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Call it a bust. A correction. A slowdown. A time to catch our breath. Whatever your euphemism, the numbers don't lie: the price of oil is down, way down, and that's had a huge impact on North Dakota, the country's number two oil-producing state.
Almost immediately after I arrived, things started to change. There were signs that summer that American oil companies had gotten too good at producing oil from places like the Bakken, creating a glut. Prices started sliding on their own, but then in November, OPEC decided not to cut back on production, meaning the world market would continue to be saturated with oil. Prices fell faster after that. As one oilman told me right around the OPEC decision, "we're not slitting our wrists, but it's terrible."
Over the past year, I've been asking everyone from truck drivers to RV park owners to school superintendents about how the falling price of oil has affected them. And along the way, I've gotten a lot of unexpected financial advice. So I'm passing those tips along to you, dear readers. Here are five things I've learned about managing my money from reporting on the oil bust.
1. Don't adopt an expensive lifestyle that traps you in a job you hate.
Last week I met a truck driver who had been hauling crude oil for four years. That's three years longer than he intended. Why did he stick around? Because he and his wife got giddy with his six-figure salary and bought a new truck, a boat and other shiny things. Suddenly, he needed that income to make the payments on all those new toys. It's called "the golden handcuffs," and it happens to a lot of oilfield workers, as my colleague Leigh Paterson has reported. If you don't like your job all that much but it pays you well, don't get accustomed to an expensive lifestyle. It will make it harder to quit.
2. Don't go into debt if your income varies wildly or your industry is unstable.
Let's stick with our trucker for a minute. When oil prices started falling, the first thing this guy's company did was cut everyone's hours. That meant no one was getting overtime anymore, which is how most oil workers make most of their money. Suddenly his income was cut nearly in half. Making those truck payments seems extra unlikely now.
So many people here have told me to avoid large debt loads, from real estate developers to people working for oil companies to small town mayors. It's practically a refrain in the oilfield, "Want to know who's screwed right now? Just look at who is in debt." So if you are working in an industry whose employment needs and overall health fluctuate wildly, whether it's based on a commodity price or because you're a freelancer or whatever, don't go into a lot of debt.
3. If you are in a job that's not ideal, don't lose track of why you are doing it. Know when it is time to leave.
I hear things like this from oilfield workers all the time. "I'm only staying here for 2 years ... I'm working this job until I pay off my medical debt ... I've re-done three rooms of the house and I have one more. When that's done, I'm going back home."
I think this is super smart, especially when you're doing a difficult job you may not like that much but that pays really well. If you're in it for the money alone, know exactly how much you need to hit your goal and then get out of there. Don't just work for the sake of working, be deliberate and know why you are sacrificing your quality of life and how much longer you intend to do that.
4. Diversify.
Last March, I interviewed the owner of a small oilfield services company. With oil prices down, his core business area — hauling things around the oilfield on demand, a subspecialty called "hot shot driving" — had started to slow, too. So he diversified. He got a bunch of power washers and put his drivers to work washing drilling rigs, which needed to be cleaned and stored since so many of them weren't being used to drill for oil anymore with the slowdown. Many of his drivers were also trained as welders, so when hot shot driving was slow he'd shift them to doing repair work. Smart.
5. If everything is collapsing around you, don't be afraid to completely change what you are doing.
A lot of people in the Bakken did not start out as oilfield workers. I've met a Hewlett-Packard employee who lost his retirement savings in the recession and wound up hauling wastewater as a truck driver. I've met a logger from Oregon who fled the state after saw mills closed and ended up owning an RV park here. I've met a journalist who now works on a drilling rig. These people have taught me not to completely derive my identity and self-worth from my profession, and not to be afraid to reinvent myself if the situation calls for it. Which given the uncertain state of journalism in the 21st century, is probably a good lesson.
Emily Guerin is the North Dakota-based reporter for Inside Energy, a public media collaboration covering energy issues in Wyoming, Colorado and North Dakota. She's also a former High Country News correspondent.]]>
Njos and her husband, Larry, live on a farm encircled by pumpjacks about 20 miles north of Williston, North Dakota, the heart of the Bakken oil boom. Initially they suspected that the Army Corps of Engineers, which they'd heard was fiddling with an upstream dam, was responsible for the changes in the creek rather than the oilfield. Then, on Jan. 7, a man from Summit Midstream, a pipeline company, knocked on their door. He said workers had detected a major break in a gathering line, which carries wastewater away from oil wells. Nearly 3 million gallons of salty, oily wastewater had spilled into Blacktail Creek — as much as spilled in North Dakota throughout the previous year. The incident was eclipsed in the news by the pipeline that leaked oil into Montana's iconic Yellowstone River the same month, although this spill was as much as 100 times bigger.
Three weeks after the spill was detected, Njos walked Blacktail Creek, the sun glaring off melting snow. She pointed out a telephone pole, gnawed by beavers, and said that she and Larry used to bring logs to the creek, because they felt bad for beavers living on the treeless prairie. "I never even thought about the spills before," she said. "It never affected us."
Large pipeline spills are not uncommon in North Dakota. But watchdogs say it doesn't have to be that way. "I think everyone in the industry agrees the ultimate goal is zero incidents," said Carl Weimer, executive director of the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust. "But they're not doing everything they could to (get) to zero."
"Produced water" or "saltwater" is a waste product of oil production. In 2013, North Dakota's 10,000 or so oil wells produced more than 15 billion gallons of it. Some comes from the fracking process, but some is sucked up from briny aquifers with the oil.
What's in wastewater can vary with local geology. In North Dakota, the water is over 13 times saltier than ocean water and laced with fracking chemicals, oil and radioactive material. It gets separated from the oil and is either trucked or moved by pipeline to an injection well, where it's pumped back underground.
Most of the time, the process works like it's supposed to. But spills are becoming increasingly common. According to an analysis by the public media team Inside Energy, the spill rate per well was nearly twice as high in 2013 as it was in 2006, at the start of the boom. The rise seems to be a function of increased drilling and the ongoing rush to lay thousands of miles of new pipelines in a short construction season, which can result in sloppy installation practices.
The spills are also getting larger, which worries Derrick Braaten, a Bismarck-based lawyer who represented ranchers affected by the state's first million-gallon-plus wastewater spill, in 2006 in Charbonneau Creek, just east of the Montana border. That spill, like the recent one, was from a brand-new plastic pipeline that leaked for at least two weeks before being detected. It was caused by a failed welding job.
Afterward, it looked like someone had sprayed herbicide for miles along Charbonneau Creek, a tributary, as it happens, of the Yellowstone River. Bleached plants wilted on the bare ground. Fish died. "It was years before the cattle went back and started drinking from the creek," Braaten said. When salty wastewater leaks directly into the soil on agricultural land, another type of common spill in North Dakota, the results can be even more devastating, sterilizing the ground for decades.
Because federal regulators have no authority over rural wastewater gathering lines, it's up to states to require inspections or monitoring. North Dakota lawmakers declined to do so in 2013, when they overwhelmingly voted down a bill that would've mandated flow meters and switches to isolate leaking parts of gathering lines.
Such devices wouldn't detect the smallest leaks, they said. And while that's true, they could at least be installed on the highest-risk pipelines, said Richard Kuprewicz of Accufacts Inc, a consulting firm that investigates pipeline breaks. "The quandary here is everyone wants a sound bite answer to a complex problem," Kuprewicz said. "(And) some people will take advantage of that complexity to not do anything."
State regulators did enact new construction standards for gathering lines. Companies now must document where they are, what they carry, and certify that they were built correctly. But the state doesn't employ any pipeline inspectors. It's tried to hire some, for $43,000 a year, but anyone with the requisite skills can double their money in the industry. So the checklists are a new form of self-policing: pieces of paper a pipeline company fills out and the state signs off on without ground-truthing.
The latest spill, combined with the recent Yellowstone River incident — the second in less than four years — might represent a tipping point. "There's a lot of dissatisfaction in our department about the current spill rates," said Lynn Helms, director of the state's Department of Mineral Resources. Gov. Jack Dalrymple echoed that sentiment, saying the recent spills "raised the question of whether there should be a higher (construction) standard when we know there is a pipeline going under a significant body of water."
Dave Glatt, the head of the North Dakota Department of Health's Environmental Health Division, was even more frank: "I can see where the public would say, 'How come our state government isn't protecting us?'"
This story was originally titled "Built to spill" in the print edition.]]>
Eventually, though, the climate caught up with Fasken – as it has with many other oil companies both in the Permian Basin and beyond. Now, faced with drought and increased competition, Fasken is trying to stop using fresh water for fracking, the injection of pressurized liquids to break underground formations, and for drilling. The company is both a model for other operations and an example of how hard it is to cut back.
According to Ceres, a nonprofit focused on sustainable business practices, Permian Basin oil companies use an average of 1.1 million gallons of water to frack each well – not bad when compared to the 4.4 million gallon average in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale. But nearly all Permian Basin wells are in water-stressed areas, and there's more being drilled daily. Ceres predicts water use for fracking here will double by 2020.
For most of the last century, Fasken got its water from the southern end of the Ogallala Aquifer, large areas of which are being drained by agriculture faster than they can be recharged. The ranch's wells were never prolific, says Jimmy Davis, the company's director of oil and gas operations, and drought has made them even worse.
Three years ago was especially bad – only three inches of rain fell near the ranch in 2011, compared to 15 on average. Meteorologists called it the worst one-year drought on record in Texas. Davis and others began to worry about how much of the Ogallala they were pumping from Fasken wells.
"We were just looking at the ranch and realizing we don't have much water, and we're concerned about the family and the future generations," he says. "It just made sense to try to do something different."
So Fasken drilled three new wells and converted five existing wells to reach the Santa Rosa Formation, a source of brackish water deep beneath the aquifer, water that couldn't be used for drinking or irrigation without being desalinated.
Fasken treats the sulfates out of the Santa Rosa water and uses it for fracking and drilling wells. It also recycles water produced during drilling and has pipelines to carry the water to a central recycling station, where it is treated and reused. Recycled water now satisfies 41 percent of Fasken's total needs. Santa Rosa water covers the remaining 59 percent.
