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WikiLeaks releases transcript of critical US film
More News from Agence France-Presse
WASHINGTON–WikiLeaks has released what it says is an annotated transcript of a documentary that takes a critical look at the anti-secrecy group ahead of the US film's Friday premiere.
WikiLeaks said it had not participated in the making of "We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks," a film by Alex Gibney that focuses on the website's founder Julian Assange and its main source of leaks, Bradley Manning.
Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst who admitted to leaking hundreds of thousands of secret military logs and confidential embassy cables to WikiLeaks, faces possible life imprisonment in a military trial to resume June 3.
Assange, the Australian hacker who founded the site, has been holed up in Ecuador's London embassy for nearly a year, seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning in a sexual assault case.
WikiLeaks said late Thursday that the film "portrays Manning's alleged acts as a failure of character rather than a triumph of conscience," and said the film's portrayal of his relationship with Assange was "grossly irresponsible."
The portrayal "suggests — erroneously and when evidence is to the contrary — that Assange may be guilty of conspiring with Bradley Manning to commit espionage or similar offences."
The WikiLeaks statement added that "neither Julian Assange nor anyone associated with WikiLeaks over the past two-and-a-half years agreed to participate in the film."
It then posted what appeared to be a full transcript of the documentary with copious notes alleging factual errors and misrepresentations.
Gibney could not immediately be reached for comment.
But in a recent interview with CBS news, the director said the film is concerned with "both the abuse of power and hubris on the part of the US government, but certainly also on the part of Julian Assange."
"At his moment of greatest fame, (Assange) ends up becoming all too much like the enemies he sought to take out or expose," Gibney said.
Gibney told CBS he engaged in "endless negotiations" with Assange but that his requests to interview the WikiLeaks founder were ultimately denied.
He was also unable to interview Manning, who has been in military detention since his arrest in 2010.
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Savory Bread
27 Jul 2010
|French bread loaf/Italian bread loaf
|1 Pound
|5 Tablespoon, softened (Acceptable)
|Chopped fresh basil
|1 Tablespoon
|Salt free lemon pepper seasoning
|3⁄4 Teaspoon
Preheat oven to 375° F.
Cut bread into sixteen slices.
Set aside.
In a small bowl, combine margarine, basil and lemon-pepper seasoning.
Spread mixture evenly on each slice.
Wrap loaf in foil and place on a baking sheet.
Bake 15 minutes.
SAVORY BREAD WITH CHILI SPREAD In place of basil and lemon-pepper seasoning, add the following to the margarine: 1 teaspoon chili powder, 1 teaspoon crushed dried cilantro, and a dash of both garlic powder and hot pepper sauce.
SAVORY BREAD WITH GREEN ONION SPREAD In place of basil, add the following to the margarine and lemon-pepper seasoning: 2 tablespoons finely chopped green onion and 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley.
Recipe Summary
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Savory Bread Recipe

subset: commoncrawl


text:
HALLANDALE BEACH, FL - Priscilla Vaccarezza's 5-year-old gelding Little Mike and Stuart Janney III's 4-year-old Data Link are a combined eight wins from nine starts over the Gulfstream Park turf course over the last two seasons. They are set to face off for the first time as the likely choices in Saturday's $150,000 Canadian Turf Stakes (G3) going one mile in a field of eight older horses.
Michael Matz-trained colt on course for March 31 Florida Derby
Haras Santa Maria de Araras' 7-year-old Kentucky homebred Simmard kept digging in after taking the lead in the final turn of Sunday's $150,000 Mac Diarmida Stakes (G2) at Gulfstream Park, and held on for a game nose victory over James Karp's 2-to-1 favorite Newsdad in the 1 3/8 miles turf test.
Peras International's Yara went into Saturday's $250,000 Davona Dale Stakes at Gulfstream Park unheralded after winning two of five starts in sprints, the first four at Calder last year. But the 3-year-old Florida-bred filly won a long head-to-head duel with Michael Dubb and partners' 4-5 favorite Grace Hall in the stretch to score by hard-fought triumph by a neck in the 1 1/16-mile test.
Trick or Treat International's Here to Win, trained by Kiaran McLaughlin and ridden perfectly by jockey Joe Bravo, held off the multiple-stakes winner Keertana down the stretch to win the $100,000 The Very One (G3) by a length. Woodford Belle was third while Breeders' Cup Filly & Mare Turf (G1) winner Perfect Shirl checked in eighth.
Champion Royal Delta Second in Prep for Dubai World Cup
HALLANDALE BEACH, FL - Buoyed by Neck 'n Neck's second-place finish behind Discreet Dancer at Gulfstream Park in a Jan. 7 allowance, trainer Ian Wilkes sent the son of Flower Alley to Tampa Bay Downs to test stakes company in the Sam Davis (G3) on Feb. 4.
Gulfstream Park is dedicated to providing world-class thoroughbred racing and gaming entertainment. We take pride in our continuous effort to maximize our guests' experiences. Click below to access convenient information about our entertainment destination.
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Copyright © 2011 All rights reserved.


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Coming from just any 94-year-old, this teary proclamation might have seemed shocking. Coming from Colorado River folk hero Katie Lee – famous for her life-long environmental activism, melodies and modeling nude in the redrock embrace of Glen Canyon before it disappeared beneath Lake Powell – it was as high a compliment any devotee of Western letters could want. Throw in the fact that the "Ed" she spoke for is none other than her friend and fellow Glen Canyon Dam opponent, the curmudgeonly literary light Edward Abbey, and you couldn't blame filmmakers Ben Knight, Travis Rummel and Matt Stoecker, seated beside Lee on stage at the 5Point Film Festival in Carbondale, Colorado late last month, for looking a bit teary and shell-shocked themselves as they got ready to discuss the object of Lee's effusive praise: Their first feature-length documentary, DamNation.
This, a visibly moved Lee told the audience as she clutched Knight's hand, this will change everything.
The filmmakers and outdoor apparel giant Patagonia, which put $500,000 into the film, hope it will at least lead both policymakers and ordinary Americans to question whether dams really generate "clean" power, and add momentum to a movement to dismantle thousands that have outlived their usefulness.
DamNation | Trailer from FELT SOUL MEDIA on Vimeo.
From eastern Washington's Grand Coulee to Utah's Glen Canyon to the giant Snake River dams blocking salmon's access to pristine habitat in Idaho, DamNation walks viewers through the U.S.'s dam-building boom years (we now have a staggering 75,000 taller than 3 feet), explores the structures' toll on fisheries and indigenous people, and follows the return of salmon and boaters after the nation's largest-ever dam removal projects on Washington's Elwha and White Salmon rivers, starting in 2011.
Stoecker, producer and director of underwater photography, and Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, the executive producer, had been pondering making a movie about dam removal for a while when they saw Eastern Rises, Knight and Rummel's lighthearted film about fly fishing in Kamchatka, at an environmental film festival early that year. "With so many other fly fishing films, it's just high fives and obnoxious fishermen," Stoecker explains. But Knight and Rummel had a gift for combining gorgeous cinematography with storytelling and character development. So when Rummel walked into the room where Chouinard and Stoecker were sipping beer, they pitched their idea. "He just kind of looked at us with a blank stare."
"We were both dumbfounded," recalls Knight, who co-directed DamNation with Rummel. "We couldn't imagine a bigger honor. But it seemed like there was no way we could do it. The idea of it, the scale of it was so daunting. So we said no." And then eventually said yes.
"Literally for a year and a half it continued to feel like a bad idea," says Knight. But as the filmmakers narrowed the list of 30 dams Chouinard and Stoecker had compiled to just a handful, and traversed the country in two tricked-out Sportsmobile vans crammed to the roof with equipment, gathering stories and footage (Knight and Rummel put 9,000 miles on the one they borrowed from a friend), the unwieldy beast of a topic began to crystallize into something more digestible.
Getting just the right footage, though, involved yet more "bad ideas." Like hiding in a hastily-built blind to get a shot of Washington's Condit Dam exploding after being denied permission to film the historic deconstruction. Like attempting to kayak through a series of locks on the Snake River meant to help gigantic industrial barges pass through the river's dams, again without permission. Like painting a giant cut-on-dotted-line set of scissors and dashes on California's Matilija Dam in the dead of night, definitely without permission (the filmmakers are mum on whether they were or weren't directly involved).
These moments of levity form the film's loose backbone, and along with Knight's narration, provide the audience with an accessible, humorous path through collected archival footage and interviews with author David James Duncan, Katie Lee, tribal elders, dam operators, government employees and dam scholars that ultimately arrives at the transformation the filmmakers themselves were most affected by: Just how rapidly a river can recover after being loosed from its dams.
"I had no idea how powerful that moment would be, standing there watching and hearing those folks yelling and screaming," Knight says of filming the first party of rafters and kayakers to run the free-flowing White Salmon.
And when the filmmakers returned to the Elwha just a year and a half after seeing salmon languishing and dying below its dams, they found chinook hurling themselves up a waterfall to reach their ancestral spawning grounds as if the concrete walls had never been. "I got goosebumps everywhere when I saw that," Stoecker says. "Travis and I spent two days filming, and literally every time they jumped, we were pumping our fists in the air. We were so excited and happy for them."
Knight is pragmatic about the long-term impact these inspiring visions will have on audiences. "I'm not expecting anyone to go out and be an activist after seeing the movie," he says. "But it's exciting just to know that they'll go home caring a little more, and the next time they see a dam, they might wonder what kind of effects it's having on their own watershed."
