Wyoming News

Let There Be Dark

The American Medical Association this month passed a resolution that recognizes a host of problems with light pollution, including health issues -- such as breast cancer -- that are "associated with human eye exposure to light at night."

The AMA resolution (view it in full here) explains that the increasing amount of light in the world, including streetlight glare and intrusive light that "trespasses" into bedroom windows and homes, is linked to higher rates of cancer and other health woes. It harms wildlife as well, the medical group says.

As the AMA puts it: "Light trespass has been implicated in disruption of the human and animal circadian rhythm, and strongly suspected as an etiology of suppressed melatonin production, depressed immune systems, and increase in cancer rates such as breast cancers." In addition, it "disrupts nocturnal animal activity and results in diminished various animal populations’ survival and health," the group says.
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Bones of Contention

Revolution rages in Tehran and the world is transfixed by millions of Iranians demanding free speech. Laramie, Wyoming is light years away from the Islamic world, but amid charges of repression of free speech and totalitarian decisions, a revolt is gaining momentum against the University of Wyoming (UW) trustees -- and its emblematic martyr is Big Al, the Allosaurus.

Facing an $18.3 million budget shortfall, UW decided to close the school’s Geological Museum in response to the state of Wyoming’s mandated 10 percent budget cuts. The museum will close to the public July 1; its director and assistant are among the people who will lose their jobs as a result.

Big Al -- whose incredibly-preserved bones greet museum visitors -- will become a recluse. Some researchers may be able to see him, but not the public. The same goes for other museum prizes, including one of the only mounted skeletons of an Apatosaurus (or Brontosaurus, as it was formerly called).
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On the Range

At one point in my life I was very interested in studying wild sheep. I almost accepted a graduate research project at the U of Alaska to look at winter diet and behavior of Dall sheep in the Brooks Range. I wimped out when I realized that I’d be alone months at a time in a tiny cabin on the North Slope peering through a night vision scope to watch the animals in the near 24 hours of darkness of mid-winter forage in 50 below zero weather. It just didn’t sound like that much fun -- though definitely interesting. But for a number of years I read everything I could about wild sheep, and I continue to follow research and news about wild sheep to this date.

Wild bighorn sheep were once fairly common in the western United States and Canada. Some estimates suggest as many as 1-2 million wild sheep once roamed the West. By 1900, over-hunting, habitat degradation and perhaps most importantly disease transmission from domestic sheep to wild sheep had brought the bighorns down to an estimated 15,000. Today there are about 75,000 sheep in the western US and Canada.

While that is a significant growth from its low point, wild bighorn sheep populations are nowhere near their biological potential. There is no doubt in my mind that the West could easily support far more sheep were it not for one thing -- domestic livestock. [more]

Herd Horrors

A grim future is predicted for the 25,000-acre National Elk Refuge in Wyoming unless the sprawling home to elk and bison gets an infusion of new policies and resources, according to a new report from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The group ranks the wildlife sanctuary -- which has one of the largest concentrations of elk in the world -- as one of America's Ten Most Imperiled Refuges.

The refuge was established in 1912 in the wilderness south of Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks in an effort to resuscitate elk herds, which had faced mass starvation after bitterly cold winters and human encroachment, PEER notes. The results have not been good. [more]

Attention Paid

Details and relief are arriving in Libby in the wake of the the Environmental Protection Agency's decision this week to declare the town a federal public health emergency, paving the way for millions of dollars of health and cleanup funds to arrive.

The federal government has announced it will provide $6 million to Lincoln County health authorities to help Libby and Troy residents get medical care for asbestos-related illnesses such as asbestosis, a scarring of the lungs, and mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer.

Of the estimated 1,200 people in Libby who have serious asbestos-related lung problems, about 70 percent of them never worked at the mine, according to the government's criminal indictment against W.R. Grace & Co. Residents inhaled asbestos fibers during everyday activities, stirring it up when they swept the floor, jogged on the local running track, played in local ball parks, or simply did the wash -- since Grace allowed employees to go home covered in dust.

The legacy of the exposures will be felt in the community for years to come, as there is often a long latency period before illness strikes. [more]

Father's Day

Christopher Buckley didn’t start it. But his latest book, Losing Mum and Pup, codifies our generation’s complaint that we had less-than-perfect parents. Baby Boomers excelled at compiling lists of grievances. Our parents’ shortcomings have always been at the top of the charts. Blame it on Dr. Spock, but why is our generation -- we who led the charge for civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, and respect for the Third World -- so singularly close-minded and judgmental when it comes to our own parents?