The Santa Rosa water costs about 50 cents a barrel to treat. The recycled water costs about $1.50 per barrel. Fresh water from its own land would cost the company almost nothing, but Davis says the costs of conservation are worth it.
Now a growing number of oil companies around the Permian have followed suit. "We realized it was a bad idea, in a business sense, to need a scarce resource whose availability and price might become issues in the future," says Cal Cooper, director of special projects at Apache Corp., one of the largest operators in the basin.
If scarcity is one reason to move away from fresh water, public relations is another. The oil and gas industry uses just 2 percent of the state's water, compared to agriculture's 56 percent. Nevertheless, oil companies are seen as water hogs. "In this time of drought, what people see is trucks carrying (fresh) water to pump it down a hole," says Danny Reible, a professor of environmental engineering at Texas Tech University. "That's a pretty negative image."
Still, only 2 percent of the water used by the oil and gas industry here is recycled. The rest is pumped back into disposal wells. Fasken, a family-owned business drilling its own land, had it relatively easy. It's harder for most other companies, which need permits to build pipelines across private ranches, have wells that are far apart or are obligated to buy freshwater from landowners as part of their leases.
But water conservation is likely to become more popular, as farmers and city officials, spooked by drought, either jack up prices for water or stop leasing it entirely. Texas could double its population over the next 50 years, and that will take a lot of water, Reible says. "To make that happen it's going to require a lot of conservation," from oil companies, farmers and everyone else.]]>
Archaeologists, historians, residents of the Fort Berthold Reservation and land owners got up to protest a request to drill in the Killdeer Mountains, near a historic battlefield. Skokos, who has been following oil and gas issues in North Dakota since 2010, says it was the first time he witnessed significant public opposition to drilling. Before then, the attitude was, "if you're against oil, you're against North Dakota. Any dissent was marginalized."
As the commission mulled the request, one of the members, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, casually suggested it give greater scrutiny to oil and gas leases in certain areas. And though the commisison ultimately approved the Killdeer permit, Stenehjem's comment was the state's first official acknowledgement that oil and gas development could impact the character of some of North Dakota's most scenic, remote places.
Ten months later, Stenehjem would defy the Republican Party and the industry transforming his state by unveiling his list of 18 extraordinary places he thought deserved in-depth study before being developed.
In crafting the list, Stenehjem (who didn't return requests for an interview) consulted with oil and gas industry types, lawyers and conservationists about which places to include on the list. Some of the sites – the three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, for example – were obvious picks. Many of the others, Skokos says, were obscure but scenic buttes on private land that held special significance to Stenehjem, who grew up in western North Dakota. "The places he was saving are the places he liked to go when he was a kid," Skokos says. "In a lot of ways he made the list all by himself, with input from others."
Last December, Stenehjem revealed his list. He proposed creating a buffer zone around each site where drilling proposals would trigger additional review by the Industrial Commission, comments from various state agencies and the public, and possibly require companies to mitigate noise, traffic and visual impacts. "It's important that the public knows 'you're doing everything you can to mitigate the impacts,'" he told the crowd, according to The Bismarck Tribune.
Almost immediately, private property rights groups and the oil and gas industry opposed the plan. "Extraordinary Places Rule endangers North Dakotans' royalty checks!" reads an action alert distributed by the Royalty Owners & Producers Educational Coalition. "If you think your property and the decisions about how and when to use it belong to you, then you should think again."
Soon Stenehjem and the Industrial Commission would remove the extra protection for sites on private property, effectively nullifying many of the places on the list. "I believe the decision to take public comment on activity on private property is a very serious policy question, and our regulatory role may not include a policy decision that significant," Governor Jack Dalrymple, who also sits on the Industrial Commission, told The Tribune.
When the rule took effect earlier this month, all that remained was a suggestion that the Industrial Commission consider the comments of the public and other agencies for drilling near extraordinary places located on public lands.
Still, it's a big change from the way things were done before, when land management agencies and the public were not explicitly invited to comment on drilling applications, Lynn Helms, the director of the Department of Mineral Resources, told The Tribune. And it's a sign that the enthusiasm for unchecked oil and gas development in western North Dakota may be waning.
Clay Jenkinson, the director of the Dakota Institute and a respected oil and gas critic, is hopeful that the mere existence of a list of extraordinary places may discourage oil and gas companies from trying to develop there, for fear of provoking a public reaction. Indeed, there haven't been any drilling applications near any of the 18 places, public or private, since May 1.
But on the whole, Jenkinson was disappointed in the outcome. "This was a test of the soul of the people of North Dakota, and I'm afraid to say I believe we failed the test," he says. "We decided we will accept wholesale fracking because we're afraid to look cross-eyed at the industry. We're afraid to jinx this miracle that's occurring here."
Emily Guerin is a correspondent at High Country News. She tweets @guerinemily.]]>
The cash came from the U.S. Treasury and was part of a big settlement between the federal government and the two tribes that share the nearby Wind River Reservation: the Northern Arapaho and the Eastern Shoshone. In 1977, the two tribes sued the feds over mismanagement of their mineral rights. They argued the government didn't negotiate a fair price for oil and gas leases and didn't follow-up to make sure companies were actually paying the proper amount in royalties.
The feds paid out a series of smaller settlements to the tribes over the years, but decided to wrap up the rest of the money in a single $157 million payout. "This is the first time people have gotten a big chunk," said Harry Sachse, one of the lawyers who filed the case on behalf of the Eastern Shoshone.
When Sachse helped file the case 37 years ago, he was a young, civil-rights minded lawyer coming off a stint at the Solicitor General's office in which he'd tried, and won, a number of Indian rights cases at the Supreme Court. One of Sachse's co-workers was a lawyer named Marvin Sonosky, a man known for his epic legal fights on behalf of Indian tribes. Sonosky worked pro-bono for 24 years to get the United States to return the Black Hills in South Dakota to the Sioux, an effort that culminated in the 1980 Supreme Court decision to award the Sioux $106 million, "more than twice as large as any previous award on an Indian claim," according to The New York Times.
Sonosky was tipped off to the government's mismanagement of mineral rights on the Wind River Reservation when the Eastern Shoshone hired his firm to draft new leases with oil and gas companies in the 1970s. "The government was trusting the oil companies for everything," Sachse recalled, "and Marvin didn't trust them at all."
Sachse lost track of Shoshone and Arapaho vs. United States when, a few years later, the tribe didn't renew its contract with his firm, Sonosky, Chambers, Sachse, Endreson & Perry LLC. Twenty-two years later the Shoshone hired the firm again, and Sachse was shocked to find the case was still open. He dove back into it, and last year, got the federal government to settle the case. "They're pretty happy with the amount of money they won," he said of the Eastern Shoshone tribal members he dealt with.
Shoshone and Arapaho vs. United States isn't the first time Indians have gotten checks from the feds for mismanaging their resources. Earlier this winter, the second set of payments from the massive Cobell Settlement arrived on the Wind River Reservation. In that settlement, landowners in over 150 different tribes received money—between $1,000 and $2,000 each. And the majority of the settlement went toward buying back land fractionated among the original owners' heirs and returning it to the tribes.
Shoshone and Arapaho, however, splits 85 percent of the total settlement money up between just two tribes, and every enrolled member gets a cut. Arapahos get just over $6,000, while every Shoshone will see around $15,000 (there are more Arapaho than Shoshone, so each Arapaho gets less money). The remaining 15 percent goes into a $10 million fund for the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho to use to clean up pollution from oil and gas companies.
"You can't buy a used car in town," Jim Davis, the executive director of the Riverton Chamber of Commerce, told me when I asked about the economic impact of the settlement on surrounding towns. Some sellers were holding onto their vehicles, waiting for newly paid buyers from the reservation.
Casper Star-Tribune reporter Benjamin Storrow was in Riverton and Lander on April 23, as the Arapaho began receiving their checks. He reported that while many people welcomed the cash, others worried it could lead to an increase in crime as thieves targeted Native Americans walking around with large sums of cash in their pockets. Indeed, the Lander police department stepped up its presence in town that week to protect people cashing some or all of their checks.
Others worried that people would spend all of the cash at once. "People need to be smart and budget their money," Randee Iron Cloud told Storrow as she cashed her check at the Atlantic City Federal Credit Union in Lander. "They need to think about the needs of the kids above all else."
To that end, the Northern Arapaho Business Council is encouraging people who don't have bank accounts to set one up and avoid check-cashing fees. In towns like Lander and Riverton, those fees can be as much as three percent. And the Eastern Shoshone, whose checks have been delayed by problems within their business council, have been working with a capital management firm to encourage people to use the pay-out to set up an education trust funds for their kids. According to Wyoming Public Media, there's even a dedicated phone line for Eastern Shoshone tribal members at an investment firm in Kansas City where people can ask questions about setting up the funds.
It's hard to ensure that the recent settlement has a lasting economic impact on the Wind River Reservation because there are so few businesses on the reservation. While it was only tribal members who received cash, most of the places they spent it – used car dealerships, supermarkets – are off reservation and owned by non-natives (except, of course, the Wind River Hotel and Casino, owned by the Northern Arapahos).
"The biggest beneficiaries are Lander and Riverton," Darwin St. Clair Jr., chairman of the Eastern Shoshone Business Council, told The Casper Star-Tribune after the first round of Cobell settlement checks came out last year. "It's nice to have some extra cash. But this isn't a life-changer."
Emily Guerin is a correspondent for High Country News. She tweets @guerinemily.]]>
This is Quincy, a town of 1,700 located 150 miles northeast of Sacramento, in the heart of the Lost Sierra, a part of California made famous by the gold-seeking '49ers. The steep forested hillsides plunge into clear creeks that still sparkle with flecks of gold. Local geological consultants stake and sell placer claims, and shops carry sieves and pans for people working the streams. But the Gold Rush isn't the only part of the past that lingers here: Deep in the Lost Sierra, the frosty still thrives.
The word "frosty" has two connotations: either the swirl of vanilla or chocolate soft-serve on a cone, or – my main interest – the classic establishments that dish it out. Typically, the restaurants date back to the 1960s and sell made-to-order fast food – corndogs, burgers and a lot of finger foods – for prices that have changed little over time.
