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<title>Today In Comedy: Wednesday, May 7, 2025 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Today In Comedy: Wednesday, May 7, 2025

 "If you've never been to a Waffle House, just imagine a gas station bathroom that sells waffles...."

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's managing editor, Greg Johnson.

Greg Johnson

Government & Politics

Politics

CHEYENNE — Data centers and Wyoming’s role in hosting them are greater than a local issue for communities debating whether they want that development or not; they represent a national security issue the state’s next governor needs to address.

That’s one of the main takeaways from a crowded Republican gubernatorial candidate forum Friday afternoon.

“We are in an AI arms race with China, and President Trump has been very bullish on data center development,” said Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder. “We have some resources here in the state of Wyoming to keep them going.”

She said she shares the concerns people in Cheyenne, Evanston, Casper and Laramie have already expressed about water usage and how data centers could impact power rates.

The answer isn’t banning data centers, she said, it’s “ensuring there is not water usage pulling from our resources … and making sure that we do not have utility rate (increases) that are on the backs of Wyoming people.”

She was on stage in the Grand Ballroom at Little America in Cheyenne with Republican primary opponents Brent Bien and Eric Barlow for a forum hosted by the Greater Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce.

Bien said that as he’s been traveling around Wyoming, “the vast majority of the folks are opposed to these, and I mean, they’re popping up all over the place.”

A career military man who spent 28 years in the Marines, and ran unsuccessfully for the GOP nomination for governor in 2022, said people are afraid of data centers because they don’t understand or trust them.

“I think what’s going on here is that the people have been left out of the loop,” Bien said. “And ultimately, it does comes down to the people.”

“If people are brought into the equation early and they understand what’s going on, then I do believe they’ll be far more receptive.”

State Sen. Eric Barlow, R-Gillette, echoed some of what Bien said about people’s fear of data centers.

A lot of those concerns are being addressed by the rapidly evolving technology that’s being built into data centers, Barlow said, referencing how directional drilling revolutionized the oil and gas industry.

[{"type":"text","text":"He also said that AI isn’t coming, it’s here."}]

“You have to think about what’s driving the demand” for data centers, said Barlow, a veterinarian who also served in the Marine Corps. “We’re part of the demand. Consumerism is part of the demand.

“Those rectangular devices some of you are looking at right now? That’s part of the demand, whether you’re asking it to do something artificially and intelligent — and I don’t know if those two words should go together.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Follow The Money"}]

Moderated by chamber chairman and Cheyenne Regional Medical Center President and CEO Tim Thornell, Friday’s forum featured three of the four registered Republicans on the primary ballot.

More than 300 people were packed into the ballroom to listen to the candidates address questions prepared by the chamber of commerce. Each had up to three minutes to respond.

When asked what Thornell admitted was a “loaded question” about how Wyoming should spend its money, all three expressed a need to be careful and frugal.

“We need to make sure we fund those essential services of government,” said Bien, who also said he drove the ballot initiative on this year’s ballot that, if passed, will allow people to claim up to 50% of their property tax bills as exempt.

“The largest budget in our state history just recently passed, you know, and we got to figure out where’s all this money actually going,” he said. “Is it really being spent on those essential services that we have out there?

“We know that there’s a lot of nonessential things that are out there.”

He claimed that residential property taxes are up 73% in Wyoming over the last six years, making it impossible for people to keep their homes or buy homes.

“The bottom line is that I’m more concerned about people staying in their homes than I am some of these frivolous things that we end up talking about across the state,” Bien said.

Barlow reminded the crowd that some of what Wyoming spends is constitutionally required, like education and public safety.

He also pointed out that minerals like coal, oil and natural gas “are paying 50% of (the state’s) bills on a daily basis.”

The Legislature also put money in savings this past session, and that money and the interest off it “is actually paying for 30% of our bills for the state of Wyoming,” Barlow said. “Think about that.”

Degenfelder, who was endorsed by President Trump in her bid to become governor before she announced her candidacy, also said she’s concerned about property taxes.

“People are being pushed out of their homes, they can’t stay in their homes because they can’t afford their property taxes,” she said. “That’s a problem.”

At the same time, “I’m not willing to compromise on basic services,” Degenfelder added. “I’m not willing to compromise on health and safety. If my house is on fire, I want a fire truck to show up right now.”

