The River of Lost Souls Life and Death on the Animas by Jonathan Thompson May 28, 2018 | $5 | Vol

REBEL YELL | POT’S FUTURE | WATER BOTTLE BATTLE

High Country ForN people whoews care about the West

The River of Lost Souls Life and death on the Animas By Jonathan Thompson May 28, 2018 | $5 | Vol. 50 No. 9 | www.hcn.org 50 No. | $5 Vol. 28, 2018 May CONTENTS

Editor’s note The scarred and the scenic

Every summer, readers stop by Paonia for a tour of High Country News’ headquarters. And like everyone else who sets out to explore the West, they always ask: What’s there to see around here? The usual response is to send them to our beauty spots — the clear, trout-filled lakes atop 10,000-foot Grand Mesa; the immense aspen forest between here and the cute-as-a-button ski town of Crested Butte; the vertiginous chasm at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park; even the patio of a local winery with a spectacular view of the West Elk Mountains. But as publisher of a publication whose journalists cover the region’s most difficult environmental and social issues, I can’t help but encourage people to peek behind the beautiful scenery. “You should check out the dismantled coal mine owned by a billionaire in the town of Somerset,” I tell them. “Also the reservoir built by the Bureau of Reclamation, which is already a third filled with silt from the aptly named Muddy Creek. And don’t miss Sylas Garippo, age 3, plays on the bank of the Animas River at Santa Rita Park in Durango, Colorado, several days the freshly cut stump of the Ute Council Tree in Delta, after the spill at the Gold King Mine in August 2015. Sylas normally would play in the water, but the river was closed. Jerry McBride/Durango Herald where tribal leaders once met in the shade before the U.S. government expelled them in 1881.” FEATURE The West is so scarred by its turbulent, exploit- ative, hubris-fueled past — and present — that we 12 The River of Lost Souls have often thought of publishing A Guidebook to the On the cover Life and death on the Animas By Jonathan Thompson Real Ugly West. But then again, that might be redun- An orange sludge dant. Almost every issue of this magazine delves into tinges the Animas CURRENTS the complex layers of history that underlie our region, River where it runs and, like a Hawaiian volcano, periodically erupt. through Durango, 5 Rebels vs. reporters Contributing Editor Jonathan Thompson has Colorado, days after The Sagebrush Rebellion takes a Trumpian turn the August 2015 spill excavated the Four Corners area for more than two at the Gold King Mine 6 The next episode for California cannabis decades, unearthing everything from the politi- above town. Why Compton said no to pot cal fractures beneath Utah’s Bears Ears National Jerry McBride/ Black women rewrite weed’s legacy in Los Angeles Durango Herald Monument to the real cause of the Gold King Mine 6 The Latest: White Sands National ... Park? disaster in 2015. Thompson’s cover story on the 8 Consider the source uranium boom that left a dangerous toxic legacy in Communities challenge the bottling of Mount Shasta’s water and around his hometown of Durango, Colorado, 8 and deeply marked his own family, not only adds The Latest: A win for wolverines another chapter to the story of the West, it is literally a chapter, slightly reworked, from his new book: DEPARTMENTS River of Lost Souls, published by Torrey Press. I highly 3 FROM OUR WEBSITE: HCN.ORG recommend it. This issue also features another dive beneath 4 LETTERS the surface, the second installment of HCN board 9 THE HCN COMMUNITY Sustainers’ Club member Wayne Hare’s “Civil Conversations” series, Complete access 91 MARKETPLACE which explores the African-American experience to subscriber-only in the West. Hare travels to the progressive city of content 22 DEAR FRIENDS Portland, Oregon, where he uncovers its racist roots HCN’s website 23 WRITERS ON THE RANGE and the kind of practices that locked generations of hcn.org A quiet goodbye to the Selkirk caribou By Ben Long African-Americans into economic and social depres- Digital edition 42 PERSPECTIVE sion, not only in Portland, but in every major U.S. hcne.ws/digi-5009 city. Like Thompson’s, it’s an uncomfortable story, but ‘Alienated’ in Portland: How segregation, redlining and racism critical for understanding this place. As you head out pushed out black residents By Wayne Hare Follow us on the road this summer, we hope that these vicari- 26 ESSAY ous journeys with our writers help deepen your own  The benediction of a bird By Melissa Hart understanding of our beautiful and ugly West. @highcountrynews 28 HEARD AROUND THE WEST By Betsy Marston —Paul Larmer, executive director/publisher

2 High Country News May 28, 2018 From our website: HCN.ORG

Pruitt’s ethics investigations haven’t stopped his rollbacks Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is the subject of at least 11 ethics investigations. More than Trending 180 members of Congress, including several Republicans, have demanded his resignation. Utah admits Meanwhile, Pruitt continues to gut pollution climate regulations and to weaken the science that change is real supports the EPA’s work. In April, Pruitt The Utah Legislature announced the rollback of a rule requiring recently adopted a automakers to increase average fuel economy resolution that moves to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. In May, the state from denying Pruitt signed a controversial new rule that global climate change many researchers and medical professionals to recognizing that worry will hamstring the agency’s ability finding a solution is to use good science in its work, under the crucial, writes Jack guise of increased transparency. The EPA also Greene in an opinion recently proposed weakening rules governing piece. Students at how coal ash, a toxic byproduct from coal- Logan High School burning power plants, is stored. And the helped get the agency is working to loosen regulations resolution passed. concerning benzene pollution in communities During an evening near petroleum refineries. program, they A staffer exits the Senate subway with a poster detailing EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s ethics Maya L. Kapoor explained their issues, in Washington, D.C. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Read more online: hcne.ws/pruitt-ethics motivation: “We, as youth leaders of Utah, have assembled with you, our state leaders, to address what we consider to be the “Wyoming is paramount issue of our generation — that footing the bill of a changing climate. We hope this dialogue will … ultimately lead for everybody to action to address this challenge on all levels — local, state else’s water and national.” Jak c Greene projects.” You say —Mark Christensen, Campbell County, Diane Brodak: “It will Wyoming, commissioner, explaining why he take young adults all supports the POWER Counties Act. The bill over the U.S. to help would amend the 1920 Mineral Leasing Act Amka Aliyak, alias Snowguard, is Marvel Comics’ new female make these changes. to funnel more federal royalties from oil and Indigenous superhero, a 16-year-old Inuk from Pangnirtung, These kids should go gas extraction back to the counties where Nunavut. Jim Zub/Line Art by Sean Izaakse/Colours by Marcio Manyz/Marvel state to state and help the minerals were produced. The federal get it started. Very government currently gets half the royalties; Native superheroes should be drawn from real life proud of them.” 80 percent of that money is earmarked for In April, Marvel Comics announced a new illustrations of Indigenous people. Lee Francis, Elena Hilaria López: the Bureau of Reclamation to support water superhero: Amka Aliyak, or Snowguard, an Inuk who established Indigenous Comic Con and projects across the West. Campbell County “Youth wins the day. teenager. To understand her world and add whose family is Laguna Pueblo, welcomes the Once again.” would receive an additional $160 million in depth to her character, writer Jim Zub reached change: “We’re not the Tontos in these stories royalties, if the bill passes. out to the Inuit community. That represents anymore.” Susan Justice: “This TAY WILES a shift: Native characters have typically been Graham Lee Brewer ‘new’ generation Read more online: hcne.ws/mineral-royalties portrayed as caricatures rather than thoughtful Read more online: hcne.ws/native-superheroes needs to start speaking up and out about everything. “We spend … Way to go, high schoolers!” Tribes lead the battle approximately 70 against the opioid crisis to 80 percent of our Read more online: hcne.ws/utah-climate The opioid crisis has disproportionately time and resources and Facebook.com/ 13 devastated tribal communities across Percent of the electricity on dealing with highcountrynews the country. In April 2017, the Cherokee used by Western problems related Colorado’s Delta-Montrose Nation sued manufacturers, distributors Electric Association that and pharmacies — the first lawsuit of its to opiates.We see is supplied by small kind in U.S. history. Since then, hundreds what’s happening to hydropower installations of other tribes, counties, towns and states our people, and we have followed the Cherokee Nation’s lead on local irrigation canals. are overwhelmed.” Carl Segerstrom and filed their own suits. Suzette Brewer —Kathleen Preuss, director Read more online: of social services for the hcne.ws/small-hydro Read more online: hcne.ws/tribes-opioids Upper Sioux Community Department of the Interior

Never miss a story. Sign up for the HCN newsletter at hcn.org/enewsletter. www.hcn.org High Country News 3 Letters Send letters to [email protected] or Editor, HCN, P.O. Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428.

High Country News After Bunkerville

Executive director/Publisher erved. Paul Larmer Thank you, Tay Wiles, for your hard s re Lee Judge Editor-in-Chief work explaining the complex and f Brian Calvert hts

tortured nature of the ongoing saga of ion o rig

Art director ss Cliven Bundy and his family (“Celeb- i All Cindy Wehling m . p rity Scofflaw,” HCN, 4/30/18). There is er Deputy editor, digital p e

Kate Schimel no easy answer to what should happen rou th G

Associate EDITORs next to address the continued tres- st

th i

Maya L. Kapoor pass, or the potential copycats. Right w

Tay Wiles ooni t ed

now, Cliven and his sons feel more s Ass istant EDITORS ar empowered than ever, as evidenced C Emily Benson e oon u th Paige Blankenbuehler by Ryan Bundy’s run for governor in t

