Two California vintners want to cut down 2,000 acres of redwood trees and replace them with vineyards in the largest woodland-to-vineyard conversion in California’s history. Do I need to explain what conservationists think of this?

Under the proposal, reported by the Los Angeles Times and later tipped by High Country News, two Sonoma County pinot noir growers, Premier Pacific Vineyards and Artesa Vineyards, want to expand their growing operations by slicing into forestlands of Douglas firs and the state’s iconic redwoods. Premier also wants to develop 60 high-end estates—for members of the 1 percent, I assume—on adjacent lands that it already owns on the ironically named Preservation Ranch.

“In exchange,” reports the Times, “the developers promise to restore streams, add more than 200 acres to a county park, plant 1 million redwoods and Douglas firs and make other environmental improvements.”

But environmental advocates aren’t appeased by these offers:

“I don’t see a need for more deforestation to have a great wine economy, because there is a lot of cleared land already available,” said Adina Merelender, a UC Berkeley conservation biologist.

“The big issue for us,” added Jay Holcomb of the Sierra Club, “is that redwoods-to-vineyards conversions are worse than clear-cutting because they are permanent.”

A Sierra Club website that has detailed information about Preservation Ranch suggests that its moniker was a greenwash from the get-go:

The project was named “Preservation Ranch” by its proponents to disguise its essential nature as a speculative for-profit venture which targets the steep, undeveloped redwood and oak woodlands of coastal Sonoma County.

A county official acknowledges that the proposal is “controversial from beginning to end,” so approval is by no means certain. One thing is sure, though: If the deal goes down, the resulting pinot noir, regardless of its flavor profile, will most certainly have a bitter, acrid finish.

UPDATE 11/9/2012: Premier Pacific Vineyards has been terminated as the manager of the vineyard investment portfolio held by the California Public Employees Retirement System, or CalPERS, according to North Bay Business Journal and Wine Industry Insight. It’s unclear how this affects the company’s proposed vineyard expansion in Sonoma County.

Sources: Los Angeles Times, High Country News, Sierra Club Redwood Chapter 

Image by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos , licensed under Creative Commons .  

If you saw a boulder impossibly perched on the side of a mountain, with little holding it back from a free fall down the side, what would you do?

That’s the scene in a short essay by Michael Branch at High Country News. Branch and three hiking buddies playing hooky come across an “immense rock” just barely holding onto the mountain. After scanning the mountain side and canyon with his “binocs,” Branch puts fears about hitting a human to rest, and the group is left to wax philosophical about the situation, invoking Sisyphus and a divine plan to help them in their decision: To roll or not to roll.  

When the three American hikers can’t decide they turn to the Frenchman among them—“a scholar of environmental literature [named] ‘Francois’”—who replies simply, “Whenever I am uncertain…I abide by this principle: WWEAD.” Don’t worry, it meant nothing to the other three hikers, either, who all looked to Francois for an explanation. “’What would Edward Abbey do?’ he explained coolly.”

(I’ll give you a spoiler alert here, because I’m going to give away the ending by telling you the hikers’ decision If you want to read the essay first, go here.)

And with that cool proclamation, the four men move with confidence toward the rock, intent on pushing it down the mountainside, confident they’re living in the spirit of Cactus Ed. As Branch watches the scene, he feels a great weight lifted, or thrown downhill, rather.

Each impact elicited a collective gasp or cheer, and I can't begin to explain how cathartic it was to watch that boulder fly. I felt as if I had been rolling a boulder up a mountain my whole adult life, and had only now decided to simply step aside and just let it go. I was Sisyphus unbound, and I had a Frenchman's love of Cactus Ed to thank for it.

Now, I don’t think I would have chosen to push the rock, but the scene does inspire a sense of freedom—the kind that (maybe) can only come with a certain amount of irresponsibility. What interested me more than the decision they made, though, was the course they took to get there—invoking Abbey as their reckless guide.

I can’t say that I’m an Abbey expert by any stretch of the imagination, but reading his letters over the years in Postcards from Ed (Milkweed Editions), I can’t say that I’d be so confident in the fact that ol’ Ed would have chosen to push the rock. And I’m not alone in being a little less sure than the hikers. In the comments section (a portion of websites I often try to avoid), a debate around the question of what Abbey would actually do was in full swing when the post went up.

Christine Petersen wrote, “Do you really think Abbey would be proud of you for choosing that particular act to commit—and write about—in his name? Sorry, but this piece just sounds self-indulgent.” While Shelley McEuen responded, “I think even Abbey had a sense of humor. Wish I could have seen the boulder cascade down the hill.”

