Jonathan P. Thompson

Agenda 21 & you

2012-02-12T02:04:00.000+01:00

Last summer, after spending a year in Germany, I paid a visit to my hometown of Durango, which is in La Plata County in southwestern Colorado. When I picked up the local rag, I was shocked to see several caustic letters to the editor regarding the county comprehensive planning process that had been going on for two years. Most alarming was what appeared to be a fairly widespread belief that the process had been hijacked by United Nations conspirators bent on implementing something called Agenda 21 via sustainability, bike paths and smart-growth.

Durango has always been a bit more progressive than other parts of the rural West, in part because it's a college town, but perhaps also because its reliance on the extractive industries has always been one step removed. That is, it wasn't ever a mining town or timber town, per se, but rather a support town for those industries. It hosted smelters and sawmills in the early days, and later became the place where the lawyers and doctors and other professionals that serviced the region liked to live.

My father was on the town board and served as Durango's mayor back in the early 1980s. During that time, a lot of pretty-serious-for-the-time planning initiatives were passed: a strict sign code, a public bus system, a new sewage treatment plant, and a blueprint, at least, for turning the once-industrial Animas River corridor into a greenway and the gem of the town. There was resistance: it was all part of the same Commie plot as fluoridizing the water, said the John Birchers, who had a strong enough influence back then to get various speakers to come speak at the local schools (I remember one guy eating uranium in front of the entire high school student body to prove that nuclear power's safe). But most of the initiatives passed, and the river corridor plan continues to be implemented today.

In the ensuing decades, those efforts helped Durango become a full-on amenity hub with a thriving New West economy. The rest of the county, meanwhile, has tried to keep a hold on its agricultural heritage -- not easy when baby boomers are willing to pay a pretty penny to build their retirement home in your alfalfa field -- while also grappling with impacts and benefits of significant oil and gas development that has been going on for decades.

For a long time there's been a bit of an imbalance between Durango and the county. Durango tends to be more liberal in its ways, the county more conservative. County folk often feel as if the Durangotangs are imposing their more urban beliefs on their rural counterparts. So when La Plata County set out to develop a comprehensive plan that would actually streamline development, while also hopefully preserving ag land and reducing sprawl, nobody thought that it would be easy. At the same time, what happened in the end came as a complete surprise: The plan, which cost $750,000 (consultant fees, staff time, etc.) was tossed into the wastebasket, so to speak. But also, a new movement had risen out of the process.

I call them the Agenders, and they are a new force to be reckoned with nationwide. They believe that everything from capping greenhouse emissions to bike paths to smart-growth, whether on the local or national level, are part of a United Nations plot to implement the sinister-sounding Agenda 21. I wrote about the phenomenon -- both at the La Plata County level and nationally -- for High Country News. The article got quite a bit of play (The Atlantic also did a big post on it).

Let me be clear: I don't think Agenda 21 fears were alone responsible for the collapse of the La Plata County comp plan. But I do believe that the united front that the Agenders ended up creating gave the planning commissioners -- many of whom obviously had an anti-planning bias (strangely enough) and a Tea Party leaning -- the confidence to strike down the plan without hesitation (and without listening to the majority of public voices in support of the plan).

Had the La Plata County plan been before the planning commission several months earlier (before some turnover had occurred on the commission, and before the Agenders rose to prominence on the national level) it might have had more success. Up almost to the bitter end, the plan had the support of at least two of the three county commissioners, Democrat Wally White and Republican Kellie Hotter. But they weren't the ones who had the final say.

One of the Agenders' scare ads.

Aside from the fact that what ended up being a moderate plan was shot down, what alarms me is that the Tea Party and this subset of the TPers has gained so much influence in my home county. In the past, whether the La Plata County voters chose Republicans or Democrats for local or national office, I always felt like they made the choice from a relatively pragmatic, non-ideological standpoint. Sure, there have always been those John Birchers (and the KKK even once had a strong presence in Bayfield, now the Agenders' main zone of influence), but they were always on the fringe, even when they were speaking to school kids.

Those days appear to be over. The disintegration started in 2006, when the La Plata County Republicans were taken over by extremists. It was bad enough to help drive state Rep. Mark Larson, a moderate who willingly reached across the aisle, out of politics. It even rubbed Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell the wrong way. Then the Tea Party came along and took the extremism even further, marginalizing any moderate Republicans that were left. This new extremism manifested itself in the evisceration of La Plata County's planning process and in the victory of Rick Santorum in the county and Colorado's GOP caucus earlier this month.

The potential ripple effects are cause for worry. Reasonable Republicans like Hotter may feel the need to slide to the right in order to keep her party happy, thereby diminishing the chances that the county will ever tackle its planning dysfunction and sprawl. And as the extremists take over, it will harm the county's "swing" status politically, thereby diminishing its political power on a regional and national level.

We live in interesting times.

Land Art (or something like that)

2012-02-05T19:18:00.000+01:00

Shiprock (geological formation, above) and San Juan Generating Station (industrial facility, below).

Google Earth/maps have changed the way we see our world. They show us violence and destruction where before we may have seen just a rock formation. They reveal strange beauty where before we may have only seen a pollution-belching coal-fired power plant that generates electricity for 1 million households.

Shiprock is a huge volcanic feature located in northwestern New Mexico. San Juan Generating Station and an associated coal mine lies about 24 miles east/northeast from Shiprock.

It's just one of the things I've been thinking about lately.

Coal exports: When energy execs sound like cigarette execs

2011-12-09T19:27:00.000+01:00

I started really thinking about the globalization of the West's natural resources a long time ago. It's not taking too big of a leap to say that outsourcing our mineral production helped lead to the closure of a lot of mines in the West. I would have never expected, a decade ago, that the globalization tide would reverse itself. Then, in 2008, while researching a story about a resurgence in copper mining in Arizona, an economic development guy in Globe, Ariz., said that the great thing about the new boom is that all the copper was going to China. An economic collapse at home, in other words, wouldn't damage the industry.

That turned out to be a bit naive. The U.S. housing bust was so big that it dragged the global economy down with it, even China's. But China, thanks to a massive stimulus package, bounced back, and so did the natural resource industries here at home. Coal, however, especially that from the West, hasn't benefited quite as much from China's hunger, mostly because it's tough to get it there. That's changing, as I've written about in HCN. It wasn't until Yale e360 asked me to write a piece about coal exports, however, that I noticed something funny: How similar today's coal executive rhetoric is to that of tobacco executives back in the 1980s. Basically, the challenges faced at home by the coal industry today are similar to those faced by cigarettes back then. And they're looking to the gargantuan Chinese market to salve their wounds.

Read about it at Yale e360.

The Future of News and my days as a small-town newspaper guy

2011-11-14T23:19:00.001+01:00

Len Ackland, the co-director of the fellowship I'm in at the University of Colorado in Boulder, sent out a Columbia Journalism Review article by Dean Starkman called The Confidence Game. The article calls into question the concept that centralized journalism, particularly long-form journalism, is a dying breed. It's a great piece.

