Such quiet is a rare gift. I haven’t been in Goodall’s Tanzanian rain forest, but recently shared Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park with a 25-year-old cousin visiting from urban America. Once in the canyons he kept pausing to say, “it’s so peaceful, so still.” He was astonished and renewed by that quiet.

This canyon country stillness is under attack. The assaults come in waves powered by motorized vehicles, engines revving.

First, the Trump administration proposes abandoning the 2023 Bureau of Land Management travel plan for Labyrinth Canyon. This 300,000-acre Utah wildland along the Green River just north of Canyonlands National Park is a gem—a fretwork of slickrock canyons along the river. Labyrinth preserves quiet for rafters, hikers, and bighorn sheep. No death-defying rapids here on this lazy, looping stretch easily paddled by families in canoes.

In a model compromise, the current Labyrinth plan maintains access to more than 800 miles of off-highway-vehicle (OHV) routes, closing only 317 miles to vehicles. In the surrounding Moab region, more than 4,000 miles of routes remain open. OHVs have plenty of room to roam.

But moderation is never enough for Utah politicians determined to motorize every inch of our public lands. They are pushing to reopen 141 miles of closed OHV routes at Labyrinth and hoping for even more. You can comment here before October 24.

In another backtrack on conservation in Utah, the administration has solicited bids for coal leasing on 48,000 acres of BLM land, much of it on and near the boundaries of national parks. The big views from Capitol Reef, Zion, and Bryce Canyon don’t stop at the park boundaries. Visitors, many from other countries, would be horrified by such industrialization of these world-class destinations. Rural Utah depends on these tourists to survive economically.

These are lands that even the conservative second Bush administration deemed unsuitable for mines. As Cory MacNulty, with the National Parks Conservation Association, said of the proposed leasing, “It’s absurd.”

Now the OHV battalions are threatening to overwhelm Capitol Reef National Park.

Utah Republican Senators Mike Lee and John Curtis introduced a bill on October 5 to open virtually every road in Capitol Reef to off-roaders. They claim that disabled Americans need this fundamental change to park policy, though even the park’s back roads are currently accessible by moderately high-clearance cars and trucks. There’s absolutely no need to permit noisy and destructive OHVs.

The senators’ second bill would potentially open other national parks to OHV use. Lee tried to pass nearly identical bills in 2021 and encountered a buzzsaw of resistance from national park advocates.

As retired Capitol Reef superintendent Sue Fritzke said, “OHVs would denigrate the very resources those sites have been set aside to protect, with increased dust and noise and impacts on wildlife, endangered species, and visitors.”

At each mile farther into remote corners of the park, off-highway vehicles become more problematic. Even though a majority of riders obey the rules, some will go off-road. They just will. Their vehicles are designed for this exact purpose. In Capitol Reef’s considerable backcountry—as in all underfunded national parks and monuments— staffing does not allow for constant patrolling to apprehend and ticket wrongdoers.

Capitol Reef is a place to slow down, not speed up. To revel in quiet, not reach for earplugs. To share the healing land with tenderness and restraint.

Lee disrespects national park values with these twin bills, and Curtis, who likes to tout his nature sensitivity on hikes with constituents, should know better. Their misguided proposals should be left to wither in committee and die. Those of us who love the restorative peace of national parks will just keep fighting such regressive bills.

In her last interview, Jane Goodall asked us to never give up: “Without hope, we fall into apathy and do nothing. If people don’t have hope, we’re doomed. Let’s fight to the very end.”

We will.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and photographer in Utah.

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His statement saddened me, since in all the time I spent on Four Corners high points, a persistent haze always limited my visibility to maybe 50 or 60 miles, blurring Shiprock’s sharp spires into a fuzzy silhouette. That’s because a fleet of massive coal-fired power plants in the region churned out haze-producing pollutants, harming humans and the ecology and blotting out vistas from the San Juans to the Sandias. It seemed as if I’d never get a view as clear as Norm’s.

But over the last decade, the failing economics of coal shuttered those power plants. That means the air on the Colorado Plateau—when not sullied by the ever-lengthening wildfire season—has become cleaner as the coal industry faded away.

The shuttered plants include Mojave, Navajo, Nucla, Escalante, San Juan and, most recently, Cholla. The closures certainly sharpened the view of folks all over the region. But more importantly, they kept tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and oodles of harmful pollutants (arsenic, mercury, sulfur dioxide and soot) out of the lungs of nearby residents, many of them on the Navajo Nation.

