Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

By now it’s becoming clear that ethanol is not the miracle fuel that will cure our oil addiction (see stories here, here, and here). Many scientists think it takes nearly as much energy to make the corn-based fuel as is produced by burning it, it’s difficult to transport to filling stations, and it hardly makes a dent in the amount of greenhouse gas being pumped into the atmosphere.

But there’s another, even more important reason to turn away from ethanol. The title of the Reuters article says it all: Mexicans torch tequila fields for ethanol boom corn.

The switch to corn will contribute to an expected scarcity of agave in coming years, with officials predicting that farmers will plant between 25 percent and 35 percent less agave this year to turn the land over to corn.

So fire up your blender before the price of tequila goes through the roof. And if you run out of ice or those little paper umbrellas, consider riding your bike to the store. It’s easier to avoid a DUI that way, too.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

It happens every summer in our national parks: someone tries to get a close-up of a bull bison, or hand-feed marshmallows to bears, or pose the kids next to a rutting moose, and ends up injured or dead. You’d think that after surviving such an encounter, you’d quit trying to get up close and personal with wildlife.

Not so for a Montana man, reports the Billings Gazette. 57-year-old photographer Jim Cole, a strong advocate for grizzlies and their habitat, was severely mauled by a Yellowstone bruin while trying to take pictures — and it wasn’t the first time:

Cole was injured in a bear attack once before, the Park Service said. In September 1993, he walked out of the backcountry in Glacier National Park after being hurt by a grizzly there.

In 2005, he was charged and later acquitted on a misdemeanor charge in Yellowstone for approaching within 100 yards of three bears, according to court records.

Let’s hope Cole recovers fully. And please, folks, give the charismatic megafauna a respectful distance.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

San Diego County was once lauded for its visionary 1997 plan to save endangered species and allow some development at the same time, but the plan has suffered from significant flaws (see our story “San Diego’s habitat triage” and the voiceofsandiego.org’s Once a National Model, Habitat Plan Faces Uncertain Future). Now, more of the county’s wildlife conservation plans have gone badly astray, allowing cities to make money and dodge responsibility.

When the California gnatcatcher hit the Endangered Species list in 1993, it threatened to derail development in the San Diego area. To keep it on track, North San Diego County cities agreed to create long-term conservation plans for the gnatcatcher in return for being allowed to destroy up to 5 percent of the bird’s coastal sage scrub habitat.

According to voiceofsandiego.org, the cities quickly used up their allocations of sage scrub and turned to San Diego County for help. The county, which had a much larger allocation of sage habitat, sold them $30,000 credits allowing developers to pave over an acre within city limits in return for preserving an acre in the county.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

This collision fascinates me.

Edward Rothstein — holding degrees from Yale, Columbia and the University of Chicago — is the roaming “cultural critic-at-large” for the New York Times, according to an online bio.

Rothstein came out West recently to experience the tourist attractions run by the Hualapais on their Grand Canyon reservation, next to the national park.

Rothstein began by paying $74.95 for the “Spirit Package,” which includes a walk on the tribe’s new Skywalk — a glass-floored overhang on the rim, extending over a huge dropoff. (High Country News reported the Skywalk’s development in February.) And Rothstein went further: He also took a “nondescript 20-minute jaunt” in a Hualapai motorboat on the canyon-bottom river, and $125 worth of Hualapai helicopter rides, and visited the Hualapais’ fake cowboy and Indian villages.

His scathing review includes descriptions such as:

(At the Skywalk) you deposit all cameras at a security desk, slip on yellow surgical booties and stride out onto a horseshoe-shaped walkway with transparent sides and walls that extends 70 feet into space, seemingly unsupported.

Below the floor’s five layers of glass (protected from scratches by the booties) can be seen the cracked, sharp-edged rock face of the canyon’s rim and a drop of thousands of feet to the chasm below. The promise is the dizzying thrill of vertigo.

… The words imprinted on the $20 souvenir photographs taken of many venturesome souls herald completion of a daredevil stunt: “I did it!!!”

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Here’s an interesting window into the culture of off-road driving. Or make that, one aspect of the culture: the hell-raising by some throttle-twisters.