After reading the article, I sat down to send Len a quick note thanking him for sending out the article, and to tell him about how my experience as a small-town newspaper owner tinted my views on such things. By the time I looked up from my keyboard, I realized I had quite a bit to say. And it wasn't until I pushed "Reply All" that I realized Len had sent The Confidence Game out to a big group that is currently debating the future of the school of journalism at the university. Here's my response:

It makes me think back to the years I spent running a weekly newspaper in Silverton, Colo.. Silverton isn't only a small town -- year-round population approx. 450 -- but it is also isolated by mountain passes on either side, and is the only town in the county and the county seat. That meant that all the business, all the politics, all the decisions, and about 90 percent of the "news" took place in a space that is about one mile long by one-third of a mile wide. And that meant that, long before the Internet was even conceived of, the newspaper in Silverton should have been obsolete under the "Future of News" gurus models. That is, you didn't need a weekly newspaper to tell you what was going on, because there were plenty of "citizen journalists" (read, gossips) to fill you in wherever you went. The streets themselves, the post office, the coffee shop and the Miner's Tavern were the Internet of Silverton, overflowing with information; if a big decision was made at Town Hall, the whole town knew about it, or could know about it, by the next day at noon, which might be a full week before they read about it in the newspaper.

Nonetheless, the Silverton Standard & the Miner newspaper has continued to be published, and read, every single week without a break since 1875. And during that 136 years, there have been many times when Silverton had two or even more newspapers (this even happened in the post-Internet age). They even kept reading it after big news was broken on Facebook or various Web sites, and after all the town/county/school board meetings were broadcast live on the local radio station, allowing everyone to get the big news delivered to them as it happened.

Why?

Because people naturally need and therefore crave the authority, voice, context and commentary that a news organization can offer by a newspaper, even if it isn't delivered in "real time." They know that while Donna down at the Post Office can tell you about how the vote turned out at last night's school board meeting, and even who voted for what, they also know that she didn't sit through all three miserable hours of the meeting recording not only the vote, but also the argument leading up to it; and not only that, but also the mood of the board members, and the audience, and the rolling of eyes and gnashing of teeth. Nor did she go back into the school the next day and pester the superintendent and the principal and get the inside scoop; nor did she dig through databases on the Internet and crunch numbers and make more calls to figure out what they mean. Nor did she dig back in the archives to see what may have led up to that particular vote.

The reporter did all of that.

And so, even a week after the vote, when everyone in town already knew the results and the straight news, they still put a couple of quarters in a machine, picked up the Standard and read the story about it, because it offered extra value, value that could not be delivered by Donna or even the Miner's Tavern's "Round Table" of town drunks and elected officials where most official decisions were actually made.

With the Web oozing into every facet of our lives, and citizen journalists, bloggers, and the like oozing right along with it, the whole world now looks a bit like Silverton always has. By following my Twitter feed, Facebook, and various breaking news sources, I can find out over and over what is happening at any given time at any given place, just as anybody could in Silverton by heading over to the Courthouse and chatting up Melody, the Sheriff's dispatcher and town busy body/pre-cyberspace Twitter feed. This can be extremely valuable in some instances -- one could probably get a better sense of what was happening with the Four Mile Fire as it burned via Twitter than from any official news outlet, thereby allowing people to react appropriately. Yet the only places that one could get a credible, in-depth, contextual account of WHY the Four Mile Fire happened, and how, and what led up to it, and what it says about wildfire in the West, climate change, fire suppression and exurban development, is from official news outlets, perhaps days, weeks, even years after the fire went out. And the fact is, people are still interested in these in-depth, long-form analyses, long after the event itself (and, yes, they will pay for them… otherwise the New Yorker would have gone out of business years ago).

The former -- the citizen journalism, social media, or cyber-gossiping -- then, is indeed valuable: It's a means of relaying raw information to a large number of people with virtually no delay. Yet it is not something that needs to be taught -- I'm sorry, but the idea of social media classes, or courses in Tweeting or Facebooking, is as absurd as courses on office gossip and chit-chat. It comes naturally. The latter -- the digging, the data-mining, the verifying and reverifying the data, the phone calls to reluctant sources, the analysis, and the conveyance of all that information in a digestible, compelling, and even fun-to-read format. Now that takes an education.

And so it is that I can give at least one reason to keep a somewhat traditional journalism school alive: To ensure that there's someone qualified to deliver credible and contextualized information to the fine people of Silverton, Colorado. And beyond.

7 billion isn't that scary; overconsumption is

2011-11-01T17:57:00.000+01:00

On October 31, the human population officially hit 7 billion. Since humans have a thing for nice big round numbers, the occasion was marked with a great deal of fretting about overpopulation. And the UN’s choice of Halloween as the official date of 7 billion gave all kinds of alarmists the opportunity to declare that population growth was a lot scarier than ghouls and goblins.

Or not.

Sure, trying to wrap one’s mind around a number like 7 billion is pretty daunting. It evokes visions of people crowding every square inch of every continent, with the poor Earth sagging under the weight of all that humanity. The real numbers we should be worried about, however, are a lot smaller, and a lot more significant. They have to do not with how many people there are, but with how much we as a society consume. Because it’s consumption, not the number of people, which dictates how much of the earth is drilled or torn up for minerals or coal. It's how much energy we use and resources we put into our cars, appliances and gizmos that ultimately determines how much pollution we spew into the water and air and onto the land. So forget 7 billion, here are some really scary numbers:

See all those scary numbers and read the rest of the post at HCN's goat blog.

The growth machine is dead

2011-11-01T04:14:00.000+01:00

In 2008, the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University released a report called Megapolitan: Arizona’s Sun Corridor. It predicted that the corridor, stretching from Nogales in the south to Prescott in the north, with Phoenix and Tucson at its heart, would more than double its population by 2040, requiring some 3.7 million housing units and 2.4 million acre feet of water. When the report was being put together, the idea that this particular stretch of Arizona would house 10 million people in just a few decades wasn’t just realistic, it seemed inevitable -- after all, the region’s identity was tied up with that revved up growth machine.

Even as the report was making its initial round, the very foundations of its predictions were crumbling into the sand. After reaching its peak during the summer of 2006, the housing boom deteriorated, and the construction industry, which had provided nearly 1 in every 10 jobs in the Phoenix area, was hemorrhaging. The state’s estimates of population, which were based on the assumption that nearly all the new houses that had been built since 2000 were occupied, were proven wrong, because at least one out of ten of those new homes turned out to be empty.

Nevertheless, in 2009 the lead authors of the Megapolitan report, while admitting that their projections now sounded a “little out of tune,” continued to believe that the growth would return.

It hasn’t. And it won’t, at least not anytime soon.

Read the rest of this post at the HCN Goat blog, where I'll continue to delve into this question: With the housing boom gone, where does the West go now? What will it mean for cultures, communities and the environment?

