Ed Quillen

Since I live in Chaffee County, Colorado, home to an even dozen 14,000-foot peaks, I’m used to encountering what we call “peak-baggers” — that is, people bent on climbing all fifty-four 14ers in Colorado, often in the shortest time possible. In recent years, the baggers have become so numerous that old trails have to be rebuilt or rerouted to handle the foot traffic that was despoiling alpine meadows and tundra.

Recently a review book arrived in my office, and it makes me wonder whether our wilderness areas are getting the same treatment — that is, not places to appreciate on their own merits, but as marks on a checklist.

The book is Wild Colorado: A Guide to Fifty-one Roadless Recreation Areas Including the Black Canyon of the Gunnison and the Great Sand Dunes (by Donna Lynn Ikenberry, published by FalconGuide). Doubtless there are many others like it. This one delivers what its cover promises, and provides details about trailheads, relevant maps, administration, ecosystems, etc.

But while providing that information, it raises a bigger question: Who really needs such a guidebook?

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In mid-July, Yates Petroleum Corporation and Mack Energy Corporation invited 55 teachers from southern New Mexico to participate in its 2006 Oil and Natural Gas Summer Institutes for Educators. Over the course of five days, teachers from the towns of Artesia, Carlsbad, Lovington, Roswell, Hobbs and Dexter, Jal and Tatum learned about the oil and gas industry, and about New Mexico’s oil reserves. Teachers also visited a drilling site and a natural gas processing facility.

And, according to this story in the Santa Fe New Mexican, teachers were paid a $500 stipend once they submitted approved lesson plans to the institute’s organizers.

So, just who were the institute’s organizers? The Center for Energy Education is run by the Hobbs, N.M.-based consulting firm Joan Tucker & Associates. Never heard of the Center for Energy Education? That’s not surprising. But the name Yates should ring a bell with High Country News readers. That’s the family energy company with close ties to both President Bush and Vice President Cheney, which also plans to drill for oil and natural gas at Otero Mesa.

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No, it’s not the latest South Park movie. “Spaceport America” is the new name for a space hub that’s being built on 15,000 acres of state land in southern New Mexico. “Southwest Regional Spaceport” was too cumbersome, so state officials and Sir Richard Branson, the billionaire owner of Virgin Galactic, brainstormed a new name and logo.

Governor Bill Richardson and the state legislature have already promised more than $100 million toward the $225 million project – which will shoot into space for two and a half hours those customers with $200,000 to spare.

According to the state’s Economic Development Department:

New Mexico is expected to benefit in the form of new jobs, revenue to the state and capital investment as a result of overall spending from suborbital and orbital activities, and research and development activities directly related to the Spaceport. A New Mexico State University study projects spending of $1 billion, payroll of $300 million, and employment reaching 2,300 by the fifth year of operation.

Support for the private spaceport seems widespread, especially given positive coverage of the project in the state’s major newspapers. Now, here’s hoping the state’s suborbital spending really does pan out in the long term for New Mexico, which has one of the highest rates of childhood poverty in the nation.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

A few weeks ago, I praised some Environmental Protection Agency staffers for their seat-of-the-pants effort to measure air pollution in natural-gas fields northeast of Denver. Basically, they drove around using an infrared camera to detect gas leaks. They achieved a kind of breakthrough, because most of that industry’s pollution is not monitored at all; it’s an ongoing secret around the West.

Now one of that industry’s U.S. senators — James Inhofe, of Oklahoma — attempts to slap down the watchdogs.

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Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Compromises wafted in the air of the U.S. House of Representatives on July 25. When everyone was done inhaling, three Western wilderness bills passed by unanimous voice vote.

Associated Press sketches some details:

The bills would create nearly 670,000 acres of new wilderness and protect 47 miles of wild and scenic rivers in California, Idaho and Oregon, as well as ban drilling in northern New Mexico’s Valle Vidal. The House also passed legislation to establish National Heritage Areas in several states, including New Mexico, Utah and Nevada.

Among the winners so far: Rick Johnson, the determined centrist leading Idaho’s biggest enviro group, the Idaho Conservation League, and his crucial ally on wilderness issues, Idaho’s jack-Mormon Republican Rep. Mike Simpson. Both men led a long effort to hammer out one of the bills, to protect more than 300,000 acres in the beautiful Boulder-White Cloud mountain ranges.

