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The drenching we got this spring didn't help Lake Mead; in early June, its water level was only a foot and a half above the threshold that triggers mandatory water cutbacks in Arizona and Nevada. But what's bad news for desert dwellers might be good for book sales. Paolo Bacigalupi, HCN's former Web editor, has a new sci-fi novel out, The Water Knife, set in a Southwest beset by never-ending megadrought. The thriller, which sprang from a short story originally published in HCN ("The Tamarisk Hunter," 6/2/06), chronicles the increasingly deadly struggle for water — between states, between rich and poor — and follows the exploits of a "detective, assassin and spy" for the Southern Nevada Water Authority. The L.A. Times lauded Bacigalupi for making "water politics sexy." Write on, Paolo! See our recent interview.
Werner Hanicke came all the way from Germany to visit his old friend, longtime Paonia resident, Ulli Lange. In 1988, a year before the Berlin Wall fell, the East German government allowed the British-born rock star Joe Cocker to perform in Dresden. Cocker, who died last year, lived in Crawford, Colorado, just down the road from Paonia, in the '90s. He dedicated that concert to freedom and made a huge impression on the two Germans, who later helped dedicate the park where he played with a placard identifying it as Cockerwiese, or "Cocker Meadow."
Deane and Debra Fehrman dropped by on their way to Cedaredge, down valley from Paonia. Subscribers for over 20 years, they prefer to savor Western news late at night, on a full stomach. After a mind-numbing day at work, Deane, an auto appraiser, says he likes the "time to reflect."
Gerald Espinosa, who stopped by after Memorial Day, visited us once before. In April, he met office manager Kathy Martinez, who was pulling weeds outside our office. She gave him a couple issues of the magazine and talked to him about life in Paonia. Instead of moving to Denver as planned, the 20-something Gerald decided to stick around. "I'm making a go of it," he says. He picked up work on a farm and at Solar Energy International, a local nonprofit. Welcome to town, Gerald! The Paonia Youth Retention Committee is always accepting applications.]]>
Of course, the river's green color is a reminder that a new world has been created here. It happened in 1963, with the completion of Glen Canyon Dam, which impounds the Colorado above the canyon. Behind the dam, the river became Lake Powell, and the sediment it carried settled out in the slack water. Today, some 95 percent of the fine sediment that once churned through the canyon in a river the color of creamy coffee is trapped behind the dam. For the beaches, this means that though the river still robs them of sand, as it always has, it no longer gives much back, as it did when sediment-rich springs floods were common events. For decades, the beaches have been slowly eroding away.
In 2012, then Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a major change in dam operations to build the sandbars up again: Any year conditions were right, strategically timed surges of water would be released from Lake Powell to create artificial floods, which would mobilize sediment spit into the canyon by tributaries downstream of the dam. This month, in an article in EoS, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, scientists reported that three years in, the new strategy is working as intended. Many sandbars are growing again. "So far, so good," says Jack Schmidt, a watershed scientist at Utah State University, and the former head of the U.S. Geological Survey Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center. "The cumulative results of the first three releases suggest that sandbar declines may be reversed if controlled floods can be implemented frequently enough," lead author Paul Grams, a colleague of Schmidt's, wrote in EoS.
The ability to increase the frequency of floods was the big coup of the 2012 policy shift. The first experimental flood ran in 1996, and two more were unleashed in 2004 and 2008. "Each one was its own political battle behind the scenes," says Schmidt, taking years of careful planning and negotiation. The floods, after all, have costs: They're run in the fall, and require the hydropower plant in the dam to run at full capacity at a time when demand for power is not especially high. And since only a certain amount of water is released from Lake Powell each year, in accordance with agreements between states in the Colorado River Basin, that means there's a bit less available when demand peaks. Additionally, some water bypasses the turbines during floods; its value for power production is lost altogether. "The enormous policy decision that was made by this administration was to ... not put political or administrative hurdles in front of having a flood. A flood could occur anytime nature allowed it."
And for the last three years, nature has delivered just the right conditions. Productive monsoon rains washed ample amounts of sediment into the Paria River, the first tributary downstream of Glen Canyon Dam, and the main contributor of sediment to the Grand in the post-dam world. Scientists monitor the accumulation of sand in the mainstem Colorado during monsoon season, and if it passes a certain threshold, controlled floods can be used to churn it up and deliver it to sandbars.
"It's a bit of triage," says Schmidt. "You're trying to play the best hand you can with not very good cards in your deck," since so much of the sand is still trapped behind the dam. The researchers also note in EoS that the continued success of floods as a management tool is dependent on good monsoons in the future. But how seasonal storm patterns in the Southwest might be affected by climate change is still highly uncertain.
Like the sandbars, humpback chub -- an endangered fish, and the last chub species native to the canyon that persists there today -- have also had a few good growth years. That appears to have less to do with floods than drought, however. The Colorado River is much colder than it was before the dam, because water is discharged from deep in the reservoir. That change in temperature seems to be the primary variable limiting chub growth, which is important because if young fish don't grow, they'll likely be eaten by other fish. Growth is the key to survival.
"The magic number for chub is 12 degrees Celsius," says Ted Kennedy, a biologist with the Grand Canyon Research and Monitoring Center. If the water temperature is below 12 degrees, they won't grow; if it's higher, they will. When Lake Powell is full, the dam's intakes pull water from the coldest layer of water, which is consistently between 8 and 11 degrees. But when it's low, as it is now, that chilly layer drops, and the intakes instead pull from a warmer layer, where sun-baked surface water and frigid deepwater mix. "Last year, release temps were 14, 15 degrees," says Kennedy.
While that's good news for fish, for now, it also underscores the limits of tweaking dam management to benefit the ecosystems the structure has transformed. "The number one thing we can probably do for these chubs," says Kennedy, "is something that's out of our control right now."
Cally Carswell is an HCN contributing editor, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Follow her on Twitter @callycarswell]]>
A couple of months later, in a rare display of outspokenness on a controversial policy matter, eight scientists published a high-profile commentary in the journal Nature, calling for a moratorium on new development of the oil sands, and of the transportation infrastructure necessary to increase production. Last week, the same scientists released a "consensus statement" expanding their argument for the moratorium as well as their list of supporters. This time, 103 American and Canadian scientists signed on.
The National Energy Board's refusal to consider pipelines' climate impacts is a prime and disturbing example of a broken policy process, says Wendy Palen, a freshwater ecologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and lead author of the Nature article. Before the hearings for pipeline proposals, she says, the National Energy Board defines the scope of its review by publishing a list of issues that can be covered. "In the list, they specifically forbid consideration of any cumulative effects," Palen says. "They specifically forbid any testimony of what happens upstream of the pipeline, in terms of additional mining and refining. And you're not allowed to discuss what happens to the products after they leave the pipelines," and are burned.
But the upstream, downstream and cumulative effects are the things that really matter, the scientists argue. While any one pipeline won't make or break future development of the oil sands, together the pipelines being proposed in North America promise to vastly expand the production and use of one of the world's dirtiest fuels. And if that happens, it will be exceedingly difficult to keep global temperatures from rising beyond the 2 degree C threshold that global leaders agree is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Chelsie Klassen, a spokesperson for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, points out that per-barrel greenhouse gas emissions from the oil sands have decreased by 30 percent since 1990. "Canada's oil sands are an important part of meeting the world's energy needs," she said, "and demands for a moratorium on development simply ignore this reality."
Since 1990, however, total emissions in Canada from the mining and initial refining of oil sands have risen by 180 percent. And according to a Pembina Institute report based on government estimates, by 2020 the industry's emissions could be twice as high as they were in 2010, putting Canada on track to miss its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction targets. A study published earlier this year, also in Nature, looked at the quantity and location of global fossil fuel reserves, and estimated which needed to stay in the ground in order to meet the 2 degree goal. The report concluded that Canadian oil sands production must vastly decrease after 2020 to stave off more extreme warming — the opposite of what is likely to happen under current policy.
"We need to focus not just on the pieces, but on the whole," says Tom Sisk, one of Palen's co-authors, and the director of the Landscape Conservation Initiative at Northern Arizona University.
During a press conference last week, the scientists calling for the moratorium said they are not suggesting the entire industry be shut down tomorrow. "(But) what the research shows is we shouldn't be doubling down or quadrupling down on the production," said Mark Jaccard, an energy economist at Simon Fraser University, noting that models agree that you can't keep expanding oil sands production and meet global climate targets.
"The risks are largest for Alberta continuing on the current path," noted Thomas Homer-Dixon, a global security expert at the University of Waterloo. "This is an economic dead end because there will ultimately be a price for carbon. The less risky path is to explore alternatives that involve extraction of less carbon intensive fuels."
The same principle applies to the Colorado Plateau, says Sisk, which has its own reserves of unconventional, high-carbon fuels. The oil sands and oil shale industries are still fledging here, he says, but efforts to develop these resources are underway in Utah. "Any scenario for developing these resources is very consumptive of water," Sisk says, and water is one thing the Colorado River Basin doesn't have to spare. "This development could make our ability to adapt to climate change that much more difficult."
Cally Carswell is an HCN contributing editor based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thumbnail image from a rally against Kinder Morgan's proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline, courtesy Flickr user Mark Klotz.
Follow @callycarswell]]>
Today, Whitham is a meticulous and accomplished ecologist based at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He wears round glasses, a gray goatee and, when outdoors, an oiled leather cowboy hat. His love of nature hasn't wavered. At last count, his home garden boasted 120 species of native conifers, poplars, shrubs and grasses. In the field, he always carries a camera, and even at sites he's studied for decades, he still finds things worth photographing. But he thinks the frontier is dead. He is no longer optimistic about nature healing itself. The challenges — a climate in disorder, a looming sixth extinction, and people, always more people, always seduced by short-term gain — have grown too big, too fast. "We live everywhere and we're affecting everything," Whitham says. "My senior colleagues, some of them use the 'f-word.' Some of them think we can't do anything."
Whitham, however, prefers not to dwell on the negative. "We don't need another study to tell us how bad things are," he says. Lots of damaged landscapes need help right now, and that need will only increase as global temperatures rise and warp the local conditions to which organisms are adapted. What we need to know is: How do we take action to sustain plants and animals through the turmoil ahead?
