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Castro Valley
Man Missing From Abandoned East Bay Senior Facility Found In San Jose
An elderly patient reported missing from an assisted-living facility in Castro Valley that was shut down earlier this month was found in San Jose on Friday
911 Calls Reveal Chaos In Closed Castro Valley Care Facility
Recordings of 911 calls show that two workers at an East Bay assisted care center who helped residents after the state shut it down called emergency dispatchers four times over three days but never told them that the center was closed.
Crews Unaware East Bay Care Home Was Closed When Patients Were Found
Authorities say they responded to four 911 calls at an East Bay assisted care facility where they say 14 patients were left practically abandoned before discovering that it was closed.
Owners, Staff Allegedly Abandon Elderly Patients At Castro Valley Assisted Living Facility
The California Department of Social Services this week moved to revoke the license for a Castro Valley assisted living facility where patients were allegedly left with inadequate care this weekend.
1 Cat Dead, 3 Saved From 1-Alarm Fire At Castro Valley Home
A cat perished and three more were saved from a one-alarm fire at a Castro Valley home Saturday morning.
Burger Joint Robber Shot Dead By Deputies In Castro Valley Was Wanted Parolee
The suspect who was fatally shot in a confrontation with two Alameda County sheriff's deputies at a restaurant in Castro Valley on Friday night was a parolee at large from Oakland, authorities said Tuesday.
3 Separate Vegetation Fires Contained Across Bay Area
Alameda County fire crews were fighting a vegetation fire near Lake Chabot Regional Park that was burning up a ridge toward homes. Meanwhile, firefighters in Santa Clara County were battling another fire that destroyed a house near the Uvas Reservoir before spreading to nearby vegetation.
Annual Vigil Set For Murdered Castro Valley Girl; Case Still Unsolved After 19 Years
Nearly two decades after a Castro Valley teenager was killed in her home, her family is honoring her memory with a ceremony, candlelight walk and art contest Friday night.
Alameda County Youth Center Opens After Decade-Long Effort
The state-of-the-art REACH Ashland Youth Center celebrated its grand opening Wednesday afternoon after a decade-long, youth-driven effort to improve the neighborhood.
Castro Valley Police Shooting Shuts Down Highway 580 On-Ramp
The Alameda County Sheriff's Office was investigating a shooting involving an officer on westbound Interstate Highway 580 near Castro Valley that occurred late Thursday night, deputies said.


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Tag Archives: religious life
João Card. Braz de Aviz: "in these 50 years, consecrated life has followed a fruitful path of renewal"
Over at the best weekly in the UK, The Catholic Herald, I saw an article about religious life and the upcoming year for religious.
There is a comment about João Card. Braz de Aviz, Prefect of the Congregation for Religious:
"We are … Continue reading
3000 religious leave religious life each year. Why? Some reasons.
I saw this at CWN:
Curial official: over 3,000 religious leave consecrated life each year [Makes you wonder how many enter religious life. I'll bet not 3k!]
The secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life … Continue reading
Pope Francis' outstanding address to international leaders of women religious
Today Pope Francis met with some 800 leaders of women's religious institutes from around the world in an organization called the International Union of Superiors General (UISG). Think of an international version of the LCWR.
This meeting of women religious in … Continue reading
A Prayer For Vocations
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Here is a prayer that perhaps parish priests will pick up and use at all Sunday and Holy Day Masses, perhaps immediately after the Gospel:
LEADER: Please kneel for our prayer for vocations.
ALL: O God, we … Continue reading
Card. Burke on the LCWR's view of religious life
I wrote about how screwed up Sr. Joan Chittister's view of religious life is HERE.
Review that and then listen to this:
Same wave length, no?
Posted in SESSIUNCULA Tagged Card. Burke, LCWR, magisterium of nuns, religious life, women religious 36 Comments
QUAERITUR – For Readers: Religious Life and Debt
I get quite a few email asking for advice/help from people who want to enter religious life, but cannot yet be accepted into a community because they have debts, usually student loans, etc.
Do you readers know of any group, organization, … Continue reading
Posted in "How To..." - Practical Notes, Brick by Brick, Our Catholic Identity Tagged debt, religious life 49 Comments
Faithful, sound orders and religious institutes for WOMEN?
Since it's LOVE DAY, let's get real.
I have been asked this before, and I think we have covered it before, but… repetita iuvant.
Really good, sound, faith, orders or religious institutes for women in the USA? England? Ireland? Canada? Australia?
Where you … Continue reading
Really cool nun video
Here is a great video which I pick up from the best Catholic weekly in the UK, The Catholic Herald.
What a delightful lady. Keep your ears tuned for what she says is her constant prayer.
Posted in Just Too Cool, Non Nobis and Te Deum, Our Catholic Identity Tagged nuns, religious life, Spain, Sr. Teresita 16 Comments
10 Points about prospective priests
I received some points of reflection from a priest friend who is a member of one of the oldest religious families. I edited two of the points with his permission.
1. Prospective priests (Religious or Diocesan) are not looking primarily for … Continue reading

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Until last month, few Americans had heard of Bundy's battle with the BLM, and many were likely surprised that grazing fees could still spark an Old West-style standoff, complete with drawn guns. But to many Westerners, the clash looked familiar – evidence that the legendary Sagebrush Rebellion was still alive, if not exactly thriving. Under Bundy, in fact, it's more radical than ever.
The original rebellion ignited in Nevada when the Legislature passed a bill in 1979 demanding that the BLM cede its lands to the state. Four other Western states followed. Anti-federal sentiment wasn't new in the state, where the federal government controls more than 84 percent of land. But following the passage of the nation's bedrock environmental laws, it intensified, and became distinctly anti-environmental in tone.
The 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which increased the BLM's ability to restrict grazing, particularly galled Sagebrush Rebels, many of whom were ranchers. The act affirmed that the federal estate would remain public, officially ending the parceling off of public lands to homesteaders and others. It also inspired new regulations, including mandatory environmental impact statements for each of the BLM's grazing districts. The agency measures grazing in terms of "animal unit months," the forage necessary to sustain one cow and calf for one month. Between 1959 and 1978, animal unit months available to ranchers on BLM land declined in most Western states, including by 41 percent in Nevada. University of Wyoming professor and Sagebrush Rebellion expert Gregg Cawley says much of the decline was attributable to environmental concerns, like overgrazing, and laws like the Endangered Species Act and FLPMA.
The Sagebrush Rebels found powerful sympathizers in President Ronald Reagan and Interior Secretary James Watt, who imposed a moratorium on BLM grazing reductions, and declared that all of those environmental impact statements were based on "faulty science," effectively blocking corrective action when such reports found damage from grazing. "The original Sagebrush Rebellion used the transfer of federal lands to the state as a strategy to get the BLM to take their complaints about federal land management seriously," says Cawley. No one expected a land transfer to occur. "(But) their strategy was successful to the extent that they caused a reassessment of BLM management policies." Within five years, the rebellion mostly fizzled out.
But the embers smoldered: Western legislatures continue to pass symbolic bills calling for state control of federal land. And now there's Bundy. He shares the Sagebrush Rebels' distaste for federal power but goes further: unequivocally rejecting federal authority and land ownership. "He refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the federal government altogether," Cawley says. In contrast, "(the Sagebrush Rebels') original intent was to take this issue to the Supreme Court," he explains – working for change within the system.
Some likely sympathizers have hesitated to get involved. The Nevada Cattlemen's Association supported the Sagebrush strategy for seeking change through the courts but rejected Bundy's lawless approach when pressed by reporters. The association's response is "a thunderous statement," according to Western historian Charles Wilkinson, that proves Bundy is "an outcast in the community."
Anti-federal sentiment is ever-present in the West. "It's just that occasionally, depending on how heavy the hand of the federal government has been, we get an outburst of more intense reaction," as notorious Sagebrush Rebel Wayne Hage once said. For Bundy's supporters, which include extreme militia groups and – briefly – a few Tea Party U.S. senators, public-lands policy isn't really the issue. Gripes about grazing fees blend with anger over Obamacare and other claims of federal overreach. For them, says Cawley, the roundup proved that "the federal government is just a bunch of jack-booted thugs."
It's Bundy who is acting the thug, though – obeying only select laws, and demanding for free a privilege other ranchers pay for. "He's a complete outlaw," says Wilkinson, "and it's ridiculous to treat that as some high cause."]]>
He's still having fun, but for different reasons. Today, Gonzalez manages a modest herd of 200 beef cows on the Jornada Experimental Range, a long-term ecological and agricultural research site near Las Cruces, New Mexico, where grass is scarce, and water scarcer. Occasionally, he says, fellow ranchers ask: "What the hell are you doing?"
