Plans to Turn America’s Rust Belt Into a New Plastics Belt Are Bad News for the Climate

An expanding petrochemical industry, thanks to fracked shale gas, could have big consequences for a warming planet.

The petrochemical industry anticipates spending a total of more than $200 billion on factories, pipelines and other infrastructure in the United States that will rely on shale gas, the American Chemistry Council announced in September. Construction is already underway at many sites.

This building spree would dramatically expand the Gulf Coast’s petrochemical corridor (known locally as “Cancer Alley”) — and establish a new plastics and petrochemical belt across states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

If those projects are completed, analysts predict the United States would flip from one of the world’s highest-cost producers of plastics and chemicals to one of the cheapest, using raw materials and energy from fracked gas wells in states like Texas, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Those petrochemical plans could have profound consequences for a planet already showing signs of dangerous warming and a cascade of other impacts from climate change.

The gathering wave of construction comes as the Trump administration works to deregulate American industry and roll back pollution controls, putting the United States at odds with the rest of the world’s efforts to slow climate change.

Trump announced in June 2017 that the United States had halted all implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement and intends to fully withdraw. America is now the world’s only state refusing participation in the global agreement to curb climate change (after Syria, the final holdout, signed in November 2017).

This petrochemical industry expansion — much of it funded by foreign investors — makes America’s refusal to participate in the Paris Agreement all the more significant, because much of this new U.S. infrastructure would be built outside of the greenhouse gas agreement affecting the rest of the globe.

If American policymakers approve this wave of new plastics and petrochemical plants with little regard to curbing climate change and reducing fossil fuel use, environmentalists warn, they’ll be greenlighting hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into projects at risk of becoming stranded assets.

From Rust Belt to Plastics Belt

Some of the largest and most expensive petrochemical projects in the United States are planned in the Rust Belt states of Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York, a region that has suffered for decades from the collapse of the domestic steel industry but that has relatively little experience with the kind of petrochemical complexes that are now primarily found on the Gulf Coast.

In November 2017 the China Energy Investment Corp. signed a “memorandum of understanding” with West Virginia that would result in the construction of $83.7 billion in plastics and petrochemicals projects over the next 20 years in that state alone — a huge slice of the $202.4 billion U.S. total. Those plans have run into snags due to trade disputes between the United States and China and a corruption probe, though Chinese officials said in late August that investment was moving forward.

The petrochemical industry’s interest is spurred by the fact that the region’s Marcellus and Utica shales contain significant supplies of so-called “wet gas.” This wet gas often is treated as a footnote in discussions of fracking, which tend to focus on the methane gas, called “dry gas” by industry — and not the ethane, propane, butane and other hydrocarbons that also come from those same wells.

Those “wet” fossil fuels and chemical feedstocks are commonly referred to as “natural gas liquids,” or NGLs, because they are delivered to customers condensed into a liquid form — like the liquid butane trapped in a Bic lighter, which expands into a stream of flammable gas when you flick that lighter on.

Ethane can represent a surprising amount of the fossil fuel from a fracked shale well, particularly in the Marcellus. For every 6,000 cubic feet of methane (the energy equivalent of the industry’s standard 42 gallon barrel of oil), Marcellus wet gas wells can produce up to roughly 35 gallons of ethane, based on data reported by the American Oil and Gas Reporter in 2011.

And U.S. ethane production is projected to grow dramatically. By 2022 the region will produce roughly 800,000 barrels of ethane per day, up from 470,000 barrels a day in 2017, according to energy consultant RBN Energy.

That supply glut is driving down ethane prices in the Rust Belt.

“The lowest price ethane on the planet is here in this region,” Brian Anderson, director of the West Virginia University Energy Institute, told the NEP Northeast U.S. Petrochemical Construction conference in Pittsburgh in June.

Chemicals and the Climate

The petrochemical and plastics industries are notoriously polluting, not only when it comes to toxic air pollution and plastic waste, but also because of the industry’s significant greenhouse gas footprint — affecting not only the United States, but the entire world.

“The chemical and petrochemical sector is by far the largest industrial energy user, accounting for roughly 10 percent of total worldwide final energy demand and 7 percent of global [greenhouse gas] emissions,” the International Energy Agency reported in 2013. Since then the numbers have crept up, with the IEA finding petrochemicals responsible for an additional percentage point of the world’s total energy consumption in 2017.

Fracking Doddridge, West Va.
Fracking trucks and equipment in Doddridge Co, West Va. Photo by Tara Lohan

Carbon emissions from petrochemical and plastics manufacturing are expected to grow 20 percent by 2030 (in other words, in just over a decade), the IEA concluded in a report released October 5. A few days later, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that by 2030, the world needs to have reduced its greenhouse gas pollution 45 percent from 2010 levels, in order to achieve the goal of limiting global warming to a less-catastrophic 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

The petrochemical industry has so far drawn relatively little attention from oil and gas analysts and policymakers. “Petrochemicals are one of the key blind spots in the global energy debate, especially given the influence they will exert on future energy trends,” Dr. Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said in a statement this month.

“In fact,” he added, “our analysis shows they will have a greater influence on the future of oil demand than cars, trucks and aviation.”

The new investments, which will rely on decades of continued fracking in the United States, offer the oil and gas industry a serious hedge against competition from renewable energy, even in the event that climate policies push fossil fuel energy to the margins.

“Unlike refining, and ultimately unlike oil, which will see a moment when the growth will stop, we actually don’t anticipate that with petrochemicals,” Andrew Brown, upstream director for Royal Dutch Shell, told the San Antonio Express News in March.

The planned infrastructure could also help bail out the heavily indebted shale drilling industry financially by consuming vast amounts of fossil fuels, both for power and as a raw material.

The American Chemistry Council has linked 333 chemical industry projects, all announced since 2010, to shale gas — that is, gas that is produced using fracking. Forty-one percent of those projects are still in the planning phase as of September, according to the council, and 68 percent of the projects are linked to foreign investment.

State regulators in Texas and Louisiana have already issued permits that would allow a group of 74 petrochemical and liquefied natural gas projects along the Gulf Coast to add 134 million tons of greenhouse gases a year to the atmosphere, an Environmental Integrity Project analysis found in September. The group said that was equal to the pollution from running 29 new coal power plants around the clock.

The expansion of plastics manufacturing in America also has environmentalists worried over a plastics pollution crisis. “We could be locking in decades of expanded plastics production at precisely the time the world is realizing we should use far less of it,” Carroll Muffett, president of the U.S. Center for International Environmental Law, told The Guardian in December 2017.

Petrochemical Paradox

The petrochemical industry transforms ethane and other raw material into a huge range of products, including not only plastic, but also vinyl, fertilizers, Styrofoam, beauty products, chemicals and pesticides.

The petrochemical industry itself straddles an uncomfortable fence when it comes to renewable energy and climate change. A significant portion of its revenue comes from “clean” technology sectors, as it provides materials used to make batteries and electric cars.

One report last year concluded that roughly 20 percent of the industry’s revenue comes from products designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the American Chemistry Council cited the industry’s role supplying “materials and technologies that improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions,” as it opposed Trump’s decision to drop out of the Paris climate agreement.

Natural gas plant
A natural gas processing plant under construction in Penn. Photo by Tara Lohan

But petrochemical manufacturers are also heavily reliant on fossil fuels. They need them to power and supply a dreamed-of “manufacturing renaissance,” as the ExxonMobil-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute explained as it pushed for Trump to abandon the Paris agreement.

Plans to use American shale gas would also link petrochemicals to the expansion of fracking, which carries its own environmental concerns. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s landmark study on fracking and drinking water concluded in 2016 that fracking has led to water contamination and poses continued risks to American water supplies.

In addition, though conversations about climate change usually focus on carbon emissions, the gas industry has such a bad methane leak problem that using natural gas can be even worse for the climate than burning coal.

“We share IEA’s view that the production, use and disposal of petrochemical-derived products present a variety of environmental challenges that need to be addressed,” the American Chemistry Council said in a statement sent to DeSmog, which also cited the use of petrochemical products in the renewable energy industry and the manufacture of products that raise energy efficiency like home insulation and lighter auto parts. “We are committed to managing energy use in our companies and manufacturing facilities.”