That sentiment fits well with the tone of the film, which, despite its funder and clear agenda (Patagonia is using it to push a petition to take down "deadbeat dams"), is far from a radical environmentalist screed. Rummel and Knight got their start as journalists in Telluride, Colorado, and told Patagonia from the get-go that they wanted to cover the issue from all sides. And though every pro-dam politician they sought for interviews turned them down, they've succeeded. This is not a film that asks us to hate dams. It's one that asks us to love rivers. Love them enough to bring them back for their own sake, and for ours.
Sarah Gilman is the associate editor of High Country News. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman
To see the film, check out this list of screening dates and venues.
For more beta on the rivers and dams of DamNation and beyond from HCN's writers, check out these links.
The Colorado River:
"Muddy Waters: Silt and the Slow Demise of Glen Canyon Dam," by Craig Childs
"New Hope for the Delta: During the worst drought in more than a century, the Colorado River may flow to the sea once more," by Matt Jenkins
"The Efficiency Paradox: Why water conservation along the Colorado River — a much-vaunted silver bullet for the West's coming era of shortage — could have devastating environmental costs," by Matt Jenkins
"One Tough Sucker: The razorback sucker evolved in a wild Colorado River. Now, humans are its biggest problem -- and its only hope," by Hilary Rosner
The Columbia and Snake:
"Salmon Justice: An interview with U.S. District Judge Jim Redden, who's given uncooperative federal agencies clear warning: Submit a viable salmon restoration plan for the Snake/Columbia River Basin, or face the possible breaching of four major dams," by Ken Olsen
"Salmon Salvation: Will a new political order be enough to finally bring the dams down?" by Ken Olsen
"Columbia Basin (Political) Science: A look at the Bonneville Power Administration's influence on salmon research," by Steve Hawley
The Elwha:
"River of dreams: The 30-year struggle to resurrect Washington's Elwha River and one of its spectacular salmon runs," by Adam Burke
"Rebuilding a river as Washington's Elwha dams come down," by Kim Todd
The White Salmon:
"Kayaking memories on the White Salmon River," by Mike Barenti
"Dooming a dam saves dollars," by Rebecca Clarren
The Klamath:
"Peace on the Klamath: The enemies in the West's most vicious water war have finally reached a ceasefire. This is the story of how it happened," by Matt Jenkins
And a few more on the complexities of dams and dam removal:
"Into thin air? Global warming has spawned a call for new dams — but there may not be any water to fill them," by Matt Jenkins
"A downside to downing dams? Freeing up stopped rivers isn't always the panacea one might expect," by Michelle Nijhuis
"Lost Opportunity: Remediating a Superfund sacrifice zone on Montana's Clark Fork river," by Brad Tyer
(And if you've managed to stick with me this long, your reward/moment of Zen is to watch part of one of Knight and Rummel's first movies, a crazy little number about fly fishermen sprinting after roosterfish somewhere in Baja. Roosterfish, for those not in the know, "are the Elizabeth Hurley of fish. They are SO hot. But at the same time, they command respect.")]]>
So what about it makes many environmental groups so mad? The Center for Biological Diversity, Food and Water Watch and San Francisco Baykeeper have all taken an explicit stand against Proposition 1, as has virtually every fisherman's advocacy group in the state. The Sierra Club, though it officially opposed the legislative bill that produced the ballot measure, remains neutral in theory, but the group's position statement announcing neutrality also uses the word hate.Chelsea Tu, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, says the problem comes down to this: While the bond measure does indeed give a nod to higher environmental concerns, "those beneficial provisions are far outweighed by the $2.7 billion in the bill set aside for surface and groundwater storage provisions." In other words, the "public benefits" it funds could mean new dams: One would flood 14,000 acres in Colusa County north of Sacramento for the proposed Sites Reservoir; another would augment current San Joaquin River water storage at Temperance Flat. Prop. 1 funds could also go toward adding 18.5 feet to Shasta Dam — a $1.1 billion project touted as a "bargain" by Westlands Water District General Manager Tom Birmingham, but opposed by the Winnemem Wintu tribe, which was flooded out of sacred lands once when the dam was first built in 1945.
Proposition 1 never explicitly states that any of the $2.7 billion will fund dam projects, however, and not every environmental group worries quite so much. "The era of big dams is over," pronounced Doug Obegi, staff attorney for the Natural Resource Defense Council, on the organization's blog. "The water bond does not earmark funding for Temperance Flat or any other surface storage project." Dams cost too much money to make sense anymore; even with taxpayer subsidies they "can't compete economically with these regional and local water supply projects."
Emphasizing that NRDC "strongly opposes" both Temperance Flat and a Shasta Dam raising, Obegi says the organization endorses Prop. 1.
Tu thinks that's not only "optimistic," but at odds with Gov. Jerry Brown's oft-stated agenda. "Every time the Governor talks about the water crisis, he talks about building out water infrastructure projects that go back to the 1950s," she says. "Those are projects that both state and federal legislatures have been pushing for many, many years." They're also projects that the state's agricultural interests, which consume more than three-quarters of the state's water, have lobbied hard for, along with a multibillion-dollar tunnel project that would suck water from the Sacramento River before it ever gets to the ailing California Delta. (Prop. 1 was written to be "tunnel neutral.")
Adam Scow, California campaign director for Food and Water Watch, calls Prop. 1"a bunch of mystery meat," ominously geared toward finding more ways to deliver water to industrial agriculture. Even more alarming, he says, is that according to the provisions of the bill, the nine members of the California Water Commission have been tasked with allocating the meat. Those nine members have been appointed by "Big Agriculture's closest ally," Scow says. "A man named Jerry Brown."
Scow thinks Proposition 1's other benefits recede in light of that fact. Aquifer cleanup, water for fish, habitat restoration and drinking water for disadvantaged communities are all good, he says, and even necessary. They just don't have to be yoked to what he calls "a bloated bond deal," written with industrial agriculture in mind.
"We do need to address the inequities in water rights we have in this state," Scow says. "We just don't need a bond deal to do it."
Judith Lewis Mernit is a High Country News contributing editor. She tweets @judlew.
In retrospect, it surprised few people that Rincon Mountain, the amphitheatrical scarp that holds La Conchita in its perilous embrace, exploded in a thunderous current of earth and debris that day, burying 33 homes and 10 people in a mountain of mud. The La Conchita disaster was every bit as predictable as the mudslide that killed 43 people in Oso, Wash., on March 22, 2014. But at the time there was horrified disbelief: "How could it happen that suddenly an entire hillside turns into a liquid flow of earth and rock?" wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Al Martinez in La Conchita's immediate aftermath. Just as the day after the Oso tragedy, John Pennington, head of Snohomish County's Department of Emergency Management, called Oso "a completely unforeseen slide," that "came out of nowhere."
In fact, had the residents of Vista Del Rincon Drive in La Conchita, and of Steelhead Drive in Oso, examined their hillsides with a critical eye before they collapsed, they would have seen a steep pitch covered with young vegetation, and above it the arc of a sand-colored ridge – telltale scars of recent slides. (Both hills slumped in 1995; the Washington one slid again in 2006.) In both cases, initial shock quickly turned to incredulity of a different sort: How could so many people – families with children, even – have dared to build homes against such unstable mountains?
Dangerous places in the West, tragically, are often desirable places, both because of their natural beauty and because the land is relatively cheap. Ed Keller, a University of California-Santa Barbara geology professor and the author of Natural Hazards, says that we're increasingly moving into them because the planet is getting crowded: "As the global population continues to grow, we're pushing people out into ever more marginal places," he says. Human activity exacerbates the peril: Clear-cut logging above Oso's Steelhead Drive may have hastened the hill's failure, just as irrigation atop Rincon Mountain contributed to its collapse. But both scarps had been changing shape for many thousands of years, Keller clarifies; they would have slid eventually. What the people who lived there may not have understood is that "eventually" sometimes means next week.
U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones has spent much of her career training the public in risk reduction. She believes that people play dice with geology for the same reason they use one cold winter to refute climate science: "As a society, we have fundamental science-processing issues," she says. "We want yes/no answers; we don't know how to handle uncertainty." Science estimates possibility and risk rather than offering the absolute answers we crave. That allows people "to pick the information they want to hear" and dismiss the rest.
Landslides, which in the U.S. cause an estimated $2 billion in property damage every year, present singular public-education challenges, Jones says, "because we can't pick out in a human timeframe what's going to go when." Nor is there any centralized database of precarious slopes. Seismologists plot earthquakes on a national map, but slide-prone hills only make news after they've done their worst. Some states require prospective developers to solicit reports from geologists, but they also allow builders to "shred (an unfavorable) report and go get one they like better," Jones says. Absent a geotechnical paper trail, no one knows which hillsides to monitor. "Around the country, there are plenty of slopes as dangerous as Oso and La Conchita," Jones says. "You just haven't heard about them yet because they haven't broken loose."
One such place might be East Gros Ventre Butte, which rises above Budge Drive and West Broadway in Jackson, Wyo. In early April, a ruptured water main alerted town managers that their pumphouse had shifted downhill. Budge Drive had buckled, and a bulge had risen in the parking lot of the brand-new Walgreens on West Broadway. Fearing a sudden release of the mountain, on April 9 authorities ordered residents out and businesses closed.
It's too soon, says Assistant Town Manager Roxanne DeVries Robinson, to assign blame: "Our concern right now is with life-safety issues," she says. Later, however, someone might ask whether it was safe to build under East Gros Ventre Butte at all. As George Machan, an Oregon-based geotechnical engineer, told a community meeting on April 10, several episodes of lowering the grade at the toe of the slide – most recently to build the Walgreens – likely hurried the geological process along, provoking a slow-motion landslide that might soon become a catastrophic one.
