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To understand how the debate over drilling the Arctic Ocean is playing out in the place most affected by it, it helps to understand a little bit about Barrow, the northernmost town in the United States. Roughly 76 percent of Barrow families are Inupiat, and whaling is the backbone of their cultural identity. Local sports teams are called the Whalers, and each spring, actual whalers set out on the ice to hunt bowheads from traditional umiaks, or seal-skin boats.
Yet Barrow is also home to some of the most cutting-edge climate research in the world, and much of the infrastructure, revenue and jobs here are in some way tied to the oil industry. Given the juxtaposition of technology and tradition, it's perhaps no surprise that the town is divided over Shell's plans to drill in the Arctic Ocean. What is surprising is the extent to which the divisions have penetrated the tight-knit whaling community here, driving a wedge between families that have been united for millennia over their dependence on the sea.
I discovered this firsthand when I visited the home of Diana Martin, who recently agreed to let me come over to try her raw whale blubber, or maktak. When I arrived, Diana was sitting in her kitchen, watching a large-screen TV and patiently sewing a wolf pelt into a ruff for a traditional parka. Diana is one of the few master seamstresses left in her community and is among the 18 percent of Inupiat who can speak their native language fluently. She can trace her ancestors back at least five generations, and she knows the stories her ancestors have passed down. Inupiaq oral history stretches so far back it includes tales of hunting wooly mammoths, which went extinct 4,000 years ago.
Like roughly 99 percent of Inupiat families, Diana raised her five kids on a diet that consisted heartily of whale, caribou, seal and other Native foods. As she and her husband told me this, they worried aloud that a single slip-up on Shell's part could devastate the offshore environment on which they depend. Diana — who generally avoids politics — had to be persuaded not to put up a "Shell go home" banner in her front yard on Nanook St. this year.
Diana's brother, Jake Adams Sr., is equally connected to subsistence whaling: he holds the prestigious position of being one of just eight whaling captains in Barrow, and much of the community depends on the meat his crew risks life and limb for. But Jake supports Shell's efforts to drill the Chukchi Sea. He sits on the board of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and is CEO of the North Slope Borough, both of which benefit heavily from taxing oil industry infrastructure. In 2012, after the first (and last) time Shell tried to drill in the Arctic Ocean — a season marred with one mistake after another, culminating in the wreck of Shell's drilling rig — Adams testified in front of Congress that the people of the North Slope would continue to support Shell's efforts. He doesn't hide the fact that his support stems from a "corporate agenda," but he points out that the same agenda is what propelled Barrow from an impoverished village with raw sewage in the streets to one of the most well-off Native communities in the state.
Jake is the second-oldest of the 12 Adams' children. Diana is the ninth. They do not discuss drilling at the dinner table.
The Adams family isn't alone. Representatives from both sides have convincing arguments, and everyone you talk to in Barrow adds their own twist. The head of a local whaling organization, for instance, tells me that oil money is necessary to fund wildlife research, which will be necessary to sustain Inupiaq culture after oil dries up and disappears — just like the commercial whaling industry of the 1800s did. Another whaler argues that, to the contrary, putting a drilling rig in the Arctic Ocean could effectively kill Inupiaq culture.
Everywhere you go in Barrow, educational posters describe the 12 core Inupiaq values. One of them — paaqlaktautainniq — literally means "to avoid conflict." For millennia, paaqlaktautainniq wasn't just a vague directive; it was critical to survival. It enabled families to work together to haul 75-ton animals from the dark ocean and to endure Arctic winters in close quarters. Today, as the issue of offshore drilling splits the Inupiaq community in half, both sides mourn the loss of this unity. "It is so troubling," Jake Adams wrote in an op-ed in the Arctic Sounder, "to find the deep divisions within our community being played out in such a public arena."
Krista Langlois is a correspondent for High Country News.
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This time it's all about Rachel Dolezal. Everyone knew her as the dynamic black president of the local chapter for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And then the world learned that she isn't black, even though she still says, "I identify as black."
Instead of talking to her constituents, she skipped out to tour the TV morning talk shows. She's resigned her post amid further allegations of deceit: She appears to have lied about receiving racist threats; at least one of her exhibited paintings appears to be a direct copy of J.M.W. Turner's "The Slave Ship," and while suing historically black Howard University for discrimination back in 2002, she told attorneys, "I consider myself Caucasian."
Color us embarrassed. If Spokane had an official gesture, it would be the dope slap.
The scandal came to light after Dolezal's parents in rural Montana let it be known that their daughter was white, sending along birth certificates and snapshots of their formerly blonde-haired, pale-skinned child.
The story, of course, was made for media and its multiple forms of comment. It gained a hashtag, #RachelDolezal, and became the top trender on Twitter as people expressed anger, confusion and wicked humor over how Rachel had become so much darker while also gaining a giant Afro. That Dolezal had become a prominent personality in racial justice and civil rights circles in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho and Spokane only added to many people's sense of outrage at her deceit.
Even though she says she is "living my truth," Rachel Dolezal has lied and lied and lied. And they were the worst kind of lies. She stole a story that was not hers. She stole a history of oppression and wore it like someone playing dress-up.
So what? some people ask. Didn't she do good work? Aren't we all the same under the skin?
Well, it's all about the skin. The hashtag #transracial was trending right alongside #RachelDolezal as many people compared Dolezal slipping into a new identity to Caitlyn Jenner slipping into a bustier. Except, and here's the catch, it doesn't go the other way. Black people can't pretend to be white when police raid the pool party, as black Twitter users said in sharply pointed posts.
Spokane is in a pretty white corner of this country. Past presidents of the NAACP have been white, and many local civil rights leaders are white. And that's laudable, because we are all in this together. The difference is that those folks didn't lie about their racial identity. Those folks didn't steal.
Many years ago, when I was a young sportswriter, I encountered a small-town high school basketball player named Sherman Alexie. I admired the poetry of his sweet jump shot, but I admired his actual poetry even more. I may have been the first journalist to predict that this kid from an obscure rez town would knock the socks off the literary world.
And he did. He was called "a major literary voice," and much more. So when an angry, brilliant new Native writer burst onto the scene, a publishing house sent his book to Alexie to get a blurb. But after Alexie opened the book and began reading, he quickly wrote back that he didn't think the writer was Indian.
He was later proven correct and wrote about what that meant in Time magazine, in an essay headlined, "When the story stolen is your own."
"His lies matter," Alexie wrote, "because he has cynically co-opted as a literary style the very real injustices caused by very real American aggression that destroyed very real tribes."
Rachel Dolezal's lies also matter. Thanks to them, she gained prominence -- leading the local NAACP, becoming an adjunct professor in Africana studies at Eastern Washington University, shaking hands with Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore, getting appointed by Spokane's mayor to chair a police oversight committee.
Her lies matter because she is co-opting roles that belong to someone else. Someone else who did suffer very real injustices. Someone else who does not lie about who she is.
Kevin Taylor is a contributor to Writers on the Range, the column service of High Country News. He is an independent journalist in Spokane.]]>
It would have been an unremarkable scene in Portland or Los Angeles, but this was Butte, a southwestern Montana town best known for the Berkeley Pit, a toxic lake in an old copper mine that's part of the nation's largest Superfund site. Yet dozens of film industry folks were gathered that night to screen Orphan Girl, a historical drama following a day in the life of an underground miner, showing the dangers, hardship and innovation that went into unearthing the copper that electrified the modern era. Butte power-couple Courtney and John McKee of Headframe Spirits wanted to use the story of the Orphan Girl mine, the namesake of their bourbon cream liqueur, to convey the "untold history of Butte." The film is not only part of a marketing campaign, it's also a tribute to Butte's mining history — and a call to arms for its future.
Since copper crashed in the 1980s, Butte has struggled to find an economic footing — and a new identity. In the '90s, the town promoted mining tourism, opening a roadside gift shop and charging visitors to gaze at the Berkeley Pit's metal-melting waters. In 2006, The Daily Show visited. "If it's the Berkeley Pit that draws them here, it's our job to keep them here … for all of the other things we have to offer," then-state Rep. Jon Sesso, D, said. The show's reporter asked for examples; Sesso's edited reply consisted of 30 painful seconds of "um" and "uh."
Since then, Butte has become as well known for its summer music festivals as for its once-legendary St. Patrick's Day bar brawls. A few tech companies have moved in, and developers have breathed life back into historic Uptown. Yet compared to Bozeman and Missoula, the economy still looks anemic: Uptown's poverty rate is nearly 30 percent.
The film, which told Butte's story with the kind of production polish more common at sporty mountain film festivals, was part of a larger effort to reboot the town's image — as well as its cultural and economic reality. The area's population peaked at over 90,000 in 1917; the McKees envision rebuilding it to just under 50,000 from its current 35,000 — big enough to bustle, but unlikely to attract big-box stores. The future city, many residents say, should meld the middle-class stability of the past with a diverse economy and amenities like parks, trails and climbing walls. They hope to prove that a post-industrial town without a ski resort or other big tourist draws can still be modern and well connected.
Today, optimism is having its own boom. A Superfund cleanup has changed the cityscape: Once-contaminated soil is now home to parks with walking paths; an old rail bed is a bike trail; one former mineyard is a grassy venue for weddings and festivals. The city is pursuing development grants, including one that built Montana's fastest broadband network. A local nonprofit brought the National Folk Festival to town in 2008, and a few years later, it started the Montana Folk Festival.