Anna V. Smith ar C

Nevada. I wouldn’t be surprised to see and

WRITERS ON THE RANGE l editor Betsy Marston Ammon run for governor in Idaho. oria Associate PHOTO EDITOR Cliven Bundy’s personal convictions t di Brooke Warren mean that he’ll never willingly capitu- E Copy editOR late to the Bureau of Land Manage- Diane Sylvain ment or any other federal authority. Contributing editorS Tristan Ahtone, Graham However, it may be possible to have Lee Judge Brewer, Cally Carswell, respected members or political lead- Sarah Gilman, Ruxandra Guidi, Michelle Nijhuis, ers of the Mormon faith appeal to him Jodi Peterson, directly. Jonathan Thompson I am not a member of the Mormon CorrespondentS Krista Langlois, Sarah Church, but I have known and worked Tory, Joshua Zaffos with people of Mormon faith for over knows full well that neither the state, Respect for the mountains Editorial Interns 40 years. Despite the fact that Bundy’s the country nor the Bundys own that I was away from the mountains for the Carl Segerstrom beliefs are not LDS doctrine, his fellow Nevada land. The federal government Jessica Kutz past two years with injuries (“Death in church members stand to be painted owns it, and mostly it does a good job Development Director the Alpine,” HCN, 5/14/18). As a member Laurie Milford with the same negative brush in the managing it. of the 14ers.com site, I was dismayed P hilanthropy Advisor court of public opinion. I’ve spoken with Thank you for writing that update. I to watch the number of inexperienced Alyssa Pinkerton many privately, and I know they are hope to someday soon read that Bundy Development Assistant climbers with cavalier attitudes grow concerned about that. pays up and adheres to proper grazing Christine List both on the site and in other social There also needs to be some legal ac- rates. Or else surely it is time to get him Digital Marketer media. Chris King tion taken, federally or locally, to affect off that public land and take those cattle When I came to Colorado in 2005, I Events & Business Partner Bundy financially. Until then, chances to pay his debt. Please keep us updated Coordinator joined the Colorado Mountain Club and Laura Dixon are he will not agree to any recommen- on this. And put me down, along with Web Application Developer took classes and even then proceeded dation — even from the LDS Church. many others I know, as a citizen who is Eric Strebel cautiously. I agree that social media He uses his religion when it suits him, tired of seeing a crook take over and get IT Manager Alan Wells downplays the reality and the dangers like he does when picking the laws away with it. IT Support Technician of mountaineering, but I also think that Josh McIntire he follows. Still, I believe it would be Signed: a small cattle rancher on a there is something missing among those DIRECTOR OF ENGAGEMENT worth pursuing and may represent the small, privately owned ranch. who don’t take it seriously, feed wildlife, Gretchen King only peaceful and mutually acceptable Acc ountant Marilyn Colyer and act as if every climb is another 15 Erica Howard outcome. Accounts Assistant Mancos, Colorado minutes of fame: respect for the moun- Mary Zachman Mike Ford tains. Sure, we’ve all bragged about Cuo st mer Service Manager Christie Cantrell Las Vegas, Nevada Climbing with care “bagging” a peak — but the ones who will stay safe and survive to climb an- Cuo st mer Service It was sad to read about those who lost Kathy Martinez (Circ. Bundy, anti-hero other day understand these truths: The their lives attempting to climb Capitol Systems Administrator), mountain doesn’t care about you. It’s Rebecca Hemer, Debra Cliven Bundy is not a hero to many of Peak in 2017 (“Death in the Alpine,” up to you to decide if it’s welcoming you Muzikar, Pam Peters, us (“Celebrity Scofflaw,” HCN, 4/30/18). HCN, 5/14/18). But one comment Peter Doris Teel, Tammy York that day. If it’s not, it’s not up to you to GrantWriter He is a crook. He has stolen public Doro made was not correct: “You don’t Janet Reasoner try to defeat it. You will lose every time. [email protected] resources like grass and water. He owes expect a giant rock to be loose. You ex- Come back another day. It will always [email protected] about a million and half dollars and pect that if you grab something as big as [email protected] be there. [email protected] continues his thievery. Who would call your body, it’s going to stay put.” [email protected] that a heroic thing? In climbing, one has to always expect Lee Grillo FOUNDER Tom Bell The government’s grazing fee is very what you grab is loose. One isn’t safe Arvada, Colorado Board of Directors John Belkin, Colo. cheap. A cattleman can graze a cow and unless you realize every move you make Beth Conover, Colo. calf all summer for less than a hundred could be your last. I hope every person Jay Dean, Calif. dollars and then sell the calf for $800. that goes into the mountains takes that Bob Fulkerson, Nev. Anastasia Greene, Wash. That is a fine deal, and here in Colorado to heart. Mountains don’t care. the waiting list for grazing permits is Wayne Hare, Colo. Steven Williams Laura Helmuth, Md. growing. Nobody can afford to buy land John Heyneman, Wyo. Arvada, Colorado Osvel Hinojosa, Mexico and then pay taxes and come out ahead. Samaria Jaffe, Calif. Bundy says: “What is a grazing permit?” Nicole Lampe, Ore. He knows full well what that means. He Marla Painter, N.M. Bryan Pollard, Ark. Raynelle Rino, Calif. Estee Rivera Murdock, Colo. High Country News is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) independent 81428. Periodicals, postage paid at Paonia, CO, and other post Dan Stonington, Wash. media organization that covers the issues that define the offices. OP STMASTER: Send address changes to High Country News, Rick Tallman, Colo. High American West. Its mission is to inform and inspire people Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428. All rights to publication of articles Luis Torres, N.M. to act on behalf of the region’s diverse natural and human in this issue are reserved. See hcn.org for submission guidelines. Andy Wiessner, Colo. Country communities. (ISSN/0191/5657) is published bi-weekly, 22 Subscriptions to HCN are $37 a year, $47 for institutions: Florence Williams, D.C. News times a year, by High Country News, 119 Grand Ave., Paonia, CO 800-905-1155 | hcn.org Printed on recycled paper. 4 High Country News May 28, 2018 CURRENTS

the event. “I work for Townhall.com and I will write any truth you send me. … Even Rebels vs. reporters if the media won’t report it, social media is powerful.” As long as you frame the mes- The Sagebrush Rebellion takes a Trumpian turn sage right, people will listen, she said. She By Tay Wiles offered some advice on DIY marketing of conservative values. “ ‘Individual’ doesn’t work right now because it makes it sound or two days in late April, a small crowd The symposium is backed by bigger like ‘I’m more important than you,’ ” she “The media F of farmers and ranchers gathered players in the Sagebrush Rebellion. A explained. “Make it about ‘family,’ make it at Modesto Junior College in Modesto, co-sponsor, National Federal Lands Con- about ‘moms.’ ” that’s here, California, to discuss property rights ference, was founded by Utahns Kathy Nunes’ condemnation of the press that’s covering at the third annual Range Rights and and Bert Smith, whom E&E News once found a largely positive reception. “He Resources Symposium. Conservative dubbed “Mr. Sagebrush Rebellion,” for his sounded like, more often than not, he’s this right now, thinkers on range management and natu- lifelong efforts to turn federal lands over distrustful of the mainstream media, I’m sure they’re ral resource law networked with constitu- to state control. Bert Smith, who passed doesn’t count on them to tell stories cor- tional rights activists and the sons of the away shortly before the first symposium, rectly,” said Kathy Smith. “It’s really, re- here to mock late Wayne Hage and Grant Gerber, two also helped found what’s now known as ally unfortunate that so many of us in the you, make fun Nevada sagebrush rebels who became the National Center for Constitutional American public don’t trust the media ei- well-known for fighting what they consid- Studies, a nonprofit that distributes ther. Thank heavens we have independent of you, call you ered federal overreach. the paperback copies of the U.S. Constitu- media sources and the internet.” cowpokes. … On the morning of the first day, U.S. tion that have become a shirt-pocket fix- Near the end of the conference, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told the gath- ture for today’s Sagebrush Rebels and far- Ammon Bundy took the stage Satur- They’re here ering, “It’s a very dangerous time in our na- right activists nationwide. day afternoon to describe his family’s to perpetuate tion’s history.” Noting that several report- The event’s other sponsor, Protect the battle over grazing rights as part of a ers mingled with the 40 or so attendees, Harvest, has a different mission: fighting religious war. In an hourlong speech that their brand of he added, “The media that’s here, that’s the Humane Society of the United States. often resembled a sermon, Bundy called politics, which is covering this right now, I’m sure they’re The nonprofit’s website states that “ex- environmentalists “an enemy to humans,” here to mock you, make fun of you, call you treme special interests in America have and read from New American magazine, a socialist brand cowpokes. … They’re here to perpetuate evolved into a wealthy and successful at- which is published by a subsidiary of the their brand of politics, which is a socialist tack industry determined to control our far-right John Birch Society: “The fact of politics.” brand of politics.” Nunes, who also chairs farmers, eliminate hunting, outlaw ani- —U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes, that the U.N. functions as a church for R-Calif., speaking at the the House Intelligence Committee, advised mal exhibitions (like rodeos and circuses), the religion of environmentalists reveals Range Rights Symposium people to circumvent the mainstream me- and restrict animal ownership.” just how dangerous this religion is.” in Modesto last month dia if they wanted to be heard. Some presenters saw opportunity in Bundy also said that water shortage and He shared the stage with Trent Loos, a the current distrust of mainstream media. overpopulation are “lies,” adding later: farmer and radio host from Nebraska and “We are the new media,” Kimberly Fletch- “If anybody wants where my sources are a member of the Trump administration’s er, founder of the conservative advocacy from, I can give them to you; I’ll just send Agriculture Advisory Committee. Loos, group HomeMakers for America, said at you an email later.” who was the master of ceremonies at the symposium, later told me he thought the congressman “hit a home run” with his comments that day. Several of the 24 speakers echoed Nunes’ scorn for what they called the “cor- rupt” and broken Fourth Estate, urging attendees to share information through smart marketing and their own social media channels. As the distrust of mainstream media intensifies under the Trump administration, the symposium revealed how the decades-old Sagebrush Rebellion is using social media and alternative online sources to get its message out. The annual symposium is a direct out- growth of the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, led by Ammon Bundy. Following the 41-day occupation, an ad hoc group of supporters pledged to continue spreading awareness about what they saw as federal overreach on public lands. Thus, the Range Rights and Resources Symposium was born. With help from well-heeled sponsors, they held the first gathering in May 2016 in Layton, Utah, and the second last year in Bellev- ue, Nebraska.

Associate Editor Tay Wiles writes from Oakland, California.  @taywiles Ammon Bundy speaks during the Range Rights Symposium in Modesto, California. Andy Alfaro/Modesto Bee via ZUMA Wire www.hcn.org High Country News 5 The next episode for California cannabis

conservative church-going Christian and teetotaler, and she didn’t acknowledge the Why Compton said no to pot benefits of the plant until Guzman’s ter- National Park Service By Christine Ro minally ill brother, who has a rare genetic disorder, began using medicinal cannabis. This long-standing opposition to canna- THE LATEST e just got raided two Thursdays In Compton, which has since become bis among the older generations is common “Wago,” says the tank top-wearing increasingly prosperous, no one wants in California’s Latino communities. “One Backstory woman behind the counter, sounding non- a return to the worst of the crack crisis. of the things that our communities face is White Sands chalant about it. We’re talking inside an Chris Petit, a retired pastor and father fear: fear from the historical violence that National Monument, unmarked building on Rosecrans Avenue, of two who grew up in the area, has long came from the war on drugs, mass sentenc- in south-central a bustling street whose name has received been vocal about what he sees as Comp- ing and incarceration,” says Guzman. But New Mexico, lies within the Army’s shout-outs in songs by popular local rap- ton’s problems. “The farce which was the Latinos for Cannabis is betting on the ben- 3,150-square-mile pers, including Dr. Dre and Kendrick war on drugs in the ’90s incarcerated efits of medicinal cannabis and safe recre- White Sands Missile Lamar. On this weekday afternoon in many of our young men and at the same ational use, as well as the potential for job Range, and the road Compton, in southern Los Angeles, the time failed to do anything about a growing creation in communities of color. into the 225-square- smoky, dimly lit marijuana dispensary fea- addiction problem in our city.” Young mi- Advocates say it’s urgent for communi- mile monument, tures a steady stream of customers, who norities have long received unjust treat- ties to get involved in shaping the canna- established in 1933, pay $20 and up for cannabis strains with ment for nonviolent drug offenses, he says, bis industry now, by addressing the barri- is sometimes closed names like Thin Mint and F*ck Trump. and he remains skeptical about whether ers to legal sales, including the high cost of by weapons testing. This is one of a dozen or so dispensaries legal weed would benefit them. licenses and the legal or financial restric- Despite the military maneuvers, the area’s operating illegally in Compton. Though Petit recognizes that his city can’t — or tions on owners with criminal records. desert grasses, shrubs they’re subject to regular police raids and won’t — enforce the law and keep illegal Some cities are trying to level the playing and cacti support closures, they always seem to bounce back. dispensaries from operating. “What I am field: LA and Oakland have been experi- abundant wildlife, In 2016, 62 percent of local voters (and against is opening the city to an industry menting with social equity programs for including pronghorn, the majority of voters statewide) support- that offers no value beyond tax revenue, the new industry, providing support with desert bighorn sheep ed legalizing individual cannabis use in especially when enforcement is lacking,” licensing and other aspects for people and and exotic oryx. California. This meant that recreational Petit says. “It’s not what I want to see in neighborhoods that have been particular Petroglyphs and users wouldn’t be prosecuted, and it paved my neighborhood.” targets for marijuana-related arrests. other ancient relics the way for dispensaries to sell marijua- Such arguments are familiar to Fan- None of this will apply to Compton, abound (“Accidental na. But this January, just two years later, ny Guzman, who, with her husband, however, where local sales remain illegal. wilderness,” HCN, 5/24/10). Compton voters returned to the polls and co-founded the advocacy group Latinos At the Rosecrans Avenue dispensary, the overwhelmingly rejected the two ballot for Cannabis in 2014, with members in staff simply reopened a few days after the Followup measures that would have legalized local Compton. For Guzman, the issue is both last raid, welcoming back their loyal cus- Now, the monument sales. This tension — between state-level personal and cultural. Her mother is a tomers, cutting through the police tape. could become New support for use and city-level opposition to Mexico’s second sales — is at the heart of many of the bat- national park. In early tles over marijuana that are happening May, Sen. Martin across the West. In Compton, the situation Heinrich, D-N.M., is especially convoluted, as the city tries to introduced legisla- move on from a painful history scarred by tion to create White illegal drugs. , Sands National Park These days, Compton is majority Lati- with wide bipartisan and local support. The no; about a third of its population is black. bill would protect mili- But six decades ago, it was a nearly all- tary usage in the area white suburb of LA. Once it became hard- through existing agree- er for property owners to pursue openly ments and complete discriminatory policies and black families a land exchange with began arriving in large numbers in the the Army begun in the 1950s, most of the white population fled. 1970s to simplify man- The erosion of the local tax base, as well agement and protect as the departure of blue-collar jobs, led to cultural resources. In late April, the monu- rising unemployment and poverty. By the ment made headlines early 1980s, Compton had become known when scientists for the crack cocaine trade and the noto- discovered fossilized rious street gang it spawned, the Bloods. Pleistocene-era foot- This was at the height of the war on drugs, prints — perhaps the when law enforcement disproportionately first-ever tracks that targeted LA’s black and Latino communi- show early humans ties, spawning accusations of racial profil- hunting, in this case, a ing and police brutality. Chris Petit is a retired pastor and outspoken critic of the legalization of marijuana dispensaries giant ground sloth. in Compton, California, where he grew up and still lives with his wife and two sons. Petit was Jodi Peterson Christine Ro splits her time between Los Angeles among those who voted earlier this year to prohibit the legalization of marijuana sales, despite and London. the fact that it is legal throughout the state and in surrounding communities. Roberto (Bear) Guerra

