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On a sticky June evening, I pull onto the narrow shoulder of U.S. 30, 12 miles northwest of Portland, Oregon. Cars speed past my little Tacoma camper as I stroll down a short hill singed yellow by the heat wave. Nearly hidden from view behind rambunctious apple trees is Carey Haider's two-story Quonset hut. Blackberry brambles creep along its edges, growing into a high thicket on the other side of the railroad tracks that run less than 20 paces from his back door. Beyond a towering power line, more mushroom clouds of greenery explode along the banks of the Multnomah Channel, blocking it from view.
Haider, who sports a beard and suspenders, leads me past an overturned toilet to piles of sledgehammered sheetrock and siding. There, he points out a flat spot where I can park and lay my head for the night. "It looks like a meth house right now," apologizes the 31-year-old graphic designer and photographer. He bought the property in December and is in the midst of overhauling it. "Whatever," I tell him. "It beats KOA."
I mean it, too, even though Haider's planned noise-blocking fence, camp trailers and wood-fired hot tub aren't yet in place. Finding a private, pleasant spot to sleep outdoors, especially near a city, can be tough. Try a pullout or parking lot, and you'll often find a police flashlight in your face at 2 a.m. And state and national park and forest campgrounds overflow with generator-grinding RVs. Haider has signed up with a new Portland-based startup called LandApart to provide campers with another way: Access to private land via an online service.
"We wanted to improve the camping experience" — especially for folks who aren't sure where to start, says CEO and cofounder Ven Gist. "A lot of them look on public lands, which are awesome, but also overused. And a lot of times, they don't go, because they think sites are unavailable or will be too crowded." Meanwhile, he says, the potential supply of private land is enormous, and campsites and event spaces can provide landowners with extra income and incentive to keep it undeveloped.
Like Haider's place, LandApart is under construction. The company, which is ironing out details with invite-only guests and 20 to 30 mostly Northwest-based hosts, aims to offer everything from backyards to ranches, and to open its website for general use by fall. Only a handful of sites offer similar services. Venture capital-funded San Francisco startup Hipcamp, already a clearinghouse for public-land camping info, launched its own private-land sharing initiative this summer. According to founder Alyssa Ravasio, the company is working with 50 to 60 hosts and had 56 California sites bookable at press time, with 50 more in the pipeline. And foreign-based Campr and Gamping (think garden camping) can set you up with landowners around the world, though Western U.S. offerings are sparse.
Generally, landowners set their own rules and prices, and the company facilitating the transaction takes a cut. Land-Apart sites, geared more toward primitive camping, now range from $5 to $60; Hipcamp's are pricier, from $30 to $300 for a group geodesic dome.
Nathanael Siemens anticipates being in the middle of Hipcamp's range. The drought hastened the sale of his family's almond orchard, and he's hoping the ocean-view group campsite he's listing will help support the new farm he's running on 120 acres outside Lompoc, California, where he and his wife grow and mill grain. With courses in cheese making and friends staying to help out, "it's become a learning farm," Siemens says. "I hope people come because they want to hang out with animals or learn to milk, instead of busting out coolers and beers and using our property as a launch pad."
That vision fits well with private-land camping's sharing-economy business model, which targets urban Millennials more interested in unique experiences than owning lots of stuff. But companies are thinking bigger, too. "We want to move more landowners into a protected space," says Ravasio — and eventually blur the line between public and private land to support recreation and preserve wilderness corridors. Campsites could financially bolster open space and even conservation easements — wherein landowners exchange development rights for tax benefits — and provide taxpayers more access to what they've paid for.
It's too early to tell if that will pan out, says Darla Guenzler, executive director of the California Council of Land Trusts. Still, "if people have more ways to enjoy and connect with the outdoors, their appreciation will grow. There are a lot of ways to protect lands other than having big iconic parks."
But building and sustaining a large inventory of campsites may prove difficult if financial rewards aren't high enough — especially since hosts would be liable for accidents and commercial insurance can be expensive. The first wave may be mostly larger landholders who have policies for existing operations, says LandApart's Hosted Lands Manager Dallas Hemphill, who is listing sites on his family's 500-plus-acre cattle ranch near Philomath, Oregon.
Haider is essentially offering his backyard, but it's zoned commercial/residential, so he has commercial insurance. And though the income will be nice, he's more excited about offering people a cheap but interesting haven off the beaten path. "That's kind of how I travel, too," he says. "It all just comes back to a good story."
After Haider leaves, I wonder what story I'll tell about this place. It won't include the trains that Haider says roll through slow as ghosts, because when I walk the tracks in the failing light, none come. And it won't involve being murdered by bloodthirsty hobos, because the human-like silhouettes I spot in the distance never move. If I didn't have to work tomorrow, I could visit the clothing-optional beach on neighboring Sauvie Island. Or jog in Forest Park, a public preserve just to the south. I lie in my sleeping bag and stare toward the Multnomah. The highway traffic trickles to silence and the forest creaks with frogs. As I drift off, I hear what I imagine to be the channel itself, whispering on its way into the arms of the Columbia.]]>
So when the long Fourth of July weekend rolled around, some friends and I sought relief in a basin of cold blue lakes high in Washington's central Cascades. The heat's signature was everywhere along the Columbia River as we set out on Thursday evening. The grassy hills stepping back from the Gorge's basalt cliffs were scorched nearly white. As we came around a bend in Highway 97, we saw that they were scorched black as well, where the bright fingers of a grassfire picked their way up through a forest of wind turbines. It took an hour to detour around the blaze. When we finally turned back onto northbound 97, we broke through an endless line of stopped cars and semis awaiting clearance to head south — their headlights stretching across the darkness like a line of flame themselves.
The Junction Fire — which had consumed 2,100 acres by Friday — was one of 1,425 fires that have started in Oregon and Washington so far this season, about double the average for this time of year, says John Saltenberger, fire weather program manager at the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center. "We're already seeing fire index values (based on heat, humidity, wind and precipitation) you'd typically see in late August."It didn't help that last winter was the warmest on record for the west side of Oregon and Washington, with much of the precipitation that would usually blanket the Cascades in a time-release reservoir of snowpack falling as rain instead. Accordingly, the National Interagency Fire Center wildland fire outlook for the summer suggests the Northwest's fire season has roared in three to five weeks ahead of schedule, while northern Idaho and western Montana are four to five weeks ahead. Even a rainforest on Washington's usually sodden Olympic Peninsula — where fire cycles run in the hundreds of years — is ablaze, stoking worries that current conditions may herald what climate change has in store for the region.
But changes in large-scale atmospheric pressure patterns are the primary culprits behind the current heatwave, says Washington State Climatologist Nick Bond, and their causes are hard to pin down. Normally, a ridge of high pressure sits over the Southwest through the early summer, punching up temperatures there before shifting northward in July and leaving a low pressure trough in its wake, ushering in that region's monsoon cycle thunderstorms while bringing the Northwest into its hottest, driest months. This year, it seems to have shifted a couple of months ahead of time; "It's like an early onset of summer," Bond says. "The movement of this high pressure has impacted the whole Western U.S." Indeed, while the Northwest cooks, the Southwest and southern Rockies have had an unusually wet few months, enjoying additional bumps of moisture from an active Pacific hurricane season. As a result, wildfire potential there is expected to be significantly lower than normal until August. And a strengthening El Niño cycle may pump yet more moisture into the region and much of the Interior West, while threatening to drag the Northwest's warm, dry times through the winter and into next spring.
Off the West Coast, a swath of water stretching from Mexico to Alaska that is 4 to 6 degrees warmer than the surrounding ocean — which Bond has dubbed "The Blob" — may also be contributing to the disparity, boosting temperatures a short way inland by warming the prevailing winds that comb over the ocean's surface, while at the same time making it easier for remnants of tropical storms to reach the Southwest. Just how much of a role The Blob is playing in the Northwest's drought is an open question, says Philip Mote, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University — one he hopes to answer soon with a massive citizen science computing project. Existing research suggests The Blob was itself caused by more persistent high-pressure conditions that have been parked over parts of the West Coast off and on for the last year and a half, contributing to both the unusually warm winter, and to unrelenting heat last summer — one of the hottest on record for Oregon.
Mote is betting that this summer is on the same track. "We actually have an office pool on the total number of days over 90 that we'll get in Corvallis. The average is 13, but we've already passed that and it's just July." But whether that translates into as bad of a fire season as predicted will depend on the number of ignitions, which for large, costly fires in the Northwest tend to come more from lightning than people, Saltenberger says — though you do get spikes on holiday weekends.
Finally up in the Cascades for our own holiday weekend, my friends and I refrain from starting any of our own fires. They're banned, but it's also just too hot, even over 6,000 feet. Sweat and floury dust congeal on our calves in brown smears that we dub "trail butter." Lower Robin Lake, where we camp, is warm enough that I swim its entire perimeter, staying in for over an hour. On our last morning, the sun rises through a weird orange-brown haze. I read later that British Columbia is awash with conflagrations — their clouds of smoke passing through Washington like the ghosts of storms that never arrived.