Such skepticism is directed primarily at the animals he raises. When Gonzalez parks next to a wood-and-wire corral, it's obvious there's something different about them. They are speckled and streaked with brown, black and white, have horns that spiral as they age, bony frames, and a name that is endlessly fun to recite. These are criollo cows. (Try it: cree-oh-yo.) One stares at us with dewy eyes, then cranes her neck and scratches her auburn face with a long hind leg, rather like a dog.
Criollo are unusually leggy. They are also unusually small, anathema to the bigger-is-better philosophy that drives the beef industry. Gonzalez's criollo top out near 1,000 pounds, a few hundred pounds less than conventional beef cows. Corporate meatpackers won't buy them. Rick Estell, an animal scientist with whom Gonzalez collaborates, says raising criollo is "kind of like raising sheep if you're a cow man."
But in the criollo, Gonzalez sees only potential: an animal that could rescue ranching and rangelands in the Southwest from their failing marriage to Angus and Hereford, the dominant British beef breeds. "Things are bad," he says bluntly. "Everybody's going broke. Everybody's running out of grass. It's all dry. Never are we going to get the same money for criollo as a big animal, but our costs will be lower. And at the same time, I think we'll be saving our land."
Criollo were brought to the New World on Christopher Columbus' second voyage in the late 1400s. (The word describes people or animals of Spanish ancestry born in the Americas.) The cows were eventually introduced and adopted from Tierra del Fuego to the Northern Rockies, and were established in the American Southwest by Spanish conquistadors in the late 1500s.
People kept criollo for milk, meat, leather, grease and draft. The hardy cows — often free-roaming and seldom selectively bred — adapted to their new environment primarily via natural selection. They required little water, subsisted on available forage, and could withstand hot weather. Texas longhorns, Florida cracker cattle, and corriente sport ropers are among their descendants.
Criollo in the Southwest started to be phased out with the introduction of British breeds during the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the modern beef industry took off, spurred by expanding railroads and beef demand in Eastern markets. But the newcomers were hard on the desert, and the desert was hard on them. Large livestock need a lot of food. Productive grasslands and inexpensive feed made the enterprise viable for a time. But unsustainable stocking rates during the droughts of the 1880s, 1910s and 1950s ravaged the grasslands, which are now dominated by mesquite and creosote, shrubs that most cattle and wildlife won't eat. And supplemental feed is no longer cheap.
Around 2000, Ed Fredrickson, a former livestock researcher at the Jornada, became convinced that with the landscape beaten up, feed and fuel costs and global temperatures rising, Southwestern ranchers needed to change, raising smaller animals that could tolerate heat, eat less and more broadly, and move more to minimize overgrazing of native grasses.
To aid his search for a desert-friendly cow, Fredrickson hired Gonzalez, who had recently returned to the U.S. Fredrickson already had his eye on criollo. "To me, it made sense to work with this animal with 400 years of adaption to the Southwest — if we could find it," he explains. "We were losing the genetics." (Longhorns, for instance, have criollo blood, but also that of other cows.) Fredrickson had been working with Mexican livestock geneticist Jose Rios, whose DNA analysis of criollos throughout northern Mexico uncovered only two populations with unpolluted genetics — pure descendants of the conquistadors' cows. One was in Baja California, a state the U.S. wouldn't allow livestock imports from. But it would be possible to draw from the other population, kept by the Tarahumara Indians and Mestizos in the Sierra Madre.
The pair took trips to the region to check out animals. Fredrickson noticed the cows eating forbs and trees, and relatively little grass. Once, in Copper Canyon, Gonzalez spotted an animal perched on the steep and rocky canyon wall. "I thought it was a goat," he recalls. Peering through his binoculars, he was surprised to discover it was a cow. "This is something we can work with!" he thought.
They wanted a "rugged animal," and in the hottest depths of Copper Canyon, they found one. The criollo was a good size. Some were semi-feral and rounded up only when needed, while others seemed like pets. They were docile, wandering in and out of people's huts and tolerating herding by small children with sticks. The cow's long, strong legs let it navigate the canyon with ease. Gonzalez and Fredrickson thought the breed could manage the Southwest's mountains and deserts and traipse long distances through sand, a laborious task for the massive British cows with their stubbier legs.
They selected and purchased 30 cows and three bulls, and in 2001, in a Jeep with no brakes, Fredrickson drove them two to three at a time to the village of Temoris, loaded them onto train cars and accompanied them to Chihuahua. "We were supposed to stop at the cattle facilities, but didn't," Fredrickson recalls. "So I'm moving cattle from downtown Chihuahua. It took some trucks, some tequila and a few things like that."
Add in time for disease testing, bureaucracy and corruption, and it took about a year to get the cows to the Jornada, where Fredrickson began to evaluate their habits. His early studies showed that criollo spend less time near water than British breeds, graze fewer hours and over more diverse terrain, and remain active during extreme heat. That might be because they store fat around their kidneys, rather than only under their hide, and thus retain less heat.
Now, a new phase of research will look more closely at their eating habits and investigate how economical criollo are, and whether there's a market for the beef. There's anecdotal evidence that criollo will eat more of the shrubs and tougher grasses on degraded grasslands, but no hard data yet on whether that amounts to a statistically different use of the landscape.
"A lot of people say, 'Why don't we go back to buffalo?' " Gonzalez muses, bracing himself against the fence. "Well, in dry lands, why don't we go back to criollo?" Gonzalez is cognizant of the argument that no cow belongs in the desert, but believes that with light stocking rates and large pastures, criollo can have a minimal footprint. For that to be true, Fredrickson notes, landscapes still need ample resting time during and after droughts. And there are trade-offs. Because criollo travel well, they also probably spread shrub seeds more widely. Still, says the animal scientist Estell, "If you're doing less damage to the landscape and can still produce some beef, it seems like a win-win."
It has been for Dennis Moroney of The 47 Ranch in southern Arizona, who is converting his whole herd to criollo. Drought and the changing climate caused Moroney to cut his herd to half the size it was a decade ago to help maintain vegetation. Raising criollo, which he finishes and sells without a middleman, has kept him afloat despite the reduction. They range well over Moroney's rugged terrain, browse shrubs, cactus, trees and grasses, calve easily, fall ill rarely and get little supplemental feed. "But the acid test for our business," says Moroney, "is do our customers like the meat?"
It's tender and beautifully marbled, Moroney reports, and farmers market and co-op customers accept smaller cuts — a 7 or 8 oz. ribeye. Moroney tells them about the animals' historical relationship to the Southwest, "but the main pitch is that it tastes fabulously," he says. "It's a little earthier than conventional beef, maybe even floral," says David Smith, executive chef at Criollo Latin Kitchen in Flagstaff, deconstructing it like a fine wine. "You can kind of taste the grass in it" — or mesquite and prickly pear, as it may be.]]>
A year ago, High Country News Senior Editor Ray Ring and contributor Marshall Swearingen sent out about 100 requests under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, seeking incident reports on threats and violence targeting employees of the federal Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest service. They discovered tens of thousands of pages indicating that threats and violence toward agency employees are fairly common, although seldom reported in the media. On Oct. 8, Tay Wiles and Paul Larmer of HCN sat down with four public-land experts to discuss the issue. We asked what inspires these kinds of incidents, why they persist and where we can go from here. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and a shorter version appeared in our recent print edition.
BOB ABBEY – Former director of the Bureau of Land Management.
PHIL LYMAN – County commissioner in San Juan County, Utah.
JOHN FREEMUTH – Boise State University professor of political science and public policy and administration.
JEFF RUCH – Executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which provides legal support for government employees working on environmental and public health issues.
Wiles: Tell us about your experience with public-lands management and these issues we're discussing today.
Abbey: I served for over 34 years in public service, with most of that time as an employee of the Bureau of Land Management. I worked in various roles and served in Wyoming, Arizona, Washington, D.C., Mississippi, Colorado and Nevada. I had the distinct pleasure to wrap up my career in public service as the director of the Bureau of Land Management, retiring in 2012.
Lyman: I'm a fan of Director Abbey, and he's done some good stuff for us out here in Utah. I'm a county commissioner in San Juan County. We're a county that's only 8 percent private land, so the public land is really important to us, especially access and roads. We're constantly dealing with Forest Service and BLM and trying to protect rights of way that have been there for a long time.
Ruch: I run an organization called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). We represent people that work inside these agencies like BLM and the Forest Service, range conservationists, biologists, law enforcement officers. In many instances, we act as shelter for battered staff. With respect to the land management and violence issues, we've been monitoring this and handling cases for the last 20 years.
