New West Feature

Back in the 1980s, when fossil fuel development fell off a cliff in Western states, there was a popular sticker pasted on the bumpers of aging pickups, rolling on tires of diminishing tread: “Dear Lord, please give me another boom, and I promise I won’t p*** this one away.”

So how have Western states handled the latest 2003-2008 boom and bust? Have we gotten smarter about handling booms, or did we do what we did the last time?

The answer, according to a new study by Headwaters Economics, is it depends on the state, the counties, the fuel and the presence, or absence, of political and industrial leadership at the right time and place.

The core finding was that tax revenues have greater impact and sustainability than highly volatile energy jobs, which can vanish as fast as they appear.

New West Feature

Riding the Rail Runner Express commuter train between Albuquerque and Santa Fe is a distinctly New Mexican experience.

As soon as the train doors close with a “Looney Toons”-style Road Runner “meep meep” chime, the crew warns passengers not to snap photos out of the windows because the train will soon cross the Tewa Pueblo and other sacred Native American lands in the Rio Grande Valley.

With a wave of GOP hostility toward commuter rail projects across the country, that experience is uncertain following the election last fall of Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, who has long questioned the need and cost of the Rail Runner Express, the first inter-city commuter rail project in the Rocky Mountain region.

One of Democratic former Gov. Bill Richardson’s most visible legacies, the Rail Runner Express connects cities in New Mexico’s most populous region, ushering commuters from the state’s largest city to the state capital.

New West Film

From the rim of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River below seemed both meek and mighty. It looks like a tiny band of water barely visible below millions of years of rock, but it was this river, blasting through fierce rapids with dirt and debris, that carved through a mile of rock like a diamond saw.

This is the Colorado River in its finest moments. River runners know it as a death-defying series of rapids, but even this whitewater is only a fraction of the hydraulics that once raged through the canyon, in the days before Lake Powell tamed it.

In its grim less spectacular moments the Colorado is not a river at all. It is an unremarkable trickle through concrete canals, and then, not even that. Just a dry riverbed that delivers not even a drop to the sea.

“It looks like the end of the line,” says photographer Pete McBride, as he and his companion, author Jonathan Waterman, find their canoes lodged in a foamy brown muck. “It looks like the garbage disposal at the end of the river.”

Guest Column

For years, I’ve worked to safeguard some of the West’s best hunting and fishing spots from poorly planned oil and gas development on public lands. Today, a new and surprising challenge is emerging for management of these lands: large-scale, commercial, renewable energy development.

Solar and wind energy have the potential to transform America, creating great jobs and providing a reliable source of clean, domestic energy. Yet despite its many virtues, utility-scale renewable energy requires massive infrastructure that could adversely affect the West’s public lands and sporting heritage, if it isn’t done right from the start.

Fortunately, we have decades of experience with oil and gas siting, enabling us to responsibly pursue siting renewable energy on public lands. Smart, common-sense solutions can foster a smooth transition to clean energy, sustain our hunting and fishing traditions, and avoid costly red-tape delays, litigation and habitat damage that often characterize public-lands oil and gas development in the past.

This month marks the end of public comment on a document that will guide solar energy development in six Western states: California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona. This document will set the precedent for large-scale renewable energy development in the West. We must get it right. Two primary alternatives are being considered: the Department of the Interior’s and Department of Energy’s preferred alternative calls for creating 24 “solar energy zones” and enabling development on an additional 22 million acres of BLM land in these six states.

New West Feature

Since moving to her home more than 20 years ago, Laveta Killsnight has never drunk her tap water.

“My water’s plum orange,” she says.

Killsnight, a diabetes technician with long, graying hair and a wide grin, lives in Muddy Cluster, a small town on the Northern Cheyenne Indian reservation in southeastern Montana. The reservation, home to about 4,800 people, is dotted with small housing clusters separated by dozens of miles of rolling plains and curving two-lane highway.

Hard water is a problem in much of this territory, but it’s a particular problem on the reservation, which often lacks the equipment and funding to put in better water systems. The tribe’s administration operates on less than $2 million a year, and the money is spread thinly among housing, health and education services.

