text:
Under that 2011 Environmental Protection Agency rule, by the middle of next month, several hundred coal- and oil- fired power plants across the country must slash their emissions of mercury, arsenic and other toxic air pollutants or shut down.
But in response to a challenge by 21 states—including Arizona, Alaska, Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota and Idaho—and some industry groups, this week the Supreme Court held oral arguments on the rule. At issue is whether the EPA was wrong not to consider costs—such as how much plant operators would spend to install pollution control equipment or switch to other fuel sources—before it decided to regulate under the 1990 Clean Air Act.
The law doesn't explicitly tell the EPA to consider costs, but directs the agency to set pollution standards if it "finds such regulation is appropriate and necessary" after studying the health impacts of these emissions. (The agency did consider costs later in its regulatory process, when it was setting specific standards for types of power plants. But the states and industry argue that this wasn't adequate and costs should have played a role earlier.)
During oral arguments in the case Wednesday, Justice Elena Kagan pushed back when a lawyer representing states and industry argued that with the words "appropriate and necessary" Congress was directing the EPA to take into account costs.
"Congress knows how to require consideration of costs, to get from silence to this notion of a requirement seems to be a pretty big jump," Kagan said.But some conservative justices made it clear they side with industry, especially considering that the EPA estimated costs of complying with the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule at $9.6 billion a year.
"I would think it's classic arbitrary and capricious agency action for an agency to command something that is outrageously expensive and in which the expense vastly exceeds whatever public benefit can be achieved," said Justice Antonin Scalia.
In the past, the highest court usually has deferred to the EPA to use its own judgment in interpreting vague provisions of sweeping laws such as the Clean Air Act. Legal experts say this case could have broad implications if the court decides against the EPA.
"It will be precedent setting if they say the word 'appropriate' absolutely includes costs," says Patrick Parenteau, a professor at Vermont Law School. "To argue that absolutely requires a cost-benefit analysis, how do you get that out of the word "appropriate?" What dictionary can you cite that says that's what the word appropriate means?"
Jeff Holmstead, an industry lawyer who headed EPA's air pollution programs under President George W. Bush, said the EPA should take costs into account unless they're specifically prohibited.
"The hope on the industry side is the Supreme Court will send a message that says you have to be more aware of the costs of your regulations," he said. "You can't just ignore those. That would send an important signal to EPA and perhaps other agencies as well."
Some industry representatives say that this ruling could have implications for another major EPA rule, which would control greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards are among the EPA's costliest regulations ever. But the EPA estimated that the health benefits would far outweigh the costs. In addition to reducing mercury and other toxic pollutants, the rule also would reduce fine particles. The EPA calculated that it would avert up to 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks and 130,000 asthma attacks every year. But the states and industry argued that those benefits are grossly inflated because much of the benefits the EPA calculated are from reducing fine particles, which were not the main target of this regulation.
Most of the power plants impacted by this standard already have decided to shut down or have installed pollution control devices to capture mercury and other pollutants.
But environmentalists cautioned that if the court sided with industry, companies might opt to keep their dirty old plants running longer or not use the pollution control equipment that they've installed.
"There are operating costs and those aren't trivial," said Jim Pew, an attorney for Earthjustice who was representing environmental groups and the NAACP in the case. "If the court threw it out they might not run it."
Although the EPA likely would rewrite the rule to address whatever shortcomings the court indicated, such a ruling could delay the cleanup of hazardous air pollution by several years.
Alternatively, the court could decide to keep the rule in effect while the EPA reworks it. As for the plants that have closed or are slated to be shut down because of the rule, some utilities say it's too late to change their plans.
But by hearing the case, the Supreme Court put a question mark over the fate of the 60-year-old Carbon power plant, which is nestled into a narrow canyon near Helper, Utah.
That plant is scheduled to close next month, largely because of the 2012 EPA rule. Most of the 600 coal-fired and oil-fired plants nationwide that were impacted by the rule installed pollution controls or have gotten extensions from the EPA and are likely to do so in the future. But there wasn't room for pollution control equipment near the 60-year-old Carbon plant.
"Right now we can't envision a scenario that would result in changing our decision to close Carbon, but I'm not going to be absolutely unequivocal," says David Eskelsen, spokesman for PacifiCorps, which owns the plant. "We don't know what the Supreme Court might do and how that might change the company's calculations."
The Supreme Court will rule before its term ends in June.
Elizabeth Shogren is HCN's Washington DC correspondent. She Tweets @ShogrenE.]]>
But the weekend's rain won't break Washington's drought. Farmers, ski area operators and water managers are waiting on snows that haven't come and that likely won't until next winter. In the Pacific Northwest, as in other mountainous regions of the West, mountain snow normally acts as a reservoir, melting off in the spring and carrying the region through dry summers. But this year, the snow just hasn't appeared. According to the latest federal data, the Cascades and the Olympics have less than a third of their normal snowpack for this time of year. In some areas, that number is less than ten percent.Most precipitation since the start of winter has come as rain, which has bolstered reservoirs and could prevent a total dry-out of the state's agricultural system. But it's also made managing water this year exponentially more difficult. In the past, managers have relied on a steady trickle of snowmelt that keeps water coming into the system through the dry summer months. But with no snow to melt, new water will come only from spring and summer rains, in sporadic, unpredictable bursts.
If managers release too much water in an attempt to prevent reservoir overflows, and no more precipitation comes this spring and summer, streams could run low and threaten agriculture and species like the threatened Chinook salmon. If they keep reservoir levels too high, a late-season storm could overwhelm an already-full storage system and cause flooding. This year, long-term weather forecasts suggest it's going to be a warm and dry spring and managers are keeping reservoirs high, for now.
"We feel more comfortable in holding onto water versus the risk of flooding," Paul Fleming, manager of the climate and sustainability group for Seattle's public utility system, recently told environmental journalism outlet Circle of Blue.
As for farmers, ranchers, small towns and other water users who don't receive water from the state's reservoir system, they'll have to rely on what little comes through the natural system—ditches, streams and undammed rivers. Without snow, that's likely to drop off as the spring and summer dry-up begins.
This year's variable weather patterns have had impacts outside of Washington, as well. Just over 60 percent of the West is in drought and is likely to stay that way at least for the next three months, barring any major weather shifts. California's drought has been the big attention-grabber, but Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico are facing a tight water supply, as well.
Take a look at how Western communities are coping:
Kate Schimel is an editorial intern at High Country News. Follow her Follow @kateschimel]]>
But it didn't take long for him to realize this wasn't a typical February fire.
"It became painfully obvious that people were going to lose homes," Stimson said. "You could hear propane tanks exploding off in the distance. It was just this sickening feeling. You knew that people you knew really well, their lives were changing forever."
The Round Fire, as it was named, burned 7,000 acres and 40 homes before local firefighters, aided by a rainstorm, brought it under control.
For local residents, it drove home a message Westerners may finally have to get used to: Fire season isn't just confined to the months of July and August anymore, or even May through September. Over the last four decades, the season across the West has gotten two and a half months longer. Last year, rare January fires swept across southern California. And just last week, the Round Fire wasn't the only abnormally early burn to hit the West. A spate of wildfires broke out in northern Utah Feb. 8 and 9, burning a few hundred acres.
These early season fires owe much to the ongoing drought. The area burned by the Round Fire is usually covered in snow at this time of year, but Stimson said the ground is bare. California's paltry snowpack, dry soils and unseasonably warm temperatures make it easier for a spark, whether caused by humans or lightning, to catch and travel faster and farther than usual. While it's nearly impossible to pin any particular fire event to climate change, we do know that the changing climate exacerbates the drought, which leads to more fires. Scientists say that Westerners can almost certainly expect more early-season fires like the Round, as climate change continues.
The immediate future is harder to predict. The fires in February could be a harbinger of an intense fire season to come or just the premature start to a normal one. If things stay as dry as they have, potential fuels at lower elevations, like grasses, won't grow as much. If a few good storms roll though and replenish the water supply, those grasses will grow bigger. Without a wet summer, they would then dry out and then potentially fuel bigger fires. At higher elevations, though, this year's skimpy snowpack, just 25 percent of normal in California, means that the larger fuels like trees are already beginning to dry out. Spring rain may be too late to reverse that trend.
For now, the National Interagency Fire Center, which monitors fire potential across the country, is still predicting a normal spring for the West overall. Their predictions, which go state by state, are too broad to anticipate events like the Round fire or Utah's fires.
Whatever the off-cycle fires signal about the coming season, they provide a firefighting challenge for fire agencies, which usually operate on skeleton crews during the winter months. When the fires broke out in Utah last week, the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, which responds to fires on state and local land, hadn't yet hired its summer firefighting force. That usually happens by May, not February.
"It's kind of unexpected and definitely earlier than normal," said Tracy Dunford, deputy director at the agency. So he scraped together a makeshift force of administrators and fire managers who were former firefighters and hadn't been in the field for a while. They successfully contained the fires within two days.
For now, he said that's the game plan if other early blazes spring up. He doesn't expect to significantly change his budget or planning, at least not yet.
"The only real impact is that it heightened our awareness of what could possibly develop," Dunford said. California fire managers echoed his sentiment, saying that it's too early to tell whether these fires are part of a larger pattern.
For residents north of Bishop, though, the fire has changed how residents prepare. Stimson says people in the area are thinking about how to better fireproof their homes and prepare for the next big burn. As for Stimson, he's been putting his valuables and photo albums in a box to keep on hand, in case of an emergency.
When the fire comes, he said, he wants to be ready to "grab and dash."
Kate Schimel is an editorial intern at High Country News. Follow her @kateschimel.]]>
"The intent of the bill is to once and for all settle the question about who owns public lands in Utah," Dabakis, a Democrat who opposes the transfer act, told me last week. "We all just want finality."
The land transfer movement, which has existed in Utah since the 1930s, was most recently resurrected in the 2012 Transfer of Public Lands Act. Opponents say the act is legally dubious and would fail in court, if tested.
But Sen. Dabakis insists the purpose of his bill is not necessarily to halt the transfer act, but to end the decades-long broader movement—whether that happens through the court upholding or killing the act.
"[The bill] has nothing to do with my position on the act," he said in a recent interview. "It's about forcing the hand of everybody. It's about forcing the hand of those who've made careers out of this dispute."
That's a reference to the fact that Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory, who sponsored the 2012 act and also works full-time chairing an organization (the American Lands Council) that advocates for land transfers across the West, is professionally vested in this issue.
Ivory did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. But he told Utah's Fox 13 News earlier this month that he opposes Dabakis' bill.
"I would speculate that Ken Ivory knows he'd lose in court, and Senator Dabakis has called the bluff," said Jessica Goad, advocacy director at the progressive nonprofit Center for Western Priorities. "Representative Ivory says he's working on the strategy in Congress, instead, but frankly I'd say that doesn't stand much of a chance either…. Utah's taxpayers are losing with this fight that's been going on for so long. The sooner it ends, the better for them."
But Ivory's commitment to the transfer movement, along with Utah's history of animosity toward the federal government, suggests the fight may not end soon, no matter what happens.The idea of transferring public lands has persisted, despite the endeavor's repeated failures, dating back to the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, which made the feds responsible for setting grazing rules. That federal law caused a stir among Utah members of the American National Livestock Association, who wanted the more acquiescent state government to control grazing rights on public land.