Julia Crain, a city planner who grew up during the 1980s mining bust, says the festivals renewed community pride. "After that, sidewalks were improved, facades started to get painted," she remembers. "You saw people like Courtney and John who were taking risks, and they were deciding to do it here. It was kind of like, there's a lot of energy here. It was really palpable."
Headframe Spirits is one of Butte's most visible economic success stories, and Courtney and John McKee are deeply involved in development efforts. Initially, though, they just wanted to stay in Butte, where they had close friends, two kids, a golden retriever and a historic home with a cheap mortgage. In 2010, John was working for a biodiesel company and Courtney had an IT business. Then the biodiesel company folded, so Courtney challenged John to turn his flair for cocktails and distilling knowledge into a -business plan.
To succeed in a market glutted with artisanal products, they needed to be, in her words, "a marketing company that sells hooch." So they built their brand around Butte's gritty history; "Headframe," for instance, refers to the multi-story hoist towers that once hauled ore from the earth and still pincushion the landscape. They named their gin, bourbon and vodka after evocative-sounding mines — Destroying Angel, Neversweat, Anselmo — and plastered bottles with historic, sepia-toned photos. Their Uptown tasting room boasts a 110-year-old mahogany bar on loan from the World Museum of Mining.-
Though they drained their savings, the sales pitch worked: John McKee now manufactures high-tech stills in Butte, and the company sells booze from California to Chicago. Orphan Girl outsells Baileys Irish Cream in Montana. Their experience showed that there was opportunity in Butte, if only people were inspired to create it. The low cost of living and supportive community, Courtney McKee says, allowed them to build a lot from very little. Their appraiser, for instance, told them that their $165,000 building would have cost $3 million in Bozeman. "You can push yourself in ways you couldn't in other places," McKee says.
Bad marketing and lack of vision are holding the city back, she thinks. Last fall, the city hired consultants to assess the local economy. There was a lot to build on, they concluded: Low housing prices, proximity to major interstates and local financing help for businesses. But to draw more residents, the city needed to aggressively sell its assets — like its historic business district. To help, McKee recently started a nonprofit called Butte Innovates, with support from the head of Butte's combined city-county government, to amplify positive messages about the town.
To that same end, the Orphan Girl film featured a handful of local entrepreneurs as Butte's "modern mavericks" — people like Anthony Cochenour, the founder of a company that secures computer networks against hackers. Cochenour opened his newest office in Butte last summer instead of expanding in Bozeman. He now works out of the 114-year-old building housing a data center connected to the town's high-speed Internet, which is critical to helping him beat hackers. Other IT companies share the building, while the National Center for Healthcare Informatics, which trains battlefield medics via computer simulations, is plugged in across town.
Crain points out that Butte doesn't lack professional jobs. The city's largest manufacturer makes high-purity silicon used to build solar panels and employs about 300 people. The hospital is always hiring, and the utility Northwestern Energy is expanding in Uptown. And mining isn't totally dead: Copper maintains a few hundred high-wage jobs. Silver Bow County's 4.7 percent unemployment rate is higher than that of Missoula or Gallatin County, where Bozeman is, but lower than the national average. Butte's population is growing again, but just barely. Its growth rate was just over 1 percent between 2010 and 2014, compared to Gallatin County's 8.6 percent.
Such tenuous gains make Crain and others fear that Butte will backslide unless citizens vigilantly maintain its current momentum. Roughly 30 of Crain's young friends, many with small children, left for bigger cities in the last year. The school district lost 60 students last year as part of a decade-long trend. Some couples leave because it's hard to find two good jobs in a small community. But Butte also lacks family-friendly amenities like an outdoor swimming pool. "I have unrivaled professional opportunity here," Crain says. She has less competition than she would in a bigger city and access to decision makers. "It's awesome. But I'm still seeing all of these people leave."
Last spring, determined to halt the exodus, Crain helped start a group called the Butte Idea Exchange to engage more young professionals in community development. At the first meeting, 145 people crowded the ballroom above Headframe Spirits. On a board on the wall, they listed Butte's assets and asked what people still wanted. The answers: More family activities, and things like community gardens, a livelier nightlife and arts scene, and better recycling programs. Basically, people wanted a New West economy and culture, and didn't want to have to go to Missoula to get it. The group started encouraging young leaders to participate in the school board, the historic preservation board and in economic development groups like McKee's, and they're trying to turn abandoned lots into small parks.
This is what Nick Kujawa, a Butte-raised real estate developer, calls "economic gardening" — small quality-of-life improvements that make people want to stay in a community. Butte's leaders recently approved a $130,000 project to create bike lanes and make Uptown more pedestrian-friendly, the kind of simple infrastructure that helps attract investors like Kujawa. In 2010, he bought an abandoned early 1900s apartment building and turned it into lofts with a grocery store downstairs, the first in the downtown core in over 30 years. The project helped kick off a small wave of similar redevelopments. Now, Kujawa says, Butte can use these assets "to convince people who grew up and moved away that, 'Hey, you know this town, there's opportunity here, and you can make a life here.' "
But to really grow, Butte will still have to attract new transplants, and that's an ongoing challenge. "It has a reputation to overcome," says Ray Rasker, the executive director of Headwaters Economics in Bozeman. Take the Berkeley Pit. "That's pollution tourism. You're telling the world you're one of the most polluted places in the world." On the other hand, he says, "People throughout Montana really respect Butte because they have a can-do spirit. That's worth marketing. They are scrappy people, and they get it done."
Courtney McKee herself is evidence that opinions can change. When she first glimpsed Butte from Interstate 90 in 2001 she saw the Berkeley Pit's ochre walls, and a dismal drag of gas stations and fast food chains in an area called The Flats. What a dump, she thought. And yet weeks later, she moved to town — to be with John, who was raised in Butte.
Now, McKee jokes that she's doing penance for her bad attitude. On a cloudy November day, she parked her pickup in a weedy old mine yard with rusting steel buildings and piles of pipe. "This whole site looks like (crap)," she griped, as ravens pecked siding off the hoist house. But she and John are negotiating to buy it. They plan to build the largest distillery West of the Mississippi here, complete with conference facilities, a restaurant, lodging in old miners' bungalows, and a music venue. A lot of cleanup is needed first, but McKee seems undaunted. "I want to create a destination like nothing else that exists here," she said. "I just want to challenge people's thinking about what potential looks like]]>
The low clouds hugging Woronofski Island are just beginning to burn off as the Chutine Warrior leaves the port of Wrangell, Alaska, and begins zooming north toward the Stikine River delta. "My name is Jim Leslie and I am gonna be your captain today," says Jim Leslie, a big guy with a sandy goatee and wavy hair. "We're gonna be looking for wildlife, and we're gonna be looking at incredible scenery. The Stikine is the fastest free-flowing river in North America."
The ten passengers hanging onto Leslie's every word are all white, all retirement age, and all adorned with some sort of camera — a smartphone, GoPro, or DSLR with a lens weighing more than a small dog. As we head into the 20-mile-wide delta, weaving between grassy sandbars and into thickly-vegetated sloughs, we pass a floathouse where a man and his son are getting nets ready for fishing. The tourists lean out the boat windows, snapping pictures. The man and his son avert their eyes.
This is what the new economy of Southeast Alaska looks like. Leslie, who used to make millions and employ 75 people felling timber in the Tongass National Forest, is now extolling the virtues of wilderness to visitors from Los Angeles and Sydney. When a combination of federal mandates and environmental pressure caused the timber industry to go belly-up in 1992, Leslie — like many of his neighbors in a place once known as the Timber Capital of Alaska — lost everything. The mills closed, and Wrangell's unemployment shot up to 35 percent. "I was bitter when the timber industry collapsed," he says later. "My future was set and so was that of my children, and at the age of 44, it was all gone."In the decades that followed, many in Southeast Alaska struggled to revive the mills and timber sales. Yet today, nearly everyone I talk to is resigned to the fact that timber isn't coming back: Only 30 million board feet come from the Tongass each year, compared to more than 520 million at its peak. There's some nostalgia for the excesses timber once conferred (and residual anger at the federal government and outside environmentalists for its loss), but like Leslie, the town has largely moved on. Now, the big question is how to recover from the timber hangover.
There's no easy answer. Some former timber towns in the region are banking on commercial fishing, while others have tied their fortunes to tourism — or more specifically, to the giant floating buffets that cruise up and down the Inside Passage, offloading thousands of tourists onto Main Streets redesigned to meet their needs. Yet the main drag in Wrangell still sells marine hardware instead of chintzy shot glasses, and there's nary a zipline to be seen. Instead, in a state where communities have historically been dependent on a single resource — and subject to its associated booms and busts — Wrangell seems to be limping toward the holy grail of economic development: a diversified economy.
To see for myself what this looks like, Leslie suggested that after taking a ride up the Stikine River with his small tourism company, Alaska Waters, I wander over to the Marine Travel Services Center. Colloquially known as the shipyard, the center is owned by the city and presided over by Don Sorric, who owns a boat-repair company called Superior Marine. Along with a nearby fish processing plant and the town's modest tourism sector, Superior Marine and the shipyard have become the main drivers of Wrangell's new economy.
When I first meet Sorric, he's being interviewed for a new reality TV show, the details of which I promised not to divulge. He doesn't so much arrive on-scene as he explodes into it, driving up fast in a truck with a Grateful Dead sticker on the window, a drink in one hand, and a cigarette in the other.
A former fisherman who helped start up the shipyard after sinking three of his own shoddily-repaired boats, Sorric now employs ten people. He complains that he hates working in the shipyard, that he'd rather be fishing; and in the same breath says that Wrangell's economy is coming out of the dumps and he's proud to be part of its revival.