The Northern Cheyenne tribe is known nationally for its environmentalism and pristine landscape. But for a tribe that fought for and succeeding in getting Class 1 air status—the same air quality standards as a national park—what they don’t always have is good water.

News Briefs

City leaders in Las Vegas, New Mexico, are struggling to provide water to residents and businesses after a brutally dry winter, according to Bloomberg Businessweek and the Associated Press.

They’ve instituted emergency water restrictions to offset the problem: barring hotels and motels from filling their swimming pools, closing down car washes several days per week, and banning outdoor watering for both lawns and gardens, according to the story. Some business owners are trying to look on the bright side:

Charlie’s Spic and Span Bakery & Cafe might start using paper plates and cups and plastic cutlery to avoid washing dishes, said owner Charlie Sandoval. That will make the dishwasher and suppliers happy, he jokes.

NEW WEST FEATURE

Scientists digging into the peat below Ziegler Reservoir at Snowmass Village, Colo., found a something like an Ice Age zoo last fall. Now, as they prepare to start digging again next month, they also have a puzzle.

Researchers are hunched over in labs piecing together fragments of mastodon skulls and ancient deer antlers. But scientists are also piecing together bigger questions. When did these animals die? Why there? And more importantly, what can they tell us about climate change – then and now?

“Who amongst us would survive if we didn’t understand our personal history, where we came from?” asks Kirk Johnson, chief curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who is overseeing the project. “The same applies to our climate’s history.”

Daily Yonder Column

Communications technologies have enormous consequences even though most of them go unrealized when those technologies are young. 

No one would have anticipated that Facebook or Twitter might one day figure in revolutions, just as no one could have anticipated that the telegraph would catalyze both the standardization of time keeping in the U.S. as well as the creation of national economic markets. 

We are now in the midst of a national debate — indeed, an international debate — around the impact of broadband networks.  The current administration is intent on expanding access to broadband, especially in rural regions that have lacked fast access to the Internet. Broadband’s importance can be measured in the over $7 billion in federal stimulus funds dedicated to broadband programs in 2009-2010 as well as the high speed wireless initiative that promises to bring 4G services to most of the country.

Critics of these measures ask exactly what broadband yields, and whether such jolts of investment found in the stimulus are justified. What does it provide to rural regions that justify such large-scale investments? 

New West Feature

A few years ago, while Chris Corbin was working in the sales and marketing department at Big Sky Brewing Company, he started thinking about water.

This was before he created a company that now helps other companies—including Big Sky—offset its water consumption by buying credits that have put water back into trout streams gone dry.

His Missoula-based company, Lotic, is a water-rights consulting firm that now manages 33 projects in 18 states.

“New opportunities exist that people aren’t looking at,” Corbin said recently. “I just saw a niche in the conservation, environmental and sustainable opportunities that have to do with water that people aren’t recognizing.”

New West Feature

Colorado was ablaze throughout March, with 27 wildfires erupting across the northern Front Range during the month. Unusually hot, dry conditions and gusty winds combined to make the beginning of spring an anomaly – the number of fires was nine times the 15-year average for March.

While state, county and federal agencies, including the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, work hard to extinguish Colorado wildfires and save homes and infrastructure close to forested public lands each year, their efforts contribute to an ironic national situation. The legacy of land managers working for over a century to suppress about 98 percent of the more than 70,000 wildfires that ignite across the country annually has created a climate where wildfires tend to be worse than they would be if more fires were left to burn out naturally, because of the buildup of deadwood and other fuels.

Historically, in the Rocky Mountains, frequent fires in low-lying ponderosa pine forests would thin out small trees and scour out dead material on the forest floor, ensuring large trees remained widely spaced, explained Bill Romme, professor of fire ecology at Colorado State University, in a telephone interview.

Even under extreme weather conditions fires would generally stay on the ground and likely not climb into the crowns of mature trees, protecting the forest from severe damage, he said.