Putting plastic squares on a fence

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Lava Lake, Idaho

context: We spent a week on the property of Lava Lake Lamb, a sustainable sheep ranch that’s trying to do research on wildlife migration through their land. We had just come from Nevada, where we listened to anti-grazing activist Jon Marvel describe the problems fences pose for wildlife migration. He told us that anytime we saw a fence in the west, we should tear it down. But as part of our work for Lava Lake Lamb, we helped them make their fences more “wildlife-friendly”.

So we put up plastic squares along fences that Jon Marvel says shouldn’t be there to stop sage grouse that he wants listed as endangered from hitting them. I don’t mind fences out here—it all looks the same to me; fences are part of the landscape as I’ve come to see it. But fences keep wildlife from moving, and I realize I’ve stopped looking at sagebrush as wild and started assuming grazing when I see it. I worry about the plastic—so many biologically pervasive toxins in them, molecules that get inside you and stick, invisibly, until you try to reproduce or are diagnosed with cancer. But I doubt those small squares will disrupt many endocrine systems. Is this what it means to see landscapes whole? To see the scars too, to always have a rejoinder starting with, “But…” whenever a solution is proposed? Can I go back to Moab senior year, when I didn’t know cattle grazed on public lands and the desert was just beautiful, even at Hidden Splendor*? Driving in Nevada, I look out the window and I see Harry Reid, gold mining, Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project, Hiroshima in September 1945, Owens Valley, the Superfund site list, cyanide, cows and climate change. Is there an off switch for this vision? Will I ever be able to see a sunrise unaffected again?

Oh, hyperbole. And yet, with everything I know, it’s still beautiful out here. Finding beauty in a broken world…almost easier, in a way. The contrast is starker. Or maybe it’s that things seem more beautiful because they’re broken—imperfect, yet still present. You acknowledge the imperfection and you work to make it whole. You put tiny white plastic squares on barbed wire fences, and they shudder like tree leaves in the breeze.

*Hidden Splendor is a site in the middle of nowhere—the San Rafael Swell in southeastern Utah. It’s where much of the uranium for the Manhattan Project was extracted, and the old mine shafts are still there. It’s also possibly the most gorgeous place I’ve ever been.

Dispatch from the West

Our latest assignment is to write a dispatch from the West, 250 words or less on one of four topics: wolf at the door, aspen, incised channels or water out of place.


Incised Channels

We were raised by a generation that doesn’t know what a stream looks like. We were taken hiking and told: this is nature. We were lied to.

They’re spread out like scars across the dried skin of meadows and desert sagebrush. In summer, heat evaporates moisture and the skin cracks, but there is no blood. The channels run straight and dry, banks trampled by cattle, aspen eaten away by elk. The groundwater is thirsty, praying for rain, but it doesn’t rain in the desert. When the snow from distant mountains finally melts, the water runs quickly, hurried without sinuous curves that used to slow it down. The stream is our journey West, the frenzied rush to build railroads and conquer the continent. We called it Manifest Destiny, and it manifested itself in beaver pelts, smallpox blankets and dams. It’s been a long time since beaver ponds told the water to slow down, stay a while. When you’re trying to squeeze profit out of dry land, water gets squeezed out too. A cow pie, a solitary puddle at the bottom of a canyon and acres of cheatgrass: this is our destiny, manifested.

We see the lie. We walk across the scars under the heat of a desert sun and fall asleep dreaming of the breeze playing with a yellow aspen leaf as it falls onto the surface of a pond built by beavers, the only animal that has ever been successful in its efforts to bring more water to the desert.

Uncomfortable truths in Nevada

Las Vegas is still growing. Las Vegas is in the middle of the desert. Las Vegas is running out of water.

Cows graze on almost all the public lands in Nevada. Land grazed by cows is easy to spot, covered in invasive grasses, cowpies, stream banks cut deep and straight with muddy hoof prints all the way to the bottom. The cost to run a cow and calf for a month on these lands is $1.35. On the allotment we visited today, 15,000 cows graze and the Bureau of Land Management takes in about $22,000 per year from the permitee. A recently constructed irrigation trough and pipeline on this land cost $400,000, paid for by the BLM. It’s full of algae with a dead bird wing buried somewhere under the muck.

Las Vegas wants to build a pipeline to Spring Valley to pump water from an underground aquifer. This water will go to feed its green lawns and the rainforests built inside casinos.

Nevada has a Senate seat up for reelection this fall. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, will face off against Sharon Angle. Reid has consistently supported gold mining in Nevada, pushing hard against reform of the General Mining Act of 1872. Because of this act, prospective gold miners can acquire a claim for $5 an acre on federal lands. If gold is found, they pay no royalties to the government.

