There’s the extinction crisis affecting animals and plants that’s 1,000 to 10,000 times the regular rate of extinction. Then there’s the erosion of soil, as half of the planet’s topsoil has been lost in the past 150 years.

Water pollution has increased because about 80% of untreated wastewaters worldwide get discharged into waterways that supply communities.

Worse is the elephant in the room—climate change—causing ever more major floods, violent hurricanes and extreme wildfires. Last year was also the first year the world exceeded the climate threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, at which climate impacts are expected to significantly increase.

These are just the headlines. It seems so grim today on Planet Earth that archaeologists, biologists and other ologists want to name this epoch the “Anthropocene”

for our human-dominated, hopeless present.

Is there an alternative to this gloom and doom? To function, I think there has to be, and much of that certainty comes out of a freshman course I teach called Environmental Conservation at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

A hundred or more students enroll each semester, representing majors from pre-business to interior design, and the students are just three months out of high school when they arrive in the fall. The world they’ve begun studying seems anything but stable.

At the beginning of the semester, I ask them if their generation can “save the world.” There are always optimists who say “yes,” though in recent years fewer and fewer hands reach for the ceiling.

Over the course of the semester, we discuss the losses on the land and to wildlife, as well as the impacts of human population growth, the starkly different levels of per-capita global consumption, and the unintended consequences of technology. 

We also gain familiarity with our local and regional watershed. We do that by participating in “ecological restoration” workdays, going to work on ranches with conservation easements. There the young students use their hands and tools to protect water sources, build wildlife-friendly crossings, and slow soil erosion by filling in gullies, among other solutions.

Watershed-based experiences like this can cut through the murky esoteric to the pragmatic: There are ways to live on our home planet without spoiling it. The best part is seeing students shifting away from a sense of despair.

Colorado has over 150 collaborative conservation groups—  collaborativeconservation.org—that bring people together where they live, work, recreate and worship. Their aim is to improve the health of soil, water, plants and wildlife. This movement has grown West-wide, spanning 11 states.

The antidote to our planet’s illnesses also has global reach. Paul Hawken, in his book, The Blessed Unrest, describes the more than one million bottom-up groups around the globe working toward environmental sustainability and social justice. Unlike traditional movements, this network is decentralized, collaborative, diverse and not driven by a single ideology or leader.

This good news applies to climate change as well, even though President Trump has, for the second time, removed the United States from the Paris Climate Accord. That leaves our country in the company of Yemen, Libya and Iran.

But people concerned about global warming reacted by going public and objecting. More than 3,800 leaders from America’s city halls, state houses, boardrooms and college campuses have signed the “We Are Still In” declaration  (https://www.wearestillin.com/we-are-still-declaration). Signers represent more than 155 million Americans and $9 trillion of the U.S. economy.

My gut tells me that many of us refuse to give in to hopelessness. But can young people, inheriting our mistakes and the determination of some to deny there’s even a crisis, “save the world”? That’s a gigantic ask.

But can they make the watershed where they live better? If the state of one watershed after another improves, might the Earth over time become healthier, one watershed at a time? All we can do where we live is to get involved in conservation locally, regionally or nationally, joining a group or starting our own.

We can also contact our elected representatives to protest this administration’s intent to maximize extractive uses on public lands.

Let’s choose hope, get our hands dirty, and make our optimism real.

Richard Knight is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He works at the intersection of land use and land health in the American West.

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DeVoto summed up the platform pressed by Western elected officials of his day in a memorable punchline: “Get out—and give us more money.” This “economic fantasy” is still with us, as DeVoto predicted, “yesterday, today, and forever.”

The new, fossil-fuel-friendly heads of federal land management agencies are serious about the “get out” part of that plea, firing thousands of their employees and closing dozens of offices across the West. Their list targets Fort Collins, Colorado; Flagstaff, Arizona; Moab and Salt Lake City, Utah; Lander, Wyoming; Boise, Idaho, and more. Local economies will lose millions they’ve depended on.

