CHRONIC WASTING DISEASE | 6 | ODES TO | 7 | PUBLIC-LAND PLOYS | 8

High Country ForN people whoews care about the West

May 11, 2015 | $5 | Vol. 47 No. 8 | www.hcn.org No. 47 | $5 Vol. 2015 11, May TheMore than aWetland decade ago, environmentalists saved an urbanWars from developers. Now they’re trying to save it again — from each other. By Judith Lewis Mernit. Page 12. CONTENTS

Editor’s note L.A.’s wild side

In mid-april, one of Southern ’s most reclusive celebrities found himself, quite literally, in a very tight spot. P-22, a mountain lion that lives in — 4,000 acres of green space in the heart of Los angeles — was discovered in the crawlspace of a home in a hip neighborhood flanking the park. television cameras swarmed, and wildlife officials tried to spook the lion out, chucking tennis balls at him to no avail. P-22’s fans worried: had the big cat finally gotten too close for comfort? Would he be shot? Remarkably, he wasn’t. Wildlife officials stowed their tennis balls and evicted the media, establishing a quiet perimeter around the house. By morning, P-22 had slipped away to the relative safety of Griffith A Harlan’s red-tailed hawk, wintering in the Park. Ballona , with the sign, Ever since P-22 left the Santa Monica Mountains 13 miles away, in the background. in 2012, crossing two notoriously congested freeways JOnathan COFFIn/StOnEBIRD, CC vIa FLICKR to take up residence in the city, he’s awakened angelenos’ wonder at the wildness that persists here amid the crush of concrete and rush of traffic. his presence has given traction to efforts to build wildlife FEATURE bridges over highways to connect the last remnants of habitat for the few remaining lions. and he has 12 The Wetland Wars helped shape an emerging environmental ethos — one that seeks to reconcile L.a.’s built environment More than a decade ago, Los Angeles environmentalists saved and human inhabitants with the wild landscape an urban wetland from developers. Now they’re trying to they’ve consumed. By Judith Lewis Mernit save it from each other. that ethos also sprang from the long-running efforts to revitalize the concrete-lined CURRENTS and protect the Ballona Wetlands State Ecological Reserve, the last patch of coastal wetlands in the area and the subject of this issue’s cover story by 5 Wins for workers On the cover Contributing Editor Judith Lewis Mernit. 6 Worrisome wasting disease Decades ago, environmentalists fought A walking path developers to save the wetlands — and fought traverses the fenced 7 Poets of the pale tide one another over how much acreage should be Ballona Wetlands 8 Ecological Reserve, Sagebrush bureaucracy saved. now, with the state trying to finalize a hard against the Playa 8 The Latest: Grand Canyon overflights restoration plan, the debate over Ballona is as Vista development in 9 fraught, impassioned and divisive as ever. how much Los Angeles. The Latest: Navajo elections bulldozing and replanting — if any — is necessary to JOnathan aLCORn “heal” the landscape? Should people be banned for DEPARTMENTS the sake of the wetlands’ species, or do we deserve access to this tiny urban wilderness? Who, and what, is this restoration really for? 3 HCN.ORG NEWS IN BRIEF Such intense debate over a mere 600 acres in 4 LETTERS a sprawling city might seem provincial. Increasingly, however, ecologists argue that re-making our farms, 11 THE HCN COMMUNITY Research Fund, Dear Friends city parks, front yards and roadsides into hospitable 20 MARKETPLACE habitat for native plants and wildlife is crucial to Complete access 24 WRITERS ON THE RANGE preserving global biodiversity. to subscriber-only For cities to become ecological refuges, we The view from 31,000 feet: A philosopher looks at fracking content have to evolve, too — rethinking the goals of By Kathleen Dean Moore HCN’s website environmentalism and adjusting the boundaries we hcn.org 26 BOOKS draw between human and wild. It’s work rife with Digital edition The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies: As Rediscovered by ambiguity, but also hope. Consider P-22’s pickle in the hcne.ws/digi-4708 Terry Tempest Williams and Brooke Williams. Reviewed by Charles Finn crawlspace: “Even the homeowners were super chill,” iPhone app The High Divide by Lin Enger. Reviewed by Jenny Shank Beth Pratt of the national Wildlife Federation told hcne.ws/wuZsWu Lewis Mernit after the incident. “Everyone wanted the 27 ESSAY No straight lines By David Oates iPad app cat to be safe. he is L.a.’s lion!” hcne.ws/nGtBYx 28 HEARD AROUND THE WEST By Betsy Marston --Cally Carswell, contributing editor

2 High Country News May 11, 2015 HCN.ORG NEWS iN bRiEF

Finding a better guard dog Trending as bears and wolves continue to move Tribes v. beyond the borders of national parks oil trains and wilderness areas, they sometimes nab a snack from sheep and cattle herds, For more than 20 angering livestock owners, who may years, the Swinomish retaliate by killing them. a good livestock Reservation, along guard dog can help minimize conflict by Washington’s Puget fending off predators. But while many , has agreed of the dog breeds currently in use are to let trains rumble successful against smaller opponents, like across its land, their coyotes, they’re outmatched by grizzlies length and frequency and wolves. So researchers have begun tightly regulated. experimenting with bigger, more exotic Burlington northern breeds, like the kangal, which is famed Santa Fe LLC, the for its courage in the face of wolf attacks company running the in its home country of turkey. While trains, was required conclusive results are still a couple years to inform the tribe off, early signs suggest these foreign of its cargo. But in canines might be well-adapted to the 2012, reservation West. One Montana rancher hasn’t lost a residents noticed single sheep to grizzlies since receiving his the trains were three kangals. bEn goldfarb via EnSia longer than they A kangal wearing a protective collar guards a herd of sheep. See the video at hcn.org. hcne.ws/ranchdogs should have been COnSERvatIOnMEDIa.COM anD PEOPLEanDCaRnIvORES.ORG hcne.ws/livestock-dog and carried volatile Bakken oil. In april, after repeated A return to Southwestern sprawl requests to stop the transport were $1.25 billion Once upon a time, developers in places like they are proposing a community called ignored, the tribe the extra revenue the Interior Department could Phoenix and Las vegas dreamed of suburbs Santolina, which could eventually house filed suit. “this is collect over the next decade if it charged market spreading like lawns across the desert. When nearly 100,000 people. Similar proposals yet another example rates for onshore drilling. the housing bubble burst in 2007, most of have cropped up around tucson. It’ll take of communities all them woke up to a harsh reality, one that a long climb to return to pre-crash heights, across the country the rules governing royalties for oil and has stifled a lot of sprawl. With the recovery, but suburban sprawl may one day return. in different ways gas from federal lands have drawn fire for though, developers are back. In albuquerque, Jonathan thompSon hcne.ws/aZcommunity rising up” against years. Critics say the government charges oil transport, Jan companies too little for the oil and gas they hasselman, an extract, shorting taxpayers. In a 2007 report, Housing starts around the West 60,000 environmental the Government accountability Office said KEY Shaded areas lawyer, told HCN. the low rate, an eighth of production value, indicate U.S. privately owned 50,000 Kindra mcQuillan results in one of the lowest government takes recessions one-unit housing in the world. the rules haven’t been updated starts authorized by You say 40,000 building permits in decades. now, the Department of the don brady: Phoenix-Mesa- units — Interior is considering revising the rules that Scottsdale, aZ “If the government govern royalties and other company costs, 30,000 — Las vegas- stops the trains, including an increase to the royalty rate. Paradise, nv people find and Many environmental groups welcome the idea 20,000 — Denver-aurora- stop the trucks of higher costs for drilling, but the industry Broomfield, CO delivering oil, we 10,000 has opposed any changes, especially given — albuquerque, nM all will be back to the dropping price of oil. the department the horse-and-buggy 0 SOURCE: has opened the issue to public comment. ‘88 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2015 RESEaRCh. era unless we want ElizabEth ShogrEn hcne.ws/oil-gas-royalty year StLOUISFED.ORG foreign oil products to be delivered to our country. then not many would be able Audio to afford real high prices for gas, diesel, Wake-ups “I think overall nor natural gas.” this spring was a strange they are (faring Eric Smith: 48hours it took Blackbird one, and nobody was more OK), especially Mine waste runoff “I suppose they’d surprised by it than the adult males, to kill trout dropped bears, some of whom found prefer 10,000 trucks.” for testing purposes themselves waking from who are big into Idaho’s Blackbird Ed hamilton: hibernation much earlier enough “Maybe the towns Creek in 1993. now, than normal. associate to take kills two decades and more can’t stop them, but Editor Brian Calvert discusses away from wolf than $50 million later, bears and climate change the reservation can.” the creek’s waters are with experts in this online packs.” hcne.ws/tribevtrain clean. bEn goldfarb audio story. —Kerry Gunther, Yellowstone bear and facebook.com/ hcne.ws/panther-creek hcne.ws/bearclimate biologist highcountrynews JIM PEaCO, , aPRIL 2013 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 REbEl-ROUSERS ficacy of Western water deals or ExEcutivE dirEctor/publiShEr the implications of those deals Articles and editorials about the Paul Larmer for our rivers , our salmon and managing Editor threat to public access are spring- the tribal people whose govern- Jodi Peterson ing up in outdoor and conserva- SEnior Editor ments are making the deals. Jonathan Thompson tion magazines with regularity art dirEctor now (“Westerners need to stand Felice Pace Cindy Wehling up for public lands,” HCN, Klamath, California aSSociatE Editor 4/27/15). Americans are beginning Brian Calvert to get it: The threat is real. Do onlinE Editor OlD EGREGiOUS Tay Wiles we want the European model, d.c. corrESpondEnt where private ownership of the The April 13 issue includes Elizabeth Shogren WritErS on thE rangE woods and waters prevails, or do a photo that shows a young Editor Betsy Marston we want the freedom to roam our woman standing in front of Old aSSociatE dESignEr federal lands? I fear that people Faithful geyser on the dirt and Brooke Warren will sit idly by while federal land off the constructed boardwalk copy Editor Diane Sylvain is transferred to the states and (“On the road with America’s contributing EditorS then sold to private individuals sightseers”). It is a well- Cally Carswell Craig Childs and corporations when state cof- publicized fact that it is illegal Sierra Crane-Murdoch fers run dry. to be off trail at Old Faithful or, Sarah Gilman Judith Lewis Mernit The 51 Republican senators in fact, in any of Yellowstone Jeremy Miller that writer Todd Tanner cites in National Park’s developed Michelle Nijhuis DavID JaCOBSOn/aRtIZanS.COM Josh Zaffos his article ought to reap what thermal areas. I would have corrESpondEntS they sow — total rebellion by the thought better of HCN than to Ben Goldfarb outdoor community. And that’s what was good so far as it went. It did not, publish such an egregious picture. Krista Langlois they’ll get if we organize. There’s no however, give readers a full view of Editorial fElloW T. Scott Bryan other way. Join an organization that salmon disease on the Klamath River, Sarah Tory Tucson, Arizona intErnS stands up for public lands — like the nor of water management and pollution Kindra McQuillan Kate Schimel Sierra Club, Trout Unlimited, the Elk issues related to disease outbreaks. Not aSSociatE publiShEr Foundation, The Nature Conservancy mentioned, for example, is that most CROWDED HOURS Alexis Halbert or the group that I belong to, the Public of the young salmon born in Klamath dEvElopmEnt managEr “The West In 72 Hours” (HCN, 4/13/15), Land/Water Association. We recently River tributaries succumb to one of Alyssa Pinkerton light-heartedly written, exposes a won a lawsuit in the Montana Supreme several diseases before they can reach dEvElopmEnt aSSiStant nationwide tragedy in progress. There Christine List Court against a billionaire whose at- the ocean. Also not reported was the is nothing humorous in the ongoing ru- SubScriptionS marKEtEr torney claimed, in court, that his client increasing reliance on hatchery salmon JoAnn Kalenak ination of our national parks. It doesn’t owned the banks, riverbed and water of to make up for the loss of natural WEb dEvElopEr matter whether the hordes of visitors Eric Strebel the Ruby River, along with the air above production, due to the ongoing juvenile are Asian, European or American. They community EngagEmEnt it. How high in that air one can only salmon disease epidemic. And the article are destroying the very thing they pro- Gretchen King imagine. ignores the refusal of the U.S. Bureau accountant fess to love. of Reclamation to release the flushing Beckie Avera George Alotrico I’ve lived in Zion Park’s entry accountS rEcEivablE spring flows, which scientists say are McLeod, Montana town of Springdale, Utah, for 25 years, Jan Hoffman needed to reduce disease among juvenile financial adviSEr and I’ve worked in the park both as salmon traveling the highly polluted Paul Gibb summer staff and as a volunteer every circulation managEr OUR lAND Klamath. year. Visitation during that time has Tammy York The article does mention the Klam- I grow tired of hearing news bites about gone from manageable crowds to total circulation SyStEmS admin. ath agreements and the legislation en- Kathy Martinez people or industries “standing up to disaster. Visitors enter the park only to abling them, which is currently stalled circulation the government” regarding land use find that the parking lots are full. We Doris Teel in Congress. But it fails to note that without accurate information (“Check- advise them to return to Springdale, Kati Johnson these flows are the same that are now advErtiSing dirEctor ing in on Cliven Bundy,” HCN, 4/27/15). find parking and return via shuttle. On producing the yearly epidemics that an- David J. Anderson Cliven Bundy is nothing but a mooch busy days, the shuttles are standing- advErtiSing SalES nihilate up to 90 percent of the Klamath and a thief. The public lands are owned room only. If you are seated, the view is Jenny Hill Basin’s naturally produced salmon. Margaret Gilfoyle by every American citizen, and we pay of belt buckles. If you stand, there is a The dams, which the stalled legislation grantWritEr to have government representatives great view of the inside of the bus. The Janet Reasoner would transfer from private to govern- care for and oversee those lands as we buses deliver hundreds of visitors to all foundEr Tom Bell ment hands, along with liability for choose. Bundy didn’t buy that land (i.e., the trailheads in very little time, crowd- their removal, are fingered as a cause of [email protected] pay taxes for owning it, or spend money ing them beyond belief. During the [email protected] the diseases, but massive agricultural maintaining it), and he doesn’t even winter “off season,” the canyon opens up [email protected] pollution, which also contributes, is not want to pay a piddly minimal fee for us- again to private autos. On busy week- [email protected] reported. ing “our” land. He should be in jail. ends, cars are parked illegally through- board of dirEctorS By and large, the settlements con- out the park, resulting in widespread John Belkin, Colo. Mary McBee tinue to allow water to (mostly white) ir- Sean Benton, Mont. damage. The folks who promote tourism Tama, Iowa rigators, while providing cash-strapped Beth Conover, Colo. are, of course, overjoyed. Jay Dean, Calif. tribal governments money in exchange Bob Fulkerson, Nev. for it. Absent robust reporting that Wayne Hare, Colo. SHORT ON KlAMATH REPORTiNG Marcel Rodriguez provides essential context, readers can’t Laura Helmuth, Md. Springdale, Utah John Heyneman, Wyo. “Plague on the Klamath” (HCN, 4/27/15) make informed judgments about the ef- Nicole Lampe, Ore. Wendy Pabich, Idaho Marla Painter, N.M. Lou Patterson, Colo. Dan Stonington, Wash. High Country News is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) (ISSn/0191/5657) is published bi-weekly, 22 times a year, by high Country news, 119 Grand ave., Printed on Rick Tallman, Colo. High independent media organization that covers the issues Paonia, CO 81428. Periodicals, postage paid at Paonia, CO, and other post offices. POStMaStER: recycled Luis Torres, N.M. that define the American West. Its mission is to inform Send address changes to high Country news, Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428. 800-905-1155. all paper. Andy Wiessner, Colo. Country and inspire people to act on behalf of the region’s rights to publication of articles in this issue are reserved. See hcn.org for submission guidelines. Florence Williams, D.C. News diverse natural and human communities. Subscriptions to HCN are $37 a year, $47 for institutions: 800-905-1155 | hcn.org 4 High Country News May 11, 2015 currEntS

