Jay Heath's Blog and Faith Applewhite's Blog 

Molly Smith - Ely, Minnesota

Field Manager

Ben Deumling - Falcon Cove, Oregon

Technical Manager

Wednesday, November 22nd:  Late afternoon:  Say goodbye to Paul, have a look around Agua Prieta,  dinner at our High Lonesome Road camp near Bisbee, AZ

Thanksgiving Day:  Sleep in, late breakfast.  Cook.  Celebrate our good fortune with a Thanksgiving Meal at 4pm.   

Friday, November 24:  9:00 am.  Meet Jeff Smith, Public Relations Agent, U.S. Border Patrol, in Naco, AZ.   Tour border area.  Afternoon:  writing time, visit Bisbee.  Evening:  Epiphany readings (first half).

Saturday, November 25:  Break camp.  Travel to Cliff, AZ.  Camp at New Mexico Nature Conservancy’s Lichty Center.  Writing time.  Service activities (move a woodpile, split some wood).  Evening:  More epiphany readings (second half).

Sunday-Monday, November 26-27:  Writing Workshop with Sharman Apt Russell at the Lichty Center.    There will be a menu of things students can choose to do, depending on individual priorities.  These include:

•    Work on a piece of writing you already have----get tips on editing, streamlining, re-organizing, etc
•    Work collaboratively with other students and Sharman on each other’s writing---a “workshop”
•    Work individually with Sharman on a piece of your writing, old or new
•    Work on your final epiphany
•    A hike with Sharman, which will include informal discussion of writing
•    Visits with guests, bird banding, discussion of conservation issues in the Gila area.

Tuesday, November 28:  Flex Day, depending on weather.  We may begin our journey home today if weather conditions so dictate.  If the weather looks good, we will move to the Hot Springs Ranch in the Mimbres Valley, a 30-year communal living experiment.  Camp, meet commune members.  Stop in Silver City en route.

Wednesday, November 29:  Driving Day.  Probable destination, Bluff, UT

Thursday, November 30:  Driving Day:  Probable destination:  Jackpot, NV

Friday, December 1:  Driving Day:  Arrive Johnston Wilderness Campus (JWC).  (All dates and probable stops en route subject to change due to weather conditions). 

We will be entering our Hells Canyon Road data while traveling home.

Students should plan on being back at JWC each evening for dinner, if you spend the day or part of the day in town.  No guests, please, during our final days together.

Saturday, December 2:  Go to campus, meet friends.  Work on final epiphanies, short images.  Select and polish epiphany and image, with accompanying pictures, for public presentation.   Finish Mary O assignment. 

Sunday, December 3:  Work on final epiphanies, and Hells Canyon Road dataset.
Select and polish epiphany and image, with accompanying pictures, for public presentation.

Dinner at the home of President George Bridges, Sherwood House.  We will be reading some of our work, and showing accompanying pictures.

Monday, December 4:  All final epiphanies due by noon.  We will read and discuss them as schedules permit December 4-7.  Work on public epiphanies.

Tuesday, December 5:  Polish public epiphanies and images. 

“Western Epiphanies” 4-5:30pm Olin 130.  Please invite and encourage friends, faculty, staff, and parents to attend.  You will be asked to present one short image, then one longer epiphany.  Each should be accompanied with appropriate pictures. 

Wednesday, December 6:  Polish Public epiphanies and images.  Those who have already done theirs will help with preliminary cleaning and storage of gear.

“Western Epiphanies” 4-5:30pm Olin 130.  (Second half)

Thursday, December 7:  Wrap-up discussion, program evaluations.  Scrub, Scrub.
Evening Celebration.

Friday, December 8:  Breakfast, clean JWC, drop-off at Reid.  Clean and return vehicles.

Joe Pachak – By Clint Kalan

    Joe Pachak, an artist/archeologist from Bluff, UT, gave us a glimpse of incredible rock art on Comb ridge and much more. From Joe we were able to glean an understanding of the possible significance of this striking art, as well as a deepened respect for the many cultures that produced them. Joe’s work is something that is only possible with the time and energy that he has invested not only in his studies, but also in deepening his relationship with the land and people of Bluff. What I will take away most from Joe is how important a deep sense of place becomes to most facets of your life living in the west: from your work (hopefully your calling), to your relationships, to even the house you build.

Gene Foushee - By Season Martin

    A white ‘87 suburban rolls up the road to our camp at the base of Comb Ridge.  It parks amongst our ’07 suburbans, a blast from the past.  The man walks toward our chair circle, worn wooden walking stick in one hand, cardboard cutouts under his other arm.  He stands among us spinning tails of his past in a southern drawl.  He came west at the age of 16 from North Carolina, got a degree in geology at the University of North Carolina, then came back to work in the Uranium mines along the Dolores River.  He and his wife Mary settled in Bluff, Utah before electricity reached the small town.  
    The cardboard cut outs are hand drawn cross sections of Bluff and Comb Ridge.  He speaks of each layer with knowledge that could only be gained from spending a lifetime in this country.  He speaks of erosion and aridity, how they form the landscape before our eyes.  His skin a land of winkles tells us how this land affects humans.  
    He takes half of our group on a walk up the old road that used to wind over Comb Ridge.  Now it ends at the present day road cut a man made cliff a hundred feet high.  More tales spill out.  
    Later we sit on a ridge overlooking the Goosenecks of the San Juan.  He builds a fire in a fire ring he has used for years, a common picnic destination.  A black pot of coffee, cowboy style, sits directly on the logs he tends too.  Kneeling on a scrap of carpet he warms pumpkin pancakes on a rock next to the fire.  All the while he tells us stories of past dwellers of this land, the Navajos, and Mormons.  He draws from the enormous pool of knowledge that he has collected over the years.  
    The other half of us takes a walk with him after lunch to the Clovis site.  Along the way he stops to point out subtle traces of desert dwellers.  First he leans over a small depression in the ground; the dirt has been disturbed by a bird, a nest for the night, small droppings lay within, presents.  The shallow nest is so faint I might have stepped on it with knowing.  He tells us of a time he found a depression that a snake had spent the night in.  Scale imprints in the dirt, and a trail leading away.  He tells us that erosion is being sped up but the grazing, fewer plants to hold onto the soil, and points to a small debris damn, one that is made up of tiny twigs, the earth is trying to catch soil, to hold its ground.  We come upon a lichen covered rock as he excitedly tells us that the orange lichens always seem to be moving outward, look closely at the edge, they are fingers.  The green ones are always in the middle of the colonies, surrounded by the orange sunbursts.  He has been photographing a lichen covered rock for 40 years to see if his hypothesis is true.  So far lichens grow to slowly to answer that question in our lifetime.
    I walk beside him and talk about Grand Junction, my home and where his wife grew up.
    “Our headquarters used to be on somewhere down on Colorado and Ute,” he says.  Familiar street names that take me home.  We talk some more geology, then he moves on to talk about his son a geologist in Tucson.  We come to the edge of the mesa, and look down on the back side of Comb Ridge.  Rainbow shales extend up to the Wingate cliffs blending into Kayenta then the Navajo Sandstone that tops the ridge.  We marvel at the colors before us accented by the evening light.  I see so much knowledge in his eyes, a curiosity that is still fresh after living with this land for most of his life.  He starts down the slope towards our awaiting cars.

