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Pumping up fear along the Colorado River

By George Sibley

Some Colorado River tribulations today remind me of a folk story: A young man went to visit his fiancé and…

Photograph by JC Peacock, courtesy of Unsplash

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Some Western states join the rush to suppress voting

By Jeff Milchen

Colorado’s elections are a bipartisan success story, so when Major League baseball responded to Georgia’s new voting restrictions by moving the…

Image by Unseen Histories, courtesy of Unsplash

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Water can be wrung out too much

By Writers on the Range

“But when Western cities grow, they look everywhere for more water, with little regard for the rivers they drain. “

Santa Fe River below Santa Fe Municipal Water Treatment Plant. Photograph courtesy of Allen Best.

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Urban-rural divide is alive and well

By Allen Best

“The annual Western Stock Show puts cowboy hats in high-end restaurants and strip joints alike.”

Photograph by Allen Best, outside of Akron, CO

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An isolated area gets the vaccine job done

By Dave Marston

“The two small counties, including the indigenous community of the Southern Ute Nation, were ready when 4,000 of those doses—10% of the state’s total—arrived.”

Photograph by Fadil Fauzi, courtesy of Unsplash

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Dying for powder

By Molly Absolon

“I don’t know anyone who’s stood at the top of a slope and thought, ‘Well, this could kill me, but it’s going to be epic powder skiing!’”

Photograph by Jan Kronies, courtesy of Unsplash

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We can act now to fight wildfires

By Harrison Raine

“In 2020, the highest we got to anywhere, was a D2 — Severe Drought. Now we are looking at D3 — D4 — Extreme and Exceptional Drought across much of the West and almost all of the Southwest.”

Cameron Peak Fire, Near Red Feather Lakes, Arapahoe and Roosevelt National Forest, Colorado – 2020 Image courtesy of Harrison Raine

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An Idaho congressman aims to dump dams

By Rocky Barker

Rep. Mike Simpson is a conservative Republican from Idaho whose concept of wildness in the 1990s was going into the…

Photograph courtesy of Rocky Barker

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Pumping iron became my armor

By Crista Worthy

“Within two months I was getting muscles. I have never been harassed since.”

Photograph of Crista Worth in competition shape, courtesy of Crista Worthy

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Sometimes, poison is the only thing that works

By Ted Williams

The ashy storm-petrel, threatened by mice on the Farallon Islands.

Photograph courtesy of Ted Williams

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The West badly needs a restoration economy

By Jonathan Thompson

“Restoration work is not fixing beautiful machinery … It is accepting an abandoned responsibility,”

Photograph courtesy of Allan Nash, open pit coal mine in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin

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Billionaire mine owner leaves a tiny town in the lurch

By Dave Marston

“..a visitor to the town notices abandoned cars parked willy-nilly and piles of junk that look as old as the town itself. “

Photograph Courtesy of Somerset Water District website

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What others are saying See More

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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