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When a skunk goes after your garden

By RIchard Rubin

Skunks love autumn as our backyard gardens fill up with ripe vegetables. But in my northern New Mexico corn patch,…

Bryan Padron via Unsplash

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Are beavers always the answer? Not really

By Ted Williams

Beavers, through their assiduous dam building, can recharge groundwater and provide habitat for fish and wildlife. In the Pacific Northwest,…

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Goats can be a forest’s best friend

By Dave Marston

Goats are particularly good at one thing: Eating. Unlike a horse or cow that leaves noxious weeds behind, goats eat…

Jonathan Bartley and Adrian Lacasse

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Let’s blow the whistle on public-land abusers

By Rob Pudim

Dozens of TVs, refrigerators, stoves, washers, dryers and abandoned cars had either been gunshot, torched or both. This place of…

Erosion Gulch, image credit Rob Pudim

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Richard Montrose Obituary

By Writers on the Range

Richard “Dick” Montrose, 80, longtime real estate business owner of Western Colorado and avid outdoorsman died suddenly at his home…

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Report from Burning Man 2023

By Dennis Hinkamp

After a quiet year of preparation and premature eulogies, Burning Man roared into the news this August. There were unplanned…

BM Build Day 3/credit Dennis Hinkamp

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We can help shape this Utah monument

By Jonathan Thompson

When President Joe Biden restored the original boundaries of both Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments in 2021, public-land…

Grand Staircase Escalante, Unsplash/Halie West

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There’s such a thing as trail etiquette

By Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff

The uppermost switchback on the Bright Angel Trail in Grand Canyon National Park is eight feet wide. Yet the last…

Bright Angel Trail, NPS/Ty Karlovetz

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Women shouldn’t be second-class citizens

By Crista Worthy

I felt like a second-class citizen when the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion last summer. After a…

Idaho State Capitol, Wikimedia commons

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Requiem for the Joshua tree

By Pepper Trail

Disheveled, gangly, the Joshua tree is surely one of the West’s strangest — and most recognizable — plants.  Named by…

Conglomerate Mesa, Photo by Louis Medina, Friends of the Inyo

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John Fielder, the man who loved natural beauty

By Betsy Marston

If you’ve ever bought a calendar or coffee table book featuring the grandeur of Colorado’s 14’ers, the stunning color photographs…

John Fielder, credit Gary Wockner/Save the Colorado

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Wildland firefighters need our support

By Gregory Mcnamee

At any given moment during this smoky summer of 2023, hundreds of wildfires were blazing in the United States —…

Calwood fire, near Jamestown Colorado, by Malachi Brooks, via Unsplash

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Larmer was the first editor of Writers on the Range after it landed at HCN in 1998, he went on to become publisher/editor of High Country News (HCN) 2003-2020, and is currently senior development director HCN. Larmer is also on the advisory board of Writers on the Range.

Writers on the Range grew out of the West’s public lands, growth, and culture wars of the 1990s. At the time, environmentalists were at loggerheads with the timber, mining, oil and gas and ranching industries that had dominated and shaped land-use and rural communities for decades. 

Meanwhile, a flood of newcomers poured into the region’s urban areas and smaller towns, stressing their social and economic fabrics beyond recognition. How could the West sort through these contentious issues in a civil manner?

The answer was to give voice to a wide range of people from the region itself.  Writers with different backgrounds, espousing new ideas, were put front and center on the region’s opinion pages.

After a brief run as a think tank, Writers on the Range landed on the front porch of High Country News in 1997.  High Country News is the well-known, highly awarded publication that covers the west’s diverse natural and human communities.  It was a perfect match.

Soon dozens of news outlets subscribed.  Over the next 20 years, Writers on the Range published fresh columns from writers and thinkers across the ideological spectrum, provoking thought, generating debate, and defining the possibilities of a better west.

 It was truly a grassroots opinion service and, now as an independent non-profit organization, is still so today.

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