New West Feature
Is Utah’s Energy Office Designed to Oppose Federal Drilling Rules?
After Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Bureau of Land Management chief Bob Abbey announced in December that much untrammeled public land across the West may soon receive the new “Wild Lands” designation, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert warned Congress in March that the designation will cost Utah billions, while others in the GOP called the move a “land grab” that sent “shockwaves” across the West.
The announcement provoked Utah state lawmakers and the state’s oil and gas industry, whose temper was still simmering after Salazar rescinded 77 oil and gas leases around eastern Utah national parks in 2009. It was when those leases were being sold that activist Tim DeCristopher staged his famous protest, for which he was recently convicted and faces prison time.
[more]Guest Column
BLM Wild Lands Policy Deserves Praise
If a misleading statement is repeated often enough, some people will begin to believe it. That appears to be the strategy of those working to overturn the Bureau of Land Management “wild lands” policy that was introduced in December by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.
Beyond the misleading rhetoric are some hard facts: The BLM wild lands policy assures that the agency will follow federal law. It requires public involvement while creating opportunities to conserve prime fish and wildlife habitat. It offers a common-sense resolution to the uncertainties currently surrounding management of valuable public lands. The policy’s future remains uncertain, however. Hunters and anglers need support from western U.S. senators and representatives to uphold and defend this important conservation tool.
New West Feature
BLM Hopes to Increase Wild Horse Birth Control
With the estimated 38,400 wild horses reproducing faster than the BLM can remove them, the BLM is looking to quadruple the use of another option it’s been using since 2004: the fertility control drug PZP.
A horse sperm has proteins that fit protein receptors on a horse egg. PZP is made up of sperm proteins, but from a pig. Once the vaccine is injected into a horse the horse’s body will create antibodies, which will attack the pig protein, said Jay Kirkpatrick, director of the Science and Conservation Center at ZooMontana in Billings, Montana. Those same antibodies will attach to the sperm receptors on the horse egg and cause them to change so they can no longer receive the proteins from the horse sperm. The Science and Conservation center is one of the largest producers and distributors of the PZP vaccine.
After the mares are injected with the $24 PZP pellet they become infertile for 22 months, but in order to apply the fertility drug, the horses still have to be corralled by a helicopter.
[more]NEW WEST FEATURE
After Conviction in Utah, DeChristopher Bemoans ‘One-Click Activism’
When Tim DeChristopher stepped out from the federal courthouse after hearing the guilty verdict against him, he walked among the crowd of supporters who had rallied around him since before his trial began. He raised his fist in the air, and they raised theirs.
They had just heard the news: The Salt Lake City jury found the climate activist guilty on two counts after he admittedly sought to disrupt a controversial oil and gas auction by posing as a bidder.
“Many before me have gone to jail for justice,” he told the crowd, “and if we are going to achieve our vision, many after me will have to join me as well.”
“I will,” someone in the crowd shouted.
It’s still not known how long DeChristopher will spend in jail. The charges carry a 10-year maximum. His sentencing is set for June 23. But while DeChristopher sits behind bars, he imagines a movement of civil disobedience rising, made of citizen activists like him willing to risk jail time.
[more]New West Feature
Economists: Smarter Water Use by Farmers Key to Solving Southwest Water Woes
The future of water supplies in the Southwest – Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah – has been under close scrutiny by scientists, economists and policymakers. Already, the amount of water available each year from rain and snowfall is less than what is being used by farmers and homeowners in these states, with the deficit made up by pumping groundwater from underground sources.
Rising temperatures in future – a result of climate change – are predicted to put further stress on water reserves. As a new report, “The Last Drop: Climate Change and the Southwest Water Crisis,” by economists Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth Stanton from the Stockholm Environment Institute, bluntly states, “water demand in the Southwest will outstrip water supply in the near future.”