Wins for workers Western cities lead national movement for a higher minimum wage

by cally carSWEll

n April 15, protesters swarmed down- O town Seattle carrying signs display- ing slogans in English and Spanish: “Raise the Minimum Wage,” “Because the Rent Won’t Wait,” “4 Jobs No Time to Sleep Help Momma Get $15 per Hr.” They occu- pied fast-food restaurants and clustered outside Uber’s corporate offices, chanting, “We can see your greedy side!” Twenty-one people linked arms and sat in the street in front of a glass-enclosed Ferrari dealer- tween 1979 and 2007, only the wealthiest voted to hike their lowest pay above the Labor rights ship, moving only when arrested. 1 percent in Nevada, Wyoming and Alaska $7.25 federal minimum wage, which ad- activists and All over the country, adjunct professors, enjoyed rising incomes; the average in- justing for inflation, is more than $3 lower supporters of the home health-care workers and employees comes of the 99 percent in those states fell. than it was in 1968, when its real value 15 Now movement at the Seattle City of McDonalds, Taco Bell, Wal-Mart, Target Over the same time period, the wealthiest peaked. Alaska voters raised theirs from Council session last and other corporations took to the streets 1 percent in Arizona, Oregon, New Mexi- $7.75 to $9.75 by 2016. June, when raising to demand a $15-an-hour minimum wage. co, California, Washington, Montana and While minimum wage workers in Se- the minimum wage In Seattle, the protests were partly to sup- Utah claimed between 50 and 84 percent attle, SeaTac and San Francisco were al- to $15 per hour — port workers elsewhere, because on April of all income growth. “Today SeaTac, to- ready making more than $7.25, the new highest in the nation 1, that city had already become one of the morrow the nation?” asked a Seattle Times $15 minimum represents a raise of be- — was approved first to offer a $15 minimum wage, which columnist in 2013. Many Western workers tween 40 and 60 percent. And yet it still unanimously. will be phased in over the next few years. hope the answer is a resounding “yes.” might not be enough to allow them to live EInO SIERPE Other West progressive hubs in the cities where they work. According have started to follow suit, and so far, heir dream may not be completely to Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s they’re the only places in the country T quixotic. It’s not just Left Coasters living wage calculator, a single adult sup- where the “Fight for $15” has prevailed. who support raising pay. Last fall, voters porting a child and working full-time in Seattle’s raise followed the success of a in Arkansas, South Dakota and Nebraska Seattle would need to earn $20.53 to cover 2013 ballot measure in SeaTac, a suburb to the south, which gave a small subset of workers in this airport town $15 an hour and paid sick leave. Last fall, San Francis- Hours worked per week at minimum wage Federal minimum wage, 1938-2012 co voters approved a phased-in $15 mini- needed to afford rent Shown in adjusted 2012 dollars and unadjusted dollars mum; Los Angeles and the state of Oregon are considering the same. 80 12$12 The West’s low-wage workers are 66 68 steadily losing economic ground. Wages 71 $10 haven’t kept up with cost-of-living in- 10 71 64 Minimum wage creases in many communities, whether the 69 (adjusted to 2012 dollars) booming tech centers like Seattle and San $88 Francisco, where rents are soaring, or the 92 service-driven “amenity” and tourist towns 77 85 $6 like Aspen, Flagstaff and Durango, where 130 6 BOR second-home owners and retirees distort the housing market for working stiffs. 85 $4 68 4 Minimum wage And in many states, average folks have (unadjusted) benefited only marginally, if at all, from recent economic growth. According to a re- n 70 hours or less $22 cent Economic Policy Institute report, be- n 71-88 hours n More than 88 hours per week 00 OF La DEPaRtMEnt SOURCE: HCN Contributing Editor Cally Carswell SOURCE: natIOnaL LOW InCOME hOUSInG COaLItIOn, Out Of ReaCH, 2012 1975 2010 1970 1935 1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1955 1960 1965 1980 1985 1990 1995 (@callycarswell) writes from Santa Fe. 2000 2005

www.hcn.org High Country News 5 “if you want to monthly expenses; in San Francisco, that states’ minimums, found no statistically works but doesn’t need to help his parents worker would need $26.03. significant impact on overall job numbers, pay rent. But Washington has no state in- talk about a Higher minimum wages alone won’t or rates of business openings and closings. come tax, so instituting such a credit in policy to benefit rectify income inequality. There’s no guar- Still, there’s no precedent for a raise addition to the federal one wasn’t an op- antee, even, that every low-wage worker this substantial. The only way to deter- tion. And politically — even morally — the the poor that will see higher take-home pay, explains mine the impact is to carry out the experi- minimum wage is a powerful symbol. “It’s you can actually University of Washington economist Ja- ment. Vigdor and his university colleagues easier to rally people around,” Vigdor ex- cob Vigdor. A restaurant owner adjusting will study its outcomes over the next five plains. “If you want to talk about a policy get done, to higher labor costs might notice she does years. Among other things, they’ll follow to benefit the poor that you can actually we’ve seen the little business in the first hour, for exam- workers and businesses to capture the nu- get done, we’ve seen the evidence come in ple, and start opening at 11 a.m. instead of ances — like the aforementioned restau- from all over the country: The minimum evidence come 10. “Every worker on payroll from 10 to 11 rant example — that are often lost in face- wage is something you can get done.” in from all over is not getting paid for that hour anymore,” less, data-driven studies. Vigdor expects to Indeed. Between the time Seattle Vigdor says. “If your higher wage is offset find that the raise helps some and hurts Mayor Ed Murray convened the labor- the country: the by lower hours, your income might not go others. Whether the benefits ultimately business task force that crafted Seattle’s minimum wage up.” From another perspective, when your outweigh the costs, he says, is a question ordinance and the city council’s passage time is valued more, you might be able to not for science but for society: It’s a ques- of it, less than six months passed. “His- is something choose to work less, in order to, say, spend tion of values. tory has its way of unfolding in moments,” you can get more time with your kids. From a policy perspective, Vigdor says David Rolf, the head of Service Em- Opponents of minimum wage increas- thinks the minimum wage is a relatively ployees International Union 775 in Seat- done.” es argue that they kill jobs, raise prices blunt tool for alleviating poverty. More fo- tle, and co-chair of the task force. “There —university of for consumers and may force some small cused, he says, is the Earned Income Tax is pent-up demand for something to be Washington economist businesses to close. However, a study con- Credit, which, through a hefty tax refund, done about stagnant wages.” Perhaps it’s Jacob Vigdor ducted for the city of Seattle on wage hikes increases the year-end take-home pay of surprising that $15 happened so quickly in places like Santa Fe and San Francisco, low-wage workers in low-income house- in Seattle, he says, “or perhaps it’s more two of the first to raise wages above their holds, though not, say, a teenager who surprising it hadn’t happened sooner.”

