Collide-a-scape

That’s the title of this counterintuitive post from Jonathan Thompson, the editor-in-chief of an environmental magazine. He riffs off a brewing controversy over spectacular places in the Southwest that might soon be nominated as National Monuments.

Except it’s not some off-the-cuff riff. Thompson writes a poignant meditation on the complicated feelings he has about a quintessentially Western issue. It’s so pitch perfect I don’t even want to quote from it. I just encourage anyone with his own soulful remembrance of a landscape to read it.

After you’ve done that, I’ve got something else for you to consider. So head over to Thompson’s piece, then come back.

Okay, if you’ve ever spent time hiking or camping in the Southwest, particularly southern Utah, chances are you’re acquainted with a legendary nature writer, who, in the best damn book introduction I know of, reels the reader in with this kicker:

Finally a word of caution:

Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the Canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place, you can’t see anything from a car; youv’e got to get out of the goddamn contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone adn through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not.

In the second place, most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memoir. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot–throw it at something big and glossy. What do you have to lose?

Well, if this iconic book left its mark on you, as it did with me, then you know I’m quoting from Ed Abbey’s classic. And you also probably know how deeply influential that book has been since it was published in 1967. How the hordes that now descend annually on Arches National Park (and, to a lesser extent, Canyonlands), make a mockery of Abbey’s mournful testimonial from four decades ago.

Yet what he felt to be already lost was surely true to him.

Still, where does that leave the rest of us who came after? Those of us who perhaps went there because of Desert Solitaire? I can only tell you that I keep going back, and that I now bring my own children too.

And one last thing. If you’re wondering about the enchanting spell of a landscape, how it sometimes takes hold in the mind,  in the case of Abbey and Desert Solitaire, consider this interesting supposition from a biology professor:

When Edward Abbey signed and dated the author’s introduction to Desert Solitaire, he appended the location as Nelson’s Marine Bar, Hoboken.  After his first term as a seasonal ranger in 1956, Abbey left Arches National Park for Hoboken, New Jersey, where his wife and son were living.  On his ostensible last day at Arches, Abbey wrote in Desert Solitaire:  “After twenty-six weeks of sunlight and stars, wind and sky and golden sand, I want to hear once more the crackle of clamshells on the floor of the bar in the Clam Broth House in Hoboken.  I long for a view of the jolly, rosy faces on 42nd Street and the cheerful throngs on the sidewalks of Atlantic Avenue.” I’m uncertain how much of Desert Solitaire was composed in Hoboken or whether any of the author’s introduction was written in one of the city’s bars.  The earliest surviving outline of what would become Desert Solitaire dates from July 1962, when Abbey was working as a welfare caseworker in Hoboken.  The possibility that Desert Solitaire, one of the most beautiful books about the Colorado Plateau, was conceived and composed in Hoboken is fascinating; it raises the question how one place influences our view of another.  Abbey’s longing on city streets and in Hoboken bars must have elicited a memory shadowed by distance, shifting subtly the tones of the sandstone landscape of Utah.   I am curious about the desires we fulfill in prose rather than place.

That might take us into the realm of nostalgia, which is deserving of another post some other time…

UPDATE: Gambler’s House weighs in with a thoughtful post. Some mighty interesting recollections of attitudes towards Abbey, too.

I know that Roger Pielke, Jr.’s loudest critics view him as a stalking horse for climate skeptics and deniers, so I’m sure they will find it useful that he’s been included in this absurdly titled and absurdly packaged Field Guide to Skeptics.

Surely the authors of this Foreign Policy article are aware that climate skeptic is a loaded term, commonly used to categorize people who either doubt the science behind anthropogenic climate change, or argue that mitigation of carbon emissions is not necessary at this point in time.

Roger is not one of those people. I know because I’ve read enough of his body of work to know where he stands. Hell, even the Foreign Policy writers seem to know this, because they end their profile of him with this quote:

For his part, he thinks, “Climate change is a huge problem, and it’s a problem linked to human activity. Greenhouse gases are an important part of that, but it’s not only greenhouse gases. And we need to respond accordingly.”

So I think Roger is justifiably perplexed at being labeled a climate skeptic by a major magazine, when he wonders aloud:

Am I the only one who finds this a bit incongruous?

No.

UPDATE: An editor’s note added to the Pielke portion of the FP article tries to explain:

The aim of the list was, as the introduction states, to separate “the noise from the serious concerns” with regards to those offering critiques of either climate science or institutions charged with presenting climate science to the public or policy-makers; the article was explicitly not intended to equate the viewpoints of all people contained on the list.

If they wanted to separate “the noise from the serious concerns,” then they were doomed from the outset when they highlighted the article on the website’s roving homepage, with an illustration of a polar bear on a melting iceberg, above this header:

Deny! Deny! Deny! FP’s Guide to Climate Skeptics

UPDATE 2: Predictably, Joe Romm is happy to note the FP designation during one of his patented rants against Roger. I do hope Romm has the courage to take up Roger’s invitation to a debate. Don’t bet on it, though. Deep down Romm knows that William Connolley is right about this.

