A water-stressed valley needs to curb development

In my drought- and fire-plagued home valley, 40 miles north of San Francisco, a debate has been simmering for decades…
MorePlenty of food, but not for all farmworkers 

On a summer morning in southern Idaho, the day breaks early, before 6 a.m. The air is stale, never fully…
Farm workers harvesting yellow bell peppers near Gilroy, California.
MoreHow much will a name change change?

It was late November in Alaska and a lousy day for deer hunting. Rough seas rocked our small boat, and…
View of Kenai Mountains, not far from the former Squaw Bay
MoreThis grizzly family comes with paparazzi

My neighbor is famous. She has 50,000 followers on Facebook and a recent post on her page there had 4,200…
Mother grizzly 399 and her four cubs
MoreA do-it-yourself, homegrown national park

National parks have been getting a lot of love since the pandemic, so much that this summer you need reservations…
MoreWildlife Fauxtography

I’m disgusted with American journalism. It’s boring. I blame editors for assigning uninteresting stories, and people interviewed for being evasive….
MoreAffordable housing shouldn’t have to take a miracle

Residents of the Westside Mobile Home Park in Durango, in southern Colorado, called it a miracle: They now own the…
MoreWant to farm? Get a cash register

In 1991, when Lee Bradley started farming near Paonia in the North Fork Valley of Colorado, he was hired to…
Image credit: P.j. Briscoe
MoreUnusual Coalition Unites for Clean Energy

Communities in the West can stand up to giant outside corporations if they want to win a renewable energy future,…
Packed State and federal hearings were packed with so many ranchers, farmers, climate activists, Tribal members, anglers, and others that it was often “sitting room only.”
MoreIdaho is a difficult state

There’s something different about the state of Idaho that’s beyond the adjective “quirky.” My husband and I may have lived…
Photo credit: Idaho Potato Commission
MoreTrailer park residents hope to buy the land beneath them

Just outside Durango, Colorado there’s a trailer park called Westside that I’ve been driving by all my life. Yet residents…
MoreDon’t blame the Upper Basin states

But the Bureau of Reclamation has regularly and faithfully released to the Lower Basin, from Powell Reservoir, the Colorado River Compact and Mexican Treaty allotments –- 8.23 million acre-feet only dropping a little below those allotments half a dozen times since Powell began to fill in the 1960s.
Bryan Egner US Dept. of energy Glen Canyon Dam 2018
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