Today in La Conchita, life carries on along flower-lined Vista Del Rincon Drive, next to the buried wreckage where Jimmie Wallet dug for hours and risked arrest to try to save his family. One house sold not so long ago, a two-story with balconies, priced at less than $400,000 for four bedrooms and three baths – just a mile from where smaller houses sell for millions. It's hard not to fantasize about waking every morning to the ocean view, the seabirds, the easy, consistent surfing at a beach break just steps away. I mean, what are the odds?]]>
Updated Feb. 3, 2015
On Jan. 5, when Edmund "Jerry" Brown, 76, was sworn in for his fourth term as governor of California, he delivered a treatise on the environment for the ages. He quoted biologist E.O. Wilson. He geeked out on microgrids. He leveled warnings about the climate and announced a plan of action. Within 15 years, Brown said, 50 percent of California's energy should come from renewables; vehicles should use half as much gas. The energy efficiency of existing buildings should double.
The goals are California's, but Brown clearly expects the world to follow his state's lead. If we stand any chance of saving the planet, he said, California "must show the way."
No governor has ever pledged what Brown has, nor have many spoken so fiercely on climate. So why didn't Brown's speech make environmentalists swoon? Beyond a few kind words from Tom Steyer, the billionaire Keystone XL fighter, most guardians- of public health and the planet came away no less pissed off than they were before. Outside the Capitol building during Brown's speech, activists dressed as oil executives played mock tug-of-war with "the people of California," yanking a suited man in a papier-mâché Jerry Brown head around like a puppet. It wasn't clear who won.
Brown hasn't talked about oil much lately, but early in his third term he made clear what he thought of people who put environmental concerns ahead of California's then-sagging economy. In 2011, he fired two regulators for subjecting drillers to rigorous scrutiny; two years later, he announced that he wouldn't be "jumping on any ideological bandwagons" to ban advanced well-stimulation techniques like hydrofracturing and acidizing, which entails dissolving rock with hydrofluoric acid. High-tech extraction techniques are critical to exploiting the Monterey shale, the 1,750 square-mile jumble of oil-packed rock that Brown called California's "fabulous economic opportunity." But most environmentalists just want drilling on the shale to stop.
"He could sign an executive order at any moment placing a moratorium on fracking," says Kathryn Phillips, the director of the Sierra Club's lobbying arm in Sacramento. "And in light of the information that we have out now, logic would suggest he do so."
That information includes the 2-degree- Celsius global temperature increase some scientists consider the climate's breaking point. Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's climate law center, notes that the governor mentioned that number in his speech, but didn't seem to understand its implications. "We cannot observe that limit if we develop the Monterey shale," Siegel says. "We just can't."
The good news for environmentalists is that Monterey won't be the nation's next Bakken: As the Energy Information Administration reported last May, there's far less recoverable oil there than the 15 billion barrels industry analysts once ballyhooed. Brown signed a law in September of 2013 requiring drillers to disclose their methods, and also calling for studies of their environmental impact. With New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo throwing down an implicit gauntlet with his own state's fracking ban, Brown might just consider some restraints on oil production when those impact reports come out this summer.-
Then will the rift mend? Unfortunately, it will not. Environmentalist dissatisfaction with Brown extends beyond the Monterey, and some objections come from former allies. As the state's governor from 1975 to 1983, Brown signed into law protections for California's coastal waters, pioneered tax credits for rooftop solar and set energy-efficiency standards so strict they obviated the need for a new nuclear power plant — a technology the governor and his then-girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt, rabidly opposed.
But that Jerry Brown is gone now, says Huey Johnson, who served as Brown's resource secretary from 1976 to 1982. He's been replaced by a distracted man with a worried eye on his legacy. "In his first two terms, (Brown would) give speeches on the importance of limits, on the limits of resources, the limits of consumption," says Johnson, now president of the Resource Renewal Institute in Mill Valley, California. "He used to talk about preserving land for wildlife or recreation."
These days, Johnson says, "He's gotten hung up on this twin tunnel stuff. And for that, he deserves to be tarred and feathered."
The tunnels Johnson refers to would divert water from the Sacramento River to thirsty farms and cities down south, ostensibly to reduce pumping from the ecologically hammered Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. They've become so synonymous with the state's Bay Delta Conservation Plan, or BDCP, and so many environmentalists hate them, that in activist circles "BDCP," says Phillips, stands for "Big Dumb Concrete Pipes."
Phillips acknowledges that Brown is "weak on natural resource issues," but disputes Johnson's view that the septuagenarian statesman differs so radically from the 36-year-old idealist who eschewed the governor's mansion for a downtown apartment because he wanted to walk to work. Like his father, Pat, who ran the state for two terms starting in 1959, "Brown has always been devoted to the idea that technology can solve all our problems," she says. "The Browns like to 'get shit done.' "
That's not all bad, Phillips argues; it's the very quality that "helped us transition so quickly to cleaner (electricity production) in this state." It's just that engineering marvels like dams, canals and high-speed rail often conflict with protecting habitat and open space.
Brown could, of course, leave an impressive- legacy on climate alone, if he'd only hold consistently to that goal. On Feb. 7, a coalition of environmental groups will hold a climate march in Oakland, Brown's hometown, where he served as mayor for eight years, and participants apparently believe Brown is vulnerable to the pressure such a demonstration can bring.
"The standard slogan you see at these rallies," Phillips says, "is 'Climate Heroes Don't Frack.' I think the governor knows that. I think he understands that extreme extraction techniques to pull up oil will counteract all his other climate goals. I have hope that he'll make the right decision."
This story was originally titled "The limits of legacy" in the print edition.]]>
Alan Kesselheim is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He lives and writes in Bozeman, Montana.]]>
I looked at my wheat, nearly three feet tall and flushed with green, and imagined mowing part of it down. I'd planted the wheat in a 200-foot-wide strip tracing the fence line. I would lose a third of my crop.
• • •
I'd not yet met my neighbor when I learned of her plans to spray, but I knew she belonged to one of the oldest farming families on Gold Hill. They were farming here over a century ago, when the county led California in vineyard cultivation and produced 52,000 tons of pears in a single year. My neighbor and her husband still ran cattle, but no longer made their living farming. Vestiges of the family's agrarian past faded: Blackberries swallowed pear orchards, swayback barns collapsed, tractors rusting into rust-colored dirt. Weeds frayed the edge of a gravel driveway. My neighbor wanted to spray to prevent the weeds from further encroaching on the drive — from burying it in the landscape as if no road existed there at all.
When my partner and I began farming on Gold Hill, my neighbor watched our progress from afar. We were young, new and organic. Worse, we leased our acreage from a land conservancy that terminated all existing grazing leases when it acquired the property, furthering local resentment between environmentalists and farmers. Now the environmentalists think they invented farming, I overheard the owner of the local farm supply say. Like my neighbor, this man belonged to an old-time farming family. Now he made his living selling inputs — mostly five-gallon buckets of Roundup — instead of growing pears.
• • •
My neighbor had not yet sprayed when, a week later, she walked up my driveway carrying something bundled in her arms. Found this cat out on the road, she said. Looks like it just got hit. The woman didn't introduce herself, and neither did I — we knew who we were. I'd watched her drive past my farm for months, as she had likely watched me roll out lines of irrigation, or kneel to examine a blade of wheat.
I looked closely at the cat, its body bundled in a flannel work shirt. It wasn't one of mine, but I'd seen it before. Yellow-eyed and ash-gray, it hung around my barn and hunted among my neighbor's cattle, disregarding the fences between our lands.
That's not my cat, I said. The woman said nothing; I repeated: No, not mine. She stared at me as if my words were irrelevant, and I realized they were. The cat belonged to neither of us, but had been hit and abandoned on a road we shared. We stood together in my driveway, a dying cat swaddled in a work shirt, a bloom of burgundy staining the sleeve. I looked down at my boots, embarrassed at what I'd said, as if I thought I could simply choose which parts of a place belonged to me and which did not.
My neighbor held the bundle out like a casserole, and I took it into my arms. Freed of the animal's small weight, the woman didn't dust the wisps of gray fur from her hands, or rub away the scent of blood and cat dander. Instead, she shoved her fingers into her front pockets. Alright, she said, and then, Thanks. I watched her drive away and thought: Perhaps there were more ways to care for a place than I knew.
That evening I buried the cat in the ribbon of no-man's-land sandwiched between my neighbor's barbed wire and my deer fence — one strip of land, it seemed, we shared.
• • •
The next week, my neighbor pulled up again. Without getting out of her truck, she said she had an extra washing machine. Could I use it? she asked. Then she explained why she wanted to spray: Fire danger — one stray spark and the dry weeds could ignite. She put her truck in gear, said she'd bring the washing machine by, and then added, the truck already rolling forward: If you want to go over to my side of the fence and mow the weeds yourself, you can go right ahead. I watched her drive out of sight, unsure whether she was doing me a favor, or asking for one.
At dusk, I held open my farm's gate while my partner drove our tractor up the road and onto the neighbor's driveway. In the pearly gray light, he lowered the mower blade and drove along the fence line, leaving behind a wake of fallen weeds.
Jaclyn Moyer lives in the foothills of Northern California where she farms vegetables and heirloom grains.
This story was originally titled "On Stewardship" in the print edition.]]>
Smith, an Environmental Studies PhD student with a curtain of blond hair and a ready smile, rifles through a stack of chilled plastic bags. The bags contain samples of animal scat, each dollop unique as a snowflake: some gray and braided, others brown and lumpy, still others flecked with the teeth of luckless rodents. "This is not the most organized freezer right now," Smith apologizes, holding aloft a smeary greenish specimen inscribed with the word Fox in permanent marker.
