Writing by Wynne Auld
Epiphany 2: Home on the Range: Rethinking What Public Lands Mean to America
Epiphany 3: The Daily Market
Other Writing:
» Comb Ridge Color
» Fear and the Desert
» Looking for a Homeland
» Gymno Gyps, Californianess
Epiphany 1: A Tale of Two Lakes, Or, A Political History of Two Terminal Lakes and a Multi-User Contractual Agreement
In the Great Basin, neither water nor histories escape. Histories reverberate across the Black Rock desert, through the granite spires of the Sierra Mountains and the tufa towers of prehistoric lakeshores. They dust the tops of Sagebrush and Saltbush and scurry like lizards over the parched and bare alkaline soil. Finally, they drain into terminal lakes, where all water and all histories here go. The Great Basin has one story, and that is the story of water.
The recent history of Pyramid Lake is an interminable scramble for water and the crafty ways of expanding, demanding urban centers. In the case of Pyramid Lake, a new contract named the Truckee River Operating Agreement (TROA) prioritizes the water demand of urban centers second only to the water needs of the endangered Lahonton Cutthroat Trout and Cui-Ui fish of Pyramid Lake, a scheme which only possible by overriding the most senior water right holders, the agriculturalists of the Truckee- Carson Irrigation District. Conveniently, TROA comes in the wake of Reno’s population boom, which is growing 9.8% per year. In the holy name of the endangered fish and for the purpose of Reno and Carson City’s urban and industrial sprawl, Pyramid Lake’s water is being stolen from agriculturalists.
The tale of two lakes begins with two twin sisters: the glamorous Tahoe, who had it all -- rippling streams, vanilla-scented Jeffery Pines, the night sky and Hollywood stars, and Pyramid, quiet, unassuming, consistently in the Northeast shadow of her sister, but brilliant. Her gems were her secrets -- mythic fish, prehistoric Cui-Ui and Lahonton Cutthroat Trout so big that even unegoistic, toothy 90 years old men describe them with wide eyes and even wider arms; thousands upon thousands of winged friends, the American White Pelicans, Peregrine Falcons, seagulls, cormorants, and herons, who visited seasonally and depended on Pyramid for her waters; and towering tufa rocks bursting like white popcorn from the blue green depths.
Tahoe and Pyramid shared a great many things. Every spring, for example, Pyramid’s Trout would swim furiously upstream in the Truckee River to spawn in Lake Tahoe. And every spring, Tahoe would begin draining the cold clear snowmelt of the Sierra Mountains to Pyramid. They shared sediments and sky and the Blackrock desert playa in between them.
When Euro-Americans struck gold in Sacramento in 1848, many Easterners traveled the route westward along the Truckee River. Reno and Carson City became stops of sin along the wagon train. Then came the Newlands Project, the famous running start to a century of water “reclamation”: there would be 400,000 of arable land where a scant 4 ½ inches of rainfall. Tahoe’s waters were soon befamed as a rose in the desert, the promise of irrigation in the arid West. Agriculturalists hoarded Tahoe’s water into ancient, irrefutable water rights, whose 1862 irrigation claim trumps even the Paiute Indian tribe’s claim of 10,000 years, trumps even the claims of the prehistoric fish Cui-Ui which has been floundering since before recorded time began. Pouring more and more life juice on the dry desert soils, Bloom! they cried.
Infatuation quickly became addiction, and addiction promises no friends. The settlers of Reno and Carson City flushed Tahoe’s waters through their turbines and their metal ores and down their toilets. While regional population and industry grew, the City of San Francisco across the Sierras began buying rights to Tahoe’s waters. Today, water-thirsty corporate vampires like the Vidler Corporation are buying rights on speculation that they will soon coalesce into diamonds. Who would blame them?
Meanwhile, Pyramid grew ill. Hushed by the shadow of her seemingly robust older sister, Pyramid first began losing water, then fish, then birds. Her once suave shores turned pallid and salty. A dry dusty path marched out to a tufa formation once named Anahoe Island and encircled it, choking it with dust clouds when the wind reared up. The water level had dropped by 80 feet since the Newlands Project’s Derby Dam.
And so time passed, a veneer of salt on the dried ledges of the lake. And their mother, nestled into the stone formations of Pyramid, wept.
