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The fallen trees shaped a path 50 feet wide and several hundred yards long. Side trails branched out from it, forming a network of ski runs hacked from the heavily wooded forest. Shocked, Parker surveyed the damage, walking past stump after stump. "It goes beyond egoism to egomania," Parker says. "It looks like someone cut their own personal run to show their friends this cool new glade they made." He reported the crime to the U.S. Forest Service and local media, and the Forest Service launched an investigation.
Most of the illegal cutting that Parker discovered occurred near Raven's Ridge, an unofficial trail near the Ski Santa Fe resort. And each time Parker returned, he found yet more slashed trunks. Plastic red ribbons flagged trees still standing in the route.
The U.S. Forest Service gave the case to the agency's crime unit, but as it grinds on, the incident vividly illustrates the paradoxes involved in managing public lands, which are open to anyone and lightly, if ever, patrolled. The federal process for developing new trails is slow and cumbersome, and that seems to be driving a few frustrated outdoor enthusiasts to forge their own renegade paths, says Miles Standish, manager of wilderness, trails and recreation for the Española Ranger District.
Cutting trees and bringing a chainsaw into designated wilderness are both illegal activities. But the culprit here went beyond simply creating an unofficial trail by repeated use; this effort was "much more intentional," Standish says. "This damage, and the attitude that seems to be behind it, is worse than in the past."
On Sept. 24, 2015, soon after Parker's report, Michael Gardiner, an Albuquerque-based investigator of the crime unit of the Forest Service's Southwest Region, took the case. Gardiner, a middle-aged man with a Hardy Boys-like enthusiasm, has tracked misdeeds ranging from illegal marijuana crops on public lands to theft of government property. But the crimes unit is seriously under-funded, and Gardiner's workload — he oversees several other investigators as well as his own district's crimes — keeps him from spending as much time as he'd like on each case.
Gardiner first turned to social media, scouring YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit for videos of cutting in the area, incriminating conversations, plans for skiing there. Nothing.
He called Parker, the sole witness, into his office to answer questions. On a topographic map, Parker sketched the damaged area. By then, he had tallied more than 600 cut trees.
In late September, Gardiner went to see for himself, driving his tan Chevy Tahoe up to the Winsor trailhead. He questioned the people he met, but learned nothing useful. Then he hiked towards Raven's Ridge, following Parker's map to the new clearing, piled with slashed debris and red ribbons waving from dozens of live trees.
The next day, on another "scoping mission," Gardiner found fresh damage, bringing the total flora fatalities to more than 1,000 trees. He thought he was hot on the heels of the perpetrators. The agency set a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
The trail wasn't the area's first illegal path. In the 1960s, in the early days of Ski Santa Fe, a young employee there hacked away a few hundred trees on lunch breaks to create his own run, just beyond resort boundaries. A few years later, the ski area absorbed the illegal glade, and the cutter even got to name it — the Desafio. The ski area appears to have no connection to the current crime, though, and no plans to absorb this new trail, which is just past the resort's westernmost run. The motivation for the deed simply seems to be someone's desire for a secluded but easily accessible trail for downhill glade skiing, Gardiner says.
It's not just skiers who carve illegal trails on public land: Rogue ATVers, dirt bikers and hikers have created dozens of unauthorized tracks in Santa Fe National Forest. "There's a more aggressive attitude prevailing in the recreation community," Standish says. "People have differing opinions about how to manage these lands. The process of public-land management can be slow."
Many renegade trails that might have otherwise been sanctioned by the Forest Service are constructed clandestinely because legal development often takes years. The proliferation of pirated trails shortchanges citizens of the usual due process: public requests, environmental impact assessments and open comment periods. Establishing new trails legally starts with a request, Standish says, but that's just the first step. "Many requests sit in a holding pattern as a nice idea, but no certain way forward," he says, especially when they don't fit into the agency's master plans, which lay out a vision and management policy for the forest.
But the Forest Service would never have given someone the go-ahead to slice a trail or ski glade inside a wilderness area, says Standish. The agency lacks the funding or staff to patrol unsanctioned paths, or enforce closures. So it prioritizes protecting tribal lands and wilderness areas — and pursuing particularly egregious cases like the crime at Raven's Ridge.
In February, there was a break in the case. Someone mailed anonymous letters to the Santa Fe Forest Service office and a local newspaper. They included a -LinkedIn profile picture of the alleged culprit, an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and a scathing argument that connected the suspect to the crime. Gardiner's head whirled: A federal employee would have access to the equipment to do it — and could slip under the radar. In early March, Gardiner and the New Mexico Office of the Inspector General questioned the suspect. After more than two hours, though, they let him go. "We didn't have the evidence to prove anything," Gardiner says. "The trail ran cold right there."
Now, Gardiner fears the case is languishing. It will be hard to solve it, he says, without more time to patrol the area, another agent on the case, or the resources to install trail cams or increase rewards.
In March, James Parker went snowshoeing through the area. Once again, the tree slasher had left behind tantalizing clues. No more trees had been cut, but crimson ribbons glistened with melted snow, lightly swaying in the wind. Parker plucked off all of them. At the very least, he says, "I'm still watching."
If you have information about illegal tree cuttings such as this, please feel free to provide a confidential tip to HCN.
Paige Blankenbuehler is an HCN editorial fellow. Follow @PaigeBlank]]>
Taking a break from his work, he walked west until he came to the edge of a cliff overlooking the Green River as it flowed through Desolation Canyon. Describing the scene a few years later, Marshall wrote of how this "strong, gray river" tore its way through the roadless, unpopulated canyon. He lingered there on his airy perch, letting the sun and the space flow into him. The wind was in the junipers, and he was completely alone.
This spellbinding scene would not last, he feared. Marshall predicted that someday, he would read about "a road being projected down the gorge of the Green River. … The article will state how many miles the distance between Vernal and Moab will be shortened, how many men will get to work, how many tourists will leave their money along the route."
Bob Marshall knew how things tended to go in Utah. Most of our political leaders never saw a road they didn't like, or an oil well or strip mine that shouldn't be built. Today we have many more roads, an overabundance of oil, and much less wilderness. But even this is not enough; we're still pursuing the Big Find that's always just over the next ridge.
Today it's natural gas, but next may come tar sands — the boom that would destroy the solitude-rich landscape that was Bob Marshall's Tavaputs Plateau.
I was gratified, at first, to see that Utah Rep. Rob Bishop included a nearly half-million-acre Desolation Canyon wilderness in draft legislation under his Public Lands Initiative, sometimes called the "Grand Bargain." But then I read further. Instead of an exceptional wilderness, the Utah Republican is giving us a wilderness with exceptions. Exceptions like allowing game managers to shoot coyotes and wolves from helicopters, like allowing grazing permittees to use all-terrain vehicles to maintain fences and stock tanks, and like allowing the Forest Service to bring in bulldozers to fight wildfires.
Many other superb wildlands are absent from his proposed bill, places like Moonshine Wash, which cuts a narrow gorge through the San Rafael Desert, much of the western bank of Labyrinth Canyon, and Fable Valley in the remote Dark Canyon Plateau. The bill provides for a major highway through the Book Cliffs, much as Bob Marshall predicted.
But the greatest damage would be caused by Bishop's virtual redefinition of wilderness. The provisions included in his bill for the convenience of administrative agencies and grazing permittees would take a long step backward from the agreements Congress reached in 1964, when it passed the Wilderness Act.
Last year, I was privileged to spend some time with Stewart Brandborg, who was Howard Zahniser's assistant at The Wilderness Society during the eight-year campaign to enact a good wilderness law. Brandborg is one of the last of that generation of conservationists who worked so hard to pass the Wilderness Act. He had met Bob Marshall in 1937 when that avid (and badly sunburned) explorer came to dinner at his parents' home. He had just completed a 40-mile-long hike through the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.
Brandborg described the years of work under Zahniser's leadership that led to passage of the Wilderness Act. He spoke of the courageous members of Congress who fought for this legislation, including John Saylor, Clinton Anderson, Lee Metcalf, Frank Church, Maurine Neuberger. These men and women came from both sides of the aisle and understood the importance of this landmark law. He expressed dismay at recent attempts to subvert their historic compromise with so-called "wilderness" proposals that grant all kinds of special dispensations for non-conforming uses.
Here in Utah, as throughout the West, we need wilderness laws without loopholes, and wilderness areas without exceptions. We must resolve to be patient and continue to work for legislation that is worthy of the land we are entrusted to protect. This means rejecting Grand Bargains that promise an accessible wilderness, an easy solitude. Convenience always comes at a price.
We like to imagine that we exalt ourselves by bringing the wilderness down to our size. But when we do so, we only diminish our own stature. To start down that road is to turn our back on the vision of big, untrammeled country that thrilled Bob Marshall 80 years ago. And in what is perhaps the greatest loss, we leave behind something of the best in us.
The Yakima River Basin Water Enhancement Project Phase III Act was one of a long list of conservation and water provisions that were attached to the energy bill in a unanimous vote during this week's Senate debate. Also included were two wilderness areas in New Mexico's Rio Grande Del Norte National Monument northwest of Taos, and parts of a bipartisan sportsmen's bill, including provisions to improve access and conservation of public land for hunting, fishing and recreation. The bill also includes a measure to permanently authorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a popular 50-year old program that provides money to buy land for everything from urban parks to wildlife refuges.
The energy bill's fate is uncertain because it now must be reconciled with a House bill that already passed. The House version does not include the conservation measures and differs so dramatically from the Senate bill that few provisions overlap. President Obama has threatened to veto the House version. Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Maria Cantwell, D- Wash., the Senate energy bill's main architects, hope the bipartisan vote of 85 to 12 will give them enough clout for a speedy negotiation with the House. But some observers say that a final energy bill is unlikely to emerge at least until after the November elections. For the House and Senate to agree "really takes a bipartisan effort and a bipartisan spirit. You'd be hard pressed to find that kind of bipartisan spirit around here," says Alan Rowsome, senior director for government relations at the Wilderness Society. "There are huge hurdles."