Koch, coal and cash

2011-10-12T18:12:00.000+02:00

The cynic in me hardly batted an eye when I read recently that Republican House Speaker John Boehner is raking in coal-stained cash. Nor did I spill my coffee when I noticed that one of Boehner’s big new donors is a Koch brother. My interest was piqued, however, when I saw that it wasn’t David or Charles Koch -- the infamous Tea Partier billionaires -- who were forking out for the Republican leader, but the “other” brother, Bill.

Read more about Bill Koch's shift in his political donations at the HCN Goat blog, where I'll be doing most of my posting while I'm in Boulder (though I'll continue to occasionally throw something up here).

On the way to the corn

2011-08-21T19:12:00.000+02:00

Water tank outside of Questa, New Mexico

A mysterious swath of landscape lies in a place that's north of Northern New Mexico and south of Southern Colorado. Some might place it on the fringe of the Taos Plateau, others on the edge of the San Luis Valley. It's an old place, and mostly empty. Here, wild horses have gnawed shrubs to dust; here the harsh white of an abondoned trailer sits juxtaposed against the Blanca Peak, rising out of a haze.

People here keep to themselves, mostly, but their broken dreams scatter the earth for everyone to see.

I passed through here recently on my way to Taos to see the work of Tiwa Farms (more on that later) and to see one of my favorite landscapes in the world.

Abandoned adobe, Costilla, New Mexico.

The Exceptional Institute, San Luis, Colorado.

The Rio Grande before it enters the Gorge.

Storefront, San Acacio.

The Global West

2011-08-04T19:56:00.000+02:00

I've been back in the US of A for just over a month now, and the culture shock is waning. Kinda. After spending a year in Berlin, my wife, daughters and I came back for the summer. I'll be sticking around for another nine months, as a Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellow at CU Boulder. I'm super excited about the opportunity; I'll be taking classes, reporting and writing, with a focus on environmental issues in the West.

Which is just what I focused on for several months while still in Berlin: I wrote a monster of a story for High Country News about global economic influences on the extractive industries of the West. It's some crazy stuff. Check out the story, and accompanying infographics here. And starting in mid-August or so, you can follow my musings about the region at the Goat blog at hcn.org.

Fracking, nuclear waste and wolves: The West in Europe

2011-03-03T11:58:00.004+01:00

Sometimes, sitting here in downtown Berlin, listening to American classic rock on the radio, I feel like I never left the American West. And it's not just the radio, or even Randy Rudd's Lucky Star Western Store in a nearby neighborhood. No, it's the news -- the environmental news, even. Some recent am-I-in-the-West headlines:

• LONE WOLF ATTACKS 15 SHEEP. Wolves had been systematically exterminated in Germany by the early 1900s, much as they were in the U.S. West. But those crazy wolves ignored borders, and over the years continued to wander over from Poland into East Germany. When East and West were reunified, the government gave wolves protected status. Now, about 60 are in the country, mostly roaming around military training grounds and old strip mines, occasionally having a sheepy feast. And it's causing the same sorts of conflicts as in the U.S. Hunters are upset. Ranchers are scared (though, as in the U.S., they get reimbursed by the government for any livestock they lose), and some residents are pretty sure the wolf's going to eat their children. Yesterday, Das Bild (the sensationalist tabloid) ran the first photo of "der Killerwolf von Brandenburg."

• EUROPE GETS FRACKED, TOO: That's right. That zany method of drilling and then "fracturing" the shale in which natural gas is trapped by shooting thousands of gallons of water -- mixed with a mysterious soup of chemicals -- into the ground is coming to Europe. It's been common in the West for a long time, and news outlets like High Country News have been questioning it for just as long. But it wasn't until fracking headed east, to Pennsylvania and New York, that most of the nation actually started noticing. Now, the practice is about to hit Europe (actually, Halliburton has already done it in Poland), and the rest of the world's getting a taste of that sweet and fizzy fracking soda. Of course, as the CEO of Cuadrilla energy, a UK drilling company, said: It's not fracking that's unconventional, it's the source where the gas is found that's unconventional. Which means what, exactly?

• THOUSANDS PROTEST NUCLEAR WASTE SHIPMENTS: Germany actually has more nuclear waste dumps than the West (though certainly not more contaminated sites, in general, i.e. abandoned uranium mines, mills, etc.). But, like the West, they take nuclear waste from other countries. Still, when did you last hear about thousands of Americans protesting against all that nuke waste headed across the region to WIPP in southern New Mexico? That's right, you didn't. You gotta hand it to the Germans: They know how to protest.

Now, what happens when the wolves hang out in the nuclear waste dumps?

Linguistic bigotry, Western stores in Berlin, and more

2011-03-01T12:15:00.001+01:00

On a recent Friday afternoon here in Berlin, the sun was shining and the temperature actually rose above freezing for once. It was enough to put Wendy and Elena and me into especially high spirits as we waited for the bus in well-heeled Zehlendorf, eating some treats from the nearby bakery. We talked about how the Germans have a talent not only for making good cake, but also for creating really healthy and tasty baked goods, like the sunflower-seed thing we were eating. As we were speaking amongst ourselves we were, naturally, speaking in English.

Apparently, that's an offensive act around these parts.

Also waiting for the bus was a lumbering woman, perhaps in her sixties, who looked as if she had eaten just a few too many cans of offal. She glared at us and, finally, as we were getting on the bus, she muttered to Wendy, in German: "When you are in Germany, you must speak German!"

Finish reading this, along with a post about a Western store in Berlin and more at gin & gelato...

The other Koch Brother: Bill's got a lot of money. Different agenda.

2011-02-23T14:33:00.002+01:00

The North Fork Valley, near where Bill Koch has consolidated his power.

Oh to be the geeky younger brother. It’s never easy. But try to be the geeky younger brother to two ideologue billionaires who are trying to take over the world and, with the help of the Supreme Court and a lot of bought-off politicians, seem to be succeeding. The big brothers in this case are David and Charles Koch, owners of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned company in the U.S., and among the nation’s top polluters. In recent years, the Koch Brothers have been expanding their empire deep into American politics. Thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, they’ve been able to freely fund Tea Party and ultra-conservative organizations to the tune of millions of dollars. Now they’re also heavily funding the anti-union push in Wisconsin, and have become the bane of liberals everywhere.

And then there’s William, one of two other Koch Brothers. Like his older brothers, Bill is a billionaire. Like his brothers, he’s a fossil-fuel-powered corporate titan and an ardent consumer of political influence. Nevertheless, the tendency to throw Bill into the same category as his older brothers is simply unfair. For one thing, he’s been at odds with his siblings for much of the last three decades, even spending a good deal of time battling them in court. For another thing, Bill Koch is much more complicated than Charles and David. He’s more opportunistic, less ideologically constrained and, in some ways, maybe even more powerful. And while his older brothers seem to be bent on creating a whole new über-capitalistic political order, Bill’s goals are harder to decipher: He’s donated to Al Gore’s campaign and Richard Pombo’s, fought against wind power and owns coal mines, and over the past two decades has amassed a tremendous amount of influence on the aspen and oak covered high plateaus, and in the rural towns below, of the North Fork Valley of Western Colorado. Now he seems to be reaching for more.

