where the wild things are

 

Why does it matter that we preserve wilderness in the United States?

Some people argue that we need to preserve wilderness for its own sake; others that wild places heal and replenish the human soul, and are necessary to our very being. There is a current wave of “neo-environmentalists” who argue wild places have economic and social value and should be preserved for those reasons. The point can also be made that wild plants and animals may hold medical secrets that could benefit humans, and there are countless other reasons stretching across time and literature and academia. But none have held up against our ongoing march toward progress.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Ralph Beistline from Alaska ruled against afederal Fish and Wildlife proposal to protect a 187,000 square mile chunk of the Arctic – an area larger than California – from oil and gas exploration to preserve rapidly shrinking polar bear habitat. Judge Beistline's ruling was applauded by nearly every public figure in Alaska: Governor Sean Parnell called the ruling a victory against “the latest in a long string of examples of the federal government encroaching on our state's rights.”

I have never been inside the Arctic Circle, and I have never seen a wild polar bear. I do not have personal experience of the financial and physical struggles of families living on Alaska's North Slope. But I like to think that I have a degree of empathy, and I've worked closely with Alaskan teenagers who have come from such families. I've spent many weeks in the wilderness with them and many hours paddling canoes and talking with them and I think that in the process I've gotten a glimpse into life in villages of the far north. It doesn't sound easy. But a line has to be drawn somewhere.

Though I haven't met with a polar bear in the wild, I have watched one at the Chicago Zoo – a massive creature with a range of hundreds of miles in the wild, forced to swim in circles in an artificially blue pool in 90 degree heat in the middle of Chicago. I've also encountered a good number of wild Alaskan brown bears, and their smaller black cousins. I've paddled a canoe next to a swimming brown bear, watched them snatch salmon from a river and spied on them through binoculars as they lumber over brown tundra. And I have seen enough other large animals – sharks, manta rays, whales, wolves, moose and buffalo in the wild – to know the contradictions that exist in such creatures: violence and grace side by side, power on one side of the coin and fragility on the other.

In response to Judge Beistline's ruling, Gov. Parnell issued a statement that he is “pleased the State of Alaska was able to fight off this concerted effort to kill jobs and economic development.” Meanwhile, environmentalists elsewhere in the U.S. have raised their collective megaphones to express outrage over the decision, protesting on behalf of the bears. All well and good, but their voices aren't heard in the one place where it matters most: Alaska, which, as a state, sued the federal government for trying to intervene in local affairs. Alaskans know that a bunch of liberals in Washington D.C. don't know shit about what goes down in northern Alaska. It's a different country up there, a different culture. And when students are dropping out of school to hunt walrus to support their family, it's hard to turn down development that brings jobs and hope to a region still struggling to define itself in the modern world.

In New Zealand, where I am spending six months, there are no large native mammals. The only native land species of any substance were the moa – large emu-like birds that were hunted to extinction by the Maori – and the Haast eagle, which died along with their main food source, the moa. True there are dolphins and whales in New Zealand's waters, but it is utterly strange to tramp through thick forest, beneath towering peaks and glistening glaciers, in deep valleys that seem as wild and remote as you can get – and not have the slightest fear of running into something that can kill you. Edward Abbey said that it ain't wilderness unless there's something big out there that can kill you, but perhaps he had never been to New Zealand. It's plenty wild down here on the South Island, but you can cook dinner right in your tent without fear of a bear attack and walk barefoot up the trails without worrying about a snakebite.

In a way, it's freeing: a hiker's paradise, free of danger as long as you bring the right clothing and don't get lost. It offers a relaxed sort of wilderness experience, and that's a nice change after spending months camping in bear country. But imagine a world where all the wild places were like that? It would get boring pretty fast. Part of the allure of spending time in the wilderness is not knowing what you'll see, what you might run into around the next bend. There's a sense of trepidation and excitement. There's the knowledge that you're not the biggest, baddest thing out there.

So why preserve wilderness? Because it's of value to use as a species, because we need it as much as it needs us, economically and spiritually and ecologically. Preserve wilderness for its own sake, in the spirit of altruism. And preserve wilderness because I personally do not want to live in a world where buffalo are nothing but a roadside attraction on the outskirts of Yellowstone and polar bears swim in hopeless circles in Chicago and people can walk in the wild places without any chance of encountering something that bigger than they are, something very much alive and breathing.