Still, Yakama Nation officials and conservationists who have been working for years on a solution called the Yakima Integrated Plan were delighted with the progress. "Watching how Congress has been working in recent years, I didn't expect that the process would get this far in the current session. I was going to believe it when I saw it and I'm starting to believe it," says Michael Garrity, director of rivers of Puget Sound and the Columbia Basin for the conservation group American Rivers.
Supporters of the Yakima water bill first heard a couple months ago that Cantwell would try to attach the measure to the energy bill. But one senator after another blocked the energy bill from getting a vote by demanding that one provision or another be attached or removed from before a vote. Murkowski and Cantwell worked behind the scenes to get the senators to stop obstructing the legislation.
Cantwell also played a crucial role by drafting the Yakima bill and adding it to the energy bill during a session of Congress when few other pieces of legislation are likely to get votes. She credited the farmers, conservationists and tribal officials in her state for creating a model for other regions struggling with water scarcity made worse by climate change. "We have to put the days of fighting over water behind us and work together to find common ground to solve our collective water challenges," Cantwell says. "Yakima is leading the way."
The Yakima water bill, among other provisions, would authorize the construction of a pumping plant that would transfer up to 200,000 acre-feet of water from Lake Kachess, a federal reservoir, for use downstream during drought years. The transfer would benefit one of the nation's most productive agricultural regions. It also would provide for the construction of fish passage projects to enable sockeye to travel above two dams to the cooler water in the upper Yakima. The salmon runs on the Yakima were among the nation's largest before dams were built more than 100 years ago.
"This is a key step in restoring the resources the Yakama people were promised by treaty 150 years ago," says Phil Rigdon, deputy director of the Yakama Nation Department of Natural Resources.
Nearly a decade ago, longtime adversaries sat down and started crafting a consensus plan, which was endorsed by the state legislature in 2013. But this federal legislation is crucial for many of the projects because they involve federal Bureau of Reclamation dams and reservoirs, so congressional approval is necessary. "The really big and expensive steps have waited until this moment," says Tom Ring, a hydrogeologist who has worked for the tribe for 25 years.
Ring says climate change played a role in getting people to collaborate after decades of discord and litigation. Farmers, community leaders, anglers and conservationists all saw the impact of reduced snow packs. "The thing that is different here is the tribe and traditional adversaries in irrigation community got on the same page," Ring says.
A similar collaborative effort preceded the designation of the Río Grande del Norte National Monument by President Obama in 2013. Local Latino leaders, Taos Pueblo tribal officials, ranchers and conservation groups combined forces to call on the president to preserve the spectacular landscape, which is home to elk, mule deer, bighorn sheep, golden eagles, black bear and American pronghorn. The two proposed wilderness areas in the monument would provide that highest level of protection to 21,420 acres. "Designating these wilderness areas will complete a national example of community-driven, landscape-scale conservation that will preserve the culture and natural resources and boost the economy of this stunning corner of New Mexico," says Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-NM, who sponsored the wilderness bill with Sen. Tom Udall.
Elizabeth Shogren is HCN's Washington, DC, correspondent. She tweets @shogrene.
Correction: An earlier version of this story spelled the Yakama Nation as "Yakima," which was officially changed many years ago. The story has been corrected.]]>
First, no legal argument supports biking in wilderness. Unambiguously, the 1964 Wilderness Act states there shall be no "form of mechanical transport" in wilderness areas. The discussion should end there, but a few claim that "mechanical transport" somehow does not include bicycles. They allege that the law unintentionally excluded an activity that emerged after it was enacted. Or they tout an early Forest Service misinterpretation of the law, which initially allowed bicycles in wilderness but was corrected over 30 years ago.
The arguments have no legal merit. Worse, they ignore the historical context and foresight of the Wilderness Act, one of our foundational environmental laws. In doing so, they distract people from truly understanding our public lands. That's not good for people or the land.
We should remember that the Wilderness Act grew from a half-century of public-lands battles, fought by America's most influential conservation thinkers, including Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, Olaus Murie, and the indefatigable Mardy Murie, among others. Theirs was a multigenerational struggle to safeguard a vestige of the nation's public lands from the advances of population and technology.
The technology part is important. The framers of the Wilderness Act knew human ingenuity was not somehow petering out in 1964. In fact, they lived in an era of fantastic invention. Forms of transport being tested at the time included jetpacks, gliders, aerocycles, and various new wagons, boats and bicycles.
That the law anticipated future invention is indisputable, but it benefits us much more to know why it does. The reason was most concisely expressed by the bill's principal author, Howard Zahniser, who in 1956 defined wilderness as a place where we stand without the "mechanisms that make us immediate masters over our environment."
Zahniser was a Thoreauvian pacifist deeply troubled by the Holocaust and other horrific events during his lifetime. In wilderness, he saw a suite of biophysical and social values that carried the potential to make us better people. But to fulfill its promise in modern times, by offering an opportunity for raw challenge, humility and solitude, wilderness had to remain a place of human restraint. For eight years, Zahniser worked with Congress to ensure that the law enshrined that ideal, with clear limits on acceptable activities in wilderness.
Some pressing for bikes in wilderness conveniently ignore this central principle. Instead, they focus on issues of trail erosion or impacts to visitors and wildlife, where they front overly rosy claims. In diminishing the purpose of wilderness, they hawk a dumbed-down version of the public estate.
Similarly, it is unhealthy to conflate the ban on bikes with a ban on a certain group of people. That tactic may stir emotion, but it undermines serious public-lands discourse. Nevertheless, some are using the trick, including Bike Magazine editor Vernon Felton, whose recent video casts bikes in wilderness as a civil rights issue. That's an affront to anyone who has worked for voting rights, fair housing, protection against hate crimes or other actual civil rights.
Felton and others also oversimplify prohibitions on bikes in wilderness study areas, calling them overreach by conservationists or the feds. But such bans are essential to the purpose of these study areas, which must be carefully managed to preserve their eligibility as wilderness pending congressional action.
Another claim is that banning bikes turns people against wilderness, or even broader conservation issues. But I think those misrepresenting the facts are the ones driving a wedge. Either way, diminished support for wilderness is not good news. But nor is it new. The historical trajectory toward better land stewardship has always been the fight of the few.
One last thing to consider is the issue's scale. The wilderness system is limited to roughly 53 million acres outside Alaska. Smaller than Colorado, that portion is scattered across 43 states. And while most of the land is in the West, most of it is also rugged and unbikable. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of acres remain open to biking.
Still, some will demand that bikes be permitted in wilderness. And they will join logging, mining, off-roading, and other interests in whittling away at the boundaries of pending wilderness proposals. At a time when so many more serious issues confront our lands –– climate change, ocean acidification, plastics pollution, sprawl and much more –– it seems a misguided use of energy.
In January, the Wilderness Land Trust bought a 4,000-acre parcel of land called the Rimrock Rose Ranch, next to the Sabinoso, with a $3 million donation from the Wyss Foundation. The plan is to transfer the land to the BLM, which manages the wilderness, as part of a larger effort to develop access routes to marooned public land.
Today, Labyrinth Canyon is battle-scarred, like hundreds of other publicly owned lands in eastern Utah. River runners and environmental groups want it protected as wilderness. Ranchers want secure grazing rights. Oil and gas companies want to drill the benches overlooking the canyon, and off-roaders want clear access to it.
For decades, environmentalists' efforts to preserve Labyrinth and other contested landscapes were thwarted by pro-industry congressmen like Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee. And Bishop and others' efforts to bring more oil and gas jobs to rural counties were likewise derailed by litigious greens. Nobody was getting ahead.
So in 2013, Bishop proposed a truce. Instead of blocking wilderness bills, he offered to negotiate — to use wilderness as "currency" to bargain for development elsewhere. Bishop and fellow Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz reached out to local and national environmental groups, mountain bikers, outdoor leadership schools, ATVers, tribes, ranchers, oil and gas companies and county commissioners, hoping to find consensus.
But as stakeholders pored over maps, deadlines came and went. Two out of nine counties dropped out of the process. A coalition of five tribes advocating for a 1.9 million-acre national monument in southeastern Utah felt its voice wasn't being heard and walked away as well. Meanwhile, as Bishop made headlines for supporting efforts to transfer public lands to state control and gut the Land and Water Conservation Fund, environmentalists grew increasingly skeptical of his intentions. Still, none wanted to jeopardize what seemed poised to become the biggest public-lands compromise the West had seen in decades.
On Jan. 20, Bishop and Chaffetz finally unveiled a draft of their legislation. (See graphic below.) As promised, the Utah Public Lands Initiative Act proposes to address a number of longstanding issues. The draft expands Arches National Park and designates 4.3 million acres of new wilderness and national conservation areas, as well as 301 miles of wild and scenic rivers. It also transfers some federal lands to the state, creates designated "energy planning areas" on BLM land, where development will be the priority; preserves motorized use and grazing on many public lands; and paves the way for tar sands mining in northeastern Utah.
The Western Energy Alliance, which represents over 450 oil and gas companies, called the bill an "important milestone" that "could help achieve a meaningful resolution to contentious public lands confrontations." The BlueRibbon Coalition, an off-roading advocacy group, says its members have mixed opinions of the bill. But many environmental groups feel betrayed. After three years of working in good faith with Bishop, they say the new bill is worse than the status quo. "I think it's safe to say that hope is lost," says Neal Clark, a field attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
At the root of environmentalists' misgivings is the way Bishop's bill defines "wilderness." They say the language is riddled with loopholes that permit activities usually prohibited in wilderness, like allowing chainsaws and using motorized equipment to build new water-storage facilities. It also denies land managers the authority to reduce livestock numbers in case of drought or other negative impacts, and lets ranchers drive ATVs to feed their cattle. And it gives the state free rein to conduct predator control — like shooting coyotes by helicopter.