Whitham believes the answers lie in an unexpected place: The DNA of species so common we usually take them for granted. As Whitham and his colleagues have researched the Southwest's cottonwoods and piñon pines, they've introduced groundbreaking new ideas about how these trees' genetic traits influence the community of surrounding organisms, and even shape entire ecosystems. If their discoveries hold true in kelp beds, coral reefs, tropical forests and desert shrublands — and so far, they have — they may transform our understanding of how everything in the web of life is connected.
That could make today's restoration efforts more successful, and even help managers take the kind of radical leaps that conservationists increasingly say are necessary to prevent extinctions: Moving species to more favorable habitats, for example, without making things worse in the process. But for now, the most revolutionary idea to emerge from Whitham's work is perhaps the simplest: Saving a large number of species has everything to do with saving the few they all depend on.
Whitham grew up in the tiny town of Agency, Iowa, with an oak and hickory forest nearby. His father, Lloyd, ran a wholesale nursery, selling big trees to banks, which paid good money for the image of stability that they imparted. Lloyd also bred new varieties for landscaping, including a frost-resistant yew that could survive a couple hundred miles farther north than other varieties. A green thumb ran in the family: Whitham studied nursery management and plant pathology in college. And though he decided not to take over the family business, his interest in trees — an inheritance, of sorts — inspired his future research.
A little way north of Salt Lake City, where the University of Utah is located, flows the Weber River. It originates high in the Uinta Mountains and gurgles through small farming and mining towns before draining into the Great Salt Lake. Whitham wandered the Weber's banks, which were lined with sun-speckled cottonwood galleries. The trees were familiar, though in Iowa the cottonwood was considered "kind of a lowly tree," he remembers. "It produces a lot of debris, it's not really long-lived. If you plant one next to your house, the wind could blow it over."
In the Southwest, however, the tree is special. Cottonwoods are one of the few big deciduous trees that grow wild in the region, and, together with willows, they anchor native riverside habitat. Cottonwood galleries are home to insects, birds and animals, and the trees themselves are beautiful — flushing a brilliant, glittering gold every fall. Though not endangered, they are vastly depleted, thanks to overgrazing by cattle, overzealous cutting, and the damming and diversion of wild rivers, whose seasonal ebbs and flows are critical for cottonwood reproduction.
Whitham began to look closely at the Weber River's two resident species — Fremont and narrowleaf cottonwoods — searching for interesting patterns. A milky, soft-bodied aphid caught his eye. The bug attacks the trees each spring, forming a hollow gall just below the leaf, where it feeds, reproduces and hides from predators. Whitham noticed that one cottonwood might attract millions, while another tree of the same species, only feet away, had none.
There were two possible explanations: There could have been something different about the trees' environment, with one spot slightly drier or warmer, creating some change that the aphid preferred, perhaps in leaf shape or size. Or something in the trees' DNA could have conferred natural pest resistance on some trees. "The trees were so close together, it almost had to be genetic," Whitham says. "But I was still kind of surprised to see it in nature, because it was so striking. I always expected it to be more subtle."
He took cuttings from 81 cottonwoods and planted them all in a "common garden." A few acres in size, it would ensure consistent growing conditions, removing the possibility that any differences that emerged were caused by soils, temperature or water supply. Sure enough, aphids swarmed clones of the same trees they attacked in the natural forests. The insects were responding to the trees' genes.
Whitham noticed other things, too: The aphids attracted other bugs that didn't visit the resistant trees, and those bugs drew an unusual number of hungry birds. He began to wonder if a tree's genetics might not only determine the presence of one measly aphid, but indirectly, the panoply of creatures that frequented its canopy.
For the next two decades, he and a formidable group of collaborators intensively studied that first garden and others, planted with diverse genetic variants, or genotypes, with each tree DNA fingerprinted. They saw the influence of the trees' genes almost everywhere they looked. Birds of various species preferred to nest in genotypes with particular branch and canopy architectures, for example, while spiders favored one with thickets of dead branches and dense foliage. Beavers selected a "sweet" genotype, with low tannin levels. Lichen attached to the trunks of a genotype with rough, topographically complex bark. On a stretch of the Weber where Fremont and narrowleaf cottonwoods naturally hybridized, the two species supported two distinct insect communities, while the hybrids hosted elements of both.
The researchers dug into the soil and analyzed leaf litter in streams. Eventually, they demonstrated that a single group of genes influenced not only the community, but the invisible ecological processes that helped sustain it. Tannin-poor and tannin-rich leaves decomposed at different rates, causing variability in soil fertility. The two leaf types similarly affected the nutrient cycle in streams, and with it the bacteria and bugs at the bottom of the food chain. Genotypes even differed significantly in their ability to sequester carbon in their roots.
Based on the researchers' hundreds of studies, it appeared that genetic diversity within cottonwood species influenced the composition and function of the entire riparian system — accounting for between 39 and 78 percent of the total biodiversity in the researchers' cottonwood gardens. Parallel research in aspen, eucalyptus and piñon pine forests suggests that "foundation species" — that is, the dominant, habitat-forming plant on the landscape — do the same in other ecosystems.
Genetic diversity — the raw material of evolution — had long been seen as important, but scientists and conservationists primarily considered it when trying to protect rare and endangered species. Without it, small populations are especially vulnerable to extinction. In the event of a disease outbreak, for instance, genetic diversity acts as an insurance policy: The more diversity there is, the better the odds some individuals will carry genes that confer some resistance. But for common species, beyond recognizing genetic diversity's importance in keeping them healthy and abundant, nobody paid it much mind. Now, there was new incentive to care.
"Almost everyone thinks a species is a species is a species," says Jessica Hellmann, a biologist at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in the ecological impacts of climate change. "Tom has shown that there are differences between cottonwoods that matter. The identity of an organism influences every other member of its community." That means that maintaining genetic variation in a foundation species is "going to be critical for the associated community's biodiversity and ecosystem function," adds Gery Allan, a plant geneticist and a member of Whitham's research group at NAU. "We know it's all tied together."
It's necessary, then, not only to understand how a foundation species' genes influence the whole community of living things around it, but also to parse out what traits hidden in its DNA might ensure its persistence, even as its world shifts. After all, species that are common today might not be so common decades from now. Some models predict that within this century, torturously hot, dry spells could kill off or significantly beat back some of the Southwest's most familiar tree species.
In the region's piñon woodlands, the crippling 2002 drought offered a grim preview, with 57 percent of the mature piñon in northern Arizona perishing. But there was a sliver of hope in the die-off, and it taught scientists a new version of the lesson they'd learned among cottonwoods: When it comes to who lives and dies, a tree is not a tree is not a tree.
On a warm September morning, Whitham and Kitty Gehring, an NAU colleague who studies soil microbes, take me to see a special stand of piñon trees, a foundation species that, at this site, supports roughly 1,000 species of birds, rodents, bugs, bacteria and fungi. The stand is about 30 minutes from Flagstaff, in Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument. The volcano erupted nearly 1,000 years ago, smothering an 800-square-mile area in lava, ash and cinder. Life rose from the rubble, but its existence still feels improbable. The sandy "soil" the trees live in has all come from somewhere else, an accumulation of dust deposited by the wind. There's just a thin layer of it, no more than one or two inches thick, sandwiched between layers of jet-black basalt pebbles that radiate the day's building heat. Growing here must be sort of like trying to eke out a living on a hot tar roof.
Right around the time Whitham planted his first cottonwood garden, he came to this place with a group of graduate students. They immediately noticed that the piñon grew in two distinct shapes. One resembles a classic tree, with a canopy, a trunk and admirably upright posture. The other has a form reminiscent of a fat, laughing Buddha, reclining lazily on one elbow, looking perhaps a little drunk, its branches sprawled across the cinder.
Research pegged the difference to the Buddha trees' genetic susceptibility to a moth that attacked each year's new shoots. The moths acted like hedge-clipper-wielding suburbanites, cutting the trees down to shrubs. Not only did the trees grow painfully slowly, there was also the matter of the sex change: Piñon produce female, seed-bearing cones in their crowns and male pollen-dusted cones down their sides, but the moths chewed only the crowns, eliminating most of the trees' lady bits. "You look at them and go, 'Poor things,' " says Gehring.
Gehring also found what appeared to be a subtler disadvantage. The moth-munched trees had much less — and different types — of a helpful kind of fungi than the resistant trees. Called mycorrhiza, these fungi form little hairs around the trees' roots and, in exchange for a supply of sugar, deliver nutrients from the soil. Experiments showed that the trees' genes determined which kind they ended up with. Because moths were attacking the shrubby trees, they couldn't afford to give their fungi much sugar. Thus, Gehring assumed, the fungi would be "cheap and not very good." She dubbed them "Wal-Mart mycorrhiza."
"These resistant trees seemed so superior," Whitham recalls, "that I would have bet that they would have taken over the piñon world."
But he would have lost that bet. After the 2002 drought, nearly 70 percent of the "superior" trees perished, while less than 30 percent of their moth-attacked neighbors did. Gehring suspects the fungi made the difference. She's discovered that the susceptible trees' fungi stay active and abundant when it's dry, while others die or go dormant, perhaps depriving trees of critical nutrients. "Maybe it's cheap," she says of the Wal-Mart mycorrhiza, "but it's really good."
It was an encouraging sign: The piñons had vulnerabilities, sure, but also wells of resilience. The dramatically higher survival rate of one genetic variant suggested that drought-hardiness was embedded in its DNA. "If you find populations like this one," Gehring explains, "and if they reproduce or if you breed them intentionally, then you may not have a species that goes extinct in Arizona in 2080. It could survive."
But for Whitham, the scale of the die-off also underscored the urgent need for action: Since trees live for hundreds, even thousands, of years, they have to be adapted to a wide range of environmental conditions. "If you see mortality in these really long-lived species, that suggests something fundamental is changing," Whitham says. Climate change was no longer a distant threat: "It's occurring right now."
This spring, the journal Science published a study that predicts one in six species globally will go extinct if carbon emissions continue climbing on their current trajectory. Some scientists say that estimate is low; the number "may well be two to three times higher," one told The New York Times. Neither estimate accounts for the species that will die out in parts, but not all, of their range, thanks to local variations that pound some areas with much more extreme climatic changes.