Elsewhere, they're known by different names – shake shacks, dairy freezes, drive-ins – but in the Lost Sierra they are almost always called frosties. Last August my friend, Katie, and I hit nine of them on a three-day road trip. Why? For the whole retro experience, the distinctive culture, and something we realized as we roamed: The uncanny way that frosties mirror their clientele and their towns.
The dessert originated in the 1930s, when either the founders of Dairy Queen or (there is some debate) Carvel Ice Cream, which billed itself as "the nation's first retail ice cream franchise," discovered that customers loved ice cream served at a slightly warmer temperature than normal, right out of the machine. But it was Dave Thomas, Wendy's founder, who capitalized on the name, putting the 35-cent category-bending treat (was it a beverage, or a dessert?) on the original 1969 Wendy's menu. Today, frosties remain one of the chain's most popular items.
Wendy's frosties are served in a cup with a spoon, but the frosties of the Lost Sierra proudly retain the original form, spiraling skyward from cones, either naked or dipped in liquid chocolate that forms a thin shell. They yield easily to the teeth and dissolve swiftly on the tongue. Frosties are low-fat and airy, with a variety of unpalatable-sounding additives that keep them from melting too fast, growing ice crystals or getting chunky.
Frosties are everywhere in the Lost Sierra. We began our tour at the Pine Shack Frosty in Chester, Calif., a town of barely 2,000 that's a gateway to Lassen Volcanic National Park. The restaurant's menu was hand-lettered by a one-legged old man named Bubba, who has also painted most of the signs in town, lending the entire place a pre-digital feel. Your meal is on the house if Mount Lassen erupts while you order.
In Chilcoot, a ranching town of 450 near the Nevada border, Tim Kanavel, who was born on a ranch, and his wife, Carolyn, have run the Chilcoot Frosty for 15 years. Their faded hand-painted sign features a smiling cowboy pointing at a carton of fries. We stopped by one hot and hazy morning, under drifting smoke from a Yosemite wildfire. I yearned for something cool and creamy, so we diverged from our policy of eschewing soft-serve before noon. We split a fresh blueberry shake – and it hit the spot.
Farther south, the sign at the Sno-Flake Drive-In in touristy South Lake Tahoe is a laser-printed replica of the original, and there are three kinds of "sortaburgers" – veggie, salmon and turkey – to cater to the non-beef eaters that tend to migrate to resort towns.
Nearly all of the frosties we visited have been around since the early 1960s, and black-and-white photos on their walls show clean-cut couples licking soft serve in classic cars, polished chrome and fins shining. But other than their vintage, what distinguishes frosties from regular ice cream shops? Like pornography, frosties are easier to recognize than to define. In a way, you can tell a frosty by what it's not. Thus, Katie and I concluded that Treats, a boutique ice cream shop in bourgie Nevada City, in the Lost Sierra foothills, does not qualify: A single scoop of Treat's hard, hand-scooped ice cream cost $3.25 (flavors included lemon custard, green tea and bittersweet chocolate), and shining glass domes covered plates of gluten-free brownies. I looked skeptically at Katie, who was licking a scoop of (admittedly) very delicious mint chip. "We gotta get out of here," she said. "We're out of the frosty belt."
Two and a half hours later, we were back in the mountains, in Portola, another small town, eating kraut dogs, onion rings and tater tots at a picnic table outside the Portola Frosty. Its giant, peeling wooden sign featured a 5-foot-tall cone, a burger that towered over my head and, in red letters, the word FROSTY. The portions were as large as the customers' waistlines, and the greasy food hit our stomachs hard. "Are we going to get fat?" I wondered as we drove off looking for a place to camp. "We might need to eat salads for a week and a half after this," Katie said.
It was the experience of eating, rather than the food, that inspired us to become frosties tourists. There's something about entering a world where generations of people have sat outside underneath the same pine trees for at least 50 years, eating the same kind of burgers and shakes. The ambiance is what matters– the hand-lettered signs, warped wooden picnic tables and rotating cast of teenage girls behind the window. Even if the menu evolves to attract new customers – many frosties now serve dairy-and-gluten-free soft-serve, brown rice and vegetable stir-fry or veggie burgers – the emotional experience of eating remains the same.
I marveled how nearly every small town we visited could support a frosty. In the Sierra Valley, we hit four of them in 40 miles. Two were for sale, though, and only one, Rhonda's Lil' Frosty in Loyalton, appeared very busy. But regardless of how dietary trends and fears of obesity affect the business, I suspect nostalgia will keep customers coming back. It's hard to resist the menu at Bud's Jolly Kone in Red Bluff: a 50-cent hamburger with any purchase, plus a receipt printed with the words "All Good Things Come From The Father Above." Naturally, that includes frosties.
This story is part of an April 2014 special issue of the HCN magazine devoted to travel in the West. Emily Guerin is an HCN correspondent and radio producer based in Paonia, Colo.]]>
The 61-year old was found dead in a friend's mobile home, an empty propane tank outside. Trailers in this frigid corner of the northern prairie are often patched together with ill-fitting doors and drafty windows. Inside some homes, "you can find frost in the corners of rooms up on the ceiling," Rev. John Floberg of the Standing Rock's Episcopal Church told the Episcopal News Service.
Like many parts of the country, the Standing Rock Reservation experienced a severe propane shortage this winter. Unusually cold temperatures in the Midwest combined with the fact that farmers used more propane than they normally do to dry out a huge harvest of wet grain at the end of the season sent fuel prices through the roof. The week before Dogskin died, propane was selling for $4.57 a gallon in North Dakota. That's almost three times higher than in winter 2013.
Yet some 250 miles away, oil rigs tapping Bakken shale were burning off millions of cubic feet of propane-rich natural gas a day – the same gas that, if captured, refined and sold, could have kept Dogskin's trailer warm.
The waste is largely an infrastructure problem, says Ryan Salmon, the senior manager for the oil and gas program at Ceres, a national non-profit focused on sustainable investing. Unlike oil, which can be easily stored on site in a tank, natural gas is hard to compress and store. It must first be captured at the wellhead and transported via pipeline to a processing facility. The pace of new drilling has been so fast, Salmon says, that the pipeline infrastructure hasn't caught up. Plus, comparatively low natural gas prices mean pipelines would take a long time to pay for themselves. In December 2013, flaring in North Dakota hit a new record: 36 percent of all natural gas produced as a byproduct of drilling for oil went up in smoke. The amount of flaring is even higher on the Fort Berthold reservation, the swath of tribal land at the center of the Bakken oil boom, where infrastructure is even more lacking than elsewhere in the state.
It doesn't help that North Dakota makes it easy for oil companies to flare. Under existing rules, oil companies can flare unrestricted – without paying taxes or royalties on that gas – for one year before they need to hook up to a pipeline. But they can continue flaring indefinitely if they demonstrate that capturing the gas is not economically feasible. (In comparison, Texas only allows flaring for 6 months, and in Alaska, producers must re-inject the gas into ground if they aren't going to capture and sell it.)
Now, people are starting to push back against the practice. Last October, mineral rights owners in North Dakota sued 14 oil companies for millions in unpaid royalties on wasted natural gas. Industry groups, recognizing how bad flaring makes them look, are offering to self-regulate. In January, the North Dakota Petroleum Council's proposed new rules to help reduce the amount of gas flared to 10 percent by 2020. State regulators will hold a hearing to take public comment on that proposal on April 22.
The Department of the Interior is also looking to crack down on flaring and venting (releasing pure methane into the air instead of burning it to convert it to CO2) of natural gas on Bureau of Land Management and Indian lands like Fort Berthold, and is holding hearings around the country this spring to get input on how best to do so. President Obama's Climate Action Plan targets methane leaks because of concerns that the emissions could give natural gas a larger carbon footprint than coal. There are also growing concerns over lost revenue: In 2010 the Government Accountability Office found that the public loses up to $23 million annually in royalties from venting and flaring of natural gas.
In order to speed up pipeline construction to transport natural gas, three U.S. senators from Wyoming and North Dakota recently introduced a bill that would exempt the pipelines on federal and Indian lands from environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. The exemptions wouldn't apply in protected areas like national parks or wilderness, and tribes and individual Indian land-owners would still have to give consent.
With their long, cold winters and twice the national average propane consumption, North Dakota residents could benefit a lot from regulations that help increase natural gas and propane production in their state. In addition to increased royalties and taxes, air quality should improve with less flaring, since fewer VOCs will be belched into the atmosphere. And the light from hundreds of dancing flames will no longer spoil the dark prairie nights.
So it's ironic that the biggest barrier to building gas pipelines is securing landowner permission, according to the North Dakota Petroleum Council. "On the one hand the flaring is an impact to communities in terms of light pollution and air quality," says Salmon, of Ceres, "but to tackle the problem (companies) have to install a pipeline where landowners might not want them to."
For landowners sick of the growing footprint of the oil industry – many of whom do not own their mineral rates and therefore don't benefit from the drilling – making the decision to allow yet another piece of oil infrastructure onto their land won't be easy.
Emily Guerin is a correspondent for High Country News. She tweets @guerinemily.]]>
The town's isolation conveys a sense of immunity to the problems facing much of the urbanized West. Downstream from the second largest natural lake in Colorado, there's definitely enough water for the town's 400 residents. And there are hardly any immigration issues, unless you count the Texans who flock here in the summers.
So it's not surprising that some Lake City residents assume their isolation protects them from diseases like measles, mumps and whooping cough. Nearly 30 percent of the children in the town's single pre K-12 school aren't fully vaccinated – almost seven times higher than the statewide rate of 4.3 percent.
Parents are required to vaccinate their kids in order to enroll them in public school or a licensed daycare. But Colorado allows three types of exemptions: medical, religious and personal belief. In Lake City, as elsewhere in the state, the vast majority of non-vaccinated children have personal belief exemptions. A bill in the statehouse in Denver is trying to bring that number down by making it harder to fill out a personal belief exemption form – which currently only requires parents to check a box.
The growing popularity of the personal belief exemption, and the rising rates of un- or undervaccinated kids, is a concern to public health officials. Children who don't get all of their shots, or don't get them on the schedule recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), are more likely to come down with vaccine preventable diseases like whooping cough than kids who are fully vaccinated on time. And to make matters worse, a 2008 study by Dr. Saad Omer, a professor of global health at Emory University who has studied vaccine exemptions extensively, found that clusters of vaccine refusal are associated with risk of whooping cough outbreaks in entire communities, not just among the unvaccinated.
