In the economy, as in ecology, diversity is critical. And just as in the environment, our economy is losing diversity. Particularly in the press and newspapers. From a recent article in The Atlantic Magazine, “One analyst told The New York Times last year that 85 percent of all online advertising revenue is funneled to either Facebook or Google—leaving a paltry 15 percent for news organizations to fight over.” How do the journalists get paid who provide the news–for free–that Facebook and Google feed on?
The other day I was compared to and quoted on the same page as Yvon Chouinard and Peter Metcalf. Chouinard has never heard of me and Metcalf might have to be reminded, but I will take it as my moment of greatness anyway. I guy now from Monticello, from Moab before that, and perhaps New Jersey originally, got worked up about a comment I made about not wanting a gravel pit in Torrey-Teasdale on a Facebook post of his and he dedicated an article on me (and Yvon and Peter) in a faux objective, compulsively contrarian piece. The unhappy guy refers to himself as a journalist and considered reporting about me his duty. So as not to seem too flattered by the attention, I admit he comes across more as a committed victim than he does as an objective journalist.
12/30/2016. The country is in a deep kind of trouble that requires a response from every thinking citizen. For the sake of my posterity I am jotting down my personal plan.
We have a Republican president-elect who is unfit to serve. I don’t say this just because my candidate lost in a normal election. I do not feel about Trump like I felt about George W. Bush. Certainly I do not feel about Trump like I felt about Romney. In fact, I have thought that it would have been better if Romney had won in 2012 so that white backlash would not have produced Trump. I proudly voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, the most qualified person to ever run for the office. That we would be electing a woman after electing a black man amazed me, and I was thrilled at my country’s ability to continue to mature and progress socially. But instead of electing the most qualified person possible, we elected the least. Misogyny, bigotry, and racism are constantly espoused by Trump, ripped out from our darkest closets and made to seem as acceptable. Ignorance and intolerance are praised. An anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-environment cabinet is being put in place. The GOP, drunk on the prospects of unlimited power, continues to put party before country and will not provide check and balance.
At the Bicknell Bottoms in Wayne County, southbound Utah Highway 24 turns west and passes through the Red Gate of the red rock Velvet Cliffs on the north and a toe of Boulder Mountain on the south. Here it enters the gorgeous Fremont River valley and the gateway communities to Capitol Reef National Park. I was at a gathering of friends and neighbors to celebrate the life and mourn the loss of the good man who built my home in the valley in Torrey. John came down from the city in the late 90’s to build my home, fell in love with the surroundings, and never left. Continue reading →
We started Torrey House Press in 2010 with the tag line “Love of the Land” and with an objective to promote more grass on the mountains and water in the streams in the West and to do so via literature. We set out to get on the front lines of the very idea of literature and the environment. We are a publisher with a cause, to conserve the fragile environment for its own sake and upon which we depend.
Successful conservation is a challenge. Compared to the 1960’s and 70’s there is less public interest in conservation. Driven primarily by the intense lobbying of the energy industry, it has now become a belligerent Republican policy plank to do whatever possible to undermine the environment and, sadly, this month the Republican’s overran the U.S. Senate. What was already difficult, protecting the environment, has become more so. Energy industry money has succeeded in making conservation equate to being anti-people. Quite strange.
Like conservation, successful publishing is a challenge. Like conservation, the obstacles to success are mounting. Amazon’s growing monopsony means an ever larger slice of the revenue pie goes to them. And although Amazon makes millions of titles available, they are best at herding readers to the best sellers so that more than ever winner takes all. The growing internet produces infinite reading for free. Since the iPhone came out during the Great Recession readers are ever less available to something as demanding as a book. Smart phones and apps like FaceBook help readers find out what each other are reading which also amplifies the effect of winner takes all. People want to do what other people are doing and it is possible today to know where the buzz is in an instant. And with digital technology there is an ever increasing number of new titles per year, millions if self-published titles are included in the count, making any new title amount to a snowflake in a blizzard.