A turnover of public lands from the feds would transform the West. But scholars say the legal hook to turn them over doesn't exist.
"The Constitution gives the federal government the authority to retain and manage that land," said John Ruple, a professor at the University of Utah's College of Law. Transfer advocates say state enabling acts—foundational documents for state governments—require the feds to hand over control of public land to states. But Ruple and other opponents of transfers disagree: "We don't think the state can make that claim. The state's enabling act does not create an obligation, and in fact [in the act] the state is disclaiming any future claims to federal lands."
And the argument that state governments can do a better job of managing public land would be irrelevant in court.
"Legally, it's like saying because your neighbor doesn't take good care of his house, his lawn is overgrown and his car is on blocks, and you think you could do better, that means you have the right to take over his property," Ruple said.
Still, Ivory is keeping the argument alive. The same year he introduced the Transfer of Public Lands Act, he founded the American Lands Council, a non-profit that coordinates advocacy and lobbying for federal-to-state land transfers across the West. Since 2012, counties from at least nine of the 11 contiguous Western states have become paying members of the council, and several other Western states have drafted legislation to pave the way for transfers. The American Lands Council claimed revenue of $228,000 on its 2013 taxes, according to research by the Center for Western Priorities, up from about $123,000 in 2012. The ALC also claimed $95,000 for Ivory's salary in 2013.
"I think Representative Ken Ivory is very committed to this cause," Goad said. "He works on it more than 40 hours a week. We also know from looking at the tax forms that he's personally benefitting, making money off of this cause. So he's committed to the cause, but he's also committed personally to there being a cause."
Ivory's interests not withstanding, Dabakis' bill is gaining traction. Earlier this month, it passed Utah's Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment Committee with support from both Democrats and Republicans, including Rep. Keven Stratton, who co-sponsors two other bills that make way for a land transfer.
"Some of the TPLA supporters, I think, are optimistic the court might order the feds to turn over the deed," Dabakis said. "And my guess is, win, lose or draw, they also just want finality."Among Western states, the land transfer movement has made the most ground in Utah. But it's certainly not the only state where the movement is taking place. Here's what's happening elsewhere:
Kindra McQuillan is an editorial intern at High Country News.]]>
There are two small towns in the watershed, with a combined population of less than 1,200 people. The villages, Escalante and Boulder, are extremely remote by U.S. standards. This area was the last part of the Lower 48 to be mapped by the federal government, in 1875. Today, the closest well-stocked grocery store is more than 100 miles away over winding mountain roads.
The people who live in the two towns are mainly Mormon — members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — descendants of the original pioneers who first arrived in the early 1880s. But there are also newcomers, maybe 25 percent of the current population, who've moved here from "outside" because of the area's natural beauty.
The insiders and the outsiders sometimes do not get along, especially on issues concerning land use and resource management. The most dramatic rift opened up in 1996, when then-President Bill Clinton created the 1.9 million acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, covering a good part of the watershed. Outsiders welcomed it; insiders were, and many still are, furious. I have a theory about the conflict. I think it's because the two groups have entirely different cosmologies, or answers to the questions of where we come from, why we are here, and where we are going.
Mormons believe we are the offspring of a Heavenly Father who put us here, in this mortal existence on the planet Earth, in order to progress toward a higher, even god-like state of being. They believe they, the Saints of the Latter Days, are chosen by God to build His Kingdom on Earth and prepare for the return of His son, Jesus the Christ, and that God promised this land to them for just this purpose. The Mormons' belief system is based upon this faith. It's how they see themselves, as God's stewards of the land.
The cosmology of the outsiders, on the other hand, is not based in faith but in reason. They believe human beings evolved from ape-like ancestors, for example, and that humans are a part of nature, not separate from it. Their god is nature, and they use science to understand His work, or Her work, if they believe in a god at all. They're environmentalists.
Both cultures are almost entirely white Americans. There are rich and poor on both sides. They speak the same language, but many of the words have different meanings. The word "cow," for instance, is a symbol of prosperity to the Mormons, but for environmentalists "cow" is a symbol of environmental destruction. And when it comes to talking about water and how to manage the watershed, the "simple logic" that Powell spoke of is something that's very difficult to achieve.
Sue Fearon works every day to try to bring people in Escalante and Boulder together around their common watershed issues. She grew up in Connecticut but has lived on Deer Creek, eight miles east of Boulder, for nearly 30 years –– first in a small camper without plumbing or electricity, but now in a home carved out of the inside of an 80-foot-tall sandstone mound. She grows a lot of her own food, has a few beef and dairy cows, pigs, turkeys, some horses. She and her husband, Grant Johnson, want to be as self-sufficient as possible.
This morning, we are in Sue's pickup, driving from Boulder to Escalante across the Hogback, a narrow winding ridgeline that drops off on both sides for several hundred feet. Sue's rather petite and she's sitting up tall with both hands on the wheel, paying close attention to our course.
"I'm a farmer," she says, "so to me it's all about productivity."
"What is?" I ask.
"The water," she says. "We can let it slide off the mountain and end up in Los Angeles. God knows they need it there. But I think we should use it here in ways that increase productivity, so we can be more self-sufficient as a community."
She's part of a group called the Escalante River Watershed Partnership, comprised of residents and representatives from government agencies and environmental groups who hope to figure out ways to restore the riparian areas in the Escalante watershed. Riparian areas slow down the water as it slides off the mountain. They have native plants and grasses, which helps the soil function as a sponge, absorbing and holding the water so that other plants and animals can use it. The partnership focuses on riparian zones because many of these areas in the Escalante watershed are in need of attention and effort.
It's complicated. Some riparian areas are on public property, some are on private property. On public property there are long lists of regulations and procedures, on private property the owner can do pretty much whatever he or she likes. Some riparian areas have been damaged by overgrazing, many have been invaded by Russian olives, and up high in the mountains the beaver have been largely wiped out. Beaver are very good at slowing water down, but some people don't like them because they clog irrigation pipes.
Sue says the partnership, or ERWP (pronounced "er-whip"), has had some productive meetings and designed projects they're carrying out, mainly controlling the invasive Russian olives, but there's a big problem in that, for the most part, the insiders are not participating.
"They won't come to our meetings," she says. "When they hear about ERWP they think 'environmentalists' and 'federal government,' and they're afraid we're trying to take away their grazing rights. But we're not. We're not trying to get rid of cows. We're just trying to restore the riparian areas, and we're using science to guide our work. We're trying to bring back the grass that cows can eat. But they don't want to talk to us."
One of Sue's jobs with ERWP is to eradicate Russian olives on private land. Russian olives were introduced into the Escalante watershed in the 1950s and have pretty much taken over in recent decades, clogging the shores along the streams in a way that turns the stream into something like a canal or pipeline, so that all the water runs away except for what the trees soak up. Sue has funding to pay crews to come in and get rid of them, at no cost to the landowner.
"I meet with the landowners and ask them what they want from their land," she says. "I ask them what they see in their minds as a best-case scenario. 'Do you want your stream beds choked with Russian olives so no cows or other animals can get down there? Do you want to not be able to ride a horse along the river?' Some people like Russian olives because wild turkeys live in them and they love wild turkeys. So I can't help them, and that's OK. I can't force anyone to do something they don't want to do, because none of this is going to work unless the landowners take a stake in it. If they don't want to go into it as partners, then it won't work."
"And how's it going?" I ask.
She says that while things improved over the last year, it hasn't always gone well, at least with some of the locals.
"It's hard to form partnerships here because I'm an outsider," she says. "They don't know who I am, and they're not used to having someone knock on their door and say, 'Let's talk about those Russian olive trees down on your creek.' "
I tell her my theory of the two cultures, the two cosmologies and how the two sides see everything differently and there's not much getting around it.
She's not impressed. She's not going to accept a theory that ends with no possibility of change.
"It's one river system that runs through this whole area," she says. "If we act collectively, we can end up with a productive and sustainable community. But if things stay the same, then everybody ends up working independently and the river is cut up in parts, where people act like what they do doesn't impact everybody else. But that's not possible, because we're all in the same watershed."
So I call Dell LeFevre, one of the few remaining local ranchers, bishop of the Boulder LDS and ward, current county commissioner, a strong political force in the area. I've interviewed him before, but he doesn't remember me, says he gets interviewed too often.
He's on his cellphone, driving a semi with a load of hay from Panguitch back to his ranch in Boulder. He says he'll meet me at the Frosty Freeze in Escalante.
It's a calm autumn afternoon, the late sunlight on leaves just beginning to turn. We sit at a picnic table next to the sidewalk. Dell's 75 years old, currently in remission from stage-4 cancer, but still looks and talks a lot like actor Slim Pickens, who played Major "King" Kong, the bomber pilot, in Dr. Strangelove. He and his wife have adopted and raised 14 kids, all from developing countries. He knows I'm the enemy, the liberal media, but he's the man, the go-to guy in this part of Garfield County, and he's going to tell it like it is.
"How can I help you?" he asks. "What is it you want to know?"
"So there's this new citizen's group, ERWP, that's trying to restore the watershed, but apparently the locals are not coming to their meetings. I'm wondering if it's true. When we met before, you said there was a war going on between 'the Hitlers and the Jews,' and you were the Jews and the government and the environmentalists were the Hitlers. Is the war still going on?"
"The truth is, we've lost," he says. "They're going to get us one way or another. They want to shut down the grazing on public land."
"But," I say, "ERWP's not trying to stop grazing. They're just trying to cut down Russian olives and bring back the grass."
Then, for some reason, LeFevre is telling me about his service during the Vietnam War, when he was stationed in the Aleutian Islands and spying on the Russians. Then he got injured and was sent to a hospital in San Francisco, where part of his recuperation involved "rolling hippies in the park." That was back when he liked to drink beer. He speaks of it fondly.
LeFevre's smart as a whip, funny and kind of charming. He tells me a story about a woman in his ward who came to him for church assistance, money to pay the bills, and he told her it would be no problem but he'd like her to sweep the church once a week, and she told him he wasn't a real bishop at all.
"I said, 'Ma'am, you know that and I know that, but apparently God does not.' "
"But what about the ERWP people?" I ask. "Why don't you go to their meetings?"
And he says, "They're the ones who shot our cows, cut our fences and burned our line cabins. You're talking to someone who's a bit bitter."
"When did that happen?"
"Back in the '90s," he says.
Actually, the cows, the fences and the line cabins belonged to Dell's father-in-law. The family later sold the grazing permit to the Grand Canyon Trust, an environmental organization interested in restoring the riparian areas along the Escalante River by removing the cattle. LeFevre, along with Garfield County and other ranchers, then sued the Trust, claiming it was illegal to buy a grazing permit and not use it for grazing. The Trust fended off this and other challenges by keeping a smaller number of cows on some of the grazing allotments it had purchased.
"My thing is," LeFevre says, "the group that's doing this, some of them are the ones that had the most say in getting us off the river."
I'm pretty sure this is just not true and he's saying it for effect, somewhat inflammatorily.
"Who do you think did it?" I ask.
"I think it was someone from the federal government," he says.
"Does it bother you they base everything in science?" I ask, trying to test my theory.
"I don't believe a lot of science," he says. "Like climate change. The earth may be getting warmer, but things change all the time. You have to go with it."
"And if it's getting warmer now it's because God wants it this way?"
"That's right," he says.