Yet in defiance of the free market that has boosted renewables, the Trump administration is acting to undo those positive changes and make the air dirty again by throwing multiple lifelines to the flagging coal industry.

It has eviscerated environmental protections limiting mercury and other toxic air emissions, ended Obama-and Biden-era freezes on new federal coal leases, and rescinded limits on carbon dioxide emissions. The administration has also blocked utilities from shutting down plants that are old, dirty and more costly than other power sources.

Trump purports to do this in the name of “unleashing” coal from regulatory constraints so it can be mined and burned to achieve American “energy dominance.” Yet it’s unlikely that unleashing the industry will reverse its decline.

It’s true that delaying implementation of the mercury rule will enable the Colstrip coal plant in Montana—one of the nation’s dirtiest facilities—to continue operating without expensive new pollution control equipment. Generally, though, utilities such as Xcel Energy, Intermountain Power Agency and Tri-State Generation & Transmission are moving forward with plans to retire their coal plants, namely because the aging facilities are dirty, inefficient, inflexible and, most of all, no longer profitable. They just can’t compete with natural gas, solar, wind, and other, cleaner energy sources.

When signing one of his fossil-fuel-friendly orders, Trump said he would “save” the Cholla coal plant near Holbrook, Arizona, from destruction, adding, “We’re going to have that plant opening and burning the clean coal, beautiful clean coal, in a very short period of time.”

But its operator, Arizona Public Service, said it had already procured cleaner, cheaper generation for the plant, and had no desire to keep burning coal at Cholla. There was no save needed.

If Trump were truly interested in energy dominance and abundance, he would have supported the fastest-growing energy sources—wind and solar power. Instead, his administration is doing all it can to stifle them, from eliminating production tax credits for renewable energy in his “big, beautiful” budget bill, to slowing down permits for clean energy developments on public lands. Both utility-scale and rooftop solar will be affected, boosting the prospects of oil and gas, coal and nuclear.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in an Economist column, revealed the philosophy behind the administration’s fossil-fuel fetishization. He wrote that climate change is “not an existential crisis,” merely a “byproduct of progress.” He said he was willing to take the “modest negative trade-off” of climate change—along, presumably, with ever more devastating heat waves, wildfires and floods—”for this legacy of human advancement.”

He is probably correct in saying that climate change and the sullied air over the Colorado Plateau are byproducts of so-called progress. But they are also nasty, deadly and avoidable. Ultimately, going backward toward coal will not only wreck progress, but perhaps life on earth as we know it.

Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He has long covered the West’s natural resources.

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From its headquarters in Washington, D.C., the National Mining Association predicted “a severe economic blow to mining states and communities,” while the industry’s political allies likened the move to declaring “war” on coal communities.

The truth is that coal has been steadily falling from its past dominance as energy king for nearly two decades. Domestic coal consumption dropped to 512 million tons in 2022, down 55 percent since its 2007 peak.

With the downward trajectory expected to continue, the Biden administration’s decision to end coal leasing in the Powder River Basin—the nation’s largest coal-producing region—reflects clear market trends. And far from killing coal, the administration’s plan allows mining to continue as the market transitions. 

Billions of tons of previously leased federal coal remain available for mining from 270 tracts across the nation, which combined cover an area larger than Rocky Mountain National Park. One Montana mine has enough coal to keep operating until 2060. Taken together, economic effects related to ending new coal leasing in the Powder River Basin may not be felt until the 2040s and beyond.

Coal companies are well aware that U.S. energy markets have rapidly changed, a fact they soberly tell investors: “Over the last few years, customers have shifted to long-term supply agreements with shorter durations, driven by the reduced utilization of (coal) plants and plant retirements, fluidity of natural gas pricing and the increased use of renewable energy sources,” Wyoming’s largest coal producer, Peabody Energy, disclosed in its 2023 financial filing.

Even with declining markets, the Biden administration did not come to the decision on its own. Arguing that BLM’s past reviews of coal’s contributions to climate change were inadequate, a coalition of environmental groups sued the government and won. That forced the agency to revisit whether more coal leasing was warranted.

“For decades, mining has affected public health, our local land, air, and water, and the global climate,” said Lynne Huskinson, a retired coal miner. She’s a member of the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a Wyoming landowners’ group that was among the plaintiffs.

Now, she said, “we look forward to BLM working with state and local partners to ensure a just economic transition for the Powder River Basin as we move toward a clean energy future.”