One year ago, Pepe Escobar, a keen observer of global energy politics, wrote this:

Forget the mainstream media’s obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama “dead or alive” bin Laden, the Taliban — neo, light or classic — or that “war on terror,” whatever name it goes by. These are diversions compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows what flows along the pipelines of the planet.

Specifically, Escobar was referring to what has become known as the The New Great Game, an international power struggle over oil and gas reserves in Eurasia.

But after reading Global Warring, Cleo Paskal’s excellent new book on geopolitics in the era of climate change, I’m convinced that someone should amend the Wikipedia entry so that in addition to Eurasia, Africa and the Arctic are included as geopolitical battlegrounds for control over the world’s energy resources.

I’ll have more to say about Paskal’s book in upcoming posts. Meanwhile, here’s my review of Global Warring in Nature’s Climate Feedback.

Goes to this post on McCain’s killer campaign ad.  Yeah, he’s been running away from cap and trade, but that doesn’t take away from the head.

I’m all for the U.S. improving avenues of cooperation with Mexico, especially if that helps ameliorate the miserable conditions of border communities. But in this post over at Natural Security, Will Rogers overreaches when he suggests that environmental initiatives with Mexico aids U.S. national security interests along the southern border. That can hardly be the case when the border remains a violent battleground, in large part because the U.S. government stubbornly clings to a futile, bankrupt policy: the War on Drugs.

Let me back up a minute. In his post, Rogers discusses

an ongoing bilateral, interagency effort that includes the U.S. Northern Command [NORTHCOM] the Environmental Protections Agency (EPA) and several U.S. and Mexican state and federal agencies around environmental preparedness, protection and response along the southern border.

Again, this is all good stuff, which hopefully will improve the heavily degraded environment along the U.S.-Mexican border. Here’s the additional upside that Will envisions:

Such sustained engagements have the ability to professionalize Mexico’s first responders, build cross-border good will and help assuage some of the tensions associated with one of the many laundry list of issues that continue to undermine stability in Mexico (e.g., drug trafficking) – a country whose national security is inextricably linked with ours.

But drug trafficking is not just one of the “many” issues–it is the premier one. Just consider the hook that Rogers uses for his post, this Washington Post story, which reports:

For the first time, U.S. officials plan to embed American intelligence agents in Mexican law enforcement units to help pursue drug cartel leaders and their hit men operating in the most violent city in Mexico, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.

So the U.S. is going to double down on Mexico’s whack-a-drug cartel member strategy. To see how that’s faring, let’s scroll down a bit in the WaPo story:

Since his inauguration three years ago, Calderón has pursued a U.S.-backed strategy of relying on the Mexican military to confront the cartels fighting for dominance in the billion-dollar corridors to the U.S. drug market. The Mexican troops, who lack law enforcement training or investigative abilities, have made record numbers of arrests, but few of the detained have gone to trial. Instead, the military has been accused of human rights abuses — coerced confessions, illegal detention, unlawful searches.

Hmm. Human rights abuses, coerced confessions, illegal detentions…I feel like I heard about that somewhere else, in another part of the world, until a change in Administration policy decided to go in a different direction.

But I digress. Let’s get back to how that tip of the spear approach is working out in Mexico:

According to U.S. and Mexican officials, the municipal police cannot be trusted, nor can they operate on their own. One U.S. official said a local police chief was caught briefing his cartel bosses via cellphone immediately after planning sessions.

“This is an enormous mess. It is now starting to hurt Calderón politically. He cannot point to any success. And he is running out of time,” said Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister and now a professor at New York University.

Oh, but here in the U.S. we don’t have that problem. Time just stands still, while a broken, failed policy marches on. So if Calderón pays a political price, then it will be up to his successor to convince the U.S. that it should rethink it’s own war on drugs. Because guess what: we don’t have that debate in this country.

And yes, at some point, if Mexico unravels because of its own internal rot and corruption, that’s a national security problem for the U.S. No well intentioned environmental initiatives between the U.S and Mexico will stop that fire from burning out of control. That’s because the fuel that feeds the illicit, immensely profitable drug trade is demand from American consumers. U.S. policy makers that keep funding the war on drugs are just fanning the flames.

In reviewing a new book that fisks Lomborg, Sharon Begley at Newsweek goes the extra mile.

Goes to this sci-fi sounding post. You just gotta read about how the baby cane toads are no match for the meat ants.

