In more than 40 years of life in Colorado, Ed Marston ran three news publications, wrote multiple books about water and agriculture, advocated for clean power sources, endlessly questioned the U.S. Forest Service, went to battle with a Koch brother over public land access and helped the West redefine itself beyond its mythologized cowboy past.
Marston — a New York native and former physics professor — was not a likely candidate for these roles in his adopted state. But his endless curiosity and abhorrence of bullies allowed him to revel in the nuances of Colorado life and defend its most valued tenets from outside interests, his friends and family said.
“For a long time, Ed was the wise man and the conscience of the wider West,” said Rick Knight, a longtime friend and professor at Colorado State University.
Marston died Aug. 31 of complications of West Nile virus. He was 78.
Marston was born April 25, 1940, in New York City to parents who had immigrated from Europe. He attended high school and college in New York City and earned his doctorate in solid-state physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook at age 28.
After marrying Betsy Pilat, a public television producer, the couple decided to move to Paonia with their two small children in 1974. The couple wanted to take a “year off” from the grind of work and city life. They didn’t intend to stay for the next 44 years.
The Marstons were not immediately accepted in Paonia, however. They were New Yorkers, after all. Worse, residents thought they were hippies.
“We didn’t know that dirt roads were real roads,” Betsy Marston said.
Out of boredom, Ed and Betsy launched a newspaper. Over the next six years, they ran the North Fork Times and the regional Western Colorado Report.
“Those six years were the most fascinating, exciting years of our lives,” Betsy said. “We were learning the West from the ground up. And everybody had a story.”
In 1983, the Wyoming-based news magazine High Country News hired Ed Marston as its publisher and Betsy as its editor. The magazine, which covers environment and politics in the rural West, moved its headquarters from Lander, Wyo., to Paonia — where it has remained since — and took a turn under their leadership.
Under the previous leadership of founder Tom Bell, the magazine had been a place for environmental activists to vent their grievances and further their crusades. The Marstons brought a more journalistic process to the publication. The magazine, which now has more than 35,000 subscribers across the country, blossomed under the couple’s leadership.
“When they started their work, no national newspaper or news magazine covered the interior West in any detail,” former High Country News board member Mike Clark wrote in Mountain Journal. “After they arrived and expanded its focus, every journalist who covered the West used the HCN framework to understand the new forces that shaped public policy across the vast, rapidly changing and much-misunderstood interior states.”
High Country News reflected the realities of the West the Marstons were coming to know. From New York, Ed saw the region as a vast untouched landscape, as many do, his wife said. But as they lived and worked in Colorado, they learned about the damage from irresponsible logging and mining. They learned how the rivers had been contaminated. They learned their new, beautiful home had a complicated past and present.
“We learned that it’s pretty beat up,” she said.
Explaining the realities of the West was thrilling work for a man who found academia tedious and loved nothing more than to talk about big ideas. During his tenure as publisher, he oversaw the magazine as it covered the end of big dam construction, changes in logging plans in national forests, the rise of renewable energy, the emergence of ranchers committed to sustainability and a shift in culture as rural towns embraced recreation as a major economic force.
“A lot of people say you can’t cover a region. But we did. We gave a sense of regional identity,” Betsy said. “We were able to discuss the idea that we live in a wonderful place, but by being here we threaten it. How do we make sense of that?”
Marston rarely backed down from a fight. As a writer, he was a “burr in the side of the U.S. Forest Service,” Betsy said. In 2012, Marston pointed out that Bill Koch, one of the four Koch brothers, was poised to gain significantly from a federal lands swap that would block public access to the scenic wilderness in Ragged Mountain Basin. Marston and the allies he rallied around him foiled the billionaire’s plan.
When Knight, the professor at Colorado State University, moved to Fort Collins from Seattle, he read Marston’s columns to understand the mountain West.
“Some people might have said he was ornery. He told people what he meant,” Knight said. “And we needed that. The West still lived in a fantasy, in a mythologized West. Ed was clear-eyed about it.”
Later, the two men became close friends and worked together on a book about the cultural aspects of ranching. Marston became a mentor for Knight, teaching him to read often, listen deeply and keep his mouth shut.
“He had a humanity that ran through him,” Knight said.
In 1990, the University of Colorado Boulder awarded Marston the first Wallace Stegner Award “for faithfully and evocatively depicting the spirit of the American West.” Later recipients included U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and author Terry Tempest Williams.
Marston stepped down as publisher of High Country News in 2002. He continued to write sporadically, but also devoted more time to other pursuits, like his longtime position on the board of the Delta-Montrose Electric Association. He helped push the rural electric co-op toward renewable energy long before it was a common effort, Betsy said.
Marston remained in good health and loved to hike until he contracted West Nile from a mosquito. Betsy said it’s impossible to tell exactly when and where he was bit by the infected bug, but recent dry summers have reduced what is usually running water into standing pools ideal for mosquito breeding. The increasing lack of water and warming weather across the West was one of Marston’s many concerns about the changing region, she said.
Marston baked rhubarb pies from the stock in his garden and adored the Boulder band Cake, his wife said. He named all the family’s dogs Buster (even if they were female). He played pranks and loved his local book club. The last book they read was by an author from Moscow, Betsy said. There was a line in the book that recently caused Ed to ponder souls: whether we have them, what they mean.
Sometimes, Marston couldn’t sleep at night. Betsy would worry about him and his lack of rest, but her husband treasured the peaceful hours to reflect.
“The next morning I’d ask about his sleep and he’d say, ‘I had some really good thoughts,’ ” she said. “And he meant it.”
Marston ended a 2009 fundraising letter to High Country News subscribers with a question that shaped how he navigated his life.
“What greater privilege do we have than to sustain that which sustains us?” he wrote.
A celebration of life for Marston is scheduled for 2 p.m. Friday at Delicious Orchards outside Paonia.