Huskinson lives in Gillette, Wyoming, where a dozen highly mechanized strip mines sprawl across the grasslands of the Powder River Basin. The Wyoming mines alone produce 40 percent of U.S. coal while employing less than 10 percent of the nation’s 44,000 coal workers.

The Basin’s mines have leased 8 billion tons of federal coal since the 1990s, a cheap and plentiful supply for the industry. The leasing process allows companies to nominate desired tracts, and then bid with little or no competition. Winning bidders often pay less than $1 a ton for coal, plus a nominal annual rent and a royalty after final sale.

There is little question that leasing helped launch and sustain the region’s energy boom. But in his 2022 decision, Judge Brian Morris of the Federal District Court of Montana cast his eye toward the future. Morris wrote that federal law required BLM to consider “long-term needs of future generations” that included “recreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish, and natural scenic, scientific, and historical values.”

The judge also gave the federal agency an out: “Coal mining represents a potentially allowable use of public lands, but BLM is not required to lease public lands.”

Morris’ words cleared the way for BLM to stop leasing, a decision that dovetails with a Colorado College poll that found most residents in eight Rocky Mountain states—including Wyoming and Montana—want Congress to prioritize conservation over energy development on public lands.

The legal wrangling will likely continue, with the BLM reviewing protests from the coal industry and its political allies that lay the groundwork for more lawsuits. For now, though, it seems the Biden administration’s decision to keep coal in the ground not only follows the market and the law, but public opinion, too.

Peter Gartrell is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a consultant in Washington, D.C., and covered coal leasing issues as a journalist and congressional staffer.

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Maybe it was the fatigue of the trip. Maybe it was the years she spent herding this class to the finish line. The hours answering their phone calls, figuring out plan Bs, worrying about them at every setback.

As she addressed the crowd, Law was nearly overcome with emotion. She paused before regaining control. There was so much to celebrate. 

On this day, 14 students donned caps and gowns, the largest graduating class in the school’s history. Among them were a record four students who graduated at least a semester early and three who were dual enrolled in a community college. Eight were headed to college or Job Corps. 

For a tiny school that lags far behind conventional performance measures, these were significant wins. 

The school, which serves majority Native American students, reports higher-than-average rates of foster care, homelessness and involvement in the criminal justice system. Some 70% of students live in single-parent households or have a deceased parent. In 2018, the on-time graduation rate was 0%. 

I spent four months visiting the school during the semester before graduation this year. Data points can’t capture the hurdles they faced—lost loved ones and an education system that’s historically failed Indigenous students. 

But what the seniors had to their advantage was an advocate and a reliable source of support: Principal Katie Law. An athletic white woman, Law often engaged in tasks that went beyond traditional principal duties. She made sure to learn the personal lives, history and family dynamics of all her students. 

Well before Law was recently awarded Principal of the Year by the Wyoming Association of Secondary Schools in a surprise ceremony, it was clear she had a rare level of commitment. 

“You’re not going to find another principal or educator that puts as much time in as she does in the evenings, on the weekends,” District Superintendent Curt Mayer said.

Law helps students get their driver’s licenses, chaperones college visits and makes calls when kids get arrested. Students have gone to Law with news that they are pregnant, and she has later cared for their infants in her office while they attend class. 

The motivation is simple. “I want to see these students succeed, and I’m going to do what it takes,” she said.

Law grew up in Colstrip, Montana—30 miles from the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. She was the daughter of educators, and never thought she would enter that world. 

But she wanted to help people, and education ultimately became the vehicle for that. During her first year of teaching in Nebraska, she found a distraught student crying in the bathroom one day and sat comforting her for an hour. When Law saw her years later, the student told her she was a pivotal teacher. It dawned on Law then that she’s different.

“I get a lot of, ‘That’s not your job,’” she says. “I’m like, ‘I know, but whose job is it?’”

She was hired to teach in the Arapaho school’s district 18 years ago, at age 23. The school was rough. Drug use and gang violence were common. She kept her head down, helped where she could. Slowly, she started building relationships. 

The work can be devastating, and many fixes don’t last. Law is stubborn. “I think my biggest asset is, I won’t give up.”

Law doesn’t pretend to share a background with her reservation students, but she uses her own experiences to build empathy. School didn’t come easily to her. Her brother died young from diabetes. And she witnessed a murder at age 14. These are experiences her students can relate to.