United Against Hallow, Inc

 Students at Ebon Elementary School, Republic of the Marshall Islands, 2006

In 2006-2007, I lived and worked as a volunteer English teacher in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a tiny, independent island nation in the Pacific comprised of 70 square miles of land spread out over 750,000 square miles of open ocean. Between 1946 and 1962, the United States of America detonated a staggering SIXTY SEVEN nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands –- the equivalent of thousands of Hiroshimas. Nuclear fallout from the bombs, some of which were laced with plutonium, continues to affect Marshallese citizens today in the form of high cancer rates, birth defects, environmental degradation, displacement and poverty. To add insult to injury, the Marshallese people allege that the U.S. government then used them as guinea pigs to study the long-term effects of radiation through a covert initiative dubbed “Project 4.1.”

This Halloween, a company in Rockville, Maryland is using these tragic events as a source of profit and entertainment.

Hallow, Inc., “a team of five young, talented entrepreneurs” based in a wealthy D.C. suburb, recently launched an urban haunted house called “The Warehouse: Project 4.1” depicting deformed, zombified Marshallese citizens as radioactive monsters let loose in a medical lab.

The premise of the $30 haunted house (explained to visitors via an introductory video) is that “specimens” suffering from nuclear fallout in the Marshall Islands were sent to a medical lab in Maryland to scare the bejeezus out of middle-class suburbanites. According to one Yelp.com review, “The actors do an excellent job (especially the female zombie holding a baby) and the tension never lets up!”

It might seem entertaining – until you consider the image of a real-life Marshallese woman holding her deformed child, a sight all too common in the Marshall Islands.

From a distance, the Marshall Islands look a bit like paradise. Though they are dealing with many of the problems common to developing nations (clean water shortages, lack of medical care, poverty, trash), these issues are framed by stunning natural beauty and a warm and generous culture. Imagine glowing turquoise lagoons, vibrant coral reefs and white-sand beaches, combined with people that value family, love music and retain cultural traditions despite a host of external pressures. In Marshallese culture, birthday parties are celebrated not by bringing gifts to the host family, but by the host family giving away their belongings to guests. After a successful keemem (first birthday party), a Marshallese family might be left without a pot left to cook in – but they know they'll be cared for by the community.

The generosity of the Marshallese people is further exemplified by a letter written to supporters of Hallow, Inc by Sherwood Tibon, a Marshallese citizen living in Hawaii. “Do I want to burn the US Flag every time I'm reminded of the horrors of Project 4.1?” he asks. “You bet! But I'm not going to. I'm not going to because I truly believe that the American people are a great people. It shows in the multitude of friends we have ... who've poured their hearts out and show their support to our cause. It shows through their tireless efforts to bring change to Hallow Inc.'s theme.”

He continues: “I understand your position and I'm not going to judge you. However, if you have a heart, which I know you do, I ask you to please pray for our victims and their families … who were directly involved in Project 4.1. Pray that one-day they may see justice; pray that one-day our children and their children's children won't have to endure what our generation has endured. Living in a nuclear (free) world is and forever will be our goal.”

Thanks to a Facebook-driven protest 2,400 members strong and a persistent campaign of letter-writing, petitioning, online reviews and media outreach, Hallow, Inc's website now includes a disclaimer that the zombies in their attraction are not meant to actually represent Marshallese citizens, and that a “portion” of the profits will be donated to a women's group in the Marshall Islands. Still, Marshallese and American protesters (including myself) do not believe that an obscure disclaimer hidden on a website is adequate compensation for a grossly insensitive enterprise that seeks to trivialize and capitalize on the suffering of innocent people.

If the Maryland “haunted house” was to end in November, one might be inclined to let it go. But a recent interview with Hallow, Inc suggests that they plan to carry forth this successful business venture for years to come, spreading it to urban centers across the U.S. each October.

It's for this reason that we are respectfully asking Hallow, Inc to change the premise of their attraction to one that does not continue to remind the 20,000 Marshallese citizens living in the U.S. of the real-life horrors inflicted on their parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles and children. Keep the zombies. Keep the gore. Keep the money. Just change the background to a story that does not send the message that the people of the United States dismiss such atrocities as mere entertainment.