Four years in at Torrey House Press we have yet to figure out how to make our publishing venture sustainable and viable. We have learned more about the financial mechanics of publishing and what it will take to become profitable enough to continue. We see, for instance, that producing titles that sell less than 5,000 copies will never get us there. Our average copies sold per title is well less than that. We are considering our options. Help from conservation organizations might make sense. Going nonprofit might be necessary. Adding more nonfiction titles that address a specific market might help. Attracting mid-list authors with a substantial following helps. We are going to poke around at exploring all of these options and try to hold our eyes and minds open to other solutions at the same time.
My wife and I are both sixth generation Utahns. We own homes in both Salt Lake and Wayne counties. We were married in the Capitol Reef National Park outdoor amphitheater in 2010. Together we cherish the natural landscape of Utah, our pretty, great state. Except for one thing. We have become sensitized to the damage done by livestock grazing on public lands. Our pioneer ancestors worked hard to survive in the arid country they were charged with settling, and we admire the determination and pluck it required. But public lands ranching doesn’t make sense anymore, and the more we learn about what our forests could be, the more we see the degradation–and absence–of plant communities and wildlife habitat. There is hardly anywhere we can go outside of the wilderness areas of the Wasatch where we don’t see it. This bothers us so much we started a publishing company in part to shed more light on public land mismanagement. We also volunteered with Mary O’Brien and the Grand Canyon Trust to do grazing damage assessment and now serve on the board of directors of Wild Utah Project with Allison Jones.
I borrowed the elephant part of the title to this blog piece from our neighbor in Torrey, Chip Ward, from something he said in a recent Tom’s Dispatch post about beaver habitat destruction by ranchers. Kirsten and I feel that if there is one simple, single thing that would most improve the natural landscape of Utah it would be the cessation of public land livestock grazing. It is everywhere yet its economic benefits are miniscule and for only a very few. Currently, 97% of the Dixie, Fishlake, and Manti-La Sal National Forests in southern Utah are actively grazed by livestock. But only one percent of Utah’s gross domestic product, or economic output, is agriculture, and only a small sliver of that is from public land grazing. Yet that one percent of economic production uses 82 percent of Utah’s water and almost all of the public land. Predators such as wolves, key to ecologic balance, have been eliminated. Others like coyotes, and now even crows, are hunted down by the state. Beavers have been virtually outlawed in Garfield County, just south of Wayne. Aspen, willow, and cottonwood growth have been stunted by livestock browsing. The problem is conceptually easy to fix, but it goes largely ignored. When it isn’t ignored, reform is blocked by tiny but powerful special interest groups. In the West, the iconic cowboy and his cow remain mythical and sacred. Like the king with no clothes, the public land is exposed and much the worse for it.
Over the last four or five years we have gathered photos illustrating both the damage from livestock grazing and what the forests could be when protected from grazing. Clicking any of the photos in the gallery below will take you to a slide show where more detailed captions are available. Perhaps many of the pictures need no caption to tell the story. We often photograph “exclosures,” areas fenced off to keep livestock out in order to assess grazing impacts. Virtually all of the exclosures we find are routinely violated by the ranchers — which makes sense since it makes them look bad. Cows are also supposed to be herded away from riparian areas, but in all our forest travels we have only seen the one cowboy pictured below.
The Southern Utah Forest Service is instituting a grazing assessment and inviting comments (send emails to “grazingassessment@fs.fed.us”) and concerns. We hope they take this chance to begin to run the forests as other than a subsidized ranch.
Last night Kirsten and went to a lecture by Michael Soule’, father of the conservation biology movement. I credit Soule for adding value back to his science of ecology by doing something about it, including founding the Wildlands Network to create wildlife corridors that enable adequate migration to protect species’ necessary genetic diversity.
