New West Network

My Page: Courtney Lowery

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.

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. 

Election '09

The elections that attracted national attention Tuesday were all on the East Coast, with New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine (suddenly burdened by his previous job as head of Goldman Sachs) going down to defeat and conservative Republican activists like Sarah Palin failing in their effort to override the local party and elect a fellow-traveler to an open Congressional seat in upstate New York. Unsurprisingly, voters across the country were worried about the economy, not too keen on incumbent office-holders, and wary about measures that might cost them money.

In Colorado, open space and marijuana were the issues of the night, in Boise, the streetcar desire played a role in the elections and in Montana, the liberal bastion that is Missoula finally has a liberal city council.

Here’s a quick and dirty roundup of highlights from election night: 

Photo Gallery

As the sun began to set, there were as many photographers as ghosts ready to march. Slowly skeletons, ghouls, drummers, dancers, and dressed up dogs emerged on Missoula’s Higgins Ave. to celebrate Missoula’s Festival of the Dead. As the sunset turned to twilight and twilight turned to dusk, the revelers paraded down Higgins Avenue in a sea of light, color, motion and sound.

Every year a pack of photojournalists from the university marches in and out of the parade in search of photographs that capture the spirit of the festival. They seek moments of celebration and remembrance. They put to work what they have learned about lighting and journalism in the real world classroom. 

We graciously thank the participants who accepted our camera lens and our bright flashes as our students learned how to capture the spirit, light and emotion of the rich parade celebrating the spirits of the dead.

News Nuggets

Strange things come in threes and this week, three animal stories in Montana caught my eye, each of them getting progressively weirder. 

1. Last week, the Great Falls Tribune reported that a grizzly bear was found along the Rocky Mountain Front shot, with all its claws missing. The scary part is that it was the second bear to meet such a fate.

2.  The Daily Interlake reported over the weekend on an albino black bear near Olney that state wildlife officials were able to capture and relocate to Glacier National Park, where they thought the bear might be safer during hunting season. Albino bears are rare, although one official said they have seen a few in the last 10 years.

3. Finally, the strangest: A downed power line near Eureka in Northwestern Montana is being blamed for the deaths of at least 12 animals. The remains found at the site of the power line included five whitetail deer, four black bears, two wolves, one coyote and a turkey vulture. Read Jim Mann’s piece here, also in the Daily Inter Lake on what created the “perfect storm” for all the electrocutions. Very sad.

News Nugget

A new study shows that sage grouse, up for Endangered Species listing in February, will face even bigger population declines in the Mountain West if energy development progresses as Bureau of Land Management expects it to.

The three year study, published earlier this month in the peer-reviewed PLoS One science journal as well as here on WyoFile.com, warns that energy development plans on BLM land in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Montana and North and South Dakota could lead to a 7-19 percent loss of population for the bird.

The study’s authors, which include The Nature Conservancy in Lander, Wyoming, the National Audubon Society in Laramie, Wyoming and the University of Montana’s Wildlife Biology Program are clear about the goal of the research: To help decision makers craft a better oil and gas development pattern that would shift exploration to less sensitive grouse habitat. If done right, the authors say, oil and gas development could keep the sage grouse safe and off the ESA list.

One of the co-authors, David Naugle, a wildlife landscape ecologist at the University of Montana, tells the New York Times: “The answer to energy development in the West is not ‘no,’ but rather ‘where.’ I think our nation’s energy independence is paramount. Thus, the way we designed this study was to be helpful.”

Scott Streater’s piece in the Times’ Greenwire blog does a good job of summing up the report here. And, you can read the full report here.

News Nugget

According to a new report out this week from the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, fewer Americans believe that world temperatures are warming and fewer and fewer see climate change as a very serious problem.

Of the 1,500 adults polled, 35 percent said global warming is a serious concern, down from 44 percent in April of 2008. And, 57 percent said they think there is solid evidence that the earth’s average temperature is on the rise. That is down from 71 percent in April of 2008.