Nonetheless, this is the future, and on a sunny Monday morning, it looks bright. A handful of tourists walk down the sidewalk, while in the shipyard, amidst piles of net and stacks of crab pots, men are hard at work welding, painting, stripping and sanding. From his trailer office, Sorric surveys the scene. "I'd say," he says, "that we're doing alright."
Krista Langlois is a correspondent for High Country News.]]>
The deal — had it been approved — would have set a new benchmark for sharing the wealth from energy development on tribal lands. Proponents were calling it a "game-changer" for how native groups could leverage North America's energy boom. In the past, and still today, tribes have often been sidelined when it comes to energy development on their land. But in rejecting the deal, the Lax Kw'alaam signaled that even huge economic incentives are not enough to win their support for massive fossil fuel projects.
"Hopefully, the public will recognize that unanimous consensus in communities against a project where those communities are offered in excess of a billion dollars, sends an unequivocal message this is not a money issue: This is environmental and cultural," Garry Reece, the mayor of the town of Lax Kw'alaams, said in a statement announcing the vote.
The rejection reverberates south of the Canadian border too, where oil and gas companies are running into a growing resistance from tribes worried about their land and livelihood. Much of that opposition centers in the Pacific Northwest, which stands between the landlocked fossil fuel deposits in the U.S. Interior and Asian markets.
To get their products to market, energy companies first have to build new terminals and pipelines to move that fuel. They need places to store the scores of oil and coal trains that they plan to run across the Northwest, and right-of-ways to lay new pipelines. And they need permission from the tribes when those projects would cross land protected by treaty rights. But instead of giving their consent, many tribes are resisting new projects, creating a "choke point" in the expansion of North America's energy industry, says Zoltán Grossman, a Geography and Native Studies professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
For the past three years, the Lummi Nation has waged a fight against the proposed Pacific Gateway Coal Terminal near Bellingham, Washington. They say the terminal would interfere with their tribal fishing rights. In 2012 the Lummi Tribal Council symbolically burned a $1 million check, to make the statement that no amount of company money will convince them to back the project. More recently, leaders from eight other Pacific Northwest tribes and a British Columbia First Nation joined the Lummi in calling for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to deny all permits for the project.
"No mitigation can pay for the magnitude of destruction to treaty resources for today and generations from now," Brian Cladoosby, the chair of the Swinomish Indian Tribe said in a statement.
Resistance to big energy and mining projects from Native groups is nothing new (tribes have been fighting hydro dams since the 1950s), but their political clout is. That power originated from treaty rights, which the courts have gradually begun recognizing, starting with the landmark 1974 Boldt decision, which determined that the treaties signed with the U.S. government in the 1850s guarantee tribal members have access to their traditional fishing grounds. Those include most of the places where the proposed fuel terminals would be located.
Empowered by the Boldt decision, other tribes have been asserting their treaty rights to oppose major energy projects as well.
Washington's Quinault tribe has spoken out against proposed oil terminals in Gray's Harbor near Quinault territory, citing threats to tribal fishing sites. In February, a state regulatory board sided with the Quinault by blocking permits for two of the terminals, saying backers have failed to address public safety and environmental issues.
When asked whether a deal like the one offered to the Lax Kw'aalam would be enough to change the tribe's position, President Fawn Sharp replied in an email that "treaty rights are not for sale." The ultimate decision, however, would rest on a democratic vote. She added that the tribe is not anti-business but that the long-term environmental threats posed by increased fossil fuel transport trump any short-term economic gains those projects might bring.
"Spills do permanent damage," she said. "Not all the oil gets cleaned up, no matter how good the effort. That oil affects the habitat, and can make it uninhabitable by fish for decades."
Across the Cascades, Washington's Yakama Tribe came out against a proposed coal export facility in eastern Oregon last year, once again citing tribal fishing rights. Yakama protests in conjunction with other regional tribes like the Warm Springs and Nez Perce were a major factor in the Oregon State Department of Lands' decision to deny the proposal. The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation also joined the Yakama in opposition to the coal project, spurning an $800,000 pay-out in the process. In a vote two years ago, the 57 nations that make up the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians decided to officially oppose all proposals for the transport and export of fossil fuels export in the Northwest.
Now, as more and more tribes turn to legal challenges and direct action – such as protests and blockades of railroads and major highways – the pressure is turning into a major business cost. New research shows how risky those conflicts are for even big energy corporations with huge resources at their disposal. There's a bit of irony in that, says Grossman. "We've gone from a situation where (tribes) feel powerless to one where companies are very worried that they're not able to build these terminals."
Sarah Tory is an editorial fellow at HCN.]]>
One hundred and twelve years later to the day, an eclectic group of conservation professionals gathered at Yosemite Valley to discuss how to help people of all races and ethnicities feel welcome in those parks. Organized by Muir's great-great grandson Robert Hanna and National Park advocate Teresa Baker, the Muir Campfire Discussion on Diversity and Relevancy brought together about 30 men and women of many different backgrounds, races and ethnicities to discuss how to make outdoor recreation and environmental conservation more inclusive.
"As two different people as (Muir and Roosevelt) were, Yosemite gave them the place to create solutions and have discussions that would speak to future generations," Hanna said. "We now find ourselves going back to the exact same place to address head-on the serious issues of our time."
With 407 National Park units existing today, the original vision of those two men stands as an enduring legacy of environmental protection and stewardship. But as the demographics of the United States shift, it's time to figure out how to make our national parks relevant to an increasingly urbanized population whose makeup and priorities grow more diverse year after year.Although the national park system is egalitarian in principle, there's a divide between those who spend time in the outdoors and those who don't. This gap, like most disparities of our modern society, falls squarely along cultural, racial and economic lines. In general, minorities, millennials and urbanites are far less likely to venture outside than upwardly mobile, suburb-dwelling, white baby-boomers. Many stakeholders dedicated to the long term preservation of public land recognize the importance of devising practical solutions to not only increase the diversity of park visitors but also the ranks of park employees and members of conservation groups.
"I believe that those gathered here have the potential to bring those solutions into play," Baker told the Muir Campfire gathering. "But we need people who will stand up, speak their truth and do the work and not be afraid of what may come if they do."
Often federal employees and nonprofit board members resist making substantive change at the risk of their careers or upsetting the status quo. But the purpose of this conversation was to come up with new ideas that would challenge long-standing policies and institutional biases that perpetuate the homogenous culture of conservation. The group gathered at Yosemite represented key figures in the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the California Department of Parks and Recreation. Also in attendance were nonprofits like the Sierra Club, the National Parks Conservation Association and the Center for Diversity and the Environment. And as most of the participants were themselves people of color, they aimed to establish best practices meant to attract and retain underrepresented members of the population to the important work of protecting the environment.
"Our parks strive to be welcoming to all people. Where we struggle is understanding why that might not be happening," said Sangita Chari, the diversity and inclusion manager of the National Park Service. "I do believe that if we could better understand what the fixes are, that people have the interest and the willingness to do that."
During a series of discussions that spanned three days, the group recognized the importance of direct outreach to communities of color. Like all government agencies, the NPS is prohibited from preferential hiring on the basis of race. But there are many opportunities to encourage multi-racial interest in the parks, such as highlighting the historic contributions of ethnic groups in park ranger presentations to visitors.
The conference acknowledged the importance of using inclusive language that takes into consideration cultural differences and varying perceptions of the natural world. With an emphasis on forging relationships between federal agencies and private foundations, the group explored creating clearer pathways to public-lands employment and participation in outdoor activities. One way is to focus outreach and development efforts on historically black universities, community colleges, churches and youth groups such as the Boys & Girls Club of America. Attendees suggested that programs could be established to help qualified applicants navigate the hiring process for jobs in conservation. And educational resources could be made available in schools to guide young people with an interest in outdoor recreation toward a lifelong passion.
Most of all, everyone at the conference agreed that the heart of their efforts must be to change the internal dynamics of each of their organizations to encourage a sense of ownership and security among all those they seek to engage. Increasing the numbers of minority visitors and employees is only a small part of the equation.
"It's a multi-faceted issue that is rooted in historical, institutionalized systems that have intentionally and unintentionally kept communities, specifically communities of color or other marginalized communities, out of the public spaces," said Laura Rodriguez, the program officer at the Foundation For Youth Investment and moderator of the event. "So to resolve that is more than just letting folks know that the parks are there. It's about creating a genuine sense of belonging and a sense of safety, not just by the employees of the parks but also of the surrounding community of visitors."
James Edward Mills is a freelance journalist and author of the book The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the Outdoors. Homepage image by James Edward Mills / Joy Trip Project, of Ronald V. Griswell with the Children and Nature Network and Michelle Gee with the National Park Service, at the recent events at Yosemite National Park.]]>
"Unless you're into meth or having sex with people you're related to, you'll find shit's pretty boring here" in Idaho Springs, 16-year-old Margaritte matter-of-factly tells a newcomer, as she introduces the boy to the downtrodden Rocky Mountain town just west of Denver. Margaritte is the protagonist of Crazy Horse's Girlfriend, the debut novel by Colorado native Erika Wurth, a poet who teaches creative writing at Western Illinois University.
Funny, tough, realistic and heartbreakingly foolish, Margaritte is a high school drug dealer on the fast track to teenaged motherhood and welfare; her dad, a white man, is drunk and abusive, while her Indian mother ceaselessly forgives and enables him.
