Ray Ring

Senior Editor

File this under landscape psychology.

A guy with roots in Utah and Oregon plans to parachute into Idaho’s stunning Snake River Canyon … every seven minutes or so … over and over and over again … all day long, on July 7.

The chutist, Dan Schilling, says he’ll leap that often and relentlessly from the Perrine Bridge, where the city of Twin Falls reaches the canyon rim. His is an extreme sport, called BASE jumping, which stands for bridges, antennae, spans and Earth (ledges) jumping-off-of.

The fall from the Perrine Bridge to the canyon floor is 486 feet … If the plan holds, Schilling will have a 60-ton crane to whisk him back up to the bridge after every jump. The Twin Falls Times-News and the AP herald the stunt.

The canyon bridge is popular — and sometimes fatal — for BASE jumpers. On Memorial Day weekend, a California woman died making the jump, and several others got badly hurt … Since 2002, two more have killed themselves doing it.

As the Idaho Statesman reports:

It’s the only bridge in the United States and one of only a few in the world where parachute skydiving is allowed year-round without a permit.

Schilling aims to get himself into the Guinness Book of World Records. He’s also raising money for charity … And he may make it. He has ample military experience in extreme ops such as the edgy one that became the book and movie, Black Hawk Down.

What is it about that stretch of the canyon? It has dingy volcanic rock walls and it gapes down to the river flowing at the bottom … A famous daredevil, Evel Knievel, more or less jumped the canyon in that area on a jet-powered motorcycle, aka “skycycle,” in 1974. Wikipedia sums that up:

The steam that powered the (skycycle) engine had to get up to a temperature of 700 °F … About two-thirds the way up the ramp, the drogue parachute accidentally deployed. The deployed chute caused enough drag that the skycycle couldn’t make it all the way across the canyon. The skycycle turned on its side and started to descend into the canyon. The main chute deployed, allowing the wind to carry the skycycle into the canyon wall. By the time it hit the bottom of the canyon, the wind had pushed it across the river enough so that it landed half in and half out of the water. Knievel survived the jump with only minor injuries.

Knievel made (and lost) a fortune as an eccentric Montana character riding around on his many flaws, often crashing, as a High Country News essay portrays him.

Schilling’s charity raises money to help the kids of soldiers who die in action. Go for it. Teetering on the high bridge, he’ll attract a big audience and sell a lot of t-shirts etc. He tells the Times-News:

“This is very much about celebration … We’re here to celebrate freedom.”

He seems to mean various kinds of freedom, including the freedom to do whatever crazy thing a person wishes to do … in a canyon that calls like the mythical sirens.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

In Control Room Politics, here’s how it works:

Say you’re the top shot-caller in the Bush Administration, and you realize that you’re going to replace your Interior Secretary, Gale Norton. She’s failed to build any constituency, beyond the energy companies she serves … She’s linked to the scandal over lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s pipelines of dirty money … She never had real ideas, and she’s tired of pretending, the way Cabinet members get in the second term …

Since you’re in the Control Room, you can time it right and make preparations. First, you get a Norton assistant, Paul Hoffman, to crank out one the most extreme proposals of her reign — for turning national parks into industrial playgrounds for mechanized recreation, rock concerts, even mining.

You ride out the uproar, smiling to yourself.

Then, once Norton resigns, you let your new Interior Secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, toss out the industrial parks proposal, as his first official act. Your new Secretary gets off on the right foot, he looks good, good, good. And by extension, you do too, whether you’re George W. Bush, or Dick Cheney, or Karl Rove, or retiring Exxon-Mobile CEO Lee Raymond, whomever calls the shot.

That’s not to say that Kempthorne, the former Idaho governor, does not have genuine conservationist tendencies. He has some record as a centrist, at least.

But these things do get planned in advance. We should not be duped by appearances and the daily news story and the pundits’ conventional wisdom. The early planning likely occurred when Kempthorne was out of the room.