Mary Rees 
    On our way out of our “mid-semester” break on the Green River and around Moab, UT, we finally had to get some work done, so we went to work gardening around Mary O’Brien’s home. With the help of her neighbor, friend, and house-tender, Mary Rees, 21 students went to work gardening around the new and beautiful straw bale home, built in Castle Valley, UT. Mary Rees is very knowledgeable about local and native plants, and she keeps many of the specimens at her own house. If any one has a green thumb, it must be Mary Rees—Mary knew about all the exotics and how to get rid of them, as well as what not to pull and how to promote its growth. With her help, the Westies went to work doing jobs from pulling the exotic Pigweed to creating cheat-grass-free zones (to encourage native plant growth) to pulling tumbleweed to scourge patrol. In about one hour we had all completed our respective tasks, leaving the O’Brien’s home looking more beautiful than ever.

By Jay Heath

Merilee Nyland - Arlington Washington
Environmental Studies and Politics

Chelsea Young - Eugene, Oregon
Environmental Studies and Humanities

Johannah Withrow-Robinson - Albany, Oregon
Environmental Studies and Geology

Ginny Robbins - Bend, Oregon
Environmental Studies and Politics

Chelsea Presto - Sammamish, Washington
Environmental Studies and Biology

Justine Pope - Portland, Oregon
Environmental Studies and Politics

James Most - Menlo Park, California
Psychology

Lia Moore - Portland, Oregon
Sociology

Nick Matisse - Harvard, Massachusetts
Undecided

Season Martin - Grand Junction, Colorado
Environmental Studies and Geology

Kate Logan - Roseville, Minnesota
Geology

Clint Kalan - Santa Fe, New Mexico
Biology

Jay Heath - Arlington, Washington
Environmental Studies and Humanities

Cori Hach - Aspen, Colorado
Environmental Studies and Humanities

Kate Greenberg - Minneapolis, Minnesota

Regina Fitzsimmons - Tucson, Arizona

Peter Drake - Wayne, Pensylvania
Environmental Studies and Humanities

Matt Cameron - Anchorage, Alaska
Undecided

Sam Bell - Gloucester, Massachusetts
Gardening

Ian Bell - Diamond Bar, California

Faith Applewhite - Santa Fe, New Mexico
Environmental Studies and Sociology

c/o Phil Brick

Whitman College

345 Boyer Ave.

Walla Walla, WA 99362

Must arrive before Dec. 6th

Afternoon Beer - By Merilee Nyland
Be The Change - Epiphany #1 - By Merilee Nyland

Afternoon Beer - By Merilee Nyland Audio Recording

Wooden doors swing into Jake’s Saloon straight out of a Western flick. A mounted deer with a rifle resting in its antlers curls its lip at the tobacco smoke that crawls restlessly up the wall. The culprit is a shapely pipe relaxing between the slim lips of a man that is either entirely confused or fervently festive. He wears his hair long and oily under a sombrero, and a dirty burlap tunic that would have been better fit for transporting potatoes. Had he just been defeated at the battle of the Alamo? Or was he aptly dressed for Lone Pine’s weekend long film festival? Too serious for my company, I flopped my Chaco’s and toted my REI backpack down the line of wranglers on bar stools and cowboy hats on balding heads. Before I had time to settle on a lone vinyl stool, an old man with skin dripping from his bones like wax from a burning candle burst from under his lonely, black hat, “Do you play pool?”I tried explaining that I was no good, but he wouldn’t have it. “Come on kid, I’ll buy you a beer.” Next thing I knew I had a Fat Tire in one hand and a Q in the other. “Be nice Boyce!” the lady behind the bar hollered. His name was Boyce Edwin Skelton, also known as the Lone Pine Hustler. I broke-nothing. “So…do you like Lone Pine?” A purple solid falls in a corner pocket; he lifts his head and looks at me like I’m crazy. “Hell no! This town’s as dead as a dog! You wanna buy a pair of pants? You wanna buy a shoelace? You wanna buy…you swear alright?” “Uh…yeah.” “Well, you wanna buy any of that fucking shit and you just can’t! Lone Pine don’t got it!” He’s got two of the solids in now, so I have the stripes-or what he calls “the little ones”. I bend over the table and eye my next victim. “You gotta good eye, I can tell.” The 6 shoots across the table and into a corner pocket with force, possessed by my anxiety to live up to his expections. “Good shot kid.” He lifts his Budweiser with his shaky hands, the same hands that had, in his words, “killed those Japs like flies” years ago.I ask him about Manzanar. “That’s a bunch of bullshit. That was no Prisoner of War camp! Just a relocation center. And those bastards got paid…$20,000, and all I got was $21 a month! Hm!” The game continues back and forth between his curling yellow fingernails and my dirty, bitten ones. He calls every shot but won’t let me tell him that he’s any good. The game ends with two “little ones” on the table, two beers swaying to loud country music in my stomach, and two hands shaking before I saddle up my backpack and exit the scene of old, rowdy cowboys who have forgotten, for at least this one prideful weekend, that the West has been won over by these modern times.