The fight to conserve the environment is a never ending battle but one Soule’, quoting the Dalai Lama, reminds us to never give up on. Soule’ mentioned it is tougher now because with the advent of smart phones people read less. Conservation can be a bit complex but it is hard to get such ideas across in a tweet. Yet he did have a success story. Our friend Mary Ellen Hannibal’s recent book, The Spine of the Continent, while not quite on best seller lists was nonetheless read by Jody Allen, billionaire Paul Allen’s sister and Ms. Allen is perhaps interested in pointing some money in the direction of Wildlands Network. Soule was obviously thrilled.
We fortuitously met Mary Ellen when she was researching the book, camping with her and other friends of the Grand Canyon Trust in the high forests of southern Utah. It will be fun to watch how any contribution Wildlands Network might get as a result of Mary Ellen’s book works out. I’ll keep an eye out.
Last Friday morning a half a dozen cars full of environmentalists, mostly, are parked on the side of a rural road waiting for dawn. It is surprising cold, a bit below 20 degrees, and most of us are a bit under-dressed. As suggested, we stayed in the cars, and again as suggested by the folks parked next to us, quieted down. As the first morning twilight came on we could begin to see and hear the sage grouse males, big as turkeys, some now even out in the road, doing their spring mating ritual thing. Fantastic.
Kirsten and I were there with the staff of Wild Utah Project to see our first sage grouse lek. We were there with folks from the Salt Lake Hogle Zoo and were hosted by a couple of guys from the National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS). I was a little surprised these guys were there with us, particularly when they started talking about grazing as “a tool.” You can guess you are in a bit of idealogical trouble when someone starts to tell you this arid environment is better off with domestic cows. The NRCS is part of the U.S. Dept of Agriculture is providing millions of dollars in incentives to get ranchers to take care of the land they use. Ranchers and the ag people are running a bit scared because of the threat of sage grouse being listed next year as an endangered species. Given that there is said to have been over 15 million birds in the sage brush oceans of the West when Europeans arrived with their cows, and now are less than 300,000, the listing is a good bet.
My question, that chilly morning, was if we enviros should be helping the ag folks try to fend off the listing, like by putting flags on barbed wire fences to keep the birds from strangling in the wire. Much of ranching is in tough times economically. A lot of ranchers would be happy and willing to take a buy out for their grazing permits, if it were legal. If buyouts could be arranged on consecutive grazing allotments, the ranchers could be capitalilzed, cows would be kept out of the leks, and those fences instead of being flagged, could come down. Listing of the sage grouse is likely the only tool that could herd the ranchers, politically, into benefiting from buyouts. From a long term economic trend standpoint, it is clear the ranchers ought to take the buyouts now before they are forced out later when their permits get denied.
Spring is here and my wife, Kirsten, and I are poking our heads out more and looking into environmental issues. In fact, it has felt like March in Utah since early February and it is good to get out. In addition my son, Nick, has been interning for Wild Utah Project and WildEarth Guardians, both environmental agencies. Kirsten hiked the Calf Creek Falls trail on Monday with her sister and two nephews strapped to their backs. Nick made a run down to Moab a couple of weeks ago to visit with the Forest Service, Wild Utah Project and the Grand Canyon Trust about exotic mountain goats recently plunked down on the La Sals.
Kirsten was impressed at the amount of beaver activity in the stream along her hike. Beaver are, of course, the original and best stream managers. For years the folks at Grand Canyon Trust have been trying to get beaver re-introduced on Boulder Mountain and the surrounding forests. But ranchers think beavers somehow steal water and the Garfield County Commissioners, all ranchers, wrote a letter of protest to the Forest Service vehemently protesting any beaver re-intoduction in their county. County commissioners have amazing amount of political clout and the Forest Service folks deny them at risk of their jobs. So Kirsten was surprised to see so much beaver activity. She described dam after dam, wide and open and lush riparian areas big enough that migrating ducks were landing. Our guess is that the BLM, the land managers in this case, have too much pressure from the national public at this popular spot to allow the commissioners to have their way. Much like the forests around the Wasatch Front do not allow livestock grazing because the public would never put up with the damage.
