Ernie Atencio

This morning I ran into a friend who works for Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, a local AmeriCorps and Youth Conservation Corps program that employs young people in all variety of community service and conservation projects around northern New Mexico. He is always so pumped about his work, new educational initiatives, inspiring success stories. I’ve worked with youth in the past – was once an Outward Bound “hood in the woods” myself – so I know it can be both brutally challenging and deeply gratifying. I understand why he’s always excited.

Today he was talking about the New Mexico No Child Left Inside Coalition. This is not new, but got me thinking and plowing back through some old material.

Richard Louv’s 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, certainly got a lot of people’s attention. That it is healthy for kids to have unstructured play outside is not a new idea, but Louv’s book drew clear connections between a deficit of nature in children’s lives and a costly epidemic of learning disabilities, behavioral disorders and childhood obesity. And the final link is the kind of adults those kids with nature deficit disorder turn into. No wonder we’re in such and environmental mess.

Louv spoke at a Quivira Coalition conference in Albuquerque two years ago and had hard-bitten ranchers teary-eyed as they recounted their own wild country upbringing. It rings true.

Since then dozens of New Mexico youth, educational and conservation organizations have coalesced together to get children unplugged and outside to learn in and from nature. I know people imagine all us Westerners always out on the land, running cattle, hiking the peaks, hunting and fishing and running rivers. But as one example of the disconnect, the New Mexico State Parks Division estimates that although 80 percent of our rural state’s school kids live within a half-hour of a state park, less than 10 percent have ever visited one. The coalition proposes to pay for this outdoor education program with a 1% tax on the sale of TVs and video games (undoubtedly the prime culprits), which would raise an estimated $4 million dollars a year. That could provide a lot of precious and transformational experiences for a lot of children.

I’ve got nothing against tests and educational performance standards, but our local school district seems to be in such a perpetual panic to meet No Child Left Behind standards that my son probably spends more of his school day preparing for and taking tests than he spends outside. We’ll all be happier when it’s the other way around.

Ed Quillen

My father, who turns 81 in about a week, has lived in the West all his life, and he swears we have no such season as spring, at least not in the sense of a gradual warming and greening as the climate makes a gentle transition from winter to summer. “One day you get a foot of snow,” he remarks, “and a week later, the trees are leafed out. There’s no season. It just happens all at once.”

That certainly seems to be true this year. The branches were bare just a week or so ago, and now the lilacs appear ready to bloom. Granted, I live at 7,000 feet above sea level, where the seasons can be expected to vary from the norm, but still, the whole concept of “spring,” as the textbook interval between the Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice, seems to fit us not at all. We pretty much jump from winter to summer without much in between.

But saying that we have but three seasons — winter, fall, and summer — seems much too simple. And the old joke that we have only two seasons — winter and visiting relatives — is even more an oversimplification, despite its ring of truth.

(Read on …)

Rebecca Clarren

I hate to mow the lawn. My yard spans a hill and cutting the grass with the electric mower I borrow from the neighbors is some strange hybrid of yoga and modern dance. (Flick the yellow power cord to the left over my shoulder, now to the right, under my leg.) My neighbor Allison, the one who so kindly lends me her mower has a solution: a neighborhood goat. We could all keep the goat for a week at a time and then, at the end of the summer, we’d slaughter and grill her up for one fantastic neighborhood block party.

The BBQ-part aside, using goats in lieu of lawn mowers or insecticides is gaining traction all over the West. For several years, Wilsonville, Ore. has hired a herd of 450 grazers to chomp down invasive plants at city parks. Clackamas County, not far from Portland, has used goats to manage weeds near reservoirs. This past May, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles hired several dozen goats (and a goatherd and a few dogs) to chew up the flammable brush around its 110-acre hillside. Ranchers in New Mexico have used hundreds of goats to eat and kill off tamarisk.

Claudia Ingham, a doctorate in rangeland ecology and management at Oregon State University, is studying the impact of grazing on landscapes rife with invasive English ivy. So far her results indicate that goats are the most effective at controlling the ivy so that native plants have space to flourish.

Using insecticides and fuel-powered mowers increasingly make little sense with raising gas prices and data about the impacts of toxic chemicals on humans and the environment. Call your local officials and get them to hire a flock of goats. It’s an idea that should take root.

Felice Pace

Last week I had the honor to meet in Bozeman with a group of people who might just manage to change the dominant realities of everyday life on the Indian reservations of Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming. It might surprise you that no political leaders were in attendance – at least not political leaders of the type we usually think about. The event was a gathering of reservation-based native non-governmental organizations (NGOs) formed and operated by individuals, couples, friends and relatives who are dedicated to serving the native youth of their far flung communities. They were brought together by another NGO that goes by the name Hopa Mountain. The focus was organizational development and the sessions were about writing grants, grassroots fundraising, governing board development, strategic planning and other similar topics.

