New West Blog News

News Nugget

A coalition formed by the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the United States Botanic Garden has created the nations first rating system for environmentally sensitive landscapes.

As LEED has done for buildings and Energy Star has done for appliances, the Sustainable Sites Initiatives will do for outside spaces. The groups describe the program like this: “Voluntary national guidelines and performance benchmarks for sustainable land design, construction and maintenance practices.”

Nancy Somerville, Executive Vice President and CEO of ASLA said in a press release on the project, “While carbon-neutral performance remains the holy grail for green buildings, sustainable landscapes move beyond a do-no-harm approach. Landscapes sequester carbon, clean the air and water, increase energy efficiency, restore habitats and ultimately give back through significant economic, social and environmental benefits never fully measured until now.”

According to a USA Today story, “The rating will measure several criteria. They may include planting trees in a parking lot or paving with permeable materials to minimize heat and storm-water runoff. Or landscaping with native plants to reduce maintenance, irrigation and use of pesticides.”

Click here for that story and here for more information from the program itself.

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Column: Politics

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has announced she’s running for Senate in California, hoping to unseat Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer.

Long one of Boise’s biggest employers, HP is part of Idaho culture. It didn’t take long for the Fiorina chatter to show up on Idaho blogs, including Tom von Alten’s Fort Boise. von Alten, a mechanical engineer who worked at HP for twenty years and still holds stock in the company, wrote, “Her campaign slogan will presumably not be ‘Let me do to the country what I did to HP,’ but I have no doubt she will put a positive spin on every aspect of her career to date.”

As a longtime resident of Boise with friends who worked at HP, I’ve sat at many a dinner party where people told tales of how, instead of “bringing people together,” she repeatedly did the opposite. Notorious for egotistical, divisive and manipulatory tactics, one of her biographers, Michael Malone, said Fiorina “created a pestilential culture” and “a poisonous stew.”

There are numerous reports of employees literally cheering and dancing in the aisles the day her “resignation” was announced.

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Is that guano we smell?

For the past several days a walnut-sized lump has been throbbing on the top of my skull. This morning when I attempted to shampoo my hair, the scrubbing motion nearly brought me to tears. I can’t wear my blue baseball hat without feeling pain.

The cause of the hideous and horribly painful lump on this writer’s noggin? It came from a sharp-ass rock in a dark-ass cave.

A lava cave, to be precise.

And despite the injury, I encourage everyone to go check out the lava caves in central and eastern Oregon for themselves. Just try not to be an idiot and get hurt yourself hurt, okay?

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Land Use

More than 3 million acres of farmland in the country is ready to be broken again this season, freed up from contracts from the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a little-known farm program that has large implications for land-use in the West and Midwest.

Roxana Hegeman of the Associated Press details the changes afoot with the program in a story today. The basics are these: CRP was created in 1985 in the thick of the farm crisis. The program pays landowners to take their land out of production and let it “rest” in native grasses for a specified period of time. Contracts range from 10-20 years. In September of this year, 33.47 million acres were enrolled in the program. But, the 2008 Farm Bill, passed last fall, capped the total acreage at 32 million, so as contracts expire, more and more land is coming out of CRP.

According to Hegeman’s story, more than 3.4 million acres were taken out of the program in September—most of them in Texas, Colorado and Kansas, but “hundreds of thousands” of acres are also going back into production in Montana and the Dakotas. In September of 2008, more than 2 million acres were taken out of CRP nationwide compared to September the previous year.

The USDA has boasted CRP as the largest private-public conservation effort in the country and indeed, studies from the agency show great benefits to water, erosion and habitat since its introduction. But, in the last five years it has come under fire for a number of things, the largest being the criticism that it takes farmers off of the land and thus contributes to the depopulation of rural America. It’s also been panned for being a “retirement plan” for farmers, driving up land prices by making cropland attractive to amenity ranch buyers who are looking for places to hunt and fish while getting income from the land. 

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Western Book Roundup

As I’ve mentioned on a couple of occasions over the years I’ve written the Roundup, when I’m not reading other people’s books, I’m trying to write my own, and after many, many years of effort, I have some good news: my first novel, The Ringer, will be published by The Permanent Press in 2011.  I am delighted about it.  Now I just need to edit the book and figure out how to convince people to read it.  (Beg?  Bribe?  Cajole?) Check out my new website for more information.

• The winners of the Utah and Oregon Book Awards were announced recently.  In Utah, the winners included David McGlynn in fiction for The End of the Straight and Narrow, Stephen Trimble in nonfiction for Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America, and in the poetry category, Craig Arnold won the award posthumously for his collection Made Flesh.  Ben Fulton of the Salt Lake Tribune wrote in greater detail about all the winners.

Also in the Roundup: Oregon Book Award winners, events at the Center of the American West, and Annie Proulx donates her papers to the New York Public Library.

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The Idaho Group Blog

With slow but steady improvement in the economy’s vital signs, two questions are gnawing at analysts’ brain pans.  First, is this a sustainable recovery with the power to fuel substantial job growth?  Second, what will happen when the “double bubble” ruptures and some $1.7 trillion in commercial real estate notes come due over the next few years?

Most economic prognosticators portend a sluggish recovery with continued job losses throughout 2010.  New job growth will be slow, they say.  Too many businesses are changing fast or forever gone, like GM’s Saturn Division.  We can’t expect the same jobs to reappear and be filled by the same folks who were laid off.  Plus, globalization and the Internet have changed the game.  Look for new jobs to develop in health care, education, government and within new or fast-changing industries.

As for the double bubble effect, commercial real estate values are down about 35 percent since the peak in 2007, according to Moody’s.  Unlike residential mortgages, commercial loans are much shorter term—usually five to 10 years.  The first $300 billion in commercial-backed securities will come due in 2010.  Obviously, many businesses are on their knees due to the slowdown.  So there is a shortage of cash to payoff real estate loans, especially where property values have fallen far below contract values, which would cause buyers to bring even more cash to the closing table to accomplish a refinancing.  Meantime, lenders have locked down their underwriting guidelines and all but stopped making commercial loans, despite claims that they are open for business.

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