Be The Change - Epiphany #1 - By Merilee Nyland
Be the change you wish to see in the world. –Gandhi
My parents could never get shoes to stay on my feet; I preferred burning cement to the prison cell of jelly sandals. So, to my parents’ disdain, I was once again slapping awkwardly large feet on the hot summer sidewalks of Pullman, Washington. I imagine them looking out the window at their seven year old daughter in her daily uniform of neon pink bike shorts and puff-painted shirt, pacing the block back and forth, twiddling her thumbs, and talking to herself. I imagine them slowly reaching for each others hands, looking sorrowfully into each others eyes, until one of them finally breaks the silence with “I think our daughter is crazy”. But I don’t think I was crazy. I did, however, have a series of questions and answers that I had to repeat to myself often in order to comprehend my being: “What am I? I am a person. Who am I? I am me. I am Merilee Nyland. I have thoughts and I have feelings. I am a person. I am Merilee Nyland. I have thoughts and I have feelings. They are my own. I am me. This contemplation of my existence would go on for several rounds until I had convinced myself that I was indeed a person named Merilee Nyland who had my own thoughts and feelings. If I was feeling particularly analytical that day I would jump into another series of questions such as: “What if I know I know something, but really it isn’t true?” or “What if the blue I see is different from the blue you see?”. I could never find answers to these last two questions, so I would have to succumb to mystery and meander my way up the block to my red-shag-carpet home.
These thoughts disappeared from the forefront of my life when my family moved across the mountains to Bellingham; I had to utilize my brain power for much more important tasks, such as memorizing all the words to Michael Jackson’s hit single from the movie Free Willy. It wasn’t until I crossed the mountains again, this time on my own accord to attend college, that these questions resurfaced.
What am I? Who am I? Yes, I am a person, I am Merilee Nyland, and I am me. But what does that mean? What makes me different from a cow or a wolf? I am also an animal. I am part of nature. My actions impact the world around me. In order for me to flip on the lights or turn on the TV there is a dam restricting and controlling the flow of a river, and species falling through the cracks of an altered habitat. As I crumble another dead-end epiphany, I imagine a clear-cut patch of forest atop our beautiful overlook of the Tetons. In order for my house to be warm and cozy, there is earth, like that in Pinedale, which is being ferociously drilled by an operation that emits dangerous levels of particulate matter, fragments the land, and displaces wildlife. Who knows, the beefy food being served to my dog is probably contributing another acre of moonscape to northern Nevada’s public land. I can’t help but think that every purchase I make is funding another Berkeley Pit somewhere. As a consumer, I not only buy a product, but the environmental footprint that comes with it. Accordingly, I no longer think that I am just me; I am me plus everything that I impact as a part of an interconnected web of reverberations.
Furthermore, as evident from my confused yet inquisitive monologue, at age seven I identified thoughts and feelings as a part of my being. This is true, and it is these thoughts and feelings that make me morally responsible for the effects of my being. Since I have informed thoughts and concerned feelings, I am morally obligated to act on behalf of them. So, as John and Kelly alluded to, if I truly “[believe] that trashing the land like this is immoral”, then wouldn’t I be “sick for supporting it”?
I often find my spirit heavy from constantly staring at images of pain and destruction that I have subconsciously tacked to the backs of my eyelids. It is easy to feel defeated by the direction of this world. But hanging my head and pointing my finger will do no good. I must take Brooke William’s advice to be a “positive force” rather than focusing on “all the bad things that are happening”. By taking ownership of the environmental problems that congregate on my bulletin-board-eyelids, I become empowered; I become that “positive force” that is in line with my own being and leading a small, but relevant, environmental revolution.
This approach can easily be swallowed by a movement that no longer expects radical change and downsizes the power of one. And no wonder it is, for we live in a society that is, in the words of Terry Tempest-Williams, “confusing capitalism with democracy”, where big corporations reign and people speak in dollar signs.
Living in a democracy, we are used to voting inside little boxes with our number two pencils, but in order to make a difference we must adjust to our capitalist society and start voting with our coins and bills. Terry Tempest-Williams is right, “we need these big, sweeping, visionary laws” that democracy offers us, but we also need small, daily, on the ground forms of activism to ensue. Terry also left us with this question: “what would you be willing to go to the line for?”. Applying this question to the small-scale approach to environmentalism would read slightly differently, but carry the same meaning: “what would you be willing to alter your lifestyle for?”. This is consumer activism.
I realize that we may view things differently in this world. To me, the Cortez Gold Mine is a ghastly hollow of pillage where the earth is scavenged and stripped away to feed our lust of luxury. To others, it is a source of wealth, pride, and utility. To me, forcing a cow to give birth without rest, stripping her calf from her, and hooking her up to machinery inside of a dank and crowded barn until the day that she is slaughtered is immoral. To others, this process provides the joy of a cool glass of milk to have with their chocolate chip cookie. This is what I know. This is my truth. I’m not sure if it matters that the blue that I see may differ from the blue that you see. But the blue of pain and destruction that I see will keep me from supporting and furthering acts with which I disagree.

9 October, 2006 - By Chelsea Young
Moving and Grooving - Epiphany #1 - By Chelsea Young

9 October, 2006 - By Chelsea Young Audio Recording

Sun tugged my eyelids early this morning,
rosy fingered dawn making use of those
dexterous digits
told me, prodded me, rather, to look up and open
and out,
up, light and fading footprints of clouds, stretch,
open, a flit of birds
two birds, restless, on pinyon pine and snag, listen
out, the birds are singing then silent, singing—
they swoop, the second an echo of the first, echo
out, I imagine
they are celebrating in thanks for the morning
but perhaps this is over eager—
perhaps, if they are celebrating at all, it is for
sturdy perches and pine nuts,
stretch again.
This is a quiet celebration of the morning, my stretch,
of rosy fingered dawn, but not yet further—
further today is heavy weighed with risks, with dealings and
phone calls and distance, echoing out,
out, white mountains, too warm yet for white
stretch before me with the morning,
I open with a stretch, listen
and a small, singing celebration.

Moving and Grooving - Epiphany #1 - By Chelsea Young

Sometimes, as Derek Zoolander’s evil arch nemesis, Mugatu exclaims, “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” And why? Intuition tells me that it just may be due to the fact that our rag-tag band of ’06 Westies have traveled approximately 3300 miles in less than one month. Just maybe. A large portion of the time, I’ll admit, our whirlwind, semester-long field trip feels just as manic and overstimulating as those commercials you encounter when you flip on your television: color! sound! Flashing flashing lights! (I won’t go so far as to compare our semester to Vegas…). We spend just enough time in one place to determine which way North is, become intensely curious about whatever issue we are brought to encounter, ask some questions, maybe take a dip in the hot springs, and off we go.
Commercials tantalize and entice. They call on our curiosity, stir our senses, and leave us before our attention has a chance to waver for even a second. And in some ways this reminds me of our encounters here. Well—here, there, and everywhere. Is it ironic that while being swept around the West, never spending more than three days in any one spot, we are simultaneously discovering and learning the beauty of other peoples’ sense of place? I know plenty of good “earth muffins” for whom the idea of “the man” capitalizing on our short attention spans, and in fact training our attention spans to be even shorter, is nothing short of an outrage and is seen as consumer abuse. But I pause. This is where my metaphor breaks and falls away, because our constant motion, our dynamic dappling in the issues and landscapes of the American West is not a superficial abuse of our senses. Where is the differentiation, I wonder?
These flashes of place, people and problems are significant to us, and despite their relative briefness, they are collectively building (we hope) an ultimately confusing bundle of questions and also a meaningful sense of place, even if that place is as expansive as the American West. It’s no big mystery to us why our moving mania is significant: the motivation behind our travels—our movement—has everything to do with what we get out of this program. With the intention of learning, reflecting, expecting conflict and frustration and insight we adventure forth. If our intention for travel was a simply a scenic photography tour, or if our goal was only to talk to people whose names started with the letter J, or if we intensely focused on Western hotsprings: their chemistry, geology and how to promote better user enjoyment, I could safely say that the semester would turn out a little differently. These are goofy intentions, and I’m not meaning to make a judgement-call on the validity of them (I rather like the hotsprings idea), but obvious concepts are best when they whack me soundly in the face, so this idea of motivations has gotten me thinking, as we groove through Nevada and I muse on movement.
Movement. Mobility. It’s what we’re actively doing, and in some ways studying. The environmental movement. Our movement through time, the land’s movement through time. The mobility to compromise, or immobility, as the case may be. How we move affects where we end up. How we move forms a knowledge of where we are and where we were, our feelings about where we are and where we were, and knowing all that, what we want to do next. For example, I can make it up that mountain, but whether I run or walk or crawl or cartwheel, my view from that mountain top is going to look different—different, in the sense that I may be too tired to appreciate the view and only wish to take a nap, or it may be the best climb of my life and therefore the best view of my life, or, who knows, maybe all that rowdy cartwheeling on scree means I never make it to the top at all. My motivation for climbing up that mountain affects where I get to in the end, both physically and otherwise.
Similarly, what is motivating the environmental movement? I know this is a general question with answers on which no two people would agree. But I think just as what motivates our movement around the West is critical to our experience, what motivates that vague force we call the environmental movement is critical as well. Let me speak more specifically.
“Sustainable land-use.” I hear this phrase constantly. This is a good question—how can we help Western land to be sustainable in terms of living ecosystems? Take grazing, for example: some people say sustainability will come as a result of human stewardship of the land—particularly through the practice of Holistic Range Management. Other people say that cattle grazing at all is a threat to the West’s ecosystems’ sustainability. No grazing is healthy grazing. So, alright. The people behind both of these arguments want a “sustainable ecosystem” for the health of the land, and both have a preferred means of getting to what they deem sustainable. But, I wonder about their means of getting to that sustainable level. Sustainability seems to pertain not only to ecosystems but also to systems of change.
I am told that we can get grazing off the Western public lands in 15 years through a delicate dance in economic dealings. If a task is accomplished purely through the use of economic gains and manipulations, how ultimately “sustainable” is that movement? How meaningful will that “end goal” be when it is finally reached? The advantage of dealing only with economics is that the risky business of dealing with people’s values and ideologies can be efficiently avoided. If we enjoy political correctness, which many people seem to do, we are wary of pressing our beliefs, whether religious or environmental on others, like how to achieve a “sustainable” landscape. People are hard to deal with. They complicate scientific studies and defy good, old “rationality,” but they are there—we are here—nonetheless.
Economic strategies are relatively efficient and speedy—maybe they could get grazing off the public lands in 15, or even 30 years. What an appealing solution. But I am concerned about “getting things done.” The bottom line, the end result—these are important. But isn’t it also equally important how we reach that bottom line or end result? How meaningful is the pretty final picture if in the process we have alienated people, created or entrenched stereotypes, ravaged trust and shut the door on future perfectly well-intentioned environmental goals? Environmental sustainability, to me, includes both a continued viability of the land and also a continued viability of the movement.
Movement is grand! Movement is exhausting. I sleep and dream of moving—whipping along windy, empty roads. Frantic and cohesive, my night and day travels edge me closer to a sense of my place here. Our place is the West, and what an intimidating, complex and wonderful collection of locales for us to call home. I am moved by the need to find hope in the future of the environmental movement. How do we move? We move with intention. We move, I hope, with good intention, and all that good intention collected by people of the West trying to get by is too good to ignore or devalue or scorn. So I guess it comes down to the question of how do we move? As environmentalists, as respectful and concerned citizens of the West, how are we choosing to move?