Freemuth: I got into all this when … I was a ranger at Lake Powell at Glen Canyon. I got a Ph.D. in public policy. I was the science advisory board chair for BLM while such a thing existed. My number-one area of interest is public lands.
Wiles: Let's talk about the origins of these types of confrontations between federal land managers and individual public-land users in the West. Could you talk about the creation of the public lands and how it's relevant to where we are today?
Freemuth: You can take public-land history back in some ways to Western concern over the establishment of the forest system. People forget that actually several presidents created the current forest system, when they were given that power that was then removed. But people pushed back 110 years ago about that sort of conservation policy. From then on, there have been things that stir up Western anger. The Sagebrush Rebellion was hardly the first time. But usually it had something to do with something like the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, or FLPMA. What's interesting this time is, I don't see anything particularly in a big policy sense that the federal land agencies have done that would cause Western anger. I could see it in the past, but this time this seems to be driven as much from ideological think tanks from the East rather than bad Western land policy per se.
Ruch: Phil, are you being driven by ideological think tanks from the East?
Lyman: Well, I wanted to get a little clarification on the ideological think tanks from the East. That kind of struck me, too. I would have thought you'd said maybe ideological think tanks from the West.
Freemuth: Well, we know Mountain States Legal Foundation has always been involved. But I've noticed this time that with some of the stuff that's come up in states like Utah, Arizona, Idaho, these sort of various demands to quote "return the federal lands," which is historically and legally probably wrong, but these resolutions were sort of passed in various state legislatures and they were all inspired by ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council, a nationwide think tank based in Arlington, Virginia). I'm not diminishing legitimate Western concerns about federal land management, but … it seemed like this current "we want the federal lands" sort of movement didn't come from any, that I saw, horribly bad federal land event — more that it's part of our politics today, where these ideas were coming from elsewhere and Westerners adopted them.
Larmer: The West has been built on the back of a lot of a lot of federal dollars. But (then there were) the regulations that happened in the '60s and '70s, NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act) and the Endangered Species Act. Then FLPMA in the '70s. These were all direct laws that tightened the conservation focus on these lands. So I guess you're confirming that indeed that was part of it, but you're not seeing it now.
Freemuth: Yeah, I could totally understand why Westerners, especially, felt that regarding the BLM lands that they had quote a "promise" that those lands would eventually be disposed of. And then when FLPMA was passed, it made it clear that the federal BLM lands would remain under federal management. I think that sort of set off the Sagebrush Rebellion. I just simply contrast that with our current era, and I never saw an event like that which made Westerners angry.
Wiles: So, sticking with the historical perspective for a moment here. Bob Abbey, would you comment: Are there any other key moments in our nation's history and the history of the West that lead to where we are right now on these issues?
Abbey: Controversy between citizens in the Western states and the federal government really isn't anything new. The West has depended on and resented Washington, D.C., involvement in its activities since the first settlers. … My first exposure to the Sagebrush Rebellion was in the early 1980s. The emotions were really set off by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act in 1976, where for the first time in many years or probably forever, many state legislators as well as members of the public in Western states were told through the passage of this law that it would be the intent of federal government to retain most of these public lands. If you look at the passage of FLPMA and the cumulative effects of all the other environmental laws that were also being passed in the 1970s, I believe it was a combination of all these things coming together that put the emotions at a fever pitch.
Tactics back in the '80s were very similar to what we're seeing today. They ranged from legal challenges of federal authority to outright defiance of federal law. During that period back then, we saw state legislatures pass laws laying claim to millions of acres of federal land within their borders. (Public) concerns ranged from administrative processes that contained too much red tape to stubborn and inefficient bureaucracies and needless interference in daily activities. Many of those citizens were accustomed to being able to do without any permit or authorizations.
Ruch: But these laws are 40 and 50 years old. (What) is going on recently is sort of a combination of a healthy dollop of political opportunism, but more importantly a thick crust of resource scarcity. BLM has been avoiding really enforcing these laws particularly in recent years to the point where the Cliven Bundy situation is just outrageous as to how lax it is. The agencies bend over backwards not to enforce the law. And to some extent, some of these tensions are, in our view, self-imposed from BLM not doing its job.
Abbey: I think (these laws) have been enforced. I don't think they've been enforced consistently from office to office or state to state. … But I also agree that the political rhetoric today does lead to animosity and increased tension, and there is a belief because of that rhetoric that it's OK to do certain things outside the law and some people believe that they're going to get away with it.
Ruch: The last cycle was in the '90s, and it was capped by the Oklahoma City bombing. That's what cooled the rhetoric. But you had a similar involvement by public officials encouraging acts of defiance and characterizing federal employees, range cons and other people like that, from the same towns, as "jackbooted thugs" and making comparisons to Nazi Germany.
Freemuth: You do find that there have always been incidents for as long as those agencies existed, if not longer. The rhetoric might be worse than it's ever been today. And I'd like to hear from other people, especially from Phil: Are on-the-ground managers making more decisions that concern you, or is it occasionally a bad decision gets people upset but you're alright dealing with more or less the local land managers on the ground? ... Has that changed, in your opinion?
Lyman: My perspective is maybe it's unique being in the West, I don't know. I've seen a change in the BLM and with the Forest Service and the approach they take. For example, the Forest Service now, when they close the road, they say, "It's part of our 1991 travel plan." People say, "If it was passed in '91, why are you doing it now?" "Well, we just hadn't gotten around to it until now." And that gets people frustrated. It's an emotional issue. At the local level, we get along well with most of our local BLM. We get to know them, their families. But I'm speaking from my office in Blanding, Utah, which was the site of the raids in 2009, with the 140 federal agents (investigating the theft of Native American artifacts from public land), pulling people out of their homes in shackles early in the morning and they say they were breaking the law, but that kind of stuff is not good for relationships. That show of force frightens people.
In response to whether this is heating up more recently, I go back and read some of the things that were written 30, 40, 50 years ago by some of the San Juan County commissioners, and I see the same thing. And this notion of the equal footing doctrine for states and the Enabling Act of the state of Utah, I see that in writings. It sounds like you're reading something that was written last week, but you look at the date and you find out it was written 50 or 100 years ago.
I don't know what ALEC is. I've never been associated with them. I do know where I get some of the information is from some local people here in Utah that write about some of this stuff. I go back and look at the Constitution and try to make my own interpretation.
Ruch: I wanted to pick up a small thread of that before it got away. A number of people inside the law enforcement programs of both the Forest Service and BLM are probably even worse critics than you are, Phil, of the way those programs are being managed. I don't know whether it's a function of coincidence or the fact that both programs are stove-piped and separated from the chains of command of the agency. But both of those programs are in need of dire reform. I think you'd find the field officers on the ground standing with you.
Lyman: You're right, and I have seen that. There are some that ideologically are 180 degrees from where we're at, but for the most part, we have friends in the BLM, especially at the local level.
Ruch: We hear of a cultural war within these law enforcement branches of basically new cops, a lot of ex-military being hired, who suddenly treat where they are as if they're on the streets of Iraqi and Afghani towns, as opposed to people that get into this because they're interested in resource management and conservation.
Larmer: Phil, you partook in the Recapture Canyon ride not too long ago. Tell us about why you did that and how it might relate to what we've been talking about.
Lyman: You probably know the BLM along with the Justice Department has filed criminal charges against me and four others, so I have to be a little bit careful about what I say.
We're on the rim of Recapture Canyon, so it's not remote. There's a reservoir that was built in 1986 with a dam and a lot of archaeological clearance and a pipeline from that reservoir that extends about four miles south down the canyon. It's got a pipeline maintenance road on that disturbance and it's been torn up. For the purposes of the protest, we rode to the end of that pipeline road with the permission of the water conservancy district who manages that, turned around and rode back. We picked up a lot of publicity because it came on the heels of what happened down in Bunkerville (in Nevada, with Cliven Bundy). That was an unfortunate association because ours was so, so different.
I feel for the Bundy family when I look at what they were going through. Ryan Bundy came, and I told him, "If you go on that trail, it's going to look like you're here for the purpose of conflict and that's not what we're about. You've got your livelihood at stake, and we're talking about a few miles of dirt road that the BLM did not follow their process on. We're challenging that closure." So it picked up this whole tenor from Bunkerville, and it was certainly not that.
But what spurred that was an emergency closure. I've been sitting in meetings for eight years now with the BLM on Recapture — I or my predecessor as a commissioner — and it says right in the instruction memorandum that it's a two-year closure, yet we're going on seven years. All we get (from the BLM) is, "We're close, we're almost finished." I said, "It seems like the ones that sue the BLM are the ones that get all the attention. And the counties are trying to look after our own people and we're not getting any of the resources devoted." The area manager said, "Sorry, that's just the way it is." We were going to do a peaceful protest. The district granted us permission, and it just kind of took on a different flavor.