Over at the next picnic table splotches of sunlight through the trees are flickering on the faces of three blonde siblings, all under 5 years old, each holding ice cream cones like fish between their hands.
Dennis Bramble is a biologist, retired from the University of Utah. He used to study evolutionary morphology. Now he studies grass in the Upper Valley.
"I prefer to call it rangeland science," he says.
He lives in Escalante but owns 160 acres of what used to be rangeland for cattle in the Upper Valley. We're going there now in his pickup truck, 15 miles west of town.
"The riparian areas along the streams in this watershed used to be thick with grasses, more than 40 different species," he says. "But the land was severely overgrazed and the grass, in a lot of areas, is gone now. I've been experimenting on my land to see what it takes for the grass to come back."
Bramble has white hair and wears glasses that are a little crooked. He's a member of ERWP and he goes to the meetings. He's tall and thin and soft-spoken, quiet or listening most of the time. He hands me a book that's been riding on the seat between us. It's a master's thesis from 1954, hardbound in leather, a hand-typed carbon copy of the original: The Impact of Man on the Vegetation and Soil of the Upper Valley Allotment, Garfield County, Utah. It might be the only copy in existence; Bramble found it at the University of Utah library.
"I'll show you my land today, but I think you should read this book and then we'll come back and it will make a lot more sense."
The thesis is a scientific report written by an insider, Heber H. Hall from Boulder, Utah, now deceased. It presents a history of grazing on the very land that Bramble now owns and includes testimony from original pioneers who admit that they destroyed many of the grassland areas in the watershed by overgrazing.
According to the first-hand accounts, when the Mormon pioneers first came to the Escalante Valley in the early 1880s, the grass along the streams was so high that herds of sheep would disappear in it. The riparian areas were lush and diverse in species, like veins of living gold the pioneers mined with livestock. They brought in 60,000 sheep and 20,000 cows, and within two decades the grass was gone.
Grass helps the soil to function as a sponge in a variety of ways, especially by intercepting water that would otherwise run freely off the land and helping it to, instead, infiltrate the soil where it is then actually stored. If the grass dies, the sponge dries up. Then, if there's a flood, the water becomes a knife that cuts the sponge in half, leaving a gap, or arroyo, in between. Now the stream is suddenly five or 10 or 40 feet lower than it used to be. There's no more water on top, and the only plants that can grow in the arid soil are sagebrush and rabbitbush, neither of which are eaten by cows. This is what happened to many streams in the Escalante watershed.
Hall writes:
"These pioneers, obsessed with misconceived ideas of unlimited abundance of forage for their livestock and water for their arable land, did not perceive that these lands and their products could be destroyed. Their main interest was to reap the harvest that Nature had planted for them without considering what effect the increasing number of sheep and cattle would eventually have upon this harvest. … The initial floods, devastating and uncontrollable, descended upon their privately owned land, ripped open irrigation canals, destroyed dams, trenched and deposited debris on the cultivated fields, rendering them sterile. … Such early destruction to the land was believed, by these early settlers, to be acts of God, punishing them for moral sins committed."
By 1920, the number of cows and sheep in the watershed had dropped by half. By 1950, according to Hall, livestock productivity had dropped to 10 percent of what it was in the beginning, and nearly 20 percent of the people in Escalante were on government or church relief.
"Little comfort can be found in the fact that the same generation that brought such catastrophe to this once fertile valley lived to reap the poverty of their folly."
Hall's tone in his summation is a little caustic, and I wonder if maybe he had something of an ax to grind with his family and friends back in Boulder. Then I run into Dell LeFevre again and I show him the book and he explains what happened.
"Heber was my uncle, and I buried his brother today," he says as he paws the pages. "But he couldn't have written this because he couldn't spell any better than I do." He hands it back to me.
"In the acknowledgements," I say, "Hall thanks his wife for proofreading and typing the manuscript, so maybe she helped him with the spelling."
LeFevre tells me that Heber went away to the Second World War and never really came back. He wound up in Salt Lake City and went to the University of Utah to study science. He became an environmentalist.
"We lost him," LeFevre says.
I go back to the Upper Valley with Dennis Bramble and we sit in his truck on the 200-foot-long bridge over the arroyo that cuts through the bottom of the valley.
"According to Hall," Bramble says, "this valley used to be a flat, grassy meadow, and the bridge over the creek was only five feet wide. Now the stream is 30 feet below us. The water table has dropped to there and the banks of the stream are covered with sagebrush and rabbitbush. No grass, no willows or cottonwoods. This is the place Hall was describing in his book."
As an experiment, Bramble has built two exclosures on his land, just above the arroyo. An exclosure is a fenced-off area designed to keep cows out, not in. Deer and elk can easily get inside by jumping the fences, but Bramble says they rarely do. Small native grazers (rabbits and voles) have free access to the vegetation inside the exclosures.
We walk inside one of the exclosures and it's obvious that there's a lot more grass, and a lot more kinds of grasses, inside the fence.
"We only graze inside the fence in the fall," he says. "In September, maybe October. The idea was to see what will happen if we reduce grazing pressure and the season."
He's walking around, bending over, looking closely at the different kinds of grasses.
"Here's some thick spike wheatgrass. … That one's blue gramma…some needle-and-thread here. That's Indian rice grass over there. These are native species, but they weren't here before we put up the fence and reduced the grazing pressure. They came back on their own. We've quadrupled the number of grass species without planting anything."
In between the patches of grass there are clumps of dead rabbitbush. The rabbitbush on the outside of the fence are doing fine, very healthy. But the rabbitbush on the inside is dying.
"Are you killing the rabbitbush on purpose?" I ask.
"I'm not killing them," he says. "The voles are killing them."
"They're relatives of lemmings, meadow mice. They eat the same things as cows and sheep. They like grassy, open, sunny places. They were living down by the creek where it's more moist, but when we changed the grazing to the fall, they moved up here. The problem with grazing in the early summer is the grasses don't get high enough or dense enough, the ground stays too hot and dry for voles. They're out-competed by cows. But if we keep the cows off until fall, the grass gets big and the ground stays moist and the voles come in, and then in the winter they eat the bark and roots of the rabbitbush, killing them, making more area for grass. I think voles are the major driver in restoring the meadows, and they do it by killing their competitors, the rabbitbush."
"Have you explained your results to the local ranchers?" I ask.
"I don't think they're going to listen to me," he says. "I'd be asking them to change their grazing practices, and there's just too much inertia in the present system. They seem fearful of change."
"Yes," I say, "that may be true, but mainly I think it's because you're a scientist, and you're not from around here." I'd been told as much by more than one insider — they admit scientists are smart, but they don't trust them.
Later, Bramble says that he disagrees with this characterization. Both Heber H. Hall and his mentor at the University of Utah, Walter P. Cottam, were members of the LDS Church, and both were conservationists.
"Cottam was a distinguished professor of botany," Brambles says, "the first person of prominence to openly call public attention to the severe problems created by the chronic overgrazing of Utah's public lands, and a co-founder of The Nature Conservancy. These individuals and others demonstrate that progressively oriented persons do occur in these communities, although they are uncommon. The factors that seem most influential in opening the minds of such individuals are exposure to the outside world and, especially, education."
He thinks my theory about the underlying problem of different cosmologies is both shallow and wrong, and worse still it tends to "further poison the well in ways that will make meaningful dialogue within the community even less likely.
"It's not the religion per se," he says, "but rather the long-term cultural, political and economic isolation of these communities that is most responsible for the standoffs between insiders and outsiders in places like Escalante."
Link Chynoweth, bishop of Escalante's Second Ward, is a third-generation farmer and rancher. We sit in his living room looking out the windows at the church property he manages, growing high-quality hay for horses. He's a calm man, thinks before he speaks.
"I feel they don't understand us," he says. "Like, I went to a Monument Advisory Committee meeting here in Escalante in the spring, and when they opened it up for public comment all the Great Old Broads for Wilderness spoke against cattle grazing on public land. When it was my turn, I said, 'You all speak like we're here to make a quick buck and rape the land, and I'm here to tell you that's not the way it is. Everybody agrees this area was overgrazed in the past. Where there were thousands of cows, now there are dozens. But I'm a conservationist, I'm not here to destroy the environment. My family's had the permit on Cottonwood Wash for three generations. We take care of it, and I want my grandkids to care of it, too.' "
I confess to him, the bishop, that I've been wondering if there's a way for the two sides to talk to each other, but I've failed to come up with anything.
"I don't think it can happen," he says. "So many people on my side, we don't want to sit down with them. We'd rather stay away from them. I don't think that's the right approach –– we need to give input and there should be dialogue –– but do I think there will be? No. There's too much suspicion and distrust on both sides.
"My main focus," he says, "is to live a good life centered on my religious beliefs. For me, the way I see it, the earth and the environment are based in the biblical story of creation –– God created the earth for man, and man is the steward over the land. But, for them, God is the earth, God is the environment."
"Yes, exactly," I say.
"So that means you can't do anything that threatens or damages the earth or the environment. What I don't understand is, just the fact that you live on the earth damages it. I mean, if you're going to take the cows off the monument then why not put up a sign that says 'No humans past this point'?"
"So you're not going to go to the ERWP meetings?" I ask.
"Well, they don't come to ours either," he says.
I go back to Sue Fearon and tell her what I've been hearing from the locals, not just Dell LeFevre and Link Chynoweth, but others who were even less diplomatic. I tell her it seems like there really is a cultural gap that has to do with different ways of answering the questions of who we are, where we came from, and where we're going. She says I don't know enough about the day-to-day interactions between people who live and work together down there. Fearon, for example, is the clerk for the local soil conservation district, a decidedly "insider" organization. She hunts with insiders. She even shows up, uninvited, at what she calls "the Old Man's Club" –– retired locals who meet for breakfast in a local restaurant.
"I used to see just the differences, but now I see a lot more common ground," she says. "The common parts are not rooted in religion, or the political stance of the politicians, or us and them. Those are the differences, the shit you have to scrape off to get the point: We're all in this watershed, it has meaning to us as individuals, and therein lies the common ground. The difference is not about truth, it's about perspective. I do this all the time with people in southern Utah –– we agree to disagree and then move on and, generally, have productive and respectful relationships."
Sue's right. I don't live down here and perhaps it's wrong for me to impose my theory on a cultural environment in which I am really the "outsider." They're going to have to figure it out for themselves. The Escalante River Watershed Partnership is an attempt to work through the problems. They're trying to bring everybody together around the same table to find what John Wesley Powell called the "simple logic" of the community. I wish them the best of luck.
Scott Carrier is a writer and documentarian based in Salt Lake City; his books include Running After Antelope, published in 2001, and his radio pieces have been aired on radio shows including Hearing Voices, This American Life and All Things Considered.
This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.]]>
But that hasn't happened. Grazing was grandfathered in, and more than 96 percent of the monument is still open to cattle, with 102 permittees on 82 allotments. The ranchers wield a lot of political power, which is one reason that the monument's top managers don't stick around long. (There have been six since 1996.) The BLM is only now devising its long-overdue grazing management plan. Even some monument staffers think that "the ranchers and county governments are running the monument," says Mary O'Brien of the nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust. "The BLM is frightened and paralyzed."