GAME MANAGEMENT UNiTS WHERE CHRONiC WASTiNG DiSEASE iS ENDEMiC Snapshot

Over 1,000 CWD cases have Worrisome been documented in Wyoming since the first one was found, wasting disease in 1979, in the southeast corner. In the last decade, his January, a bull elk living on a commercial researchers have seen the Tgame farm in northern Utah tested positive disease slowly spread north for chronic wasting disease, or CWD, a fatal and west. neurological disease that affects deer, elk and WY moose. In March, Wyoming Wildlife advocates published a map showing the disease spreading westward through Wyoming — possibly carried by ultra-long-distance deer migrations. It’s now less than 40 miles from Yellowstone national Park. the world’s first case of CWD For wildlife advocates and sportsmen, this was found at a research facility is troubling news. the disease has long worried near Fort Collins, Colorado, Wyoming hunters east of the Continental Divide. in 1967. today, the disease’s If CWD continues to spread westward, it will known endemic areas cover affect those west of the Divide in the state, much of the state. including visitors to Yellowstone. But right now there are holes in the research, so no one’s quite UT sure how quickly the disease is spreading. CO In 2003, Congress passed a bill to expand research funding, bolstering efforts to track down CWD. But that funding has decreased in recent years, creating a decline in reporting. Utah’s first case of CWD was new Mexico’s first case of CWD On top of that, different states have different identified in 2003, and the ways of tracking the disease, making it hard to state Division of Wildlife was identified in 2002. Since then, there have been a total understand over the broader region. Resources has found a total of Miles Moretti, president of the Mule Deer 62 cases since then. of 48 cases here, a rate of about three to four new cases Foundation, a sportsmen’s group that is part per year. of the Chronic Wasting Disease alliance, says more funding might help researchers figure out whether or not it’s spreading, and where. “We’re not having a lot of new (infected) areas show up,” he says, “and maybe that’s because we aren’t NM looking as hard.” Kindra mcQuillan

SOURCES: COLORaDO PaRKS anD WILDLIFE, WYOMInG GaME anD DEPaRtMEnt, Utah DIvISIOn OF WILDLIFE *thIS MaP IS nOt a DIRECt InDICatOR OF GMU BOUnDaRIES. DEtECtED CWD InFO IS BaSED On thE MOSt RECEnt Data avaILaBLE. RESOURCES, nEW MExICO DEPaRtMEnt OF GaME & FISh 6 High Country News May 11, 2015 Poets of the pale tide A gathering of maritime minstrels on the Oregon coast

by bEn goldfarb

at Dixon wrote his first fishing poem P in 1989, in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. For 12 years, Dixon had gillnetted salmon in Cook , the fin- ger of water that points from the of Alaska to Anchorage. After the Valdez dumped its noxious cargo into nearby Prince William Sound, fishing in Cook Inlet was shut down, and Dixon was cast adrift. One bleak afternoon by the water, as he watched a squall move along the , he found himself day-dreaming about all the things he was going to miss. A poem came to him, unbidden, and there, in the front seat of his parked truck, he began to write. Twenty-six years later, on a chill night near the mouth of the Columbia River, Dixon — a barrel-chested man with a beard the color and texture of polar bear fur — climbed onto a stage in Astoria, Or- “Write what you know,” they say, and stood at the mic. Hermansen has fished Jon Broderick pushes a egon, to read a new poem, “Exit Strategy,” it’s a maxim the fisher-poets have taken to summers in Cook Inlet since she was a skiff into deeper water to a rapt audience of 200. In a clear, un- heart. Their verse serves as a crash course child — “I knew I was a fisherman be- beside a set gillnet in hurried voice, he intoned: in the daily rituals and hard-won knowl- fore I knew I was a woman”—and she’d Nushagak , Alaska. edge of their profession. John Palmes, a started writing poetry in college to amuse ChRIS MILLER I shall leave today, hand-troller from Juneau, tore through her friends. Fisher-Poets had long been motor through a school of leaping fish a song about humpback salmon’s singu- on her bucket list, and her set at the 2011 stretching from the lar preference for pink lures (as opposed gathering was the first time she’d ever to the horizon’s soft curve, to coho, which favor chartreuse). Doug read in public. sluice my bow through a green Rhodes, from Craig, Alaska, drew reliable “Now I think about the event all year ocean swell, tide on my stern, laughs by poking fun at the government’s long,” she told me. She’s inseparable from sun white alongside, burning regulatory ineptitude. Rob Seitz, a trawl- her notebook. “I’ve written poems out on reflection in a moving mirror. er from Los Osos, California, performed the skiff, which is not the most convenient “Tribute to the Five-Gallon Bucket,” a bit place to have something come to you.” Dixon was among the 87 commercial of doggerel about the hazards of at-sea Onstage, Hermansen had time for one fishermen who’d come to perform at the defecation: more poem. “Back home in Alaska, there 18th annual Fisher-Poets Gathering, a are some proposed projects that stand to weekend-long celebration of maritime The water from the bucket would get threaten our wild salmon stocks and habi- verse. Readers came from Cordova, Alas- your backside drenched tat,” she said. She ticked off the dangers: ka; Camden, Maine; Jyväskylä, Finland. Kind of like those toilets designed by coal mines that would bury streams, dams On the streets, pickup trucks sported the French. that would obstruct rivers, the cop- bumper stickers condemning salmon per mine in Bristol Bay. Her voice low and farms and the overreach of the National Even love and lust, poetry’s most time- lyrical, she launched into the piece with- Marine Fisheries Service. Baseball caps less concerns, were contemplated through out notes: and facial hair were de rigueur. a briny lens. From Erin Fristad, of Port “This is our party, and we’re doing it Townsend, Washington: “She engulfs We need to realize our way,” Jon Broderick, Fisher-Poets’ me like she has the mouth of a lingcod / Open our steel eyes founder, told me. Broderick is a former I know that shouldn’t be sexy, but it is.” Before we jeopardize high school teacher who chases salmon in The landlubbers in the audience giggled What we should all esteem. Alaska’s Bristol Bay with his sons every uncertainly. There is a place for enterprise summer. He’s also a talented songwriter, On the festival’s final evening, a But we need to analyze and scrutinize and he’d followed Dixon’s reading with a standing-room-only crowd packed into As they attempt to minimize and swaying, klezmer-inflected ode to an allur- a waterfront restaurant that jutted out capitalize ing female cannery worker. “There’s noth- over the Columbia on wooden pilings. For we all live downstream. ing ersatz or kitsch or phony about it.” Rust-colored tankers glowed in the fiery sunset; sea lions honked beneath the pier. The crowd applauded at poem’s end, Ben Goldfarb (@ben_a_goldfarb) is an HCN At the front of the room, a mop-haired and Hermansen smiled shyly as she left correspondent based in Seattle. veterinarian named Meezie Hermansen the stage.

www.hcn.org High Country News 7 Sagebrush bureaucracy An obscure legal provision is the latest weapon in the fight to wrest public-land management from the feds by JoShua zaffoS ERIK ManSOOR

THE lATEST uzy Foss became a Ravalli County, decisions,” says Martin Nie, director of the often through a resolution, and then es- S Montana, commissioner during the Bolle Center for People and Forests at the tablish a citizen advisory committee to de- Backstory 2010 Tea Party wave. Sixty-five with a University of Montana. And federal of- velop natural resource policies or contract the 1987 national Sarah Palin vibe –– stylish glasses, brown ficials, who interpret “coordination” very for scientific research, sometimes through Parks Overflights act hair and bangs –– Foss raises Arabian differently, fear it’s stoking more conflicts American Stewards. Before Foss left office prohibited below-the- horses and border collies on a ranch abut- than it resolves by misinforming locals. in December after losing a primary, she rim flights and was ting the Bitterroot National Forest, which But though critics, including federal and her fellow Ravalli County commis- supposed to restore takes up three-quarters of the county. land managers, may dismiss American sioners drafted a county natural-resources peacefulness to the Foss blames the federal government for Stewards’ interpretation of coordination, policy calling for more grazing, logging, Grand Canyon and the post-’90s local decline of timber sales it’s gaining traction among state and U.S. irrigation and forest-road access than is other parks. But and grazing permits, as well as the rise of lawmakers and Western governors. “It has outlined in local national forest plans, and only a few flight restrictions have been wildfires and wolves, and says locals de- no legal basis, but it’s as much about try- wrote another policy for higher wolf-hunt- implemented since serve more power over land management. ing to frame things politically,” Nie says. ing quotas and longer hunting and trap- then. A 2011 plan “This is brought on us by people who “These proposals are pushing way, way ping seasons. Commissioners shared these would have required mean well, but they’ve killed the forests of outside the mainstream.” plans with the Forest Service, but their aircraft to fly at a America,” Foss says. “They’ve murdered impact is unclear, since the agency main- higher altitude and them as deliberately as if I took a machine yfield’s strategy is inspired in part tains that counties’ role remains advisory. restore “natural gun out and went and shot someone in a b by the long, acrimonious legal bat- Following their own 2013 training, quiet” to as much crowded mall.” tles waged by her father, Wayne Hage, a Colorado’s Garfield County commission- as 67 percent of the So in 2011, Foss asked American Stew- southern Nevada rancher and one of the ers hired consultants to study greater Grand Canyon (“Park West’s early Sagebrush Rebels. Through Service finally drafts ards of Liberty for help. The Texas-based sage grouse. They claim to have found four a solution to conflicts nonprofit trains local governments to use the 1980s and ’90s, Hage sued the feds for times as much regional grouse habitat as over canyon flights,” “coordination,” an often-overlooked provi- control of his public-land grazing leases the BLM, and say that the bird — which HCN, 6/13/11). sion in two key environmental laws that and water. After his death, the court is being considered for endangered species that plan was tabled govern land management: the Federal upheld his property-rights claims and listing — doesn’t need federal protection. when 2012 legislation Land Policy and Management Act and awarded his estate $4.2 million. American Stewards considers the oil- required restoration the National Forest Management Act. Back in Hage’s day, leaders in rural rich Permian Basin on the Texas-New of quiet to just half of FLPMA specifically directs the Bureau Western counties with large public-land Mexico border its greatest success. The the park. of Land Management to “coordinate the bases passed resolutions claiming “coun- group introduced coordination to local land use inventory, planning, and man- ty supremacy” and ownership of federal governments there in 2011, and say the Followup agement activities” with states, local gov- lands. Courts rejected those, but the idea resulting locally funded science forced the Starting last ernments and tribes as well as with their lives on: When Nevada rancher Cliven U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to back off year, the Obama own management programs to “provide Bundy urged county sheriffs to disarm administration began an endangered species listing proposal for offering incentives for for meaningful public involvement” when BLM officials last spring, he was waving the sagebrush lizard in 2012. “We commercial plane and developing rules and plans. The National the banner of county supremacy. can honestly say that had it not been for helicopter operators Forest Management Act includes similar Byfield, however, says coordination is what the eight counties and one soil and to use, or convert to, language for the Forest Service. different. She learned the strategy from water district did using our coordination “quiet technology.” According to American Stewards Ex- Fred Kelly Grant, the Hages’ litigation strategy,” Dan Byfield, Margaret’s hus- A law implemented ecutive Director Margaret Byfield, coordi- chairman, who was president of American band and American Stewards’ CEO, wrote in April allows nation means that federal agencies must Stewards in 2006. Grant has promoted on the group’s website, “the lizard would more flights in the involve counties and states in planning coordination in speeches to local govern- have been listed.” Dragon and Zuni and give them an “equal position at the ments while railing against the United Fish and Wildlife and others, however, Point corridors, as long as the aircraft negotiating table” for decision-making. Nations’ Agenda 21, a sustainable-devel- credit voluntary conservation agreements don’t exceed federal “It is,” she says, “pretty straightforward.” opment initiative some conservatives view covering hundreds of thousands of acres of noise standards. The nonprofit says over 100 local govern- as an international conspiracy against lizard habitat on public and private lands It’s expected to draw ments have invoked coordination to fight private property rights. in the region. Still, watchdogs and envi- thousands more land-use restrictions since 2006. Counties typically pay American Stew- ronmentalists charge that the decision flights this year. Some Many groups, including environmen- ards $1,500 for an initial daylong training, was unscientific and politically motivated. environmentalists talists, try to influence land management plus travel expenses. Foss says she and The agency’s then-Texas administrator doubt the technology with scientific research and alternative other citizens footed the cost in Ravalli even lodged an official scientific integrity will reduce the overall management proposals, but policy experts County, but other local governments use complaint, and, after he was reassigned level of noise in the say that the coordination movement has a taxpayer money for the training and addi- canyon. indefinitely, filed a whistleblower retalia- tay WilES distinctly anti-federal government flavor tional consultation, and some rack up size- tion complaint. He has since retired. — a Sagebrush Rebellion in bureaucratic able bills. Custer County, Idaho, had paid clothing, with links to state efforts to take American Stewards more than $23,000 ederal managers acknowledge that over federal lands. Coordination propo- as of August 2014, an HCN open-records F they meet more frequently with lo- nents are “essentially arguing a county request revealed, and Garfield County, cal officials in counties that have passed would have veto authority on federal land Colorado, has paid the group more than coordination resolutions and drafted re- $26,000 since 2012. source policies — but not because they’re The training encourages a local gov- required to heed those plans. “It’s fostered Joshua Zaffos is a contributing editor for HCN ernment to invoke “coordinating status,” dialogue and communications, and that’s based in Fort Collins, Colorado.

