Writing by Theodore Barnhart
Epiphany 2: Unholistic Management
Epiphany 3: Geo-Engineering: A Pause Button for Climate Change
Epiphany 4: Monkey-Wrenching with Navajo Power Plants
Other Writing:
» Magnifying Reflection
» Walking the Darkness
» Weather Report, October 8, 2008
» Weather Report, October 11, 2008
» Trespassers
» Gnarls in the Canyon
» Form and Function in the Desert
» Hanging Over the Desert
Epiphany 1: The Tree-Band
Sheltered on the lee side of a boulder at 11,000 feet in the Sierras I experienced a lucid moment. Unwittingly, I had positioned myself on the edge of one of this landscape’s extremes. Here sub-alpine foxtail pines give way to the pure granite of the Sierra-Nevada Batholith. Here the rock above treeline is windswept and the air struggles to reach above 50o Fahrenheit even in the summer. This is a harsh place.
The other extreme of this landscape lies below at 6,000 feet and lower; where the piñon pines and juniper give way to the bare sand and sagebrush of the desert. The wind commands here as well. Its hot breath desiccates the landscape forcing grit into every crevice. The desert is also a harsh place.
Thinking of these two extremes pushed me to realize how the landscape of the West mimics the people found there. Doug McDaniel, a rancher and forester from Wallowa County, Oregon, is an excellent paradigm of this. After a meeting with Mr. McDaniel on a piece of his forest he explained to me how so much more could be accomplished in this country if we removed ten percent from each extreme of the political spectrum. This leaves the middle eighty percent to go about their business. When I take Mr. McDaniel’s explanation to heart it resonates well with how I think about the West. Look at beaver for example. Initially they were hunted to one population extreme, near extinction, and the land began to fail. Conversely, if their population was allowed to explode they might flood too much valuable cropland. The middle ground is what is needed in this situation. Nature usually finds this spot on its own through predation and disease. However, when one of these factors is missing humans have to lend a hand at maintaining the balance.
The pattern of taking the middle ground has already shown itself several times on our travels through the West. In Owens Valley, California Mike Prather, who works with The Owens Valley Committee on sustaining the region’s water, gave a scathing criticism of idealism. Mr. Prather instead advocates applying feasible solutions when it comes to solving environmental problems in the West. This means working with all parties such as, ranchers, environmentalists, recreators, the hunting and fishing communities, and the residents of the area. Doing so effectively cuts out much of the two extremes on any issue. All who stand in the middle ground and have discourse will outweigh those who want to graze and irrigate the land into an alkaline dust pile and those who advocate closing all roads into the backcountry and letting the land continue without any human presence.
When I think about including all parties in environmental problems my mind automatically skips over the hunting and fishing communities. This is a problem that I chronically noticed this summer, but I also increasingly discovered the positive contributions the hunting and fishing communities have made to solve environmental problems. The constructive effects on wetlands and stream restoration that organizations like Ducks and Trout Unlimited have been clear to me for some time. Nevertheless, I did not grasp the power of the hunting and fishing communities fully until Mr. McDaniel described to me why he restored a section of the Wallowa River almost single handedly by reintroducing its natural meanders. Mr. McDaniel’s rational for such an action was to improve the fishing where the river runs through his property. The restoration of the Wallowa River may have been radical in its methods, but its purpose solidly serves the increasingly important middle ground. It serves those hunters and fishers that use the land as much, if not more, than other users. The people my mind used to skip over.
The extremes of any environment, be it political, economic, or natural, are harsh places. They are unsheltered from the barrages of words and weather. Where progress can be made is in Mr. Prather’s and Mr. McDaniel’s respective feasible middle ground. This region is akin to the swath of greenery on the eastern slope of the Sierras. I call this region the tree-band. It is removed from both the stifling heat of the desert and the oppressive cold of the alpine. Mr. McDaniel and Mr. Prather have found the tree-band in their work. Their methods and mistakes can serve as a guide to others attempting to reach the middle ground. Doing so may begin to do away with some of the deadlock that the extremes of the Western landscape have created.
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Epiphany 2: Unholistic Management
The politically and culturally contentious practice of livestock grazing on public lands has existed in northeastern Nevada since 1870. Back then ranchers could access vast tracts of federal land on which to graze their cattle without regulation. Presently those lands reside in the hands of federal agencies such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which now permit ranchers to use the land. The Boies and Cottonwood Ranches in northeastern Nevada use allotments of public lands and practice holistic land management in an effort to be better land stewards. They call in a suite of range managers and scientists from the state and federal agencies as well as the ranch employees to make land use decisions. Environmental groups such as Western Watersheds receive invitations, but do not attend meetings.