But Donald Trump and Elon Musk aren’t doing so well with the “give us more money” part. Voters who elected Trump may not get what they bargained for.

I have a home in southern Utah, in Torrey, gateway to Capitol Reef National Park. My neighbors in Wayne and Garfield counties, who gave well over 70 percent of their votes to Trump, often complain about federal overreach. They see conservation of national public lands as “locking up” land.

Yet Westerners love all that financial support coming in from the agencies they profess to hate. They rely on the federal government for so much more than they often acknowledge.

After a charming presentation about cowboy culture at Torrey’s nonprofit Entrada Institute recently, my wife asked a young rancher what his family did for health insurance.

“My wife works for the Forest Service,” he said. Indeed, government employees make up 23 percent of the workforce in Utah’s Garfield County and 25 percent in Wayne County. These salaries and the benefits that come with them are crucial to family stability.

A revealing interactive map in Grist magazine shows the reach of investment by the federal government through legislation passed by the Biden administration. I click on the town of Torrey and find tens of millions of federal dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law flowing into the county.

Think upgrades of rural airports, solar panels on small businesses, bridge replacements, removal of lead from drinking water—and on and on.

And then on February 14, the Department of the Interior announced the firings of more than 2,300 public servants at the Department of the Interior, including the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Geological Survey. With this “Valentine’s Day Massacre,” southern Utah communities will feel accelerating impacts — loss of income and benefits, more money going to unemployment payments, understaffed parks and monuments, irate visitors.

My inbox and social media feed are flooded with anecdotes about what these firings mean. One man grew up in a Park Service family and then worked as a park ranger himself for years. He transferred to the Forest Service recently, becoming a “probationary” employee only because he was new to his position. He lost his job and his career thanks to the Trump administration.

When rural Westerners say “get out” to the feds, I don’t think this is what they have in mind.

President Trump is also considering once more eviscerating national monument protection for Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears in southern Utah. These monuments have been good for local communities and economies.

The monuments haven’t locked up the land; ranchers still have their grazing permits. Pre-existing mining and drilling claims remain in force. And the conservation and tourism values of these designated preserves expand every year.

According to a recent Colorado College poll, 84 percent of Utahns support establishment of new national parks, national monuments, national wildlife refuges and tribal protected areas. Still, Utah’s governor, attorney general, and congressional delegation continue to waste millions on fruitless lawsuits attacking those same preserves.

Westerners are evolving; politicians aren’t keeping up. And yet we keep re-electing these same officials. Maybe, just maybe, the Trumpian war on civil servants will force a reckoning. We’ll re-evaluate why we need a robust federal presence in the West.

And our war against ourselves will end.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He worked for the National Park Service, BLM, and Forest Service in his twenties and has been a conservation advocate ever since.

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I have nothing against out-of-staters moving to Montana or working at a business. I fit both categories myself years ago. But I think this change in politicians’ backgrounds reflects a change in how Montanans view their identity.

Previous Montana politicians who weren’t government lawyers often came from farming and ranching or related businesses. Today’s business backgrounds are less intimate with Montana’s land. Gianforte started a software company. Sheehy founded imaging technology and aerial firefighting businesses. Downing, a real estate developer, has owned everything from self-storage units to vineyards.

Seeking business-friendly policies, Republicans have long favored candidates with business backgrounds. But today’s desire for political outsiders includes Democrats like Busse, a former firearms executive without experience in elected office. And recent high-profile Democratic candidates have included educators, managers, and a musician—in other words, people who have not worked daily with nature and its resources.

Montanans used to mistrust government officials who lacked intimacy with the land. But today, both parties elevate politicians who lack that intimacy, probably because Montanans care more about ideological issues such as immigration, abortion, inflation or gender identity.

Political power used to flow from grazing stock and vast acreages. Now it flows from Wall Street stock and scenic mansions. For example, Sheehy and Downing own homes in the chichi resort of Big Sky; Gianforte comes from the expensive Bozeman area; Busse comes from the scenic and pricey Flathead region.

