Legislation that would greatly increase logging on public land in the Pacific Northwest is on a list of this week's priorities released by U.S. House Republican leaders, and it could have far-reaching effects for California. The bill, HR 1526, includes several options to cut more timber to make money for economically-depressed rural counties, primarily in Oregon.
However, according to Noah Matson, vice president for Climate Change and Natural Resources Adaptation at the group Defenders of Wildlife, it sets a dangerous precedent by making timber sales the goal and exempting large portions of public land from such federal environmental laws as the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.
Matson points out that clear-cutting and its effects on the environment and wildlife are what prompted limits on logging 20 years ago. But sponsors of the bill say the land that would be logged in Oregon was meant for sustained timber yield when it was given to the state in the 1930s, and that today, the counties where the land is located desperately need the income.
Taking my usual walk out in the open desert I saw it crossing the trail ahead: a low black dot with an air of confidence. It made no attempt to hurry for cover despite standing out plainly against the light gravel.
That's unusual for small desert animals. Almost everyone out here is on the make, looking for bits of food and moisture, and a beetle the size of a raspberry would ordinarily draw lots of attention from passing birds, lizards, and mice.
This beetle didn't care. It took its time, walking in a casual straight line from point A to point B, until I caught up with it. It turned to face my boot, calm as you please.
It was the placid self-assuredness of an animal that knew it could make life miserable for anything that bothered it.
Southern California burns. That's a given.
What's not is how we respond to wildland flames that erupt on distant mountains or nearby foothills, scorching hundreds, even thousands of acres. Or, as is the case with Wednesday's 17-acre brush fire on the Robert J. Bernard Field Station, an outdoor research lab owned by the Claremont Colleges, to a relatively undeveloped piece of property that is surrounded by residential neighborhoods and the community's many educational institutions.
And what we say, what we demand, what we conclude about these fiery events says a great deal about our understanding of our place within this region's fire-adapted ecosystems.
That's why the particulars, the details matter. This two-alarm fire -- dubbed the Foothill Fire -- erupted quickly and moved fast.
Its point of ignition, eyewitnesses noted, and L.A. County Fire investigators have confirmed, was the result of a crew from Golden State Water Company employing a chop saw and torch while fixing an aboveground water pipe. Its shower of sparks kicked off the blaze (and even as flames swept east, these men continued to cut pipe on Foothill Boulevard, which delineates the field station's southern border, shooting more sparks into the air). This news will certainly shape any potential legal ramifications and more generally how some will interpret this fire's significance.
What's the timeline for forgetting an event we swore we'd always remember? Flipping through the Los Angeles Times this morning, I found no mention of 9-11, so maybe twelve years is the expiration date.
For me, it was a bit earlier. In 2008, while driving north from Cape Cod to Boston, I followed a small white truck adorned with a single, one-word bumper sticker: "Remember." It took more than twenty miles trailing behind that vehicle, shifting lanes and freeways, and slipping beneath a series of bridges bedecked with American flags and Styrofoam cups wedged into the chain-link fences above, many of which spelled out "Never Forget," before I recalled the impending anniversary.
Before I could summon up the moment when I first heard the news of the brutal assault on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and of a plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field. I was shocked at how easily those terrifying days had slipped from my memory.
And staggered, because I had flown into New York hours earlier for a set of meetings the next day at Grey Towers National Historic Site; located in northeastern Pennsylvania, it was maybe fifty miles from Wall Street. No sooner had I arrived at the former home of Gifford Pinchot, founding chief of the U.S. Forest Service, than word spread of the attack. Almost instantly, like all federal installations, the site went on full alert, its gates closed and staff sequestered.
In Southern California's urban communities, a war is being waged against the prevalence of food deserts -- communities which lack access to fresh, healthy food due to socioeconomic and geographic conditions. Common strategies to winning this war include opening certified farmer's markets, creating community gardens, and propagating health and nutrition education.
But food deserts are not exclusive to the urban setting of the congested, polluted concrete jungle. Even in rural areas, the glut of fast-food restaurants, the dearth of fresh produce, and a sustainable means to grow them locally are just as problematic to the community.
In the Owens Valley town of Lone Pine, some 200 miles north of Los Angeles, where the Great Basin Desert meets the Sierra Nevada mountains, a similar war against the food desert is also being waged, and in 2010, a group of local growers and residents decided to get ready for battle by growing food locally for both personal consumption and for the community.