8 High Country News May 11, 2015 usually beneficial,” says Charles Mark, American Stewards and many rural offi- also passed a law in 2013 to ease coordi- supervisor of central Idaho’s Salmon- cials oppose most endangered species list- nation efforts and claims. Challis National Forest, which includes ings and federal land-use restrictions. Even D.C. is hearing demands for great- Custer and other coordination counties. Garfield County, for example, paid a er local authority: Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi, UDIOS The BLM has even teamed up with scientist who has also worked for the oil R, introduced a bill this March that would American Stewards to host coordination and gas industry — which has a lot to amend the Endangered Species Act to trainings. “Five years ago, they would lose if sage grouse are listed — $35,000 to mandate that federal agencies include data say there was no requirement in the law help develop its sage-grouse conservation from states, local governments and tribes for them to (participate),” says Margaret plan. And meeting transcripts show that in scientific analyses. The bill would also LIGht LanGUaGE St Byfield. “That’s definitely changed.” But Byfield participated in county sage grouse require agencies to provide states with all Russell Begaye Cynthia Moses-Nedd, the BLM’s intergov- strategy calls involving consultants and relevant studies before decisions are made. ernmental liaison, says the agency wants industry officials. (The House passed a similar bill in 2014, to clarify what coordination is and isn’t: The BLM’s draft sage grouse manage- largely along party lines.) The legislation THE lATEST “We’ve had to dispel some myths.” ment plan, released last August, included would essentially provide legal grounding Backstory Some federal staffers question how Garfield County’s grouse plan and habitat in line with American Stewards’ version of Last summer, successful that’s been. Dave Campbell, a maps in its appendices. BLM spokeswom- coordination and “something close to equal incumbent navajo recently retired Bitterroot National For- an Vanessa Lacayo says local governments footing” for counties and states on endan- President Ben Shelly est district ranger, hesitated to meet with had “significant influence,” but that final gered species decisions, says Jake Li, De- unexpectedly came Ravalli commissioners about coordination decisions “remain the BLM’s to make.” fenders of Wildlife’s director of endangered in seventh out of 17 or the county resource policy for fear it species conservation. candidates in the would lend credibility to the county’s posi- egardless of coordination’s on-the- “We’re all in favor of having local gov- primary, disrupting tion. “They took that one word out of (fed- R ground effectiveness, its principles ernments and the people closest to these the country’s largest eral laws) and defined it to say the county are gaining ground in other ways. The landscapes be a serious part of the deci- sovereign Indian gets first shot at planning,” he says. “It Western Governors’ Association is stump- sion-making process, ” says Jessica Goad, nation. It appeared was confusing to the public.” Adds Mark, ing for “expanded, meaningful opportuni- advocacy director at the Denver-based that Joe Shirley Jr., a former two-time “At times, I think (local officials) think ties for states to comment, participate, or Center for Western Priorities. “But that president, would they’ve got some sort of special status, take the lead” on endangered species deci- changes when it comes to the agenda be- face newcomer which they don’t.” sions. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, R, signed a hind ‘coordination.’ A lot of these policies Chris Deschene in And while officials generally encour- new law this March that requires counties shrouded in the term are undermining the the presidential age more research and data, environmen- to develop local resource-management role of the federal government. We’re see- runoff, but Deschene talists and others question the objectiv- plans, partly as “a basis for coordinating ing public lands as a vehicle for achieving was disqualified, ity of county-funded research, given that with the federal government.” Montana very anti-federal government goals.” purportedly because he wasn’t fluent in Navajo (“a question of fluency on the navajo nation,” HCN, 12/22/14). a legal and cultural battle erupted, all nine members of the Board of Election Supervisors were removed, and the election was delayed. Followup in an April 21 special election, businessman Russell begaye defeated Shirley, 63 percent to 37 percent. this may hinder the proposed Grand Canyon Escalade, a controversial but economically appealing $1 billion tourist development on the reservation. Begaye’s priorities include jobs and infrastructure, but he says the Escalade isn’t the answer: “We need to involve … the voice of the local people, rather than allowing big corporations to make those decisions.” KriSta langloiS

Crowds gather at the Roswell International Air Center, New Mexico, in 2011, to protest a proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the dunes sagebrush lizard as an endangered species. American Stewards claims their coordination strategy influenced the agency not to list the reptile in 2012. MaRK WILSOn, ROSWELL DaILY RECORD/aP PhOtO

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Since 1971, reader contributions to the Re- in memory of paul catterson | Black hawk, CO search Fund have made it possible for HCN in memory of george W. durham | Seattle, Wa to investigate and report on important issues that are unique to the american West. Your the lyme timber co. | hanover, nh tax-deductible gift directly funds thought- booth gallett | Santa Fe, nM provoking, independent journalism. paul & annie hudnut | Loveland, CO thank you for supporting our hardworking Kathie & Steve Jenkins | Reno, nv journalists. dick & marianne Kipper | Woody Creek, CO The High Plains transform into a domestic forest of trees and the Herschler Building is built robert & Kay moline | St. Peter, Mn in these photos looking up Randall Avenue in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1910 and 2007. John & gwen nixon | Crested Butte, CO JOSEPh E. 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WYOMiNG REViSiTED: REPHOTOGRAPHiNG THE SCENES OF JOSEPH Farewell, Ivan Doig E. STiMSON We were saddened to hear of was in Paonia visiting her sister, Michael a. amundson the April 9 passing of ivan Doig, Donna, and niece Krista, and 352 pages, hardcover: $29.95. the prolific and down-to-earth they all dropped in to visit HCN University Press of Colorado, 2014. writer who was born in rural headquarters. Sherye told us Montana and set many of his that their father used to own In 1890, Joseph E. Stimson began novels in gritty, working-class the old Gambles Hardware photographing Wyoming’s parks, communities. Doig’s work building across the street — ranches, people and landscapes, always carried the aroma of where HCN was first housed hoping to promote the brand- new state. In the process, he sage and the sweat of hard-lived when it relocated to Paonia documented an early Wyoming boom. For over 60 years, he followed the state’s lives, and we feel honored that in 1983 from its birthplace in rise as train lines raced across the state, sheep and cattle ranching expanded he and his wife, Carol, were Lander, Wyoming. and oil production increased. Photographer Michael amundson has carefully longtime subscribers and donors Frank DeMita and Georgia retraced his footsteps, first in the 1980s, in black-and-white, and then again to High Country News. Doig Nakou came all the way from in 2007-2008, in color. amundson reveals the unpredictable evolution of the told HCN Publisher Paul larmer Jersey — no, not that Jersey, West — the uneven ways that change ripples across a landscape. Many of the once that though he loved our but the largest of the British small towns amundson revisited appear unchanged from Stimson’s original gritty journalism, he was no fan . Frank first photographs. But others show the traces of the state’s dramatic boom-and-bust of our change from a black- ran across High Country News history. Images of the Cambria Coal Camp in the Black hills of northwestern Wyoming, for example, document the gradual disappearance of the mine’s and-white news tabloid into a as a law student in Taos, New infrastructure. In the final photograph, only a faint dirt road remains. “slick” four-color magazine. Why Mexico, and has kept an eye on waste cover space on a fancy the magazine ever since. They photograph when we could print were eager to sample Paonia’s good old-fashioned black-inked culinary delights, so we sent stories there? Doig promised them off with back issues and a cheryll faust | Salida, CO carolyn & rich miller | Breckenridge, CO to keep reading the magazine list of scenic hikes to walk off all glenn feldman | Paradise valley, aZ robert millette & maggie pedersen | nonetheless. To honor him, we Glenwood Springs, CO those tasty meals. James fereday & margaret ryan | Coos Bay, OR encourage you to read — or bill & martha mitchem | Rangely, CO Susan flader | Columbia, MO re-read — his books (like This MAGAZiNE SCAMMERS bUSTED? richard moos | Las vegas, nv robert follett | highlands Ranch, CO House of Sky, English Creek, Remember those “Subscriber Jerry munson | Rapid City, SD martin fowler | Fort Collins, CO Sweet Thunder, Dancing at the Alert” notices in recent issues of | Boulder, CO paul J. fowler | Denver, CO Kathryn mutz Rascal Fair), perhaps savor- HCN about an Oregon company William franklin | amherst, Ma heidi narte | Burien, Wa ing them while on a road trip sending unauthorized renewal michael gadsden | Denver, CO anne nelson | St. Cloud, Mn through his beloved West. offers? In March, the state’s ralph garboushian | Washington, DC dave nelson | aspen, CO attorney general filed a lawsuit daniel glick | Lafayette, CO doug & darlene newton | tucson, aZ SPRiNG ViSiTORS against 19 companies and nine magali goirand | San Francisco, Ca david & gail niebruegge | vista, Ca April winds brought Kelsey people accused of running a roger goldhamer | Santa Fe, nM Kevin notheis | Boulder, CO Elwood, a teaching and research “sophisticated mail scam” that thomas gougeon & donna middlebrooks | rita o’connell | Duluth, Mn assistant at Colorado College in tricked people into paying in- Denver, CO patrick o’driscoll | Denver, CO Colorado Springs, to our door. flated prices to renew their sub- Jason greenwald | Los angeles, Ca Steve orr | Boulder, CO She was in the area to study scriptions to various magazines lucinda haggas | Salmon, ID Edroy parker | twisp, Wa how those brisk winds affect and newspapers, bilking them barb & lyle hancock | Durango, CO forrest peebles | Seattle, Wa local farmers’ orchards. Kelsey, of some $20 million. Reader mary hanley | Washington, DC ronald J. penner | Salt Lake City, Ut a Western Slope native, was de- R.N. Vredenburg of Grants Pass, Sonia l. perillo | Scottsdale, aZ lighted to be back on this side of Oregon, sent us a clip about the FRiEND gary petri | Denver, CO the mountains for a week. She lawsuit and wrote, “Out of busi- anonymous (15) Eric & Kathy pierson | Durango, CO reminisced with fellow Colorado ness soon? Let’s hope for the in honor of Jonathan bowler | Laramie, WY the pitts family | Salida, CO College alum, HCN’s Online best!” We sure hope so, too! in honor of bob Kisthart | nPS - Yellowstone n.P bruce plenk | tucson, aZ Editor Tay Wiles, about mutual in honor of betsy marston lauren pope | hesperus, CO friends and old professors. in honor of | Montrose, CO margaret porter & James Knifong | Boulder, CO Sherye bacon boylan, who CORRECTiONS in honor of Kate Stonington happy price, Ken price inc. | arroyo hondo, nM grew up here in the area but Alert reader Steve Snyder of in memory of russ busch | Seattle, Wa margaret priver | huntington Beach, Ca now lives in LeRoy, New York, Marlin, Texas, sent us a note peter landres & madeline mazurski | John t. purcell | Flagstaff, aZ about our April 13, 2015, story Missoula, Mt norm rasulis | Fort Collins, CO “The West in 72 Hours.” He wrote: “Space shuttles may have l. g. lauxman | Rociada, nM pat rathmann | Moscow, ID landed at Edwards (Air Force Katie lee | Jerome, aZ Janet reither | Cotopaxi, CO Base, in the Mojave Desert), Sue ann leininger | Poway, Ca david & francis reneau | Menlo Park, Ca but they were, of course, never nicholas lenssen | Boulder, CO dan richardson | the Dalles, OR launched from there, which is lloyd levy | Wheat Ridge, CO William ritchie | Ilwaco, Wa phyllis lindner | Clarkdale, aZ the verb in your story.” Thanks Kathleen roman | Buena vista, CO for the careful read, Steve. Also Scott lorditch | Conifer, CO penny & mike rucks | Reno, nv Joe & Wendy lowe | Idaho Falls, ID in that issue, we referred to peggy Salzer | Lakewood, CO the Grand Tetons rather than James h. maguire | Boulder, CO Edward | Rifle, CO Grand Teton National Park, and John mcallister | Evergreen, CO nick Sayen | Des Moines, Ia “Glacier National Park” ap- Sean & lori mcconnor | new Meadows, ID carolyn J.c. Schauble | Boulder, CO peared as “Galcier.” Ouch. HCN James g. mccue | Idaho Falls, ID Wayne Schimpff | Chicago, IL Sherye Bacon Boylan and her sister, regrets the errors. Edward mcilvain | Golden, CO ray Schoch | Minneapolis, Mn Donna Bacon Widmer, visit High —Paul Larmer and Julia mcilvaine | Dover, Pa don Sharaf | victor, ID Country News. Jodi Peterson for the staff Eric & donna mendelson | Missoula, Mt barbara & bud Shark | Lyons, CO aLExIS haLBERt