Among the losers so far: hardliners on all sides. They include wilderness advocates who don’t like many aspects of the Idaho bill, such as its giveaways of federal land; and snowmobilers and mountain-bikers who don’t want to lose access to high peaks.

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Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The New York Times and Oregon’s statewide newspaper, The Oregonian, both weighed in July 25 with stories on the West’s hottest political campaign — the libertarian effort to cripple land-use planning in six Western states.

In their timing, the big papers follow the publication of the current High Country News cover story about the campaign. And it seems clear, they’re doing a bit of scrambling to keep up.

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There’s nothing like settling down to coffee and the paper on a bright Sunday morning, only to blow a gasket. “Is it all just hot air?” asked the Albuquerque Journal front-page headline. Journal staff writer John Fleck goes on to profile Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Petr Chylek, who says Greenland isn’t actually warming. Fleck quotes Chylek — “a dissenter from the mainstream” — as saying “You really cannot say for certain what is causing current climate change.”

It’s not until you turn to page two – and just how many casual readers bother to do that? – that the Albuquerque Journal lists some of the facts that all but a few climate scientists in the world agree upon: that the world is warming and carbon dioxide is likely responsible for that warming trend. That’s also where readers also learn that Chylek speaks for himself – and not for the laboratory.

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Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Up to 2,500 barn owls have been struck by vehicles along a 200-mile stretch of Idaho interstate in the past two years, according to researchers who find the carcasses. The Idaho Statesman reports:

… Researchers are worried the deaths may be greatly reducing the population, even raising the spectre of localized extinctions. … Barn owls numbers have been declining around the world for decades, but the numbers in southern Idaho are particularly striking … It’s fairly clear the owls are being hit by vehicles.

Roads take a toll on many species, but the numbers are rarely documented like this. And the dead owls could be a symptom of something larger askew in the ecosystem:

… Why barn owls are dying at a rate more than 10 times that of the next most frequently found (roadkilled) bird is unknown … The owls appear to be hunting before they die — some have been found with a vole in their talons and many have undigested voles in their stomachs — and likely follow rodents to the road …

… One theory is that the owls are getting nonlethal poisoning from pesticides in their agricultural hunting areas, (says Boise State University researcher Than Boves). The poisoning could affect their central nervous system, making them a little slow to react to vehicles.

Boise State University biology professor Jim Belthoff warns:

“Often predators are really good indicators for environmental problems.”

For a survey of roadkill issues — and roadkill-obsessed characters — around the West, check High Country News … And deeper into the Who Knows Department, I have to wonder, maybe this sad wave of roadkilled owls is one more complicated effect of global warming?

Does Los Alamos National Laboratory need to build more bombs? Here’s your chance to weigh in on the issue: The U.S. Department of Energy has opened the public comment period on the lab’s plans to manufacture new plutonium bomb triggers, or “pits,” for nuclear warheads.

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Ed Quillen

For once, our politics get some attention from the Eastern Press Establishment — The Atlantic magazine, no less.

The July/August edition has a three-page piece called “Purple Mountains” with the subtitle “Could the interior West — long seen as an archetypal red region — be turning blue? The fate of the Republican Party may hinge on the answer.”

Written by Ryan Sager, a New York Post columnist, it’s an excerpt from his book, The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party, which is scheduled for September publication. The full article is available only to subscribers at theatlantic.com.

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In mid-June, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, D, pledged $5.9 million toward improving the living conditions in 15 “colonias” in the southern part of the state. Colonias, of which there are about 150 in New Mexico, are unincorporated border communities that generally lack potable water, sewage systems and paved roads.

The entire project, which comes at a total cost of $43 million – from private, state and federal sources – will fund wastewater projects and build infrastructure such as roads, storm drains and flood control structures in 15 colonias. The money will also be used to build a new border crossing between Sunland Park, N.M. and the Mexican colonia of Anapra. According to a press release from New Mexico Economic Development Department, this project is the result of the governor’s Colonias Initiative.

This announcement of goodwill comes less than a year after Richardson declared that colonias were responsible for devastating southern New Mexico with the “ravages and terror of human smuggling, drug smuggling, kidnapping, murder, destruction of property and the death of livestock.” Last August, he declared a state of emergency, calling for increased law enforcement, sending emergency funds to four southern counties and forcing the governor of the Mexican state of Chihuahua to bulldoze the border village of Las Chepas. At the time, Richardson referred to the area as an “abandoned town” – though its estimated 400 residents might have disagreed.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Maybe you’re wondering why your horizon looks smoky at the moment? … Or maybe wondering how global warming affects your neighborhood? … Get the answers to both questions with a few quick clicks.

