Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Paonia residents and former HCN interns are keeping some pretty illustrious company these days. The latest issue of Time Magazine lists the planet’s “environmental heroes” — and along with folks like Mikhail Gorbachev, Robert Redford and Al Gore, it includes Chip Giller (fall ‘94 intern), the founder of green news site Grist.org, and HCN’s hometown scientist, Theo Colborn, who studies endocrine disruptors.

Founded in 1999 by Giller, a journalist who saw an opening for a digital newsletter on the environment, the Seattle-based Grist is a one-stop shop for news, reports and opinion — all delivered with a welcome satiric twist. The punny headlines can be clever (URSINE OF THE TIMES, for a piece on, yes, the polar bear) or groan-worthy (TO BEE OR NOT TO BEE, for a story on honeybee deaths), but the lightheartedness chips away at the sanctimony that too often coats environmentalism. “The strategy is to use irreverence and humor as a way to get through the jadedness that people have around these issues,” says Giller, who has grown Grist from a tiny e-mail newsletter to an influential and comprehensive site with 750,000 daily readers. “We’re a beacon in the smog.”

Way to go, Chip. You do us proud.

And we’re happy to see more recognition of Theo, who also appears in DiCaprio’s recent eco-pic The 11th Hour:

Colborn’s tireless research resulted in the groundbreaking 1996 book Our Stolen Future, and over the past decade she’s won over many of the skeptics. “Endocrine disruption has become a distinct discipline of its own,” says Colborn, who retired from the World Wildlife Fund in 2003 and returned to her Colorado home to found the Endocrine Disruption Exchange www.endocrinedisruption.com, a clearinghouse for research and information on the topic. “The evidence is now overwhelming that prenatal exposure can lead to irreversible disorders,” Colborn asserts. This would explain “the pandemic of endocrine-related diseases we’re seeing, especially in the northern hemisphere,” she says. “One out of three children born today will develop diabetes — and it’s one out of two if you’re a minority. Thyroid problems are everywhere.”

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Most people want to protect the environment — but they rank many other issues as more important.

That’s the dilemma environmentalists face, whenever they attempt politics.

It’s documented anew — in powerful terms — in voter surveys collected by American Environics (a cutting-edge consultant) for the Nathan Cummings Foundation (green-politics).

The surveys show, for example:

Even self-described environmentalists place gay marriage, abortion, and illegal immigration higher (in importance) than the environment.

For all voters, the environment ranked dead last.

Recent surveys have confirmed this finding. A late April 2007 CBS News/New York Times poll found that a majority of voters (51 percent) could still vote for a candidate who did not share their views on environmental issues.

Check out page 5 of the consultant’s report — and the rest of it is also worth reading — here. An Atlantic Monthly blogger covers it here, and the New York Times covers it as the second item here.

How can environmental issues break through?

They can, when they’re immediate, in voters’ backyards and drinking water and inhalations of air. Once in a while, environmentalists — or catastrophes — succeed in making the green issues immediate, at which point the voters respond.

That’s the essential challenge in getting action on our biggest environmental issue, global warming.

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.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

In the 1980s, a Presbyterian minister in Tucson, Rev. John Fife, and a few other religious leaders founded the Sanctuary Movement — smuggling refugees from Central America across the border and helping them start new lives in this country. Those refugees were often fleeing death squads, but U.S. authorities cracked down on the movement anyway, dragging Fife and others into court on criminal charges.

We haven’t heard much about the movement since then — if it’s been operating, it’s been quiet.

But now churches in five major cities have announced, they’re launching a New Sanctuary Movement. They have humanitarian goals, and it’s another rebellion against our nation’s heavy-handed, blundering, in-total-denial immigration policy. They say they have churches in more than 50 cities ready to participate. The AP story is worth a read.

Since the immigration crisis and the numbers of players have only grown, this Sanctuary go-round could be even more compelling than the last.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The older I get, the more I love politics. The sport has more body slams than TV wrestling and is far more interesting and somewhat more realistic.