www.hcn.org High Country News 11 The

Wetland Wars

ot too long ago, Roy van de Hoek was a has, however, thrown him into a bitter new dispute More than a one-man guerrilla restoration force, a over the Ballona reserve’s future. Officials with the decade ago, warrior for native species wherever he California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the went. In the 1990s, while working as a state Coastal Conservancy, allied with local non- Los Angeles Bureau of Land Management biologist profits, have declared in notices of intent, blogs and environmen- on Central California’s , an elegant website, BallonaRestoration.org, that talists saved Nhe independently began “girdling” Australian euca- the Ballona State Ecological Reserve needs to be lyptus trees on the protected landscape, stripping the restored. They want to tear out the ice plant and an urban trees of their bark until they slowly starved to death. replace it with native marsh grasses. They want He was convicted of a misdemeanor and lost his to bulldoze away old construction waste and tear wetland from job managing the Carrizo, but for his pains, Mother down the levees that contain , which developers. Jones magazine named him June 1997’s “Hellraiser cuts through the wetlands on its way to the ocean. of the Month.” They want to redesign the straightened creek so it Now they’re Van de Hoek last risked arrest for native plant meanders through the wetlands, mimicking a more trying to save life in 2006, when he began pulling alien vegeta- natural stream. tion from the 600-acre Ballona Wetlands Ecological Some local ecologists disagree with the state’s it from Reserve on the coast, near his specific plans, but still believe a restoration is in or- each other. home. The City of Los Angeles charged him with van- der. Hanscom, van de Hoek and their allies, however dalism, but later absolved him on the condition that — who include local Sierra Club leaders, politicians FEATURE By van de Hoek, a gifted interpreter of nature, provide and even some journalists — believe almost any- JUdiTh LEwis them with scientific reports and lead wetland tours. thing but the most gentle rehabilitation, conducted These days, at 58, van de Hoek is an environ- by hand, would be a disaster. As they await the MERniT mental educator with Los Angeles County Parks state’s long delayed environmental impact report for and Recreation and a reformed man. One afternoon, the restoration, they show up at county supervisor as I stood with him and his fiancée, environmental meetings, comment on blogs, and write letters to edi- activist Marcia Hanscom, counting monarchs in a eu- tors. If the restoration goes ahead, Hanscom told me, calyptus grove on the southern fringe of the Ballona sweeping her hand over a carpet of green, less native Reserve, he told me the story of his conversion. How, than non, “everything that lives here now will die.” after a squabble with a neighbor over his girdling of Why every discussion about the Ballona Wet- a local ficus tree, he noticed native waders, like night lands divides environmentalists into camps so herons and egrets, roosting in the ficus trees. How he entrenched they can barely talk to one another is recognized that ice plant, a South African succulent, a question that stumps even some of the people shelters native voles and frogs. How he started read- involved in the fight. Wetlands matter, yes — they ing Robert Michael Pyle. protect inland settlements from storms, offer habitat Pyle traveled more than 9,000 miles follow- to birds, rodents and even coyotes. They treat inland ing the monarch migration across the West for his runoff before it enters the ocean. They contain plants 1999 book, Chasing Monarchs. Van de Hoek felt a that exist nowhere else in the world. Southern Cali- deep kinship with him. “The way he carries books fornia has lost 90 percent of its original 49,000 acres in his car about natural history, the way he drops of coastal wetlands. For Los Angeles, Ballona is the everything to chase a butterfly,” van de Hoek says. very last patch. “I wanted to call him up!” Monarchs, Pyle observed, But Ballona’s significance goes beyond that. It’s roost in eucalyptus in the absence of their native co- as if, in the concrete sprawl of the L.A. metropolis, nifers. He was angry that state land managers were where almost every view is owned and where fist- cutting the “eucs” down. “He was angry at me,” van fights erupt over beach access, any swath of undevel- de Hoek said, pressing binoculars to his face to count oped land takes on outsized significance. It becomes the fluttering masses above our heads, clinging there a place to project all of our hopes for healing the like rust-colored petals. climate and saving imperiled species, and perhaps Slowly, van de Hoek began to see certain urban even wresting power back from bureaucracy and A great blue heron , like the Ballona Wetlands, not as places developers. and great egrets in a in need of a heavy-handed fix, but as places in the This, right now, is the burden of Ballona, a tidal channel in the process of evolving — not back to what they were landscape caught between competing visions of what Ballona Wetlands before humans arrived, but into something just as is good, desirable and even natural in urban wild- Ecological Reserve, wild, beautiful and ecologically significant. lands. If restoration ecology, as British scientist A.D. Playa del Rey, Van de Hoek’s philosophical transformation Bradshaw declared in the 1980s, is the “acid test of California. Jonathan Coffin/ means he no longer goes around girdling trees. It the ecological movement,” then Ballona is the acid stonebird, CC via fliCkr

12 High Country News May 11, 2015

Wetland Wars

Pullout goes here quay sans medium 14/18 aligned toward spine —Tag

www.hcn.org High Country News 13 if the proposed test of the acid test — a place that might wetland in exchange for the Friends drop- more than 100 activist groups in pursuit prove what restoration can, and perhaps ping their decades-old lawsuit against the of a sweeter deal. They didn’t stop Playa restoration of should, achieve in an increasingly urban- development. That was never enough for Vista — its apartments and shops and the Ballona ized West. Marcia Hanscom, who in 1995 founded parks now loom over the wetlands like an the Wetlands Action Network to organize enemy compound — but they did get the wetlands The liTTle eucalypTus grove where Playa Vista resistance. That same year, state Coastal Conservancy to purchase goes ahead, van de Hoek counted butterflies — 218 Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and another 192 acres from the developer. In of them — once belonged to a 2,000-acre David Geffen announced plans to locate 2003, the California Department of Fish “everything that system of seeps, dunes, willow their DreamWorks movie studio in Playa and Wildlife bundled it up with the acre- lives here now groves, mud flats, and marsh Vista, and the fight for Ballona became a age Lansford had secured, and designat- called Ballona (pronounced Bye-ona). The blockbuster media event. ed it all an ecological reserve. Playa Vista will die,” says people fished and farmed here Celebrities led marches on the turned another 36 acres just outside the activist Marcia before early Spanish colonists forced wetlands’ behalf; one activist staged a reserve’s southeastern edge into a fresh- them inland to build missions. Early-19th hunger strike. Hanscom, then in her water marsh to treat the development’s hanscom. century Mexican ranchers grazed their 40s, found herself organizing wetland runoff. In 2005, Hughes’ heirs gave the cattle on marsh grasses. Later, oil extrac- tours for journalists from Variety and state another 70 acres to settle a tax tors lined the with derricks. The Hollywood Reporter. People who debt, and the modern boundaries of the Then came the influx of post-war spent most of their time in dark theaters reserve were set. residents looking for homes near the rode around on school buses learning Little has been done around the wet- sea. Howard Hughes bought up much about the lifecycle of the tidewater goby, lands since then. The “Friends,” as they’re of Ballona in the 1940s for his own a tiny fish gone from Ballona but na- known, conduct tours and do restoration personal airport; in the 1960s, parts of tive to California . They learned whenever possible. Hanscom and van de the wetland were carved out to create why the bright yellow mustard flowers Hoek, who in 2005 founded the nonprofit Marina del Rey, a recreational boat har- blooming in the wetlands didn’t belong, Ballona Institute, aren’t allowed any offi- bor surrounded by upscale shopping and and why the ragged salt grass did. They cial access and have uneasy dealings with high-rise apartments. After Hughes died learned that sloughs and marshes and everyone who does. The public has been in 1976, his heirs laid plans to transform springs once extended for 20 miles inland officially shut out. In 2013, the Annenberg what remained of the property into a from the Southern California coast, and Foundation donated funds for a full-time 1,000-acre housing and retail develop- that Conservation International had, land manager, and the state hired an ment called Playa Vista, but a local resi- in 1996, identified the California Flo- ecologist, Richard Brody, the first in the dent, Ruth Lansford, mobilized to stop ristic Province from Tijuana, Mexico, to preserve’s history. The Annenberg money them, founding the first activist group southern Oregon as one of 35 “biodiver- ran out last year, and California Fish and to defend the area, Friends of Ballona sity hotspots,” rich with species found Wildlife now struggles to fund Brody’s job. Wetlands. In so doing, she launched one nowhere else on Earth. The Annenberg group also at one point of the signal battles of the Los Angeles Eventually, the DreamWorks partners made a bid to build an interpretative cen- environmental movement. pulled out, but Hanscom had already ter on Ballona property that would have In 1990, Lansford entered into an leveraged the spotlight they’d flicked on. included a veterinary facility for stray agreement with a new group of develop- Under the banner, “Citizens United to cats and dogs. Amid intense opposition, ers, who promised to preserve 297 acres of Save All of Ballona,” she brought together last December the foundation backed out.

14 High Country News May 11, 2015 Roy van de Hoek and Marcia Hanscom, facing page, are advocates of a minimal restoration of the Ballona Wetlands. At left, salt flats in the Ballona Wetlands butt up against Marina Del Rey, California. Jonathan alCorn

There’s no getting around the reality authors, Johnston says, disagree on its that Ballona now suffers from the kind implications for restoration. An urban of entropy that sets in when any urban ecological reserve in a city of 5 million wildland has been left alone too long. people is in some ways beyond redemp- Brody says he and his crew pulled out 15 tion. Everything around it has been al- tons of debris last year alone. “Needles, tered; it can’t be returned to exactly what stolen luggage, trash,” he says, much of it it was. So how close should a restoration left behind by homeless people who use try to get? the preserve for campouts, constructing fire pits and setting up tents. Though like so maNy moderN ecological fences surround parts of the reserve, movemeNTs, the one that informs the labeled with signs warning “No Tres- Ballona restoration began with Aldo passing” and “No Dogs Allowed,” people Leopold. In 1935, at the University of let their dogs run loose and trample the Wisconsin-Madison, Leopold led a crew vulnerable, low-to-the-ground nests of in replanting native tallgrass prairie the state-endangered Belding’s savan- on exhausted farmland, an installation nah sparrow. Fountains of pampas grass that later became the centerpiece of blight the landscape with their feathery the school’s renowned arboretum. Fifty excess. Feral cats breed and roam and years later, two professors at the uni- kill. versity, John Aber and William Jordan, “We can’t look at this and say this is formalized what they called “restoration a natural system, everything’s fine and ecology” as a field of study and practice. tion near the Los Angeles International Trash in the reserve. healthy,” says Karina Johnston, direc- Aber saw it as a middle ground between Airport, just down the street from Bal- Jonathan Coffin/ stonebird, CC via fliCkr tor of watershed programs for the Santa exploitation and preservation, a way of lona, was stabilized with “native” plants Monica Bay Restoration Foundation, an acknowledging that humans can, if they that ended up encouraging insects whose independent nonprofit that supports the put their collective will toward it, benefit competition nearly wiped out the El work of the state-run nature. Segundo blue butterfly. The plants were Restoration Commission. Nor can the Aber and Jordan were clear that the native to Southern California, but not to necessary overhaul be accomplished with goal of restoration was to bring back the the habitat where the butterfly had volunteer labor on weekends. “Over 3 native plants and animals that inhab- thrived. million cubic yards of sediment have been ited an area before humans mucked it Then there’s the question of time: dumped there,” Johnston says bluntly. “It up. Even then, that wasn’t easy: Leopold What point in the past should a res- didn’t get there with wheelbarrows.” himself had come to understand that you toration try to re-create? In 2005, the In 2012, the Bay Commission solicited can’t bring back tallgrass prairie without National Park Service and The Nature a historical ecology study of Ballona to the disturbances it evolved with, such as Conservancy began a violent restoration figure out what the wetlands looked like fire to kill woody plants that out-compete of , off the Southern during a period from 1850 to 1890. The grasses. Well-intentioned replantings California coast, slaughtering feral pigs, idea was to inform a restoration with evi- can also be brought down by the wrong burning tall fennel stands and relocating dence from the past. But even the study’s vegetation mix: In 1975, a dune restora- golden eagles, who had moved into the

www.hcn.org High Country News 15 Travis Longcore, an associate professor of spatial sciences at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, with a map he and a team created showing the historical geology of the Ballona Wetlands. Jonathan alCorn