Water from the already strained Colorado River, which supplies 18 percent of the region’s water, and groundwater supplies, which account for 35 percent of water use, is projected to be unable to meet the needs of a growing population with increasing incomes in the next 100 years. Climate change exacerbates the problem. The researchers emphasize that “continuing the current trend in global greenhouse gas emissions will make the cost of the next century’s projected water shortage at least 25 percent higher.”
[more]New West Column
In Utah, State Guns and Campus Firearms
One thing Utah’s recent legislative sessions have made clear is that Utahns like their guns, and they like the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
That amendment, as ratified by the states, reads:
“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Sounds simple, no?
[more]Western Book Roundup
Ruth McLaughlin’s “Bound Like Grass” Wins the Montana Book Award
This year’s Montana Book Award winner is Ruth McLaughlin’s moving memoir, Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains (University of Oklahoma Press). The prize committee praised it for its “acute observation,” honesty, and beautiful writing. The committee also named four honor books published in 2010:
Everything by Kevin Canty (Nan A. Talese)
Goodbye Wifes and Daughters by Susan Resnick (University of Nebraska Press)
The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking)
Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountains by Dan Flores (University of Oklahoma Press)
The winners will be honored at the Montana Library Association conference in Billings on April 7. McLaughlin will do a victory lap at several bookstores in Montana: in Bozeman at the Country Bookshelf on March 29, in Hamilton at Chapter One Bookstore on March 30, and in Missoula at Fact and Fiction on March 31. All readings are at 7 p.m.
Also in the Roundup: Boise’s Alan Heathcock launches Volt, Benjamin Percy reads in Denver, and three Western bookstores are in the running for the Bookstore of the Year Award.
[more]New West Feature
Poll: Rockies Voters Want Stronger Economy, Environmental Protections
Voters in five Rocky Mountain states say state and federal leaders should still fund programs that protect land, air and wildlife despite budget woes, according to the results of a recent survey titled “Conservation in the West.”
Pollsters called 2,200 voters throughout Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming in late January and asked them questions to create a snapshot of how Westerners viewed conservation and environmental issues.
“Residents reject the concept that the economy and environment are in conflict,” said Walt Hecox, a professor of environmental science at Colorado College and director of their State of the Rockies project. “In this trying economic time that’s really interesting.”
[more]New West Book Review
Bierstadt Meets Bigfoot in Jonathan Evison’s “West of Here”
Deep into West of Here, Jonathan Evison’s entertaining, expansive novel of Western American settlement and its aftermath, a contemporary parolee named Timmon Tillman finds himself “forced to concede that his fate was inextricably linked in the most arbitrary ways to things and people and events he’d never given a thought to.” This idea serves as a sort of a structural thesis statement for the book, whose action jumps between the late nineteenth century beginnings of Port Bonita, a fictional town on the Pacific coast of Washington state, and the down-on-their-luck residents of the town in 2006, many of them descendents of the early settlers. The ties between the two sets of characters start out loose and gradually tighten as Evison expertly weaves an array of seemingly disconnected plot threads into a panoramic tapestry.
Jonathan Evison will discuss West of Here at the Tattered Cover (Colfax) on February 28 (7:30 p.m.), at the Boulder Book Store on March 1 (7:30 p.m.), at The King’s English in Salt Lake on March 3, and at several events throughout Washington and Oregon this spring.
[more]NEW WEST FEATURE
Activist Heads to Trial for Disrupting Utah Gas Auction
Last Wednesday, Tim DeChristopher picked up a protest sign and stood with fellow activists in front of an energy company’s Salt Lake City headquarters, part of a demonstration against coal mining called by his group Peaceful Uprising.
On Monday, many of the same protesters will be on the street again, this time in front of a federal courthouse. DeChristopher will be inside listening as government prosecutors open their case against him. The four-day jury trial that could send DeChristopher to federal prison for 10 years for his efforts to derail an auction of natural gas leases close to treasured Utah landscapes and national parks.
[more]