A century of vying for the waters shared by Pyramid and Tahoe has coalesced into a regal agreement, TROA, King of the Western Nevada desert. Named not for Pyramid nor for Tahoe but for the artery of water that gives life to the two, the Truckee River, TROA listened to the tales of both Pyramid and Tahoe. The Renophites chimed in. The Paiute Indians had their say. The water-vampires Vidler showed up to promise the import of 8,000 acre feet of water per year from Someone Else’s Stream. And TROA spoke forth a diligent document of multiple users and multiple uses for the life-giving waters of the Truckee. In the guise of a revised water allotment treaty, TROA foretold the following future for young Pyramid:
There will be fish.
There will be Reno.
There will be an established water quality.
There will be recreation, meaning there will be a certain water level in the lakes.
In that order.
Conspicuously absent from the TROA are the farmers of the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District (TCID) who hold the most ancient water rights to the Truckee’s waters, the ones for whom the future was once most certain. Undoubtedly, their alfalfa was never meant to grow in the Nevada desert. Undoubtedly, they didn’t deserve water rights senior to the Pauite Indians in the first place. But agreements made without the consent of the most senior right holders should give us pause.
Consider the EIS economic impact analysis which predicts that $9 billion new dollars could be had if the agriculturalists’ water rights, 40,000 acre-feet, were reallocated to commercial or industrial consumption, otherwise known as Reno and Carson City’s urban sprawl and industrial parks (base year: 1990).
In the face of a statewide population growth of 11% per year, the City of Reno’s website assuages the concerns of local residents by saying that the water rights must be purchased by new developers, and that those water rights are fixed, ancient, and irrefutable. For the urban centers this may be true. While Reno and Carson City may have once more promised themselves water for the next century, history tells another tale. Urban centers will get what they want, when they want it. Although TROA prioritizes the fish dependent on Pyramid Lake, in the next drought, I wouldn’t bet on the trout.
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Epiphany 2: Home on the Range: Rethinking What Public Lands Mean to America
I’m convinced that the cowboy, the iconic image of the American West and our public lands, is largely beyond redemption. The Western rangeland, already stressed, faces a hotter and drier future; the foodshed once dependent on local beef has long turned to Wal-Mart as the neighborhood grocer; and ranchers’ balance sheets bleed more red daily. The nail in the coffin for the cowboy may be the recent public uproar over ranching on public lands. Many ranchers depend on public lands, both because it is cheaper to graze than private land and because desirable private lands in places like Nevada are freckles on a map dominated by public ownership. Conservation groups like Western Watersheds Project have been largely successful in convincing courts that management of grazing on public lands has been a sham. Even with a favorable ruling, a cowboy is left with the same pitiful situation plus monstrous legal fees.
I admit, I find it tragic. I, too, am attached to the romantic image of a cowboy on the range, using the land for the earnest reward of his own providence and the providence of his community. However, it is not so much the cowboy himself that is beyond redemption so much as the iconic image of the cowboy, the idea that he belongs here more than we do. The cowboy represents the predilection of public lands to specific industries, a truth vested in a long history dating back to the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934; today, 96% of BLM land is grazed. However, national democratic interest in land that is both geographically and informationally obscure lies not in specific uses, such as ranching, but rather in the broader ecosystem services that these lands provide. These services are a democratic value that all of us can agree on, because they are critical to all life: water retention, controlling soil erosion, preserving open space, and cycling carbon.
Ecological standards imply federal monitoring but not federal management -- management should be community based. Locals have the most at stake and are the most knowledgeable. Community based management precludes mismanagement by corporate and absentee owners. When managed for ecosystem services, potential land uses are undefined -- land users may innovate in land management technique, so long as their methods protect democratic interest -- it is our land, after all. Some ranchers are making progress in management techniques that protect these services while proving more economically profitable and socially viable. If given the opportunity, the American cowboy may not ride into a final tragic sunset after all. His prosperity, though, should hinge on the shared prosperity of our public lands.
If public lands aren’t managed for specific industries, what might their sustained use look like? Rancher Steve Boies, the white bearded, third generation owner of Boies Ranch in Northeastern Nevada, announces to his Holistic Management team that there are now cutthroat trout on his crick and the number of bird species has increased. The Boises’ management team, comprised of BLM, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife officials, and regional residents gather several times a year to string a variety of interests into a cohesive management plan. Although they do not explicitly manage for ecosystem services, indicator data like hydrologic and vegetation transects measure the robustness of the Ecosystem. Here, the traditionally adversarial arrangement of Rancher vs. Wren Lover share each other’s prosperity. The success of this ranch speaks for itself: although the past seven of 10 years have been drier than average, Boise is running more cattle with improved ecosystem success.