Sarah Gilman is a High Country News contributing editor based in Portland, Oregon. Follow her @Sarah_Gilman.]]>
The two birds couldn't be more different, but they're often compared because their declines catalyzed massive, controversial federal interventions. A few years after the owl was listed under the Endangered Species Act, the Clinton administration hammered out the nation's first-ever landscape-scale attempt to manage for ecosystem health. Crafted in a mere 90 days under intense pressure to end years-long wars over logging's environmental toll, the Northwest Forest Plan sought to balance the industry with habitat protections across 24 million federal acres. But timber harvests proved much lower than promised, leaving local communities reeling and making the spotted owl a magnet for ESA bashers.
Critics will have an even better target if the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists the grouse this year: The bird shares its vast range with powerful industries like oil and gas. To avoid a listing, in late May Interior Secretary Sally Jewell unveiled 14 plans that protect 66 million acres of grouse habitat on Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands across 10 states. Unlike the Northwest Forest Plan, though, the sage grouse process has been collaborative from the get-go. The resulting strategy walks a political tightrope, building on states' existing efforts to conserve the bird, while imposing the consistent, range-wide safeguards needed to convince Fish and Wildlife that additional protections are unnecessary.
"We're trying to put together something that works for the bird and provides flexibility for sustainable economic development," says Jim Lyons, Interior's deputy assistant secretary for lands and minerals, who has helped coordinate the planning since 2013 and did the same for the Northwest Forest Plan. But if things skew too far in either direction, the whole endeavor may collapse.
Over more than a century, wildfire, invasive species, energy development, livestock operations and ranchettes have gobbled up sagebrush steppe, causing sage grouse numbers to plummet from historic estimates in the millions to as low as 200,000. Though the new plans vary, all adopt tiered restrictions for a large swath of the remaining habitat. The most stringent go to "sagebrush focal areas" that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service identified as critical to the species' survival, then to "priority" habitat. Both limit overall surface disturbance, and, with notable exceptions in Wyoming, generally forbid aboveground infrastructure on new oil and gas leases and exclude renewable energy development. "General" habitat faces the fewest limits.
The rules won't apply to existing rights of way and oil and gas leases, and habitat areas aren't off-limits to future leasing, but the administration says most viable hydrocarbon reserves are outside their boundaries anyway. Nor is grazing prohibited anywhere, though every proposal includes stepped-up protections if bird numbers or habitat decline below set levels.
Many environmentalists offer circumspect praise, saying the plans appear much stronger and more consistent than their 2013 drafts, which hewed more closely to the priorities — and politics — of individual states. "Is it perfect? No," says Nada Culver, The Wilderness Society's BLM Action Center director. "But it's a stewardship vision. Cross-state wilderness lands, wildlife migration corridors, those should all be easy to plan for after this."
Still, some states are balking at the changes. "While lip service is paid to 'collaboration,' the focus of federal regulators is increasingly unilateral and dismissive of state conservation actions," Kathleen Clarke, Utah's sage grouse lead and Bush-era BLM chief, told a House committee -recently.
Harder-line environmental groups are pushing back, too. For example, in fossil fuel-rich Wyoming — home to 37 percent of remaining sage grouse — the feds adopted the state's existing 5 percent cap on total surface disturbance in priority habitat, rather than the 3 percent limit in most other plans. But studies have shown that anything above 3 percent will result in lost birds, argues WildEarth Guardians' Erik Molvar. "For an administration that claims to be concerned about climate change, they sure are bending themselves into a pretzel to keep sage grouse from becoming an obstacle to drilling."
Yet Fish and Wildlife itself has endorsed Wyoming's strategy. And the 5 percent cap is actually more restrictive than other states' because it counts wildfire and invasive weeds as "disturbances," says Audubon Society Vice President Brian Rutledge, a member of Wyoming's Sage Grouse Implementation Team. "This ecosystem was utterly without protection 10 years ago. We're a hell of a lot better off than we were."
That kind of "good-enough" sentiment hints at the delicate politics surrounding sage grouse. A rider passed last year already forbids Fish and Wildlife from spending any money in 2015 to issue rules for grouse if it determines protection is required. As of early June, Congress was considering a defense bill amendment that would delay both a listing decision and implementation of the federal sage grouse plans for several more years. If federal conservation efforts don't go far enough, and the bird is listed, the ESA itself will be open to even fiercer attack. If they alienate states, the backlash against the plans could also gain momentum.
"You can't turn the whole West over to sage grouse," says Fremont County Commissioner Doug Thompson, an active participant in Wyoming and federal conservation planning. Thompson recently lobbied lawmakers not to interfere with the process, but "if the final determination is that the plans are as bad or worse than a listing," he says, "then I might change my mind."]]>
If you're a whooping crane chick raised in captivity at the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Maryland, this is the costume worn by the human pretending to be your mom. Because your species numbered around 20 in 1941, scientists carefully selected your biological parents to avoid genetic problems. Once you hatch, your surrogate "crane" teaches you, by example, to eat crane kibble, and to swim in a pool and dash across the grass so that your legbones develop correctly. When you're old enough, she teaches you to follow an ultralight aircraft on your first migratory flight to Florida's Gulf Coast. She shapes you, in essence, to an approximation of wildness, hoping that you will one day mate with another whooper, and build a population that thrives without intervention in the world beyond Patuxent's walls.
Over the past half-century, we've gone to great lengths to conserve rare species, with some success. There are now hundreds of whooping cranes, wolves and grizzlies have reclaimed the Northern Rockies, and certain salmon runs have increased. But today's conservation challenges are infinitely vaster than anyone could have imagined when Congress passed the Endangered Species Act. We are driving Earth's sixth mass extinction, radically changing habitat and the climate to which we are all adapted. Saving every struggling creature now will be impossible, particularly if it requires draconian measures. "Conservationists need new strategies," writes contributing editor Cally Carswell in this issue's cover story. And one of the most viable may involve looking beyond rare species to some of the much more common ones.
Ecologists at Northern Arizona University have built a strong case that genetic diversity within seemingly ordinary cottonwoods and piñon pines determines the biodiversity of the vast community of creatures that live in those trees' canopies and on their bark. That means saving a lot of species at once may be as simple — and as complicated — as ensuring that the handful that form an ecosystem's foundation have the necessary genetic resilience to weather the coming crises. Protecting, and perhaps even directly manipulating, their innate ability to adapt could give everything else a better shot at survival.
That's an unsettling vision of the future — like playing God, as one biologist observes. But it's not all that different from what we already do with whooping cranes, working desperately and with an almost maternal devotion to ensure that this graceful bird, with its nearly 8-foot foot wingspan, inhabits our future as more than just a carefully maintained artifact from a vanishing era.]]>
Set against a backdrop of a few difficult drought years, reservoirs dropping and some communities overpumping aquifers, the scenario can seem a pretty compelling argument for two massive and controversial water projects that the state wants to build: A 6-foot-diameter, 140-mile-long pipeline that would allow Utah to draw its remaining share of Colorado River water from Lake Powell and pump it to Kane and Washington Counties; and a new dam on the Bear River system, which feeds into the Great Salt Lake, that would supply 220,000 acre-feet of water to surrounding communities.
Trouble is, that scenario may be flat wrong, or at the very least overstated.
On May 5, Utah's Legislative Auditor General released a damning (damming?) report revealing that the water agency's forecasts are based on unreliable data and failed to adequately account for the possible contributions of conservation and irrigation water freed up as new homes consume farmland. "By excluding this added water supply," the auditors write, "the projections accelerate the timeframes for developing costly, large-scale water projects." Zach Frankel of the Utah Rivers Council, which opposes the pipeline and stumped for the audit along with several other groups, puts it more bluntly: "We are not," he says, "running out of water."
The data problems are partly driven by inefficiency and inadequate resources. The division obtains information about water use from 468 local water providers secondhand through another agency. Just one staffer is devoted to this task, and though that person attempts to verify data by calling local officials directly every five years, errors slipped through. Sometimes, water providers made mistakes because they weren't properly trained or didn't understand the instructions or purpose of the data. One city even reported water use for 2012 by submitting data from a city in New York with an identical name.
"We agree with many of the audit conclusions and recommendations and believe that (they) will enable us to strengthen our processes," Division of Water Resources Director Eric Millis told lawmakers at a hearing the day the report was released. "We tried to do the best we could with what we had available."
The audit's conclusions about conservation are even more troubling. Despite being one of the nation's most arid states, Utah consistently tops nearly every other state in per capita water use. And yet the division assumes that conservation can only drop statewide consumption by 25 percent. Its projections have water use flatlining at 220 gallons per person, per day after 2025 – still much higher than current use in many other Western states.
"We find one regional comparison that is insightful," the auditors write. "The Southern Nevada Water Authority, which serves the Las Vegas region, has a goal to reduce water use to 199 (gallons per person per day) by 2035. In contrast, the communities in Southwestern Utah, which have a climate similar to that of Southern Nevada, have a goal to reduce water use to 292 by the year 2060."
That's the area that would be served by the Lake Powell Pipeline. Given the project's expected cost of $1 billion to $3.5 billion, Frankel calls southwestern Utah's conservation goals "appalling for a state that claims to value water and fiscal conservatism."