Though it may be a touch haphazard, this freezer forms the heart of Conservation Scats, the citizen science project through which Smith is unveiling the secrets of Santa Cruz's wildlife — and revealing how even our most benign activities affect our fellow creatures.
Conservation Scats' origins lie in a complex question: How are Homo sapiens affecting carnivores in the Santa Cruz Mountains? When Smith launched the study in 2014, she suspected that human disturbances, from home-building to hiking, were forcing coyotes, bobcats and gray foxes to modify their lifestyles — to change how they hunted, perhaps, or to compete for certain prey. But how to figure out what the animals were eating?
The obvious solution was to examine scat. If you've ever dissected, say, an owl pellet, you know you can tell an awful lot about a predator's habits from the hair, fur, bones and teeth embedded in its droppings. Still, even seasoned biologists are prone to excrement errors, and Smith needed certainty. To that end, she found a lab that would analyze the DNA in her scat samples. Not only could the lab reliably differentiate coyote from bobcat from fox, but it could tell her exactly what the carnivores had noshed on.
Though Conservation Scats' aims are unique, it's hardly the first wildlife project to go high-tech. While buckling radio-collars around furry necks still has its place, scientists are increasingly leaning on camera traps, hair snares, and Environmental DNA — techniques that don't require laying a finger on fauna. Such non-invasive methods are not only cheaper, they also prevent animals from having to suffer through being captured, drugged, and saddled with gadgets. "This is the new wave," Smith claims.
With one problem solved, Smith faced another challenge: How the heck was she going to collect several hundred samples of predator poop? For the dirty work, she turned to citizen scientists, the class of untrained but eager volunteers who have assisted other researchers in identifying phytoplankton, surveying spiders, and observing hummingbirds, among other efforts. Though picking up scat may not be quite as glamorous as, say, counting pikas in Glacier National Park, 27 enthusiastic civilians answered Smith's call and collected a total of 293 samples.
"Some people talk about walking in labyrinths as a kind of spiritual journey," says Kelly Runyon, a San Francisco-based environmental engineer who bagged around 20 samples at the 2,000-acre Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserve. "I wouldn't call looking for poop a spiritual journey, exactly, but there was a contemplative yet focused aspect that I'd never experienced before."
Though Smith hasn't yet had her samples analyzed — each scat costs $60 to process, and she's still raising the money — she hopes the results will aid conservation. A burgeoning body of literature suggests that recreation disrupts ecosystems more severely than well-intentioned outdoorsmen realize. One 2008 study, for instance, suggested that bobcats were five times scarcer in California reserves that allowed hiking. Smith's research represents the next phase in understanding our own footprint: Not only does our presence alter the behavior of individual species, but it may profoundly influence interactions within entire ecological guilds — in this case, mid-sized carnivores.
"People in the Bay Area want to protect these ecosystems, but they might not realize that a high-traffic preserve is not actually preserving all that much," Smith says. "That knowledge could affect how we buy open space in the future, how we protect core areas, or where we put trails." You could hardly ask more from a freezer full of dung.
Ben Goldfarb is a Seattle-based correspondent for High Country News. Homepage image of Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserve in the Santa Cruz Mountains, by Flickr user David Baron.
Follow @ben_a_goldfarb]]>
I love this. The High Sierra.
I loved it in detail, over years of exploring, before I abandoned the sins and automotive savageries of California for the cool green urbanisms of Portland.
In my hand is a book of poetry — Stephen Dunn's — and I'm about to enter a long, savoring poem listing his "Loves." In detail. Things and people and ... How much he loves! And with what precision and determination: The ocean in winter. Shifting from second to third.
I love the carpenter bees
in spring, mating in air, and I don't mind
the holes they make in my house ...
I love the way sorrow and lust
can be companions. I love the logic
of oxymorons, and how paradox helps us
not to feel insane.
I guess it's a kind of epicure's trick, to save a book like this for a moment like this. But it works for me, helps lift me from the pettiness of my familial disapprovals and frictions. You know what I mean: the morbid power a loved one's ill-concealed faults can exert over you. In my family (as in yours, I bet) there is racism and fundamentalism and bigotry — smug, impervious to evidence, infuriating. I'm the gay son come home to make nice for a few days. Each night I call my partner — whose name is never uttered here — to try to draw strength from the thin stream of voice in the earpiece.
I hiked up here today across glacier-slick granite a-dance with streams and melts and trickles under that famous sharp and somehow divinizing light. Pines limber and lodgepole are gardened into it, a bonsai wide as the world, with tiniest greens of grass and flower lipping the pools and tumbles. I loved this, and I came here to love it again. But instead, for half the journey, I have been rehearsing the unspoken arguments that muddy up my heart: making the iron-clad Q.E.D. for global warming (yes it's real!), for diversity and inclusion, for a bigger god...
We are all, too much of the time, captives of the wreck and the mistake. Can't take our eyes off it, can't stop thinking about it, can't stop picking that scab. We slide into our merely negative identity — defined by what we refuse.
But it's not enough, is it? Is our nation adrift, hijacked by mountebanks and neocons and thugs? It is not enough to hate them. We must remember what we love. Time spent saying no is, at some point, time robbed from the yes that must follow. A long time ago I read Jesus' words "Do not resist evil" and wondered what in the world he could have meant. Maybe this: We must stand on what we love — live it, be it and bring it. And not waste time in the other direction, preaching up devil and denunciation. In mere reaction we become impotent and diminished — as I know well. It's no place to live.
A bit tired and a lot refreshed, I return toward evening and find a meal set specially for me, of pork chops seethed in sweet apples and onions. A hundred-dollar-bill is tucked in at my place, to help with the trip. So wrong on the macro, on the micro these are good and loving folks. What can I do but love them back?
There's a random dangerous rightness abroad in this wide shining world. It's a rightness, not a correctness. We don't need so much to counter other people's errors as to bring the light and joy of that right and beautiful world: what we desire for our planet and ourselves, what we are doing instead of hating and denying and bombing.
If I live to be my parents' age, I'll have three more decades to help Portland develop its answers: how we'll live in a warming world without cheap oil. Will it be a good life in 2036? Every day, in my adopted hometown, we struggle and argue, build and make choices toward a yes — one that might someday be useful all over our swaggering, sweltering, beloved land.
Our job is to work on what we love. Daily. In detail. With precision and determination.
David Oates is the author of City Limits: Walking Portland's Boundary. He can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com.]]>
Americans drink more than 8 billion gallons of bottled water every year, spending more than $11 billion annually on Dasani, Aquafina, Evian and other brands. With a growth rate of 10 percent per year, bottled water is the fastest-growing segment of the beverage industry, surpassing milk and likely to outpace soda in the near future. Bottling plants are popping up everywhere, many in rural areas that boast of pristine spring water.
Though often heralded as a clean industry, water bottlers have not been welcomed in some communities. In Mecosta, Mich., citizens won a lawsuit against Nestlé after proving its operations harmed nearby streams and wetlands. Similar battles have erupted in Florida, Texas and Maine. Activists routinely attack the industry as a whole because of its contribution to landfill overflow and because it commercializes what many see as an essential human right. Still, the fight has been slow to ignite in the West, where communities, often reeling from the loss of one extractive industry or another, have generally welcomed the economic promise of bottlers with wide-open arms.
California is now home to more water-bottling facilities than any other state in the nation. Some suck water directly out of springs; others filter the municipal water supply. Nestlé alone has plants scattered from Calistoga, in Napa County, to the Morongo Indian Reservation on the fringes of Los Angeles. In the northern part of the state, Crystal Geyser, Mt. Shasta Spring Water and Dannon are already in operation.
So, when Nestlé's natural resource manager Dave Palais first arrived in McCloud four years ago, the stage seemed set. His affable nature and casual dress went over well with locals. But when the five-member district board unanimously signed the contract without public review, the love affair abruptly ended. The town was split down the middle like firewood. ----
Though bottling was nothing new to Northern California, a confluence of factors had merged in McCloud to galvanize opposition to the Arrowhead plant. In addition to the sheer size of the facility and length of the contract, McCloud is the gateway to Mount Shasta and to celebrated fishing streams, making it a charismatic destination for tourists along the I-5 corridor. Over time, many of its blue-collar residents have been replaced by urbanites attracted to the scenery and the prospect of a quieter and cleaner life. Janet Connaughton, who moved here from Marin, fits that profile. She's in shock over the contract.
"How did two loggers, two housewives, and a retired insurance salesman get to sell water that belongs to us all?" Connaughton asks, referring to the service district board. She runs a small bookstore, knits in her spare time, and enjoys the town with its mild-mannered residents who wave to each other in passing. Though her first impulse was to flee to a new town, she resisted, and has instead become the leader of the local opposition.
She and her allies are haunted by the thought of a massive facility sitting on the town's historic mill site, its fluorescent glow intruding on McCloud's starry nights, and an endless barrage of delivery trucks devastating the mountain silence. Worse, she wonders what the water mining will do to the water table. Nestlé would withdraw 1,600 acre-feet of spring water per year, an amount about equal to the town's yearly use. Measurements over the past two years indicate that there's plenty of water to go around — at least 9,000 acre-feet per year flow from the spring. But Steve Bachmann, a local Forest Service hydrologist, says that the unique volcanic hydrology of Mount Shasta, with its lava tubes and springs that can appear and disappear from one year to the next, is poorly understood. No one really knows what effect a severe drought or global warming might have, he says. This uncertainty has drawn California Trout and Trout Unlimited into the fray; the springs feed an important tributary to the McCloud River, a renowned fishing stream and the mainstay of the local tourism economy.