Until Hallow, Inc complies with this simple request, we will continue to make our voices heard. Please join us by signing this petition, telling your friends and, above all, boycotting Hallow, Inc's attractions until this is resolved. 

Thank you. Kommol tata. 

 Arriving by boat to a keemem on Ebon atoll, Marshall Islands

in the news

And now for my semi-regular news roundup: stories that caught my eye and made me think this week. From Indonesian coral reefs to Amazonian rainforests to Alaskan villages and gas prices, here they are, with links to the original articles and my own two cents thoughtfully included for your reading pleasure:

1.  Winner of the least-reported, most-important award: Bolivian president Evo Morales rescinds on a contract to build a major road through the Amazon. Kudos, Mr. Morales: for listening to the people you serve, for allowing cooler heads to prevail and for preserving intact rainforest important to the ecological and cultural health of your country, and that of the world.

2. The 92-page report Energy 2020, written by the head of global commodity research at Citigroup, says that the tar sands and shale gas deposits newly available for energy development in North America have the potential to turn the continent into a "new Middle East."

"The only thing that could stop this is politics -- environmentalists getting the upper hand over supply in the U.S., for instance," writes Ed Morse in the report. A New York Times article on America's new energy supply goes on to say that when "resources are available, they end up being developed." OR we could develop something that doesn't cause earthquakes, use up precious water resources and emit CO2.

3. Meanwhile, as Americans tighten their wallets over record-high gas prices and turn their ire into a political weapon, a National Geographic article I just came across from last fall shows that a gallon of gas in Turkey costs about $10.02, in the U.K., $8.39, and in Toronto, $5.41. In some rural Alaskan villages, it's currently up to $9 a gallon. Astronomical by our standards, but perhaps a better representation of the true cost of oil and an impetus to use less.

4. In Alaska, village schools are closing at unprecedented rates: 27 rural schools in the past 13 years have shut down because of a government mandate that cuts funding at schools with less than 10 students. When a school disappears, the vitality of the community is sure to follow. Similar shutdowns, though to a lesser degree, have been taking place in Vermont: I remember one old timer from Corinth who prophesied that when the village school there was absorbed into a regional school, the general store would be the next thing to go, followed by the post office, eventually leaving the community a shell of its former self. He was spot on. The news of rural schools closing is also indicative of the general population shift to urban areas, something that I think represents a great loss for American values, skills and culture.

5. And lastly, some good news: it turns out the cost of helping to protect the marine environment can be as low as $24 per person a year. A study by the Nature Conservancy shows that educating local people in Indonesia of the value of protecting marine resources and practicing sustainable, low-impact fishing led to a substantial increase in positive attitudes toward conservationism and a decrease in illegal fishing over five years. In the U.S., I'd imagine that giving low-income kids living along the coasts a cheap mask and snorkel would lead to a similar surge in the desire to protect our oceans. No one cares about protecting a place until they've experienced its wonders firsthand.  

Can this:

Help prevent this?

 

(Marshall Islands photos by me)

In other news, I'm off to the desert for five days with my good friend Desirae! Photographs of red rocks, slot canyons and two very happy people to follow.

Learning from the past

Last night, I was searching for something in the depths of my computer and came across a short piece I'd written when I worked for a company that digitized the pages of historic newspapers. I have absolutely no recollection of writing this, except I know that it was done as a personal project, likely when I was bored one day after writing marketing copy for our Texas historical newspapers product. Anyway, I thought it was worth posting here. Though it's important to look to the future and come up with modern, original solutions to our climate and environmental crises, we mustn't forget to look to the past as well. Progress isn't always forward-moving.

***

In the mid-19th century, it seemed to Americans that the world was changing at an unprecedented rate. The American West was opening up. All over the East Coast, people in overcrowded cities and over-farmed land were suddenly struck with Oregon Fever, Gold Fever, a sudden urge to pack their belongings into a wagon and populate this great country from sea to shining sea. 

Smallpox and other European diseases had considerably lessened Native populations in the West, and vast tracts of land were newly open for the taking. Best of all, in the 1870s, places once considered too arid for farming were being deluged with enough rain to grow shoulder-high wheat and basketball-sized melons. Thanks to countless massacres, buffalo populations were decreasing too, and would-be ranchers were tempted with enough space to graze record herds of cattle. Newspapers from the time chronicled a national obsession with progress, with looking ahead to the future and ignoring the past.