Begin here for a map of the West’s major active wildfires. You’ll see at a glance, ’tis the season for smoke and flames … Click again tomorrow, to see how things have changed, as federal agencies update the map frequently. It’s your taxpayer money well spent, a great reference tool … It tells us, for example, which fires are allowed to burn more or less naturally, and which get battled. Zoom in on specific fires, to learn how big they are and how fast they’re spreading.

Then for a companion reading, try a Sacramento Bee sum of a statistical analysis linking global warming to the West’s explosion of wildfires. Researchers in California and Arizona amassed “a database of more than 1,100 Western wildfires, plus climate data including precipitation and snowmelt,” reports the Bee’s Matt Weiser:

The study doesn’t address what causes fires … but it finds that climate change creates longer, drier seasons and better conditions for catastrophic fires. (The researchers) found a fourfold increase in large wildfires between 1987 and 2003 compared with the preceding 16 years. The increase corresponds to an average 1.5-degree Fahrenheit temperature rise across the region, which includes the Rocky Mountains, the Southwest, the Sierra Nevada and the Northwest. During the warmer period, fires burned 6 1/2 times more land, and the fire season grew by an average of 78 days. The average fire duration also increased, from 7.8 days to 37 days.

“The real message of the paper is not as much about forest management,” said Steven Running, a University of Montana ecology professor who was one of the study’s peer reviewers. “It’s that this is yet another dimension of global warming’s impact. To me, it’s the equivalent of the hurricanes on the Gulf Coast. This is our hurricane.”

The Los Angeles Times also spotlights the research. The Times’ Robert Lee Hotz reports:

Last year was the worst wildfire season on record, with over 8.53 million acres burned nationwide by the end of December. So far this year, more than 60,000 wildfires have charred almost 3.9 million acres — twice the number of fires during the same period last year …

In the Moreover Department, looking ahead, the wildfires will not only be bigger and hotter and more frequent, they’ll become a global force on their own, accelerating the climate change, experts say.

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Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Gritty struggle between workers and the owner at the daily newspaper in ritzy-ditsy Santa Barbara, California: Pearl-wearing heiress Wendy McCaw, who bought the paper six years ago, recently began meddling in the news coverage, and for once, the journalists jeopardized their paychecks by pushing back.

McCaw reportedly ordered that advertisers be treated nicely, while suppressing unpleasant news. In response, all six top editors quit. So did an investigative reporter and the newspaper’s longtime columnist.

The ex-columnist, Barney Brantingham, writes in the Santa Barbara Independent weekly:

I quit the Santa Barbara News-Press last week after more than 46 years because I couldn’t bear to watch the destruction of a fine newspaper. And it was too painful to see the destruction of the lives of dedicated staffers whose only crime was publishing the news. And I could not continue to work at a paper that had lost its credibility and its soul.

That’s what columnists are for — hearts on their sleeves. Meanwhile, the mess has attracted the attention of scavenger journalists from bigger newspapers including the Los Angeles Times; the New York Times and Vanity Fair magazine are said to be circling overhead.

The LA Times has a good summation and reports:

Acquaintances said they believed McCaw, 55, was in the Mediterranean, where she normally spends her birthday cruising on her yacht.

One of McCaw’s controversial actions: she killed a story on opinion editor Travis Armstrong’s arrest for drunken driving. Then, when things went downhill, she named Armstrong publisher … As the French say, voila! … The LA Observed blog has many angles here and here and here, including, a Teamster-powered uprising against Armstrong:

At 3:30 Thursday afternoon, about thirty of the remaining staff — including almost all reporters — stood up at their desks and walked silently to publisher Travis Armstrong’s office to present him with a letter announcing that they are now represented by the Graphic Communications Conference of the Teamsters union. The letter demanded that Armstrong observe journalism ethics, restore the traditional separation of news and opinion, and invite the six top editors who have resigned to return. … Armstrong, described as shaken by the show of solidarity, called the action inappropriate and ordered them to return to their desks.

GOAT’s view: It’s good to see someone, anyone, anywhere actively resisting the degradation of journalism that we’re seeing in many operations.

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