Like the author, Margaritte is Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee; her best friend is her adopted cousin, Jake. "He's Nez Perce, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and black. And big. ..." Margaritte talks tough and acts superior to the other impoverished residents of her town. "I knew where that kind of thinking led. To a doublewide trailer and miles and miles of cheap macaroni and cheese, ten for a dollar." However, her knowledge fails to inform her behavior; again and again, she makes the wrong choices.
For nearly 300 pages, Margaritte speeds toward impending doom, pausing along the way for multiple pit stops at the emergency room, a detour to an abortion clinic, various alcohol- and drug-fueled forays, and a flight with her mother and younger twin sisters to a hotel, followed by their drunk, gun-toting father.
Yet, Margaritte's kindness and compassion prevail. Even after her alcoholic father literally drives the family into a ditch during a thunderstorm, she thinks, "Sometimes my sadness for him overwhelmed my resentment, and that was even worse." She and the new boy fall in love. His family, wealthy and white, buys him expensive outdoor gear, but he's never slept outside. Margaritte takes him camping on Mount Evans. Sitting beside the campfire, she finds bliss. "I felt so content, so beautiful parts of me felt like they were dying off, exploding."
As Margaritte careens into and out of disaster, her strong fingers grip the reader's heart from the very first sentence, never letting go. She skids close to the edge of unredeemable stereotype, then screeches decisively to a halt, exploding into brilliant humanity. Exhilarated and terrified, readers of Crazy Horse's Girlfriend will be grateful for the ride.
We continue on to the destination, nonetheless, pulling off the narrow highway onto a rocky drive that leads to the overlook, created to give passersby a view of the Ray Mine, owned by mining giant Asarco. The wheel of a giant ore hauler truck welcomes visitors. (Google the overlook and you'll find a photo of a woman standing inside the wheel's diameter, topless.) There are no trees or bushes or flowers, just some shaded picnic tables, an older couple pointing and peering through binoculars, and a chain link fence to keep us from stepping into the abyss.
And what an abyss it is. Hundreds of feet deep, six miles long, two miles wide. This manmade canyon's walls are splashed with greens, oranges, burnt reds and lined with what appear to be farming terraces, except they are huge and devoid of life. It's beautiful and it's terrifying. Palpable is the violence that has raged for decades, the blasting, gouging and hauling of the earth at a rate of nearly 100 million tons per year. The number is so big it means very little, so I point at the yellow dump trucks crawling up each "step" on the far side of the mine. "Those things are each as big as a house," I tell Elena, my daughter. She doesn't believe me. So I seek out a normal sized truck near one of the haulers and point out the difference between the two, like an ant standing next to a grasshopper. She seems to be in shock but also bedazzled: We are watching humans and machines alter the earth on a geological scale in real time.
I try to explain that what we are looking at is merely the gaping yaw of our collective hunger for stuff and for things. I point to the iPod she's been gazing at for much of our trip, I point to our car, the computer on which I write this, the wires that carry the electricity that lights our home. Copper, like petroleum, is everywhere, connected to nearly everything our modern life desires or requires. We have to get it from somewhere, so why not here?
In the 135 years since the mine was founded it has claimed a desert stream that once left a lush scar on the desert. It has taken hills and washes, cacti and mesquite, wildflowers and coyotes and roadrunners and reptiles. Yet it also gave life to a handful of towns: Sonora, Ray, Winkelman, Hayden. From other mines nearby were born Globe and Miami, Superior and Mammoth. They all once bustled. Kids played in the yards along the dusty streets, and the weekends were rowdy. During our drive, Elena and I had pulled onto Mammoth's main drag and seen an old whitewashed building with blue signs promising dancing and dining. "This must have been a fun place," I told her, raucous with miners and their generous pay.
There was a certain calculus to it all that made some sort of sense: The world needed copper, so companies hired people to tear up the earth to get it. Surely there was greed, and faraway executives took more than their share of the bounty. The towns were segregated, racism common, the Hispanic workers paid less than their counterparts. And yet enough of the wealth made it back into the towns, and was distributed equally enough, to create vibrant communities and a strong middle class. And when it didn't, the unions had the power to stand up to the bosses and make some sort of change.
Somewhere along the line, however, something went wrong. The mines are still running, some of them churning out more ore than ever before. While commodity prices go up and go down, copper's has remained generally high enough to keep the mines, smelters and copper thieves in business. Last year, GrupoMexico, ASARCO's parent company, raked in $1.7 billion in profits — after taxes. And yet the communities that once flourished have all but dried up and blown away. The mine eventually gobbled up the towns of Ray and Sonora. Hayden, in the shadow of the smelter's slag piles and smokestack, is badly contaminated. Winkelman's businesses are mostly abandoned and boarded up. Many of Miami and Globe's grand old buildings are crumbling, and poverty rates are high.
It's not hard for me to explain to Elena the link between our gadgets and the mine and the destruction it's wrought, or between the mine's productivity and prosperity in nearby communities. But this new equation, in which the mine thrives but the towns nearby suffer, in which a single corporate executive earns more than all 1,000 workers at the Ray Complex combined, is far more difficult to comprehend. The equation has been corrupted. By no means is it limited to Arizona's Copper Triangle or even mining country in general. It's everywhere. For this, I have no explanation.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News.
These days, at 58, van de Hoek is an environmental educator with Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation and a reformed man. One afternoon, as I stood with him and his fiancée, environmental activist Marcia Hanscom, counting monarchs in a eucalyptus grove on the southern fringe of the Ballona Reserve, he told me the story of his conversion. How, after a squabble with a neighbor over his girdling of a local ficus tree, he noticed native waders, like night herons and egrets, roosting in the ficus trees. How he recognized that ice plant, a South African succulent, shelters native voles and frogs. How he started reading Robert Michael Pyle.
Pyle traveled more than 9,000 miles following the monarch migration across the West for his 1999 book, Chasing Monarchs. Van de Hoek felt a deep kinship with him. "The way he carries books in his car about natural history, the way he drops everything to chase a butterfly," van de Hoek says. "I wanted to call him up!" Monarchs, Pyle observed, roost in eucalyptus in the absence of their native conifers. He was angry that state land managers were cutting the "eucs" down. "He was angry at me," van de Hoek said, pressing binoculars to his face to count the fluttering masses above our heads, clinging there like rust-colored petals.
Slowly, van de Hoek began to see certain urban ecosystems, like the Ballona Wetlands, not as places in need of a heavy-handed fix, but as places in the process of evolving — not back to what they were before humans arrived, but into something just as wild, beautiful and ecologically significant.
Van de Hoek's philosophical transformation means he no longer goes around girdling trees. It has, however, thrown him into a bitter new dispute over the Ballona reserve's future. Officials with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the state Coastal Conservancy, allied with local nonprofits, have declared in notices of intent, blogs and an elegant website, BallonaRestoration.org, that the Ballona State Ecological Reserve needs to be restored. They want to tear out the ice plant and replace it with native marsh grasses. They want to bulldoze away old construction waste and tear down the levees that contain Ballona Creek, which cuts through the wetlands on its way to the ocean. They want to redesign the straightened creek so it meanders through the wetlands, mimicking a more natural stream.
Some local ecologists disagree with the state's specific plans, but still believe a restoration is in order. Hanscom, van de Hoek and their allies, however — who include local Sierra Club leaders, politicians and even some journalists — believe almost anything but the most gentle rehabilitation, conducted by hand, would be a disaster. As they await the state's long delayed environmental impact report for the restoration, they show up at county supervisor meetings, comment on blogs, and write letters to editors. If the restoration goes ahead, Hanscom told me, sweeping her hand over a carpet of green, less native than non, "everything that lives here now will die."
Why every discussion about the Ballona Wetlands divides environmentalists into camps so entrenched they can barely talk to one another is a question that stumps even some of the people involved in the fight. Wetlands matter, yes — they protect inland settlements from storms, offer habitat to birds, rodents and even coyotes. They treat inland runoff before it enters the ocean. They contain plants that exist nowhere else in the world. Southern California has lost 90 percent of its original 49,000 acres of coastal wetlands. For Los Angeles, Ballona is the very last patch.
But Ballona's significance goes beyond that. It's as if, in the concrete sprawl of the L.A. metropolis, where almost every view is owned and where fistfights erupt over beach access, any swath of undeveloped land takes on outsized significance. It becomes a place to project all of our hopes for healing the climate and saving imperiled species, and perhaps even wresting power back from bureaucracy and developers.
This, right now, is the burden of Ballona, a landscape caught between competing visions of what is good, desirable and even natural in urban wildlands. If restoration ecology, as British scientist A.D. Bradshaw declared in the 1980s, is the "acid test of the ecological movement," then Ballona is the acid test of the acid test — a place that might prove what restoration can, and perhaps should, achieve in an increasingly urbanized West.
The little eucalyptus grove where van de Hoek counted butterflies — 218 of them — once belonged to a 2,000-acre system of seeps, sand dunes, willow groves, mud flats, lagoon and marsh called Ballona (pronounced Bye-ona). The Tongva people fished and farmed here before early Spanish colonists forced them inland to build missions. Early-19th century Mexican ranchers grazed their cattle on marsh grasses. Later, oil extractors lined the beaches with derricks.
Then came the influx of post-war residents looking for homes near the sea. Howard Hughes bought up much of Ballona in the 1940s for his own personal airport; in the 1960s, parts of the wetland were carved out to create Marina del Rey, a recreational boat harbor surrounded by upscale shopping and high-rise apartments. After Hughes died in 1976, his heirs laid plans to transform what remained of the property into a 1,000-acre housing and retail development called Playa Vista, but a local resident, Ruth Lansford, mobilized to stop them, founding the first activist group to defend the area, Friends of Ballona Wetlands. In so doing, she launched one of the signal battles of the Los Angeles environmental movement.
