Writers on the Range

It all began with pizza

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In the mid-1960s, my dad served on the school board in Cortez, in rural southern Colorado. He recalled that at one meeting he said...

When no home is affordable, where do you live?

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It’s a common story: Candace McNatt of Durango, in southern Colorado, kept losing bidding wars to buy a house. She finally settled on a...

Fired up

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At any given moment during this smoky summer of 2023, hundreds of wildfires were blazing in the United States — more than 850 as...

Gun nut has a warning

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When I was a young man growing up in rural Oregon, there was a term for people like me: “gun nut.”  By my 20s I...

Colorado is conflicted about cutting its water use

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In Colorado, farmers were required to enroll in a four-state program by March 1 if they want to get paid for fallowing their fields,...

The West is an exploiter’s paradise

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High on a mesa where everyone can see it, a trophy house is going up in the northern Colorado valley where I live. Some...

Atmospheric rivers endanger the West

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Moab, Utah, gets just eight inches of rain per year, yet rainwater flooded John Weisheit’s basement last summer. Extremes are common in a desert:...

The West badly needs a restoration economy

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Farmington, a city of 45,000 in the northwestern corner of New Mexico, has run on a fossil fuel economy for a century. It is...

Old bones can be a small town’s movie stars

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The prehistoric past can perk up the present. When woolly mammoth bones were found in my hometown in Wisconsin years ago, they became the...

When a skunk goes after your garden

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Skunks love autumn as our backyard gardens fill up with ripe vegetables. But in my northern New Mexico corn patch, that meant a determined...

We need to act now to fight wildfires

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For the 2021 fire season, the writing is on the wall. The West, despite a few days of intense winter, is far drier than...

The ‘energy gap’ nobody wants to tussle with

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Many Western states have declared they will achieve all-renewable electrical goals in just two decades. Call me naïve, but haven’t energy experts predicted that...