New West Feature

“It’s Your Experiment” is the official slogan of northern New Mexico’s Valles Caldera National Preserve, a broad volcanic valley in the heart of the Jemez Mountains near Los Alamos.

The slogan doesn’t refer to a science experiment, but to the preserve itself and its unorthodox management scheme. Congress created the preserve in 2000 to be managed by the Valles Caldera Trust, a wholly-owned government corporation with the mandate to make the national preserve financially self-sustaining by 2015.

With that goal looking increasingly unlikely, a Sen. Jeff Bingaman-led effort to end the experiment failed in December when the lame duck Congress sidelined an omnibus public lands measure that included a bill that would have transferred management of Valles Caldera from the trust to the National Park Service. The NPS manages the adjacent Bandelier National Monument and oversees many of the nation’s other national preserves.

NEW WEST GUEST COLUMN

U.S. Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack just announced that this year’s “transition” payments to counties from the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act (SRS) will again “contribute to rural communities becoming self-sustaining and prosperous.”

The Secretary stressed that these payments ($389 million) fund local roads and schools—important for communities still feeling the after-effects of the recession. They do much more.

In the West, federal spending is important, but equally so are federal public lands. How SRS payments are funded and distributed is a key factor in determining how public lands are managed, and the kinds of jobs available in rural communities.

Gas and Oil Development

Tests are conducted by trained volunteers who take the sample and ship it off to one of several labs that have been vetted by the group. “The lab must be nationally certified,” Ruggierro says. “This means that the lab must (meet) the national testing lab criteria, so they have been certified, by the Feds as well as their respective state.”

Ruggierro says the group’s goal is not litigation. But if landowners decide that’s the route they want to take, he wants their tests to stand up in court.

“We are not opposed to drilling,” he says. “We are, obviously, opposed to being poisoned.”

Testing for air and water typically runs in the $700 to $900 range per test, although other contingencies such as labor, mileage and tech fees can be thrown in – costs Shaletest hopes to help cover. Currently, the group is focusing on environmental monitoring, but they hope to be able to test livestock and people for chemicals in the future. Those tests can cost thousands of dollars and are typically not covered by insurance.

New West Essay and Book Preview

Reading the latest demographic data from the U. S. Census Bureau reminds me why I so miss the late Hal Rothman, a brilliant historian of the American West who died in 2007 from ALS. He would have loved knowing that his adopted state of Nevada—he taught at UNLV for 15 years and loved every minute of it—has experienced the largest population jump of any in the union over the last decade. 

Yet immediately after absorbing that striking data, he would have dashed off a sharply worded critique for New West or High Country News or the Las Vegas Sun that placed this boom into the larger context of the Silver State’s hostile politics, depressed economy and the yawning gap between its rich and poor. Growth for its own sake was nothing to brag about, he would have argued, an argument that is as key to his incisive study of Las Vegas, ”Neon Metropolis” (2002) as it is to his posthumously (and just) published history, The Making of Modern Nevada (2010).

The same could be said for the West in general; its boom comes with an implicit bust. The census reveals, for instance, that the region’s population continues to grow at a double-digit rate. Although the increase between 2000 and 2010 is not as steep as it has been—in 1950 the uptick was 40.4 percent, in 1970 it was 24.1 percent, and in 1990 it was 22.3 percent; and although the past decade’s rise of 13.8 percent is the lowest in a century, the figure remains impressive and troubling. 

New West Feature

With hands worn from three decades of labor, Tim Steigers slides a small metal wedge out of an axle frame and turns toward his toolbox. Opening a drawer, he aligns the chunk of old steel – once the property of Smurfit-Stone Container – among the others of various sizes.

Steigers, 54, peers inside a frame, trying to figure out what to do next. Even with decades of craft experience, this is a complex riddle. Each casting and gear removed is met with another and another, like an endless Russian nesting doll.

He’s in the middle of a large garage at the University of Montana’s College of Technology, working slowly, making every move like an experienced chess player. Meanwhile, a group of college-aged students swarm around him, attacking projects with the goal of finishing early on this Friday afternoon.