Labyrinth Canyon would receive a one-mile wilderness buffer on either side of the Green River. Motorized use would continue just outside the boundary, and oil and gas leasing adjacent to side canyons could increase. Depending on how you look at it, either everybody wins, or nobody does. The way Clark sees it, "It's wilderness in name only."
Fred Ferguson, chief of staff for Rep. Chaffetz, counters that the language is modeled after existing wilderness bills, including 2014's popular Hermosa Creek bill in southwest Colorado. But SUWA, along with the Grand Canyon Trust, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Wilderness Society and the Center for Western Priorities, claim the proposed loopholes are unprecedented. Other groups, including Pew Charitable Trusts and Trout Unlimited, have concerns but seem cautiously optimistic that they can be addressed.
Ferguson emphasizes that this is only a draft, and the door is still open for changes. But after a press conference, Bishop didn't seem particularly amenable; he reportedly dismissed environmentalists' concerns as "crap."
And while Bishop and Chaffetz claim the bill reflects the needs of local users, Grand County councilman Chris Baird says that's not necessarily true. After debates that nearly tore communities apart, Grand County voted down a highway that would connect the Book Cliffs' proposed tar sands mines to Interstate 70. That highway, though, is included in Bishop's draft as a "public utility corridor."
There's one last sticking point that might doom Utah's "grand bargain." Should Bishop's legislation pass Congress, it could die on the president's desk. That's because the Utah delegation insists on including a provision limiting the Antiquities Act, a century-old conservation tool that allows presidents to create national monuments by executive order. For the Obama administration, kneecapping the Antiquities Act is likely grounds for a veto.
Meanwhile, conservationists are already scrambling to prevent the legislation from reaching the president. Instead of putting out the fires of contention in eastern Utah, Bishop may have only fanned the flames.]]>
The Northern Rockies are America's epic mountains, bastion of grizzlies and other wildlife, the awe-inspiring terrain that Lewis and Clark explored and chronicled two centuries ago. In Travels with Charley in Search of America, John Steinbeck called Montana "a great splash of grandeur. The scale is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda."
It's a landscape whose wild spirit draws backpackers, hunters and anglers. And that spirit appears on every page of Where Roads Will Never Reach: Wilderness and Its Visionaries in the Northern Rockies, Frederick Swanson's history of wilderness preservation in the region. The book is scrupulously footnoted, yet accessible to the general reader, with maps to show where the writer is taking us.
When you love a place, you want to save it, not just for yourself but for others. You cherish memories of a backpacking trip into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Area or a horse-packing trip into the great complex of the Bob Marshall, Great Bear and Scapegoat wilderness areas. We're talking big landscapes here — over 7.4 million acres preserved in 17 wilderness areas.
Such preservation does not come unbidden, like a wind across the plains. It reflects hard work by people who passionately love a favorite wild landscape. This is the story Swanson sets out to tell, by getting into the hearts of those people, interviewing many who were there at the creation.
Swanson begins with a full disclosure: "My heart is, and always has been with the preservationists." I plead guilty here, too, for I had a role in some of the successes recorded in this book. But my role was minor; the preservation of wilderness areas requires — requires — that the local congressional delegation be behind any proposals for them to succeed. And that can only happen when there is broad grassroots support.
And that, in turn, means support not so much from environmental groups, but from the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker — and the hardware dealer. Cecil Garland, for example, a thickly accented North Carolina native who owned a store in Lincoln, Montana. Hearing that the Forest Service planned to log his favorite hunting area, Garland just said, "Nope." As the ink dried on the 1972 law establishing the 256,647-acre Scapegoat Wilderness, the regional forester groused: "Why should a sporting goods and hardware dealer in Lincoln, Montana, designate the boundaries? If lines are to be drawn, we should be drawing them."
Wrong. The 1964 Wilderness Act, which chartered our national program of preserving the wildest, most natural portions of our national forest and other federal lands, gave that boundary-drawing authority to Congress. But it took devoted, hard-working volunteers to motivate their elected officials to push wilderness-protection bills through Congress, with the help of legislative giants like Sens. Frank Church, D-Idaho, and Lee Metcalf, D-Mont.
This is the heart of Swanson's story, and here he makes a unique contribution, by introducing us to unlikely heroes like Doris Milner, a housewife from Hamilton, Montana, who noticed trees marked for logging in the wild country where she and her family loved to camp. When asked why she got involved, she seemed puzzled by the question: "I just got mad!" And she got her senators involved. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the law, adding Milner's magical place to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area.
Among those who worked with Sen. Church on the huge River of No Return Wilderness Area were his longtime Idaho camping cronies, led by Ted Trueblood, an editor of Field and Stream. Environment groups joined in and national lobbyists provided advice, but the real power lay with the Cecils, Dorises, and their like across the country.
Well into the 1970s, the leadership of the U.S. Forest Service was on the wrong side of the wilderness. In part, this reflects the agency's deference to its corporate logging clientele, and in part a strong dislike to giving up its discretion over the lands under its care — in this case, the decision regarding which should be protected as wilderness and what boundaries might be folded back to accommodate roads into wild country.
But a balance has been struck in the Northern Rockies. Wilderness has done well, without destroying the region's economy. After long struggles, a sustainable timber industry is emerging. "A century hence," Swanson writes, "the Northern Rockies could be a place where generations of loggers still work in the woods, passing along their knowledge of good practices; where families can drive to and camp by peaceful lakes and clear, undammed streams; where agricultural lands fill verdant valleys."
Where Roads Will Never Reach: Wilderness and Its Visionaries in the Northern Rockies
Frederick H. Swanson
376 pages, softcover: $24.95.
University of Utah Press, 2015.
But a new study by Montana nonprofit Headwaters Economics shows that's not necessarily the case. Overall, rural Western counties with more federal land performed noticeably better by four key economic indicators than counties with less public land. Not only that, but counties with land protected as national parks, wilderness, national conservation areas, national monuments or national wildlife refuges — land with little or no extractive resource production — fared best of all for personal and per-capita income growth.
"We're data-driven, and our reflex to hearing (recent anti-public lands) rhetoric is to look at the data," says Megan Lawson, the study's author. "There are certainly rural places that are struggling, but that's not the primary story we're seeing across the West."
Though economic growth in rural areas is still far surpassed by urban growth, Western rural counties with the highest share of federal lands had on average faster population, employment, personal income and per capita income growth between 1970 and 2014 than those with less public land.
When you take into account federal lands specifically protected for recreation and wildlife, rather than extraction, the differences remain strong.
The study looked at all 276 Western counties without a city of 50,000 or more or with population density below 1,000 people per square mile, designated as "non-metro" by the U.S. Census Bureau. To be fair, the overall gains are thus skewed by a few very wealthy counties, like Colorado's Summit County (home to ritzy ski resorts) and Teton County, Wyoming (home to Jackson Hole), which had personal income growth of 2,757 and 2,253 percent, respectively. Lawson says that when she took the top 5 percent — the Vails and Aspens — out of the equation, the difference in economic growth between counties with the highest and lowest protected federal land decreased by about 16 percent. But the overall gains were still significant.
Scrolling through the list of counties, it's clear that most of those with high proportions of federal land have experienced at least moderate economic growth. It's equally clear that those with less public lands have a lot of negative numbers. "I don't want to say that public lands cause economic growth," Lawson cautions. "But what we're seeing is they certainly don't stop it."
Given the time scale covered, the findings don't represent a short-term boom and bust or the influence of a single industry. Instead, they suggest that as the Western economy has shifted from a resource-driven economy to a service-based economy over the past four decades, the role of public lands has changed. Today, recreation and scenic views often bring more economic benefit than resource production.
That's not to say that resource production isn't vital. For many counties — and the overall economy — it is. But today, real estate, health care and tech and investment jobs, including those that allow employees to work remotely, are the biggest drivers of economic growth. Entrepreneurs and creative types are drawn to scenic places with easy recreational access, which might explain the rise in places like Port Townsend, Washington, or Durango, Colorado. Other places, like Chaffee County, Colorado — where commercial rafting on the Arkansas River has exploded in popularity — are likely driven by the outdoor service industry itself.
So why are outliers like Harney County, Oregon, lagging behind? Lawson suggests it's because tourism, tech and healthcare are faster-growing or more stable than agriculture, timber, or oil and gas. Counties struggling to maintain their workforce tend to have stuck with the latter — either intentionally or not. Every region and county has a unique "economic potential," and places that are particularly isolated, far from markets and airports, typically have a harder time diversifying their economies beyond traditional extractive industries. For places like Harney County, there are no easy solutions.
Yet snowballing economic gains can have their own downsides. With growth can come unaffordable real estate, unoccupied second homes and hordes of tourists, not to mention overstressed natural resources. "If it's an attractive place to live… working class people can get pushed out," Lawson says. But as a county transitions to a more diverse economy, it also becomes better able to weather the loss of a big employer or a national recession, which benefits the working class. "It's a double-edged sword. You have a higher cost of living, but also also greater resiliency. It's a real struggle."
Krista Langlois is a correspondent at High Country News. Follow @kristalanglois2
This week, however, many in the conservation community lost faith. On Jan. 20, Bishop, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, and Utah Republican Reps. Jason Chaffetz and Chris Stewart unveiled a draft of their Utah Public Lands Initiative Act. As promised, the bill addresses longstanding land-use issues in eastern Utah. It expands Arches National Park and designates 4.3 million acres of new wilderness and National Conservation Areas, as well as 301 miles of Wild and Scenic River on the Dolores, Colorado and Green rivers. It also expedites oil and gas drilling in certain designated areas, expands motorized use and protects or expands grazing, among dozens of other measures.
