Feral pigs. Every time I say that, I grin. I heard once that any joke with a duck in it is naturally funnier. I think the same goes for feral pigs. Too bad they’re a top-notch invasive species. The New Yorker ran an entertaining story on feral hogs back in December, including a nice riff on feral hog distribution as it correlates with political leanings. But now it looks like Oregon, too, is going to the pigs. From KTVZ.com:

“These animals have the capability to create incredible damage across a large area,” said Bruce Coblentz, a fisheries and wildlife scientist in OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences. “One pig on one golf course in one night can cause $50,000 to $60,000 in damages. They are extreme generalists with a capacity for tremendous growth.”

Quotes like this can only make you root for hogs all the more, and even fantasize about sending the critters to Phoenix. But this story actually has an interesting core: Hog spread in Oregon also corresponds to global warming.

“They tend to be most successful in warmer, wetter areas and are often found in riparian zones,” he said. “It used to be a population would die off due to freezing temperatures, but we’re not having winters like we used to, and we’re seeing the results in range expansion.”

It seems that we’re completely in the dark when it comes to understanding what the true implications of global warming will be. We talk about doomed polar bears and rising sea levels, but who expected a plague of swine?

The Vancouver Sun reports that a wolf sterilization campaign has failed to control wolf populations. Canadian wolves have, in fact, increased:

Since the study started in 2003, ministry officials have sterilized 26 wolves in two packs at a cost of up to $2,500 per wolf. All wolves within Gemini pack were sterilized, whereas only some members of Birches pack were sterilized.

That’s where it gets interesting. The ministry documents show that one wolf left Gemini pack and two other adults joined, “resulting in a 15-per-cent increase in size. In contrast, some members of the Birches pack were sterilized but the pack produced pups.”

Typically, only the alpha male and alpha female breed in a wolf pack, raising the question whether biologists in fact sterilized the dominant pair in the Birches pack or whether other members of the pack figured that if the dominant wolves were not going to raise pups, they might as well give it a try.

Looks like another job for the guys with the guns and the silencers.

…and like all addicts, we want to blame someone else for the problem.

I’m sick of people complaining about high gas prices. I’m sick of people complaining about gas companies making record profits. Exxon and Chevron and their ilk are sitting on top of an increasingly scarce commodity. Lucky them! If I was a crack dealer, I’d sell for the highest price I could, too (Remember, only the first hit is ever free). It’s not Conoco’s fault that we’re all deciding day in and day out to be oil junkies. And it’s not George Bush’s fault either. He’s not twisting our arms to go out and pour money into gas company coffers. He didn’t show up with gun and put it to my head today and say, “Son, you need a second car. And make sure it’s damn big.”

I just watched a (politically liberal) woman drop her kid off at day-care with a Chevy Suburban. Her and her three-year old. 5,000 pounds of metal, seating for nine, crummy gas mileage, and all so that she could move one 30lb girl.

We’re getting exactly what we deserve.

Note to self: Buy a scooter. At 50-80mpg, it really doesn’t matter if gas goes to $15 a gallon. Or buy a house near public transit, or (gasp) close to your job. Ride a bike and work off some of the fat from your American tush. Use a push mower. Every dollar you spend at the gas pump goes to global warming and gas company P.R. campaigns designed to make you feel good that someone else out there is going to solve your problems. BP, anyone? (The green gas company! They’ve even got a CO2 calculator on their website’s homepage). Newsflash. They haven’t stopped selling gas. And that’s because you keep giving them little green dollars. Pavlovian response. You wave money at them, they drool. Stop waving money at them.

Bitching about our poor pitiful selves is America’s new pastime. When did we become such whiners? Senators (and not just the Republicans, mind you) want to give us a tax holiday from gas? As though the tax is the thing that’s making gas expensive? (try a gas tax in Europe if you don’t like America’s low low prices always) and some have proposed giving us a $100 gas rebate… if we drill for oil in ANWR. When did our senators become such pandering idiots? Oh right, when we started only voting for the ones who made us feel safe and warm and promised us that we could have anything we wanted: a painless war, a big car, a 3,000 sq. foot house, cheap fuel, great highways… and a tax break! Everything’s free! Don’t worry! This is the Land of Do As You Please!