“i think there predator void left by DDT-ravaged bald , feeding a . mizing the influx of saltwater matters. eagles. The goal of the restoration was to In the late 1930s, the U.S. Army Unlike Hanscom and van de Hoek, are smart things return the island to what it was before Corps of Engineers lined the banks of Longcore isn’t completely opposed to a you could do 19th century ranchers colonized it. It was Ballona Creek with concrete to protect Ballona restoration. “I think there are done primarily to save the endangered the communities around it from flooding. smart things you could do with Ballona with Ballona island fox. Where the creek emptied into the ocean, that would make it better ecologically, that would That restoration has been a success, now with enough directed force to keep and function better for rare species that on its terms; since it was completed in a channel open again, the Corps built we care about,” he says. “Some of them make it better 2007, the little fox has rebounded. But concrete levees to keep those tides away do require bulldozers.” One would involve ecologically, recent archaeological evidence sug- from land. raising Culver Boulevard, a major street gests the fox might not be so indigenous. Right now, the Ballona Wetlands con- that bisects the wetlands. The wetlands and function Thousands of years ago, gray foxes were tain a mixture of ecologies replenished could flow under the elevated road, con- better for rare brought to the islands by the Chumash meagerly by urban runoff, winter rains necting the north and south segments. Indians, who cherished them as compan- and minimal tides through a single gate. Wildlife could then move freely under species that ions; one theory suggests the island fox Whether any restoration should, or even the road instead of ending up as roadkill. we care about. evolved from those animals. Whether that can, return them to their mostly fresh- Culver Boulevard is also the official tsu- matters to you depends on which point water 19th century condition is a mat- nami escape route, so raising it would be some of them in time you pick to consider the island ter of much agitated debate. The state’s good for public safety, as well as a hedge do require “natural.” preferred plan would lower parts of the against climate-influenced sea-level rise. At Ballona, it’s not just thousands reserve to sea level and demolish the But Longcore, who is president of Los bulldozers.” of years of human influence that have levees, allowing the tides to flow in and Angeles Audubon, also wants any resto- made settling on a restoration epoch create more saltwater marsh. But that, ration of Ballona to protect its —Travis Longcore, tricky. Earthquakes and weather, too, says Travis Longcore, an associate profes- population of birds and animals. And that USC scientist who have altered the system through the sor of spatial sciences at the University goal, he says, is often at odds with the helped map Ballona’s years. Before 1825, the Los Angeles River of Southern California and an authority state plan, which he believes imposes a historical geology emptied into the ocean at Ballona, and, in ecological restoration, is “the wrong big simple, ostensibly low-maintenance ideal with its relatively strong hydrologic force, move.” Those levees, he says, mimic a lost he calls “flush, baby, flush” on a complex kept the wetlands open to the tides. But feature of the wetland as it evolved since and diverse ecology. That plan will have after a series of seismic shocks and floods 1825. dire consequences for the habitat of shoved the river’s course south, only little “The levees now function like an outer certain species, like the federally endan- Ballona Creek trickled down from the dune system,” Longcore explains, keeping gered California gnatcatcher, a tiny bird inland watershed, most years lacking the the tides at bay. If you’re restoring the recently spotted in Ballona’s coastal scrub force to breach the dunes and let salt- Ballona Wetlands for the sake of the spe- for the first time since 1880. The bur- water in. The creek petered out into the cies that historically depended on it, mini- rowing owl would also lose ground were

16 High Country News May 11, 2015 Snowy egret in the slough of the Ballona Wetlands. Jonathan Coffin/stonebird, CC via fliCkr

Venice Beach

Caption. Credit Marina del rey Ballona Creekballona Wetlands ecological reserve

Playa del rey

Pacific Ocean

GooGle earth seawater to flood its habitat, and more tides. The construction of the new estuary tion of on the North would be destroyed, at least temporarily, dredged and bulldozed most of it away to San Diego County coast jettied the mouth when fill from the excavation of a tidal make way for more open water. permanently open to the ocean; another basin gets dumped on upland habitat. “So if you ask, ‘Was the Malibu wetland, Bolsa Chica, 30 miles down the To underscore his argument, Longcore Lagoon project a successful restoration coast from Ballona, was reconfigured nine brings up another restoration, completed for the south coast marsh vole?’ ” Long- years ago with a fully tidal lagoon. Long- two years ago, 20 miles up the coast from core says, “the answer would be no. They core argues that such projects are not res- Ballona, at Malibu Lagoon. Most local removed a lot of individuals. I don’t know torations, because they create permanent environmentalists consider the restora- where they put them. Some specimens tidal openings where only ephemeral tion — done chiefly for the sake of water came to the natural history museum to openings were found in the past. Instead, quality — an unqualified success. The be, you know, specimens.” like Ballona, both Batiquitos and Bolsa restoration did not open the lagoon to the I talked to Longcore in his basement Chica were blocked from the tides by ocean, as would the removal of Ballona office on campus, on a brisk, showery day sand bars and sediment, except when a Creek’s levees, but it did create much in December. At 45, he is tall and ener- major winter storm briefly blasted a tidal more open water than existed there getic, with a fountain of short dark hair. inlet clear. before, replacing an algae-clouded marsh He talks with his entire being, even while Longcore shows me a color-coded map with a clean, open lagoon. Biologists have sitting in his chair. He is a consummate of the North San Diego County coast in reported that the populations of certain scholar: He has examined old surveyor the 19th century. The pink on the map endemic fish, like the tidewater goby, are accounts and 19th century coastal maps, represents “seasonally flooded salt flat,” on the rise. and claims to have read every L.A. Times he says. Salt flats are dry most of the And yet Longcore believes that the story that mentions Ballona. He has spring and summer, wet when rain falls restoration got it wrong. “Of course, there contributed to several historical ecology or storms blow in. “And the reason they are tidewater gobies there,” he says heat- reports on California’s coastal wetlands, matter ecologically,” says Longcore, “is edly. “There were tidewater gobies there including the one on Ballona curated by that they provide seasonal habitat with before.” It’s the other creatures that the the Bay Commission. And he argues that different depths of water for all kinds of $7 million state-run collaboration ran Southern California is moving in the migratory birds: short shorebirds, tall roughshod over that trouble him, ani- wrong direction when it comes to restor- shorebirds, dabbling ducks, diving ducks.” mals like the south coast marsh vole. The ing coastal wetlands. Ninety-five percent of the North County vole, a state species of “special concern,” “We’ve had a San Francisco Bay salt flats are gone. Meanwhile, open also exists at Ballona; it occupies a wet, model of wetland restoration cookie- water in the area’s coastal wetlands has meadowy area, says Longcore, above the cuttered onto almost all of our lagoon increased by 600 percent. tidal zone. Before the restoration, Malibu restorations here in Southern California,” Wetland habitat “is hard for people to Lagoon had a lot of habitat for the vole, Longcore says. That model favors big, get their minds around,” Longcore says. which needs room to escape the incoming open bays and lagoons. A 1997 restora- “It’s neither fish nor fowl. You can drive a

www.hcn.org High Country News 17 with the state’s car across it sometimes; it’s covered with once-wet city as much as Longcore does. because she wants the wetlands to be water otherwise. People have a hard time But historical ecology is “only a snap- wet again, as they were back when free- plan, s ome designing for it,” and the public has a shot,” she says, and she doesn’t believe flowing freshwater creeks and streams animals will hard time appreciating it. “You hear peo- the wetlands have to be returned to what and occasional tides refreshed them. For ple say, ‘Oh look! There’s now an octopus they were in 1850 for a restoration to be the creeks to water the wetlands again, die. “none of in Bolsa Chica! Isn’t this great? We have meaningful. And anyway, it can’t be done: they would have to be released from their us like it,” says diversity!’ But no, octopus do not belong The riverine forces that once shaped the concrete culverts, and floodplains would in Bolsa Chica.” Sea slugs, adapted to Ballona Valley, transporting rocks and have to be cleared of homes, offices and environmental opening and closing systems, do. sediment from the mountains through shopping malls. “That’s not going to hap- scientist Longcore knows it’s a lot easier to love the watershed, no longer exist in the pen in my lifetime,” Luce says. So let Bal- blue water than to embrace the messy, paved-over city. Now there are “gas lines lona be what it can be: A self-sustaining, shelley Luce. tattered, sometimes brown, sometimes and airports and private property,” Luce mostly . Saltwater marsh is “But we’re mucky, salt flats. Even Longcore’s wife says. “We have to consider what’s pos- habitat, too, and supporters of the resto- thinks he’s weak on messaging. “She says, sible.” ration believe that certain species, like doing it ‘Look, if your argument is, ‘This stuff that Luce is 44, willowy and calm, and an the endangered California least tern and because two looks ugly to people is good,’ you’re going influential coalition builder. She was a the clapper rail, might rebound in the to lose. Because politicians aren’t going to major player on the Ballona restoration project’s wake. years later, the spend the time to sit down and under- until recently, when she left her post as British restoration pioneer Bradshaw whole place will stand the history of coastal wetlands. As director of the Santa Monica Bay Resto- once described the American approach long as there’s no homeless and no trash, ration Commission to serve as executive to restoration as: “If you can’t put it back come back 10 and there’s blue water to look at and director for the nonprofit Environment like it was … then don’t do it!” But that, times better.” it’s green, they’re going to be happy.’ All Now. She still participates in the dis- he wrote, is “a counsel of perfection lead- they want to know is, ‘Is this going to be cussion, publishing a newsletter called ing only to despair.” If a landscape has pretty?’ ” Access Ballona and sitting on advisory been altered beyond redemption, he said, committees. And she’s still the scientist it’s OK to find another model for it — one iT Was pouriNg raiN the December day who makes the best case for the state’s that fits the local community, meshes I met Shelley Luce for lunch at a French restoration plans. with the local ecology, and accommodates restaurant in Culver City, a few miles Luce doesn’t dispute Longcore’s the modern era and its inhabitants. inland from the wetlands — a place once description of Ballona as closed to the That’s exactly what Luce believes the so verdant with riparian beauty that pro- tides. “It looks from the historical ecology state’s plan does. “We might create more ducers in the 1920s built studios here to that there was more freshwater than saltwater marsh in Ballona than was shoot scenes of pioneers fording Ballona () at times,” she says. Still, she there in 1850,” she admits. “It might be Creek. It was the kind of day that makes wants those levees to come out, in part closer to the way things looked in 1650. people like Luce, an environmental scien- so that Ballona can join the citywide re- We don’t know.” Either way, she says, tist, dream of freeing the city’s streams wilding effort revolving around the Los there’s a net gain for coastal wetlands. Environmental from their confines, returning the region Angeles River, where the Army Corps “We’ve lost a lot of salt marsh up and scientist Shelley Luce, at Ballona to its secret hydrological roots, when the last May approved a $1 billion project to down the coast, too,” Luce says, though Creek in the Ballona Southern California landscape ran wet demolish 11 miles of the river’s 75-year- only a handful of those areas were ever Wetlands area. with creeks and sloughs. old concrete banks. fully open to the ocean. “We have an Jonathan alCorn Luce loves the old survey maps of this But she also wants the levees out opportunity to get one or the other back at Ballona, and both are good. The salt marsh option just means we’ll have some- thing that might be more sustainable over time.” Longcore disagrees. If Ballona is opened to the tides, it will need periodic expensive dredging to stay that way, because sediment happens. And beyond what an expanded salt marsh would do to displace existing habitat, he worries about what will happen to the resident animals during construction. Luce admits some will die, even if you take great care not to kill them. “None of us like it,” she says. “But we’re doing it because two years later, the whole place will come back 10 times better.” There’s no guarantee of that, of course. Bradshaw considered restoration the best test of ecologists’ understanding of nature, but he knew back then that their understanding of nature wasn’t per- fect. It isn’t now, either. Any restoration is to some extent a risk: No one knows for sure whether any altered landscape or its biodiversity will come back better, worse, or simply different.

