ehrenreich’s ‘Desert Notebooks,’ a fragmented style attempts to change the way we think, and write, about the Anthropocene.
Posted inArticles
Ranchers blindsided by Trump’s border wall
They built a coalition to protect open space. Now, they’re up against the country’s largest construction project.
Posted inArticles
Trump’s border wall threatens fish species
The U.S. is skirting conservation laws and withdrawing millions of gallons of groundwater.
Posted inSeptember 2, 2019: In Bad Faith
The desert gets a biocrust skin graft
Without its cover of living microorganisms, the desert is eroding.
Posted inJuly 21, 2019: A Radical Return
Last words from a desert scribe
Essayist Ellen Meloy’s posthumous collection is profound, outspoken and hilarious.
Posted inJuly 21, 2019: A Radical Return
Paranoia and a ‘preposterously’ oversized water tank
An affluent Utah community spent millions to extinguish its fear of fire. Decades later, they’re still trying to buy their way out of a bottomless pit.
Posted inJune 24, 2019: Losing Lake Coeur d'Alene
The West’s worst fires aren’t burning in forests
Range fires get bigger every year, threatening sagebrush habitat and rural towns.
Posted inArticles
The grassroots groups helping asylum seekers on the border
‘We had no choice but to make it work.’
Posted inArticles
Russian investors are keen on Nevada’s copper
Demand for clean cars is causing an uptick in copper mining in the West, but at what cost?