Sure, those places are Montana. But Montana’s politicians once came from less-glamorous places, including bare-knuckle Butte, the faded mining metropolis; remote Libby, with its logging and mining economy; and dusty Billings, an oil and cow town. In the 2000 and 2004 gubernatorial elections, Democrat Brian Schweitzer owned a Flathead mint farm but bragged that he was raised on an eastern Montana cattle ranch.

In other words, politicians once claimed Montanan identity through shared experience. That often included in-state birth and always included land-based pastimes like hunting. Today it’s less “Are you a hunter?” than “Are you endorsed by the National Rifle Association?”

The shift makes it hard to interpret politicians’ actions. For example, in 2021, Governor Gianforte a killed a mountain lion and trapped and killed a wolf. Because he’s not a rancher-politician, we can’t understand, much less endorse, such acts in the context of a lifelong working relationship with land and livestock.

Similarly, Gianforte, Busse, and Downing have all been cited for various gradations of hunting violations. Should we judge them differently than we would a native-born hunter? And Sheehy’s company is deeply in debt. For a ranch, that wouldn’t be surprising. But for an aerospace company?

To the rest of the country, choosing leaders based on ideologies may sound familiar. But Montana, aka “Big Sky Country,” used to pride itself on being different. More place-based, more rural, more centered on the individual.

Outsiders may have dismissed such philosophies as insular and backward—but that dismissal was what made them outsiders.

How should we react to this change? We might celebrate that Montana is leaving behind its tired frontier myths. Or we might mourn the shift, because Montana’s extraordinary landscapes—and people’s deep relationships to them—were what once made the state special. As Montana changes from bovines to business and from rural to resort, its politics can feel like yet another big-box store featuring all the latest national trends.

Then there’s Senator Jon Tester, the lone elected Democrat who’s running for re-election. The third-generation farmer from the wide-open plains of Big Sandy represents the land-based tradition that Montanans once cherished. But do Montana voters still want a senator like that?

Regardless of outcomes this November, the act of choosing by ideology rather than deep roots in the land marks a huge change.

John Clayton is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. The author of books including Stories from Montana’s Enduring Frontier, his newsletter is naturalstories.substack.com.

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Most wetlands in the arid West owe their existence to the “inefficiencies” of unlined irrigation canals and flood irrigation. But when well-intentioned urban folks insist that irrigation companies use water more efficiently by piping their ditches, the result may be more about loss than water “saved” for rivers.

One of the least-known truths in the West is that many of our wetlands are the result of irrigated agriculture. For example, an irrigation company in northern Colorado irrigates about 24,000 acres, thanks to 146 miles of ditches.

The area served by the irrigation company also has approximately 1,300 acres of wetlands, and it’s no accident that most of those wetlands lie below a leaking ditch. A study by Colorado State University discovered this connection using heavy isotopes to create hydrographs of groundwater wells, ditch levels and precipitation. This is a West-wide issue.

We all know that climate change has been causing hotter, drier weather, and that helps reduce the flow of the Colorado River that 40 million Westerners depend on. In the Laramie Basin of Wyoming, 67% of its wetlands are attributed to agriculture. In North Park, Colorado, close to 75% of all wetlands are byproducts of irrigated agriculture.

Decades ago, Aldo Leopold wrote, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One, you think that heat comes from the furnace and two, you think that breakfast comes from the grocery store.”

May I add a third? We don’t know much about the water we depend on.

Farmers and ranchers produce two “goods,” a private good and a public good. They’re compensated for the private one by producing food. Their public goods, ecosystem services, are not compensated, though they include wetlands, biodiversity and plants sequestering carbon.

But knowing that rural agriculture uses 79% of the Colorado River’s water, our urban neighbors tell their rural counterparts to conserve water or, better yet, sell it to them.

Meanwhile, the environmental community would like rural agriculture to use less water so more could stay in the rivers to help fish and provide recreational opportunities.

Clearly, there are too many demands for the West’s diminishing water supply. Drinking water, ag water, river health. Where do wetlands fit in?

