Natural Resources & Energy

Air quality specialists say the smoky conditions that showed up earlier than usual this year, could stick around until October for some parts of the region.

A massive new infrastructure bill is slowly moving its way through Congress this summer. But a coalition of elected officials, farmers, conservationists and tribal leaders want to make sure it doesn’t include new big pipelines or dams along the parched Colorado River.

A recently approved wind farm could bring significant tax dollars to Albany County and the state, while helping humanity reduce carbon emissions. But the Rail Tie Wind Project's approval this week came with some stipulations. Wyoming Public Radio's Jeff Victor reports those stipulations represent something of a compromise with the vocal and well-organized movement that fought the wind farm for more than a year.

Another dry year has left the waterway that supplies 40 million people in the Southwest parched. A prolonged 21-year warming and drying trend is pushing the nation’s two largest reservoirs to record lows. For the first time this summer, the federal government will declare a shortage.

Wyoming's mountains sit at the headwaters of some of the most important rivers in the American West, including the Colorado and the Missouri. Wyoming Public Radio's Melodie Edwards sat down with Journalist Anne MacKinnon to discuss her book Public Water: Lessons from Wyoming for the American West. The book tackles the fascinating history of how we came to manage all that water, and what other states could learn from us as we face greater droughts and climate change in the future.

On Saturday, July 17, a kickoff event will take place for the Bighorn River Blueway Trail in Manderson and Basin. The project is a proposed river trail that starts in Thermopolis and ends in Lovell.

Severe wildfires across the West have prompted the nation’s top fire agency to increase its preparedness level to the highest and most critical stage — the earliest the agency has done so in a decade.

Emergency water releases from reservoirs upstream of Lake Powell have begun to preserve the nation's second-largest reservoir’s ability to generate hydroelectric power.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently partnered with a group of high schoolers from Cody to plant seedlings for sage-grouse habitat. The students, who were part of The Buffalo Bill Center of the West's Youth Advisory Board, were interested in finding a conservation project that would help preserve the Greater Sage-Grouse population, so they turned to the BLM's Cody office.

The Albany County Commissioners voted Tuesday to approve the long-debated Rail Tie Wind Project, which will cover 26,000 acres in the south of the county.