The audit identifies numerous areas for improvement, not least of which are Utah's incredibly cheap water rates, which are heavily supported by property taxes. "We subsidize water more than any other state," says Republican state Senator Howard Stephenson, president of the Utah Taxpayers Association. "When my neighbor is running his garden hose down the gutter while he's washing his car, there's no impact to his pocket book because he's socializing the waste among all of his neighbors. If people actually bear the cost of their choices, you'd assure more conservation." The state could also implement tiered rate structures in which heavy users pay more, and actually meter "secondary" — or outdoor — water systems, which, unlike several other Western states, Utah has yet to tackle.
And though much of Utah's expected residential growth will gobble up farmland on the Wasatch Front, the Division appears to vastly underestimate the amount of freed up irrigation water that would be shifted over to residential use. In the Weber River Basin, for example, the auditors found that 52,000 more acre-feet would be available than the state has projected. That's roughly equivalent to the share of water that communities there would receive from the $1.5 billion Bear River Project.
Department of Natural Resources Executive Director Mike Styler, who oversees the Division of Water Resources, told lawmakers at the May 5 hearing that the audit was "a great help" for predicting future water use and that his staff was already looking into implementing recommendations. If anyone should be nervous about the report, he added, it's "you in the Legislature. (This audit) is suggesting that you look at ways to alter water demand. That's saying, 'Folks, we want you to consider changing your way of life.' … That will take great courage."
Sarah Gilman is a contributing editor at High Country News. Follow @Sarah_Gilman
Homepage image of Salt Lake City courtesy of Skyguy414, Wikimedia Commons.]]>
Complaints about pesticide drift are nothing new in Oregon communities abutting private timber lands, where the spraying occurs; the state's rules governing the practice are the weakest on the West Coast. But the high profile Gold Beach incident added urgency to rural residents' and environmentalists' calls for reform.State Senate Bill 613, introduced this February by Portland Democratic Senator Michael Dembrow and Lake Oswego Democratic Representative Ann Lininger, looked like their best hope. It would have required advance public notification of spraying, so that rural residents would know when to move livestock and pets, shut windows, and stay out of recently treated areas. Currently, the industry has a 12-month window to spray after notifying the Oregon Department of Forestry; it does not have to provide a specific date. The bill also would have forced companies to disclose the chemicals involved, and required the state to set buffers around homes and schools. As it stands, the state calls for 60-foot buffers around salmon streams and along stretches upstream of a drinking water intake, but nothing for wells or residences.
But SB613 died under industry pressure April 10 without ever receiving a hearing, even though it was weaker than rules in neighboring Washington. Going into 2015 with a freshly strengthened Democratic majority in the Legislature, "everyone was predicting the greenest legislation in 20 years," says Steve Pedery, conservation director at Oregon Wild. But when it comes to timber in Oregon – as with ranching in Rocky Mountain states, or oil drilling in North Dakota – alliances don't forge neatly along political party lines.
The first sign of trouble came when Eugene Democrat Chris Edwards, who has received far more in campaign contributions from the timber industry, according to the Oregonian, replaced Dembrow as chairman of the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee. There, the bill went into a work group instead of a hearing – and never came out.
Meanwhile, Clatskanie Democrat Rep. Brad Witt, who has received hefty contributions from timber and chemical interests, convened a competing work group in the House to come up with alternative proposals, but refused to consider advance notification on the grounds that it could tip off ecoterrorists who might attack sprayers. "It was impossible for me to make a call on whose safety (neighboring property owners or people making the aerial sprays) is more important," he told The Register-Guard.
The surviving bills call for what the timber and pesticide industries have argued for all along: increased penalties and strengthened oversight, rather than changing the rules. They would create a toll-free hotline to report incidents, funnel more money from pesticide registration fees to the state's Pesticide Analytical and Response Center, which investigates incidents, and instate new licensing requirements for helicopter pilots. "Part of the reason for the frustration for rural residents is that the state's response was poor," Salem Democratic Rep. Brian Clem, told the paper. The measures, many of which he introduced, would mean "better and faster investigations."
Pedery's not so sure. "It's hard to say whether it's better than the status quo. But none of those things do anything to address why complaints are actually happening."
And at least one, House Bill 3429, might make it worse by "effectively requiring" Pesticide Analytical and Response Center board members "to either currently be employed by the pesticide and logging industries, or have been employed by those industries in the past," thus compromising its independence, Pedery argued in April 15 testimony. "Oregon is supposed to be this great green Nirvana of the Northwest," he says, but "the politics around timber are still stuck in the '70s."
Sarah Gilman is a contributing editor at High Country News. Follow @Sarah_Gilman]]>
Now, when I visit my folks, three megahouses stand on that once-haunted lot. A wall of palatial abodes with price tags in the millions rings the mesa's edge, part of an endless wave of gentrification. Sometimes, filled with quiet vengeance on night walks, I'm tempted to leave my dog's offerings on the manicured landscaping.
The gift of staying in any place long enough to learn it well is that it shapes your way of seeing the world, becomes mortar with which you assemble the pieces of yourself. And the grief is that it inevitably becomes something else beneath your feet.
In this issue's cover story, contributing editor Sierra Crane-Murdoch profiles a man grappling with the transformation of one of the grandest spaces of all: North Dakota's prairie and badlands. Over the last few years, the Bakken oil boom has chewed through private land and the Little Missouri National Grasslands all the way to the edge of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. John Heiser, the park's backcountry ranger, has lived near it his whole life and worked there longer than anyone. Arbitrarily drawn borders can do only so much to protect any landscape, so Heiser has watched with rising fury as drilling noise and lights diminish the park's sense of sanctuary, and an invasion of new visitors — mostly transient workers — brings in the crime and chaos that are de rigueur in Bakken boomtowns.
This erosion of peace has set off a deeper erosion of trust, cutting into the bedrock of those communities. Residents have turned inward and bunkered down; many have left. These are no longer places, Crane-Murdoch writes, where everybody knows everybody. Heiser, the boom's most vocal critic, is unusual for pointing these things out loudly and often. But he articulates a feeling many North Dakotans share: Something timeless has been changed forever. And when that happens, what's left for those who stay?
The kids growing up in my old neighborhood today don't know a cougar once killed a deer in the vacant lot down the hill where a church and condos now stand; I don't know what the mesa looked like before houses were there at all. It is hard to grieve what you never saw or understood. Ignorance can be shelter; knowledge can turn from mortar to wrecking ball.]]>
A week later, she and 38 other collared does embarked with their kin on a much bigger journey that scientists working in southern Oregon's Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge and northern Nevada's Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge were hoping to finally understand. About 3,500 pronghorn occupy the jointly managed refuges, which respectively encompass 278,000 and 575,000 cattle- and wild horse-free acres, separated by a 20-mile wide strip of Bureau of Land Management land.
The protected areas were established by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s to provide safe haven for the species; pronghorn numbers had fallen from historical estimates of 35 million animals to just 13,000 by 1915, thanks to overhunting and habitat loss. Even then, the lands they contained were known to provide important fawning grounds and summer range, Gail Collins, the complex's supervisory wildlife biologist, explains. But until a few years ago, when tracking collars became light enough to avoid injuring the animals, she and her colleagues were forced to wonder: Where did the refuges' pronghorn spend their winters?
When the GPS collars broke away after two years, in 2013, they collected them and had their answer: Unlike their cousins in Wyoming, who use a 120-mile long migration route with defined pinch points to travel between summer range in Grand Teton National Park and winter range in the Red Desert, the Sheldon and Hart Mountain pronghorn migrated in several directions along common routes, about half of them to shared winter grounds in the unprotected land between the two ranges, in an area called Beatys Butte. One doe even traveled from Hart Mountain clear down to the foot of the Black Rock Range in Nevada to winter – a roundtrip journey of 200 miles. All told, they utilized some 3 million acres.
Though the pronghorn wintering outside the refuges compete with cows at Beatys Butte, as well as hundreds more feral horses than the BLM's management plan for that area allows for, they don't face the same acute habitat fragmentation threats – subdivision, busy highways, oil and gas development – that the Wyoming migrators do. Collins says the data – currently being prepared for publication – helps the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service "establish a baseline, so that we understand what areas are important" if something like a pipeline is proposed.
"The takeaway is that our pronghorn use the lands around us," she adds; as with so many protected areas, even these massive chunks are not big enough to contain all the resources a wide-ranging species needs. "We'll work closely with our BLM partners to ensure that those areas where animals are moving are protected so that we don't see breaks in those migrations."
Bend, Oregon resident Alice Elshoff hopes to ensure the same, but in a different way. From June 8 to 14, Elshoff, a former elementary school teacher who is 80, plans to hike 10 miles per day with friends Julie Weikel and Helen Harbin all the way from Sheldon, through some of the migration areas, to Hart Mountain, to document habitat conditions in the area between the refuges and raise awareness about the creatures who rely on it, including greater sage grouse. "It's just basically my love affair with the American pronghorn," Elshoff, who sounds maybe 40 on the phone, says by way of explanation before listing the creature's virtues. "This little speedster of the plains is just such a wonderful example of form following function": spring-loaded toes, a windpipe the size of a vacuum hose, a massive and powerful heart.
The Oregon Natural Desert Association, an environmental group which Elshoff helped found in the '80s, will bring the women's gear to each camp. The route has yet to be solidified, but one thing is certain, says Weikel, a retired large animal vet who flies her own plane and is herself pushing 70. "Wherever we end up getting picked up at the end, we're going straight to the Hart Mountain Hot Springs."