The scale of the crisis seems well beyond the scope of laws like the Endangered Species Act. As the national climate change policy advisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Mark Shaffer, wrote in a recent editorial in the journal Conservation Biology: "Tending to one species at a time in the face of thousands in need promises a long journey to closure." Protected areas are one way to safeguard lots of species at once, but our current collection wasn't designed to withstand a turbulent climate. Joshua Tree National Park, for instance, may become unsuitable habitat for Joshua trees. And without protected corridors between these islands of preserved habitat, creatures may not be able to move or connect to other populations as their environments change.
So conservationists need new strategies. Shaffer's editorial introduced a group of papers focused on a novel approach dubbed "conserving nature's stage." It suggests ensuring that a wide array of geophysical features are protected — soils, topography, geology — "as 'stages,' " Shaffer writes, "for the evolving cast of players sure to be on the move in an era of climate change." Another option is "assisted migration," where people pluck species or populations out of habitats they're no longer suited to, and plop them down in more hospitable ones. Yet another is the idea of preserving genetic diversity within foundation species.
With any of this, there are practical problems. In a lot of places, we don't yet know what the foundation species are, nor can — or should — we relocate every struggling species. We don't know whether it would even work. And there are risks. A transplanted species could become invasive in a new environment, crowding out others that were doing fine before humans intervened. "The idea of assisted migration comes up all the time," says Notre Dame's Hellmann, a leading thinker on the approach. "But the leap from starting to think about it to actually implementing it is a big one. We probably have five, 10, 15 years we can spend thinking about it," before it becomes much more common for species to blink out in parts of their range. "We don't have much more time than that."
Scientists are thus rushing to understand whether species can move quickly enough to friendlier climes on their own, or adapt quickly enough to stay where they are. And for critical species that are already dying at alarming rates — such as corals — scientists are at the same time trying to devise ways to help them adapt.
"Corals are foundation species, just like trees," says Ruth Gates, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii. Scientists are only beginning to study how genetic variation among corals might affect all of the algae, fungi, plants and fish associated with them. What they already know, however, is that — just like Whitham and Gehring's piñon — some corals within the same species withstand stress better than others.
"When you go on a reef that is in a stress event, usually from high temperatures, you'll see some are completely colored, and the one next door will be bleached," which often leads to death, Gates explains. She and a collaborator in Australia, Madeleine van Oppen, are now working to understand the survivors' biology in order to develop stock able to endure and adapt to future climate conditions, an approach they've dubbed "assisted evolution."
"We need to see if we can manipulate the system using selective breeding," Gates says. "Or create environmental treadmills, giving them experiences that will turn on certain genes." It appears, for example, that stress flips on genes in some coral that help them survive bleaching events, and that once those genes are "on," they stay on and can be passed on to offspring. That's an exciting prospect, Gates says, because "these changes happen in the same timeframe that these radical environmental changes are occurring."
If Gates and her collaborator can develop resilient stock that can be successfully planted in the wild in Hawaii and Australia, they will then hurry to see whether their methodology can be applied to a wide array of coral species around the world. "We'd have to make this a viable restoration strategy," she says. "We're all in the race against time."
It was with the goal of winning that race that Whitham refocused his research around enabling conservationists and land managers to figure out how to keep critical species like piñon and cottonwood, along with a little, or maybe a lot, of the insects, birds, microbes and mammals they support.
Today, he and a laundry list of collaborators — including the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, The Nature Conservancy, the Flagstaff Arboretum and the Arizona Game and Fish Department — are creating a climate-focused network of 10 common gardens in Arizona, plus a number of satellite sites around the region, called the Southwest Experimental Garden Array. The 10 core gardens will span elevations from 5,000 to 9,000 feet above sea level — a gradient that can be used to mimic the effects of climate change — and feature a range of soil and habitat types, from desert scrublands to aspen and mixed conifer forests. They'll be big enough to support multiple studies, and offer ready-to-go infrastructure — fencing, data management, irrigation systems that can be controlled from afar — to encourage as many researchers as possible to use them.
The methodology is not so different from that of field trials to develop new seed varieties in corn country. But where agricultural experiments might focus on increasing the harvest from each acre, here the metrics of success involve biodiversity and long-term survival.
"The huge power of genetics is that you can take a species like piñon or cottonwood and look at the variation over their whole range," Whitham says. "You can find areas where they're adapted to much more severe conditions that reflect what another area will become in the next 50 years." And you can quantify how much environmental change different genotypes and populations can tolerate. "Genetic differences," Whitham explains, "are the difference between life and death in a given environment."
One of the gardens in the new experimental array will sit on the bank of a Little Colorado River tributary called Chevelon Creek, just south of Winslow, Arizona, on Arizona Game and Fish Department land. The day after visiting Sunset Crater, Whitham and I meet Michael Ingraldi on the creek, where similar work is already underway in an established garden. Ingraldi, youthful-looking at 50, inquisitive, a constant jokester, is a research biologist with the state agency. Both men, it turns out, have species of flies named after them, gifts of a kind from the friends who first identified them. Whitham's namesake eats poop, Ingraldi's sucks blood.
Ingraldi is in charge of removing tamarisk from some 55 acres around the creek and restoring its native cottonwoods and willows. Sounds routine enough, but it's no small task. Though the tamarisks at the garden's edge are now thick enough to hide a meth lab — which they have, in fact, been known to do — they are probably on their way out. In 2001, federal officials introduced a beetle to the West to kill the riparian invader, and it is making its way into Arizona. Ingraldi must ensure that native vegetation becomes established in its wake rather than tumbleweeds, which now grow so big here they look ready to collapse under their own weight.
Plus, trees planted for restoration projects often die. "People say it's because of salty soils," Ingraldi explains, or because the water table has dropped too low. Climate change doesn't help, he adds. "That's why we're partnering with these guys. We want it to work." After all, they're on the hook. Once his agency replants the area, it must maintain it in perpetuity. Moreover, this restoration work will be a demonstration project for a larger vision: To restore the cottonwoods and willows that have been lost in much of the 27,000-square-mile Little Colorado River watershed. "This is going to be the jewel of the Little Colorado," Ingraldi says. "Hopefully."
Until now, restorations like this have typically been done with cuttings from local trees, on the theory that they are the most likely to thrive, or with plants of unknown provenance bought from a nursery. But "this place is probably going to get drier," Ingraldi explains. "And if it gets drier and warmer, you would assume cottonwoods and willows from a drier climate would do better here. Well, is that true?"
To find out, researchers have planted local cottonwood and willow genotypes in the garden, along with genotypes from lower and higher elevations, and more southern and northern climes. They track their growth and survival rates, and how different combinations of willow and cottonwood fare together, among other things. As Whitham explains it to Ingraldi, citing data collected at other sites: "If you tell me, 'I want a tree that supports the greatest diversity,' I can guarantee you that we can select trees that maximize biodiversity. If you want to maximize growth, we can do that."
That might sound like a potentially dangerous level of meddling. But Dan Simberloff, an invasive species expert at the University of Tennessee and a sharp critic of assisted migration, says there's little risk in moving cottonwood and willow genotypes around across relatively short distances, and to already highly disturbed sites, within their native range. There's not a lot to mess up on the tamarisk-lined banks of Chevelon Creek, as Whitham puts it, but there is a lot of opportunity to learn "the tools of a new trade."
His confidence that this kind of restoration can work comes in part from a proof of concept project on the Weber River 13 years ago. Simply planting strategically selected cottonwoods has helped shift a site that was completely consumed by invasive weeds to one composed of nearly 40 percent native plants, and with some 700 species of bugs living in the trees alone. The lesson of this project: If you build it, they may come.
Things were a bit different on the Weber, though: Creatures didn't have to go far to colonize the restoration site; they had intact habitat nearby. If managers plant genotypes from a hundred miles away, or in places without cottonwoods and willows nearby, it's unclear how much of the life they supported in one place would follow them. Kevin Grady, a restoration ecologist at NAU, is just beginning to tackle these additional layers of complexity in large research sites on the Little Colorado River, transferring understory grasses and even microbial communities with trees.
Already, it seems likely that economically expedient one-and-done plantings won't last indefinitely. Climate models predict that the Chevelon Creek site could warm by 6 degrees Celsius this century, but new results from the garden show that cottonwoods adapted to those higher temperatures don't thrive here now. They leaf out too early and set their buds too late, often getting nipped by frost, and they are more vulnerable to pathogens; some have died. Conversely, data from a garden to the south show that the trees that do well here now won't thrive under radically warmer conditions. That means that land managers may have to consider planting new genotypes incrementally.
"The genetics stuff is getting sort of science-fictiony," Ingraldi observes after a while. Whitham nods. The pie-in-the-sky goal, he explains, would be to have the genome of everything sequenced and functionally parsed apart — the natives, the invasives, the soil microbes. "Then we could say, 'This is the gene in the tree that's interacting with the gene in the willow interacting with the gene in the tamarisk, and if you take this gene away it's going to have these effects, negative or beneficial.' "
Ingraldi works it over in his mind: "Once you understand these interactions, you're saying then, we can play God, in a way. If I want this, just tweak this gene here, or move this from the system, and you'll get it."
"That's true," Whitham says. "And I think it's actually possible" — eventually. That kind of precise understanding of the genetic basis of everything, as another NAU biologist touring the site with us quips, is "Tom's Death Star."
After Ingraldi departs for a tango lesson in Flagstaff, Whitham and I sit on a cooler a few hundred yards from the creek, waiting for a group of grad students scrambling to collect their last data of a research project. Cottony clouds on the horizon begin to blush purple and pink.
Whitham pulls out a graph, determined to make sure I understand it. It's based on data from a garden in Yuma, planted with Fremont cottonwoods from across the species' Southwestern range. It plots their reproductive success against the temperature shift they've experienced going from their native environment to their new home.