Many of the most well-known clusters of vaccine exemptions are in the West. Ashland, Ore., was dubbed one of the least-vaccinated cities in the U.S. by Frontline, which filmed part of its 2010 documentary "The Vaccine War" there, after the CDC held public meetings in town to figure out why the opt-out rate was so high.
On Vashon Island in Washington state, nearly 25 percent of kindergartners have skipped at least one vaccine, similar to Ashland's rate. In individual schools, the rate can be even higher: at the Yuba River Charter School in Nevada City, Calif., for example, 81 percent of students have personal belief exemptions.
Although these communities seem to have a lot of traits in common – progressive politics, strong environmental ethic and a back-to-the-land or homesteading lifestyle – there's not a lot of good data on what kinds of people tend to forgo vaccination. A 2009 study showed that parents who opt out were more likely to live in well-educated, higher-income areas than non-refusers. Omer's 2008 study of vaccine exemption clusters in Michigan found they were associated with high population density, more racial and ethnic minorities, larger families and more kids under 5 (although he says all associations except family size were "of low magnitude").
Parents give a number of reasons for opting out of vaccination: the long-discredited theory that vaccines cause autism, concerns about unnecessary toxins in the vaccine formulas, a belief that natural, acquired immunity is superior to immunity from a vaccine, or the assumption that they are unlikely to get any vaccine-preventable diseases anyway.
It's important to note that there is absolutely no debate in the medical, scientific community about the efficacy of vaccines. There are instances of people being injured by vaccines, but the harm they cause is far outweighed by the good they do for public health worldwide.
Now, four of the Western states with some of the highest rates of personal belief exemptions are trying to make it harder to opt out. In 2011, Washington state was the first to pass a law requiring parents to get a doctor's signature before opting out for personal belief reasons. Since then, the state has seen its exemption rate among kindergartners drop from a high of 7.6 percent in the 2008-2009 school year to 4.6 percent in 2012-2013.
Similar laws in Oregon and California went into effect this year. Now, Colorado's legislature is trying to pass its own law requiring parents to either see a doctor or watch an online class on the benefits and risks of vaccines before opting out.
The bill's sponsors say the idea is that by making it harder to opt out, it will eliminate the group of parents who think it's more convenient to sign a personal belief than take their kid to the doctor. Dr. Irene Aguilar, a state senator from Denver who is co-sponsoring Colorado's bill, says another goal is to make sure that people who choose not to vaccinate are making that decision based on scientific, evidence-based information.
"We like to make sure people have gotten a balanced report of what the risks and benefits are," she says. "I think the people who strongly oppose vaccination are perhaps more swayed by some stories than what the research shows, what the data is."
Opponents say the laws assume parents seeking a vaccine exemption are uneducated, and requiring them to see a doctor or take an online class not only undermines parental rights, but is coercive.
"When you go in for a pap smear or strep throat, does your doctor sign off on any piece of paper saying they've informed you of the risks and benefits and you've decided to say no? It's no different. Vaccination is a medical procedure. We're giving away our right to control what type of medical risk taking we're deciding to take," says Theresa Wrangham, the executive director of the National Vaccine Information Center, which describes itself as a non-profit organization that advocates for vaccine safety and does not promote or advise against vaccines. (A peek at the NVIC's Facebook page suggests otherwise, with posts like "50 Reasons Not to Vaccinate Your Children.")
But there is a difference between a pap smear and a vaccine – cervical cancer isn't contagious. Diseases like whooping cough are. When we talk about vaccines, we're not just talking about personal choice, says Dr. Aguilar, we're talking about the ability of other parents to keep their children, and themselves, safe, too.
No one is completely immune from diseases, and vaccines can and do fail. But if enough people get them, the likelihood that a disease like measles will make a comeback is pretty low. Yet as the vaccination rate drops, everyone is at a higher risk of getting sick – even people who feel protected by living a remote valley at the edge of the San Juan Mountains.
Emily Guerin is a correspondent for High Country News. She tweets @guerinemily.]]>
On Dec. 23, as the tribal council speaker called for a vote on legislation related to the purchase, Yazzie broke in, speaking loudly in Navajo, his long, silvery black hair hanging in tight braids that slapped against his black leather jacket. The speaker demanded order, and Yazzie switched to English: "Mr. Chairman, you are out of order. Your council is out of order. I stand in opposition to this … circus," he said, smiling and ignoring the police officer pulling on his arm. "I call the score five to zero. The company (BHP Billiton) is five. The Navajo Nation is zero."
The mine in question, the Navajo Mine, sits on the northern edge of the reservation between Shiprock and Farmington, N.M. It supplies the Four Corners Power Plant, which has generated electricity for some 1.7 million homes across the Southwest since 1963. The plant was about to cut the amount of coal it bought from the mine by 30 percent, thanks in part to the impending closure of three of its units, and the departure of one of the plant's partial owners, a California utility being forced to ditch coal by the state's strict environmental laws. As a result, BHP Billiton wanted out of the mine.
That opened the door for the Navajo Nation to buy in, and a week after Yazzie's protest, it did. A tribally owned corporation became the new owner – the first time the Navajos have ever owned a significant piece of the energy infrastructure on their reservation. Some say it's a great deal for the tribe, one that will make money, preserve jobs and give the Navajos greater control over their natural resources. Others call it a huge mistake, especially given the coal industry's uncertain future.
The debate over the purchase reflects a larger rift in the tribe between "traditionalists," who say the coal industry is doing irreparable physical and spiritual damage to the environment, and "progressives," who want to buy into the industry and reap more of the profits. "I think for too long we tried to imitate the modern, Western society," says Yazzie, who has become the traditionalists' de facto voice. "But is that who we want to be?"
On clear dark nights, a cluster of lights glows in the desert near the confluence of the San Juan and Chaco Rivers. Great clouds of steam billow from the smokestacks of the Four Corners Power Plant, obscuring the stars that northwestern New Mexico is famous for. The plant is perhaps the starkest symbol of the shift from a traditional to a capitalist economy on the Navajo Nation. For decades, the land was home to several families who grazed sheep. But that changed in the early 1960s, when utilities and mining companies forced the families out, and opened the plant and nearby Navajo Mine, the first of several built on or near the reservation between 1963 and 1974. It was part of a development frenzy on the Colorado Plateau that "eclipsed virtually every other industrial effort on earth," says Charles Wilkinson, a professor and tribal law expert at the University of Colorado Law School.
The beneficiaries of the "Big Buildup," as Wilkinson calls it, were the urban consumers who got cheap power. After all, as the darkness that envelops the reservation at night attests, virtually all of the electricity generated at the plants goes somewhere else – to far-off cities like L.A., Las Vegas, Phoenix and Albuquerque. It was much more convenient for the utilities to build out here, near the coal, where there were few people to complain about pollution and no need to worry about California's emerging anti-smog regulations.
The losers were the Hopi and Navajo people. Beginning in the 1920s, the U.S. government cut deals with coal, oil and gas companies on behalf of the tribal councils, which had initially been created to facilitate the extraction of natural resources from Indian land. But the feds failed in their duty to negotiate aggressively on the tribes' behalf; as a result, they lost out on hundreds of millions in royalties and lease payments.
While the tribes saw only meager profits, they shouldered most of the burden of the industry's pollution. Many people had to move when mining companies took their land, and those who didn't complained that coal dust poisoned their sheep and burned their lungs. The smokestacks spewed sulfur dioxide, particulates, mercury and arsenic. Meanwhile, hundreds of tribal members remained without electricity and running water.
Still, the mines and power plants were one of the tribes' few economic lifelines. Coal revenue accounted for a third or more of tribal budgets and employed hundreds of tribal members, especially Navajos, who lived nearby and also heated their homes with free or cheap coal from the mines.
By the 1970s, the Navajos and other resource-rich tribes had become increasingly frustrated with watching corporations like Peabody and BHP Billiton profit from tribal coal, gas and oil while leaving them to clean up the mess. So, in 1975, Navajo Nation President Peter MacDonald created the Council of Energy Resource Tribes to provide Native Americans with the expertise and power to take control of energy development on their land. He described the group of 25 tribes as a domestic OPEC. A Washington, D.C., bureaucrat told People Magazine in 1979, "I'd rather be a Navajo than the president of Exxon. They're going to get even for the last 200 years."
CERT, however, lost a lot of its heft in the early 1980s, when coal and oil prices dropped suddenly and the uranium industry imploded. And even though the newly empowered Navajo government was able to renegotiate more favorable leases for the mines and power plants, the corporate owners retained control, leaving the tribe in the role of underpaid landlord.
Increasingly fed up, in 1985 the Navajo Nation created the Diné Power Authority to develop its own energy projects. It proposed a high-voltage transmission line from northern New Mexico to Nevada and, in partnership with a German company, the Desert Rock power plant, which would have burned coal from the Navajo Mine. Both projects have since been shelved, unable to secure funding and key environmental permits, in part thanks to legal opposition from Navajo activists. An attempt to build a utility-scale wind farm also foundered.
Outside forces continued to affect the tribe in other ways. The Black Mesa coal mine, on the Arizona portion of the Navajo Reservation, closed in 2006 after the power plant it supplied, the Mohave Generating Station, shut down due to lawsuits and a requirement that it install expensive pollution controls. As a result, the Navajo Nation lost some $15 million annually in royalties and lease payments, or about 15 percent of its budget; 230 employees – most of them Navajo – lost their jobs. The tribe was powerless to stem the economic fallout.
It was no surprise, then, that when tribal officials saw an opportunity to buy into the industry – to evict a corporate giant and take the decision-making, and profits, into their own hands – they jumped on it. "If you are an equity holder, you have input directly into the operation, maintenance and future planning," says Chris Deschene, a Navajo tribal member, former Arizona state representative and attorney who worked on the Desert Rock project. "And for me, being independent that way gives you more autonomy, more options, more strength, and the ability to provide more for your people."
That opportunity, at least in part, arose in 2006, when California passed a law that essentially forbade the state's utilities from investing in coal plants, even in other states. Two years later, the state also required that they get 33 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020. California utilities have since begun a slow exodus from the Interior West's coal plants. Southern California Edison, one of the state's biggest utilities, owned half of two of Four Corners' five units, and announced in 2010 that it wanted out. Around the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency forced Four Corners – the nation's largest emitter of nitrous oxide – to clean up its act.