In 1990, Lansford entered into an agreement with a new group of developers, who promised to preserve 297 acres of wetland in exchange for the Friends dropping their decades-old lawsuit against the development. That was never enough for Marcia Hanscom, who in 1995 founded the Wetlands Action Network to organize Playa Vista resistance. That same year, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen announced plans to locate their DreamWorks movie studio in Playa Vista, and the fight for Ballona became a blockbuster media event.
Celebrities led marches on the wetlands' behalf; one activist staged a hunger strike. Hanscom, then in her 40s, found herself organizing wetland tours for journalists from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. People who spent most of their time in dark theaters rode around on school buses learning about the lifecycle of the tidewater goby, a tiny fish gone from Ballona but native to California lagoons. They learned why the bright yellow mustard flowers blooming in the wetlands didn't belong, and why the ragged salt grass did. They learned that sloughs and marshes and springs once extended for 20 miles inland from the Southern California coast, and that Conservation International had, in 1996, identified the California Floristic Province from Tijuana, Mexico, to southern Oregon as one of 35 "biodiversity hotspots," rich with species found nowhere else on Earth.
Eventually, the DreamWorks partners pulled out, but Hanscom had already leveraged the spotlight they'd flicked on. Under the banner, "Citizens United to Save All of Ballona," she brought together more than 100 activist groups in pursuit of a sweeter deal. They didn't stop Playa Vista — its apartments and shops and parks now loom over the wetlands like an enemy compound — but they did get the state Coastal Conservancy to purchase another 192 acres from the developer. In 2003, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife bundled it up with the acreage Lansford had secured, and designated it all an ecological reserve. Playa Vista turned another 36 acres just outside the reserve's southeastern edge into a freshwater marsh to treat the development's runoff. In 2005, Hughes' heirs gave the state another 70 acres to settle a tax debt, and the modern boundaries of the reserve were set.
Little has been done around the wetlands since then. The "Friends," as they're known, conduct tours and do restoration whenever possible. Hanscom and van de Hoek, who in 2005 founded the nonprofit Ballona Institute, aren't allowed any official access and have uneasy dealings with everyone who does. The public has been officially shut out. In 2013, the Annenberg Foundation donated funds for a full-time land manager, and the state hired an ecologist, Richard Brody, the first in the preserve's history. The Annenberg money ran out last year, and California Fish and Wildlife now struggles to fund Brody's job. The Annenberg group also at one point made a bid to build an interpretative center on Ballona property that would have included a veterinary facility for stray cats and dogs. Amid intense opposition, last December the foundation backed out.
There's no getting around the reality that Ballona now suffers from the kind of entropy that sets in when any urban wildland has been left alone too long. Brody says he and his crew pulled out 15 tons of debris last year alone. "Needles, stolen luggage, trash," he says, much of it left behind by homeless people who use the preserve for campouts, constructing fire pits and setting up tents. Though fences surround parts of the reserve, labeled with signs warning "No Trespassing" and "No Dogs Allowed," people let their dogs run loose and trample the vulnerable, low-to-the-ground nests of the state-endangered Belding's savannah sparrow. Fountains of pampas grass blight the landscape with their feathery excess. Feral cats breed and roam and kill.
"We can't look at this and say this is a natural system, everything's fine and healthy," says Karina Johnston, director of watershed programs for the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Foundation, an independent nonprofit that supports the work of the state-run Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission. Nor can the necessary overhaul be accomplished with volunteer labor on weekends. "Over 3 million cubic yards of sediment have been dumped there," Johnston says bluntly. "It didn't get there with wheelbarrows."
In 2012, the Bay Commission solicited a historical ecology study of Ballona to figure out what the wetlands looked like during a period from 1850 to 1890. The idea was to inform a restoration with evidence from the past. But even the study's authors, Johnston says, disagree on its implications for restoration. An urban ecological reserve in a city of 5 million people is in some ways beyond redemption. Everything around it has been altered; it can't be returned to exactly what it was. So how close should a restoration try to get?
Like so many modern ecological movements, the one that informs the Ballona restoration began with Aldo Leopold. In 1935, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Leopold led a crew in replanting native tallgrass prairie on exhausted farmland, an installation that later became the centerpiece of the school's renowned arboretum. Fifty years later, two professors at the university, John Aber and William Jordan, formalized what they called "restoration ecology" as a field of study and practice. Aber saw it as a middle ground between exploitation and preservation, a way of acknowledging that humans can, if they put their collective will toward it, benefit nature.
Aber and Jordan were clear that the goal of restoration was to bring back the native plants and animals that inhabited an area before humans mucked it up. Even then, that wasn't easy: Leopold himself had come to understand that you can't bring back tallgrass prairie without the disturbances it evolved with, such as fire to kill woody plants that out-compete grasses. Well-intentioned replantings can also be brought down by the wrong vegetation mix: In 1975, a dune restoration near the Los Angeles International Airport, just down the street from Ballona, was stabilized with "native" plants that ended up encouraging insects whose competition nearly wiped out the El Segundo blue butterfly. The plants were native to Southern California, but not to the dune habitat where the butterfly had thrived.
Then there's the question of time: What point in the past should a restoration try to re-create? In 2005, the National Park Service and The Nature Conservancy began a violent restoration of Santa Cruz Island, off the Southern California coast, slaughtering feral pigs, burning tall fennel stands and relocating golden eagles, who had moved into the predator void left by DDT-ravaged bald eagles. The goal of the restoration was to return the island to what it was before 19th century ranchers colonized it. It was done primarily to save the endangered island fox.
That restoration has been a success, on its terms; since it was completed in 2007, the little fox has rebounded. But recent archaeological evidence suggests the fox might not be so indigenous. Thousands of years ago, gray foxes were brought to the islands by the Chumash Indians, who cherished them as companions; one theory suggests the island fox evolved from those animals. Whether that matters to you depends on which point in time you pick to consider the island "natural."
At Ballona, it's not just thousands of years of human influence that have made settling on a restoration epoch tricky. Earthquakes and weather, too, have altered the system through the years. Before 1825, the Los Angeles River emptied into the ocean at Ballona, and, with its relatively strong hydrologic force, kept the wetlands open to the tides. But after a series of seismic shocks and floods shoved the river's course south, only little Ballona Creek trickled down from the inland watershed, most years lacking the force to breach the dunes and let saltwater in. The creek petered out into the estuary, feeding a freshwater marsh.
In the late 1930s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lined the banks of Ballona Creek with concrete to protect the communities around it from flooding. Where the creek emptied into the ocean, now with enough directed force to keep a channel open again, the Corps built concrete levees to keep those tides away from land.
Right now, the Ballona Wetlands contain a mixture of ecologies replenished meagerly by urban runoff, winter rains and minimal tides through a single gate. Whether any restoration should, or even can, return them to their mostly freshwater 19th century condition is a matter of much agitated debate. The state's preferred plan would lower parts of the reserve to sea level and demolish the levees, allowing the tides to flow in and create more saltwater marsh. But that, says Travis Longcore, an associate professor of spatial sciences at the University of Southern California and an authority in ecological restoration, is "the wrong big move." Those levees, he says, mimic a lost feature of the wetland as it evolved since 1825.
"The levees now function like an outer dune system," Longcore explains, keeping the tides at bay. If you're restoring the Ballona Wetlands for the sake of the species that historically depended on it, minimizing the influx of saltwater matters.
Unlike Hanscom and van de Hoek, Longcore isn't completely opposed to a Ballona restoration. "I think there are smart things you could do with Ballona that would make it better ecologically, and function better for rare species that we care about," he says. "Some of them do require bulldozers." One would involve raising Culver Boulevard, a major street that bisects the wetlands. The wetlands could flow under the elevated road, connecting the north and south segments. Wildlife could then move freely under the road instead of ending up as roadkill. Culver Boulevard is also the official tsunami escape route, so raising it would be good for public safety, as well as a hedge against climate-influenced sea-level rise.
But Longcore, who is president of Los Angeles Audubon, also wants any restoration of Ballona to protect its current population of birds and animals. And that goal, he says, is often at odds with the state plan, which he believes imposes a simple, ostensibly low-maintenance ideal he calls "flush, baby, flush" on a complex and diverse ecology. That plan will have dire consequences for the habitat of certain species, like the federally endangered California gnatcatcher, a tiny bird recently spotted in Ballona's coastal scrub for the first time since 1880. The burrowing owl would also lose ground were seawater to flood its habitat, and more would be destroyed, at least temporarily, when fill from the excavation of a tidal basin gets dumped on upland habitat.
To underscore his argument, Longcore brings up another restoration, completed two years ago, 20 miles up the coast from Ballona, at Malibu Lagoon. Most local environmentalists consider the restoration — done chiefly for the sake of water quality — an unqualified success. The restoration did not open the lagoon to the ocean, as would the removal of Ballona Creek's levees, but it did create much more open water than existed there before, replacing an algae-clouded marsh with a clean, open lagoon. Biologists have reported that the populations of certain endemic fish, like the tidewater goby, are on the rise.