Environmental groups had hoped for large reductions in the number of cows roaming the monument's fragile desert soils and riparian areas, but have managed only a few small wins. In 1998, the Grand Canyon Trust began buying grazing permits from willing ranchers, eventually acquiring leases on about 344,000 acres of the monument. It relinquished some of the permits to the BLM, which closed some allotments to grazing, established some as grass banks, and reduced cattle numbers on others. Worth Brown, then-chairman of the Canyon County Ranchers Association, told a local newspaper in 2002, "The BLM is working with preservation groups to put us out of business."
However, a federal memorandum issued that same year has made it difficult for future buyouts, by forcing the BLM to first declare that lands within grazing districts are no longer "chiefly valuable for grazing" before allowing a permit to be retired.
And that's a declaration the BLM has been reluctant to make in the monument, even though studies in the early 2000s indicated that roughly 65 percent of its grazing allotments failed to meet "rangeland health standards." Another assessment in 2008 — which conservationists denounced as a surrender to ranchers — found that about 20 percent of the allotments did not meet the standards.
Last month, the agency finally released a draft environmental impact statement for its grazing plan. The analysis includes five proposals for varying levels and amounts of grazing. The Grand Canyon Trust is trying to get the BLM to include a "Sustainable Grazing Alternative" among the options. That alternative would establish a process for allowing relinquished allotments to become permanently cow-free, allow public participation in decisions about grazing, and set a goal that livestock will not harm wildlife habitat.
Meanwhile, in mid-January, two Republican Utah senators, Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, announced their Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Grazing Protection Act, which would "preserve the grazing rights that Utah families have used for generations," and prohibit the BLM from reducing grazing.
That protection might turn out to be a double-edged sword, though. "It's pretty ironic that, as climate change unfolds and these guys have no grass to graze," says Bill Hedden of the Grand Canyon Trust, which hasn't been able to buy out a Grand Staircase permit since 2002, "all we can say to desperate ranchers who approach us about a deal is, 'Good luck, guys, your political champions have protected you from the possibility of a voluntary buy-out.'"]]>
Pale Harvest
Braden Hepner
366 pages,
softcover: $16.95.
Torrey House Press, 2014.
Set in modern times, in a small "passing-over place" in northern Utah, Idaho author Braden Hepner's debut novel follows Jack Selvedge, a 20-year-old dairy farmer working his grandfather's land, struggling against his own indifference. Young Rebekah Rainsford shakes things up when she returns to town, fleeing her abusive father. She becomes Selvedge's obsession, a symbol of hope. "She had brought with her an essence. … It was a sullen thing she carried, in some ways frightening and in some ways appealing and in all ways maddening. It was something he needed but could never get in the remote and meager collection of houses. …" As their relationship forms, her dark history forces him to confront the chasm between his ideals and reality, while two major betrayals threaten everything.
Hepner captures the nuances of the dramatic landscape of the Cache Valley, where cultivated fields give way to desert and mountains rise up against open skies. He employs a meditative language drawn from the land, delivering the richness of Selvedge's inner life: "On the gentle hillside bones stood from the sand and yellow grass like ruins, the white architecture of death. How to describe what flowers grew from those bones in the springtime. Of deep purple and yellow, blue and red and white. Each one a marvel worth contemplation. How many times had he stopped to watch them tremble in the wind among the white bones."
Pale Harvest is a dark novel by a deft storyteller, a modern retelling of the legend of Adam and Eve. It explores tensions between good and evil, ignorance and knowledge, and hope and belief. The occasional appearance of phrases like "primitive and beautiful squaw" does nothing to further the characters; Hepner does a superb job of making them full and authentic, and doesn't need to resort to language of exoticism and conquest. Pale Harvest walks the reader into the liminal spaces between life and death, and shows how a human being can be made anew. "Hope was his faith, his religion. It was the consequential vestige of maturity, of knowledge, a remnant product of adult sin. In the end they had nothing more than a hope commensurate with their fear, and in this way they were purified and set free."]]>
These are the kinds of things we did: On July 22, 80 protesters met before dawn to enter the mine's machinery yard. Linking arms, some blockaded a gate, while others locked themselves to equipment. Later, another group blockaded the only road the police could use to haul protesters off to jail. Twenty-one people were arrested.
My own arrest took place after one of the smaller work stoppages that continued throughout the summer. On Sept. 23, a group of us wearing chipmunk masks (we try to keep our sense of humor) took over the worksite, forcing numerous machines off the field for part of the afternoon.
U.S. Oil Sands, based in Calgary, Canada, had been constructing its processing facility at this site, planning to begin production in late 2015. The company aims to extract low-grade fuel out of oil-rich rock, which requires massive amounts of energy and water. The process also pollutes nearby communities around mines and refineries, as well as those downriver.
The grassroots groups Utah Tar Sands Resistance, Peaceful Uprising and Canyon Country Rising Tide all decided they had to do something to shut the mining down. This decision did not come easily. For several years, members have tried to rouse opposition to tar sands mining through rallies, street theater and presentations at agency meetings. We repeatedly asked our government to uphold human rights over corporate rights. We got nowhere. For example, Moab-based Living Rivers launched a legal challenge to tar sands mining in 2011. Its case went to the Utah Supreme Court, which dismissed the group's appeal on a technicality on June 24, 2014. Twelve days earlier, the EPA had informed U.S. Oil Sands that it needed additional permitting to continue operations because its facility sits on traditional Uintah and Ouray Ute land. We watched as the company continued bulldozing while police stood guard. To us, it was becoming ever clearer that we had a moral imperative to step in.
Though we came to Utah from various places, we were drawn to the fight against tar sands mining for similar reasons. Like me, many were Utah residents taking part in a summer-long encampment in the site slated for mining. We'd watched the scar of the company's test pit grow to a 10-acre wasteland that threatened to claim 32,000 acres of lush canyons. We lived among a heartbreakingly diverse range of wildlife — black bears, turkeys, even the occasional buffalo or cougar. At night, hearing coyotes howling beneath the brightest stars I've ever seen, I felt my roots sinking into the earth. I believe that this place, these animals, these streams flowing to the Colorado River, have a right to exist that trumps anyone's right to make a quick buck.
In July, Camila Ibanez, a young and energetic migrant-rights organizer who grew up in Utah and now lives in New York City, joined us. She emphasized how this struggle affects migrant rights, because by seizing the Colorado River's flow, industry robs people in Mexico of their traditional livelihoods on the land. Other participants from indigenous communities stressed that tar sands mining could pollute water down the Colorado. This has been happening to a First Nations community downstream from the Canadian tar sands, increasing their rate of contracting rare cancers.
A group of college students came from California in July, believing tar sands mining would push our world over the edge of climate collapse. Middle-age folks, including Lionel Trepanier of Utah, told how they decided to act against tar sands mining in order to leave their grandchildren with a fighting chance for a livable future.
Despite our divergent backgrounds, we were united by the belief that when legal solutions fail, taking risks of imprisonment through direct action is a necessary step toward justice. Making personal sacrifices then gives others the gumption to do the same. So, despite the attempts to intimidate us with trumped-up felony charges, when U.S. Oil Sands returns to work this spring, you can bet we'll be there, too.
Melanie Jae Martin is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. She has organized with Utah Tar Sands Resistance and Peaceful Uprising for several years, and lives in Utah.]]>
The ban would prohibit the use of solid fuel burning devices for over four months every winter in seven northern Utah counties. The Utah DAQ is accepting comments through Feb. 9 and plans to make a decision or revise the rule before the beginning of the 2015/2016 winter inversion season.
The folks who brought the stoves to the tailgate were part of a recently formed coalition called "Utahns for Responsible Burning." With backing from the fireplace industry, they want to exempt Environmental Protection Agency-certified, low-emissions stoves from the proposed ban. They see this exemption as a "common-sense solution" that will result in cleaner air and "preserve basic freedoms."
Utahns for Responsible Burning are not an unruly bunch, but it's this second focus of their mission -- to preserve basic freedoms -- that attracted the large crowd of concerned citizens to the meeting. They created a slick website with pre-written comments for the DAQ that users could submit with one click and made sure the word got out about the seven public hearings. "This is not about wood burning," said one resident going on the record to oppose the ban. "This is about rights."
If it passes as proposed this would be the strictest wood burning ban in the nation. To combat exceptionally high levels of particle pollution that form during winter inversions, Utah Governor Gary Herbert proposed the ban and tasked the DAQ with probing public opinion. Several northern Utah counties are out of compliance with federal air quality standards. Study after study has linked these pollution episodes to serious health problems, including asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease, stroke and early death.
The Utah Division of Air Quality already bans wood burning on so-called "red-air days," when pollution levels exceed federal standards, but DAQ Director Bryce Bird says they still find wood smoke particles on their detection filters on these days, so there is clearly a problem with enforcement. An all-out ban seems a simple solution to curb these emissions.
Bird has already worked to assure the public, via a local call-in radio show, saying the DAQ would be reviewing each and every comment. His personal opinion is that it's unlikely that the state will finalize the proposed rule as-is after considering the public feedback. "The result will be rule-making action informed by public opinion," he said. But it's hard to imagine a satisfying rule informed by the opinions of an angry mob, the fireplace industry, clean air activists, and citizens who value their self-reliance above all else.
At the Cache County hearing, only two residents voiced their support for the ban. One, an older woman with lung cancer, was booed by the crowd when she said that the ban would ease some of the suffering of her disease. A man who said his wife's and son's asthma had worsened since moving to Logan was jeered and told to get rid of his car and "ride a horse" or and move his family out of the valley.
There will be public hearings in each of the seven affected counties during the 40-day comment period. Five of the seven have already taken place. They've been like the Cache County hearing -- with overwhelming opposition and anti-government rhetoric. Many residents believe that the decision to ban wood burning has already been made without regard to their opinions. "We already know you're going to implement the ban," said one Cache County resident, "so you should know right now that we're not going to comply."
Jennifer Pemberton reports on community and the environment for Utah Public Radio. She writes about the West from her home in Logan, Utah.
Follow @YearofJen]]>
The shaggy beasts had been imported from Yellowstone National Park, a quixotic project co-sponsored by the state and a local rod and gun club. Seventy-four years later, those bison's descendants find themselves unwitting combatants in a range war, blamed by Utah cattlemen for eating cows out of house and home. A new study, however, suggests that ranchers' real beef should be with another mammal entirely — along with state predator control policies.
Upon their release in 1941, it didn't take long for the bison to flourish. By the 1960s, the shaggy beasts had forsaken the desert in favor of the Henry Mountains, between Capitol Reef and Canyonlands National Parks, where their numbers kept growing; today, the population hovers at 325. While nearly all of America's half-million bison contain cattle genes, the Henry Mountains herd has remained pure, its numbers carefully managed through the issue of wildly popular hunting tags. "We've worked hard to maintain a genetically viable population while increasing hunting and wildlife viewing," says Bill Bates, section chief at the Utah Division of Wildlife.
Bison tend to attract controversy wherever they roam, however, and the Henry Mountains are no different. Unlike in Yellowstone, the problem isn't that the bison harbor the bacterial disease brucellosis — the Henry herd has been certified clean since the 1960s — but rather that they compete with cows. Some 4,200 cattle share the bison's winter range, and the struggle for forage can be fierce. When, in 2007, the state decided to incrementally grow the herd by dispensing fewer hunting licenses, many cattlemen were incensed. "The atmosphere was really intense," says Utah State University ecologist Dustin Ranglack. "There was a lot of mistrust."
