My Page: David Frey
NEW WEST FEATURE
In Colorado, Leaders Seek Common Ground on Wild Lands
Much of western Colorado’s rural Garfield County is public land. Forest Service land mostly makes up the higher elevations. Bureau of Land Management land lies below. It’s a Republican-leaning county whose leaders bristled when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a new “wild lands” policy to protect remote BLM landscapes.
Neighboring Pitkin County, home to the slopes of Aspen, has less BLM land, is heavily Democratic and supports the new wild lands proposal.
Their differences echo across the West. Western legislators, mostly Republican, have come out against the measure. Environmental groups and some outfitters and outdoor recreation groups have supported it.
In Colorado, county commissioners from across the state are trying to find a middle ground that could be adopted across the country.
[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
Report Warns Western Colorado Gas Drilling Could Sicken Neighbors
Residents of Battlement Mesa, a sprawling housing development in western Colorado, are used to seeing the golf course from their windows, not gas rigs. But when an energy company announced plans to start drilling inside the subdivision, residents became concerned not just about the noise and the traffic, but the health effects of air and water pollution.
“I can understand gas drilling,” says Bob Arrington, a retired engineer and former bed-and-breakfast owner who bought a home in Battlement Mesa three years ago, when gas drilling amid the residential development was the farthest thing from his mind. “But when they go into urban areas, I think they have a much higher obligation to mitigate and protect the health of people than when they’re operating out in the boondocks.”
He and other neighbors asked Garfield County to fund a heath impact assessment to see if any health harms might come from the drilling operations. They received a blunt answer. Researchers found air emissions from natural gas operations will probably make some residents sick.
[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]NEW WEST FEATURE
Protecting Western Forests from Global Warming a ‘Moral Issue,’ Gore says
Seen from above, the mountains of central Colorado are a snow-covered mosaic of meadows, aspens and lodgepole pines. Some of those pines are green, their branches holding new-fallen snow. Others are red fading to brown – the telltale signs of trees killed by an epidemic of bark beetles that have wiped out millions of acres across the West.
Scientists say those trees are also a clear indication of global warming, one of several indelible marks a warming planet has left on the West.
“We have beautiful forests. We have to protect them,” said Al Gore, the former vice president who has become a climate change crusader.
Gore appeared Friday at the symposium Forests at Risk: Climate Change & the Future of the American West. The conference was hosted by For the Forest, a local group that formed after residents became concerned about the spread of pine beetles into the mountains that surround the ski town, but whose focus has widened as scientists increasingly pointed to a link between beetles and a warming globe.
[more]NEW WEST FEATURE
Bill Aims to Boost Ski Areas’ Off-Season
A bipartisan team of legislators is putting forward a bill intended to make it easier for ski resorts to get permission for non-ski activities on Forest Service land.
Touted as a job-boosting measure and a way to improve year-round economies at ski resorts, the legislation is aimed particularly at summertime activities. On-mountain activities slow down in the summer, but ski areas are increasingly looking to summer recreation, like hiking, mountain biking and mountain boarding, to bring visitors during warm-weather months.
“You know that the last snowflake doesn’t signal the end of outdoor recreation,” said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., the lead sponsor of the legislation. “Our ski areas shouldn’t have to close shop once the snow stops either.”
[more]NEW WEST FEATURE
Artificial Flooding May Help Grand Canyon
When Glen Canyon Dam blocked the natural flow of the Colorado River to create Lake Powell, it unleashed a torrent of effects downstream, including in the Grand Canyon, where the once-muddy river became a blue waterway where native plants and animals struggled to survive.
After 15 years of experimenting with artificial releases meant to mimic historic floods, scientists say periodic high flows can help rebuild the sandbars that provide habitat for native fish and campsites for rafters. But they say it’s unclear how long the effects will last and if they can survive outside the drought conditions that have gripped the West.
And they say the artificial flooding will never bring the river back to the way it used to be.
“There’s really no way we can expect to have a pre-dam landscape by implementing high flows,” said Paul Grams, a hydrologist with the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center and a co-author of a report released Tuesday that examined the findings of three experiments of high flows from the Glen Canyon Dam stretching back to 1996.
[more]NEW WEST FEATURE
Al Gore to Headline Seminar on Climate Change and the West
When Aspen, Colo. resident John Bennett flew across Colorado after the devastating pine beetle infestation had taken effect, he was shocked by what he saw.
“I had a very strong sense of flying over a cemetery. A vast graveyard,” he said.
Entire pine forests had turned brown and died as the beetle epidemic spread, and the death toll of trees continues to rise, not just across Colorado, but across a swath of forest from Canada to the Mexican border.
Forests across the West are seeing a confluence of factors killing off trees in numbers never before seen in human history. Various beetles are attacking weakened pines, spruce and pinons. Wildfires have reached explosive proportions. Aspens, the iconic tree of the west, are falling ill and dying in massive numbers. No single cause is behind all of them, but scientists believe climate change is one factor they all have in common.
For the first time ever, a group of scientists and land managers will come together in Aspen in February to discuss the plight of Western forests and the role climate change is playing in it.
[more]NEW WEST FILM
In ‘I AM,’ Tom Shadyac Seeks Connection With the Audience - and the World
Tom Shadyac was a fabulously successful filmmaker whose movies like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Liar Liar and The Nutty Professor were blockbuster hits. But after a mountain bike accident nearly took his life, Shadyac set out to make a different kind of film, asking two basic questions: what is wrong with the world and how can we fix it? A frequent visitor to Telluride, Shadyac premiered his independent documentary I AM at Telluride MountainFilm last summer to audience acclaim. After three Colorado screenings this week, it begins a wider national release in February.
Look for I AM Tuesday at the University of Denver, Wednesday at Colorado State University and Thursday at Pine Creek High School in Colorado Springs.
[more]BOOK REVIEW
‘Yellow Dirt’ Explores Toxic Legacy on Navajoland
Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed
By Judy Pasternak
317 pages, Free Press, 2010
The deserts of the American West were about as far-removed from the battlefields of World War II as any place could be, but they played a key role in the war, and in shaping the atomic age that followed.
The first nuclear mushroom cloud rose over the Trinity bombsite in New Mexico. The uranium used for the nuclear bombs was processed in Colorado and Utah. Some of the ore that provided the uranium came from Utah and New Mexico, particularly the Navajo Reservation. The Manhattan Project may have been based in New York, but its work was carried out in the West.
Navajos famously provided their language for the war cause, their code talkers turning their mother tongue into a code undecipherable by the Axis. But the Navajos who remained at home working in the uranium mines also became unexpected war victims, beginning a toxic legacy that has plagued the tribe ever since.
In the annals of the Cold War, the Navajos are the forgotten victims, but they paid a heavy price for the nuclear escalation that brought the world’s superpowers to the brink of mutual annihilation.
In her book Yellow Dirt, former Los Angeles Times reporter Judy Pasternak presents the horrific story of Navajos and the uranium mines that were bored into the earth beneath their mesas and buttes – a landscape considered sacred to them. It is a story of environmental destruction, and yet another tale of betrayal of American Indians. It’s a heartbreaking story, and Pasternak tells it masterfully.
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