Sarah Gilman is a contributing editor at High Country News. Follow @Sarah_Gilman
An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that ONDA was founded in the '60s. HCN regrets the error.
As a recent transplant from rural Colorado, I can relate. What we aliens need, I figure, is an outsiders' guide to insider Portland. So, on a rainy Saturday, I don a silver onesie and homemade alien mask, and set out by bike to concoct one.
First, I pedal along the Willamette River's industrial waterfront, where I peer at graffiti-decorated freight trains, then hit the Eastbank Esplanade, a multi-use path with great views of downtown that connects to the lengthy Springwater Corridor trail. Two women spotted a cigar-shaped UFO here in 2004. But all I see are passing joggers who studiously avoid meeting my black ovoid eyes. Hoping for friendly banter, I ask a man at an overlook — an out-of-towner like me — to snap my picture. But he returns my iPhone as if it burns him and strides swiftly away.
Just to the east is the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, where I pocket my alien face (no masks allowed) and visit a large public display of human fetuses. At a computer terminal, I age my actual 33-year-old face to a wizened 58, then wander a maze representing the hydrologic cycle, "falling" from the sky as a raindrop on a diminutive zipline before a spin of a giant dial "contaminates" me with mercury and I "flow" into a trash-filled "ocean."
Portland's oldest planned neighborhood, Ladd's Addition, lies several blocks farther east. With picturesque houses, big trees and main streets arranged in a giant X, it makes an inviting UFO landing pad for extraterrestrials hoping to sample the profusion of great restaurants and shops on nearby Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard and Southeast Division Street. After grabbing a rich Vietnamese bone-broth soup and a microbrew at the Double Dragon, I pop into the Independent Publishing Resource Center to watch locals make prints on ancient letterpresses, then buy a 'zine from a converted cigarette machine.
Oaks Amusement Park, where UFOs were spotted shortly after Arnold's sighting, is a pleasant ride south down the Springwater trail. It offers roller skating-curious aliens a historic wooden rink complete with a Wurlitzer pipe organ. At the evening roller-derby class, instructor Next of Ken teaches us to crossover our skates and speed in tight circles. Perhaps because we ETs are more accustomed to interdimensional movement, however, my skates tend to fly out from under me.
HAUS Shows, a network of private homes that host occasional concerts, are easier on the tailbone. At that night's venue, I squeeze onto a sofa amid hip young people to listen to sweet-sounding folk and Americana. The singer from a Colorado band smiles at me with something like recognition: "Luchadorable!" he exclaims.
Even so, being an alien is exhausting: Baristas ignore you, passersby yell obscenities. So fellow extraterrestrials might consider escaping for a hike in Forest Park, one of the nation's largest urban parks, where moss-furred trees exude the homey air of an X-Files set. To warm up after, head for a soak at Common Ground Wellness Cooperative, a co-ed, clothing-optional hot-tub spa.
Then there's the Peculiarium – an oddity emporium and art gallery in northwest Portland. The alien autopsy display is insulting (I would never use barbecue tongs to handle intestines!), but I have my picture taken with it anyway, then befriend the giant Sasquatch and contemplate a life-sized gummy brain on a Styrofoam tray.
But it is zoobombing that fills my alien heart with the most joy. Participants meet every Sunday night to ride kiddie bikes at lightning speed down one of the city's tallest hills. Around 10 p.m., I join a dozen men and women fiddling with custom rigs as hiphop pumps from a set of speakers lashed to an ancient road bike. Some strap on dirt-bike helmets with full face-shields. "Cheap dental insurance," one zoobomber explains helpfully. A sprightly woman in striped stockings and garter belts calls out the rules: Don't block people! Yell out when you see a car! Don't leave anyone behind! Then we're off, screaming around steep turns on rain-shimmered streets through silent neighborhoods. Ahead of me, a man in a studded denim vest with "DROPOUT" emblazoned across the shoulders miraculously stays upright atop a bike built for a kindergartener that keeps losing its chain.
I stop at West Burnside Street, the downtown drag that will lead me to my truck, and watch the other zoobombers descend. Through my mesh eyeholes, their evenly spaced taillights seem to blur into one graceful machine. Like a UFO, gliding out of sight into the city.
Sarah Gilman, formerly HCN's associate editor at the home base of Paonia, Colorado, is a contributing editor in Portland, Oregon. Follow @Sarah_Gilman]]>
No wonder United States Geological Survey wildlife biologist Karyn Rode describes collecting samples and measurements from tranquilized polar bears as "surreal." And yet, it wasn't the bears per se that most captured her imagination when she arrived on the southern Beaufort Sea by helicopter in 2007 for her first field season. It was the fact that they manage to eke out their existence on such a vast, featureless white expanse of ice, floating on the ocean. "I was like: 'Seriously, you live here? How do you figure it out?' " she recalls now. "It's just phenomenal."
Eking out a polar bear-sized existence has gotten ever harder as that ice recedes thanks to global climate change. To sustain their bulk, the bears spend more than 50 percent of their time hunting and consume a diet that is up to 70 percent fat—mostly seals coming up for air at holes in the ice, or basking on its surface. Less ice means less opportunity to hunt seals, and makes travel and mating more difficult; of the nine most studied populations (there are 19 total), four are declining, National Geographic reported last fall. In 2008, the federal government declared polar bears "threatened" and extended them special protections under the Endangered Species Act.
Recent studies and corresponding headlines have suggested that bears are increasingly turning toward sources of food on land—everything from berries and snow goose eggs to musk oxen—perhaps making up for the expanding caloric gap in their diets. Some have even argued that these sources could help the bears weather the transition to a less wintry world.
But in a review paper published online April 1 in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Rode and coauthors argue that existing data just don't support those hopeful conclusions. "It's so intriguing to see big polar bears raiding a nest," she says. "It's generated a lot of excitement. Our motivation for the study was to stop and put it into context."
The places where increased terrestrial feeding has been observed, such as around Canada's Southern Hudson Bay, are also some of those with the richest available onshore foods. Yet bear body condition, survival and population levels in those places continues to decline as time spent on land increases, the scientists write. Meanwhile, documented cases of terrestrial feeding are so far limited to a small number of individuals – no more than 30 of any given population have yet been shown to be feeding on bird eggs, for example.
The scientists also point out that polar bears coming ashore in the Arctic are likely to come into direct competition with grizzlies that currently occupy much of the coastal habitat and rely for their survival on the lower fat terrestrial foods that polar bears are beginning to exploit. Those sources are already marginal enough there that they are some of the smallest of their species – and just half the size of polar bears.
But even if land foods are unlikely to help polar bear populations in a meaningful way, the bruins' increased reliance on them could have profound effects on the ecosystems they move into, in part because their caloric needs are so great. Polar bear predation has already caused "catastrophic" nesting failures for some species of seabirds, according to the paper.
There are still some hopeful signs, though. The bears that Rode now spends her spring field seasons with—the population that splits time between Alaska and Russia on the Chukchi Sea—have so far fared well despite ice losses, possibly because their marine environment is more productive. "We thought things were going to be really ugly, but we were happily surprised," she says. Some mother bears even rear three healthy cubs there, a sign that they've been getting enough to eat. "I don't know if it's going to stay that way. We'll see."
Sarah Gilman is a contributing editor at High Country News. Follow @Sarah_Gilman]]>
One thing is certain: The rules are much stronger than what was in place before on federal lands, which account for 11 percent of the nation's natural gas production and five percent of its oil production. "Current federal well-drilling regulations are more than 30 years old and they simply have not kept pace with the technical complexities of today's hydraulic fracturing operations," Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said in a prepared statement. Indeed, recent technological advances in drilling and fracking – which involves firing a slurry of water, sand and chemicals underground to release trapped oil and gas – have unlocked formerly unreachable formations and initiated unprecedented flurries of drilling activity from Pennsylvania to North Dakota to the Intermountain West. The uptick in activity has spurred a parallel flurry of public concern over possible air and water contamination. "This updated and strengthened rule," Jewell continued, "provides a framework of safeguards and disclosure protocols" to help ensure that the public has "confidence that transparent and effective safety and environmental protections are in place."
Among the significant changes in the final rules are:
The major sticking points for many environmental groups – most of which are still analyzing the 395-page rule document – center around its requirements for the public disclosure of fracking fluid's chemical constituents. Not only are companies not required to disclose them until 30 days after fracking, but they are allowed to do so through the industry-backed website FracFocus, run by the nonprofit Ground Water Protection Council. A federal panel and a Harvard study have both found the database to be significantly lacking. According to FuelFix, though the feds are working with the Council to alleviate concerns about data accessibility and accountability, relying on it "will at least temporarily violate an executive order on government transparency," because the information it contains isn't machine-readable. Plus, some groups say they've noticed significant discrepancies between what companies report on state permits and what they report on the website.
Companies also still get to invoke trade secret exemptions essentially on their own authority, rather than the agency making the call, says Amy Mall of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the rules lay groundwork for states to apply for exceptions if their own "meet the same objectives" – wiggle language Mall finds alarmingly vague. Nor does the rule cover whether some places should be kept off-limits altogether.