Pittsburgh and Paris

Climate implications make a petrochemical build-out risky, not only from an environmental perspective but also from a fiscal perspective, Mark Dixon, cofounder of NoPetroPA, which opposes fracking-based petrochemicals projects, told DeSmog.

One plant, Shell’s $6 billion ethane “cracker” plant currently under construction in Beaver County, Penn., has permits to pump 2.25 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year into the air near Pittsburgh, roughly equal to the annual carbon pollution from 430,000 cars.

Industry advocates say the region can produce enough ethane to support up to seven more ethane cracker plants like Shell’s.

“We’re trying to drop our emissions 50 percent by 2030,” Dixon said, referring to Pittsburgh’s highly touted plans to comply with international climate targets despite the federal government’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement. “The Shell cracker alone will decimate that.”

Stranding Assets

International negotiators met in Bangkok in September to hash out details on how the Paris agreement will be implemented. The United States, which participated in talks despite the Trump administration’s intention to withdraw from the accord, faced criticism over working to delay clarity over the agreement’s financing (nonetheless, a top U.N. negotiator praised  “good progress” from the talks).

While the Paris agreement is not directly binding, globally there has been discussion of using trade agreements and tariffs to pressure countries that fail to keep up with their carbon-cutting commitments.

In February the European Union declared that it will not sign new trade agreements with any country that refuses to get on board with the agreement.

“One of our main demands is that any country who signs a trade agreement with E.U. should implement the Paris agreement on the ground,” France’s foreign affairs minister Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne told the French Parliament. “No Paris agreement, no trade agreement.”

“They’re already shooting across the bow, saying look, you’ve got to implement the Paris climate agreement,” Dixon told DeSmog. “We could very well spend 10 years building an infrastructure to support fracking all over the region, crackers, ethane, plastics, everything, then have Europe say, ‘Sorry, you can’t do that. You have to shut it down.’ ”

In other words, whether or not the United States puts its signature on the climate pact’s dotted line, the pressure from trading partners to reduce greenhouse gas pollution — and the underlying concerns about the rapidly warming climate — could remain the same.

That said, while the United States is the only country rejecting Paris on paper, it is far from the only country on track to miss its targets aimed at warding off catastrophic climate change. Only Morocco and Gambia are projected to hit “Paris Agreement Compatible” targets, according to the Climate Action Tracker (whose rating tracker includes many major polluters but not all countries worldwide).

The E.U. itself currently earns a rating of “insufficient” from the group (China is ranked “highly insufficient,” while the United States and four other nations earned the worst “critically insufficient” grade).

Closing Windows

The next several years will determine the future of petrochemical production for decades to come, crucial years when it comes to the fate of the climate, if industry gets its timing right — particularly in the Rust Belt.

“The window to make this all work is not forever,” Charles Schliebs of Stone Pier Capital Advisors told the NEP Northeast U.S. Petrochemical Construction conference in June. “It’s maybe two to five years.”

That means key decisions may be made while Donald Trump remains in office — though state and local regulators will also face important calls over permits and construction planning.

For some living near the center of the planned petrochemical expansion, the problem is readily apparent.

“We’re not going to be able to double down on fossil fuels,” Dixon said, “and comply with the Paris climate agreement.”

This story originally appeared on DeSmog Blog.

How the Environment Fared in the Midterm Elections

Candidates promising action on climate change and public lands won many victories, but several important ballot initiatives were defeated.

This week’s midterm elections didn’t quite deliver the expected “blue wave,” but they did bring some welcome news for the environment — and the planet.

The most notable progress occurred on the state and local level, where several new progressive candidates will now take office and successful ballot initiatives will help preserve habitats and support clean energy.

With the Democrats now in control of the House of Representatives, President Trump has at least one major barrier to accomplishing his pro-business, anti-environmental agenda. Congress won’t have the ability to block many of his attempts at deregulation, which don’t require congressional approval, but they could help hold the line on harmful legislation such as the barrage of attacks against the Endangered Species Act that the Republican-led Congress has pushed over the past two years.

Voted stickers
Photo: Element5 Digital/Unsplash

Of course, the likelihood of the Democrats in Congress passing any new environmental legislation in 2019 seems slim, as Republicans have increased their control of the Senate. And locally, several important ballot measures failed to pass, including a much-watched carbon pricing proposal in Washington, pushing back critical potential to protect the climate.

But still, the next two years will likely see progress on several environmental initiatives, while several anti-environmental initiatives pushed by the Trump administration will probably be slowed, at the very least.

Here are some results from notable elections around the country — and what they could mean for the future of the planet.

Congress

Several progressive victories took place on the congressional side, perhaps most notably the election of 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, whose climate-change platform included “transitioning the United States to a carbon-free, 100 percent renewable energy system and a fully modernized electrical grid by 2035.”

Minnesota and Michigan, meanwhile, elected the first of two Muslim women ever to serve in Congress. Ilhan Omar campaigned on a platform that addressed clean energy and environmental justice, while Rashida Tlaib promised progress against pollution and for the EPA.

Congress also gained its first two female Native American representatives, Sharice Davids in Kansas and Deb Haaland in New Mexico. Each campaigned on a number of environmental issues, including climate change and clean water.

For the first time in more than 30 years, Democrats flipped a House seat in South Carolina. Former ocean engineer Joe Cunningham won an upset victory over Republican Kate Arrington. Cunningham campaigned on a platform opposing offshore drilling. Opposition to offshore drilling on the East Coast appears to be mounting throughout the Southeast, with Floridians taking a decisive stand on the issue as well.

Florida did not reelect Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a leader on the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, which has never accomplished much but did at least embrace Republicans who took moderate stands on climate change. All told the caucus lost about a third of its 45 Republican members.

Beyond the individual races, the Democratic wins will cause a shift in priorities for the entire Congress. Nancy Pelosi, who seems poised to regain her previous position as speaker of the House, told The New York Times she plans to revive a committee on climate change and seek legislation on energy conservation and other climate-change mitigation efforts.

The EPA could also get renewed support in Congress. Rep. Frank Pallone, who is expected to take over leadership of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told Washington Examiner, “We have serious concerns with how Trump’s EPA has consistently sided with the special interests over people’s health and the environment and we will look to restore the environmental protections that have been gutted over the last two years.”

Democrats will also take leadership of the House Scientists and Science Committee, which has been chaired by notorious climate denier Lamar Smith (who is retiring, only to be replaced in the House by another climate denier, former Ted Cruz chief of staff Chip Roy). The committee’s likely new chair would be Texas Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson, who said her priorities will be acknowledging and mitigating climate change and “defending the scientific enterprise from political and ideological attacks, and challenging misguided or harmful Administration actions.”

Finally, the House Natural Resources Committee — currently chaired by Republican Rob Bishop of Utah, who consistently votes against endangered species and public lands — is likely to have a new chair, re-elected Arizona Democrat Raúl Grijalva, who has said he wants Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to testify before the committee next year. “We will conduct oversight and we will hold Interior accountable,” Grijalva told Outside magazine last month.

Senate

Shockingly, Florida Governor Rick Scott, who had been heavily criticized for his mishandling of the state’s red tide crisis and other environmental issues, appears to have won his bid for the Senate, potentially defeating incumbent Bill Nelson, who called Florida “ground zero” for climate change. (The race is currently headed for a recount, although Scott has declared victory.)

The Senate did lose North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp, who never had a very good environmental record, but gained Republican Kevin Cramer, who helped shape President Trump’s energy-dominance agenda and has one of the worst environmental records tracked by the League of Conservation Voters.

In one of the few bright spots in the Senate, Nevada elected Democrat Jacky Rosen, who campaigned on issues related to protecting public lands. She defeated Dean Heller, a foe of wilderness and national monuments.

Governors

The nation’s governors will now include three new candidates who made commitments to 100 percent renewable energy — Jared Polis of Colorado, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois. Polis’s plan is actually the most ambitious in the country.

New Mexico, meanwhile, elected Michelle Lujan Grisham, who has spoken out against President Trump’s attacks on public lands. She defeated Steve Pearce, who advocated for transferring ownership of federal lands to the states. Lujan Grisham also pledged to make her constituency “the clean-energy state of America,” possibly by regulating methane emissions. She has, however, also promised to work with the state’s powerful oil and gas industry.

These races could have potential impacts on the policies pushed by the Western Governors’ Association, which includes Colorado and New Mexico. The Association frequently takes on policies considered favorable to extractive industries.