It’s not easy being a conservation biologist. You have to fight on multiple fronts just to maintain and preserve viable wildlife populations. Habitat fragmentation often poses the biggest threat to imperiled species. But there is one battle that the media has all but ignored–that between animal rights proponents and conservationists. So this post from wildlife biologist Michael Hutchins caught my attention, because his frustration is palpable, especially here:

I can think of no other issue that illustrates the deep incompatabilities between the values and goals of animal rights and conservation proponents than feral cats.  As I have said previously, it is impossible to be an animal rights proponent and a conservationist simultaneously.  Those who wish to bring these two increasingly disparate movements together will ultimately fail. Some ideas are better than others, and animal rights–with its exclusive and reductionistic focus on individual animals–cannot and will not come to grips with what it is going to take to conserve biodiversity in a human-dominated world.

I first became aware of this rift in the late 1990s, when I wrote a feature story about Colorado’s troubled lynx reintroduction program for Science magazine. At the time, five of the animals imported from Canada and Alaska had starved to death in the San Juan mountains, shortly after they were released. One of the issues I focused on was whether Colorado still had suitable habitat for the transplanted lynx–specifically, whether there was enough snowshoe hares to support a breeding lynx population. Canada lynx are specialists and rely largely on the rabbits for food.

I walked away from the article wondering if cultural attitudes perhaps trumped science in the case of the Colorado lynx reintroduction program. In other words, I wondered if Colorado’s state biologists just really wanted to see the cats back in Colorado. (The species was eliminated from Colorado in 1973, after a hunter shot the last known lynx.) In today’s world, there are compelling factors that work against the lynx repopulating the West and nearly all of them point to humans. That said, over the years I’ve also been impressed by the dedication of Colorado biologists–especially Tanya Shenk– who have stuck with the program.

Since 1999, over 200 lynx have been reintroduced into Colorado’s high country. This article seems a pretty good snapshot of where the program stands today. And this piece spotlights the issue that I explored in my Science story. The bottom line: it’ll be years before experts can say with any certainty if lynx have successfully re-established themselves in Colorado, much less the Western region.

All this is by way of introduction to one of the most fascinating characters I have met in my reporting on environmental issues: Marc Bekoff. Professionally, he’s an animal behaviorist, with distinguished research on carnivores. Until his retirement several years ago, Marc spent decades teaching at the University of Colorado, at Boulder. My thumbnail sketch doesn’t do justice to his career, and of course doesn’t speak to his dual role as a prominent animal rights advocate and outspoken critic of species restoration programs, such as the lynx reintroduction.

I’ve kept in sporadic contact with Marc over the years; we’ve met twice, once in New York a decade ago (where he showed up in the middle of winter wearing sandals) and again last year in Colorado, when I was a Fellow at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism. Marc is one of the smartest people I know and a very articulate and thoughtful advocate for animal rights.

So after I read what Hutchins wrote about the ongoing devastation to wildlife by feral cats, and how this issue encapsulates the irreconcilable differences between animal rights and conservation advocates, I emailed Marc to get his take. Here’s what he wrote back:

While there is a problem I don’t see this as the most significant one at all – maybe ‘up there’ but there are other issues for sure concerning native ‘versus’ non-native species, the fate of individuals in reintroduction programs – should individual wolves die for the good of their species/other wolves – should hamsters/black-tailed prairie dogs be fed to black-footed ferrets so the ferrets can practice predation to increase the ferret’s chance of survival…

I take this to mean that Marc is referring to other issues that are just as divisive to the relationship between animal rights proponents and conservationsts. And his answer got me wishing there was more attention paid to these issues by the press. I have to think that is something that both Hutchins and Bekoff would agree on.

That’s what three formerly reputable investigative journalists are saying here, in Howard Kurtz’s WaPo column, when they rationalize taking money from the Church of Scientology for a “study” on a Florida paper’s in-depth examination of the famously prickly and secretive self-help organization.

From Kurtz, this you have to read to believe:

Steve Weinberg, the former IRE [Investigative Reporters and Editors] executive, who has taught at the University of Missouri’s journalism school for a quarter-century, says he was paid $5,000 to edit the study and “tried to make sure it’s a good piece of journalism criticism, just like I’ve written a gazillion times. . . . For me it’s kind of like editing a Columbia Journalism Review piece.”

Oh, gag me with an Audit.

In August, after the hard-hitting special report on the Church of Scientology first appeared, CJR said this:

The St. Petersburg Times’s coverage of Scientology, though, is a noble example of a journalistic organization doing stellar and gutsy work, with the full understanding that lawsuits, or worse, could ensue.

“Worse,” in my book, is three investigative reporters becoming hired guns for the subject of an unflattering portrait in a newspaper.  They ought to be ashamed.  No word, yet, from CJR on Weinberg’s incredible assertion– that what he did is akin to a piece that might appear in CJR.

[Here's Gawker's take.]   UPDATE: CJR weighs in.

So on the one hand, we see the U.S. military accepting of climate change and coexisting peaceably with endangered species.

On the other hand, there’s Utah: a bastion of inanity, where that ol timey sagebrush mentality never dies.