Writer

Jonathan Thompson

Jonathan Thompson has been reporting on and writing about the Western U.S. for a quarter of a century. He is a freelance writer based in Colorado and Bulgaria, a contributing editor at High Country News, and the author of River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster (Torrey House 2018) and the forthcoming novel Behind the Slickrock Curtain (Lost Souls Press 2020).


Articles

Wyoming shoots itself in the foot

By Jonathan Thompson

This summer, the Biden administration offered Wyoming $35 million to help the state plug and clean up abandoned oil and…

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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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Chronicle of an abandoned oil and gas well — one of millions

By Jonathan Thompson
Abandoned well, Jonathan Thompson image

Even from a distance it’s clear that an oil and gas well called “State Senate #2” in New Mexico has…

Abandoned well, Jonathan Thompson image

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Guess who has outsized clout on public lands?

By Jonathan Thompson

This may be a surprising story. It begins with a working group trying to save the last native bighorn sheep…

Image by Pete Nuij, courtesy of Unsplash

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Housing prices in the West are over the moon.

By Jonathan Thompson

“But now the Zoom Boom-fueled market fire is spreading beyond the “best places” into the once-affordable bastions of working class neighborhoods, the bedroom communities, rural ranchettes and even trailer parks.”

Photograph by Phil Hearing, courtesy of Unsplash

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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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Now We Need to Rollback the Rollbacks

By Jonathan Thompson

“Yet Obama’s policies were equally friendly to energy development.”

Photograph by AJ Nash — @VernChronicles

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The West’s Population Grows and Churns

By Jonathan Thompson

“Americans are still mobile and still moving West..”

Photograph by Brooke Cagle, courtesty of Unsplash

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COVID’S KILLING THE OIL INDUSTRY, AND IT MAY NOT COME BACK

By Jonathan Thompson

Cracks began to appear in the hydrocarbon-bubble years ago and in the months prior to the arrival of the coronavirus a breakdown appeared imminent.

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WHAT THE CORONA VIRUS TEACHES US

By Jonathan Thompson

What I was witnessing was just one instance of an ad hoc, failed response to a crisis

This transmission electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, isolated from a patient in the U.S. Virus particles are shown emerging from the surface of cells cultured in the lab. The spikes on the outer edge of the virus particles give coronaviruses their name, crown-like.

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