Maine elected its first female governor, Janet Mills, who as the state’s attorney general stood up to Scott Pruitt’s deregulation at the EPA (but who has also been criticized for attacking tribal water and fishing rights). She will replace climate denier Paul LePage, who blocked new wind-power projects and repeatedly claimed that existing windmills used motors to turn their turbines. LePage says he plans to move to Florida, which seems appropriate.

Speaking of Florida, voters elected as their next governor Ron DeSantis, who famously said “I am not a global warming person.” He won over opponent Andrew Gillum, whose eight-page environmental agenda would have tackled renewable energy, climate change, sea-level rise, nutrient runoff and other topics.

Meanwhile, as expected, California elected Gavin Newsom to succeed Gov. Jerry Brown. Newsom is expected to follow Brown’s climate-change mandate, but he also inherits the greenhouse-gas emissions problems from state’s enormous fossil-fuel industry.

One last piece of good news amidst the governor’s races: Climate skeptic Scott Walker of Wisconsin has lost his bid for reelection to Democrat Tony Evers, who campaigned against Walker’s poor environmental record.

Ballot Initiatives

There was more bad news than good on the environmental front when it came to voting on ballot initiatives.

The biggest environmental win that happened through the ballot initiative process came from Florida. Voters there approved Amendment 9, which covered two unrelated issues, banning offshore oil and gas drilling in state waters and banning the use of electronic cigarettes in workplaces. The drilling ban was supported by environmental interests as well as the tourism industry, both of which would like to keep Florida’s waters and beaches clean.

In another win for the environment, Nevada voters passed Question 6, which seeks to increase the amount of energy the state’s utilities need to get from renewable sources such as wind, solar and geothermal. Question 6 increases the renewable portfolio standard to 50 percent by 2030.

Photo: Tara Lohan

Arizona had an identical measure, Proposition 127, on the ballot, but it was soundly defeated after an outpouring of $30 million from its opponents, including the state’s biggest utility.

In what was likely the most-watched environmental ballot initiative race, Washington’s Initiative 1631 was defeated. If it had passed it would have been the first state-wide initiative to put a fee on carbon pollution. Environmental supporters hoped Washington would be a good proving ground to inspire more carbon pricing programs across the country, but voters didn’t go for it this time and have defeated similar measures in recent years.

While Colorado voted in clean-energy enthusiast Jared Polis as governor, voters defeated Proposition 112, which would have increased the buffer between oil and gas drilling operations and occupied homes and businesses.

Two other ballot measures sought to protect clean water. Montana’s Initiative 186, which would have set stricter standards for the mining industry, was defeated. And so was Alaska’s Measure 1, which would have protected salmon habitat.

Other Races

Congress and the Senate tend to get the most attention, but local candidates also deserve attention.

Several states got new attorneys general in the midterms, most notably New York, where Letitia “Tish” James will succeed acting Attorney General Barbara Underwood. The office, somewhat tainted by former AG Eric Schneiderman’s abuse and assault scandal, has nonetheless done admirable work on climate for years, something likely to continue under James.

In Utah, San Juan County Commissioner Rebecca Benally — who opposed Bears Ears National Monument and who actually said “national monuments kill people” — was defeated by Bears Ears supporter Kenneth Maryboy.

Another land commission race went to Democrat Stephanie Garcia Richard in New Mexico, who campaigned on promises to regulate polluters, including some natural gas fracking operations.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, as local shifts in power have been reported all over the country. Those city, county and state governments could hold the true power for moving on climate change even as the Trump administration continues to drag its heels.

Final Impressions

To many, the election illustrated how deeply divided the country has become. As The Washington Post put it, “Red states got redder, and blue states got bluer on Tuesday.”

Is that entirely true, though? Red states like Texas and Florida actually experienced incredibly competitive campaigns, with narrow losses by Beto O’Rourke and Andrew Gillum. The political divisions in this country are quite evident, but so in many ways are the connections.

So, too, is the shift toward progressive ideals. Democrats won over more independent and undecided voters this year, a change from the 2016 and 2014 elections.

Still, the divide does exist, and we can almost certainly expect big fights on environmental issues — if not all political issues — on the horizon. President Trump has already declared that he’s ready to come out swinging as soon as the Democrats try to stand in his way, and especially if they move to investigate any of the many issues tainting his administration. Meanwhile he’s attacking the press and cleaning house of his less-than-enthusiastic supporters, including Jeff Sessions.

But with Democrats now in control of the House and heading up key committees, it’s at least a fairer fight.

The age of big money, however, will continue. Billions of dollars were sunk into this election, and big spending by energy companies almost certainly tanked several of this year’s ballot initiatives. With that unlikely to change any time soon, political progress on climate change and other issues will have a tough road ahead.

The path, though, is somewhat clearer than it was just a few weeks ago, and that’s likely to continue — at least until the 2020 election season ramps up.

National Parks at Risk From Trump Administration’s Energy Agenda

Experts fear oil and gas development could permanently damage millions of acres of ecologically and culturally important public lands.

Millions of acres of ecologically and culturally important public lands could face permanent damage or destruction under President Trump’s energy-dominance agenda, experts warn.

“The Trump administration’s ‘energy dominance’ agenda is prioritizing oil and gas development above all other uses of public lands,” says Laura Peterson, attorney with Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a nonprofit organization that seeks to protect Utah’s red rock wilderness. “In pursuit of that quixotic goal, it is sacrificing Utah’s wildest and most remote lands.”

Earlier this year the Department of the Interior ordered the Bureau of Land Management to simplify and streamline the oil and gas leasing process to lessen what it called “unnecessary impediments and burdens” on developers. The Trump administration says this is critical to America’s energy independence. Environmental experts, however, have sounded alarm over drilling in close proximity to national parks, national monuments and other areas with significant cultural, ecological and historical resources.

In Utah hundreds of thousands of acres of land previously closed to development are being auctioned off for oil and gas leasing.

The most recent leases took place this past September, when 109 oil and gas leases consisting of more than 200,000 acres of federal public land were up for grabs. Some of the parcels were less than two miles away from Horseshoe Canyon near the Canyonlands National Park and a few miles further from the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Horseshoe Canyon contains, according to the National Park Service, some of the most significant American Indian rock art in North America, including the Great Gallery — a world-renowned panel of well-preserved, life-sized figures with intricate designs.

Some of the September leases covered small territories, while others were quite large. Seventy-two leases spanned 158,944 acres in the remote San Rafael Desert, a scenic area with mesas, cliffs and canyons, as well as the northern Dirty Devil River area, an 80-mile tributary of the Colorado River.

San Rafael River
San Rafael River. Photo: Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance

All told the September oil and gas lease sale fetched over $3.3 million. The biggest buyer was a Canadian company, North American Helium, which submitted the month’s highest bid of $435,591 for a 1,970-acre lot in northwest Colorado.

Interestingly, despite being publicized as a successful sale, the September lease didn’t actually generate the anticipated interest. Only 69 out of 109 parcels were auctioned off, and many of the sites leased for bargain-basement prices. More than 40 lease parcels sold for as little as $2 per acre, while 40 parcels didn’t receive bids at all.

Peterson says the lack of infrastructure in Utah’s remote areas kept many developers at bay.

“There is little to no existing infrastructure for development and there is not a significant amount of oil and gas resource there,” she says.

But lack of oil doesn’t always translate to “no sale.” Dave Nimkin, senior regional director for the southwest region of the National Parks Conservation Association, says buyers often purposefully tie up large swaths of land without prior analysis or scrutiny. Companies and individuals then hold on to the purchased land for years, hoping it will become an asset when oil prices go up.

Utah is a prime example of this “lease and hold” strategy. At the end of the 2016 fiscal year, approximately 2.9 million acres were leased to oil and gas operators, but only about 1.1 million acres were in production.

The companies leasing the lands “are not necessarily in business of energy development,” Nimkin says. “They are really speculators looking to sell that asset for greater value than what they paid.”

Whether the sites are oil-rich or not, both recent and proposed future lease sales in Utah have included lands rich in cultural, historical, ecological and biological resources.

For example, Peterson says a March 2018 lease sale included parcels near Bears Ears, Hovenweep and Canyons of the Ancients national monuments, as well as in the Alkali Ridge and along the Green and San Juan rivers.