Ruch: And you never got an explanation for eight years?
Lyman: No. The initial right-of-way application was filed in March 2006. We're talking about 13 miles of trail. As we got into the process, we found some sensitive archaeology at the south end, so that was dropped from the application, with the assurance we could open up that loop and the city of Blanding would be able to market it to tourists and it would be useable. So we dropped that seven miles, and that was more than seven years ago. And still no action.
Abbey: Yeah, there has to be more timely decisions. (In some cases) the agency would rather defer than make that decision and stand by it. … I think it's to some degree a fear of litigation. That's been one of the biggest changes in my career. From 2008 to 2012, there were over 250 lawsuits filed against Bureau of Land Management. One result is the inability of the agencies to move forward in a more timely manner and issue decisions and stand up to what the decisions reflect.
At the same time … there are some members of Congress who are going out of their way to see that these agencies fail. To create their own sense of conflict, but also through reduced budgets. And if the agencies can't respond in a timely way to proposals like that, it does lead to frustrations and discontent.
Wiles: Jeff Ruch, would you tell us about the documentation project PEER has been working on and trends you've noticed pertaining to threats to federal employees?
Ruch: I wanted to note as someone who brings lawsuits against these agencies, the only way these small nonprofit groups can afford to bring them is to win the suits, which means that the suits are an indication of agency dysfunction, not a cause of it. What we've been doing is since the Oklahoma City bombing, we've been FOIA'ing each natural resource agency for records of threats and violence against their people and facilities. In the early period, very few agencies report or even kept track of it. The tracking is getting better. Now, agencies like the Forest Service, they're reporting 400 or 500 incidents a year, whereas a few years ago with the same level of violence, if not more, they were reporting 30 or 40.
The incident that will stick with me was with Guy Pence, a district ranger in Nevada, and the issue was grazing. His office was firebombed and his truck in front of his house was firebombed. And the Forest Service for his own safety moved him to the regional office in Boise, which was closed immediately for a bomb threat. We likened it to moving a burn victim into a match factory. During those periods, the agency sort of had a "don't ask, don't tell" approach. These incidents were going on, but they didn't want them reported.
Freemuth: I want to add to this that the agency's funding has been cut quite a bit over the last few years. I think Bob's onto something that there are people who have a strategy to so weaken and defund the agencies, they become incapacitated, and then it's easy to make the argument that they can't get anything done. But I think we're not going to see the agencies get the funding maybe they should get, given the political climate.
Ruch: In the Cliven Bundy incident, we were unable to discern what the agency plan was. So we FOIA'ed the agency. We're now in federal court battling a mum BLM that's about to be forced to give them to us.
Larmer: You talked about the agencies not reporting these incidents but now doing a better job of that. Are threats — everything from hurling an insult to hurling a Molotov cocktail — as ubiquitous as it was in the '90s or is it a matter of reporting?
Ruch: That's hard to tell. In the '90s, it culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. But right before then, members of Congress were encouraging people to take action. There was a road closure on the cover of TIME magazine. It was like the issue was trying to evolve to its logical conclusion, but once people saw where it was going, everyone backed away from it. And that appears to be the dynamic (now).
Lyman: (With the BLM) we get a new area manager every two years and a regional manager and state directors and people who just show up.
Ruch: Can you blame them for not staying?
Lyman: I don't know why they switch so often.
Freemuth: Historically, this all stems from a philosophy that Gifford Pinchot started in the Forest Service that you wanted to move agency professionals so they wouldn't marry the natives, literally, and would be closer to the agency rather than the community they're in. So they do move a lot. I think a lot of us today would say that, unfortunately, that needs to be rethought.
Lyman: It's not that we resent Washington, D.C. It's that they just don't know what we're dealing with here. You take a rancher who's been ranching the same piece of ground for generations and a range con who comes in and tells him, "Nope, your grass is overgrazed, you've got to get off." They're looking at it and saying, "No, it's not overgrazed. This is the rye grass and you're talking about the bent grass." They know more about it than the range con, yet they get this authoritative response.
Ruch: But there's almost a fiction here that something's not going on on-the-ground. There's been three years of crippling drought, and when you talk to people both inside and outside the agencies, they'll tell you these lands have been abused. It's just getting worse. By BLM's own limited records, a third of their allotments don't meet minimum standards — an area the size of Alabama.
Lyman: Are you saying that the ranchers are disingenuous when they say that their grass is sufficient to maintain their cattle?
Ruch: I think what (some ranchers) are saying is, "This is the way we've always done it. And we've seen it worse." And that may be true, but that's still abuse of the land. That's why these environmentalists are winning these suits, because the conditions out there are so god-awful.
Lyman: I don't know a single rancher that wants to abuse his own grazing allotment, because it's his livelihood. He's got more incentive to take care of it than anybody.
Ruch: Not as private land. People are much more careful with the private land where they have to pay full market rate than they are with the public land where it's basically free.
Lyman: I admit it is cheap to operate on federal land. That's a huge benefit, and I think it was given to them through the Taylor Grazing Act.
Ruch: But it's now treated as a right and not a privilege.
Lyman: Yeah, it's one of those things — Well, ah —
Ruch: And it is a privilege.
Larmer: We want to turn you a bit more toward solutions. Do you have examples of where things are actually working between federal employees and locals?
Ruch: If you look at the contrast in states like Washington, Oregon and California, and the level of cooperation and joint action between federal and state, it's night and day a couple of states over. That signals to me that what's going on is a fundamental ideological split. It's hard to collaborate with somebody who doesn't want to plan, who believes that things should be open regardless of the resource damage.
Abbey: I would add despite all the divisive rhetoric, I found that we have much more in common than differences when it comes to how public lands should be managed. We allow our minor differences to be barriers to accomplishing our mutual goals. We need to engage in a lively debate but remain focused on how much we hold in common.
Larmer: The violence we're seeing today may or may not be more than in the past, but it persists and seems to have an ideological overtone. Is this a cyclical thing or are we in new territory here?
Freemuth: I think it'll stay contentious for a while; it's just the nature of it. There's enough people right now of the persuasion to keep the fight going, like Ken Ivory in Utah, who want to keep this revved up. Little successes will help, but I think we're in for it for a while. *(Correction: In the print edition, this quote was attributed to Jeff Ruch.)
Abbey: I don't see the solutions coming out of Washington, D.C. The burden falls on all of us as public-land stakeholders, of trying to put our differences to the back of the room. Having said that, it's important that there's repercussions for Mr. Bundy and his people. Without repercussions, we're going to continue to see copycats. I was disappointed in the tactics that were deployed by the Bureau of Land Management in that impoundment; there could have been a different outcome. But having said that, there were laws that were broken; there were lives that were threatened and there have to be consequences for that. I'm looking at the federal judge to issue a decision sooner rather than later. Something needs to take place against those people who threatened those federal employees.
Ruch: But, Bob, your comments also underline the fact that D.C. has to be involved in the form of agency leadership. If there's not agency leadership from the top, the middle managers are going to be left hung out to dry in the same sort of paralysis as you're seeing now.
Abbey: You're absolutely right. After the fiasco with Mr. Bundy, there was nobody in the agency willing to answer questions.
Ruch: Or right now, (BLM District Manager) Doug Furtado at Battle Mountain — there's a national demonstration calling for his removal; I haven't heard anyone from BLM saying, "We endorse what he did and we're going to stand behind him." It's almost like they're going to say, "We'll see how much of a dent you can make, and maybe we'll get rid of him."
Abbey: There is that fear among the agency employees that leadership will not stand behind them for making difficult decisions, and that needs to change.
Editor's note: If you would like to submit a tip or report to HCN about a threat to a federal public-land employee, see our tipster form here.]]>
Utah counties bulldoze the BLM, Park Service (1996)
Nevadans drive out forest supervisor (1999)
Shoveling vs. sniveling (2000)
Showdown on the Nevada range (2001)
Change comes slowly to Escalante country (2003)
Road warriors back on the offensive (2003)
Rebels with a lost cause (2007 Sagebrush Rebel lawyers)
Rebels in Kane County, Utah (2011 package)
A dark moment, a glimmer of light (2011)
Utah's Sagebrush Rebellion capital mellows as animal-lovers and enviros move in (2001)
One Sagebrush Rebellion flickers out -- or does it? (2012 Wayne Hage)
Cliven Bundy (2014)
Rancher vs. BLM: a 20-year standoff ends with tense roundup
After the standoff, what's next for Bundy and the BLM?