Though the contract requires that Nestlé be treated like any other member of the water district, paying the same rate and subject to the same cutbacks in times of drought, the terms are unsettling. Nestlé can draw up to 1,800,000 gallons of water every day at a cost of just 8 cents for 1,000 gallons. That's 8 cents for enough water to fill 3,780 Arrowhead 1-liter bottles, each of which can sell for $1.50 or more down at the local convenience store. It's potentially a huge profit margin, though Palais won't release an exact figure; it's protected, he says, "like the Coke formula." And, for the next 100 years, as the value of water inevitably rises, McCloud will have no chance to look for a better deal: Nestlé's contract forbids the town from selling water to any potential competitors.
For environmental groups campaigning against bottled water, McCloud makes the perfect poster child. Poised at the headwaters of the Sacramento River, the area sits at a critical juncture for California's water supply. "Mount Shasta is a symbol of Northern California," says Ruth Caplan, organizer of the Sierra Club's Water Privatization Task Force, which fights corporate control of water. The organization uses McCloud as a cautionary tale: Communities should take a closer look at water bottling, activists say, and pass ordinances preventing the bulk export of surface and groundwater. "This is just the beginning," says Caplan. For her, the war is not over until all communities are granted democratic control of their water.
Still at work on the dinner train, Patty Ballard is worried more about paying the rent for her subsidized apartment and raising her son than about drying wetlands and global warming. "It's like worrying about Armageddon. I don't want to think about it. You've got all this stuff going through your brain. Is there going to be a big flood? Is the volcano going to blow?" She characterizes the plant's opponents as urban refugees who want McCloud to be a meditative retreat. Her friend, Sheri Burris, agrees: "McCloud wasn't meant to be quiet." Burris has deep roots here; her father worked as the head oiler for the mill powerhouse back when McCloud was a timber town. The big wheel that turned the generator sits inert on the lawn behind the town's timber museum.
The two friends have formed the McCloud Grassroots Committee; they host meetings with Nestlé supporters that fill Burris' house. They'll agree that the contract with Nestlé is a bit long. They'll admit to some fear of big corporations. But the bottled water is just too good an opportunity to pass up. Burris fears that without it, the town she grew up in will die.
But the opposition won't go away either, despite the recent blow from the state Supreme Court. Opponents have attacked the draft environmental review, which doesn't address impacts on fish and aquatic life and leaves a number of other questions unanswered. The county is expected to either hand down a final review and decision, or start the review process over this summer. In the meantime, the "antis" plan to keep fighting, here and elsewhere. They see McCloud as a precedent-setting case that could affect watersheds across the West. "There is nowhere to run," says Connaughton. "This battle is going to be everywhere."
The author writes from Ashland, Oregon, where citizens just rejected a city charter revision that contained loopholes allowing for the sale of water for bottling from Ashland Creek.
This article was made possible with support from the William C. Kenney Watershed Protection Foundation and the Jay Kenney Foundation.
When Clarence Aragon began managing the half-century-old Mora Mutual Water and Sewer Association 12 years ago, he thought he was helping the environment. Hundreds of households around Mora, N.M. -- a small river-valley community on the eastern slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains -- flush wastewater through subpar septic systems, sending trickles of variably treated sewage into a shallow aquifer and eventually to the Mora River. But Aragon's 1,000 or so subscribers employ one of rural New Mexico's few treatment plants, a system of lagoons that oxygenate the water while special bacteria digest harmful sludge.
The system isn't perfect, Aragon admits: The lagoons need repairs, and even when they're working properly, they weren't designed to reduce algae-fueling nutrients -- nitrogen and phosphorous -- enough to meet up-to-date water-quality standards. But building a treatment plant to meet those standards, which originated in a 1997 environmentalist lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, would cost around $7 million.
"This is a community with zero economy and 25 percent unemployment," Aragon says. "Even if someone were to write me a check for (that system), we couldn't afford to run it."
So the EPA will soon revoke Mora Mutual's permit to discharge into the river, leaving Aragon with two choices: Build a new treatment plant a half-mile from the river that would treat wastewater less stringently than the EPA requires and let it percolate into Mora's groundwater -- the community's only source of drinking water -- or abandon his subscribers to septic tanks. "There's no law that says we have to have a sewer service," he says.
James Bearzi, the New Mexico Environment Department's chief of surface water quality, calls that second option an "outrageous proposition," one that "would dramatically increase the total amount of contamination in the Mora River Valley."
But Aragon feels increasingly pushed in that direction. In mid-October, the EPA sent him a letter warning that he was about to incur fines of $5,400 per day because he hasn't fixed his lagoons. Never mind that the state told him several years ago to cease work on that upgrade because the lagoons could never meet the new permit's terms.
Aragon wrote back, reminding the EPA of Mora Mutual's history. But the threat compounded his frustration. "The people who formed this association did so because they cared about the community's health and safety," he says. "Now it's turned into something we can't afford."
Mora Mutual's predicament echoes thousands in the rural West: small, community-run drinking water and sewer associations entangled in state and federal water-quality laws whose terms they can't afford to meet. Even as environmental groups were suing the EPA over water in New Mexico, they were also suing in nearly every state from California to Maryland. At issue was a long-overlooked provision in the Clean Water Act ordering states to analyze their waterways and set "total maximum daily loads," or TMDLs, for pollutants in them. The EPA was obligated by law to step in where those states refused. Tens of thousands of TMDLs have since been set for everything from heavy metals to unnaturally high temperatures. And local governments with shrinking budgets are straining to meet them.
"We struggle with this all the time," Bearzi says. In New Mexico, the state writes the TMDL and the EPA includes that standard in a discharge permit; the state has no legal authority to intervene in the enforcement process. "Every time we go to (the EPA) with a TMDL for nutrients in a rural area, it becomes a problem for whatever wastewater treatment plants are in that watershed. Ten thousand dollars might as well be $10 million to them."
TMDLs have yielded unqualified successes. In California's Los Angeles County, for example, they've inspired laws requiring buildings to retain rainfall and inland cities to install screens to catch trash in storm drains. That's in part because the Legislature went after scattered, or "nonpoint," pollution sources, holding whole communities accountable for what runs off of their streets. "California has done an excellent job of regulating nonpoint sources of pollution," says Alexis Strauss, who oversees the water programs for the EPA's Pacific Southwest region.
Then again, Los Angeles is a urban area, with millions of people to share costs and hundreds of participants to hammer out agreements. When the TMDL for trash in the Los Angeles River was set at an unattainable zero, regulators agreed that simply installing catch screens was good enough. "It was the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law," says Joyce Neal Amaro, public education coordinator for the City of Los Angeles' stormwater program. "And we're seeing water quality improve."
Still, in rural California, state water authorities continue to exempt certain agricultural producers from TMDLs; California's latest water inventory, submitted to the EPA in early October, shows that more than half the state's bodies of water fall short of "water quality goals." Many rivers and wetlands suffer from the same nonpoint source pollution that afflicts nearly every state's waters: agricultural runoff.
"TMDLs are a fine gesture in the right direction," says Joe Gutkoski, the founder of Montana River Action, who cautiously cheered a district court judge's October ruling ordering the state to develop TMDL-based cleanup plans by 2014. "But agriculture is still in the hands of Jesus in this state."
And so it is in New Mexico, where despite a recent, hard-won agreement to control wastewater from dairy farms, the state regulates agricultural runoff through voluntary programs. Few laws govern septics. So the only polluter that regulators can target for a waterway's problems is the federal permit holder -- in this case, a small nonprofit water association originally created to protect the water.
Aragon will likely leverage a $1.8 million federal grant to build a groundwater discharge system, turning Mora Mutual into a nonpoint source. But he'd prefer to build that same plant on the river and expand his services -- reducing overall septic pollution in the valley in exchange for a more relaxed permit for discharge into the river. The EPA has already rejected that proposal, however, "and with our current financial situation, there's no chance of us getting more subscribers," Aragon says. With upcoming rate hikes, in fact, he may very well lose them.
Bearzi doesn't yet know the answer. "The state water quality people, the local community, our own Legislature have to come together to figure out a solution for Mora," he says. "This is a problem that took decades to manifest. It's going to take years to resolve."
This story was funded by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation.]]>
When it comes to water use, the United States,
A. Withdraws billions of gallons more water from rivers, lakes and aquifers than it did in 1970.
B. Withdraws the same amount of water
C. Withdraws less water.
2. The state whose residents use the most domestic water (indoor and outdoor) on a per capita basis is:
A. Nevada
B. Arizona
C. Utah
D. Idaho
3. The biggest water gulping category in the United States is:
A. Golf courses
B. Thermoelectric power
C. Irrigation
3. The biggest water using category in the West is:
A. Las Vegas Fountains
B. Fracking
C. Irrigation
You'll have to read on to find the answers.
According to a US Geological Survey report on water use released last week, the U.S. in 2010 not only withdrew* less water than it did when the agency conducted its previous survey five years earlier, but it also withdrew less than it had since 1970. As the Pacific Institute's Peter Gleick, a well-known water guru, put it: We appear to have reached Peak Water, decades ago.The implications are huge. The U.S. has added 105 million people since 1970, and the economy has grown tremendously. Yet we somehow have managed to shrink our overall water footprint. It's not only counter-intuitive; it's baffling. Surely, some of our water guzzling was sent overseas when we outsourced manufacturing and food production. Yet most of the savings can be attributed to simple thrift, and huge gains in efficiency in just about every sector.
