The Magazine

The discovery of a potential major oil and gas deposit in the heart of the Bridger-Teton National Forest in western Wyoming is creating a conflict between two highly valued resources: oil and wilderness.

Although the sagebrush flats of southern Wyoming appear monotonous and dry, to biologists they are a complex natural system — one that is likely to be disturbed by extraction of coal.

The stories of solar homeowners indicate that harnessing the sun for heat by putting collectors on a roof may not be as simple as it appears.

If America expects to preserve the grizzly bear, certain public land use policies must change. And there is no better example than the custom of allowing thousands of domestic sheep to graze the last remnants of grizzly habitat around Yellowstone National Park.

In the West, environmentalists and farmers and ranchers have worked together for several years opposing some common threats, including coal mines, loss of agricultural water, the social impact of industrialization, and transmission lines.

Concerned citizens in Montana’s North Fork Flathead River valley are organizing against a proposal by Sage Creek Coal Ltd. to mine coal upstream, across the Canadian border.

ANG Coal Gasification Company quieted opposition to its plans for a facility in North Dakota by purchasing land owned by members of the community who opposed the project.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has approved the Northern Cheyenne Indian tribe’s request for Class I — the most stringent classification — air quality for its reservation, a decision that could have a major impact on nearby construction of the Colstrip power plant units 3 and 4.

Recent headlines saying that 22 Indian tribes are meeting with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) have brought national attention to the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, an organization that had virtually been ignored since its formation in 1975.

HCN editor Dan Whipple takes stock of the environmental movement and its quest for clout in the political system.

A Colorado company called Bio-Gas claims it can provide rural electricity by harvesting and digesting cow manure to produce burnable methane gas.

A group led by the Bureau of Reclamation and the Bureau of Land Management embarks along Wyoming’s Sweetwater Canyon to determine whether this river section measures up to Wild and Scenic status.

A massive Canadian energy complex along the U.S.-Canadian border in Saskatchewan is becoming one of the most complicated legal controversies the West has ever faced.

President Jimmy Carter’s national energy plan calls for a heavy reliance on coal to bridge the gap between today’s oil- and gas-fueled society and the renewable resource-based society of the future.

In the wake of the defeated plans for the giant Kaiparowits power plant, another coal-fired power plant is planned for the canyon country of southern Utah — the 3,000 megawatt Intermountain Power Project, to be located 10 miles east of Capitol Reef National Park.

For the Shoshone and Arapahoe Indian tribes, everything is at stake in a suit filed by the state of Wyoming requiring more than 20,000 water users in the Bighorn River basin to defend their water rights.

Proposed water projects and uncontrolled pumping of groundwater for irrigation threaten the wide-flowing, flooding, living oasis that sandhill cranes call home on Nebraska’s Platte River.

Although Utah is one of the first Western states to require all new buildings to meet energy conservation standards, it has also been instrumental in pushing the controversial Intermountain Power Project coal-fired power plant.

Using geothermal energy to warm your home and heat your water may sound like a far-fetched idea, but some residents of Warm Springs Avenue in Boise, Idaho, have been doing it for 85 years.

Today, with rising energy costs, wood burning is probably the fastest growing form of alternative renewable energy use.