If Any Agency Ever Needed Reorganized

July 24, 2026

Earlier this year U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Chief Tom Schultz announced a major reorganization of the agency, prompting the usual opposition from employees predictably opposing any change in the status quo. A few environmental industry groups expressed skepticism, but the story was mostly ignored elsewhere. That might be because many people assume it will face […]

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Choosing Green Fairways or Green Pastures

July 17, 2026

I met a guy at a golf course recently who expressed grave concern about the health of the grass this summer, because of Colorado’s ongoing drought. We hadn’t met before and knew nothing of each other’s backgrounds. But he entertained me with a tirade about Colorado’s waste of water, especially for agriculture. He asserted that […]

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Different Spins on the Same Issue

July 2, 2026

Rodney Page’s first novel, a political thriller called “Powers Not Delegated,” follows a congressman learning how Washington works. He clings to his parents’ advice that “If you never tell a lie, you won’t have to remember what you said.” But eventually he develops “a perverse respect for politicians who had mastered the art of spin… the […]

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Decline of the Aspen – a Prophetic Report

June 24, 2026

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that “Truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.” Twenty-eight years ago, in the summer of 1998, the Club 20 Research Foundation published a report called “Decline of the Aspen: A Special Report on the Health of National […]

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Why We Build Fences – And Dams

June 22, 2026

A Montana friend reminded me of an old cowboy adage: “Before you take down a fence, you ought to pause long enough to ask why it was put there.” It’s a principle called “Chesterton’s Fence,” coined by writer G.K. Chesterton who cautioned against acting rashly. He wrote, “a “modern reformer” says of the fence, “I […]

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Improving the Environment, One Plant at a Time

June 10, 2026

In a popular Substack publication called Asterisk Magazine, a California physicist named Casey Handmer wrote a great piece titled “It’s 2024 and Drought is Optional,” about desalination technology. But he also touched on an even more fundamental point about how people don’t want to think about the importance of infrastructure. “The past century of prosperity […]

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Climate Future Not What it Used to Be

June 3, 2026

In 1937 the French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry published Reflections on the World Today, in which he originated one of literature’s great lines: “The problem with our times is that the future is no longer what it was.” The line was perfected later by Yogi Berra, who said simply, “The future is not what […]

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Turn Down the Volume on BLM

May 29, 2026

This week the Senate finally confirmed the new Director of the Bureau of Land Management, former New Mexico Congressman Steve Pearce. The firestorm surrounding his nomination a few weeks earlier has not yet cooled and probably won’t. The volume is louder than the situation justifies, though, and the vast western sky above BLM land is […]

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Is the Southwest’s Water Problem Serious Enough Yet?

May 22, 2026

One month after proposing to put a man on the moon, JFK said getting drinking water from the ocean would be “one of the great breakthroughs of history” that would “dwarf any other scientific accomplishments.” Californians have worried about water for decades. The Colorado River, upon which the entire Southwest depends, is dying. The region’s […]

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California Could Finally Get Serious About Water

May 15, 2026

The Wall Street Journal headline said “San Diego Now Has So Much Water That It’s Selling It.” The article said San Diego generates enough water to rescue Arizona, though that’s jumping the gun just a bit. No such deal has actually been finalized yet, but the fact that the conversation is underway marks a new […]

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