Between 1951 and 1992, there were a total of 1,021 test of nuclear weapons conducted at the Nevada Test Site. One hundred of these were above ground. The radioactive fallout blew downwind into Utah and southern Nevada. Some of it ended up in Spring Valley.

In the East, where is rains, you measure land in cows per acre. In the West, where there is a desert, you measure in acres per cow. The math will give a solution between 25 and 150 acres.

A dumptruck full of gold ore will yield about one ring’s worth of gold. To get it out of the rock, you use cyanide. The waste from this process sits in ponds, sometimes lined, sometimes not. If the original prospector goes broke or can’t be found, the government pays to clean up the mining waste.

If Las Vegas takes the water out of Spring Valley, the land will dry up. The soil will become dust and the dust will become airborne. The dust is volcanic soil and is full of a carcinogen as potent as asbestos. The dust blew into the valley as fallout from the Nevada Test Site. The dust is full of tiny particles which have a knack for working their way into the moist linings of human lungs and staying there.

Sharon Angle, the Republican challenging Harry Reid for Senate, has called the separation of church and state “unconstitutional”.

Cows need water to drink. Cows need hay to eat and hay needs water to grow. You get water in the West by damming rivers or pumping it out of the ground.

Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in the United States. The Strip is covered in homeless men too resigned to ask for spare change. The neighborhoods outside feature fences topped with barbed wire and billboards advertising attorneys who can fight DUIs.

As climate change occurs, the West will become hotter and drier. Reservoirs will evaporate faster. River and stream flows will decrease because the glaciers on the mountains that feed them are disappearing.

About ninety percent of the population of Nevada lives in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, or in Reno. You can’t get elected in Nevada unless you support what Clark County and Reno want. And right now, they want their pipeline.

Cows trample biotic soil crusts. These crusts are made of mosses, lichens and microorganisms. They hold soil together, retain moisture, increase the productivity of adjacent plants and fix nitrogen and carbon into the soil. Without them, the soils blow away and water evaporates faster. Without them, the land becomes more desert and less water. Cows need water. Las Vegas needs water. The people of Spring Valley need water.

What can I eat?

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Jackpot, Nevada

context: We spent this week camped on public lands in Nevada learning more about grazing. Our week included a visit with Jon Marvel, the director of the Western Watersheds Project. Jon is fiercely anti-grazing on public lands and has a reputation as a bit of a bully among ranchers in the area. We also visited Steve and Robin Boise, ranchers in the area who are practicing rotational grazing and limiting the number of cattle on their allotment to allow the land to recover.

I have no idea what I can eat. Well, that’s not strictly true. I know I can go to farmer’s markets, pay $6 a pound for Thundering Hooves ground beef, ask my food producers questions and eat relatively sustainably.

Buy how do we feed the world? If ranching means incised channels and toxic waste runoff from feedlots and wheat means methyl isocyanate and Monsanto’s patented genes, what on earth are my customers, coworkers and family members who live on food stamps supposed to buy? How do we change this system from the ground up? Because changing it top-down will never work as long as ranchers control Congress and agribusiness contributes 132.7 million a year to them.

Listening to ranchers on this trip, I like them. They’re good people, people I’d want to have as neighbors. Robin and Steve, Todd Nash…it’s so hard to listen to them and say, “Too bad.” It’s so hard to remember that they’re wrong about some things. Listening to Jon and Suzanne, I don’t get that feeling of neighborliness. They’re not the sort how make you feel at ease. They’re not easy to listen to. But I think more of the truth lies on their side of the fence. How do I speak what they say and sound like a rancher? I don’t want to manipulate statistics the way Jon does—2-3% of cow weight is very different than 2-3% of cows raised on public lands. I don’t want to be frenzied and upset, but it’s so hard not to when you’re seeing things that are unspeakable and no one else will listen to you about them. I guess mostly I want to work with people, not against everything, not with corporations and not from inside the groups causing the problem or tacitly allowing it to continue. But compromise with ranchers seems easy. I can’t see myself a ranching activist, and compromise with the LA Department of Water and Power or Monsanto seems so much harder. Steve and Robin are people, but Exxon-Mobil might as well be Satan. Maybe this is where I take a lesson from Mike*, who helped get some lake back. After all, I still don’t really want to blow up a dam. Maybe compromise is our best hope. God, that’s a scary thought.

*Mike Prather, an activist who has worked to restore Owens Lake in California, after LA’s Department of Water and Power pumped it dry for their municipal water supply. Now, the lake is a series of square pits filled with water, technically designated as a construction site (we had to wear vests and hard hats to go birdwatching). But a lot of migratory birds have come back to the area.