Wetlands cover 1% of the West’s land surface, yet halfof our threatened and endangered species rely on them. Wetlands serve a similar function to our kidneys: They filter out impurities from human land uses, making our environment healthier.

Perhaps it’s time for all of us to wise up a little. Many of these wetlands are human created; that is, they were created by farmers and ranchers and are not “natural.” Many will disappear in the pursuit of water conservation. Must it be water conservation and efficiency at all costs? 

Will we prioritize water for urban uses, including urban sprawl? Or will we support more water staying in our rivers to create a healthier environment? Will water for food production be considered a necessity? Do green lawns trump healthy rivers and wetlands?

With more informed conversations about our region, talks between rural and urban neighbors, perhaps we could pursue a triple bottom line: water for food production, water for urban uses, and, yes, water for our region’s rivers, streams and wetlands

Wouldn’t we all like that? Let’s figure out how to make that happen.

Rick Knight is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that seeks to spur lively conversation about the West. He works at the intersection of land use and land health in the American West.

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As a hunter myself, I understand their frustration.

But reducing non-resident tags, as Andrew Carpenter suggests, takes us in the wrong direction. The greatest threat to hunting now and in the future is the loss of habitat.

Private lands provide up to 80% of habitat for all wildlife species, including critical winter range that’s the limiting factor for most big game populations. Yet these family farms and ranches are struggling for economic survival and in many places are under immense development pressure.

According to the American Farmland Trust, Colorado is on track to lose approximately a half-million acres of open land in the next two decades. Other states have similarly alarming projections. As these lands disappear, so does the wildlife they support.

Income generated by providing access and outfitting services to out-of-state hunters is one of the few economic lifelines keeping ranches and habitat intact.

As New Mexico rancher Jack Diamond explained, “Without non-resident hunters, we couldn’t survive at this point in the ranching business. I don’t want to see this place subdivided, but we’d have to consider that as a last resort.”

David Olde, also a rancher from New Mexico, concurred: “We ended up with so many elk that we had to reduce our cattle. If I can’t sell hunts, what can I do—turn it into ranchettes?” 

For the fourth-generation Bramwell family ranch in Colorado, hunting income is an integral part of their operation.

“Our out-of-state clients have been coming here to hunt for generations,” Darla Bramwell said. “These migratory animals do not care whose grass they are eating or whose fences they tear down as they come from forest lands to eat in our hay meadows at night. Without the income from the non-resident hunters, something would have to give.”

Most states already heavily favor resident hunters, both in draw quotas and license fees. In Colorado, for example, residents are now allocated 75% of licenses while non-residents receive only 25%. Further, non-residents typically pay hundreds of dollars more per license than residents. In Colorado a resident bull elk tag is $61. A non-resident bull elk tag costs $760.

Several things happen when non-resident licenses are further reduced. First, it squeezes the bottom line of family farms and ranches that support wildlife and depend on hunting for a portion of their income.

Second, it harms local livelihoods and rural economies. Visiting hunters outspend resident hunters by a large margin, supporting local restaurants, hotels, stores, outfitting services and the local tax base in rural communities.

As Bramwell said, “When our out-of-state hunters come here, they not only support our family but they support our community. They buy local gifts, food, fuel, lodging, meat processing and taxidermy work.”

Diamond’s operation supports between seven to 10 guides from August through December. “These are good-paying jobs and the money generated is all spent locally in the two counties we live in,” he said. “We buy gas, propane, groceries. We also pay state gross receipts tax on the entire hunt.” 

Third, state wildlife agencies depend on the high license fees they charge out-of-state hunters.

Fourth, the loss of visiting hunters would remove incentives for prospective ranch buyers to invest in conserving and managing land for wildlife.

Finally, it would also mean more hunters crowding public lands and forcing elk to seek refuge on private lands, reducing hunter opportunity and creating a lower-quality hunt experience.

Pulling the economic rug out from under private lands and wildlife isn’t the answer. So, what is a better solution?

We need to increase, not decrease, incentives for landowners to conserve habitat and provide hunting opportunities. We should bolster, not undermine, the role of hunting in supporting agricultural lands and rural economies. And we need to improve wildlife habitat on public lands with better management of our forests and rangelands.

