Mary O'Brien's come a long way in conservation, and she now finds herself as a lone voice for aspen, beaver, and soil crusts in Southern Utah, but has struggled to effect actual change. Through collaboration and the threat of legal action, she's found fun and function in the bureaucracy that most consider boring.

In the 1990's, the Endangered Species Act listing of spotted owls and salmon brought Wallowa County to the edge of collapse. With the lumber mills, shut down, there didn't appear to be a way out, until a local non-profit combined environmental stewardship and job creation to establish a new identity for the county.

The Desert Tortoise doesn't have an easy life: predators, heat, and development of the Mojave threaten these long-lived creatures every day. Solar energy investment and endangered species funds have let scientists work to protect and breed the tortoises, but the results of this work won't be clear for a long time.

Peabody Coal and the strip mining of Black Mesa, on the Navajo Nation, spelled doom. The mine displaced Navajos who'd lived there for centuries, and has sucked the once plentiful and clean Navajo aquifer, completely dry.

Fires are part of a forest's cycle of growth: they are continuously changing, sometimes dramatically. People tend to become attached to forests that look a certain way. Can we learn to love the ashes, too?

Valer Austin needed to keep water on her ranch, so she built small dams on her creeks. An absolute ecological revitalization resulted, bringing plants and fish back to her ranch. She ended up in court with the Center for Biological Diversity. Why?

Californians love wind power, and Californians love endangered species. What happens when a new energy project and the restoration of California Condors intersect? Synergy.

Kryptobiotic soil crusts, or biocrusts, are small colonies of bacteria, fungi, and other species, but they're not much to look at. Yet, these diminutive dry patches are among the best indicators of healthy Western arid landscape, and their conservation is of paramount importance.

Ted Turner’s known for a lot of things: CNN, baseball, and sailing being just a few. But what about bison ranching and Pleistocene rewilding? To write his conservation legacy, Turner’s trusted experienced and innovative ranch managers to do whatever it takes, as long as it’s profitable. 

Individually, ranchers and environmentalists tend to understand one another, but in groups, there is little ability to compromise. How can large-scale collaboration be accomplished across the West if no region-wide agreements are possible?