By Mike Koshmrl
A dozen or so wild horse advocates and photographers were gathered on a ridgeline near White Mountain in August 2024 when news started spreading that federal land managers got the OK from the courts to eliminate two entire herds, and a part of another, from 2.1 million acres of the area known as the Red Desert.
By Emma Dietrich and Patrick Anderson
“The checkerboard is always in the back of our minds” says Jim Wasseen, Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative coordinator for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.
By Kristen Pope
A bolt of lightning crashes down and hits some brush, which begins to smolder.
By Katie Hill
It took all night to drive hundreds of miles from the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) in northwestern Montana to the shores of Yellowstone Lake,
By Christine Peterson
Long before a group of hunters from Missouri hoisted a ladder over a fence in southwest Wyoming—setting off a series of headline-grabbing court cases and breathless predictions—the US government had a plan.
By Heather Hansman
The hunters, technically, never touched the ground.
Issue 15 of Western Confluence will explore the unique history and modern-day implications of the checkerboard pattern of public and private landownership in the West. Stories will be released online throughout 2025 and in print January 2026.
Perspective from Robert B. Keiter
Yellowstone National Park—established in 1872 and widely regarded as the world’s first national park—represents the initial dominant model for nature conservation both here and abroad.
By Camilla Sandström
Long ago, it is said, the Indigenous Sámi people of the North made a quiet, sacred promise with the reindeer.
By Kelly Dunning
One of my first days in Eswatini, a small country bordered by South Africa and Mozambique, my guide told me a story about the Rhino Wars.
By Maria Vittoria Mazzamuto and Sukhchuluun Gansukh
By Francesco Bisi
The first wolves to enter the Alps in nearly a hundred years found themselves in southeast France’s Mercantour National Park in 1992.
By Annabella Helman
In Kenya’s Rift Valley, a pride of lions begins to stir as the sun descends to the horizon and the air grows still.
By Temple Stoellinger
By Shaleas Harrison
It’s 8 am as the sunlight moves across the foothills of Carter Mountain, the longest mountain in the Absaroka range and east from Yellowstone National Park.
By Tesia Lin
In the 1990s, Kenya’s hirola antelope population “plummeted from 15,000 to an estimated 300-500 animals,” says retired professor Dr. Richard Kock.
By Emily Downing
Every spring, Chris Williams looks forward to seeing the terns alight on the meadows of the southern Wyoming ranch that he manages.
By Ezra Stepanek
Bruna Ferreira tried to go into her conversations with the people living around Atlantic Forest State Park without expectations.
By Kristen Pope
Chip Jenkins, Superintendent of Grand Teton National Park, knows he has to pay attention to what happens beyond his park’s borders.
By Ben Goldfarb