Hardly any of the rhetoric from either side of the political aisle demands responsibility and thoughtfulness from America as a whole. Drive less, drive slower (Jimmy Carter, we miss you so much!) get a small car, give up on the family drive to Yellowstone and the 70-mile commute to the latest megamall, and the five-acre ranchette thirty miles from the nearest town.

Wake up, America. Deal with the fact that sometimes life provides less rather than more.

After being kicked into compliance by a citizen’s initiative in Wyoming, it looked like gas companies were on the run from surface owners — and might even be forced to start treating people with a modicum of respect. But since then, the gas industry has rallied.

First, Colorado’s bill for surface owner protection went down in flames, and now Montana’s has as well. You might not like the way the energy companies do business, but you’ve got to be impressed with how well they work the legislatures.

A bit of advice to surface owners: Follow Wyoming’s example (HCN, 2/7/05: Split-estate rebellion: Ranchers take on energy developers). Make it a ballot initiative and maybe you’ll stand a chance.

Here’s the story from the Billings Gazette:

Key provisions were cut Monday from a plan intended to give landowners more legal protections from damage caused by oil developers who own the mineral rights on their property. The oil industry, which sparred with lawmakers earlier in the day over the plan, welcomed a revamped version of the proposal. Originally, it would have given landowners the opportunity to force mineral rights owners to get a bond to pay for any potential damages.

Bonds. Those pesky landowners just want too damn much.

According to AP, Rocky Mountain National Park has decided against using wolves to solve their elk overpopulation problem. Despite the fact that wolves could solve myriad ills caused by the 2-3,000 head of elk in the RMNP ecosystem (HCN: An ecosystem wanting for wolves) — everything from CWD to stream health — the toothy predators were deemed too controversial, even with their breeding potential clipped. Instead, Park officials have a much better option:

They’re going to shoot them.

At night.

With silencers.

Here’s the quote:

Park officials realize some people will object to elk being killed, Patterson said. The plan calls for park employees and contractors to shoot the animals at night with silencers in part to keep the culling out of the public eye.

Is this the beginning of a new Elk Mafia?

“Hey Guido, I want you to do a hit on Freddy Four-Point. Do it at night, and don’t let nobody hear youse.”

Willamette Week has a strongly worded editorial about OSU’s close relationship with the timber industry, as evidenced by back-and-forth emails between the forestry department’s dean, and various timber players. It’s titled In Bed With Big Wood, and the title isn’t the seamy part.

The dean’s emails discuss everything from how to spin the Donato incident to rants against environmentalists. The most irritating sample (from an HCN perspective) is this one from Dean of Forestry Salwasser to Jennifer Phillippi of Rough & Ready Lumber Co.:

“These activist groups set up all the hurdles that make these projects money losers then they complain that the agency loses money so that projects should not be done…i can’t call these goons out from my position but someone must bring this to light eventually. This is not ‘environmental protection’ it is extortion.”

As we wrote in our article “Unsalvageable,” the blame for expensive salvage timber appeals and controversy generally falls to an overly ambitious Bush administration. They don’t need any help from the tree huggers. Nonetheless, Salwasser has thrown his weight behind a new bill that would fast track post-fire salvage projects — the “Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act” — that we discuss in our current lead story.

WIRED Magazine, the cheerleader of the high-tech set has an interesting article in their latest issue on GMO creeping bentgrass.

True to many WIRED stories, “Turf Warrior” starts out with a profile of a high-octane can-of-whup-ass CEO on a mission to take tech to the masses and make gobs of cash in the process.

For him [Jim Hagedorn], the lawn is not the boring domain of suburban dads and little old ladies. It’s a business battlefield where innovation is crucial. When it comes to grass, people worry about watering, maintenance, and weeds, three headaches that genetic engineering - ­transgenic turf - could dramatically alleviate. “That’s the big kahuna for consumer lawns,” he says. “Solve those three ­issues and you’re a friggin’ hero!”

WIRED seems to have a fetish for these can-do corporate types. The men with the vision for the future. Unfortunately, the “Former F-16 pilot who collects muscle cars (40 at last count)” (What is he, Clive Cussler?”) is the fearless leader of Scotts-Miracle Grow company, the company that created transgenic grass-seed that (surprise!) blew out of its contained fields in Oregon and turned GMO into an EIS issue.

