Last summer, the excavation of some of the world’s richest mineral
deposits – and the degradation of some of the world's richest salmon
habitat – seemed well within the grasp of global mining interests. But
with the release of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's long-awaited environmental assessment
on Jan. 15, the development of Pebble Mine in southwest Alaska's
Bristol Bay slipped just a little bit further from reach – the latest
and perhaps most significant in a series of defeats for the embattled
project.
The EPA assessment confirms Pebble’s potential to severely damage
salmon runs, using stronger language than previous drafts (“could” has
turned to “would”) and describing in detail the acidic waste that could
leach into watersheds even under routine operation. The report is also
turning the tide of political opinion. "Wrong mine, wrong place, too
big," U.S. Sen. Mark Begich told the Anchorage Daily News
after reviewing it. Begich, a Democrat, is the first member of
Alaska's congressional delegation to publicly take a stand against
Pebble Mine, though previous politicians have also opposed it. Former
Gov. Tony Knowles called it “terrifying.”
Despite its gargantuan size – the mine itself would consume up to 94
miles of stream and 5,350 acres of wetlands, with an additional 64
streams affected by road building, the EPA found – Pebble has come to
represent more than just a fight for one place or one ecosystem. Even
people who have never stood on the banks of a river teeming with salmon
are deeply invested in this corner of Alaska as a symbol of wildness, a
vestige of the ecological and cultural riches that were once bountiful
across North America. As HCN senior editor Ray Ring wrote after visiting Bristol Bay last summer, "the
restoration efforts I'd reported on (in the American West) were kind of
desperate, almost pathetic" in comparison: "The Lower 48 will never
regain the kind of wildness that survives in Alaska."
Read the rest of my story by clicking here: http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/final-epa-report-the-latest-in-a-series-of-blows-to-alaskas-pebble-mine
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Monday, January 20, 2014
A tale of two states
What happens when you give a homeless person a subsidized apartment?
The answer isn’t as straightforward as you might think. But in Utah,
it’s proven a resounding success – out of 17 chronically homeless people
who took part in the state’s 2005 pilot program, all were still off the
streets two years later, spurring a long-term “Housing First” initiative that’s reduced Utah’s homeless population by 74 percent while saving the state millions of dollars.
Lloyd Pendleton, Director of the Utah Homeless Task Force, remembers one woman who took part in the pilot program. She’d been on and off the streets for over a decade, but after she was given a place of her own in Salt Lake City, still chose to sleep outside next to a dumpster. Eventually, she started crashing on the floor of the apartment. And after a while, she began sleeping in the bed. Today, she lives near her family, 70 years old, sober and happy.
Had she lived just across the border in Wyoming, her story might have ended very differently. Though its rate of homelessness isn’t particularly high, Wyoming falls dead last in the nation for sheltering its homeless, with only 26 percent receiving shelter, compared to 61 percent nationally. Plus, Wyoming’s homeless population has been on the rise: According to official data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it’s more than doubled over the last three years, though Mary Randolph of the Wyoming Rural Development Council says it’s hard to know what the exact numbers are because the state’s record-keeping has been so inconsistent.
Still, she adds, the homeless population has indeed increased: “When the economy tanked, people heard there were (oil and gas) jobs in Wyoming and flooded out here. There weren’t jobs, and weren’t homes either, so a lot of people ended up on the streets.”
It wasn’t until last year that Wyoming officials fully realized that the state’s plan for addressing homelessness lagged so far behind neighboring states’. “We weren’t getting the funding from HUD that we were eligible to get. We didn’t have an organized continuum of care like most other states, and there was (no one) overseeing homeless programs,” says Brenda Lyttle, a senior administrator in the Department of Family Services who now coordinates the state’s homeless services.
Under Lyttle’s direction, Wyoming is taking action. ....
Read the rest of the story at http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/a-tale-of-two-states-utahs-become-a-model-for-reducing-homelessness-but-wyoming-lags-behind
Lloyd Pendleton, Director of the Utah Homeless Task Force, remembers one woman who took part in the pilot program. She’d been on and off the streets for over a decade, but after she was given a place of her own in Salt Lake City, still chose to sleep outside next to a dumpster. Eventually, she started crashing on the floor of the apartment. And after a while, she began sleeping in the bed. Today, she lives near her family, 70 years old, sober and happy.
