The Magazine

How the Russians conquered the West.

Dave Foreman and three others are arrested for allegedly trying to fell a tower that carries high-voltage lines used by the Central Arizona Project.

It wasn’t until timber sales planner Jeff DeBonis was transferred to the Willamette National Forest — the biggest timber-producing national forest in the country — that what he saw made him open his mouth.

In the midst of Wyoming’s energy depression, Char-Fuels of Wyoming, Inc. seemed to offer a dream come true.

The U.S. Department of Energy is preparing to place the nation’s first high-level nuclear waste repository on federal land adjacent to a former nuclear test site.

This issue began months ago when staffer Becky Rumsey wrote to some 200 nonprofit groups offering outdoor or environmental education programs in the West, asking who their clients were and how their organizations were faring.

As a harsh winter follows a summer of fire, up to one-third of Yellowstone National Park’s 21,000 northern herd elk may die, either at the hands of hunters or from starvation.

At first it looked like simply another battle over trees, but this particular environmental war in Montana has a political twist.

With contracts that insulate it from low energy prices, the Great Plains coal gasification plant in Beulah, N.D., endures as a relic of the federal government’s 1970s syn-fuels fascination.

What does oil shale’s past mean for its future?

Ready access to fishing and hunting in states like Montana, Idaho and Wyoming is now threatened by the trend toward fee hunting by owners of large blocks of land.

Many agree that Lujan won’t have the aggressive hostility to conservation interests of a James Watt. Beyond that, few can say.

By a two-to-one margin, Grand County residents voted down a toxic waste incinerator slated for the all-but-abandoned railroad town of Cisco.

The Department of Energy — a mainstay of the West’s economy — is in serious trouble.

Jackson Hole environmentalists and local government suffered two big defeats recently in the ongoing war over oil and gas leasing on Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest.

Analysis of 1988 Election results from 13 Western states.

Part 4 of The Reopening of the Western Frontier, a four-issue series exploring the West’s changing economic and cultural landscape.

Part 3 of The Reopening of the Western Frontier, a four-issue series exploring the West’s changing economic and cultural landscape.

Part 2 of The Reopening of the Western Frontier, a four-issue series exploring the West’s changing economic and cultural landscape.

Thanks to a mixture of geography, climate and natural resources, the rural West became the domain of a particular way of life that has lasted for 100 years. But today its economies are in retreat, and the Western frontier is reopening.