“That lease sale was especially egregious,” Peterson says, “because of the parcels that are incredibly rich in cultural resources — in areas like Recapture Canyon, Mustang Mesa, Alkali Ridge and Montezuma Creek. The sites in that area include ancestral Puebloan habitation sites, structures, storage facilities, short term camps, limited activity areas, petroglyphs and pictographs and artifacts.”

Drilling and a Return to Deregulation

Environmental regulations that govern oil and gas leases are an important determinant of how much drilling is allowed in a given area. These regulations have undergone significant changes over the past decade, culminating with the recent rollbacks by the Trump administration that aimed to facilitate oil and gas development in the areas that have previously been off the table.

The issue dates back to an earlier era. During the Bush administration, six “resource-management plans” — land-use plans that provide a framework for managing BLM-administered lands over the next 15 to 20 years — were completed in Utah in August 2008, sparking protests from environmental groups. Some alleged that the timing of the release was politically motivated, as the Bush administration was about to leave office, making it difficult to review the six massive documents.

The plans were ultimately pushed through in the same year, which critics say in many ways emboldened oil and gas development that had previously been subject to review and assessment.

That slowed, temporarily, under the Obama administration, when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar put a moratorium on 77 oil and gas leases that the Bush administration had granted on the doorstep of the Arches National Park.

Salazar introduced leasing reform to address a system that was close to the breaking point, with nearly half of all proposed parcels receiving community protests and a substantial proportion resulting in litigation, according to the BLM. As a result, a new tool called “master leasing plans” was launched by the agency in 2010. The plans served as guide to facilitate balanced leasing and development of energy resources on public lands while protecting wildlife, natural resources and outdoor recreation.

The lease plans engendered a stakeholder process that assessed potential impacts before formalizing the leases.

However, the Trump administration ditched master leasing plans along with all of the preliminary steps that were required before gas and oil lease sales could take place with a single goal to expedite oil and gas leases.

Compounding the problem, the BLM has recently reduced its public comment period in the lease sale process.

Before the September lease sale in Utah, the agency didn’t allow the public to comment on its environmental analysis and allowed only written “scoping comments” — a much more limited form of comment that prioritizes “substantive comments” regarding a project’s impact and ignores opinion statements — during a 15-day period in July. During that time the public had no information beyond the location of the lease parcels, according to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

It’s not just the public that’s been cut off. Nimkin says the National Park Service, the BLM’s sister agency, is now consulted only “marginally,” and even local BLM managers and state directors are often disconnected from the process.

“The ability of BLM local officials to make decisions based on their own discretion has now been taken away from them,” Nimkin says. “We are being told that virtually every deferral choice for any lease sale is being made at the highest level in the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C.”

This lack of public comment has already proven, at least in part, to be illegal. On Sept. 21 a federal judge temporarily blocked a Trump administration policy that would have drastically limited public involvement in oil and gas leasing decisions. According to the preliminary injunction order, issued by U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge Ronald E. Bush, lease sales scheduled for December in greater sage-grouse habitat spanning hundreds of thousands of acres across the interior West must now include 30-day public comment and administrative protest periods. The injunction stemmed from a lawsuit by the Western Watersheds Project and the Center for Biological Diversity (publisher of The Revelator).

The December lease sale was supposed to be conducted in accordance with the BLM’s Instruction Memorandum 2018-034, similar to the September lease sale, which severely limited public involvement.

The BLM’s Utah office didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment seeking to find out how the agency plans to handle the December lease sale in light of the ruling.

No matter how they move forward, however, the December lease sale is poised to be the largest in Utah in more than a decade, with 225 parcels encompassing 329,826 acres of federal public lands.

Labyrinth Canyon
Green River, proposed BLM wilderness, Labyrinth Canyon. Photo: Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance

That sale includes wilderness areas in Book Cliffs, the White River area, Labyrinth Canyon and Four Corners region, according to Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

Other parcels are located in or near culturally rich landscapes, including Nine Mile Canyon and the Alkali Ridge Area. In addition, there are 159 parcels in the Uinta Basin, a geologic structural basin in the eastern part of the state that already suffers from some of the worst air quality in the nation because of increased oil and gas development. Environmental experts are worried that those problems will only worsen with expanded energy development.

In addition, tourism and outdoor recreation, which generate $12.3 billion a year in Utah, could be at risk. Peterson fears that tourists and outdoor recreation enthusiasts are not going to come “to explore pump jacks and pipelines.”

Just Warming Up

Looking further ahead, the BLM recently released a draft “resource management plan” that would open to development 2 millions of acres in southeastern New Mexico, where deposits of oil are said to be second only to Saudi Arabia.

While the plan would allow developers to tap large deposits of oil in the region, which includes part of the Permian Basin, critics say the passage of this first major resource management plan under the Trump administration could also pave the way for the unrestricted energy development in other western states.

The BLM’s Carlsbad field office, the busiest in the nation for oil and gas drilling, is in the middle of the resource plan revision process. A draft published Aug. 3 would determine how the region’s resources will be managed for the next 20 years. The draft features four alternatives for development of oil, natural gas and mineral extraction with the overarching goal of balancing the extraction industries with preservation of natural resources and public lands, according to the Carlsbad Current Argus.

Judy Calman, staff attorney at New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to protection of New Mexico’s wilderness areas, says there’s a lot of pressure on the Carlsbad field office from the Trump administration and from the companies who want to develop the area.

“I think the field office is seeing a lot of direction from D.C. about what kind of decisions to make, and I think it’s like a microcosm of the Trump administration’s energy policy,” she says.

The draft covers numerous ecologically important regions, including more than 130,000 acres bureaucratically defined as “lands with wilderness characteristics,” which have been documented during separate inventories conducted by the BLM and the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance.

Although these lands have been determined to meet the BLM’s wilderness characteristics criteria, this alone does not guarantee they will be preserved. The agency can formally recognize these areas and can also decide to manage them for preservation. Without recognition, these lands will be up for grabs for oil and gas companies, according to the Wilderness Alliance website.

Separately the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance has proposed four new Areas of Critical Environmental Concern — units of public land spanning over 550,000 acres that protect important grassland habitat for birds of prey, riparian ecosystem components, nest colonies for great blue heron and culturally significant salt playas from fast-track oil and gas development.

In certain situations this type of designation can provide additional protection for lands that do not qualify as having wilderness characteristics but nonetheless are important for their wildlife, cultural or other resource values, according to the Wilderness Alliance website.

Of special concern is Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which famously boasts more than 100 miles of caves. Oil and gas development can already be seen from the park, and research is still being conducted on the network of caves inside and outside the caverns regarding the potential impacts that oil and gas development may have on the park.

About 75 percent of land managed by the Carlsbad field office is either already under development or about to be developed because it has been leased. In 2018 the office received 1,533 applications to permit drilling — the highest number in 10 years.

Calman says while the proposed plan is still under review her organization is trying to protect whatever little is left undisturbed.

“The Trump administration has this energy dominance thing and it seems like it’s playing out here in southeast New Mexico,” Calman says.

Unlike the oil and lease sales, the proposed resource management plan still had a public comment period, which closed on Nov. 6. The BLM also held eight public meetings across New Mexico in September.

The plan was in actually the works under the Obama administration for eight years, but the Trump administration has proposed to include areas that were previously closed to development.

According to a report by High Country News, the Carlsbad Field Office initially planned to protect certain areas for wildlife scenic or cultural values that are not included in the new version. For instance, maps drafted in 2016 show that the BLM’s preferred alternative included more extensive protection for grasslands west of Artesia, a town with a population of 12,000 people.

The BLM’s New Mexico office also didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment regarding how the organization plans to address environmental concerns and when the agency plans to finish the proposed resource management plan.

Some worry that with its passage the agency will prioritize oil and gas development over managing the area for multiple use, meaning the country will see a major shift in public-land management.

The 90-day public comment period on the draft resource management plan started Aug. 3 and closed Nov. 5. Calman says throughout that period, her organization was still trying to convince the BLM to make changes to the document and prioritize conservation over development.

“This is the first one,” Calman says. “I think it’s a good opportunity to stop it before it gets rolling too much.”