The revolt that wouldn't die
Cliven Bundy needs to pay his grazing bills (Writers on the Range)
Timeline: The BLM vs. Cliven Bundy
A reluctant rebellion in the Utah desert (2014 )
Six cattlemen, spread from New Mexico to Alabama, pressed the class-action lawsuit against Tyson/IBP in an Alabama court. The jury found Feb. 16 that Tyson has been manipulating cattle prices in violation of the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act — an antitrust law partly spurred by novelist Upton Sinclair's 1906 slaughterhouse exposé, The Jungle. "It's wonderful," says Mabel Dobbs, who runs 140 head of cattle on her family's 200-acre ranch near Weiser, Idaho. "In the last 20 years, what's happened in the meat industry is a tragedy — the bigger guys garner more and more control, and they manipulate the market, so it's harder for the small family operations to survive."
Despite the antitrust law, with recent mergers and buyouts, the nation's three biggest meatpackers have taken over handling 75 percent of all "fed cattle" (which become steaks and other quality cuts). "No other manufacturing industry showed as large an increase in concentration" in modern times, according to Congress' General Accounting Office.
The meatpackers use their growing economic muscle to take an increasing cut of every consumer dollar spent on beef. They tap a supply of cheap imports from South America and elsewhere, and secure the cooperation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Congress with about $1 million per year in campaign contributions and lobbying.
The lawsuit challenged one tactic, "captive-supply contracts," in which meatpackers buy cattle up to a year in advance of slaughter. The contracts provide tremendous leverage: When prices in the spot market rise, meatpackers merely tap their captive supply, forcing everyone else's prices down. They can even force down the price on captive-supply herds.
Squeezed like that, cattle producers now get just 45 cents of every consumer dollar spent on beef (down from 65 cents a decade ago), and the number of U.S. ranchers has declined by 200,000 to 1 million.
With the jury's verdict, many ranchers may get retribution. U.S. District Judge Lyle Strom will either approve or adjust the $1.28 billion finding. He'll also determine which of the estimated 30,000 cattle producers harmed by Tyson deserve compensation, and possibly how to keep it from happening again.
Across the country, lawsuits are taking on the other giant meatpackers — Swift/ConAgra and Excel/Cargill — and the whole corporate agricultural hierarchy faces challenges.
The reformers are a mix of independent ranchers and feedlot owners, and environmentalists who work with them on ag issues and on classic green issues such as oil and gas drilling.
They're seeking to prohibit meatpackers from owning cattle, or changing the terms of "captive supply" contracts. They also call for "country of origin labeling" on ag products, which would identify imports. And many are challenging "checkoff" programs, in which the USDA imposes fees on sales of livestock and crops, with the proceeds going to promote processed products and even imported beef (HCN, 9/30/02: Independent ranchers fight corporate control).
Elsewhere on the political spectrum, ranchers and environmentalists battle each other over wolves and grazing, but the essential issue is corporate power, says Gilles Stockton, a Montana rancher and member of the grassroots Northern Plains Resource Council, who was lobbying Congress last week. "I've lost a hell of a lot more money to two-legged wolves than to four-legged wolves."
Also among the strange bedfellows are Republican senators Mike Enzi of Wyoming and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who join Democratic senators from the Dakotas in sponsoring reform bills in Congress.
"We operate in a highly complex business," counters Jay Truitt, a lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, which says it represents the interests of several hundred thousand cattle producers, but often aligns with the big corporations. "Simple populist answers" ignore the complexities, and might lead to even lower earnings for cattle producers, he says.
Mabel Dobbs scoffs at that notion. She says the local sale barn used to host eight to 12 cattle buyers, and now ranchers deal with no more than three, and sometimes only one buyer: "There is just no competition."
The author is HCN editor in the field.]]>
Hopkin, a sturdy 68-year-old with a shock of white hair, grew up stringing fence and tending cows in conservative, pro-ranching northern Utah. Now the grazing management specialist for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, he says he's still "at my best when I'm talking over the hood of a pickup." Cattle, he fervently believes, can help rangelands thrive.
O'Brien, also 68, is elfish and unflinchingly direct, with a big laugh. She grew up in Los Angeles, devouring Willa Cather's books and falling so in love with grasslands that she would later encourage ecology students to honor native plants by thinking of each as a person. Before joining the Grand Canyon Trust, she earned an anti-grazing reputation for arguing against introducing cows to areas formerly grazed by sheep in Hells Canyon, on the Idaho-Oregon border.
Last May, at Kanab's Amazing Earthfest, O'Brien's husband mentioned that they had been married for 45 years. "I am so sorry," Hopkin cut in. But instead of spite, his tone revealed affection and respect developed working with O'Brien to improve public-lands grazing in Utah. Though federal managers say reforms in the '60s and '70s helped heal lands damaged by settlement's grazing free-for-all, conditions on southern Utah's three national forests, the Dixie, Fishlake and Manti-La Sal, have since largely plateaued. Ninety-seven percent of their land is grazed, and roughly on the same schedule, regardless of various ecosystems' needs. As a result, biodiversity and water quality have suffered, and environmentalist lawsuits and appeals have piled up.
O'Brien and Hopkin were in Kanab to showcase a different approach: A collaboration as unlikely as Earthfest's own celebration of public lands, where yogis rub shoulders with motorheads in a county best known for opposing public-land protection.
In 2012, Hopkin, O'Brien and a dozen other diverse stakeholders hammered out recommendations to make grazing on southern Utah's national forests more ecologically sustainable, while still economically viable. That they reached consensus is surprising, given environmentalists' historic opposition to public-lands ranching and ranchers' reluctance to embrace restrictions on an already difficult business. That it happened in Utah – where O'Brien's name is practically an epithet among many ranchers – is remarkable.
But it also happened because of that dynamic. Managers and moderate environmentalists say they must build social capital to get beyond stalemate to meaningful reform, especially as the Dixie, Fishlake and Manti-La Sal move this summer to overhaul their grazing policies.
"If I want a durable solution, I need as many people to own a piece of it as possible," says Fishlake National Forest Supervisor Allen Rowley, who will lead that effort. Adds Harv Forsgren, who championed grazing reform as the regional forester overseeing Utah, Nevada and parts of Wyoming, Idaho and California: "I think it's a turning point."
Reforming grazing policy has always been tricky in the West, given ranching's outsized political and cultural clout. Livestock nosh grass on about 80 percent of Bureau of Land Management holdings, and 60 percent of national forests. For nearly two decades, the Grand Canyon Trust's now-Executive Director Bill Hedden has tried to ease that pressure on the Colorado Plateau, including by working directly with willing Utah ranchers and officials to retire grazing leases and remove cows from federal land. But that did nothing for still-grazed land, and agency support for retirements in Utah eroded during George W. Bush's tenure, Hedden says. "The basic public-lands grazing work there backed way off."
Hoping to spur broader change, O'Brien, an ecologist, began collecting data on damage the Trust and others wanted to repair. What volunteers found across the three southern Utah forests was disturbing: Livestock and wild ungulates appeared to be chewing aspen stands to death. Big trees persisted, but shoots weren't surviving to become saplings. The same was true of cottonwoods and willows. Armed with this, O'Brien helped stir up a collaborative group in 2009 that produced aspen restoration guidelines that included modifying grazing. It was on that project that she and Hopkin bonded over their concern for Utah's landscape. "When I saw some of the aspen, I was devastated," Hopkin says.
Forsgren and Rowley saw an opportunity in the aspen group and others. "There was a nucleus of players we might be able to build something with," Forsgren says, including state officials who agreed the status quo was unsustainable.
In late 2011, Utah's then-Agriculture Commissioner Leonard Blackham and Department of Natural Resources Director Mike Styler carefully picked stakeholders with a variety of perspectives and tasked them with finding common ground on how to make grazing better. Representatives from universities, state and federal agencies, local government, the woolgrowers' and cattlemen's associations, hunting and conservation groups, and, of course, the Trust, took part. As a starting point, everyone had to recognize grazing as a valid use of public land and acknowledge its impacts. Nobody's concerns could be ignored or voted down: Solutions had to be unanimous to make the group's report.
At first, meetings were tense. Then-Wayne County Commissioner Tom Jeffery received angry calls from other local officials for participating because "they thought it was to do away with grazing."
It wasn't until the group got out on the ground that trust grew. On one field trip, they visited an area that was battered even though cattle had been fenced out – validating ranchers' claim that they sometimes get blamed for impacts beyond their control. O'Brien "recognized that elk were doing damage," says fourth-generation rancher Dave Eliason, former president of the Utah Cattlemen's Association. "I'm pro-aspen," explains O'Brien. "I don't care who's overbrowsing it."
