The installation at Tucson’s Museum of Contemporary Art is made from the landscape.
Deserts
Posted inArticles
The recipe for restoring damaged lands is missing one key ingredient: seeds
A new report highlights recovery solutions to fires, droughts and other climate catastrophes.
Posted inMay 1, 2022: New Ways of Seeing the West
There are millions of acres of ‘failing’ rangelands, data shows
54 million acres of federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management aren’t meeting the agency’s own land-health standards.
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Border wall scars: ‘It feels like if someone got a knife and dragged it across my heart.’
Tribal leaders and Borderlands communities reflect on their fruitless struggle to stop the wall.
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The Border Patrol is leaving migrants to die
A new report shows that the agency systematically ignores emergencies — neglecting thousands of lives.
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Can we write our way out of catastrophe?
In Ben Ehrenreich’s ‘Desert Notebooks,’ a fragmented style attempts to change the way we think, and write, about the Anthropocene.
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Ranchers blindsided by Trump’s border wall
They built a coalition to protect open space. Now, they’re up against the country’s largest construction project.
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Trump’s border wall threatens fish species
The U.S. is skirting conservation laws and withdrawing millions of gallons of groundwater.
Posted inSeptember 2, 2019: In Bad Faith
The desert gets a biocrust skin graft
Without its cover of living microorganisms, the desert is eroding.
Posted inJuly 21, 2019: A Radical Return
Last words from a desert scribe
Essayist Ellen Meloy’s posthumous collection is profound, outspoken and hilarious.
Posted inJuly 21, 2019: A Radical Return
Paranoia and a ‘preposterously’ oversized water tank
An affluent Utah community spent millions to extinguish its fear of fire. Decades later, they’re still trying to buy their way out of a bottomless pit.
Posted inJune 24, 2019: Losing Lake Coeur d'Alene
The West’s worst fires aren’t burning in forests
Range fires get bigger every year, threatening sagebrush habitat and rural towns.
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The grassroots groups helping asylum seekers on the border
‘We had no choice but to make it work.’
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Russian investors are keen on Nevada’s copper
Demand for clean cars is causing an uptick in copper mining in the West, but at what cost?
Posted inMarch 4, 2019: El Nuevo Movimiento
Humanitarian aid is being criminalized at the border
Deterrence strategies have turned increasingly punitive for immigrants and activists.
Posted inMarch 18, 2019: Arizona's Wild Horse Paradox
Development plans test a decade-old conservation deal
Were concessions to protect undeveloped land in California worth it?
Posted inFebruary 4, 2019: Nizhoni Girls
The shutdown has halted important scientific research
Disrupted funding for federal science hurts Western lands and economies.
Posted inNovember 26, 2018: Follow the fish
Latest: Trump’s BLM approves a massive California solar plant
Opponents cite potential harm to desert wildlife, views and sand dunes.
Posted inNovember 12, 2018: Old Wests, and new
The contradictions of iconic lands
The photos inside two new volumes show the grandeur and vulnerability of landscapes like the Grand Canyon and Bears Ears National Monument.
Posted inArticles
A high-stakes water reckoning looms in the West
Be it a wet or a dry year, the water rich in Colorado’s North Fork Valley take their share.