But while industry groups so far seem to support the bill, environmentalists largely oppose it — in part because of numerous loopholes they say make the new protections even weaker than the status quo. Tim Peterson of the Grand Canyon Trust says that to call it a "disappointment would be a dramatic understatement," while The Wilderness Society called the legislation "a missed opportunity." The Sierra Club, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Western Priorities also came out against the legislation as written.
The letdown was a long time coming. In 2013, Bishop wrote to dozens of public land users, calling for an end to the stalemate that's plagued eastern Utah for decades. Instead of blocking wilderness bills, Bishop said he was willing to negotiate; to think of wild lands as "currency" that could be used to bargain for development elsewhere.
First, he and Chaffetz wanted on-the-ground consensus from nine counties, with input from tribes, mountain bikers, oil and gas companies, environmentalists, motorized users and others. As stakeholders pored over maps and argued over prized landscapes, deadlines came and went. Two counties dropped out of negotiations. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition said they felt their voices weren't being heard and dropped out as well.
Bishop and Chaffetz warned that not everyone would be happy with the final result. And indeed, while some environmental groups quickly launched a media blitz to disparage the legislation, others were more diplomatic. The Pew Charitable Trusts and Trout Unlimited both have concerns, but seem cautiously optimistic that they can be worked out. And the Western Energy Alliance, which represents over 450 oil and gas companies, called the bill an "important milestone" that "could help achieve a meaningful resolution to contentious public lands confrontations in Utah."
Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of government and public affairs at Western Energy Alliance, said on Twitter that environmental groups simply weren't willing to compromise. She wondered: Was 4 million acres of wilderness not enough? Energy producers didn't get everything they wanted either, but Sgamma says they're willing to support the final effort as the result of hard-won local consensus.
Fred Ferguson, chief of staff for Rep. Chaffetz, encourages anyone with complaints to immediately submit them in writing. While he believes the bill is fair and balanced, he emphasizes that it's still a draft. "The door is open for another round of changes," he says.
If that's true, a number of environmentalists' concerns could be resolved. But in a news conference on Wednesday, Bishop reportedly dismissed those concerns as "crap."
Keep an eye on future issues of High Country News for more details on what the Public Lands Initiative means for eastern Utah. You can also read the full text of the bill and check out maps here.
Krista Langlois is a correspondent with High Country News. Follow @kristalanglois2]]>
Summers last only a few weeks in the White Cloud Mountains, and with off-road vehicles and mining closing in on these once-remote expanses, environmentalists have campaigned since the 1970s for wilderness protection. Recently, frustration with congressional inaction led to a push for a 600,000-acre national monument, which President Obama seemed ready to endorse. Then the Republican Idaho congressional delegation agreed to compromise on a 275,000-acre wilderness bill that passed last August.
Wilderness bills, though rare these days, sometimes include unfortunate concessions, such as the Hondo Wilderness bill in New Mexico, which had to reduce acreage to accommodate mountain bikers. But the Boulder-White Cloud wilderness bill included a provision that both ranchers and environmentalists supported, and it's one that may help shift public-land grazing throughout the West. It allows ranchers to voluntarily sell or donate their federal grazing leases back to the Forest Service on 700,000 acres surrounding the newly designated wilderness. In turn, the Forest Service will permanently close the affected grazing allotments. In large part, ranchers agreed to relinquish these allotments after years of predator-cattle conflicts within the Sawtooth National Recreation Area.
Though other localized buyout programs have passed Congress since 1998, ranchers have defeated national buyout legislation because of the precedent-setting nature of ending grazing allotments, and because some ranchers consider federal grazing areas their private property. The Boulder White Clouds bill reveals that an aging population of ranchers, struggling to make ends meet in a drought-affected, urbanizing West, may be ready to ride off into the sunset.
According to BeefResearch.org, 65 percent of ranchers are over age 55 and only 12 percent are under 45 years old. As the majority of ranchers reach retirement age, most don't have children willing to do the hard work and earn the low pay that comes with ranching in the arid West. Buyouts offer ranching families a chance to end their ranching careers with a decent income.
Farther south, in New Mexico's Gila Mountains, nonprofit organizations have been working for years to develop a grazing allotment buyout plan to restore overgrazed Forest Service land and reduce cattle-Mexican wolf conflicts. Many ranchers say they are ready to take privately funded buyouts on a half-million acres of public land, but the Forest Service is making things difficult: It is blocking the buyouts because having fewer cattle allotments to manage means budget cuts for the agency.
The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management spent about $128 million in 2013 administering their grazing programs while receiving only $12 million in receipts from ranchers, a small fraction of which goes back to the agencies. These direct costs to taxpayers stand beside incalculable indirect costs, such as watershed damage, and the spread of flammable cheatgrass where cattle have trampled biotic crusts. There's also the impact of grazing on hundreds of millions of acres of sage grouse habitat and recreation areas in high-altitude wilderness areas.
Since 2011, a bill to permit permanent federal grazing allotment buyouts has languished in Congress. Called the Rural Economic Vitalization Act, it would authorize buyouts on any federal lands and would be a critical tool for agencies facing endangered species conflicts, such as the BLM with sage grouse, or the Forest Service with bison, wolves and 170 other species. If passed, the bill would allow conservation groups, ranchers and agency managers to end grazing on key areas in a way that promises both dignity for the rancher and restoration for the land.
This market-based solution should appeal to conservative politicians (as it has in Idaho) as well as to many ranchers of retirement age.
By endorsing grazing buyouts in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, Idaho's congressional delegation has given the national buyout campaign the biggest bipartisan push it has received to date. Idaho especially stands to gain if agencies can relieve grazing pressure on sage grouse habitat. Ending grazing with buyouts will finally begin the long process of native plant restoration over hundreds of millions of acres of public land.
It's a sure-fire remedy for awkward silences at cocktail parties. Whenever I'm plummeting into a chthonian abyss of social ineptitude, it's my conversational ripcord. Coolly and casually, I mention that I grew up in Alaska.
"You lived in Al-as-ka?"
(My interlocutors invariably lean hard on that second syllable as if to emphasize just how alien "Alaska" feels in one's mouth. Think "Alpha Cen-taur-i" or "Zeta Re-tic-uli." You would never say "Con-nect-icut" or "Wis-con-sin," would you?)
Alaska is quite possibly the most evocative place-name in the English language. It's the Last Frontier — words emblazoned across the license plates, in case you ever forget. Twice the size of Texas, with a fraction of Texas' pavement, Alaska is the last, vast untamed expanse of ground in the United States. It doesn't hurt the state's image that the world map of choice in most American classrooms is the Mercator projection, which, with its obsessive preservation of right angles and its bias toward the Northern Hemisphere, makes Alaska look bigger than Africa.
Alaska represents romance — the struggle of the individual against the wilderness. It symbolizes the extreme — humans grappling with a hostile environment and deadly wildlife on a daily basis. People desperately want to believe that Alaska, rather than Space, is the Final Frontier. After all, moving to Alaska is possible. Getting your hands on your own starship Enterprise is another matter. Maybe Frederick Jackson Turner spoke a tad too soon. Maybe the frontier isn't closed just yet; maybe there's still hope.
Too bad it's not true. Not for me, at least. In the urban jungle of downtown Los Anchorage, where I misspent my youth, kamikaze motorists and a highly visible and often stentorian homeless population were more conspicuous than any superlatives Mother Nature might serve up.
Yes, Alaska is big. Yes, it's remote. And, yeah, it gets kinda cold sometimes. But the mountains surrounding Denver are just as tall as those encircling Anchorage; Buffalo, New York, gets more snow; and winter temperatures are just as cold in Omaha, Nebraska. And is a three-hour flight from Seattle really that much of an ordeal?
But a little hyperbole — or maybe a lot — is what my listeners yearn for. They want a good story. They want to hear about life on the edge of survival. Above all, they want to believe that life in Alaska — anywhere in Alaska — is fundamentally different from life anywhere else. When people find out I'm from Alaska, I know they have expectations I can never fulfill. I'm supposed to look like I just walked out of a Jack London novel: battered slouch hat, stained plaid shirt, faded jeans, whiskers so unkempt as to be likely inhabited. I'm supposed to reminisce about the Gold Rush whilst pensively stroking my muttonchops: "Yep, back in the winter of '89, me 'n' ol' Jack McGrew were comin' down the Chilkoot Trail. …"
So my social triumphs are inevitably short-lived. It won't take you five minutes to realize Jon Krakauer is never going to write a book about anything I've done. The statement "I grew up in Alaska" is literally true when I say it, but it feels like a lie, or at least an exaggeration. It sounds like I'm bragging: "I grew up in the wilderness."
To be honest, I always found the Alaskan wilderness rather, well … scary.
Take bears, for instance. Many people go to Alaska with the express intent of having an ursine encounter. I'd rather get beamed up by cattle-prod-wielding aliens. Grizzlies accomplish in real life what hook-handed, hockey-masked psychopaths can only pull off with Hollywood special effects. Now that humanity has more or less gotten impaling, flaying and divers other gory diversions out of its system, a bear-mauling is about the only way a body can manage to get disemboweled alive.
Most people think of the wilderness as a place to see natural wonders, relax and rejuvenate. I find it difficult to relax when I know that big, furry natural wonders might be hungry.