With the state's support, Ranglack set out to quantify just how much forage was being scarfed down by bison. "When you drive around that area, the bison are pretty conspicuous — they've trampled down the dirt, they've got these big dust wallows," he says. "But when you step out of the truck, you start noticing the jackrabbit scat." Ranglack saw clusters of little spherical pellets everywhere. He began to wonder whether rabbits might be even more prolific grazers than bison.
To figure out who was eating what, Ranglack set up a simple experiment. At 20 sites throughout the Henry Mountains, he constructed two 8x8-foot squares of cattle-proof fencing — pens designed not to keep animals in, but to shut them out. To one exclosure at each site, he added an apron of chicken wire that deterred rabbits. In sum: 40 exclosures overall, 20 that barred cattle and bison but let rabbits in to browse, 20 that thwarted all grazers. To figure out which large herbivore was exerting more grazing pressure, he melded data from bison radio collars with ranchers' own reports about their cattle's activity.
A year later, Ranglack returned to his sites to see how much vegetation remained in each plot. According to his analysis, published Monday in the Journal of Applied Ecology, cows were the power mowers of the Henry Mountains, devouring around 52 percent of the available forage. Bison, by contrast, were eating just 13 percent. As for those tiny, innocuous jackrabbits and their lagomorph cousins? They gobbled 34 percent.
Clearly, then, the Henry Mountains are chock-full of bunnies. But why? Ranglack speculates that Utah's take-no-prisoners coyote management strategy is responsible for the rabbit explosion. The state spends $1.35 million on lethal coyote control annually, paying a $50 bounty for every kill; in the Henry Mountains, a trophy mule deer unit, at least 156 coyotes have been eliminated over the last five years.
Ranglack is quick to point out that the link between predator policies and lagomorph populations hasn't received scientific scrutiny. Still, it's conceivable that, at least in some places, the trophic cascade set off by coyote control is actually costing Utah money in the form of lost cattle forage. And the state is taking notice: Ranglack's study "is something we'll definitely have to take into account" in devising future management plans, says the Division of Wildlife's Bill Bates.
State managers aren't the only folks rethinking the Henry Mountains ecosystem. Over a year ago, Ranglack presented his then-unpublished data before a group of local ranchers. He'd tried to keep cattlemen in the loop during his experiments, but he knew his analysis ran counter to expectations. He feared the meeting would turn ugly.
Nonetheless, Ranglack launched into his presentation, quickly arriving at the slide that broke down which critters were consuming how much grass. As he explained what he'd found, a loud, challenging voice boomed from the audience.
"Wait a minute," the rancher interrupted. "You're trying to say that jackrabbits are eating twice as much as bison?"
"That's what I'm saying," Ranglack replied. He waited nervously for the outburst. A murmur passed through the crowd. Then the rancher spoke up again.
"Well then," he declared, "we need to stop shooting all these coyotes!"
Ben Goldfarb is a Seattle-based correspondent for High Country News.
Follow @ben_a_goldfarb]]>
The activists called their camp a "permanent protest vigil," its purpose to monitor and impede construction of what could become the first tar sands mine in the U.S. They have stood in front of and locked themselves to heavy machinery. Once, they dressed up as chipmunks and chased road graders around a construction site. At least one woman trespassed regularly into the mine's test pit, to see if there was anything worrisome worth documenting.
The September weekend that I dropped in, the activists were hosting a special campout to encourage locals to "connect with the land." After a long drive on winding backroads, I found the camp on the shoulder of a sweeping ridge, hidden among a stand of pine and fir. Tents pincushioned the forest floor on either side of a slim spur crammed with cars and pickups and ending in a tight turnaround — a cul-de-sac in the woods. The days I was there, activists wore jeans, T-shirts, fleece, clogs and hiking boots. People read books around the fire-pit, and lounged in the kitchen, an elaborately tarped affair with a spice rack and serving buffet. They slept in, brewed endless pots of coffee, and told camp tales: of encounters with bears, hikes gone awry, epic meals prepared and eaten (one involved cashew cream sauce). It felt pretty laid-back for a hotbed of radicals intent on revolution. Then again, it was the weekend.
On Saturday morning, with the wind calm and temperature pleasantly climbing, I joined the "morning circle" –– around 15 people, sitting in camp chairs or on five-gallon buckets or in the dirt around smoldering coals. Each person introduced themself, and gave their preferred gender pronoun — he, she or they — which everyone was asked to respect. Vigil stalwart Raphael Cordray, who once owned a gift shop for radicals in Salt Lake, volunteered to lead a tour of the test pit. Chad Hamblin, a high school science teacher, offered to lead a nature hike. Kathy Albury, a member of the environmental ministry at Salt Lake's Unitarian Church, wanted to march on Sunday, the same day demonstrators would clog Manhattan for the People's Climate March. Rachel Carter, also from the Salt Lake area, agreed: "These sources of extraction are where people should be marching," she said, and suggested a hashtag: #comeherenextyear.
Then it was on to explaining "camp norms," which were scrawled in colored marker on a cardboard sign hanging from the food trailer: Don't talk to the cops; no racism, sexism, transphobia or other forms of bigotry; no violence of any kind. Also, "no pants at the fire pit" –– code for no cell phones, which could be tapped by police, the FBI, or other Big Brothers. Welcome to the resistance.
I first heard of the vigil in July 2014, after reading a newspaper story about one of its rowdier moments. It came after a weeklong campout, when 80 or so people came to the Book Cliffs to learn about community organizing, nonviolent direct action and "climate justice" –– the idea that climate change solutions must alleviate the social and environmental burdens our energy economy disproportionately imposes on the world's poorest, usually non-white, people.
Before dawn on July 21, a group of activists had made their way to a fenced lot where U.S. Oil Sands, the mine's developer, kept its heavy machinery. Their goal: to stop construction for the day. Though sheriff's deputies were camped out there, a few activists slipped in and locked themselves to the equipment. Around 20 others linked arms and stood or sat outside the fence, blocking the road. By the end of the day, deputies had carted 21 people off to the Uintah County jail.
Reading about it brought me back to a crowded theater in Paonia, Colorado, where in 2013 I watched the documentary Bidder 70. It tells the story of Tim DeChristopher, a University of Utah student who, in 2008, made bids at a BLM oil and gas lease sale, driving up prices and winning 14 parcels he did not plan to drill, worth $1.8 million he could not pay. DeChristopher spent 21 months in federal prison, becoming a minor folk hero in the process.
I remember being impressed by DeChristopher's eloquence and unbending adherence to his principles. He deliberately broke the law to keep the oil and gas in the ground –– to prevent the greater crime of more carbon pollution, he said –– and refused a plea bargain. But there was something disquieting about his story and the images of his comrades storming the Interior Department in Washington and getting arrested; weeping outside the Salt Lake courthouse after his sentencing, sitting in the street, refusing to move, getting arrested. Climate change stirred something in him –– in them –– that it had yet to stir in me. Anger, maybe? Passion? I wasn't sure. But it was an emotion I didn't recognize in myself, or in most of my friends.
Which left me feeling conflicted. I'm an environmental journalist, well informed on climate change. I write stories about the science, which keeps getting worse, and the policy, which keeps standing still. I write about irrevocable changes to the mountains and deserts I love, and about how drought and heat could render some of them uninhabitable. I know the climate crisis is big and bad. And yet I don't get angry about it, not really angry. Neither do most of my well-informed and idealistic friends. But shouldn't we?
Reading about the U.S. Oil Sands lock-in, and remembering DeChristopher's story, made me curious about what was brewing in the Book Cliffs. Did these people know something I didn't? More to the point, did they feel something I didn't?
After Saturday's morning circle, I piled into a big white van with seven others to tour the mine's test pit, a few minutes down Seep Ridge Road, which was in the process of being widened and paved for future industrial traffic. At the pit, vegetation had been cleared, a berm cut into the ridge, and a hole dug, exposing brown, gray and ebony rock layers. Rainwater had created a pond the color of dark tea, where Raphael Cordray said she had seen cows drinking. She suspected it was toxic.
The tour was for outsiders (mainly me) and visitors from the nearby Uinta Basin who opposed the mine but came up only occasionally. There was Stagg, who goes by one name only, along with David Bell and Lori Savage. They all lived around Roosevelt, Utah, population around 7,000, some 90 miles away. Hamblin, the science teacher, also from the Roosevelt area, was up for his third campout and brought his dad. He was excited to meet like-minded neighbors; environmentalists are few in the Uinta Basin, home to Utah's top oil and gas producing counties. Still fewer are those willing to speak out against energy development. "It feels like the Lone Ranger out there sometimes," he lamented.
U.S. Oil Sands, a Canadian company, had secured permits and leases on state trust land, leaving environmentalists without legal leverage to stop it. Now, the company was clearing a building site for a processing facility, aiming to begin commercial production in 2015. CEO Cameron Todd told me the company respects the activists' right to voice their opposition, but that their tactics sometimes crossed the line and posed safety risks. He said his company is willing to engage anyone interested in figuring out better ways to do things, but added, "There's not much of a dialogue (you can have) with people who just don't want things to happen."
The construction activity was at the building site, but there were actual tar sands to see at the test pit. A future mine was easier to imagine here. On the south-facing slope below the pit, thick, jet-black goo oozed from rocks, forming drip patterns like coagulating blood, with the dry, oppressive smell of fresh asphalt.
As others scrambled downslope to check out erosion and fossils, Hamblin and I lingered on the rim. A tall, solid man with a full beard and lively eyes, Hamblin had an encyclopedic knowledge of plants and animals. Zeal for nature burst from his lips like light from a sparkler. He snapped photos, calling out that he had casting equipment if anyone found animal tracks.
The night before, he'd sported a "Bidder 70" baseball cap –– a nod to the DeChristopher film. Like some others, DeChristopher was part of the reason he was here. In 2011, he spent a weekend camping around Dinosaur National Monument, where he ran into an acquaintance who said that his camping spot would have become a "big oil well" if not for DeChristopher. That inspired him to later drive two-and-a-half hours to Salt Lake to see the movie, which is where he met some of the activists and learned about the tar sands development.
Hamblin bemoaned what he saw as the loss of public-land access to energy development. He recalled a university lecture about permafrost thawing: "I was the only member of the public who came," he said. "It was like, 'Wow, she's saying a lot of what's going on is not reversible.' I like to cross-country ski, and climate change is making it so there's less snow and more rain. I'm concerned on a lot of levels."
Soon, we climbed back in the van, and bumped down the road to see the scar of a failed 1980s mine. I asked why they called the camp a "vigil." Lionel Trepanier, co-founder with Cordray of Utah Tar Sands Resistance, one group behind the protest, explained that "vigils" were considered by courts to be constitutionally protected free speech. "Although there are tents and a kitchen, this isn't camping," he said. "The vigil is the presence."
"So is it like being a witness?" Hamblin asked. Yes, several people replied.
"If we're here and witnessing what's going on, then we'll know other ways to respond," Corday said, adding that their presence draws attention to the little-known mine. "And it creates a place people can come and learn about the issues. It's a safe place if they want to show their discomfort and not be arrested."
The number of people willing — even eager — to risk arrest trying to stop fossil fuel developments is still small. But it seemed notable to me that they existed at all.