It's proof that conservation is not an impediment to economic growth, and that we can limit our collective environmental impact even as the population grows, without sacrificing quality of life. And the western U.S. is leading the way.
The biggest water user in the country is thermoelectric power — most coal, natural gas and solar thermal power plants need water to produce steam to turn turbines and for cooling purposes. Over a five-year period, U.S. plants were able to cut their water withdrawals by 20 percent by installing dry-cooling technology or simply by becoming more efficient. The West has shown even more progress, cutting use by about 50 percent since 2000.
Irrigation is second in water use nationwide, but in the West, it tops the list, guzzling water at almost ten times the rate of Western power plants. Nationwide, irrigators cut water use by about 9 percent since 2005, about the same as in the West, by increasing efficiency and switching from flood irrigation to micro-irrigation, or drip, systems.
Domestic use dropped by 5 percent. Some Western cities hit hard by drought have cut water use by incentivizing homeowners to tear out their lawns, or by limiting turf at new homes. Increasing water rates on big guzzlers has also helped, as have more efficient plumbing fixtures. Las Vegas reduced a tremendous amount of waste simply by plugging the leaks in its pipes.
The mining industry, on the other hand, which includes oil and gas extraction, pulled 39 percent more water from the earth than it did in 2005, thanks to the sharp uptick in drilling. The mining industry still only accounts for about 1 percent of all withdrawals, about half of which consist of the otherwise unusable saline byproduct of oil and gas production, which is then re-injected into the well to stimulate production. But drillers use mostly fresh water for the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water used to hydraulic fracture a single well. This use shows up in North Dakota, for example, where mining's water withdrawals shot up from 5.6 million gallons per day in 2005 to 27 million in 2010. Still, that's only one-sixth of the state's withdrawals for agriculture. In Wyoming, which saw a natural gas drilling bust between 2005 and 2010, mining's water use plummeted.
All of this, and there's still plenty of waste. Las Vegas has taken great strides in conserving water over the last decade, but it still has entire neighborhoods that look like Connecticut, thanks to gluttonous lawn-watering. Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming and California farmers still rely mostly on flood irrigation for their crops. And folks in some of the driest places pay the least for their water, contrary to economic principles. This is all good news, because it means that despite gains, many low-hanging fruit remain. We must pluck them before we even think of building the next dam, pipeline or groundwater pumping scheme.
*The USGS report tracks total withdrawals, or the amount pulled from the source, whether it's returned to the source or not, rather than consumptive use, which is arguably a more critical measure. Consumptive use is when the water is precluded from subsequent use (at least for a while) because it's consumed by humans or livestock or is incorporated into a product or plant. A good deal of the water sucked up by a power plant, for example, goes right back into the source, as does a portion of the water used to flood irrigate a field.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. Follow @jonnypeace
I didn't go to the beach on Sunday morning, July 27. Crowds generally clog up the swells on weekends, so I escaped to the mountains in Ventura County. When I left, the weather in Venice was gloomy with a mild drizzle — not an unusual syndrome for the Southern California coast — but by the time I hiked and returned to the car at around 3 pm, it had evidently taken a dramatic turn. When I flipped on the radio for the traffic report, I heard that just a half an hour earlier, a bolt of lightning had struck the water near Venice Pier, and 13 people had been injured. Two were found face down in the water.
Frantically, I called home to make sure my husband was not among the victims. He was not; he'd been inside all day. "It was close," he told me, "and loud." On KNX 1070 News Radio, reporters interviewed volleyball players who felt an electrical current through their bodies, who saw other players' hair stand on end. Later we found out that one young man, 20-year-old Nicholas Fagnano, had been killed when he ventured into the water to wash off sand. A 55-year-old man was in the hospital in critical condition; he'd been out on his board riding waves fueled by storms far out at sea — storms he no doubt assumed would remain there, as they almost always do. I arrived home to the repetitive thwump of circling helicopters and the screams of ambulance sirens. There was not a skateboarder nor cyclist, nor beach-going tourist in sight. The surfers who daily walk our streets with their wetsuits stripped to their waists, boards under their arms, were all hunkered down indoors, or on their way back to their inland homes.
Was the bizarre weather that hit Venice Beach a climate-related phenomenon? It's dangerous to pin any one local weather event on climate change; climate, as we know, is global and measured on trend lines, not in isolated cloudbursts. Still, it's hard not to suspect that something is up with our local weather on the West Coast, an area seized from north to south in an epic and record-breaking drought.
During the months of December and January, the sky stayed relentlessly blue, thanks to a high-pressure ridge parked for months out over the Pacific Ocean. When a storm finally did break through, a half a year's normal rainfall came all in a weekend at the end of February, accompanied by hail and high winds and weak tornadoes. It wasn't different, necessarily, than the weather the region usually gets — long periods of dry weather broken by ferocious rainstorms that flood intersections and send rivers of mud cascading through bedrooms. It was only more extreme.
But the Venice Beach lightning storm was not just a matter of degree. It was fundamentally weird for this microclimate in any time of year, and absolutely unheard of in the summer (even a trace of rain broke records for July in downtown Los Angeles). You have about as much chance as dying by lightning strike in all of California as you have of being killed by a shark anywhere in the world — one in 7.5 million (in Montana, by contrast, the lightning-strike odds are one in 250,000). Of the seven lightning deaths that occurred in California between 2003 and 2012, according to statistics compiled by the National Lightning Detection Network, none were on the coast.
"You don't have the complex vertical structure and wind shear typically associated with lightning storms," Kevin Trenberth, a climate analyst at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said of Venice-area weather. Trenberth stopped short of making a lightning-climate connection, but a reporter at the news site the Daily Climate inched closer: "A changing climate may alter those weather patterns," she wrote, "making such 'freak' occurrences more common."
Confused, I called Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Climate change is huge," he says. "The world is warming. Los Angeles is warming. I tell my colleagues: I was talking about it before they were born." But when you have a "normal" climate that produces one inch of rain in one year and 38 in the next, as coastal California does, "it's almost impossible to say anything about climate change."
What happened in Venice that Sunday was not a global warming phenomenon, Patzert insists. "It was a weather event." Patzert went on: "Lightning strikes the surface of the earth 33 million times a day. In the United States on average over the last couple of decades, about 45 people a year are killed by lightning strikes." They just don't happen where I live.
"People generally have become blasé about lightning strikes in coastal California," Patzert says. "We're just not sensitized because they're so unusual."
In Florida, where lightning strikes every day, they have warning systems. "They see it coming, and they clear the beaches and golf courses, and get the kids off the playground." Such a system may not be worthwhile in Southern California — "you have to weigh the costs versus the frequency" — but the National Weather Service in Colorado already has one in the works: The Lightning Potential Index, developed by lead forecaster Paul Frisbie. Right now, it only covers western Colorado, but it may be expanded "if it proves valuable," Frisbie told the Christian Science Monitor.
Patzert does allow that eventually, global warming will begin to influence local weather events in a way we can't ignore. But at the moment, he says, "I'm getting tired of watching extreme weather and global warming stories," most of which are really about bad zoning decisions or the lack of storm shelters for Oklahoma school children. "What we should be talking about is population density and zoning and living with risk."
So when can we talk about global climate and local weather? When do we cross the line into a world where a freak summer storm really can be called a climate phenomenon, and the tragic deaths that come with it are climate-related deaths?
"I'll let you know," Patzert assures me. "I'll give you a call in a few years."
Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor of High Country News. She tweets @judlew.]]>
Tim Sullivan writes from Portland, Oregon.
The following sidebar articles accompany this feature story:
- In a bitter strike, grocery workers lost ground
- Wal-Mart: Love it or loathe it
This story was made possible by the support of the EMA Foundation.
San Bernardino, Calif., has a reputation for poverty and crime, but poet Juan Delgado and photographer Thomas McGovern offer a vibrant view of the city's working-class Latino neighborhoods in their new book, Vital Signs. The people of this urban landscape are strikingly absent from McGovern's stark images, which showcase hand-painted signs and murals on buildings framed by the empty blue California sky. But Delgado's understated poems, grouped in sections between the images, richly convey the stories of the region's resilient inhabitants.]]>
This is Quincy, a town of 1,700 located 150 miles northeast of Sacramento, in the heart of the Lost Sierra, a part of California made famous by the gold-seeking '49ers. The steep forested hillsides plunge into clear creeks that still sparkle with flecks of gold. Local geological consultants stake and sell placer claims, and shops carry sieves and pans for people working the streams. But the Gold Rush isn't the only part of the past that lingers here: Deep in the Lost Sierra, the frosty still thrives.
The word "frosty" has two connotations: either the swirl of vanilla or chocolate soft-serve on a cone, or – my main interest – the classic establishments that dish it out. Typically, the restaurants date back to the 1960s and sell made-to-order fast food – corndogs, burgers and a lot of finger foods – for prices that have changed little over time.
Elsewhere, they're known by different names – shake shacks, dairy freezes, drive-ins – but in the Lost Sierra they are almost always called frosties. Last August my friend, Katie, and I hit nine of them on a three-day road trip. Why? For the whole retro experience, the distinctive culture, and something we realized as we roamed: The uncanny way that frosties mirror their clientele and their towns.
The dessert originated in the 1930s, when either the founders of Dairy Queen or (there is some debate) Carvel Ice Cream, which billed itself as "the nation's first retail ice cream franchise," discovered that customers loved ice cream served at a slightly warmer temperature than normal, right out of the machine. But it was Dave Thomas, Wendy's founder, who capitalized on the name, putting the 35-cent category-bending treat (was it a beverage, or a dessert?) on the original 1969 Wendy's menu. Today, frosties remain one of the chain's most popular items.