Sneaking Suspicion - By Johannah Withrow-Robinson
Creating a “Healthy Land” Ethic - Epiphany #1 - By Johannah Withrow-Robinson

Sneaking Suspicion - By Johannah Withrow-Robinson Audio Recording

My face is pressed against the cold matrix of metal that is my only separation from the Cortez Gold abyss. Below me, the mine is a hive of activity. House sized dump trucks cart 400 tons of dusty rubble hundreds of vertical feet up and out of the terraced pit. The roads are regularly doused with water to suppress the golden dust that aches to emerge from this parched environment.
Currently this pit extends almost 500 feet down toward the center of the earth. When mining began in 1996, the water table was at only 200 feet below groundlevel. Currently the mine pumps 25,000-30,000 gallons of water per minute from the area to create an intentional cone of depression around the pit. This has led to a localized drop in the water table, a controlled drawdown of water which will continue until the pit reaches 1500 feet in depth. The hundreds of thousands of gallons of water pumped away from the mine each day are spread across heaps of cyanide impregnated ore, over miles of seeded sagebrush expanse, and a sprinkler sprays a fine mist 24 hours a day across a field of brilliant green alfalfa stubble.
Only a couple hundred miles away, I stand at the edge of Owens Lake’s dusty remains and look at another famous, multi-million dollar mining project. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) entered the Owens Valley in the early 1900’s, with engineers, politicians and money. Since 1913, the DWP has been pumping up to 500,000 acre feet of water per year out of the Owens Valley, around the Sierra Nevada and into LA’s gaping mouth. The birth of this pipeline was the death of the Owens Valley as a lush, agricultural community, the death of Owens Lake as a healthy rest stop for flocks of birds whose undulating V’s cloud the sky. The lake remains today as a dust bowl of toxic proportions, with band-aid patches of trickling water over the Owens River delta here, over the Black Rock wetland there.
The ugly secret of mining, I have come to discover, is every projects evil stepmother. Her presence is integral to the existence of the extractable resource, but she creates an insufferable problem which must be dealt with. At Cortez, she manifests herself as a raging torrent of water trying desperately to return to its bedding planes to replenish the soil that has withered in its absence. Here at Owens, she waits in silence until the south wind roars through the little valley. Then she strikes with dagger strength, with the strength of salt and arsenic embedded into the delicate filter membranes of lungs. Although it is easy to be blinded by the beautiful, shining daughters of gold and water, it is essential to look behind them, to find the silent figures stalking in dark shadows.