Harry Reid's pipeline

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Jackpot, Nevada

context: We spent the day before in Baker, Nevada, a tiny town with one intersection, no grocery store and no stoplight. Baker is home to groundwater that is desperately wanted by Las Vegas to feed their growing city, so a pipeline has been proposed. Senator Harry Reid is very in favor of the pipeline, given that he needs urban votes to get re-elected.

There is so much political intrigue here. I wish Nevada had a better Democrat than Harry Reid, someone who didn’t have an interest in gold mining, someone who cared about the land. He’s a politician to the core, and I suppose he’d have to be to be Senate Majority Leader, but I can’t help but think that his principles are largely based on majority rule in his electorate, not actual principles. That makes him so political, and I suppose it’s not a bad thing necessarily. He stalls Yucca Mountain more out of NIMBY than any true environmentalism, because if he cared about the earth or public lands much, he’d stop gold mining and the Las Vegas pipeline. Utilitarianism would dictate that the line be built, I think—how many people live in the area in question? But utilitarianism of that sort ignores non-humans and the fact that cities in deserts aren’t sustainable. I’ve heard it argued that even cities aren’t sustainable, though I’m not entirely convinced. But Ed Abbey had it down. There’s no shortage of water in the desert unless you try to build a city where no city should be.

A day in the life

So, it’s occurred to me that in all my excitement to muse about the Sierra Nevadas and LA’s water supply, I have utterly neglected to describe a typical day on Semester in the West. I thought about this and realized that it’s probably impossible to describe “typical” on a program like this. This week, we’re doing ecological research in the forests of Utah, so I’ll settle for a typical day of ecology. We’re working with Mary O’Brien, a botanist/activist who works with the Grand Canyon Trust. She’s largely focused on documenting the problems with cattle grazing on public lands and trying to get the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to change some policies. I’ll probably talk about grazing a lot more in future posts. But anyway, here’s what our days look like.

0630—wake up, notice time, contemplate getting up, notice frost on sleeping bag, go back to sleep

0700—cook crew starts making breakfast (we have five cook crews of four people, so everyone cooks every five days)

0715—alarm goes off. get up, put on fleece booties, fleece pants and down jacket. hang out and read Cadillac Desert or check email.

0800—breakfast is supposed to be ready

0810—breakfast is actually ready, cook crew rings breakfast bell

0830—finish eating. Mary explains our work for the day, which sometimes takes up to an hour because it turns into a discussion about grazing and work she’s done with the Grand Canyon Trust.

0930—cook crew finishes dishes/cleanup. everyone packs sack lunches and reconvenes. By this time, people are starting to shed layers and look less like obese snowmen.

0940—a more specific explanation of our work, including dividing into teams, explaining for the fourth time that we should be nice to the GPSs, issuing data sheets, mass confusion about sampling methodology, lots of questions, more clarification and making sure teams are divided in such a way that each Suburban has a driver in it

1030—pile in the Suburbans (we have 3, each with 7 people) and head out

1031—Suburban 3 fails to make contact on radio check. Lots of gesturing out the window finally gets them to turn their radio on.

1032—sing-along to Dynamite by Taio Cruz, which we have unanimously voted to re-name “Galileo”

1035—recounting of traumatic childhood experiences and general bonding

1045—arrive at field work site. break up into groups and work, which could include counting cows, taking pictures of aspen, recording types of vegetation along a 200’ transect line or recording prevalence and height of aspen and willow plants along a stream with beaver dams

1500—finish field work and return to camp

1505—discover that returning to camp involves executing a 20-point turn on a Forest Service road. panic briefly.

1520—return to camp safely. enter data, have beers, hang out, read

1700—dinner cook crew starts

1800—dinner is supposed to be ready

1830—the smell of burning bacon wafts into the trailer

1930—dinner is ready after some improvisation. the dinner bell is rung. everyone gathers and dinner crew read a “humble”, which could be a poem about cows, Ed Abbey ranting about tourism, a description of regional geology or a lyrical description of land by Terry Tempest Williams, depending on who’s doing the humble. people eat, talk about shared cultural experiences (homestarrunner.com, Harry Potter, adventures in the TKE basement back at Whitman…)

2030—everyone crowds into the trailer to finish data entry, GPS photo linking and to study for our test on Sunday, which involves deciphering two journal articles about grasses in the West

2130—get into sleeping bag

2132—realize I have to pee, get up, pee, get back in, shiver briefly, read

2200—turn headlamp off and realize the full moon might as well be a spotlight. burrow into sleeping bag.