Other comments get to the contrary figure that was Ed Abbey. One man writes:

I once asked Ed Abbey after a lecture, "Is the real Ed Abbey the man who preaches environmentalism or the one who writes about how he rolled tires off the cliffs into the Grand Canyon and carved the initials of himself and his girlfriend into aspen in the La Sal National Forest?" Ed said not a word, just smiled impishly and enigmatically, and moved on to the next question.

And another scolds his fellow commentors:

[E]vidently people create their own version of Abbey to suit their own sets of values. Abbey defended throwing beer cans out of car window, and definitely was into rolling rocks to hear the sound. He writes about the delights of pushing giant tractors full of oil and diesel fuel off canyon rims to see them tumble to the bottom. Abbey purist or leave--: his first day on the job in Arches he killed a rabbit with a rock just to see if he could. So if you're going to speculate on what Abbey would have said, be sure you've actually paid attention to what he did say.

So, what would you have done? Left the boulder for future hikers to marvel at or give the darn thing a shove and watch with glee for a handful of seconds? And, do you think you’d be making the same decision as the impossible-to-categorize Cactus Ed?

Source: High Country News 

Image by Krikit<3, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Our library contains 1,300 publications—a feast of magazines, journals, alt-weeklies, newsletters, and zines—and every year, we honor the stars in our Utne Independent Press Awards. We’ll announce this year’s winners on Wednesday, May 18, at the MPA’s Independent Magazine Group conference in San Francisco. From now until then, we’ll post the nominees in all of the categories on our blogs. Below you’ll find the nominees for general excellence, with a short introduction to each. These magazines are literally what Utne Reader is made of. Though we celebrate the alternative press every day and with each issue, once a year we praise those who have done an exceptional job. 

Since 1932, The American Scholar has provided a forum for the spirited exploration of ideas. The “venerable but lively” quarterly, published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society, enlightens and provokes readers with thoughtful prose on public affairs, history, science, and culture. 

***

An arts magazine with a decidedly literary bent, The Believer covers books, film, music, and pop culture with barely contained intellectual glee. Part of the McSweeney’s empire founded by author Dave Eggers, it constantly finds new ways to showcase the creative impulse. 

***

The Western United States is a key battleground for many environmental issues, and High Country News is your experienced and knowledgeable correspondent from the front lines. Its watchdog coverage of mining, ranching, logging—and simply Western life—is unmatched.

***

Since 1976, the folks behind the investigative nonprofit Mother Jones have relentlessly and reliably delivered “smart, fearless journalism,” transcending the day’s political spin to unearth stories on everything from global climate change to torturous foreign policy decisions on both sides of the aisle. 

***

The most literary of environmental magazines, Orion takes a big view, touching on spirituality, philosophy, and the arts in its gorgeous pages. Thoughtfully provocative columnists keep it from drifting off into the rapidly warming atmosphere. 

***

The Sun is the best of so many things—philosophy, spirituality, photography—but what always stands out is the writing. In essays, fiction, memoirs, and poetry, this ad-free, independent magazine lets all of its content shine brightly, whether it’s a story about a recovering alcoholic finding redemption in a new family or a poem about the sweet things we leave behind when we die.  

***

A labor of love, the Brooklyn-based Wax Poeticsis a geeked-out fanzine dedicated to unearthing the grittiest funk, coolest jazz, and smoothest soul ever pressed into a groove. The writers proselytize, the editors keep the mix fresh, and the archival album art and concert footage is beatific. 

***

YES! Magazine, a magazine of “powerful ideas, practical actions” published by the nonprofit Positive Futures Network, gives us information and tools to build a more sustainable, just tomorrow. Readers cannot help but be inspired by the quarterly’s celebration of human potential and community well being.

See our complete list of 2011 nominees. 

Image by .reid., licensed under Creative Commons.

Our library contains 1,300 publications—a feast of magazines, journals, alt-weeklies, newsletters, and zines—and every year, we honor the stars in our Utne Independent Press Awards. We’ll announce this year’s winners on Wednesday, May 18, at the MPA’s Independent Magazine Group conference in San Francisco. From now until then, we’ll post the nominees in all of the categories on our blogs. Below you’ll find the nominees for the best environmental coverage, with a short introduction to each. These magazines are literally what Utne Reader is made of. Though we celebrate the alternative press every day and with each issue, once a year we praise those who have done an exceptional job. 

Audubon rightly believes that if you care about birds, you care about the environment. The Audubon Society’s magazine is a must-read for nature watchers of all kinds, digging into its subjects with a keen eye for both natural beauty and the forces that threaten it. 