It happened Easter weekend in the 60,000-acre playground called Little Sahara Recreation Area, which is managed — if that is the proper term — by the federal Bureau of Land Management. The agency’s internal evaluation of the weekend, released last week by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, says, according to the Salt Lake Tribune:

BLM and law enforcement officials don’t dispute the specifics of the report, which describes two “incidents” during the Easter weekend that each involved up to 1,000 people, took several hours to quell and resulted in the ejection of approximately 200 people from Sand Mountain, Little Sahara’s largest single gathering spot, and an area where 24/7 riding is allowed.

“Groups of partyers were blocking an area and forcing women to bare their breasts in order to leave, along with numerous incidents of unwanted fondling of women,” said the report, which was obtained by PEER. “When law officers took action, the crowd became unruly, throwing objects at the officers. A Utah [Highway Patrolman] was struck in the head and sustained minor injuries.”

(Read on …)

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

An Alaskan mine will not be able to dump its toxic tailings in a lake, according to a ruling issued yesterday by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Couer Alaska had sought to shove 3.4 million cubic yards of waste rock, laden with lead, mercury and aluminum, into Lower Slate Lake near Juneau (see our earlier story).

The Anchorage Daily News reports:

“The toxicity of the discharge may have lasting effects on the lake and may negatively affect its ability to sustain aquatic life in the future,” the ruling said.

The decision has important implications for mining. A few years ago, the Bush administration redefined mining waste as “fill”, which can legally be dumped into streams and lakes. Couer Alaska’s mine, the first metals mine to get a permit under that new definition, would have set a dangerous precedent for allowing mines to dump toxic tailings into Western waterways. We can all breathe a sigh of relief — for now.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Thanks to environmental news service Greenwire for the best quote of the day:

“It appears this administration uses retirement like some perverse witness-protection program.”

— Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), on the resignation of Greg Smith, the director of the Minerals Management Service’s royalty-in-kind program.

Rahall has introduced legislation to rein in a program that allows energy companies to pay royalties with oil and gas instead of cash (see our story on alleged underpayment of energy company royalties). He’s understandably irritated that key witnesses in many recently-launched investigations keep retiring before they can be called to the stand. Other recent high-profile resignees include Johnnie Burton, the director of the Minerals Management Service (who had been sharply criticized by Congress for impairing the government’s ability to collect energy royalties), and Julie MacDonald, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior (who faced investigation for interfering with government scientists; see our earlier blog item). Says Rahall:

“Perhaps what they are really doing is building a Wall of Shame at the Interior Department,” he added. “Whenever I call a hearing, the Interior officials involved are suddenly gone. We never even get a chance to have them appear before the committee, because they are retiring or resigning.”

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The headline, played dramatically on the cover of the current Business Week, packs a punch:

The Poverty Business: Inside U.S. companies’ audacious drive to extract more profits from the nation’s working poor

The story, by Brian Grow and Keith Epstein, begins:

Roxanne Tsosie decided in late 2005 to pull her life together. She was 28 years old and still lived in her mother’s two-room apartment in a poor neighborhood in southeast Albuquerque known as the War Zone. … She landed a job as a home-health-care aide for the elderly and infirm. It paid $15,000 a year and required that she have a car … A friend told her about a used-car place called J.D. Byrider Systems Inc.

The bright orange car lot stands out amid a jumble of payday lenders, pawn shops, and rent-to-own electronics stores … Signs in Spanish along the street promise “Financiamos a Todos” — Financing for All. On the same day she walked into Byrider, Tsosie drove off, jubilant, in a 1999 Saturn subcompact she bought entirely on credit. “I was starting to think I could actually get things I wanted,” she says.

The writers go on to show, Roxanne Tsosie became a victim of predatory business practices that are tolerated by most business leaders, politicians and journalists:

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Even if you merely dip in the news stream, you know the basics about melamine from China showing up in pet foods across this country. Because nothing could be more serious than threatening United States of America pets!

We’re going to see more of this — a lot more — as we understand better all the hidden costs from globalization and Wal-Martization. In this case, thanks to no oversight and belief in the God of Low Prices, Chinese businessmen slipped the plastic into wheat gluten and other ingredients, because it mimicked protein but cost less. Dogs and cats and who knows what else got sick and died. Probably some U.S. businessmen knew of the deception, or some suspected and looked the other way.

It turns out, the Chinese melamine — which is also an ingredient in many kitchen counters — got sold into fish food sprinkled into salmon hatcheries in the West. The stories on that are here and here and here and here.

