Because of federal staff cuts, two online registries for cancer studies and the health status of firefighters are down and no longer operate, writes Riva Duncan, wildland firefighter and advocate. As the busy summer fire season approaches, it’s just one more “punch in the gut,” says one firefighter. “But when the fire call comes, we’ll respond like we always do and worry later.”

Calling ethanol wasteful and inefficient doesn’t begin to list its drawbacks, writes Ted Williams. Derived from corn grown in the Midwest and West, he finds that It costs more to produce than gasoline, reduces mileage for vehicles, corrodes gas tanks and car engines, pollutes air and water, and, by requiring more energy to produce than it yields, increases America’s dependence on foreign oil. But so far, Williams adds, ethanol remains protected by a powerful agribusiness lobby.

Idaho writer Crista V. Worthy says that unless they’re rescinded or reduced substantially, President Trump’s Chinese tariffs will wipe out the investments made in her family’s small business and kill their manufacturing plant in Boise, Idaho. China had been about to become a major buyer of health products from the family’s business when President Trump announced confiscatory Chinese tariffs. Worthy writes that she’s asking Idaho politicians to stand up for Idaho businesspeople and farmers, opposing tariffs that raise prices for everyone.

Montanan Tracy Stone-Manning, former director of the Bureau of Land Management and now director of The Wilderness Society, writes with passion about our heritage of public lands. Yet selling parts of that heritage is the goal of the current administration, whose budget bill will be under consideration starting this week. Stone-Manning warns that once public lands turn into private profit centers for energy extraction or housing, wildlife will suffer, and all of us who love the still-wild outdoors will begin to lose what makes America unique in the world.

Scientific criticism followed fast to the news that a company called Colossal had produced three genetically engineered dire wolves. Biologist Pepper Trail points out the habitat no longer exists for an animal that was adapted for preying on now-extinct ground sloths and giant bison. And the gene “edits” only involved 14 genes, with 20 differences between living gray wolves and extinct dire wolves.The goal of conservation is not to preserve individual animals, Trail writes, it is to help populations sustain themselves in their native habitats and for that we have a long way to go.

Benjamin James Waddell is a legal advocate for immigrants in Colorado who has seen ICE, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, become increasingly aggressive. Since President Trump took office, ICE has arrested nearly 33,000 people, though only half of them were convicted criminals.

It’s such a wonderful concept—thousands of homeowners selling power back to the electric company, while also reducing their vulnerability to natural disasters such as wildfire, writes Andrew Carpenter. What’s even better: Residential solar power mimics a stand-alone power plant, one that need never be built.

When LaPlata County in southern Colorado needed a boss of emergency preparedness, they found a winner in Shawn Lagarza, an experienced firefighter whose career spanned working on Hotshot crews to overseeing all federal firefighting in California, Hawaii and the Pacific Islands. Now, she wants Durango residents and others in the county to prepare themselves for a time wildfire approaches. During the week of April 20, 42 neighborhoods will participate in mock evacuations, responding to an alert as if fire danger were the real thing. “We’re not going to live forever,” she said, “and every day becomes more precious than the day before. Let’s all be ready for the worst.”

A lot of us feel hopeless today, writes Richard Knight, conservationist and college teacher, but “Let’s choose hope, get our hands dirty, and make hope real.” He tries to do that by taking students out to conservation easements where they fill in gullies to slow down water, among other projects. Taking action, including contacting elected officials to protest threats to public lands, is another way to take heart when the news about everything, from politics to climate change, is so discouraging.

Writer Ted Williams calls recovery of wolves in the West “the biggest success in wildlife management.” But what does recovery look like today? Williams writes that in Montana, for example, the population is declining by about 100 animals per year, but that’s not fast enough for wolf-haters. Montana’s legislature is considering a bill for non-stop hunting until a 600-wolf quota is reached. And in Wyoming, “wolf whacking”—chasing a wolf from a snowmobile—is still legal. Wolves need federal protection, Williams writes, because the states can’t be trusted.