The holistic management teams appear like awkward company sports teams dragged out of the office by their bosses. They drive in half empty pickup trucks, not wanting to sit too closely to one another, and get out slowly at each stop. At night, around the dinner table, they nervously pat each other on the back for their restoration “accomplishments.” The holistic management teams’ members all know they have something better to do, but find safety and satisfaction in numbers. Nevertheless, the holistic management teams for each ranch contain a diverse range of specialists. However, their lack of an advocate for the land causes their pro-cattle nature to show through. This deficiency makes holistic management a misnomer for experimental grazing.
The BLM ad Forest Service allotments around both the Boies and Cottonwood Ranches have been grazed off and on since the 1870’s and, consequently, the land epitomizes cattle-hammered. Tumbleweeds, bare ground, and the two-day old stubble of overgrazed grass dominate the area. Further signs of neglects manifest themselves in the deeply cut stream channels, mangy and sickly aspen stands, and thick fields of sagebrush. Recent management improvements have brought back some thickets of willows and a few bunch grasses, but the more persistent scars remain.
In ventures to heal some of the land’s wounds the holistic management teams attempt “restorations” that, without an advocate for the land turn into experimental grazing practices. Examples of these methods include the use of cattle to fill in eroded stream channels and clearing sagebrush by training cattle to eat it. In this charged of an environment an advocate for the land will prove a difficult position to hold. An advocate for the land will need unfaltering guts and a diamond-plate exterior to stick it out with this crowd. Fortunately this man exists. Jon Marvel, the executive of Western Watersheds, has the ability to repulse crowds of environmentalist college students while espousing his uncompromising policies about ranching on public lands. Mr. Marvel acts in such a way were it becomes possible to loath and agree with every word out of his mouth at the same time. This is precisely why he does not attend the holistic management team meetings.
Instead, Mr. Marvel works behind the scenes by litigating the BLM and Forest Service for not upholding the grazing standards they have enacted. The BLM and Forest Service’s inability to enforce their grazing standards leads ranchers to abuse the land for their own financial benefit. Mr. Marvel’s tactics will hopefully push the BLM and the Forest Service to get their minds out of the watering trough and see the effects of ranching on public lands. An attitude shift in the BLM and the Forest Service towards advocating for the health of public lands rather than their misuse would allow these agencies’ employees to call out ranchers on the fallacy of holistic management. Ultimately an advocate for the land employed by the BLM or the Forest Service would replace Mr. Marvel and would command authority over ranchers’ grazing permits. Ranchers would then have to cater to the BLM and Forest Service and care for their grazing allotments to maintain their permits.
Without a powerful advocate for the land included in holistic management teams, like those found of the Bois and Cottonwood ranches, cattle men and women will continue to delude themselves from the realities and infeasibility of sustainable ranching on public lands. An advocate for the land can only work in the shadows for so long while holistic management cloaks ranching from the public eye. The Forest Service and the BLM will only entertain so many lawsuits before it becomes cheaper to nip abusive ranching in the bud.
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Epiphany 3: Geo-Engineering: The Pause Button for Climate Change
Standing on the edge of a volcanic neck in the Chihuahua Desert I bake in the sun. I am at the end of a string of people searching for a rare plant, the night blooming cereus. The plant, a cactus, presents itself plainly on the surface, but contains a large tuber below ground to increase its drought resistance. The cereus lives inside the shelter of the creosote bush to create a cooler and more humid environment. In short the creosote bush allows the cereus to live in hotter and drier places than it usually would.
Cereus will die when the earth gets hotter. They are too selective with their habitat. Nevertheless, we should take note of this plant’s ingenuity to live within another plant and consider using similar methods to cool our planet. When we change the earth’s climate it is known as geoengineering. We, of course, have unconsciously geoengineered this planet since the eighteen hundreds, when we began to burn coal and other fossil fuels for industry and transportation. Alternative energy and activism alone cannot solve climate change, so all routes must be considered. We can, however, use geoengineering as a pause button while slower tactics to fight climate change catch up. This concept is not foreign, just frightening now that we are aware of it.
Geoengineering solutions exists in many forms, most of them at immense and daunting scales. Solutions such as mimicking polar ice by building colossal solar reflectors and treating jet fuel with sulfates to copy the effects that large volcanic eruptions have on our atmosphere. While traveling the West, landscape altering projects become commonplace. Gargantuan dams, mountains of tailings piles, and massive canals unfold in every state. They, however, are not to the scale of covering icecaps or dispersing millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere as a large volcanic eruption would (Kious and Tilling). Nevertheless, the great projects of the West do show that such geoengineering projects may exist in our grasp.
