The Magazine

Back in the ’70s, Montana led the way in progressive environmental legislation, but now with its economy faltering, those laws are being eviscerated, and environmentalists need to find a new strategy.

If the 1993 New Mexico Mining Act is allowed to work, it could usher in a new era of mine reclamation in which mines actually have to clean up and pay for the messes they leave behind.

Along New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, pueblo tribes are working to bring back the disappearing bosque – the cottonwood gallery forest that once lined the river, offering habitat, shade and leafy bounty to a dry landscape.

In Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, the coming energy boom in coalbed methane gas has local ranchers and environmentalists worried.

Three years after cows were banned from some Southwestern rivers, the San Francisco River in the Gila National Forest shows signs of recovery, but struggling ranchers and uneven wildlife numbers prove that the struggle over desert grazing is still alive.

Canadian activists trying to save Alberta’s Castle-Crown wildlands from rapid oil and gas development are frustrated by their nation’s lack of effective environmental protection laws.

For 30 years, activists have been working to remove two dams and restore salmon runs on Washington’s Elwha River, and now the goal is in sight — if the money comes through from Congress.

In Arizona’s Galiuro Mountains, desert streams appear and disappear during the course of a day, and the native fish that have adapted to this complex ecosystem face extinction due to introduced non-natives.

In California, the Forest Service issues a revolutionary management plan for the Sierra Nevada’s forests, putting the health of trees and wildlife before that of the timber industry.

In the Klamath River Basin on the Oregon-California border, farmers, Indians, wildlife refuges and now three endangered fish are fighting over scant water in a dry year, and some say the Endangered Species Act only makes the situation worse.

Greg Woodall and his sister, Carla, are focusing on Arizona’s state school trust land in their quest to save the desert landscape around Scottsdale, Ariz., through the McDowell Sonoran Preserve.

The unexpected power shift in the U.S. Senate raises environmentalists’ hopes that the high-level nuclear waste dump proposed for Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which once seemed unstoppable, may not be a “done deal” after all.

The Bonneville Power Administration has long provided the Northwest — especially its aluminum industry — with some of the cheapest public power, but drought, endangered salmon and the deregulated electricity market may just change all that.

In New Mexico, some Indian reservations are jumping on a surprising new economic bandwagon, making use of their land and water rights to build golf courses and resorts to attract golf-playing tourists.

Under the “4.4 Plan,” California will begin a water diet, designed to reduce the state’s use of Colorado River water over the next 15 years to the 4.4 million acre-feet it has long been allocated, but always exceeded.

In the wake of last summer’s devastating Western wildfires, the Forest Service is trying to figure out how to restore the unhealthy, doghair, fire-prone forests created by a century of fire suppression and indiscriminate logging.

A historian of fire recalls the “Big Blowup” of 1910, an explosion of wildfire in Idaho that took 78 lives, made a hero of ranger Ed Pulaski, and helped to share a century of fire policy on the national forests.

Patricia Mulroy, general manager of Las Vegas Valley Water District and Southern Nevada, Water Authority, has kept water coming to her booming desert city, but environmental concerns and water-quality problems are signs that her water empire can’t last forever.

In the West’s public schools, corporations and conservationists quietly compete to control what students will learn in the largely unregulated field of environmental education.

El Paso, Texas, is dependent on the underground waters of the Hueco Bolson, but as the population grows and the bolson declines, both the city and its sister across the border, Ciudad Juarez, are turning to the already overtaxed Rio Grande.