The same month Tim DeChristopher went to prison, in 2011, 1,200 were arrested in Washington, D.C., protesting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry Canadian tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries. Keystone helped galvanize the national climate movement, thanks to organized opposition from the tribes, ranchers and farmers whose land it would cross, and from prominent activists like former NASA scientist James Hansen. Protests small and large, in Washington and elsewhere, have followed the 2011 demonstration. Getting at tar sands and making the oil takes a massive amount of energy, making the fuel hugely carbon intensive. "If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing," Hansen wrote in The New York Times in 2012, "it will be game over for the climate."
But there are mini-Keystones all over — smaller pieces of less politically and environmentally significant infrastructure that are the foundation for a rush on fossil fuels right here at home, including tar sands. Grassroots activists have taken notice, loudly opposing developments of all sizes and consequence.
In Massachusetts, a coalition aims to stop all new fossil fuel infrastructure, including three gas-fired power plants and one pipeline expansion. Massachusetts activists were among those who blockaded the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's offices for a week in the fall. More than 100 were arrested in D.C. and related protests, according to organizers. A Michigan man was recently given a suspended two-month jail sentence and one year of probation after being convicted of a felony for skateboarding inside an unfinished pipeline and refusing to leave. In upstate New York, locals have blocked the entrance to a gas storage facility since October, protesting a FERC-approved expansion. At press time, 170 had been arrested.
My question was not whether the activists in Utah or these other incidents were right, wrong or somewhere in between, or whether in each case their tactics were justified or strategic. I wanted to know what motivated them. Civil disobedience involves some level of personal risk, and people wouldn't engage in it, I assumed, without feeling a powerful emotional involvement; the kind of intellectual response many of us have to the climate crisis is simply not enough.
"Be as frank as possible," an editor at High Country News advised before I began reporting. "They're not like regular people. They're not just saints. They have a certain personality."
"Nature walk departing!" crowed a few not-just-saints in unison, standing by the campfire, lit despite Saturday evening's lingering warmth. Hamblin led a group down a trail and into a stand of Doug-fir, piñon and juniper, carrying a shepherd's crook in one hand, a camera carabineered to his shirt. He wondered aloud if finding threatened or endangered plants might help stop the mine.
We lingered on a southerly slope, under a haggard old piñon, its roots snaking out from the tan soil as though coming up for air. Among them, we discovered an antlion, an insect whose predatory larvae bury themselves in sand, awaiting prey. We poked its pit with a twig, which it attacked, provoking oohs! and more pokes.
I wandered back uphill to camp with Rachel Carter, a dedicated member of Peaceful Uprising, a Salt Lake climate justice group sponsoring the vigil. It was co-founded by DeChristopher after the BLM auction and has continued working locally, though he moved out of state to attend Harvard Divinity School. Carter wore a shaggy pixie cut and army-green pants. Her black T-shirt with its cut-off sleeves proclaimed: "I Am The Carbon Tax."
Though Carter didn't spend all season here, she frequently delivered food that Salt Lake supporters donated and foraged from suburban grocery dumpsters, and joined for special campouts. I asked her why she joined Peaceful Uprising and was surprised to learn she was relatively new to environmentalism and radical activism, if not unfamiliar with it. Her Mormon parents were members of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society, which fought communism and the civil rights movement in the 1950s and '60s. She joined at 15 and was raised believing Joseph McCarthy was a hero. But as she grew older, she became uncomfortable with her family's politics. She moved to Seattle and "was liberalized but not activated," as she struggled to sort out her feelings on Mormonism. "My approach for a long time was just no involvement with anything," she said.
In 2008, she moved back to Utah, right after Proposition 8, which sought to ban same-sex marriage, passed in California with hefty support from the Mormon Church. Carter, who had left the church, was incensed that it had entered politics "in a way that fucked a lot of people over." A rare protest was held outside the Salt Lake Mormon Temple just before she moved home. Then DeChristopher went to the BLM auction. "There was a lot happening, and it was exciting," she told me. "There's something about being an underdog that engages me. Democrats being an underdog in Utah, I was interested in trying to help change that."
She volunteered with LGBT advocacy groups and worked with the Utah Democratic Party. In 2010, she got involved with people in Peaceful Uprising after DeChristopher posted an ad on Craigslist seeking a "courageous congressperson" for Utah's 2nd District. He and his cohort were fed up with conservative Utah Democrat Jim Matheson, who had voted against health-care reform and cap-and-trade. So they decided to "hire" his replacement. "Must have solid moral values and a resistance to selling out to corporate interests," the ad said. Job responsibilities included "stopping catastrophic climate change" and "ending imperialistic wars of aggression."
At a local library, Carter watched while select "applicants" answered questions. That night, a candidate was chosen. "There wasn't a ton of overhead and bullshit and bureaucracy," she said. "And it was just a lot of fun." She worked on the campaign (it failed after forcing Matheson into a runoff), and about six months later, helped prepare for DeChristopher's trial.
"The climate end of it was not one of my main reasons for getting involved with Peaceful Uprising," she said, as we stood on the edge of camp. "It was more about the culture of the group and what they were creating. It was a really creative, energetic group of people."
I heard a similar story from Jesse Fruhwirth, a member of Peaceful Uprising and vigil keeper, who was among the 26 in court this month. In early 2011, he was a reporter for City Weekly, Salt Lake's alternative paper, covering criminal justice, homelessness, DeChristopher's trial, and a 2011 effort by the Utah Legislature to gut open-records laws. It was the first time his editors allowed him to "throw objectivity to the wind and be blatantly biased toward open access," he told me in a phone interview. "I felt like in real life I was a polarizing firebrand, but that journalism snuffed that out. Not everyone has that, and I feel like it's the best thing I've got."
By the spring of 2011, though, Fruhwirth was feeling burnt out, and thought his body was showing signs of stress. Once, when someone hugged him, he said, it broke a rib. He quit and bought a vegan hot dog stand in downtown Salt Lake. But though he'd gotten a taste for polemics, he wasn't sure how to satisfy it. He thought a lot of activism lacked a winning strategy. When a friend dropped by the hot dog stand to tell him about planning meetings for Occupy Salt Lake, late in the summer of 2011, he remembers mentally rolling his eyes. But once the Occupy encampment was established, in early October, he stopped by. He was surprised to see a homeless woman he knew from his reporter days running the welcome booth. "It didn't match my stereotype of what an activist was," he said. "I was very inspired to see homeless people acting politically with non-homeless people." He joined the camp.
Occupy Salt Lake lasted a little more than a month before the city police dismantled it. Both Fruhwirth and Carter were arrested during the eviction. Some activists returned to their day jobs, Fruhwirth said, "but some of us joined the revolution and never looked back." He found Peaceful Uprising one of the few refuges for the newly radicalized in Salt Lake. Climate change was not his top priority, but neither did these seem like typical environmentalists. "I'd heard Tim DeChristopher question capitalism," he told me. "Hearing an environmentalist talk about capitalism was not quite as awesome as seeing a homeless person running the welcome booth at Occupy, but it was one of those moments."
Peaceful Uprising members told me their goal at present is to stop "extreme energy extraction" on the Colorado Plateau. Grassroots activists across the country are converging on a similar aim: No new infrastructure for the extraction, transportation or burning of fossil fuels. "Not here, not in Fort McMurray, not in Mobile, Alabama," Lauren Wood, an early Peaceful Uprising member who just left the group, told me. "Not fracking, not oil, none of it." It's a tall order; stopping even one Utah mine will be tough unless tumbling oil prices change things for the company. Yet the activists' ultimate goal is even more ambitious: to end growth-at-all-costs capitalism and oppression in all forms — to fundamentally restructure the entire economic and social order.
"Of course it's too big," DeChristopher told me, when I reached him by phone and inquired about the grassroots movement's ambitions. "If we're going to create any kind of change, it's going to have to come from a mass movement. And to effectively mobilize people you need a big vision," he said. "Every successful social movement in our history has been unrealistic. Even people who were anti-slavery thought abolitionists were completely nuts. There had literally always been slavery until it was banned. Why not aim for something we actually want? Why not aim for the kind of world we want to see?"
On Saturday night back in the Book Cliffs, I crawled into my tent and opened The Monkey Wrench Gang. I'd brought it with me, guessing that Abbey's environmental call-to-arms had helped inspired the activists. If so, it never came up.
Late Sunday morning, under a pocket of blue sky, some 30 people climbed out of vehicles onto Seep Ridge Road. One man wore a colorful clown mask; another played "This Land is Our Land" on a saxophone. A brown-and-white teacup of a dog scampered about, its fur ruffled by a whiplashing wind.
A couple of people unfurled a banner — "Together and Everywhere We Rise Up for Climate Justice" — and the group marched toward the test pit. The banner was a nod to the People's Climate March, now underway in New York, where hundreds of thousands jammed the streets in an event Politico described as "a coming-out party for a new breed of environmentalism — one that's louder and rowdier than the old-school greens."
The Utah activists hoped the New York march would accomplish something but were disappointed with its tame approach. It was planned in cooperation with the police and did not confront any specific threats. They were more jazzed about Flood Wall Street, a more aggressive, unpermitted sit-in planned for the following day. Its slogan: "Stop capitalism. End the climate crisis."
Here, though, things were pretty tame, too. When the marchers arrived at the test pit, about half of them scrambled through an opening in the fence, past "no trespassing" signs, some with bandanas or scarves pulled up like bandit masks. They stood beside the pit's brown pond and posed for pictures. The clown climbed atop a pile of excavated rock and thrust a "No Tar Sands" sign in the air. Others stayed on the legal side of the fence, either not interested in breaking the law, or seeing little value in it in this instance. The cops never appeared; I was the only reporter. There was scarcely anyone out here to witness it. Nevertheless, the protesters were here to say "no" to the mine because, as a white-haired woman from Moab named Dorothy put it: "These days, if you're not saying 'no,' you're saying 'yes.' "
I drove home after the march, where on and off for the next couple months, I tried to figure out exactly what I had learned about the climate activists and about myself.
I was surprised by how little they resembled the environmentalists I usually interviewed. There was little talk of the finer points of renewable energy policy, little time spent lamenting the death of trees, or the troubles of pikas and polar bears. But immigration reform came up. The legacy of colonization for Native peoples came up. Capitalism and its sins came up –– a lot.
Radicals, more than one person told me, try to attack the roots of problems. The word "radical," they said, means "going to the origin." And the members of Peaceful Uprising have come to believe that the root cause of climate change and other massive problems, like income inequality, is the profit-hungry capitalist system we're all part of, and especially the people at the top of it.
"This isn't just about CO2 in the atmosphere and parts per million," Carter told me. "The various oppressions that have led up to this have been going on for centuries. All of these things are feeding the same system of overlapping and self-reinforcing problems." To Carter and her comrades, climate change represents the last, worst example of the unjust relationship between rich and poor, white and black, colonist and Native. "The refugee crisis we're going to be seeing will affect the most marginalized. Wars –– that is real."
I got some of what they were saying about the climate fight being not just about the environment, but a web of "intersecting oppressions." I understood that poor communities of color had long shouldered an unfair share of pollution, and that climate change promised to punch them hardest again. But was the climate fight really of a piece with the immigration fight? The struggle against police brutality? The connections weren't always obvious, and in any case, was it possible or practical to take on everything that was wrong with the world at once?