6 High Country News May 28, 2018 The next episode for California cannabis Black women

rewrite Bridgett Davis, one of several female weed’s legacy entrepreneurs who have taken advantage of the wider acceptance in Los Angeles and legalization of marijuana and started By Ruxandra Guidi businesses selling marijuana products. Below, one of Davis’ ridgett Davis wore a bright flowery artisanal salves and B dress to welcome friends and ac- essential oils, which quaintances into her parents’ home in she has now infused Inglewood, a historically black city in with cannabis oil. southwestern Los Angeles. A big sign They’re based on homemade remedies propped by the entrance read “Launch she learned from her Party for Big Momma’s Legacy,” Davis’ great-grandmother, start-up company, which makes cannabis- known as Big Momma. infused essential oils and salves. The invi- Roberto (Bear) Guerra tation said noon, but things were running late: The so-called edibles like lemon and rose cookies and the ubiquitous brown- can help ease chronic nerve pain caused to bring profits of $3.7 billion by the end ies didn’t get served until closer to 1 p.m. by injury or surgery, it is increasingly be- of 2018, an effort is underway to ensure Neither did the “medicated” hibiscus tea. ing seen as a natural, non-habit-forming that the burgeoning industry is inclusive. The gathering, mostly of women of col- option for pain management. The city of Los Angeles is currently devel- or, was not simply to find new customers “Many of my clients are seniors,” said oping a “social equity” component to its and foster women-owned businesses. It Davis. “I tell them that they’re not going to regulations that would give licensing pri- was part of an effort to celebrate a prod- go to hell for using cannabis, then I show ority to those populations that have his- uct that — until this year — was illegal. them how to incorporate it into their ev- torically been most affected by drug law Not long ago, people here feared arrest eryday life.” enforcement. Smith is hopeful about plans for marijuana possession; according to But legal weed is very complicated, to make training programs and techni- the American Civil Liberties Union, back and entrepreneurs like Davis are still cal assistance more accessible. And she’s in 2013, African-Americans were nearly learning the ropes. On Jan. 1, California helping other black women find success in four times more likely to be arrested for became the sixth state to allow licensed legal weed, by guiding them through the marijuana possession than whites. Today, shops to sell marijuana to anyone 21 and licensing process and helping them devel- Los Angeles is considered the largest legal older. At the same time, new state regula- op a business plan and a path to becoming marijuana market in the world, with more tions and temporary licenses kicked in for financially stable. dispensaries than the entire state of Colo- every type of marijuana business. The pro- So far, Davis hasn’t sought out the rado. Now, black women like Davis — and cess is neither easy nor cheap: Between li- help of the California Minority Alliance or many others in the very communities that censes, permits and taxes, start-up costs the city of Los Angeles, preferring instead were most harmed by marijuana prohibi- can run as high as $20,000. to grow “Big Momma’s Legacy” on her tion — see an unexpected opportunity. “Let’s say you get a license, but if own. “I’ve had a few rappers and investors Davis started working with cannabis you’re not compliant, you’re going to fail,” reach out to me offering to help,” she tells four years ago. A real estate agent by day, Kathy Smith told me. Smith owns three me. “But I stay away from that,” wary of she wanted to kick a drinking habit, so she legal dispensaries in Los Angeles and is get-rich-quick schemes and scams target- began using essential oils “to stay calm.” director of the California Minority Alli- ing marijuana entrepreneurs. Inspired by the homemade remedies ance, a membership organization sup- At the launch party at her parents’ prepared by “Big Momma” — her great- porting people of color in the marijuana home, a table on the side of the room grandmother, Rachel Richardson — Davis market. “And this business is overtaxed displayed Davis’ salves alongside her cooked up all sorts of salves with natural and overregulated: Anyone from the state friends’ products — Kat’s homemade ingredients meant to relieve aches and can come to your shop and ask for your beauty creams and free samples of Will’s pains. “And then one day a lightbulb went records, at any time.” Cannabis taxes in “Hot Chocolate Cannicakes.” The guests off,” she told me. “What if I put some can- California are higher than for other indus- exchanged business cards, and around 20 nabis in it?” tries, and companies cannot claim typical people, mostly young women, lingered for Weed proved to be the ingredient that business deductions. lunch, becoming giddy with “medicated” set Davis’ products apart. With a growing Only about 1 percent of weed business- treats. They began to disperse as the af- body of research showing that marijuana es around the country are in the hands of ternoon wound down, chatting about their African-Americans and people of color, plans to work in the cannabis industry, Contributing editor Ruxandra Guidi writes from according to the Drug Policy Alliance. In still amazed by the knowledge that now Los Angeles, California.  @homelandsprod California, where the market is expected they could do this openly.

www.hcn.org High Country News 7 Mount Shasta, seen from Highway 89 near McCloud, California. G reg Vaughn/Alamy k oc Ist age/ Ym t million-square-foot bottling facility. The ar m

_ McCloud Community Services District, s Cutline. o

t the only local government, had entered

o Credit

ph into a closed-door agreement for a 100- year contract that placed no limits on THE LATEST the amount of surface and groundwater Nestlé could use. Backstory Locals feared that Nestlé would si- By the early 1900s, phon off the surface water that supplies trapping and their homes and gardens — an increas- poisoning had killed ingly precious asset threatened by climate off most wolverines change. A grassroots coalition challenged in the Lower 48, and the contract in Siskiyou County Superior today, fewer than Consider the source Court, which ruled it null and void. It 300 remain, mostly in Washington, Communities challenge the bottling of Mount Shasta’s water took five years of pressure before Nestlé Idaho, Montana scrapped its lobbying and legal efforts. and Wyoming. The By Jane Braxton Little But the respite for Cook and other op- deep snowpack they ponents was short-lived. In 2015, the Mc- require to raise young Cloud Artesian Spring Water Company is declining, due to ount Shasta reigns over Siskiyou Western communities are resisting the arrived with a new proposal: a small “bou- climate change. The M County, a commanding presence companies determined to extract their tique” operation using environmentally U.S. Fish and Wildlife even when cloaked in clouds. The snow water. Some, like the Siskiyou commu- friendly glass bottles. On a damp January Service proposed on its flanks percolates into a vast un- nity of Dunsmuir, welcome the jobs, while night this year, the three Sacramento- federal protections in 2013, but backtracked derground aquifer of volcanic tunnels others, such as McCloud, are fighting the area contractors behind the company met in July 2014, citing and bubbling springs. Steeped in legend attempts of international corporations to with the public in a community clubhouse. uncertainty about the and celebrated for its purity, Shasta wa- privatize their local water sources. “Water Their modest original plans have grown impacts of climate ter is almost as mysterious as its name- is a resource. It’s our resource. It’s why we to include a 100,000-square-foot plastic- change (“Climate sake California mountain. Little is known are here,” says Bob Hall, former mayor of bottling plant and the right to divert up to changes for wolverine about how much is actually stored there Weed. 200 gallons a minute for 25 years from In- listing,” HCN, or how it moves through the subsurface take Springs, where the company’s pipes 8/4/14). fractures. he latest proposal to bottle Shasta would be installed just above the water Locals and reverent pilgrims might water is aimed at McCloud, a faded T tank that supplies McCloud. They have no Followup have been the only ones to appreciate this logging town whose broad streets offer experience with water bottling, but were Now, for the first water if it weren’t for the private compa- glimpses of the peak’s glaciered slopes. drawn to McCloud by its lack of other in- time in more than nies now descending on the small towns Dominating downtown is the century-old dustries, says Brent Wiegand, one of the a century, both at the mountain’s base. Ten different pro- McCloud Hotel, built for lumber workers male and female partners. “We think we can be a part of the wolverines have posals have sought to bottle and send wa- in an era when the sawmill provided the solution for this town.” been found in ter to markets as far away as Japan. Four town’s electricity and steam heat. Today, Under its agreement with the services Wyoming’s Wind have been approved. the three-story hotel caters to skiers, hik- district, the company would pay $500,000

River Range, and Nestlé, Crystal Geyser and startups ers and anglers lured by one of the West’s annually for spring water. The project s o a breeding female t like McCloud Artesian Spring Water, at- most famous trout streams. would help fund the fire department, am- o was documented in tracted to the region by its combination of Across Main Street from the hotel is bulance and other services, and provide h Washington’s South water availability and economic decline, Mountain Community Thrift Center, an around 30 well-paying jobs, says Kimberly ora P

