Picture a clear stream where spawning salmon undulate over clean gravels, pressing upstream through waters the iconic fish once vanished from entirely. That’s Lookingglass Creek, in the Umatilla National Forest.In the Wallowa National Forest, Huckleberry Mountain sustains rare species like the Wallowa rosy finch, and on the Malheur National Forest, there’s an Alaska yellow cedar forest hundreds of miles inland from its core range.These three national forests in eastern Oregon share something in common: They are intact roadless forests now on the verge of losing the protections that have kept them free from industrial logging and new roads. These lands are also common ground shared by Tribal members, hunters, anglers, wildlife watchers and anyone who values a quiet trail into the backcountry.

When I was 18 and first worked as a river guide, I assumed I had to be as tough — or even tougher — than the guys I worked with.It was the early 2000s, when few women were guiding. Though I loved being on the river, I often felt isolated, thinking I had to work harder than anyone else to be taken seriously. I believed that in part because I didn’t know the stories of women who had come before me.Little by little, I began to hear about Georgie White, the first female guide on the Colorado River through Grand Canyon. She started Georgie’s Royal River Rats in the early 1950s and made a name for herself running huge motorboats — stocked with Coors and manned exclusively by Los Angeles firemen. Her trips were known to be raucous and so were her outfits, leopard prints preferred. But the stories sometimes made her seem more like a caricature, a wild and outrageous woman.

When Wendell Berry, 92, died August 31, the West lost a writer who focused on the importance of rural land. He studied under the writer Wallace Stegner at Stanford University and wrote nine novels about characters — some like himself — who farmed and cared about the land.What also stood out about him was his public leadership — his readiness to march and commit civil disobedience, protesting against national, state and local government when he found their policies harmful and short-sighted. His targets included both a coal-fired and nuclear power plant, our war in Vietnam and the death penalty. He said he also opposed abortion. A Christian, Berry was a critic of organized religion for what he saw as its abstract notion of compassion.

Had Donald Trump been president in 1973, when Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into federal law, the Gunnison sage-grouse would be extinct. Close to 90 percent of all Gunnison sage-grouse remaining on the planet are in the Gunnison River Basin of west-central Colorado. The rest are in Utah. They’ve been extirpated from Arizona and New Mexico.The species is critically endangered in fact, if not by official decree. It is protected by the Act as just “threatened” because the Interior Department lost a lawsuit brought by Gunnison County, the states of Utah and Colorado, and ranching, livestock and energy-development interests.

I drove to the bluff overlooking the “Gunny” to process the sad news — news that hasn’t yet been made official — that by October a big portion of the lower Gunnison River in western Colorado will be dry. The official term is “fully dewatered.”Monsoons were supposed to be heavy this year. As I looked down at the river in late August, clouds in the distance appeared almost monsoonal. Wisps of rain streamed out, but they evaporated before reaching the parched ground. It just about made me cry.Below me, the North Fork of the Gunnison unceremoniously trickled into the Gunnison River at a place known as Pleasure Park, a weather-beaten outpost of civilization that’s one of the last best-kept secrets in Colorado.

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.

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.

Tracy Stone-Manning, president of the Wilderness Society, sounds the alarm on the largest proposed rollback of conservation protections in American history.“The administration has announced it intends to remove protections on 45 million acres of national forests and allow roads to be punched into some of our wildest public lands."

Here’s a true story about the West: An oil company leases some public land, drills a well, pumps the oil, and posts a $10,000 bond as its promise to clean up the site when the well runs dry. Years later, the company declares bankruptcy — or it simply walks away.The well remains, leaking methane and salty wastewater into the ground for the foreseeable future. Plugging it could run north of $300,000. The company forfeits its $10,000 and vanishes. You and I cover the rest. That math rewards walking away, and it sat protected by federal regulation for more than 60 years.

Conservation biologist Pepper Trail recounts a question he was asked recently: "What keeps you going?" His answer? Wildflowers.He’s politically active, he says, because as a scientist, he’s appalled at this administration's defunding and mismanagement of our nation’s scientific enterprise, from the National Science Foundation to the Centers for Disease Control. But along with resistance, Trail writes, there must be recharge—a hike, a walk, or just sitting in the backyard. And noticing wildflowers.