Creating a “Healthy Land” Ethic - Epiphany #1 - By Johannah Withrow-Robinson

Over the past four weeks we have driven hundreds of miles across eight western states. The landscape we see outside the car windows and feel beneath our feet is in constant flux, with rock, plant communities and wildlife shifting in both subtle and sudden ways within the span of an hours drive. We walk, travel, and sleep on land both public and private, managed and wild, damp and bone dry. Riparian areas, alpine meadows, bunchgrass prairies, sagebrush expanses- we see them all. We meet ecologists and read scientific papers on the destruction and exploitation present in current land management practices, and we meet ranchers who tell us stories of their land with passion and good intent present in their voices and behind their eyes.
Many of our classes, speakers, and discussions emphasize restoration and conservation of the land, but the methods they promote of restoring the “health” of the land are often contradictory. This brings to the light the question of what land in a “healthy” and “natural” condition looks like, and what measures we can take as land stewards to help the land reach this state.
Cattle grazing is both common and controversial across the West. At the rim of Hells Canyon, the tawny slopes stretch down to the Snake River thousands of feet below. With heavy packs full of water, we descend through the high elevation prairies to the warmer grasslands below. We see with our own eyes the invasive annual grasses, “adapted” to grazing and rapid re-growth intermingled with the stalwart perennial bunchgrasses, sensitive and slower to rebound. We read scientific papers explaining the horrors of grazing, and compare the annual and perennial grasses in two previously grazed allotments. We conduct an experiment to compare the growth of the invasive versus native grasses on the two allotments, and although the validity of our transects is questionable, the results may trend toward a greater presence of native grasses in a longer absence of grazing. This landscape, we are left to infer, is “healthier” with the community of native grasses and therefore without the presence of grazing, which the delicate native bunchgrasses are not adapted to (In this case, I am using native as previous to the entry of European-Americans into the area. Aside from the occasional backpacker or hunter, these grasslands are left to their own devises. At the end of a blazingly hot, dry western summer, it is difficult to distinguish between the bundles of dried grass. It is hard to comprehend how any species of the thin brown blades lying flat on the parched ground can provide for a herd of elk or cattle as part of a healthy ecosystem this time of year.
Todd Graham stands in front of our group as we sit on the dusty floor of his barn. The warm smell of horse and dust penetrates deep into my nose. Graham, manager of the Sun Ranch near Ennis, Montana, explains his leeriness of the hands-off land management ethics of what he calls “Earth Muffins” out to “save the environment.” As a true cattleman of the West, Graham has applied experience working on and managing ranches, resulting in the vision he is working towards on the conservation ranch we now sit on. The Sun Ranch emphasizes building a healthy ecosystem that includes a ranching and farming operation. By grazing their cattle lightly on the land, they provide prime wintering grounds for over 3,000 head of elk each year. In just three years under Graham’s management, the native vegetation in the grazed pastures has increased both in species numbers and density. There is endless evidence of bears and wolves- day beds, dens, shredded logs- on our walk through the ranch’s forest, and as we drive back through the pasture, rabbits and birds start at every turn. As coyotes yapp in the dimming light behind a scattered herd of cattle, I recognize the abundance of life that is present on this tract of land. Instead of pushing wildlife to the periphery of their operations, Graham and the others on the ranch have incorporated the animals in a healthy and productive way into the ecosystem.
While Graham recognizes the harm that can be inflicted upon the land without a respite from grazing, he also thinks that cattle can be a valuable part of a functioning a functioning ecosystem if managed properly. He gives an example of how local land is positively responsive to human management. When cattle were removed indefinitely from allotments in the Madison Valley, both on the Sun Ranch and on neighboring Nature Conservancy Land, within a few years the fodder intended for elk had decreased, and the herds moved away to overgraze neighboring pastures. Now both of these allotments have managed cattle grazing on them to renew the grasses and spread the elk out across the valley. Perhaps if the infrastructure of our communities were different, they would allow for more wild space. In light of the current situation, however, the Sun Ranch has created an ecosystem that promotes health and habitat that would not be possible if this land is left alone in its current state.
The living examples that we have been witness to highlight two very different forms of grassland management both striving to bring the ecosystem to a state of balance and “health.” But what does a healthy grassland ecosystem in the arid west look like? Is it possible to have one distinct model that covers all grasslands in the eleven Western states? How, if it is possible, do humans fit into the picture? In Gardeners of Eden, Dan Dagget states that, “…to our contemporary way of thinking about the environment, the health of a piece of land or a collection of ecosystems is not a matter of condition. It is purely a matter of how that land is managed. More specifically, it is purely a matter of the extent to which it is managed according to the assumption that the only way we can heal the land is to leave it alone” (p 18).
Contrary to the idea that healthy land is analogous only to unmanaged land, I see the need for evaluation of many aspects of an ecosystem to determine the health of land, both managed and wild. I see the need for the emphasis to be placed upon locality of the land in question, not the management the land is placed under. I believe that land can achieve a condition of health both when there is human intervention and when it is left to its own devises, but it is necessary to evaluate the land personally through direct interaction with the ecosystem to determine the method that best fits considering the climate, vegetation, wildlife, soils and other aspects of the area. Under these circumstances, I consider both the Sun Ranch and west slope of Hells Canyon to be healthy ecosystems. Although they are both “western grasslands,” their nuances distinguish them in subtle yet defining ways. To manage them in the same way could mean death to one or both of them.
Health of the land is tied to place. It is tied to place just as the animals and plants are connected to and rely on the soils and weather patterns of that area they inhabit. Healthy land is in a delicate, specialized balance. It is hard to define and perhaps harder still to achieve under human control. And yet I believe that at times under our the current regime of humans, land needs a push in the right direction. In places like the Sun Ranch, the grasses are adapted to the grazing of large ungulates. In face of human development, the elk need a little incentive to get onto lands that will provide adequate grass for the winter months. With their cattle, the Sun Ranch has achieved this balance. They have found a way to incorporate humans, cattle, native grasses and wildlife into an ecosystem that has in similar ways existed since the last ice age. In their own slow way, the grasses in Hells Canyon are on the same trajectory to health. Landscapes have different responses to similar pressures depending on the animals, plants, and weather that are most natural to the place. For this reason, management of western grasslands that look similar at first glance must be specific to locality, no matter whether they are public or private. Traveling hundreds of miles over vastly different landscapes has led me to realize that there is a myriad of ways for land to be healthy. It is difficult to evaluate, and even harder to facilitate. Sometimes restoration of health involves direct and constant interaction, but sometimes while our backs are turned, bluebunch wheatgrass will slowly but surely return to fill the trampled landscape.

Dancing to Hard Rock - By Ginny Robbins
Guiding From the Heart - Epiphany #1 - By Ginny Robbins

Dancing to Hard Rock - By Ginny Robbins Audio Recording

Reaching, grasping, fumbling, falling.
A rope catching my harness yet again, lowering me to the ground.
I can’t, I can, I will, I must
climb this route.
Again scrambling up rock,
scraping, smearing, slipping, swinging in midair
when the rope tightens again.
Frustration, disappointment, despair.
My arms hurt.
“Just dance with the rock” coaxes my
friend, teacher, belayer, and believer.
Up on the wall again, trying to move my body smoothly in rhythm with the rock.
My hips turn out at a slight push from the wall. My feet slide and pause on a knob. Hands, find the niche that grasps them perfectly, and heartbeat echoes the rise and fall in the rock.
Sway, spin, dip, push…
I lose the beat before my partner does, pushing me away so I’m again sitting in my harness. I may not have topped out yet, but I’ve learned a valuable lesson.
The more I fight the wall, the more difficult my route becomes. Surrendering myself to an unheard beat allows me to excel in ways I don’t expect.
Relax, repeat, regroup, respond
to difficult situations and rework solutions. Stubborn in my
ways, routes, ideas, approaches
gets me nowhere except frustrated.
A climbing problem, interpersonal problem, environmental problem,
gets easier if I allow my opponent to work alongside and sometimes guide…me.
The more I fight them, the more I’ll be pushed away, back to sitting, swinging in my harness, having to start from the bottom.
Lead, follow, dance, collaborate, generate.

Guiding From the Heart - Epiphany #1 - By Ginny Robbins
You are the future leaders in the environmental movement
So often we are told by our guests that we have this responsibility in our future. This is a lot of pressure. I want to create positive change, but we have large shoes to fill, and with more and greater problems surfacing every day. I am overwhelmed by this burden and the commitment it will require. Environmental issues are so complex that I have no idea where to even begin with them! I’m not sure what I’m most passionate about, and I’ll need a lot of passion to tackle any of these problems.
Firm commitment to environmental issues is confusing enough, much less assuming a leadership role. The step into environmental leadership is intimidating, so it is easy to postpone it until “later”; once I live off campus, once I graduate, once I have a steady job…then I’ll understand what I feel passionate about. As I continually delay my entrance to the environmental community it becomes more and more daunting and my commitments become more elusive. I build it up in my mind, pushing it further beyond my grasp.
Our meeting with Terry Tempest Williams challenged me more than I was prepared for. I don’t know “what it would take for me to take a stand,” and I am overwhelmed by the staggering responsibility our generation needs to take up. But, Terry and Brooke’s confidence in us, the next generation, enabled them to push us to places we’d never been before. If they did not see something special in us, they never would have been able to transfer their passion and commitment into each of us.
Leaving the Murie Center I reveled in the indescribable power we had experienced. I was inspired by the grandeur of the Tetons, and the equally impressive legacy of the place we were leaving. I was also encouraged by Terry’s support for all of us, and suddenly my duty seemed less of a burden than an opportunity. My thoughts flashed to my home, and the people and work I am committed to there. And, through my passion for place, rafting, and outdoor adventure, I have a key to my environmental leadership. I already have a role in the environmental community as a guide; inspiring my love in the people around me. I don’t need to lead the environmental movement at this time, but I can still lead others in an environmental direction.
Terry suggested that solutions will come from the heart. I don’t need to find a problem and then foster a love for the cause. Instead I can focus on my passions and do what I can to work from there.
My role in the environmental community will be guided by my heart, and my heart will speak through my actions. I am privileged to guide people’s experience in a place, so it is essential that my passion guides their experience and the memories they take away from it. There is no greater way to inspire love and respect of something than to demonstrate commitment to it yourself.
I don’t have a grand plan to solve all the problems, or even know exactly where I stand on a lot of issues. But for now that doesn’t matter. I don’t need to have it all figured out before I make a difference. I know that I’m passionate about the environment, and I already have an avenue to foster that in other people.
I’d like to challenge Terry’s suggestion that we are the environmental leaders of the future, and suggest that we are the environmental leaders of today. Let’s not put it off any longer, but start now with what is available to us to make a difference today. Now is the “real world” that we hear so much about; we’re in it. Many of us already do make a difference. And though our current efforts may not dramatically change the world, they are a starting point. We already have our foot in the door, so let’s start to meet the people in the room and let them know we’re here!