"We were concerned about the lack of fresh nutritious produce and few healthy food choices in general in southern Inyo county," said Jane McDonald, a food grower, baker, and board member of the Owens Valley Growers Cooperative, which was established in 2012. "We formed the co-op in order to support increased local production and markets, developing a local sustainable foodshed, supporting development of our local economy."
The crazy-hectic close of the California legislative session is a make-or-break moment for those hoping to bring long-overdue regulatory control of fracking in the Golden State.
At issue is whether the legislature will pass SB 4. It is the sole surviving bill this session that seeks to compel Big Energy and state regulators to open up to public scrutiny and scientific analysis the impact that hydraulic fracking (and its technological cousin, acid well treatment) has on public health and the environment.
Because there has been relatively little discussion of this initiative in the mainstream press and thus in the civic arena -- even Governor Brown seems to be snoozing on the question of fracking -- it is important to spell out three of its key provisions, (as amended, September 3):
- "The bill would require the Secretary of the Natural Resources Agency, on or before January 1, 2015, to cause to be conducted an independent scientific study on well stimulation treatments, including acid well stimulation and hydraulic fracturing treatments."
- "The bill would require an operator of a well to record and include all data on well stimulation treatments, as specified."
- "The bill would require the [Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources in the Department of Conservation], in consultation with the Department of Toxic Substances Control, the State Air Resources Board, the State Water Resources Control Board, the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, and any local air districts and regional water quality control boards in areas where well stimulation treatments may occur, on or before January 1, 2015, to adopt rules and regulations specific to well stimulation, including governing the construction of wells and well casings and full disclosure of the composition and disposition of well stimulation fluids."
Because the corporations using hydraulic fracturing as a tool to release millions of barrels of oil and gas from tight geologic formations like the Monterey Shale refuse to identify the composition of the fluids injected at high pressure and immense volume to fracture the rock miles below the surface, SB 4 would require the state's Natural Resource Agency to mount an "independent" study of this controversial technique and its ramifications. The critical term, here, is independent. Given the hand-in-glove relationship between the regulators and the regulated, establishing an outside group to analyze what is occurring is essential to assure the public of the legitimacy of this vital research and analysis.
After the Rim fire blasts into Sierra Nevada granite and flickers out. After the last gallon of fire retardant rains down on the high-country blaze deep in the Stanislaus National Forest. After the last engine, dozer, helicopter, jet, and drone pull back from the charred land. After the last soot-stained firefighter retraces her steps to base camp, and then heads home. After the last hose is drained, dried, and stored. After the last Pulaski is racked. If, after all that, we begin to plan for the future it may well be too late.
Our culture's relentless focus on the now has shaped the way we have covered this particular fire, those that have erupted this season, and any conflagration dating back to the late 19th-century. Journalism's daily mission, after all, is to keep us abreast of the news as it breaks, the very language of which emphasizes the need to mirror the moment.
Reflect on that as you flip through your local newspaper, watch your favorite anchor, or scroll through relevant websites, catch how every story about the Rim fire (and its analogs) contains a powerful, one-word mantra: containment.
As you repeatedly enunciate it, absorbing its Cold War evocation of sealing off the "enemy," a series of worried questions are unleashed. Is the fire contained? How much is it contained? Why has more containment not been achieved? When, oh when will it be contained?"
Although I have walked the trails that hug the Clark Fork River as it flows through Missoula, Montana, I've never canoed those cold waters. If I ever did, I'd want Brad Tyer in the stern as my guide, showing me how to navigate its boisterous length, how to read the complex natural landscape and built environment as we floated by.
That he knows where to pull out would be another plus.
After a 2011 run down the powerful snow-melt-pushed river, in which he and his fellow travelers barreled downstream so fast that they covered in "twenty minutes what usually takes an hour," the flotilla swung on to a gravelly beach. This was not just any rest-stop: Above them was the wide and welcoming deck of one of the Garden City's best watering holes, the Finn and Porter Restaurant; beer awaited. "Missoula is nice like that."
That much I knew.
What I had not known until reading Tyer's unsettling, page-turner of a new book, "Opportunity Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape", was the complicated past and present of the Clark Fork -- and why we should care about its turbulent history and contemporary dilemmas.