"So let's say we're down at this low-elevation garden, and it increases 4 degrees," he explains, moving his finger four steps down the graph. "According to our research, you can't find a cottonwood that would tolerate a 4 degree increase down here. This would predict, well, they're dead." The only way to maintain cottonwoods at that hot, dry edge, then, might be to genetically engineer them, like a soybean. Unlike the near-term efforts to shuffle cottonwoods and willows around, "that is a controversial thing to do," Whitham acknowledges. "But then, I have a choice. Would I rather have a genetically engineered one, or none at all?"
Whitham doesn't want to make that choice. But the climate is already changing faster than many scientists expected, and our emissions remain on a trajectory that promises extreme future warming. If nothing big changes — and soon — that's bad news for a lot of life on earth. It makes Whitham think that the day could very well arrive when we have to make many such decisions. It will be imperative, he believes, to have good science to inform them. Saving species may "require moving things around, and upsetting the natural order of things," he says. "But we made this problem. Now we've got to do our best to fix it."
Cally Carswell (@callycarswell), an HCN contributing editor, writes from Santa Fe, New Mexico.
This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.]]>
Much of Colorado has been getting similarly soaked. "Last I checked we lived in a high mountain desert not a temperate rainforest," a friend of mine on the Western Slope quipped on Instagram, under a photo of two Adirondack chairs swallowed by grass higher than their arms. Here in New Mexico, people are getting grumpy. "I just want it to be sunny and 80 degrees," an acquaintance griped recently as we stood near a deserted music stage at a festival, our hoods up and getting drizzled upon. With another storm approaching just days after the night of thunder, my local All Things Considered host warned of "nasty weather" all over the listening area. Such words.
Lest the residents of sunshine states forget: This rain, we needed it, even if California needed it just a bit more. It may save us yet from a June spent choking on smoke. For now, the wildfire risk in much of the Intermountain West is not above normal, though that may change in July and August in the Northern Rockies, when wildfire season usually gets going there.
The rains won't save us from all of our drought-related ills, however. That still takes snow, and this winter was not generous with it throughout much of the West. Snowpack usually peaks in the region around April 1, but this year at that time, thanks to a balmy March and an unremarkable dusting, it was rapidly melting out.
Nearly two months later, snowpacks look misleadingly good in parts of Colorado and New Mexico, where conditions for this time of year are above average thanks to late snow in the mountains at a time it would usually be waning. The new snow doesn't make up for its lack earlier in the year, nor the long, slow melt-out that would contribute to deep soil moisture.
That said, the rains and snows of May have improved soil moisture at shallow depths. They've also been good for streamflows in some places, and beneficial for overall water supply, according to the Colorado River Basin Forecast Center, by reducing demand early in irrigation season.
The expected inflow into major reservoirs is still expected to be low, however. Projections for inflow into Lake Powell from April to July remain at just 42 percent of average. And as we reported recently, Lake Mead has hit a record low. It's just three feet above the level which will trigger mandatory curtailments in Arizona and Nevada. Meanwhile, Elephant Butte, one of the major reservoirs on the Rio Grande, is only 20 percent full.
So please, sun lovers, let us repent: Rain, rain, don't go away. Come again any ol' day. We didn't mean to call you nasty. Bring the thunder, morning, noon or night.
Cally Carswell is an HCN contributing editor based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Follow @callycarswell]]>
Remarkably, he wasn't. Wildlife officials stowed their tennis balls and evicted the media, establishing a quiet perimeter around the house. By morning, P-22 had slipped away to the relative safety of Griffith Park.
Ever since P-22 left the Santa Monica Mountains in 2012, crossing two notoriously congested freeways to take up residence in the city, he's awakened Angelenos' wonder at the wildness that persists here amid the crush of concrete and rush of traffic. His presence has given traction to efforts to build wildlife bridges over highways to connect the last remnants of habitat for the few remaining lions. And he has helped shape an emerging environmental ethos — one that seeks to reconcile L.A.'s built environment and human inhabitants with the wild landscape they've consumed.
That ethos also sprang from the long-running efforts to revitalize the concrete-lined Los Angeles River and protect the Ballona Wetlands State Ecological Reserve, the last patch of coastal wetlands in the area and the subject of this issue's cover story by Contributing Editor Judith Lewis Mernit.
Decades ago, environmentalists fought developers to save the wetlands — and fought one another over how much acreage should be saved. Now, with the state trying to finalize a restoration plan, the debate over Ballona is as fraught, impassioned and divisive as ever. How much bulldozing and replanting — if any — is necessary to "heal" the landscape? Should people be banned for the sake of the wetlands' species, or do we deserve access to this tiny urban wilderness? Who, and what, is this restoration really for?
Such intense debate over a mere 600 acres in a sprawling city might seem provincial. Increasingly, however, ecologists argue that re-making our farms, city parks, front yards and roadsides into hospitable habitat for native plants and wildlife is crucial to preserving global biodiversity.
For cities to become ecological refuges, we have to evolve, too — rethinking the goals of environmentalism and adjusting the boundaries we draw between human and wild. It's work rife with ambiguity, but also hope. Consider P-22's pickle in the crawlspace: "Even the homeowners were super chill," Beth Pratt of the National Wildlife Federation told Lewis Mernit after the incident. "Everyone wanted the cat to be safe. He is L.A.'s lion!"]]>
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."]]>
The dust and traffic and lights aren't always easy to live with, and sometimes they create tension between local residents and industry. Rarely, however, do we stop to consider what all of this new infrastructure collectively costs us. How much vegetation is being lost to the boom nationwide, and how much does its loss matter? How fragmented is habitat becoming at a regional or continental scale?
Brady Allred, an assistant professor of rangeland ecology at the University of Montana, had the seeds of such questions planted in his mind while living in Oklahoma a few years ago, doing research on plants, fire and grazing. Oil and gas wasn't new to Oklahoma, by any means, but new wells were popping up all over the place. Allred was struck by how much infrastructure and activity came with them. "The pad sizes were bigger, the amount of transportation, the amount of people that were needed," he recalls. "That's because of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. It requires a lot of space and equipment to get that done. You'd drive by at night and it looked like a little village out there, all lit up." He moved to Montana and visited neighboring North Dakota's gushing oil fields, and noticed the same things. "I thought, 'I wonder what it would be like if we zoomed out and looked at the bigger picture?' "
He and a few colleagues did just that for the central U.S. — including the intermountain West — and Canada. Their results, published in the journal Science in late April, provide the clearest picture to date of the cumulative ecological impact of the drilling frenzy of the last decade-plus.
The researchers wanted to broadly gauge the ecosystem services lost to oil and gas development — things like the land's ability to produce food and support wildlife. So they decided to quantify changes in "net primary production," essentially a measurement of a landscape's plant growth. By combining a large dataset on new wells drilled throughout the study region between 2000 and 2012 with annual satellite measurements of plant growth, they concluded that some 7.5 million acres had been stripped of vegetation — the equivalent of three Yellowstone National Parks.
Much of the development took place on rangelands and croplands. The vegetation loss on rangeland represented enough forage to support 5 million cows for a month; the acreage of developed cropland was enough to grow 120.2 million bushels of wheat, or about 13 percent of the wheat exported in 2013.
Julia Haggerty, an assistant professor of geography at Montana State University, and a co-author on the paper, says the findings "reinforce for me that we do very little assessment of oil and gas impacts beyond the scale at which most permitting decisions are made."
Big as they seem, the numbers are actually pretty small when considered against the total landmass studied. But if current trends continue for another 10 or 15 years, the loss of vegetation could be much more consequential, significantly reducing the landscape's ability to store carbon, and possibly conflicting with food production, and other land uses. The losses thus far, the researchers note, may be long-term; reclamation typically isn't done until the end of the well's life, and even then, requirements and monitoring are spotty between states and on private land, where 90 percent of the drilling in the study took place.
The point Allred and his colleagues want to make is that these are trade-offs we're making unconsciously. It would be wise, they say, to continue quantifying them and consciously decide how much land and ecosystem services we're willing to cede to oil and gas production. "This is kind of a thief in the night — it's just crept up on us," Allred explains. "Everyone's excited about drilling because it's great for jobs and energy independence. All of those things are important. We just wanted to say, 'This is what we're losing because of it.' We've decided up until now we're OK losing three Yellowstones. At what number are we not OK?"
Remember the Dust Bowl, he cautions. It stemmed from technological advances — combustion engines and tractors — that allowed people to farm almost anything. And they did. "That removed a bunch of natural vegetation and reduced the resilience of the region to drought," Allred says. An accumulation of small disturbances resulted in a big disaster. To be clear, he's not saying that drilling activity has put us at the precipice of a similar catastrophe, just that we need to pay more attention to what the small things add up to. "We have the technology to make sure (the Dust Bowl) doesn't happen again. We have the ability to monitor acre-by-acre. We can look at these cumulative effects."
Cally Carswell is a High Country News contributing editor based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Follow @callycarswell
Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user Bryan Jones.]]>
But there might be another way to achieve the same goal: Go through Congress, instead of the courts.
Last week, the U.S. Senate passed a budget amendment sponsored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, supporting the idea of selling, transferring or trading federal lands to the states. The measure is purely symbolic. It doesn't cover any specific parcels or give Congress any kind of new authority to chuck federal holdings. Proposals still have to make it past the House, Senate and the White House to go through. But the amendment is a "signal" that considering such bills is a priority of the Congress, says Robert Dillon, communications director for Murkowski's energy committee.
Jessica Goad, a policy advocate at the Center for Western Priorities, which opposes the state land-transfer movement, believes Murkowski was "testing the waters" with the amendment, attempting to gauge how her colleagues might vote on land transfer bills in the future. Such bills are likely in the pipeline. E&E Daily reported earlier this month that Michael Swenson, a D.C.-based lobbyist for the American Lands Council, the Utah-based group leading the states' movement, is educating "lawmakers on the benefits of relinquishing federal lands to the states." Swenson told E&E that he "expects federal legislation to be introduced by fall."Sportsmen's groups have been particularly vocal about their opposition to the land-transfer movement, believing that in the hands of the states, which lack the financial resources to manage them, lands would be developed and privatized, resulting in a loss of access. Whit Fosburgh, head of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, called the Murkowski amendment "a finger in the eye to sportsmen everywhere." In an email statement to High Country News, Fosburgh said: "It was not clear to us why the amendment was necessary, and its language was sufficiently broad to be worrisome about its potential implications for the future. Senator Murkowski may not have intended to suggest that millions of acres of public land be put on the market, but the unfortunately broad language of the amendment implies that."