And yet Longcore believes that the restoration got it wrong. "Of course, there are tidewater gobies there," he says heatedly. "There were tidewater gobies there before." It's the other creatures that the $7 million state-run collaboration ran roughshod over that trouble him, animals like the south coast marsh vole. The vole, a state species of "special concern," also exists at Ballona; it occupies a wet, meadowy area, says Longcore, above the tidal zone. Before the restoration, Malibu Lagoon had a lot of habitat for the vole, which needs room to escape the incoming tides. The construction of the new estuary dredged and bulldozed most of it away to make way for more open water.
"So if you ask, 'Was the Malibu Lagoon project a successful restoration for the south coast marsh vole?' " Longcore says, "the answer would be no. They removed a lot of individuals. I don't know where they put them. Some specimens came to the natural history museum to be, you know, specimens."
I talked to Longcore in his basement office on campus, on a brisk, showery day in December. At 45, he is tall and energetic, with a fountain of short dark hair. He talks with his entire being, even while sitting in his chair. He is a consummate scholar: He has examined old surveyor accounts and 19th century coastal maps, and claims to have read every L.A. Times story that mentions Ballona. He has contributed to several historical ecology reports on California's coastal wetlands, including the one on Ballona curated by the Bay Commission. And he argues that Southern California is moving in the wrong direction when it comes to restoring coastal wetlands.
"We've had a San Francisco Bay model of wetland restoration cookie-cuttered onto almost all of our lagoon restorations here in Southern California," Longcore says. That model favors big, open bays and lagoons. A 1997 restoration of Batiquitos Lagoon on the North San Diego County coast jettied the mouth permanently open to the ocean; another wetland, Bolsa Chica, 30 miles down the coast from Ballona, was reconfigured nine years ago with a fully tidal lagoon. Longcore argues that such projects are not restorations, because they create permanent tidal openings where only ephemeral openings were found in the past. Instead, like Ballona, both Batiquitos and Bolsa Chica were blocked from the tides by sand bars and sediment, except when a major winter storm briefly blasted a tidal inlet clear.
Longcore shows me a color-coded map of the North San Diego County coast in the 19th century. The pink on the map represents "seasonally flooded salt flat," he says. Salt flats are dry most of the spring and summer, wet when rain falls or storms blow in. "And the reason they matter ecologically," says Longcore, "is that they provide seasonal habitat with different depths of water for all kinds of migratory birds: short shorebirds, tall shorebirds, dabbling ducks, diving ducks." Ninety-five percent of the North County salt flats are gone. Meanwhile, open water in the area's coastal wetlands has increased by 600 percent.
Wetland habitat "is hard for people to get their minds around," Longcore says. "It's neither fish nor fowl. You can drive a car across it sometimes; it's covered with water otherwise. People have a hard time designing for it," and the public has a hard time appreciating it. "You hear people say, 'Oh look! There's now an octopus in Bolsa Chica! Isn't this great? We have diversity!' But no, octopus do not belong in Bolsa Chica." Sea slugs, adapted to opening and closing systems, do.
Longcore knows it's a lot easier to love blue water than to embrace the messy, tattered, sometimes brown, sometimes mucky, salt flats. Even Longcore's wife thinks he's weak on messaging. "She says, 'Look, if your argument is, 'This stuff that looks ugly to people is good,' you're going to lose. Because politicians aren't going to spend the time to sit down and understand the history of coastal wetlands. As long as there's no homeless and no trash, and there's blue water to look at and it's green, they're going to be happy.' All they want to know is, 'Is this going to be pretty?' "
It was pouring rain the December day I met Shelley Luce for lunch at a French restaurant in Culver City, a few miles inland from the wetlands — a place once so verdant with riparian beauty that producers in the 1920s built studios here to shoot scenes of pioneers fording Ballona Creek. It was the kind of day that makes people like Luce, an environmental scientist, dream of freeing the city's streams from their confines, returning the region to its secret hydrological roots, when the Southern California landscape ran wet with creeks and sloughs.
Luce loves the old survey maps of this once-wet city as much as Longcore does. But historical ecology is "only a snapshot," she says, and she doesn't believe the wetlands have to be returned to what they were in 1850 for a restoration to be meaningful. And anyway, it can't be done: The riverine forces that once shaped the Ballona Valley, transporting rocks and sediment from the mountains through the watershed, no longer exist in the paved-over city. Now there are "gas lines and airports and private property," Luce says. "We have to consider what's possible."
Luce is 44, willowy and calm, and an influential coalition builder. She was a major player on the Ballona restoration until recently, when she left her post as director of the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission to serve as executive director for the nonprofit Environment Now. She still participates in the discussion, publishing a newsletter called Access Ballona and sitting on advisory committees. And she's still the scientist who makes the best case for the state's restoration plans.
Luce doesn't dispute Longcore's description of Ballona as closed to the tides. "It looks from the historical ecology that there was more freshwater than (salt marsh) at times," she says. Still, she wants those levees to come out, in part so that Ballona can join the citywide re-wilding effort revolving around the Los Angeles River, where the Army Corps last May approved a $1 billion project to demolish 11 miles of the river's 75-year-old concrete banks.
But she also wants the levees out because she wants the wetlands to be wet again, as they were back when free-flowing freshwater creeks and streams and occasional tides refreshed them. For the creeks to water the wetlands again, they would have to be released from their concrete culverts, and floodplains would have to be cleared of homes, offices and shopping malls. "That's not going to happen in my lifetime," Luce says. So let Ballona be what it can be: A self-sustaining, mostly tidal marsh. Saltwater marsh is habitat, too, and supporters of the restoration believe that certain species, like the endangered California least tern and the clapper rail, might rebound in the project's wake.
British restoration pioneer Bradshaw once described the American approach to restoration as: "If you can't put it back like it was … then don't do it!" But that, he wrote, is "a counsel of perfection leading only to despair." If a landscape has been altered beyond redemption, he said, it's OK to find another model for it — one that fits the local community, meshes with the local ecology, and accommodates the modern era and its inhabitants.
That's exactly what Luce believes the state's plan does. "We might create more saltwater marsh in Ballona than was there in 1850," she admits. "It might be closer to the way things looked in 1650. We don't know." Either way, she says, there's a net gain for coastal wetlands. "We've lost a lot of salt marsh up and down the coast, too," Luce says, though only a handful of those areas were ever fully open to the ocean. "We have an opportunity to get one or the other back at Ballona, and both are good. The salt marsh option just means we'll have something that might be more sustainable over time."
Longcore disagrees. If Ballona is opened to the tides, it will need periodic expensive dredging to stay that way, because sediment happens. And beyond what an expanded salt marsh would do to displace existing habitat, he worries about what will happen to the resident animals during construction.
Luce admits some will die, even if you take great care not to kill them. "None of us like it," she says. "But we're doing it because two years later, the whole place will come back 10 times better."
There's no guarantee of that, of course. Bradshaw considered restoration the best test of ecologists' understanding of nature, but he knew back then that their understanding of nature wasn't perfect. It isn't now, either. Any restoration is to some extent a risk: No one knows for sure whether any altered landscape or its biodiversity will come back better, worse, or simply different.
Roy van de Hoek no longer gives tours of the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve. In 2008, he got into a dustup with Brody, then a biological consultant for state Fish and Wildlife, who had covered a segment of the wetland with a tarp to smother alien vegetation without herbicides. The goal was to restore native milk vetch, which had been wiped out in the wetlands in the 1950s. Van de Hoek objected — too vehemently — that the tarp would also kill squirrels, voles and Pacific chorus frogs. He was subsequently banned from the reserve.
So it was without his and Hanscom's company that I trespassed into the reserve myself, around sunset one Sunday afternoon, walking around behind a pocket park where only wooden stumps and signs warned me away.
Lizards skittered under my feet, and ducks landed out on a bare circle of sand known as the "horse-riding ring," because at one point, that's what it was. I took a deep breath and inhaled the bright, green breeze, thick with sea and flora. I walked among tendrils of California salt grass and stands of pickleweed, plants whose names I knew mostly because van de Hoek taught me to revere them a decade ago, back when he believed they were sacred, and told me to kneel upon the ground in their presence.
No one stopped me, so I kept walking. Out onto the sandy riding ring, which was covered with footprints both human and canine — coyote, maybe; domestic dog, more likely. The ducks startled away. I walked and walked, sneezing through fields of non-native yellow crown daisy, tripping over bouncy succulents. But I never felt at ease. I was alone in an unsafe city. I was breaking the law. I worried about the Belding's savannah sparrow, nesting all around me in the pale green fingers of pickleweed.
And yet the Ballona Wetlands is still an enchanted, astonishing place, where nature persists on whatever terms civilization has allowed. I could see the adaptability Hanscom and van de Hoek so worshipped. But I also wanted trails, interpretative signs, a place to sit and think. What if I, and so many people who live nearby, could go for an evening walk in the reserve, counting the least terns and bufflehead ducks? How might that change life in our crowded and overdeveloped city?
I thought about what Shelley Luce had told me, that she considers it "a crime on the part of public agencies that, 10 years after the purchase, (Ballona) is not one iota more accessible." I also thought about what Longcore said, that the wetlands' fate isn't a matter of public opinion; it's a scientific call. "It is," he says, "an ecological reserve." And I thought it not so far-fetched that Ballona could be both an ecological reserve and a place the public could enjoy, with rules, and guidance. Designing for that would require a process that has been difficult to conduct around the Ballona Wetlands, ever since the rifts broke open around Playa Vista and the wetlands became a battleground. It would require open public meetings, leadership, stakeholders willing to hash out a compromise, and a steady stream of money for care and maintenance.