Being able to provide basic services is “why we keep a lean government,” she said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Stop Talking About It And Do Something"}]

Another issue all three agree on is that there needs to be more action after decades of officials and state leaders saying something needs to be done to keep young people from leaving Wyoming.

The issue isn’t money, said Bien. He said Wyoming spends about $22,000 per K-12 student, which jumps to about $35,000 including capital construction investments.

“I don’t think it’s a money issue. I think what this is is a coordination issue,” he said.

There’s a disconnect between education and industry when businesses say they need certain skills and Wyoming students aren’t learning them.

“Right now in this community, I know that the demand is for trades, for an electrician, for someone who knows heating and air conditioning controls,” Barlow said. “That is a pretty dang good job.

“In fact, it probably pays better than being a veterinarian — even if I was a good veterinarian.”

[{"type":"text","text":"That last jab at himself drew laughter from the crowd."}]

He pointed out there is some work being done to reverse that outward migration, like teaching certified nursing assistant (CNA) courses in high schools.

“Someday I’m going to be in a nursing home and that CNA is going to be looking after me, right?” Barlow said

Wyoming’s young talent leaving the state “is a problem we’ve all experienced,” Degenfelder said. “It may be your son or daughter, someone that you worked with, your friends leaving the state of Wyoming.

“We can’t just keep talking about it,” she continued. “We have to solve this problem.”

One way to do that is to stop putting a focus on training and educating people for jobs they can’t find in Wyoming.

“Moving away from trying to prepare kids for jobs that don’t even exist in Wyoming,” she said. “(Then) you talk to our businesses, like all of you in this room, and we can’t fill our jobs. There’s a disconnect there.”

Gov forum IMG 6542 6 5 26 6 5 26

<title>GOP Gov. Candidates Say Data Centers A National Security Issue For Wyoming And US | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Data centers are important to national security and for Wyoming, said the top GOP candidates for governor during a Friday forum. “We are in an AI arms race with China,” Megan Degenfelder said, with all agreeing it will be a priority for the next governor.

GOP Gov. Candidates Say Data Centers A National Security Issue For Wyoming And US

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

Business

The first presence of the dreaded New World screwworm in America since 1968 represents an “immediate threat” to Wyoming’s ranchers and owners of horses and pets, Wyoming’s state veterinarian said Friday.

“We don't know that it won't show up tomorrow,” said Hallie Hasel. "We don't know that it might not show up for six months. It may not show up at all, but we would consider screwworm something that we immediately need to start watching out for," she said.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed a 3-week-old calf in La Pryor, Texas, near San Antonio, was infested with the flesh-eating larvae of the parasitic fly.

Another case of screwworm had been confirmed in Mexico, 25 miles from the U.S. border, a week earlier. 

La Pryor is more than 1,000 miles away from Wyoming, but Hasel said the long distance that doesn’t mean ranchers should underestimate the spread of screwworm. 

[{"type":"text","text":"If anything, she added, they need to be more on their guard than ever."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"The Screwworm Situation"}]

. Hasel was the chair of a symposium on the preparedness, prevention, and response to screwworm in September 2025, which discussed the fly's anticipated return to the U.S. at some point in the near future.

“The United States has been preparing for this since about 2024, when we knew that the screwworm was moving north out of Panama,” she said. “We were aware there was a problem and needed to start preparing immediately, which the federal government and several states did.”

As of Friday, the USDA has taken “immediate action” to contain and stop the potential spread of screwworm. They’ve established a 12-mile "infested zone" around the detection site and have implemented additional proactive measures in coordination with the Texas Animal Health Commission.

Hasel spoke highly of the federal and state response to this confirmed case of screwworm.

“Texas has been implementing an excellent program to make sure that they stop screwworm right where it's at,” she said. “We have a lot of faith in their ability to stop it right where it's at.”

With the current programs in place, Hasel didn’t anticipate screwworm spreading rapidly into the rest of the country, let alone into Wyoming, in the near future.

“We don't expect it to come out of South Texas anytime soon,” she said.

However, that doesn’t mean the threat of screwworm isn’t worth taking seriously.

