The Magazine

Tenacious animals like crows and coyotes have made a home
for themselves in the suburbs – and even downtown areas – of places
like Seattle and Phoenix. Can we make cities friendlier for
less-adaptable species?

Also in this
issue: Hunters turn out in record numbers as Colorado
tries to figure out just how serious the chronic wasting disease
outbreak is.

After a decade and a half without reasonable or effective
leadership,Arizona has become the West’s most incompetently run
state, its politics propelled almost entirely by growth. This
year’s gubernatorial election offers a chance for change.

Also in this issue: The
1994 Northwest Forest Plan was seen as a watershed move to balance
logging with environmental protection. But logging companies say
the plan’s controversial species-management provision has put too
much land off-limits, and now the Bush administration is moving to
relax the rules.

California’s sprawling San Joaquin-Sacramento river
delta has been mercilessly shaped by agriculture and
water-development projects. A massive $8.7 billion plan holds hope
for restoring the Delta and helping sate California’s growing
thirst, but political infighting and a lack of funding have clouded
the project’s future. Also in this
issue: In central New Mexico’s Sandia and Manzano
mountains, drought, hunting and traffic accidents have cut black
bear populations in half. But for the second year in the row, the
state’s Department of Game and Fish has extended the bear hunting
season.

For nearly a century, the Imperial Valley’s wastewater has
kept the Salton Sea alive. Now, the push to make California more
watertight may threaten this wildlife haven – and Imperial’s
agricultural economy. Also in this
issue: The San Juan Basin, on the New Mexico-Colorado
border, has long been an oil and gas hotspot. It’s about to get
hotter: A new BLM management plan could add nearly 10,000 new wells
over the next 20 years.

As a new boom in coalbed methane gas drilling hits the
West, some counties are taking on industry-friendly state
regulating agencies and demanding that gas companies listen to
local concerns.

Also in this
issue: EPA chief Christie Whitman and Idaho Sen. Larry
Craig dipped champagne glasses in Idaho’s Lake Coeur d’Alene and
toasted the newly-created commission tasked with cleaning up mining
waste in the lake. But the Coeur d’Alene Tribe wants the problem to
be taken seriously.

The drought of 2002 has left the West blistered and burnt,
scientists predict worse to come. Have we learned anything yet?

Also in this issue: This
year’s drought has killed 10,000 cattle and ravaged the range. But
corruption and resentment over earlier attempts to control grazing
are stifling reform just when it’s needed most.

After generations of struggle, the Western Shoshone decide in a divisive election to accept land settlement payments from the federal government in lieu of the tribe’s ancestral lands, which one spanned the Great Basin.

A visit to the biggest forest fire in Colorado history — the Hayman Fire — and time spent with some of those battling it leads the author to speculate on the mystery and complexity of humanity’s relationship with fire.

The problem of controlling Africanized bees is now widespread, and some are taking advantage of the frightening invasion to earn a good living.

With 15 runs of salmon federally listed as threatened or endangered, a conservation group, Long Live the Kings, hopes hatchery reform can help save wild stocks of fish.

Wolves have been restored in the Northern Rockies, but their conflict with civilization now prompts wildlife managers to face some agonizing decisions about the animal’s future.

Inhabiting a parcel of land in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley demands a specific responsibility, according to the writer, who attempts ecological restoration on his piece of ground, to help bring back the West’s rich biological diversity.

The brine-shrimp industry of Great Salt Lake has helped put that misunderstood ecosystem under a microscope; can the lake be saved from its history of abuse and a rapidly increasing population around it?

When the dairy industry invades rural Idaho, communities face the dilemma of what to do with the waste cows produce. The huge dairy operations are contaminating local air and water.

In West Yellowstone, Mont., where snowmobile tourism is a mainstay of the economy, locals are split between fierce supporters of the industry and those who favor a little more quiet and a measure of control.

The author remembers his early days in a small Colorado mountain town, and ponders the economic and social changes that have slowly turned “Mendicant Mountain” into a bustling, expensive ski resort.

On South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, some Oglala Lakota are defying the federal government to grow industrial hemp, hoping that it can help to revitalize both the tribe’s economy and its government.

The last issue of the “Imagine a River” series on the Rio Grande examines how the river has become the “Rio Wimpy,” running out of water twice before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico.

Across the Interior West, as the sagebrush sea recedes under the environmental stress of human impacts, its emblematic bird, the sage grouse, is also in decline, and no one seems to know what to do about it.

Across the West, Native Americans are working to revive vanishing tribal languages, using their elders and language-immersion schools to try to gain fluent speakers.