Writing by Ben Serrurier
Epiphany 2: Local Solutions for BLM Management Reform
Epiphany 3: Don't Worry About the Future, Prepare for It
Other Writing:
» To Be a Trout
» Blood in the Desert
» Weather Report, October 10, 2008
» Things That Make Me Cry
» Little Orphan Sand
» The Uneasy Silence
Epiphany 1: Wrestling in the West
Menlo Park is a classic suburb. Its cul-de-sacs have basketball hoops and the lawns are green. The downtown restaurants and tree lined avenues reflect “creature comforts.” Legend has it that alternative names, considered before Menlo Park, included “Easy Street” and “Nice Yet Unadventurous Place to Raise A Family Of 2.3 Kids.” Northern Nevada was not an option.
Menlo Park has given me many things: education, friendship, a decent public library and clean water. While its borders are small (Redwood City and Palo Alto are only three stoplights away); there are no discernable features to determine where one suburb ends and another begins. Menlo Park is the epitome of consistency.
Growing up inside this bubble was safe, seamless and easy. So far as I call it home, I will seek this environment out, where ever I am. Faced with foreign surrounding and intimidating changes, I like to pop a MP and drift away to the sound of not-before-8am lawnmowers, and Priuses floating by on electric. Suburban comfort is a drug so good it should be illegal. I am a suburban addict. Nothing drives me to that cozy mini-van filled utopia like Northern Nevada. Strikingly desolate and painfully sparse, the deserts of Nevada represent everything Menlo Park is not.
However, something odd happened the other day as I crossed from the forested hills of eastern Oregon into the empty space of the Black Rock Desert. My eyes burned a hole in the car window, all limbs battling the urge to shatter the transparent barrier and dash headlong into the untouched void beyond the headlights. Perhaps it was because the iPod, my favorite means of avoiding these reckless thoughts, was out of reach, or finally the confinement of the seatbelt had given my legs a mind of their own. I prefer to think, thought, that this was no passing sensation, but the introduction of a lifelong challenge.
The desert knew I was an easy target. “This slick urbanite can’t handle me!” it boasted. And true, the sagebrush had me pegged, for I could not go meet it on it’s hot, dusty terms. I resigned myself to stay in the car, but I never took my eye off the crafty landscape. We locked eyes through the tempered glass, the rugged bluffs puffed out their arrogant chests, the Pinyon pines selfishly hoarded the water. My mind buzzed with activity, as if put on high alert: eyes darting across the horizon, seeking out of the weak spots in my foe. A green streak betrayed a trickling stream, an overhanging cliff conspired to offer me shade. The desert blinked first, and I won round one.
Credit for this first victory must go to Menlo Park: all of its mundane charm has inspired me to explore the opposite. Because I know the easy life, I want to find a challenge. If I need water, make me find it! Shelter? Make me build it! Menlo Park will always be in my corner, ready to heal me without effort, a cut man with a magical remedy. But it is also my trainer, pushing me into the ring with sturdy boots and a full Nalgene. I don’t want Menlo Park any more, I want you Northern Nevada! We’ll meet at the normal spot, five miles deep in inhospitality. I’ll be there enjoying my desolate solitude, winning round two because this is not Menlo Park, and this is where I want to be.
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Epiphany 2: Local Solutions for BLM Management Reform
As part of the taxpaying American public, I am included in ownership of all federal public lands. There are endless possibilities of how to use these lands, but with 300 million co-owners, it is difficult to gain a majority stake. Did I miss a big shareholders meeting where the BLM fields questions and recognizes new management ideas? The reality is that much of the public feels divorced from their shared open space. Federal agencies, like the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), are supposed to manage the public lands for multiple uses, a tall order for rugged, sparsely populated and often remote landscapes. Further constrained by limited financing, the BLM works closest with those interested parties who have the most invested in using public lands: ranchers and miners. Disenfranchised environmental groups can only be heard in the court room. Snide nicknames for the BLM – such as the Bureau of Livestock and Mining – have stemmed from the belief that only ranchers and miners have a seat at the public lands table. In order to discourage destructive litigation and heal the wounds caused by years of animosity, the management of public lands must be reformed.
Due to the breadth of the BLM’s oversight, as well as the livelihood of those who depend on public lands, management reform cannot be taken lightly, gambled on with haphazard experimentation. Collaborative methods, currently being used with success on single ranches in Elko County, Nevada, and throughout the West, could allow local communities to participate actively in the management of their public lands. On these progressive ranches, Holistic Management (HM) Teams are formed at the behest of the ranch owners to work towards common goals of ecological and economic health. By including specialists, biologists, conservationists, public agents and ranchers, a level flexibility and sustainability is introduced the decision making process. Each participant is encouraged to cooperate so their objective is addressed seriously by the whole team. Conservationists benefit by saving money on litigation, and ranchers receive the support of the environmental community, as well as a healthier range producing better cattle. By using this strategy on a larger scale, to affect whole communities, greater progress could be made in solving contentious issues such as public land management.
Working much like a school board or planning committee an elected HM team could represent a county’s interests to the BLM. This team, although elected, would act in the same capacity as those currently working on ranches. Representing not only economic and environmental concerns, the county HM team would reflect the attitude of the local communities. Through recommendations to the BLM, the team would play an important role in the management of public lands, perhaps carrying legal weight.
The importance of local communities is essential to this new management process. Local community members are far more invested in the state and function of their surrounding public lands. For example, from my house on the California coast, I care little about the management decisions made in eastern Nevada, but the residents of Wells, NV, are potentially dependant on the recommendation. Perhaps the community will continue to promote grazing operations, but by including all voices in the discussion, a more accepted and complete management plan will be produced.