***

Published by the Society for Conservation Biology, Conservation transcends its modest roots with intellectual depth. From exploring “the dark side of green consumerism” to asking, “Can we feed ourselves without destroying the planet?” it gets to the environmental stories that demand our attention.  

***

A publication of the Earth Island Institute, the group founded by legendary activist David Brower, Earth Island Journalreports from the front lines of the environmental crisis. Its global focus and eagerness for stimulating debate make it essential reading for greens.  

***

The footnotes in Environmentmagazine say “academics at work”—but the stories will have you asking, “Why isn’t anyone else writing about this?” This publication covering “science and policy for sustainable development” goes in-depth but never gets out of reach. 

***

Environment Yale covers myriad stories from the forefront of environmentalism, whether it’s the U.S. military’s use of forestry as a counterinsurgency tool or “urban ecology” putting teens to work greening their cities. Published by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the biannual provokes readers to change the way they think about the natural world.  

***

The Western United States is a key battleground for many environmental issues, and High Country News is your experienced and knowledgeable correspondent. Its watchdog coverage of mining, ranching, logging—and simply Western life—is unmatched. 

***

The quarterly journal of the Natural Resources Defense Council, OnEarth monitors what’s happening to our land, air, water, and wildlife. It’s a pretty nature magazine, but it also brings a keenly analytic eye to the societal and political dimensions of environmentalism.  

***

The most literary of environmental magazines, Orion takes a big view, touching on spirituality, philosophy, and the arts in its gorgeous pages. Thoughtfully provocative columnists keep it from drifting off into the rapidly warming atmosphere.

See our complete list of 2011 nominees .  

Image by Enokson, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Whitewater rafting is a risky sport: Those aren’t plastic Disneyland-style boulders in the middle of the rapids, and your life vest may or may not save you if you go overboard. But proposals to make two Western rivers a bit safer by moving gnarly rocks has kicked off a debate about how far humans should go in engineering nature for recreation’s sake.

High Country News reports on controversial proposals to alter two dangerous whitewater rafting spots: Staircase Rapid on Idaho’s Payette River and Frog Rock Rapids on Colorado’s Arkansas River. Fifteen to 20 rafts wrap around a particular boulder on Staircase Rapid every season, writes Sarah Gilman, and a river guide drowned there in 2007; Frog Rock Rapids has claimed four victims since 2000. In both places, proposals to mess with the river have raised objections:

Why the kerfuffle? Humans regularly rejigger rivers, using dams, diversions, riprap and concrete. But in rafting, like many outdoor sports, the risk is part of the thrill. “People die on Longs Peak every year, but we’re not going to tear that down,” says Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area senior ranger Stew Pappenfort. Then again, he adds, Frog Rock “is a real dangerous spot on an (otherwise) intermediate run.” So how far should land managers and outfitters go to protect recreationists? And in doing so, are they encouraging an increasingly common public expectation of a casual, risk-free natural experience?

The discussion echoes my 2001 Utne Reader article, “The Late, Great Outdoors,” which covered the debate over completely human-made whitewater courses and faux rock climbing walls in urban environments. “Some feel that something is lost when the rapids are always just right and the view at the top of the climb is the checkout line,” I wrote. Reconfiguring natural rivers seems to be just another variation on this unnatural approach.

In a sense, the law may be on the river’s side. Experts suggest to High Country News that river modifications could backfire, since “if an agency alters a hazard like a rapid, even with the intent to make it safer, it could potentially be held liable for future accidents there.”

Still, the legal picture is uncertain: Proposals to alter natural riverbeds for boater safety are rare and seldom carried out. On the lower Youghiogheny River, in one famous case, the state of Pennsylvania undertook a five-year public review and an engineering study to determine whether Dimple Rock Rapid, the site of several deaths, ought to be changed. In 2006, it concluded that alterations could easily create new dangers without reducing the risk of flipping. The river guides who took matters into their own hands on Arizona’s Salt River in 1993—dynamiting dangerous Quartzite Falls—ended up facing a federal grand jury.

Dynamiting the falls? Now that sounds more dangerous than whitewater rafting.

Source: High Country News  

Image by Video4net , licensed under Creative Commons .  

When you read a Western novel, you know that cowboy hats may be involved, and when you read Southern lit you might expect the appearance of a moss-covered mansion. But these sorts of expectations from readers and publishers can be frustrating for writers who don’t want to fill their books with clichés.

North Carolina novelist Clyde Edgerton gets at this in an amusing exchange with writer Amy Frykholm at the Christian Century:

What is happening now in Southern fiction?  