To comply, Arizona Public Service, the plant's operator, would buy out Edison's share of its two units, and shut down the remaining three. The resulting cut in coal consumption hit BHP's bottom line, and it wrangled with APS over the price of coal. If the two couldn't agree, both the mine and plant would close in 2016, wiping out some $47 million in annual royalty and lease revenue to the tribe, along with about 900 well-paid jobs, mostly held by Navajos.
But then the third option emerged: The Navajo Nation could buy the mine. And on Dec. 30, the Navajo Transitional Energy Corporation signed a deal for approximately $85 million. In theory, at least, the tribal corporation will make decisions that benefit tribal members rather than distant shareholders or CEOs. "Of course we'd rather have the Navajo Nation control its own resources," says Roger Fragua, former deputy director of CERT and a member of Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico. "Coal is a loaded gun. You want it in the hands of the mature person, and there's nobody more mature, nobody older than an Indian tribe."
Yet the purchase has met with strong resistance, mostly from the same traditionalist groups that fought Desert Rock. They claim the Navajo Nation is getting taken advantage of once again, and that the purchase perpetuates the tribe's reliance on the coal industry and its damaging ways. Yazzie has become one of the most vocal and respected opponents. His hometown of Shiprock is only a 30-minute drive from the Four Corners Power Plant, whose yellow haze smears the town's sky on cold days. The chapter sees few of the industry's benefits: Most workers live in wealthier chapters even closer to the plant and shop in Farmington, just off the reservation.
Yazzie sees the tribe giving up control, not gaining it. He says the council is rife with corruption – Council Speaker Johnny Naize, a big supporter of the mine purchase, was recently charged with bribery and conspiracy for misusing nearly $37,000 in tribal funds – and unlikely to make decisions that benefit its constituents. And the purchase was so rushed that the tribe may have overlooked important details; tribal attorney Craig Moyer says Edison's need to divest from the plant made it set "very aggressive timelines."
There are larger concerns about whether this is a good time to be buying into the coal industry. Coal is currently the country's largest generator of electricity, but natural gas is expected to surpass it by 2040. And impending EPA regulations on carbon dioxide and mercury emissions from existing power plants could impact Four Corners, and thus the Navajo Mine. Like other U.S. coal companies, the tribe is considering exporting coal, but there are transportation barriers and growing opposition to shipping it overseas. "It's a declining industry," Yazzie says, "and here we are, heavily investing in it."
But Steve Gundersen, a financial consultant and chairman of the Navajo Transitional Energy Corp. board of directors, says that the industry's current weakness is what enabled his tribe to buy in. He's confident that, given coal's abundance in the United States and on the reservation, the industry will figure out a way to stay viable. Besides, the tribe has a guaranteed buyer for its coal until 2031. Given APS investments in emissions controls at the Four Corners plant, Moyer says, "It is hard to imagine that this would not be one of the last coal power plants ever to go away."
And the Navajo Mine appears profitable. According to BHP's financial reports, it and the San Juan Mine, which supplies the nearby San Juan Generating Station, brought in a combined total of $588 million in fiscal year 2013. Though the Four Corners plant will be buying less coal now, the new owners have an advantage: Unlike BHP, the tribe probably won't have to pay state or federal taxes. According to Gundersen, the Navajo government will receive about $50 million a year in royalties and taxes from the mine and power plant, and be able to pay off the purchase price within four years.
Tribal officials hope to use 10 percent of the mine's profits to diversify the Navajos' energy portfolio by investing in Navajo-owned renewable and alternative energy projects. As Moyer told the tribal council in April 2013, buying the mine "can be the bridge to the future and the revenues to pay for it."
It's easy to be skeptical, however. It's difficult enough to build any utility-scale renewable energy project, let alone one that is developed by a tribe. Thickets of red tape and taxation issues make such deals incredibly complex, and distrust of outside companies' intentions means that hardly any tribally owned projects make it past the planning stage. Plus, NTEC includes coal gasification and carbon capture on the list of alternative energy sources it might fund with coal mine profits, making the future look a lot like the coal-heavy present.
And, as long as coal is around, there's little incentive to seek alternatives. "If we're not presenting a viable option, then these tribal governments go with the breadwinner. They're going with the certainty," Andy Bessler, who worked on renewable energy and tribal politics for many years in the Southwest with the Sierra Club, said last April. "We don't have a $50 million check in our hands. And (coal companies) have that every year." Perhaps just as important, the coal industry offers good jobs in a poor region, where unemployment generally hovers around 50 percent.
Marie Justice knows what it's like to lose a well-paid job at a coal mine. These days, she drives a truck at Peabody's Kayenta Mine on Black Mesa, which supplies coal to the Navajo Generating Station on the western side of the reservation near Page, Ariz. After I reassured her that I was a journalist, not an environmental activist, she agreed to meet me at the Black Mesa Shopping Center, a convenience store along Highway 160 at the turnoff to the mine.
As I waited in the parking lot, stray dogs sniffed at my rental car, and miners in trucks pulled in after the shift change to gas up before driving home to Kayenta, Tuba City or Page. Justice, a middle-aged Navajo woman with dark shoulder-length hair, arrived in a late model Chevy SUV, wearing a sweatshirt, jeans and silver studs made by a Navajo jeweler.
Justice started working at Black Mesa mine – which is adjacent to the Kayenta Mine – in 1988, driving the massive trucks that make normal vehicles look like Matchbox cars. She spent the summer of 2004 in California, trying to convince regulators not to force Mohave Generating Station and Black Mesa Mine to close, and hoping to show what the impact would be on Navajo people. "I don't think they really understood it," she says. "They're flipping their light switch and they got their electricity, they don't know how it gets there." Justice and hundreds of others lost their jobs anyway.
She found work with the United Mine Workers union until a position opened up at Kayenta Mine two and half years later. Others, she says, were forced to leave the reservation to find work or take early retirements. Lacking higher education and transferable skills, many of the laid-off older workers had trouble finding new jobs. "There have been divorces because of what happened here," she says. "The emotional impact on the family itself, I think, was really hard."
Erny Zah, then-spokesman for Navajo President Ben Shelly, says that the tribe stepped in to save the Navajo Mine primarily to stop a catastrophic repeat, which would ripple far beyond just the laid-off workers and their immediate families. Because of the way Navajo families are structured, one person with a well-paid job "can carry the load for 10 to 15 people," Zah said. "When we talk about one job, we're talking about multiple families."
"I think of this as being such a poignant example of the difficult choices that tribal governments have to make," says CU's Wilkinson. "The Navajo Nation knows about climate change. It knows about health effects on individual people. It knows that buying into the coal economy now is dicey." These factors and more, Wilkinson says, "ought to create a good amount of understanding for the Navajos' decision."
After leaving Justice, I drove down the road and stopped for a late lunch at the Anasazi Inn, a low-slung motel with turquoise trim and a parking lot full of trucks. Miners coming off shift often stop here for roast green chile and mutton on pillowy frybread.
For the past 24 years, Patricia Manygoats, a warm Navajo woman with a ready smile, has managed this roadside motel. One of her brothers works at the San Juan Generating Station just outside of Farmington, the other at Kayenta Mine with Manygoats' husband, a truck driver, who formerly worked at Black Mesa Mine. That's where Manygoats' father used to work, manning the pipeline that sent a mixture of Black Mesa coal and water 273 miles to Mohave Generating Station. She and her husband used to take their kids to visit the plant, and they would point at the smokestacks and say, "Dad used to crush the coal, give it to Grandpa and he'd slurry it down to that big old power plant there."
After that, it was hard not to see coal everywhere. I smelled its acrid tang as I drove through reservation towns, where people burn it in woodstoves. I saw it in the transmission lines that run beside the homes of Navajos who still herd sheep and haul water, as well as in the iPad and smartphone that belong to Hubert Harwood, president of Upper Fruitland Chapter and an employee of the San Juan plant. His fingers black with soot, Harwood texted as we sat in leather desk chairs in the chapter's modern offices. "Everybody, if you actually think about it, deals with the plants and the mines," he said. "If something affects one of these mines out here, one of these plants, it affects everything."
The Grand Canyon Trust, a Flagstaff-based nonprofit, hopes to lessen that dependence – using money from coal. The organization helps administer a $5 million fund donated by the utilities that run the coal-fired Springerville Generating Station in eastern Arizona, as part of a settlement over the plant's expansion. The money funds renewable energy projects and helps local chapters diversify their economies – something that is difficult in the highly centralized Navajo Nation, where all business development decisions must pass through Window Rock, the seat of the Navajo tribal government. The goal is to foster social entrepreneurship as an alternative to resource extraction, says the Trust's Tony Skrelunas, former director of the Navajo Nation Economic Development Division, and it begins by encouraging bright young people to return to the reservation after college to start businesses.
Brett Isaac, a talkative, barrel-chested 29-year-old, is one of those young people. He likes to lift weights and race his BMW X6 around the reservation, although sometimes he first has to clear the tumbleweeds out of his long, unpaved driveway.
Isaac grew up in Kayenta, son of a schoolteacher and a heavy-equipment operator. He pursued American Indian studies at Arizona State, but always knew he wanted to return to the reservation, bucking the brain drain. "When most people see despair, there's potential," he says. After he was hired by a tribally owned economic development corporation, he convinced its board of directors to get into the solar business. Now he's the CEO of Shonto Energy LLC, a community-owned business, where he builds off-grid solar systems for Navajos living without electricity, using money from the Springerville settlement.
Identifying and encouraging people like Isaac and projects like Shonto may enable the Navajos to take control of their own resources more effectively than buying a mine. After all, no matter who owns the Navajo Mine, it's still subject to the same macroeconomic forces –– opposition to coal export terminals, EPA regulations, the price of natural gas, state policies –– that affect BHP Billiton, Peabody or anyone else in the coal industry. Ultimately, true control of coal resources may be an illusion.