Had she lived just across the border in Wyoming, her story might have ended very differently. Though its rate of homelessness isn’t particularly high, Wyoming falls dead last in the nation for sheltering its homeless, with only 26 percent receiving shelter, compared to 61 percent nationally. Plus, Wyoming’s homeless population has been on the rise: According to official data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it’s more than doubled over the last three years, though Mary Randolph of the Wyoming Rural Development Council says it’s hard to know what the exact numbers are because the state’s record-keeping has been so inconsistent.
Still, she adds, the homeless population has indeed increased: “When the economy tanked, people heard there were (oil and gas) jobs in Wyoming and flooded out here. There weren’t jobs, and weren’t homes either, so a lot of people ended up on the streets.”
It wasn’t until last year that Wyoming officials fully realized that the state’s plan for addressing homelessness lagged so far behind neighboring states’. “We weren’t getting the funding from HUD that we were eligible to get. We didn’t have an organized continuum of care like most other states, and there was (no one) overseeing homeless programs,” says Brenda Lyttle, a senior administrator in the Department of Family Services who now coordinates the state’s homeless services.
Under Lyttle’s direction, Wyoming is taking action. ....
Read the rest of the story at http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/a-tale-of-two-states-utahs-become-a-model-for-reducing-homelessness-but-wyoming-lags-behind
Sunday, January 12, 2014
small towns struggle to save their theaters.
One snowy evening over the holidays, I sat down for a beer with screenwriter Susan Shilliday ("Legends of the Fall"), who moved from Los Angeles to rural western Massachusetts eight years ago to run a used bookstore.
We were discussing how difficult it is for independent booksellers to
stay in business when Susan brought up a similar challenge faced by her
first love: cinema. The theater in a nearby college town had recently
closed, she told me, and many others are on the brink.
I’m a diehard bookworm and not much of a movie buff, so while I’ve pined for small, independent bookstores since watching Meg Ryan’s character lose hers in 1998’s "You’ve Got Mail," I hadn’t realized that small theaters are equally endangered. According to Rolling Stone, more than 1,000 rural theaters are at risk of closing in the next few years, and hundreds more have already shut their doors. The threat isn’t so much competition from giant multiplexes (though that’s an issue, too): It’s the cost of retrofitting old facilities to meet new digital standards.
As I write this, a Hollywood revolution is quietly unfolding: 35-mm film, the iconic medium that captured Charlie Chaplin, Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, is becoming obsolete. The change began in 2002, when a coalition of big studios got together to create new digital parameters for the industry. Digital films are less expensive to produce ($150 per copy compared to $1,500), and studios can save billions each year by going digital. By the mid-2000s, only a few hundred theaters worldwide were capable of playing digital films, but with the digital-only release of "Avatar" in 2009, scores converted to be able to screen the 3D hit.
For corporate multiplexes, the $40,000 to $75,000 per screen required for digitization wasn’t a problem. Yet for small theaters, the change can be catastrophic.
As of this year, Hollywood will begin releasing movies almost solely in digital format, meaning theaters that haven’t converted will be left in the dust. It’s rare that Hollywood’s actions reverberate through the rural West, but the switch to digital has given remote Western towns more reasons to worry for their future. “They’re … forcing people to convert or close,” says Amy DeLuca, program director for the 89-year-old Paradise Theater in Paonia, Colo., High Country News’ hometown. “It would be a tragic loss (for the town) if we can’t keep the theater open.” ...
... Read the rest at: http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/as-film-grows-obsolete-western-towns-struggle-to-keep-their-theaters-open
I’m a diehard bookworm and not much of a movie buff, so while I’ve pined for small, independent bookstores since watching Meg Ryan’s character lose hers in 1998’s "You’ve Got Mail," I hadn’t realized that small theaters are equally endangered. According to Rolling Stone, more than 1,000 rural theaters are at risk of closing in the next few years, and hundreds more have already shut their doors. The threat isn’t so much competition from giant multiplexes (though that’s an issue, too): It’s the cost of retrofitting old facilities to meet new digital standards.
As I write this, a Hollywood revolution is quietly unfolding: 35-mm film, the iconic medium that captured Charlie Chaplin, Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, is becoming obsolete. The change began in 2002, when a coalition of big studios got together to create new digital parameters for the industry. Digital films are less expensive to produce ($150 per copy compared to $1,500), and studios can save billions each year by going digital. By the mid-2000s, only a few hundred theaters worldwide were capable of playing digital films, but with the digital-only release of "Avatar" in 2009, scores converted to be able to screen the 3D hit.
For corporate multiplexes, the $40,000 to $75,000 per screen required for digitization wasn’t a problem. Yet for small theaters, the change can be catastrophic.