Like so many American success stories of the 20th Century, the Koch family’s was built on oil. Fred Koch, the father of Bill, Charles, David and Freddie, figured out a new way to refine oil (or possibly stole the idea from other oil companies), and got rich developing the method in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. He returned to the U.S. in the 1940s and started the Rock Island Oil & Refining Company. When Fred died in 1967 Charles, the second oldest brother, took the helm of the company and changed the name to Koch Industries. Today, the company rakes in some $100 billion per year and has 70,000 employees.

Bill never really fit into the family or the family corporation’s mold. As a youngster, he was reportedly jealous of his older brothers’ athletic prowess and success, which caused problems all through childhood and then again when Bill, Charles and David were all at MIT (a fourth brother, Freddie, went to Harvard, studied playwriting, and remains out of the limelight). Later, when Bill joined Koch Industries as a consultant and then as President of Corporate Development, the old family friction continued. Things didn’t go well for Bill, and in 1982 he attempted a corporate coup-de-tat on his brothers. It failed, and he was canned. But Bill sued the company and David and Charles, ultimately walking away with a reported $260 million.

Koch used that cash to found the Oxbow Group, a huge energy conglomerate that today has nearly $4 billion in annual sales, according to the company website, and operates all over the world. Oxbow is often spun as an “alternative energy” company. Such a claim is hard to swallow after seeing Somerset, Colorado, though. There, a smattering of small time-battered houses hug the windy highway in a steep valley where the sun rarely shines during the winter. The houses’ walls of this Western slice of Appalachia are all streaked black. A faded sign squeezed between highway and houses proclaims this a UMWA town, even though the union was busted long ago. And the futuristic yet primitive machinations of a giant coal mine loom over the town, stretching their way up hillsides that constantly move because millions of tons of their innards have been extracted. Just up from the dingy post office, the huge loading tower rises up over the town. On its coal-stained sides it reads: Oxbow.

One of Oxbow’s early ventures was the Sanborn Creek Mine, here in Somerset, in Western Colorado. In 2003, after a fire and a fatality in Sanborn Creek, Oxbow developed the Elk Creek Mine, which today loads some 5 million tons of low-sulfur coal into mile-long trains that snake their way to power plants in the East. Oxbow’s primary products are coal and petroleum coke -- not exactly alternative energy.

Koch’s victory against his brothers and the fortune it got him were apparently not enough. In 1989, he again went after Charles and David in court, only this time he did it on behalf of the federal government. Bill alleged that Koch Industries had under-measured and undervalued the oil and gas that it produced on tribal and federal lands in, among other places, Colorado, Oklahoma, Utah and California. Thus, the company had underpaid its royalties, ripping off the federal taxpayer and the tribes. It was hardly a new practice, nor did it go away – the Mineral Management Service scandals of recent years, besides being soaked in sex and drugs, were really about oil companies skipping out on royalties, even as the feds sat by and did nothing. Long before that, again with the feds turning a blind eye, companies had been stealing oil and gas from tribes. It’s telling that it took Bill Koch -- not federal regulators -- to notice the problem and to drag Koch Industries to court.

The jury ruled that Koch Industries was liable for more than $200 million in underpayments. The company actually paid about one-tenth of that amount. For his part, Bill Koch walked away with $7 million. He had filed what’s known as a “qui tam,” in which the plaintiff is entitled to a share of the cash. Despite this obvious self-interest, the fact that Bill actually stood up for the feds on this issue demonstrated a clear, if only occasional, ideological break from his regulation-hating brothers.

When he wasn’t busy collecting legal victories against his siblings, Bill was collecting other, more tangible things. He spent half a million dollars on four bottles of wine that purportedly once belonged to Thomas Jefferson (they turned out to be fakes). His stockpile of art includes notables by Monet, Degas, Picasso and even Modigliani’s Reclining Nude. And in 1992, he spent a bundle of cash to develop a carbon-fiber sailboat that got him an America’s Cup to add to his collection of trophies.

Meanwhile, Koch kept amassing power in Western Colorado. In 2001, Oxbow formed Gunnison Energy, its natural gas production branch, which operates in the southern flank of the gas-rich Piceance Basin not far from the coal mine. It currently produces 560,000 MCF of natural gas each year, making it a relatively small player in the Basin, but it has drilling rights on more than 100,000 acres of leases. That, combined with the Elk Creek Mine, make Oxbow an economic powerhouse in an economically depressed region. The mine – one of three big ones working the same coal deposit -- employs 400 or so workers, who pull in salaries that are three to four times higher, on average, than the per capita income of Delta County*. Gunnison Energy also provides a handful of lucrative jobs on the rigs.

That bought the companies political influence without them even trying. The long fought-over 2001 Roadless Rule and its various iterations hovered over Oxbow’s operations as a potential threat for nearly a decade. Then, last year, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack gave Elk Creek Mine an exemption from the rule, allowing the company to bulldoze into a roadless area to drill wells to vent methane** as the mine expands its reach. The local environmental group and most regional politicians supported the exemption because of the mine’s economic influence. But regional and national groups opposed it, saying it weakened an already beleaguered rule. Two years earlier, Gunnison Energy had defied the same rule when federal land managers allowed the company to build the Bull Mountain Pipeline through a stretch of roadless forest, despite outcry from environmental groups. The company and the feds argued that the roads associated with the line’s construction are not permanent, and therefore don’t violate the rule. The pipeline’s completion last year opened the door to significantly more gas development in a previously relatively undeveloped area.

Bill Koch is unusual among ultra-rich art collectors in that he chooses the art himself, rather than having a professional pick out the pieces most likely to gain value. He has a personal and aesthetic, not just financial, attachment to the pieces he buys, carting a big chunk of his collection back and forth between his Palm Beach, Fla., home and his Cape Cod summer place each year. He seems to view the North Fork region of Colorado similarly; rather than just using it as a distant place from which to extract minerals and dollars, he also actually lives there sometimes. In 2006, Koch spent some $8 million for a 5,000-acre ranch on an undulating plateau in the shadow of the spectacular Ragged Range, about a dozen miles upstream from the Elk Creek Mine. From parts of the ranch, at night, one can see Gunnison Energy drill rigs on adjacent mesas, pillars of sharp lights tearing apart the darkness. Koch runs Longhorn cattle here, rides horses and hosts hunting expeditions.

But last year, a proposed land exchange that would enlarge the ranch was the subject of a local controversy, which tested the limits of Koch’s regional influence. And though opponents of the land exchange tried to fire up the opposition by associating Koch with his Tea Partying brothers, the fallout from the controversy actually showed that Koch is not anywhere near as ideologically constrained as his siblings.

