A plague of tumbleweeds

Posted on by sarahgilman7

This infographic appeared in the March 21, 2014 issue of High Country News

Tumbleweeds first engulfed J.D. Wright’s house in southeastern Colorado Nov. 17. Wind gusted up and there they were, piled so deep over doors and windows that Wright’s grandson had to dig him and his wife out with a front-end loader. “We had some bad weeds in the ’50s and ’70s (droughts),” Wright says, “but nothing like this.”

The skeletal orbs, also known as Russian thistle, aren’t newcomers; they wandered over from Eurasia in the 19th century. But Western drought has invigorated them as farmers fallow fields, ranchers stop grazing cattle that eat weed shoots, and native perennials wither. With so much bare soil, a burst of moisture last fall sparked a tumbleweed explosion. Now, packs of them scythe across the prairie, enthusiastically scattering seed. Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico have reported miles of blocked roads and weed mountains stacked behind fences and in ditches. A January windstorm buried a three-quarter-mile-by-half-mile section of Clovis, N.M., rooftop-to-rooftop in 435 tons of prickly mayhem.

The accumulation is more than inconvenient; it blocks emergency vehicles and boosts fire danger. But how the heck do you overcome a tumbleweed takeover of sci-fi proportions? More…

Also, check out the related web exclusive story for more details about Crowley County’s tumbleweed troubles.

Avalanches weren’t – and aren’t – only a backcountry threat

Posted on by sarahgilman7

This web exclusive appeared on hcn.org on March 11, 2014

In the handful of times I’ve visited Missoula, Montana, the grassy slopes of neighboring L- and M-emblazoned Mounts Jumbo and Sentinel have never looked any more threatening to me than the hogbacked foothills that yaw out of the ground west of Boulder, Colorado, my hometown. Velvety, yes. Curved like a set of relaxed shoulders, yes. Welcomingly draped in the low-angled sun of late afternoon, yes. Avalanche death zone? Not so much.

But on Feb. 28, an unusually intense blizzard snapped a wet quilt of deep snow over the valley, rumpling it into drifts and slabs with gusts up to 50 mph. Atop Jumbo and Sentinel, as well as the surrounding mountains, a weak crust of ice that unseasonably warm weather had glazed over the existing snowpack earlier in the week strained beneath the weight. When a group of snowboarders started down Jumbo — closed since November to protect a wintering elk herd – around 4 p.m., that strain released spectacularly. A large slab avalanche ran from near the mountain’s peak almost 1,300 vertical feet into a neighborhood on the valley floor, obliterating a two-story house, damaging several other homes and vehicles, and worst of all, burying three people. More…

The Odd Couple

Posted on by sarahgilman7

This article on public lands grazing reform in Utah appeared in the February 14, 2014 issue of High Country News

If you had never heard them talk about one another, you might assume Mary O’Brien and Bill Hopkin were enemies.

Hopkin, a sturdy 68-year-old with a shock of white hair, grew up stringing fence and tending cows in conservative, pro-ranching northern Utah. Now the grazing management specialist for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, he says he’s still “at my best when I’m talking over the hood of a pickup.” Cattle, he fervently believes, can help rangelands thrive.

O’Brien, also 68, is elfish and unflinchingly direct, with a big laugh. She grew up in Los Angeles, devouring Willa Cather’s books and falling so in love with grasslands that she would later encourage ecology students to honor native plants by thinking of each as a person. Before joining the Grand Canyon Trust, she earned an anti-grazing reputation for arguing against introducing cows to areas formerly grazed by sheep in Hells Canyon, on the Idaho-Oregon border.

Last May, at Kanab’s Amazing Earthfest, O’Brien’s husband mentioned that they had been married for 45 years. “I am so sorry,” Hopkin cut in. But instead of spite, his tone revealed affection and respect developed working with O’Brien to improve public-lands grazing in Utah. More…

L.A. is here to stay

Posted on by sarahgilman7

This essay introduced a special double issue of High Country News, published January 20, 2014, on urban sustainability that I assembled and edited

Paul set his mug of wine down and glowered at me over his glasses. Los Angeles? Why would any magazine editor include Los Angeles in a special issue on environmental sustainability?

My friend and former professor had good reason to ask. The camper Paul calls home, where I had stopped for dinner that October night, is parked on the upper edge of the sprawling sage-furred desert of California’s Owens Valley. In the early 1900s, L.A. drained the water from Owens Lake, about 80 miles south of here, to feed its own booming growth and glitz. Its thirst left behind toxic dust storms and a bitter grudge among the area’s rural residents.

I encountered similar sentiments when I told others about the stories of urban environmental innovation I was editing for High Country News‘ annual Future issue. Las Vegas? A city like that in a desert is a crime against nature, an environmentalist friend scoffed to me at the local brewery. Phoenix? That, too. Even our student-writing contest got a rise: “While I am very interested in writing an essay that would further our efforts to achieve sustainability in Western Colorado, there is one big problem,” wrote one prospective participant. “A modern industrial society will NEVER be sustainable (here). Virtually all our essential supplies are imported from outside our area.” More…

If the gas industry wants enviro cred, it should embrace methane regulation

Posted on by sarahgilman7

This web exclusive appeared on hcn.org on January 15, 2014

Shift more of the nation off coal-powered electricity and onto that supplied by natural gas, and what do you get? A significant reduction in the carbon emissions driving the alarming climatic shifts we already experience in our daily lives. That’s the theory anyway, based on the fact that natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide that coal does when burned. And if you put aside concerns about drilling’s impacts to air and water quality, it’s an important one, since this electricity switch may account for a significant portion of the overall decrease in U.S. greenhouse gas releases that’s occurred over the last few years.

Trouble is, the climate benefits of natural gas hinge on just how much is leaking from the wells, pipelines, compressor stations and other infrastructure used to extract and deliver the fuel. But due to the paucity of comprehensive data, the large margins of error in the findings and the wildly disparate conclusions of various researchers, nobody’s quite sure what the percentage is. Methane, natural gas’s primary component, is a vastly more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, though more short-lived; as Sarah Keller reported for High Country News last summer, as little as 3 percent loss could cancel out the emissions reductions achieved by moving from coal to gas. Recent studies certainly don’t stoke confidence. One based on thousands of actual air samples, published in the The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November, concluded that U.S. methane emissions were actually 1.5 times higher than previously thought, and that those for the oil and gas industry in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas were 5 times higher, reports The New York Times.

 

Given this, you’d think the industry would be falling all over itself to do away with leaks and thus help ensure its place in the U.S. energy pantheon long into the future, as well as improve its dismal public image. More…