The BLM estimates the new rules, which come into effect in 90 days, will add about $11,400 to the cost of drilling each well – approximately 0.13 to 0.21 percent of the total. The Western Energy Alliance, an industry trade group, puts it at more like $97,000, and joined the Independent Petroleum Association of America, in filing a lawsuit the same day the rules were released.
But if anything, the rules seem mostly to institutionalize, at a federal level, practices that the most responsible companies and the most strict state regulatory agencies already use. "Basically, you've got the whiners that don't want to come into this century," argues Baizel, who has worked on oil and gas issues for OGAP since 2002. And if companies had been more open to these sorts of basics a decade ago, then today's fierce skirmishes over whether local governments have to the authority to regulate or even ban fracking may never have happened. "But now, with so much lack of trust because of peoples' experience from the last 10 years," he says, "these rules won't solve any of the political questions."
Correction: An earlier version of this story stated Amy Mall's last name as spelled Moll. Sarah Gilman is a contributing editor at High Country News. Follow @Sarah_Gilman
"I have become a liability to the very institutions and policies to which I have dedicated my career," Kitzhaber conceded in a quavering voice. The state House speaker and Senate president, both fellow Democrats, had joined The Oregonian in calling for him to step down. Kitzhaber finally did so but remained defiant, denying wrongdoing and aiming a barb at his accusers and former allies, charging that he had been "tried, convicted and sentenced by the media with no due process."
The reversal in his political fortunes was indeed stunning. Kitzhaber was a popular and effective centrist politician who vastly expanded health-care coverage for vulnerable populations and championed environmental causes. He had comfortably won re-election to an unprecedented fourth term just months earlier — after the scandal first broke. And though federal officials were conducting a criminal investigation, no charges had been filed. The extent of Kitzhaber's involvement remained uncertain. So how did the governor fall so far so fast?
Public corruption appears about as scarce in Oregon as sunshine on its rainy coast. The state ranks eighth from the bottom for its rate of corruption convictions, according to unpublished research by Dartmouth professor emeritus Richard Winters. "In some ways, this scandal would be laughable in Ohio or Maryland or New Jersey," says Bill Lunch, Oregon Public Broadcasting's political analyst.
Consider, for instance, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who stayed in office through multiple years of media scrutiny, federal investigation and indictments of associates and was only impeached after being arrested for, among other things, trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat. Or New Jersey's Chris Christie, who is still in office and nursing presidential hopes despite federal investigations into whether his administration closed bridge lanes and caused record traffic jams to retaliate against a mayor who refused to endorse his re-election.
But the last time an Oregon governor left office mid-term was in 1952, when Douglas McKay stepped down to become Eisenhower's Interior secretary. No one has ever resigned under a cloud. The state may be particularly queasy about scandal, Lunch explains, because of its deeply "moralistic" political culture: Oregonians still see government as a place for service and an agent for the collective good.
Even Hayes' and Kitzhaber's alleged transgressions fit this public-service mold, in a twisted way: They appear to have been motivated less by money than by progressive ideals. Hayes' unpaid work as a policy adviser, and her paying clients' agendas, involved fighting climate change and promoting clean energy and holistic measures of economic success that weigh the growth of the economy against things like environmental cleanup costs and income inequality. In a speech at Portland State University last April, Hayes described how she blithely dismissed Kitzhaber staffers' early concerns about her ambiguous role. "One of them said, 'You know, when you work for the governor. …' And I said, 'I don't work for the governor, I work for the Earth.' "
As a last-term governor with a Democratic majority in the Legislature, it's conceivable that Kitzhaber could have made good on his promise to price carbon. His successor, Democratic Secretary of State Kate Brown, is subject to a special election in 2016 and seems unlikely to make such bold moves for awhile. But some observers doubt Kitzhaber had the political capital, and sources close to him say he had no immediate plans to try. His big climate priority for this session had been the renewal and full implementation of a low-carbon fuel program. After his departure, it still passed the Legislature easily.
In the end, as a rapid-fire legislative session ramped up, Democrats may have realized they had more to lose from standing by Kitzhaber than asking him to go. A poll last summer showed significantly more Oregon voters wanted Kitzhaber replaced than re-elected, due in part to the spectacular failure of the state's healthcare exchange. But Republican challenger Dennis Richardson didn't stand a chance in the left-leaning state. And Brown is a more liberal Democrat, with her own long legislative record of fighting for social and environmental causes. "I think there was a feeling that the governor needed to take one for the team," says Democratic strategist Jake Weigler. "It was not a matter of his own political fortunes anymore, but rather about the larger progressive agenda for the state."
In fact, for all the drama around Hayes and Kitzhaber, the ripple effects on the causes they championed have so far been undramatic. If anything, many of the state's leading environmentalists seem optimistic. Most laud Kitzhaber's ability to bring disparate sides to the table to compromise — particularly during his first terms in the '90s, when he oversaw the creation of a massive collaborative effort to restore salmon habitat. But many felt his timber policies favored industry at steep environmental cost. "Our logging practices are the weakest on the West Coast," says Sean Stevens of Oregon Wild. "They don't keep water clean for wildlife or for people."
Brown "is going to be a strong ally," says Oregon League of Conservation Voters Executive Director Doug Moore. "I don't think it will be a step back. In some regards, it could be a step forward." Still, "a lot of people in Oregon are sad to see (Kitzhaber) go," adds Oregon Environmental Council spokeswoman Jessica Moskovitz. "A lot of people are still in office in other states who have done a lot worse."]]>
The drama of Mowad's last months in office unfolds in a nearly 700-page transcript of the hearing for his retaliation complaint. Released by the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility in late February, it's received little press. There's been just one extensive piece on the case, by Houston Chronicle writer Matthew Tresaugue, which is now making the rounds in Texas papers.
Among the players is the sloe-eyed, sand-colored dunes sagebrush lizard. In 2010, the agency proposed listing the species as endangered. Its habitat, which straddles the Texas-New Mexico border and the oil-and-gas-booming Permian Basin, had declined 40 percent since 1985. Yet, though little had changed on the ground, the agency reversed its position and pulled the proposal in the summer of 2012. The decision was based in part on the Texas Conservation Plan, signed just months before. Under it, private landowners agree to voluntarily implement conservation measures to protect the lizard, in theory allowing both economic activity and species recovery. In exchange, they receive assurance that they won't have to put up with more onerous land-use restrictions if the agency later decides to list the lizard. But those agreements, arranged through the Texas Comptroller's Office, not its wildlife department, were confidential.
As the agency's top Texas-based official at the time, Mowad didn't think that was adequate or legally defensible. "We weren't allowed to know where the impacts to the species occurred or where the mitigation to offset those impacts was," he testified. "In my opinion and the opinion of those who know this and do this work everyday, this plan was not only not enforceable, but it wasn't even verifiable."
He charged that one of the reasons it went through was that Deputy Director Joy Nicholopoulos of the Region 2 office, which covers Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, had an inappropriately close relationship with the Texas Comptroller and her associates and gave them preferential treatment. Indeed, Nicholopoulos passed over his recommendations for biologists to review the listing package, and essentially ordered him to appoint a less-experienced biologist with whom she had a close personal relationship. That biologist was moved out of his chain of command, and he was kept out of subsequent reviews.
He also felt, based on an offhand comment made by Region 2 Director Benjamin Tuggle, that the outcome of the listing decision was predetermined: It would be politically inconvenient to list a lizard in a basin producing 20 percent of the nation's domestic energy supply in an election year.
In the summer of 2012, he reached out to the Department of Interior's Office of Inspector General to report his suspicions. In mid-September, he lodged a complaint with the Service's Office of the Science Advisor, which was relayed to one of USFWS Director Dan Ashe's deputies. The day after that complaint's closure on Sept. 25, Mowad's nightmare began.
Tuggle and Nicholopoulos called Mowad, who was pulling a full workload in Austin, to tell him he was to report to the Albuquerque office for a work detail lasting an indeterminate amount of time. Though it's unclear whether or how Mowad's official complaints made it back to them, Nicholopoulos was already aware Mowad had concerns about her.
Mowad expressed repeatedly that he needed to be in Austin because his mother had Alzheimer's-induced dementia and needed his care, and that his daughter was just starting high school. Yet his requests for telework and flexible scheduling were denied. He filed a formal complaint of whistleblower retaliation with the Inspector General. When he finally arrived in Albuquerque, no housing had been arranged; the agency had not even provided a computer. The tasks he was supposed to complete were never clearly spelled out. For weeks, Texas' highest fish and wildlife official alleges, he was forced to essentially twiddle his thumbs.
As the incident unfolded, Associate Inspector General for Whistleblower Protection Laurie Larson-Jackson called Tuggle several times for explanation and found his justification "wanting," she testified. "It did not make sense to me that there was a decision to detail Gary Mowad, and Gary Mowad only, that there was no one else who could do this work … but there was no amount of detail whatsoever as to what (he) would be doing …"
The work also appeared to have no end. Back in Austin, Tuggle and Mowad's supervisor called a special meeting to divvy out his regular duties. "I'd never seen (that) in my 38-plus year career," Arlington field office supervisor Tom Cloud testified. "I felt (the relocation) was permanent." Afterwards, he remembers exchanging looks with another field supervisor and saying, "well, I think Gary's toast."