Cascades, south of ur

have been welcomed by county officials. artfully arranged hole-in-the-wall with Paul, the district general manager. A I-90. The discoveries This cradle of the s state of Jefferson is ice skates and vintage clothing for sale at came during the first That’s more than Nestlé offered, says range-wide wolverine generally resistant to regulations, and it bargain prices. On a cold January after- Cook, but the community still risks los- survey, conducted has been particularly accommodating to noon, Angelina Cook presides from behind ing control of its water by giving the bot- this spring by federal bottled water. With the collapse of logging the ironing board that serves as a sales tling company first priority. And the plant agencies, five states and mining before that, “other industries counter. Lean and athletic, with weath- may preclude other businesses that might and tribes. Bob Inman, are not exactly beating a path to us,” says ered laugh lines around blue-green eyes, prove far more beneficial for McCloud © Kennan / Harvey furbearer coordinator Siskiyou County Supervisor Ed Valenzu- Cook has a gray-flecked braid that swings without depleting the water supply: micro- for Montana Fish, ela. across her back. A McCloud resident and breweries, water parks, “businesses that Wildlife and Parks, But some residents of the towns watershed advocate with the Mount Shas- use but don’t export water,” says Cook. “I told the Casper Star- scattered across this Northern Califor- ta Bioregional Ecology Center, Cook, 42, am not opposed to attracting wealth to the Tribune, “The three things we’re working nia county are questioning the effects of has spent 13 years working to protect the region, but let’s do it in a way the commu- on are connectivity, commercial pumping on the aquifer and area from threats to its communities and nity can benefit.” reintroductions to demanding more scientific information. ecosystems. Critics object to what they call sweet- historic range and Even as bottled water sales grow — from “And here we go again,” she says with heart exemptions for bottling companies, monitoring the 9.2 billion gallons nationally in 2011 to a weary smile. citing a dearth of information about the population.” 12.8 billion gallons in 2016 — numerous When Nestlé Waters North America water table and a lack of scientific stud- Jodi Peterson came to McCloud in 2003, the community ies on groundwater pumping’s impacts. Jane Braxton Little writes on science and natural of 1,100 residents had just days to review Exporting groundwater out of the coun- resources from Northern California. the corporation’s proposal to pump 1,250 ty requires a permit, but the ordinance  @JBraxtonLittle gallons a minute of spring water into a Please see Mount Shasta, page 22

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12 High Country News May 28, 2018 FEATURE By Jonathan Thompson

The River of Lost Souls Life and death on the Animas

“The farmers along the Animas River are sitting and a worm on a hook. I would throw the bait as down and permitting the waters of that river to be far as I could, which probably wasn’t that far, but so tainted and polluted as that soon it will merit then it didn’t really matter. I gently held the line, the name of Rio de las Animas Perdidas, given it until I felt the telltale tug that prompted me to by the Spaniards. With water filled with slime and grab the branch and sprint up the beach. I turned poison, carrying qualities which destroy all agri- back to see a trout on the line, flopping in the cultural values of ranchers irrigated therefrom, it sand, its scales shiny like mica. I picked up the will be truly a river of lost souls.” fish, felt its weight, its power, its will to live, and watched for a moment as its scarlet gills fluttered —Durango Wage Earner, 1907 in the sun. “Don’t let it suffer like that,” my dad said, bending down and gently but firmly taking was maybe 6 years old, and the pungent hold of the gasping fish. He struck it against a aroma of the season’s first cutting of hay driftwood log, and it twitched a few more times still lingered in the air on my grandparents’ before it stilled. Blood trickled from its mouth. farm in the Animas River Valley in south- From the trees, cotton fell like snow. west Colorado. My father led my older Just downstream from the sandbar there was Ibrother and I on a walk, stopping occasionally to a place where the riverbanks got steeper and the point out a stalk of asparagus just gone to seed, water darker, and cottonwood branches jutted like a red-tailed hawk floating overhead, telling us bleached bones from the current, which whis- what it was and looking at us with warm brown pered in what I imagined to be ancient tongues. eyes to make sure we understood. We ambled Stand too close, my grandmother warned, and the past a raspberry patch and cornfield, then the bank would give way and you’d fall in, the under- low, whitewashed milk house and the rickety hay tow pulling you deep down into the cold, where barn, through a gaping, dank culvert. The culvert you would join the lost souls, the animas perdidas had been built to divert the Animas’ floodwaters of the river’s name. under the highway that led to Durango, five miles My grandmother did not mention the other to the south, but to a 6-year-old boy, it felt like the dark secrets of those waters. She could not have gates to the underworld. known that on an August day four decades later, Beyond the culvert, the river ran slow, lazing 3 million gallons of toxic water would come through sandbanks and wetlands and cotton- bursting out of the Gold King Mine, turning our wood groves, bending back on itself, as though to beloved river a psychedelic shade of orange for rest from its tumultuous southward tumble from miles downstream, reminding us of the myriad the nearby San Juan Mountains. Sand gathered ways our world has come unhinged, of the trans- on the outside of the sharpest bends, creating gressions we’ve committed against the land, the beaches like the one we called the Sandbar, where water, the air and even ourselves. She never told we fished and played and picnicked and camped. us that the real lost souls of this river are those I didn’t have a fishing pole, so that day, my dad killed or displaced by our insatiable hunger to cut a long willow branch, to which he added fish- pull the riches from this land, to take, take, take ing line, a lead sinker and red-and-white bobber, and never give back.

www.hcn.org High Country News 13 In 1955, a 33-year-old doctor named George Moore Moore didn’t like the looks of the operation, so he sent staffers arrived in Durango, then a town of 7,500 people, to oversee to check it out. They “brought back dead fish heavy with uranium the San Juan Basin Health Department, which served four ore,” he later wrote. The mill, he learned, had been giving tailings counties of southwestern Colorado. Moore, who served in the to area highway departments and construction companies, to use military and later worked in Kathmandu, Nepal, for the U.S. as road base, on streets and sidewalks, and even in homes in Du- Public Health Service, might have expected a staid office job in a rango’s burgeoning post-war suburbs. He notified his former col- healthy community; instead, he found a leaderless organization leagues at the U.S. Public Health Service, but it took three years in disarray, in a region full of health hazards and illness. Rico, a before the agency finally sent a team of researchers to assess the small mining town to the northwest, had a tuberculosis out- situation. What they found was unnerving. break. Mesa Verde National Park, an hour away, lacked sanitary Each day, the mill churned through about 500 tons of ore. drinking water. The Southern Ute Indian Reservation had high The chunks of pale yellow rock were pulverized into a sandy rates of obesity, alcoholism, pneumonia, tuberculosis and infant powder, then processed with a chemical soup. One ton of ore mortality — along with an epidemic of sexually transmitted yielded around 6 pounds of uranium, the remainder ending up diseases brought by a recent wave of oil and gas workers. as waste. The Durango mill kicked out some 997,000 pounds of To top it off, in relatively affluent Durango, a uranium mill tailings per day, containing leftover uranium, a host of naturally and mountain of radioactive tailings loomed along the shores occurring toxic metals, and leaching chemicals, including sulfu- of the Animas. In 1942, the federal government purchased the ric acid, salt and soda ash, tributyl phosphate and kerosene. remains of an old smelter on Durango’s south side and leased Norman Norvelle was in the seventh grade in Farmington, the site to the United States Vanadium Corporation, which New Mexico, in 1958. His family had moved to the region not secretly milled uranium for the Manhattan Project. After the long before, and his father was a big fan of the mountains, so end of World War II, the Atomic Energy Commission bought the nearly every weekend they all drove up the Animas River and site, and Vanadium resumed milling uranium and producing past the uranium mill. “The (mill) had several large ponds next yellowcake. to the river that were usually full and a deep green,” Norvelle, a tall man with a friendly demeanor, who worked for years as a scientist with the New Mexico Health Department, told me. “Many times when we drove by the ponds, the dirt walls and dikes retaining the acid process wastewater would be breached. The ponds would be empty, and on the river shore you could see where the contents went into the river.” What the young Norvelle did not see was a separate liquid waste stream that flowed directly into the river at about 340 gallons per minute, carrying with it at least 15 tons per day of spent ore solids, leftover acid leaching chemicals and an iron- aluminum sludge. At the time, the Animas and San Juan rivers were the primary drinking water sources for at least 30,000 people downstream. Farmers irrigated thousands of acres of crops with the water, and their cows, sheep and goats drank it. Of all the nasty ingredients, radium-226 — a radioactive “daughter” of uranium, with a half-life of 1,600 years — was of most concern to the researchers. Radium was discovered by Marie Curie — in ore mined in western Colorado, about 100 miles from Durango, in fact. It was once seen as a sort of miracle substance. Paint it on watch numbers or even clothing, and they’d glow in the dark. It pur- portedly could cure cancer and impotence and give those who used it an “all-around healthy glow,” as one advertisement put it. During the early 1900s, it was added to medicines, cosmet- ics and sometimes even food. Makers of the “Radiendocrinator” instructed men (and only men) to wear “the adapter like any ‘athletic strap.’ This puts the instrument under the scrotum as it should be. Wear at night. Radiate as directed.” Radium’s glow dimmed, however, when the women who painted it onto watches began dying, and the inventor of the Radiendocrinator was stricken with bladder cancer. We now know that radium is highly radioactive and a “bone-seeker,” meaning that when it is ingested it makes its way to the skeleton, where it decays into other radioactive daughter elements, including radon, and bombards the surrounding tissue with radiation. According to the Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry, exposure leads to “anemia, cataracts, fractured teeth, cancer (especially bone cancer), and death.” The government scientists sampled river water, milk from cows that drank the water, and crops that were irrigated with river water for 75 miles downstream from the mill. They found that the Animas River was polluted with chemical and radioactive materials. Water, mud and algae samples taken two miles below the mill were 100 to 500 times more radioactive than the control samples taken above the mill. Another 20 miles downstream, farmers were drinking and irrigating with water that was 12 to 25 times as radioactive as the Animas above the Navajo miners operate a mucking machine at the Rico Mine in 1953, where pyrite was extracted mill, double the Public Health Service’s “maximum permissible to use in the manufacture of sulfuric acid for uranium processing, top. Above, the smelter, stack concentration.” and tailings pile along the Animas River, where uranium was processed. Water that Norvelle drank from the taps in his Farmington Special Collections/Center for Southwest Research (UNM Libraries); LOC HAER CO-38-A