On the Senate floor, however, Murkowski was unambiguous about why she believed the amendment was necessary: It is too difficult to drill, mine and otherwise develop energy on federal land. It's true that it is much easier to develop certain state lands. "Trust" lands, for instance, are explicitly intended for development and to make money for the states; they have no real conservation mandate, and are subject to few environmental regulations. Whether that's a good thing, of course, is a matter of opinion. It's also true that the shale booms have largely taken place on private land, but that's a function of geology more than regulation. North Dakota, for instance, has very little federal land.
It is not the case that federal lands are broadly hands-off for the energy industry. For proof, visit, well, Utah. Or, consider that onshore oil sales from federal lands increased from 96 million barrels in 2003 to 133 million barrels in 2013, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Curious how your Senator voted on Murkowski's amendment? It was almost a straight party-line vote, with only three Republicans coming out against it. Cory Gardner of Colorado was the lone Western Republican to vote no, joining all of the Western Democrats.
Cally Carswell is a High Country News contributing editor and is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.]]>
These days, he's especially preoccupied with one kind of algae — an enigma that haunts wild rivers worldwide. Wearing a blue rain jacket and an orange baseball cap over salt-and-pepper hair, Taylor stood in a bubbling stream on lab property, his eyes searching the rocks for Didymosphenia geminata. Didymo (pronounced "Did-i-mo") is a single-celled algae or "diatom." Diatoms are among Earth's most common life forms and the foundation of aquatic food webs. They're only visible through microscopes, but if you've ever slipped on a slimy river rock, you've encountered them.
Less than a decade ago, however, Didymo became much easier to spot here. The cells began sprouting stalks about the thickness of human hairs that coalesced into sprawling underwater manes, which felt like wet, dirty wool. They did the same in Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Connecticut, West Virgina, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, Poland. The algal mats smothered streambeds for miles. They were inconvenient, threatening and gross — described, in scientific journals, as "mucilaginous." In the popular press, Didymo was dubbed "rock snot."
The mats mucked up fishing in popular rivers, like Montana's Kootenai. Anglers' casts got lodged in gobs of snot. They seemed capable of clogging water intakes, and, in the Rockies, were also bad for fish. The worms that carry whirling disease, an exotic killer of native trout, thrive in Didymo blooms. The mats even change the food web.
To demonstrate, Taylor grabbed a flat rock from the stream, and scraped pimples of Didymo into a dish. A mess of fidgeting midges emerged, but few large mayflies. Blooms favor small insects, Taylor explained; they can take refuge in the mats, while the larger ones become entangled and more vulnerable to predators. Here, that's stunted the growth of some trout. Taylor next scraped a Didymo-free rock, revealing a diverse mix of bigger bugs. "You don't need a Ph.D. to be able to say something's going on," he said.
Something — but what? Puzzlingly, the algae colonize rivers that are virtually devoid of phosphorus, the nutrient from farms and septic systems that often stimulates nuisance algae. So what's behind Didymo's advance? And can anything be done to make it stop?
If you fly-fish, you might have heard that Didymo is an invasive species. That may not, in fact, be true.
Canadian freshwater researcher Max Bothwell is one of the people most responsible for popularizing this idea. Now, he and Taylor are its most vocal critics. Bothwell, whom Taylor lauds as the "Yoda" of rock snot, spent much of the 1990s trying to finger its cause on Vancouver Island. Didymo cells were native there, but the blooms were new. Bothwell looked for evidence that rivers' phosphorus levels had increased, but found none. Their hydrology hadn't shifted significantly. Experiments also ruled out ultraviolet radiation from the waning ozone layer as the culprit.-
In 2004, Bothwell got a new clue when blooms were discovered in New Zealand, where Didymo cells had never been seen, despite thorough diatom surveys. Here, scientist Cathy Kilroy and others argued, Didymo was a recent immigrant, transplanted by humans. After a research trip to New Zealand in 2006, Bothwell started to wonder if Vancouver Island had suffered an introduction, too — perhaps of a new genetic strain more prone to stalk production. Combing historic records, he noticed that the blooms coincided with an uptick in fishing and the popularity of felt-soled waders, which prevent anglers from slipping in streams, but, if not properly dried and cleaned, can transport living cells. Plus, the blooms seemed to occur at popular fishing spots. The evidence for introduction of a genetic super-stalker was circumstantial, Bothwell wrote in his 2009 On the Boots of Fishermen paper, but it seemed convincing.-
The paper was a hit: Didymo was -declared invasive the world over. In some places, felt-soled waders were banned. Public agencies and fishing groups launched educational campaigns, -encouraging anglers to "check, clean and dry" their gear between rivers and switch to rubber-soled boots. In the past, says Dave Kumlien, who works on invasive species for Trout Unlimited, the stream-fishing community resisted the idea that they helped spread whirling disease, which, like a lot of aquatic invaders, was mostly invisible. "This is one that people could see, and it screwed up your fishing," Kumlien says. "Didymo got stream anglers thinking about what they were doing. It began to shift the paradigm of -behavior."
Bothwell thought he'd solved the mystery. "Finally, this monkey was off my back," he says. "It seemed to make sense."
Except it didn't — not entirely, anyway. By then, Brad Taylor was separately studying Didymo in Colorado, where invasion seemed an unlikely explanation. The cells had long been present in streams, but Taylor and others never saw long, thick mats around the field lab until 2006 and 2007. In 2008, however, the mats didn't appear. They smothered streambeds again the next year, but didn't in 2011. And Didymo erupted only in certain streams, even though the cells lived in many others. If the blooms were caused by an invasion of a genetic mutant, shouldn't they grow every year, in every stream?
Taylor suspected something in the environment had shifted. The blooms followed unusually warm springs and rapid snowmelt. In non-bloom years, on the other hand, substantial snowpacks melted gradually, more as they had in previous decades, when Didymo cells remained benign. Taylor measured flows in unaffected and affected streams; the latter peaked about two weeks earlier, because they drained smaller watersheds, or were more exposed to the sun.
Around the same time, Bothwell and Kilroy — who had been running experiments in New Zealand — made an unexpected discovery: Didymo bloomed when levels of the nutrient phosphorus dropped. Typically, the opposite is true. Most algal blooms — the toxic blue-green variety in Lake Erie, for instance — are caused by spikes in phosphorus.
The drop Didymo responded to was so small it wasn't even measureable with traditional tools. That's why changes in the nutrient's levels hadn't registered in other streams despite testing. The scientists think cells produce stalks to allow the cells to move up into the water column, where they have a better shot of accessing traces of phosphorus, which they need to divide and reproduce.
Taylor and Bothwell began brainstorming potential causes of phosphorus declines. Last spring, they published a paper detailing their leading theories — and arguing that Didymo, rather than being invasive, is probably native to most places it's bloomed.
If they're right, Didymo may ultimately be a lesson in how minor environmental changes can have outsized effects on ecosystems. Taylor now believes the Colorado blooms are linked to changes in the timing of spring, a sign of the warming climate. When spring comes early to the Rocky Mountain Lab — as it does with increasing regularity — rapid snowmelt could be flushing phosphorus from soil in one big pulse, rather than delivering it gradually, depriving streams of the nutrient after the snow is gone. Or, when plants "turn on" early, they might use more of the available phosphorus, leaving less for streams. Most likely, some combination of these factors is at work. Elsewhere, phosphorus declines could be a symptom of nitrogen pollution, from the atmosphere or fertilizer- applications.
U.S. Geological Survey diatom expert Sarah Spaulding agrees that the evidence that phosphorus regulates blooms is compelling, but thinks Taylor and Bothwell have been too quick to dismiss the human role. The idea that human-caused changes in phosphorus and nitrogen are driving the blooms "might be true," she says, "but it needs to be shown with data."
Cathy Kilroy, in New Zealand, tends to agree with Taylor and Bothwell that in much of the world blooms are likely to be the result of environmental changes. But many questions remain. There is still no historic evidence, she says, of the cells in New Zealand streams, and it's even possible that a boom in environmentally triggered blooms "facilitated (the) spread of cells, possibly to places where Didymo wasn't present previously."
Taylor acknowledges that more research is needed. But if Didymo was introduced to some rivers, he believes, it will continue to spread, whether on the boots of fishermen or the hooves of livestock and wildlife. "If environmental factors are causing the blooms, that's the main issue," he said. "We need to nail down if Didymo is a good sentinel for impending changes" — the canary-in-a-cage for rivers, warning of important shifts most of us can't yet perceive.]]>
In February, the chub became the first fish ever to be taken off the list. (The Modoc sucker, in Oregon and California, has been proposed for delisting; a decision is due in May.) Its recovery involved numerous habitat restorations and introductions, some on private land, but required no major water or land-use changes. "In most of the West, we deal with the concern that we're going to take away water that people need," says Oregon Fish and Wildlife biologist Paul Scheerer. "That was not the case here."
In mid-January, the agency released its new "strategic growth policy," declaring that expansion should prioritize lands and waters to protect threatened and endangered species and migratory birds. Acquisition proposals must identify how refuges can contribute to landscape-scale conservation, with nearby landowners' cooperation, and whether they can still thrive as the climate changes. "It's a way for the Service to say, 'Given our limited resources, how are we going to do this in the future?' " says Desiree Sorenson-Groves of the National Wildlife Refuge Association.
Vapor pressure deficit: Ever heard of it? Didn't think so. But this wonky atmospheric term is one you might want to study up on, especially if you're a Westerner who likes trees and cares about whether they live or die.
Why? For one, it might be fun. One gardening website attests that once you understand vapor pressure deficit "you start to think and feel like a plant." Who could resist that? Also, it's actually pretty easy to understand. And it's important. High vapor pressure deficits appear to have played an instrumental role in killing off vast numbers of trees in the Southwest over the last decade and a half, whether they died by drought, beetle or wildfire. And that's a big deal because vapor pressure deficits that seem extreme now are likely to become the norm as the world heats up.