Nick went down to Moab to visit with the Forest Service about the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources’ (DWR) introduction of mountain goats on to the La Sal Mountains last fall. There were no mountain goats in Utah when the pioneers arrived, and all current populations in the state were transplanted from other places. The La Sal’s have special wilderness zones established for scientists, like those at Wild Utah Project, the Grand Canyon Trust and the Forest Service, to study the effects of climate change. Goats, as we know, eat everything and the scientists are duly concerned. DWR is often accused of “trophy farming” and put the goats up on the mountain in defiance of current memorandums of understanding with other existing land management agencies, such as the Forest Service, in a unilateral decision to please hunters, their primary special interest constituency.
More on captured agencies and these issues as the year unfolds.
Grand Staircase Escalanate National Monument, Burr Trail (GSENM), May 20, 2013
It doesn’t make sense to subsidize environmental degradation on public lands. Kirsten and I went out for a couple of nights camping to the Deer Creek campground off the Burr Trail in the GSENM. After a hike down Deer Creek for less than a mile we turned around, sad and disgusted, and came back a day early.
The campground is an oasis in the high desert red rock country. Deer Creek runs off of Boulder Mountain toward the Escalante River and on to Lake Powell. Along its banks are cottonwood trees, coyote willow, aspen and spring wildflowers. That is, if the delicate area is protected from cows. The campground is cattle guarded for the most part and was a delight. Out of the gate, across the road and down the stream was another matter.
Leaving camp we came across the first ominous signs. Inside the campground the spring grasses were knee high and robust.
Cattle guard and fence at campground. Cows hang out at viewer’s right.
On the other side of the fence the grass was already overgrazed and gone. Ranchers and their apologists such as the responsible BLM agents call this a “sacrifice zone” saying that cattle will congregate along fences making things worse there than in general elsewhere. But in general cows are to be kept out of riparian zones. In fact, that is where they primarily hang out. We crossed the road and signed in at the trail head register. Behind the first row of willows it smelled and looked like we had walked into a stock yard. The trampled stream was at our feet and the cows were there strip mining away.
It costs a rancher $1.35 per month for a permit to graze a cow and her calf on public land. It is the same price they paid in 1962 and 1/10 to 1/20 the going market rate and less than it costs for you to feed your gerbil. It costs the taxpayer more to manage the ranching/permittees than the ranchers make doing it. It’s the reason for the pejorative “welfare rancher.” These folks couldn’t afford to keep doing it with out subsidy.
The grass, wildflowers and willows should be hip high in this riparian area.
In addition to paying for gates and fences, the taxpayer also pays to exterminate wildlife that might threaten the cows like wolves and coyotes and even beaver (beaver are virtually outlawed by the county commissioners in Garfield County where much of the Monument is).
Cow burnt.
It is wolves and other predators that keep ungulates on the move in riparian areas allowing the supporting undergrowth like the grasses, wildflowers, and the cottonwoods, aspen and willows to prosper. That bugs ranchers so even federal agencies like the so called “Wildlife Resources” spend millions making creeksides like this one a virtual private ranch where, as if they are the only concern, there is no need to monitor and manage the cows. A half a dozen of the hooved locusts were munching nearby.
The ranchers answer that this is their way of life. But who gets that? Torrey House Press is losing money, and it is my way of life, but I am not asking for subsidies. I have to make it work or get out of the business. The commissioners ask who I am going to put out of a job. Great rhetoric but the wrong question. I am not qualified to say who should have a job and who shouldn’t and the government certainly isn’t. Ask the Soviet Union about that practice. The market could be allowed to work it out and there are market solutions. The conservation community is standing by ready to buyout grazing permits but only if the permits can be retired. By current law permit retirement on BLM land literally requires an act of congress.
Cows made sense for a little while in the arid Intermountain West and the Colorado Plateau but with the advent of the railroad and easy transportation, such things as grazing need to be done on private land where it rains. There is plenty of it east of the 100th meridian. It is nuts to keep hammering our public treasures this way.