But other projects loom not far behind, and that could have a lasting impact. “In its quest for energy dominance, the administration is leasing more remote, wild and sensitive areas,” Peterson says. “That push is both unnecessary and misguided. Once these sensitive landscapes are gone, we cannot get them back.”

© 2018 Daria Bachmann. All rights reserved.

Farming While Black: Growing Food and Community While Saving the Earth

We asked Leah Penniman, cofounder of Soul Fire Farm and author of Farming While Black, about the healing power of soil and ending an unjust food system.

In the introduction to her book Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (Chelsea Green, 2018), author Leah Penniman quotes Toni Morrison as inspiration: “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

the askSo she did.

Penniman describes her newly released book as “a reverently compiled manual for African-heritage people ready to reclaim our rightful place of dignified agency in the food system.” The book covers all the practical aspects of building a farm, from finding funding to saving seeds to raising animals. But it’s also a guide to growing community and uprooting racism.

She has put it all to practice as cofounder of Soul Fire Farm, near Albany, N.Y., where she helps grow food and train activist farmers. The farm delivers weekly shares of freshly grown food at sliding-scale prices to families around the region, many of whom live in areas without access to affordable, nutritious groceries.

We talked to Penniman about the ecology and politics of growing food.

What do you love most about being a farmer?

Cover of Farming While Black book.There is so much to love about being a farmer. Today I am in love with the opportunity to be close to the source of all wisdom, which I believe is the living Earth. And by having contact with the soil, there’s abundant communication that comes from the Earth about how we can best live in human community. For example, the mycelium connects the trees and transports sugars and minerals between them, weaving together life across divisions of species and geography. When we have contact with that, I believe that wisdom seeps into our consciousness and helps us know how to better be fully part of the interconnected web of life on Earth.

What is it about your crops and farming techniques that make them healthier for the soil and planet?

At Soul Fire Farm we use almost exclusively Afro-indigenous farming technologies. Examples of that include semi-permanent raised beds fashioned after the Owambo people in what is now Namibia; the fanya juu terraces that are originally found in Kenya; a polycropping system of trees integrated with herbs and vegetables from Haiti; cover cropping, which George Washington Carver taught us with legumes. We also use animals integrated into our systems in a rotational grazing method that comes out of many places across sub-Saharan Africa. And there are more.

When we got here in 2006 our topsoil was just a few inches deep, with hardpan clay underneath and severely eroded. Since then our soils have more than tripled in depth. We’ve seen the pollinators coming back and a return of biodiversity to the land from these practices.

You write in your book that you initially thought “organic  farming  was  invented  by  white  people”  and  worried  that  your “ancestors  who  fought  and  died  to  break  away  from  the  land  would  roll  over  in  their  graves  to  see  me  stooping.” What did you learn that made you realize that was wrong, and who were the people that inspired the path you’re on now?

It was during a Northeast Organic Farming Association conference as a teen. I’d been farming for a couple years, ready to make it my life’s work, and I was, as you mentioned, feeling disillusioned about the fact that it seemed like a really white community, a white movement. I wondered about my place in it.

I went around and handed out little slips of paper to anyone who appeared Black, Latinx or indigenous to me and asked them to meet. And we shared really common feelings about being one of the few [people of color] in this movement.

Karen Washington was there at the time, who went on to become a farmer at Rise and Root Farm and the founder of the Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners Conference. She said to hang in there — we’re going to claim space in this movement. And that was a turning point for me because it gave me a hypothesis that maybe I didn’t know the whole story.

I started investigating the origins of different sustainable-agriculture techniques and found out that of course everyone from Fannie Lou Hamer to Booker T. Whatley to the Sherrods to the Haitian peasant movement had all made these monumental contributions to sustainable agriculture and sustainable businesses. Those just aren’t talked about in the white-dominated food and land spaces. And so it was time to write a new narrative.

Your work helps to bring food to communities that lack access. What is “food apartheid,” that you reference in the book, and how widespread is it in the United States?

Leah Penniman
Farming While Black author Leah Penniman works at Soul Fire Farm. Photo by Jonah Vitale-Wolff

Last I checked there were about 12.5 million people who live in food deserts.

Food apartheid is a concept that Karen Washington taught me. As opposed to a food desert, which you could see as a natural ecosystem and something that has an inevitability to it, food apartheid is more accurate in that it talks about a human-created system of segregation that relegates certain people to food opulence and others to scarcity.

These divisions are often right down the lines of race and very much determined by zip code, which is in turn determined by a history of redlining and the exclusion of people of color from desirable neighborhoods.

What it results in is that black and brown communities are disproportionately impacted by hunger, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and all these other diet-related illnesses. And that is a tragedy for our physical health and it’s also a tragedy for our democracy because folks who are not feeling well cannot participate in civic life.

It’s really incumbent upon all of us to reconsider and reframe how we think of food, not as a privilege reserved for the few, but as a basic human right for all of us.

What can we do as individuals to increase the number of Blacks, Latinx and indigenous people who own land and grow food? What do we need at a policy level to help resource and scale these efforts?

Some of the most important things we can do are to engage in reparations work to fix the harm that’s been done. The land that we stand upon that we farm — it’s stolen land. It rightfully belongs to indigenous people, but it’s been stolen from other communities after that too, including the black community who’s been dispossessed of over 14 million acres of land since 1910. Not through choice, but through legal trickery, through racist violence and through governmental discrimination.

So we really need to look at actually giving that land back and that can be done through a number of channels, like the Land Loss Prevention Project and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

I think also at the policy level, we need to look at the way our governmental supports are distributed. Right now they disproportionately benefit row-crop farmers of commodity crops. They benefit corporate farmers and certainly white farmers. We still haven’t remedied that discrepancy in terms of who has access to those resources. And so programs like the 2501 Program [The Outreach and Assistance for Socially Disadvantaged and Veteran Farmers and Ranchers Grant Program] need a complete overhaul and also an increase of funding to make sure that it’s getting to those who need it most.

Our Votes for the Best New Environmental Books of November

Books on our ballot this month look at wolves, turtles, animal activism, the psychology of climate change and a lot more.

revelator readsIt’s election season, and we all need something to read after we’re done combing through our midterm voters’ guides. Here are our votes for the 16 best environmental books coming out this month, covering everything from wolves to wolverines and climate change to animal rights. Some of these books are intended for professional conservationists, while others may appeal to kids, mystery lovers, history buffs or fans of wildlife. And while many of these books are admittedly dark and depressing, you’ll find more than a few solutions in the mix as well. We hope you enjoy them. (Now if we can just get our politicians to read some of these books, too…)

Wildlife and Endangered Species:

Keepers of the Wolves by Richard P. Thiel — The first edition of this classic book, originally published in 2001, was a first-person account of the early days of wolf recovery in Wisconsin. Thiel’s update takes us to the present, including the start of wolf hunting in 2012, and looks to the future of this embattled species.

In Search of the Canary Tree: The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World by Lauren E. Oakes — Climate change has started killing off Alaska’s old-growth yellow cedar trees. The author, an ecologist, examines the threat in her new book, and in the process uncovers reasons for hope.

Dreaming in Turtle: A Journey Through the Passion, Profit, and Peril of Our Most Coveted Prehistoric Creatures by Peter Laufer — An examination of endangered turtles around the world and the people who both value them and are failing them. Oh, and the ones who are helping them, too.

The Re-Origin of Species: A Second Chance for Extinct Animals by Torill Kornfeldt — A worldwide look at the scientists behind the de-extinction movement, which seeks to resurrect the mammoth and other long-gone species.

No Place for Wolverines: A Jenny Willson Mystery by Dave Butler — The murder of a wolverine researcher kicks off this ecological crime novel, which pits a poacher-hating Canadian national park warden against an American corporation and the shadowy political puppets pushing to create a ski hill in an important wildlife habitat. Just like real life!

Climate Change:

Urgency in the Anthropocene by Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland — Most people describe the Anthropocene as an apocalypse in the making. But what if it’s the opposite, and it’s actually an age of enlightenment and emerging coexistence with nature? Either way, we’d better learn the answer to that question pretty darned quickly (hence the title).

The Psychology of Climate Change by Geoffrey Beattie and Laura McGuire — Why do some climate initiatives fail? The authors examine the mental factors that cause people to deny climate change and prevent global action, while also illustrating how to overcome these issues and create positive action.

Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States edited by Michael B. Gerrard and John C. Dernbach — The full book by this title, coming up in early 2019, promises to provide the “technical and policy pathways for reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.” There’s no need to wait until next year, though, to take action. This month’s shorter edition provides easy (and early) access to the main volume’s key recommendations and summarizes its 35 chapters (a third of which are already online). Both books will be must-reads for the lawyers helping to save our planet from climate change.

Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy by Hal Harvey — Why wait for new technologies when communities can start taking action now? This book offers “policymakers, activists, philanthropists and others in the climate and energy community” a guide of proven solutions to help fight climate change, with case studies on previous success stories.

Food and Agriculture:

Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by Leah Penniman — A how-to guide for ending racism and injustice in our country’s food system, both on farms themselves and in nutrition-starved Africa-American communities. Bonus: The same techniques improve the soil, treat livestock humanely, preserve rare plant varieties and provide benefits for the climate.

Pollution:

River of Redemption: Almanac of Life on the Anacostia by Krista Schlyer — A photographic look at a terribly polluted and neglected river in Washington, D.C., and a reminder that watersheds are an important and vital part of our social and ecological communities.

Fossil Fuels and Energy:

Oil, Power and War: A Dark History by Matthieu Auzanneau — An in-depth history of the fossil fuels that are robbing us of our future.

Farewell, King Coal: From Industrial Triumph to Climatic Disaster by Seaton Anthony — A history and obituary of the coal industry detailing the closure of Britain’s last deep coal mine in 2016 and looking ahead to our future health threats under the effects of coal-driven climate change.

Culture and Society:

Earth-Friendly Engineering Crafts by Veronica Thompson — Here’s a fun book for the science-minded kids in your life, offering tips on turning your recycling into interesting projects like airplanes and wind socks. The physical book is just 32 pages, but it comes with supplementary digital content to help keep the projects (and the learning) moving along.

The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump by James Morton Turner — Not a horror novel, but it sure sounds like one.

Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism by Mark Hawthorne — The heavily updated tenth anniversary edition of this classic text offers guidance on taking direct action to save species and speak out for animal rights.

That’s our voting list for this month. For dozens of additional recent eco-books, check out our “Revelator Reads” archives.

Did we miss any of your recent favorites? Post your own candidates in the comments — but only after you’ve voted in the midterms!

Drought Detective

Drought can lead to anger and even violence. Climate change will make things worse. One cop is on the beat.

CORTEZ, Colo. — Dave Huhn usually is off work on Sundays, but when the phone rang one Sunday during the height of irrigation season a few years ago, he picked up.

The woman on the other end was frantic, screaming as she watched from the window as a neighbor, age 86, beat her husband, 82, with a shovel. The fight was over water, the most valuable resource in much of the West. One neighbor accused the other of taking more than his share from their irrigation ditch, leaving less for everyone else. The situation escalated to the point that farm tools became weapons.

“It was a situation where you had two old-timers that were very stubborn and very hard-headed,” says Huhn, a sheriff’s deputy for Montezuma County. “They were bound and determined to do it their way. And the other party was saying, ‘No you won’t.’”

Montezuma County is a stretch of sagebrush mesas and sandstone cliffs bordering Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, home to Mesa Verde National Park, where the cliff dwellings of ancestral Puebloans still stand. Unlike most local law enforcement throughout the West, Huhn specializes in the complex world of water law.

For the past nine summers, he has crisscrossed the county, seeing up close the conflict that chronic aridity creates. In 2009, when Huhn took over as the sheriff’s department’s water enforcer, word spread quickly.

“The very first month of the very first year, I had almost 450 calls that one month,” Huhn says. “That was just extraordinary.”

These days, depending on the severity of arid conditions, Huhn says he averages 60 to 100 water-case calls per month.

Water disputes — both violent and nonviolent — sometimes get the attention of local law enforcement, but because of an ignorance of what the law actually says, many deputies will simply tell the parties to hammer out their differences in state water court.

Huhn says the common refrain is that conflict over water is a civil matter, that no criminal statutes have been broken.

But in some cases, Huhn says, that’s incorrect. Local law enforcement can issue citations for water violations and police how people use and abuse the scarce resource.

On the beat for nearly a decade, Huhn says he’s known for fairly and thoroughly investigating water cases. His reputation precedes him to the scene.

“I’ll walk up to the front door or out in that field to talk to whoever I need to talk to, and they’ll turn around look at me and give me a funny look and say, ‘You’re that water cop, aren’t you?’ So I’ve kind of gotten used to that.”

The majority of calls he receives are claims of water theft, Huhn says.

There are a few methods to steal water. One popular method, he says, is to simply drop a pump into an irrigation ditch. Throughout the county, ditches run through private properties on an easement, meaning the residents see the water on their land, but they have no rights to it. If they turn that pump on and divert from the ditch without the water rights to do that, it’s a crime.

Huhn started confiscating dozens of pumps, storing them in the evidence room, “and as they started to pile up, I was told not to do that anymore.”

Disputes among farmers are sometimes harder to prove, he says.

One party might have rights to some water but take more than its share. After consulting the local water commissioner and documents related to a water-rights decree, Huhn can issue either a warning or write a ticket, just like at a traffic stop.

“First, people were shocked. They were like, ‘You’re kidding me right? You’re going to cite me over water?’ I say, ‘Yes, it’s a valuable commodity in this state.’”

Another common citation is for failing to have a measuring device on a ditch, like a weir or a flume. Those who divert from a stream are required by state law to measure the flow of what they take.

Enforcement of that requirement varies across Colorado, but not in Montezuma County. No measuring device? That’s either a warning or a citation, Huhn says.

Farmer Bob Schuster, 76, has called on Huhn to help resolve water disputes among his neighbors a few times.

At dispute is water in a ditch that irrigates farmland in the county’s McElmo Canyon, a narrow, picturesque reach of sandstone with a series of vineyards and pastures that stretch across the Utah line.

Schuster grows wine grapes and hay, and he runs a plumbing supply store in the county’s biggest city, Cortez. Schuster says water conflict is a constant fact of life in the county, but droughts like the current one make people desperate.

“People are basically — and these are good people — basically dishonest,” he says.

Schuster’s farm sits at the end of an irrigation ditch with a handful of users upstream. If they’re taking more than they’re entitled to, the ditch goes dry before it reaches his fields.

“They look out their fields, they see they need water, and they take the water going through that’s not theirs,” he says. “They don’t consider their neighbor needs his water.”

Because livelihoods here are so dependent on water, emotions run high when accusations get thrown around. In true Hatfield and McCoy fashion, Schuster says, people have pointed guns at him, swung shovels at his head and sucker-punched him during fights with neighbors over water.

When water deliveries are cut because of drought restrictions, everyone’s on edge.

“Water is more scarce,” says Mike Preston, general manager of the Dolores Water Conservancy District. “And so you get the same demand, less water. And so that heightens the potential for conflict.”

Huhn’s role — enforcing water law and interacting with the county’s agricultural community — is unique in the state, Preston says.

“To tell you the truth, I can’t believe that other counties aren’t doing the same,” Preston says. “Once this kind of program is put in place, if it’s done with a well-trained person, they’re never going to want to go back to the bad old days.”

Back at the sheriff’s office, Huhn says violent skirmishes over water have been on the decline since the county started enforcing water law. But the continued dry years add pressure on farmers and ranchers trying to make ends meet.

“Historically, we’ve had people killed over water in the state of Colorado. We have in this county,” he says.

Huhn’s job has all the makings of a tall tale from the Wild West, with sweeping desert vistas and shootouts with outlaws. But his role seems more futuristic. The most recent science on climate change predicts the Colorado River Basin, which includes all of Montezuma County, will be hotter and drier as decades pass.

“We don’t want the violence,” Huhn says. “We don’t want the fighting between families and between friends. We want to be able to resolve it in a nonviolent way.”

This story is part of Elemental: Covering Sustainability, a new multimedia collaboration between Cronkite News, Arizona PBS, KJZZ, KPCC, Rocky Mountain PBS and PBS SoCal. 

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.  Connect with us on Facebook.

Trump, Zombie Deregulation and the Hawaiian Hawk

A bid to remove the bird from the Endangered Species Act has emerged once again — long after the disappearance of the organization that proposed its removal.

The National Wilderness Institute no longer exists. Its website has disappeared, its phone number has been disconnected, and its founder has moved on to become a senior advisor for the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation.