Sounds pretty benign, right? So why do I make apparently grandiose claims about the potential impact of this group of youth workers?

To answer the question I must tell you something about the reservations of these three western states. If you are non-native you likely wouldn’t know that NGOs in general and social service NGOs in particular are, for the most part, a new phenomenon on these reservations where civil society institutions and structures are at best underdeveloped. That’s because since their founding those who control the reservations – first and always the federal Department of Interior and in recent decades the tribal governments - have been in charge of youth and other social services. With federal funding and institutionalized programs named after long-dead members of congress it has long been assumed that there was no need for non-governmental organizations to care for the reservations’ youth. But now community-based youth programs are sprouting on the reservations like cottonwoods after a flood. On the Pine Ridge Reservation alone there are at least 15 such programs which have begun operations over the course of the last five years and the spontaneous generation of more programs and services does not appear ready to abate anytime soon.

How can we explain this phenomenon? For the answer we need look no further than the federal agencies and tribal governments which were presumed to be providing all the services reservation youth could possibly need. The naked truth is that these government agencies with their dozens of programs and solid year-after-year funding are failing the reservation youth; there is a growing cadre of adults who are no longer willing to stand by and watch the debacle.

Many of the new youth programs are focused on traditional culture and language preservation. While tribal programs have long claimed to teach traditional culture and reservation schools all have native language programs, traditional values continue to erode and few younger people have become fluent in their native tongues. This erosion of tradition and language along with the epidemic of negative youth behaviors has prompted the folks who gathered in Bozeman last week to take matters into their own hands - undertaking the daunting task of establishing youth programs outside tribal government and education structures.

(Read on …)

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

More than 90 formal protests from local governments, organizations and individuals, plus a letter from the Salazar Brothers…taken together, they’ve halted the auction of 144,000 acres of prime land in southern Colorado’s Rio Grande National Forest — at least for a while.

The BLM announced the deferral of 84 parcels from its May 8 oil and gas lease sale “until additional analysis can be completed.” But a spokesman for the BLM said the agency is “completely unsure” of how long the leases may be deferred. The agency cited information “received from the public, local governments and our own internal review” as the reason for the deferral. Among the concerns: the impact of gas and oil development on lynx habitat (the deferred parcels are within the core release area used by the Colorado Division of Wildlife to reintroduce lynx), potential damage to the cutthroat trout and other wildlife including the greater and Gunnison sage grouse and the boreal owl. There was also a general outcry from the public — concerned about the impact of oil and gas development on health and quality of life.

One protester, retired organic farmer Greg Gosar, put it this way: “Now our life’s work and final dreams could possibly be sacrificed to a short-term, destructive, and so far impotent attempt by the out-going administration to deal with world-wide energy problems. We are deeply angered at the shallowness and futility of this idea.”

Three parcels near Crestone (one of the local governments that filed a formal protest) will still be auctioned May 8.

Rebecca Clarren

In a stunning display of passive aggressive behavior the federal government has once again failed to propose a plan that will recover thirteen species of endangered Northwest salmon. Since 1994, environmental groups, tribes and the state of Oregon have complained that three different NOAA Fisheries proposals, called Biological Opinions, for salmon recovery violate the Endangered Species Act. The feds have gone so far as to claim that the dams are part of the natural landscape, akin to say a mountain, and therefore the fact that they kill tens of thousands of salmon each year, can’t be mitigated.

The latest biological opinion, released yesterday, once again fails to comprehensively consider the impact of the dams. Instead of doing what salmon defenders say would be the most effective and best move to help the struggling fish: remove four dams along the Snake River, the $75 million a year plan would make $500 million in capital improvements to the system’s 14 dams over 10 years, and boost rates for hydropower generation by the dams by up to 4 percent, reports the Oregonian.

(Read on …)

Ernie Atencio

Our local town council recently passed a resolution to make Taos the first officially-designated “Fair Trade Town” in the West. It’s also only the fifth in the nation, according to Fair Trade Towns U.S.A.

What does “fair trade” mean for a rural northern New Mexico town?

According to Wikipedia, fair trade is a “market-based approach to alleviating global poverty and promoting sustainability” that “advocates payment of a fair price as well as social and environmental standards . . . in particular on exports from developing countries to developed countries.” With some of the persistently highest rates of poverty and childhood hunger in the nation, New Mexico is right in there with many of those developing countries. And the northern counties are among the poorest.

The council’s resolution calls for public education and promotion of fair trade principles, encouraging local commerce in fair trade products and procuring and using “Fair Trade Certified products such as coffee and tea, which would normally be purchased for council meetings, office supplies, etc. when such products are available and competitively priced.”

It’s hard to imagine how buying fair trade coffee and tea and copy paper for town meetings (when competitively priced) will make much of a dent in global poverty. And what about buying local? Those third-world Taos-area farmers don’t grow coffee or tea, but they do grow organic wheat and wonderful produce and grassfed bison and beef.