What We Could Carry - By Chelsea Presto
I Hide Behind These Walls - Epiphany #1 - By Chelsea Presto

What We Could Carry - By Chelsea Presto Audio Recording

Our car hums along at the mild speed of 5mph, yet I feel like I might vomit. This isn’t some kind of freak motion sickness; it’s not because my breakfast didn’t settle quite right. I am disgusted by the fact that the land around me has been turned into some kind of empty wasteland under the hot desert sun, doing no justice to the thousands of people who worked, cleaned, danced, cried here years ago. After reclamation and reimbursement, almost nothing remains of the buildings and the gardens that used to exist in this camp. I don’t know how I should feel about being here at Manzanar. Am I supposed to feel a certain way? And what is that—moved, humbled, offended, proud? Part of me wants to cry, part of me is more than curious and wants to explore every inch of this ground, and part of me is just plain upset about what once occurred here. And then, yet another part of me is angry—absolutely livid—because some people come here each year, ogle in front of the pretty exhibits in the visitors’ center, drive the auto tour like it’s some kind of safari, and exclaim things like “wow, how sad” or “how horrible that must’ve been.” Then, after maybe an hour or two here, they leave in their tour buses and rental cars and don’t think twice about it. As our car exits through the front gate I am overwhelmed with the idea that I can do so. The idea that I can walk in and out of this place so freely, when years ago my friends and relatives were forced to live entirely within these barbed-wire fences. I ask my Auntie Nancy about her internment here, and she simply replies, “Kelekea, be grateful for what you have.” In 1942 her possessions consisted of what she could carry with her. I know I can never even begin to understand her experience then—her confusion, sadness, pain…and I don’t pretend to think I can. So what is it about this place that’s getting to me? What am I expecting to get out of being here? I feel so connected to it…because I know people who were interned here, or simply because I’m Japanese-American? I don’t know for sure. All I know is that my Auntie is right; I am grateful that I live in a time when I don’t feel threatened by my heritage. At my age she wasn’t so lucky. I still don’t know how to feel about being here—but perhaps, like the experiences of my Auntie and many others, these mixed feelings I have are not ones I will ever understand, or am ever meant to. The car continues moving, and my Auntie Nancy’s words reverberate through my mind. “Be grateful for what you have.” Our wheels hit the smooth pavement of the highway, and these thoughts are what I carry with me.

I Hide Behind These Walls - Epiphany #1 - By Chelsea Presto
I was six years old when I learned how to ride a bike. I was staying at my aunt’s house, which is enclosed in a cul-de-sac, so I wasn’t far from safety. My uncle would give me push-starts, then run alongside me in case I started to fall. I’d sway a little less each time as I slowly started to get the hang of it. Then once I fell—hard. The skin on my right leg had been scraped up so badly that I could look down and see the white of my kneecap. My uncle carried me, sobbing, inside, where he treated and bandaged the abrasions. Besides a few shed tears and a scar, problem solved. Easy.
It’s a crisp, sunny morning as I think back to that day. I’m standing in a dried up creek bed. I look down, and around my feet deep cracks seep out in every direction across the arid ground, the way they do in photographs of the remote Southwest. But unlike a snapshot, this isn’t appealing or picturesque, but far from it. My heart sinks a little. Overgrazing has turned this area of the creek into a wasteland, a moonscape. I am nineteen years old, and for the first time it hits me that I can’t just reach into a pocket, pull out a band-aid, and cover up the damage here. I want to reach for my Nalgene and pour it into the land, in some sort of desperate attempt to quench its thirst and bring it back to life. But I can’t.
When I was six, it was easy to clean up my injuries, to nurture them, protect them and allow them to heal. Now, as I stand out here in rural Nevada, a wave of grief takes over me and sparks a flame of frustration. I feel a little helpless, but mostly angry, that I can’t fix this problem easily or on my own. Why haven’t I seen it so clearly until now? Perhaps because I have been caught up in the sheltered lifestyle of my suburban hometown. Or maybe I do see these problems but try to avoid them by building a barrier between myself and the open environment.
The bed of this creek is my land. It’s mine and it’s yours. This is the same earth from which I come, the same elements of which I am made. Every day this land is slowly dying. Why, then, do I hide behind the walls of my house, the metal frame of my car, or behind my computer screen? Why, when I drive through Yellowstone National Park, do I feel more comfortable observing the landscape from behind the windows of a Suburban than actually being outside in it, breathing it, being a part of it? Why can’t I step outside of my comfortable world and face these things? I often worry about the number of hours left on my cell phone battery or whether I have time to go in the hot springs before class, when there are real, tangible problems building right in front of me. What will happen if my land—our land—becomes lifeless, uninhabitable, unrecognizable?
I close my eyes tightly, trying to hide from these thoughts in my mind. I don’t want to have to face them, although I know that I must. I can’t do anything about it until I bring myself to face my fears. For some reason, it’s as if I’m scared of the natural environment, afraid of the power of nature. These fears are wounds…open wounds that won’t close until I can find myself again. So I wander off alone, out into the land, in search of me.
* * *
Now I’m sitting on a rock on the edge of an aspen grove, looking out upon a sagebrush meadow. For as far as my eyes can see there is no one else, just me and the earth. This place is magical. I am a part of the land here. Here I find my refuge, my solace, and suddenly I am restored. I’ve come to this place—this physical, mental, and spiritual place—all on my own. My deepest wounds from the façade that has been my life are healed, and I finally feel whole.
I think, once again, back to that day thirteen years ago, and I’d like to get back on my bike and just ride for miles. I don’t need someone to give me a push-start or guide me along. And if I should fall, I will brush off my scrapes and keep going. Scars are okay. They remind me of my past, and I can learn from them, even create new ones along the way.
But for now, I am just here. “This landscape extends for miles,” says Kelly, but as John says in reply, “That doesn’t matter. We’re here. Not there.” He’s right. We are here. I’m here. For once I do not feel hopeless or frustrated. Instead I am liberated and optimistic. I want to run wildly across these fields, to bask in the sunlight and bathe in the spiritual aura that surrounds this place. I want to be one with the land, because now I am free from it all, away from the confinement and distraction we call civilization. I am free at last. No longer do I hide.

