Ben Long
All Stories

Trump’s administration can’t grasp that some American lands should remain wild, without roads or logging (ap)
Pushing to build new roads in our most rugged areas is a fool’s errand. Letap restore the national forests, trails and access roads that for too long we’ve allowed to...

ap: Beware the Trojan Horse of “affordable housing” targeting public land
Recently, some pundits have suggested that a fix for America’s housing problem is to sell off public land. After all, the federal government manages hundreds of millions of acres.

ap: After 40 years of living with wolves, this wildlife biologist concludes managing people is the more difficult task
Biologist Diane K. Boyd has had a front-row seat to 40 years of wolf recovery in the West, but her new memoir reveals that entanglements with humans in Montana were...

ap: Stop villainizing the cowboy. Turns out ranchland is essential for conservation.
As that story was told, its villains were often the folks in the cowboy hats. It was an old tale that cattle and predators didn’t mix. Environmentalists came up with...

ap: Hiking public lands shouldn’t require a ladder or a lawsuit
Imagine you were part owner of a nice piece of rural land, maybe with a trout stream running through it. But your neighbors won’t let you in. You don’t have...

Writers on the Range: Politicians are trying to smother America’s conservation fund
A handful of our representatives in Congress are quietly preparing a multibillion-dollar rip-off of American families.

Long: Idaho’s caribou teach a harsh lesson
The end of the line seems imminent for the last caribou of the Lower 48. Woodland caribou once roamed the forested northern tier from Maine to Michigan to Washington state,...

Long: Can Trump’s Interior pick, Ryan Zinke, live up to Roosevelt?
The newly drafted secretary of the Interior Department, Ryan Zinke, takes pride in comparing his conservation principles to those of Theodore Roosevelt.