By using some of the Navajo Mine's profits for small-scale projects like Isaac's, the tribal government can perhaps appease both the progressives and the traditionalists –– supporting businesses that give Navajos electricity while allowing them to continue living the way they always have. Plus, an industry that fulfills an obvious need (18,000 homes on the Navajo Nation lack electricity) and doesn't rely as much on the whims of faraway customers and politicians may offer the Navajos a truer form of economic independence.
Coal companies "imprisoned our intelligence because they made us think that without that job there's nothing out here, we wouldn't survive," Isaac says. But that could change "if we created the competency out here, the confidence.
"Then," he adds, "we wouldn't feel so threatened."]]>
It was the height of the oil boom in the Permian Basin, a geologic formation that underlies southeastern New Mexico and West Texas. The Permian was a place where newly drilled oil wells spurted into the sky, producing 600 or more barrels of oil a day. But by 1983, the 10-year energy crisis had ended, Saudi Arabia amped up production and the price of oil dropped. West Texas emptied out, and since then, oil production in the Permian has sputtered.
Now, thanks to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing – the same technology that turned quiet western North Dakota towns into congested cities teeming with roughnecks – the Permian is on its way to another boom. The region's aging, under-producing vertical rigs are being replaced by new, horizontal drilling operations that can suck crude from hard to reach places.
In the past five years, horizontal drilling in the Permian has exploded: the number of rigs has increased fivefold. Since 2011 alone, companies have drilled over 9,300 new wells. The federal Energy Information Administration expects Permian oil production to surge to over 1.3 million barrels per day in 2014, from just 800,000 barrels in 2007. The basin is now the country's largest oil producer.
Water is one of the key ingredients facilitating the boom. In the Permian Basin, like many other oil and gas producing regions, water is scarce and over allocated. A new report by Ceres, a Boston-based environmental non-profit focused on sustainable investing and business, found that more than 70 percent of the Permian's oil wells are in areas of extreme water stress, which means over 80 percent of surface water and shallow groundwater is already allocated.
In the Permian, 1.1 million gallons are needed to frack each well – which isn't much compared to other parts of the country (wells in the Bakken use twice as much, and in Texas' Eagle Ford Shale each well averages over 4.4 million gallons). But the sheer number of wells in the Permian means the gallons add up, and with more wells biting into the shale every day, Ceres projects water use in the Permian to double by 2020.
Only two percent of fracking water is recycled in the Permian, says Brooke Barton, the water program manager at Ceres. That's because Texas, like 32 other states, gives companies a cheaper, easier solution: injecting wastewater into a deep underground well.
"Some companies have tried to do recycling, but they stopped doing it because it costs more money than using a disposal well," says JP Nicot, a research scientist who studies water consumption in the oil and gas industry for the Bureau of Economic Geology at University of Texas-Austin. "If it's not sustainable, they'll stop doing it."
Still, there is at least one oil company operating in the Permian that's trying to cut its water use. Apache Corporation recycles fracking water and supplements it with brackish water pumped from aquifers, reducing its consumption of fresh groundwater. But there's a catch: in some parts of the Permian Basin, there is no fresh water to be found. "Using brackish water looks good on paper, but there is no other choice," Nicot says. "They could use fresh water, but they'd have to ship it from 15 miles away. So it doesn't make sense."
And while using brackish water for fracking may seem like a conservation measure now, that could change. Parched Texas cities like Odessa, Dell City and Abilene are increasingly interested in tapping brackish aquifers for drinking water by building desalination plants. That could lead to competition between industry and residential water users down the line. Water has yet to become a limiting factor for Permian Basin oil companies, Nicot says, but they're concerned about the future.
As writer Christi Stark puts it in an article for The Permian Basin Petroleum Association Magazine, "Whether it is finding new sources of water, treating and re-using flowback or produced water, or practicing desalination of brackish water – or all of the above – one thing is for certain: Water is the key to the future of the oil and gas industry in the Permian Basin, not to mention the key to the future of West Texas itself."
The next batch of Permian Basin millionaires may still make their money on oil, but this time, they'll need to be innovative with water.
Emily Guerin is a correspondent for High Country News. She tweets @guerinemily.]]>
Amphibian populations worldwide are plummeting, and entire species are going extinct. The West's struggling species include boreal toads and mountain yellow-legged frogs. Invasive species and habitat degradation play a major role, but amphibians are dying even in places with good habitat. Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, an aggressive fungus commonly known as chytrid, is often to blame.
McKenzie, who was studying the role of farmland conversion and suburbanization in the decline of leopard frogs in Colorado, suspected chytrid was also a factor. When she read a paper about a strain of bacteria found on red-backed salamanders that inhibited chytrid's growth, she began to wonder: What microbes lived on the skin of her frogs and toads? And could any of them fight chytrid?
She captured boreal toads and leopard frogs and swabbed their legs, feet and bellies at research sites near Boulder and Meeker, Colo. She took the samples to Rob Knight, a fellow CU-Boulder biologist who studies the human microbiome. In exchange for DNA analyses of the bacteria on her amphibians, McKenzie volunteered for Knight's study, handing over fecal samples and forehead, armpit and hand swabs. "I was like, 'Whatever you want, can you just run some of my frog samples?' " she laughs. "That's how I got my first data set."
McKenzie and others now hope to harness the breakthroughs of the human-microbe revolution to slow two of wildlife's most prolific – and seemingly unstoppable – modern killers: chytrid, "the worst infectious disease ever recorded among vertebrates," according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that has killed more than 5.7 million bats in North America since 2006.
"When you see almost 99 percent of your population perished on the (cave) floor, it's incredibly alarming," says Tina Cheng, a University of California-Santa Cruz Ph.D. student who studies white-nose syndrome. "People are desperate for solutions."
Chytrid is a cruel and efficient killer. It spreads through water and skin-to-skin contact – during mating, for instance – infecting amphibians' skin, reducing their ability to absorb water and disrupting electrolyte levels enough to cause major organ failure. In weeks, it can obliterate populations.
Scientists suspect the disease is so devastating because most amphibians have never encountered this strain of the fungus before. Humans likely transported it around the globe in the pet trade, on American bullfrogs, whose legs are a delicacy, or on African clawed frogs, which doctors used for pregnancy tests until the 1970s. (The frog laid eggs when injected with a pregnant woman's urine.) Scientists first linked mass mortalities to chytrid in Australia and Central America in the late 1990s. It's since driven more than 200 species to collapse or extinction and colonized every continent except Antarctica.----
For years, Vance Vredenburg, a blond, Chaco-wearing frog biologist at San Francisco State University, watched miserably as his favorite animals, mountain yellow-legged frogs, fell victim to chytrid. "These frogs were incredibly abundant for a very long time," he says. "Now they've become so scarce that most people don't know they live up there."
Vredenburg has monitored chytrid's march through the Sierra Nevada since the early 2000s, often hiking 15 miles over 12,000-foot passes to check alpine lakes for the disease. He knew chytrid had arrived when mountain yellow-legged frogs disappeared from lakes or floated belly-up near shore. He watched some frogs, too sick to swim, drown. "It was one of the worst experiences of my life," he says.
On a 2002 trip to Sixty Lake Basin in Kings Canyon National Park, he found the usual carnage. But at a remote lake in Yosemite National Park that same year, a few populations of mountain yellow-legged frogs appeared to be living with the usually fatal disease. What was the difference?
He found the first clues in 2005, during a talk by Reid Harris, the biologist who discovered the chytrid-inhibiting bacterium that would also inspire McKenzie's research. Just like McKenzie, Vredenburg began to suspect that microbes helped determine which frogs lived or died. To test the theory, he and one of Harris' post-docs hiked back into the Sierras. They caught and swabbed mountain yellow-legged frogs in a Kings Canyon lake that was still chytrid-free, and returned to sample the surviving Yosemite frogs.
Their results affirmed Vredenburg's hypothesis. A significantly higher proportion of the Yosemite frogs had Janthinobacterium lividum on their skin – the same anti-fungal species Harris found on salamanders. Just one year later, the Kings Canyon population went extinct. Harris, Vrendenburg and others then exposed one group of mountain yellow-legged frogs to chytrid, and one to J. lividum and chytrid. The results were dramatic: Every frog in the first group died. Every frog in the second group lived.
The experiment changed Vredenburg's career. "It forced me to become a much bigger-picture biologist," he says. Instead of doing field research on "my favorite little frog that nobody else in the world cares about," he now works in a lab with bacteria and has graduate students studying the skin microbes of amphibians around the world. He hopes to discover a way to fight chytrid by treating frogs with higher concentrations of anti-fungal bacteria than already live on their skin.
One obvious way to do that is to dose them all with J. lividum. But scientists are hesitant to spread the microbe around for fear of inadvertently spawning a new biological threat, as happened with the chytrid fungus. When animals are exposed to microbes their immune systems have never encountered, "it's a huge concern," explains McKenzie. Plus, J. lividum may not take to every amphibian, she says. "It's not one-size-fits-all."
Scientists prefer to identify and culture anti-fungal bacteria already familiar to the frogs. But it's hard to do. Even though DNA analysis revealed local strains of J. lividum growing on McKenzie's endangered boreal toads, she has failed to grow any of them in a petri dish. That means she can't test how reliably the bacteria can protect toads from chytrid in the lab. And so her ultimate goal – to increase the survival rate of captive toads released into the wild to boost populations by bathing them in beneficial bacteria – remains out of reach.
Scientists worry that because research takes so long and chytrid kills so quickly, amphibians will continue to go extinct before they find the bacteria that could save them. To get ahead of the fungus, Harris and a grad student have set their sights on Madagascar, one of the world's last chytrid-free areas. They hope to find and stockpile native fungus-fighters before chytrid appears. That way, if the disease arrives, they can respond quickly by releasing local strains of bacteria into the environment and letting them spread from frog to frog. "I like to call it crisis biology," Vredenburg says. "We don't have time to figure out the nuances. We have to do something now before these frogs go extinct."----
Unlike chytrid, white-nose syndrome has yet to wipe out an entire bat species, and there are still many places in North America unaffected by it. That gives researchers like Tina Cheng hope. If they can identify an anti-white-nose strain of bacteria before the disease hits Western North America, they may be able to blunt its impact.
