The Magazine

The conflict over logging on Arizona’s Escudilla Mountain is headed to the courts unless the Forest Service, now mired in increasingly poor public relations statewide, reopens the possibility of a settlement.

The Decker-Birney Resource Study has identified 285,000 acres of superior coal reserves along the Tongue River in southern Montana, stirring up opposition from local ranchers.

Land use planning has entered a new phase of complexity as tight money has slowed the pace of condominium and second home development.

A curious thing is happening on the way to energy independence: an east-to-west shift in coal production is actually going to be putting western coal into power plants in West Virginia and Ohio.

Plans to extract oil shale from northwestern Colorado raise concerns about how to balance energy development with efforts to address social impacts, air pollution, oil shale tailings, and impacts to water and wildlife.

A look at how Montana and Wyoming towns booming from energy development — Rock Springs, Gillette, Hanna, Colstrip, Lame Deer — are responding to pressures on their infrastructure, schools, police, health services, and social fabric.

There is nothing new about tapping the wind to produce energy, but a growing number of scientists are turning their attention to wind power as an alternative to burning fossil fuels.

Water — the lack of it and the need for it — looms ever larger in the West’s developing energy situation. Water is used in huge amounts to generate electricity in coal-fired plants, to gasify coal, to liquify coal, and to develop oil shale.

Few environmental challenges seem as stark as the threat to dam a stretch of wild river like Montana’s Upper Missouri. But the heyday of big dam building may be nearing an end.

Montana Gov. Thomas Judge has notified Interior Secretary Rogers Morton that the state will take the lead in regulating coal-fired power plants, rather than waiting for federal environmental impact statements for plants like Colstrip.

As independent, idealistic inventors forge ahead with plans to heat buildings with the sun, traditional institutions and businesses are taking cautious steps in the same direction.

The blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the Hawaiian hoary bat and the light-footed clapper — all endangered species — don’t receive the attention they deserve.

North Dakota landowners and policy makers are weighing the “one-time harvest” of strippable lignite coal against the productivity of agricultural land that would be sacrificed.

Arnold Miller, the leader of the United Mine Workers of America, discusses the energy crisis and the coal industry.

Even as 146 nuclear power plants are under construction or on order — on top of 36 nuclear power plants already operating — public understanding of peaceful use of atomic energy has been inhibited by the Atomic Energy Commission.

With the present shortage of crude oil, industry is bidding hundreds of millions of dollars on leases to tap shale oil on public lands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

Even though President Richard Nixon didn’t mention solar energy once in his outline of “Project Independence,” there’s a lot of solar energy around, and working solar equipment exists today. If the U.S. were really determined to introduce solar energy in the 1970s, it could be done.

We have been enjoying an energy “high” for as long as most Americans can remember. And the most remarkable thing about the energy crisis is not that it came so fast or that is may have been contrived, but that we lack specific information about the energy we depend on.

Faced with growing volumes of trash, states like Connecticut and Oregon are leading the way with programs to reuse and recycle solid waste.