A constructive process could arise around the state's environmental review when it comes out at the end of the year. Or it could be thwarted by more internecine acrimony in the lawsuits that will inevitably follow. Land manager Brody, at least, still has faith. "I look forward to the day when I meet all of these people out on the trail in the reserve," he says. "It's going to be a great place."
Update: The original version of this story said that Roy van de Hoek girdled eucalyptus while a Bureau of Land Management employee; he actually did that two years after leaving his job with the agency.
Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor at High Country News. She has also written for Sierra, Capital and Main, TakePart, The Atlantic and the Los Angeles Times. Follow @judlew]]>
Twenty-six years later, on a chill night near the mouth of the Columbia River, Dixon — a barrel-chested man with a beard the color and texture of polar bear fur — climbed onto a stage in Astoria, Oregon, to read a new poem, "Exit Strategy," to a rapt audience of 200. In a clear, unhurried voice, he intoned:
I shall leave today,
motor through a school of leaping fish
stretching from the river mouth
to the horizon's soft curve,
sluice my bow through a green
ocean swell, tide on my stern,
sun white alongside, burning
reflection in a moving mirror.
Dixon was among the 87 commercial fishermen who'd come to perform at the 18th annual Fisher-Poets Gathering, a weekend-long celebration of maritime verse. Readers came from Cordova, Alaska; Camden, Maine; Jyväskylä, Finland. On the streets, pickup trucks sported bumper stickers condemning salmon farms and the overreach of the National Marine Fisheries Service. Baseball caps and facial hair were de rigueur.
"This is our party, and we're doing it our way," Jon Broderick, Fisher-Poets' founder, told me. Broderick is a former high school teacher who chases salmon in Alaska's Bristol Bay with his sons every summer. He's also a talented songwriter, and he'd followed Dixon's reading with a swaying, klezmer-inflected ode to an alluring female cannery worker. "There's nothing ersatz or kitsch or phony about it."
"Write what you know," they say, and it's a maxim the fisher-poets have taken to heart. Their verse serves as a crash course in the daily rituals and hard-won knowledge of their profession. John Palmes, a hand-troller from Juneau, tore through a song about humpback salmon's singular preference for pink lures (as opposed to coho, which favor chartreuse). Doug Rhodes, from Craig, Alaska, drew reliable laughs by poking fun at the government's regulatory ineptitude. Rob Seitz, a trawler from Los Osos, California, performed "Tribute to the Five-Gallon Bucket," a bit of doggerel about the hazards of at-sea defecation:
The water from the bucket would get your backside drenched
Kind of like those toilets designed by the French.
Even love and lust, poetry's most timeless concerns, were contemplated through a briny lens. From Erin Fristad, of Port Townsend, Washington: "She engulfs me like she has the mouth of a lingcod / I know that shouldn't be sexy, but it is." The landlubbers in the audience giggled uncertainly.
On the festival's final evening, a standing-room-only crowd packed into a waterfront restaurant that jutted out over the Columbia on wooden pilings. Rust-colored tankers glowed in the fiery sunset; sea lions honked beneath the pier. At the front of the room, a mop-haired veterinarian named Meezie Hermansen stood at the mic. Hermansen has fished summers in Cook Inlet since she was a child — "I knew I was a fisherman before I knew I was a woman"—and she'd started writing poetry in college to amuse her friends. Fisher-Poets had long been on her bucket list, and her set at the 2011 gathering was the first time she'd ever read in public.
"Now I think about the event all year long," she told me. She's inseparable from her notebook. "I've written poems out on the skiff, which is not the most convenient place to have something come to you."
Onstage, Hermansen had time for one more poem. "Back home in Alaska, there are some proposed projects that stand to threaten our wild salmon stocks and habitat," she said. She ticked off the dangers: coal mines that would bury streams, dams that would obstruct rivers, the Pebble copper mine in Bristol Bay. Her voice low and lyrical, she launched into the piece without notes:
We need to realize
Open our steel eyes
Before we jeopardize
What we should all esteem.
There is a place for enterprise
But we need to analyze and scrutinize
As they attempt to minimize and -capitalize
For we all live downstream.
The crowd applauded at poem's end, and Hermansen smiled shyly as she left the stage.
To read and listen to more Fisher-Poetry by Dixon, Broderick, Hermansen and other performers, check out In the Tote.]]>
On April 15, protesters swarmed downtown Seattle carrying signs displaying slogans in English and Spanish: "Raise the Minimum Wage," "Because the Rent Won't Wait," "4 Jobs No Time to Sleep Help Momma Get $15 per Hr." They occupied fast-food restaurants and clustered outside Uber's corporate offices, chanting, "We can see your greedy side!" Twenty-one people linked arms and sat in the street in front of a glass-enclosed Ferrari dealership, moving only when arrested.
All over the country, adjunct professors, home health-care workers and employees of McDonalds, Taco Bell, Wal-Mart, Target and other corporations took to the streets to demand a $15-an-hour minimum wage. In Seattle, the protests were partly to support workers elsewhere, because on April 1, that city had already become one of the first to offer a $15 minimum wage, which will be phased in over the next few years.
Other West Coast progressive hubs have started to follow suit, and so far, they're the only places in the country where the "Fight for $15" has prevailed. Seattle's raise followed the success of a 2013 ballot measure in SeaTac, a suburb to the south, which gave a small subset of workers in this airport town $15 an hour and paid sick leave. Last fall, San Francisco voters approved a phased-in $15 minimum; Los Angeles and the state of Oregon are considering the same.
The West's low-wage workers are steadily losing economic ground. Wages haven't kept up with cost-of-living increases in many communities, whether the booming tech centers like Seattle and San Francisco, where rents are soaring, or the service-driven "amenity" and tourist towns like Aspen, Flagstaff and Durango, where second-home owners and retirees distort the housing market for working stiffs.
And in many states, average folks have benefited only marginally, if at all, from recent economic growth. According to a recent Economic Policy Institute report, between 1979 and 2007, only the wealthiest 1 percent in Nevada, Wyoming and Alaska enjoyed rising incomes; the average incomes of the 99 percent in those states fell. Over the same time period, the wealthiest 1 percent in Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico, California, Washington, Montana and Utah claimed between 50 and 84 percent of all income growth. "Today SeaTac, tomorrow the nation?" asked a Seattle Times columnist in 2013. Many Western workers hope the answer is a resounding "yes."
Their dream may not be completely quixotic. It's not just Left Coasters who support raising pay. Last fall, voters in Arkansas, South Dakota and Nebraska voted to hike their lowest pay above the $7.25 federal minimum wage, which adjusting for inflation, is more than $3 lower than it was in 1968, when its real value peaked. Alaska voters raised theirs from $7.75 to $9.75 by 2016.
While minimum wage workers in Seattle, SeaTac and San Francisco were already making more than $7.25, the new $15 minimum represents a raise of between 40 and 60 percent. And yet it still might not be enough to allow them to live in the cities where they work. According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology's living wage calculator, a single adult supporting a child and working full-time in Seattle would need to earn $20.53 to cover monthly expenses; in San Francisco, that worker would need $26.03.
Higher minimum wages alone won't rectify income inequality. There's no guarantee, even, that every low-wage worker will see higher take-home pay, explains University of Washington economist Jacob Vigdor. A restaurant owner adjusting to higher labor costs might notice she does little business in the first hour, for example, and start opening at 11 a.m. instead of 10. "Every worker on payroll from 10 to 11 is not getting paid for that hour anymore," Vigdor says. "If your higher wage is offset by lower hours, your income might not go up." From another perspective, when your time is valued more, you might be able to choose to work less, in order to, say, spend more time with your kids.
Opponents of minimum wage increases argue that they kill jobs, raise prices for consumers and may force some small businesses to close. However, a study conducted for the city of Seattle on wage hikes in places like Santa Fe and San Francisco, two of the first to raise wages above their states' minimums, found no statistically significant impact on overall job numbers, or rates of business openings and closings.
Still, there's no precedent for a raise this substantial. The only way to determine the impact is to carry out the experiment. Vigdor and his university colleagues will study its outcomes over the next five years. Among other things, they'll follow workers and businesses to capture the nuances — like the aforementioned restaurant example — that are often lost in faceless, data-driven studies. Vigdor expects to find that the raise helps some and hurts others. Whether the benefits ultimately outweigh the costs, he says, is a question not for science but for society: It's a question of values.
From a policy perspective, Vigdor thinks the minimum wage is a relatively blunt tool for alleviating poverty. More focused, he says, is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which, through a hefty tax refund, increases the year-end take-home pay of low-wage workers in low-income households, though not, say, a teenager who works but doesn't need to help his parents pay rent. But Washington has no state income tax, so instituting such a credit in addition to the federal one wasn't an option. And politically — even morally — the minimum wage is a powerful symbol. "It's easier to rally people around," Vigdor explains. "If you want to talk about a policy to benefit the poor that you can actually get done, we've seen the evidence come in from all over the country: The minimum wage is something you can get done."