14 High Country News May 28, 2018 Dolph Kuss, a downhill ski coach in Durango in the early 1950s, skis down the Smelter Mountain tailings pile. C ourtesy of the Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College home had 10 times the radioactivity of Durango’s tap water. shuttered the Durango mill in 1963, and moved its operations “The river was Cabbage, sweet corn, apples and other crops from downstream to Shiprock, New Mexico. There, Vanadium took over the Kerr- farms tested similarly high in radioactivity. Downstreamers McGee uranium mill, constructed in 1954 on the banks of the a pea-green who drank from the river and ate local food were taking in at San Juan River, on the Navajo Nation. It’s hard to see the move least 250 percent of the maximum permissible concentration of as anything but a blatant act of environmental injustice — a color during radiation. This was added to the strontium-90, another bone- continuation of late 19th century policies when Native Ameri- seeker, that wafted in high concentrations over most of the cans were forcibly relocated to make way for greedy extractive low flow near Interior West as a result of the extensive nuclear bomb testing industries. Nearly everyone for hundreds of miles downstream the state at the Nevada Test Site during the same time period. from the Kerr-McGee mill was Diné. There was no George The river also had high levels of other toxic metals, both Moore to sound the alarm, nor government scientists at hand to line. (It) was from upstream metal-mining pollution and the uranium mill, get to the bottom of pollution problems. In 1960, when Kerr-Mc- and was virtually devoid of “bottom fauna,” such as aquatic Gee was operating the mill, one of the evaporation ponds broke, mostly dead, bugs and algae, and fish, for nearly 30 miles downstream from sending at least 250,000 gallons of highly acidic raffinate, con- except for a the mill. “The river was a pea-green color during low flow near taining high levels of radium and thorium, into the river. None the state line,” Jack Scott, who was in elementary school in of the relevant officials were notified, and people continued to few suckers.” Aztec when the study occurred, told me. “The river was mostly drink the water, put it on their crops and give it to their sheep dead, except for a few suckers.” and cattle. It wasn’t until five days later, after hundreds of dead —Jack Scott, who was Clearly, the Vanadium Corporation was violating the laws fish had washed up on the river’s shores for 60 miles down- in elementary school and regulations. But since the same laws were virtually tooth- stream, that the public was alerted to the disaster. in Aztec, New Mexico, in the 1950s, when less, there was little the feds could do except ask them to stop. the Public Health Shortly after the results were revealed to the general public, When Vanadium Corp. left Durango, it left a festering mess Service conducted a Vanadium officials vowed to build a treatment facility to reduce behind. Two huge piles of tailings lay piled up at the mill site, study on pollution in the poisoning of the Animas River, prompting the government perilously close to the Animas River. No lining was installed be- the Animas River to report that the “situation was brought under control before low the piles to prevent leaching into the groundwater, and no the population of the area had ingested sufficient amounts of cap put on the piles to prevent tailings from running off into the this radioactive material to cause detectable health damage.” water. Wind picked up the fine dust and blew it over the river The declaration, while calming, is dubious. By that time, onto town. The closest neighborhood to the pile was low-income downstreamers had been drinking tainted water for at least a and predominantly Hispanic. Kids played in the tailings, revel- decade, if not more, and no one had done a systematic investiga- ing in the sandy beach-like texture; one local told High Coun- tion of the effects on human health. In 1959, Public Health Ser- try News in 1980 that it was “the biggest, best sandpile in the vice officials launched a study to much fanfare, asking Farming- world.” For a long time, folks would go over to the mill and fill a ton and Aztec school kids to skip the tooth fairy and turn their truck with the tailings, to break up the clay-like soil in gardens, baby teeth over to them. In return, the children would receive a or use in the foundations of homes, or under the concrete side- lapel pin that read: “I gave a tooth for research!” walk. In September 1970, a huge rainstorm dumped onto the And yet, there’s no record of the study ever being completed, San Juans and sent torrents running down the Animas River, nor was any other epidemiological study ever done on the down- swelling it to double the volume of the peak spring runoff. The stream residents, who for nearly two decades had consumed rushing waters didn’t quite reach the bottom of the uranium radioactive and otherwise poisonous food. Fearing more public tailings piles, but the event reminded residents of the potential outcry and grappling with a drop in uranium prices, Vanadium for such a catastrophic event.

www.hcn.org High Country News 15 A dead fish lies in I was born in a Durango hospital just days after the flood- bottom sediment downstream from the old mill site. One sample the shallows of the waters subsided, and while I was still an infant, my family registered 800 picocuries-per-gram (pCi/g) of radium-226, which Animas River a week moved from a little trailer on my grandparents’ farm into a is 160 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s limit for after the spill. house in town, a couple of blocks from the river and about one drinking water, and at least as radioactive as a typical uranium Brent Lewis/The Denver mile north (upstream) of the old uranium mill and its tailings mill’s wastewater. Post via Getty Images piles. In the late 1970s, when I was still a boy, a local doctor The river, which twisted through Durango like a scoliotic named Scott McCaffrey noticed what seemed to be an unusually spine, was our playground. We spent hours on the Animas, high number of lung cancer cases in town. When state health wading, swimming, fishing and chasing minnows. We’d dislodge department researchers took a closer look, they determined old cottonwoods that had drifted downriver, drag them into the that McCaffrey’s statistics were off, but they did notice anoma- current, and grip them with our skinny legs, riding maybe 20 lies on the south side of town, where folks were being dosed yards before the log bucked us into the icy waters. My brother, a with elevated levels of radon-222, which can cause lung cancer. trout-whisperer of sorts, reeled in a half-dozen fish a day, feed- They cautioned against alarm, claiming the sample size was too ing the family all summer long. When we got older, we’d head to small to be conclusive. A more systematic epidemiological study the river on warm summer nights, strip down and leap from the was never performed. footbridge into the deep, dark cold. My father was a writer and an intellectual jack-of-all trades. We mostly had the river to ourselves. But always, in the But more than that, he was a resident of this particular region, background, the tailings piles loomed. We traversed the rocky and as such he tended to get dragged into other positions. In the banks of the river just below, where rattlesnakes posed a more late ’70s, he was elected to the Durango City Council. He and immediate danger than radon or thorium. Occasionally, on his colleagues were pushing hard to nudge the city out of its nights after a snowy winter storm, people would sneak up the fading industrial, extractive past and into what today we might piles and ski down their steep slopes, illuminated under the or- call a New West amenity economy, one that banked on quality of ange glow of streetlights. When I was 8 years old, 15 years after life, cottage industry and tourism. He thought the town should the Durango mill stopped operating, a scientist examined river- value the river not as a conveniently located dump, but for its

16 High Country News May 28, 2018 intrinsic, ecological and recreational values. I still remember lessness. I put drops of morphine on his dried-up tongue, like when he brought home plans for the downtown riverfront — the Sacrament. I pushed tiny seeds into soft, rich soil, lit his with parks and walking paths and restaurants with patios over- cigarettes and dressed him for chemotherapy and could never looking the water — and how exciting it seemed at the time. get his shoes onto his swollen feet. The seedlings thrived in the Sometime during his term, someone put a big yellow placard warm air of death, grew as he withered. atop the mill piles, warning of their radioactive dangers. This Cancer took his mother a decade earlier. It would take his upset my dad, though I’m not entirely sure why. I suppose he younger sister 15 years later. Victims and survivors of the felt it was alarmist, and that such scaremongering might ham- disease are everywhere around here, it seems, in Silverton per their efforts to replace the old with the new. No one would and Shiprock, Durango and Farmington. We look to the world want to live in a radioactive town or play in a radioactive river. around us for answers: the plume of fallout from the Nevada In 1986, the Department of Energy finally came in and bomb tests, the junk pouring from the coal plant smokestacks, spent $500 million in taxpayer dollars to clean up the mess — a the smelters and the mines, the metals and radon wafting in mess it had originally financed with taxpayer dollars. I was in the wind over our towns. high school, and I vividly remember going out onto the roof of The science and the statistics tell us we’re looking in the the school to watch the demolition of the original smelter, its wrong places. Sure, living next to an old uranium mill or gas tall brick chimney crumbling into a cloud of dust. The chimney well may elevate your cancer risk, but it’s by an infinitesimally had served as a sort of monument to a hundred years of indus- small amount. Studies of the folks living in uranium country try that had built our community; its fall was mourned even at Grants, New Mexico, and Uravan, Colorado, have failed to then. Over the next five years, the bricks (and all the detritus turn up unusually high cancer rates among the folks who lived from mill and smelter) were scraped away and buried just over near the mills but didn’t work in the mines. And when a cluster the hill, less than two miles away as the crow flies. Especially is found, the researchers and health officials attribute it to egregious hot spots around town, where tailings had been used elevated smoking rates, or natural background radiation. We for construction, were also cleaned up. But a lot of tailings were learn that the zinc, lead, cadmium and copper spilling out of the “Water is our left behind and still lurk underneath streets and sidewalks. The hardrock mines will kill fish, but unless one drinks the chroni- life. ... We site of the once-sprawling industrial complex is now a dog park, cally orange and acidified waters of Cement Creek every day, and is slated to become the city’s official homeless camp. The the acid mine drainage won’t hurt the humans. are confused, place where the radioactive water once poured into the river is We are Westerners, pathologically independent, pragmatic the biggest rapid in town, and a favorite of rafters and kayakers people. We accept the science, and scold those who put giant, anger alike. scaremongering signs atop tailings. We scoff at the ones who starting to Mills all over that part of the West were cleaned up at around cringe in fear when they see a river run orange with iron hy- the same time, from Uravan to Grand Junction, and from Rifle droxides, the same stuff that, after all, gives some curry sauces boil, our to Moab, where the cleanup of the old Atlas Mill continues. At their burnished color. And we’re happy to shoulder the blame Shiprock, the waste was impounded on-site in a giant tomb-like for our own demise. The tailings piles didn’t kill my father. He elders have repository. Yet no matter how many millions of tons of tailings smoked too much, worked too hard, didn’t use sunscreen, had are removed, the toxic legacy endures, somewhere, somehow. bad genetics or just plain rotten luck. That’s what killed him. sad misty Studies in Shiprock have found elevated levels of birth defects, And yet a seed of doubt remains, an inkling that something else eyes, this is kidney disease, cancers and other persistent health problems. is going on, something the data cannot reveal. Radioactive, heavy-metal-laden water continues to seep into so surreal.” Many Devils Wash, adjacent to the site of the Shiprock mill, and Duane “Chili” Yazzie is a Diné farmer, and he irrigates his then into the San Juan River, flummoxing scientists. Groundwa- fields of corn, squash, tomatoes and hay with San Juan River —Farmer and poet Duane “Chili” Yazzie, ter beneath the Durango dog park still swims with high levels water. The day after the Gold King Mine blew out in August from his poem about of uranium, lead and other contaminants. We can only guess at 2015, as word got out about the yellow river, he was out in those the effects of the Gold what lurks in the silt of the Animas riverbed. fields. Like other farmers downstream from the spill, Yazzie had King spill on If my father were still alive, I suspect he’d be surprised and to shut off the water to his fields and watch his crops wilt under the Diné people even a little baffled by how quickly the people of Durango man- the rainless summer sky. The Environmental Protection Agency aged to forget that part of their town’s history — how soon after sent giant tanks of water for the horses, sheep and goats, but it was gone they’d pushed not just the tailings and the old mill, the water arrived in old gas-field tanks, tainted with residue. but all of that toxic past, into the dark corners of their minds, The plume passed by, the water returned to its regular silty convincing themselves that it was all safe now, all cleaned up, state, and a few weeks after the spill, the EPA and state and and that it now made sense to drop a million dollars or more county health departments assured everyone along the Animas on a house in south Durango — where for decades sulfur- and San Juan rivers that all was back to normal. They had dioxide-tinged train smoke, lead-loaded smelter smoke and sampled the waters exhaustively, and the data didn’t lie: The radon-tinged dust had settled out of the sky. He had hoped that water may not have been pure, but it was no worse than before historic preservation and remembering would not only attract the spill. It was safe to swim in, fish in, irrigate with and, with people to the region, but also help us learn from our mistakes. proper treatment, drink. Instead, we got mass amnesia as a form of economic develop- Nine months after the spill, Yazzie stepped up to the lectern ment. at a conference on the Animas and San Juan rivers in Farming- There are those, however, who will never forget. The surviv- ton. Most of the other speakers were scientists, engineers or bu- ing mill workers whose friends died painful deaths won’t forget. reaucrats, presenting technical papers on sediment transport, Those who lived downwind or downstream from the mill — bulkheads and microbial communities. Yazzie, his graying black anyone whose grandmother, father, aunt or friend died of cancer hair pulled back into a bun, recited a poem he had written, or kidney failure — will always wonder if it was the tailings, the titled “Yellow River.” The poem tells the story of his farm, the Nevada nuclear tests, not enough sunscreen or just terrible luck Gold King spill and the aftermath — a story of sadness, trauma that killed their loved ones. and desperation — and he read it with force and passion, beat style, like Allen Ginsberg. My father was dying. They found cancer in his lungs in the “Water is our life,” he intoned. “It’s who we are. … We don’t spring of 1997, when he was 56. Over the next winter, the can- know what will happen, the water is being shut off. We are cer slept, but it returned for springtime, leafing out, blooming confused, anger starting to boil, our elders have sad misty eyes, mercilessly throughout his body and brain. He sat in his chair this is so surreal. … Government sez farmers will get compen- by the window and stared out at the Sleeping Ute, at the sky, at sated, payday time, lawyers licking their chops. Water tests ok, the canyon in between. This was something he did long before Rez Prez sez turn on water, EPA steps out, water must be ok, the sickness invaded his body, but I could never figure out what bye, bye.” so raptly held his gaze. I put a garden into the earth outside his Despite the reassurances from the authorities, Diné farm- little house, hacking away at the claylike soil with tearful ruth- ers in the Shiprock Chapter, Yazzie included, refused to use the

