Montana writer Todd Wilkinson spent seven years writing the definitive biography of Ted Turner, who died recently at age 87. Turner was a complicated and accomplished man, he says, not just for starting CNN and 24-hour news, building a major league baseball team, his hometown Atlanta Braves, and starting a foundation run by former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth to strengthen the United Nations.Above all else, Wilkinson says Turner loved the West’s open lands and wanted to protect them for bison and all wildlife. As his former wife Jane Fonda put it, he wanted to be known as “a good guy."

With only simple majority votes required in each chamber of Congress, the management plan for the 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument could soon be thrown out, writes Scott Braden, executive director of South Utah Wilderness Alliance.Representatives who would like to replace redrock scenery with oil and gas drilling and ATV trails have been using the Congressional Review Act to cancel management plans that were years in the making. Now it’s Utah’s turn, Braden says, and all we can do is urge everyone who cares about the state’s bedrock canyons to tell their elected representatives just that.

Tracy Stone-Manning, president of The Wilderness Society, calls the administration’s new plan for reorganizing the Forest Service “destructive.”By closing dozens of the agency’s regional offices and research centers, staffers will no longer be on the land they manage, Stone-Manning says, and many will be forced to quit. She adds that the plan to move headquarters from the nation’s capitol to Salt Lake City will only further fragment and isolate the Forest Service.

Auden Schendler lives in Basalt, Colorado, where spring is usually measured by snowpack, river levels, and the return of kayak season. But after one of the driest winters in recent memory, Schendler says the rivers he and his friends depend on never truly arrived—a loss that signals far more than a bad recreation season.Schendler argues that climate change is not only reshaping the American West’s landscape and economy, but also eroding the rituals, friendships, and sense of identity tied to home.

Until recently, David Calkin was a senior scientist for the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station. Now a wildfire consultant in Missoula, Montana, Calkin says that staff cuts in the agency have already hampered its fire-fighting ability.Under the Forest Service’s planned reorganization, Calkin says there will be even fewer skilled management teams to respond to fires. The question, he asks, is not whether the fires will come. It is whether we are still capable of responding effectively when they do.

Aaron Weiss writes about the Interior Department’s plan to hollow out its agencies that maintain and protect America's public lands. Released in early April, the 2027 budget plans to cut nearly 3,000 positions from the National Park Service alone.Congress largely rejected cuts like this the last time around, says Weiss. Now, conservationists are once again working hard to rally the public and defeat Interior's budget.

In Tucson, a city of 542,000 in the Sonoran Desert, extreme heat is a given. Two years ago, temperatures over 100 degrees lasted for 112 days.“We crave shade here," writes Karen Mockler, and that’s why she’s joined other volunteer residents and city staffers working for an ambitious goal: planting one million trees planted by 2030. The digging part, she writes, turns out to be one tough job.

A stranger recently committed three random murders of women from the tiny towns of Lyman and Torrey, Utah. Stephen Trimble writes that these violent acts by someone who killed people to steal their vehicles disrupted everyone's sense of safety. The women who lost their lives were his neighbors in remote Wayne County.Trimble says it will take the powers of both land and community to get back to the reassurance and resonance of living in harmony.

Officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) don’t wear masks because their job is risky, writes Benjamin James Waddell. He points out that statistically, teachers have much riskier, life-threatening jobs: “ICE agents wear masks to instill fear while shielding themselves from the public they are supposedly protecting."

It’s just by chance that any bison survived a ruthless slaughter of the 1880s, but over the last 50 years, a few thousand buffalo have painstakingly been brought back by federal and state agencies and Western tribes. But in Montana, write two Montana state legislators, Governor Greg Pianoforte is doing everything he can to pressure the Bureau of Land Management to reverse earlier, positive bison decisions.