A more just and equitable future of farming

Civil Eats

More Than Succession. It’s About Story.

Peach farmer Nikiko Masumoto shares her vision for a more just and equitable future of farming, which is connected deeply to her ancestral past.

By Nikiko Masumoto, Young Farmers Unite September 17, 2018

In 1948, my jiichan (grandfather), Takashi Joe Masumoto, bought the first 40 acres of the Masumoto Family Farm. It was only three years after my entire Japanese-American family had left the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona to go back to California, back to the Central Valley. And my jiichan decided that he was going to literally plant roots in a country that did not want him.

To me, that story is an act of resistance and of love. Mine was one of many Japanese-American families that returned to agriculture after unjust incarceration. Through farming, my jiichan dedicated his life and work to love and nurture this earth and soil in the same state and country that had so deeply hurt him and his family. His actions said, “I’m going to turn that around and actually make a place of joy.”

My jiichan was not a bitter man, though I know he experienced rage and anger; he was also a joyous and quiet man. I don’t think he ever verbally said “I love you” to me, but I felt it every day through the peaches that he grew. I lived with my grandparents during the first couple of years I spent working full-time on the farm. Every day, I came in from the fields tired and covered with dust. My jiichan, then in his 80s, would smile as I came in the door and we would join hands for a moment.

That is just part of the ancestral story of our farm. Today, my father and I work together to grow organic peaches, nectarines, and grapes on 80 acres. My familial portal into farming gestures to the fact that no land is devoid of story. We would be wise to listen to the stories of those who are erased, made invisible, or live and work in the margins.

When you think about farming through story, you begin to think about the conversation that began before you were here. I can’t conceptualize my life on our farm with my family without a sense of story. I did not become a farmer because I wanted to be wealthy, or because I had ambitions for fame. I became a farmer because I felt a deep calling toward home—a calling to give my most radical self to a single place.

I’m often asked what it feels like to be a woman in a field dominated by men (roughly 86 percent of farmers). Similarly, people ask, “What’s it like being queer in the Central Valley?” And, in truth, it’s not easy. In fact, stepping out into the world in my farm clothes and dusty shoes feels a like a small, badass act every day.

While I take pride in my small acts of defiance-by-virtue-of-being, I find understanding my role to be much more powerful when I conceive of it in a lineage of people who have pushed boundaries and forged paths of resistance, always trying to make room for others. All of the women in my Japanese-American family have worked the land, and who knows how many might have been queer. But they weren’t counted in the census as “farmers.”

I had an unusual entry into farming. Studying Gender and Women’s Studies at U.C. Berkeley gave me the tools to see how power structures and ideologies encircle my life. And it prompted me to ask important questions about other people’s experiences. Feminism offers core questions that must be answered if we’re going to change the food and farming world for the better, questions such as: How is power functioning? Who is benefiting? Who is left out? Who is making decisions for whom?

One of my wishes for the future of farming is that we would eventually able to see and name inequities and biases. Any movement or work toward a better food future must place working against xenophobia and racism at its core. Asking about, including, and making room for people of color and immigrants to lead cannot be an afterthought. We will destroy the future of California agriculture if we do not shift these questions to the core of our work.

But seeing and naming problems alone is inadequate, too. We must engage with each other and actually change how we interact, how we structure resources and who is given power. Changing how we interact with one another begins with self-observation: What assumptions do I bring with me, what are my barriers to listening? On our farm, constant energy is put into considering how we approach communicating with the employees.

This means on-going study of language and culture. Many of our workers are most comfortable speaking in Spanish, and so we do our part to study not only vocabulary, but also understand the cultural frames and concepts that are important to support our ability to work together. There is no simple list of things to do; it’s ongoing work. We are also experimenting with different models of structuring our farm work, bringing more voices into decision-making processes.

I have found that difficult conversations and disagreements are served well when two people have seen each other sweat and respect the effort each puts into their work. In many contexts, I might use words like “progressive” to describe myself, but that term is less important to me than actual conversation. My father, with whom I work every day, likes to use the term “sweat equity” to describe this approach to social change.

When we witness each other working, enduring similar work conditions like the dusty fields and the relentless heat of summer—though there are still important and distinguishing structures, privileges, and powers—the fact that we are witnessing each other’s work creates a shared respect. This can become the foundation for conversations about change, policy, and other things more contentious. California’s Central Valley is prime real estate for sweat equity activism.

Photo by Alan Sanchez

My life depends on this work. I’ve staked my future on the bet that we will be able to “right the ship” and build enough shared purpose to see equity as essential to the future of food and farming. The reality for most farmers (of all scales) is that the margins of profit we work for are small compared to other industries. I’ve half-joked that if we had to pitch a business plan for our family farm to the judges on “Shark Tank,” no one would invest. Yet, food is one of the essential parts of life.

As the average age of the American farmer hovers around 60, many in the sustainable agriculture community are worried about the future of farming. These conversations are primarily framed through questions of how to support the next generation of farmers facing inaccessible land prices, changing climatic conditions, and an increasingly difficult market for mid- and small-scale operations to succeed. “Farm succession” is on everyone’s tongues.

