New West Feature

A decision by the Utah Board of Oil, Gas and Mining to confirm a 2009 mining permit for Alton Coal Development is the best thing to have happened to the communities of southern Utah in some time—and the worst. It was a vindication of the thoroughness of Alton Coal’s proposal and a confirmation that the state is completely out of touch with modern values.

The board stood up to badgering from extremist environmental groups and caved in to pressure from their wealthy friends in the mining industry.

“The (Sierra) club is disappointed in the board for upholding the decision, but we plan to pursue every other avenue possible to stop the mine,” said Clair Jones, the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign spokesperson, in a response to the Aug. 3 decision.

“The board’s decision to uphold the mine permit is a clear victory and will allow development to proceed in an environmentally responsible manner,” said Alton Project Manager Chris McCourt in a press release on the day of the decision.

The environmental groups involved in the dispute are trying to stop any new mining in southern Utah, as usual. The mining company is trying to push the project forward while avoiding public scrutiny, as usual. The locals in favor of the mine have been cast as ignoramuses incapable of deciding where their best interests lie. What else is new?

Special Report

Ranchers arrived at hotels, at campgrounds, anywhere they could find to sleep in Fort Collins last night in preparation for today’s meeting jointly held by the Departments of Justice and Agriculture to address competition--and, more precisely, the lack of it--in livestock industries.

Advocates for the cattle industry, R-CALF USA chief among them, pushed to fill meeting rooms at Colorado State University this morning as speakers from the federal and state levels gave their takes on enforcing the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921, which is in place to guard against monopolies in meatpacking.

That law, Montana’s Attorney General Steve Bullock told the crowd, needs “a new set of dentures.”

Dept. of Justice antitrust attorney, Christine Varney, chimed in: “I don’t know what the answer is, but I sure know there is a problem.”

Prior to the start of today’s one-day conference, reporter Jamie Folsom began talking to and photographing participants about why they traveled to Fort Collins, what their issues are and what they hope will come out of the meeting:

Livestock and Agriculture

Two cents.

Those two words stuck with me from a recent meeting of farmers and ranchers in Nebraska. It turns out the cost of providing livestock raisers a fair price for their cattle and slaughterhouse workers a living wage for their work preparing the meat for sale was a lousy two pennies on a pound of ground chuck.

Adding two cents on every pound in the meat counter would keep ranchers from losing money and turn slaughterhouse jobs from work into a living. Two cents a pound at the grocery would fundamentally change the economies of thousands of rural communities.

Bill Bullard explained the first cent. Bullard is with R-CALF, the cattle raisers organization. He talked at a recent meeting of the Organization for Competitive Markets in Omaha about the dramatic drop in the share of each food dollar that goes to the rancher.

In 1980, ranchers and farmers got 63 cents out of every dollar consumers spent on beef. That dropped to 60 cents in 1990, to 49 cents in 2000 to 43 cents in 2009.

Colorado Event

Billings-based R-CALF has ambitions. The association that backs cattle-raisers is urging people to get to Fort Collins, Colo., on Aug. 27th for “the largest gathering of rural Americans in the history of the United States.”

The big deal is a federal-level workshop about competition in the cattle industry. It’s being hosted at Colorado State University by both the Dept. of Agriculture and the Dept. of Justice, which has lately expressed a willing ear on accusations of meatpacking monopolies.

To get the word out, R-CALF’s cowboy-hat-wearin’ CEO, Bill Bullard, has been traveling the country, preaching to anyone who will listen about the degradation of the cattle industry and the importance of the Fort Collins event. NewWest caught up with him “somewhere in southwest Minnesota.” He’d recently left Redwood Falls, MN, and planned to be in D.C. tomorrow. Before that, he’d been stomping around Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming as he attempts to get 25,000 people to the one-day conference he calls “unprecedented.”

From the Daily Yonderhttp://www.dailyyonder.com/Daily Yonderhttp://www.dailyyonder.com/

Capt. William Clark is my friend on Facebook. Yes, that Capt. Clark. He gazes over my left shoulder as I visit his page, his red hair tied back, the white ruffles on his shirt collar the result of a good show with the starch. Maybe he approved my friend request because he knows I am his descendant, many generations hence.

Clark was co-leader with Meriwether Lewis of the Corps of Discovery, seekers of a convenient way to travel to the Pacific Northwest over land, by water. They proceeded to find a way, “convenient” if one didn’t mind portaging around that wall of towering mountains striping the western third of the country.

Now more than 200 years later, Capt. Clark busies himself sending his friends electronic dispatches from the trail. Just the other day, he posted this:

(June 20, 1805). While Cpt Lewis is admiring the river scenery, my party has been hiking overland, combatting musqueteers and worse. The feet of the men with me So Stuck with Prickley pear & cut with Stones that they were Scerseley able to march at a Slow gate this after noon!