It seems to work. At graduation, the seniors handed out roses to people who were meaningful. Law received six roses, and six heartfelt hugs.  

It’s not realistic to expect all struggling schools to find administrators like Law, who live and breathe their jobs and don’t burn out. Still, parents and educators can take this to heart: One caring adult can make an enormous difference in a student’s life.

Katie Klingsporn is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about Western issues. She lives in central Wyoming, where she reports on education and outdoor recreation for WyoFile.com.

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Best is based in the Denver area, and his twice-a-month e-journal looks for the radical transitions in Colorado’s energy, water, and other urgent aspects of the state’s economy. These changes, he thinks, overwhelm the arrival of the telephone, rural electrification and even the internal combustion engine in terms of their impact.

Global warming, he declares, is “the biggest pivot of all.”

Whether you “believe” in climate change — and Best points out that at least one Colorado state legislator does not — there’s no denying that our entire planet is undergoing dramatic changes, including melting polar ice, ever-intensifying storms, and massive wildlife extinctions.

A major story that Best, 71, has relentlessly chronicled concerns Tri-State, a wholesale power supplier serving Colorado and three other states. Late to welcome renewable energy, it’s been weighed down with aging coal-fired power plants. Best closely followed how many of its 42 customers — rural electric cooperatives — have fought to withdraw from, or at least renegotiate, contracts that hampered their ability to buy cheaper power and use local renewable sources.

Best’s first newspaper job was at the Middle Park Times in Kremmling, a mountain town along the Colorado River. He wrote about logging, molybdenum mining and the many miners who came from eastern Europe. His prose wasn’t pretty, he says, but he got to hone his skills.

Because of his rural roots, Best is most comfortable hanging out in farm towns and backwaters, places where he can listen to stories and try to get a feel for what Best calls the “rest of Colorado.” Pueblo, population 110,000 in southern Colorado, is a gritty town he likes a lot.

Pueblo has been forced to pivot away from a creaky, coal-fired power plant that created well-paying jobs. Now, the local steel mill relies on solar power instead, and the town also hosts a factory that makes wind turbine towers. He’s written stories about these radical changes as well as the possibility that Russian oligarchs are involved in the city’s steel mill.

Best also vacuums up stories from towns like Craig in northwestern Colorado, home to soon-to-be-closed coal plants. He says he finds Farmington, New Mexico, fascinating because it has electric transmission lines idling from shuttered coal power plants.

His Big Pivots may only have 1,091 subscribers, but story tips and encouragement come from some of his readers who hold jobs with clout. His feature “There Will Be Fire: Colorado arrives at the dawn of megafires” brought comments from climate scientist Michael Mann and Amory Lovins, legendary co-founder of The Rocky Mountain Institute.

“After a lifetime in journalism, his writing has become more lyrical as he’s become more passionate,” says Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability for the Aspen Ski Company. “Yet he’s also completely unknown despite the quality of his work.”

Among utility insiders, and outsiders like myself, however, Best is a must-read.

His biggest donor has been Sam R. Walton’s Catena Foundation — a $29,000 grant. Typically, supporters of his nonprofit give Big Pivots $25 or $50.

Living in Denver allows him to be close to the state’s shot callers, but often, his most compelling stories come from the rural fringe. One such place is the little-known Republican River, whose headwaters emerge somewhere on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. That’s also where Best’s grandfather was born in an earthen “soddie.”

Best grew up in eastern Colorado and knows the treeless area well. He’s written half a dozen stories about the wrung-out Republican River that delivers water to neighboring Kansas. He also sees the Eastern Plains as a great story about the energy transition. With huge transmission lines under construction by the utility giant Xcel Energy, the project will feed renewable power from wind and solar to the cities of Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins.

Best admits he’s sometimes discouraged by his small readership — it can feel like he’s speaking to an empty auditorium, he says. He adds, though, that while “I may be a tiny player in Colorado journalism, I’m still a player.”

He’s also modest. With every trip down Colorado’s back roads to dig up stories, Best says he’s humbled by what he doesn’t know. “Just when I think I understand something, I get slapped up the side of the head.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

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For 60 years the air was dingy, polluted by two, enormous coal-fired power stations in nine units that produced 3,723 megawatts of generation — enough to power two million homes. Now, just 1,540 megawatts remain in two units equipped with modern, air-pollution control systems.