Alchemy - By Justine Pope
What is my West? - Epiphany #1 - By Justine Pope

Alchemy - By Justine Pope Audio Recording

The steel is showing through on Cliff's right boot, glinting behind ragged worn leather. I think: how can you mistrust a man who so honestly wears through his workboots? I believe most everyone I meet at the Cortez Gold Mine, and this worries me. I am drawn to the game that is mining; overproportioned and full of heat and machines so large, so jawing, I lose myself. I lose the size of Pipeline Pit, I don't question the use of these public lands, I forget environmental rationality, because I am on a digger that is gnawing away at a pile of low-grade ore, it took 32 steps to ascend to the cab, and this truck is bigger than my imagination.
They show us a pile of what looks like coffee grounds, but assure us it is much denser; it is eighty percent gold. Gold-making is magic, and B-movie campy. A man wearing a Liberace-style suit – insistent, silver, sparkling – pours a hissing liquid streak from a cauldron, we wait expectantly at a loaf-sized iron pan, and then I am holding half a million dollars in the form of 67 pounds in my uncertain but greedy hands. Mining is a game, and I have become a willing participant.
It takes 210 truckloads like the ones I saw filled earlier, trucks allowed to drive no more than 20 miles per hour down the stair-stepped benches of Pipeline. They drive below where the water table used to be; 300,000 gallons a minute must be pumped to keep a cone of depression around the pit. When filled, this hole will become an 8 billion gallon lake.
“Most of the land here has nothing on it,” John says. He is the Pit Boss and I am staring into such an awesome, gaping extraction that the negative space prevents me from seeing either the sagebrush or ridged peaks that used to fill it. It isn't until later, while driving West across Nevada, that I see the nothing-land John described earlier. Abandoned mines dot the landscape. A Tungsten mine looks like Picasso's exercise in deconstructing the bowl; mountains are wrought down to simplest form, de-contoured, stripped a shade lighter and craggy lines simpler. Maybe ore is locked into the ground in such hidden ways for a reason.

A Discourse on Public Lands Ranching - By James Most
What About Speed? – Epiphany #1 – By James Most

A Discourse on Public Lands Ranching - By James Most Audio Recording

Hey! Hold up for a second! That is the third dirty look I have gotten today. What is the deal? Do you think I don’t have feelings or something? Let me guess, you don’t want me to be here. We let me clue you in- I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE EITHER! Every day I roam around this dry landscape thirsty as hell and the plants here are practically inedible. Don’t even get me started on cheat grass. When you go driving by in the luxury of your climate controlled wheelie box, you treat me like I want to cause all these problems. I didn’t tell them to put up these fences- I love elk. I am so often seen as the destroyer of riparian areas, well if there were 2,000 of you locked in here for weeks, I bet it wouldn’t look too Yankee Doodle Dandy, regardless of the fact that you only have two hooves. Man oh Man what I wouldn’t give to be back in those soft, green, fenceless forests of Eurasia where we evolved. Those we the days…who decided to move us out here anyway?? Isn’t it pretty obvious that we love water and moving us to the desert would probably be a bad idea? Geez, you humans. I agree that there should be no ranching on public lands- In fact, I think that there should be no ranching anywhere! It’s bad for the land. I am going to be frank and say that unless you want us to starve ourselves, we are going to be messing stuff up. So sorry. I don’t see you humans starving yourselves even when you are destroying the environment. Heres the solution: Loan us some frequent flyer miles, and we’ll get the hell off your public land and go back to Eurasia where we belong. That way you can have your happy public land and you won’t ever have to give me a dirty look again. But what do I know, I’m just a dumb cow, right.

What About Speed? – Epiphany #1 – By James Most
Phil’s leaving! Frantic scrambling and hackey sack stowing as the sound of diesel rolls away. Oh damn! That’s the third time today! I bet he’s pissed, someone worries. Soon we are in convoy, rolling down the highway at over one mile per minute. Slam Slam Slam! Students and notebooks scrambling. Down the tunnel and soon we are looking at the 1 mile wide pit of death inappropriately named Berkley. We read the signs, jay snaps some photos and molly yells, let’s go hippies! I cringe. SUCH an inappropriate description I whine. Back in the cars, cue ace of base- dance party and we are rolling again. Ah this feels great.
While watching a David Attenborough flick on the life of mammals, I ponder brain evolution. There was this crazy chimpanzee or gorilla, I can’t remember which, that literally flew through the treetops. Branches were grabbed, and this mammal that must have raised Tarzan goes swinging through the canopy. As I am hit with the woooooooah factor, I hypothesize that this mammal’s brain must be wired for that high speed, and moving through a canopy at twenty miles per hour must be a piece of banana cake.
Back to the West- as Death Cab for Cutie whines on in suburban number three, Phil’s voice comes over the radio- Hey guys, either this range or the next one is where the great Basin watershed turns into the Colombia basin watershed. We all ponder this for a moment and return to toying with our Ipods. Some might consider it a huge deal to be crossing the boundary between two multi-million acre watersheds, but we are moving too fast to give it more than a minute of attention.
Switch to James’ latest theory on human evolution- don’t worry, it’s a simple one. My fundamental question-slash theory is that humans have been evolving while moving an average speed of 3 miles per hour- sometimes we ran if we had to, but mostly we walked, or so I assume. So what happens when in the past 200 years, we have made a giant stumble for mankind and developed the technology to accelerate our bodies to 30mph (trains), 65mph (cars), 400mph (planes), and even 1000mph (spacethings)? It is comparable to if we suddenly were put in a jungle canopy and told to swing around at high speed with one of Attenborough’s chimps and not hurt ourselves. I’m talking about the fact that our brains are not wired to interpret and soak in our surroundings at speeds greater than we have moved at for the past millennia. Miraculously, our heads don’t pop and we don’t go blind when our senses are subjected to such high-speed abuse. Remarkably, the human brain seems to embrace this new capacity for speed as it would embrace a buzz from fermented spirits.
We see our literal addiction to technologically induced speed in everything our culture creates. High speed trains, planes, and automobiles are everywhere. Under 100 years ago, the Lincoln highway connected the coasts for independently-minded automobilists who shunned the train. Since then, an impressive- no suppressive, geologic process has occurred as a rapid migration of stone and oil has paved the landscape in a phenomena know as “Asfault.” I like to spell it A-S-F-A-U-L-T. Roads now stretch from Burlingame to Belize, Gloucester to Arcadia, even Menlo Park to Corvallis. God forbid we would have to slow up our vacation and walk to see wildlife in Yellowstone. How do we view the world differently at 60 miles per hour? Formerly it took days to travel what can be covered in an hour or two in a vehicle. What is lost? The concept of a watershed for example. When, as with television, images pass before our eyes at speeds that we have not evolved with to process, we lose a valuable piece of our awareness. When one becomes habituated to life at this speed, life at a natural walking pace can become slow, non-engaging, and even boring.
I see the psychological presence of roads providing the venue for our speed addiction leading to greater ecological consequences than the paving of our land. Many practices that would have been viewed as impossible 100 years ago are now mainstream, and seen as normal. The average piece of food travels 2,500 miles before consumption. Cattle is raised in Nevada and sent on semis for finishing in Nebraska. Families in California travel to North Carolina for thanksgiving. The power of speed infuses our minds so deeply that when a label on an orange reads “South Africa” we don’t even blink. If this is seen as efficiency, I am seriously scared for the future of this world.
Before I project this addiction as everyone else’s problem, I must accept and address my own symptoms. I drove by myself in a car every day to high school when my high school was only two and a half miles away. I fly to and from Walla Walla. Frequently I am tempted to drive places that can easily be reached by bike. So what do I do to begin to cure myself of this addiction? How can I make sure that I don’t permanently damage my awareness by becoming habituated to a life of accelerated speed? Well, step one is acceptance. I realize I have been raised in a culture where speed addiction is confused with efficiency and seen as normal and progressive. I also realize that I may be emotionally attached to many pieces of technology in my life that perpetuates my speed addiction. Distancing myself from this technology will help me recover and become more of the human I evolved to be. I acknowledge that as a student I will be interacting with cars, computers and phones, but I can mitigate the effects by not owning this technology myself and by maintaining awareness of their effects while using them. Change begins with knowing that things need changing, and it starts with me. Si Se Puede!

