In October of 2013, a helicopter sprayed a cocktail of herbicides over four clearcuts in a valley north of Gold Beach, Oregon, a coastal community at the mouth of the Rogue River. Logging companies rely on the practice to keep weeds and shrubs from outcompeting tree seedlings. The chemicals, though – including 2,4-D, an ingredient in Agent Orange – spread beyond their intended targets. As Rebecca Clarren reported in a cover story for High Country News last November, 35 nearby residents fell ill on the same day, reporting diarrhea, rashes, nosebleeds, bleeding lungs, and sickened animals.
Complaints about pesticide drift are nothing new in Oregon communities abutting private timber lands, where the spraying occurs; the state’s rules governing the practice are the weakest on the West Coast. But the high profile Gold Beach incident added urgency to rural residents’ and environmentalists’ calls for reform. More…
This web-exclusive appeared on hcn.org April 14, 2015:
A helicopter hovered low over a flat, sagebrush expanse as a pronghorn gracefully bounded across the dusty earth ahead. A crewmember aimed a cannon-like device and fired a net. The pronghorn snagged beneath it and the copter landed, disgorging a handful of people who raced to untangle it. The researchers gently fitted the creature with a blindfold, then a lightweight GPS collar. They took blood to scan for disease and hair for genetic testing. In less than 10 minutes, the doe was free again – North America’s fastest land mammal flying across the high desert on her narrow legs. More…
This story appeared in the April 13, 2015 issue of High Country News:
Ever since pilot Kenneth Arnold reported saucer-shaped objects flying near Mount Rainier in 1947, spawning the term “flying saucer,” the Northwest has drawn extraterrestrial tourists. Last year, Oregon led the nation in per capita UFO sightings, many of them in Portland. But the typical alien sojourn appears to be a mere flyby, sans a single visit to a vegan strip club. Perhaps, like tattoo-less Midwestern tourists in ill-fitting pants, they feel out of place here.
As a recent transplant from rural Colorado, I can relate. What we aliens need, I figure, is an outsiders’ guide to insider Portland. So, on a rainy Saturday, I don a silver onesie and homemade alien mask, and set out by bike to concoct one. More…
This web exclusive appeared on hcn.org April 1, 2015:
The polar bear is the most carnivorous and gigantic of the ursids. No grizzly documented in Yellowstone has weighed more than 900 pounds. The largest male polar bears? In excess of 1,700 pounds. No wonder United States Geological Survey wildlife biologist Karyn Rode describes collecting samples and measurements from tranquilized polar bears as “surreal.” And yet, it wasn’t the bears per se that most captured her imagination when she arrived on the southern Beaufort Sea by helicopter in 2007 for her first field season. It was the fact that they manage to eke out their existence on such a vast, featureless white expanse of ice, floating on the ocean. “I was like: ‘Seriously, you live here? How do you figure it out?’ ” she recalls now. “It’s just phenomenal.” More…
This piece originally appeared in the Mar. 16, 2015 issue of High Country News:
In February, on an especially strange Friday the 13th, Oregon Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber announced his resignation. Over the past several months, Willamette Week, The Oregonian and other media outlets had revealed that clean energy consultant Cylvia Hayes — Kitzhaber’s fiancée and energy policy advisor — may have violated ethics and public corruption laws by using her access to Kitzhaber’s office for personal financial gain, possibly with his knowledge and participation. Since 2011, Hayes had reportedly landed at least $213,000 in consulting contracts with groups working to advance the same causes on which she advised him.
“I have become a liability to the very institutions and policies to which I have dedicated my career,” Kitzhaber conceded in a quavering voice. The state House speaker and Senate president, both fellow Democrats, had joined The Oregonian in calling for him to step down. Kitzhaber finally did so but remained defiant, denying wrongdoing and aiming a barb at his accusers and former allies, charging that he had been “tried, convicted and sentenced by the media with no due process.” More…
On Jan. 1, I joined 15 friends on a raft trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. That morning, our boats were covered in snow; the canyon’s red cliffs, capped with white, looked like giant slabs of frosted carrot cake. The ranger said locals had never seen the place so wintry.
So we were delighted to return to Colorado — thousands of feet higher, where the river’s Rocky Mountain headwaters lie — and find no sign of winter. “Mountain biking in a tank top. Suck it, New England,” one of our trip leaders crowed from Durango on Facebook as a blizzard battered the East Coast.
But as the endless warm days slushed snow into mud and turned mud into hardpan, a growing alarm replaced our lizard-like impulse to bask. Between Jan. 25 and Feb. 8, 174 Colorado communities met or broke high temperature records. A few on the state’s eastern plains even neared or surpassed 80 degrees Fahrenheit. More…
Gary Mowad enjoyed a 25-year career at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Mostly, that was in law enforcement, working as a special agent posted in places like Colorado and Alaska, and later, as deputy chief in DC. At the end, he served for a couple years as the agency’s top administrator and head biologist in Texas. Nearly everyone who worked with him seemed to hold him in high regard. And yet, by February, 2013, he appears to have essentially been forced into retirement by his superiors for reporting what he construed to be scientific misconduct and political interference with an endangered species listing. The whistleblower retaliation case, which the government settled last fall, raises alarming questions about Fish and Wildlife’s handling of such complaints, as well as how much politics influence the agency’s science. More…
This feature originally appeared in the Jan. 19 print edition of High Country News:
Oil and gas waste pits at Danish Flat, Utah, just across the Colorado border.
Kaye Fissinger collects Don Quixote.