White-nose syndrome is caused by a cold-loving fungus called Pseudogymnoascus destructans, which grows on bat's wings, faces and tails during hibernation. Irritated, the bats wake from their torpor too often, flying around and expending energy when they should be resting. Eventually, they lose body fat and starve. The disease spreads easily, likely through bat-to-bat transmission, and can kill more than 90 percent of the individuals in a cave.
Thought to have originated in Europe, white-nose was first discovered on American soil in New York in 2006. The disease has spread to 22 states in the Eastern U.S. and five Canadian provinces. It's not clear when white-nose will reach the West, and it will likely act differently when it does, given the region's low humidity and the propensity of some Western bats to hibernate in smaller, more dispersed groups.
Cheng, who was one of Vredenburg's students, originally studied frogs but switched to bats for her Ph.D. "I thought it would be really important to address white-nose syndrome," she says. "Unfortunately for chytrid, it was too late for many species."
She has already identified and cultured a strain of bacteria that seems to slow the growth of P. destructans. Now, she's replicating Vredenburg's experiment on mountain yellow-legged frogs. In Winnipeg last fall, Cheng wiped the bacterium and the fungus on little brown bats collected from a northern Manitoba cave at the start of their hibernation. She then released them into a refrigerator that mimics the cave environment. The bats settled back into sleep and Cheng flew home to Santa Cruz, where she spends hours looking for signs of infection through a camera feed. Sick bats typically live two to three months before dying, but when really ill they will sit alone on the cave floor, shaking. In early February, Cheng said all the bats were calmly hibernating; it was too soon to tell if any were infected.
Eventually, she hopes to develop a bacterial soup that could be misted onto bats as they begin hibernation. "My interest is in prevention for those populations that have not been hit by white-nose," like those in the West, she says. But she's also interested in helping species that have already been affected. "We could prevent species from going extinct."
Research on white-nose has progressed much faster than on chytrid. Only two years after the first New York bats died, scientists had identified P. destructans, linked it to the die-offs, and started looking for ways to combat it. It took years after chytrid was first described for most amphibian biologists to agree that widespread declines were happening and to acknowledge the fungus' contribution. "By the time white-nose came along, people were familiar with a fungal disease affecting wildlife. With chytrid, there was no reference," says Katie Gillies of Bat Conservation International. Still, bat scientists face their own challenges. Because white-nose affects bats at their most vulnerable – while they hibernate – Cheng's proposed spray-bottle application could be as disruptive to bats as the fungus itself.
This disturbance is what Christopher Cornelison, a post-doctoral researcher at Georgia State University, is trying to avoid. Trained as a microbiologist with a specialty in fungi, he isn't interested in the outdoor fieldwork many scientists live for. "The bat people, they always joke that they're going to drag me into a cave and make me do some sampling," he says. He prefers white lab coats, gloves and tidy laboratories, where he's working with the U.S. Forest Service to turn Rhodococcus rhodochrous, a common soil bacterium, into an anti-white-nose weapon – without touching bats.
Cornelison discovered R. rhodochrous through a research group studying how it delayed the ripening of peaches. They noticed that less fungus grew on fruit that had been exposed to R. rhodochrous. Cornelison, who had just begun researching white-nose as a possible dissertation topic, realized the fungus might do for bats what it did for peaches.
R. rhodochrous not only slows the growth of P. destructans, he found, it annihilates it. The bacterium produces volatile organic compounds so potent they can permanently stop the fungus' spores from germinating just by being enclosed in the same chamber together for 12 hours. Now, Cornelison is designing ways for land managers to deploy the bacterium. He's come up with a bacterial paste that can be spread on a plastic sheet, covered with a semi-permeable membrane, and hung in a cave during winter, allowing R. rhodochrous VOCs to escape and kill P. destructans. In the spring, when bats begin leaving caves by day and are at lower risk of infection, the sheet could be removed. Then, says Cornelison, "you no longer have the potential collateral impacts that everybody's concerned about," such as bats dying after being disturbed by well-intentioned humans or the disruption of the cave's microbial community.
Few of these technologies have been field-tested. Still, bat and amphibian researchers feel a sense of urgency that inspires them to work faster, collaborate more, and break down the traditional barriers between microbiology, medicine and field biology. "We have no time to waste," says Vredenburg. With humans spreading germs around the globe at unprecedented rates, "(we need) to figure out what we can do to ameliorate some of the terrible consequences of (an increasingly interconnected) biosphere."]]>
The Democratic state senator representing the district had called the meeting and lined up a series of speakers to offer advice and encouragement to the out-of-work miners. During a presentation about re-training programs, a miner named Cliff Brewer spoke up.
"I'm all for the re-training programs and I've looked into them already, but the fact of the matter is, it does not support our life. A $10/hour job, that's not enough to keep us here," he said, to murmurs of agreement from the crowd. "Is there anything that would train a miner to make the kind of money he's used to making underground?"
With a few exceptions, the answer to that question is no. "The city of Montrose (Colo.) hired patrol officers starting at $50,000 a year," said John Jones, the director of Delta Montrose Technical College, as he touted the school's law enforcement training program to the miners. "It's not the kind of wage that a miner makes, but it's a good living wage."
But for miners accustomed to making – and spending – nearly double that amount, it doesn't feel like a living wage. The transition can be especially hard for those miners who only have high school diplomas. "I don't have a college degree and I make 80 grand a year, you tell me another job that's going to pay me $80,000 a year," Brewer said when I talked to him after the meeting. "There's none. I'm going to go where the mines are at and unfortunately that's not here anymore."
Miners willing to move may find jobs in coal-producing regions that are still booming, like Wyoming's Powder River Basin or the Illinois Basin in Western Kentucky. But for those who want to stay put and find new jobs in places like Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and, at the moment, Paonia, Colo., it can be hard to accept the severe pay cut.
Brett Dillon is the director of the West Virginia office of the United Mine Workers of America's Career Centers. A former coal miner himself, he tells recently laid-off miners in the Southeast that they might need to take a job where they'll just scrape by, but that that's better than relying on unemployment. "Some of you guys will get back (into coal mining)," he tells them. "But what I encourage you to do is take advantage of the training while you're drawing unemployment, so that if you do go back and you get laid off again, you have something to fall back on."
Dillon's miners can learn welding, get a commercial drivers license or become a diesel mechanic. In Western Colorado, Delta Montrose Technical College has miners studying to be emergency medical technicians and policemen.
West Virginia lost 10,000 coal jobs since January 2012, and neighboring Kentucky's not much better with 6,000 miners out of work. That's where Michael Cornett of the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment program is trying to spend over $5 million in federal grant money to help miners move into new professions. But as Erica Peterson with WFPL Radio in Louisville, KY reports, that's more easily said than done:
"The reality is it's a difficult switch in this culture to get people to consider other alternatives," Cornett says. … "This is a culture that is used to the coal industry waxing and waning throughout the years," he says. "They're not at all unaccustomed to layoffs, but typically those layoffs have been shorter and the phone would ring a lot sooner and they'd go back to work. That's simply not happening now."
Back in Western Colorado, miner Brian Waitman has applied to coal mines out of state, but also says he's waiting to see if Elk Creek will re-open in a year, as the mine's managers claim. "I can get by for a year, if in fact it comes back," he said.
And that's a big "if." An underground fire that forced the company to abandon its longwall, an $80 million piece of equipment, prompted Elk Creek's recent lay-offs. But the decision whether to re-open the mine – and re-hire its workforce – will be a macroeconomic one.
In general, Western coalmines like the ones in Colorado's North Fork Valley haven't been hit as hard as Appalachian coalmines, largely because there is still a strong market for the area's high BTU, low-sulfur coal. But the economics of coal are rapidly changing as utilities replace coal with natural gas and decide how to respond to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's mercury regulations, which come into effect in the next two years and require all coal plants to have scrubbers. The Energy Information Administration predicts a loss of 60 gigawatts of coal power by 2020 – roughly the amount of energy generated by 26 Navajo Generating Stations, one of the largest coal plants in the West – mostly from the retirement of old, dirty plants.
In the North Fork Valley, mine operators are closely watching how much coal large customers are buying and where they're getting it from. Already one huge customer, the Tennessee Valley Authority, has said it will likely purchase less coal from Colorado going forward. That could mean more lay-offs at a neighboring mine.
Even if the conditions that led to their predicament aren't identical, laid off Appalachian and western Coloradan coal miners do have one thing in common – the reluctance to call it quits on an industry that not only paid them well, but provided them with a sense of belonging. Compared to oil and natural gas booms, where workers from around the country live in man camps hundreds of miles away from their families, the coal communities I've seen in Appalachia, New Mexico and Colorado seem much less transient, and much more entrenched.
"We are a community, we are a family, and everybody's there to help everybody else," said the wife of a laid-off Elk Creek coal miner, who cried when she told me her family was planning on leaving the North Fork Valley to find mining work elsewhere.
Brewer put it this way: "It's a way of living to us, it's not just a job."
Emily Guerin is a correspondent at High Country News. She tweets @guerinemily.]]>
To avoid stranding rural residents, that same year the FAA started paying commercial airlines to fly into small towns. Not all airlines were interested, but some, like Cheyenne-based Great Lakes Airlines, found a niche in flying to Essential Air Service communities, as the program is known. Great Lakes is now the most heavily-subsidized airline in the country and the largest provider of Essential Air Service flights, receiving 42 percent of its revenue from the federal program. It services 13 states in the West and upper Midwest.
Yet despite its broad reach, Great Lakes passengers have recently taken to calling the airline "Great Mistakes." Stories abound in places of cancelled flights, lost baggage and missed connections. According to WyoFile:
Rob Godby, an economist at the University of Wyoming, told WyoFile he once hosted a visitor who bought a ticket to fly out of Laramie to Denver. The flight to Denver originated in Worland, and would stop in Laramie to pick up passengers. But when Godby took his visitor to the Laramie airport, the plane never arrived. Great Lakes employees explained that the plane, "forgot to land."
Great Lakes blames the service problems in Wyoming and elsewhere on a major pilot shortage caused by new FAA regulations. Last August, the agency began requiring all co-pilots to have 1,500 training hours before stepping into the cockpit of a commercial airline. Previously, co-pilots of smaller airlines only needed 250 hours. The change came in response to a pilot error that resulted in a 2009 crash of a regional jet flying to Buffalo, N.Y. Fifty people died in that crash.
