Ernie Atencio

Country music in a rural honky-tonk inspires writer Rebecca Solnit to ponder the class and cultural underpinnings of the “crisis of environmentalism,” which has caused so much green soul-searching in recent years. “One Nation Under Elvis: An environmentalism for us all,” in the latest issue of Orion Magazine, explores the divide between urban and rural, left and right, environmentalist and rancher in musical tastes.

Solnit recalls enviros she’s known who seemed more offended by rural culture and lifestyle (and music) than by any actual damage that culture was doing to the land, or liberals who scorn backward rednecks for their religion and politics. There’s the other side, of course, like people wearing t-shirts that say WRANGLERS (Western Ranchers Against No-Good Leftist Environmental Radical Shitheads).

It begins to sound cliché, but of course there’s common ground. Not always, but often, these are artificial divides that we have missed important opportunities to bridge. It’s a loss to us all. She writes, “The result of all this has been a marginalized environmental movement . . . that has alienated the people who often live closest to ‘the environment.’” Beyond the strategic expedience of bridging the gaps, she also says that something “will go out of us if the resourcefulness, rootedness, and richness of rural culture disappears.”

“Yes!,” I said aloud as I was reading this. That’s exactly the point HCN and others often miss about ideas like the “radical center” and organizations like The Quivira Coalition (HCN 9/5/05) (full disclosure: I am the current chair of the radical centrist Quivira Coalition). Then she mentions Quivira as one example of cultivating that common ground.

But we need more. If we want this movement to succeed and the land to thrive we need to be making more friends than enemies. As Solnit puts it, creating “a music that everyone can dance to.”

By the way, always great music at Quivira Coalition conferences.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor for President Bill Clinton, has become a provocateur.

Reich is now a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, writing opinion columns calling for economic reforms.

Reich’s latest, in The New York Times, lays out the causes of our looming recession. He says the good times during the 1990s and early 2000s were really hollow, and now …

The underlying problem has been building for decades. America’s median hourly wage is barely higher than it was 35 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago. Most of what’s been earned in America since then has gone to the richest 5 percent.

Yet the rich devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than the rest of us because, after all, they’re rich. They already have most of what they want. Instead of buying, and thus stimulating the American economy, the rich are more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest return.

The problem has been masked for years as middle- and lower-income Americans found ways to live beyond their paychecks. But now they have run out of ways.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

This is really funny and worth a few minutes of online listening.

First the setup:

Gazillionaire Duane Hagadone calls most of the shots in the resort town of Couer d’Alene, Idaho, and the surrounding territory. He owns the skyscraper resort hotel and marina that dominate downtown, and the daily newspaper and other nearby newspapers, mansions, luxury cars etc etc etc. Thus, he pulls a lot of political strings.

Now Hagadone is building a new mansion on the shore of Lake Couer d’Alene. And he wants it equipped with a huge dock, suitable for at least two cruise ships, and a floating helipad, so he can fly in and out easily.

In a rare display of backbone, Idaho’s state lands department, which has authority over the lake’s surface, told Hagadone that he can’t have the helipad and huge dock because they would take up too much of the public’s water. The standard news story is here.

In the Very Unstandard Department, Doug Clark, a columnist for Spokane’s Spokesman-Review, has written a couple of funny columns about it, here and here, and a song, “The Duane B. Hagadone Blues.”

As Clark writes:

There’s only one thing for a fellow to do when faced with the bitter disappointment of not getting a helipad.

Sing the blues.

That’s right. Singing the blues has long been a way for the downtrodden and oppressed super-rich to shake off their petty inconveniences.

(By the way, if you want more background, High Country News had a cover story on Hagadone back in 1996, here.)

Anyway if you do nothing else that’s amusing today, at least do this: To listen to the columnist singing the rich-guy’s blues, click here.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

I suspect this kind of problem occurs pretty broadly, in many of the efforts to improve energy use in homes and businesses.

The problem: Mostly it’s wealthy people who conduct such efforts. They can afford to invest in expensive energy hardware like solar panels and better insulation and efficient appliances and windows.

It’s ironic too, because often as a result, their monthly electricity and gas bills are reduced.

Meanwhile, people who can’t afford to invest in solar panels and better appliances and windows pay higher monthly utility bills.

Here’s a story in the LA Daily News, about a local government program where three-fourths of the benefits go to wealthy residents. It indicates the pattern.

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

Even Nobel Laureate climate researcher Steve Running, who adapted Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s “Five Stages of Grief” to the climate crisis, was amazed. “Disbelief was the primary reaction,” he told the New York Times, alluding to the cancellation of his talk at Choteau, Montana’s high school.

Running, a professor of ecology at the University of Montana, was to speak about global climate change — but parents complained to the school board that Running’s perspective was one-sided, school board members put pressure on the Superintendent, and the talk was cancelled. As the Times puts it:

…as in much of the West, Choteau is home to a deep-seated mistrust of environmentalism, which many here see as a threat to their agricultural way of life. The town has also been largely on the pro-development side of a long and sometimes bitter battle over whether to exploit oil and gas reserves along the wild Rocky Mountain front or to preserve it primarily for wilderness and wildlife.

Finally, there is the raw politics of the matter. Dr. Running specializes in an issue associated with Mr. Gore, not a popular figure among many in this predominantly Republican town.

The first two stages are denial and anger, Running noted to the Times.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

David Nolt, writing for NewWest.Net, dissects a Montana development that illustrates a disturbing regionwide trend. The development is called the Ameya Preserve, and this blog has already found it irritating, here and here.