Starting in the 1960s, the town’s giant smokestacks could be seen from miles away, and their dangerous emissions helped add the designation of “national sacrifice zone” to this Four Corners area. Pollutants included “beryllium compounds, chromium compounds, cobalt, and five other carcinogens,” reports ProPublica.

But these days you might describe Farmington, population 46,422, as an attractive river town where “you can see mountains 100 miles away,” says Mike Eisenfeld, energy and climate program manager of the San Juan Citizens Alliance, a regional environmental powerhouse with 1,000 members.

Farmington is becoming known for its recreation, ranging from national parks and monuments to eight miles of river walks and mountain biking on 120 miles of trails.

“Jolt Your Journey!” is how the town promotes itself to visitors. A cultural battle, though, is being fought over what substitutes for coal as a power supply.

Given the town’s near-constant sunshine and underused grid tie-ins to Sunbelt cities, solar-powered electricity might seem the obvious replacement. However, the people with clout in town — Mayor Nate Duckett, City Manager Rob Mayes, and the nonprofit Farmington Electrical Utility — yearn for the good old days of fossil fuels.

Power from the now-closed San Juan Generating Station was cheap, says Mayor Duckett, who enjoys broad local support, having won his seat with 86% of the vote in his last election in 2018. “It was also homegrown,” he adds, “and there were good jobs,”

To keep its coal plant open, Farmington, chased a carbon-capture scheme even though its history is one of failure. All eleven of President Obama’s carbon capture projects have either gone belly up or were never built. A Mississippi coal project alone cost $7.5 billion, leaving only mountains of scrap.

Farmington’s failed carbon-capture scheme cost millions of dollars in legal fees and precious time. Without power-purchase contracts, Farmington Electric had no steady electrical supplier when its coal-fired electricity was switched off. The utility burned through a good portion of $100 million in reserves buying gas and electricity on the open market.

To rebuild a financial cushion, the Farmington utility raised customer rates in April. This angered many residents though resentment had been simmering for years. Everyone knew that coal was nearing its end, yet no plans had been made for developing a major replacement.

Aztec, a town of 6,163, was once a customer of the Farmington utility, but it rebelled, now buying carbon-reduced electricity from Guzman Energy. Neighboring Bloomfield, population 7,371, says it also wants to partner with Guzman. Meanwhile, solar development has been flourishing around Farmington, with 1,300 megawatts of utility-scale generation either planned or under construction.

Farmington could easily get into the action since it can self-permit. It also owns those valuable grid tie-ins through its substations. In fairness, it has vague plans for a solar array, but an inefficient, gas-powered plant is what’s in the process of getting built to augment a big gas plant they already own.

Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which gave a boost to nonprofit utilities like Farmington Electric, there’s federal money available to help build solar arrays. The Act allows a utility to build and sell renewable electricity while also raking in generous government incentives. Farmington’s need is pressing, as both New Mexico and the region aren’t producing enough homegrown energy.

All of the financial support right now for developing solar power adds to the frustration of area conservationists.

Mark Pearson, executive director of the San Juan Citizens Alliance, says, “Farmington… wants to export chemicals manufactured from natural gas in the region. But they have the means to export a finished product — electricity made from the sun — via high-voltage electric lines.”

 The Alliance’s Eisenfeld thinks a tipping point is fast approaching. “You need the philosophical buy-in that the transition from coal to clean energy is actually upon us,” he says. “Then it all happens quickly.”

But for now, the good ole’ boys are still in charge. Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

This column has been corrected. Aztec, buys carbon-reduced, not carbon-free electricity from Guzman Energy.

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Alice Jackson, former CEO of Xcel energy’s Colorado operation, was blunt at a renewable energy conference in February 2020: “We can reliably run our grid with up to 70% renewables. Add batteries to the mix and that number goes up to just 72%.”

Grid experts now say that Jackson’s number is 80%, but still, how will that utility and others produce that missing power?

Bill Gates and a raft of other entrepreneurs see the answer in small, modular nuclear reactors, pointing to the small nuclear engines that have safely run America’s nuclear submarines for decades.

Here’s what we know about these efficient reactors: They’re built in factories, and once in operation they’re cheap to keep going. Each module is typically 50 megawatts, self-contained, and installed underground after being transported to its site. The modular design means that when more power is needed, another reactor can be slotted in.

Breakthrough features include safety valves that automatically send coolant to the reactor if heat spikes. This feature alone could have eliminated disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl, where water pumps failed and cores started melting down.