I cannot speak fully on the validity of these geoengineering concepts, which would require a more lengthy discussion. However, including geoengineering in a multifaceted approach to climate change becomes essential when we apply strategies to fight climate change to places like the West. While traveling the West the difficulty of changing this nation’s paradigm of power consumption becomes evident. The distances are too large and the communities lie too far apart thus necessitating the use of fossil fuels for their energy. I do not doubt that those types of communities will eventually disappear, but not as fast as the climate will change. Geoengineering may provide the necessary cushion for those communities to catch up.
Geoengineering possibilities may provide some powerful tools with which to fight climate change. They can, however, also run wild; doing more harm than good. With the option of undertaking such projects their effects become a serious concern. Geoengineering should not be hailed as a panacea for climate change as dams were for clean energy only to be fraught with environmental consequences. The ability of geoengineering to mitigate climate change comes at the price of potentially changing other parts of the world for the worst. Too much cooling could stop the monsoon cycle in Asia thus depriving a hefty portion of the world from its food source (Beglay). Sadly this is not my largest worry with geoengineering. I worry that our use of geoengineering will continue indefinitely instead of using it to pause climate change. Instead of a gradual shift away from carbon emissions geoengineering could create a culture of complacency.
Like the cereus plant we should consider engineering the world around us, but we should not allow that engineering to overtake us. With such a diverse array of climate change solutions geoengineering should not be our ace in the hole. We would not want to end up like the cereus; unable to live without its creosote bush. Rather, geoengineering should be researched and developed so as to be ready for implementation as a last resort. Climate change holds too great of a threat to be tackled by one approach. Our chances of finding a solution as reliable as the creosote bush appear slim.
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Epiphany 4: Monkey-Wrenching with Navajo Power Plants
A lone gas station marks the little town of Teec Nos Pos far out from the city of Shiprock on the Navajo Nation. I watch Navajos come and go. The older ones leave with milk and bread while the children appear with bright faces and bags of candy. Not many people fill their tanks. This gas station serves as my rendezvous point with Elouise Brown, the president of Dooda Desert Rock, a Navajo organization opposing a planned coal-fired power plant near Farmington, New Mexico. The Name “Dooda Desert Rock” represents a pairing of English and Navajo with “Dooda” meaning “absolutely no” and its alliteration with “desert” showing Brown’s immense dedication to her cause.
Desert Rock, potentially the third power plant in the northeastern desert corner of the Navajo Nation, threatens to pump more pollutants into the region’s already filthy air. In scuffed white tennis shoes, black sweat pants, and a bright Navajo style wool jacket, Brown firmly opposes the proposed plant. At a protest camp near the plant’s site, Brown holds meetings and music festivals to organize her supporters. She will not let this power plant go in her backyard. One night at the camp, around a fire of freshly cut piñon pine, Brown described driving out to the Desert Rock site and pulling up all of the survey stakes. Brown’s description of this act reminded me of similar acts performed by George Hayduke and his band in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. Of any activists I have met in the West so far, Brown’s methods prove the most radical. Brown, however, like Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang, does not target the right points for change. Dooda Desert Rock’s leader shows immense passion for her causes but less vision for organization. Without solutions and innovation, protest looses its edge. Stagnating over an issue does no prove an efficient way to effect change.
Protest and resistance of the kind that Brown partakes in generates publicity the way a thorn draws attention to a larger wound. The thorn does no more than raise the alarm. It applies no bandage or poultice to the situation. Resistance and activism that pose no viable alternatives sabotage their own efforts. In a world that needs solutions a new one must replace every option taken off the table. Protests that suggest no alternatives fail to address the hearts of the very issues they attempt to improve.
Without a viable alternative, protests to projects such as Desert Rock do not fill the power needs of the people that the plant would have otherwise. Diné CARE, another Navajo organization protesting the Desert Rock plant is a more compelling example of an effective activism group. Diné CARE argues that the Navajo Nation should build wind and solar projects instead of another coal-fired power plant. To support this Diné CARE has compiled the wind and solar radiation studies of the Navajo Nation.
