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My Page: David Frey

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‘EXTINCTION WHILE WE WATCH’

Grizzlies are one of the most iconic of the endangered species that have all but vanished from the American West. Efforts to bring them back, though, have been dogged by their reputation for eating humans, a trait that has made them even less popular than wolves as government biologists have fought to help the species regain some of its lost ground.

Even hikers, who tend to be among the most conservation-minded among forest users, have balked at the idea of sharing more hiking trails with more grizzlies.

The grizzly arguably has been affected more by the Bush administration’s war on the environment than any other forest dweller. It was Interior Secretary Gale Norton who scuttled plans to boost the bear population in the Bitterroots, effectively ending augmentation plans anywhere else. But the contention over grizzlies, and the collisions between science and politics goes back long before that.

Author David Knibb tells the tale in his book Grizzly Wars: The Public Fight Over the Great Bear. Plenty of other species have suffered at the hands of human expansion across the continent. Some have disappeared altogether. Few, though, spark the imagination, or for some, the hatred, that the grizzly does. [more]

CONFIRMED

After a dust-up raised by Sen. John McCain, the Senate has confirmed Bob Abbey as head of the Bureau of Land Management. [more]

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

The latest salvo against the nation’s agricultural-industrial complex is on the big screen.

Food, Inc., a documentary by filmmaker Robert Kenner, is a forceful indictment of concentrated cattle ghettos, squalid chicken factories and cornfield deserts. At the film’s core is this thesis: the way we eat has changed more in the past 50 years than in the previous 10,000, and not for the better.

Sure, our shopping cart loads are getting cheaper, but our health, the environment, the animals and the people who handle them pay the price, Kenner argues.

“We spend less of our paycheck on our food than anytime, but it comes at a heavy cost,” Kenner told a crowd at the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Ideas Festival, after a screening of the film. [more]

GOP BLUES

For the first time in a century, the mountain West has more Democratic senators, and more Democratic congress members, than Republicans.

That’s part of a shift across the region and the nation, say a pair of Stanford University professors, that has the Republican Party in crisis.

“There is no silver bullet for Republicans,” says Doug Rivers, professor of political science at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. “For the short-run, the news is pretty bad.” [more]

FRACKING FRACAS

Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., made headlines last month when she introduced legislation to regulate chemicals used in a part of the gas-drilling process called hydraulic fracturing. “Fracking” pumps a brew of chemicals into the ground to help the gas flow and open up gas plays once considered too tough to drill. These chemicals were regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act until the 2005 Energy Bill exempted them. DeGette wants that exemption taken away.

The energy industry has balked, though, saying the chemicals are safe and further regulation would be both costly and unnecessary. Environmentalists say the chemicals could contaminate groundwater and may have already poisoned people who were exposed to them.

DeGette has introduced similar legislation before, but it never caught the attention of the energy industry as much as this time. An Obama White House and a Democratic Congress -- now filibuster-proof -- has boosted its chances. New gas plays in places like New York and Pennsylvania have raised the profile.

But DeGette’s legislation probably won’t see a vote this year, either. She tells New West that fracking will see more studies before it sees more regulation. [more]

gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day

The Interior Department released maps on Tuesday detailing vast stretches of public land in the West that could be opened to utility-scale solar development.

The so-called Solar Energy Study Areas make up 670,000 acres in Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and California.

The proposed areas focus on lands considered to have excellent solar access and manageable slopes, with roads and transmission lines or corridors nearby, and with at least 2,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land. Sensitive areas, wilderness areas and other lands with high-conservation values were ruled out. [more]

WESTERN BOOK ROUNDUP

Author Luis Alberto Urrea doesn’t usually make the list of Western writers. Lately he’s been living in Chicago, after all. But after a teaching stint at the University of Colorado in the 1990s, he says, he still has his stuff in a Boulder storage unit, and he’s afraid to move it, lest it giving up on his dream of living in the mountains.

“As long as my junk is on the Front Range, somehow I’ll find a way back there,” he told the crowd at the Aspen Writers’ Foundation’s Summer Words literary seminar.

Urrea tends to be considered a border writer, maybe a Latino author. His works often straddle the U.S.-Mexico border. But those lonesome deserts are the West. [more]

ASPEN JACKSON

Add this to the list of Michael Jackson memories, and to the ongoing struggle to understand the enigmatic man behind the sequins and dark glasses.

You can’t claim celebrity status without ending up in Aspen sometime. I think it’s written in the celebrity union rules somewhere. The King of Pop was no different.

Aspen should have been a good place for Jackson. Locals have a famously low-key approach to the A-listers who haunt the slopes and the shops. Paparazzi have become a phenomenon, but they’re still rare.

For the famously reclusive Jackson, this should have been the perfect Neverland to get away from Neverland Ranch. But Jackson not only managed to get himself noticed. He nearly got himself arrested.

Why he thought it would be a good idea to go shopping in the Glenwood Springs Wal-Mart wearing a ski mask is a mystery. But there are many mysteries behind Michael Jackson.

[more]

WESTERN BOOK ROUNDUP

This is what author Luis Alberto Urrea has to say about the role played by a sense of place in his books, which tend to hopscotch back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I firmly believe there is no ‘them.’ There is only ‘us.’ I also believe that place is not out there. It’s right here.”

Urrea was speaking on Monday at the Aspen Writers’ Foundation’s Aspen Summer Words literary festival. He is among a group of writers from around the planet gathered for the festival, with a theme this year of “World of Words.”

Among the others: Ishmael Beah, of Sierra Leone, author of the bestselling A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and Colum McCann, who launches his newest novel, Let the Great World Spin today at the festival. (It's Amazon's book of the month for June.)

Monday’s events also included the 18th annual Colorado Book Awards. It should come as no surprise that David Wroblewski won the award for fiction for his breakaway success, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

“There’s a connection between Edgar’s story and the Aspen Summer Words program,” Wroblewski says. It was the last place Wroblewski workshopped the novel, back in 2005.

[more]

'A VERY BIG PLAY'

Oil shale has a rocky past in the West and an uncertain future, but the sheer amount of resources available, and dwindling supplies of world oil, could make it a crucial resource.

That’s the conclusion of a report by the University of Colorado’s Center for the American West, which found “serious and significant” environmental challenges related to extracting the fuel, balanced against the “world class proportions” of oil shale believed to be in the ground.

“As the world moves toward a renewable energy future, oil shale may well be the end game of the Fossil Fuel Age,” write authors Patty Limerick, the center’s director, and Jason Hanson, a member of its research faculty. “But it is a very big play.” [more]

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