Daily Yonder Column

Powell, Wyoming, at first glance may appear to be the typical rural community that large and even some small broadband service providers avoid. The town has just over 5,000 residents in a county with a population density of four people per square mile. The last place for a fiber network, right? Wrong! Powell’s community-owned network, Powellink, is one of the great success stories in broadband.

Powell’s network broke even in 18 months and has operated profitably ever since. Two service providers, including the town’s partner, Tri-County Telecom, compete for subscribers of data, voice and video services. And most stunningly, this $5 million project put no taxpayer dollars at risk.

In 2005, constituents and businesses decided they needed better, faster broadband than incumbent providers were willing or able to deliver. Powell already had built a fiber ring around the town in 2000. The next step was to extend this ring with a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network. Powell would have been an ideal candidate to apply for a broadband stimulus grant or Google gigabit network – if either had existed at the time. Instead, Powell opted to follow a do-it-yourself path that today provides a valuable lesson for rural communities and small towns everywhere.

Powell’s method is relatively easy to describe; the devil, of course, is in the details. Every community is different and each will need to tailor the approach. Some may even reject it.  But here’s how Powellink became a reality.

New West Feature

From the back porch of Suzanne Morlock’s home along the western border of Jackson Hole, Wyo., I observed on a mid-May day how the sky, a color like office paper, illuminated winter’s final gestures: gray aspens, brown leaves in patches on the ground, matted grass, granular snow full of debris. Morlock pointed to a gap in the porch railing where snow from the roof had wiped it out, and then to the tilted fences around her berry bushes, trampled by a herd of deer that inhabit the hillside. The depressed landscape seemed to punctuate the dichotomy between humans and nature so prevalent in her artworks: In the midst of conditions designed for decay and renewal, humans strive for durability to the point that even our disposable products last indefinitely.

Morlock creates large sculptures out of found and discarded materials (some more biodegradable than others) that not only call our attention to the amount of unnecessary waste our society produces, but also question our idea of permanence. Newspapers, the most disposable of media, become durable yarns when rolled together. Audiotape, made to preserve the preciousness of its content, outlasts its usefulness in the face of new technology. And petroleum-based materials headed for the dump take the form of comfortable “everyman” clothing. Morlock became interested in repurposing trash while working on her master’s thesis at UCLA, a project that took her to the region’s landfills. “At that time, I said that every child should have to go to one of these landfills to see at a formative age what we create, what we produce,” she said.

New West Feature

Colorado’s snowiest surveyed location, Buffalo Pass, on average reaches its maximum depth on May 9 and then begins shrinking.

This year is not average.

Snowpack at the 10,500-foot pass, located north of Steamboat Springs, this year got to 202 inches but has lost little bulk. Too much new snow keeps coming. That, in turn, means the water content keeps rising. The former record of 71.1 inches was breached long ago, and as of Monday morning the new record was 79.2 inches.

Spring this year is looking over its shoulder at winter. But when the snowmelt finally begins in earnest, Colorado will have what kayakers and rafters call a big water year. The circumstances have some emergency service personnel a trifle nervous. Dam operators, worried about what will happen when the weather inevitably warms, have been draining reservoirs, confident that there’s plenty of water on the mountain slopes in replacement.

Downstream in the desert, the giant reservoirs called Powell and Mead should have higher water levels. Half of the Colorado River’s water comes from Colorado.

Public Works

When the famous photographer Margaret Bourke-White made her iconic 1936 Life magazine cover shot of the still under construction spillway at Fort Peck Dam – the very first cover of the magazine – the country had no environmental impact statements. A cost-benefit analysis? Huh, what’s that?

There was no Fish and Wildlife Service in the 1930s to assess how the massive dam across the Missouri River would impact fish or whether whole species might be endangered by drastically altering habitat. The Fort Peck Tribes weren’t consulted. The states of Montana and North Dakota had little roles beyond having their federal elected officials weigh in on the project.

In fact, Fort Peck was constructed with no Congressional authorization whatsoever. Franklin D. Roosevelt simply decided to build the dam after he was lobbied by Montana Sen. Burton K. Wheeler and others. Roosevelt could do that because the Congress had granted him, and him alone, the authority under New Deal-era relief legislation to spend billions of dollars building things and putting thousands of the unemployed back to work.

Construction began on Fort Peck late in 1933 and by 1936 more than 10,000 were laboring on the massive project in the far northeastern corner of Montana. They built a town – Fort Peck – as the administrative center of the Corps of Engineers project, but many workers preferred to set up housekeeping in haphazardly constructed shanty town with names like New Deal and Wheeler. The booze ran day and night in these places even though Montana was still legally dry. The prices were sky high but you could buy anything, including certain services in an area known as Happy Hollow. Over the course of construction at Fort Peck, it was largely finished by 1940, it is estimated that 50,000 different people were employed on the dam.

