Writers on the Range

As near as I can tell from historical accounts, in order to celebrate a traditional Christmas in the West a couple of hundred years ago, you needed to get so riotous and tipsy that you could forget that you were starving. Rather than decorate any evergreen trees, you’d happily burn them as firewood. In 1800, […]

He tells me to park close to the vigil site, but far enough down the block to allow for a view from the street. It is noon, a spectacular fall day. The sun is edging onto the bench where dad likes to sit. We unload signs – “War Is Not The Answer,” “An Eye for […]

Las Vegas is a city that plays the odds, and if you want to know which odds to play, you need to follow the smart money. Unfortunately, that money seems to be moving toward building yet more dams that will drain yet more water out of an already oversubscribed Colorado River. Unlike most cities in […]

I’ve told this story before. This is the abbreviated version. I’d just moved to a rural mountain community high in California’s Sierra Nevada, a young father with two kids and long hair. It was 1970, the Viet Nam war raged on, and wearing long hair was often enough to provoke some people, who, on occasion, […]

It wasn’t unexpected that Big Oil would run rampant when it first started fracking the Bakken in western North Dakota in 2008.  The region had been steadily losing population and suffering from a stagnant economy since the 1930s, so it was in no position to reject the high-paying jobs that accompanied the boom.  North Dakota’s […]

It’s 5:30, dusk scudding into darkness. A fawn stands on the centerline of Highway 20, gazing with vacant curiosity into my Pathfinder’s grille as the truck’s brake pads challenge the laws of physics having to do with objects at rest and in motion. A car is barreling down at us from the other direction. The […]

The U.S. Senate is set to take up a deeply flawed Nevada wilderness bill in the November lame-duck session. If passed, it would set terrible precedents for all future wilderness bills. The bill, HR 5205, introduced by Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., bundles together seven separate Nevada lands bills, and after being amended by the House […]

I’ve usually admired David Brooks, New York Times columnist, and Mark Shields, campaign strategist and analyst, for their smart political opinions on public television. So it was sad recently to see their heads stuck in Alberta’s tar sands over the highly controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which will surely be reintroduced in Congress next year. Pipeline […]

Remember that fourth-grade Thanksgiving pageant, the big feast with Indians providing most of the food? Squanto was there, kindly teaching the Pilgrims how to put a fish in a hole to grow corn and beans and squash. Somehow I don’t remember learning that Squanto — more properly “Tisquantum”— was taken to England and then abducted […]

With Thanksgiving near, it’s the season to be grateful and take stock of our situation. In that spirit, here’s some of what I’ve been thinking about. First, as we conclude our celebration of the golden anniversary of the Wilderness Act, let’s give a cheer to the 88th U.S. Congress, which, in 1964, passed the law […]

The following is just a sample of what public-land managers have encountered while on the job in the last few years: On a dirt road in Arizona, a man who was paranoid about the federal government aimed a rifle at federal rangers and opened fire. In California, a shooter targeted a firefighter in a national […]

John Hickenlooper, the recently re-elected (by a whisker) governor of Colorado, should be called the new “silver fox” for his work on water sharing, in memory of Delphus Carpenter, who earned that title back in 1922. That year, Carpenter cajoled seven Western states into signing the historic agreement that divvied up the Colorado River. Hickenlooper […]

Only God can make a tree, but only Congress can designate a wilderness, and the Wilderness Act, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, became the law it is today largely because a powerful Colorado congressman, Wayne Aspinall, blocked the legislation in his committee over and over again. His stubborn opposition, however, gave birth to […]

I’m biased in favor of flowing rivers, yet my favorite, the Rio Grande, has been anything but flowing lately. Over the past few years, it’s been drying up downstream of Albuquerque every irrigation season between mid-June and Halloween. It seems odd to say it, but the river hasn’t the right to its own water. Instead, […]