www.hcn.org High Country News 17 water. They were so uncertain that they abstained from irrigat- “I stepped away from being out in the field sampling and … ing their crops for at least a year. Their fields fallowed, corn went started to think about interpreting data. You and I can sit here unplanted. The scientists and officials were baffled by this and, and talk about arsenic and talk about manganese and barium admittedly, so was I. Even at its peak, the Gold King slug was not … but these chemicals have no word in the Navajo language. especially dangerous. It didn’t kill any fish as far as anyone could They have no meaning. Scientists were looking at the origin of tell, and by the time it reached Utah, it wasn’t even distinguish- the contamination. … I was looking as a scientist at cultural able from the usual San Juan River silt. Why ignore science, at and traditional aspects — how the Navajo live and how they the expense of your crops, maybe even your sustenance? use the water in their daily lives. But when I think of that spring, and my dad, I think that “We are made up of four basic elements: water, land, air and maybe there are some places science just can’t reach. Chemi- heat,” Charley said. “If any one of these elements is disrupted, cally speaking, the water quality may be no different, but the we are out of balance with nature. We are out of sync. We are place — the interaction between the people here and the land not walking in harmony. We are not walking in beauty. That’s and water — I think that did change somehow. Those who value what happened out there.” the river the most, who draw physical and spiritual sustenance I don’t know whether my father walked in beauty or not, but from its waters, were altered. Once a mountain is mined, it is I believe that he spent his life trying to do so, constantly search- diminished, a place out of balance, transfigured. When dyna- ing for that harmony and balance, in spite of the culture from mite and draglines chomp apart traditional grazing lands, they which he came. And finally, all that searching took its toll. take away more than just grass, rocks and shrubs; they shatter My father’s body wilted away to a skeleton, his lips dried up a delicate balance that existed between humans and the land and we doused them with sponges, and his arms were no more for thousands of years. When a cluster of oil wells and holding than loose skin draped on brittle bones. His teeth fell out, one tanks explodes, rending the night, the place is tainted. This di- by one. But his hands remained the same. His hands, which minishment, or unbalancing, produces a trauma that wends its had always seemed huge and powerful to me, had somehow way into our psyches and into our cells, maybe even our genes. been spared from the disease and its equally brutal treatment. About six months after the spill, the University of Arizona His hands that had written thousands of words. His hands that Institute of the Environment held a panel discussion to explore could pull away dried springtime grass on the edge of a moun- the Diné perspective on the Gold King spill. Yazzie, who has be- tain meadow to reveal the speckled eggs of a snowy plover. His come something of an authority on the subject, was a panelist, hands that could coax a lush array of spinach and tomatoes; along with a man named Perry Charley, who is also Diné and a zinnias and radishes; cosmos and squash from the rocky, red professor at Diné College. Charley grew up in Waterflow, New soil in the garden in the backyard of our house in Durango. Mexico, along the San Juan River, not far from two giant coal I had always assumed it was his mind that gave him his power plants, and has worked for years on uranium issues on power. But as his life faded, I realized it must have been his the Navajo Nation. He was a witness to the orange slug coming hands, for they, more than anything, connected him to his be- Jonathan Thompson is down the San Juan, and he explained how its effects transcend- loved earth, this beautiful land, this unbalanced place — where a contributing editor ed the data and the science. “My first inclination as a scientist on spring days, when the wind kicks up, the yellow dust lifted at High Country News. was to go out there and do sampling … but I started to back off the tailings piles and drifts, ghost-like, toward the bright  @jonnypeace off, because I knew that this was catastrophic,” Charley said. blue sky.

Adapted from River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster. Torrey Roy Etcitty points out debris on the banks of the San Juan River, which catches water from the Animas, following the Gold King Mine spill. Etcitty House Press, 2018. was among the farmers and residents of the Navajo Nation whose water was shut off after the spill. Brent Lewis/The Denver Post via Getty Images 18 High Country News May 28, 2018 MARKETPLACE

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20 High Country News May 28, 2018 Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada & High Country News present Environmental Justice in the Great Basin WITH Debra Harry · Abby Johnson Kimberly Padilla-Estrada Marla Painter · Grace Potorti MODERATED BY Paul Larmer Executive Director/Publisher · High Country News Opening Prayer/Song with Norm Harry Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe Friday, June 8, 2018 6:30 - 8:00 PM University of Nevada, Reno Crowley Student Union Theater · 1664 N. Virginia St, Reno, Nevada Free and open to the public. More information at www.hcn.org/great-basin.

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www.hcn.org High Country News 21 DEAR FRIENDS

Scorpions and other fair-weather friends

With spring warming up, camping season had to be shooed — very politely — into West. Johanna, a Colorado native whose has come to western Colorado. On an a patch of bunchgrass before play could father set up one of the first alpine early May weekend, a group of edito- continue. research stations outside Boulder, reads rial staffers ventured into the nearby Meanwhile, some non-venomous HCN to keep tabs on the West from her Gunnison Gorge Wilderness to test our friends have visited our Paonia office. home in rural Wisconsin. Peg and David tents and bags. The trip was bittersweet, Peg and David Engel came by in their We also welcomed new staff members. Engel, left and right, celebrating Editor-in-Chief Brian Calvert’s 20-plus-year-old pickup with attached Debra Muzikar and Rebecca Hemer have who arrived in a birthday while saying adieu to Assis- camper, after hiking Comb Ridge in joined our customer support staff, so camper sporting a tant Editor Anna Smith, who will work Bears Ears National Monument. Both next time you call you might hear their “West Obsessed” for HCN from Portland, Oregon. But we work with an organization called Stay friendly voices. Debra comes to us from bumper sticker, are shown with made some new friends, including the Cool, which seeks to bring climate change Aspen, where she worked in the nonprofit HCN Development tiny scorpion that crawled onto editorial curricula into schools. world. Rebecca just moved to Crawford Director Laurie intern Jessica Kutz’s ball cap, completely Alan Apt and Nancy Olsen, from Ned- from the big city of Grand Junction, Colo- Milford. Paul Larmer disrupting our card game. The little fella erland, Colorado, dropped by on a Friday rado. When she’s not at work, she’s hang- afternoon, on their way home from a five- ing out in the garden with her 4-year-old day camping trip in Utah’s San Rafael daughter, Briley. Josh McIntire, who still Swell. The longtime subscribers talked works part-time for the Delta County Li- about their hometown’s growing pains, brary District, is joining the tech wizards as new residents arrive from elsewhere in the IT department. When he’s not at on the Front Range, especially Boulder. work here (or fixing a library computer), They left as Research Fund contributors. Josh is likely chasing around one of his Thanks, folks! four kids, or enjoying a movie. Gregory Staple, a longtime resident Corrections: A caption from our of Washington, D.C., likes to spend time Research Fund page, (HCN, 4/16/18), in Marble, Colorado, in the mountains incorrectly said Gates of the Arctic musk east of town. Gregory, who calls HCN oxen came from Russia; they arrived via a “national treasure,” had lunch with Greenland. “What to do with an extra Development Director Laurie Milford billion or two?” (HCN, 4/30/18) called and Publisher Paul Larmer, and shared New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall chair of the thoughts on expanding our readership in Senate Committee on Indian Affairs; he California and on the East Coast. is the vice-chair. We regret the errors. Subscriber Johanna Solms visited — Carl Segerstrom, while on an extended trip around the for the staff

Mount Shasta continued from page 8 Geyser’s proposal to reopen a Coca-Cola what it was 40 years ago,” he says. Here, plant idled since 2010. Neighbors com- the expansion of a Crystal Geyser plant in exempts bottling companies, and it doesn’t plained the previous operation depleted operation since 1996 is eclipsed by a court apply to spring water. State laws requir- their household wells. But in 2013, Siskiy- battle over who owns the water in question. ing local regulation of groundwater do not ou supervisors authorized the new project Around the West, other rural communi- apply because most of Siskiyou County is with no public hearings and no caps on ties are also contesting bottling proposals. not considered a groundwater basin. pumping groundwater, which pays noth- Nestlé’s decade-old effort to open a plant Cook coordinated a 2016 ballot mea- ing to the community. A citizens’ group in Cascade Locks, on the Columbia River sure that would have required a permit demanded a review of the impacts and in Oregon, failed in October, when Oregon for all groundwater exports. Nearly 56 eventually won an environmental report Gov. Kate Brown, D, halted a critical ex- percent of the voters rejected it, however. certified in December. change of water rights. In Southern Cali- Fears that bottling companies will drain It was not the victory they hoped for, fornia, Nestlé is disputing a state report community water are unfounded, says Jill says Bruce Hillman, president of We Ad- that says it lacks proper rights to about Culora, a spokeswoman for International vocate Through Environmental Review. three-quarters of the water it withdraws Bottled Water Association. Bottled water The report contains numerous factual from the San Bernardino National Forest. comprises just 0.011 percent of all water errors, relies on “old scientific data,” and Siskiyou County citizens are pressing and 0.02 percent of all groundwater used provides no way for the county to enforce for information about their water before in the United States. limits on pumping if the operation affects more international corporations move in. In an aquifer as convoluted as Shas- neighboring wells, he says. Crystal Geyser The Mount Shasta group is involved in ta’s, it’s not easy to determine the effects officials declined to comment. court-mandated settlement discussions of pumping groundwater or diverting County officials say they’ll be moni- with the county over the Crystal Gey- springs for bottled water, says Gordon toring the company to ensure it does not ser environmental review, while Weed’s Grant, a hydrologist with the U.S. Forest harm the environment. “No one’s going to citizens expect a ruling later this year Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Sta- get a free ride,” says County Supervisor on water ownership. In McCloud, a draft tion. With most of the 80 inches of annual Valenzuela. environmental review for the proposed precipitation seeping underground, some Hillman and his group are not con- bottling operation should be available in estimates suggest as much as 40 million vinced. With the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, 2019. acre-feet may be stored in the complex they have asked a Siskiyou County judge From her perch behind the ironing volcanic fissures — more than California’s to set aside the county’s environmental board at the McCloud thrift store, Cook top 100 reservoirs combined. report. seems resigned to a long struggle over cor- The residents of Mount Shasta City, In Weed, a gritty working-class town porate prospecting for Shasta water. She 12 miles northwest of McCloud, want to on the northwest flanks of Mount Shasta, shakes her head with a wry smile. “It’s learn more about their aquifer. They hope former Mayor Hall has been watching the nothing less than a water industry siege to bring some scientific scrutiny to Crystal water table for decades. “We know it’s not on Mount Shasta,” she says.