Prediction: The Bush Admin will make more moves to look green. For big instance, Bush must see Al Gore making a comeback with his global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth … Gore is clearly lining up for another run for the presidency, in 2008, and Gore could be much tougher for the Repubs to beat than Hillary Clinton. A lot of Americans in both parties know Gore earned more of the popular vote in 2000 than Bush did, and then Gore was a good sport, surrendering the field graciously when the Republican-majority U.S. Supreme Court refused to allow a recount of suspicious Florida votes … In 2008, much of the country will be thinking, let’s give Gore his due … And since Gore’s issue is global warming, look for Bush to take it off the table before 2008 …

I think we’ll see Bush leading the Repubs in Congress to do meaningful controls on global warming emissions within the next year or two … How green will that be? Control Room Green.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Rapidly expanding natural-gas fields in the Rockies emit millions of tons of air pollutants each year. The pollution includes more than 200 hazardous compounds such as benzene and nitrogen oxide, which form acid rain, ozone, haze and etc etc.

One of the most shocking aspects of it is, not much is being done to monitor the pollution — the crucial first step in trying to limit it. The gasfields (including coalbed methane wells) sprawl over millions of acres, so it would take thousands of monitoring stations sampling the air. Federal and state agencies have not required the energy companies to pay the costs of setting up monitoring stations.

As High Country News reported recently:

… (The air pollution comes from) tens of thousands of engines on drilling rigs, compressors and water pumps, from New Mexico to Montana. Thousands of storage tanks in gasfields vent chemical and natural gas fumes, and nobody knows how many leaks there are in the thousands of miles of gas pipes. The trucks that service the wells raise dust clouds on huge networks of dirt roads. And waste fluids and gases are often disposed of in open-air fires, called “flares.”

Other than rough estimates like the one above, which get no argument, nobody really knows much about the pollution. It’s simply one of the vague facts of life growing worse.

But now we have a report from Colorado, combining macabre humor and a breakthrough in the effort to document some of the many pollution sources.

Basically, a few wise guys in the Environmental Protection Agency got an infrared camera and drove around the gasfields northeast of Denver. According to the Rocky Mountain News, they used the heat-seeking camera:

… to see emissions that are normally invisible to the naked eye. … Aiming the camera at pipelines, valves and hatches atop storage tanks, the EPA regulators found numerous sources of “fugitive emissions” — those leaking from various areas of the facility — during a two-hour drive-by of the region last week.

In one case, an open hatch atop a storage tank was gushing such a tremendous volume of emissions into the air that one participant jokingly compared it to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius near the ancient city of Pompeii.

Even funnier and worse, many of these emissions may not even be breaking any air-pollution regs, because the regs are few and far between.

But the emissions do form ozone, which then forms the smog that clogs the air in many Western cities, including those along Colorado’s Front Range. As the News says:

Recent figures produced by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment found that the fast-growing (gas) industry northeast of Denver is expected to produce emissions of smog-forming compounds at a rate of 236 tons a day by the summer of 2007 - 90 tons a day beyond predictions of a few years ago.

That’s 236 tons per day — or 86,140 tons per year, just from the gasfields near Denver.

The EPA wise guys have drilled a tiny pinhole in the wall of de-facto secrecy around the gasfield pollution. They get Goat’s HERO OF THE MOMENT AWARD.

And yes, it’s time to reclaim the word “hero” from all the spinmasters who stole it.

High Country News also profiled another guy who drills pinholes in this particular wall of secrecy: Perry Walker. He’s a retired Air Force engineer, driving around Wyoming gasfields with a spectrometer hooked to his laptop computer, measuring emissions … A modern Lone Ranger, pushing the agencies and companies.

In times of negligent, corporate-dominated government, we make progress by individual initiative.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

A conservative Western Republican politico, Wyoming’s Sen. Craig Thomas, has come out against increased oil-and-gas drilling in national forests. It may have Westwide implications …

Thomas tells the AP:

“… Even if you do it (drilling) well, you’re changing the character of these lands.”