Yet I do love the outdoors. A bike trail runs from downtown Anchorage to the south edge of the city, offering breathtaking views from cliffs rising high above the ocean. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of riding down that trail — exulting in the snowy grandeur of Mount Susitna, the craggy bluffs of Point Campbell and Point Woronzof, the summer sun shimmering on the silvery waters of Cook Inlet. While gulls screeched and sandpipers warbled around me, I'd breathe in the musky fragrance of the devil's club, the pungent scent of Sitka spruce and the bitter brine of the sea.
Go ahead and call it Nature Lite. It worked for me.
And I got to keep my intestines.
James Thompson lives in southwestern Idaho, in constant terror of mountain lions.]]>
The U.S. Forest Service wants to allow mining despite its own new analysis that reveals the mining could result in a net cost to society of as much as $12 billion. The agency did a social cost of carbon analysis — which includes impacts on agricultural productivity, human health, property damages from increased flood risk, among other things — because a federal judge last year found the government's original environmental analysis failed to take a "hard look" at the potential contributions to climate change as required by the National Environmental Policy Act. At the time, District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson stopped the expansion of Arch Coal's West Elk Mine into the Sunset Roadless Area of the Gunnison National Forest near Paonia. As HCN reported, that ruling was groundbreaking because it was the first time a judge blocked an approval of a coal mine because the government failed to grapple with the mine's impact on climate change.
The victory helped inspire a group of environmentalists to repeatedly sue the government for its failure to adequately consider climate change in its actions related to federal fossil fuels across the West. Despite the legal onslaught, the Obama administration largely has operated its coal and oil and gas programs as if climate change did not exist. The Forest Service's new proposal to allow mining in undeveloped areas of the North Fork Valley is the latest example of agencies continuing to defend the status quo.
"This massive give-away to the coal industry undercuts the U.S.'s commitment to reducing climate pollution at a time when the world is looking to America for leadership," said Earthjustice attorney Ted Zukoski, who represented the groups in federal court. "If there's any place to keep fossil fuel in the ground, it's here, where mining for dirty coal will release huge amounts of methane and destroy pristine wildlife habitat next to a wilderness area."
In its new draft environmental analysis, the Forest Service estimates that if allowed, the mining could contribute anywhere from 13.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to 43.2 million metric tons annually. The draft also stated that the mining could last until 2054, depending on the rate of production. In keeping with the judge's ruling, the analysis also calculates how much additional greenhouse gas emissions would be released nationally if the country opens this area for mining. In the past, the government and industry have argued that if this coal isn't mined, coal from another mine will just replace it and the climate change impacts will be equivalent. But the agency's analysis estimates that in fact that's not the case: 131 million metric tons more climate change pollution could be released than if the mining didn't happen and other fuels for electricity were used.
Industry representatives and state officials were pleased with the government's proposal. Mike King, executive director for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, says reinstating the North Fork Coal Mining Area exception is "fundamental" to achieving the balance between conserving Colorado's landscapes and providing economic opportunities for local communities.
Stuart Sanderson, president of the Colorado Mining Association, said that even though current market conditions are challenging for coal companies, the Forest Service process to reopen North Fork roadless areas for mining is important. Right now, the demand for Colorado coal is shrinking because of competition from low-priced natural gas, and new state and federal air pollution regulations. But that could change in the future, Sanderson says, and mines need to plan years ahead to acquire leases. Only two years of coal are left to mine under Arch Coal's current leases, according to the Forest Service analysis. Arch Coal spokeswoman Logan Bonacorsi said the proposal "will extend the life of the mine and help ensure the future viability of important, well-paying jobs in the region."
But environmental groups blasted the Obama administration for continuing to pursue a federal coal policy that they say is out of sync with President Barack Obama's climate change objectives.
"With Arch Coal on the verge of bankruptcy, the Obama administration should be helping the North Fork Valley become less reliant on the West Elk mine," says Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians.
Nichols says the proposal is all the more glaring given the timing, just before the Paris climate change conference. By contrast, the United Kingdom this week announced plans to close its coal-fired power plants.
"Frankly, this is essentially giving the rest of the world the middle finger," Nichols said.
Still, mining in Colorado's roadless areas would be a long ways off. The Forest Service will take public comment for 45 days and hold public sessions in Paonia and Denver early next month. The agency expects to make a final decision next summer. Before any mining could start, the agencies would conduct a separate environmental review, which could take two to four years to complete.
Elizabeth Shogren is HCN's DC Correspondent. Follow @shogrene]]>
At the top, Imper, a retired Fish and Wildlife Service botanist and rare plant advocate, kneels next to a wire cage shaped like an oversized top hat. Beneath it, a lupine is blooming, its rich pink-and-white flowers in vibrant contrast to the rocky ground.
"This is just a holding pattern," Imper says, pointing out 20 more flowers in cages nearby. There are approximately 350 Lassics lupines left on the planet, found only here and on nearby Red Lassic. The plants face threats from encroaching forests to severe drought, but the cages protect them from the most imminent danger: rodents.
The Lassics team hypothesizes that fire suppression has caused the plant's present woes. The natural fire regime, they say, would normally burn back encroaching vegetation that creates new habitat for rodents, giving them easier access to the scrumptious lupine seeds. The flowers, which evolved on wide-open barrens, aren't made for that kind of predatory pressure. "Smokey the Bear (screwed) us," says Imper.
Caging the lupines, the scientists warn, isn't enough; they want to cut back or burn the invading chaparral and trees, too. But Congress designated Mount Lassic a federal wilderness in 2006, and Forest Service officials say the 1964 Wilderness Act makes such intervention difficult, although it doesn't prohibit it outright. "The imprint of man's work (shall be) substantially unnoticeable," the law states, and its protective regulatory hurdles have hampered rapid action to save the lupine.
In this case, ironically, wilderness may hinder wildflower conservation. "We have this (designation) that was meant to save and preserve," says Dan Dill, the Forest Service district ranger who administers Mount Lassic, "but it has quite possibly put a species in jeopardy at the same time."
In 2003, scientists realized that chipmunks and deer mice were eating nearly all of the lupine's annual seed output. In response, Imper and his colleagues at Fish and Wildlife and the Forest Service began caging the wildflowers almost immediately. Within seven years, the population nearly tripled.
Then, at the end of summer 2012, officials at Six Rivers National Forest ordered the team to remove the cages. Forest Service botanist Lisa Hoover, who helps oversee the project, explained that the site was located in designated wilderness, and top agency brass believed the cages made the mountain look "trammeled by man." Normally, the researchers stored the unwieldy equipment onsite during winter; now, they didn't know if they'd be allowed to use it in the future.
After meetings between the Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife, the team was allowed to resume caging the following summer. Imper, however, has lobbied for years for more aggressive action. In 2012, for instance, he delivered a 171-page report to agency officials urging the felling, burning or girdling of conifers and chaparral in lupine habitat. But his recommendations fell flat. In the Forest Service, he says, "there has been outright opposition to doing any restoration."
The lack of action is due to administrative obstacles, not agency opposition, says Hoover. The National Environmental Policy Act requires federal agencies to analyze the environmental impacts of their actions, so the Forest Service must do rigorous reviews before removing vegetation, especially in wilderness areas. That requires input from specialists as well as extra work and money, and is subject to public comment. Given its limited resources, the agency has not initiated the NEPA process.
Critics like Imper, though, believe the agency has mismanaged the crisis. Improving habitat can be consistent with wilderness values, says Ryan Henson, policy director at the California Wilderness Coalition, citing other successful restoration efforts within protected areas. His group is working on legislation that would, among other things, direct the Forest Service to pursue robust lupine management without delay.
And then there's the Endangered Species Act. This fall, Imper hopes to petition for an emergency listing. The brutal drought killed most of the lupines on the south-facing slopes this summer and cut the overall population in half, so it's increasingly urgent that trees be removed from the wetter north side. A listing would offer stronger legal cover for such actions.
In mid-August, a wildfire marched through the wilderness. Imper and his colleagues waited anxiously to see if the flowers would survive. Finally, in early September, a researcher hiked in. The southern part of Mount Lassic, and much of its chaparral, was charred. The crucial northern slope, however, experienced only low-intensity fire, which killed a few flowers and some trees, but likely left the big pines intact. The fire might reduce rodent density, but the flowers still face drought, heat and invading forest, with no relief in sight. "The plants are being squeezed in every direction," Imper says, "and there's no place left to go."]]>
For most Alaskans, the energy chairmanship would be sufficient. But Lisa, as nearly everyone in the state calls her, had also strategically positioned herself to lead one of the most important subcommittees in resource development: the Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies. This second chairmanship controls the spending of energy-policy heavyweights like the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Environmental Protection Agency, giving Murkowski unparalleled leverage over officials who might thwart energy development — and making her among the most influential people in Washington when it comes to the economies and environments of the American West.
Murkowski is a steadfast supporter of the oil industry. She wants to reduce restrictions on development, ramp up production and open more public lands to drilling. Yet she's also a moderate Republican who was among the first in her party to acknowledge that climate change is a threat. Her voting record is among the most bipartisan in Congress, and her ability to broker deals is a source of both admiration and fear. "In the context of other Alaska members of Congress I've dealt with in the past 15 or 20 years, she's the most formidable," says Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club's Lands Protection Program. "She's smart, she's serious, and she's very professional."
She may be all those things — but first and foremost, Murkowski is an Alaskan. "Anything bad for Alaska is a deal-breaker for me," she recently wrote to High Country News. As the first woman from her state and the first person born there to serve in Congress, Murkowski's willingness to compromise may be trumped only by the fierce protectiveness she feels toward her home turf. Cross Alaska — as President Barack Obama has done by limiting oil and gas development there — and you cross Murkowski. And especially with her new gavels, Lisa Murkowski is not someone you want to cross.
"She's always been a tough lady," says Oliver Leavitt, an Iñupiat leader and family friend. "But now she's a tough lady with a big stick."
