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.

The West is in a world of hurt this spring, warns writer Jonathan Thompson. We are two and a half decades into the Southwest’s most severe drought of the last 1,200 years, and this winter’s snow dearth is one of the most extreme on record.

In western Oregon, the Bureau of Land Management proposes a new Resource Management Plan without a single public meeting and with one goal: To quadruple the logging volume on Western Oregon BLM forests, returning these public lands to the “robust” levels of the 1960s and 1970s.The plan would open nearly 2 million acres to clearcutting with no protections for remaining old-growth, writes Pepper Trail, and the public only has 30 days to provide comment.

Denver never stops seeking more water, but Durango, a town of 19,000 people across the Rockies in southern Colorado, is taking a wait‑and‑see approach, writes Dave Marston.There is a solution — hooking into a reservoir called Lake Nighthorse — but so far, the town hasn’t acted. The city continues to rely mainly on the Florida River, with backup from the Animas River.When the two rivers flow normally, the taps run. If both rivers fail or get clogged with debris, the city could run out of water within weeks, Marston warns.

This year, in what it calls a “study,” Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources is killing off mountain lions to try to increase mule deer herds, writes Ted Williams. Hired trappers are allowed to dispatch lions using any method, including banned traps and neck snares.But Williams points out that it's drought and a harsh winter that’s cut into deer herds: Killing lions isn’t supported by science and will do nothing to help deer.

Utah Republican Congresswoman Celeste Maloy wants to discard a collaborative plan for managing the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument. This end run against a plan that was inclusive and two years in the making, writes Stephen Trimble, would leave much of the monument unprotected from extractive industry and off-road vehicles.It would also set a precedent here and across the nation that could upend public lands protection for years, Trimble adds. Even the deeply conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation said it fears a “Wild West” for land-use planning if Congress acts on Maloy’s radical approach.