Respondents in the Mountain West have had the biggest change in attitude, according to the poll. In this year’s poll, 44 percent said they believe the earth is warming. In 2008, that number was 77 percent. That’s a 31 percent drop. The region with the next biggest change was the Great Lakes region, which saw a 20 percent drop.

The Mountain West also had the biggest drop in the the concern over climate change. In 2008, 44 percent of regional respondents said climate change is very serious problem. Today, that number is 26 percent—down 18 percent. Both the West and the Great Lakes region also saw the biggest declines in the percentage of respondents who believe global warming is caused by humans.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has enjoyed a somewhat on-again-off-again relationship with those advocating for sustainable agriculture and food system reform since his appointment late last year and predictably, any mention of biotechnology is what changes those dynamics. So far this month, Vilsack has hit two rocky patches with the sustainable ag community.

First, and it’s not really about him, but more about the department itself, is the appointment of Roger Beachy, who comes from the Missouri-based Danforth Plant Science Center, as the head of the newly formed National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which replaces the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES). Ag and GMO-giant Monsanto has given funding to the Danforth Plant Science Center, a red-flag for the sustainable ag community. As Paula Crossfield writes at Grist, “The re-branding of CSREES worries sustainable food advocates who fear U.S. research priorities could shift with the private sector’s coaxing further towards a more biotechnology-oriented focus in an attempt to end world hunger, even though more viable solutions to hunger—a problem of distribution and not yield—exist on the ground that are both cost-effective and ready to implement now in the developing world.”

That worry was only heightened then, by Vilsack’s comments to the Community Food Security Coalition conference in Iowa this week. First, Vilsack got a standing ovation for his comments on supporting local food but when one audience member (Jeffrey Smith, an anti-GMO activist, who writes about the exchange here on the Huffington Post) asked him about his stance on biotechnology, he didn’t quite win over the crowd. From all accounts, it seems he played it well, saying he is essentially all ears when it comes to the criticisms of GMO, but then he did mention the hunger argument, saying, according to Dan Mitchell of Big Money’s The Daily Bread blog: “I’m telling you what people are telling me"—that genetic modification is necessary to feed the world. That alone elicited boos and hisses from the crowd.

Guest Column

There is increasing interest in resolving multiple-use conflicts through place-based (national forest-specific) legislation. Throughout the West, divergent interests are negotiating how they would like particular forests to be managed. Many of these proposals include provisions related to wilderness designation, economic development, forest restoration and funding mechanisms, among others. But unlike more typical collaborative efforts, some groups are seeking codification of their agreements.

Numerous factors have precipitated this interest in going to Washington in search of legislation, including perceptions of agency gridlock, unresolved roadless and wilderness issues, and the disarray that now characterizes forest planning.

Nowhere is the place-based approach more apparent than in Montana. [more]

News Bite: The New West Blog

Especially after reading the this gruesome story in this weekend’s New York Times about E. Coli and the failings of the inspection process in mass-produced ground beef, this piece from Douglas Brown in the Denver Post, about a different way of getting beef from pasture to plate, is timely.

The Times piece details an investigation into hamburger in the U.S., which came to this conclusion: “Neither the system meant to make the meat safe, nor the meat itself, is what consumers have been led to believe.” It’s a story of how our food system has made meat, particularly cheap meat, dangerous.

By comparison, the Post piece shows what happens when meat is produced, processed and sold on a smaller, regional scale.  Brown tracks an organic grass-fed steer from a ranch on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation to the meat section of the Whole Foods store in Boulder, Colorado, a journey that illuminates and educates on food safety, local food and organic agriculture.

But, as Brown points out in the story, it’s also about more than just food and ag. “The journey from calf to brisket, for these cattle, captures within it a sweep of issues and notions about the West, about agribusiness, even about philosophy and ethics.”