Indeed. Between the time Seattle Mayor Ed Murray convened the labor-business task force that crafted Seattle's ordinance and the city council's passage of it, less than six months passed. "History has its way of unfolding in moments," says David Rolf, the head of Service Employees International Union 775 in Seattle, and co-chair of the task force. "There is pent-up demand for something to be done about stagnant wages." Perhaps it's surprising that $15 happened so quickly in Seattle, he says, "or perhaps it's more surprising it hadn't happened sooner."]]>
For many Crow Indians, the thick coal seam running below their Montana reservation seems like a savior. With over half the adult population unemployed, and lacking adequate housing or healthcare, a new agreement to mine coal for export with Cloud Peak Energy, one of the world's largest coal companies, could prove a lifeline for the tribe in the form of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yet opposition to export terminals in the Pacific Northwest has reached a fever pitch, with residents, mayors and environmental groups lining up to protest the pollution and traffic congestion that would accompany this new portal to the global fossil fuel trade. Ultimately, the fate of the Gateway Pacific Terminal may rest with the Lummi Indians, a Native American tribe in Puget Sound whose treaty rights under federal law guarantee them access to hunt and fish their native lands near the proposed terminal site. Many Lummi are concerned that the proposed coal terminal would pollute the fishing grounds they depend on and defile the ancient cultural sites that sustain their traditions.
Environmental reviews for the terminal are expected in 2016.]]>
Complaints about pesticide drift are nothing new in Oregon communities abutting private timber lands, where the spraying occurs; the state's rules governing the practice are the weakest on the West Coast. But the high profile Gold Beach incident added urgency to rural residents' and environmentalists' calls for reform.State Senate Bill 613, introduced this February by Portland Democratic Senator Michael Dembrow and Lake Oswego Democratic Representative Ann Lininger, looked like their best hope. It would have required advance public notification of spraying, so that rural residents would know when to move livestock and pets, shut windows, and stay out of recently treated areas. Currently, the industry has a 12-month window to spray after notifying the Oregon Department of Forestry; it does not have to provide a specific date. The bill also would have forced companies to disclose the chemicals involved, and required the state to set buffers around homes and schools. As it stands, the state calls for 60-foot buffers around salmon streams and along stretches upstream of a drinking water intake, but nothing for wells or residences.
But SB613 died under industry pressure April 10 without ever receiving a hearing, even though it was weaker than rules in neighboring Washington. Going into 2015 with a freshly strengthened Democratic majority in the Legislature, "everyone was predicting the greenest legislation in 20 years," says Steve Pedery, conservation director at Oregon Wild. But when it comes to timber in Oregon – as with ranching in Rocky Mountain states, or oil drilling in North Dakota – alliances don't forge neatly along political party lines.
The first sign of trouble came when Eugene Democrat Chris Edwards, who has received far more in campaign contributions from the timber industry, according to the Oregonian, replaced Dembrow as chairman of the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee. There, the bill went into a work group instead of a hearing – and never came out.
Meanwhile, Clatskanie Democrat Rep. Brad Witt, who has received hefty contributions from timber and chemical interests, convened a competing work group in the House to come up with alternative proposals, but refused to consider advance notification on the grounds that it could tip off ecoterrorists who might attack sprayers. "It was impossible for me to make a call on whose safety (neighboring property owners or people making the aerial sprays) is more important," he told The Register-Guard.
The surviving bills call for what the timber and pesticide industries have argued for all along: increased penalties and strengthened oversight, rather than changing the rules. They would create a toll-free hotline to report incidents, funnel more money from pesticide registration fees to the state's Pesticide Analytical and Response Center, which investigates incidents, and instate new licensing requirements for helicopter pilots. "Part of the reason for the frustration for rural residents is that the state's response was poor," Salem Democratic Rep. Brian Clem, told the paper. The measures, many of which he introduced, would mean "better and faster investigations."
Pedery's not so sure. "It's hard to say whether it's better than the status quo. But none of those things do anything to address why complaints are actually happening."
And at least one, House Bill 3429, might make it worse by "effectively requiring" Pesticide Analytical and Response Center board members "to either currently be employed by the pesticide and logging industries, or have been employed by those industries in the past," thus compromising its independence, Pedery argued in April 15 testimony. "Oregon is supposed to be this great green Nirvana of the Northwest," he says, but "the politics around timber are still stuck in the '70s."
Sarah Gilman is a contributing editor at High Country News. Follow @Sarah_Gilman]]>
Nearly all of those planned and approved "communities" still sit empty. The housing bust killed, or at least stalled indefinitely, the mad rush into the desert, but it was aided and abetted by demographic shifts and a renewed desire to live somewhere besides a placeless suburbia. People were ditching their cars and the long and expensive commute. They gave up the dream of homeownership and headed instead to apartments in the urban core and along public transit lines. Even as the fringe building frenzy withered into the desert, the downtowns of Denver, Phoenix, Tucson and even Las Vegas were getting new life, reversing the declines that began back in the '50s. If sprawling suburbia wasn't dead, it was at least taking a pause for the first time since World War II.
The hiatus appears to be over. A year ago, we reported that population growth patterns had shifted, and that suburban areas had again become the fastest growing places in the nation. Now it looks like new development is revving back up again, too, or at least it's trying. A couple of examples:
• On the west edge of Albuquerque, developers have proposed turning almost 14,000 acres of undeveloped land into a master planned community called Santolina. If it gets county approval, Santolina could someday have 38,000 households and nearly 100,000 people, or about one-fifth the current population of Albuquerque. Growth trends would have to kick up quite a bit to fulfill the plans, though. Albuquerque's population increased by just 10,000 between 2010 and 2013. Homebuilding is sluggish, at best. And the city currently has more than 16,000 vacant housing units and hundreds of empty lots in subdivisions approved during the last building boom. Meanwhile, Albuquerque's main urbanized footprint still has plenty of open areas that could be developed to house an influx of population, if there ever is one.
• A proposal to build Villages at Vigneto, a Tuscan-inspired, mixed-use development containing some 28,000 homes slated for the desert south of Benson, Arizona, is currently going through the permitting process. Yes, that's Tuscan-inspired, not Tucson-inspired, though the development will essentially be a detached exurb of the latter. Benson's about 45 miles southeast of downtown Tucson, with a sizable swath of open desert between Tucson's urban fringe and the planned development, making it classic, Arizona leapfrog-style sprawl. If built out as planned, the Villages will dwarf Benson, population 5,000 (and shrinking, according to Census data). A similar development in the same place was first proposed years ago, during the housing boom, but went dormant during the Recession. Tucson's once rapid growth and fringe development also slowed considerably during the downturn, and housing prices remain relatively low.
Both planned developments are in areas that are water-challenged even in wet years, a condition currently made worse by long-term droughts that are gripping the Southwest. Snowpack in the headwaters of the Rio Grande is at 35 percent of average for this time of year, and similarly dismal in the San Juan Basin, which Albuquerque relies on for water via the San Juan/Chama Diversion. Most of Arizona is in some degree of drought, too. Santolina will likely need to buy up water rights from farmers in the area, thus drying up fields, in order to keep all those projected faucets flowing. The Villages at Vigneto, meanwhile, will pull water from an aquifer that has connections to the ecologically-rich San Pedro River, potentially impacting the river or a nearby wetlands, the only one of its kind remaining in the protected watershed, according to the Arizona Daily Star. It's well established that low-density, single-family home development, i.e. sprawl, is less energy- and water-efficient, than compact, urban development.
In addition to these rather grandiose plans, there are other signs of a comeback of sorts for pre-bust growth patterns. Cheap gas prices are not only helping sales of big cars and drawing some ridership away from transit, but it also makes living out in the suburbs less expensive. And the most recent Census data show that suburban areas are among the fastest growing places in the nation; Western cities in the top 10 include St. George, Utah, Bend, Oregon, and Greeley, Colorado.
So does this mean we've just gone back to those pre-Recession days of unfettered sprawl? Nope. Not yet, at least. The archetypical exurb of Buckeye, for example, issued about 750 building permits last year. That's more than in the depth of the Recession, but a fraction of what was issued during boom times, and those zombie subdivisions are still looking pretty dead. And a look at building permit statistics for Western states reveals an interesting trend: Yes, there is a rebound in construction, in general, but there's a significant surge in multi-family home construction, even in areas like Tempe and Phoenix, Arizona, where very little of such building occurred in the past.
Meanwhile, the urban renaissance that blossomed during the downturn shows no signs of wilting. If any Western city represents the return of the downtown, it's Denver, and multi-family, mixed-use development is going gangbusters there. Tucson's urban core has been spruced up significantly with the help of a new streetcar line. Phoenix's downtown continues slowly to come back to life, as well, and its inner-ring suburbs — Tempe, Mesa — are doing well. Even some outer-ring suburbs are hankering for light rail and pushing to become, well, less suburban.
Chances are, Santolina and the Villages at Vigneto and many other "communities" like them will get the go-ahead from local governments, with or without a proven water supply. The question is: Will people actually want to live there? Or will they just become the zombie subdivisions of the future?
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News.


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Geology Hike to Sculptured and Santa Maria Beach
- Travel & Outdoor
- Point Reyes Station, CA, 94956
Birds of the Delta —A Natural History Cruise
Point Reyes Field Institute
Saturday, February 22, 2014 from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM (PST)
Come aboard for a wonderful day exploring the rich habitats of the California Delta system. Our trip will begin in Antioch and we'll cruise the meandering tidal channels in comfort aboard the Delphinus or River Dolphin with their high viewing platforms. We'll search for shorebirds, raptors and thousands of waterfowl, such as Tundra Swans, Snow Geese, White-fronted Geese, numerous ducks and even stately Sandhill Cranes that spend the winter in the Delta. In previous years, participants have sighted six or more species of raptors in the first hour, including harriers, kites and Peregrine Falcons. Enjoy a specialized look at the rich natural and human history of the California Delta at a time of year when bird life is abundant.
We are the primary nonprofit park partner of the National Park Service at Point Reyes. With community support we are helping to fund and implement resource preservation projects within the park, while also providing people a way to explore, discover and connect with the natural world through our environmental education programs.
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