Park Williams, a bioclimatologist with Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is one scientist who has helped reveal the role of vapor pressure deficit in forest mortality in the Southwest. His most recent contributions are two studies published last month considering its role in wildfire, and specifically in the big, hot fires of 2011.
But before we get to that, a bit more on vapor pressure deficit, or VPD. Essentially, it is the difference between the moisture the atmosphere is capable of holding and the moisture it is actually holding. In the Southwest, high VPD is usually a function of high temperatures. Here's why both matter to plants, as I explained in a 2013 HCN feature:
Minor temperature increases have an outsized effect on the amount of water the atmosphere can hold: When the temperature goes up, the atmosphere gets a lot spongier. The relationship is exponential. Stubbornly set on fulfilling its potential, warm air sucks water more greedily from both plants and soil. If the water supply it's drawing on becomes depleted, the tension begins to strain a tree's water columns. Picture an eager child sucking the last drops of a milkshake from a straw: The water columns, like the straw, collapse.
During the 2000 drought, when pinon died in seemingly greater numbers than they had during the 1950s drought, ecologist Dave Breshears suspected the reason was that the recent drought was warmer. He and others dubbed it a "global change type drought." VPD, he told me recently, explains why a small rise in temperature could result in a lot more dead trees. "From the plant's perspective, it's more directly experiencing that atmospheric demand (for water) than the temperature itself," Breshears said. "That really gives us insight into why a little bit of temperature goes a long way in having negative effects for a plant."
Previous work by scientists including Breshears and Williams has demonstrated how high VPD can stress trees, making them vulnerable to bark beetles, or even killing them outright. Williams' new work considers its relationship to the West's other primary tree killer: wildfire.
His big picture conclusions echo those of previous studies: High vapor pressure deficits result in more dead trees. One study showed that fluctuations in VPD year-to-year correlated very closely to fluctuations in the number of acres burned. In fact, among climate variables, VPD has been the best predictor of area burned for the last 30 years -- better than temperature or precipitation. Jim Randerson, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine, reached a similar conclusion studying the factors driving growth of wildfires in Alaska's boreal forest. "VPD was more important than temperature or humidity by itself," he said.
Williams' second study considered the climate conditions and wildfires of just one year, 2011, when two of the Southwest's biggest blazes in recorded history -- the Wallow and Las Conchas fires -- scorched Arizona and New Mexico. Interestingly, 2011 was not exceptionally hot in the Southwest, but owing to an extremely unusual alignment of atmospheric anomalies, vapor pressure deficit was off the charts. The air was mind-bogglingly dry, sponging up water from trees and plants like mad.
"2011 gave us this really neat opportunity to look at how forests respond to really high VPD," Williams said. Even though the spike wasn't caused by temperature, forests responded in the same way, affirming, Williams said, the idea that the influence of VPD on fire is especially pronounced. If climate is the Oz of wildfire risk, you might say, VPD is the man behind the curtain. (Although in this version of the story, he has co-workers.)
"When we think about the future," Williams explained, "and VPD is supposed to go up as temperature goes up, this study solidifies that we should really expect burned areas to increase in step with VPD."
Another finding from the study has even more startling implications for the future. No climate models predict that the anomalies that zapped the atmosphere of water vapor over the Southwest in 2011 would ever converge. "Climate models just don't think the climate can be as extreme as it was in the Southwest in 2011," Williams said. Obviously, it can. "If a 2011 event would occur in the 2050s, the results would be very similar, except they'd all be imposed on this warmer background temperature." Which means even higher VPD.
Moreover, projections of changes in VPD based on temperature increases alone show that even in average years, extremes on par with 2011 are probable. "If we still had as much forest, we should expect 2011-like forest fires," Williams said. "But then there's a chance we have this atmospheric craziness. If that happened in the 2050s, the VPDs would be amplified into a realm that is really incomprehensible to me right now."
Williams fears that climate-driven forest loss in the Southwest will not occur gradually, but in catastrophic pulses similar to 2011, and often as a result of wildfire. "Preparing forests for climate change isn't necessarily just figuring out which forests should die and which ones shouldn't," he said. "It's protecting the ones that shouldn't from catastrophic wildfires."
Cally Carswell is a High Country News contributing editor and freelance science and environmental journalist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Follow @callycarswell]]>
Unfortunately, the whole mess conjures a sense of deja vu. On July 1, 2011, an ExxonMobil pipeline also running beneath the Yellowstone ruptured near Laurel, Montana, vomiting 63,000 gallons of crude oil into the river. Already at flood stage, it flushed hydrocarbon slicks into riparian habitat and across nearby agricultural fields. The accident came just a year after a much more devastating spill flooded Michigan's Kalamazoo River with some 800,000 gallons of crude from the Canadian tar sands.
The mishaps helped draw attention to the vulnerabilities of the country's pipelines, especially where they cross rivers, and to the weaknesses of regulations dictating precautions companies must take to avoid breaches and to respond to them when they do occur. Congress convened hearings on pipeline safety within weeks of the Yellowstone spill, and at the end of the year, passed the The Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act of 2011.
So when the Yellowstone became laced with oil again, it raised a larger question: Are rivers underlaid with pipelines any better buffered against significant spills than they were in 2011?
I called Rebecca Craven, program director at the Pipeline Safety Trust, a watchdog group formed by families whose children were killed when a gas pipeline exploded in Bellingham, Washington in 1999. When I told Craven I wanted to know more about what reforms had resulted from the 2011 pipeline safety act, she responded that it would be a very short conversation. Not much at all had changed, she said.
The 2011 act called for studies into various issues, like whether existing regulations were adequate for pipelines carrying diluted bitumen, the heavier, more corrosive crude produced in the tar sands, and a review of incidents involving hazardous liquid pipelines that cross inland waters. It also allowed the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to levy higher fines against companies for safety violations.
But so far, the studies have not led to new rules to address some of the major areas of regulatory weakness that pipeline safety advocates have identified. Those include requiring the use of remote-controlled shut-off valves, or more protective automatic shut-off valves. The latter close automatically in response to drops in pressure, providing the quickest response to a breach and protection against serious spills. With respect to rivers, safety advocates would like to see the depth at which pipelines must be buried increase in order to decrease the likelihood that scouring of the riverbed during high water would expose a pipeline, leaving it vulnerable to rushing rocks and debris.
"The 2011 bill really didn't enact any new regulatory requirements," Craven said. "Things are where they were in 2011."
The head of pipeline safety at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), Jeffrey Wiese, acknowledged as much in 2013. InsideClimate News published remarks made that year by Wiese to an audience in New Orleans:
Wiese told several hundred oil and gas pipeline compliance officers that his agency ... has "very few tools to work with" in enforcing safety rules even after Congress in 2011 allowed it to impose higher fines on companies that cause major accidents.
"Do I think I can hurt a major international corporation with a $2 million civil penalty? No."
A team which includes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, PHMSA, the company and spill response contractors they've hired, has deployed to the scene. However, the EPA reports that ice flows in the river are complicating cleanup efforts.
At this point, it's hard to say whether stronger regulations could have helped prevent the newest Yellowstone River spill. Details about the incident are still emerging, and the cause is not yet known. (PHMSA will investigate the cause and response.) Bill Salvin, a spokesman for Bridger Pipeline, said the pipeline was buried at variable depths below the riverbed, and 8 feet at the shallowest. (Salvin did not immediately return an inquiry to clarify whether the 8-foot measurement was taken recently, or represents the depth the pipeline was initially buried at.) Pipelines are required to be buried a minimum of 4 feet under waterways, but safety advocates argue the standard is wholly inadequate in many dynamic rivers. Salvin also said the pipeline was inspected in 2012 with a "smart pig," a device inserted inside pipelines to assess their integrity, which Craven said should be in compliance with inspection rules, which vary depending on a pipeline's location, but at their strictest require inspections every 5 years.
Whatever the outcome of the investigation, however, the incident provides occasion to ask, again, whether we should be doing more to protect our communities and our environment from the hazards beneath our feet.
Cally Carswell is a High Country News contributing editor and freelance science and environmental journalist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Follow @callycarswell]]>
The activists called their camp a "permanent protest vigil," its purpose to monitor and impede construction of what could become the first tar sands mine in the U.S. They have stood in front of and locked themselves to heavy machinery. Once, they dressed up as chipmunks and chased road graders around a construction site. At least one woman trespassed regularly into the mine's test pit, to see if there was anything worrisome worth documenting.
The September weekend that I dropped in, the activists were hosting a special campout to encourage locals to "connect with the land." After a long drive on winding backroads, I found the camp on the shoulder of a sweeping ridge, hidden among a stand of pine and fir. Tents pincushioned the forest floor on either side of a slim spur crammed with cars and pickups and ending in a tight turnaround — a cul-de-sac in the woods. The days I was there, activists wore jeans, T-shirts, fleece, clogs and hiking boots. People read books around the fire-pit, and lounged in the kitchen, an elaborately tarped affair with a spice rack and serving buffet. They slept in, brewed endless pots of coffee, and told camp tales: of encounters with bears, hikes gone awry, epic meals prepared and eaten (one involved cashew cream sauce). It felt pretty laid-back for a hotbed of radicals intent on revolution. Then again, it was the weekend.
On Saturday morning, with the wind calm and temperature pleasantly climbing, I joined the "morning circle" –– around 15 people, sitting in camp chairs or on five-gallon buckets or in the dirt around smoldering coals. Each person introduced themself, and gave their preferred gender pronoun — he, she or they — which everyone was asked to respect. Vigil stalwart Raphael Cordray, who once owned a gift shop for radicals in Salt Lake, volunteered to lead a tour of the test pit. Chad Hamblin, a high school science teacher, offered to lead a nature hike. Kathy Albury, a member of the environmental ministry at Salt Lake's Unitarian Church, wanted to march on Sunday, the same day demonstrators would clog Manhattan for the People's Climate March. Rachel Carter, also from the Salt Lake area, agreed: "These sources of extraction are where people should be marching," she said, and suggested a hashtag: #comeherenextyear.
Then it was on to explaining "camp norms," which were scrawled in colored marker on a cardboard sign hanging from the food trailer: Don't talk to the cops; no racism, sexism, transphobia or other forms of bigotry; no violence of any kind. Also, "no pants at the fire pit" –– code for no cell phones, which could be tapped by police, the FBI, or other Big Brothers. Welcome to the resistance.