Fiction writers are still dealing with that species of animal called human in a hot place where there’s plenty of reactionary fundamentalism and family loyalty and a history of living close to the land, along with a poverty that often finds little hope in the promise of America.

You once said, “Because I was born in the South, I’m a Southerner. If I had been born in the North, the West or the Central Plains, I would be just a human being.” Do we make too much of Southern culture generally or of Southern literature in particular? 

Maybe we do make too much of it—because it’s often loud and, in the case of good fiction, accurate. Whereas various media interpretations of the South are sometimes only loud. It’s always a bit of a downer for me when those not from the South start talking about front porches and sweet iced tea and quirky characters. I visualize the caricatured life and predict the next string of dead mule generalizations.

Western writer Laura Pritchett makes a more pitched complaint in “The Western Lit Blues” in High Country News:

I’m a writer who writes about the West and the people out here. You know, the tough outdoorsy folks who populate Western books. People who hunt, camp, ride horses, and love to gut fish. Men and women who live on ranches or fall in love with ranchers. Or the folks who have a kayak on their Subaru and suntan marks on their feet from Chaco sandals, and the people who fall in love with suntanned, Subaru-driving kayakers.

… But I have to say: Even though I am similar to my fictional counterparts, I am also not them. There’s more going on with life out here in the West than is often rendered in books. We Westerners are more complex and worldly and unique than what I sometimes find on the page, frankly. And as a writer, a reader, an observer, and a half-assed cultural critic, I’m starting to get a little worried.

Pritchett acknowledges that some of her peers are broadening their scope—“the oil drillers of Alexandra Fuller’s nonfiction, the odd lovers in Rick Bass’ novels, the Spanish-infused language and Chicano influence in Aaron Abeyta’s poetry”—so it’s not that writers can’t and won’t push boundaries. It’s just that a self-perpetuating mythology can stifle artistic innovation:

Co-creation. That’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. How books create our self-identity, and our identity gets captured in books, and back and forth it goes like some frenzied feeding machine. I read, I reflect, I transfer. So do you. Books and life feed each other, and then they create a monster of an ideology that we feel obligated to live up to.

Sources: Christian Century, High Country News

   Image by crowt59, licensed under Creative Commons.

The cover story of the early August edition of High Country News features John N. Maclean's expert storytelling and discerning analysis of the recent shift in perception of wildfire arson and those who commit it. In "The Fiery Touch," Maclean establishes a context to his story for those unfamiliar with the primarily Western phenomenon, writing that:

For many decades, deliberately set wildfires were treated more as a nuisance than as a major crime. Rural communities not only tolerated arson in their backyards; they often practiced it as a cultural prerogative, to stimulate new grass on grazing land or to create jobs on fire crews.

His narrative thread is the story of Raymond Lee Oyler, a 38-year-old automechanic accused of starting Southern California's 2006 Esperanza wildfire that killed five U.S. Forest Service firefighters. Oyler's case marked the first time that a wildfire arsonist was convicted of first-degree murder (five counts), and furthermore, sentenced to death. Maclean's chilling retelling of the five deaths by fatal burning ("Flames overran the crew with a swiftness that left no time for more hose lays, burnouts or last words—except for one unintelligible radio transmission, the haunting cry of a never-identified young man in extreme distress") and poignant descriptions of family reactions in the courtroom lend humanity to what might otherwise be a dry issue of crime and the legal system.

The precedent set by the strict crackdown on Oyler has been reflected in subsequent trials of wildfire arsonists, in the hopes of deterring outcomes similar to that of the Esperanza fire:

The conviction of Raymond Oyler for murder would have been unthinkable a century or even a few decades ago. Swift justice will not bring any of the victims back to life, but it sends a new and unequivocal sign of community respect for those who suffer irretrievable loss while engaged in defense of lives and property. The Oyler case stands as a warning to every would-be fire starter: Tolerance for the torch has gone the way of the Old West.

Source: High Country News   

Image by 96dpi, licensed under Creative Commons. 

High Country News has published an interactive report about the contents of a stranded gray whale’s stomach. The whale was 37 feet long, so there was room for plastic bags, duct tape, assorted clothing, and a Capri Sun juice pack, among other things. HCN puts it all in a global perspective, offering stats on the items most frequently found drifting in the oceans. The only thing more ubiquitous than plastic bags? Cigarettes. Which would be fine, but smoking whales just go extinct faster.

Source: High Country News

Congratulations to High Country News, which won a 2010 Utne Independent Press Award for environmental coverage.

Image by little blue hen, licensed under Creative Commons.

