New West Blog News

Bend visitor claims to be hit by minivan

After being struck by the large motorized vehicle, Gerad Byrne felt as though he was living in southern Florida.

“There’s some pain, yeah,” he said Wednesday morning, just several hours after being hit by a minivan on the streets of Bend.

Byrne, an Irishman presently living in Central Oregon, was walking Wednesday morning near the intersection of Lava Street and Franklin Avenue when the incident occurred. According to Byrne, a turquoise-colored minivan driven by a woman with black hair and who had a crazed looked in her eye struck him while he attempted to cross the street.  Oddly enough, the event occurred approximately 48 hours after Bend was named the second friendliest city for pedestrians in Oregon.

“It happened so quick, ya know,” Byrne said of being hit by the vehicle.

News Nugget

Once hailed as the Utah version of the posh Yellowstone Club, the Elk Meadows development near Beaver has followed a similar fate and is now on the auction block.

As the Salt Lake Tribune reported earlier this week, the development near Beaver, which was supposed to have all the amenities of the high-end resort market of earlier this decade: Jack Nicklaus golf course, private ski runs and extravagant second homes, was once worth $3.5 billion, but is now in an online auction with a suggested value of $5.15 million. But, the starting bid is $1 million. As Jodi Peterson notes on the High Country News Goat blog, (HCN, by the way, did a good story on the resort in 2008, which you can read here) in May, the Yellowstone Club was sold for $115 million.

The original developers, the Mount Holly Partners, filed for bankruptcy this summer, but in the face of objections from one of the resort’s investors, MHU Holdings of New York City, the bankruptcy was rejected and Mount Holly turned the property over in foreclosure proceedings.

public transit

Public transit, such as Boise’s proposed streetcar, is bad for the economy and bad for the environment. Just ask Randal O’Toole, who works on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues at the Cato Institute, and who spoke in Boise today about public transit, particularly in Portland.

By the way, O’Toole also believes that urban planners caused the recession, that they’re using social engineering to try to turn the U.S. Communist, and that all roads should be privately owned.

Western Book Roundup

Economic conditions and their implications for the book industry continue to be dire, and yet I have mostly good news to report this week.

• First, several prestigious literary magazines across the nation are facing budget cuts or conversion to online-only publication, including the New England Review, TriQuarterly, and The Southern Review, but in Boise, according to Idaho Review editor Mitch Wieland in an interview with Boise Weekly, “While other universities are cutting their budgets for their literary magazines, the administration here at [Boise State] has actually increased our funding in support of what we do.”

Wieland spoke to Bill English of Boise Weekly last month on the occasion of the publication of The Idaho Review‘s tenth anniversary issue.  It didn’t take long for The Idaho Review to vault into the top tier of literary magazines, with its stories and essays regularly winning national awards.  Writer and Boise State teacher Alan Heathcock told the Boise Weekly:

“The success of The Idaho Review is all Mitch Wieland.  Every journal in the country is writing letters to big name writers, asking them to send work. Mitch has some special charm that when he asks Rick Bass, William Kittredge or Ann Beattie, they not only send work, but they send great work. Ten years ago, Boise State didn’t even have a writing program, and now is known nationwide largely because of the reach and reputation of The Idaho Review.”

• My second bit of good news: Bill Husted, gossip columnist for the Denver Post, reported Sunday, “HBO is developing a movie based on Denver author Steve Knopper’s book Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.”

Also in the Roundup: How the boxer Rocky inspires writer Benjamin Percy, a vintage Cormac McCarthy ad in Dwight Garner’s Read Me, and how books by women were left off a key best-of-the-year book list.

Plant One on Us

Camelina isn’t a household word. Neither is biofuel. But the two words combined add up to an eco-friendly, Montana-grown commodity that can help feed livestock and ease the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Camelina sativa, a sleeper oilseed crop, is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, the heart-healthy nutrients that many humans these days ingest via fish oil supplements. Camelina also produces relatively low-cost biofuel while requiring less use of fossil-fuel-laden fertilizers and toxic herbicides, supporters say.

With that as a backdrop, here’s the news: the Food and Drug Administration has decided to approve camelina concentrations of up to 10 percent in cattle feed. And Montana growers are celebrating.

News Nugget

The New York Times has a fascinating piece this week exploring dwindling plant species and a new idea that could save them—or turn them invasive.

From Anne Raver reports that the Chicago Botanic Garden is launching a new program to collect seeds from 1,500 prairie species by 2010 in Midwest, West, Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin area. The point, Raver reports, is to save species by bringing them to areas that might better suit them in a changing climate.

Kayri Havens, the botanic garden’s director of plant science and conservation puts it this way in the story: “We recognize that climate change is likely to be very rapid and that seeds only disperse a few hundred yards, half a mile at most, naturally. They’ll need our help if we want to keep those species alive.”

It’s not a new idea—in fact, the BLM has since 2001 been collecting seeds from native plants across the United States as part of it’s Seeds of Success program.

But, the notion has become a controversial one, critics saying so-called “assisted migration” can be costly and could spread invasive species in place they weren’t meant to grow.

The whole story is here—it’s worth a read.

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.

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.

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?

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.