New West Feature

Naturally occurring uranium and the radioactive products it forms as it breaks down over time cannot be seen, tasted, or smelled in water. This lesson hit home for some residents in southwest Montana recently, when laboratory testing showed their well water contained high concentrations of radioactive material.

New West Feature

Astronauts who looked back on Earth from outer space for the first time quickly understood the importance of the biosphere, which biologist E.O. Wilson describes as a “razor-thin” bubble shielding the earth from the void of space. Putting people into high places has that impact – an immediate, personal, visceral realization of how nature enfolds the earth.

EcoFlight, a nonprofit aerial reconnaissance program based in Aspen, has been putting people into high places for 11 years, revealing environmental threats to a multitude of landscapes. The hope is that passengers aboard will gain a new perspective of large-scale land use issues like forest clear-cuts, beetle infestations, water pollution, strip mining, road building and gas and oil drilling.

But thanks to a new partnership, not everyone has to pay for a coveted spot, limited to four at a time, in EcoFlight founder Bruce Gordon’s single-engine Cessna.

Gordon’s “virtual tours” will soon provide links to Google Earth that he says will convey the impact of being on board. 

High Country News Feature

In my last post, I explored what appear to be conflicting views on what we today call environmental justice in Edward Abbey’s cult classic, Desert Solitaire. The book is fun to assign to my Environmental Rhetoric students because, between the lyrical descriptions of Utah wilderness and the fist-pounding Luddite rants, it’s guaranteed to provoke lively discussions, even among the usually sleepy and stealth-texting back row. The upshot of these conversations, if there is one, is that Abbey’s a tough nut to crack, and his brand of environmental consciousness resists pigeonholing.

We’re certainly not the only ones invoking the ghost of Abbey lately; Michael Branch’s recent High Country News essay memorably related an episode where he and his friends applied the question WWEAD (What Would Ed Abbey Do) to the seductive temptation of dislodging a precariously-perched hillside boulder. The virtuous greenie would “leave only footprints” and feel pretty guilty even about those. Though Abbey was green at heart, Branch implies, he wouldn’t be opposed to shaking things up a bit, “freeing” the boulder, even (perhaps especially) if it infuriated the virtuous.

Daily Yonder Feature

In November of 2004, the voters of the Montrose, Colorado, Regional Library District told us they were happy with the way we had operated the new Montrose Regional Library and gave us permission to double our property tax rate (known here as a mill levy).

They voted to raise taxes from $1.5 to $3 per $1,000 of assessed property value (1.5 mils to 3.0 mils).

Before receiving this operating money, the district had not been able to consider expanding any services to our branch libraries. But with this good news, we began to plan for expansion where we felt it was most critically needed, in Naturita.

Naturita, Colorado, is a two-hour drive from the main library in Montrose. Its local library had been housed in a facility of less than 500 square feet, so tiny that any program or service for more than six people had to be held outside. Also, the Naturita library was situated on the edge of town, out of sight and out of mind.

New West Feature

Roadless areas are not quite wilderness, but they’re not quite freely open to development either.

They’re somewhere in between, particularly in Colorado, where the fate of roadway-free, undeveloped national forest land has been rancorously contested for a decade and could soon end up with a management scheme entirely unique to the state.

On April 14, the U.S. Forest Service and the state of Colorado unveiled a final draft of a federal rule that will govern how more than 4 million acres of roadless land in Colorado’s national forests are managed. The Forest Service is asking for public feedback on the draft rule through July 14, with the feds’ final blessing expected sometime late this year or in early 2012.

If the Forest Service finalizes the rule, it would mean roadless areas in Colorado will probably get different treatment than similar roadless areas elsewhere in the country. The Colorado rule involves two different levels of roadless area protection, one keeping the land more wild than the other, while allowing some logging of trees killed by mountain pine beetles and some rights-of-way for oil, natural gas, coal and ski area development.

New West Feature

In 1989, energy activist Amory Lovins noticed a simple typo — “negawatt” for “megawatt” — in a report. That simple mistake, thought Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, captured the essence of what he believed should be done. Instead of building new power plants, he advocated using existing electrical generation more efficiently.

That idea of negawatts continues to gain purchase in the West as investor-owned utilities, which are overseen by state utility commissions, begin to bend down the growth in electrical demand even while earning profits.

Last week, for example, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission set energy-saving goals for Xcel Energy, the state’s largest provider of electricity and gas. The PUC specified that Xcel should aim to institute electrical savings equivalent to 1.14 percent of sales beginning in 2012, escalating to 1.68 percent of sales in 2020. The PUC, in its written opinion, called these targets “properly ambitious yet realistically achievable.”

The Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, an activist group, estimates that if Xcel succeeds, the savings in Colorado will shave electrical use by four billion kilowatt hours per year in 2020. That’s unlikely to close power plants, but it’s could eliminate the need to build a 575-megawatt power plant for base-load generation, says Howard Geller, the group’s founder.