22 High Country News May 28, 2018 WRITERS ON THE RANGE

A 2007 photo of a woodland caribou in the southern Selkirk Mountains of Idaho. Steve Forrest/USFWS, Pacific Region

A quiet goodbye to the Selkirk caribou

To steal a line from the poet T.S. El- happen in the future, or has already hap- always come about with a meteor strike iot: This is the way the world ends / Not pened in the past. This is happening now, from outer space. It’s usually a slower with a bang but a whimper. Worse yet, on our watch. process — a trickle of bad news that extinction comes without even a whim- Mountain caribou are uniquely comes gradually to a stop. per, only a click and a yawn. adapted to life in snowy mountains. They The fate of Selkirk mountain cari- The end of the line seems imminent thrive so well in harsh winter climates bou isn’t unique. Today, there are less for the last caribou of the Lower 48. that they migrate up the mountains in than 100 bighorn sheep left in the Teton Woodland caribou once roamed the for- the winter, surviving on certain types of Range near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. ested northern tier from Maine to Michi- lichen that hang from low tree branches. There are about 75 resident orca whales gan to Washington state, as they had for It’s a precarious way to make a living, in Puget Sound off Seattle. When popula- OPINION BY centuries. One herd has struggled for though, and it doesn’t take much to tion numbers get this low, conservation Ben Long decades along the border of Washington, impact their survival. gets expensive, and the odds of survival Idaho and British Columbia, in the Sel- Caribou get killed by cars and grow increasingly long. kirk Mountain Range. Although I have poachers and cougars and wolves. But The Endangered Species Act is seen the distinctive footprints of these these are tiny nicks in the population important, but the way out of this cycle caribou, I never caught up with any of compared to the slashing wounds of the is to not end up relying on it so heavily them on the hoof. large-scale clear-cut logging that has in the first place — to keep the land and Now, my chances may soon be over. swept over British Columbia, Idaho water and wildlife healthy enough to not Biologists recently completed their win- and Washington since the 1960s. I don’t need the emergency room. For that, we ter survey of these animals and found intend to point fingers; I print words on need to acknowledge that wildlife habi- only three individuals in the Selkirks. pulp, live in a wooden house and have tat has a value, whether we are weigh- This is down from nearly 50 a decade friends and neighbors who make a living ing it against cheap oil and a policy of ago. All three caribou are female. You cutting and milling trees. But clear-cuts “energy dominance,” or the growth of don’t need a degree in biology to know are killing the caribou. It’s just a fact. another foothills subdivision, or just the how this story ends. I believe that people have a right to price of a two-by-four at the lumberyard. Even if those animals happen to log trees, but also a responsibility not Only a tiny handful of U.S. news be pregnant, the outlook is grim, said to push our fellow beings into oblivion. outlets have even mentioned the crisis of biologist Bart George, who works for the That was the idea behind the Endan- the Selkirk caribou. I guess extinction in Kalispel Tribe of Indians. gered Species Act. Extinction can be a our time cannot compete with the latest “We are all in mourning,” George told natural process, but not when it’s driven tweetstorm from Hollywood or Wash- me. by human greed and consumption. The ington, D.C. There is only a whimper, or The southern population of mountain Endangered Species Act is sometimes maybe a few tears. I want to believe that caribou in British Columbia, Alberta, described as the “emergency room” of America can do better than that. For the Washington and Idaho is in a tailspin. conservation. Unfortunately, critical care sake of our grandchildren, I hope I am The Selkirks are one of perhaps 15 appears to be coming too little and too right. mountain ranges that face similar prob- late for our caribou. lems, though some are not quite as dire. I could tell you all about how human- Ben Long is senior program director for I’ve been writing about these caribou ity’s fate is tied to our natural world, Resource Media in Kalispell, Montana. for 30 years and reading about them my how healthy forests are crucial for clean Writers on the Range is a syndicated service of WEB EXTRA entire life. In my business — conserva- water and “ecosystem services.” But To see all the current High Country News, providing three opinion col- tion and journalism — I frequently write forget all that. I’ll just say this: Caribou umns each week to more than 200 media outlets Writers on the Range about extinction. But it’s usually an have a right to be here, and our nation is columns, and archives, around the West. For more information, contact visit hcn.org abstract concept, something that could poorer without them. Extinction doesn’t Betsy Marston, [email protected], 970-527-4898.

www.hcn.org High Country News 23 PERSPECTIVE

‘Alienated’ in Portland How segregation, redlining and racism pushed out black residents

few years ago, after the violence in building plant. The company built a slap- value. They sent their children to college, AFerguson, Missouri, a brilliant friend dash, segregated city north of Portland took care of their parents, and bequeathed of mine, a surgeon, told me that if black to house some 100,000 workers. When a wealth to the next generation. Black people wanted to live better lives, they 1948 flood destroyed Vanport, as it was families largely could not. Black American should move to a better place. I’d heard called, white residents had some choice incomes average about 60 percent of white this sentiment before, always uttered as to where to move. Blacks did not. They incomes, and yet black American wealth with the unspoken privilege of ignorance could either leave entirely or move to the is just 5 percent of white wealth. This that comes with being white. “Why don’t Albina district of northeast Portland, the enormous difference is almost entirely those people make better decisions ... like only place they could legally buy or rent attributable to federal housing policy we do?” But it’s not that simple. How to homes. The code of ethics of the Port- implemented — by law or by custom — A civil explain? Race is complex. land Realty Board forbade realtors and throughout the 20th century. conversation I think white people assume that bankers from selling or giving loans to the America they experience is the only “Negroes or Orientals” for properties in o see how this policy played out in Wayne hare America. After all, it’s all they know. If white neighborhoods. T Portland, I visited Albina, today whites want to move and can afford to, Across the nation, federal law rein- considered a “mixed race” neighborhood. they move. But if blacks want to move to forced this housing discrimination. In I passed beautifully restored Victorian a “better place,” i.e. a white neighborhood, 1934, Congress created the Federal Hous- homes and modern condos with patios we have to make a different calculation: ing Authority to insure private mortgag- over-looking tree-lined streets; I saw Will I feel accepted, or isolated? Will I feel es. This led to lower interest rates, a drop remote-control parking garage gates, ... safe? Will my children? How will the in the required size of down payments, green-painted bike lanes and $4-a-scoop police and neighbors treat us? Perhaps and eventually lower housing prices. The ice cream shops. I saw white women jog- this explains why black families making FHA rated neighborhoods using maps: ging, yoga mats tucked under their arms, $100,000 a year tend to live in the kinds All-white neighborhoods received an “A,” but very few blacks. of neighborhoods inhabited by white while neighborhoods with even a single With the help of Gloria Cash and families making $30,000. black family received a “D” and were Florida Blake, two spunky women who I was raised on a small dairy farm in outlined in red. Black people were viewed had grown up in Albina, we tracked down New Hampshire, so I know little about as a contagion, and no federal money was historical markers. They showed me the challenges faced by blacks in places loaned to “redlined” districts. where black businesses had once stood: like Ferguson. But I know they don’t Realtors were complicit. As late as the drugstore; the print shop; the bowling choose to live there because they love 1950, the National Association of Real alley; the Burger Barn, where four white crime and poverty and government-built Estate Boards’ code of ethics concluded, cops had once flung dead possums onto projects. Still, my friend’s statement got “A realtor should never be instrumental the steps to leave a message. All were me thinking. Why do black Americans in introducing into a neighborhood ... now hipster, white-owned businesses. end up in these places? And what keeps any race or nationality ... whose presence Gloria and Florida didn’t seem sad or them there? will clearly be detrimental to property bitter; they talked about their childhoods My quest led me to Portland, Oregon, values.” here and laughed. But at lunchtime, considered one of the nation’s most liv- Even banks were complicit. In 1990, Gloria was clear: “I don’t support white able cities. I lived there in the late ’80s The Oregonian found that altogether, businesses. I figure they already have and early ’90s and enjoyed its easy access Portland’s banks made just 10 mort- enough support.” to whitewater rivers, big mountains and gage loans in the black community of Albina’s gentrification was preceded miles of single-track mountain biking. Albina, at the same time they’d made by the deliberate evacuation of its black And yet I’d heard that, behind its pro- over a hundred loans in similarly sized residents. gressive façade, Portland had a racist his- tracts elsewhere in the city. And hous- What the city’s leaders really wanted tory. I wondered if it held the key to my ing discrimination continues today: In was a white corridor from downtown to questions. That key, as it turns out, was 2011, Eric Holder’s Department of Justice the new Lloyd Center shopping mall. So literally to the closed door of that most fined Bank of America $335 million for they brought in development, building American of dreams: home ownership. predatory racist lending practices, and a new coliseum in the heart of Albina, Wells Fargo $175 million in 2012. Federal and began to displace black families — hen Oregon became a state in 1859, Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, asked condemning 476 mostly black-occupied W its Constitution boldly declared: about modern-day redlining, said, “If homes, all of the district’s businesses and “No free negro or mulatto not residing in people are denied access to credit, then many of its churches. Residents were told this state at the time of the adoption of they are going to be less able to attend they had to be gone before the bulldozers this constitution, shall come, reside or be school, less able to start a family, less able arrived. within this state or hold any real estate, to move to a new job, all kinds of things… Highways were constructed, separat- or make any contracts, or maintain any and if you take that out across a broad ing black neighborhoods from white, a suit therein. ...” Oregon voters didn’t population, it would certainly hurt the tactic endorsed by the Federal Housing amend their Constitution until 2001. The growth of the country.” Administration nationwide. In 1956, con- state, like the rest of the country, was Whites could rely on a legitimate lend- struction of I-5 eliminated another 125 conceived as a white utopia. ing system backed by their government; black homes. City officials, as housing Wayne Hare is a Yet blacks came to Portland any- blacks, however, were excluded or herded discrimination expert Richard Rothstein member of the High way — first with the railroad in the late toward unscrupulous lenders. The result told NPR, viewed the interstates as “a board Country News 1800s, and then during World War II, was devastating. White families grew good opportunity to get rid of their local who lives in Grand with the construction of the Kaiser ship- relatively wealthy as their homes grew in nigger town.” Junction, Colorado.

