KVNF's weekly call-in gardening show. As the Worm Turns is now on Wednesday's @ 5 PM.

Before the Forest Service logs a drainage or the Bureau of Land Management leases a parcel to a driller, the agency must publish what it intends to do, allow the public to respond, and answer the objections. That arrangement is 56 years old and 640 million acres of federal land run on it.But on July 3 of last year, five federal departments filed rules in the Federal Register that gutted their own environmental review regulations. Agriculture. Interior. Energy. Transportation. Defense filed twice. All six took effect the day they were published, with public comment invited afterward, if at all.

An interview with Buffy Witt, the former director Hinsdale County EMS, about the difficulties of running a volunteer dependent agency in the most remote county in the lower 48 states.

Comparing is a natural way that we place ourselves within this complex system of life and figure out our unique identity within it.

Your weekly regional science update.

Sara Rinne spent nearly 18 years with the Montrose library. Now she's deputy director of the Western Colorado Alliance for Community Action. She talks with KVNF about grassroots organizing on the Western Slope — and the Alliance's Power Forward conference, coming to Grand Junction on August 29.

“My writing often comes to me that way–something that interests me in the real life world, something kind of political and thorny, something I don’t entirely totally know how I think about it, something I’m interested in exploring.” These words from short story writer and novelist Claire Boyles are at the heart of this episode on the relationship between fiction and real life. How might having personal experience in a certain arena both help and hinder our ability to use it as material for fiction? How can characters drive the way opinions are explored in a book? How do we create more compelling characters? What must be let go as we create a fictional realm? How can fiction help us explore “thorny” political themes? And how might our past lives help us in practical ways as we move forward in our creative lives?Claire Boyles (she/her) is a writer and former farmer. Her debut novel, Appraisals, is forthcoming in August 2026. A 2022 Whiting Award winner in fiction, she is the author of Site Fidelity, which won the High Plains Book Award and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award, the Colorado Book Award, and the Reading the West Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Sierra Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals, and she is a screenwriter with multiple credits on the Hallmark Channel. She splits time between Loveland, Colorado and Ames, Iowa, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and the Environment at Iowa State University.Claire will be a speaker at the Grand Mesa Writer’s Symposium in Cedaredge on September 12. Details here: https://www.grandmesawriters.org/schedule

It’s no secret that grizzly bears in the Lower 48 live close to the edge of extinction. Now, with little explanation and almost no time for the public to respond, the Trump administration and three Western governors have proposed to make it easier for states to authorize the killing of these bears.The federal proposal would change regulations that now protect grizzly bears under the Endangered Species Act, stripping away protections that keep grizzlies in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming alive. States that have repeatedly pushed to kill more bears would exercise far more control. The public has until Aug. 17 to comment.

Artist Karen Floyd is turning old unused newspaper boxes into free art exchanges. The first News to Muse box is up at Gambles Hardware in Hotchkiss, and Floyd wants them in every town in Colorado.