The politics align. Labor unions in Wyoming — which include oil and gas workers — took an unprecedented stand against drilling the Bridger-Teton National Forest, a couple of weeks ago. Kim Floyd, head of the 18,000-member Wyoming State AFL-CIO, tells the Casper Star-Tribune:

“We value the hunting, fishing, recreation and tourism economies that these lands support … We’re looking at the long term … You’ve never, ever seen us do this before, but the time is now, and with this pace of development, the day is gone where we can sit back and say nothing …”

Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat elected in a 2-to-1 Republican state, has also come out against drilling the Bridger-Teton forest.

The unusually cohesive opposition reacts to an industry desire to penetrate the heart of the Wyoming Range, west of Pinedale. The Wyoming Range, and the rest of the Bridger-Teton forest, have gorgeous scenery, huge elk herds, unpolluted streams rich with trout, that’s all … Energy companies have nibbled around the range’s fringes for decades … In the industry view, the area has some of the best natural gas reserves left nationwide.

Downhill, in the sagebrush run by the federal Bureau of Land Management, the Jonah and Pinedale Anticline fields are on their way to being the most intensively developed fields anywhere on the planet. They already produce billions of dollars of natural gas per year, with new wells proposed as tight as one well per five acres … It’s becoming clear, a lot of people from different backgrounds do not want the forest drilled to those tatters.

Senator Thomas’ call for carefulness seems to extend to national forests around the West. It offers hope to those who fight the drillers’ wish-lists along Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front and in the national forests of Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico.

And it can’t be dismissed as mere political posing, either. Everyone has pragmatic reasons. The workers want their hunting and fishing grounds and inspirational grounds preserved … Behind the scenes, Thomas and Freudenthal probably have money on their minds. Some of their biggest financial backers live in Jackson, the Republican resort community nestled between the Bridger-Teton forest and Grand Teton National Park. Jacksonites love to protect their environment. And they make campaign donations to politicians who do it.

Jackson, for instance, is typically the top zipcode sending this kind of green to Thomas for his political races. He’s up for re-election this November, and as of March 31, Jacksonites have given his campaign $30,750, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

OK, let’s all be realistic … The oil and gas industry has given the senator $56,950, as of March 31, and the senator’s total campaign war chest bulges over $1 million, thanks to more contributions from electric utilities etc etc …

But the Jackson money, and other kinds of influence from Jackson’s movers and shakers, has to be noticeable to Thomas … The senator has even picked up $6,750 in campaign money from the tiny, double-take village called Bondurant, which clings to snowcapped peaks in the drillers’ bull’s-eye.

For Your Info, the senator gets a hugely low rating from the League of Conservation Voters, based on his performance in Congress on enviro bills. Political life is not as simple as the League frames it … Congressional stuff happens beyond the action on bills, as the senators pressure the agencies in relative privacy …

How important will Thomas’ leverage be, as the feds set a course for managing the forests? Well … it looks like he’ll be in the Senate for another six years anyway. His Democratic opponent in this year’s race, Dale Groutage, has raised only $26,000 in campaign money, as of March 31. Hmmmm … Thomas’ $1 million-plus versus Groutage’s peanuts. Anyone care to bet against Thomas?

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Enviro politics have grown broader … where else? … in the West’s top liberal resort town. Evidence: the Aspen Board of Realtors has formed a new committee to advocate for preserving federal lands in its Colorado neighborhood. And for once, this is a committee with a snappy name — Realtors for Wilderness.

Bob Starodoj, co-chairman of Realtors for Wilderness, tells the Aspen Daily Times:

The image of Realtors isn’t the greatest in the valley. (But) the fact that we sell real estate doesn’t make us bad guys.

It’s good for the general politics, overcoming stereotypes, and good for efforts to designate more wilderness areas. Scott Condon of the Times reports:

The committee took its first step to preserve public lands … by calling on the Colorado Roadless Area Review Task Force to protect all 84 inventoried roadless areas in the White River National Forest. … Realtors for Wilderness said in a letter to the task force that preservation of undeveloped lands makes good business sense. “Much of the added value of real estate in our resort economy is a measure of the quality-of-life benefits of the absence of roads and development on public lands that surround our area,” the Realtors’ letter said.