The future of hunting—and wildlife—both depend on landowners and sportsmen working together to sustain our remaining wild and working lands.

Lesli Allison is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. She is CEO of the Western Landowners Alliance, a West-wide, landowner-led organization that supports working lands, connected landscapes and native species. www.westernlandowners.org.

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In Durango, Colorado, former firefighter Jonathan Bartley runs a business called DuranGoats, along with partner Adrian Lacasse, and it’s so popular they’re booked daily. Their herd usually works along the wildland-urban interface of the San Juan National Forest, clearing undergrowth around private houses in heavily wooded, steep areas at the town’s periphery.

Thanks to his work, Bartley has come to a conclusion about newcomers to the West: “When people move here thinking ‘I’d love to live in the woods,’ they’re probably making a big mistake.” If they do choose to live surrounded by trees or next to a forest, though, he has advice.

Because utilities cut off electricity during fires, he suggests buying a generator to keep sprinklers for irrigation running. He also advises homeowners to install a metal roof to repel wind-driven sparks. Always, he adds, have a go-bag ready with your most important stuff if flight becomes necessary. Most of all, he wants homeowners to create flame breaks around their house with gravel while also cutting back trees and shrubs within 30 feet of the house.

That last bit of advice is key. Firefighters triage neighborhoods, he said, picking winners and losers. When they scan neighborhoods quickly, they tend to give defensible homes extra resources while deciding that the brushy, overgrown properties are going to be lost causes.

Bartley knows fire well. He worked for a private company called Oregon Woods as part of a hand crew of 20 based in Eugene, Oregon. There, the Holiday Farm Fire started within a half-mile of his house. From that experience, he learned that our approach to wildfire is backward: “We react, rather than manage landscapes ahead of time. Spending a few million dollars on fire mitigation would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars.”

These days, he said, “I’m still fighting fires — just with goats.”

Bartley is quick to point out that fire itself is beneficial to forests. Even Cal-Fire, the firefighting arm of the state of California, says on its website, “Fire removes low-growing underbrush, cleans the forest floor of debris, opens it up to sunlight and nourishes the soil.”

The problem across the West, Bartley said, is so many unmanaged dense forests full of deadfall and brush — “ladder fuels” — that allow fire to climb into tree canopies. “By the time wildfire gets into the treetops to become crown fires,” Bartley said, “firefighters have evacuated and are miles away.”

Everyone knows that western wildfires are becoming worse. Half of the 10 biggest fires in the United States this century all burned in this region. When wildfires grow massive and super-hot, they destroy forest ecosystems, leaving nearly sterilized bare ground that’s perfect for flammable cheatgrass to invade. That sets up burned areas to burn again, often quickly.

Bartley has big ambitions for his goat herd, which can clear a quarter-acre in a day. DuranGoats charges $400 daily, he said, much less than the cost of a crew of landscapers armed with weed whackers and loppers on hilly, broken terrain. Moreover, the goats’ sharp hooves churn the dirt and fertilize it with poop and pee, setting up a regenerative cycle that improves the soil.

In northwestern Montana, former journalist David Reese has a similar business called Montana Goat. His herd moves daily, and once the animals strip leaves off small trees and gobble up the cheatgrass and knapweed, he said, it’s quick work to chainsaw small trees and dead branches.

Like Bartley, Reese has found he has almost more business than he can handle. He plans to scale his herd to 400 goats, while Bartley aims to build up to 100 goats. Both are angling for bigger contracts from homeowners and also government agencies.

Finding four-legged workers is easy. “A male dairy goat has a life expectancy of a week,” said Bartley. “They’re not plump like meat goats, have no dairy value and often are dispatched at birth.”

Extra income for DuranGoats comes from outdoor weddings. Festooned with wildflowers and bells, goats roam the grounds and are a favorite with all the guests, even pitching in as ring-bearers, or in a pinch, groomsmen. But like any single man at a wedding, they have a wandering eye, which means that flower arrangements can be gobbled up quickly.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

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We’d spent the day building a sawbuck fence around a spring. From the spring, gravity would carry the water through a pipe to a stock tank in the middle of the pasture.