There is a sentiment popular with resource managers who have seen success through collaboratve process: “There are extremes on the right and the left, and we can let them lob grenades at each other while the people in the middle work on getting something done.” As of now, the BLM’s management process is attuned to the extremes. By inviting a wider range of views to the management plan undertaking, and increasing the local awareness of the issues facing public lands, an elected collaborative recommendation team would maximize the potential of the productive middle to solve the conflicts that plague public land management.
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To Be a Trout
I see you there,
Just postin’ in the riffle
Your barely have to move,
You’re so slick.
Ain’t nothin’ but kickin’ it
Down there on the bottom
Lurking like the
Six inch fresh water stream monster that
You are.
I dig your drive, man, I really do.
You can’t be distracted,
Not by bubbles, rocks or pine needles,
You know what you want,
You want what little bug, hmmm.
Oh and you see him now,
Sneaking up all silent like,
Waving that tail all non-chalant.
“This bug not even worth my time!”
but, gulp, ooh wee, that tasted good.
Damn trout, you one smooth operator,
One badass rainbow.
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Blood in the Desert
So much water is needed,
Without, there is blood.
In my nose the West?
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Weather Report, October 10, 2008
I wake up each morning sunburned, parched and flaking – more and more like the desert. We are like a married couple, growing old together, merging into one.
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Things That Make Me Cry
Onions, sliced or diced
Affection, left unsaid
Finality
The beginning of “Saving Private Ryan”
Amazing Grace
Watching someone else cry
Vulnerable conversations
Memories that cannot be shared
The debate rhetoric of Sarah Palin
Bach’s Concertos for the unaccompanied cello
Alpine glow on snoy peaks
Short e-mails that end with “I love you”
Regretted decisions
4am-up-all-night laughter
The Koln Concert, by Kieth Jarret
Thinking of my grandfather
The last drop of Cholula
Not having cried in a while
Tear gas
Bad puns
Nails on a chalkboard
When my Mom is stressed, and
When my Dad tells me he’s proud of me.
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Little Orphan Sand
I feel the sand with my feet, but I am not scratched like the rough sand stone. That is because the sand is an orphan. It has been passed over and beaten, and has nowhere to turn. Disowned by the large solid rocks it was born from, the sand has been whipped up by the wind, covered with shrubs and trampled by everything. As my toes near the seemingly cohesive surface, the spirit of the sand seems to remember traumas past and shrinks away into the earth. I step down, and crassly move on, leaving the crushed powder to cower in my wake.
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The Uneasy Silence
To understand a landscape, listen to it. The sounds that float over the horizon represent the nature of the rocks, plants, dirt and animals that call this land home. History will rebound off pictographs and echo around cliff dwellings. A distant wind will snare a coyote’s yips or a canyon wren’s diminishing whistle and deliver them to waiting ears. The sound of a location helps me place myself in the borders of the land. After the land questions my actions and motives, I can either be accepted as a welcome traveler, or rejected as a trespasser.
But what of a landscape that bites its tongue? The deep hallows hold back their voice and further obscure their secrets; how can I grovel at the mountains feet or the water’s edge and plead for the worthiness of my cause? A wilderness that refuses to cooperate makes me wary. Without an established line of communication I am handcuffed, unable to worship my surroundings. Although any country can be mute, it is usually the desolate windblown wastes which refuse to answer my emissary: the barren cold of a Chugach glacier and the hot desecration of the Utah slick rock desert.
There are endless stretches of time when nothing moves in the Chugach Range on the south coast of Alaska. The rivers of ice appear to have reconsidered their destination and bide their time before moving back uphill. The clouds have stopped their own migration and perch in the sky like a drawing. Mountains, having been pushed upwards for centuries, have met their limit and dare go no further. It is up to the sun to prove that the day is still progressing, but this far north in the summer, the sun never sets, suffusing the sky with eerie light at all hours. Sitting in this stasis for hours--no, eternity--I have struggled to place myself amongst the miles of ice and rock. Being in the environment is not enough, I want to interact with it: have a discussion, a debate or share a laugh. I scan the salt and pepper ridges, but it appears that all the spirits are gone.
Perhaps there is an important meeting going on where the sky, ice and rock meet to discuss long range planning and climate change, but I wasn’t invited. I bide my time until I receive a reply, but with each deafening breath and uncouth shuffle of my feet I am brutally aware of my intrusive fidgeting and clamor. Until the wind returns and whistles through the high passes and the clouds jostle in the sky, I will feel unwelcome – an uninvited guest in an empty house.
The hot rock of the desert is just as dismissive of my presence as the avalanches and crevasses of the glaciers. When looking out over the fragile dust to the San Juan River, the bluffs and ridges of the desert reveals very little. I ask the land to receive me and stow me away in its cool caves to hide from the prying sun, but receive no verdict. Dangling in purgatory, I become acutely aware of myself and the disturbance I cause. The biotic soil peers at my feet with distrust and the climbing sandstone is suspect of my clambering strides. I do not want to stay long in a place, such as this, when I am fearful to take a step and can only hear my own breathing.
Soon, however, when the desert returns to its house and finds that I have taken up residence, I get an abrupt answer. The wind roars; tousling my hair and flinging bites of sand into my eyes. A revolt against my presence, the land has reached a conclusion: I am not allowed. The angry wind is not an obstacle for me, but a key. No longer confined by my own presence, I turn on the invisible wall and recognize my role as an agitator. My defiance of the desert’s loneliness, and its blustery response does not anger me, but accepts me. Like the grain of sand that makes its way into an oyster’s shell, I am a thorn in the desert’s side. Now I revel in the red rock canyons, the silty rivers, the cold rain sinks and the gnarled juniper. Although not coddled by the parched earth, I have been recognized, and set off on a quest to find the reason for the blusterous revulsion.
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