Let There Be Dark
AMA Links Light Pollution to Cancer, Health Woes
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.
Bones of Contention
Beloved Dino Museum to Close its Doors, Shutting Down the Public
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).
Herd Horrors
Wyoming’s National Elk Refuge on Ten Most Imperiled List
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.
New West Book Review
Birdman: Rachel Dickinson’s “Falconer on the Edge”
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.
Western Writers
An Interview with Ron Carlson About “The Signal”
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.
New West Book Review
Lisa Jones’ “Broken: A Love Story”
Broken: A Love Story
by Lisa Jones
Scribner, 275 pages, $25
Colorado writer Lisa Jones was a freelance journalist on assignment for Smithsonian magazine when she first met Stanford Addison, a charismatic horse trainer on the Wind River Arapaho reservation near Lander, Wyoming. Addison doesn't match the typical image of a horse trainer: he is a quadriplegic who has been confined to a wheelchair for over twenty years following a car accident. Addison "gentles" horses rather than breaks them, offering instructions from outside the corral, and even working with the horses himself. And Addison is also an Arapaho healer, hosting regular sweat lodges, praying for those who ask it of him, and communicating with spirits, good and bad.
Jones began her friendship with Addison as a skeptic about the spirit world, but she never doubted his healing powers.
Spiritually adrift in mid-life, she returned frequently to the Addison ranch, where Addison served as the center of a complicated family. In Broken: A Love Story, Jones tells the remarkable tale of Stan Addison's life and work, investing it with detail that brings his world to vivid life for the reader. Through Jones' hard-earned understanding of one Northern Arapaho family, the reader is given an inside glimpse into this culture. Despite their poverty, they lavish love on one another, others taking care of children when a parent dies or leaves, and pulling together in difficult times, which are heartbreakingly frequent.
Lisa Jones will appear at the Center for The Arts in Jackson, Wyoming, on June 12 at 7 p.m.
Larry Lasich said: "I blame the proto-ancestor who started using fire. They should have seen this coming and stopped using it."