The Magazine

Utah Governor Scott Matheson flatly opposes the Department of Energy’s proposal to bury high-level nuclear wastes just outside Canyonlands National Park.

The Chimney Rock Coal Company wants to mine a Forest Service site in southwestern Colorado that’s home to well-preserved Anasazi ruins.

The West has been obsessed by something it calls “economic development” since the great resource bust of 1981-1982 turned attention from mining, drilling and cutting to tourism, manufacturing, and agriculture.

An issue exploring the role of nature in National Park management, plus a new Department of Interior program to make park management more efficient.

A special issue exploring how and why the latest efforts to cook liquid oil out of oil shale are rapidly failing.

The MX missile deployment in Nebraska and Wyoming is meeting stepped up opposition, with Colorado pressing to be included in an assessment of regional impacts.

The Linowes Commission has found James Watt’s Department of Interior guilty of man-handling coal leasing.

EPA Superfund whistleblower Hugh Kaufman travels the country telling one horror story after another about the Carter and Reagan administrations.

A special issue on Wyoming’s politics, its economics, and the way it welcomed home James Watt. Plus, a centerspread on Wyoming’s marooned antelope.

A special issue on the drowning of Salt Lake City, Colorado Gov. Lamm’s year 2005 vision, and the Rockies’ role in a boomless future.

Grassroots groups, not government regulators, are reacting to problems at the Envirosafe toxic waste landfill in Idaho, a facility once considered the safest in the West.

1984 is ripe for a flood of state wilderness bills to pass Congress, meaning that President Ronald Reagan could end up signing more wilderness legislation into law than any other chief executive.

The biggest earthquake in the United States in 24 years rippled through Idaho on October 28, blasting trees from the ground and causing widespread damage.

In Montana, a construction workers’ union has joined the state’s leading environmental group in a lawsuit against a power company and state agencies that granted permits for a 200-mile-long natural gas pipeline.

Even in defeat, Secretary of Interior James Watt has achieved a certain triumph. He has denied the fruits of victory to those who finally beat him.

The battle over oil and gas drilling in the Palisades area straddling the Idaho-Wyoming border illustrates the chaotic way in which natural resource development and wilderness preservation decisions are made.

Was this year’s high water a “controlled flood” as the Bureau of Reclamation contends? Or was it, as residents along the Lower Colorado maintain, a “manmade disaster”?

Despite a few rearguard skirmishes over the “scientific” question, the real issue has become: how much reduction in acidic emissions will there be, and how will those reduction be achieved?

Everyone from dam builders to dam blockers agrees that no new, large and federally funded dams are likely to be built.

The Rockies and Great Plains are home to virtually all of the United States’ land-based nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).