On this land protected by a conservation easement, cows would no longer drink, pee and poop while trampling the spring’s vegetation. The spring could recover while the cattle drank clean water elsewhere.

My students had spent the day outdoors in the company of their classmates doing challenging physical work. At the moment, though, the young people were trying not to fall asleep as we neared town.

Yet all day I’d seen the light in their eyes, and I could tell they felt pride in learning and exercising skills they hadn’t had before. They also clearly liked the idea of giving something back to land that would never be developed.

This kind of volunteer work — The Nature Conservancy got us involved — addresses many problems today that we’ve come to call crises: species extinction, climate change, soil loss, and the decline of both water quantity and quality. Fortunately, many nonprofit groups, along with some owners of private lands that are protected by conservation easements, offer people an opportunity to improve damaged lands.

In my home watershed of northern Colorado, we often work with the nonprofit Wildlands Restoration Volunteers, a statewide grassroots group established in 1999. To date, it has completed over 1,000 projects on public lands assisted by more than 40,000 volunteers, who have contributed over $10 million in time and expertise.

Wildlands Restoration Volunteers includes people from both cities and rural areas who agree with what Wendell Berry wrote: “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”

At the end of the 20th century, scientists from around the world got together to measure our planet’s health. Shockingly, they reported that three out of every four acres of the Earth’s surface were in a degraded state.

The urgent global need to restore our damaged lands and waters has also caused the United Nations to name this the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (https://www.decadeonrestoration.org/). It’s clear that we have yet to locate the sweet spot of a sustainable relationship with our world.

For humans to have a future on Earth, we need to reverse the erosion of soils, pollution of air and water, and weakening of the natural ecosystems that support us. Ecological restoration can attack those problems while also playing a critical role in the drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide, sending it back into the plants and soils where it belongs.

Although restoration and recreation have much in common, there is a major difference between the two. While outdoor recreation fulfills oneself, ecological restoration gives back to the land. Not that benefiting oneself is bad; one of the reasons we recreate is for the regenerative powers of spending time in nature. 

But adding restoration into the domain of outdoor recreation could go a long way to enhance our time outdoors. I’ve found that when a group acts to restore the health of soil, land, plants and animals, the people involved always feel better about themselves.

As author Robin Wall Kimmerer put it in “Braiding Sweetgrass,” “…as we care for the land, it can once again care for us.” By restoring damaged lands and waters, we still find joy in the outdoors, but we also give back to the home planet that sustains us.

Let’s seek out that work, turning it into something we do outdoors together, restoring lands and water while at the same re-creating ourselves.

Rick Knight is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is professor emeritus of wildlife conservation at Colorado State University.

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Until this happened, my valley seemed to offer much of the best of what Colorado has to offer, including views of a snow-capped mountain range, and spread out below, irrigated hayfields with black cows on tan rangeland. But now, right in the center of the valley, will be one person acting out a lack of consideration for others.

Gigantic trophy houses seem to signal, “I built here to see, but also to be seen.” It’s a jarring reminder that we in the New West are remaking the Old West in our own image, a job that apparently requires a drastic redoing of topography. These big homes seem to follow a pattern of complicated rooflines, lots of windows that reflect the light and “ego gates” at the beginning of driveways.

Most of us in this valley delight in what we’ve been able to see from our front door: Uninterrupted ridgelines, cliffs, and the rounded slopes that converge to make foothills, which then rise into mountains. Nature made these views, and we’ve been fortunate to have them in our lives every day.

But more and more, houses that resemble castles are sprouting on ridgelines and hilltops, here and all over the mountains. And sometimes it’s ordinary houses or trailers that get built on ridgelines, interrupting the natural flow of the land.

Where only a few years ago our eyes might find comfort in tracing a ridge’s backbone — wondering how it got to be named White Pine Mountain when no white pines grow there — now we look at manmade structures that irritate the eyes.