Lisa Ann Murkowski was born in Ketchikan in 1957, the second of six children. Her father, Frank, was in banking, and it became a family joke that as soon as his wife, Nancy, got settled enough to put up new wallpaper, they'd move again. By 1962, when Lisa was in kindergarten, the Murkowskis had moved up the coast to Wrangell, then known as the timber capital of Alaska.
Like most Southeast Alaska towns, Wrangell is accessible only by water or air, a thumbprint of civilization surrounded by the vast green archipelago of the Tongass National Forest. Rainfall in the Tongass can exceed 150 inches a year, and more often than not, the rocky beaches and narrow ocean passages are shrouded in clouds. Moss blankets everything.
Though some of the biggest trees in the world grow here, the timber industry long ignored Southeast Alaska. Logs were too far from market, and often too soggy, to be profitable. But just before the Murkowskis arrived, the federal government began subsidizing huge logging contracts, transforming sleepy fishing villages into international hubs of commerce. Two sawmills sprang up
in Wrangell, each running two shifts a day. From the Murkowskis' new home, the family could watch tugboats piled with logs chugging up and down the coast.
Frank had a 19-foot motorboat, the Emerald, and often took Lisa and her siblings into the maze of islands around Wrangell to fish for salmon or picnic on remote beaches. As the 1960s passed, the view from the Emerald changed. Swaths of old-growth rainforest were replaced by muddy, stump-strewn clear-cuts. Environmental protection was almost nil; logging companies drove their bulldozers right up the channels of salmon-producing streams.
Yet from the Murkowskis' perspective, Southeast Alaska was thriving. Lawmakers and international businessmen visited Wrangell frequently, and as bank manager — an important position in a frontier town — Frank was invited to meet every luminary passing through. He and Nancy would join Sen. Ted Stevens for lunch with fewer than a dozen others.
It was such a tantalizing glimpse into political life that, in 1970, Frank ran for the U.S. House of Representatives. To help get out the vote, 13-year-old Lisa spent hours in a makeshift post office in the basement, licking stamps and stuffing envelopes. It was her first political experience, and she was hooked.
But Frank lost, and the family moved to Fairbanks. There, Lisa again witnessed the transformation that resource development can bring to a struggling rural economy. Not long after the Murkowskis rolled into town, the first shipment of North Slope crude began flowing through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Tens of thousands of pipeline workers flooded the town; in three years, the number of businesses almost doubled.
The Murkowskis absorbed some of that wealth. Their home sat on five acres and featured a heated swimming pool, tennis courts, a stable and an airplane float. The family passed their time flying bush planes, skiing and hunting with the likes of Ted Stevens and his family — the Alaskan equivalent of royalty. Lisa, by now a tall, athletic teenager, particularly loved horseback riding, and was unfazed by shoveling out a winter's worth of frozen manure each spring.
In 1980, Frank was finally elected to Congress, beginning a 22-year career in the Senate. That same year, Lisa graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in economics. Now retired, Frank and Nancy spend their summers in Wrangell, in a modest log cabin wedged between the industrial harbor and the protected waters of the Inside Passage, not far from Lisa's childhood home. Local art decorates the walls. On the sunny May morning that I stop by, a bag of organic fertilizer leans against the porch.
Frank offers me coffee and sits down at the table, while Nancy relaxes on the couch with her feet up, reading the news on a phone in a jeweled case. It soon becomes clear that Mrs. Murkowski is a political force to be reckoned with: When Frank fumbles a reference to a mining operation his daughter opposes, Nancy jumps in with the latest news and legislation. "In our family, all we talk about around the dinner table is politics," she says. "All our children — but Lisa mainly — were raised on politics."
In 1985, after earning a law degree from Oregon's Willamette University, Lisa returned to Alaska, working first in the district attorney's office and later in private practice. But the Alaska of her childhood was changing. From Anchorage's Government Hill district, Murkowski watched as the resource economies that had defined Alaska since statehood began to crack. In the Tongass, a combination of market forces, federal regulation and environmental pressure devastated the timber industry. Sawmills closed their doors, and unemployment shot up to around 35 percent. Murkowski — now married with two small boys of her own — watched in dismay as families she'd grown up with lost their jobs and moved away.
On the other end of the state, the Alaska pipeline began its long, steady decline. The oil fields at Prudhoe Bay had peaked, and the federal government was slow to offer leases in its Arctic holdings. Amid this turmoil, in 1999, Lisa Murkowski decided to run for the Alaska House of Representatives.
From the beginning, she bucked the system. Frank was a classic conservative, fighting taxes to catalyze the free market. Lisa increased the state tax on liquor to offset the costs of alcohol abuse and supported reproductive rights, sponsoring legislation that required insurance companies to cover contraception. She volunteered for several finance committees, familiarizing herself with the state's complicated budget process and quietly building a reputation as a politician who knows the issues. "She wakes up every morning and thinks about three things," says Kara Moriarty, CEO of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association and a family friend. "Policy, policy and policy."
In 2002, Murkowski was still wrangling with the intricacies of state fiscal policy when her father announced he was ending his last Senate term two years early to run for governor. All he had to do was name his successor.
The list of possibilities was long, and Frank Murkowski remembers putting their names into a spreadsheet to compare qualifications: law degree, legislative experience, personal background. Among the candidates were Sarah Palin — then a rising political star — Ted Stevens' son, Ben, and Frank's own daughter. Frank wasn't serious about Lisa at first, but as he put together the spreadsheet, she started to rise to the top.
Lisa couldn't believe it. But after taking a few days to consider, she accepted the nomination.
"And then that — what's the word?" Frank calls to Nancy, who's still on the couch.
"Nepotism," Nancy says, without looking up from her phone.
"Nepotism," Frank repeats. "I learned how to spell nepotism real quick." (Bumper stickers of the day read, "Lisa, who's your daddy?")
But the shadow of nepotism no longer hangs over Murkowski's career. "She's her own person," Nancy says.
"She's a what?!" Frank asks, aghast.
"I said, she's her own person. She makes up her own mind."
"Oh. Yeah," Frank says, relieved, then adds, "I've shot a lotta ducks, so my right ear doesn't hear as well as the left. Lisa, by the way, is an excellent shot."
Ted Stevens once said that Lisa Murkowski was "a hell of a lot better senator than her dad ever was," and many D.C. insiders who have worked with both agree. "I think that Gov. Murkowski was a good bit louder and a bit more impetuous than (Lisa)," says McKie Campbell, Lisa's former staff director. "Because she is somewhat quieter and more reflective, people often mistake that for a lack of resolve."
During her early years in the Senate, Murkowski kept a low profile; a Newsweek article dismissed her political style as "unglamorous" and referred to her as "the other woman from Alaska." But while Palin worked the cameras, Murkowski worked the backrooms. She volunteered for the committees with the most influence on Alaskan issues — Indian Affairs, Appropriations, Energy and Natural Resources — and built the relationships necessary to further Alaska's pro-development ambitions on the national stage. Colleagues describe her as unfailingly polite and personable, with a genuine desire to get things done.
Yet Murkowski's attempts to revive logging in the Tongass and expand Arctic drilling either died in Congress or got caught up in endless litigation and roadblocks, and her disregard for the pillars of conservatism riled some Republicans. By 2010, the financial market had collapsed, Obama was president, and Palin had ousted Frank from the Alaska Governor's Mansion, the harbinger of a wave of Tea Partying in the state. Murkowski, on the other hand, was openly pro-choice and supported gay rights. She even collaborated with Democrats on a public-lands bill that created 2 million acres of wilderness and 1,000 miles of wild and scenic rivers.
When she finally did catch the media's attention, it was for the wrong reason. Lisa Murkowski — an incumbent Republican senator with a famous last name from a strongly Republican state — lost the 2010 primary to a Tea Party candidate named Joe Miller who believed "compromise is destroying the nation."
Murkowski was devastated. She conceded the primary, and it looked like she'd throw in the towel altogether. "In many ways, she thought how good it would be to be back in Alaska on the sidelines of a soccer game and just be known as Nick or Matt's mom," Campbell remembers. But back in Alaska, supporters kept calling her back — a waiter at a restaurant in Anchorage, acquaintances she'd run into at the airport. She contemplated a write-in campaign, but the notion seemed preposterous: No one had won by write-in since Strom Thurmond in 1954, and it seemed unlikely that anyone with a last name as difficult as "Murkowski" would stand a chance.
But support kept building. One evening in mid-September, Murkowski found herself at the dinner table at her cousin Anne Gore's house in Anchorage, hashing out her options long after the salmon was eaten and the dishes cleared. "We always have very loud dinner table discussions in this family," says Murkowski's older sister, Carol Sturgulewski, who was there. "We look at issues 18 different ways. It's OK to have a difference of opinion, because if she doesn't hear it from me, she's gonna hear it from the guy sitting next to her on the Senate floor. So we were doing what we always do, going around the table, around and around and around."
Eventually, Gore took a quarter out of her wallet and flipped it. Heads, Murkowski would run. Tails, she wouldn't. No one could look. Finally, Sturgulewski pried open Gore's fingers, looked down and smiled: Heads.
Murkowski swiftly put together a $1.7 million budget and a staff of 20. Ted Stevens had died in a plane crash just weeks before, and his staffers rallied to her side. Her chief political strategist was Cathy Allen, who generally works for Democrats, and many Democratic voters, fearful of what would happen if Joe Miller won the election, backed her. A super PAC of Alaska Native Corporations formed and donated more than a million dollars to Murkowski's write-in. Oil companies chipped in a quarter-million.
On Sept. 17, wearing a royal blue blazer, her chestnut hair perfectly coifed, she stepped in front of a podium plastered with the words "Let's Make History" at the Dena'ina Center in downtown Anchorage. As chants of "Run, Lisa, Run!" died down, someone in the audience yelled, "Love you, Lisa!"
