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.

In 1947, the Utah-born writer and historian Bernard DeVoto summed up the West's attitude toward the federal government: "Get out and send us more money." Now, says the Utah writer and photographer Stephen Trimble, federal offices are being closed and staffers fired, but no additional money is coming. The federal presence is crucial to the region, Trimble says, and the economic crisis caused by the new administration might just open the region's eyes to a necessary and beneficial partnership.

As of early March, 92 percent of New Mexico was experiencing drought, with almost 30 percent of the state in severe to extreme drought, writes Laura Paskus, a longtime New Mexico journalist. That also means earlier and longer wildfire seasons. An Albuquerque tv station enlived commercial breaks during the Oscars March 2 by flashing red-flag fire warnings for much of New Mexico. Dry soil, dry air, water supplies running dry—it's a familiar litany not just in New Mexico, but in Arizona and parts of Utah, too. Climate change, Paskus writes, must be faced: We have no other choice.

The gutting of our national park system, by Ben Long, attacks Elon Musk's "efficiency" team for cutting park workers. His example is Montana's Glacier National Park, whose annual operations budget is about $15 million to serve visitors who boost the local economy by their spending $350 million annually. As Long puts it, Glacier Park is a cash cow, "one of the greatest bargains in government." But it must have park workers to keep people safe.

Many people are reeling as cost-cutters in the Trump administration wade into land management agencies and indiscriminately fire people. This is no way to sensibly evaluate workers and no way even to save money as the federal workforce accounts for only 4% of the annual budget, writes Riva Duncan. The big guns in terms of spending are Medicare, Medicaid and the Department of Defense, which together make up 60% of the budget.Duncan, a 32-year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service, knows many of the workers recently fired. She tells about two of them, both recently hired for their “dream” jobs, and now recently let go for reasons they found insulting and not based on evidence. “The land and people will suffer from [this] if nothing is done,” one told her.

President Donald Trump's policy of demonizing workers who are here illegally and rounding them up while indiscriminately firing people from federal agencies has rocked Washington, D.C., and the nation. Combined with new tariffs and rising inflation, this chaotic beginning signals a rough economic road ahead, writes Dave Marston—one that won't be good for non-billionaires.