Mowad made one last-ditch attempt to transfer into the Office of the Science Advisor in January but was rebutted, and, feeling he had no other option, retired. "That was very disappointing to me. I loved the service, I loved my mission," says Mowad from the private consulting practice he now runs. "But somebody had to stand up."
Worst, though—especially as the Fish and Wildlife Service gears up to make a politically delicate decision about whether the greater sage grouse, with habitat in 11 states, deserves endangered species protection—is evidence presented at the trial that there was a similar pattern in other offices under Tuggle's leadership that may have been tolerated by the agency's DC office. Three other retaliation and scientific misconduct cases were proceeding in Oklahoma, and despite months of warnings to Tuggle and Director Dan Ashe and his deputies, none of the offending supervisors had been formally disciplined, according to a 2013 letter from the Inspector General to a deputy Interior Secretary.
As for the lizard, Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity have sued to overturn the agency's decision not to list it, using the same critique of the private land conservation plans that Mowad had made. They lost in district court last fall, but are challenging the ruling. "Our appeal is pretty much the best hope for the lizard at this point," says CBD's Endangered Species Director Noah Greenwald. If the Fish and Wildlife Service prevails, it will set a precedent that significantly lowers the standards voluntary conservation plans must meet in order to be used as justification for not listing a species, adds Ya-Wei Li, Defenders' director of endangered species conservation.
"The critter didn't get a fair shake," concludes Mowad. "What I've seen within the Service is a disturbing recent trend where decision-making (on species) is kept with the regional leadership. In my opinion, the regional leadership has a politically-driven outcome they want to see and they drive staff and resources to ensure they get it."
Sarah Gilman is a High Country News contributing editor based in the Pacific Northwest. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman. Photograph of dunes sagebrush lizard, courtesy USFWS.]]>
So we were delighted to return to Colorado — thousands of feet higher, where the river's Rocky Mountain headwaters lie — and find no sign of winter. "Mountain biking in a tank top. Suck it, New England," one of our trip leaders crowed from Durango on Facebook as a blizzard battered the East Coast.
But as the endless warm days slushed snow into mud and turned mud into hardpan, a growing alarm replaced our lizard-like impulse to bask. Between Jan. 25 and Feb. 8, 174 Colorado communities met or broke high temperature records. A few on the state's eastern plains even neared or surpassed 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Colorado River, which supplies 40 million people and a $1.4 trillion economy, is already gripped by one of the worst droughts in 1,200 years, so the balmy weather doesn't bode well. And Lake Mead, the giant reservoir that supplies Las Vegas, may this year drop dangerously close to an official shortage.
This was among the grim possibilities that Patricia Mulroy, the former head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, spent the latter half of her 25-year career preparing for. Now, a year after her retirement, cover story writer Matt Jenkins looks back at Mulroy's long fight to ensure that Vegas retained enough water to feed its growth even as the Colorado River shrank. Though many readers associate Vegas with selfish excess, Mulroy used its predicament to help push the river's water managers into a new era of deal-making and shared sacrifice. The goal is to stretch existing supplies as far as possible — with the side benefit of lessening the need for expensive and environmentally damaging new water infrastructure.
Though Mulroy has moved on, that part of her legacy is increasingly relevant: A NASA study released Feb. 12 suggests that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at current rates, the Southwest and Central Plains have an 80 percent chance of succumbing to multi-decade megadrought in the latter half of this century. "There are degrees of screwed," Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute pointedly told Slate, "and this paper suggests we're falling off the cliff."
Maybe. But how far we fall, and the severity of impact, may depend on how we choose to adapt — especially as Congress continues to ignore climate change. Mulroy reminds us that looming disaster can be a catalyst for change: A glass half-empty is still a glass half-full. So how will we make the best of this dry new normal — one where any snow along the Colorado, even in the Grand Canyon, must be seen as an ever more precious blessing?]]>
In a way, so does Fissinger, but hers are the oil-drilling rigs that have popped up lately in her area. She looked computer-tired, clad in a white turtleneck, her hair pulled into a ponytail. She led me upstairs to a cluttered home office, cleared a stack of documents from a chair and urged me to sit. When she came here from L.A. in 2006, she explained, she was worried about the separation of church and state.
She didn't yet realize that the plains further to the northeast were pin-cushioned with tens of thousands of wells, many of them hydraulically fractured, or fracked — a process that involves firing water, sand and chemicals thousands of feet underground at incomprehensible pressures — or that the boom had intensified in recent years.
Then one day in 2011, an automated phone survey asked her an odd question: How would she feel if drilling took place on Longmont open space? "Radar, radar!" she exclaimed. A company, it turned out, had proposed drilling around a local reservoir. The more she learned, the more she worried. She thought of her great-grandkids. A lung cancer survivor, she thought of her respiratory health. She thought about the flat lot near her house that might be a perfect place for a rig.
And in 2012, she helped found the nonprofit Our Health, Our Future, Our Longmont, which spearheaded a ballot initiative that made the city the first in Colorado to ban fracking. The next fall, despite industry's expensive counter-campaign, several other Front Range communities followed suit. Places across the West and the country have also joined in, from rural Mora County, New Mexico, in 2013, to, most recently and significantly, the state of New York, which overlays a booming shale gas formation.
Though many bans face long odds in court — Longmont's and others have already been shot down and are headed for appeals — activists and local officials keep fighting. "We're in it for the long haul," Fissinger told me emphatically. "Fracking is a toxic, extreme energy extraction method. I don't think it can be made safe."
The prospect of a drill rig towering over one's home would terrify just about anyone, me included. But I still felt conflicted: A near-term transition from oil and gas is profoundly unlikely. Natural gas is slowly supplanting coal as a primary electricity-generating fuel. Petroleum runs our planes, trains and automobiles. Both make it into a dizzying array of plastics and personal care products.
The corporate machine of hydrocarbon development contains a ghost. And the ghost in that machine is us. Until that changes, every fracking ban — Longmont's, Mora County's, New York's — no matter how heroic and justified, simply pushes drilling somewhere else. I wanted to know: Where are we saying yes to such development, and how can we say it in a way that lessens impacts on landscapes and people?
I had one hunch. To see if it bore out, I rented a red Chevy Cruze, filled the tank, and got behind the wheel. "Remaining Oil Life: 97%" blinked on the dash. How appropriate, I thought, and drove west, toward Energy Country.
I wasn't the only lone driver headed into the mountains on I-70; hundreds of us sped along in Subarus, Tacomas and other sporty rigs — Colorado cockroaches, we call them — likely bound for the outdoor meccas around the Continental Divide. But once the resort bedroom community of Glenwood Springs was in my rearview, traffic thinned. The tiny Cruze wobbled in the wake of scattered semis ferrying goods. Compressor stations and natural gas well pads lined the roadsides. Not far west of the Colorado-Utah line, I pulled off at the exit for Danish Flat. There, amid eerie silence, was a vast complex of plastic-lined ponds: The final resting place for the waste from the drilling operations I had passed in western Colorado.
In their 2003 report, What Every Westerner Should Know About Energy, historian Patty Limerick and her colleagues observe that there seems to be nowhere left to put energy infrastructure without a fight. "We have run out," they wrote, "of unloved and unlovely places." Clearly they weren't talking about this spot, I thought, peering across the chain-link fence at the stagnant water and plugging my nose.
To the northwest, exploding from the flat expanse of weed-scattered earth, the Book Cliffs looked like a better example of a lovely, loved place. Beyond their rims stretch great swaths of unbroken piñon-juniper forest that eventually give way to sun-etched canyons pouring into the Green River where it wends through Desolation and Gray canyons. About 6,000 boaters annually ply an 84-mile stretch of whitewater through their remote depths. For years, the hardline Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, based in Salt Lake City, has fought development that threatened these and millions of other acres of wilderness-quality land.
And yet, in 2010, SUWA essentially said yes to hundreds of gas wells that a company called Bill Barrett Corp. had proposed on the West Tavaputs Plateau not far west of Desolation Canyon. By doing so, SUWA wasn't caving. It was allowing inevitable development to go forward in a way that was least harmful to landscapes it wanted to protect. It was also making a sort of tradeoff.
On a sunny October day, I hitched a ride to the top of the plateau with Bureau of Land Management Price Field Office Manager Ahmed Mohsen to see what SUWA got in return. "Isn't this pretty?" Mohsen said as we gazed from one of the field's well pads on a finger of mesa top into a red-rock fissure called Jack Canyon. A wilderness study area, it feeds into the much larger Desolation Canyon wilderness study area that encloses a stretch of the river's west flank. The promontory we stood on was part of Horse Bench, an unroaded sagebrush mesa sweeping to the northeast, backed by a pastel layer cake of buttes. On a primitive road at the field's edge, I found black bear tracks threaded along the tire marks of an oilfield services pickup.
Bill Barrett had legal right to drill in all three places, and had proposed nearly 240 wellpads there. But it relinquished plans for all but a half-dozen of those, sparing some 65,000 acres of wilderness quality land, in exchange for SUWA's agreement not to sue to delay the entire project, most of which sprawls farther from the canyon to the west. The cluster of remaining wellpads that Mohsen showed me that day were near historic wellpads that the company has since reoccupied, and their infrastructure was set out of sight below ground, with seasonal restrictions on drilling to avoid disturbing boaters. Jarring as the naked scrapes of earth were, they clearly beat the alternative.
