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A community of river guides copes with loss

By Rebecca Lawton

The Grand Canyon boating community — devoted to each other and to the Colorado River — was shocked to learn…

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A Japanese-American internment camp has much to teach us

By Paul Zaenger

“While other children were sent to daycare, when I was 3 years old I was sent to a Japanese-American prison,”…

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This rancher has radical ideas about water

By Dave Marston

If Jim Howell, a fourth-generation rancher in Western Colorado, has a guru, he’s Allan Savory, the champion of intensive cattle…

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Sometimes, the simplest things can help wildlife

By Richard Knight Heather Dannahower

“Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roamWhere the deer and the antelope playWhere seldom is heard a discouraging…

Ranch manager Zach Thode, works beside professors and students to help wildlife

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Let’s redefine those bucket lists

By Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff

What did we learn this summer and fall? We learned that people who’d been cooped up, thanks to COVID-19, flocked…

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If you see racism, call it out

By Wayne Hare

Black Americans get a lot of messages about who matters and who does not in this country, and the question…

Dixie National Forest

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Please don’t pet the wildlife

By Kelsey Wellington

“I can’t believe that person is getting that close.” Just off the road stands a bull elk — a 700-pound…

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Chaco Culture National Park is under siege

By Bruce Babbitt

It is not an exaggeration to say that New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park is under siege. A surge…

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It’s time to stop shipping water across the Rockies

By David O. Williams

It was 1952 when the cities of Aurora and Colorado Springs first started gobbling up water rights in a remote,…

10,000 year old high altitude fen slated for drowning by Colorado Springs and Augora, CO

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How I learned to love maggots

By Dave Marston

If you’re one of those people who composts everything you can think of because you want to build up your…

Black Soldier Flies in author, David Marston’s hand

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Welcome to Yosemite, the new Pyrocene Park

By Stephen Pyne

The Pleistocene epoch that began 2.6 million years ago sent ice in waves through Yosemite. Glaciers gouged out great valleys…

Photo by Laurel Balyeat, Yosemite Park

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Our new age of fire

By Stephen Pyne

Fire in the West is expected, and not so long ago, it seemed something the West experienced more than anywhere…

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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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