The problem started because a strip of public land slices through the middle of Koch’s ranch, allowing the public to pass through the boundaries of “his” ranch without even trespassing. So, like many a wealthy landowner in such situations, Koch, with the help of The Western Land Group, arranged a swap. Koch would give up a total of 991 acres of land in Dinosaur National Monument, on the Utah border, and in Curecanti National Recreation Area, over the mountains near Gunnison, in exchange for the 1,840-acre strip of public land. While such deals are often handled administratively, this one involved several land management agencies, meaning it has to go through Congress. Last year, with backing from Gunnison County commissioners*** and conservation groups, U.S. Rep. John Salazar, D-Colo., introduced the legislation in the House, with Colorado Democrats Michael Bennett and Mark Udall, along with Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, sponsoring the Senate version.

When Delta County residents caught wind of the proposal, though, they were outraged. Led by former High Country News publisher Ed Marston, they accused exchange proponents of keeping the deal secret. They said it would take away local access to a Wilderness area while not benefiting locals in return. Some worried that Koch was just buying the land in order to drill it for natural gas. Others accused him of trying to lock up the land just to keep others from drilling in his backyard.

Emerging from the scuffle – and mentioned in nearly every media account of the controversy -- was the fact that Koch and Oxbow employees were collectively the biggest donors to Salazar’s campaign. Koch, his wife Bridget, Oxbow’s employees and Oxbow’s Political Action Committee donated a combined total of nearly $70,000 to Salazar’s campaigns, a significant chunk for a representative in a rural district such as this one. Less known was the fact that Udall and Hatch, the other sponsors of the exchange legislation, also benefited from Oxbow’s largesse, though to a lesser extent. Salazar put the bill on hold, promising to revisit it later, with more public hearings. Despite all of Koch’s money, however, Salazar lost his bid for re-election. The exchange is dormant, lest someone like Tipton, the Republican who beat Salazar, takes it up.

And who knows, he just might. Koch and his colleagues didn’t donate to the Tipton campaign directly. But in the weeks leading up to the election, both Koch and his wife gave big bucks – a total of $60,800 – to the National Republican Congressional Committee. The Committee, in turn, spent $763,000 in opposition to Salazar, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. This isn’t unusual behavior for Koch. While his brothers aim all their money at ideological allies, Bill’s political spending is more erratic. He’s given to the campaigns of Democrats Ted Kennedy, Patrick Kennedy, Salazar, Udall, Bill Nelson and Hillary Clinton. He’s funded Republicans Lamar Alexander, Bob Dole and John McCain. He gave money to Al Gore. And he gave money to the nemesis of environmental regulations, Richard Pombo.

Koch even became a full-on environmental activist – in the manner of Wyoming oil baron turned anti-windpower activist Diemer True. Koch bankrolled the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, which was created to fight against Cape Wind, a huge offshore wind facility. The facility is planned to stick out of the ocean off of Cape Cod, in view of Koch’s summer place. So Koch joined forces with a host of unlikely allies to try to stop construction, reportedly spending well over $1 million on the cause. Last year, however, Koch lost the battle when the Department of Interior gave the go-ahead to the wind facility. Making that decision was none other than Ken Salazar, John Salazar’s brother.

Still, Koch’s not one to take such defeats lying down. After he discovered that the Thomas Jefferson wine bottles he had spent a fortune on were inauthentic, he went after auction houses, dragging them to court. And even as Salazar was getting trounced in the election, potentially jeopardizing Koch’s bid to consolidate his ranch, Koch simply went out and bought some more land. In the fall of 2010, he purchased 2,400 acres in the North Fork Valley in Delta County for $7 million.

* The work is also unusually hazardous: Elk Creek has had 130 employee or contractor injuries since 2001, two miners died here (one at Elk Creek and one in 2000 at its Oxbow-owned predecessor, Sanborn Creek), and the company’s been slapped with more than 2,000 citations from the Mining Safety and Health Administration over the last decade, adding up to more than $1.5 million in penalties. The mine’s “operator incident rate” has been higher than the national rate during five of the last nine years.

** The North Fork coal mines are all underground mines, as opposed to open pit/surface mines. Methane builds up in the miles-long tunnels and so, for safety’s sake, the methane must be vented via vertical tunnels from up above. Roads into roadless areas are needed to drill the vents. Ironically, the mines vent the methane – an extraordinarily potent greenhouse gas – directly into the air. Meanwhile, Gunnison Energy drills for the same stuff nearby to pipe and sell to market. Efforts to require the mine to capture and use its methane have not been successful.

*** This issue, and Koch’s influence here in general, have been complicated by political boundaries that don’t match up with demographic or topographic realities. Koch’s ranch and his coal mine lie, and much of his gas and oil activity takes place, in Gunnison County. That means Gunnison County gets the property tax revenue from Koch’s operations, and that Gunnison County citizens are the ones who were asked for their opinion on the land exchange. That’s in spite of the fact that Koch’s holdings are all isolated from the population, government and most of the infrastructure of Gunnison County, and are much more intimately connected with neighboring Delta County.

IKEA, Marriage, Winter in Berlin and Tropical Islands

2011-01-18T21:19:00.000+01:00

I'm about to reach an important juncture in my life as an expat, or quasi-expat, or pseudo-expat, or immigrant, or whatever the heck I am. I'm about to finish my integration courses. When an auslander like me wants to live in Germany, he must get a residency/working permit, which I was able to get because my wife is a German citizen. But even in my situation, the visa is contingent on me completing a full array of so-called integration courses: 600 hours of German language, plus 45 hours of instruction on politics, history and culture. Thanks to four years of German in high school (many, many years ago), I was able to skip 400 hours of language instruction. I began my German classes here at level B.1, which was way too high for me, but with extra studying, I was able to make it through. Now I'm in the culture, history, politics section, which is super interesting.

When I finish, in just two weeks, the family and I are heading to Rome for a week. And when we get back, I have no good excuse anymore: I've got to find a real job, or at least enough freelance work to keep me from joining the ranks of the 8 a.m. subway beer guzzlers. Seriously. In other words, I'm aching for some freelance assignments, and I'm piling up ideas r.e.: integration, immigration, renewable energy, low budget travel with slightly crazy family in tow, searching for the perfect Negroni in Rome, etc. In the meantime, I've been writing about IKEA and the way it wrecks marriages and the Berlin winter and how I've survived it by visiting an indoor tropical island theme park. Read it all at my gin & gelato blog.

The shellacking of the West's public lands

2010-11-22T15:27:00.002+01:00

By now we've all heard about the "shellacking" Obama and the Dems got in the last election. For Democrats it was almost universally grim, with some notable exceptions in the Western states (I wrote an overview of the situation for High Country News). And for every Harry Reid or Michael Bennet that managed to cling to his political career, there were several examples of extreme right-wingers winning House seats or even taking complete control of a state Legislature.

It's pretty clear, then, that the Democrats lost the 2010 midterm elections. The question is, who won?

The Western Caucus' Marlboro Man-esque cover for it's "War on Jobs" report

Yes, the Republicans took control of the House, and gained in the Senate. And, yes, many of the winners naturally had an "R" beside their names. But today's Republican party is, well, not really the Republican Party (it sure as hell isn't the party of Lincoln, let alone Teddy Roosevelt or even, for that matter, Nixon). It's more like a lost soul that has, for many years, been possessed by an extremist, shape-shifting parasite that wants to drag the party to the right (alienating the party's moderates). The Tea Party is merely the most recent incarnation of that parasite. And, yes, one might say the Tea Party won the election, except that the Tea Party doesn't really even know what it is. It may have been founded as an anti-tax and -spend movement, but it's now become home to all kinds of fringe factions, including the anti-immigrants, the Christian Right and more.