I met the diminutive 70-year-old at her home in a quiet subdivision of Longmont, Colorado. Amid memorabilia from her work in musical theater, black-and-white portraits and an eye-popping snapshot of her body-builder daughter, the man of La Mancha stared from prints and paintings, posed in wooden statuettes and porcelain figurines.
“Why Quixote?” I asked.
She regarded me over gold-rimmed glasses, a smile quirking her mouth. “Because he tilts at windmills,” she said.
In a way, so does Fissinger, but hers are the oil-drilling rigs that have popped up lately in her area. She looked computer-tired, clad in a white turtleneck, her hair pulled into a ponytail. She led me upstairs to a cluttered home office, cleared a stack of documents from a chair and urged me to sit. When she came here from L.A. in 2006, she explained, she was worried about the separation of church and state.
She didn’t yet realize that the plains further to the northeast were pin-cushioned with tens of thousands of wells, many of them hydraulically fractured, or fracked — a process that involves firing water, sand and chemicals thousands of feet underground at incomprehensible pressures — or that the boom had intensified in recent years.
Then one day in 2011, an automated phone survey asked her an odd question: How would she feel if drilling took place on Longmont open space? “Radar, radar!” she exclaimed. A company, it turned out, had proposed drilling around a local reservoir. The more she learned, the more she worried. She thought of her great-grandkids. A lung cancer survivor, she thought of her respiratory health. She thought about the flat lot near her house that might be a perfect place for a rig.
And in 2012, she helped found the nonprofit Our Health, Our Future, Our Longmont, which spearheaded a ballot initiative that made the city the first in Colorado to ban fracking. The next fall, despite industry’s expensive counter-campaign, several other Front Range communities followed suit. Places across the West and the country have also joined in, from rural Mora County, New Mexico, in 2013, to, most recently and significantly, the state of New York, which overlays a booming shale gas formation.
Though many bans face long odds in court — Longmont’s and others have already been shot down and are headed for appeals — activists and local officials keep fighting. “We’re in it for the long haul,” Fissinger told me emphatically. “Fracking is a toxic, extreme energy extraction method. I don’t think it can be made safe.”
The prospect of a drill rig towering over one’s home would terrify just about anyone, me included. But I still felt conflicted: A near-term transition from oil and gas is profoundly unlikely. Natural gas is slowly supplanting coal as a primary electricity-generating fuel. Petroleum runs our planes, trains and automobiles. Both make it into a dizzying array of plastics and personal care products.
The corporate machine of hydrocarbon development contains a ghost. And the ghost in that machine is us. Until that changes, every fracking ban — Longmont’s, Mora County’s, New York’s — no matter how heroic and justified, simply pushes drilling somewhere else. I wanted to know: Where are we saying yes to such development,and how can we say it in a way 0that lessens impacts on landscapes and people?
I had one hunch. To see if it bore out, I rented a red Chevy Cruze, filled the tank, and got behind the wheel. “Remaining Oil Life: 97%” blinked on the dash. How appropriate, I thought, and drove west, toward Energy Country. More…(subscription required.)
The energy-rich Roan Plateau has been synonymous with the larger battle over oil and gas development on Colorado’s Western Slope for over a decade.
Rising 3,000 feet over small energy boomtowns with names like Rifle and Silt along the Colorado River, the former Naval Oil Shale Reserve hosts wilderness-quality roadless areas, a rare strain of native Colorado cutthroat trout, plants found nowhere else in the world, and crucial mule deer and elk habitat. It also happens to contain an estimated 8.9 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas; the Bureau of Land Management’s 2008 sale of mineral leases to companies hoping to tap those riches was the highest grossing in the Lower 48 in history, at $113.9 million.
As you might expect, throwing those volatile elements together has produced results akin to dropping a chunk of pure potassium directly into a glass of water (hint: KaBOOM).
Shortly before the lease sale, ten environmental groups filed suit over BLM’s management plan governing the area, and the energy companies holding the leases joined the agency against them as defendants. In 2012, a district judge sent the plan back to the BLM on the grounds that it had failed to adequately analyze more protective options as well as air quality impacts; both the energy companies and environmental groups appealed. The fight appeared as though it would only continue to escalate and even helped inspire a murder mystery novel whose hunting guide heroine prefers to end a long day by downing a cold beer in a hot shower.
But on Friday, November 21, U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell took the podium at the state capital building to announce that the parties involved had reached a landmark settlement that seems to make everyone happy.More…
This web exclusive appeared on hcn.org Nov. 4, 2014:
On a crisp fall day lined with cottonwoods yellow-bright as balls of flame, I take a gravel shortcut from Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon toward Vernal, an energy boomtown of some 10,000 souls. Though I’ve spent the day looking at natural gas wells going in along the fingers of the plateau that cradles Nine Mile’s storied rock art, I’m surprised by what I encounter shortly after hitting asphalt, popping up around each curve in time to Phil Collins crooning a Supremes cover on the radio: Pumpjacks. Everywhere.
You can’t hurry love
No you’ll just have to wait
Two tall as buildings nod up on the right.
She said love don’t come easy
It’s a game of give and take
Two more nod down the left. Then another two.
How long must I wait
How much more must I take
A prickling of several more on the mesa tops, and then
Before loneliness
Will cause my heart, heart to break?
the broad dome of dry-grass desert opens up to reveal a vista that is anything but lonely: Densely spaced oil wells and clustered tanks spread to the horizons. When I pull over and climb onto the shoulder, I can feel a vibration deep in my chest – hundreds of pumpjack engines rattling with flatulent backfires like impolite party guests.
If it were a cold, still day with snow carpeting the ground, there would likely be a lungful of nasty air to accompany this chorus, and a much hazier view. More…
Sarah M. Gilman 