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When wildfire keeps coming back

By Char Miller
Malachi Brooks via Unsplash

Since January 2021, more than 6,272 fires have burned 917,000 acres in California

Smoke plume from wildfire in Boulder County, CO

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Two Western states act to control methane

By Tim Lydon

Gated methane vent pad in Sunshine Roadless area above Paonia, CO. Methane originates in active Arch Resources coal mine. This collection of vents makes Arch the third biggest greenhouse gas polluter in Colorado.

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Willing workers are right at the border

By Benjamin Waddell

Photo by Barbara Zandoval via Unsplash

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Hands off the rocks

By Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff

Hikers are flooding our public lands, so I ask the question: Why can’t people just leave the poor rocks alone?…

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Hard lessons from the border

By Gary Paul Nabhan

Animals have been blocked from migration, their food chains disrupted. Now, exotic weeds, insects and diseases can use the lengthy scar as a nick point for invasion, ultimately disrupting far more than what human border-crossers can do. Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash

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As Lake Powell dwindles, wonders open up

By Tim Treuer

It would take us another day and a half of increasingly arduous travel to finally enter Lake Powell

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When immortals die

By Pepper Trail
Photo by Joshua Earl on Unsplash

Giant sequoias come as close to immortality as living organisms can. Many live over a thousand years despite nature’s challenges. So…

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How to love the bear’s world

By John Horning
Photo by Becca on Unsplash

When a bear kills a person in the wild, that’s no reason to enact laws making it easier to kill bears. Rather respect that bears are wild creatures and be cautious when in their territor

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Looking back to when water was plentiful

By Dave Marston

During his 50 years in rural western Colorado, Jamie Jacobson has seen a lot of flooding. While caretaking a farm…

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What do we owe wildland firefighters?

By Jonathon Golden

Vacancies, of course, limit how much federal firefighters can do. If Western communities want to be protected, they need to ensure that their firefighters receive better pay and benefits.

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Call it Bindweed or thistle – Writers on the Range just won’t die

By Dave Marston

It sprouted again during a fall hike in 2019. Betsy, Steve Mandell, his wife, Terri, and I, agreed that Writers on the Range deserved to live again.

Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash

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Don’t bet against redband rainbow trout

By Brian Sexton

Photograph by Justin Miles

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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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