"I love you," she replied, grinning incredulously. Her usual stiffness and poise seemed to melt away. In the heartfelt 25-minute speech that followed, she described the overwhelming support that prompted her decision, took a few digs at the Tea Party, and led the crowd in an exercise spelling her last name: M-U-R-K-O-W-S-K-I! The response was uproarious.
Murkowski finished by quoting the late Sen. Stevens. "The hell with politics," she cried. "Let's do what's right for Alaska. Let's win!"
Murkowski won. By 13,000 votes.
The 2010 victory marked a turning point in Murkowski's political career. Though she ran as a Republican, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told her she no longer had the support of the Senate's GOP leadership, and the Alaska Republican Party refused to acknowledge her. In some ways, it was the best thing that could have happened: No longer shackled to her party, Murkowski had even greater freedom to forge her own path.
The timing, however, couldn't have been worse: Democrats had lost their filibuster-proof majority, and the next four years marked one of the worst stalemates in congressional history. Democrats refused to pass energy bills, while Republicans, led by Rep. Doc Hastings of Washington, blocked one wilderness bill after another. The 112th Congress became notorious as the first since the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 to not designate a single acre of new wilderness.
By the time Republicans swept the 2014 election, hundreds of bills had piled up, and lawmakers on both sides were ready for action. Hastings was about to retire, though not without first seeing some of his pet measures passed, and Democrats, about to lose their majority, had impetus to dust off long-stalled legislation. As one Republican negotiator told the Brookings Institution, Murkowski saw the opportunity and ran with it.
While the media and her fellow senators were distracted by the threat of a government shutdown, Murkowski helped negotiate a massive back-door compromise, wrapping dozens of development and land-protection bills into a 169-page package. It created 250,000 acres of Western wilderness and 140 miles of wild and scenic rivers, and halted mineral development on hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands. It also streamlined permits for grazing, oil and gas development and opened an additional 110,000 acres to logging and mining.
Though it was the biggest lands deal Congress had passed in years, it "was not one of those heralded mega-deals announced by proud lawmakers at a triumphant press conference," writes Jill Lawrence for Brookings' Center for Effective Public Management. Instead, it was a "profile in negotiation," a "collection of mini-deals affecting people and places in 36 states in myriad different ways."
Murkowski's personal triumph in the package was a bill known as Sealaska, which transferred 70,000 acres of the Tongass National Forest to an Alaska Native corporation (which was owed the land), to be logged without lawsuits or federal environmental regulations. Tim Bristol, then-director of Trout Unlimited's Alaska program, says that while he and other environmentalists were initially opposed, the final bill was swallowable. In addition to the land transfer, Murkowski agreed to put 152,000 acres of old growth into conservation. "The original bill and what ended up passing were quite a bit different," Bristol says. "There were a few places where common sense took hold."
The entire deal was attached to a must-pass defense bill and signed into law on Dec. 19, 2014. It was by far the biggest thing Murkowski had negotiated in her 12 years in the Senate. But by then, she had won her twin gavels, and the public-lands compromise was mere practice for what was to come.
This January, as the 114th Congress got underway, Murkowski faced a dilemma. Her rise to power coincided with a fiscal crisis in Alaska, where a precipitous drop in oil prices — combined with low production — led the state to slash funding for education, transportation and other sectors. Murkowski in part blames the federal government, and she's angry. Angrier than she's ever been.
Yet to pass the kind of energy reform that could become her legacy, Murkowski needs her moderate bipartisan roots more than ever. Though the 2014 deal unclogged the glut of public-lands bills that had built up in the congressional pipeline, an equal number of energy bills are still languishing — like the Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency bill, a measure about as uncontroversial as any in Washington. It would improve energy efficiency without imposing federal mandates, but because it got caught up in the (unrelated) fight over Keystone XL, the bill has been unsuccessfully introduced in each Congress since 2011.
If anyone can pass Shaheen-Portman and the dozens of other measures that have fallen victim to partisan politics, Murkowski believes it's her. The last time Congress comprehensively updated America's energy policy, in 2007, the landscape looked entirely different than it does today: It was twice as expensive to put solar panels on a roof, and the U.S. only produced about 5 million barrels of crude oil a day, compared to around 9.5 million now. "The world has changed," Murkowski told Brookings last year. "The energy world has changed. And what hasn't changed are many of the policies."
In the West, this disconnect means — among many things — that the grid isn't prepared to accept all the renewable power that could come online, and that innovative utilities wanting to reduce the need for new power plants by sharing electricity are stymied by outdated technology or policies. So this January, Murkowski set out to do what previous chairs have been unwilling or unable to: revamp America's energy policy. She kicked off her chairmanship in Energy and Natural Resources by gathering input from environmental groups, oil companies and everyone in between on what they consider America's most pressing energy needs, then gave committee members a month to introduce bills. She held vigorous debates on everything that flooded in, and weeded out measures that members couldn't agree on.
In the end, she was left with a 357-page package of bipartisan energy bills. She unveiled it in July, passed it through committee in September, and hopes to have it on the president's desk before long. J. Bennett Johnston, a conservative Louisiana Democrat and energy-policy insider, says the package offers the best opportunity in years to update America's energy laws. "It's not very controversial," he says. "It's not world-shaking. But it's got a lot of things in it they've been trying to pass for a long time, and I think it's got a decent chance."
As with the 2014 public-lands deal, many of the measures in Murkowski's energy package seem inconsequential. But taken as a whole, the thrust is clear: The senator wants to increase every source of energy — wind, solar, geothermal, oil, natural gas, coal, marine hydrokinesis, biomass, nuclear and others — largely by removing federal restrictions that hinder their development. Her energy spokesman, Robert Dillon, says the senator would never do so in a way that compromises environmental safeguards, but at least 11 major environmental groups have come out against Murkowski's package. A section that deals with expanding hydropower is particularly grating, an "industry wish list" that will roll back environmental protections for rivers and fish, says American Rivers' John Seebach. Another section will speed up exports of natural gas, further tying the economy to fossil fuels "at a time when we should be transitioning away from their use," according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Nonetheless, the package goes a long way toward updating the West's electric grid and making room for more renewables. It sets up a noncompetitive leasing program for geothermal energy on public lands, improves efficiency standards, and permanently reauthorizes the Land and Water Conservation Fund. It's not perfect, but it moves the ball forward.
It also provides a glimpse of what Alaska's senior senator can do when she's at her best. But Murkowski's nine months as chairman offer a look at another side of her, too.
On the days when Ted Stevens felt most "pumped up" to defend the great state of Alaska, he showed up for work wearing a tie featuring The Hulk, the Marvel Comics character who explodes in size and smashes anything in his way when angry.
Murkowksi inherited Stevens' fondness for The Hulk; she keeps a figurine in her D.C. office, and when she's ready for battle, drapes a scarf printed with the green-hued hero over her shoulders. But while Stevens pounded his fist and raised his voice when he felt the feds were slighting Alaska, Murkowski stays unnervingly calm, even venomous. "Channeling my inner #Hulk while meeting with the press," she once posted on her Instagram account.
Murkowski has had plenty of reasons to channel her inner Hulk this year. Six months after she passed the Sealaska provision to expedite logging in the Tongass, the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down an effort that both Murkowskis had championed since the 1990s: exempting the Tongass from Clinton's roadless rule. The environmental community cheered the decision as a final blow to old-growth logging in the Tongass, but for Murkowski, it was another sign that the federal government was abandoning its commitment to Alaska's resource development.
Further proof, she says, lies in the state's oil production. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, built in the 1970s to transport Arctic oil from Prudhoe Bay, is currently moving 500,000 barrels of oil a day, compared to the 2 million it was designed for, and dropping by 5 percent annually. If Arctic production continues to decline, keeping the pipeline running may not be economically feasible. And with state lands getting tapped out, Murkowski believes the most surefire way to keep Alaska's economy afloat is for the federal government to let oil companies begin drilling.
Since 2004, Murkowski has introduced eight bills to allow drilling in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an area estimated to hold the largest unexplored onshore oil reserves in the United States. None have passed. But when she assumed her chairmanship in January, it offered fresh hope to her allies that she might be able to force the president's hand.
And then, without warning, Obama crushed those hopes. On the morning of Jan. 25, his administration released a minute-long YouTube video of sweeping vistas, herds of caribou and regal polar bears. The Arctic Refuge's coastal plain, the president announced, would be managed as wilderness. The longest-running battle of oil versus wildlife was settled, at least for now, in favor of wildlife.
Murkowski's Hulk was unleashed. "Folks back home woke up Sunday morning to the news that this president effectively declared war on our economic future," she told the Senate floor that week. "When our economic opportunities as a state, which lie in our natural resources, are denied us … there is no other way to describe it (than) as a war."
"We are left with no choice," she added in a later statement, "but to hit back as hard as we can."
Since then, Murkowski has introduced legislation, separate from her energy package (see sidebar at right), to facilitate offshore drilling in the Arctic, end the ban on crude oil exports and make it easier to transfer federal public lands to state control. She's convinced the Environmental Protection Agency to exempt Alaska from the 2015 Clean Power Plan and is helping other senators fight for the same in their states. And according to the Center for Responsive Politics, three of the five biggest contributors to her 2016 campaign are oil and gas-related groups.
"I think 'worried' would be a more-than-fair classification of how we look at Sen. Murkowski," says Dan Ritzman, the Sierra Club's Arctic program director. "She's always been a loud advocate for drilling and development, and this year she's found a way to turn up the volume."
