After the latest big oil spill — 200,000 + gallons on the Keystone line in South Dakota — I decided … More
Author: Jonathan P. Thompson
Journalist, editor and writer focusing on the Western United States and its landscapes, communities, and cultures. Creator of Land Desk. Author of "River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster" (Torrey House Press 2018), "Behind the Slickrock Curtain" (Lost Souls Press 2020), and the forthcoming "Sagebrush Empire: A journey into the heart of the public land wars" (Torrey House 2021).
On oil, milkshakes, movies, Albert B. Fall and Ryan Zinke
Surely the most famous monologue in Let There Be Blood, the 2007 Paul Thomas Anderson film about a California oil … More
Back home for a bit
I’ve been in Bulgaria for the past nine months, but made it back to the Four Corners Country homeland for … More
The West’s juice generators, big and small
I’m working on something about the electrical grid in the West, and found this massive trove of data from the … More
Fiction: Howitzer Love
(Author’s note: I wrote this piece several years ago for the Silverton Mountain Journal. I retooled it for the current … More
This Land Should Be Your Land: A National Parks Reading List
Originally posted on Longreads:
When President Obama walked out of the Oval Office earlier this year, he left behind more…
The diminishing Animas River
I just handed over to my editor the second draft of the manuscript for River of Lost Souls. We’ve still … More
How oil and greed led to the 1923 centralization of Navajo government
In 1920, the San Juan Basin of northwest New Mexico and southwest Colorado teetered on the line between being an … More
Why President Obama needs to designate a Bears Ears National Monument
“People have always stereotyped and cartooned Blanding in an unfair way. I get tired of redneck knuckleheads cartooning the environmentalists, … More
Comb Ridge parcel privatized: A sign of things to come?
It was like a sucker punch to the gut last week when the State of Utah sold off 800 acres … More
Jonathan P. Thompson 