My Page: David Frey
gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day
Interior Unveils Solar Hot Spots Across West
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.
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WESTERN BOOK ROUNDUP
Urrea at Home Among Western Authors
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.
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ASPEN JACKSON
Michael Jackson’s Aspen Visit Showed a Troubled Man
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.
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WESTERN BOOK ROUNDUP
‘Edgar Sawtelle’ Has Aspen Homecoming
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.
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'A VERY BIG PLAY'
Report: Oil Shale Offers Promise, Pitfalls
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.”
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NO, NOT THAT ABBEY
Obama Picks Abbey, Department Veteran, to Lead BLM
President Barack Obama plans to nominate Bob Abbey, a longtime Interior Department official, as the new head of the Bureau of Land Management.
The announcement has been welcomed by the energy industry, conservationists and recreational vehicle users, who consider Abbey an even-handed leader.
“Bob Abbey is thoughtful, even-tempered, and responsive to stakeholder concerns,” said Marc Smith, executive director of the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States.
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CLEAN AND GREEN
Report: West Leads in Clean Energy Boom
Western states are seeing some of the fastest growth in clean energy jobs, in most cases outperforming job growth in other sectors, according to a study released Wednesday by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Leading the region is Colorado, with a large and fast-growing pool of clean energy jobs. Idaho had a small number of jobs in the sector, but it had the highest growth rate in the country. Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Montana also had small but growing clean energy sectors. Utah was alone in the region in losing clean energy jobs.
“The clean energy economy is poised for explosive growth,” said Lori Grange, interim deputy director of the Pew Center on the States. “These jobs are driving economic growth and environmental sustainability at a time when America needs both.”
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WILKES WITHDRAWS
Obama’s Forest Service Pick Backs Out
Homer Lee Wilkes, President Obama’s choice to oversee the Forest Service, has withdrawn his nomination, saying it was a bad time to move his family to Washington.
“It was great for me, but when it comes to the end of the day, I had to do what’s best for my family,” Wilkes told NewWest.Net in a telephone interview on Monday afternoon.
Wilkes said because he had two sons in high school it would be a difficult time for him to move his family from their home in Mississippi.
“Had this worked for me and the timing had been right, oh yeah, I would have done it,” he said.
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COMMON GROUND
Filmmaker Ken Burns Raises Curtain on National Parks Series
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has produced beloved PBS series on deeply American themes, from the Civil War to baseball to jazz. His next project, due out this fall is The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.
Burns credits the subtitle to the great Western writer Wallace Stegner, who would have turned 100 this year. The six-part series tracks over a century of the park system, from the creation of Yellowstone in 1872 up to 1980, when the once-foreign national system was being loved to death.
Now, parks face just the opposite problem. Burns worries about declining interest in national parks, from children and their parents more plugged into iPods and Xboxes than nature. Meanwhile, the parks have been declining under years of neglect and are in need of millions in upgrades. One of the biggest problems facing national parks today, Burns says: “Money, money, money.”
We caught up with Burns at Mountainfilm in Telluride, Colo., where his new series had its world premiere.
New West: Your films have always tried to capture a quintessential Americana. How do you see the national park system fitting into that?
Ken Burns: It’s one of those great inventions of ours, like jazz and baseball.
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HOMER WHO?
Obama Stuns with Forest Service Nominee
President Barack Obama’s pick to oversee the Forest Service was a shocker. He didn’t look to a career Forest Service employee. He didn’t choose a forester or an environmental activist, either. He didn’t even pick a Westerner.
His choice of Homer Wilkes, a longtime but little-known Natural Resources Conservation Service official in Mississippi, surprised any who expected an environmental crusader charged with undoing the legacy of his predecessor, Mark Rey, a former timber lobbyist lambasted by environmentalists.
“I think it reflects the rather low priority that the Obama White House places on public lands, except in so far as they are accessible for energy production – green energy or otherwise,” says Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.
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