If small nuclear modules don’t fill the renewables gap, where else to find the “firm power” that Jackson says is needed? The Sierra Club calls on pumped hydro and geothermal as sources of reliable electricity you can just flip on when renewables slow down. But the best geothermal spots have been taken, and pumped hydro has geographic limits, and environmental resistance.

Another proposal is linking grids across the country for more efficiency. The idea is that excess wind blowing in Texas could be tapped after the sun goes down on California’s solar farms. This holds incremental promise but progress has been routinely blocked by conservative lawmakers.

There’s also the cost argument — that renewables are cheaper. In a fossil-fuel-dominated grid that’s true. However, MIT points out that as renewables dominate the grid, on-demand forms of power rise in value.

The extreme danger to the grid is the dreaded “dunkelflaute,” a German word for cloudy, windless weather that slashes solar and wind power generation for weeks.

So the problem remains: To avoid rolling blackouts, we need reliable power at the right times, which are usually from 5-8 p.m. That’s when people come home and fire up their gadgets and appliances.

The increasing demand for electricity only adds to the problem: A 2020 Washington Post article predicted that electrification of the economy by 2050 would result in a usage bump of 38%, mostly from vehicles. Consider Ford’s all-electric F150 Lightning, cousin to the bestselling gasoline F150. The $39,000 entry-level truck was designed to replace gasoline generators at job sites, meaning vehicle recharge happens when workers go home, just as renewables flag.

This calls into question what many experts hope car batteries can provide — doing double duty by furnishing peak power for homes at night.

Longer-lasting storage batteries have long been touted as a savior, though Tara Righetti, co-director of the Nuclear Energy Research Center at the University of Wyoming, has reservations. “There are high hopes that better batteries will be developed. But in terms of what is technically accessible right now? I think nuclear provides an appealing option.”

Meanwhile, small nuclear reactors are underway, with Bill Gates’ TerraPower building a sodium-cooled fast reactor in the coal town of Kemmerer, Wyoming. One 345-megawatt reactor, which generates enough electricity for 400,000 homes, will be paired with a molten-salt, heat storage facility.

Think of it as a constantly recharging battery in the form of stored heat. In the evening as renewable power flags, it would pump out 500 megawatts of power for up to 5 hours.

These reactors also tackle the little-known problem of cold-starting the electrical grid after an outage. In 2003, suffering a blackout, the Eastern grid could not have restarted with renewables alone.

However we choose to close the energy gap, there’s no time to lose. Wild temperature swings have grid operators increasingly nervous. California has come close to rolling blackouts, and temperatures in the West now break record after record.

As our climate becomes more erratic, reliable electricity is becoming a matter of life and death.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Colorado.

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Maybe not “the complete final destruction of the world,” but certainly “an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale,” to quote the two definitions in the Oxford Online Dictionary. Not yet, but soon.

This has me wondering: How will we know when we move from pre- to post-apocalypse? This summer, my hometown in southern Oregon was crushed under a heat dome, sweltering in triple-digit temperatures. A fire across the state line ignited and within 24 hours exploded to become California’s largest wildfire this year so far.

The two mountain lakes that provide water to our valley orchards and vineyards are at 2% and 6% full, that is, 98% and 94% empty. Last year, an even more severe heat dome pushed temperatures in normally cool Seattle and Portland to record-shattering levels, wildfires burned more than a million acres in Oregon and 2000-year-old giant sequoias perished in fires of unprecedented severity in California’s Sierra Nevada.

Catastrophic extremes are becoming normal. The Great Salt Lake is at the lowest level ever recorded, spawning toxic dust storms. A mega-drought has shriveled the Colorado River, with the beginning of major cutbacks in water deliveries to Arizona and Nevada. Elsewhere in the West, flooding devastated Yellowstone National Park in June, collapsing roads and leading to the evacuation of over 10,000 visitors.

Widening our view, Dallas is currently inundated with what is described as a “1,000-year” flooding event, following similar flooding disasters in Las Vegas, St. Louis and Kentucky earlier this summer. Across the Atlantic, Europe was scorched by the highest temperatures ever recorded this summer, triggering massive wildfires, the collapse of a glacier in Italy and over 10,000 heat-related deaths. India, China, and Japan experienced record heat waves this year.

I could go on, but no doubt you have read the news, too, about climate-caused apocalyptic events. Closely related is the global extinction crisis, with over a million species at risk by the end of this century. Bird populations in the United States have collapsed by one-third in the past 50 years, and the world’s most diverse ecosystems, including tropical rainforests and coral reefs, could largely disappear in coming decades.

