The Magazine

In Las Vegas, strong unions help service workers achieve the kind of prosperity and security seldom reached by the working-class people of the West’s non-union resort towns.

In the Interior West, politicians must work with federal agencies and let go of fading extractive industries, if the region is to thrive as part of the nation and not be overrun by Bruce Babbitt’s new national monuments.

The Yellowstone River is the longest undammed river in the West, but Montana’s rapid growth is affecting it, as property owners afraid of floods lay huge amounts of riprap along its banks.

Asbestos-laced dust from a vermiculite mine near Libby, Mont., has caused illness and death among locals for decades, but it is only recently that the media – and victims – have called W.R. Grace & Co. to account.

The land trust movement is bigger than the earliest groups imagined, but the challenge the 250 Western groups face is even bigger, as development swallows the last open space.

While cash-strapped land managers praise the Recreation Fee Demonstration Program, some recreationists and activists rail against it, and others point out that the program isn’t producing as much money as was hoped for.

Lyle McNeal revived the Churro sheep, a dying breed, and helped the Navajos who once depended on them, but now the professor is locked in a bitter battle over the sheep and other issues with Utah State University, which once supported the project.

Recreationists of every kind have long used Colorado’s White River National Forest as a playground, and the Forest Service’s proposed new plan, which would limit some activities in an attempt to help the forest, is being met with a lot of anger.

In Washington, conservationists, farmers, and federal and state agencies are passionately debating whether four dams on the lower Snake River should be breached in an attempt to restore endangered salmon and steelhead runs.

In Colorado’s San Luis Valley, Peggy Godfrey works hard raising sheep, writing cowboy poetry, helping neighbors at calving time and living what she describes as the life of a free woman.

While Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt considers greater protection for Oregon’s Steens Mountain, local ranchers and environmentalists argue over whether the land should become a cow-free national monument or a conservation area that would allow grazing.

President Clinton and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt have a new strategy for protecting and managing the public lands, encouraging citizens and politicans to implement national conservation values in a regional and local way.

New Mexico’s Petroglyph National Monument is threatened by problems that include the runaway growth of the neighboring city of Albuquerque, disagreements over how to manage the resource, and a controversial, embattled superintendent, Judith Cordova.

In northern New Mexico, the small, family-owned Sipapu Ski Area is battling the little farming town of Dixon over water rights to the Rio Pueblo and Rio Embudo, tributaries of the Rio Grande. Plus, the endangered silvery minnow is forcing the water users of the Middle Rio Grande in New Mexico to reconsider the ways cities, towns, pueblos and farms have always made use of the river.

A hike through the old growth of Olympic National Park with former millworker Jim Podlesny reveals more than one way to look at a giant Douglas-fir, and also at the life of a one-time logging community.

In Nevada, Walker Lake is slowly disappearing, as local farmers, an Indian tribe and conservationists battle over the rights to the water that once filled the lake.

In this special issue: city-dwellers’ usual support for the Endangered Species Act can be severely tested when an endangered species is found in or near their own backyards.

After a century of poisoning and shooting the black-tailed prairie dog at will, ranchers are up in arms over the push by conservationists to have the animal listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Jon Marvel, Hailey, Idaho, architect, founded the Idaho Watersheds Project to target public-lands grazing, but his notoriously in-your-face, confrontational style has roused a lot of controversy along the way.

The series “The Hidden West” is High Country News’ look at communities that are on the edge and often uncertain of their future.