But the legacy of the organization, founded in part to attempt to repeal the Endangered Species Act, lives on. Back in 1997 the National Wilderness Institute petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove the Hawaiian hawk, or ‘io (Buteo solitarius), from the Endangered Species Act. That petition has never achieved what it set out to do, but it keeps rising from the grave like a bad horror-movie zombie. The latest resurrection occurred this week and could end up being the final chapter in a very long, very strange saga.

The Twist of History

The only hawk species native to Hawaii, the ‘io once lived on six of the archipelago’s islands. Today it can only be found on the Big Island, Hawaii. The original causes of its decline are not known, but they appear to be linked to the original settlement of Hawaii by Polynesians.

The hawk continued to suffer once Westerners arrived, bringing with them loggers, livestock, invasive species and disease. By the time the Hawaiian hawk joined the endangered species list in 1967, six months after passage of the original Endangered Species Preservation Act, the species’ population was estimated at just a few hundred birds with a very limited range on a tiny portion of the island.

Legal protection and decades of recovery efforts helped the Hawaiian hawk. In 2014 the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated the population at close to 3,000 — a number that seemed to have been stable since 1998. As their population has grown, the hawks have also spread their wings and now range across nearly 60 percent of the island.

That population increase is a big part of the delisting push. When the Service published its Hawaiian hawk species recovery plan in 1984, researchers suggested that a population of 2,000 birds would be enough to consider downlisting the species from “endangered” to “threatened.” They wrote that because of the hawk’s “high breeding success, the relatively low levels of predation and human disturbance, and the absence of environmental contaminants affecting the ‘io, the population appears to be in a more secure condition than previously thought.”

With that in mind, the Service itself first proposed reclassifying the hawk as “threatened” in 1993. That initial proposal kicked off a few years of meetings, demographic studies and reviews. In 1997 a working group that was formed to study this possibility passed the issue back to the Service, saying that a simple population count was not enough to reevaluate the species’ status and suggesting that trends and other threats should also be considered.

At about the same time, the National Wilderness Institute filed its petition to delist the hawk. The Service declined to act on the organization’s petition for more than a decade, saying that other species took priority over the agency’s scant resources.

Then, in 2009, the agency formally proposed not just reclassifying but removing the Hawaiian hawk from the endangered species list. That proposal initiated a public comment period, a normal process under the Endangered Species Act. Those comments yielded new information, which, according to a February 2014 filing in the Federal Register, showed “negative habitat trends due to urbanization and nonnative plant species invasion” but also identified several ongoing reforestation projects that would benefit the hawk.

The Sequel

The 2014 bid to delist the Hawaiian hawk eventually failed, but now it’s back again. This past May President Trump’s massive “Unified Agenda” of planned deregulatory measures once again proposed delisting the hawk. That proposal came one month after the Heritage Foundation issued a report claiming many species — including the Hawaiian hawk — were only protected by the Endangered Species Act due to supposed “data error.”

The author of that Heritage Foundation report? You guessed it: Robert Gordon, cofounder of the defunct National Wilderness Institute.

Now the Fish and Wildlife Service has taken things further. This week the Service announced a new plan to consider delisting the Hawaiian hawk. The Federal Register listing cites no new population counts for the bird but does mention several new and ongoing habitat restoration efforts that have benefitted the species. A new public comment period runs through November 29. The agency seeks any additional information on the hawk and either its recovery or threats, including the bird’s ecology, population trends and positive or negative effects of land-management practices, as well as any potential impacts of the recent Kilauea Volcano eruptions.

So what happens next? This story has already stretched on for decades, and the Hawaiian hawk’s protected status has outlasted the organization that sought to remove it, if not the person behind that push. That history could repeat, but with the bird now also in the crosshairs of President Trump’s deregulatory agenda, it’s hard to say how this long, strange saga may finally conclude.

A version of this article was originally published in 2014 by Scientific American.

Shock as China Legalizes Medicinal Trade in Rhino Horns and Tiger Parts

Conservationists fear this will stimulate demand for poached animals while making it harder to enforce existing laws.

In a move that shocked and horrified many conservationists, China this week opened up two legal markets for rhino horns and tiger body parts. Under China’s new rules, which overturn a 25-year-old ban, farm-raised tiger and rhino “products” can be approved for use in medical research or by accredited doctors in hospitals, despite the fact that the body parts have no known medicinal value. China also approved limited trade in antique tiger and rhino products.

China didn’t throw the door open for all trade in these products, and in fact banned all other sales of rhino and tiger parts. The announcement says the two new legal markets will be highly regulated and controlled and adds that illegal items will be confiscated. China also banned the sale of any tiger or rhino products currently in personal collections.

Still, environmental groups say this change will actually create additional consumer demand for all tiger and rhino products. The Environmental Investigation Agency called the new rules “a brazen and regressive move that drastically undermines international efforts for tiger and rhino conservation” while stimulating China’s growing tiger-farm industry. Thousands of tigers live in the country’s many breeding facilities, where they often end up being slaughtered for meat, skins, tiger-bone wine or other products.

There is no comparable market for rhino products yet, but evidence suggests efforts to import rhinos into China for similar breeding and distribution.

While some argue the use of captive-raised animals helps reduce pressure on wild species, the markets for both farmed and antique animal products have frequently been used to “launder” poached animals. Meanwhile the two-tier legal system of allowing some products to be sold while banning others also makes enforcement of trade laws more difficult, as it is almost impossible to visually distinguish parts from farmed and wild animals. This has been most notably the case with elephant ivory.

“China’s experience with the domestic ivory trade has clearly shown the difficulties of trying to control parallel legal and illegal markets for ivory,” Margaret Kinnaird of the World Wildlife Fund said in a press release.

A similar problem has been reported with numerous other species, especially those used in traditional medicine, which values wild animals more than farm-raised for their supposed higher potency.

WWF and other organizations have called for China to close its tiger farms, but this seems increasingly unlikely in the face of the new markets.

Climate Change Really Gets This Researcher’s Goat

Will mountain goats be able to shed their thick winter coats in time for earlier warm seasons? The Mountain Goat Molt Project wants your help to find out.

Picture your favorite winter coat. Something warm and cozy, perfect for bundling up in when the temperature dips. Come January, you reach for it every morning and wouldn’t think of leaving home without it.

Now imagine being forced to wear that coat during a heatwave. For animals that grow a shaggy winter coat in the fall and shed it in the spring, climate change could make that uncomfortable situation a reality.

With climate change already creating new risks for mountain species, researcher Katarzyna Nowak wondered how earlier spring warmings might affect animals that grow and shed heavy coats each year. Earlier this year she launched a project to collect photographs of mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) taken during their annual molt to track whether or not its timing is changing.

If so, it could create a number of problems for the animals. “If they can’t sync, then their thick winter coats will become a liability in summer,” says Nowak. “They’ll have to seek shade and water and be more active at night, and they could potentially be more vulnerable to predators because of how they’re changing their activity patterns.”

The first key source of data? Members of the public, or “citizen scientists,” who have been invited to share their photos of mountain goats. Nowak turned to the app iNaturalist, which lets users upload photos of plants and animals, including metadata about the date and place where they were observed. Nowak’s iNaturalist project page allows users to contribute their photos for the research.

“It’s just been a really cool way of conducting the project,” she says. “We’ve had some emails from rangers who say, hey, can I hang your mountain goat project poster at the start of this trail, because there’s a mineral lick and people take photos there.” The project has also gotten a boost from the #MountainGoatMoltProject hastag on Twitter.

But recent photos taken by citizen scientists aren’t enough; to track whether molt is changing through time, Nowak needs older photos for comparison. Archived images from Glacier National Park showed plenty of goats, but they didn’t always include the dates the photos were taken, so Nowak’s search for pictures with the necessary dates has led her to some sources she didn’t expect. “We met a reporter from a newspaper near Glacier called Hungry Horse News, and he did a piece about the project and shared some photos with us from the newspaper’s archives, which do have exact dates,” says Nowak. “So it seems like some newspapers — and I never even thought of this initially — may have better-maintained archives than some national parks and even museums when it comes to dating their images.”