I first heard of the vigil in July 2014, after reading a newspaper story about one of its rowdier moments. It came after a weeklong campout, when 80 or so people came to the Book Cliffs to learn about community organizing, nonviolent direct action and "climate justice" –– the idea that climate change solutions must alleviate the social and environmental burdens our energy economy disproportionately imposes on the world's poorest, usually non-white, people.
Before dawn on July 21, a group of activists had made their way to a fenced lot where U.S. Oil Sands, the mine's developer, kept its heavy machinery. Their goal: to stop construction for the day. Though sheriff's deputies were camped out there, a few activists slipped in and locked themselves to the equipment. Around 20 others linked arms and stood or sat outside the fence, blocking the road. By the end of the day, deputies had carted 21 people off to the Uintah County jail.
Reading about it brought me back to a crowded theater in Paonia, Colorado, where in 2013 I watched the documentary Bidder 70. It tells the story of Tim DeChristopher, a University of Utah student who, in 2008, made bids at a BLM oil and gas lease sale, driving up prices and winning 14 parcels he did not plan to drill, worth $1.8 million he could not pay. DeChristopher spent 21 months in federal prison, becoming a minor folk hero in the process.
I remember being impressed by DeChristopher's eloquence and unbending adherence to his principles. He deliberately broke the law to keep the oil and gas in the ground –– to prevent the greater crime of more carbon pollution, he said –– and refused a plea bargain. But there was something disquieting about his story and the images of his comrades storming the Interior Department in Washington and getting arrested; weeping outside the Salt Lake courthouse after his sentencing, sitting in the street, refusing to move, getting arrested. Climate change stirred something in him –– in them –– that it had yet to stir in me. Anger, maybe? Passion? I wasn't sure. But it was an emotion I didn't recognize in myself, or in most of my friends.
Which left me feeling conflicted. I'm an environmental journalist, well informed on climate change. I write stories about the science, which keeps getting worse, and the policy, which keeps standing still. I write about irrevocable changes to the mountains and deserts I love, and about how drought and heat could render some of them uninhabitable. I know the climate crisis is big and bad. And yet I don't get angry about it, not really angry. Neither do most of my well-informed and idealistic friends. But shouldn't we?
Reading about the U.S. Oil Sands lock-in, and remembering DeChristopher's story, made me curious about what was brewing in the Book Cliffs. Did these people know something I didn't? More to the point, did they feel something I didn't?
After Saturday's morning circle, I piled into a big white van with seven others to tour the mine's test pit, a few minutes down Seep Ridge Road, which was in the process of being widened and paved for future industrial traffic. At the pit, vegetation had been cleared, a berm cut into the ridge, and a hole dug, exposing brown, gray and ebony rock layers. Rainwater had created a pond the color of dark tea, where Raphael Cordray said she had seen cows drinking. She suspected it was toxic.
The tour was for outsiders (mainly me) and visitors from the nearby Uinta Basin who opposed the mine but came up only occasionally. There was Stagg, who goes by one name only, along with David Bell and Lori Savage. They all lived around Roosevelt, Utah, population around 7,000, some 90 miles away. Hamblin, the science teacher, also from the Roosevelt area, was up for his third campout and brought his dad. He was excited to meet like-minded neighbors; environmentalists are few in the Uinta Basin, home to Utah's top oil and gas producing counties. Still fewer are those willing to speak out against energy development. "It feels like the Lone Ranger out there sometimes," he lamented.
U.S. Oil Sands, a Canadian company, had secured permits and leases on state trust land, leaving environmentalists without legal leverage to stop it. Now, the company was clearing a building site for a processing facility, aiming to begin commercial production in 2015. CEO Cameron Todd told me the company respects the activists' right to voice their opposition, but that their tactics sometimes crossed the line and posed safety risks. He said his company is willing to engage anyone interested in figuring out better ways to do things, but added, "There's not much of a dialogue (you can have) with people who just don't want things to happen."
The construction activity was at the building site, but there were actual tar sands to see at the test pit. A future mine was easier to imagine here. On the south-facing slope below the pit, thick, jet-black goo oozed from rocks, forming drip patterns like coagulating blood, with the dry, oppressive smell of fresh asphalt.
As others scrambled downslope to check out erosion and fossils, Hamblin and I lingered on the rim. A tall, solid man with a full beard and lively eyes, Hamblin had an encyclopedic knowledge of plants and animals. Zeal for nature burst from his lips like light from a sparkler. He snapped photos, calling out that he had casting equipment if anyone found animal tracks.
The night before, he'd sported a "Bidder 70" baseball cap –– a nod to the DeChristopher film. Like some others, DeChristopher was part of the reason he was here. In 2011, he spent a weekend camping around Dinosaur National Monument, where he ran into an acquaintance who said that his camping spot would have become a "big oil well" if not for DeChristopher. That inspired him to later drive two-and-a-half hours to Salt Lake to see the movie, which is where he met some of the activists and learned about the tar sands development.
Hamblin bemoaned what he saw as the loss of public-land access to energy development. He recalled a university lecture about permafrost thawing: "I was the only member of the public who came," he said. "It was like, 'Wow, she's saying a lot of what's going on is not reversible.' I like to cross-country ski, and climate change is making it so there's less snow and more rain. I'm concerned on a lot of levels."
Soon, we climbed back in the van, and bumped down the road to see the scar of a failed 1980s mine. I asked why they called the camp a "vigil." Lionel Trepanier, co-founder with Cordray of Utah Tar Sands Resistance, one group behind the protest, explained that "vigils" were considered by courts to be constitutionally protected free speech. "Although there are tents and a kitchen, this isn't camping," he said. "The vigil is the presence."
"So is it like being a witness?" Hamblin asked. Yes, several people replied.
"If we're here and witnessing what's going on, then we'll know other ways to respond," Corday said, adding that their presence draws attention to the little-known mine. "And it creates a place people can come and learn about the issues. It's a safe place if they want to show their discomfort and not be arrested."
The number of people willing — even eager — to risk arrest trying to stop fossil fuel developments is still small. But it seemed notable to me that they existed at all.
The same month Tim DeChristopher went to prison, in 2011, 1,200 were arrested in Washington, D.C., protesting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry Canadian tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries. Keystone helped galvanize the national climate movement, thanks to organized opposition from the tribes, ranchers and farmers whose land it would cross, and from prominent activists like former NASA scientist James Hansen. Protests small and large, in Washington and elsewhere, have followed the 2011 demonstration. Getting at tar sands and making the oil takes a massive amount of energy, making the fuel hugely carbon intensive. "If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing," Hansen wrote in The New York Times in 2012, "it will be game over for the climate."
But there are mini-Keystones all over — smaller pieces of less politically and environmentally significant infrastructure that are the foundation for a rush on fossil fuels right here at home, including tar sands. Grassroots activists have taken notice, loudly opposing developments of all sizes and consequence.
In Massachusetts, a coalition aims to stop all new fossil fuel infrastructure, including three gas-fired power plants and one pipeline expansion. Massachusetts activists were among those who blockaded the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's offices for a week in the fall. More than 100 were arrested in D.C. and related protests, according to organizers. A Michigan man was recently given a suspended two-month jail sentence and one year of probation after being convicted of a felony for skateboarding inside an unfinished pipeline and refusing to leave. In upstate New York, locals have blocked the entrance to a gas storage facility since October, protesting a FERC-approved expansion. At press time, 170 had been arrested.
My question was not whether the activists in Utah or these other incidents were right, wrong or somewhere in between, or whether in each case their tactics were justified or strategic. I wanted to know what motivated them. Civil disobedience involves some level of personal risk, and people wouldn't engage in it, I assumed, without feeling a powerful emotional involvement; the kind of intellectual response many of us have to the climate crisis is simply not enough.
"Be as frank as possible," an editor at High Country News advised before I began reporting. "They're not like regular people. They're not just saints. They have a certain personality."
"Nature walk departing!" crowed a few not-just-saints in unison, standing by the campfire, lit despite Saturday evening's lingering warmth. Hamblin led a group down a trail and into a stand of Doug-fir, piñon and juniper, carrying a shepherd's crook in one hand, a camera carabineered to his shirt. He wondered aloud if finding threatened or endangered plants might help stop the mine.
We lingered on a southerly slope, under a haggard old piñon, its roots snaking out from the tan soil as though coming up for air. Among them, we discovered an antlion, an insect whose predatory larvae bury themselves in sand, awaiting prey. We poked its pit with a twig, which it attacked, provoking oohs! and more pokes.
I wandered back uphill to camp with Rachel Carter, a dedicated member of Peaceful Uprising, a Salt Lake climate justice group sponsoring the vigil. It was co-founded by DeChristopher after the BLM auction and has continued working locally, though he moved out of state to attend Harvard Divinity School. Carter wore a shaggy pixie cut and army-green pants. Her black T-shirt with its cut-off sleeves proclaimed: "I Am The Carbon Tax."
Though Carter didn't spend all season here, she frequently delivered food that Salt Lake supporters donated and foraged from suburban grocery dumpsters, and joined for special campouts. I asked her why she joined Peaceful Uprising and was surprised to learn she was relatively new to environmentalism and radical activism, if not unfamiliar with it. Her Mormon parents were members of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society, which fought communism and the civil rights movement in the 1950s and '60s. She joined at 15 and was raised believing Joseph McCarthy was a hero. But as she grew older, she became uncomfortable with her family's politics. She moved to Seattle and "was liberalized but not activated," as she struggled to sort out her feelings on Mormonism. "My approach for a long time was just no involvement with anything," she said.
In 2008, she moved back to Utah, right after Proposition 8, which sought to ban same-sex marriage, passed in California with hefty support from the Mormon Church. Carter, who had left the church, was incensed that it had entered politics "in a way that fucked a lot of people over." A rare protest was held outside the Salt Lake Mormon Temple just before she moved home. Then DeChristopher went to the BLM auction. "There was a lot happening, and it was exciting," she told me. "There's something about being an underdog that engages me. Democrats being an underdog in Utah, I was interested in trying to help change that."