0200—wake up, realize I’m wearing a) not enough, b) too many or c) a good amount of clothes and a) put on an extra fleece and socks, b) lament the fact that my layers are going to be sweaty and gross in the morning or c) smile and go back to sleep

One month in

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Fish Lake National Forest, Utah

And today, we’re at a month. I’ve been sleeping in a sleeping bag since August 11. I haven’t taken a “real” shower since we left Johnston Wilderness Campus. I have five t-shirts and twenty-three people, and they don’t change. And I’m so incredibly happy. The most stressed I’ve been out here barely registers on an at-school scale—it’s never even come close to a typical Sunday night. I love food again—no feeling stuffed and guilty, then starving and broke in alternating cycles all day long. I don’t mind the dust so much, unless it gets in my eyes. And it’s not like some trips, where they’re fun in part because you know you have civilization waiting for you when you come home at the end of the weekend. Weekend trips, you can wear yourself out, trash your gear and eat whatever unhealthy crap you want. Here, you’re living. You have to take care of yourself. Right now, I feel so balanced. I’m full, I’m warm, I’m outside breathing clean, clear air. I’m in no rush to return home, however I define it. This could even qualify as home for all I care. Clive would be a nice addition, but I’m fine without him. I miss Seattle and edible sushi, but I miss that in Walla Walla anyway. I’ve barely ever felt this good and happy—for a bit in Costa Rica, backpacking around Glacier Peak—and when I do, it’s always when I remove myself from Western Civilization. What does that say about Western Civilization? Maybe it says more about me, that I can’t let go and let myself relax unless I have an excuse to only communicate with the outside world on my own terms. Maybe that’s something I should work on. When I get back, I want to go through my closet and be merciless. I want to try to stay in mental detox—less TV and YouTube, more time at Discovery Park, even if it is winter. More time with my cousins. More time getting up early and writing. Probably less time washing my hair.

Pando Clone and conservation

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Pando Clone, Fish Lake National Forest, Utah

context: The Pando Clone is a giant stand of genetically identical aspen trees, making it the largest organism on earth. It’s also declining steeply due to disease and climate change (warmer winters mean that parasitic organisms which used to be killed off survive the winter to prey on the trees). We were divided into two groups—art and science. As part of the art group, I spent half a day wandering around taking pictures of the trees.

Aspen trees are gorgeous, especially now when the leaves are starting to turn. I’m so glad I got to see and photograph that and spend a day relaxing somewhere so beautiful. Is it bad that seeing beauty like this makes me care more about restoration? It’s such a stark contrast with yesterday, where we saw trampled streams and cowpies everywhere. The healthy trees here are beautiful, striking, even worthy of a postage stamp. But sometimes, what’s right ecologically doesn’t look as impressive aesthetically. So many exotic species were introduced because someone thought they would look better. How can we get people to care about more than appearance? How can we fight for the endangered dung beetles and seaweeds of the world when everyone’s focused on polar bears and tigers? I’m biased towards those charismatic megafauna just as much as everyone else, but I’m not even sure about ecological roles. I suspect large mammals generally play fairly key ecological roles, so perhaps our focus on them isn’t entirely misguided. But I don’t know that for a fact. Either way, they need research and money and habitat and PR, so maybe a public concerned about baby polar bears is better than a public indifferent o eubacteria or rare Amazonian lichens. But I want to believe we have more options than that. I want to get people to care about everything and the whole ecosystem, more than the sum of its parts. I want them to care because these things matter, not because they’re beautiful or they have potential for pharmaceutical research. But isn’t any kind of caring better than apathy? I’m not even sure why I care anymore, except a vague notion that my life depends on a planet in balance. I’m starting to think that balance is more subjective than I thought. I see balance in enclosures, but not the whole forest. Balance in the US, but not Brazil. How much balance do we need? How many functioning ecosystems? Is it ok to sacrifice the rest once we get there? In August, I would have shouted, “NO!” Now, I say no quietly, a bit hesitant. So many things I don’t know…

Coming home

Today, I feel lonely. I had free time and called a bunch of family and friends. It was nice to hear what everyone’s doing, but sometimes I feel like I have less and less in common with the people I’ve left behind. When I get back, sleeping inside is going to feel foreign. Having running water will be an incredible luxury, bordering on being unnecessary. Showering more than twice a week will seem wasteful.

I don’t want the power of my life out here to fade when I come home. For some people, outdoor living is a necessary evil required to go backpacking or climbing. For me, it’s enjoyable in and of itself. I like the freedom of not having to do anything but put contacts in when I wake up in the morning. I love seeing blurred dots of light above my head when I fall asleep. I love working a bit harder to do basic things like shower or make breakfast, because it makes the result that much more exciting.