As of this year, Hollywood will begin releasing movies almost solely in digital format, meaning theaters that haven’t converted will be left in the dust. It’s rare that Hollywood’s actions reverberate through the rural West, but the switch to digital has given remote Western towns more reasons to worry for their future. “They’re … forcing people to convert or close,” says Amy DeLuca, program director for the 89-year-old Paradise Theater in Paonia, Colo., High Country News’ hometown. “It would be a tragic loss (for the town) if we can’t keep the theater open.” ...
... Read the rest at: http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/as-film-grows-obsolete-western-towns-struggle-to-keep-their-theaters-open
Monday, December 23, 2013
Two months' of journal snippets.
Fall in the mountains: Woke with melting frost dripping on my head, dead leaves sifting through a tangle of willows, blue sky snapped tight like a sheet out to dry. The morning sun makes everything look more golden than it already is -- burnt, burnished, waiting for snow. The coffee in my tin cup gets cold before my fingers can warm up. ...
Tonight after work I went out to the small grocery store just as it was closing; the kids who work there having a last cigarette in the parking lot, pushing the carts in a train toward the door. The four-way stop in town was empty of traffic, moon rising over the hill, my bicycle creaking, rolling home through silent, dreaming streets...
I dreamt last night that I took Jesse to Vermont, that we went to a ski mountain and the drive in was beautiful, the mountains taller than they really are, hazy on the horizon, and Jesse exclaimed how beautiful it was, and lift tickets were only $4. Places that do not exist except in other dreams, places I do not know but that are real in the dreamworld I have built slowly, one night at a time, a few pebbles each night (except, sometimes, with a flash of lightning, one that brings a whole city into being in less than an hour) -- those places were there -- a house up a windy road on a hill, a restaurant, a collection of cabins under thick pines. Dirt roads, a friend's house. Jesse liked it all, and I was happy.
All day, I write, and yet time passes unmarked; the days slide by as stealthily as fog. Thanksgiving is past, autumn is past - winter blew in overnight, eight inches of sparkling snow, a fine sift of powder falling all day. In the evening, after a good day at work, I eat thin slices of elk, then go for a glittering starlight snowshoe above town, looking down at the houses with Christmas lights and up at the gathering stars, the dissipating clouds. Headlamp off, tramping over the blanket of snow, making tracks intersected only by those of deer, and perhaps the mountain lions that we know are here somewhere, out of sight... The trees and shrubs are strange, twisted lumps under the snow ... lungs burning, nose cold, heart full ... a burst of laughter, then home to a soft blanket, hot cocoa, and the last 20 pages of a book.
The days slide by like fog over the river, but sometimes the fog burns off and a day stands out, shining, clear.
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Shaming America into better Native justice
In 1881, a Brulé Lakota man
in South Dakota who shot and killed another member of his tribe was
sentenced to death by federal officials who thought the tribal
punishment of eight horses, $600 and a blanket was too lenient. The case
set a precedent that certain crimes committed on tribal lands are to be
tried in federal, rather than state or local, courts.
One hundred and thirty years later, on the same reservation, 17-year-old Bryan Boneshirt, a Rosebud Sioux, pleaded guilty to homicide for beating and strangling MarQuita Walking Eagle. State courts are prohibited from sentencing juveniles to life in prison without parole, but because cases for certain crimes involving Native Americans on reservations go straight into the federal system, which has no such restrictions, Boneshirt was tried as an adult and sentenced to a 48-year sentence without parole. He’ll likely spend the rest of his life in jail.
Boneshirt’s crime was heinous, says Troy Eid, chairman of the national Indian Law and Order Commission, a non-partisan advisory group. Yet if the same crime had been committed off-reservation, say by a teenager in Denver, the defendant would have been tried in district or state court and received a significantly shorter sentence, even if he was tried as an adult. The fact that Boneshirt was subject to a different, harsher set of laws simply because he lived on a reservation is indicative of the “extraordinary dysfunction” of Native American criminal justice, Eid adds.
In a groundbreaking 324-page report on tribal safety released last month, Eid and his eight co-commissioners found that Native American juveniles serve sentences roughly twice as long as those served by any other racial or ethnic group, and that two-thirds of all juveniles serving time in federal prisons are Native. “It’s extraordinary,” says Eid, a law professor and private attorney. “(Current laws) create a systemic inequity that’s absolutely appalling.” ....