Our library contains 1,300 publications—a feast of magazines, journals, alt weeklies, newsletters, and zines—and every year we honor the stars in our Utne Independent Press Awards. We’ll announce this year’s winners on Sunday, April 25, at the MPA’s Independent Magazine Group conference in Washington, D.C., and post them online the following Monday. We’re crazy about these publications, and we’d love it for all of our readers to get to know them better, too. So, every weekday until the conference, we’ll be posting mini-introductions to our complete list of 2010 nominees.

The following eight magazines are our 2010 nominees in the category of environmental coverage.

American environmentalists would be wise to look to Canada’s Alternatives Journal for cogent, well-informed reporting and commentary on green issues. The official publication of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada puts topics from climate change to local food into clear-eyed perspective. www.alternativesjournal.ca

Audubon rightly believes that if you care about birds, you care about the environment. The Audubon Society’s magazine is a must-read for nature watchers of all kinds, digging into its subjects with a keen eye for both natural beauty and the forces that threaten it. www.audubonmagazine.org

Published by the Society for Conservation Biology, Conservation transcends its modest roots with intellectual depth. From profiling “the mushroom messiah” to asking “Is a warmer world a sicker world?” it gets to the environmental stories that demand our attention. www.conservationmagazine.org

A publication of the Earth Island Institute, the group founded by activist legend David Brower, Earth Island Journal reports from the front lines of the environmental crisis. Its global focus and eagerness for stimulating debate make it a must-read for greens. www.earthisland.org/journal

The footnotes in Environment magazine say “academics at work”—but the stories will have you asking “Why isn’t anyone else writing about this?” This publication covering “science and policy for sustainable development” goes in-depth but never gets out of reach. www.environmentmagazine.org

The Western United States is a key battleground for many environmental issues, and High Country News is your experienced and knowledgeable correspondent from the front lines. Its watchdog coverage of mining, ranching, logging—and simply Western life—is unmatched. www.hcn.org

The quarterly journal of the Natural Resources Defense Council, OnEarth keeps tabs on what’s happening to our land, air, water, and wildlife. It’s a pretty nature magazine, but it also brings a keenly analytic eye to the societal and political dimensions of environmentalism. www.onearth.org

The most literary of environmental magazines, Orion takes a big view, touching on spirituality, philosophy, and the arts in its gorgeous pages. Thoughtfully provocative columnists keep it from drifting off into the rapidly warming atmosphere.  www.orionmagazine.org

In 2007, the bald eagle was officially (and with plenty of pomp and circumstance) removed from the endangered species list. Now, High Country News reports, conservationists face a difficult question: What to do about the fact that these eagles are wreaking havoc on seabird populations along the coasts of Oregon and Washington?

The Oregon coast now supports over a million nesting seabirds, including common murres, storm petrels, western gulls, cormorants, and tufted puffins. While none are federally endangered, Washington regards common murres and tufted puffins as species of concern (along with bald eagles); the puffins are also considered “sensitive” in Oregon. After the bald eagle’s decline, these seabirds nested for generations without being harassed, says Isaacs: “I feel sorry for the seabirds.” These days, on the northern part of the coast, bald eagle predation has caused the collapse of entire murre colonies, once 300,000 birds strong. “Some of our rocks that were significant colony sites are now permanently abandoned,” Lowe says.

For now, scientists seem to be watching and waiting. Not much is known about the bald eagle’s historical population levels and interactions with murres and gulls—these "raids" on seabird colonies, High Country News notes, “may simply represent a shift towards balance.”

Researchers speculate that seabirds like murres were sometimes prey for eagles in the past, and could not breed in large colonies with such a predator in the picture. The eagles might also help bring gull numbers back down to historic levels. But for less robust species, such as cormorants and great blue herons, the raptor’s indiscriminate appetite could prove a problem.

Historically, bald eagles fed opportunistically on a wide variety of prey, including salmon and mammals, but decades of decline in wild salmon populations may have forced them to dine on other birds more frequently. “Predator-prey relationships are not a new threat,” says Steve Mashuda, an attorney with the nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice. “It is only a threat in the context of an imbalance that is largely human-caused.” Many seabird populations are already impaired because of human activities, including oil spills, fishery by-catch, and loss of habitat to development.

Source: High Country News

When you hear someone complaining about environmentalists who file lots of lawsuits, they’re talking about organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity, the national green group famous for going to court to protect threatened and endangered species—and very often winning. Among its higher-profile clients are spotted owls, polar bears, and Mexican gray wolves. High Country News has an illuminating interview with one of the center’s feisty founders, Kierán Suckling, who doesn’t dance around the subject of legal action as the equivalent of a shock-and-awe offensive:

High Country News: What role do lawsuits play in your strategy to list endangered species?