People who have lived in my valley for decades share a different style. Appreciating what a winter wind can do to steal warmth from inside a house, they looked for sheltered areas to build. They saw it made sense to build low, tucking a home against the south side of a hill or cliff.

Most yard lights were few and hard to see, as were their homes. But the new Western lifestyle broadcasts yard lights at night for all to see, just as the homes are conspicuously visible during the day.

In this newfangled West that has “ranched the view,” people apparently need to stand out to enjoy an amenity lifestyle. Will these new folk ever take time to appreciate the human and natural histories of the place they live in now, to show respect for the land and its natural beauty? Will they learn to be considerate of neighbors and not take away from the views that define where we live?

It’s shameful to think that just as we first moved into the West to exploit its valuable resources, we now exploit the last resource our region has to offer — its heart-stopping beauty.

There is some good news, because in many parts of the West we are learning how to sustainably log, graze, divert water and develop energy. I hope it’s not too late for us to also realize the value of fitting into the land as residents, to keep intact our ridgelines, mesas, mountains and valley floors. Once a house caps a hilltop, however, that view is irretrievable, gone forever.

I hope we can learn how to value homes that blend with the land in shape, color and location. Maybe a new generation of home builders, architects, and developers will lead the way in paying due respect to our region’s natural beauty.

But I’m afraid that it’s too late for our valley. The great writer Wallace Stegner told us that the task of Westerners was to build a society to match the scenery. From what I see, we’re not doing the job.

Richard Knight is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that hopes to inspire lively conversation about the West. He works at the intersection of land use and land health in the American West.

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That is a massive reduction for a river system that currently produces about 12.4 million acre-feet. The Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Colorado River, warned that it will “act unilaterally to protect the system” if the states cannot come up with an adequate plan on their own.

The seven states have worked cooperatively over the past two decades to identify solutions to a shrinking river. But their response now, much like the global response to climate change, seems far from adequate to the enormous challenge.

In a recent letter to BuRec, the Upper Colorado River Commission, speaking for the four Upper Basin states, proposed a plan that adopts a business-as-usual, “drought-reduction” approach. They argue that their options are limited because “previous drought response actions are depleting upstream storage by 661,000 feet.”

The Commission complains that water users “already suffer chronic shortages under current conditions resulting in uncompensated priority administration, which includes cuts to numerous present perfected rights in each of our states.”

This leads the Commission to conclude that any future reductions must come largely from Mexico and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, because they use most of the water. 

But the Lower Basin states have already taken a significant hit to their “present perfected rights,” and if BuRec makes good on its promise to act unilaterally, they will face another big reduction. The cooperative relationship among the Basin states will not endure if the Upper Basin refuses to share the burden by reducing its consumption. 

A good place to start might lie with two Colorado projects to divert water from the Colorado River basin to the Front Range. Both began construction this summer. The Gross Reservoir Expansion Project will triple the size of one of Denver Water’s major storage units. Denver Water’s original justification for this project – to serve Denver’s growing urban population – seems odd given that water demand in their service area over the past two decades has shrunk, even as its population rose by nearly 300,000. 

Similar questions have been raised with the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District’s Windy Gap Firming Project, which plans to store Colorado River water to support population growth in Front Range cities.

These two projects suggest that Colorado is prepared to exacerbate the current crisis when the opposite response is so desperately needed.

Abandoning these two projects would signal that Colorado is serious about giving the Colorado River a fighting chance at survival. It might also jump-start good-faith negotiations over how Mexico, the states, and tribes might work to achieve a long-term solution to this crisis.

The homestead laws of the 19th century attracted a resilient group of farmers to the West who cleverly designed water laws to secure their water rights against all future water users. “First in time, first in right” became the governing mantra of water allocation, because, except for Tribal Nations, the farmers were first.

That system worked well for many years. As communities grew, cities and water districts built reservoirs to store the spring runoff, ensuring that water was available throughout the irrigation season. 