[{"type":"text","text":"Not A Food Issue"}]

Gene Copenhaver, president of the National Cattle and Beef Association, was in Cody on Friday for the Cattle Industry Convention and Trade Show. He took time to discuss the screwworm case in Texas that morning.

“There is a concern, but we've been expecting this for over a year,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “We thought it'd come last summer, so it gave a lot of time to get ready for it.”

Copenhaver agreed with Hasel’s assessment of the current situation. While there isn’t much concern about screwworm spreading beyond South Texas, livestock owners need to stay vigilant to ensure nothing gets past them.

There was one big thing Copenhaver wanted “the consumer” to know: screwworm is a pest issue, not a food issue.

“It’s not a food-borne safety issue,” he said. “The beef from a cow infested with screwworm is still good. There was some concern that speculation (on screwworm) was going to hurt the market, but they’re dealing with it, and I think we’re good.”

The confirmation of the screwworm immediately led to concern that beef prices could increase. Even if screwworm spreads much further and faster than anticipated, Copenhaver said that shouldn’t be a concern for beef buyers.

“It's a pest issue for the producer, not a food safety issue for the consumer,” he said.

[{"type":"text","text":"Help On Wheels"}]

New World screwworm is the larva of the New World screwworm fly. The flies lay their eggs in living tissue, usually in open wounds or body openings like the eyes, nose, and mouth.

When the eggs hatch, the maggots feed and burrow into the surrounding tissue, which can quickly kill the afflicted animal.

“They can burrow into that wound and kill the animal within seven to 10 days,” Hasel said.

A female screwworm can fly more than 120 miles and lay more than 3,000 eggs in its short 20-day lifecycle.

The fly itself can’t move very far or very fast, so the flying range of female flies is not the primary concern in the spread of screwworm. The biggest concern is what Hasel called “help on wheels.”

“The fly doesn't move long distances, except when it has help on wheels,” she said. “The primary concern is that larvae go unnoticed on an animal that moves from an area where they’re supposed to move, or from where we aren’t aware that screwworm is present.”

Cattle are constantly moving throughout the United States in tractor-trailers. If one individual has an open wound with screwworm larvae inside, it could quickly become a widespread issue.

 between 1966 and 2025, but many ranchers 

 about its impact on their cattle. Its reappearance has many agricultural producers spooked, and Hasel thinks they’re right to be concerned.

“We need everyone to maintain their vigilance, just in case it does move on a trailer somewhere else,” she said. “That it doesn't mean that you need to put every animal in the chute every day. It just means you need to be aware, look at any wound that you see on an animal, and make sure there isn't something in that wound that looks unusual.”

The discussion around screwworm has focused primarily on its potential impacts on cattle ranchers, as the first case was detected in a calf.

While the impacts of screwworm on livestock is a potent concern, Hasel believes that’s narrowing the scope. The threat of screwworm is much broader.

“What we're really concerned about is not just livestock, but all species,” she said. “It’s not just cows and horses. It’s cats, dogs, and other companion animals.”

[{"type":"text","text":"That’s where Wyomingites need to be concerned now and in the future."}]

Hasel mentioned that animal shelters nationwide take in rescued cats and dogs from southern states like Texas and Florida. That’s where they’re more likely to be infested with screwworm and, potentially, spread it very far in a very short amount of time.

“We get a lot of pets into Wyoming rescues that go up for adoption from states like Texas,” she said. “Should any of those animals have a wound and the larvae aren't noticed, we're concerned that that could also spread screwworm into Wyoming.”

Fortunately, there are several approved treatments and preventative products that protect pets from screwworm. If people don’t already have this protection for their pets, Hasel highly encourages them to obtain it now.

“Having them on a preventative is just a great all-around measure,” she said.

[{"type":"text","text":"It’s also worth noting that humans can be afflicted by screwworm, too."}]

In August 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that someone in Maryland had screwworm after returning from a trip to El Salvador.

It was the first human case of travel-associated New World screwworm myiasis from an outbreak-affected country identified in the U.S.

“It could get into a slight wound or scratch on any warm-blooded animal,” Copenhaver said. “It can affect wildlife too, and we can’t doctor to wildlife like we can our own cattle. That’s the fear.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"What To Do (When You Need To)"}]

Hasel doesn’t believe the single confirmed screwworm case in Texas this week poses an imminent threat to Wyoming. However, the risk of screwworm needs to be taken seriously.

