Ray Ring

Senior Editor

This just in: Barack Obama has won the Democratic presidential nomination, says the Associated Press.

Rebecca Clarren

Let’s face it: the Western landscape, home to the cowboy and tumbleweed, is the stuff of legend. Like most Westerners today, I live in a city where I buy my food at the grocery store and meet my cowboys in the pages of Cormac McCarthy novels. The era of the self-reliant cowboy is dead.

Except for one place.

The open ocean remains the last true frontier. Fishermen still harvest something wild. There are few cops at sea. Like cowboys, fishermen tend to be independent, tenacious and scrappy.

However, like any good Spaghetti Western, the plot has gotten a little thick lately. As we all know, ocean ecosystems are in trouble. Worldwide it’s estimated that 75 percent of the world’s major fisheries are fully exploited, or worse, according to a National Marine Fisheries Service report on over fishing. A 2004 HCN story Mending the Nets detailed the more depressing state of the Pacific Coastline.

Overfishing doesn’t account for all of this – water pollution and seaside development take some of the credit. But the news about fishery collapse, about the potential for a future of nothing but farmed fish, hooks your attention.

(Read on …)

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

Tacked onto U.S. Senate Bill 1200, which authorizes $35 billion for Indian health care programs over the next 10 years, and listed under “miscellaneous,” is an “Apology to Native Peoples of United States.”

The resolution was passed (83-10) last week with no fanfare, no hoopla and no drum roll, and among tribes, “it received about as much celebration as every other promise made to Indian people,” according to RedClout, an Indian blog.

Included in the apology is an admission that Native peoples suffered and died because of forced removal from their lands, during massacres and on the reservations; and a recognition that “there have been years of official depredations, ill-conceived policies, and the breaking of covenants by the Federal Government.”

Oh, and there’s a disclaimer at the end, stating that nothing in the resolution “authorizes or supports any claim against the United States; or serves as a settlement of any claim against the United States.”

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

It can be a gut-sinking experience as an editor: You send the magazine, including a fresh and maybe even groundbreaking cover story, to the printer, excited that HCN will be the first to do the story in this way. During the lag time as the paper is printed and put in the mail, the New York Times does your story. Scooped!

That happened today. A few hours before the edition of HCN that includes a pretty cool thought piece by M. Martin Smith reached our office, the Times Web site had a story on a similar topic. They call their story the “Preservation Predicament” and we call ours “Unnatural Preservation.” Both are about how preservation may change in the face of climate change. Read the Times piece today; and get a more in-depth look this Friday, when Smith’s piece is posted at HCN.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

Today’s number one headline, spread across the Grand Junction Sentinel’s front page, is quite dramatic. It reads, “Energy Industry: Maybe we’ll leave.” The article came out of a meeting between Colorado Oil and Gas Association President Meg Collins and the Sentinel’s editorial board in which Collins told the Sentinel that new rules could force the industry right out of the state. Hmmm… let’s see here. The industry is drilling at record pace, making record profits, and has stated just recently that it plans to keep going full bore next year. And now they’re saying a few new regulations might force them to pull up stakes and head out?

Give me a break. Enough said.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Here’s an exciting accouncement from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE):

DOE … is offering $30 million over the next three years for companies to design and build plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) and then test them in fleets located in geographically diverse areas.

The PHEVs must be able to travel at least 10 miles using only their electric drives, although DOE would prefer vehicles that come closer to achieving the goal of a 40-mile electric range.

The vehicles must be comparable to current production vehicles in terms of emissions, safety, comfort, and performance, and the projects must either involve a high-volume vehicle manufacturer or a company with the capability of producing vehicles in high volumes.

The selected projects are intended to address many of the critical barriers to achieving DOE’s goal of making PHEVs cost-competitive by 2014 and ready for commercialization by 2016.

PHEVs with a 40-mile electric range would satisfy about 70% of all the average daily travel in the United States.

(Read on …)

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

By now, everyone knows that a good portion of southern California is aflame. 500,000 evacuated thus far, more than 1,000 homes burned, two killed. And the flames aren’t slowing down.

Some of the best coverage:

LA Times: They’re in the thick of it, and have spectacular images on the website, plus good Google maps showing the fires with regular updates.

Get the southern view with the San Diego Union Tribune.

Very cool satellite view from NASA — it shows how the Santa Ana winds, counterintuitively, are pushing the fires towards the ocean.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

Culturally sensitive liberals such as myself and, I imagine, many of you readers out there, mostly think that places like Chaco Culture National Historic Park are good things. After all, it preserves the remains of the culture that lived there hundreds of years ago, and gives us a glimpse of how earlier civilizations understood, adapted to and succumbed to the land. It also keeps the gas wells and coal mines at bay. So it was a bit surprising to me to read this article from the Navajo Times. It’s about the park’s centennial, and about how Navajos who live nearby aren’t celebrating:

This year marks a century that Chaco Culture National Historic Park has been in existence, preserving thousand-year-old ruins and interpreting them for visitors from all over the world.