roy vaN de hoek no longer gives tours of the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve. In 2008, he got into a dustup with Brody, then a biological consultant for state Fish and Wildlife, who had covered a segment of the wetland with a tarp to smother

18 High Country News May 11, 2015 Pullout goes here quay sans medium 14/18 aligned toward spine —Tag

Stilts on the Ballona Creek Estuary. Jonathan Coffin/stonebird, CC via fliCkr alien vegetation without herbicides. The Out onto the sandy riding ring, which 10 years after the purchase, (Ballona) goal was to restore native milk vetch, was covered with footprints both human is not one iota more accessible.” I also which had been wiped out in the wet- and canine — coyote, maybe; domestic thought about what Longcore said, that lands in the 1950s. Van de Hoek objected dog, more likely. The ducks startled away. the wetlands’ fate isn’t a matter of public — too vehemently — that the tarp would I walked and walked, sneezing through opinion; it’s a scientific call. “It is,” he says, also kill squirrels, voles and Pacific cho- fields of non-native yellow crown daisy, “an ecological reserve.” And I thought it rus frogs. He was subsequently banned tripping over bouncy succulents. But not so far-fetched that Ballona could be from the reserve. I never felt at ease. I was alone in an both an ecological reserve and a place the So it was without his and Hanscom’s unsafe city. I was breaking the law. I public could enjoy, with rules, and guid- company that I trespassed into the re- worried about the Belding’s savannah ance. Designing for that would require a serve myself, around sunset one Sunday sparrow, nesting all around me in the process that has been difficult to conduct afternoon, walking around behind a pale green fingers of pickleweed. around the Ballona Wetlands, ever since pocket park where only wooden stumps And yet the Ballona Wetlands is the rifts broke open around Playa Vista and signs warned me away. still an enchanted, astonishing place, and the wetlands became a battleground. Lizards skittered under my feet, and where nature persists on whatever terms It would require open public meetings, ducks landed out on a bare circle of sand civilization has allowed. I could see the leadership, stakeholders willing to hash known as the “horse-riding ring,” because adaptability Hanscom and van de Hoek out a compromise, and a steady stream of Judith lewis Mernit is at one point, that’s what it was. I took a so worshipped. But I also wanted trails, money for care and maintenance. a contributing editor deep breath and inhaled the bright, green interpretative signs, a place to sit and A constructive process could arise at High Country News. breeze, thick with sea and flora. I walked think. What if I, and so many people who around the state’s environmental review she has also written among tendrils of California salt grass live nearby, could go for an evening walk when it comes out at the end of the year. for Sierra, Capital and and stands of pickleweed, plants whose in the reserve, counting the least terns Or it could be thwarted by more interne- Main, TakePart, The names I knew mostly because van de and bufflehead ducks? How might that cine acrimony in the lawsuits that will Atlantic and the Los Hoek taught me to revere them a decade change life in our crowded and overdevel- inevitably follow. Land manager Brody, at Angeles Times. ago, back when he believed they were oped city? least, still has faith. “I look forward to the this story was funded sacred, and told me to kneel upon the I thought about what Shelley Luce day when I meet all of these people out with reader donations ground in their presence. had told me, that she considers it “a on the trail in the reserve,” he says. “It’s to the high Country No one stopped me, so I kept walking. crime on the part of public agencies that, going to be a great place.” news research fund. www.hcn.org High Country News 19 MARKETPLACE

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Grassroots Advocacy Conference, June 18- of Arizona’s Center for Science and Public ence developing and implementing effective com, www.LPappliances.com, www.grid-tie. 20, at the American Mountaineering Center Policy, providing leadership, technical ex- conservation campaign strategies, building com or call toll-free for information: 877-627- in Golden, Colo. This year’s conference will pertise and mentoring in spatial analyses community and bipartisan political support, 4768. focus on the Forest Service’s new Over–Snow and modeling, database development and and fundraising. Travel in the Yellowstone Vehicle Travel Management Rule. This is an management, and GIS technology, initiates region and to Washington, D.C., is required.

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www.hcn.org High Country News 21 MARKETPLACE

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22 High Country News May 11, 2015 SuStain independent media for future generations with your legacy gift

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www.hcn.org High Country News 23 WRITERS ON THE RANGE

The view from 31,000 feet: A philosopher looks at fracking I was flying the red-eye home to Port- that can be thought. The time when one set of stories, one land, when the pilot spoke over the What story permits fracking’s and worldview, grinds up against another intercom. “We are currently over North the industrial growth economy’s system- is unstable and dangerous. Things fall Dakota. Below us are the famous Bak- atic violence against the Earth? A super- apart; the center cannot hold. The facts ken shale-oil fracking fields.” I looked hero comic book, I’m thinking, fantasies that people encounter, the feelings they down into the night. As far as I could of planetary subjugation and mastery directly experience, no longer fit the sto- see toward every horizon, the plain was that stir the loins of boys and Wall Street ry they were born to, but the new story is studded with flames — oil rigs flaring bankers. That story tells us that we not yet fully formed, and who can make methane. How is it possible, I remember humans are separate from and superior sense of this tectonic trembling? This is asking myself, that humans can do this to the rest of Earth’s beings, in control of a time of shouts and bullies, as the old OPINION BY to the Earth? a planet that is ours alone. We are lonely story struggles violently for control of KATHlEEN Of course, what it is possible for us heroes in endless competition. The losers the narrative. DEAN MOORE to do depends on the stories we tell our- in that competition — plants, animals, Then something happens. The old selves. A culture embodies a worldview, future generations — should be grateful story shatters and a new story emerges answers to the fundamental questions to live on the toxic trickle-down excess of to take its place. Philosophers call it a of the human condition: What is the us winners. Of course, superheroes are paradigm shift, this sudden leap from Earth? What is the place of humans exempt from the rules that govern the one foundational understanding to an- on Earth? How, then, shall we live? rest of the world. other. No one can know where it begins: A worldview is so pervasive, so built Within this story, poisoning ground Copernicus’ workshop. Selma, Alabama. WEB EXTRA To see all the current into the structure of our lives that we water and smashing ancient rock for The Berlin Wall. The Bakken fracking Writers on the Range don’t notice or question it, any more petroleum make perfectly good sense. fields in North Dakota. columns, and archives, than a trout questions water. Inside the But that story is wildly inconsistent with North Dakota is the place where visit HCN’s Web site, structure of such a story, acts that would emerging ecological and evolutionary fracking has driven the old story to hcn.org otherwise be unthinkable become all understandings. its crumbling edge. It is a reductio

24 High Country News May 11, 2015 ad absurdum of the theory of human domination, to crush the last drop of oil from the rocks, to take everything until there is nothing left to take, to wring out the washrag to drink the spilled wine — and to claim that this is right and smart. Suddenly, this is inconceivable. Literally that, unthinkable — because it can only make sense inside a system of thought that is now being shattered with every underground fracturing of ancient A gas flare billows rock. up on a private oil A very new, or very old, story is be- and gas installation ginning to take its place. It’s an ecologi- leased near the Fort cal-ethical-indigenous account of human Berthold Indian kinship in a world that is interconnected, Reservation, North interdependent, finite, beautiful and Dakota. resilient. Like any worldview, it provides BRuce FaRnsWoRTh a measure of what is sensible and good. Because we understand that the and precaution to replace a destructive Kathleen Dean Moore is a writer and world’s systems are interconnected, we ethos of excess. This is the foundation of distinguished professor of philosophy realize that damage to any part is dam- prudence. emerita at Oregon State University. She age to the whole. This is the foundation Because we understand the planet’s is a contributor to the book, Fracture: of justice. systems are resilient, we are called to Essays, Poems, and Stories on Frack- Because we understand the world stop the harm and undo the damage that ing in America, which will be published is interdependent, we acknowledge our has been done. This is the foundation of December 2015. reliance on one another and on the life- hope. giving systems of the Earth. This is the Writers on the Range is a syndicated service of Because the Earth is beautiful, we High Country News, providing three opinion foundation of compassion. will refuse to tolerate the oil industry’s columns each week to more than 70 newspapers Because we recognize that the Earth wars against the Earth. This is the be- around the West. For more information, contact is finite, we embrace an ethic of restraint ginning of moral courage. Betsy Marston, [email protected], 970-527-4898.

Tell us the best place to recreate on Western public lands

In the spirit of a good old-fashioned Join us for this very special issue. verbal fracas — and to celebrate our region's most iconic places — • Huge discounts available on print, High Country News invites you to eNewsletter and Web advertising. vote in Battle of the Lands, • Package and à la carte options a bracket-style tournament to available. crown our readers' favorite spot • Special ad pricing is extended to to recreate in the West. Starting all Marketplace ads. May 28, choose between our ISSUE COVER DATE: July 20, 2015 match-ups by voting online at SPACE RESERVATION DEADLINE: June 29, 2015 hcn.org/public-lands-vote AD ART DEADLINE: July 6, 2015 Visit hcn.org/OR Essay Contest In addition to voting for your favorite public land, consider your favorite place or contact David Anderson: for outdoor recreation, and tell us why your land rules in our essay contest. 800-311-5852 or [email protected] Essays are due by June 12. See hcn.org/public-lands-essay

PHOTOS: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

www.hcn.org High Country News 25 BOOKS A lost classic made new

First published in 1886, The Story of My journey into their own hearts. Jefferies, it prose with a chapter of his own commen- Heart, by Richard Jefferies, is a slim, turns out, was an English nature writer, tary. He sees in Jefferies a kindred spirit, mystical volume — a nature writer’s essayist and journalist. And he did not someone he could imagine being friends exploration of his own soul. lack 20th century admirers; Rachel with today. “This story,” he writes, “is Three years ago, well-known natu- Carson supposedly kept two books by her about living in this modern world, vastly ralist and author Terry Tempest Wil- bedside: Thoreau’s Walden, and Jefferies’ different from the natural world we liams and her writer husband, Brooke, book. evolved into.” stumbled upon an old copy of the book in The Williamses’ quest culminated in As Terry Tempest Williams writes in an independent bookstore in Maine. They this sincerely felt tribute, The Story of My the introduction, readers who have never were immediately caught by its stunning Heart by Richard Jefferies: As Redis- heard of Jefferies before may “rediscover prose. covered by Terry Tempest Williams and what it feels like to fall back in love with The Story of My Heart “My heart was dusty,” Jefferies writes Brooke Williams. the world.” by Richard Jefferies: As in the opening paragraph, “parched for Jefferies’ writings, the Williamses Torrey House Press and the Wil- Rediscovered by Terry want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind note, are relevant today: He was a great liamses have done a great service for the Tempest Williams and arid and dry, for there is dust which proponent of exercise, for example, in 21st century with this reissue. The Story Brooke Williams settles on the heart as well as that which particular daily walking, as well as of of My Heart speaks across the ages, and Richard Jefferies, Terry falls on a ledge.” Who was this eloquent the benefits of being idle. But his real belongs on the same shelf as Thoreau, Tempest Williams, Brooke writer from another century, they won- message was a spiritual one, urging the Emerson, Whitman, Muir, Beston and Williams dered? reader to “go higher than a god; deeper Leopold. 233 pages, softcover: Their search for the answer would than a prayer.” lead the pair to England and thence to After each chapter by Jefferies, BY CHARlES FINN $21.95. France and the Louvre, as well as on a Brooke Williams balances the Victorian Torrey house Press, 2014.