On a separate trip to Nevada, Hopkin, O'Brien and two other members toured a project where ranchers and the BLM had restored a riparian area simply by changing the grazing regime. "What made Mary breathe hard was when she saw the beaver dams," laughs Hopkin. "She was looking over the edge of the stream and I heard her say under her breath, 'Holy shit.' " Afterward, they shared before-and-after pictures of a once shallow, muddy channel now verdant with willows and bursting with life. "For Mary to stand up in front of Dave Eliason and say, 'They never reduced (cattle) stocking,' " Hopkin recalls, "was a huge social change for the entire group."
The group's report, released quietly in December 2012, lays out indicators that, with simple monitoring methods anyone can use, would help give a more comprehensive picture of forest health in grazed areas, from plant diversity to stream macroinvertebrates, as well as economic and social indicators, such as meat production and whether the Forest Service is including multiple stakeholders in decisions. The report also suggests grazing changes to better account for ecosystem needs, depending on what monitoring reveals and what's feasible for ranchers –– grouping grazing leases together to manage at a landscape scale, for example, or resting pastures, especially during growing season, even creating reference areas without livestock grazing to better assess its effects.
"What we have is a representative agreement that grazing is appropriate, but not everywhere, all the time, " Rowley says. He won't speculate on how the report will shape the upcoming policy changes, but points to south-central Utah's Monroe Mountain as an example of the sort of innovations he'd like them to encourage.
There, another collaborative co-chaired by O'Brien and Hopkin is applying the 2009 aspen group's recommendations. In addition to prescribed burns and some logging, the Fishlake National Forest's Richfield Ranger District is overseeing installation of extra fence and tanks, troughs and pipelines to help it manage three allotments, totaling 56,000 acres, as a unit. The increased number of watered pastures will allow ranchers to move livestock more often and vary the times they graze certain areas, in theory helping protect streams, as well as giving some high-elevation pastures a much-needed rest. There, researchers will be able to single out what role elk and deer play in the aspen's troubles. They'll also monitor whether the changes help boost aspen. If not, the district will further tweak livestock grazing, or work with the state to reduce wildlife browsing.
"I don't know if the Forest Service would have gotten to this type of proposal on our own," says District Ranger Jason Kling. "And we certainly wouldn't have the same support."
But it's unclear how well such methods would translate to other spots. The infrastructure and monitoring cost $675,000, including $145,000 in federal funds – too much for ranchers to shoulder on their own, says Will Talbot, who runs sheep on Monroe when not working full-time for the county road department to make ends meet. The cost of maintaining new infrastructure also has ranchers apprehensive, and it takes extra work and employees to get animals settled in new grazing patterns. That will be a squeeze if managers make them reduce their herds.
The expense is a significant sticking point for environmentalists outside the Monroe group. "Why should we industrialize public lands for livestock production, especially if it requires big subsidies to do so?" asks Jonathan Ratner, who watchdogs Utah, Wyoming and Colorado for the Western Watersheds Project, the environmental group ranchers are wariest of. "If you wanted to open a pizzeria, would you expect the federal government to supply the oven, hire the people for you, buy the flowers?"
O'Brien concedes that she has "real questions about propping up grazing," but adds that Monroe will help untangle what strategies produce real results, and enable the public to judge if the infrastructure is worth it. Hopkin thinks it is, given public-land ranching's place in rural economies and culture, and the ecosystem benefits he believes ranching provides. At a 220,000-acre ranch he managed for the Mormon Church, for example, Hopkin says a carefully calibrated grazing plan helped increase wildlife and plant diversity and improve stream condition, even as herd size increased, ultimately boosting livestock and hunting profits.
Whatever happens, change is afoot in Utah. "There are rare people in the agencies who recognize these issues," says the Trust's Hedden. The key will be maintaining momentum: Forsgren retired last January, though he now works on the same issues for Trout Unlimited, and his successor, Nora Rasure, supports the sustainable grazing group's approach. Hopkin is partially retired. O'Brien frets over what will happen when he leaves. "When he walks into a room, he shakes hands with everybody, he makes self-deprecating jokes. He really models to other ranchers how you can talk to environmentalists without a whole lot of pain."
She says she won't retire any time soon, though. "There's too much good that comes out of this work. Now, all you have to say is, 'Hey, people can talk. It's worked before.' Every time there's one of these collaborations, it's clearer that the days are over in Utah where just (ranchers) and the agency make the calls on grazing."
Sarah Gilman is HCN's associate editor.]]>
This reversal came as a result of hundreds of Bundy supporters, including out-of-state armed militia, arriving to protest the roundup and confront federal agents. According the BLM, the agency stopped the roundup in order to avoid an outbreak of violence that appeared imminent as tensions ran high among protestors.
Bundy stopped paying grazing fees to the federal government in 1993, when desert tortoise conservation priorities altered the terms of his grazing allotment. By 1997, Clark County had purchased all remaining grazing permits in the Gold Butte area in accordance with their Desert Conservation Program and permanently closed the area to grazing. But from 1993 to 2014, Bundy's cattle continued to graze, despite two court orders to remove them and nearly $1 million in unpaid fees and fines.
An estimated 1,000 Bundy cattle continue to illegally roam the area.
Text by Christi Turner, who is an editorial intern at High Country News. She tweets @christi_mada.]]>
But when I checked back with WildEarth Guardians executive director John Horning a year ago to see how things were going, he hedged a bit. The story, he said, was not quite ripe. Though plenty of ranchers were interested, the first deals had yet to come through.
If journalists waited until something fully "ripened" on Western grazing issues, though, they would write very little. Which is why, in this issue, we've jumped in with two public-lands grazing stories that are as much about process and potential as they are about on-the-ground changes.
April Reese's story on the Gila buyout program (which still awaits the completion of its first deal as we go to press), and associate editor Sarah Gilman's on collaborative grazing management in Utah, provide ample evidence that environmentalists, ranchers and agencies are evolving. In Utah, they have, together, come up with plans to manage livestock in ways that don't harm the land. Their ideas – including moving cattle around more frequently and excluding them from riparian areas – are not new, but their spirit of cooperation, their flexibility, and their willingness to monitor and understand the landscape's condition are.
In New Mexico, Horning's group had to make a conceptual leap to even consider paying ranchers to vacate allotments – they had to start treating public-land grazing as "a right" and acknowledge its monetary value. That may not sound like much, but for activists who have spent decades in court trying to compel agencies to remove cattle from public lands, it is.
Promoting the buyout program face-to-face with ranchers has forced both environmentalists and ranchers out of their comfort zone. Some ranchers are even starting to accept that Mexican wolves are here to stay. As Terry Reidhead, who hopes to receive a sizeable check soon from WildEarth Guardians in exchange for giving up his federal grazing permit, told Reese, "I wasn't for the wolf reintroduction. We've been making a living off this old forest for 100 years. But it's a steep, rugged allotment and it's probably better suited for wildlife than anything. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
Coming from the heart of New Mexico's Sagebrush Rebellion country, that is a promising sentiment. It may not make for exciting headlines, but we think it's a great story.]]>
Livestock Guardian Dogs from Conservation Media on Vimeo.
Video courtesy Conservation Media.
Ben Long is a writer, outdoorsman and conservationist in Kalispell, Mont. He is senior program director for Resource Media. He owns a Lab mix guard dog who protects the bird feeder from squirrels, skunks and coyotes.]]>
We have talked with angry environmentalists and scientists who can't understand why public-land managers ignore the ecological damage caused by cattle and sheep, or why the federal government only charges ranchers the cost of a cup of coffee (or even less, if you happen to imbibe Starbucks) to graze a cow-calf pair for a month on the public's lands.
We have talked with multigenerational ranchers who are deeply attached to their place in the West, who believe that they actually improve the land's ecological health through careful grazing, and who worry that they will be forced to sell their private lands to developers if they lose the right to graze on public lands.
And we have documented the dozens of administrative appeals, lawsuits and even cabinet-level initiatives - recall Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's ill-fated effort in the early 1990s - that have aimed at "grazing reform" and wound up proving that the phrase is an oxymoron. How could the country's public-grazing system continue in its eco-unfriendly and financially indefensible state, year after year? Well, for one thing, the West's ranching community continues to hold political power far beyond its numbers in many state legislatures and county commissions. There is also the sheer weight of history itself.
"You've got to remember that when the national forests were created, we didn't have a Clean Water Act or an Endangered Species Act, and so every piece of public land with grass on it was set up for grazing," veteran wildlife advocate Hank Fischer reminded me recently. "Undoing any part of this system is not easy."