Really, the 2010 election will go down as the midterm in which the corporate interests secured an even tighter grip on power, at the expense of everyone else. It began back in January, when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same rights as people, and could therefore donate to political campaigns without restraint. The result was an unprecedented infusion of corporate cash into these elections -- Sharron Angle's Nevada campaign for Senate spent an estimated $97 per vote. Oil companies funded the anti-emissions cutting measure in California without inhibition (as well as donating millions to mostly Republican candidates). Angle and the California polluting prop. both lost, as did other beneficiaries of bundles of corporate cash. But the corporations won, nonetheless, ushering enough obstructionists into Congress to guarantee a brand of gridlock that will work to their favor.

But there was a quieter and perhaps even more significant power shift in Washington that could have big ramifications for the public lands in the West. A group known as the Congressional Western Congress, a posse of nouveau Sagebrush Rebel politicos, has seized control of many a House committee. That includes Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the wealthiest member of Congress, who will be heading up the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee; he'll be backed up by Western Caucus member Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a hard-right Republican from Utah. Arizona's Rep. Jeff Flake will be serving on the House Committee on Natural Resources. Wyoming's Rep. Cynthia Lummis -- who was a facilitator of the Bush assault on public lands in the name of energy independence -- sits on the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources on the House Natural Resources Committee. And, most significantly, there's Rep. Doc Hastings of Washington, who will lead the House Committee on Natural Resources, and his ideological twin Rep. Rob Bishop, of Utah, ranking member of the National Parks, Forests and Public Lands Subcommittee. (Hastings isn't listed on the Western Caucus' roster, but he should be; Bishop is chairman of the Caucus).

The Western Caucus is preparing to assault all regulations on federal land & mineral (shown in red).

Already, Hastings, Bishop and their gang are planning their attack. They're targeting the "de facto offshore drilling moratorium in the Gulf, potential new monument designations and plans to lock up vast portions of our oceans through an irrational zoning process.” And they're clearly in a position to at least push the Western Caucus' agenda, which will surely include killing new land protection proposals of any kind. In the meantime, they'll be waiting anxiously for the opportunity, after 2012, to bring back as many Bush-era policies as possible, and to go even further. (Update: These guys aren't only going after the public's lands, they're also going after the Constitution, itself).

The Caucus, predictably, touts so-called traditional economies and the need to protect jobs by tearing down regulations on public land. It's an old line, but an effective one, especially in times like these when jobs are so sparse. People would always rather blame the environmentalists and the government for their woes than the real culprits: An economic collapse caused by a lack of regulation on unscrupulous corporations, and simple greed on nearly everyone's part. From its Marlboro Man-like motif of a cowboy getting ready to rope a calf, to its report on Western "job killers," the Caucus takes it a step further, arguing that regulations also kill Western culture, and will be the demise of cowboys, miners and the like (strangely enough, they extend the argument to absurd lengths, suggesting that somehow by limiting ATV traffic in the Utah canyon country, for example, the feds are killing local, traditional economies).

This false dichotomy appeals even to a greenie's sense of romance and it helps the Caucus project a populist image. Too bad the Western Caucus' wishful policies don't actually help people (unless, that is, you subscribe to the Supreme Court's idea of corporations as people). In its "War on Western Jobs" report, the Caucus argues that taxing oil and gas production is a "job killer" because it will drive the domestic energy producers out of business. We're talking about companies that have raked in record profits in recent years. They can afford to fork out a few more bucks in taxes, methinks, and they'll continue to hire the same workers, to whom they'll pay the same wages for doing the hard and treacherous work of drilling wells. A tax cut won't create more jobs, it will just up the company profits. The "Jobs" report -- the Caucus' manifesto -- takes aim at all types of environmental regulations, from "valuing species over people" to the possibility of the EPA classifying coal combustion waste as hazardous (currently the nasty, heavy metal-laden stuff, which coal plants kick out at a rate of millions of tons per year, is regulated like household garbage, and is a major environmental justice issue). If the Western Caucus really wants to help out the Western working man, it might consider pushing for more regulation of coal ash; but it doesn't and it won't.

In this way, the Western Caucus is a parallel to the Tea Party: Both paradoxically depend on their populist image to achieve their goals which (unwittingly or not) end up helping out the corporations who, both openly and secretly, bankroll the whole deal. It's a bizarre perversion of politics, not to mention logic.

And, you can bet your bolo tie that some of the extra profits that the new guard will facilitate will be going back to Western Caucus candidates in the next election. Hastings pulled in a handsome amount from the oil and gas industry, despite the fact that he really didn't need any help to win. Bishop's big donors include Energy Solutions -- the nuclear waste giant -- and the National Association of Realtors. The list goes on, without too many surprises.

Two years ago, greens across the West celebrated the departure of the Bush administration and the arrival of a new guard. The celebration ended this November.

Burqas, immigration and assimilation, an Auslander's view

2010-11-17T20:26:00.001+01:00

The phenomenon of immigration -- and the politics that grow up around it like mold on bread in Berlin -- has always interested me. This might have something to do with the fact that, among Americans and especially Westerners, I have been unusually non-migratory. The various branches of my family had come to the U.S., mostly from northern Europe (Sweden, Germany, England and some wild card that gave me my olive skin and dark hair), back in the 1800s or earlier, and had ended up in Colorado before 1900. When I was growing up in Durango, I had Hispanic friends whose families had come to the region long before mine, and Native American friends whose ancestors came long before theirs. Mine was a decidedly non-transitory childhood. (Though I do remember well the Latino workers on the Slades' ranch out on the Dryside, and the goat roasts the Slades' held each year for the county Democratic party).

When I lived and worked in Silverton, a tiny high-mountain mining town in southwestern Colorado, I started focusing on the immigrant roots of the town. Italian, Welsh and other European miners had flocked to the area in the late 1800s, and had left lasting impressions. Chinese immigrants had also created a community there, until the European-rooted populace turned on them and ran them out of town for good (a phenomenon that was common in Western communities in the early 1900s). In the 1990s and early 2000s, a new wave of immigrants was coming to Silverton to work the restaurants and hotels in the summer (my El Salvadoran intern at the Silverton Standard newspaper and I put together a special issue on immigration, in both Spanish and English). In 2006, I moved to Paonia to work for High Country News. There, I spearheaded a special issue on immigration, and continued to push it as a topic of coverage for the magazine.

Now, I'm experiencing immigration from a completely different perspective. On the one hand, I'm an immigrant myself, having relocated to Germany several months ago. But I'm also living among immigrants, in the Wedding district of Berlin, a neighborhood of Turkish, Arab and other immigrants from mostly Muslim countries. In the meantime, there's a big debate going on here about integration, and the alleged failure of these Muslim immigrants to integrate into German society and culture.