Like Christopher Buckley, I grew up in awe of my father. Charles Longstreet Weltner, a Democratic Congressman and Georgia Supreme Court justice, was a world away from Buckley in terms of culture and politics and fame. Tom Brokaw described my father in Boom, his book about the Sixties, as “the local Congressman, Charles Longstreet Weltner, a scion of a prominent white family, (who) was the only Southerner to vote for the Civil Rights Act in 1964.”

Yes, he was named after Civil War General James Longstreet, blamed by some historians for losing the Battle of Gettysburg. Yes, he voted his conscience in 1964, and again when he resigned from Congress in 1966 rather than comply with a Georgia Democrat Party requirement to take a “loyalty oath” to support all other Democrat nominees on the ticket. This was the year notorious segregationist Lester Maddox was the party’s nominee for governor. Maddox was famous for two things: riding a bicycle backwards and wielding an ax handle to chase African-Americans from his "whites-only" restaurant.
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From the Missoulian

The new Chief of the U.S. Forest Service will be Tom Tidwell, the Region 1 Forest Supervisor, according to a Missoulian news story by reporter Rob Chaney.

In February 2007, the U.S. Forest Service promoted Tidwell to regional forester for the Northern Region, which includes more than 25 million acres of public land in Montana, Idaho and North Dakota. Prior to the promotion, Tidwell had been deputy regional forester in the Pacific Southwest Region.


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New West Book Review

Falconer on the Edge: A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West
by Rachel Dickinson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 220 pages, $24

In Falconer on the Edge, Rachel Dickinson gives readers an in-depth look at a subculture that many people may not be aware existed. Falconers are an intense, passionate, tight-knit group of bird-loving hunters, and they subdivide themselves according to the type of bird they fly, from those who favor hunting sage grouse with gyrfalcon-peregrine hybrids ("an überbird [with] stamina and speed and beauty") to those who fly hawks to catch squirrels and jackrabbits. The falconers Dickinson depicts remind me of a more athletic and outdoorsy version of Trekkies, with their conventions, cliques, private jargon derived from Norman French, and the way they are often misunderstood by outsiders.

Although falconry ("a loose term [that] refers to flying any kind of raptor or bird of prey") originated perhaps 3,500 years ago in the Middle East, spread through Asia and Europe, and didn't catch on in North America until the twentieth century, it seems a pastime tailor-made for the American West, as it requires a lot of open space and abundant game. With all the care and training that a bird of prey demands, not to mention the need for the falconer to be in top condition to run through fields after his bird, it might be the most labor and time-intensive variety of hunting, which is why so few practice it. Dickinson writes, "Today there are approximately forty-five hundred licensed falconers in the United States, and two to three thousand of them belong to [the North American Falconers Association]." Judging from the portraits in Dickinson's book, there are no casual falconers. [more]

Western Writers

Utah native Ron Carlson has been publishing acclaimed novels and short stories for over three decades, and in recent years he's hit a stride, with two novels, Five Skies and the new The Signal back-to-back. Carlson directed the Creative Writing program at Arizona State University for many years and three years ago became the Creative Writing program director at the University of California at Irvine. The Signal, which Carlson wrote at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, is the action-packed tale of a divorced couple who go backpacking in the Wind River Mountains and run into all sorts of trouble, including some unfriendly meth-runners who poach elk on the side. I recently spoke with Carlson about his new novel, which he started because he "wanted to stand up behind [his] goddamn pickup truck again," and about how "camping is essentially about when things go wrong."

New West: Is The Signal just an elaborate way for you to scare other potential campers off of your favorite hiking trail?

Ron Carlson: You know, it has that. I didn't mean to scare everybody.

NW: In the front of the book, you advise people, "If I was going to go into the Wind Rivers today, I would use the Bears Ears trailhead and I would go before September 10." But after reading about all the perils that Mack and Vonnie face, nobody is going to want to go on this trail.

RC: I just wanted to make sure that no one went after then, because you can run into snow.

NW: I think I'd rather run into snow than some of the things that Mack and Vonnie run into.

RC: I don't want anybody to get snowed in the way I did, and I've written about that. What I really wanted to do was have my vicarious experience and write a little love letter to the mountains, which I'm not in enough. I just got on fire for that and wrote this outdoor book. [more]

A new report on the effectiveness of thinning forests under the National Fire Plan shows that most logging occurs far from communities, thus questioning their effectiveness. Plus the majority of lands that should be treated lie not on federal lands, but private lands. The report gives new credence to critics such as myself who maintain that most fuel reduction logging operations are wasting tax dollars and causing more harm than good. [more]