New West Profile

There are two topics you don’t want to bring up with most Idaho ranchers: wolves and Jon Marvel, the white-haired, 63-year-old founder and executive director of the Western Watersheds Project.

Exactly what is it about this guy who looks more like a college professor than an environmental activist worthy of nstant, visceral, angry reactions from ranchers, that include “he’s an asshole” to “I hate that bastard” to “he’s an abusive guy” and other not-suitable-for-work quotations?

As it turns out, Marvel, a history graduate from the University of Chicago who founded WWP in 1993, is not at all mild-mannered unless it serves his purpose. In reality, he’s is an intense, combative man who does not believe in compromise. “You don’t influence change without directly taking on the people who oppose that change,” he says in a recent interview. “Collaboration simply gets you marginalized.”

He’s also a man who harbors a long-standing grudge with roots in an incident many, many years ago at his family cabin in Stanley, Idaho. “One day I found this rancher cutting across my land without permission, taking salt blocks to his stock. I told him to go around, go back the same way he came in and you know what he said? ‘Where did you come from?’ It was like he felt he was somehow entitled to use my private property as he saw fit.”

New West Series

“We had exhausted all other possibilities aside from litigation,” Borg Hendrickson said.

She was talking about the decision she and her husband, Lin Laughy, made earlier this year to join a lawsuit against the Idaho Department of Transportation (ITD) and ConocoPhillipps concerning whether permits should be issued to allow the oil company to truck mega-loads of mining equipment along pristine Highway 12 over Lolo Pass into Montana. “We had been gathering more and more information, and building a stronger and stronger sense of how wrong turning this scenic byway into an industrial corridor would be,” she said.

In Part One, Lin Laughy and his wife Borg Hendrickson described their alarm in the spring of 2010 regarding plans by the state of Idaho and oil companies to use U.S. Highway 12 through north-central Idaho to Montana as a permanent “high and wide” corridor for trucking oversized loads of mining equipment to projects in Montana and Canada. Through this spring and summer, the couple, who are longtime area residents and tourism business owners, began a people’s campaign to raise awareness of the issue. The Idaho Supreme Court is now deliberating the case. Part Two of this report chronicles the legal tussle, in which Laughy, Hendrickson and local tourism operator Peter Grubb are the plaintiffs.

Historically logged forest sites are denser and potentially more prone to severe wildfires and insect outbreaks than unlogged, fire-excluded forests and should be considered a high priority for fuel-reduction treatments, according to a new University of Montana study [PDF].

Anna Sala and Cameron Naficy, lead researchers in the study, published an article on these findings in the most recent issue of the journal “Ecological Applications.” Sala is a professor in UM’s Division of Biological Sciences, and Naficy graduated with a master’s degree from UM in 2008.

Sala and Naficy’s study compared logged, fire-excluded sites to unlogged, fire-excluded sites in forests mainly consisting of ponderosa pines. The study covered a broad region spanning the Continental Divide of the Northern Rockies, from central Montana to central Idaho.

Guest Column

This is a really complex topic. The simplest way to preserve open space is for the government, or an entity comparable thereto such as Ted Turner or Paul Allen, to buy or reserve a huge expanse of land.  Yellowstone Park, Glacier Park, the Escalante BigAss Staircase in Utah, or National Forests and Wilderness Areas.

Various wildlife habitat requirements drive a number of advocacy groups to strive to preserve other expanses of land as open space. Most environmental groups, lacking the money to buy or preserve land, try to use government regulations to preserve land and habitat.  This engenders a great deal of bitterness in many cases.

As an alternative, the the Nature Conservancy emerged as an honest broker, in parallel with but not necessarily beholden to advocacy-oriented groups, to subtly encapsulate private lands with conservation easements or outright acquisitions.  Real estate agents hate them and some enviros suspect them, but Nature Conservancy has accomplished what I think passes for miracles, over and over.

Thirty-five years ago, when I returned to Wyoming as a fresh-faced enthusiastic environmental advocate with a newly minted degree in botany, planning to protect the Plains from coal mines and power plants, I was suspicious of ranchers who shot coyotes in the morning and professed conservation in the afternoon as their cows grazed the ‘hood into moonscape.  There have been alliances between environmentalists and agriculture, but there is a lot of tension in the relationship.  All ranchers profess conservation but not all practice it.

Guest Column

Earlier this month, the Western Wood Products Association released the 2009 statistics on the overall economic performance of the 170 lumber mills in the Western United States.  Lumber production at those mills was the lowest it has been in 60 years.  Just since 2005, production has fallen by almost 50 percent, dragging total output almost 25 percent below the previous low that occurred in 1982.  To compound the problems faced by lumber mills, low lumber prices led the total value of lumber production to fall even more drastically over the last five years, with almost two-thirds of the lumber value disappearing.

Almost all lumber mills across the West have either shut down for periods of time, eliminated shifts or reduced employment and payrolls in other ways.

