The Magazine

The atomic age began with a big bang. The buildup to the Cold War took place in a few short years. But the struggle over its legacy and lessons for humanity have just begun.

Fear of the Supreme Court leads tribes to accept an adverse decision, while a new electric power technology could help the Grand Canyon and salmon.

A primer on Election 1992 in ten Western states.

Today, across the West, scientists, rockhounds and those who collect for profit are battling over the bones of the 100-million-year-old wildlife of the Mesozoic.

Pulling his horse up short, U.S. Forest Service District Ranger Steve Posey turns to
watch a helicopter fly overhead with another load of concrete and building materials dangling from its belly …

Beavers on a ranch in Idaho have turned a previously gouged creek bottom into a wetland brimming with wildlife and produced a new pasture for the ranch’s livestock.

The $4 billion Central Arizona Project provides water, but few can afford to buy it.

Dams and coal hit the age of limits.

Conservation comes of age.

A century-long battle for water rights waged by the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in Arizona ended as Western film rarely do: The Indians won.

Two Idaho and Montana studies by the Forest Service represent the first full-scale efforts by the agency to control damage caused by grazing, but substantial improvements on the range may be a long way off.

For more than 100 years, the last thing the people of Victor, Colo., would think of doing is to say “no” to gold mining. Now they are saying “whoa.”

Politicians, environmentalists and business leaders agree, the 1992 congressional campaign in Montana (between Pat Williams, a Democrat, and Ron Marlenee, a Republican) is likely to result in the most important — and interesting — election in perhaps a generation.

The General Accounting Office (GAO) repeatedly criticizes the BLM for mismanaging livestock on public lands.

Until recently, Las Vegas appeared to be thriving on its unique brand of illusion, while the rest of the country wallowed in a deepening recession. Now hard times have come to Glitter Gulch and the Strip, too, once thought immune to economic doldrums.

HCN editor Ed Marston says: The dozen or so articles in this issue came out of two visits to the high desert country of southeastern Oregon in summer and fall 1991. I went there convinced that, perhaps over the medium term, public-land ranching was doomed.”

The key question in 1992 is whether pro-fish political forces, with the aid of the Endangered Species Act, can change dam operations fast enough, and significantly enough, to save the salmon.

The assumption underlying new county ordinances is that grazing permits are the “intangible” property of the permittee. Federal agencies, meanwhile, insist that grazing permits have always been a privilege, not a right.

… but the trouble is few want to hear that thousands of acres are poisonous to plants, cows and people.

Apaches split over nuclear waste, the government seeks radiation warnings that will endure the test of time, and more.