Across from Steigers, two kids bang away at their axle, trying everything and anything to crack its spell. “I think there’s a better wrench for that,” Steigers says, smiling.

He is among the oldest students in the diesel mechanics class, which also includes with five other former employees of Smurfit-Stone, the plant that closed one year ago after a half-century of operations in Frenchtown, just west of Missoula. 

New West Guest Column

It is time to give some love to the vast Sagebrush Sea that dominates the western landscape between the Sierras and the Rockies. For too long, federal conservation policy has favored “scenic” mountains, verdant forests, rushing streams, and procreant wetlands. Even the hotter, drier Sonoran and Mojave deserts enjoy more protection than shrubsteppe. Despite its size, the Sagebrush Sea remains the least known and least conserved landscape in the American West.

We need a new federal conservation vision that provides long-term protection for the Sagebrush Sea for the benefit of native flora and fauna and the people who live there. The Obama Administration should use the occasion of the recent listing decision for greater sage-grouse to designate a new system of sagebrush reserves on public land.

New West Feature

With two inches of snow on the desert at the end of a long growing season, Randy Ramsley is ready for a break.

“Harvest is over,” Ramsley said with a sense of relief. “Mostly I’m just resting from a brutal season.”

After losing his help on Mesa Farm in Caineville, Utah, this summer, the organic small farmer had to do it alone: wrangling 50 goats, milking 15 of them, baking every day, making cheese every other day, running the road-side store, delivering produce to buyers and growing the garden.

“Working 14, 16 hours a day seven days a week taught me a lot about myself, so I have to bless the experience,” Ramsley said. “I wouldn’t want to do it again.”

Here on Mesa Farm, surrounded by desolation, Randy Ramsley makes the desert bloom. Under the shadow of Luna Mesa, he produces everything from lettuce to peaches to goat cheese - all organically and without chemicals. A growing family of 50-some goats grazes the weeds in his fields and makes fertilizer for the one-acre vegetable garden, milk for cheese, and meat for the table.

New West Feature

When the Cotter Corp. shut down operations at the Schwartzwalder uranium mine in the mountains above Golden, Colo., in 1999, it was supposed to have prevented any of the radioactive ore from leaching into Ralston Creek.

The creek, which flows below the mine, feeds into the drinking water supply for Denver and its suburb of Arvada.

Earlier this year, Colorado public health officials slapped Cotter with a $55,000 fine after the uranium levels in Ralston Creek were discovered to be seven times the level considered safe for drinking water.

In an act of defiance, Cotter sued the state, claiming it had no evidence the mine was contaminating the creek.

Arvada City Manager Craig Kocian called the suit “legal and technical baloney,” and said a state plan to reclaim the creek should be adequate, but if Cotter prevails in court and doesn’t clean up the creek, Arvada’s drinking water could be threatened.

New West Feature

A month and a few days after Wyoming started requiring drillers to list the ingredients of hydraulic fracturing fluids with drill permit applications, the process is, for the most part, going smoothly.

That’s the consensus opinion of conservation groups, an industry representative and of Tom Doll, supervisor of the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

“It is working pretty well,” said Doll. “Most operators were well-prepared to comply with the new regulations.”

One hiccup in the process occurred when major drilling service companies operating in Wyoming got briefly caught between the state and their own suppliers wanting to keep ingredients a proprietary secret, said Doll. Two of the biggest service companies are Halliburton and Schlumberger.

“We’ve been doing a bit of educating,” Doll said, noting that two companies that specialize in blending fracking fluids for specific requirements are now applying for trade secret status before the commission.

From the Idaho Panhandle

Sandpoint city councilman Stephen Snedden recently held a public workshop to discuss, among other things, his “Small Spaces Initiative,” an approach to “affordable housing and inexpensive commercial spaces” in the city. [Details are included here in the packet of materials provided to council members for the meeting.]The workshop garnered the attention of most members of the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission as well as a good sampling of builders and at least one real estate sales agent, and this garrulous group suffered no shortage of ideas and opinions about the proposal.

Snedden’s original idea was to provide a group of incentives to developers who were willing to build homes or offices with a footprint of less than 1000 square feet. Such a project would be deemed a “Certified Small Space.”