I’m not saying that all public land management should be a feel-good collaboration of the good, the bad, and the delinquent. Holistic Management faces criticism but nonetheless represents a step in a new direction of public land management. Ed Maston, editor of High Country News, said “at last . . . both the Forest Service and ranchers are ready for a new approach to the range [and] the push is coming from . . . everyday people [in the Forest Service and BLM offices and in Western communities]” (HCN 1990). The iconic image of the cowboy is obsolete -- he is an image of how the land should be used rather than what it should be used for. But, with innovative management, perhaps the cowboy will redeem his name as a provider for both himself and his community. After more than a century of defining our public lands by specific industries, it is time to define it by the provision of our nation’s livelihood.
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Comb Ridge Color
Rust
Blood
Sky
Sage
Bone
Sand
These are the colors of this landscape.
They are not metaphors.
They are consistent understandings of light waves of a certain length.
My Blood Red is the same as His Blood Red, who lived here 10,000 years ago, and perhaps that is the only thing we have in common.
My mind has named colors, like chartreuse and mauve and magenta, but each of these is defined by what other people tell me it is defined by, and not by substance.
If, from the top of Comb Ridge, he sees the landscape covered in blood flowing from the shorn nipples of his ancestral mother, and I see crimson, then what do we have in common?
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Fear and the Desert
Recently I sat on the Northern Lakeshores if Lake Michigan waves crest and crash. A small girl with a round belly and lips like the flying wings of a pea flower walked past, wondering at me with her big blue eyes underneath her bowed forehead. Hallo, I said, big and toothy and away she ran with the frightened pitter-patter of a spooked pony.
I am thinking of the small girl that I was and the things that spooked me -- Strangers. Unlocked doors. Snakes. Rodents. The dark. I never could have imagined that I would pull my sandaled feet though thigh-high riparian grasses, as I did on Trout Creek in Oregon, nor wade waist deep through its sediment-laden waters where crawdad nipped and a snake swam carrying a wriggling rainbow trout. How can someone who is afraid of the dark imagine sweet slumber beneath the moon song of coyotes as it rippled across the Nevada desert?
The fears of my youth are partially attributable to a fearful society. Few memories of my seven year old mind are more vivid than scenes from the John Benet Ramsey case, a story so sensationalized by the media that the name along surely conjures up your own memories. I especially remember my mother’s fear during and following the case: wear sunblock and don’t talk to strangers. We lived in a close-knit, rural community of 4,000.
The media presents a reality of reckless danger, of malevolence that we can only hope to have to have mercy and pass us over. Insurance. I.D. tags. Alarm Systems. It is as though we hope for the worst.
Ironically, it was the recognition of another great force, a power that I must recognize and then respect, which enabled me to release my fear. This was the force of nature and the rule of natural law. Wonder obliterated fear as I began to garden. I watched bees dip deep into sacks of nectar and gather pollen on the minute furs of their bodies. I observed and read intently to understand soil ecosystems, how a tomato vines, and how to protect meristems or nodes, the points of regrowth, during harvest. When a mysterious pest munched on the peppers, I staked out in the moonlight, waiting to see what it would be. I know my immersion into the natural world via growing food is not entirely unique -- when I worked on a farm last summer, a customer of our vegetables came to volunteer once, only to find that “dirt” and “bugs” grossed her out. A professional chef and she squirmed to see food crops grow.
Unfortunately, I don’t consider my pitiful youth of fright to be unique, and I think some of this is attributable to inadequate contact with the natural world. For American society at large, the chaotic and dynamic processes that we encounter in nature -- for example erosion or a meandering stream -- have been replaced by predictable and static interactions associated with indoor living -- 90 degree angles, computed automations of video games and computers, and a controlled environment, including light and temperature. As cities, suburbs, and towns expand, access to green space in general, be it alpine wilderness or a plot of sweet potatoes, is diminishing. While there are important distinctions between wilderness and domestic agriculture, the wonder of nature and the power of natural law are discernible from both. Society at large is becoming further removed from what they eat, what they wear, and how the natural world could be the fundamental provider of these consumer goods. Milk is from a carton, I have heard a second grader say.
I admit my childhood fears are a distant figment of my past, a part of me that I have selectively remembered into insignificance. I actually forgot about it entirely until this a semester of field-based, experiential learning. In the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, there are small scorpions, black widows, and rattlesnakes -- I’ve seen two. Still I walk to my sleeping spot alone, awed by the stars and struck by the uneven steps through the dark.
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