Wendy's frosties are served in a cup with a spoon, but the frosties of the Lost Sierra proudly retain the original form, spiraling skyward from cones, either naked or dipped in liquid chocolate that forms a thin shell. They yield easily to the teeth and dissolve swiftly on the tongue. Frosties are low-fat and airy, with a variety of unpalatable-sounding additives that keep them from melting too fast, growing ice crystals or getting chunky.
Frosties are everywhere in the Lost Sierra. We began our tour at the Pine Shack Frosty in Chester, Calif., a town of barely 2,000 that's a gateway to Lassen Volcanic National Park. The restaurant's menu was hand-lettered by a one-legged old man named Bubba, who has also painted most of the signs in town, lending the entire place a pre-digital feel. Your meal is on the house if Mount Lassen erupts while you order.
In Chilcoot, a ranching town of 450 near the Nevada border, Tim Kanavel, who was born on a ranch, and his wife, Carolyn, have run the Chilcoot Frosty for 15 years. Their faded hand-painted sign features a smiling cowboy pointing at a carton of fries. We stopped by one hot and hazy morning, under drifting smoke from a Yosemite wildfire. I yearned for something cool and creamy, so we diverged from our policy of eschewing soft-serve before noon. We split a fresh blueberry shake – and it hit the spot.
Farther south, the sign at the Sno-Flake Drive-In in touristy South Lake Tahoe is a laser-printed replica of the original, and there are three kinds of "sortaburgers" – veggie, salmon and turkey – to cater to the non-beef eaters that tend to migrate to resort towns.
Nearly all of the frosties we visited have been around since the early 1960s, and black-and-white photos on their walls show clean-cut couples licking soft serve in classic cars, polished chrome and fins shining. But other than their vintage, what distinguishes frosties from regular ice cream shops? Like pornography, frosties are easier to recognize than to define. In a way, you can tell a frosty by what it's not. Thus, Katie and I concluded that Treats, a boutique ice cream shop in bourgie Nevada City, in the Lost Sierra foothills, does not qualify: A single scoop of Treat's hard, hand-scooped ice cream cost $3.25 (flavors included lemon custard, green tea and bittersweet chocolate), and shining glass domes covered plates of gluten-free brownies. I looked skeptically at Katie, who was licking a scoop of (admittedly) very delicious mint chip. "We gotta get out of here," she said. "We're out of the frosty belt."
Two and a half hours later, we were back in the mountains, in Portola, another small town, eating kraut dogs, onion rings and tater tots at a picnic table outside the Portola Frosty. Its giant, peeling wooden sign featured a 5-foot-tall cone, a burger that towered over my head and, in red letters, the word FROSTY. The portions were as large as the customers' waistlines, and the greasy food hit our stomachs hard. "Are we going to get fat?" I wondered as we drove off looking for a place to camp. "We might need to eat salads for a week and a half after this," Katie said.
It was the experience of eating, rather than the food, that inspired us to become frosties tourists. There's something about entering a world where generations of people have sat outside underneath the same pine trees for at least 50 years, eating the same kind of burgers and shakes. The ambiance is what matters– the hand-lettered signs, warped wooden picnic tables and rotating cast of teenage girls behind the window. Even if the menu evolves to attract new customers – many frosties now serve dairy-and-gluten-free soft-serve, brown rice and vegetable stir-fry or veggie burgers – the emotional experience of eating remains the same.
I marveled how nearly every small town we visited could support a frosty. In the Sierra Valley, we hit four of them in 40 miles. Two were for sale, though, and only one, Rhonda's Lil' Frosty in Loyalton, appeared very busy. But regardless of how dietary trends and fears of obesity affect the business, I suspect nostalgia will keep customers coming back. It's hard to resist the menu at Bud's Jolly Kone in Red Bluff: a 50-cent hamburger with any purchase, plus a receipt printed with the words "All Good Things Come From The Father Above." Naturally, that includes frosties.
This story is part of an April 2014 special issue of the HCN magazine devoted to travel in the West. Emily Guerin is an HCN correspondent and radio producer based in Paonia, Colo.]]>


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Audio Push - Come Back to Me
Artist: Audio Push
Producer: Kadis & Sean
Album: Broadies Over Wodies
Avg Rating: 3.3 ( 19 votes )
Audio Push's first and, to date, only solo feature found the Californian duo full of swaggerrific energy and ready to instruct us all in the art of Jerking. Nearly 12 months later, Price Tag and Oktane aren't sounding quite so chipper – of course, a nasty breakup like the one described on new single Come Back to Me is enough to take the wind out of anyone's sails. Backed by the mournful, string-laced production of Kadis & Sean, Audio Push address a shawty who was the Topanga to their Cory, the Adrian to their Rocky, the Chewbacca to their Han Solo (OK, I made that last one up). While there doesn't seem to be much hope of rekindling the relationship described in this track, the twosome's prospects of winning over Booth readers seem considerably brighter – but that, of course, is for you to decide. If this downbeat but catchy jam leaves you intrigued, keep it locked; Audio Push's long-delayed freshman album, now bearing the unusual title Broadies Over Wodies, has yet to receive a solid release date, but we'll continue to bring you the latest.
Written by richard on Jun 30, 2010
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The Cruising Life, by Jim Trefethen, and Cruising Financials
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Early Departure, Anyone?
Originally Posted by
I'm still at least 3 years away from casting off.
Ugh, I know the feeling. It's too easy to think of scenarios that would "force" an early departure, even with low numbers in the kitty and for the boat. Who cares if the money runs out? I'm not certain if this saving and planning is making it easier to do career work, or harder...
I feel lucky that I have a basic and affordable 27 footer to enjoy in the meantime (and yes, I've pondered how far we could go in it).
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Craftsy Member since August 2011
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Culture and Trends
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Audi auf der CES Asia 2015Audi überzeugte auf der ersten Consumer Electronics Show in Asien mit einer ganzen Fülle an neuen Technologien für die Mobilität der Zukunft. Neben marktspezifischen Kooperationen mit Baidu und Huawei zeigten die Vier Ringe auch das neue Showcar, den Audi R8 e-tron piloted driving. Alle Infos zum Auftritt von Audi bei der CES Asia finden Sie im Audi Blog: http://blog.audi.de/2015/05/24/audi-gestaltet-die-digitale-revolution/
Audi - Pionier in ChinaIn der Fahrzeugelektronik treibt Audi als Pionier den Fortschritt entscheidend voran. Der jüngste Coup: Auf der CES Asia demonstrierten die Vier Ringe die neuesten Entwicklungen zum pilotierten Fahren. Dabei fuhr der Technikträger, ein Audi A7 Sportback, pilotiert durch den Stadtverkehr der Megacity Shanghai. Mehr dazu in den Audi MediaServices: https://digital.audi-presskit.de/de/ces_asia_2015
CES Asia 2015 – Audi-KeynoteMit einer Keynote eröffnete Audi die erste Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Asia. Auf der Bühne des vollbesetzten Da-Guan-Theaters in Shanghai präsentierte die Marke mit den Vier Ringen Innovationen aus den Bereichen Elektrik/Elektronik, Fahrerassistenzsysteme sowie Connectivity und zeigte, wie digitale Features konsequent ins Automobil integriert werden können. Weiteres Highlight: das Showcar Audi R8 e-tron piloted driving, die nächste Stufe der Mobilität der Zukunft. Weitere Informationen finden Sie in den Audi MediaServices: http://bit.ly/1PFeUrE
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In einer neuen Serie stellen wir Ihnen in den nächsten Wochen die einzelnen Standorte unserer Marke vor. Die europäische Hauptstadt Brüssel ist idealer Produktionsstandort für das kleinste Mitglied der Audi-Familie: Im vergangenen Jahr fertigte Audi Brussels 115.378 Audi A1 Modelle: http://bit.ly/1eyQjnJ.
In unserer Serie stellen wir Ihnen in den nächsten Wochen die einzelnen Standorte unserer Marke vor. Die AUDI HUNGARIA MOTOR Kft. produziert in Győr Motoren für die Vier Ringe und für den Volkswagen-Konzern, außerdem wird hier die Audi A3 Limousine, das Cabriolet und der neue Audi TT gefertigt: http://bit.ly/1AxnIZN.
Vor der Eröffnung der ersten CES Asia hat Audi in seiner Keynote gezeigt, wie digitale Features ins Automobil integriert werden können und stellte mit dem Showcar Audi R8 e-tron piloted driving ein weiteres Highlight vor. Mehr finden Sie in der digitalen Pressemappe: http://bit.ly/1PFeUrE.
Recent Press Releases
12/03/14Culture and Trends
The force within: Audi prologue at Design MiamiAudi is continuing with its new design strategy: At Design Miami, the brand with the four rings is presenting the essence of quattro as "The force within". To mark the tenth anniversary of the show, which takes place from December 3 through 7, 2014, Audi is also presenting the revolutionary Audi prologue concept car – this is the first vehicle created by the Audi design team under the leadership of new design chief Marc Lichte.
06/17/14Culture and Trends
Audi at Design Miami/Basel 2014: Konstantin Grcic designs the "TT Pavilion"Audi is presenting its first-ever architecture installation designed by Konstantin Grcic, one of the most influential industrial designers of the age, at this year's Design Miami/Basel. The source of inspiration for the polygonal TT Pavilion is the new Audi TT. Grcic has used parts of the TT to create a mobile space that transfers the technology of automotive engineering to architectural design.