Fischer, who works for the National Wildlife Federation, would know. Over the past five years, his organization has quietly cut deals with a number of ranchers and the Forest Service to voluntarily "retire" controversial grazing allotments on the borders of Yellowstone National Park. The deals - which can take years to negotiate and often involve a cash payment to ranchers and access to alternate allotments - have removed cattle and sheep from 500,000 acres of prime grizzly bear and timber wolf habitat.
Half a million acres is small potatoes compared to the hundreds of millions of federal acres that are currently grazed, but the Wildlife Federation's success shows that the grazing knot can be loosened when everyone stands to gain from a change. Around Yellowstone, conservationists, ranchers and forest managers are eager to end the constant conflicts that arise when slow-moving livestock are mixed with hungry - and federally protected - predators.
The knot may also be loosening in central Idaho, where sheep ranchers and wildlife advocates have long battled over efforts to establish bighorn sheep populations around Hells Canyon. As Nathaniel Hoffman reports in this issue, the evidence that bighorns cannot survive near domestic sheep is now so strong that a federal judge has pushed the Forest Service into closing several sheep allotments on the Payette National Forest.
Some sheep ranchers are fighting the decision, but the writing is on the wall: Bighorn sheep, which are not only popular with wildlife watchers, but also with hunters, must be given more space if they are to survive as a viable wild species.
This decision is a tough pill to swallow for sheep ranchers who graze near bighorn herds, but it is the right medicine for the West's public land agencies, which for too long have favored livestock over wildlife. One can hope the parties at Hells Canyon will embrace the collaborative approach that has worked so well at Yellowstone. With some creative changes to herd management, and some grazing allotment buyouts, there's no reason that ranchers and one of the West's most spectacular animals can't both thrive.]]>
At the height of Hahn Niman's legal career, she was hired by Bobby Kennedy Jr. to start a national campaign to reform meat industry pollution. A few years later, she got into the ranching life when she married Bill Niman, founder of Niman Ranch in northern California. The natural meat company is well-known for traditional husbandry methods, no hormone use, and environmental land stewardship. In Defending Beef, Hahn Niman, who happens to be a long-time vegetarian, seeks to add nuance to what she deems an oversimplified public discussion about beef's environmental and health impacts in the U.S. She explained some of these nuances in a recent conversation with High Country News.
HCN Will you elaborate on your claim that, while there are slightly more cattle, there are overall fewer large animals on farms in the U.S. than there were a century ago?
NHN It's commonly perceived that numbers of all livestock have increased exponentially over the past century. But if you add up all large farm animals, the number is actually lower now. Red meat is eaten less and there are fewer animals on the landscape. Of course, part of this is that the animals are killed when they're younger. This country used to slaughter at 5 (years old), they now do it at 18 months. So, you end up getting more meat with fewer animals on the land.
HCN Let's talk about methane. It's commonly accepted that cows emit a lot of methane and, therefore, contribute significantly to global climate change. But, as you say in your book, there are far fewer ruminant mammals roaming around now than there were prior to European colonization.
NHN The methane thing has captured people's imagination. The number of ruminants in the globe — animals like cows, elk, deer, buffalo — is lower today than it was historically. … The single biggest cause of human-generated methane in the 1980s was from rice farming. And because that became known and because there were concerns about global warming, there was pressure on the rice industry to reduce their methane emissions. To me the same rationale should be applied to cattle and beef. Is methane from cattle an intractable problem? No. There are easy methodologies for reducing the amount of gas. Putting small weights in the cow's rumen (the first of several compartments in a cow's stomach) can bring gas production down by 25 percent.
HCN Can you talk about how we've learned to blame cattle for deforestation and why that's not necessarily true?
NHN There are parts of the developing world — Brazil, Sudan, Indonesia — where fairly major deforestation is happening. In Brazil, the leading trigger really is the creation of fields for soy cultivation. There are a variety of causes of deforestation; raising cattle is one of them. But my point is that (deforestation) is not intrinsically related to cattle production. People shouldn't be doing that to raise cattle; that's a very bad human decision. But if it's not inherently a part of it, I don't think it's fair to attribute (deforestation) to (cattle ranching).
HCN In your book, you acknowledge that soil erosion and desertification are happening at such a rate that the world will run out of topsoil in little more than a century. And yet this isn't a result of too many cattle. You argue that it's a matter of managing cattle properly: Close, dense herds that are consistently on the move. Will you explain?
NHN I do not deny that cattle can have an impact on the land that is negative. I dispute the characterization of this damage as "overgrazing." What people are seeing in the American West is not over-grazing; it's improper grazing. It mostly has to do with allowing the cattle to be too dispersed and not tightly managing them, or moving them frequently enough. In 1800, there were 70 million bison on the land. Our whole global ecosystem evolved with these enormous herds.
HCN Much of the western U.S. has experienced drought for three years in a row now. How do you respond to critics of the cattle industry who say that grazing exacerbates the drought?
NHN The overall understanding of how much water it takes to produce beef is misunderstood and exaggerated. A pound of beef and a pound of rice, not that much different as far as how much water it takes to produce it. When you look at the actual figures, (beef) is not that different than a lot of other foods. Chocolate, coffee, sugar — these are all water intensive foods.
When you have an area of degraded land, whether it's been poorly grazed, or it's abandoned, you have very little water retained. The total number of inches of rain you get annually is a far less important figure than how much is held in the ground. That's what actually needs to be the focus. Well-managed cattle raising that keeps a dense vegetative cover on the ground might be the optimal way…to create ground that holds onto water. It just kind of flips this whole issue on its head.
Cattle grazing, when it's done right, has an incredibly beneficial effect as far as how water works in our ecosystem. It could actually be a really good counter-drought strategy. And I don't think that anyone really knows how exactly to do that. It's an idea that people are beginning to realize…you do this correctly, you're actually going to be using water a great deal more effectively and therefore, maybe we should actually be doing this in drought-stricken areas.
Wyatt Orme is an editorial intern at High Country News. He tweets @wyatt_orme.]]>
This transformation is the subject of Foglia's new book Frontcountry, out this spring from Nazraeli Press. But the collection is just as much about everyday life amid the region's vast landscapes, and is more portrait than indictment of heavy industry – one that resists romance or nostalgia.
Taken over a series of long trips between 2006 and 2013, the images are intimate and occasionally challenging. Foglia's subjects often confront the viewer with piercing eyes and tough-to-read faces, or appear in odd, even contorted postures. Both interiors and exteriors are harsh and spare, with lights and lines that give them a hard emotional edge.
High Country News associate editor Sarah Gilman caught Foglia at his Berkeley studio by phone in May to chat about his aesthetic, his artistic methods and his minivan escapades.
High Country News: Tell me about the project's origins.
Lucas Foglia: (In 2006, I took a picture in Texas) of an abandoned farmhouse and in the background is a wind farm. The idea of new technology interfacing with a landscape that was historically farmed, and of industry transforming the economy of that landscape, was fascinating to me. Then in 2009 I went to Wyoming to visit my good friend Addie Goss, of Wyoming Public Radio. We started traveling, and the areas we visited – Marbleton, Star Valley, Pinedale, the Pinedale Anticline, the Jonah Field –were undergoing a natural gas boom. Seeing that made me feel like this was a project I needed to work on: I'm from a small farm 30 miles from New York City, and as I was growing up, the land around us was sold and developed. There are now fairly large houses where our neighbors' farms used to be. So the dynamics of maintaining a rural lifestyle when there are economic incentives to change, to leave or to develop feel personal and relevant to me.
HCN: How did you choose where to spread out from Wyoming – to Nevada, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico and Texas – and what was your process?
Foglia: Almost everyone I photographed was a friend of a friend. So I met a few folks through Addie, and through them, I met other people who introduced me to other people. And I'd go and visit the same people and communities again and again. I really like sleeping on couches. I also have a van with a bed in the back that lets me camp.
The strange thing about that landscape is that it's so big: Driving down a road, you can look to the left and see a stormcloud, and look to the right and it's a blue sky. The first time I was there, I realized that if my van broke down, I could walk off and no one would find me. (Then) I ran out of gas, because I had expected there to be a gas station. And so I was sitting on the side of the road, looking out at endless sagebrush. In about 20 minutes, someone else drove by, and they immediately stopped, and they had gas in the back of their pickup truck. The experience for me was one of realizing how close-knit those communities are.
One of the ranches I stayed at had a policy. The first day I was a guest, and then every day after, I was free labor. And that's something I believe in pretty strongly: If I stay around long enough to really participate, then out of those friendships come situations I can photograph, and the pictures feel like they come out of everyday life.
What I'm looking for is postures, gestures or expressions that feel distinct and dramatic, which sometimes can be subtle. Like with Tommy, about to fall off a pole while holding a loaded gun. Or with Roger, bending back, stretching after lifting weights. And in Jeffrey City, Wyoming, I met Thomas and Kimberly, who (in their photo) are swimming in a pond surrounded by uranium mines.