Then, on a December evening, after wrestling with writer's block in my Santa Fe office, I tackled what seemed like a more manageable task: applying for health insurance through the new marketplace. I'd left my staff job at High Country News about seven months earlier, to see if I could make it independently. My husband, a potter, had also recently started his own business. I typed in our unimpressive income, and up popped our options. The cheapest plan would cost around $225 a month. If we had a baby, a brochure informed me, it would cover $1,240 of average delivery costs, and we'd pay $6,300. This was insurance, new and improved? None of it was affordable. None of it. As I drove home, I cried alone in my car, then a little more in my kitchen. I felt ashamed. And then I got pissed.
The healthcare law had been carefully designed to win support from private insurance companies, but it still resulted in crappy options that squeezed scrappy people like us. It was hardly surprising, but it didn't seem fair. Then it occurred to me that maybe in that moment, I was angry about climate change, too. My basic complaints about the healthcare reform sounded pretty similar to the critique the activists I spoke with made about the failed 2010 federal climate bill: It tweaked a broken system at its edges, appeasing polluters for political viability rather than proposing the kind of changes the crisis actually demanded. It was a false solution, people told me, and many didn't care that it failed. I thought about their argument about "root causes," and recognized twinges of their anger in myself.
A lot of things started converging in my mind: Occupy. The fast food workers' "Fight for $15." The outrage and despair over the killings by police of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner. All had one thing in common: the sense that our society is designed to work for some and not for others, with the balance tipping ever more in favor of those who need the least help. When I applied for health insurance, I felt something similar: The deck was stacked, against me.
The New York Times recently ran a story about the fight for $15 an hour, profiling one of the campaign's leaders, Terrance Wise, a father of three who worked at both Burger King and Pizza Hut and still had trouble paying rent and utility bills. When he asked his manager at Pizza Hut for a raise, she showed him the pay policy, saying she could boost his pay at most 25 cents after three years, even though he made less than $8 an hour. "If I gave you 25 cents," he recalled being told, "that means you're perfect."
"It makes me angry, and you should be angry, that these billion-dollar corporations are robbing from my kids and your kids," Wise said in the story. "So we're going to have to stand up and fight back." It was the same sentiment I'd heard in the Book Cliffs. People wanted a society with a little more humanity, one whose outcomes are less determined by corporations that serve only their shareholders, valuing profits above the stability of the atmosphere or the dignity of their workers.
When I first arrived at the vigil, I imagined the activists as agitators on the fringe of the environmental movement. They saw themselves, instead, as one twitchy muscle in a much broader and building unrest. I was starting to see them that way, too.
Be as frank as possible. They're not like regular people. That may be true, but these are not regular times.
Cally Carswell is a High Country News contributing editor and freelance science and environmental journalist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work has recently appeared in Science and Modern Farmer. Follow @callycarswell
This story was originally titled "Occupy the Book Cliffs" in the print edition.
A friend once told me that, long ago, before all that red rock and sand in southern Utah settled at the bottom of an inland sea, it crumbled away from the top of the Appalachian Mountains. Erosion carried it down ancient summits, hundreds of miles away, and softly deposited it in a shallow Western sea. To him, hiking the Hayduke trail was like walking over the ashes of one of the greatest mountain ranges that ever was. All those lonely mesas and all that empty sky will do that to a person — make him think that way.
Give me silence, water, hope.
Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.
—Pablo Neruda
The West seems dry now, but it's going to get a lot drier. Lake Powell is getting so low that, any day now, the ghost town of Hite, Utah, will emerge from its depths, and Ed Abbey's Seldom Seen Smith might even stroll down its streets again. In 50 years, there may not be enough water to keep the whole thing going. They're already calling for water rationing by 2017. We built our oases in a desert during the wettest part of the past millennium and still had to stop the 6 million year flow of the Colorado River to the Pacific in order to do so. Where will we find the water and the hope to sustain us in the coming drought amid all the struggle and iron?
Drought drove the Anasazi people out of history back in the 13th century, and drought may cause their ancient dwellings to rise back form the ripples of receding Lake Powell in a few short years. Will we notice and remark on this irony of this, or be too busy preparing for our own exodus?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
—William Butler Yeats
In a hundred years, there may not be so many people in the American West. Changing climate and a lack of water will dry up our desert metropolises. It happened to the Maya. It happened in Petra, and India, and Zimbabwe; why not Utah? I suspect there will be more Hanksvilles than Salt Lake Cities out West in a hundred years.
But that's not to say things will be quiet. Wolves will howl in pursuit of bison in the Henry Mountains, cheatgrass will sizzle in wildfires across the Colorado Plateau, and hundreds of thousands of wind turbines will creak as they turn and turn in the sun - a mechanical gyre so dizzying that even after dark you won't be able to hear the nighthawks buzzing. Turbines will turn and solar panels will glare. Wildlife will abound, but the sputterings and coughing of the continent's new energy extractors may drown out its voice. And who will be there to hear it? The shepherd without a flock?
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
—T.S. Eliot
I suppose the West will be quiet again in 200 years: Just ragged gila monster claws scuttling across the floor of a dried-up sea. Dust will scratch away at some long-forgotten sock left in Coyote Gulch that refuses to decompose in the arid climate. Irrigation pivots won't turn. Oil wells won't bob. The world will end, after all, with a whisper.
But would it have been wrong for us to look forward? Would the head-scratching and throat-clearing and predicting and increasingly urgent warning have been worth it?
A great professor once told me something that I'll never forget. Gaia, he said, would be here long after we were gone. Climate change won't destroy the Earth. It may destroy people, but not the planet. Drought won't destroy it, either. We probably won't destroy the Earth — at least not before we destroy ourselves. Something will remain. I find that comforting. I'll continue to revel in the majesty of the red rock desert and rebel against the forces that seek to unhinge it. I'll work to conserve, and preserve, and fortify, and protect. But, in the end, nature wins. No matter what, sand and time and mesas and sky will triumph.
Daniel Kinka is a doctoral student in ecology at Utah State University and is currently investigating the use of livestock guardian dogs as a non-lethal management technique for large carnivores.
As runner-up winner of the 2014 Bell Prize, Kinka received a $500 package from our generous sponsor Mountainsmith.]]>
The problem is that the animal in the hunter's crosshairs turned out to be a federally-protected gray wolf. In the days following, speculation swirled that the 3-year-old female was none other than Echo (named by schoolchildren), who appeared on the north rim of the Grand Canyon in October – the first gray wolf sighted there in over 70 years.
Though wolves have been delisted in a region of northern Utah, they are still protected under the federal Endangered Species Act in southwestern Utah, where the shooting took place. But it's unclear whether the hunter – who reportedly told officials he thought he was shooting at a coyote – will face criminal charges. (The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, for its part, has already stated that the shooting was accidental.)
More details about the animal's identity and circumstances of its death may be revealed after the completion of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service-led investigation, which includes a DNA analysis. But according to Mike Jimenez, a spokesman for the USFWS, there is no definitive time frame for completion.
While uncertainties abound, what seems clear is that this wolf's death is collateral damage in Utah's concerted push to exterminate coyotes – an effort underpinned by two pieces of Utah legislation passed in 2012. The Predator Control Funding Act allocates funds to control predators said to pose a danger to "the health of Utah's non-predatory wildlife." The second, the Mule Deer Protection Act, sets aside $500,000 dollars per year to pay hunters a $50 bounty for every coyote they kill in areas deemed important mule deer habitat. (Notably, in this case of mistaken identity, a 2010 state law also requires wildlife managers to prevent the reestablishment of wolf packs in the state.)
Last year, more than 7,000 coyotes were killed across Utah – resulting in $352,000 in payments – under the state's Predator Control Program. (According to DWR figures, an additional 2,700 coyotes were killed by hunters but not submitted for payment.) Since the law's passage in 2012, more than 14,000 of the canids have been killed under the state coyote bounty program.
To date, says Mark Hadley, a spokesman for the Utah DWR, over 2,000 hunters have been certified as eligible to receive bounties. Hadley said he is unsure if the wolf shooter is among them. To become certified, hunters must complete a short online quiz. Incidentally, I took and passed the Utah Predator Control program quiz last week. The test consists of 10 questions and focuses on the specific provisions and intent of the law. But it conspicuously lacks questions about safe hunting and humane trapping practices; moreover, it does not require the test taker to identify a picture of a coyote, much less distinguish one from any other animal -- like a large dog or a wolf.
While news of a wolf at the Grand Canyon enthralled the public, it is perhaps little surprise when one considers the rate of their population growth and dispersal across the West. USFWS estimates that the wolf population in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming (the states with the greatest number of wolves in the Lower 48) has grown to over 1,500 since federal wildlife agents reintroduced more than 60 Canadian wolves to Yellowstone in 1995.
Besides Echo, the West's best-known wild canine is OR7, a male gray wolf who in 2011 wandered more than 1000 miles between Oregon and California, becoming the first wolf confirmed in Oregon since 1947 and in California since 1924. He now has a mate, pups and another adult wolf has reportedly joined the pack. Though reports of wolves have been infrequent in Colorado and Utah, there have been at least a few sightings. In 2010, a gray wolf was trapped and killed in Rich County, Utah by wildlife managers after attacking livestock.
If the wolf shot in December proves to be Echo, there is sure to be a collective howl of despair from wolf advocates. If, however, the animal happens to be another far-ranging female, the story will be no less mournful – but it will also become far more interesting.
Stay tuned.]]>
The root causes of this mountain misery have remained a mystery. Maybe we kill ourselves at a higher rate because we have so many guns at our disposal, and maybe we reach that extreme of misery because we are physically and emotionally isolated: We not only live further apart from one another, but our independent Western spirit prevents us from seeking help and support. Maybe the notion of driving over mountain passes for mental health care is too daunting.
But a group of researchers think they may have found the reason the mountain states top not only the Lists of Misery, but maybe also the Listicles of Happiness: high altitude. Two studies, each by an overlapping group of scientists looking into the matter, were published back in 2010 and 2011. The findings didn't get a lot of play at the time. But after CDC released its latest data, for 2012, showing that the suicide rate has been increasing nationwide, particularly in Western states like Utah and Colorado, and after an article on the altitude findings was published at Science.Mic in November, the theory attracted more attention.
In the paper "Positive Association between Altitude and Suicide in 2584 U.S. Counties" published in 2011 in High Altitude Medicine and Biology, the authors looked at every county in the U.S., and found a strong positive correlation between the average altitude of the county and the suicide rate. Counties that lie below 2,000 feet above sea level had an overall suicide rate that was about half that of counties lying between 4,000 and 5,000 feet in altitude. Counties above 9,000 feet had the highest suicide rate. And so on. This in spite of the fact that high altitude counties generally have a lower mortality rate from all other causes. The authors note:
Prior reports of increased suicides in the U.S. Mountain Region have prompted speculation that the excess is owing to greater access to firearms, increased isolation, or reduced income. Even after controlling for these variables in our analysis, the positive correlation between altitude and suicide still exists, which suggests that the increased suicide rate in the regions with greatest altitude, such as the Mountain Region, may be owing to, at least in part, its altitude per se.
How could altitude lead someone to end their own life? Possibly through hypoxia, or lack of adequate oxygen to the brain, the phenomenon that causes us to get dizzy, or drunk faster, at high altitude. "Altitude is a well-known cause of hypoxia," the authors say, "and the greater the elevation, the greater the hypoxia. Chronic hypoxia also is thought to increase mood disturbances, especially in patients with emotional instability." The authors go on to admit that hypoxia's effect on mood is complex, and more study is needed.