The WIRED story is odd because it almost feels as if two different people wrote the story: it’s a technology rah-rah love fest, but then slowly — almost unwillingly — it acknowledges just how much of a genie in the bottle an herbicide-resistant bentgrass might be for ecosystems. But even as it acknowledges hazards, it also works to dismiss them:

…Plants with a new, survival-boosting trait gain a competitive advantage that will launch them on a global ­ecological conquest, potentially disrupting whole ecosystems.

In the case of the Roundup-ready bentgrass, though, such a superweed scenario is probably a stretch. Researchers have found no indication that the transgenic variety has any advantages over its conventional cousin besides its resistance to glyphosate. And the grass can still be killed with other (harsher) herbicides. In other words, Butler says, a clump of Roundup-ready bentgrass along this or that irrigation canal is doing what any clump of grass does: photosynthesizing and keeping the banks from falling into the canal. That’s about it.

HCN covered the creeping bentgrass story last year, and all the high-tech details that should have been in WIRED (I really used to love this magazine): genetic drift, how bentgrass already functions as an invasive in riparian environments, examples of other biotech surprises that have happened, etc. are in High Country News. When did the Luddites start being more thorough on tech than the techies?

In any case, by the end of the story, WIRED has recovered from whatever fever dream worries it might have had about its swashbuckling CEO’s plans for genetically improving the world. Life is an adventure and technology is fun to tinker with! Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes! They close on this note:

Hagedorn­ likes to pull out jargon from his days in the Air Force. One of his favorite terms is FEBA - forward edge of the battle area. ScottsMiracle-Gro was in the FEBA in central Oregon, and the company is clearly in the FEBA with its version 2.0 transgenic grass. Hagedorn may have been slowed down by the USDA, but he has no intention of giving up on innovation. “I decide what I’m going after, and I go after it,” he says. “I don’t stop.” Watching grass grow was never so exciting.

I’m excited. Aren’t you?

That’s what Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer is saying about a better electrical grid for Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and California. He wants the proposed Frontier Line to run to Montana as well. After all, there’s not much point in sitting on top of the Saudi Arabia of coal — or of coal-to-diesel projects — unless you’ve got some way and some place to deliver the power. Enter the snazzy Frontier Line and millions and millions of power-starved Californians (we always knew they were good for something).

With an amped up grid, Montana would be in a better position to exploit its state-owned coal reserves and make bank. Interestingly, Wyoming, despite being involved in the project, has sounded a few notes of warning about the implications of a free flowing energy market. They’ve been burned before. As new natural gas pipelines made Wyoming gas available to coastal customers, one of the unintended complications was that it drove up natural gas prices for Wyoming residents who suddenly had to bid for their own resource against richer and hungrier markets back East and far West. Freudenthal is trying to reassure people that they won’t get screwed this time around. From the Casper Star Tribune:

Freudenthal said boosting Wyoming electrical exports should not have the same effect, because electrical generation built specifically for export would not compete with those utilities regulated under the Wyoming Public Service Commission.

For example, if Californians insist on having electricity generated from coal-based integrated gasification technology, or IGCC, even though it might cost a little more, California customers ought to be willing to pay that higher price.

“Clearly, we’re sensitive to the fact that if California wants to pay the cost for combined cycle power, that’s fine with me as long as they’re willing to pay for it,” Freudenthal said.

And finally, one other interesting wrinkle is the fact that the Frontier Line is being billed as a way to get access to alternative energy such as wind and solar… even though it aims straight for states which are best known for good old coal. From the Utah Daily Herald

Frontier Line advocates have said it would be a way to get alternative energy into the distribution grid.

However, critics have said solar and wind power would account for only about 2 percent of the load. Meanwhile, plans for at least 27 new coal-fired power plants are on the boards, including at least 10 that would sell power to California.

California so very much wants to be green. Fortunately, the rest of us are willing to get dirty so it can.

Loved this article from the Billings Gazette. Apparently Japanese beetles are finding Billings, Montana to their liking. They eat grass and roots and roses and look like they’re trying to establish themselves as a new successful invasive on the Western Frontier. How do they get here? Via convenient international air links.