Margot Roosevelt at the LA Times has today’s favorite enviro-politics story, beginning with:

A national consumer campaign to save wild salmon will launch in Washington today, as about 200 chefs from restaurants in 33 states call on Congress to pass laws to restore river habitats and tear down massive hydroelectric dams that have decimated salmon species along the Pacific coast.

The initiative, led by celebrity chef Alice Waters of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse …

OK, great, I can visualize Celebrity Chef Alice — perhaps we pronounce her Aleece? — and her fellow chef-soldiers prancing with spatulas raised onto the battlefield where salmon advocates have been trying to destroy the concrete that is hardest on salmon runs (four dams where Idaho’s Snake River flows to the Columbia River and ultimately to the ocean, and four dams on California’s Klamath River).

“Wild salmon is one of the unique, authentic heritage foods of the Pacific Northwest,” the chefs wrote in a letter to Congress to be released today. “It represents perhaps our country’s last great wild meal.”

Hmmm. “Our … last great wild meal.” I guess bald-eagle burgers and barbecued grizzly-bear ribs never caught on.

The salmon chefs point out that farmed salmon — what you mostly find in restaurants and grocery stores — are contaminated with residues from their industrial upbringing and taste lousy compared to wild salmon. (For more info on the many-faceted yukkiness of farmed salmon, see the High Country News in-depth story by Rebecca Clarren, and her followup columns here and here.) The chefs want more salmon consumers to realize the issue.

The national campaign has adopted as its slogan, “Vote with your fork.”

This chefs-move by salmon advocates does look like good politics, an attempt to get more people nationwide focused on the dams that block salmon runs. And who thinks the sport of politics is always unsavory?

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

If you’re interested in seeing some of the West’s eeriest, beautiful high desert — including aptly named Killpecker Dunes, Boar’s Tusks, Adobe Town and White Mountain Petroglyphs — with an informed guide, for free …

Click here for the Casper Star-Tribune story … and here for the announcement from the guides, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance.

The seven trips go through areas that are targeted by gas drillers, so the enviro guides would like more people to understand what’s at risk. Sounds like a good combination of enjoyment, significance and anxiety.

And it’s an interesting strategy that more enviro groups might like to try.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance plays hardball, trying to protect Utah’s haunted, spectacular redrock. SUWA, as the group abbreviates itself, swings lawsuits against many proposed wildland developments, while perpetually and not-so-successfully nagging Congress for wilderness designation for more than 9 million acres.

Now SUWA has reached out to a natural-gas company, to make a small compromise deal. “We hope this is breaking new ground, to show we can negotiate with companies,” SUWA lawyer Steve Bloch tells me.

The deal covers a portion of a 13,000-acre parcel, which includes hoodoo rocks along the White River, where people like to canoe and hike.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

This news needs no help from me. The Washington Post’s Blaine Harden has it nailed, reporting:

Modern hunters rarely become more famous than Jim Zumbo. A mustachioed, barrel-chested outdoors entrepreneur who lives in a log cabin near Yellowstone National Park, he has spent much of his life writing for prominent outdoors magazines, delivering lectures across the country and starring in cable TV shows about big-game hunting in the West.

Zumbo’s fame, however, has turned to black-bordered infamy within America’s gun culture — and his multimedia success has come undone. It all happened in the past week, after he publicly criticized the use of military-style assault rifles by hunters, especially those gunning for prairie dogs.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

I met Les Skramstad a couple of years ago, while I researched national political angles in the apparent backwaters of Libby, Montana. A multinational corporation — W.R. Grace — and earlier companies had poisoned hundreds of local people with deadly fibers from an asbestos mine. I wrote my take on it: The environmental movement, as a whole, seemed less interested in human victims than in ecosystems.

Les Skramstad finally surrendered to the poison and died last week. The Missoulian has a fine tribute to the man, and a link to a podcast in which you can see and hear Les himself, and another link, to a podcast of Montana Sen. Max Baucus orating his remembranches of Les in the U.S. Senate (when you take the link to the senator, you get a little graphic in the upper-left of your screen, then click on the play button there). Both podcasts are worth hearing.

If you’d like more background the Libby debacles, try my High Country News cover story on the political angles, and an earlier HCN cover by Mark Matthews, on the corporate negligence.