“The American people, sir, are a forward going people,” wrote Stuart Perry in an 1841 editorial urging settlers to come to Texas. “The wild geese [here] are very tame... and can be easily killed with your pistols. Oysters are in great abundance... deer and wild turkeys are very numerous... [and] sugar and cotton grow by rattoon. There are many who can testify to four thousand pounds of seed-cotton having been produced in one year from one acre of land.” It would take ten years, Perry added, to produce such bounty in the eastern states. 

What Perry does not mention, however, is that a century earlier, valley soil in the East had been just as fertile as that he describes in Texas. But farmers rarely practiced the crop rotation necessary to keep fields productive over time. Why did they need to? There was more than enough land in the Americas. 

Amidst the mad rush to move forward, a few men looked to history and strove to make their voices heard. Observing the declining productivity of eastern farms and hoping to avoid the same in the West, an unidentified author in the Texan Advocate prophesied in 1848 that “the production of one or two great staples for export, neglecting...a wise rotation of crops, is sure to exhaust the soil, impoverish the people, and depopulate large and once-fertile districts.” The author goes on to admonish the British colonial system, which derived goods “from distant countries” and advocate sustainable local food produced “without impairing the natural fertility of the earth.” 

But as usual, sensational ideas generated far more attention than sensible ones. In 1885, a writer identified as N.A.T. from the Dallas Morning News reported on a new scientific phenomenon known as “rain follows the plow,” which hypothesized that increased human populations led to increased rainfall. “The annual precipitation [in the Texas panhandle] is far greater now... than it was when settlers first came into the country” N.A.T. wrote. The crops planted by settlers “serve as so many pumps, which, by their millions and millions of tiny roots suck up from the subsoil the water which lies hidden there, out of reach, and then by means of their leaves set free the water into the atmosphere.” 

While the notion seems quaint today, it had serious implications in its time. People flocked to the Texas plains, lured by promises of fertile land, easy profits and the ability to conquer the weather. They replaced native grasses with rows of cotton and failed to plant ground cover in the winter. They overgrazed cattle and didn't rotate crops. Nonetheless, for the next century at least, the weather generally cooperated and many settlers prospered.

Here’s where 4th grade history comes in: in 1930s, a natural drought combined with eroded soil and a lack of native grasses began to cause massive dust storms. “Texas in Need of Heavy Rain!” proclaimed one contemporary headline. “Black Blizzard: Visibility Zero at Amarillo as Dust Blots Sun” declared another. While some Texans resorted to prayer—or exploding TNT into the skies in hopes of generating precipitation, a tactic also employed today by the Chinese government—Dallas Morning News agricultural editor Victor H. Schoffelmayer had a more practical solution. He urged farmers to plant vegetative land cover to decrease soil erosion and help curb the effects of the weather, if not the weather itself. But even as devastating dust storms killed livestock and humans and destroyed crops and livelihoods, Schoffelmayer recognized that “to expect farmers to think first of the soil and later of their own interest may be expecting too much.”
However, he wrote, “the time is here when they must think in those terms.” Those words could well be echoed today.

The sun bakes the ground at the Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. Much of the arid West was settled during a time of above-average rainfall; now, as droughts become the new normal, cities and farms are struggling not to go the way of the Anasazi, the ancient people who built civilizations among desert cliffs during a similarly wet era and disappeared when the rains dried up.

news spin

I read more news at this moment in my life than ever before, and perhaps more than I ever will again. And without fail, every day as I swim through a pool of newspapers and blogs and news sites, I am blown away by what I read. Unbiased journalist? How is that possible? The more you read, the easier it is to be opinionated. Outraged, even. I may strive to make my writing fair and balanced, but that's only part of the story. Regardless of a reporter's objectivity, news outlets demonstrate their bias, conscious or not, simply by what they choose to print and report on and what they ignore or overlook.