Diné CARE acts very similarly to Brown’s Dooda Desert Rock by speaking at the planning meetings for the plant and educating the Navajo community about the negative impacts of coal-fired generation, but their major success rests in their advocacy for alternatives to the power plant. To further support their message, aside form their wind and solar studies, Diné CARE has generated reports on viable alternative energy strategies for the Navajo Nation. Although, Dooda Desert Rock calls attention to the health problems the addition of another coal-fired power plant will exacerbate on the Navajo Nation it still fails to address the heart of the issue; that people want and need power. Brown recognizes this deficiency and says, “We’d rather have alternative energy, but we’re so focused on stopping this [power plant] first… Then…maybe, part of our group would work on alternative [energy] and part of our group would say ‘no’ to the power plant.” Protest it seems is Brown’s niche. If she had them, she would let other people work on renewable energy while she protests the power plant. Brown has succeeded in stalling the power plant with comments on its environmental impact statement and objections to its permits. She can now afford to take a break from her stagnating protest to channel her passion for the issue towards advocating for renewable energy on the Navajo Nation.
The Monkey Wrench Gang provides a glorified image of protest in the West, but it is an unrealistic one. Abbey’s characters enjoy the means while allowing the ends to slip past them. Brown does not fit this model. She thinks only of the failure of the Desert Rock plant and lets the means slip past her. Groups like Brown’s need to find an alternative that fits them and see it through to completion. The problems of the West necessitate solutions not just protests. It does not work to continue to push undesirable developments from state to state or from reservation to reservation. Eventually, the West will run out of back yard to spoil.
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Magnifying Reflection
By inverting my head into the icy water of a mountain pool above Lone Pine, California a nearby stone turns into a granite orb suspended in the sky of the still waters. That swift motion turned that stone into a complete world. The stone in the pool is much like the West. The stone reflects off of the pool’s surface as places in the West reflect off of their surroundings. The complete detail of a place in the West can only be realized when it has been examined alone and then put into the greater context of the variables surrounding it. Pyramid Lake, Nevada is a prime specimen of a place in the West. At first glance Pyramid Lake is simply a miniature inland sea in the desert. However, upon deeper examination the details of Pyramid Lake come to the surface. Details such as native fish, the Truckee River, Derby Dam, The Bureau of Reclamation, Lake Tahoe; Fallen, Nevada, Timothy O’Sullivan, and Francis Newlands all come out. Their relationships to the lake are all different yet their effects are compounding when looked at in the context of the greater West. For example Francis Newlands facilitated the creation of The Bureau of Reclamation and Derby Dam on the Truckee River to irrigate alfalfa fields in Fallen. This consequently inhibited native fish spawning migration and caused the level of Pyramid Lake to fall. How all of these variables are related characterizes the West. Like the stone, Pyramid Lake can fill the world, but it also has its place among the other rocks on the bank.
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Walking the Darkness
The stars on a clear night can be breathtaking. They can be like viewing a painting by a master where exquisite new detail reveals itself the longer you spend with it.
But what about when you have to locomote in that irritating darkness that seems to always come around right when the stars show up? I have developed some techniques for getting around, sans headlamp, when this happens.
The first method involves memorizing the camp when it is still light out. This way, when darkness comes, you will be able to navigate in your head and avoid those blasted tents and tables. Be forewarned, though, unless you have a photographic memory this may not be the most efficient way to maneuver through camp past the crepuscular hour.
The second modus operandi, the high-step, I find the most useful. This method has some delightful benefits such as not running into small boulders and avoiding sticks and logs. The name really explains all of this technique, but if your imagination is not particularly vivid I shall illustrate for you. You walk by raising each foot up to about the level of your knee. Then you move it forward and repeat with the other foot. You may think that this will make you appear ridiculous to observers, but remember that they can see you just about as well as you can see that shin high log about to intercept you.
The third procedure you might attempt goes by “following the darkness.” This routine works principally on roads and trails. These surfaces usually reflect less light than the brush, stumps, and flesh tearing barbed wire that surrounds them. Consequently, if you follow the band of darkness in front of you, you will stay on track. Caution: high-stepping is recommended on all unpaved roads and trails.
Give these techniques a go. A good training regimen is to begin your night walks on the full moon when you will have more useable light. Keep walking every night, and as the moon wanes and your skills will gradually increase. If not, you will end up with some nice bruises and scratches. As with anything, remember to scout for cliffs before you start. Also don’t be afraid of the dark because large rocks and branches will start to gravitate towards you.
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Weather Report, October 8, 2008
I see it there. Silhouetted by the Technicolor orange of the red-rock sunrise. Its quivering mound like shape pulls delicately up from the orange nylon of my sleeping bag. My eyes widen as it begins its accelerating descent towards my bag’s orifice. “No. No, no, no, no, no” I think. It lands with a muffled kerplop on my skin that has been kept so warm in my cocoon’s inner sanctum. Shivers. Time to get up. Demonic dew.
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Weather Report, October 11, 2008
Scallops of muddled white.