Sharp and Jagged Arrowheads - By Lia Moore
Investing in a Cultural Dream - Epiphany #1 - By Lia Moore

Sharp and Jagged Arrowheads - By Lia Moore Audio Recording

I like hiking, she said, because you can carry your whole life in one backpack. The decision is empowering, choosing between convenience and weight, between need and want. In the end, we need very little, which si a lesion clear to us when we hike from snow to desert heat in one fell swoop along eastern Oregon’s Hell’s Canyon, toting only a fraction of our own body weight. Weighed down but free, backpackers are light, soaring migratory birds.
As we begin this trip we hope to mimic this life when we return, paring down and giving away belongings like snake skins, snail shells for another to make a home. But we do not. We are heavy nesters, in for the long haul, collecting fluff and bits of string. Urban intellectuals from home call this acquiescence to capitalism, and from their lofty, Spartan lofts they cry “reduce, reuse, recycle”. They cry “the world is buried in non-degradable garbage, in styrofoam and battery acid”. They cry “look to nature, return to a simpler, rural life”.
They certainly have a point, or so I’ve always believed. But after camping in the west, I do not see this illustrious light weight city bird. I am the only migrant, or at least the only migrant with but one bag to my name. The country is filled with trash, and we embrace it. Not as the shiny, new packages that I am told is our downfall, but the rusty twigs and fluff of nests past. Everywhere there are lawns ornamented by junkyards, spare parts, and string for rainy days, for cold winters when we stay to the north. We see use in trash, and not just for physical needs, but for rememberance as well – old braids, letters, soap tins and gasoline cans from years ago wedge neatly between the sticks in our circular avial havens. Museums of it spring up and we call it social history, we call it ghost towns, where even scrap metal and broken glass become treasures, illegal to remove. They become out pantheon, our pyramids, our ashy remains from Pompeii, as our wings reach out to junk, to stone and metal, to glass, and one day, to plastic. My bag will probably only be one small part of my collective belongings, my junk, for our love of fluff endures, as we line our nests with waste, with our empty eggshells, our string, our sharp and jagged arrowheads that pierce our feathered hearts.

Investing in a Cultural Dream - Epiphany #1 - By Lia Moore
Ranchers, like many agricultural workers, are subsidized by the government. We’re told it’s because it helps keep the cost of food down for the consumer. Farmers pay less for water and I get cheaper veggies. Ranches graze in national forests and I get cheaper meat.
Except I don’t. I’ve heard various things about how farmers might be wasting water or selling it for a profit. And maybe food prices should accurately represent their energy cost. Now I find out that my beef (which I haven’t eaten in years, but it’s still my tax dollars and somebody eats it) doesn’t even come from these ranchers. It comes from the east coast and it comes from abroad. I’m paying for ranchers to tear up public land, treat cattle poorly, and barely scrape by for a living. Jon Marvel said that we, as tax payers, are basically paying for a lifestyle. If I were going to do that I might as well support starving actors – I have way more friends that want to do that for a living.
But the truth is, when I pay for ranchers, I’m not just supporting their lifestyle. I think I’m supporting mine too. Not me as a food consumer, but me as an American, as someone with the dream of wide open spaces in the West. I’m not alone; this seems to be a collective cultural lifestyle pervasive among people of the United States. I read it in Town Shopping and a glimmer of it is there in every environmentalist. We want to know that there is someplace green. Or brown, depending on where it is and what the definition of healthy is for a particular landscape. We want to know that we can quit our city jobs and live out on the grasslands for the weekend, for the summer, for the rest of our lives.
Jon said that ranches have to be sick in the head to graze and degrade our lands, but it seems hard to blame them for this when really, we all seem to be afflicted with the same hazy delusion of space. We want to live on their lands too. I would’ve signed up in a heartbeat to work on the Sun Ranch like Bryce. Our culture loves the idea of waking up on the rangeland and putting in a hard days work, soaking up the beauty of the area. Ranchers give us a living example of what we could be too, were circumstances, geography, and mortgages different. It is beyond Manifest Destiny. It is the legacy of space. We believe, however irrationally and subconsciously, that we can use the land because there is always more. Because there always has been.
Perhaps the ranchers’s idea of space is no different from ours as we concrete our cities and look west, paying our taxes to help our dreams of more space stay alive. Maybe my desire to come in here and “fix” this place still stems from that, now that we’ve discovered that our ranch dreams have started to burst. Does this excuse the grazing problems at hand? Absolutely not. But we are victims – or perhaps, more appropriately consumers – of our culture, and are so no more or less than those that live here. Those that ranch here. I helped perpetuate the dream. And I still want to. Part of me wants to live out in Montana, even though I know full well that moving there will degrade it, just as it happened to Aspen, Jackson, and the next small town discovered that has a nice view, good hiking, or fantastic skiing.
We still want the romantic West, it still lives in our hearts as we read Gretel Ehrlich and Ellen Meloy. We still want it at any length. Only now we’ve shifted the dream, now that we see ranching won’t work for us any longer. We put our eggs in the wrong basket last time around. I can’t fully blame the basket. So how do I tell this basket of ranchers that we’ve changed our minds and therefore they must change to fit it? Is it my dream versus theirs? Do I get to take the higher ground because I’m playing the Lorax and speaking for the trees (or sagebrush, as it were)? Because I woke up first from the dream?
The idea of public land makes it trickier. Who is the public? Who should be? I’ve never been to Nevada before in my life and I, as a taxpayer, should have the authority to tell these people what they can and cannot do? Me, with all the resources and votes from the more populated coasts? Me, who let the rancher carry my romantic vision of open space? Me, who was not here, on the land, helping out or noticing the problem earlier, when this mess might have been more gradually altered in slightly more an amicable and collaborative way?
We can’t ignore unsustainable practices like grazing and call it permissible just because it’s a victim of our cultural machine, no more than forgive mechanized meat industries for simply being a product of capital. There is blame somehow, but also compassion and the need to see the problems within ourselves as well. We’re all guilty.