When someone you know dies as a direct result, the issues come home.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

Dolores LaChapelle lived a life in and of the mountains of the West. She died Jan. 21 in Durango after suffering from a massive stroke.

LaChapelle is known as one of the early adherents of Deep Ecology, a philosophy described by Fritjof Capra like this:

Deep ecology does not separate humans - or anything else - from the natural environment. It does see the world not as a collection of isolated objects but as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. Deep ecology recognizes the intrinsic value of all living beings and views human beings as just one particular strand in the web of life.

LaChapelle was one of the first female sages of the movement, rubbing elbows with the likes of Gary Snyder, Michael Soule, George Sessions and Arne Naess. She was also a pioneer of skiing deep powder — she made the first ski ascent of Canada’s Mt. Columbia and the first known ski run down Alta’s Baldy Chute in Utah. She wrote books on both deep ecology and deep powder, including: Sacred Land Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep; Deep Powder Snow; and D.H. Lawrence: Future Primitive. An essay of hers can be found here.

But I’ll remember her not for her many credentials or guru-like status she had gained amongst skiers and ecologists, but as a woman filled with delightful contradictions: She was deeply emotional about beautiful places, but could be harshly rational. She was a nature freak that loved sweets. She spent the last three decades of her life in Silverton, Colo., at 9,318 feet, surrounded by mountains. For a lot of that time, Silverton was a true, dyed-in-the wool mining town. And miners and environmentalists don’t always see eye to eye.

But that never seemed to bother Dolores. In fact, once mining died, and tourism took its place in Silverton, Dolores looked back on the old days with nostalgia. She saw that mining, as destructive as it can be to water quality, forged a direct link between the community and the land. And from that, she once told me, comes a unique, mountain culture. She did what she could to nurture that culture. She was the Silverton Brass Band’s biggest fan, her long silver braid and sincere grin distinguishing her from the rest of the crowd.

Dolores mentored and influenced and touched many people from all different realms. The mountains and their communities will miss her.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

OK, my headline exaggerates the count, but not by much. Blaine Harden at the Washington Post reports a breakthrough in enviro-worker politics:

In a first-of-its-kind alliance that could fundamentally reshape the environmental movement, 20 labor unions with nearly 5 million members are joining forces with a Republican-leaning umbrella group of conservationists — the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership — to put pressure on Congress and the Bush administration.

The Union Sportsman’s Alliance, to be rolled out in Washington on Tuesday after nearly three years of quiet negotiations, is to be a dues-based organization ($25 a year). Its primary goal is to increase federal funding for protecting wildlife habitat while guaranteeing access for hunters and anglers.

… (The alliance) is making bedfellows of blue-collar workers and old-guard conservationists, who historically have shared little but suspicion and disdain.

Some Westerners are leaders of this new direction. One I’m thinking of is Kim Floyd, who heads the Wyoming AFL-CIO. A few months ago, Floyd positioned his Wyoming unions to take a public stand against natural gas drilling in the Wyoming Range forests. More groundwork has been laid by Western foundations, including Bullitt in Seattle and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in California, as they helped launch the Apollo Alliance several years ago, trying to pull together workers and enviros.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Writers struggle to describe the natural-gas drilling spree on federal sagebrush and forest in western Wyoming. Video, and aerial photographs, make it vivid.

Now SkyTruth, a high-tech environmental group, debuts the Wyoming drilling on the world’s leading do-it-yourself video website, YouTube.

SkyTruth’s 10-minute video is worth seeing, not only for its illumination of the drilling impacts, but also for its savviness in using the new media tools.

Click into the Wyoming video full-screen on SkyTruth’s site, and then see how it looks on YouTube. And consider checking a previous GOAT post that has a link to SkyTruth’s time-lapse aerial photos of coalbed-methane drilling in another industry sweet spot in Wyoming.

To meet SkyTruth’s “eco-geographer,” John Amos, you can see a photo and profile of him on the Grist site.

These enviros are learning how to reach a wider public without having to go through junk mail and inevitable filters of conventional news reporting.