Pure cloud mixing with the desert dust.
Suspended and saltated to coalesce with the whipped peaks of the atmosphere.
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Trespassers
Up a gully, down a wash, through the juniper, ascend the slick rock, negotiate the potholes, and stick to the rim. All this time with eyes on the ground to search and glean bits of past culture from the rock. All this time the mass of the surroundings is forgotten. Its majesty dwarfed by the shard of pottery or the flake of chert held in hand. People walked the same cow paths here 5,000 years ago, except the people were not looking for potsherds and there were no cow paths. Are we intruders on their land? How many points and pieces have errant boots and hooves crushed?
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Gnarls in the Canyon
Lingering limestone nips at the calves.
The cacophony of water gnarling over rock wavers back and forth like whispers in the ear brought by the wind.
The timeless creep and grind of particle laden liquid through the arid steppe.
Like clumped sugar run through with water.
Some grains, more resistant than others, persist in the channel to gnarl the water.
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Form and Function in the Desert
No more than twenty meters from our cars, standing in a sandy wash, Joe Pachak stoops down and lifts a small piece of chert from the dust. More accurately it is a flake, chipped off of a larger core in the hope that it would be just right to be worked into an arrowhead or dart tip.
Joe Pachak is Bluff, Utah’s resident artist and archeologist. He spends his time hiking the region and recording artifacts for archeological excavations. I was lucky enough to accompany Joe for a day in the field looking for an ancient road and shrine on an elongate monocline stretching north-south near Bluff called Comb Ridge.
We found neither the road nor the shrine, but the frequency at which we found potsherds and pieces of worked chert floored me. Entire washes and hillsides were practically littered with artifacts from thousands of years of habitation. Dwellings of stone and mortar lay tucked within every overhang and crevice. Movement required precise though so as to not crush the shattered past.
This outing with Joe illustrated an unnoticed deficiency in my desert experience. I have been a student of the Southwest’s canyon country for some time now. I am no veteran, but I can feel my way around. I rush to it during spring break and settle in for months during the summer time. On these past forays into the region I have concentrated on the macro. A patch of Navajo Sandstone, similar to Comb Ridge, but to the northwest, resonates in my mind whenever I think of the desert. At that patch, perched thousands of feet above the Dirty Devil River, the entire thickness of the Navajo formation presents itself for exploration. Its domes and cliffs yearn for bipedal inspection. I have used this place many times as a base camp for canyoneering in the region, but my efforts have always concentrated on the form of the sandstone; not its function.
Joe may have blown the dust from a new piece of the desert for me, but I continue to retain a certain fondness for the pure form of sandstone. Arriving at Comb Ridge gave me similar feelings to when I first met my patch of sandstone above the Dirty Devil. Nourishing that feeling I climbed to the peak of the Comb and was greeted by the quivering innards of the monocline. The surgeon like effect of water on this land exposed blood red shales and the while fat of limestone. A rampart of precipitation, feeding from a small band of clouds, also presented itself, and it was heading my way. The decision to scramble down and back to camp to close bags and cover tents was considered, but what if the deluge was unbeatable? Any effort would then have been in vain. Instead, clothes were stashed in the inner reaches of a particularly foliated juniper and the hopefully brief storm was welcomed to my desert experience.
Usually I fear rain in the desert. Roads slick with muddy clay, flash floods, and washes flowing across escape routes clutter and push the silence from my brain. I felt refreshed to receive the rain at Comb Ridge as an unfamiliar part of the macro desert that I have come to expect. The rain replenishes this depleted landscape and coxes even the rock to life with gurgling shoots of water through potholes, violent torrents down gullies, and the gentle sheet wash on smooth faces.
Regardless of Comb Ridge’s exceptional form, Joe illuminated to me what I have missed in the desert so far; its utility for a great number of past people. What have I overlooked on my travels? How many potsherds and knappjngs have I unwittingly trampled? Perhaps I have not looked in the right places or am not looking at all. Should I revisit my past explorations to gain this extra knowledge? Is it better to continue in the same fashion as before, but with a new eye for the small things? The latter option contains the most value in this scenario. It is probably best not to revisit old places until I tire of new ones.
Instead of feeling that I have missed out in past canyons the positive of these experiences should be noted. Joe has given me a new tool to use in concert with my preexisting affection for the desert, a tool to deepen and expand my desert experiences. A tool that gives me reason to explore further and does not burden me except in knowledge of hidden places.
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Hanging Over the Desert
Scallops of muddled white. Pure cloud mixing with the day-glow desert dust. Dust, suspended and saltated, to coalesce with the whipped peaks of the atmosphere.
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