The deal — the largest of a handful of similar compromises SUWA has since made — seemed like a win-win from here. It also openly made the judgment implied in every fracking ban: Some places are more valuable than others. "Part of the thinking was to push development back to stay next to existing development, and that way limit new roads, new intrusions, new infrastructure," SUWA attorney David Garbett had told me earlier. Because the group's focus is on wilderness protection, from its perspective, "once oil and gas is a use in an area, it's the dominant use. It's already a sacrifice zone."
That's not an unusual sentiment among conservationists working on oil and gas issues, particularly in politically conservative states: With limited resources, many opt for triage, focusing on protecting superlatively beautiful places or intact islands of important wildlife habitat — just as the Fissingers of the world work to protect their communities — while actively or tacitly accepting development in other places. That same compass of reasoning suggested I might find what I had come for in the gray area between the two, in places already drilled enough that more could be tolerated. And it pointed due north from West Tavaputs, to the massive oil and gas fields at the heart of the Uinta Basin.
As I pulled down the main drag toward my hotel in Vernal, Utah, a sign for a juice bar and camo seat-cover shop popped into view: "I ♡ DRILLING!"
Perhaps, I thought, "tolerated" is the wrong word.
On a chilly night the weekend before Halloween, I visited the Pumpkin Festival in Jensen, southeast of Vernal. Hundreds of young families — many pregnant or toting infants or both — milled around a circuit of jack-o-lantern dioramas and a giant pallet fire while an old-time band strummed sweet-sounding harmonies. I felt on edge as I lined up for a cheeseburger: Could they tell I hailed from Boulder, Colorado, an epicenter of anti-fracking sentiment? I had heard stories of public meetings here where the mere suggestion of limiting drilling incited virtual riots. But a teenage girl in a Nirvana T-shirt, with ratted hair and a face painted like a sugar skull, offered me a shy smile along with my food.
I sat down at a picnic table next to a woman named Ellen Mecham, who pointed out her father picking a guitar at the far end of the bandstand. She wore dark eye makeup and her hair in stiff black spikes and bounced a fussy granddaughter in her lap. She grew up in the nearby town of Gusher, she told me: "Lots of time outside, not much TV." All three of her brothers work in the oil fields; her mother, sitting across from her, also counted a son-in-law. Nearly everyone I spoke to said the same: Multiple members, multiple generations. Hydrocarbons run deep here: in the ground and in the blood of the people.
Below our feet stretched the same geologic treasure trove that contains West Tavaputs' gas. The Uinta Basin has tar sands, oil shale, even obsidian-esque gilsonite, used in inks and drilling fluids. Natural gas and oil have been produced here for decades. The bulk of that development — more than 10,000 active wells — is concentrated several miles southwest of Jensen and Vernal in the central part of the basin, in an area informally called The Fairway. What's another 1,000, even 10,000, wells in a place like that?
That Saturday, Mike Stiewig, who oversees much of the development as BLM's Vernal Field Office manager, drove me through The Fairway's west side. I could see what SUWA's Garbett meant: A web of connecting roads and dozens of densely spaced pumpjacks, tanks and wellpads stretched to the horizon across dun-colored grass, amid plumes of dust kicked up by service trucks. Each pumpjack's engine blatted with backfires, accumulating into a low frequency thrum like a swarm of approaching bees. Whatever might have been lost here looked like it was already long gone.
Stiewig showed me the Monument Butte field, where one company hopes to drill over 5,000 new wells, more than half likely from the wellpads of thousands it already operates. It's basically infill, like when new homes and businesses are built within a dense urban core instead of leapfrogging across old farmland as far-flung suburbs. "The appearance wouldn't really change much," Stiewig explained, except for one thing: "It would pretty much just be lonely pumpjacks. All those tanks would go away." Instead of being stored on individual well pads, oil and other fluids would be pumped through bundles of black piping to giant centralized plants where off-gassing chemicals are much easier to contain. These thousands of individual, widely scattered tanks are, it turns out, a major source of air pollution, as are the trucks required to service them.
If all the companies developing here adopted similarly stringent controls, as they increasingly must under Utah's and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's tightening air quality rules, then perhaps the basin really can sustain the more than 25,000 new wells projected in the coming decades. I tried to picture their sprawl: the perfect place to drill, colonized to the max. But the scale was so mind-bogglingly vast that I couldn't help but doubt the premise of my trip.
The fact that controls like those in Monument Butte even exist in such a rural part of Utah is evidence that development is already hitting some very real limits. When wintertime inversions seal oilpatch pollutants into the valley like a giant Tupperware lid, ozone levels here spike well beyond federal limits designed to protect human health. The gas can harm healthy lungs and exacerbate existing respiratory problems. Some of the primary chemicals that contribute to its formation, called volatile organic compounds — including benzene, a potent carcinogen — also collect in the valley's communities at high-enough concentrations to warrant further scrutiny. But thanks in part to a lack of year-round monitoring and comprehensive studies, the health risks they pose remain mysterious. It leaves some residents wondering, especially given reports of birth defects, increased infant mortality and other weird health problems near drilling sites here and elsewhere.
The day before I left the Uinta Basin, I went back to Jensen to visit a curmudgeonly river rat named Herm Hoops. Oar blades engraved with the names of the rapids that broke them from their shafts decorated his garage; rare books on historic river expeditions shared shelf space with volumes by Mary Oliver and Ellen Meloy in his living room. Stocky and boisterous with a full beard, Hoops regaled me with tales of many trips down Desolation, including one that involved hiking dozens of miles overland back to civilization after getting stuck in an ice jam early in the year.
"There are nights when we can't sleep with the windows open," Hoops told me. Hydrogen sulfide gas pools around the house, pouring in from an old oil field and complex of waste evaporation ponds down the road. He gave me directions to see more; there are about 160 such ponds in the basin, each adding its own chemical vapors to the hazy air. A bitter cold west wind kicked up while we spoke; when I stepped out the door, the smell of rotten eggs slammed me in the face. I headed south, then southwest, descending through scrub-topped benches and knobs of painted earth, all of it dotted with gas wells. In the distance beyond, the Green River carved toward Desolation. From here, the land between looked no less lovely, no less worthy of protection. "There's enough drilling here," Hoops had told me. "If you want a sacrifice zone, move it to Boulder. Let's have big money fight big money and see who comes out the winner."
And so it was that my quest led me back home. As I drove down I-25 toward Longmont and Boulder, ranchland and sporadic cornfields gave way to new subdivisions, and soon enough, the giant scaffolds of drill rigs came into view, towering over car dealerships, strip malls and houses, with the massive pyramidal bulk of Long's Peak looming to the west on the Front Range skyline. I looked at the dash: "Remaining Oil Life: 74%." Perhaps Hoops was right, I thought. If we're worried about peoples' health and welfare, and if we truly value the wilder parts of the world, then our wealthy and bustling suburbs and cities are exactly where we should be drilling. Not because anyone deserves the accompanying nightmares, but because no one does.
Drilling was going strong in the West's rural oil and gas basins long before fractivists like Fissinger began fighting, long before fracking was a household word. But companies have figured out how to develop much more of our energy domestically, tapping giant, once-marginal reserves and drilling more wells at a faster pace to maintain production. As drilling has reached more densely populated areas in the West, or rural areas not far from places like New York City, oil and gas development has at last begun grabbing regular national media coverage. And vastly more people have been forced to directly confront the costs of something they've always used freely.
That awareness is already having an impact, inspiring reams of new research into how development affects air, groundwater, health, economies and more. It's helped spur both federal and state governments to begin reining in an industry that had long enjoyed a regulatory carte blanche. Colorado, arguably the Western focus of this clash, is widely regarded as a leader, though its rules are hardly perfect. Over the past several years, the state has moved to better protect wildlife, force disclosure of jealously guarded fracking fluid chemicals, increase setbacks from homes, and require companies to test nearby groundwater before and after drilling. Most notably, last winter it passed strict industry air pollution controls that are the first in the nation that aim to curtail releases of methane, the primary component of natural gas that also happens to be a potent greenhouse gas.
"It's sort of like in forestry," Pete Morton, a Boulder-based economist with the Conservation Economics Institute who served with The Wilderness Society for 18 years, told me over breakfast at Hotel Boulderado. The sound of jazzy music and clinking flatware wafted over the mostly empty tables as a hard rain fell outside. "They used to put in the beauty strip to hide the clear-cut. What we've done is cut down the beauty strip on oil and gas. Now we have all these eyes on industry." And some companies are clearly paying attention. When Colorado officials rolled out those new air measures, they did so alongside representatives from three of the state's major operators, Noble Energy, Anadarko Petroleum and Encana, which worked collaboratively with the pragmatic environmental group Environmental Defense Fund and the state to help develop the proposal.
More significant, though, is what this new awareness may do to galvanize action around the root cause of the problem: our own energy use. As Patty Limerick told me before I embarked on my journey, those same suburbs railing against drilling were enabled by the availability of cheap gasoline. "We live," Limerick said, "in the era of improbable comfort made possible by a taken-for-granted but truly astonishing infrastructure. Now that we have peoples' attention, maybe this production-consumption thing can get thought about."