If anyone confirms or suspects a cow, horse, or companion animal has an open wound infested with screwworm, they need to take immediate steps to save the animals and notify the proper authorities.

“If it's a livestock-sized animal, do not move that animal,” Hasel said. “Lock it up in a small pen, right where it's at. If you see any larvae in an open wound, do not throw them on the ground. Collect them into a container, take pictures of the wound and the larvae, and examine the rest of your herd.”

For potentially afflicted cats and dogs, Hasel said pet owners should take them to a veterinarian immediately. Any larvae should be collected and placed into a sealable container.

Regardless of the animal, Hasel said Wyomingites need to report any confirmed or potential screwworm infestation to her and the Wyoming Livestock Board immediately.

“We all work together,” she said. “If you can’t reach us, your veterinarian will know how. People just need to remember that even if you find it in cattle, and if it spreads to more cattle, we have appropriate treatments in place.”

[{"type":"text","text":"300 Million Solutions A Week"}]

Since the return of screwworm to the U.S. has been anticipated for years, preventive measures have been in place for some time.

The primary way screwworm was eradicated in the 1960s was by breeding and releasing sterile male screwworm flies. That’s the same strategy being developed to stop screwworm in the 2020s.

“The flies only breed once,” Copenhaver said. “If the females breed with sterile males, they can’t put out their larvae.”

Copenhaver mentioned that a facility in Panama is already releasing 100 million sterile screwworm flies a week to reduce, and hopefully eradicate, the parasitic fly in Central America. A new facility being built in Mexico, with financial support from the U.S., will release over 300 million sterile flies a week.

“That will be on board by midsummer 2027,” he said. “Hopefully, we’ll have screwworm on the run by this time next year.”

In the meantime, Copenhaver believes the USDA and the Texas Animal Health Commission are “doing a great job” handling the single confirmed case of screwworm and reducing the potential spread by every means necessary.

“Screwworm needs to be taken seriously, but I think this case is very much under control,” he said. “We want people to know that this is a pest issue, not a food issue, and this is a single confirmed case that we’ve anticipated for a while.”

And, if all else fails, Wyoming livestock and companion animals have an additional layer of protection. Screwworms don’t like the cold.

“They won’t come where it gets very cold,” Copenhaver said. “When it's wintertime, they’ll go away because of the cold weather.”

Screwworm and cattle

<title>Wyoming State Vet Says Wyoming Ranchers Need To Be Worried About Screwworm | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Wyoming State Veterinarian Hallie Hasel said Wyoming ranchers and pet owners should treat the detection of the New World screwworm in Texas as "an immediate threat." She said Texas officials are doing a good job stopping the spread but it should be taken seriously.

Wyoming State Vet Says Wyoming Ranchers Need To Be Worried About Screwworm

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Energy

Green

CHEYENNE — Protests and rallies are something f

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"In fact, Thursday marked a first for him."}]

Stephens, whose family has what he describes as a “modest” cow-calf operation south of Glenrock that’s been there since 1910, said he’s spent most of his life avoiding microphones and politics. 

But as wind projects have encircled his part of the county, he felt he could no longer afford not to get involved.

“We’ve got surrounded by wind farms,” he told a crowd gathered Thursday at the Wyoming Capitol in Cheyenne to call for more study of a wind wall that’s sprung up across a 200-mile swath of southeast Wyoming. 

“If you look at Converse County right now, between the farms that are there and the ones that are proposed, it’s 200,000 acres,” he said. "That’s a lot. And then this 

 showed up. Half of it’s going to be on state land. That was enough for me.”

When he started talking to neighbors, Stephens learned how widespread wind farms had become. That made him feel uneasy. 

So, he decided to come and be part of what was his first-ever rally, even though it meant his family’s ranch would be short-handed that day. 

“I have talked to ranchers all around,” he said. “I’ve talked to 68 ranchers, and there’s 50-some against it, three who won’t say, and six who are for it,” he said. “And this is the ranchers all the way around me. And they don’t have to save the ranch. They’ll go to work and do whatever they need to do to make it.”

At a State Board of Land Commissioners meeting in Douglas that Stephens helped arrange, he saw 200-some people in the crowd, with another 100 or so on Zoom, all against more wind in Wyoming. 