One of the researchers, at least, has continued that study, and thinks he's closer to solving the mystery. In the Science.Mic article, writer Theresa Fisher spoke with Utah neuroscientist Perry Renshaw about his findings. Renshaw told her that he believes altitude messes with our bodies' levels of dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that regulate our sense of happiness. Hypoxia, he says, causes serotonin to go down in our brains (which usually results in depression) and dopamine to increase (which usually creates a sense of euphoria, e.g. "runner's high").
Whether this conflicting combination of effects makes us happy or makes us sad depends on the makeup of our brains. Folks with a history of depression are more likely to get more depressed if they move to the mountains, as are women, according to the Science.Mic article. And people who are naturally happy are likely to get downright ecstatic at higher altitudes. And that would explain how so many mountain towns can top both the Listicles of Happiness and the Lists of Misery.
When I first caught wind of the theory a few months ago, it seemed absurd. I've lived all but one year of my life between 5,000 and 9,300 feet. Looking back at those times — as well as the year I spent at sea level — I don't see any correlations between my mental health and the altitude at which I was living. Sure, my sanity often wore a little thin while living in Silverton, Colorado, at 9,300 feet, but then there were many other factors aside from altitude to consider: A tiny populace, psychotic politics, a treacherous drive to the nearest movie theatre and, yeah, I was running the town newspaper, a sure road to mental illness.
Having said all of that, suicide has been a shockingly common cause of death in Silverton since the heydays of mining, and many of its current residents — the ones who aren't fighting over at Town Hall — can tend to get wrapped up in a sort of hypoxic euphoria. I always thought it was the scenery. Perhaps it's the altitude.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News.
Follow @jonnypeace]]>
To Barb Smith, a 52-year-old Forest Service wildlife biologist with striking green eyes and a silvery braid, the upper La Sals are an ecological paradise, one of the few chunks of land in Utah that isn't grazed, logged or scarred by off-road vehicles. Smith is also a botanist, and as she and a dozen or so volunteers climb above 11,000-foot Burro Pass, she rattles off the Latin names of flowers: Polygonum bistortoides, Tetraneuris grandiflora. There are so many, it's hard to take a step without crushing one.
We pause on a wind-scoured slope to catch our breaths and everyone crowds around Smith, who has spotted a cute if unremarkable yellow button called the La Sal daisy. She explains how to identify the flower and mark its location on a GPS. "This kind of effort, this kind of documentation, is going to be really helpful," Smith says. The volunteers hold out their smartphones to take pictures.
The La Sal daisy grows nowhere else in the world, and no one knows how it's been faring in the drier winters lately plaguing these mountains. Smith has spent the past five years trying to find out, gathering baseline data on the daisy to use as a marker to measure the effects of climate change. Until recently, she's had a near-perfect place to do so: the Mount Peale Research Natural Area, a 2,300-acre preserve surrounding the La Sals' highest peak. There are 29 research natural areas in Utah, each meant to protect a specific biome from human influence so that biologists like Smith can observe long-term ecological changes there, and use as a control against which to compare the effects of human activity on similar environments.
Lately, though, Smith's work has taken on a new urgency: Last year, despite opposition from the regional Forest Service office and a cadre of local and national environmental groups, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources released 20 non-native Rocky Mountain goats into the La Sals for hunting and wildlife viewing. This September, they released 15 more. Eventually, they hope to increase the population to 200.
To Smith, the goats defeat the very purpose of Mount Peale, which is supposed to be maintained in a natural state without human influence. She and other Forest Service biologists worry that the voracious, sharp-hooved goats will undermine research and irreversibly alter a fragile alpine ecosystem. But many of the volunteers who are here to help her collect data — mainly in hopes of convincing Utah officials to remove the goats or at least limit their numbers — are opposed to the animals on more philosophical terms. "This is our backyard mountain range," says Paul Frank, a desert tortoise biologist who's been coming to these mountains nearly every week since the 1970s. "And we don't want invasive species here."
State wildlife officials say that not every introduced species ends up being a problem, and that goats have been transplanted to other Utah mountain ranges with no ill effects. But that argument holds little weight with Mary O'Brien, who marches along behind Smith as we continue to climb higher into the ominous storm clouds settling over the La Sals.
O'Brien, a wiry 68-year-old botanist with close-cropped gray hair and a sun-worn face, is the unofficial leader of the anti-goat movement. She grew up in east Los Angeles, the daughter of a Skid Row social worker and a minister, and though her family had little money, they spent two weeks every summer in Kings Canyon while her father preached in an open-air chapel. The experience shaped O'Brien's life: Today, as Utah Forest Program director of the nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust, she lives in a straw-bale house in the shadow of the La Sals and spends most of her time trying to protect public land from overgrazing and overuse. "Every cell in my body says that national public land exists so a kid from East L.A. can come up here and wander around," she says.
Though my own fingers are so cold I can hardly hold a pen, O'Brien — who refuses to wear close-toed shoes — strides across the ridge in a pair of Chaco sandals, unfazed. As the storm begins to batter the mountains, she stops to throw her hands up, framed against the dark clouds. "We're losing alpine areas to climate change," she says. "And then, for very little reason at all, we introduce an exotic ungulate. Why not elephants? Don't you think it would be neat to have elephants up here?"
She hikes on.
Thirteen months earlier, on June 4, 2013, O'Brien sat in the back of a Utah Wildlife Board meeting in downtown Salt Lake City and listened patiently as the eight-person, governor-appointed board went through the usual formalities. Then the discussion turned to the issue that most of the 60 or so attendees had come for: whether or not to put mountain goats in the La Sals.
Mountain goats aren't native to Utah, but since the 1960s, they've been introduced to a dozen mountains around the state for hunters and wildlife aficionados. Despite the fact that Utah is several degrees in latitude below the goats' native range in Washington, Idaho and Montana, the animals are thriving. There are now some 2,000 of them, and they're extraordinarily popular: In 2012, 7,999 hunters applied for the 161 available tags, which cost between $400 and $1,500. A mountain goat viewing in Beaver, Utah, brought 2,000 tourists to the town of 2,500.
Justin Shannon, the big game coordinator for Utah's Division of Wildlife Resources, was also at the meeting, making the case that goats do more good than harm. "As an agency, if we have an opportunity to expand our wildlife populations for the hunting and viewing public, we go for it," he told me later. Like all big game in Utah, the goats and their habitat will be carefully monitored, and any damage will be mitigated by reducing the population. With goat populations decreasing in parts of their native range, some biologists think that transplants in Utah, Colorado, Nevada and elsewhere may even help the species survive.
This is our backyard mountain range, and we don't want invasive species here."
But why put them in the isolated La Sals? Shannon told the board that the state is simply restoring an ungulate to an alpine community: Bighorn sheep were sighted in the mountains in the 1940s and '50s, but can't be introduced because they'll contract diseases from the domestic sheep that graze at lower elevations. Goats, then, are the next best thing. Decades of study by state biologists elsewhere in Utah show no negative impacts on habitat or vegetation — a fact that the Utah Bowmans' Association, Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife and other hunting advocates reiterated at the wildlife board's meeting.
But many Utahns who traveled to Salt Lake City for the chance to speak to the board — including mayors and commissioners from decidedly conservative counties — dispute that logic. The La Sals are smaller, drier and less well-vegetated than other ranges where goats have been introduced. With limited forage and a higher proposed goat density (four per square mile in the La Sals compared to 1.7 elsewhere), the anti-goat faction fears the animals will trample and overgraze alpine ecosystems. There's also a question over the methodology of state studies, and no evidence that bighorn sheep actually lived in the La Sals to begin with: "One sighting by somebody … is not substantiation that (sheep) used to be up there all the time, regularly grazing," Chris Baird, executive director of the Canyonlands Watershed Council, told the board.
Though the debate remained civil, the atmosphere in the room was intense. At one point, after someone expressed concerns that goats in Washington and Montana had harassed and even killed hikers, Shannon spoke up: "A few months ago we got report of a beaver that bit a guy on an artery and killed him. A beaver. But we are not going to (wage) war on beavers because someone had a bad experience."
At its next meeting, the board voted 4-2 in favor of introduction.
A month later, in September 2013, three goats and a kid were munching alpine forb in central Utah's Tushar Mountains, where goats were already doing so well that their numbers were roughly double the target population of 125. When the whup of helicopter blades interrupted their meal, one goat bolted, dodging trees and dashing across bare rock. The helicopter followed, flying low.
A balled-up net exploded into the air, and the helicopter banked and landed. A state wildlife official rushed out to the entangled goat, which thrashed wildly for a moment before being fitted with an orange blindfold. Then it was laced into a sling and airlifted out of the mountains, along with 19 other animals who would become the first of their species ever to roam the La Sals. The Salt Lake Tribune concluded that the operation was "the start of a grand adventure for the billies, nannies and kids."
State wildlife biologist Riley Peck agreed, telling the Tribune that goats "bring joy to a lot of people." The transplants, he said, have been "a fantastic success as far as I'm concerned."
Other wildlife introductions haven't gone so smoothly: Biologists who tried to reintroduce native grizzly bears to Montana's Bitterroot Mountains in 2000 received death threats, and a scientist who suggested bringing new bears to bolster an existing population in Washington's North Cascades was spat on at a public meeting. Exotic ungulates that can be hunted, on the other hand, are generally welcome.
Between 2005 and 2007, for example, Colorado imported 91 moose to Grand Mesa on the state's Western Slope for hunting and wildlife watching. Roger Shenkel, the local physician who helped hatch the plan, said that every time he drove by a particular bog, he felt like he ought to see a moose there. "People just love seeing moose," he told the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. Never mind that the largest tabletop mountain in the world evolved without them: It simply looked like moose ought to be there. Today, there are an estimated 380.
Mountain goats, equally beloved by hunters and children's book authors, are also appealing. In 2005, Oregon wildlife officials tried to introduce non-native goats to the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. The nonprofit Friends of the Columbia Gorge, fearing that the animals would damage endemic wildflowers, sued the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Forest Service. A federal district court ordered a National Environmental Policy Act review, but the agencies instead withdrew the proposal. "Any national forest land requires a special use permit to (bring in) a new species," explains Nathan Baker, a lawyer who represented the Friends. "And there was really no environmental analysis whatsoever."
O'Brien believes that a similar process would convince a judge that the La Sal goats will also harm native flora, and are in violation of Forest Service policy. But though she, Barb Smith and the other volunteers crawling around looking for blooms at 11,000 feet care more about plants than most people do, their fight isn't about flowers. It isn't about goats. It's about protecting this particular place, in its entirety, from the notion that by eliminating some species and introducing others, we can re-shape wild places to what we think they ought to be.
As the storm clouds spit icy rain onto the ridge above Burro Pass, O'Brien cinches the hood of her rain jacket, puts on a pair of gloves and resolutely jabs at her GPS. "In decades," she says, looking across the gnarled spruce and July snow to the ochre plateau below, "someone will come up here and see the big sunflowers and say, 'Oh, that's pretty.' They'll never know there were these other eight species that grew only here. They'll never know what these views used to look like when the mountains were covered with flowers."
This story was originally titled "Unwelcome ungulates" in the print edition.]]>