So far Nowak has amassed around 520 photos of molting goats, more than 70 percent of which came from citizen scientists. She also made a trip to the Yukon over the summer to photograph mountain goats at the northern end of their range. She and her colleagues use Photoshop to analyze each individual photo, cropping the animal from the background, painstakingly delineating the shed and unshed portions of its coat, and counting the pixels in each area. They’re currently applying for funding to develop machine learning algorithms that can automate this.

mountain goat
Mountain goat molt, pixel by pixel.

Nowak’s analysis of the photos she has so far hasn’t revealed much evidence about changing molt dates, at least not yet. That could be because she simply doesn’t have enough older photos yet to document long-term changes. She hopes that anyone with mountain goat photos they’re willing to share — especially photos with dates from years or decades ago — will consider uploading them to iNaturalist or the project’s other citizen science portal, CitSci.org.

And while Nowak’s focus is on hooved mammals, climate change’s effects on the timing of plants’ and animals’ annual cycles — what scientists call “phenology” — goes beyond overheated goats.

“Something analogous happens with alpine plants — warmer temperatures can mean earlier snow melt, but because very cold frosts happen earlier, the likelihood of getting your flowers zapped by an early frost increases,” says the University of Washington’s Janneke Hille Ris Lambers, who has studied the effects of climate change on the plant communities of Mount Rainier National Park (home to its own population of mountain goats) for the past decade.

Other animals could be affected, too. Some, such as snowshoe hares, change color with the seasons, turning from brown to white and back again as snow accumulates and then melts. Scientists have started to study how being mismatched with their environment due to earlier spring warming could affect them, with early results indicating they could lose their camouflage from predators during important months when their fur doesn’t match the color of their ground cover.

“I wish people appreciated how large the effects of climate change are going to be on the plants and animals with which we share our planet,” says Hille Ris Lambers. “I think in general folks might assume that warmer temperatures will be good for all kinds of animals — after all, you don’t need that winter coat anymore! — but it’s obviously more complicated than that.”

If it turns out that mountain goats can’t adapt to the shifting timing of the seasons, Nowak and her colleagues have thrown around some fanciful ideas for how to keep the animals from overheating, like providing them with extra shade or even artificial snow. And it isn’t just goats that could be affected — other animals from musk oxen to moose also grow and shed shaggy coats every year, and Nowak hopes more researchers will begin looking at how climate change could disrupt their annual molt cycles.

Nowak believes that thinking about climate change in terms of when you need to take off your winter coat is something everyone can relate to.

“My grandmother in Poland used to wear fur coats, but she doesn’t wear them anymore because it just doesn’t get cold enough to need them,” she says. “Even for people who don’t follow climate science or who have their doubts about our influence on the climate, the fact that your heavy coat has been in the closet for the past five years, that’s something you notice.”

© 2018 Rebecca Heisman. All rights reserved.

Helping Plants, Healing People

In his new book, ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan chronicles the efforts of “plant midwives,” women who are working to restore edible plants and healing herbs.

In ethnobotanist and author Gary Paul Nabhan’s newest book, Food from the Radical Center: Healing Our Land and Communities (Island Press) he writes about communities engaged in the radical restoration work of connecting culture, food and place. His stories range from bees to bison, soil to sturgeon. In this excerpt, readers get to meet the women who practice “plant wifery,” helping to protect and restore species that have medicinal and cultural importance.

Have you ever been hiking and stopped in your tracks to gaze at wildflowers so vibrant and abundant that you couldn’t keep your eyes off of them? Did their delicate petals bring out the color in other lives found around you — the deer, the seed-eating sparrows, the other hikers making their way along the trail?

And was it just their beauty or also their scent — exuded for bees and butterflies — that told you that one day you too might taste this sweetness?

In late May 2017, ethnobotanist Joyce LeCompte offered me an opportunity to see such a sight and take a deep whiff of such a delectable fragrance. We hightailed it out of Seattle early one morning to rendezvous with others at the Glacial Heritage Reserve in the South Puget Sound area of western Washington.

There, the native plant in lavish bloom was the blue camas lily — Camassia quamash — the signature flower of wet prairie meadows in the Pacific Northwest. That spring, camas seemed to be blooming and blanketing the entire meadow in every direction we turned.

As far as our eyes could see, their six-petaled flowers added hues of pale lilac, violet blue and deep purple to the vivid greens and subtle tans of the open prairie.

If you happened to arrive at the reserve unfamiliar with the restoration project happening there, you could easily assume it was first and foremost about the restoration of beauty. After all, who could object to preserving the jaw-dropping, heart-pounding natural beauty of this world we live in?

The beauty of camas lilies was not ignored by previous generations of both residents in and travelers to western Washington. As early as the 1850s, camas lily bulbs were being dug up and shipped everywhere from the Atlantic seaboard to England to grace ornamental gardens.Book cover: Food from the Radical Center

But don’t get me wrong: This camas lily is not just another pretty face to be sent off to Some Place Else. Its ultimate value may lie in its ability to combat adult-onset diabetes among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. The complex carbohydrates in camas roots slow the digestion and absorption of glucose, flattening blood sugar levels and potentially reducing stress on the pancreas.

In addition to being a traditional food of great significance to First Nations communities along the Pacific North Rim, it may be a key factor in their future health. More than 20 indigenous cultures in western Canada and the United States still tend, collect, clean and pit-roast its bulbs for special seasonal events. Many of these communities hope that camas can help keep their children free of diabetes.

Of course, some of these intertribal “root festivals” have been taking place for centuries and millennia. But now the bulbs are being dried and stored for families to eat year-round as one more means to deal with nutrition-related diseases.

Camas is just one of those “cultural keystone plants” that is both deeply intertwined with both indigenous health and the environmental health of the wet prairies. Thus the restoration of camas in wet prairies is linked to the restoration of human health for native communities who live in or near those landscapes.

And that is exactly why Joyce LeCompte of the University of Washington wrote an incubator grant to the Center for Creative Conservation: to bring together amazing women with diverse skills — Frederica Bowcutt (botany), Taylor Goforth (environmental communications), Valerie Segrest (native nutrition) and Sarah Hamman (restoration ecology). Their own goal was to provide technical as well as social support to leaders interested in camas that are emerging in Coastal Salish tribal communities.

The multicultural team set out to restore this landscape with the appreciation that indigenous knowledge, stewardship and use of these plants matter deeply to neighboring communities.

I doubt that it has escaped your notice, but historically, most “environmental remediation” projects were dominated by men — albeit well-intended men — who inadvertently practiced a top-down management style that echoed the military as a whole and the Army Corps of Engineers in particular.

Under the auspices of “improving the environment” to control floods and stream flow, the Army Corps drained marshes and wet meadows while planting shrubs for game birds and to stabilize soil. That’s exactly what plants like camas lilies do not need.

Few of these environmental engineers were even aware that local women were continuing to take their families out to harvest camas in places like the South Sound Prairies. As shrubs and Douglas firs moved in, camas lilies began to fade away, and harvesting became less frequent.

To reverse historic declines in camas and their traditional uses, Joyce and the other women who cohosted me have formed a multicultural “community of practice” for the edible plants and healing herbs of the South Sound Prairie.

I was heartened to see that these restoration and recovery efforts now involve dozens of indigenous harvesters, healers and herbalists as well as land managers, botanists, wildlife biologists, fire ecologists, nutritional scientists and ethnobotanical educators. They exemplify a trend that even the higher-ups in the U.S. Forest Services now embrace: that diverse membership in scientific communities fosters innovation and problem-solving more effectively than communities with a narrow range of knowledge, skills and experience.

In fact, many of the practitioners are women with a set of technical and experiential skills that ethnobotanist Kay Fowler calls “plant wifery.” Elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, ethnobotanist Madrona Murphy might be considered one of those “midwives.” As she herself has documented, “Tribes cultivated [camas] in large gardens, subdivided into family-owned plots passed down through the generations. These were fertilized with seaweed, cleared of weeds and stones, and burned to control brush and grass.”

Building on these ancient practices, the women in Joyce’s entourage have initiated what they call “the Camas Prairie Cultural Ecosystems Incubator.” They are like traditional midwives who use plants to help “bring out of the incubator” and into full light fresh ways of engaging with other people and with the land.

Excerpted from Food from the Radical Center by Gary Paul Nabhan. Copyright © 2018 by the author. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Previously in The Revelator:

What Is the Fate of the World’s Plants?