As Denke explained it, the beetles have a strong attraction to jet fuel and will fly into the open doors of cargo planes that are being loaded or unloaded at airports. They will stay in the planes until they take off and land somewhere else, and when the doors open again they will fly out into the sunlight.

’tis indeed a small world. I wish I could travel so cheap.

The BLM is busy erasing President Clinton’s conservation legacy, one management plan at a time. When 1.3 million acres north of the Grand Canyon were designated as two national monuments in the 90s, the intention was that they were to gain permanent protection. But according to the L.A. Times, the BLM’s first proposed management plan for the 3 million-acre Arizona Strip opens the doors to mining around the monuments, and within the monuments it allows grazing and motorized vehicle recreation, both cross-country and on up to 3,000 miles of roads. The plan calls into question the agency’s committment to protecting the largely untouched cultural resources of the area. From the article:

“The BLM says none of the proposed activities in the monuments would damage resources. But critics contend that the agency can’t claim that roads won’t damage archeological resources, considering the BLM doesn’t even know where all of the sites are.”

Apparently, 97 percent of the land within the two monuments has not been surveyed for archeological or paleontological sites. Again from the Times:

On a recent tour of Vermilion Cliffs, Rick Moore of the Grand Canyon Trust pointed out many archeological sites near roads, especially vulnerable to vandals. He showed one site atop the Paria Plateau where a road sliced though remnants of an early pueblo, the ruin’s low stone walls flanking the dirt road.

It’s always interesting to watch a big land management plan get ground-truthed. The devil is in the details.

Ted Kerosote has written a scathing essay about Bush Administration energy policies — in Field and Stream, of all places. It’s telling, I think, that Field and Stream is willing to print this. There’s been a big rift in the “outdoor writers” community over this same issue. Here’s an excerpt:

Rod and gun in hand, and backing the Second Amendment right to own firearms, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have won the hearts of America’s sportsmen. Yet the two men have failed to protect outdoor sports on the nation’s public lands. With deep ties to the oil and gas industry, Bush and Cheney have unleashed a national energy plan that has begun to destroy hunting and fishing on millions of federal acres throughout the West, setting back effective wildlife management for decades to come.

No punches are pulled in the rest of the article as Kerosote tours western landscapes and details the abuses. Despite the bleak and angry tone of his writing, I find it wonderfully comforting to read; sportsmen have real political muscle, and when they use it to protect game and habitat, everybody wins. Happy Friday!

This Washington Post article on Jackson Hole gives a nice window into the wealth economy of the West. Couple it with Fayhee’s hunt for the next great place to trash and the second-home economies of the West, and you’ve got a decent picture of real estate issues in the small-town, scenic West. The Post reports:

…the Rocky Mountain resort forecast is for years upon years of the incoming rich — seeking big sky, big houses and the comfort of others who can afford to live large.

“The herd instinct is as strong with multimillionaires as it is with any two- or four-legged animal,” said Bob Graham, 69, a real estate agent here for three decades.

You can translate this to: “Rich people are afraid of anyone who doesn’t at least drive a Mercedes M-Class.” But the real meat of the story is here:

In the 1990s, despite a decline in tourism and skiing in Jackson Hole, per capita income multiplied at about five times the national rate, unemployment all but disappeared and the Latino population grew rapidly to fill service jobs.

“We used to be a tourism economy; now we are a lifestyle economy,” said Jonathan Schechter, executive director of the Charture Institute, a local think tank, and an economic analyst who studies resort towns.

It’s like the rich are a new natural resource for Wyoming, right up there with natural gas. You just have to figure out how to exploit them.

So with a wealth-friendly tax environment coupled with telecom and travel infrastructure that effectively turns Wyoming into a suburb of the East and West Coasts, you have a perfect storm for growth. Given the huge numbers of wealthy people in populous states who are looking for a nice view, the poor (we used to call them “normal”) people in any Western scenic setting can expect to be slowly shoved down valley, across the pass, or down the highway to less appetizing places.

In the past, we might have been able to hope to live in the servants quarters of the wealthy, but thanks to cars and (relatively) cheap commutes, we’ve got a much more interesting social stratification where the least valuable workers are shoved comfortably down the road.

More on the Missoula mountain biker conflict with the Forest Service from newwest.net. Good window into user conflicts on public lands. Mountain bikers want a playground, Forest Service wants to manage for multiple use.