Let’s also not forget the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed at least 6.46 million people worldwide and sickened 597 million. That pandemic shows no sign of ending as the virus continues to evolve new variants. Meanwhile, the new global health emergency of monkeypox has been declared. And polio, once eliminated in this country, is back, thanks to people who aren’t vaccinated.

What about America’s social fabric? According to a poll taken this summer by the New York Times, a majority of Americans surveyed now believe that our political system is too divided to solve the nation’s problems. The non-profit Gun Violence Archive has documented 429 mass shootings so far this year in America, with “mass shootings” defined as at least four people killed or injured.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has led to a rapid and stark division of the country into states that permit abortions versus those that outlaw it. Republicans and Democrats increasingly live in separate media universes, with both sides concerned about the possibility of a civil war.

I admit this is a staggering list of “damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale,” but I’m not ready to declare myself a citizen of the post-apocalypse. We don’t have to live there. Instead, let’s accept that humanity and the whole planet are “apocalypse-adjacent.” The apocalypse is before us and we can see it clearly. But the world is not yet ruined.

Human beings do have this redeeming and also infuriating trait: We are at our most creative and cooperative when it is almost too late. We can — we must — pull each other back from the brink. To fail is to condemn our children to live in the hellscape of a dystopian video game. As they will tell you, that is no place to be.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a naturalist and writer in Ashland, Oregon.

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Bradley decided to focus on marketing. “We shined the apples and sold them wherever we could,” he says. With the pressure on him and his wife Kathy, they also opened a farm stand inside their leased barn close to a highway.    

“At first, we were only going to sell what we produced. But people had money, so we scrambled, grabbing local products from everywhere to have more for people to buy.”    

A few years later, in 1996, Homestead Meats, a local, natural beef (no additives) cooperative, began, with only five families involved. Plant Manager Gary Peebles recalls that everyone agreed to “keep it small and try the idea.” Now six families strong, he says, “No one thought we’d have 40 employees or a packing plant.” Not quite all grass-fed, the beef is finished with grain, “ensuring consistency and marbling,” says Peebles.  

Consumers got on board, as many people have become increasingly concerned about how the beef they buy is produced. 

Now, Peebles reports, Homestead Meats just bought Callaway Packing, which doubles their production to 80 local animals processed weekly and sold throughout Western Colorado. Best of all, they are no longer subject to the commodity market, where 85% of beef is processed by four corporations.  

Stories like this apparently make Delta County a model, attracting young farmers and ranchers. Thirty percent of Delta County’s farmers were considered “new and beginning” farmers in the 2017 USDA farm survey, and most are pursuing natural but not strict “USDA organic” practices.  

When the documentary, The Real Dirt on Farmer John, played at the Telluride Film Festival in 2005, few Coloradans had heard of Community Sponsored Agriculture, which asks dedicated consumers to pay farmers upfront for weekly boxes of food.    

Fast forward 17 years, and hundreds of CSAs, as they’re called serve cities and rural areas in Colorado, reports Farmshares.info, including several CSAs in the North Fork Valley.    

The widespread availability of natural produce and meat wasn’t always a given. For decades, most products grown in the North Fork Valley were shipped to cities. Today, it’s resort towns like Aspen and Crested Butte that see North Fork Valley food and wine at their farmer’s markets or in their CSAs.    

Bradley recalls a meeting 20 years ago of the newly formed Valley Organic Growers Association (VOGA), where he doled out some advice that gave the up-and-coming juice maven, Jeff Schwarz, a hot idea.     

“Clean up your farm, get a cash register and you can sell stuff to the public right there,” Bradley recalls telling Schwarz, whose Big B’s Juices now processes 7.5 million pounds of apples annually for juice and cider, much of which he sells directly to the public at his outdoor restaurant. Schwartz scoops up every available apple locally and imports the rest from Washington.    

Today, what Schwarz and Bradley have in common is that their thriving businesses sell a wide variety of food, wine, and diverse crafts. Exploring either place can turn into a daylong event.    

“I think it’s all about knowing your farmer,” says Bradley. “People wander around the farm. They see how you operate and pick stuff themselves, which gains trust.” He is not certified organic, saying that the cost is too much and ties his hands when pests invade.    

And the best part? Young people who want to farm see local opportunity. “A business called The Painted Vineyard is getting started close to me,” says Bradley. It will have a tasting room, a B&B and a camping area, and Bradley figures its customers will also be his.    