More Than 3,500 Signatures On Petition So Far

For the rally on Thursday, Stephens brought his daughter-in-law Kelsey and two grandchildren, Emory and Acelynn, to Cheyenne. 

“My husband and I built our home with our own two hands alongside family and friends,” Kelsey told the crowd. “We chose this place intentionally for the land, the view, and the life it allows us to live. 

"Picture a summer evening on our front porch — crickets and frogs singing, the smell of freshly cut hay in the air, and the red hills glowing as the sun sets. That’s a view that will take your breath away.”

And it’s exactly where a new wind farm plans to locate.

A petition the family has helped circulate has so far gathered 1,778 signatures from Converse County residents alone, Emory told the crowd, with another 500 from Douglas and another 1,241 coming from Glenrock and nearby areas. That’s more than 3,500 signatures so far.

About 98% of those are from Wyoming residents, Emory added. 

“Based on the most recent available data, Converse County generates approximately 43% of Wyoming wind power and electricity, but only receives 12% of the wind generation tax revenue,” she said. “That’s a small fraction of the benefits compared to what it produces for many residents.”

For her, the point of the rally in Cheyenne was all about making sure Wyoming people, including ranchers, have a say in the decisions that are affecting them.

On a map taped to her kitchen table, Cheyenne Realtor and Dereemer Ranch family member Wendy Volk has plotted an informal picture of what Wyoming’s wind tower surge looks like on the land. 

She started the map a little more than a year ago after receiving a letter notifying her that one or more neighbors planned to rezone their land from agricultural to industrial. The map she received with the notice was all but incomprehensible.

There was a dot for Cheyenne in the right-hand corner of the page and another dot in the lefthand corner for Laramie. Chugwater floated near the top of the page.

“Smack dab in the middle of that was this postage-size stamp, depicting this project,” she said. “And I’m a real estate agent, but I couldn’t make heads or tail of that map.”

A different page offered an enlargement of the postage stamp, a 56,000-acre tract dotted with 189 wind turbines, crisscrossed with access roads and transmission lines, as well as symbols for substations. 

But it was still impossible to tell where her family’s property was in relation to all of that.

She reached out to the company for a better map, and that wasn’t as straightforward as she had expected.

“I kept being very tenacious, asking questions, and then the gentleman said I have to go through legal,” she said. “He eventually sent me a better map, which he thought didn’t show that we were even touching.”

With the improved map, though, Volk finally verified that the project was about 1,000 feet off of her property line, as well as some of her neighbors. That’s when she started looking for a bigger picture. 

She hadn’t set out to become an expert on Wyoming’s industrial siting laws or federal permits. She just wanted to see a master map of all the projects to understand their overall footprint on the land. 

She’d noticed, now that her own property was directly affected, that there were an awful lot of wind projects popping up all over the place. She figured someone, somewhere would already have created such a map at the state level.

Nope. And further, there had been no state-level look at the cumulative effects of all these many wind projects.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"So she decided to make her own."}]

“I started putting pink sticky notes on a Wyoming map anytime someone mentioned a wind or solar project,” she said. “All of a sudden, the sticky notes were like connecting dots. And that’s when I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is an entire wall of wind projects that will stretch easily from Casper to Cheyenne and from Cheyenne to Rawlins. It’s just going to fill in and create a triangle.'”

It will be a massive “wind wall” that industrializes well over 200 miles of southeastern Wyoming rangeland and migration corridors, she said.

In Volk’s mind, the problem with that isn’t just any one wind farm in particular. It’s that no one at the state level is looking at the whole picture. 

Across southeast Wyoming, ranchers like Volk and her family rarely show up at hearings in their own communities, much less drive hours to Cheyenne to attend Industrial Siting Council meetings or stand on the Capitol steps for something like a rally.

Making time to be in Cheyenne means leaving their families shorthanded for tasks involving animals and fields. 

But Thursday, Stephens and Volk were there with other ranching families to help make a statement about what they feel is unprecedented and unconstrained growth of wind towers in Wyoming.

“These are not protest kind of people,” fourth-generation Wyomingite and Albany County Conservancy founder Anne Brande told Cowboy State Daily. “But they are calling me from Niobrara County, from Chugwater, from Wheatland, from Casper, from Goshen. 