Well, it’s a start in the right direction.

Ed Quillen

Bottled water has attracted ample criticism on environmental grounds, mostly because plastic bottles end up in the waste stream. But there’s another environmental cost: Transporting the water.

An article in today’s local newspaper explained now Nestlé plans to tap some local springs near Nathrop (between Buena Vista and Salida in Chaffee County, Colo.) for its Arrowhead bottled water.

The company proposes to collect 0.3 cubic feet per second (about 135 gallons) and transport the water by truck to its bottling plant in Denver. That works out to 194,400 gallons per day. A gallon of water weighs 8.35 pounds, so that’s 1,622,268 pounds, or about 811 tons, to be hauled from Nathrop to Denver every day.

(Read on …)

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

Bamboos are part of the grass family, and estimates of the number of species range from 200-1,200. Some bamboos reach heights of 60-90 feet, with stalks up to 8 inches in diameter. Canebreaks, once common in the southeastern U.S., are native North American bamboos.

“Gregarious flowering” is common to bamboos: all members of a particular species flower, produce seeds and then “die in synchrony.” Bamboos produce only once every 3 to 120 years, creating seed crops numbering in the thousands. Between flowerings, they reproduce via rhizomes, which develop underground and send up shoots that emerge from sheaths to grow into stalks.

(Read on …)

Evelyn Schlatter

The Bureau of Land Management released a statement April 30 to the press that it rejected a hardrock mining lease application (chose the “no action” alternative, in agency-speak) from General Moly (formerly Idaho General Mines, Inc) for an area 12 miles northeast of the Mount St. Helens volcanic crater. The BLM director for Washington and Oregon said that the agency wasn’t able to determine whether a hardrock mining lease would be compatible with the purpose for which the lands were originally purchased.

The open-pit mine was originally slated to be anywhere from a few hundred to 3000 acres, from which copper, molybdenum, and silver would be extracted, over the next 30-40 years. BlueOregon noted that much of the area originally considered for the lease entered an area protected under President Clinton’s 2001 Roadless Rule and mining at Goat Mountain could have affected threatened salmon and steelhead runs in the Green River as well as drinking supplies of Kelso, Longview, and Castle Rock. For a handy map of the Mount St. Helens area, click here.

General Moly, based in Lakewood, CO applied for a fractional interest hardrock mining lease in March 2005 for 217.3 acres and a fringe acreage lease for 682.2 acres in the vicinity of Goat Mountain and the headwaters of the Green River. The planned mine, on the south-facing slope of Goat Mountain, would have eradicated much of the mountain.

(Read on …)

Ernie Atencio

I just read Craig Childs’ excellent cover story in the current issue of HCN about the thin line between plundering archaeological sites and what we take to be legitimate archaeology. I can imagine archaeologists out there bristling at the suggestion that they are just glorified pot hunters. But it reminded me of something my daughter said many years ago.

She was three and we were wandering around a potsherd-littered landscape on the Colorado Plateau. They were irresistibly beautiful, big, polychrome pieces and she had collected an armload, but she knew the rules and understood she couldn’t keep them. “But I just want to hold them for a while,” she said. As she was reluctantly scattering them back where they came from, she said, “I wish someone would invent a new national park called Finders Keepers National Park.”

Yeah, that would be a popular one, but with the public’s obsession about collecting souvenirs it wouldn’t last long.

(Read on …)

Ed Quillen

Recently I had to drive across South Park, a vast valley rimmed by mountains in the middle of Colorado. Something stuck out that I hadn’t noticed on previous excursions: half-a-dozen new towers to provide service to cellular telephone users.

Or at least I think that’s what they were. For all I know, the towers could have been connected to some new top-secret Homeland Security intruder detection system, or maybe they were part of an array of antennas searching for intelligent life in the universe.

Most of South Park is in Park County. A few years ago, the county’s Board of Adjustment denied a request for a cell-phone tower because it would interfere with “key vistas” in an open-space zone.

The company offered to build a fake silo around the 90-foot tower, on the assumption that this would fit well in a rural area. The board countered that a silos might fit in dairy country, but not in grazing country like South Park.

(Read on …)

Felice Pace

Was anyone surprised by the article about the abuse of conservation easements which appeared in the March 31^st edition of HCN? If you were, you have not been paying close attention to what has been going on in our society.

In a country where energy traders collude to rip off customers, corporate leaders cook the books to deceive investors, brokers sell mortgages to folks they know can’t afford them and federal regulators wink at usury and worse, what else should we expect?

Stay tuned for the carbon credit scandals to come.

This is all the product of a society in which the highest good is making obscene amounts of money and in which one can sin all week and get forgiven on Sunday without penance or consequences.

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