The Rural West

Kern County is a region whose intense oil and gas development increasingly overlaps with renewable energy projects. This report seeks to answer the question: is the oil economy set to follow the downward trajectory of conventional resource economies, or is renewable energy ready to fill the void?

How can rural western communities work together towards environmental sustainability and better health outcomes? Catch up with this overview of the Sixth Eccles Family Rural West Conference, which brought together academics, practitioners, and policymakers in Yakima, Washington on March 22-23, 2018.

The University of Utah Press has published Bridging the Distance, a book by the Rural West Initiative of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Edited by the distinguished historian David B. Danbom and with a foreword by Center co-founding director David M. Kennedy, the book explores the Rural West across four dimensions: Community, Land, Economics – and defining the Rural West itself.

Most people think of dangerous levels of ozone gas occurring in traffic congested cities like Los Angeles, so it’s a surprise to find high concentrations of it in pristine areas of the American West. But it’s happening. Two basins that lie along the Green River in the intermountain West have some of the worst ozone pollution in the nation. Reported and written by John McChesney. Edited by Ariana Reguzzoni and Geoff McGhee for the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.

High energy prices have made advanced drilling technologies profitable, pushing drillbits into parts of the West once believed tapped out, and into new places once thought inaccessible. A look at three communities in North Dakota and Wyoming who find themselves at different stages of an energy boom. 

With American newspapers under stress from changing economics, technology and consumer behavior, it's easy to forget how ubiquitous and important they are in society. For this data visualization, we have taken the directory of US newspaper titles compiled by the Library of Congress' Chronicling America project – nearly 140,000 publications in all – and plotted them over time and space. This visualization is also viewable as a series of video animations.