Since the new rules came into effect, Great Lakes has had trouble hiring and retaining employees. According to the Associated Press, in August the airline had to lay off 30 co-pilots who were just short of 1,500 hours. And co-pilots who do complete the extended training on their own are less willing to work for low-paying regional airlines like Great Lakes now that they have the experience to work elsewhere. Before the new law, co-pilots would work at places like Great Lakes until they could accumulate the amount of flying hours needed to move to a larger airline. Now, they jump straight to the big leagues, since they have to get the requisite hours anyway. As noted by one air industry blogger, "would a pilot with 1500 hours rather go to Great Lakes & fly a prop, or go to a Republic, Mesa, or SkyWest and fly a shiny jet?"
The pilot shortage has caused Great Lakes to cut back on its service. In January, the airline stopped serving Moab and ditched five additional airports, though none in the West. And it's not just Great Lakes: regional airlines around the country say they're having a hard time hiring and retaining co-pilots now.
The service problems call into question the economic viability of the entire Essential Air Service program, which conservatives have tried to place on the chopping block many times in recent national budget battles. "Although this program is called the Essential Air Service, in my view it's far from essential," Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., said in 2011, the year a standoff over the service's funding shut down the FAA for nearly two weeks.
Recent reforms to the program have eliminated some of the more egregious subsidies, like the more than $3,000 per passenger that Great Lakes received for servicing Ely, Nev., where flights were occasionally completely empty. Now, to qualify for Essential Air Service, a community must: be at least 90 miles from the nearest medium or large airport; average more than 10 passengers per day (unless it's more than 175 miles from an airport); have an average subsidy of less than $1,000 per passenger and have been part of the program between September 2010 and 2011, the year before the reforms were passed. The new rules don't apply to Hawaii or Alaska, where 82 percent of communities cannot be reached by road.
In the West, the new requirements have caused two Montana airports to lose air service entirely. Montana is the most reliant on Essential Air Service of all Western states, with the most passengers using the service, highest average per-passenger subsidy and highest total annual subsidy.
Critics point out that as the U.S. continues to urbanize, Essential Air Service serves fewer people. In much of the lower 48, it would take just as long to drive to a larger airport than to fly there on a subsidized flight from a small town. And because Great Lakes service can be so spotty, many rural residents often drive to larger airports, anyway, to avoid the hassle. As austerity becomes the norm in Washington, and if cancelled and delayed flights continue to tarnish the reputation of Great Lakes and the entire program, rural airline subsidies could end up at risk of being killed once again.
Emily Guerin is a correspondent at High Country News. She tweets @guerinemily.]]>
Holiday was visiting his in-laws when he noticed the local telephone utility laying fiber-optic cable: Ten Sleep was getting high-speed Internet. In 2011, President Obama used Eleutian as an example of the Internet's effects on rural economic development: "For local businesses, broadband access is helping them grow, prosper and compete in a global economy."
But such access – the basic modern infrastructure many city-folk take for granted – is far from universal. Of the 19 million Americans who lack broadband access – defined as 4 megabits per second (mbps) download speed, 1 mbps upload – 14.5 million live in rural areas. Thirty percent of Indians living on reservations also lack access.
Speedy Internet is not a panacea, but it can provide a much-needed boost. For rural residents, writes Sharon Strover, a communications professor at University of Texas-Austin, "having broadband is simply treading water or keeping up. Not having it means sinking." Now, projects to wire the Navajo Nation and other rural areas could help close the West's connectivity gap. Will they be the economic boon everyone hopes?
The more densely populated a place is, the more likely it is to have fast, affordable Internet. When people live far apart, service providers don't profit enough to cover the costs of building and maintaining the physical infrastructure. If they do provide access, it's often at higher prices and slower speeds than in urban areas. In the rural West, where 2 million people lack broadband access, topography is also a barrier. Mountains and narrow valleys can block signals from wireless towers and satellites and make it difficult to install fiber-optic cables. Silverton, for instance – population 637, at an elevation of 9,300 feet in a remote and rugged alpine area – is the only county seat in Colorado not plugged into fiber-optic cables.
As the Internet becomes a more integral part of daily life, people with shoddy connections are at an economic disadvantage. Fast Internet is necessary to take video-based online classes and to sign up for health care. (Imagine the horror of trying to navigate Healthcare.gov with dial-up.) Rural hospitals use it to video-conference with urban medical specialists, and schoolteachers increasingly record lectures that students can watch at home.
But Lawrence Wood, associate professor of media arts and studies at Ohio University, says the most significant drawbacks are cultural. "The main reason people use broadband these days is for entertainment," he says. Having a smartphone or a fast Internet connection "is really a matter of being a part of contemporary life in the United States."
Expecting the private sector alone to fill the broadband availability gap is unrealistic. So a number of rural areas have turned to community-owned networks. Powell, Wyo., built its own fiber-optic network, which a local Internet provider pays to use, and many of Washington state's public utility districts are doing the same, some with help from the 2009 stimulus. On the Navajo Nation, where fewer than 4 percent of residents have broadband access, the tribal utility recently received a $32 million federal grant to bring wireless service to the entire reservation. And in southeastern Colorado, a rural electrical co-op provides broadband in places like Two Buttes, population 43 – doing for Internet what it did for electricity in the 1930s.
But simply having access isn't enough; people have to actually use it. Broadband adoption rates are 13 percent lower in rural America than in cities, Strover found, with non-users citing high cost and the belief that they don't need to be online. But when rural residents use broadband, there are economic benefits. In a 2013 study, Strover found that rural counties where over 60 percent of people used broadband had more rapid income growth and slower unemployment growth than similar counties with fewer people online.
Broadband cannot, however, reverse long-term economic trends like rural-to-urban migration, or change proximity to a highway or the quality or size of the local labor force. "Most economic decisions depend on a multitude of factors," writes Shane Greenstein, who studies information technology and economics at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, "and broadband is but one of many."
While broadband helped lure Eleutian Technology to Ten Sleep, it wasn't enough to keep it there. After three years, the company decided to move. Eleutian needed a bigger building, but no water or sewer lines ran to the large lot it had bought a quarter-mile outside of town, and the cost of installation was too high. Plus, Ten Sleep lacked adequate housing for Eleutian employees, some of whom had to live in trailers, and the long drive to the Yellowstone Regional Airport was burdensome.
So Eleutian moved to Cody, population 9,500 – a city by Wyoming standards. A Cody-based economic development team secured a grant to build the company's headquarters, which Eleutian now leases with the option to buy at below market value in the future.
"We just couldn't compete with the bigger area," says LeeAnn Chenoweth, executive director of the Washakie Development Association in Worland, Wyo., which tried to keep Eleutian in Ten Sleep. "Having broadband can attract business, but places that have 200 or 300 people are probably always going to be challenged by the economy of scale."]]>
Erionite -- which an August 2013 study called "an emerging national public health concern for respiratory disease" -- naturally occurs in rocks and soil around the West, and is only hazardous when disturbed. Driving, walking and even sweeping in certain areas can cause erionite to become airborne and enter the lungs, causing respiratory problems and malignant mesothelioma, a type of cancer also associated with asbestos exposure. Though lesser known to the public, erionite is believed to be a more potent carcinogen than asbestos. In the 1970s, scientists linked erionite exposure to abnormally high rates of mesothelioma in Cappadocia, Turkey, where people live in stone houses embedded with the poisonous mineral.
Geologists have known about erionite deposits in the West for decades, but until recently, no one thought people were being exposed to it. However, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, "evidence has slowly accumulated linking exposure to erionite with serious adverse health effects in North America, and suggesting that some workers may have a greater potential for exposure than previously recognized."
According to Myron Levin, editor of the consumer watchdog news website FairWarning, it wasn't until the mid 2000s that North Dakota geologists began connecting the dots on their state's geology and the health risks of erionite exposure. For decades, people unknowingly dug gravel pits near erionite deposits in western North Dakota. A 2011 study found that in Dunn County, N.D. alone, over 300 miles of roads were surfaced with contaminated gravel.
Since being discovered in North Dakota, researchers have set about mapping other erionite deposits to help prevent future exposures and determine whether health problems previously linked to asbestos are actually from erionite.
Thus far, no one has detected any erionite-related cancer in western N.D., but a 2010 study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found lung scarring on two long-time road workers. The disease can take over 30 years to develop, as Aubrey Miller of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences told Living on Earth in 2011.
A lot of the people there say: "Well, we don't see any disease here yet, so should we be worried?" Well, the exposures are there, and there is a long latency between getting the disease. So we want to do what we can now to start making people aware, and start being more proactive - for a public health stance - to help ensure that we don't end up with an epidemic of disease.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommends, among other suggestions, training workers on the risks of erionite exposure, wetting roads and quarries to keep dust down and avoiding the use of gravel that is known to contain the mineral. But it's hard to make sure people aren't being exposed because, despite the known health risks, erionite is still unregulated by the federal government.
Since 2007 the North Dakota Department of Transportation has no longer used erionite gravel to resurface state or federal roads. Yet that move is unlikely to have a big impact, since most gravel roads in the state are either private or maintained at the county level. According to New Scientist, "as the road gravel gets worn away, it is being topped up with safe gravel, but some erionite must still be there, lurking underneath, and there are no current plans for a clean-up operation." As Miller told New Scientist, "if it was asbestos, there would be more public alarm."
Scott Radig, director of the division of waste management at the North Dakota Department of Health, says counties know the risks of using erionite gravel, but make their own decisions based on cost and safety. "In many cases it's the only gravel in a county, so there's no other alternative," he says. "Either you have a mud road or one with gravel on it which may contain erionite."
In November 2011, FairWarning reported that Dunn County was still using contaminated gravel because it was cheaper than bringing it in from elsewhere. According to meeting minutes, in February 2012, Dunn County commissioners authorized the use of erionite gravel in a road project, noting that its use "should result in a significant reduction in cost." Radig says he knows it's still being used today.
And with the additional traffic from the oil boom, counties are weighing the risk of vehicle accidents, which are more frequent on roads shoddily surfaced, against an unquantifiable risk of cancer sometime in the future. And usually, Radig says, immediate safety concerns outweigh the hypothetical long-term risk.
Emily Guerin is a correspondent at High Country News. She tweets @guerinemily.]]>