George, who's on the cover of the book (in front of a plume of smoke), is a retired rancher who enjoys chasing wildfires. He told me very confidently that he had safety provisions. And I asked, "What safety provisions?" And he said: "I have two bottles of water, a Coke, a candy bar, a shovel, and a handgun."
HCN: A lot of photographers from outside the West take images of ranching culture that are highly idealized. Yours mostly aren't: The people seem real; they're contemporary.
Foglia: What's happening now is more complicated and more interesting than the image of cowboys I see in Western movies. There's tension in it. I wanted to be careful 1. Not to idealize, and 2. Not to simplify the photographs with criticism.
Someone told me that mining and ranching are the same idea, just at different rates. Both rely on the land, and people in both have to work really hard. Ranching is very vulnerable to weather. A frost could come in and skyrocket the price of hay. Or the government could change grazing regulations in response to drought. And mining is vulnerable to fluctuations in the prices of resources globally: In Nevada, whole towns are built or abandoned based on the price of gold.
The core question that I encountered was, how should the open land we have left be used? Mining helps with roads. It helps with courts. Teachers in the schools. Libraries. The counter-argument is that it changes the (small-town ranching) culture that the landscape is famous for: The Wild West is part of our American story. To me, Randy Stowell speaks to this tension. I photographed Randy in his last season on the Big Springs ranch (near Wells,) Nevada, which has since been transformed into a new gold mine. He told me, "This little town has nothing. It's dying on the vine. But with the mine here, it'll bring in jobs and make everything bigger and better. There are people who want that boost to the community. I'm not one of them. The mine will ruin this mountain, and you'll never find land this beautiful anywhere else."
HCN: You open Frontcountry, not with an artist's statement, but with an essay from another rancher, Olan Clifford Teel. Why let him provide the frame for the images?
Foglia: My mother who told me that the circus is magic if you don't see the strings. I was writing the opening essay, and I kept thinking about the hours of casually recorded conversations with Cliff I had from visits over a couple of years. In most of them, the wind was blasting into the microphone, and we were walking around land or just talking over dinner. He's someone who cares about ranching, and has spent decades raising cattle. But he has friends who work for the mines. And friends who ranch whose kids work for the mines. He touches on all of the important questions in the book, without at any point saying that you need to think something's right or something's wrong. It's up to whoever sees the photographs to figure out what they believe and how they feel.
Foglia's images will be on display at Robischon Gallery in Denver, Colorado, from Sept. 18 to Nov. 1. .]]>


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Olympic Scavenger Hunt: Go for the Gold, Plus Drink Specials
* Additional fees apply.
The last date listed for Olympic Scavenger Hunt was Sunday July 29, 2012 / Noon.
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Spooky Nighttime Adventures at The New York Botanical Garden
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We found a garage not to far and paid only $15.00 for the dayHalloween Scavenger Hunt info • Nov 04 2012 star this tip starred
The food and drinks where amazing.Halloween Scavenger Hunt info • Nov 04 2012 star this tip starred
Reviews & Ratings
Featured review from simplyweber
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Even with some follow up emails from GoldStar they (Goldstar) managed to get the starting place wrong and sent us to the wrong place about 20 minutes away... not a good way to start the day off.
We had an event that evening that, with the 30 minute late start, forced us to not be able to come back and complete the race. That was not a good start.
This was billed as an "Olympic" scavenger hunt, but aside from teams dressing up there was nothing "Olympic" about it. Likely the same questions as their regular activities. If it wasn't for the fact we met some pretty cool people this would have been a something to skip.
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I really like scavenger hunts and have done a few with friends. This was absolutely the WORST I've attended. Disorganized (they actually sent the wrong location for the start of the event - really???), incompetent (the app were were told to...continued
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Using a smartphone app, you're asked to scan QR codes related to tasks or trivia questions, and then you have to go out and complete them.


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Edgar Leery of Quinn's Plan for Prison Closures
By Jeff Bossert
Former Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar says he's sympathetic to current Governor Pat Quinn when it comes to state finances.
By Jeff Bossert
Former Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar says he's sympathetic to current Governor Pat Quinn when it comes to state finances.
By The Associated Press
Illinois has completed a draft layout for a proposed airport in the far southern Chicago suburb of Peotone and submitted it to the Federal Aviation Administration for review.
By Jeff Bossert
Congressional candidate Rodney Davis says an extension of current tax rates and removing government regulation will mean the the survival of small employers.
By The Associated Press
A union for Illinois government workers says negotiations with the state are at a ``virtual standstill.''
By Pam G. Dempsey
After four years of discussing how to best publicize restaurant health inspection results, board of health members from Champaign County and the public health district have decided to move forward on a proposed color-code system that would require restaurants to disclose food inspection results.
By Jim Meadows
One marker of the economic slow-down in Champaign-Urbana was when the big development projects stopped. Development has never completely stopped in Champaign-Urbana. But announcements of the really big projects --- ones that expand the borders of the two cities --- pretty much came to an end with the bursting of the housing bubble.
By Sean Powers
A rate hike is set to kick in by Oct. 1 for customers of the Illinois American Water company.
By Sean Powers
Good news came early Saturday morning for fans of the Fighting Illini and other conference teams. The Big Ten Network has finalized a new agreement with DISH Network, which returns Big Ten games to the satellite TV service.
By Jeff Bossert, with additional reporting from The Associated Press
Utility company Ameren is disappointed with the Illinois Commerce Commission's decision this week to order a $48 million delivery rate cut.
By Amanda Vinicky
Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn wants to raise the state's minimum wage. His support comes as new census data shows more Illinois residents are living in poverty.


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Centralized PC power managers not created equal
Autonomic, BigFix, and Symantec Altiris solutions offer a wealth of potential power savings, but also differences in policy depth, granularity, and ease
Companies are anxious to reduce power usage these days, both to save cash on energy bills and to reduce their environmental impact. One area that's ripe for power savings is the desktop. At companies across the globe, end-users leave their computers and monitors on day and night for any number of reasons, be it for late-night backups and patching or ensuring they can get cracking the moment they sit down at their desks each morning.
These conveniences come at an overlooked price: Keeping a PC running 24/7 can cost as much as $375 per year, depending on the type of computer and monitor, as well as energy rates in your region. Shutting down a PC for 16 hours or so per day can cut those costs by 66 percent. That translates to potential savings of more than $120,000 if you have 500 machines.
[ InfoWorld debunks 10 myths about power saving. | Learn more about the ROI of PC power management. | Learn about free power management alternatives to pricey management suites. ]
Rather than relying on end-users to power down their machines and monitors each night, then reboot them in the morning, organizations are increasingly turning to power management offerings, products capable of powering machines on and off at predetermined times to ensure that they're awake when it's time for work, backups, or patches. Otherwise, they'll be asleep so as not to waste energy and money.
I had an opportunity to test out three power management software systems aimed at the enterprise desktop market, from vendors Autonomic Software, BigFix, and Symantec. Notably, all three software products are part of suites intended to provide a great many more PC management functions beyond control over power usage, such as remote desktop support, configuration and patch management, vulnerability assessment, and endpoint protection.
Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 already come equipped with tools for putting a machine in a low-power state (ranging from standby and sleep to complete shutdown) at a set period of time or a predetermined amount of inactivity. Why, then, would an organization invest in a separate power-management tool? The reason: These tools offer several useful features not available in Windows. For example, they can locate systems with hibernation disabled and re-enable it. They can shut down applications and save files before powering down the system. Admins can set different durations of inactive time before hibernation is triggered; for example, to prompt a machine to sleep after only a couple of minutes of inactivity during evenings and weekends -- but not until, say, a half-hour during the work day. Admins also can use the tools to automatically restart PCs at predetermined times, such as in the middle of the night for software updates and patches, or in the morning, shortly before the users arrive.
Enter power mode
There are several modes of power saving, depending on the OS, motherboard, monitor, and power strip or UPS. When Windows powers down a monitor, for instance, power usage on the monitor doesn't drop to zero; rather, it enters a power-saving mode defined by the manufacturer, generally using less than 3 watts. Even if the monitor is turned off, its power supply may be using some electricity. This is true of PCs as well; even when shut down, they still draw some power to keep the clock running and enable wake-on-LAN and other features.
|InfoWorld Scorecard
Effectiveness (30.0%)
Setup (10.0%)
Value (10.0%)
Scalability (20.0%)
Manageability (30.0%)
Overall Score (100%)
|Symantec Altiris 7.0.354
|Autonomic Software ANSA Platinum Suite
|BigFix Enterprise Suite 7.2
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