Consider the reason he and his canoeing colleagues had shot down the river so quickly. Some of their speed was attributable to a higher-than-normal volume of water, a rush that was also the result of the river's upstream undamming.
The decommissioning of dams along the west's many rivers and streams is a furiously debated issue. Taking down these bulwarks is the key to restoring anadromous fish populations such as the Steelhead trout that once nosed up the rivers of Southern California and salmon that in vast numbers once spawned along the extent of the Columbia River watershed.
In the Pacific Northwest, this decided environmental good is up against the keep-the-dams demands of Big Ag for irrigation and barge transport and of Big Hydro and its downstream consumers of electricity.
The fight in Missoula over the pulling down of the Milltown Dam offers a variation on this theme. It pitted upriver copper-mining interests that had no interest in paying to clean up the toxic byproducts of their manufacturing processes piling up behind the century-old structure against those local environmentalists who believed that removing this earthen-filled straightjacket would liberate a once free-flowing river, restoring its pristine nature.
Tyer, a veteran journalist and managing editor of the Texas Observer, neither disputes this restorative impulse nor its whitewater consequences; neither does he doubt that the years of protracted negotiation that led to the elimination of the Milltown Dam was worth the effort. He just asks some hard questions about who gained and lost when the dam came down, about whom and what suffered so that Missoulians, including himself, could paddle down the Clark Fork in thrilled delight.
When the Perseid Meteor Shower made its annual celestial light show earlier this month, I gathered a group of sky-curious friends to gather for an informal meteor-watching party in the northwestern Antelope Valley to watch it. We enjoyed a potluck meal of snacks and finger foods, and proceeded to watch the debris from comet Swift-Tuttle streak their way into our atmosphere in the form of "shooting stars."
The viewing spot was an area I had adopted as my western Mojave Desert "neighborhood" after learning my parents own a small plot of vacant land in the vicinity, and since 2010, the dirt shoulder of a major road there served as our viewing locale of choice, just north of the Kern-Los Angeles county border.
Though there are more ideal places to view a dark night sky in Southern California, this was a decent enough location, just a reasonably, short 80-minute drive from the bright lights of Los Angeles. Save for the southeastern and southern skies glowing with the cumulative light pollution of urban Antelope Valley and the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the skies were dark enough to clearly see unmistakable arc of The Milky Way across the sky, along with countless constellations not even visible from our urban climes.
But upon arriving for last year's meteor-watching party -- after skipping the 2011 shower -- I was chagrined to discover the slightly-distracting unison glow of red lights in the northern horizon: all being warning lights atop the giant turbine towers of the Mojave wind power facility. Even worse was the glow of bright white lights emanating from a power station a few miles north. It turned out that even my little desert "neighborhood" was already feeling the effects of development. The 80-minute drive was starting to not be far enough.
For more than a century, America's National Forests have proved an environmental gift and cultural treasure -- our spectacular backyard. But this system of public lands, which encompasses193 million acres from California to Maine, Florida to Alaska, has become increasingly vulnerable to the cumulative consequences of past management practices, catastrophic disturbances, and a warming climate.
To restore resiliency to these imperiled terrain, the National Forest Foundation (NFF), which Congress designated in 1991 as the official non-profit partner of the U.S. Forest Service, has launched a now-or-never campaign that identifies places of greatest need; with a 1:1 matching contribution from the U.S. Forest Service, it has committed to raise millions of dollars to underwrite these lands' restoration.
One of the selected sites is the Angeles National Forest, which at 1000 square miles constitutes Southern California's biggest playground, accounting for more than 70% of open space in greater Los Angeles. As vital as the recreation opportunities it provides, this urban national forest, draped across the San Gabriel Mountains with its tall peaks, steep-sloped terrain, and sharp-cut canyons, also captures much-needed precipitation blowing off the Pacific; perhaps one-third of the region's water supply sheets off the Angeles.
The life-giving watershed is in trouble, however, in part as a consequence of the 2009 Station Fire. Ignited by an arsonist late that August, it blew up into the largest conflagration in the recorded history of Los Angeles. Torching approximately 250 square miles during its two-month-long fiery run, it burned through chaparral shrubland, oak woodlands, and up-elevation mixed pine forests.
'Slake' Video Project Puts Heat on LADWP Over Owens Valley
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