Too many people and too much poop.
Todd Wilkinson
Posted inArticles
Yellowstone grizzlies keep endangered species protections
A court ruling disallows sport hunting the bears in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.
Posted inArticles
Hunting faces an ethical reckoning
Gruesome social media videos show how far modern hunting has drifted from its roots.
Posted inAugust 3, 2015: Outflanked
It’s time to end Custer worship
A Montanan faces up to the West’s own history of racism.
Posted inJanuary 21, 2008: An energy oasis in the political desert
Where do you draw the line?
As a journalist, I’ve watched many forms of civil disobedience in the West. I’ve known EarthFirst! tree-spikers and interviewed armed, tax-evading Freemen. I’ve seen “green” grandmothers lie down before bulldozers to stop the blazing of new logging roads across public land, viewed the carcasses of dead grizzly bears and wolves shot down by opponents of […]
Posted inWotr
Where do you draw the line?
As a journalist, I’ve watched many forms of civil disobedience in the West. I’ve known EarthFirst! tree-spikers and interviewed armed, tax-evading Freemen. I’ve seen “green” grandmothers lie down before bulldozers to stop the blazing of new logging roads across public land, viewed the carcasses of dead grizzly bears and wolves shot down by opponents of […]
Posted inWotr
Here’s to an honest man
Chances are you’ve never heard of Jim Alderson, and I’m willing to wager that no toy company is going to model an action figure after him. He’s more than a little balding on top and he’s working on a middle-aged paunch. You won’t find charisma to match that of California’s movie-actor Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But […]
Posted inAugust 5, 2002: Land or money?
She left the ranch to save her soul
Picturesque and nostalgic as the pioneer era might seem in hindsight, to be a prairie woman must have been, on most days, pure hell. But that story is sometimes absent from the pioneer literary history, a genre written largely by white men, about white men. Until now. If you continue west from the stage for […]
Posted inOctober 8, 2001: Whoa! Canada!
Whoa! Canada!
Activists fight an uphill battle against a gas boom along Canada’s Rocky Mountain Front
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Democrats see the light in Montana
The 2000 elections could be pivotal for theeconomy and environment
Posted inMarch 13, 2000: Libby's dark secret
Tom Watkins has left us, but his Western dream remains
Tom Watkins, another pathfinder, has passed from the campfire circle. “He was a strong, clear and important voice backed by a good old-fashioned Rooseveltian-Ickesian liberal heart,” says Bozeman writer David Quammen. “Now we’re all older and more alone again, as we knew we were when Ed Abbey died.” T.H. Watkins died last week from cancer […]
Posted inMarch 13, 2000: Libby's dark secret
Marc Racicot: One of the would-be president’s men
You never know who you’re going to meet on an airplane. Last summer, on a flight to Helena, Mont., as the seats in coach class began to fill, a handsome, middle-aged man walked up the aisle and slipped into the seat next to me. He appeared exhausted. His name was Marc Racicot, and he was […]
Posted inNovember 8, 1999: A new road for the public lands
The Forest Service sets off into uncharted territory
TARGHEE NATIONAL FOREST, Idaho – Jim Gerber is staring me in the eye and he doesn’t look happy. He’s tall and lean, wears his gray hair clipped in a buzz cut, and he’s angry. The U.S. Forest Service has dug itself into a hole, he says, and he’s hell-bent on digging the agency out, and […]
Posted inNovember 8, 1999: A new road for the public lands
A convert to conservation
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Shawn Regnerus is a native Montanan, a hunter, angler, hiker and a former lover of dirt bikes. Regnerus, 30, grew up in rural Amsterdam, near Bozeman, where his father worked as a high school teacher. He later studied law at the University of Montana […]
Posted inNovember 9, 1998: Grizzly war
Grizzly war
Scientists, activists and politicians clash over taking away the great bruin’s federal protection
Posted inApril 27, 1998: The old West is going under
Will Dombeck sock it to rebellious supervisors?
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. For three decades, Tom Kovalicky worked his way up the ranks of the Forest Service bureaucracy until he became supervisor of the Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho during the 1980s. Once in that position, Kovalicky attempted to restrain the logging on […]
Posted inApril 27, 1998: The old West is going under
Breaking an agency of its old ways
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. Andy Stahl, the executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE) oversees the largest activist organization in the country devoted exclusively to forest management issues. FSEEE was founded a decade ago by former timber planner Jeff DeBonis, to create a […]
Posted inApril 27, 1998: The old West is going under
The worker ants keep the agency alive
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. Joyce Whitney is typical of many young people who enter the Forest Service with a gleam in their eyes, believing they can make a contribution to the stewardship of America’s public lands. She works on the Bozeman Ranger District of the Gallatin […]
Posted inApril 27, 1998: The old West is going under
Forest Service seeks a new (roadless) road to the future
Note: see end of this feature story for a list of four accompanying sidebar articles. In his first major appearance as the 14th chief of the nation’s Forest Service, Mike Dombeck was summoned the winter of 1997 before the House Agriculture Committee to testify about a “forest health” bill sponsored by Rep. Bob Smith, the […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
Will the bison killing resume next winter?
With half of Yellowstone’s bison now hanging in meat lockers or filling the bellies of grizzly bears, the spring of 1997 was supposed to end the “buffalo war” outside America’s oldest national park. But though the guns are silent following the largest slaughter of wild bison in the 20th century, a bitter debate continues. The […]