... Read the rest of the story (including the particularly staggering inequality in Alaska Native communities) at http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/a-new-report-hopes-to-shame-america-into-rethinking-native-justice
One hundred and thirty years later, on the same reservation, 17-year-old Bryan Boneshirt, a Rosebud Sioux, pleaded guilty to homicide for beating and strangling MarQuita Walking Eagle. State courts are prohibited from sentencing juveniles to life in prison without parole, but because cases for certain crimes involving Native Americans on reservations go straight into the federal system, which has no such restrictions, Boneshirt was tried as an adult and sentenced to a 48-year sentence without parole. He’ll likely spend the rest of his life in jail.
Boneshirt’s crime was heinous, says Troy Eid, chairman of the national Indian Law and Order Commission, a non-partisan advisory group. Yet if the same crime had been committed off-reservation, say by a teenager in Denver, the defendant would have been tried in district or state court and received a significantly shorter sentence, even if he was tried as an adult. The fact that Boneshirt was subject to a different, harsher set of laws simply because he lived on a reservation is indicative of the “extraordinary dysfunction” of Native American criminal justice, Eid adds.
In a groundbreaking 324-page report on tribal safety released last month, Eid and his eight co-commissioners found that Native American juveniles serve sentences roughly twice as long as those served by any other racial or ethnic group, and that two-thirds of all juveniles serving time in federal prisons are Native. “It’s extraordinary,” says Eid, a law professor and private attorney. “(Current laws) create a systemic inequity that’s absolutely appalling.” ....
... Read the rest of the story (including the particularly staggering inequality in Alaska Native communities) at http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/a-new-report-hopes-to-shame-america-into-rethinking-native-justice
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
snowy days and cold nights
 |
| San Juan mountains, Colorado |
 |
| sledding + whiskey = not a good mix |
 |
| The gypsy wagon, Avalanche Hot Springs, Colorado |
 |
| Avalanche Hot Springs |
 |
| McClure Pass, western Colorado |
 |
| McClure Pass |
 |
| Almost home... en route to Paonia, Colorado |
Could the fight for Browns Canyon be over?
The struggle to protect Browns Canyon,
a rugged stretch of the Arkansas River in central Colorado, has been
waxing and waning since the area was first studied for wilderness
designation in the 1970s. Several attempts to create a new federal
wilderness have been floated since then, and though they’ve come
tantalizingly close, none have yet passed.
Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., wants to change that. A former Outward Bound director, wilderness proponent and mountaineer (he’s climbed Denali, Aconcagua and 26,000 feet of Everest), Udall announced on Tuesday the culmination of a project he’s been working on for 18 months: a bill to create a brand new, 22,000-acre National Monument in Browns Canyon, including 10,500 acres of wilderness. After soliciting thousands of comments and holding several public meetings, Udall seems to have found a recipe for success – the support of local businesses, national monument designation (which offers more flexible management than pure wilderness), and unchanged access for hunters, ranchers, off-roaders and human-powered recreation such as rafting.
“There’s tremendous support on the ground,” says Matt Keller, the national monument campaign director for advocacy group The Wilderness Society. “Senator Udall and his staff have done a tremendous job listening to people’s concerns and addressing them.”
But noticeably absent from the discussion has been Rep. Doug Lamborn, the Republican who represents Chaffee County, where the Canyon is. Though he has yet to make an official statement, Lamborn’s spokesman told High Country News Wednesday that the Congressman does not support Udall’s bill, and still has “concerns over the lack of consensus … from certain residents.”...
... Intrigued? Read the rest at http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/could-the-fight-for-browns-canyon-finally-be-over
Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., wants to change that. A former Outward Bound director, wilderness proponent and mountaineer (he’s climbed Denali, Aconcagua and 26,000 feet of Everest), Udall announced on Tuesday the culmination of a project he’s been working on for 18 months: a bill to create a brand new, 22,000-acre National Monument in Browns Canyon, including 10,500 acres of wilderness. After soliciting thousands of comments and holding several public meetings, Udall seems to have found a recipe for success – the support of local businesses, national monument designation (which offers more flexible management than pure wilderness), and unchanged access for hunters, ranchers, off-roaders and human-powered recreation such as rafting.
“There’s tremendous support on the ground,” says Matt Keller, the national monument campaign director for advocacy group The Wilderness Society. “Senator Udall and his staff have done a tremendous job listening to people’s concerns and addressing them.”
But noticeably absent from the discussion has been Rep. Doug Lamborn, the Republican who represents Chaffee County, where the Canyon is. Though he has yet to make an official statement, Lamborn’s spokesman told High Country News Wednesday that the Congressman does not support Udall’s bill, and still has “concerns over the lack of consensus … from certain residents.”...
... Intrigued? Read the rest at http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/could-the-fight-for-browns-canyon-finally-be-over
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)