Most significantly, Murkowski has made it clear that if Obama continues to restrict development in the Arctic, she won't hesitate to use her new power to squeeze the Interior Department's budget, affecting land management across the West. Already, she's dismissed the department's 2016 budget request — which includes extra funds for fighting catastrophic wildfires — as "wishful thinking."
"I'm seeking to defund the administration's wilderness grab through the appropriations process," she explained to HCN in an email.
With an upcoming election in Alaska — her first since nearly losing in 2010 — we may be seeing more of the same as Murkowski fights to preserve her state's economy and satisfy its conservative voters. When asked about how else she plans to "hit back," Murkwoski replied: "I have a lot planned on this, but am not ready to share all of it publicly."
HCN correspondent Krista Langlois lives in Durango, Colorado, and frequently covers Alaska.
This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.]]>
The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation
Fred Pearce
272 pages, hardcover: $32.
Beacon Press, 2015.
You're hiking alone along a steep switchback trail in Washington's Olympic Mountains, when suddenly you turn a corner and see a massive mountain goat, its black eyes trained upon you. A few years ago, a goat attacked and killed a man in this very park, and, at the thought, a trickle of sweat wends its way from your hairline to your collar. The goat is still looking at you. Then you remember that mountain goats aren't native to these mountains, meaning that both it and you are relative newcomers here. But does that — should that — knowledge do anything to diminish the wildness of this encounter?
Congress has the power to designate wilderness areas, but every wilderness lover has his or her own definition of "wild." A few purists would see the non-native goat as a deal-breaker, but increasingly, many people define wilderness regardless of whether a particular landscape is "pristine," or occupied by native or non-native species. Instead, they see wilderness simply as places that humans aren't currently managing, whether it's a remote mountain range or just an overlooked patch of pine trees by the railroad tracks. And this is true both of passionate, old-style wilderness lovers and of pragmatic, technophile greenies, as clearly evidenced by two new books.
Ecologists have known for generations that no place, no matter how remote, is absolutely free of human fingerprints. We tend to notice the obvious signs: the traces of an old road, or perhaps — as Earth Island Journal editor Jason Mark describes in his new book, Satellites in the High Country — a bright blue cooler washed up on a beach in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But increasingly, our warming climate is changing ecosystems that humans have never visited. Either we accept a certain amount of human influence, or we'll run out of wilderness altogether. "Forget untouched," Mark writes. "What matters now is whether a place is uncontrolled."
Mark carves out a fine distinction between inadvertent influence caused by factors like climate change and intentional control. He offers a heartfelt ode to the continued importance of nonintervention in wilderness areas, even if doing so leads to unrecognizably changed landscapes. We should resist the temptation to help, he says, no matter the consequences. "The pika may perish," he writes. "The Arctic fox might slip into the great void of extinction. Places we've known and loved … may become unrecognizable to us."
British journalist Fred Pearce takes a surprisingly similar stance in The New Wild, although rather than despairing at the resulting changes, he sees them as exciting. We live, he believes, during a dynamic time in our planet's history. He delights in tweaking the noses of those who despise so-called "invasive species." For him, that doesn't restore wildness but rather reduces it in a futile attempt to freeze nature in time. His "new wild" is a mash-up of natives and exotics that vigorously adapt to climate change, pollution and incoming species without our assistance. Conservationists should embrace such landscapes, from abandoned industrial sites covered in plants that thrive on metallic soils to second-growth tropical rainforest. We should be, he argues, "supporting the new, rather than always spending time and money in a doomed attempt to preserve the old."
Both Pearce, the technology-loving pragmatic environmentalist, and Mark, the traditional wilderness lover, agree: Even in a world of overwhelming human influence, we shouldn't intrude on every landscape with our well-intentioned sprays and shovels, poisoning weeds and relocating species. Both writers argue for keeping some places uncontrolled, unmanaged — wild, in perhaps the simplest sense of the word — as an arena for undirected evolution, as a traditional conservation practice, and as a good way to practice humility and retain essential mystery in the world.
Both base their arguments for nonintervention in part on the notion that as the world changes, it is nature — not human beings — that will figure out how to adapt. By killing non-natives, planting disease-resistant trees or shooting invasive barred owls to save spotted ones, they say, we may inadvertently prevent the species-level evolution and ecosystem-level re-sorting that help create more resilient natural landscapes.
Pearce uses science to bolster his case, picking apart the surprisingly thin evidence that non-natives cause lasting harm, except in a few cases (like the brown tree snake, which has destroyed most of Guam's native birds). Mark's arguments have a more ethical, spiritual and emotional flavor. Wilderness and wildness, he declares, are very good for the human soul. He says little about non-natives, but notes that he considers those introduced Olympic mountain goats to be indisputably wild, in part because as fierce, "feral" beasts, they are capable of killing us.
The two writers' arguments for letting nature take care of itself are compelling and make interesting back-to-back reading. But there's one aspect of both books that will alienate many readers: Both authors accept extinction as inevitable, to a certain extent. And many environmentalists will find it hard to accept that an abstract notion of resilient wildness is more important than, say, the survival of the Arctic fox. As Mark says, hewing to a policy of nonintervention as ecosystems change and species wink out "will require an emotional fortitude to which we are unaccustomed, an almost Buddhist sort of nonattachment." We should rather restrict our emotional engagement to immediate and instinctive experiences in the wilderness itself, whether that be awe, reverence, or — in the case of coming face-to-face a mountain goat — naked fear.
Emma Marris is an environmental writer. She lives in Klamath Falls, Oregon.]]>


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Interior Design Materials Resource Librarian
This position is currently filled.
EmployerInterior Design
AddressAnnex South
Room 101
Purpose of Jobs, Duties, and Responsibilities
The Interior Design Materials Resource Librarian is responsible for organizing, cataloging and maintaining the Materials Resource Library in the Interior Design studio.
Duties / Responsibilities:
- Organization of the Materials Resource Room into material types (textiles, wood, glass, etc.)
- Create / maintain a generic inventory of materials on hand
- Contact and meet with materials representatives to restock the library
This position is a great opportunity for freshmen and sophomore Interior Design students to familiarize themselves with the various materials, construction and decorative, that are used by designers as well as network with professionals in the industry.
Job open to Interior Design (BINT) students. Multiple positions available.
Interested applicants should apply in person.
Supervisor and Contact Information
Traci-Ann DiSalvatore, Academic Coordinator, Interior Design
Federal Work-Study, Leopard Work Program, or both
Federal Work-Study/WIT Work

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November Dinner at Liberty Elks
Wednesday, from 5-7pm (or until gone) Turkey Dinner with all the fixings, dessert & beverage. $10 adults or take-outs, $5 children ages 5-11, under 5 free. Liberty Elks Lodge #1545, 30 Oberfest Street Liberty. Public invited. Call 845/292-3434.
Sullivan County Historical Society
Please join the Sullivan County Historical Society in honoring the 143rd New York Volunteer Infantry at The Elks Club, Liberty, NY, dinner reservations $30/person, social hour 4 PM, Dinner 5 PM. Call 845/434-8044 for reservations or info.
American Red Cross Blood Drive
Sponsored by the Liberty Masonic Lodge #521, Free and Accepted Masons. Friday, from 12:45 PM to 6:30 PM at the Lodge Meeting Room, 20 Eagle Drive. All donors will receive a hot meal courtesy of Liberty Lodge. To schedule an appointment to donate, call 1-800/RED-CROSS (1-800/733-2767)
Aglow International Liberty Lighthouse invites you to their breakfast meeting on Saturday, at 9:00 a.m. at Lighthouse Ministries, 5 Triangle Road. Breakfast cost $4.00. For more information contact Barbara at 845/439-3794
Geocaching/GPS walk with Outdoor Club
On Friday, 5:30pm to be hosted by Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) and Sullivan County's new Outdoor Club at the CCE Turtle Spring Nature Trail, 64 Ferndale-Loomis Rd. Attendees must register ahead of time at the CCE office. Contact: Nicole Slevin at email@example.com or call 845/292-6180 www.sullivancce.org.
"Getting to Know the ABC's and D's of Medicare And How the New Health Care Reform Affects Your Benefits
Medicare workshop to be presented by James Farnham, MBA, MS, Senior Health Insurance Representative, at the Liberty Public Library on Thursday, 6:30pm. Free and open to the public. For info, please call 845/292-6070. 189 North Main Street, directly in front of the elementary school.
Liberty Public Library Exhibits Science Fiction Art
Exhibit of art by Ethan Fox. Mr. Fox and will display during the library's regular hours from October 10th through the end of November. For more information, please contact the library at (845)292-6070 or visit us online at www.libertypubliclibrary.org.
SC Hist Society ANNUAL DINNER
Please join the Sullivan County Historical Society in honoring the 143rd New York Volunteer Infantry, and the re-enactors from the 143rd New York Volunteers Infantry at The Liberty Elks Club, dinner reservations $30.00 per person, social hour 4:00 PM, Dinner 5:00 PM..
Please call 845/434-8044 for information or reservations (by October 15th).
Tea Party Patriots Monthly Meeting
Guest speakers Ann Prusinski and Rodney Gaebel, Commissioners of the Sullivan County Board of Elections, will address the process of registering to vote, filing absentee ballots and more. 7pm. Contact Marta, (845) 439-5401 or email@example.com.
Concert celebrating the harvest season
Music, drama & dance at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, 3pm, free (donations welcome). Refreshments. 845/292-4626.


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BUSINESS BRIEF — Port Angeles computer shop plans to close on May 31
Peninsula Daily News
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The closure is due to economic hardships, the owners said.
Even so, after nearly six years in business, the owners will continue to provide services to the public on an appointment basis working out of the company van.
For the remainder of this month, all inventory, including counters and furniture, must be sold.
For more information, phone owner Wayne Weiderman at 360-809-3207.
Last modified: May 07. 2014 7:02PM