Meanwhile, near retirement at 70 but still farming thanks to his son, Ryan, Bradley continues to give advice to newcomers to the valley. One example is The Storm Cellar, a Winery and Vineyard, run by Jayme Henderson and Steve Steese, a sommelier-trained couple from Denver. They came to the valley knowing a lot about wine but not much about planting vines, repairing equipment or making wine from scratch   

“So we kept going back to Bradley,” says Henderson, “and he kept helping us out.” 

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to lively discussion about the West.

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By Bruce Palmer

If you’re hankering for a true Western vacation, come to the Cowboy State, where we live by the slogan, “Wyoming is what America used to be.”  

Perhaps you’re yearning for a conversation that doesn’t involve which COVID shot you got, Pfizer or  J&J. If so, Wyoming belongs on your itinerary: The state boasts all 11 of the most vaccine-hesitant counties in the nation. There’s nothing Moderna about modern Wyoming!

Wyoming has a long history of anti-vaxxers, and many can be found in our Legislature. As Republican State Sen. Troy McKeown falsely claimed, “The death rate from the vaccination so far is almost as high — if not higher — than the death rate from COVID.” We did have a mask mandate for a few months, but most people ignored it. Several legislators even hosted mask-burning rallies at the state Capitol.

In Wyoming, we’ve got cows and we’ve got coal. But we’re having a heck of a time getting rid of that coal. And that is making us mad, because no one could have seen this coming.

But we’re responding like rugged individualists: We’re going to sue the bastids. After Gov. Mark Gordon said, “I will not waver in my efforts to protect our industries, particularly our coal industry,” our legislators passed a bill giving him a $1.2 million slush fund to sue any state that has the nerve to pass laws that ”impede Wyoming’s ability to export coal or that cause the early retirement of coal-fired generation facilities in Wyoming.”

Once you come to Wyoming, it’s easy to pretend you’re back on the lightly populated Western frontier of 1890 or so. According to the 2020 census, Wyoming added just 13,000 residents over the past decade, a roughly 2% growth rate — by far the lowest in the Mountain West.

Idaho and Utah might be booming, while Wyoming is playing it safe by staying stagnant. But you won’t have to worry about any troublesome young ‘uns. A recent study by the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services shows that the population of 25- to 40-year-olds decreased by 6% in the last half of the decade. No rowdy whippersnappers to get in the way: Folks who grow up in Wyoming flee as soon as they get a chance, because good jobs are harder to find than endangered black-footed ferrets.

Fact is, millennials have become our primary export.

So who were those 13,000 people who did move here? Many were millionaires who flocked to Wyoming to dodge taxes. But you won’t have to interact with them because they’re hidden away on their sprawling ranches.

“Mega-stars like Harrison Ford, Sandra Bullock, Jeffree Star, and RuPaul are snatching up real estate across Wyoming, a state known for mud, manure and manual labor,” said MTV Pop Factor host Yoonj Kim on a recent episode. Why Wyoming? “To save money,” she explained. Wyoming is a tax haven for the wealthy, which means these newcomers contribute little to the public coffers.

In Wyoming, where revenue ends, adventure begins. In addition to playing the new road-trip game — “Guess the future Wyoming ghost town” — you can experience the thrill of being in the outback without assurance of medical care.

Thanks to Wyoming’s refusal to generate tax revenue, at least 10 communities are in danger of losing emergency ambulance service. So if you get seriously hurt while mountain biking (as I did, 30 miles from the nearest hospital), you can howl beside a lonesome road for hours on end — just like the coyotes — with nothing to disturb you, except maybe the coyotes.

And if you do make it to a hospital, you’ll get to live like the Wild West gambler you’ve always longed to be. Most of our rural hospitals are losing money, in large part because the state has refused to expand Medicaid, so they’ve been forced to eliminate some personnel and services. We call it “Wyoming Roulette”: Will the hospital (if you can find one) be equipped to help you?

Be prepared to open your wallet, regardless. Health-care procedures in Wyoming are among the most expensive in the nation. If the hospital you finally stagger into lacks the expertise to treat you, better hope your insurance covers helicopter rides. Our bare-bones hospitals often have to fly patients elsewhere, and $100,000 bills are not uncommon.

Still, a no-tax, no-vax Wyoming vacation may be just the adventure you need. Come to Wyoming and live dangerously! We’ll be waiting for you, pardner.

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