In pursuit of ghosts

As The High Divide opens in 1886, past sooner: “If only she had been able to serve as a proving ground for Ulysses’ Gretta Pope’s husband, Ulysses, a U.S. summon the strength to draw the poison growing sons. Army veteran, has been missing for six out of Ulysses. … But she had been In clear, vivid prose, Enger describes weeks, leaving her with two sons to raise, raised to believe that a man’s burdens the family’s journeys, expanding the story past-due rent, and no idea about where were meant for him alone to carry.” of the search for one man into an investi- he might have gone or when he’ll be In The High Divide, the West is swift- gation of the West’s conscience at a time back. An odious landlord begins to circle ly transforming from a savage, blood- when men had recently decimated its Gretta, demanding payment in more than thirsty land into a settled place where the native peoples and fauna and were just money. Then Gretta’s son, 16-year-old only remnants of the bygone, unfettered beginning to reap the consequences. In Eli, intercepts a letter to his father from West are the buffalo bones that litter the the process, he tells a tender story of love, a woman in Bismarck, suggesting that prairie, which men scavenge for quick sorrow and the quest for redemption. Ulysses recently visited her. Eli sneaks money. And yet this changing land will BY JENNY SHANK out of the family home in Sloan’s Cross- ing, Minnesota, and hops a freight train The High Divide west to find his father, but his sickly Lin enger 9-year-old brother guesses his plan and 332 pages, hardcover: follows. Meanwhile, Gretta embarks on $24.95 her own travels and investigations. algonquin, 2014. Minnesota novelist Lin Enger switch- es to the perspective of a different family member in each chapter, updating us on their individual odysseys and making it clear that the members of this family love each other deeply and want to be togeth- er, even though their lack of communica- tion has split them apart and left them wracked by doubts about everything. The boys and Gretta are astonished to learn that Ulysses re-enlisted after the Civil War and served in Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment, which was notorious for killing women and children in Indian villages. Ulysses’ recent erratic behavior Young men hop on appears to spring from his secret past; he a freight train in is clearly haunted by something that hap- Bakersfield, California. RondaL PaRTRidge, u.s. pened when he was in the military. naTionaL aRchives and As she seeks her husband, Gretta re- RecoRds adMinisTRaTion bukes herself for not delving into Ulysses’

26 High Country News May 11, 2015 ESSAY | BY DAvID OATES

No strAIght lINes You’re not too sure what you’re seeing when you walk in these Northwestern woods. Thick-shadowed Sunlight seeps through forests overgrown in the half-light, more kinds of moss and lichen than you can name, woolly-green the forest of arms above and woolly-green cushions around … roc k, tree, yielding, standing. the Columbia River Gorge. John chRisToPheR You can walk for hours without a real view. else in America. And more hikers. We belong here, we think, in /JchRisToPheR What you get instead is this light tricksy and shifting. Is this forest, this wet paradise. Cradled here, we rest in it. gaLLeRies. a running whisper of questions and speculations. Things that Strenuously. coM might be one thing but, at the next step, turn out to be some- ~ thing else. Logic, grammar, straight thinking far from mind. Up Yet … sometimes we catch godlight flooding downward in beams ahead, through the tree-crowd and the green-gloam — Bear? through the moted tallness. Stump? Sasquatch? Gone when you get there. It will stop you, awaken strange hopes. You’ll look up — Here in the damp upper corners of America — Oregon, straight up — where fragment blue might persist beyond the Washington, maybe Vermont and Maine — we wonder about branchwork. You’ll try to think what to think. It’s all so very things. We wonder. Baroque. So visions-of-heaven. Something is demanded. ~ Then gray will close back over, trail will pull you on, your Down in the blazing desert states, I seem to remember, things glasses will fog with green breathing. The quotidian and the were clear, horizons unmistakable, black and white. The hot, contingent. Here is your pack, your stride, footfall your next bright West produces more than its share of absolutists, untrou- turning. Here the lungfilling smells, the soft incessant needle- bled by doubts or hesitations. Government bad, death penalty fall, the easy underfoot loam. Yes. Back to the embrace. Like good. God with us. War now. I recall the razor-sharp distinctions. being inside something. Cradled, nestled, you know the words. Me right: you wrong. Convert. Or die. That reassurance. Void of demand, of edge, of view. Was that really me? Hard to feel it, so long ago. Except … except. … It seems that desert religions have engulfed half the world That air, fog-distilled or shot through with the divine — and more: Muslim, Jew, Christian — heck, even Mormon. Some that’s our air. We own it, we made (or re-made) it. Thinned here, days, disturbed by my own hard-edged memories, I fear their thickened there, poisoned, hydrocarbon’d. We’re breathing it, seared visions of moral clarity. But then I recall that for every this forest and I. All the world is. And I drove a car to get to this haranguing jihadist, there’s a quieter, subtler believer, probably trailhead, whatever trailhead it is, I guarantee it. just off-camera. For every absolutist, there’s a Sufi, scholar, nun I want to see clear, but I cannot. I want to act, but what is … or simple follower, seeking (and giving) loving kindness. I’ve my action? Really. I just want to hike and be hiked. Simple. But met them, too. then … I rage to slay the industries and march militant against ~ tycoons and politicians. And voters. And non-voters. And all who Up here, we hardly ever see it, that horizon. Unless from the drive and eat and pollute. beach (rocky crags and tangled forests at our backs) or from Then I want to be left alone, on my squishy trail, rain on my mountaintops (hard-won and temporary). Otherwise, our per- cheeks, lunch in my knapsack. I want to quiet my mind from spectives are closer, more changeable. Our sky is a fir-fringed impossible foes and fears. scrap. And our idea of “bright” is laughable, a sun-break between O the godlight broken, O the cradle fallen from the bough. clouds, flattering and then abandoning. We know gray. It is all Belonging is acting, is caretaking. Wipe the glasses. Shoulder scale, all spectrum. As many days and lights as you walk, that is the pack. Take a step. Action is not victory, is not glory. Does not how many versions you see. need a master plan, a D-Day of concerted inevitability. Action is: The deity that fills this green-gray world is, perhaps, deities. one foot in front of the other. It’s tempting to see a spirit in each turn of the trail, stream This, our forest actually does teach. Take a step. Any step. by grove by dale. Such places murmur, and you wish to make Where will it lead? We wonder. Yet on we go. friends with them, to propitiate each in its time: to shelter in a dry nook — listen at a bend in the river — tread silently among David Oates writes about nature and urban life from Portland, giants. It seems enough. Oregon. He is the author of five books of nonfiction and poetry, We have fewer churchgoers in Oregon than almost anywhere including What We Love Will Save Us.

www.hcn.org High Country News 27 U.S. $5 | Canada $6

HEARD AROUND THE WEST | BY BETSY MARSTON

The WesT Choices, and The Beginner’s Guide to Human A wonderfully ugly California condor that van- Sacrifice. Actually, they’re fake jackets placed ished from Grand Canyon National Park and over other books, explains the Los Angeles was feared dead was found alive and well in Times. A group called Redditor ObviousPlant southern Colorado. Franz Carver, a seasonal claims credit. Still, we can’t help echoing “au- park ranger, spotted the 2-year-old male near thor” Dr. Pinder Chipps’ wise advice about rais- Dolores. At first, he thought it was a turkey ing centaurs: “Whether your children have two vulture, but with a wingspan of almost 10 feet, feet or four hooves, your love for them should it looked way too big, he told the Cortez Journal. come first.” When he closely examined his photos, he noticed a tag on the bird’s wing, reading N8. California coLoRado condors have wandered afar in both Arizona and She’s a 6-foot-1 pastor who wears jeans and a Utah; now Coloradans who think they’ve seen clerical collar. She spurns what she calls “prig- the giant birds can proudly declare: “Yes, that gish Christianity,” sports colorful arm tattoos was a condor!” and is proud to be “anti-excellence, pro-partic- ipation.” Her name is Nadia Bolz-Weber, and WashingTon the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America North Bonneville, a remote town of 1,000 in congregation she founded in Denver in 2008 is the Columbia Gorge, had just $20,000 in the a far cry from holier-than-thou, reports Kirsten bank a year ago and little hope of repairing its Akens, who profiled the minister for the Colo- caLiFoRnia We have a problem with speeding dilapidated “tot lot” playground. Without a retail rado Springs Independent. Bolz-Weber, 45, holds squirrels. gLen MaRTinez sector bringing in sales taxes, the city would church services for some 200 fellow sinners, tell- stay “on its knees financially,” said a consultant ing them, “Oh, my gosh, I admit some horrible hired by the town to analyze its fiscal crisis. things about myself. I would stop telling the bullying earned the Native American writer What could the little town do? Try selling drugs, stories if they would stop happening, but I’ve not Sherman Alexie a dubious honor last year. His of course. It might be unorthodox, but with run out of material to offer people of me being semi-autobiographical book, The Absolutely True marijuana legal in Washington, town officials an asshole and what I’ve learned about it.” Bolz- Diary of a Part-Time Indian, topped the list of wondered if they could create a public agency Weber and her husband share a small, walkable 2014’s most frequently challenged and banned to run a municipal pot shop. The legal answer life, focused mainly on her neighborhood and books in libraries around the country. Though it was yes. So, in early March, North Bonneville church. Being a Christian, she says, isn’t about won the National Book Award in 2007, Alexie’s opened “Cannabis Corner” in a plain-Jane doctrine or lifestyle: “The one thing that you are account of leaving the Spokane Indian Res- building on, yes, a corner, reports TheJointBlog. more and more convinced of is how desperately ervation to go to an all-white high school was Cannabis Corner is a one-stop shop, selling in need of God’s grace you are.” criticized for being sexually explicit as well as buds and marijuana-infused cookies along with profane. In Idaho, which removed the book from coffee, glass bongs and rolling papers, with sales WYoMing all of its public schools last year, critics also averaging $2,200 a day, according to The Liberty Goodbye to coalbed methane in the Powder River called it “anti-Christian,” containing words “we Eagle blog. It’s strictly regulated: Pot shop work- Basin, says WyoHistory.org: “Few of the 24,000 do not speak in our home,” reports the Ameri- ers, who start at $11 an hour, take the same wells drilled during the heyday of the 2000s pro- can Library Association. Alexie was undaunted: drug test as town employees. The only difference duce much gas, many sit idle, and approximately The book-banners “want to control debate and is that they’re expected to test positive for pot, 3,000 wells are left orphaned (and) a liability limit the imagination. I encourage debate and not negative. As one town official explained, “It’s for the state to clean up.” Instead of “R.I.P,” celebrate imagination.” important to have informed workers. We need to maybe say “A.E.C.,” for Aftermath is Expensive be doing constant trial and testing.” And what caLiFoRnia Cleanup. will the town do with the profits? Renovate that Some call it a mischievous art project, others a crumbling playground. new form of trolling, but shoppers in a West WEB EXTRA For more from heard around the West, see Hollywood bookstore are finding strange titles www.hcn.org. The WesT in the self-help section: So your Son is a Cen- His “diverse content” and vivid depictions of Tips and photos of Western oddities are appreciated and taur: Coping with Your Child’s Confusing Life often shared in this column. Write [email protected].

high National monument status will only increase tourism, Country and more tourists will only mar delicate News “ For people who care about the West. landscapes. High Country News covers the important issues and —Andrew gulliford, in his essay, “Plans are percolating to remake the management of southern Utah,” stories that are unique to the American West with a from Writers” on the range, www.hcn.org/wotr magazine, a weekly column service, books and a website, hcn.org. For editorial comments or questions, write High Country News, P. o. Box 1090, Paonia, Co 81428 or [email protected], or call 970-527-4898.

28 High Country News May 11, 2015