A lack of bias is ever more pertinent now that most journalists have personal or professional blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. I try to be very clear that mine are personal, but when you're a public figure, even at a local community paper, the line between personal and professional is easily blurred. Larger (and more tech-savvy) news organizations than mine give reporters strict guidelines on how they should conduct their online presence, not only so they don't broadcast photos of themselves swilling beer and flipping off the camera, but also to discourage them from publicly voicing any sort of bias or opinion that could compromise their objectivity as a reporter.

I understand that journalists chronicle history, and that objectivity is essential to this goal. But with the explosion of blogging and social media and the gradual influx of new forms of journalism, asking reporters to maintain a completely neutral online presence is, I think, unrealistic. So -- because I'm about to leave the newspaper and head back to the outdoor industry, here are the stories that blew me out of the water this week. Maybe I'll try to make this a weekly blog posting.

1. Two commonly used pesticides have been linked to the death of bees. While it's not news that both wild and managed bees are dying in untold numbers, and it certainly shouldn't be news that the pesticides used to kill "bad" insects are also killing the ones necessary to pollinate and propagate our food crops, the study published in Science does two things.

First, it gives credible scientific backing to something that had previously only been common sense. While common sense is good enough for some organic farmers, it doesn't stand up well in court and isn't enough for policy change. To move away from the use of harmful pesticides and save our natural pollinators, we need proof that many pesticides are doing more harm than good.

Second, it shows how wrong claims of "environmentally friendly" can be, and how easily a bit of clever marketing can dupe the general public into believing such claims. The relatively new pesticides studied by the bee researchers were heralded by their developers as being more environmentally friendly than previous pesticides. When you look at it that way, I guess death by Agent Orange was friendlier than death by machine gun.

2. Dartmouth hazing scandal goes national with Janet Reitman's Rolling Stone article. This may be only interesting to me since I live here, witness the Dartmouth culture firsthand, and have been following it and reporting on it since Day 1 -- or even before than, since my in-depth piece on sexual assault at the college was published last spring. Either way, the Rolling Stone piece is a compelling read and worthwhile expose on the entitlement and desensitization to suffering that feeds directly into Wall Street culture.

3. Along the same lines: the House GOP budget. Working as a journalist has forced me to pay attention to and understand issues that I previously skimmed over, like (strangely) our national budget and the politics behind it. All I can say is, really? I must live in a fairly insular bubble, because I cannot fathom WHO would buy into a proposal to cut health and human services while maintaining tax cuts for the super-rich. I'm thankful this budget is DOA when it hits the Senate, but nonetheless discouraged that we waste so much energy arguing about non-issues like tax cuts for the wealthy, health care for women and presidential religion that we ignore the issues that really matter -- like, say, food and water security.

Which brings me to number four:

4. The EPA proposes a monumental first step in curbing greenhouse gas emissions. While this spells trouble for dirty coal plants, it also encourages the use of natural gas, which encourages fracking. Oy vey.

5. This was not a news item from the most recent week, but it's perhaps the most interesting thing I've read all month, so I thought I'd end on a high note and share this fascinating story of giant, presumed- extinct insects clinging to life on an oceanic megolith higher than the Empire State Building. Go forth into the week, and know that the world is full of wonder.

workin overtime

 

At the age of 26 and with little professional training, I managed to get into a field that, if I live to be 80, I imagine I'll look back on much as a silent film star might look back on old Hollywood, or a logger upon the days when trees were the size of Volkswagens. It will be a relic of a different time, before daily print journalism changed irrevocably. Things change, of course, but the slow death of community journalism represents something greater than a single loss. Newspapers are as much a part of this country's heritage as cowboys, their history as romanticized as railroads'. We don't know what the industry or the medium will look like in 80 years, but there's no doubt that right now, it is on the verge of something monumental. And I get to witness it from the increasingly rare perspective of a daily community journalist.

The recent documentary Page One about the media desk of the New York Times is a good film for anyone interested in the future of journalism, but it focuses on the perspective of the big guys. While we as a society tend to place great value on world and national news – and the people who produce it – most of it doesn't affect us one bit. The world is becoming more globalized and it's important to know what's going on, we tell ourselves while reading the Wall Street Journal at the airport, sipping espresso and feeling sophisticated. Meanwhile, community journalism founders at our doorstep.