There are signs that this is beginning to happen on a scale that transcends a few solar homes and plug-in vehicles, Morton told me. Liberal Boulder, often dismissed as the ultimate Not-In-My-Back-Yard community, is trying to become its own electrical utility in order to reshape its power supply around renewable sources balanced by natural gas. As part of that effort, a working group that includes Morton is looking at how the city might use its buying power to influence the way that gas is extracted by adopting environmental certification standards not unlike those developed for the sustainable timber industry. Someday, Boulder might replace natural gas entirely with biogas, generated perhaps by excess manure from Greeley, a former cowtown ironically positioned in the midst of Colorado's oil boom.
Little of this comforts fractivists like Fissinger, who worry that regulations are a cynical political ploy that will only encourage people to embrace a dangerous and inherently unsustainable status quo. And indeed, whatever you believe about the risks of fracking and horizontal drilling, the techniques have ensured that scarcity won't be the crisis that weans us off hydrocarbons in time to avert the worst effects of climate change. No matter how completely we might mitigate drilling's local impacts, no matter how carefully we protect special places, near or far, oil and gas development's ultimate externality, global climate change, still looms.
It's a conundrum that demands the "ideal future" that Yi-Fu Tuan envisioned in Topophilia, his seminal 1974 work on cultural geography. A future wherein we give our deepest loyalties to home — the place we love beyond all others, Tuan writes, the shelter of memory and family — and "at the other end of the scale, to the whole earth."
And therein lies the true power of the hardliners' "no." "The reality is that we're not going to flip a switch tomorrow and everything's OK," acknowledged Jeremy Nichols of the environmental group WildEarth Guardians, which hopes to leverage anti-fracking energy to influence public-land battles over oil and gas in the absence of higher-level climate policy. "But I don't want to say, '(development) is OK here.' Some of it is going to happen whether I say yes or not. If no one points out the costs or says no, there's really not going to be incentive for anyone to develop something different. Crisis fuels innovation and invention and creates opportunities." In other words, "no" can squeeze us toward an acceptable "yes." And expanding development is giving us a bigger, more widespread NO than, perhaps, we've ever heard before — a "no" that seems to hint at genuine change.
With the rise of fractivism, "you have people who were never involved in these issues before, and they're moving the goal posts 200 yards down the field," Morton said as he polished off his eggs benedict. "I think it's the rebirth of the environmental movement."
On a clear November Saturday, Vic's Coffee in north Boulder buzzed with hip 20- and 30-somethings grabbing late-morning lattes and pastries. Petroleum geologist Matt Silverman, a fit 61 years old with salt-and-pepper hair and a tidy mustache, blended in surprisingly well, lounging on the sunny patio. He led me to his SUV, apologized as he moved some yoga equipment, then ushered me into the front seat.
A little ways northeast of town, we pulled off the road at a barbed-wire fence. Beyond it, at the center of a wedge-shaped plot of rib-high grass with a clear view of Boulder's iconic Flatirons, was an ancient-looking pumpjack and tank coated in chipping green paint and rust. This is the McKenzie #1-21 — the first producing, and the last remaining, well from a 200-well oil field that has since been replaced by city open space and stately homes. The equipment is from the '50s, Silverman explained, but the McKenzie was drilled in 1902 and produced until the 2000s. This was the first field in the basin that is now booming to the northeast, and helped establish Denver as the energy capital of the Rocky Mountain region, he said. "Let's not turn our back on any of our history. Let's recognize all of it."
I looked past the pumpjack at the three buzzing highways hemming us in, planes floating into the nearby municipal airport, and, to the south, the boxy complex of National Center for Atmospheric Research offices where scientists study climate change. If the McKenzie is a monument, I thought, does it celebrate all that hydrocarbons have given us and, as Silverman argues, provide a lesson that the scars of their extraction are fleeting? Or could it become a memorial to a world that we no longer want — a reminder that, if we push hard enough, this history could someday be just that, the past and nothing more?
Sarah Gilman is a deeply ambivalent hydrocarbon addict, freelance writer and High Country News contributing editor now based in Portland, Oregon. She served as the magazine's associate editor for six years. Follow @sarah_gilman
This story was originally titled "Sacrifice Zone" in the print edition.]]>


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In Florida, it is a felony to possess, distribute, transmit or manufacture child pornography. If you are convicted, any of these charges could result in heavy fines, a long prison sentence and lifelong registry as a sex offender. These consequences affect educational opportunities, employment and housing options. However, not everyone facing child pornography charges is guilty of a crime. If you've been charged with possessing, distributing, transmitting or manufacturing child pornography, there are strong legal defenses that could allow you to walk free. Here are some examples of possible defenses:
- Statute of limitations — Child pornography charges must be brought within the statute of limitations or the prosecutors cannot proceed with the criminal case. Typically, child pornography offenses are charged as third-degree felonies and must be brought within three years of the date that the crime was committed. A defense attorney can help prove that the offense occurred beyond the statute of limitations and is therefore ineligible for prosecution.
- Illegally seized evidence — The U.S. Constitution and the Florida Constitution prevent the unreasonable search and seizure of private property. If evidence of child pornography was gathered through an illegal search, this may result in the charges being dropped. Examples of illegal search and seizure include:
- When law enforcement searches a person or property without a valid search warrant or legal cause
- When law enforcement searches beyond the scope of a valid search warrant
- When someone consents to a search based on coercion or intimidation by law enforcement
- Entrapment — If law enforcement officials induce a defendant to commit a crime that the defendant is not predisposed to commit, the defendant can present the affirmative defense of entrapment. This is a common defense when a defendant is arrested after an Internet sting, such as those portrayed on the television show To Catch a Predator. An entrapment defense can result in a defendant being found not guilty.

subset: commoncrawl


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Learn the basics of using Grasshopper, the visual programming add-on to Rhino, to create complex 3D models with simple math, algorithms, and repeating forms.
Learn how to make beautiful renderings that showcase your designs with Rhino and V-Ray.
Learn how to create models for CNC milling machines with RhinoCAM.
Learn how to build your own 3D design models and prototypes with the NURBS-based modeling tools in Rhino 5.0 for Windows.
Shows how the 3D NURBS-based modeling tools in Rhino are used to create 3D objects for industrial design and rapid prototyping.
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Survey Asks Britons How Often Bedsheets Are Changed
By editor
Originally published on Mon August 26, 2013 3:57 pm
Good morning, I'm David Greene.
A new survey in Britain is airing that country's dirty laundry. The mattress company Ergoflex asked Britons how frequently they changed their sheets. Among men aged 18 to 25, more than half said they put fresh sheets on just four times a year.
Half of those guys said they thought this was perfectly fine. But some admitted they had learned the hard way that it actually wasn't. About 17 percent said their smelly sheets had, quote, "put off potential romantic partners." Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.


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We were looking for a change of pace to the rug that had been in our breakfast area for 10 years. This was a wonderful choice! The colors are true to the photograph, which is always the hardest part of ordering such items on line. It is thick, soft and comfortable to walk on. The yarn quality and density of the stitching is excellent. It is as pretty at night as it is when the sun is lighting it up during the day. The best part is it was heavy enough to roll out flat from day one! Speedy delivery from Overstock made the breakfast area merry for the holidays and the coming year(s)! An excellent rug for the price!...
ITEM#: 14138619Bring a touch of fun with this whimsical Botanical Gardens rug. Premium wool is used in this hand-tufted handmade rug. Careful taste was used in color selection to craft this easy to decorate with rug. This floor rug has a Beige background and displays stunning panel colors of Blue, Beige, Red, Rust and Green.
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Unfortunately, our rug had a pick in it that grew over several days until there was a bare spot. We had to return it. We were very sad to see it go it was beautiful.Read More
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We were looking for a change of pace to the rug that had been in our breakfast area for 10 years. This was a wonderful choice! The colors are true to the photograph, which is always the hardest part of ordering such items on line. It is thick, soft and comfortable to walk on. The yarn quality and density of the stitching is excellent. It is as pretty at night as it is when the sun is lighting it up during the day. The best part is it was heavy enough to roll out flat from day one! Speedy delivery from Overstock made the breakfast area merry for the holidays and the coming year(s)! An excellent rug for the price!Read More
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My rug arrived and I love it! It is very close to the picture on the site, perhaps a shade darker. It is very large and the texture is high quality. I have not vacuumed it yet, but will do so to speed along any "shedding" process. Very soft on my feet. The pile is sort of a loop rather than fringe fibers. I think this makes it look like a much more expensive rug. I'm going to purchase a similar one for my living room!!Read More
This rug is perfect! Great colors and pattern that isn too busy, it's sof to walk on and feels of great quality. I'm extremely happy with this purchase.Read More
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Danny Buggs - 1974 West Virginia Playing Cards #13C
Buggs was inducted into the West Virginia University Sports Hall of Fame in 1995. He played professionally for the NFL's New York Giants and Washington Redskins, the CFL's Edmonton Eskimos, and the USFL's Tampa Bay Bandits and San Antonio Gunslingers.
Player: Danny Buggs
Position: wide receiver
College: West Virginia
Hometown: Atlanta, GA
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