And, some would argue, oppressing local Navajos.

About 150 Navajos gathered Saturday just outside the park boundary to share stories of their experiences with the park. They told of forcible evictions from their homes, not being allowed to collect medicinal herbs in the park, and being denied such amenities as paved roads in the name of historical preservation.

Wow. Who would’ve thought?
Aside from providing a different perspective on national parks, the Chaco issue also gives a little view into the complexities of archaeology. Its mission is to shed light on a culture, but to do so, archaeolgists must literally dig into that culture’s past, which can ruffle some feathers, to put it mildly. (In recent years, southwestern archaeology has put more emphasis on cultural sensitivity as well as considering Native American viewpoints).

As the comments on the Navajo Times article demonstrate, things are even more complicated at Chaco. It’s in the heart of Navajo country. But the people who originally settled Chaco weren’t Navajo, they were ancestors of today’s Puebloans, who now live in the Pueblos along the Rio Grande, in Zuni and at Hopi. And the Navajo and Puebloans haven’t always had friendly relations.

The point, I guess, is that things in the West are often a lot more complicated, and interesting, than they may seem at first glance. Check out the Navajo Times article, and while you’re at it, browse through their other news, as well: They’ve got an interesting story about Rez Dogs (and a follow-up here)and another one about R.G. Hunt’s Mutton shop in Waterflow, N.M., home of a Navajo delicacy known as ‘ach’ii’.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

It’s now official: Phoenix, Arizona, is stinkin’ hot. On Aug. 29, the mercury topped 110 degrees for the 29th day this summer, setting a new record (the reader comments on this story are especially fun). Blame global warming, if you want, but the culprit could be much more localized than that. Try pavement and concrete. As HCN pointed out here, urban environments create their own ecology, and climate. The Christian Science Monitor reiterated that fact today, with a look at “heat islands” in Phoenix. It’s been over 100 degrees in the city for 29 of the last 32 days; to get the raw data on climate in Phoenix and elsewhere, check out this groovy section of the National Weather Service site.

In totally unrelated news … Aspen, worried about the diminishing staying power of its snow, gives a lot of lip to climate change. Problem is, they have thousands of cars carrying commuters coming into town every day; hundreds of private jets landing at the airport and spewing out greenhouse gases; and dozens of ginormous, mostly unoccupied homes. And, it turns out, those empty houses — often in excess of 10,000 square feet — contribute more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than lived-in houses, according to a Denver Post article. It’s all those pesky driveway heaters, roof snow melters, towel heaters, steam showers, humidor fans, wine cellar coolers, and other necessities that are gobbling up the megawatts and contributing to climate change.

Solution? How about opening up the Aspen wine cellars to Phoenicians who are struggling with the heat? It’s cool down there, and chances are, no one’s around to be put out by the guests.

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.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

When Gale Norton resigned as Interior Secretary this spring, she said she and her husband wanted to get back to “the mountains we love in the West.” She’s back, and guess what: She’ll be helping an energy giant suck fossil fuels out of those very mountains, just like she did in Interior. She’ll be working for Royal Dutch Shell, says the Denver Post, helping them with the legal aspects of oil shale development. No word on what Gale’s compensation package will look like, but it’s likely to be more than she would have gotten working for the Sierra Club: Royal Dutch Shell had $307 billion in revenues last year.

It’s always nice to see a political appointee, who stepped down from her post while her department was under a shadow of scandal, be handsomely rewarded for her efforts in office. Isn’t it?

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

Are you stuck in the Denver airport, waiting for the blizzard to pass and need something fun to do online besides surfing freesex.com? Then check out some energy porn here at the Energy Information Administration’s state energy profiles. You can learn all kinds of groovy stuff about your state, like where major transmission lines, coal power plants and coal reserves are located.

I learned, for example, that New Mexico’s San Juan Basin is the nation’s largest field of natural gas reserves, that the state contributes 9 percent of the nation’s total natural gas and that New Mexico is the fourth poorest state in the nation with a per-capita personal income of $27,644.

With knowledge like this, I can’t help but be the hit of holiday cocktail parties!

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management wrongly fired an employee who blew the whistle on cleanup problems at Nevada’s Yerington mine – so says a U.S. Department of Labor judge.

Former BLM project manager, Earl Dixon, was in charge of cleanup at the abandoned Anaconda Copper Company mine in western Nevada. But he was fired in October 2004 after only one year on the job, he says, for informing local residents that the mine was releasing radioactive contamination into the community. During his tenure at the agency, he also repeatedly complained that the BLM, state of Nevada and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency were protecting neither the environment nor public health.

Dixon was known for his straightforward — some might even say blunt or tactless — way of communication, telling this HCN reporter two years ago that his title was ‘environmental protection specialist’ — not ‘environmental suck-up.’ “

At the end of August, Judge Richard K. Malamphy ordered the BLM to pay Dixon back wages, as well as $10,000 in damages – and to give him a favorable, or at least neutral, job reference.