Was there something disdainful in his tone about his companions “admiring river scenery”? Hard to tell. Regardless, I posted back that his adventure sounded a bit like the hike I’d just taken with my husband and dog along the Snake River just outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in Grand Teton National Park.

Oil and Gas Drilling

Methane migration is a critical part of the discussions of underground contamination risks from drilling and hydraulic fracturing. It demonstrates that a pathway exists for contaminants to move through the substrata to the surface or into water supplies. In many of the cases described in ProPublica’s articles, methane—which was proved to be thermogenic and not from biological decay—is believed to have moved from thousands of feet underground, or travelled several miles laterally, sometimes from the same layer of gas being exploited for energy.

Fracturing consists of injecting water and (usually secret) concoctions of chemicals deep underground, where it fractures the rock and releases the natural gas deposits. One of the most influential explanations why fracturing presents no risk hinges on the assertion that the deep isolation and many layers of rock and earth effectively seal off the fracture zone from the surface—that it is impossible for chemicals, water, gas or anything else to move from thousands of feet below into shallow aquifers.

But the consistent and widespread detection of methane migration from unnatural causes—in places including Colorado, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York—shows that it is not impossible, that in fact there are underground pathways for such movement. And if methane can move, it’s an indicator of other substances’ ability to migrate as well.

From the Panhandle

I have chosen not to shop at Sandpoint’s new Super 1 grocery store, opened a few weeks ago. It’s evident from their ads that they have lots of good deals on things I need, and my husband says they have a phenomenal salad bar. But they built a big box with a parking lot in front—a kind of structure that the people of Sandpoint had specifically said they didn’t want on the site Super 1 chose.

With the adoption of a Comprehensive Plan in 2009, citizens indicated instead that they wanted mixed-use developments in this area, with pedestrian-oriented storefronts near the street and parking lots in back. As a result, Super 1 is kind of a museum piece, an instant anachronism—the last big box fronted by a big parking lot within walking distance of Sandpoint’s downtown.

Adaptive Management

Today 1,500 natural gas wells pierce the Pinedale Anticline and hundreds of miles of road lattice its surface.  An earlier industry-funded study of mule deer in the Anticline showed a 30 percent decline from 2001 to 2007. And the Mesa can expect only further industrialization. Less than a tenth of recoverable gas reserves in the Pinedale Anticline have been extracted so far. Drilling is scheduled to continue through the year 2025, with production continuing until 2065. A total of 4,399 wells are allowed under the current management plan.

As managers sort out contracting processes and monitoring protocol, some of America’s most spectacular wildlife populations still await protection in their home ranges.

A decade ago Wyoming was poised to lead the United States into a new era of environmental planning for oil and gas development projects with the 2000 Environmental Impact Statement Record of Decision for the Pinedale Anticline.

“The Pinedale Anticline Project was the BLM’s first attempt to use adaptive management to extract oil or gas. The project was intended to showcase adaptive management and its potential to mitigate environmental concerns while facilitating development,” writes Melinda Harm Benson in her review of what has happened on the Mesa, a paper titled “Integrating Adaptive Management and Oil and Gas Development,” published in October of 2009. A professor of geography at the University of New Mexico, Benson has worked as a lobbyist and attorney for several western conservation groups, and as a lecturer and research scientist at the Haub School and Ruckleshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming.

The story of the short-lived partnership is in one respect a straightforward tale of a business deal gone awry. But it also highlights the challenges Native Americans face when they seek to share in the nation’s prosperity while safeguarding their natural resources and culture.

Indians and whites have been doing business together since the time of Columbus—almost invariably to the Indians’ detriment. But the announcement last year that the Northern Arapaho tribe had been tapped to supply organic grass-fed beef to Whole Foods Markets seemed like a win for all concerned: The tribe would make money off its land, the grocery chain would score points for environmental and social responsibility, and consumers would enjoy the health and culinary benefits of eating free-range beef with a Native American pedigree.

Alas, it hasn’t worked out that way.

Barely a year after it was trumpeted with tribal dances and cooking demonstrations at Whole Foods stores in Denver and other western cities, the beef deal has collapsed. Tribal officials pulled the plug after a price dispute with Paramount Meats, Inc., the California firm that was the middleman in the deal and now provides Whole Foods with grass-fed beef from other sources. The tribe has recently resumed selling its cattle in the conventional beef market.

Mount Sneffels and Lizard Head Public Lands

A bill that would protect some of Colorado’s most picturesque mountains cleared committee this summer and will head for a full vote of the House soon.

The San Juan Mountains Wilderness Act introduced by Rep. John Salazar, D-Manassa, proposes to permanently protect 60,000 acres in Southwest Colorado, designating half of them as wilderness. The area includes the slopes of Mount Sneffels and Wilson Peak, two of the state’s “fourteeners.”