Climate change and mega-droughts have upended that system. Nowhere have the consequences been as dire as in the Colorado River Basin.  America’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead – key components of the Colorado River’s water storage system – have not filled for more than two decades. They now sit well below 30% of their capacity. 

Hotter temperatures, less mountain snowpack, and dry soils that soak up runoff like a sponge have brought us to this seven-state crisis. All seven states must now share the pain of addressing this crisis. 

The Upper Basin Commission’s anemic response to BuRec’s plea is not a serious plan. We can do better and we must.

Mark Squillace and Quinn Harper are contributors to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. Mark Squillace is the Raphael J. Moses professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado Law School. Quinn Harper is a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in natural resource policy at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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In the indigo hour when night becomes morning, dozens of people — most from Mexico — queue for the van that will shuttle them to the picking fields. For the next 15 hours, they harvest. Ladders teeter on the uneven, parched earth. Cherries are quickly pulled from high branches by the handful. 

The fruit isn’t for them. Like most regions in the country whose economies rely on exporting food, little of what’s picked here makes it onto the plates of the people who harvested it.  

At the end of the daylight hours, a company bus returns and drives the farmworkers to the Walmart, on the far side of town, where they can shop for groceries and gloves. Farmworkers forced to shop late at night have frequently been met with depleted shelves ever since the early days of the pandemic. They buy what little they can, then re-board the van that brings them home. Many fall asleep hungry.  

In 2020, when the pandemic began, organizer Samantha Guerrero drove across the low, parched hills of Idaho’s Canyon County to a neighborhood she calls Farmway Village. First built as a labor camp, the low-income housing complex has become home to many of the county’s agricultural employees. Guerrero had planned to distribute information about the new virus. But what she found wasn’t a lack of information; it was a lack of good groceries. She’s been working to change that ever since. 

For immigrant farmworkers, food is in short supply: “The only thing close to that place is a gas station,” Guerrero told me. “That means they only have access to the processed foods sold there.” 

Guerrero works for the nonprofit Idaho Organization of Resource Councils, which is trying to change things. Recently, it started distributing culturally relevant foods, like masa for corn tortillas, and some local, organic farmers let volunteers glean produce like tomatoes and pumpkins to redistribute.  

Yet the need is widespread — in Idaho and elsewhere where farmworkers are needed — and even the best-organized mutual aid projects can’t meet the demand. Nonprofits try to help, but they aren’t equipped to make the systems-level changes needed to end the lack of nutritious food and the hunger suffered by farmworkers and other immigrants. 

Local food pantries try, but they’re not always an answer. Many farmworkers come from agricultural communities south of our border with Mexico, Guerrero says. They’re used to fresh fruits, home-raised meats, or hand-pressed tortillas. Even though these immigrant communities are the primary audience for many food pantries, the canned and boxed food they provide can be unrecognizable to the people they serve.  

This holds true across the West. I’ve spoken to other farmworkers and organizers in Montana, Oregon, and the Dakotas, and all echo those sentiments. We haven’t diminished the hunger of the workers who feed us. 

There are 3 million migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the United States. For more than 20 years, migration from Mexico has been largely driven by economic hardship that began in 1994, when the NAFTA treaty crashed the value of the peso. Now, migrants from that country and Central America are increasingly coming north to escape drug violence, or when landslides, hurricanes, and other disasters hastened by the changing climate force them to flee.  

When many workers land at large, corporate-owned farms, they sometimes find harsh conditions; this February, for example, the U.S. Department of Labor found that one large Idaho farm had shortchanged its 69 workers by $159,000. 

Ninety-one percent of counties with the highest rates of overall food insecurity are rural, and workers there face soaring costs of food and a declining number of grocery stores, as consolidation and rising real estate values close outlets. Although farmworkers harvest fruit and vegetables all day, it is odd, but true, that they are living in “food deserts.” 

“I have to say,” Guerrero says, sighing, “that there is a lot of abundance (in Idaho). There is enough to go around. It’s just all going elsewhere.” 

Astra Lincoln is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to lively debate about Western issues. She writes in Oregon.

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