"The Next Leap in Mobility" – start of the Audi Urban Future Award 2014Four fundamental breaks with the past show the way to the future of urban mobility. This conclusion arises from research and dialogue with urban planners, architects, sociologists and mobility experts in the context of the Audi Urban Future Initiative. With the theme "The Next Leap in Mobility", four interdisciplinary teams are entering this year's Audi Urban Future Award to validate theses about urban change in four cities: Berlin, Boston, Mexico City and Seoul. The competition entries relate to specific current urban development projects. A jury with an international composition will present the Audi Urban Future Award 2014 in October to the best proposal.
12/04/13Culture and Trends
Audi at Design Miami/ 2013Audi's presence at Design Miami/ from December 3rd to 8th will be dominated by Audi Sport and will feature two of its sportiest models: the production model R8 Spyder and the R8 LMS ultra for customer racing. The Audi sculpture entitled "Fragmentation" serves as the backdrop. This three-dimensional installation plays with the red rhombus, the symbol of Audi Sport.
07/17/13Culture and Trends
Hugh Jackman arrives at The Wolverine premiere in Audi R8The stars of The Wolverine, distributed by 20th Century Fox, were joined by a very special guest – the Audi R8 – at the premiere of the film in London's Leicester Square last night (16 July 2013). The smart occasion was attended by numerous big names including Will Yun Lee, Rila Fukushima, Tao Okamoto, Famke Janssen and director James Mangold - all of whom were chauffeured to the top of the red carpet by a fleet of Audi A8s.
06/11/13Culture and Trends
quattro silhouettes: Audi at Design Miami/BaselAt Design Miami/Basel held from June 11 to 16, Audi will showcase an installation by Tim John: "Home of quattro." The scenographer will portray milestones from quattro history as silhouettes. And two extraordinary Audi models will take center stage: the new Audi RS6 Avant – unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show in March – and the legendary 1984 Audi Sport quattro. In February 2013, the company with the four rings celebrated a remarkable achievement: the five-millionth Audi with quattro drive rolled off the assembly line.
04/19/13Culture and Trends
Stars turn out for the special screening of Iron Man 3 including the Audi R8 e-tronThe stars of Marvel's Iron Man 3 movie were joined by a very special guest at a VIP screening of the film in London's Leicester Square on Thursday 18 April: the Audi R8 e-tron. The film, distributed by Disney, is due for general release in cinemas in the UK from 25 April.
03/07/13Culture and Trends
Audi suits up to reprise its leading role in Marvel's Iron Man 3Audi has joined forces with Disney and Marvel Studios, a subsidiary of Marvel Entertainment, LLC for the release of Marvel's Iron Man 3 due in theaters on May 3, 2013. The brand will once again be highlighted throughout the entire film. The Audi R8, R8 Spyder, A8, S5, and Q7 were all featured in the first and second installments.
01/14/13Culture and Trends
Designer Miguel Vieira Baptista wins "Audi Mentor Prize by A&W"Miguel Vieira Baptista has received the "Audi Mentor Prize by A&W." The Portuguese designer accepted the prize in Cologne yesterday. It was presented by André Georgi, Head of Product Design at the Audi Concept Design Studio in Munich. This year marks the fifth time that Audi has bestowed the award in cooperation with Architektur&Wohnen magazine.
11/26/12Culture and Trends
Audi Hosts Design UniversitiesAudi invited four European design universities to "Audi Design UNIverse" in Ingolstadt on November 22–23. For the first time, students and professors from Bratislava, London, Milan and Offenbach presented models to the Audi Design team.
11/30/11Culture and Trends
Design Miami: Streets without limitsIn the future, streets will communicate with every road user – this hypothesis is put forward by architectural firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) in their vision of mobility of the future. Visitors to Design Miami/ 2011 (November 29 to December 4) can discover what the architecture group's idea actually looks like. In cooperation with AUDI AG, they have created the interactive LED installation "Urban Future". At its heart is the Audi A2 concept: an integral part of the future model that connects to its environment.
08/03/11Culture and Trends
Audi earns Brand of the Year honorsThe Automotive Brand Contest was held for the first time this year. Audi finished particularly well, winning the special Brand of the Year category as well as taking home "Best of the Best" honors in seven of 13 categories. The Automotive Brand Contest was organized by the German Design Council and is the first international brand and design competition for the automotive industry. The prizes will be officially awarded on September 13 during Designers' Night at the International Motor Show in Frankfurt.
12/01/10Culture and Trends
Design Miami: Filling up on creativityFill it up, pay, get on your way. It probably won't be that easy with electric cars, since charging takes longer than filling up with gasoline or diesel. At the Design Miami show (December 1 to December 5), Audi takes a playful look at this aspect: What can drivers do in the meantime? What amenities will charging stations of the future have to offer?
09/12/05Culture and Trends
Audi design – technology in shapeIf the expression "Audi design" makes you think of stylish cars, you're almost on the right track. But note the "almost". Perhaps you should go to the district of Schwabing in Munich and look for a former car repair shop on Kurfürstenstraße. What is developed here can be summed up by the term "lifestyle articles" – for example, watches, bags, bicycles and any other Audi products that bear the impressive name "Audi design". Because it's all about design, and not only when we're talking about vehicles.
09/12/05Culture and Trends
Data sheetThe sporty Audi design travel bag has ample room for a short, spur-of-the-moment 1 to 2-night trip. Inside you will find another small, useful zipped compartment. Dimensions: width 41 cm, depth 28 cm, height 26 cm. Order number: 110.04.001.00.
09/09/05Culture and Trends
The square face of timeAudi design stands for the combination of cutting-edge technology and innovative design. The new collection of top-quality watches developed under the eye of Audi's Head of Design Walter de'Silva is also true to this principle. The centrepiece of this collection is the Audi design Square Chronograph. The Audi Design team set out not only to develop a particularly elegant watch; they set out to make their own mark on time. The result was the Audi design Square Chronograph, a visual and technological masterpiece. It bears the unmistakeable Audi fingerprint. If you wear the Square Chronograph, you have a real piece of Audi on your wrist.
09/09/05Culture and Trends
Audi design – technology in shapeIf the expression "Audi design" makes you think of stylish cars, you're almost on the right track. But note the "almost". Perhaps you should go to the district of Schwabing in Munich and look for a former car repair shop on Kurfürstenstraße. Here, where car mechanics once toiled behind a rather modest gateway, designers work in an area of about 800 square metres on inspirational ideas for the Audi, SEAT and Lamborghini brands. But not all of these ideas have to do with bodywork, wheels and an engine. Many of them will go on to tick, many of them can be packed or carried and you will even be able to travel on many of them one day. In short, what is developed here can be summed up by the term "lifestyle articles" – for example, watches, bags, bicycles and any other Audi products that bear the impressive name "Audi design". Because it's all about design, and not only when we're talking about vehicles.


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October's Own, but it's looking like July 4
from Drake (Ft. Alicia Keys) – Fireworks Lyrics on Genius
October's Very Own is Drake's blog/crew. However, he's blowing up like the 4th of July! (hence the song's name)
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Impossible Game
100,000 - 500,000 downloads
- Addictive gameplay
- Tilt controls
- Responsiveness
- Adding time and scores would make it more challenging
- There aren't global leaderboards
+ By Nitish Kasturia
"Nerves of steel"
Reviewed by Emmanuel Lund / Apr 13, 2014
Shaky hands? Forget it, dude!
You will need surgeon's steady hands and tons of patience to beat Nitish Kasturia's Impossible Game.
The idea is straightforward: you must tilt your device to maneuver a ball through a mazed level while avoiding walls and objects. Just graze an obstacle and you will have to start from the beginning. That's going to drive you mad. There's a high risk of feeling impelled to throwing your smartphone through the window, especially when you are about to finish a level and the ball insists on touching an obstacle. Aarrrg!
There are only 5 levels to beat and the difficulty gradually increases. In other words: you won't feel like there are just a few. It's good enough.
The game's graphically simple: black background, solid colors for the blocks and a red dot (the ball that will drive you mad). Minimalism to the extreme.
However, tilt controls are astonishingly responsive. You don't even feel you are moving your device. That makes all the difference. Otherwise, game's playability would have been affected.
Regardless, some features could make the game way more challenging: adding time and scores to the level as well as global leaderboards to show them off.
Apart from that, Impossible Game is a must-have for bold players.
A simple yet addicting game. Tilt your device to reach the end of the level while avoiding the obstacles. Simple to learn but difficult to conquer! Try to unlock all the levels!
New level!
Some lists where this application appears: Reviewed by Emmanuel Lund, Reviewed by Anna Grace.
But please could someone tell me how u complete the first level I am completely stuck
I had so much fun with this game please make 100 more levels : )
It was stupid ''tilt to move'' not my favorite game but it would be better if it had some buttons like, a button to down and up and sideways
The glitch award go's to this game.
Did not work


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March 26, 2010
Photo by Valerie Baldowski
Maurice Hawk, also known as "Muzicville," plays a drum solo at the McDonough recording studio where he works.
Stories this photo appears in:
Henry studio aims to help recording hopefuls
Entering Cunningham Enterprise, a recording studio located at 125 McDonough Parkway in McDonough, visitors are treated to the sound of music drifting from the back of the business.
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DICKINSON, Texas Claire Lankford, a 5-year-old girl KHOU 11 News introduced to viewers back in February, has lost her battle with cancer.
In February, her mother and several volunteers surprised her at her home in Dickinson by making Claire's dream of being a princess come true, complete with a prince and horse-drawn carriage.
From all of us here at KHOU 11, we want to extend our deepest condolences.


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If you are looking for great car service to Newark Airport NJ residents can click here. For additional details on Limo All Over come to the homepage at http://www.limoallover.net now.