Across much of the West, the difficulties of our wood products mills have regularly been blamed on the U.S. Forest Service and the dramatic reduction in the contribution that federal lands have made to total timber supply since the early 1990s. This diagnosis of the problem has even been embodied in proposed federal legislation that would mandate that the U.S. Forest Service harvest a certain number of acres of trees each year to boost the available timber supply to feed local lumber mills. That is, the problem has been portrayed as one of inadequate timber supply due to the failure of National Forests to keep timber production at the high levels of the past.

That diagnosis of the problem is clearly not accurate. 

Center for the American West

You can see how Ted Turner might be a handful. Patty Limerick, the noted historian of the American West, interviewed him on Tuesday morning, and for awhile it was uncertain whether she would get a question in edgewise. Limerick, who can parse and parry with the best of them, rarely has that problem.

In Boulder to receive the Wallace Stegner Award from the Center of the American West, Turner talked about the slaughter of bison, the appalling use of AgentOorange in Vietnam and his philosophy on winning.

A billionaire several times over by the late 1990s, Turner said he had spent little time in the West until in his 40s. When in places like Denver, he was mostly in hotels. But he bought a 1,000-acre ranch in Montana, got bison and, as the bison herd expanded, he decided he needed to buy more land.

“I just fell in love with it,” said Turner, of the West. He now has 2 million acres in seven states, mostly in the West, and is the largest individual land owner in North America. His 25,000 bison rank him No. 2 in the nation – next to the federal government. 

Report Due in October

As far as ranges go, the Wyoming Range is the proverbial diamond in the rough, overshadowed by its neighbors which sit like a heavy anchor on the northwestern corner of this solidly square state.

To the north are the Tetons and the madness of the National Parks. To the east, the Wind Rivers jut out, an upside down middle finger, half poised to flip off the towns of Lander, Rawlins, Casper and Cheyenne. Like the difference between heels and sneakers, the Winds and Tetons are flashy, but the Wyoming Range is functional.

This is exactly how it should stay, say a well-documented mix-matched group of local conservationists.

After years of fighting for what they see as their range – their namesake – they are returning once more for what will amount to yet another uphill battle against a Texas-based energy development company.

Plains Exploration Company, or PXP, is awaiting an environmental assessment on their plan to drill 136 wells on the Bridger Teton National Forest located in the heart of the range. The proposal calls for 17 well pads, 29 miles of new and upgraded roads, about 400 acres of new surface disturbance and about 240 vehicles in and out of the area per day.

The draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was slated to be out by now, but due to the complex nature of this environmentally sensitive area, it has, not surprisingly, been delayed to sometime in October.

From the Idaho Panhandle

The radio delivered some heartening national news earlier this week—The long-faltering housing market began to recover last month, as was evident in a 10 percent increase in permits to build new homes. And for people who plan for the future of communities, a particularly pithy detail was that “much of the growth was in the apartment and condo sectors, up 32 percent from the month before. Construction of single family homes, which makes up the bulk of the housing market, rose at a much more modest rate of 4 percent.”

It remains to be seen how this pattern will play out in Sandpoint. But it meshes nicely with the town’s comprehensive plan and recently adopted code for commercial zones, which encourages the construction of apartments and condos on the upper stories of downtown buildings to accommodate anticipated population growth. 

Montana-Canada Border

A subsidiary of the Exxon Mobil Corporation has decided not to pursue oil and gas development on more than 21,000 acres of leased land in the North Fork of the Flathead River.

The subsidiary, XTO Energy, notified Montana Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester that it is retiring 11 leases, according to a statement released on Sept. 10. With the announcement, 80 percent of leases in the region have been voluntarily retired.

In a statement, Baucus called the announcement “great news for Montana and for all folks who enjoy our outdoor heritage.”

“I’m thrilled that Exxon has become the latest company to step up to the plate and protect the future of this special place, so future generations can camp, hike, hunt and fish there like we do,” the senator said.

Hydraulic Fracturing

Wyoming, a bastion of conservative politics long influenced by the energy industry, is now the first state in the nation to say that the ingredients in hydraulic fracturing fluids used to rupture rock blocking oil and gas reserves will be public information.

In June, the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission unanimously ruled that ingredients would be reported to the commission – at the insistence of Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal, a member of that body. At the time, it was unclear how that would work and whether ingredients would be public.

In late August, Commission Supervisor Tom Doll clarified the situation, saying the ingredients will be public information and on Sept. 15, the commission’s new rules will go into effect, forcing companies to reveal new details about the chemicals used in a range of drilling fluids, including fracking fluids.

In a phone interview with New West, Freudenthal said he’d pushed a straightforward argument – that the actual formula or recipe for fracking fluid could remain a commercial secret, but that the ingredients had to be revealed to the state and, by extension, the public.

Several energy companies were not enthusiastic about this approach, said the governor, but none of them pushed back as hard as Halliburton, the leading developer of hydraulic fracturing technology.

“Halliburton sent a big-time lawyer to talk to us, but it didn’t go well for him,” Freudenthal said.