Kierán Suckling: They are one tool in a larger campaign, but we use lawsuits to help shift the balance of power from industry and government agencies, toward protecting endangered species. That plays out on many levels. At its simplest, by obtaining an injunction to shut down logging or prevent the filling of a dam, the power shifts to our hands. The Forest Service needs our agreement to get back to work, and we are in the position of being able to powerfully negotiate the terms of releasing the injunction.

New injunctions, new species listings and new bad press take a terrible toll on agency morale. When we stop the same timber sale three or four times running, the timber planners want to tear their hair out. They feel like their careers are being mocked and destroyed—and they are. So they become much more willing to play by our rules and at least get something done. Psychological warfare is a very underappreciated aspect of environmental campaigning.

Source: High Country News (subscription required)

Image courtesy of the Center for Biological Diversity.

You can’t grow crops in a desert, right? You can if you grow desert crops. Farmer Mark Moody is staking out a local food niche by cultivating mesquite, the scrubby and tough little tree, in Arizona’s Sonoran desert, reports High Country News. He processes the tree’s slender pods into a gluten-free, high-protein flour and has other plans for mesquite products, which according to the magazine are many:

The mesquite tree is one of the Sonoran Desert’s most useful plants. Southwestern tribes harvested it for centuries. The whole tree can be utilized — the pods ground into a sweet, nutty flour, the yellow catkins used to produce honey, and the cherry-brown hardwood sawed into furniture and flooring, not to mention used for sweet-smelling firewood and grill flavoring.

In addition to his own orchard plantings, Moody wild-harvests (with Park Service permission) mesquite pods from native stands along the Colorado River. “The Indians call this the tree of life,” he tells High Country News, and predicts, “In the next three years, mesquite will be common in everybody’s kitchen.”

Take a trip to Moody’s mesquite orchard by watching the accompanying video report “The Mesquite Wrangler,” an online extra produced by former Utne Reader intern Cally Carswell.

Source: High Country News

Image by cogdogblog, licensed under Creative Commons.

Green your Twitter feed—in a single click. Investigative reporter Osha Gray Davidson, editor and publisher of the Phoenix Sun, has set up a TweepML list for the Society of Environmental Journalists. With one click, users can follow 58 environmental reporters, writers, and publications, including Utne Independent Press Award-winning High Country News.

(Thanks, @orion_magazine.)

Featured in this week’s episode:

- A rumor mill for Baltimore, one of the ideas dreamt up by this year’s Urbanite Project participants (from Urbanite)

- Western innovations from High Country News

- The new Rad Dad, with dispatches from southeast Asia and a pair of essays exploring gender, identity, and parenting (not available online)

- Tapping Alaska’s grease market, from biodieselSMARTER

Sources: Urbanite, High Country News, Rad Dad, biodieselSMARTER

Utne Reader librarian Danielle Maestretti shares the highlights (and occasional lowlights) of what's landing in our library each week.

Utne's library is abuzz with a steady flow of 1,300 magazines, journals,weeklies, zines, and other dispatches from the cultural front that are rarely found in big-box bookstores or newsstands. 

Featured in this week’s episode: 

- High Country News on remembering the nuclear west

- The state of American charcuterie, from The Art of Eating (not available online)

- Nigerian author Chris Abani on humanity and writing, in a special issue of Witness on “Dismissing Africa” (PDF)

- Advice for activists on running productive meetings, from Red Pepper (not available online)

Sources: High Country News, The Art of Eating, Witness, Red Pepper

The NRA came out forcefully against Barack Obama during the campaign, warning its members that he would be “the most anti-gun president in American history.” And though the group's endorsement of Obama’s Republican rival was criticized by some gun rights and conservation advocates in the hunting community (as we blogged about a couple months ago), Obama clearly took the threat of the NRA’s vitriol seriously, going out of his way to reassure voters that he didn’t plan to strip them of their firearms.

But recent infighting among gun owners shows many vocal Second Amendment supporters remain unconvinced. Dan Cooper, co-founder of Cooper Firearms of Montana, was forced to resign from his post as the company’s president when word leaked that he was an Obama supporter, a scandalous revelation that “led to calls on pro-gun Web sites to boycott the company's products,” according to Real Clear Politics.

Cooper told USA Today that he had voted for only Republican presidential candidates since Nixon, but would be crossing the aisle this year because of the war and what he saw as the Republican Party’s shift to the far right.