Living like this for so long is making me think about things I want to change when I get home. I’m probably going to shower every other day, quickly, and only wash my hair every four or five days. I’m thinking about things like composting toilets in my future. I know a lot of my friends and family shrug things like this off or chalk them up to my hippie-ness, but I want to be taken seriously. I don’t want people to shake their heads at what they perceive as quirks or think that eventually, I’ll “get used to” civilization and forget how I feel out here. Living outside has its challenges, but it also makes me feel more whole and present than I ever do when I’m being civilized.

Going back to “real” school will be a challenge too. My mind will be occupied with issues of land management, ranching, fire policy, and climate change. I’ll have faces and personal stories associated with all possible sides of these issues. I’ve seen ranchers moved almost to tears describing what wolves are doing to their livelihood, and I’ve seen ecologists break down thinking about the devastation of riparian ecosystems. How can I go back to a textbook after experiencing this? How could a politics class hope to capture the essence of an issue in lectures and readings?

I’ve had culture shock before, returning home from wolf tracking after a week to find myself so perplexed by walls that I spent an hour sitting on my bed crying and wanting to go back to the forest. I couldn’t explain how I felt to anyone else, and my adjustment over the course of the next day was one of the loneliest days of my life. Coming home from two and a half weeks in Guatemala, I immediately left for England and found myself sickened by the excesses of being a tourist in a rich country—throwing away restaurant food, driving all over the country and showering every day. Once again, I felt isolated, powerless to explain how strange the world I found myself in was to the people around me.

I hope that by blogging, emailing and calling people I know, my return home won’t be as painful. I’m hoping to give people some idea of what life is like out here, a glimpse of how simple it is to be happy because of a full moon, a cozy sleeping bag or a delicious dinner of sweet potato and bean burritos. But I know there’s so much I don’t know how to convey, so many things I’ll never be able to show anyone else. And I worry that without that common ground, I’ll be left adrift, not able to recreate this experience, but not feeling home with the people I’m with and the places I’m in. So tonight, as I fall asleep under a full moon, tucked in the folds of a dusty silk liner, I pray someone will understand when I come home and don’t want to sleep inside.

Grazing: learning to see

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Escalante, Utah

context: During this week, we were working with Mary O’Brien, an ecologist with the Grand Canyon Trust. Mary was one of several ecologists we met who believed that cattle grazing on Western public lands was an environmental nightmare and is working to reduce the amount of land that’s grazed. Today, we went out on an actual grazing allotment to count cows and see what the land looked like.

I think today, I get it. I’ve seen Suzanne cry and Mary rant about riparian habitat and grazing. I’ve seen cows and incised channels. But today, wandering across a few miles of moonscape covered in hoof marks and cowpies, I saw a bit of what they see. The fence, built perhaps to keep cows away from part of the stream and the juniper bushes, was in decent shape, but the cows had access to the stream on both sides because they’d managed to erode a path down into the gully. The water was muddy and trampled to death.

I’m still having trouble being angry about it. Maybe because it’s hard to pinpoint a source. I don’t fault the individual rancher trying to make a living, though I have no sympathy for absentee billionaires or giant corporations who run cattle. Cows are far too docile and placid to be the objects of anger. And the political and bureaucratic clusterfuck seems difficult to pin on any particular person, law or agency. It’s a beast of its own, independent of individual human desires, although a product of them.

But I know it needs to change. I’m not as strident as Mary, though I feel the truth in her statement that some jobs or lifestyles cannot be justified because the cost to the earth is too high. I know absolutely that a rancher should be able to graze fewer cattle than an allotment allows for and should be able to sell it for conservations purposes if both parties are willing. But beyond that, it’s so hard to untangle. I worry about imperialism and outsourcing of negative consequences. If we eliminate the 2-3% of beef grazed on public lands here (and 2-3% of American beef is still a ton of cows), demand won’t follow the drop in supply. So we’ll import from Argentina or Brazil and eat cows with a huge carbon footprint grazed on pasture that used to be Amazonian rainforest before it was clearcut. We’ll have our land back and some smug satisfaction or feeling of grand victory, but I worry we’ll just be outsourcing the problem. So what, ethically, should I be eating? If I add a no-public-grazing clause to my vegetarian meat-eating ethics, I might as well just go back to no meat at all. I want to be healthy, which means no more tofu if I can help it, and I’m not the kind of girl who can live off of lentils. I love dairy, but that’s a curtain I’ve barely started to pull back, and I know I won’t like what I find. Someday, I want a house in Seattle with a backyard big enough for chickens and a goat. But until then, I still think I’m doing better eating cheese, raw milk and Thundering Hooves beef.