"People are just tired of these (wind turbines) in these rural communities. They want to have a state conversation about it.”

Brande’s group isn’t asking to stop every wind turbine, but they want tougher siting scrutiny, as well as a cumulative impact review that looks at how so many wind turbines showing up all at once will affect wildlife, migration corridors, viewsheds, agricultural land, and rural communities across Wyoming. 

Wind turbines have already killed a number of golden eagles, Brande said. 

“We’ve been trying to place a golden eagle nest cam,” she said. “We think that’d be a fun project, but we’re having a hard time locating a viable nest, a viable golden eagle nest, and that’s a very different narrative than what we had even two, three years ago.”

Federal policy analyst David Wojick has spent the past two years digging into what wind development is doing to golden eagles across the American West.

He says the Eagle Protection Act is misnamed and is actually a license to kill a certain number of golden eagles every time a project gets a permit. That’s because each permit allows a certain amount of eagle “take” or deaths.

“There’s supposedly a program whereby every eagle that’s killed by a wind turbine, 1.2 golden eagles are saved from electrocution, because the wind people pay to have power poles somewhere in the country fixed,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s all false, by the way. And that’s the thing that I’m the most focused on.”

Wojick has been involved in broad environmental impact assessments of offshore wind in Wales for the last six or so years, and said that’s what he believes Wyoming needs to do about its wind wall.

“We’ve got this huge number of projects, some of which are built, some of which are under construction, and a whole bunch of which have been applied for in various processes,” he said. “And they’re being treated individually. The cumulative effect is obvious, and could be devastating.”

Wojick sees an “ecological death trap” phenomenon with such a widespread swath of land being taken up by wind towers. 

“Somebody’s got to be looking at that,” he said. “The feds should be looking at it. I don’t know if there’s some provision in Wyoming wildlife law for this, but if there isn’t, then the governor should just like convene a task force or committee to look at this.”

Wojick has seen studies showing the number of golden eagles killed by wind turbines has doubled in the Rocky Mountain West. 

He’s also heard ornithologist and bird biologist Bryan Bedrosian’s say that Wyoming’s golden eagle population has dropped by 30% over the last 20 years. Bedrosian is founder of Sporting Lead-Free, as well as conservation director at Teton Raptors Center.

“When you’ve got around 1,500 turbines at this point and with another 1,500 coming, I mean you could wipe (golden eagles) out, quite literally,” Wojick said. “You need to have a moratorium until somebody decides how many eagles you’re prepared to kill.”

What’s The Legacy For Future Generations?

For ranchers like Stephens and Volk, the wind wall isn’t theoretical. It’s either become the view from their front porches, or will be soon.

They’re not asking to turn back the clock on every wind turbine in the state. They just want a thoughtful look at the big picture, instead of a piecemeal approach.

“Governor Gordon’s recent executive order just yesterday regarding data center development recognizes many of these same concerns,” Volk said. “It acknowledges the importance of stewardship, water resources, wildlife, local communities and the entire region. 

"If Wyoming recognizes the need to evaluate cumulative impacts associated with large-scale data center development, then we should be willing to examine the cumulative impacts of industrial corridors forming across southeastern Wyoming.”

The rally, she added, is not about protesting energy development. 

“It’s about making sure Wyoming residents have a voice and the cumulative effects of these projects are honestly evaluated before our landscapes are permanently changed,” she said. “Today, I respectfully ask our city council members, our county commissioners, our state legislators, our state agencies, governing boards to consider the bigger picture, because southeastern Wyoming is not an empty space on a map. 

"It is ranch land, it is wildlife habitat, it is open space, and it is our heritage.”

Wyoming has a responsibility, she added. to be good stewards of that land, and to consider carefully the legacy that will be left to future generations, a legacy she’s sketched out in pink sticky notes that paint what she feels will be a disquieting story.

Wind rally 20260604 121506 6 4 26

<title>Wyoming Ranchers Rally Against 'Wind Wall' Of Turbines Across The State | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Wyoming ranchers rallied at the state Capitol on Thursday demanding action against what they call a “wind wall” of turbines across the state. “We’ve got surrounded by wind farms,” said one rancher about wind power and its impact on Wyoming’s rural future.

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