She volunteered with LGBT advocacy groups and worked with the Utah Democratic Party. In 2010, she got involved with people in Peaceful Uprising after DeChristopher posted an ad on Craigslist seeking a "courageous congressperson" for Utah's 2nd District. He and his cohort were fed up with conservative Utah Democrat Jim Matheson, who had voted against health-care reform and cap-and-trade. So they decided to "hire" his replacement. "Must have solid moral values and a resistance to selling out to corporate interests," the ad said. Job responsibilities included "stopping catastrophic climate change" and "ending imperialistic wars of aggression."
At a local library, Carter watched while select "applicants" answered questions. That night, a candidate was chosen. "There wasn't a ton of overhead and bullshit and bureaucracy," she said. "And it was just a lot of fun." She worked on the campaign (it failed after forcing Matheson into a runoff), and about six months later, helped prepare for DeChristopher's trial.
"The climate end of it was not one of my main reasons for getting involved with Peaceful Uprising," she said, as we stood on the edge of camp. "It was more about the culture of the group and what they were creating. It was a really creative, energetic group of people."
I heard a similar story from Jesse Fruhwirth, a member of Peaceful Uprising and vigil keeper, who was among the 26 in court this month. In early 2011, he was a reporter for City Weekly, Salt Lake's alternative paper, covering criminal justice, homelessness, DeChristopher's trial, and a 2011 effort by the Utah Legislature to gut open-records laws. It was the first time his editors allowed him to "throw objectivity to the wind and be blatantly biased toward open access," he told me in a phone interview. "I felt like in real life I was a polarizing firebrand, but that journalism snuffed that out. Not everyone has that, and I feel like it's the best thing I've got."
By the spring of 2011, though, Fruhwirth was feeling burnt out, and thought his body was showing signs of stress. Once, when someone hugged him, he said, it broke a rib. He quit and bought a vegan hot dog stand in downtown Salt Lake. But though he'd gotten a taste for polemics, he wasn't sure how to satisfy it. He thought a lot of activism lacked a winning strategy. When a friend dropped by the hot dog stand to tell him about planning meetings for Occupy Salt Lake, late in the summer of 2011, he remembers mentally rolling his eyes. But once the Occupy encampment was established, in early October, he stopped by. He was surprised to see a homeless woman he knew from his reporter days running the welcome booth. "It didn't match my stereotype of what an activist was," he said. "I was very inspired to see homeless people acting politically with non-homeless people." He joined the camp.
Occupy Salt Lake lasted a little more than a month before the city police dismantled it. Both Fruhwirth and Carter were arrested during the eviction. Some activists returned to their day jobs, Fruhwirth said, "but some of us joined the revolution and never looked back." He found Peaceful Uprising one of the few refuges for the newly radicalized in Salt Lake. Climate change was not his top priority, but neither did these seem like typical environmentalists. "I'd heard Tim DeChristopher question capitalism," he told me. "Hearing an environmentalist talk about capitalism was not quite as awesome as seeing a homeless person running the welcome booth at Occupy, but it was one of those moments."
Peaceful Uprising members told me their goal at present is to stop "extreme energy extraction" on the Colorado Plateau. Grassroots activists across the country are converging on a similar aim: No new infrastructure for the extraction, transportation or burning of fossil fuels. "Not here, not in Fort McMurray, not in Mobile, Alabama," Lauren Wood, an early Peaceful Uprising member who just left the group, told me. "Not fracking, not oil, none of it." It's a tall order; stopping even one Utah mine will be tough unless tumbling oil prices change things for the company. Yet the activists' ultimate goal is even more ambitious: to end growth-at-all-costs capitalism and oppression in all forms — to fundamentally restructure the entire economic and social order.
"Of course it's too big," DeChristopher told me, when I reached him by phone and inquired about the grassroots movement's ambitions. "If we're going to create any kind of change, it's going to have to come from a mass movement. And to effectively mobilize people you need a big vision," he said. "Every successful social movement in our history has been unrealistic. Even people who were anti-slavery thought abolitionists were completely nuts. There had literally always been slavery until it was banned. Why not aim for something we actually want? Why not aim for the kind of world we want to see?"
On Saturday night back in the Book Cliffs, I crawled into my tent and opened The Monkey Wrench Gang. I'd brought it with me, guessing that Abbey's environmental call-to-arms had helped inspired the activists. If so, it never came up.
Late Sunday morning, under a pocket of blue sky, some 30 people climbed out of vehicles onto Seep Ridge Road. One man wore a colorful clown mask; another played "This Land is Our Land" on a saxophone. A brown-and-white teacup of a dog scampered about, its fur ruffled by a whiplashing wind.
A couple of people unfurled a banner — "Together and Everywhere We Rise Up for Climate Justice" — and the group marched toward the test pit. The banner was a nod to the People's Climate March, now underway in New York, where hundreds of thousands jammed the streets in an event Politico described as "a coming-out party for a new breed of environmentalism — one that's louder and rowdier than the old-school greens."
The Utah activists hoped the New York march would accomplish something but were disappointed with its tame approach. It was planned in cooperation with the police and did not confront any specific threats. They were more jazzed about Flood Wall Street, a more aggressive, unpermitted sit-in planned for the following day. Its slogan: "Stop capitalism. End the climate crisis."
Here, though, things were pretty tame, too. When the marchers arrived at the test pit, about half of them scrambled through an opening in the fence, past "no trespassing" signs, some with bandanas or scarves pulled up like bandit masks. They stood beside the pit's brown pond and posed for pictures. The clown climbed atop a pile of excavated rock and thrust a "No Tar Sands" sign in the air. Others stayed on the legal side of the fence, either not interested in breaking the law, or seeing little value in it in this instance. The cops never appeared; I was the only reporter. There was scarcely anyone out here to witness it. Nevertheless, the protesters were here to say "no" to the mine because, as a white-haired woman from Moab named Dorothy put it: "These days, if you're not saying 'no,' you're saying 'yes.' "
I drove home after the march, where on and off for the next couple months, I tried to figure out exactly what I had learned about the climate activists and about myself.
I was surprised by how little they resembled the environmentalists I usually interviewed. There was little talk of the finer points of renewable energy policy, little time spent lamenting the death of trees, or the troubles of pikas and polar bears. But immigration reform came up. The legacy of colonization for Native peoples came up. Capitalism and its sins came up –– a lot.
Radicals, more than one person told me, try to attack the roots of problems. The word "radical," they said, means "going to the origin." And the members of Peaceful Uprising have come to believe that the root cause of climate change and other massive problems, like income inequality, is the profit-hungry capitalist system we're all part of, and especially the people at the top of it.
"This isn't just about CO2 in the atmosphere and parts per million," Carter told me. "The various oppressions that have led up to this have been going on for centuries. All of these things are feeding the same system of overlapping and self-reinforcing problems." To Carter and her comrades, climate change represents the last, worst example of the unjust relationship between rich and poor, white and black, colonist and Native. "The refugee crisis we're going to be seeing will affect the most marginalized. Wars –– that is real."
I got some of what they were saying about the climate fight being not just about the environment, but a web of "intersecting oppressions." I understood that poor communities of color had long shouldered an unfair share of pollution, and that climate change promised to punch them hardest again. But was the climate fight really of a piece with the immigration fight? The struggle against police brutality? The connections weren't always obvious, and in any case, was it possible or practical to take on everything that was wrong with the world at once?
Then, on a December evening, after wrestling with writer's block in my Santa Fe office, I tackled what seemed like a more manageable task: applying for health insurance through the new marketplace. I'd left my staff job at High Country News about seven months earlier, to see if I could make it independently. My husband, a potter, had also recently started his own business. I typed in our unimpressive income, and up popped our options. The cheapest plan would cost around $225 a month. If we had a baby, a brochure informed me, it would cover $1,240 of average delivery costs, and we'd pay $6,300. This was insurance, new and improved? None of it was affordable. None of it. As I drove home, I cried alone in my car, then a little more in my kitchen. I felt ashamed. And then I got pissed.
The healthcare law had been carefully designed to win support from private insurance companies, but it still resulted in crappy options that squeezed scrappy people like us. It was hardly surprising, but it didn't seem fair. Then it occurred to me that maybe in that moment, I was angry about climate change, too. My basic complaints about the healthcare reform sounded pretty similar to the critique the activists I spoke with made about the failed 2010 federal climate bill: It tweaked a broken system at its edges, appeasing polluters for political viability rather than proposing the kind of changes the crisis actually demanded. It was a false solution, people told me, and many didn't care that it failed. I thought about their argument about "root causes," and recognized twinges of their anger in myself.
A lot of things started converging in my mind: Occupy. The fast food workers' "Fight for $15." The outrage and despair over the killings by police of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner. All had one thing in common: the sense that our society is designed to work for some and not for others, with the balance tipping ever more in favor of those who need the least help. When I applied for health insurance, I felt something similar: The deck was stacked, against me.
The New York Times recently ran a story about the fight for $15 an hour, profiling one of the campaign's leaders, Terrance Wise, a father of three who worked at both Burger King and Pizza Hut and still had trouble paying rent and utility bills. When he asked his manager at Pizza Hut for a raise, she showed him the pay policy, saying she could boost his pay at most 25 cents after three years, even though he made less than $8 an hour. "If I gave you 25 cents," he recalled being told, "that means you're perfect."
"It makes me angry, and you should be angry, that these billion-dollar corporations are robbing from my kids and your kids," Wise said in the story. "So we're going to have to stand up and fight back." It was the same sentiment I'd heard in the Book Cliffs. People wanted a society with a little more humanity, one whose outcomes are less determined by corporations that serve only their shareholders, valuing profits above the stability of the atmosphere or the dignity of their workers.
When I first arrived at the vigil, I imagined the activists as agitators on the fringe of the environmental movement. They saw themselves, instead, as one twitchy muscle in a much broader and building unrest. I was starting to see them that way, too.
Be as frank as possible. They're not like regular people. That may be true, but these are not regular times.
Cally Carswell is a High Country News contributing editor and freelance science and environmental journalist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work has recently appeared in Science and Modern Farmer. Follow @callycarswell
This story was originally titled "Occupy the Book Cliffs" in the print edition.