Like Cooper, most in the firearms community have been voting consistently Republican for some time, a reality that Hal Herring says should make Democrats consider abandoning gun control. In an article for High Country News, Herring writes:

Single-issue gun-rights voters are especially destructive when it comes to environmental issues. Year after year, Republican politicians swear allegiance to the Second Amendment, an act that costs them nothing, but guarantees the gun vote. Then they support measures to exploit, degrade, and even sell off the public lands and waters that hunters and fishermen depend on. Neither the NRA nor the gun voters themselves do anything to protest this. The gun vote has gone to anti-environment politicians for so long now that millions of non-hunting American no longer associate hunters with conservation, despite the fact that sportsmen have painstakingly restored wildlife and habitat, rivers and lands, with their gun and ammunition tax dollars, their license fees and waterfowl stamps. This will eventually backfire on gun owners — and on conservationists. In a society increasingly disconnected from nature and hunting, with places to shoot growing increasingly scarce, fewer citizens grow up in a traditional gun culture. That means fewer hunters will fund assets like the Federal Wildlife Refuge system, and fewer shooters will respond to future, inevitable challenges to the Second Amendment. 

It is not too late for a new vision, one as unique as the nation itself. If the Democratic Party would recognize the Second Amendment as the Supreme Court has interpreted it in the Heller decision, and reassure gun voters that the years of backdoor maneuvers to promote gun control are over, the Republican deadlock on the gun vote could eventually be broken. It seems a small price for the Democrats to pay. All they have to do is recognize the Constitution.

Photo by Marion Doss, licensed under Creative Commons.

As Jake Mohan wisely reminded us earlier this week, George Bush still has a few more months in office, which is plenty of time for him to do some serious harm to environmental protections.

Bush recently aimed his firing squad at the Endangered Species Act (and not for the first time). According to High Country News, he attempted to dismantle the act like this:

Back in August, the administration proposed tweaking the law to give federal agencies the discretion to opt out of independent biological oversight when considering new projects such as highways and electrical transmission lines. The proposal would also let the feds pass on considering individual projects' global warming impacts on species. Such changes usually take months or even years to accomplish, but by late October, the Interior Department had 15 staffers slamming through some 200,000 public comments (not including another 100,000 form letters) in a mere 32 hours…

Additionally, Bush is pushing changes that will ease pollution limits for power plants, allow factory farms to self-regulate their water pollution, reduce buffer zones around streams designed to protect them from mining waste, and open millions of acres of unspoiled public land in Utah to oil and gas exploration. On the last point, the New York Times writes:

This sort of pillage would be hard to justify even if Utah’s reserves were large enough to make a difference, which they are not… And even if those reserves were worth going after, it would still be essential to protect areas of special cultural, scenic and recreational value.

So don't forget to keep an eye on the Crawford cowboy as he rides off into the sunset, lest he plop an even bigger mess into Obama’s lap than he already has.

In a move seen by many Environmental Protection Agency staffers as an effort to “suppress information on environmental and public health-related topics,” the Bush administration took a wrecking ball to the EPA’s network of technical libraries in 2006, locking the doors of some libraries and removing scads of materials from collections. Now the outrage expressed by scientists and librarians seems to have had an effect. High Country News reports that at least four of the closed libraries have been reopened and access to some library holdings restored.

But how much damage was done in the interim? According to HCN, the public, agency staffers, and outside researchers lost access to thousands of documents that were moved into repositories where they would supposedly be digitized. But those repositories “have grown into giant information dumps whose contents will remain un-cataloged for years to come.”

A press release by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) quotes its associate director, Carol Goldberg, saying that even with the reopenings, “EPA will still accord its own scientists and the public less access to information than it did back in 2005,” and the closures leave in their “wake scattered and incomplete collections.” Among the libraries the administration locked up was a specialized chemical library, which was closed “with no notice to the scientists who rely on those holdings to analyze new pesticides and toxic chemicals,” according to HCN. PEER says a “small portion of holdings” from that library will now be available at an EPA headquarters library as a “special Chemical Collection.”

Much remains unknown about the fallout from the closures, according to president of the American Library Association, Jim Retting, whose congressional testimony on the matter is quoted by HCN. Retting told Congress:

Unfortunately, there continues to be a lot that we don't know: exactly what materials have been being shipped around the country, whether there are duplicate materials in other EPA libraries, whether these items have been or will be digitized, and whether a record is being kept of what is being dispersed and what is being discarded. We remain concerned that years of research and studies about the environment may be lost forever.

Image by Joe Crawford, licensed under Creative Commons.

