IKEA, Marriage, Winter in Berlin and Tropical Islands

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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.