My foray into newspapers began with the comics of the Springfield Republican, spread out on my parents' mauve living room rug on Sunday mornings in a square of dusty sunlight. As I grew up, I began reading the paper voraciously, largely because there was always a copy sitting at the kitchen table and I found it impossible to eat a bowl of cereal without reading something. Newspapers were infinitely more interesting than the backs of cereal boxes. Later, I spent a year and a half at a company that digitized the pages of historic and current newspapers. When I was done, I could tell you the names of nearly every small town newspaper that had ever thrived in the U.S.. The names were lyrical, like the names of boats. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. The Cleveland Plain-dealer. Oracle of the Day.

These newspapers told stories in a way no history book ever has. Our marketing line was that newspapers were the “first draft of history,” and after spending hours at my desk poring through digitized copies of old newspapers, I found it to be true. I could search nearly every newspaper printed between 1692 and 1922 for a single word or phrase. I tracked advertisements as they evolved from rewards for runaway slaves to automobiles to furs and Brillo cream. I found my ancestors in the obituaries and birth and marriage announcements. I saw the arc and fall of wars and of fashions, the bursts of breaking news – fires and strikes and scandals – the evolution of the form itself.

I worked there in 2007, when the newspaper industry was on the verge of a change still upending the world around us with no clear end in sight. No one knows what's going to happen. The company I worked for was weathering the storm pretty well, but they too worried about what the future would hold. Like the newspapers they dealt in, the company was built on the premise that people paid for reputable information. The internet is changing that.

Now I work for that dying breed, a daily print newspaper serving a largely rural area. My paper straddles the Vermont/New Hampshire border, and our proximity to Dartmouth College keeps us alive: it brings wealthy, educated people to a rural region, people who understand what's happening to community journalism and actively want to support it. We in the newsroom are derisive of the wealthy bubble they've created. But we're lucky.

I got in just in time. Twenty years from now, I don't know what the job I'm doing will look like or how many paid positions there will be. Right now, though, with the exception of the internet making research a thousand times easier, my job looks much like it has for decades. I approach strangers in the rain with a pen and narrow notebook poised, ready to scribble down the words that fly from their throat, hoping for the perfect quote, one that is regionally inflected, pointed, concise and witty all at once.

We cannot smoke in the office anymore, but we have John, who greets us every morning with a hearty “hey, gang” and looks like he belongs behind a smoky desk, and Jim, who is amicable but may win an award for most cynical man on the planet after David Carr dies. There is another John, who wears a plaid bowtie and pecks at the computer like its a typewriter. I try to be hard-edged, but it doesn't come naturally to me. I smile when I call an elderly woman on the phone and hear her delight in talking to the Valley News – her favorite out of the three local newspapers she and her husband get: us, plus the Claremont Eagle-Times and the Rutland Herald. She says she couldn't live without it.

Avid readers follow the staff writers and know our beats. I meet people at parties and introduce myself and they know who I am, recall an article I may have written months ago and reference it. “Which of my favorite Valley News writers are you?” asked a woman I met at a potluck several weeks ago. “Krista Langlois,” I said. “Oh, I'd hoped so!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms me like we were old friends. It's heartwarming to live in a place that values journalism, but is quick also to criticize, to keep us on our toes. Daily journalism operating out of a single, central location – rather than an unseen network of solitary bloggers sending off their work with a single key – is something to behold, a constant, churning machine. Reporters on deadline, the groan of the metal press, the bundles of papers loaded into trucks in the middle of the night, bleary eyed editors at their desks. It is nothing short of a daily miracle.

I've lived without news, too, for long stretches of time. I found it unsettling, in the Marshall Islands, to be stuck on a long, narrow crescent of sand and palm trees in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean without the slightest idea of what was happening elsewhere in the world. Once a month (if I was lucky), I would get a photocopied newsletter mailed to me with the month's headlines: St. Louis Wins World Series. More Than 30 Die in Virginia Tech Shooting. Wildfires Rage in California. That was it. World War III could have been going on and I wouldn't have found out until months later. But I knew everything that was happening on my island. Who was having a baby and who had gotten into a fight and who was flying to Majuro and would bring back new clothes and bags of candy. Which fish were running. It was hard to wean myself off the daily dose of global and national news I had grown so accustomed to, because it seemed important to be aware of what was going on in the world, but I knew what was going on in my world, and in the end that mattered more.