What exactly makes a building green? Writing for Colorado’s High Country News, Monique Cole takes on the concept of building "green" McMansions after reading about a businessman who built a 6,500-square-foot home near Boulder. The mansion, which uses extensive solar power and ecological building materials, was named "the greenest home in North America" by the Boulder County Business Report. But do these choices actually make the building “the greenest”? No: Even though the materials and power sources are eco-friendly, it still takes gas for the movers, builders, landscapers, and utility workers to get to the property, some 10 miles outside Boulder (not to mention the extra fuel it takes for its owners to get to and from work and commerce). The kicker, Cole points out, is that this house’s square footage is three times that of the median American household. "Everyone’s looking for the silver bullets that will allow us to carry on our consumptive lifestyles just as we always have. But to be truly green, some sacrifices have to be made, such as giving up the home theater or that fourth bay in the garage."

Image courtesy of  Allan Ferguson , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

When it comes to conservation, all gun rights advocates are not created equal. And according to Pat Wray at High Country News, the National Rifle Association (NRA) is the worst of the worst.

Wray, a life member of the NRA, is running for the organization’s board of directors to try to change that. Wray is a hunter who wants his right to bear arms protected, but he also wants wildlife habitat protected, and at this the NRA is failing miserably, he says.

“The NRA’s ability to take money from hunters and use it in ways that will ultimately ruin hunting constitutes one of the most dishonest public relations campaigns ever perpetrated on the American people,” Wray writes.

Wray goes on to describe politicians the organization has supported, like former Rep. Richard Pombo, Sen. Larry Craig, and President Bush, who have sold off public lands to private companies or removed protections for roadless areas. As a member of the board, Wray says he would “Require the organization to work with politicians who care about the environment, wildlife and wild lands in addition to their support of our Second Amendment rights. The two are not mutually exclusive.”

While Wray tries to change the system from within, the American Hunters and Shooters Association (AHSA) is competing with the NRA from the outside, but with some of the same complaints.

At New West, Bill Schneider calls the AHSA “the bane of the NRA because it’s not just pro-gun but unlike the NRA, also pro-hunter.”

The NRA will spend up to $40 million to defeat Barack Obama this election season. Meanwhile, the AHSA will be throwing its weight—however much that is—behind Obama and emphasizing conservation in its message. As AHSA president Ray Schoenke stated, “Senator Obama’s commitment to conservation and protection of our natural resources and access to public lands demonstrates to us his commitment to America’s hunting and shooting heritage.”

For his part, Obama told Montana voters, “There is not a sportsman or hunter in Montana who is a legal possessor of firearms that has anything to worry about from me.”

Image by Richard Bartz, licensed under Creative Commons.

California’s Salton Sea isn’t just a body of water, it’s an epic tale of environmental tinkering gone wrong wrapped up in a storyline that involves real estate fever, massive fish kills, congressman Sonny Bono, and more than a few sunburned eccentrics. High Country News tells part of the strange tale in its March 3 issue. For a cinematic, even weirder take on the sea and its characters, check out the documentary film Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, now out on DVD, which is reviewed in the March-April Utne Reader.

—Keith Goetzman

It's easy to romanticize the life of a hitchhiker. I quickly conjure up visions of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Ken Kesey hitching rides, listening to jazz, meeting charming people, and exploring the American landscape. I remember my dad's stories of hitching his way from Michigan to Florida in his 20s, imagining him as an oh-so-cool hippie before the days of parent-teacher conferences and two cars in the driveway. Part of me has always wanted to follow his footsteps: pack a small bag, head out to a freeway ramp, and stick out my thumb.

But the other (bigger) part of me knows I'm not of the Beat generation, and the horror stories of hitchhiking-gone-bad cloud my dreams of running around the country with strangers. Dev Carey, on the other hand, estimates he has received 400, maybe 500 rides from strangers, and his hitchhiking history is chronicled in the latest issue of High Country News, as told to contributing editor Michelle Nijhuis.

Carey has used his thumb to navigate the U.S. West, France, Holland, Germany, and Luxembourg—and has only felt as though he was in danger once. He says he simply enjoys the human connections that emerge from sharing the road with someone. He feels good that he was saving gas and money, and although he has options for travel beyond hitchhiking, he says he is advocating for those who don't.

After 20 years of hitchhiking, however, Carey finally had a breakdown after being passed by cars for hours on end. He writes, "They looked like they were in a rush, they looked guilty, they looked angry, they flipped me off. I’d been watching that for a long time, and I finally let myself really feel it… I was suddenly very aware that all of us were going around so scared, so isolated, that we wouldn’t even look at each other." 

—Cara Binder