And these property-pushers have pull:

The 625 members of the Aspen Board of Realtors sold more than $2 billion in real estate (locally) last year.

Among the things they may gain — respect!

“Someday we can maybe have status above used-car salesmen,” Starodoj said with a laugh.

Read the whole story here (it may require a brief registration with the Times). Of course, Aspen is so comfortably progressive already, this isn’t exactly a breakthrough. But … message alert! … it reminds us to keep looking for ways to get creative with the politics wherever we are.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

It’s the next big step for the West’s energy development: The feds have issued a regional map showing “energy corridors” — the routes where new power lines and pipelines will cross federal lands in the 11 Western states.

Worried that monstrous new towers slinging gobs of electricity, and the ground-ripping for fatter pipelines, might come through your favorite public land? Download the map … check it out.

And don’t go ballistic … yet. The map is only a first draft. The agencies doing it (Energy, Interior, Ag and Defense) ask you to submit your comments (deadline July 10) to take it to second draft.

If you spot troublesome routes, please also let Goat’s readers know by posting a comment below.

If the schedule holds, the corridors will be finalized by August 2007. The potential impacts include a bulldozer invasion, loss of wild ambiance, and permanent scars on the land’s beauty. Bruce Pendery, director of public lands for the Wyoming Outdoor Council, tells the Casper Star-Tribune:

These things (energy corridors) do have very substantial environmental impacts, not the least of which is the aesthetic appeal of some of these landscapes.

For Your Info, Wyoming’s enviros — living in an energy colony — like what they see so far: The proposed energy corridors generally parallel Wyo’s interstate highways. Not only would that protect the backcountry, everyone driving the big roads through mucked-up scenery would have a better picture of the costs of this nation’s addiction to fossil fuels.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The National Park Service has reversed its reversal of a public-information policy. … Say what? It has to do with people who get hurt or killed in the parks. For decades, the agency released the victims’ names and other basic info, so the public could understand the hows and whys. Then recently the agency began to keep that info secret. Many critics, including journalists and park flaks, didn’t like the official zipping of lips (Goat chewed it over in a June 8 post that drew reader comments). Now the Park Service has gone back to its policy of openness and freedom of info. Ta-daaah! The system of public government and journalistic watchdogs works, once in a great while anyway. … AP has the story on the flip-flop-flip.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Environmentalists wanted to pound a stake through the heart of California’s Rep. Richard Pombo in the June 6 primary election. Pardon the metaphor, but Pombo acts like Dracula on the green issues in Congress: He wants to suck the life from the Endangered Species Act etc.

Groups such as Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club spent more than $1 million on TV ads and foot soldiers, backing the greenish Republican Pete McCloskey in the primary. It could have been an epic battle, since McCloskey helped write the Species Act when he served in Congress 33 years ago. Yet once the primary votes added up, McCloskey got only 32 percent to Pombo’s 62 percent.

What does it mean, looking ahead? Will enviros nationwide also get shrugged off in November’s general elections?

As usual, the experts disagree on significance: Some say it means that Pombo and other ungreen candidates will roll onward to November victories. Some say the opposite, that because 32 percent of the voting Repubs rejected the seven-term incumbent, it means green issues will rock in November. … If you want the yes-no-yes-no analysis, try the San Francisco Chronicle and the Modesto Bee and the Stockton Record.

Mainly it makes me wonder, if we didn’t have experts, would we disagree so much?

The dreaded Pombo will face off against a not-so-dreaded wind-power Democrat named Jerry McNerney in November. In a district where registered Repubs outnumber registered Dems, 44 percent to 37 percent. So probably the incumbent will win.

That’s what I don’t wonder about: the power of incumbency. Anyone who holds the advantage of a political office is awfully hard to retire these days, with such widespread apathy and negligent corporate journalism and a kaleidoscope of other distractions. … That’s true especially in the U.S. House of Representatives, where the home districts have been gerrymandered to be even more unassailable than Dracula’s castle.