24 High Country News May 28, 2018 And then there was Emanuel Hospi- Families escape the Vanport Flood in tal. A 1962 study by the Portland Devel- May 1948. Because opment Commission declared Albina “a of segregation, black ‘worthless slum’ and proposed clearance families searching to prevent the spread of slums to adja- for homes were cent neighborhoods,” writes Portland limited to Albina, historian Tom Robinson. The hospital, a neighborhood which wanted to add 19 acres to its cam- that was already pus, “was a perfect partner to accomplish overcrowded. this. The commission received a grant © Thomas Robinson from the Model Cities Program to make an urban renewal district for Emmanuel Hospital that would clear about 10 blocks of homes and businesses.” Homeowners received a flat $15,000 for their homes, far below market value. Renters received a mere pittance, and all were given just 90 days to be gone. Some 300 black residences were destroyed. In an ironic twist, just as the demolition neared completion, Congress failed to appropriate funding for the hospital. De- cades passed before the hospital expansion started. Gloria and Florida pointed out lots that are still vacant 45 years later. I snapped a photo of Gloria standing in front of her childhood home, now a Ronald McDonald House. As the neglected and decimated neighborhood declined in the 1990s, Portland officials, under pressure from the black community, started another urban renewal process that ended up pushing out even more residents. White folks swooped in to buy Victorian homes for less than the price of a used car. Black residents, priced out, left. A decade after urban renewal began, black residents owned 40 percent fewer homes in the community while white folks owned 43 percent more.

hile in Portland, I watched Priced W Out, a 2017 documentary about Albina’s gentrification. It features lifelong The Model Cities resident Nikki Williams, who fought to Citizens’ Planning rid its streets of trash and drugs. She per- Board discusses the severed because she loved her neighbor- expansion of the hood, the only one she’d ever known. Now, Emanuel Hospital, however, she felt like an outsider: “I guess which would result cleaning up the neighborhood meant in the demolition getting rid of the brown folk!” Eventu- of 209 homes in ally, she sold her Habitat for Humanity the community, in home for $330,000 and boarded a bus for June 1970. Their voting power had Texas. “I’m at the point in my life where I been stripped by need to be around more brown folk,” she the mayor prior to said. “I have begun to feel so isolated and this meeting, and 25 alienated here in Portland that I cannot days later the federal call this living. This is just existing.” funding came As I hopped into my motorhome and through for the headed back to Colorado, I wished that hospital to acquire my surgeon friend had been with me. He the land and begin might have gained some insight into the building. ©Thomas Robinson complexities underlying his simple, well- intentioned statement, “Blacks should just move somewhere better.” There’s a perception out there — promoted by some — that slums, poor schools, menial jobs, poverty, high crime and incarceration are who black Americans are. But that’s not who we are. It’s what we endure.

www.hcn.org High Country News 25 Essay

The benediction of a bird By Melissa Hart

he song of the Swainson’s thrush defies after one another in a gesture of homage. Nuttall — description — three low notes followed by who shared his surname with a woodpecker, a mag- an upward burble in a cautionary key, like pie and a violet — named the thrush after British Ta sound you might hear in space, as if R2D2 sang naturalist William Swainson. Sadly, Swainson never a piece by Mozart. While the females forage in the got to see or hear his bird; he’d relocated to New Zea- forest for insects and berries, males mount song land, to the bloodcurdling shriek of the kiwi. battles to establish territory. Across the trees, they I learned all this in my mother-in-law’s home, her trade tunes, growing louder and more resonant. It’s Audubon CD echoing through the hallways dawn America’s Got Talent of the genteel sort. to dusk as company for her caged songbirds. The I first heard the thrush in the mist outside a Swainson’s call, fragile exuberance in the midst of coastal cabin where I’d gone for two days to retreat parakeet screech, rang out from her study. I raced from the news — budget threats to the arts, the cries across the house to investigate. for border walls, impending climate travesties. The “What is that?” I yelped to the trio of budgies, liquid trill rang out among the spruces, shaking me who lacked in voice what they made up for in pastel out of despair and into the world unfurled. Though plumage. What a thing to possess both substance I scanned the prickly branches, squinting through and style; alas, the thrush in my field guide is a drab binoculars, I couldn’t spot its source. I dashed across little creature with a brown and buff body which it the road to my neighbor’s house. “What’s that bird?” fills unglamorously with insects and earthworms. I demanded. But, oh, that memorable musical motif. … “What bird?” the man asked. After so many Two centuries after Nuttall’s discovery, we can years, the song had become mere background noise listen to almost anything we desire, whenever we de- to him. Familiarity, the enemy of awe, overtakes us sire. But to hear birdsong in its natural environment all. — that is a gift. A wild creature calls when it wants “It sounds like this.” I attempted to replicate the to, how it wants and where. I assumed, leaving the melody, but choked on my warble. cabin on the coast, that I’d not hear the song of the “You’ve lost me,” my neighbor said, so I returned thrush again in real time until I returned. to my cabin and threw open the windows and shiv- Miraculously (I’ve learned to take my miracles ered in a symphony of unseen, nameless singers. where I can), I was wrong. Pruning blueberries and The Swainson’s thrush, like other birds, possess- fuming over politics in my backyard a hundred-plus es a two-sided voice box — a syrinx — that allows miles southeast of the spruce forest one day, I heard it to switch rapidly between pitches, even to sing the thrush among the firs. I froze and called for my two at once. Two centuries ago, British naturalist husband. “The Swainson’s!” I whispered. “It’s here.” Thomas Nuttall traveled to the mouth of the Co- I shouldn’t have been surprised. Swain- lumbia River and discovered the vocal acrobatics son’s thrushes migrate, flying eight hours a emanating from the syrinx of the thrush. He night without food or water, from Canada documented it accordingly, then relegated to Central America and back again. Still, the bird to the role of specimen. How his this was the first time I’d heard one in my pulse must’ve quickened beneath his high yard. I bowed my head under the benedic- CAN HEAVY DUTY BE LIGHTER WEIGHT? starched collar when he first heard the tion of the bird, its song reminding me to song, how his heart must’ve ached at breathe and to listen, to feel the ripening the sight of the little chorister dead in blueberries under my fingertips. its box, eastward bound for some My thrush was a soloist, staying Introducing All Seasons Women’s museum. but a day. But he left me this: If a All Seasons Hemp Canvas Workwear Hemp Canvas Naturalists then were song can define a place — and I think Bib Overalls a generous sort; they that it can — what does it mean named their when we can no longer hear it? When Drawing its strength from industrial hemp, our newly developed discoveries the anthem has vanished, when the work cloth is a lightweight but remarkably durable material that symphony shuts down and the concert requires no break-in and offers the resilience and freedom of falters, when we retreat behind walls, motion needed to carry the day as temperatures rise. we become inured to a different background noise: the creak and shriek and Michael O’Casey of the Oregon Natural Desert Association removes old gears of our destruction. barbed wire fencing in the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Melissa Hart is Protection Area, allowing native wildlife to move freely through the land- We’d do better to throw open our scape once more. SAGE BROWN © 2018 Patagonia, Inc. windows and launch song battles ourselves, the author of the tournaments of melody, adding wonder to the forthcoming Better with Books: Diverse world instead of terror. Then no one, not even Fiction to Open Minds the smallest and drabbest among us, would and Ignite Empathy be mute. We’d all of us sing our names and Compassion in Men’s through the trees as proof of our exis- Children (Sasquatch, All Seasons tence and worth, our voices echoing 2019). Website: Hemp Canvas generously for centuries. www.melissahart.com Double Knee Pants

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www.hcn.org High Country News 27

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HEARD AROUND THE WEST | BY Betsy Marston

ARIZONA bake delicious cookies, says park staffer Isabelle A British-owned newspaper is such a spoilsport, Woodward, is a closed car and relentless heat: issuing dire warnings to Phoenix-area resi- “When you move to an extreme place, you have dents that they’re living in a fool’s paradise of to learn to make your own fun.” bluegrass lawns and cooled pools. The nation’s fifth-largest — and growing — city is danger- UTAH ously overstretched, warns the Guardian. Its Folks with a taste for wanton destruction seem “megapolitan” area has become “a shrine to to harbor a grudge against Utah’s dinosaurs, towering concrete,” and when you drive through reports The Associated Press. Over the last six the sprawl of its satellite towns up to 35 miles months, vandals have flung hundreds of ancient away, it’s all too easy to imagine “there is no raptor tracks — incised in sandstone — into the such thing as a water shortage.” Yet drought is reservoir at Red Fleet State Park. “Some of the a perilous threat, says writer Joanna Walters. slabs sink to the bottom of Red Fleet Reservoir, Phoenix gets less than 8 inches of rain each some shatter upon hitting the surface, and oth- year, and it’s dependent on the ever-shrinking ers dissolve entirely,” said Utah Division of State ARIZONA Colorado River, 300 miles away. Phoenicians Drivers get a cutting-edge update Parks spokesman Devan Chavez. “Some of them on bear awareness. Melissa Urreiztieta might have noticed recent warning signals are likely lost forever.” The park is putting up about the local impacts of global climate change: more signs asking visitors not to touch the stone In February, “the U.S. government calculated experience air so intense that it shimmers, and toe tracks, and staffers are also considering that two-thirds of Arizona is facing severe to they delight in seeing mirages on the horizon. sending a team of divers to recover what it can extreme drought, and last summer, 50 flights “August has become one the of the busiest from the lakebed. Some 193 million years ago, were grounded at Phoenix Airport because the months of the year,” reported National Parks the park was a bog where carnivorous Dilopho- heat — 116 degrees — made the air too thin to Magazine. Most visitors come from Asia and saurus raptors “ambushed other dinosaurs while take off safely.” Nonetheless, proposals for new Europe. A German tourist told writer Kate Siber they were resting or drinking from the swamp.” growth abound, including a plan from Microsoft that he relished the extreme temperatures on The park’s fossils have been targeted before; founder Bill Gates to build a “smart city” on his first visit, but returned a second time for the in 2001, three teenagers were tried in juvenile undeveloped desert west of Phoenix. Gates re- landscape: “There’s heat and stone and silence. court for destroying a paleontological site there. portedly invested $80 million in a development In a world with so much built up, this is hard to firm that would build 80,000 new homes. Still, find.” The record for hottest-hot in the world was THE WEST the city has not declared any water restrictions, set in Death Valley in 1913, when temperatures Twenty-year-old Dylan McWilliams, who was and the state government has not drawn up a soared to 134 degrees. How hot is that, you ask? dragged out of his sleeping bag by the head and drought contingency plan. The same old “solu- So hot that a ranch caretaker reported seeing bitten by a bear in Colorado, a few years after tions,” however, keep popping up: “The conversa- swallows fall dead from the sky at midnight. he was bitten by a rattler in Utah and, more tion … turns periodically to the outlandish ideas But 2017 was no slouch in the sweltering recently, bitten by a shark in Hawaii, is “one of of drawing water from the Great Lakes 1,700 department: A summer scorcher sent Death the unluckiest people on the planet,” says Na- miles away or building expensive desalination Valley thermometers to 127 degrees. That kind tional Geographic. McWilliams, who is thrilled plants on the Pacific Ocean…” If the past is any of extreme heat turns 15 minutes of exposure to be alive, disagrees, telling the Grand Junction guide, Phoenix could be headed for depopulation: outdoors into an endurance contest. In any sea- Daily Sentinel: “I’m thinking I should buy a lot- In the 15th century, the 40,000 original inhabit- son, dehydration and heat exhaustion remain tery ticket!” ants of Phoenix, known as the Hohokam people, problems, say park rangers, and each year the fled the area “for reasons believed to relate to search and rescue team responds to about 180 disagreements over scarce water.” medical emergencies. Tragedy occurred in 2014, WEB EXTRA For more from Heard around the West, see when a Frenchman on a bus tour wandered onto hcn.org. NEVADA the dunes during a break. The temperature in Tips and photos of Western oddities are appreciated and While Phoenicians endure summer heat that hov- the parking lot was 117 degrees, and though he often shared in this column. Write [email protected] or tag ers above 98 degrees night after night, summer was found within four hours, the man died. On a photos #heardaroundthewest on Instagram. visitors to Death Valley National Park really happier note, in August rangers sometimes treat like it hot. They travel thousands of miles just to visitors to “dashboard cookie day.” All it takes to

High Those who mourn the loss of Glen Canyon know that Country this was the year the gates slammed shut on News “ For people who care about the West. the ‘damn dam.’ All I knew, at the tender age of 4, High Country News covers the important issues and stories that are unique to the American West with a was that I loved the red rocks. magazine, a weekly column service, books and a website, Crista Worthy, in her essay, “The playground of Lake Powell isn’t worth drowned canyons” hcn.org. For editorial comments or questions, write from Writers on” the Range, hcn.org/wotr High Country News, P.O. Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428 or [email protected], or call 970-527-4898.

28 High Country News May 28, 2018