The most recommended reading goes to the scene of the crime — a factory in China that carried out the poisonous deception. The LA Times has the story, opening with the dateline Xuzhou, China:

Before Mao Lijun’s business exported tainted wheat products that may have killed American pets, his factory sickened people and plants around here for years.

Farmers in this poor rural area about 400 miles northwest of Shanghai had complained to local government officials since 2004 that Mao’s factory was spewing noxious fumes that made their eyes tear up and the poplar trees nearby shed their leaves prematurely. Yet no one stopped Mao’s company from churning out bags of food powders and belching smoke — until one day last month when, in the middle of the night, bulldozers arrived and tore down the facility.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The park’s glaciers are disappearing, thanks to global warming … which means apparently pretty soon, the park’s current name will be deceptive, inaccurate.

So the National Environmental Trust is running a contest to rename the park. It’s tongue in cheek — but hey, how often do enviros admit a sense of humor? The contest is a good idea from that perspective alone.

The Hungry Horse News, a weekly Montana newspaper near the park, suggests The National Park Formerly Known as Glacier or Used-To-Have Glaciers National Park.

The winning entry gets a $250 gift certificate for gear at REI. To submit your entry, click here.

Hmmmm. How about Fossil Fuels National Park?

Or, to commemorate everyone’s overconsumption of natural resources:

Fat City National Park.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

For a clear-eyed look at the issues surrounding illegal immigration, check out Immigration in Context: A Resource Guide for Utah. A group of honors students at the University of Utah spent more than a year researching and writing this impartial 87-page guide. To add a human dimension, they lived with families in Michoacan, Mexico for 11 days (for more immigrant tales, see “The Immigrant’s Trail” and related stories).

The Salt Lake Tribune reports:

Eric Peterson, a 24-year-old U. senior and Utah native, said sometimes Americans are intimidated by immigrants and make decisions on immigration based on stereotypes, such as the notion that immigrants don’t want to adapt to their new communities.”Both sides suffer from not being educated enough about immigration,” he said. “We wanted to resolve some myths and provide some facts.”

The report covers the history of immigrant legislation, the economic impact of immigrants, and the influence of media portrayals on public opinion, then delves into practical resources. Chapter four lays out the “difficult legal process required for an immigrant, both documented and undocumented, to attain residency.” Later chapters examine racial and immigration rhetoric, provide scenarios for discussion, and list resources for immigrants and those who help them.

Regardless of where you come down in the debate over immigration, you’ll be better informed after reading this guide.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

In Rocky Mountain National Park, the wildflowers are disappearing. That’s because nitrogen, caught up in the haze over the park, is saturating the ground and fertilizing grasses and sedges, which then crowd out the flowers. The nitrogen comes from ammonia, much of which comes from agriculture, and nitrogen oxides, produced by combustion engines. The park currently has about 15-20 times the natural level, or twice the “critical load,” of nitrogen deposition. HCN covered the phenomenon last year.

Now, federal and state agencies have finally come up with a plan to tackle the problem, covered by the Denver Post here. The draft plan hopes to cut nitrogen deposition in half — or back down to the critical load — by 2032. In the beginning, only voluntary measures will be used; if that doesn’t work, the plan calls for actual regulation to kick in. It’s a tough row to hoe: The agencies executing the plan can’t just ask a few power plants to put scrubbers on their stacks. That’s because the main cause of the pollution is not power plants, but the thousands of cars driving around Colorado’s Front Range (including in the park itself) and hundreds of diesel engines powering natural gas compressors. Then there is the fertilizer spread out on fields and the ammonia rising up from feedlots. None of these sources are easy to pinpoint, let alone control or regulate.

But the plan includes tangible ways to tackle these problems. And it’s a truly remarkable effort, unprecedented in that it’s the first time so many agencies have come together to try to solve a problem like this in a particular park.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Goat has been pretty serious lately, what with posts about such dire topics as global warming, political corruption, suicide, and Richard Pombo’s rebirth as a lobbyist.

For some comic relief, check out the Pow Wow Comedy Jam, a group of Native American standups now touring the West and “taking back the land one joke at a time.” Upcoming shows are in South Dakota, California, Colorado and Nevada; the schedule is here.

Here’s one example of their edgy humor, from Navajo comedian Marc Yaffee:

“I’m a Mexican Irish Navajo, Mexi-jo. My ancestors exploited my own ancestors. I feel guilty and oppressed.”