In many House primaries like Pombo’s, incumbents triumphed, regardless of issues and scandals. As the AP reports:

The outcomes (of the primaries in) California’s 53 House districts — drawn to create safe seats for 33 Democrats and 20 Republicans — produced the predictable results.

“Incumbents did very well, including those who had a modicum of opposition,” said GOP analyst Allan Hoffenblum, whose nonpartisan California Target Book tracks races in the states. “The message from California and these nicely gerrymandered districts is that the voters didn’t send any message related to the national races in November.”

The political parties keep redrawing the House district boundaries with increasingly sophisticated software that identifies and excludes hostile voters. U.S. News & World Report calls it a “fake democracy”:

… Two years ago, nearly 98 percent of House incumbents seeking re-election won … (and now) the Cook Political Report rates just 35 of this fall’s 435 House races as competitive. Other analysts put the number at 25, or fewer than 6 percent of races. That’s down from more than 100 competitive races in 1992 …

So you heard it here first: Those of you looking for big changes in Congress in November, despite all the predictions of change, don’t get your hopes up. If it happens at all, it’ll happen where incumbents are vacating their House seats (Idaho and Colorado have vacancies, for example), or it’ll be in the Senate, where there is no gerrymandering protecting incumbents because those are statewide races.

And for a revealing profile of Rep. Pombo — “the man, the myth” — check High Country News.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

One of the essential functions of any presidential administration is to generate … outrage!

The Bush2 administration seems especially good at it. If you want evidence, check half the Internet.

Now we have a new reason to be outraged, and it’s a strange iteration of the Bush2 obsession with secrecy:

Some major national parks, following a directive from DC, no longer release the names of tourists who suffer accidents or die in the parks.

So people who get attacked by Glacier National Park bears, or who get drowned in Lake Powell boat wrecks, may become mere statistics, with no identities at all.

The Billings Gazette ran AP’s murky story.

The new Zipped-Lips Policy deprives us of a full understanding of how people get injured (their identities and backstories help reveal the hows and whys). Historians will have a tougher time doing their thing, and authors will struggle even more as they try to write books about bear attacks, etc etc etc.

Several newspapers have tried Freedom of Information Act requests to pry out the information that used to be public. They have been defeated.

Even longtime park flaks, such as Grand Teton’s Joan Anzelmo, don’t like it. Anzelmo tells AP:

“I would dread having to go from the professional cooperation that we have with members of the news media who are covering stories in the national parks to not providing information that has always served the park and the agency and the public.”

And Charles Davis, executive director of the University of Missouri’s National Freedom of Information Coalition, says:

“We have every right to know how and when and why people are perishing in what are supposed to be fun, safe places. That’s how we identify problems in this country.”

Bush2 seems determined to set all kinds of records, including in uptightedness. And in zipping as many lips as possible. To the sound of wind in the pines, add zzzzpp zzzzpp.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Whether you gripe — or say hooray — about the West’s people explosion, take a look at a map drawn by the Center for the Rocky Mountain West.

The mapmakers answer an interesting question: How much does each county’s economy depend on construction jobs?

The West’s counties tend to be more dependent on construction jobs, compared to counties Back East. But surprise … some of the most dependent counties don’t have booming megaburgs like Vegas or Phoenix. Instead, they are the likes of Oregon’s Deschutes County (Bend and its suburbs) and Colorado’s Mesa County (Grand Junction and its suburbs).

Beyond the national map, the Center’s text tightens to analyze the Rocky Mountain states. That’s the Center’s mission. The analysis, while brief, includes dramatic stats like, from 1990 to 2004, “construction labor earnings” in most Rocky Mountain states doubled or tripled.

The Center concludes:

This growth has made all of these states much more construction dependent …

That’s what makes it tough for those trying to slow down or contain the West’s people explosion. Despite the obvious negatives of growth (more pollution, more habitat lost, more traffic jams, more crime, more total aggravation), all the hammering on new houses and Bigger-and-Bigger Box Stores means income for workers. It can shore up the whole local economy. Arguing against it amounts to arguing against workers. The politics must go uphill.