The Magazine

Rarely in the history of the country has there been a relationship as close and as symbiotic — and as effective for conservation — as existed between President Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the newly formed U.S. Forest Service.

Despite a resurgence of enthusiasm for wind power, expensive new wind turbines — many of which are proving unreliable — are undermining widespread adoption.

Targhee National Forest officials, who manage nearly all of the Island Park Geothermal Area adjacent to Yellowstone National Park, are being pressured by more than 70 parties who want to drill for hot water that would be used to generate electricity.

Out of necessity, many residents in and around sunny but cold Taos, N. Mex., have turned to passive solar technology to heat their homes.

To try and bring the elusive black-footed ferret back from the brink of extinction, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will conduct stealthy inventories of the the animal’s habitat.

As nuclear waste piles up, environmentalists predict that the West will bear the main burden of a mounting federal effort to dispose of the waste.

New coal slurry pipeline proposals are raising major regional questions concerning water use priorities, Indian water rights, interstate cooperation and competition, and perhaps even the scale of future Western coal development.

With varying degrees of success, mediation has been substituted for legal or political confrontation in a number of recent environmental battles.

When Congress passed the Clean Air Act amendments in 1977, it didn’t approve federal funds for the studies necessary for air quality classification, meaning that most states have trouble accessing the law’s protections.

President Jimmy Carter has taken the first step toward establishing a national Indian water policy, which has been defined de facto by large water projects that flood Indian lands while not providing a proportional share of the water.

In Colorado, the public has rallied to the defense of “nongame” wildlife — animals that are deemed to have no commercial value, and have tended to be overlooked in management — but the effort may be undermined by the state legislature.

The Bureau of Land Management, the least known and most maligned public land agency, oversees more than 350 million acres of lands that are increasingly valuable and cherished despite being handed down from the failed policies of Western settlement.

As the 96th Congress convenes, the gains of the past decade and a half may be sorely tested by legislators well-tuned to demands for fiscal conservatism.

As the Bureau of Land Management inventories potential wilderness on the 174 million acres its oversees in the Western states, industry spokesmen are leveling charges of “land grab” while conservationists are concerned about the compressed timetables and a lack of knowledge.

A plan to divert the South Platte River in order to recharge groundwater and ease an agricultural water shortage on Colorado’s northeastern plains might also create wetlands that would provide needed wildlife habitat.

The Tennessee Valley Authority will begin remediation of a uranium mill in Edgemont, South Dakota, and the agreement about who will pay for the cleanup could pave the way for remediation of other sites across the West that are contaminated by uranium.

Largely because of pocketbook promises from the candidates, voters in the Northern Plains and Rockies states have apparently stacked the deck against progressive environmental lawmaking in the state legislatures next year.

Amory Lovins delivers a message that grassroots efforts and individual action can create a transition to “soft technology” — diverse, renewable, relatively simple and matched in scale to their end use needs.

As the National Park Service has expanded to manage new and unusual places, it has grown into a sprawling agency that is less professional than the Forest Service, less dedicated to management principles than the Fish and Widlife Service, and more set in its ways than the Bureau of Land Management.

Despite criticism, Alan Merson, recently appointed the regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency in Denver, doesn’t back down from claims that he’s an environmentalist.