I'm guessing this will be a big topic for me as long as I'm here, and beyond. My first shot at writing about it in any serious way is now up on my gin & gelato blog. It's a bit of thinking out loud for me, but I hope it's kind of interesting. And I also hope that readers will respond with their own thoughts.

Southern Ute recall progresses (and why we should care)

2010-10-31T13:06:00.001+01:00

Interesting news from the Old Country (as I like to call my home-region back in the U.S): Dissidents within the Southern Ute Indian Tribe appear to have successfully moved a recall effort to the next phase. When I wrote about the tribe this past spring, the recall effort, after a strong start, was foundering. Its leaders were passionate enough in their convictions to toss out the current tribal council, saying the council had mismanaged tribal money and become pawns of its white advisors. But they weren’t having much luck building a following, and the leaders of the effort – mostly elders – had their own personal concerns to contend with. Now, it appears that some new blood has entered the fray, and they’ve switched the focus of the effort a bit. According to the Durango Herald, the recall cabal is now accusing Tribal Chairman Matthew Box of “being less than transparent, dismantling the tribe's health program and denying members and employees an arena to air their complaints.”

The Herald plays the story pretty straight without going into much background. But read between the lines – and take a look at the readers’ comments that follow the story – and you quickly see the challenges that this sort of story brings for both the tribe, and the newspaper covering it. As is almost always the case with any story that has even a whiff of controversy attached, the Southern Ute leadership refused to comment. And, as is often the case, some commenters fretted over the fact that the non-tribal newspaper was airing the tribe’s dirty laundry.

Indeed, the tribe, being a sovereign nation, is not beholden to the non-tribal media, and so shouldn’t be compelled to give comments to the Durango Herald. And, since people outside of the tribe won’t be voting in any recall election, it makes sense that tribal members might want to keep this process secret from the outside world.

But the Southern Utes are perhaps the most influential entity in the Four Corners region. They were responsible, or partially so, for the construction of the Animas-La Plata project and the relocation of Mercy Medical Center from the center of Durango to its outskirts. The Mercy move, in turn, created an anchor for the Southern Ute-owned Three Springs “neighborhood,” which, when built out, will be as big as a small town. That, in turn, will pull Durango’s growth in that direction, encouraging yet more sprawl and possibly necessitating the construction of new roads through the Horse Gulch/Raiders Ridge area to make it easier for downtown Durangoans to access their new exurb (and only hospital). The Southern Ute tribe is the region’s biggest employer, providing more professional-level jobs, with salaries to match, than any other public or corporate entity. In one way or another, the tribe controls or has partial control over most of the oil and gas resources in southwestern Colorado.

So what happens with the Southern Ute also ripples out to the entire Four Corners community. And that makes those happenings of interest to all the residents of the region, Ute or not. As for the tribal government, it would behoove them to open up to the outside press. Or, at the very least, it should provide more information to the Southern Ute Drum and allow it to disseminate that information freely. That does not appear to be happening now. Because the Southern Ute Drum’s staff is employed by the tribe, it can’t be relied upon to dig up the truth. In fact, everything the Drum prints is potentially as tainted as any state-owned news organization anywhere. Which is to say, its credibility is rather weak.

But if we outsiders demand information from the tribe, then we’re also demanding some sort of accountability. We’re saying that we – those outside the tribe – should have some influence or say in how the tribe governs itself. But to have such a say is to diminish the tribe’s sovereignty, and it reeks of the same sort of paternalism that Native Americans in general have borne the weight of for more than a century. If the feds are called in to clean up the Southern Ute government, doesn’t it imply that the tribe is unable to govern itself?

So, on the one hand, this recall effort (and even the way outsiders may react to it) is no more than a group of people within a political entity doing their best to pursue democracy. On the other, it’s both a test and exercise of that elusive concept of tribal sovereignty. And what’s tribal sovereignty? Ask 10 lawyers, tribal leaders or academics what tribal sovereignty means, and you’re likely to get 10 different answers. That’s in part because tribes in the U.S. are unusual entities with extremely complex and always changing relationships with state and federal governments. It doesn’t help that the bodies exercising sovereignty – tribal governments – were in many cases created or imposed upon the tribes by the federal government at a time when the feds would have been happy to just see the tribes vanish. There’s a historical component to all of this, in other words, and that component is neither pretty nor simple.

Complex as it is, tribal sovereignty is extremely important to the nation, but especially the West. It will become more important as more tribes follow the Southern Ute example. So, it’s worth following this recall effort very closely.

The political carnage in the U.S. -- my take

2010-10-20T15:05:00.002+02:00

Perhaps the most closely watched and most expensive mid-term elections ever are right around the corner in the U.S. Election night will certainly be interesting in every state, but this year's contests, in my opinion, are especially significant in the West. Just two years ago, the Democrats celebrated a new dominance in the Interior West. And the West celebrated its own newfound influence in national politics.

Today, the West's influence holds: Probably no race has attracted more attention than Nevada's contest pitting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid against Tea Partier Republican Sharron Angle. And other state races are also attracting oodles of outside money along with visits from the Obamas and Sarah Palin. The Democrats' influence is much more tenuous -- it's conceivable that we'll all wake up after Election Day to a much redder region.

Of course, that red will be tainted by whatever color one might consider the Tea Party, which has successfully knocked out a number of mainstream, relatively moderate Republican candidates, and replaced them with hard-liners and extremists. The new Tea Partiers run as Republicans but look significantly different than the G.O.P. of a decade ago, even. Also of note is the fact that the Tea Partiers have failed to win significant influence in some surprising states: Washington, Arizona, Oregon. And in Colorado, they've virtually succeeded in handing the Governor's office back to the Democrats.

All of that and more in High Country News' guide to the elections, written mostly by yours truly (senior editor Ray Ring edited the package and wrote about the Northern Rockies states). Read it. Comment. And keep it around for election night.

A special honor

2010-10-18T15:18:00.002+02:00

I was surprised to find out not too long ago that a story I was reporting a year ago this month earned a special citation from Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism folks. I'm flattered to share the podium, so to speak, with this year's winner Lewis Kamb and the other special citation honoree Dawn Stover.

The story, for High Country News, was called Wind Resistance. It was about the huge boom in wind energy in Wyoming. More than that, though, it was about the oil and gas dominated culture of Wyoming politics, and how the wind boom was both affecting that culture, and being impacted by it. It was also about a guy named Diemer True, a wealthy Wyoming oilman who carries a lot of political weight in the state. True's an interesting character. His politics are libertarian, even Tea Party-esque; he's Dick Cheney's buddy; he has spent a good deal of his career lobbying to knock down environmental regulations in order to make it easier for the energy industry to access public lands.

Now, he's taken up a new cause: Fighting against wind farms in the Laramie Range, where he owns ranches. It's classic NIMBYism, sure, but it's also something more. After spending a bit of time with True, I became convinced that he generally cares about the Laramie Range; that, in some weird way, he's an environmentalist. I also learned that True was a really nice, gentle guy, in contrast to the angry, spittle-generating politics that he supports. Indeed, his tall, lanky physique, sun-burnished skin, close-cropped haircut, slow cowboy's drawl all kind of reminded me of my grandfather. Not only that, but the guy's a cowboy poet.