A few excerpts from Nolt:

There are many unique aspects to the proposed Ameya Preserve … but in one key respect the project is almost commonplace in the New West: it’s aimed at the ultra-rich, those who can afford to spend many millions of dollars on a second or third or fourth home.

… What the developers hope will set Ameya apart are its eco-friendliness and its emphasis on cultural amenities. Call it the thinking-man’s second-home community, or, if you’re more cynical, the liberal elite’s luxury retreat.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Lisa Girion at the LA Times continues to pry up the lid on the stinking mess of health insurance. The latest:

One of the state’s largest health insurers set goals and paid bonuses based in part on how many individual policyholders were dropped and how much money was saved.

… Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies …

The revelation … comes amid a storm of controversy over the industry-wide but long-hidden practice of rescinding coverage after expensive medical treatments have been authorized.

… These “rescissions” … typically leave sick patients with crushing medical bills and no way to obtain needed treatment.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The New Yorker magazine broke the story with a very funny 700 words, and then The New York Times added a few more grins in its longer piece. Basically, a bunch of congressmen who are either indicted or enmeshed in scandals — including Idaho Sen. Larry Craig and Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens — happen to live on yachts in a marina neighborhood in D.C.

As the New Yorker’s opening line says:

There’s something about politicians and boats.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Last week, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated funding for a program that “was keeping nearly 5,000 people off the streets … with a smart mix of housing and all the necessary support services.”

So reports LA Times columnist Steve Lopez, who goes on to make a provocative connection:

If the governor was looking for savings, he could have taken his scalpel to an estimated $45-million tax break for purchases of yachts, planes and RVs.

To find out just how the break works, I called a yacht company in Marina del Rey. A sales rep told me I would have to buy the boat outside of California, but there’s a loophole … technically, he said, if I took ownership of the boat three miles off shore, I’d be out of the state.

In other words, if I wanted to buy a $100,000 sailboat, I would sign the contract at the shop in Marina del Rey and then navigate around the tax bite with a little vacation.

“We would effect delivery out of state, three miles out, with a hired skipper who would take you out,” the salesman explained. If I then sailed down to Mexico for 90 days, I’d avoid the sales tax of $8,250.

That’s the cost of helping a mentally ill person for a year, through the program that’s being eliminated, Lopez says.

His column, here, carries the headline:

Lives may founder, but yacht sales will flourish

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Hall and Hall is a leading seller of Western ranches. The company, in business for 61 years, has headquarters in Billings, Montana, and more salesmen in branch offices in Bozeman and Missoula; Jackson, Wyoming; Sun Valley, Idaho; Denver and two more Colorado cities; Nebraska and Texas.

Sample listing, among dozens of ranches Hall and Hall has for sale at the moment:

Encompassing 255,371± deeded acres and a 500±-acre lake … Flanked by two large rivers flowing 80 miles along two of the ranch borders … 70 percent of this land lies within … the largest wetland in the world. Currently producing 8,000 to 10,000 calves a year and farming soybeans on 12,000± tilled acres with far greater potential. Very high quality ranch improvements and residences with a main airstrip and auxiliary runways for the cow camps. $50,000,000 …

If you’re interested and want to see the property, keep in mind, it’s called Fazenda Santo Antonio do Paraiso, and it’s in Brazil.

Hall and Hall, you see, has responded to the current mess in the U.S. ranch market — prices soaring, sellers with unrealistic expectations, buyers holding back, causing a slowdown in sales — by listing ranches in South America, where apparently bargains can still be had.

Another sample listing, from Hall and Hall’s summer 2007 newsletter:

Bahia Mala (a ranch in Chile): Located along 2.5± miles of Pacific beachfront, this ecologically-rich gemstone property includes a comfortable lodge, 4 cabins with views of the ocean and up a river valley to a snowcapped volcano. These 1,730± acres augmented by 17,000+ acres of 30-year concession are truly a paradise 12 miles south of Raul Marin Balmaceda. $3,500,000 …

Or maybe you would prefer to buy:

Estancia Pilpilcura (in Argentina): Only 45 miles NE of Bariloche, this classic Patagonia ranch has 7,375± acres with 3+ miles of the Pichileufu River, a medium–sized stream known for excellent trout fishing. Residential compound overlooks the river with a superbly constructed 8,000± SF owner’s residence plus staff accommodations. The property is a haven for wildlife — eagle, red deer and valley quail. Pilpilcura Creek crosses the ranch for 2+ miles. Easy access to the airport. This ranch is a recreational treasure complemented by a working cattle operation. $3,300,000 …

Hall and Hall’s website is here, and the summer 2007 newsletter is here.

My take? Don’t know much about it really — might be good for South American locals and landscapes, or not. But it’s definitely one more sign that we’re in a new Gilded Age, in which those with tons of money to burn, and their business associates, bless their hearts, have their way regardless.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

And guess it was inevitable … I wonder, are they designer firefighters, arriving in custom, swooshy fire trucks and cute outfits? One more sign of the times, here.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

For some grins or teeth-gnashing, thanks to writer Kimi Yoshino, check out this LA Times story about another ominous trend — the “luxury” camping experience for those who “only sorta kinda want to rough it.”

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Twenty-eight backshop jobs, disappearing at the San Jose Mercury News, and reappearing on the far side of the planet — filled by cheaper, nonunion workers …

The story, very terse, is here.

For previous posts about the apparent growing wave of NewsBiz outsourcing, and other NewsBizBuzz, begin here and scroll down.

Globalization, ho.