Throw in a sage grouse, conflicted environmental activists, and turbines as far as the eye can see, and you've got what I thought was a pretty interesting story. Apparently, the Knight-Risser folks agreed. Looking back, I'm just amazed that I was able to research, report and write the thing while I was also serving as editor-in-chief of the magazine. I must have been drinking more coffee back then.

The prize is based at Stanford and is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and co-sponsored by the Bill Lane Center for the American West (a very cool organization!).

Matt Jenkins -- whose writing I've always admired and with whom I've had the privilege of working many times -- won the award for High Country News back in 2006.

Berlin bikes, bureaucracy and a movie of our 'hood

2010-08-26T07:46:00.003+02:00

I'm interested in just about everything. That can be distracting (if I had a brain-cam on just this morning's Web-surfing session, it would yield a pretty shaky, erratic movie). But it's also why I've pursued journalism: It allows me to indulge my curiosity and constantly learn about new things. When we moved to Berlin two months ago, it was like being dipped in a big vat of newness. Everything is new, and challenging, and worth exploring. So, as of late my journalistic explorations have been somewhat dormant, giving way to my more personal explorations, some of which can be found over at my other blogs: gin and gelato and Burning Sunflowers. I've even delved into a bit of video production. Feel free to check it out.

Talking about the Southern Utes

2010-07-22T21:22:00.002+02:00

I consider myself a journalist/writer, which means I like to write my thoughts down, not talk about them. But at High Country News, I often found myself talking about my thoughts anyway, thanks to a variety of public radio stations that interviewed me about various stories we ran. Then, we started our own little audio interviews with High Country Views.

So on the one hand, it was kind of old hat when Colorado Public Radio interviewed me about my most recent HCN story. But it was also new. Instead of doing the interview from my HCN office, or the KVNF radio studios, I did it from our temporary apartment in Berlin. A great freelance radio journalist, Alexa Dvorson, came over and recorded me while I answered questions via Skype from CPR in Greeley. Woah.

Anyway, here's the interview. I enjoy these talks immensely, but make it a point never to listen to the finished project. I hope my answers are not too meandering.

The Ute Parallax

2010-07-10T09:19:00.007+02:00

The Southern Ute Indian Tribe, based on a tiny reservation in southwestern Colorado, is really rich. The 1,400 or so tribal members are, collectively, worth somewhere from $4 billion to $14 billion, making each one a millionaire, at least on paper. This isn't news to a lot of folks, everyone from the Denver Post to the Wall Street Journal has covered this part of the story. I wanted to go deeper; to understand and explain how the tribe got wealthy, and what it might mean for the tribe, the region and other tribes with rich energy resources across the West.

I was also curious about how tribal sovereignty plays into all of this, and how we might/should view a tribe like the Southern Utes, which has expanded its financial empire to far-flung places, including other reservations and to deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

The story has finally come out as a cover story for High Country News. It was a difficult story to write, in part because the subjects of the story -- the tribal government, administration, and employees -- refused to talk to me. That meant I had to do some directional drilling, if you will; getting underneath the surface by starting at the fringes. That took digging into all kinds of Congressional testimony, Mineral Management Service records, and interviewing a lot of outsiders (along with a few insiders on deep background), who are familiar with the tribe and how it works. I was also lucky enough to get an interview with Tom Shipps, the tribe's energy legal/policy guru for the past 30 years, before the tribe slammed its doors on me.

As always happens, the story was cut down significantly in the editing process, and it lost a lot of the context -- and some of the color -- that I was fond of. I also prefer the more opaque "The Ute Parallax" as a title, because it more accurately reflects one of the main concepts I was trying to get at: That depending on which angle you come from, the Southern Utes can look like either a corporation, or a tribe. And the distinction is very important. But the important stuff stayed in there, so please check it out on HCN. It also comes with a good infographic (click on the image multiple times to make it legible) that looks a lot better in the magazine than it does on the web. So subscribe.

I've included the long (okay, way too long) version, complete with exhaustive footnotes, here.

No new national monuments?

2010-07-08T11:29:00.002+02:00

Republican Calif. Rep. Devin Nune, who is no friend to the environment, has introduced a bill in Congress that would require congressional approval of any new national monument designations. It's an obvious reaction to the hoo ha that erupted when an internal Interior Department document was made public a while back, along with its list of places across the West that are worthy of protection. Even though the document emphasized that public input would be considered prior to any action, many a Western Republican lawmaker siezed on the opportunity to bash Obama/Salazar for trying to make an underhanded land grab. They saw in the document echoes of Bill Clinton's sweeping national monument designation run back in the 1990s, which perhaps most significantly made a remote, extraordinary chunk of canyon country into the Escalante Grand Staircases National Monument. I wrote about the list, etc., over at High Country News' Goat Blog.

While I have my own ambivalence when it comes to turning normal public land into national monuments (because I believe it increases the danger of commercialization of the land and surrounding towns), I'm still a big supporter in the presidential power to make such designations. That's because it's really one of the last possibilities of sweeping land protection; one of the last ways a special place can be set aside relatively quickly, protecting it from the impacts of extractive industries and motorized recreation, among other things.

In contrast, look at the wilderness designation process. Yes, Wilderness is a much higher order of protection than a monument, but it's also almost impossible to come by these days. Even the most carefully crafted, collaborative -- often watered down -- wilderness bills tend to linger in Congress for years, during which time they are watered down some more. Obstructionist lawmakers use procedural tricks to hold up the bills to make points about things like government spending. Etc.

Organizations such as the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance are admirably trying to get wilderness designation for big chunks of southeastern Utah's beleaguered canyon country. And they should continue the fight. But we should all acknowledge that the canyons' best bet is probably a series of sweeping national monument designations, done quickly. It might also be Obama's best bet for any kind of environmental legacy.

Of dogs and pneumonia in Germany

2010-07-08T08:41:00.000+02:00

I guess I should mention that my non-journalistic (or maybe gonzo-personal-journalistic?) writing appears at my blog, gin & gelato. It started out being about martinis and ice cream, but I haven't written about that much lately. Now, it's mostly my zany experiences as an immigrant in Berlin, including shipping our dog from America, and getting pneumonia and not being able to say the word for pneumonia in the local language. It still sounds funny to say that I'm an immigrant, but I suspect that after I wade through the immigration bureaucracy, it won't sound funny at all.

After that, I hope to be able to recapture enough German to be able to start doing some real journalism. So much here to explore: energy policy, polluted urban water ways, is Germany really as green as we make it out to be? etc.

Also, my short fiction and some photography shows up at my Burning Sunflower blog. It hasn't been updated in a while, but I'm working on a new short story now: "They call me Herr Sagebrush." It should be up in the next week or so. Also in the next week or so, my latest, hopefully not last, cover story will appear in High Country News.