The problem with “succession” is its singular linearity, however. Succession implies that farm ownership only moves in one direction and erases the context of land and people. While I do plan to succeed my father at this work when he is no longer farming, it won’t be my land alone. And so the question I ask myself is: What is the verse that I want to offer to the ancestral story of this place?

This is the question I whisper to myself as I get out of bed, exhausted at 4 a.m., and the day’s high temperature is supposed to soar into triple digits; this question compels me to work toward a higher purpose. It shakes me from my ego and points me toward the story of place. With my jiichan’s shovel in my hand, I know I am not working alone, and my vision of the future is about so much more than just my one life. My verse has not fully come into view yet, but I know it is feminist, it is fierce, and it will help us bend toward justice.

Based on comments given during a panel discussion on farm succession hosted by the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA).

Pollution fears: Swollen rivers swamp ash dumps, hog farms

Associated Press

Pollution fears: Swollen rivers swamp ash dumps, hog farms

Michael Biesecker , Associated Press September 17, 2018

A hog farm is inundated with floodwaters from Hurricane Florence near Trenton, N.C., Sunday, Sept. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Helber).

Flooded rivers from Florence’s driving rains have begun to swamp coal ash dumps and low-lying hog farms, raising pollution concerns as the swollen waterways approach their crests Monday.

Duke Energy said the weekend collapse of a coal ash landfill at the mothballed L.V. Sutton Power Station near Wilmington, North Carolina, is an “on-going situation,” with an unknown amount of potentially contaminated storm water flowing into a nearby lake. At a different power plant near Goldsboro, three old coal ash dumps capped with soil were inundated by the Neuse River.

An Associated Press photographer who flew over eastern North Carolina’s Trent River on Sunday saw several flooded hog farms, their long metal buildings ringed by dark water. Such farms typically have large pits filled with hog urine and feces that can cause significant water contamination if breached. State regulators said they hadn’t received any reports of spills so far.

An AP analysis of location data from hog waste disposal permits shows at least 45 active North Carolina farms are located in 100-year and 500-year floodplains.

Federal forecasters predicted several rivers would crest at record or near-record levels by Monday, and high water could linger for days. Officials with the N.C. Park Council, and industry trade group, said farmers had prepared for the storm by lowering water levels in waste ponds and moving animals to higher ground.

At the closed Sutton plant, Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said a full assessment of how much ash escaped from the water-slogged landfill can’t occur until the rain stops. She said there was no indication that any contaminants had reached the nearby Cape Fear River.

The company initially estimated Saturday that about 2,000 cubic yards (1,530 cubic meters) of ash were displaced, enough to fill about 180 dump trucks. Sheehan said the estimate could be revised later.

The coal-fired Sutton plant was retired in 2013 and the company has been excavating millions of tons of ash from old waste pits and removing it to safer lined landfills constructed on the property. The gray ash left behind when coal is burned contains toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, lead and mercury.

Sheehan also said three inactive ash basins at the H.F. Lee Power Station near Goldsboro were under water.

State environmental regulators said they’ve been unable to inspect the Sutton landfill because of flooding.

Duke’s handling of ash waste has faced intense scrutiny since a drainage pipe collapsed under a waste pit at an old plant in Eden in 2014, triggering a massive spill that coated 70 miles (110 kilometers) of the Dan River in gray sludge. The utility later agreed to plead guilty to nine Clean Water Act violations and pay $102 million in fines and restitution for illegally discharging pollution from ash dumps at five North Carolina power plants. It plans to close all its ash dumps by 2029.

Environmentalists have warned for decades that Duke’s coal ash ponds were vulnerable to severe storms, potentially threatening drinking water supplies and public safety.

“Disposing of coal ash close to waterways is hazardous, and Duke Energy compounds the problem by leaving most of its ash in primitive unlined pits filled with water,” said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center.

He said he hoped “Duke Energy will commit itself to removing its ash from all its unlined waterfront pits and, if it refuses, that the state of North Carolina will require it to remove the ash from these unlined pits.”

Associated Press data journalist Angeliki Kastanis is in Los Angeles and writer Gary D. Robertson contributed from Raleigh.

Democratic Socialism

Bill Maher

September 15, 2018

The new campaign slogan for the Democratic Party should be: We’re Not Socialists – You’re Traitors

Scary Socialism

The new campaign slogan for the Democratic Party should be: We're Not Socialists – You're Traitors

Posted by Bill Maher on Friday, September 14, 2018

There’s a natural solution to climate change all around us.

EcoWatch

September 16, 2018

There’s a natural solution to climate change all around us, but we’re taking it for granted. Alec Baldwin and Dr. Jane Goodall explain how we get back on track. #YEARSproject #theforgottensolution with the Jane Goodall Institute

via We Can Solve This

The Forgotten Solution

There's a natural solution to climate change all around us, but we're taking it for granted. Alec Baldwin and Dr. Jane Goodall explain how we get back on track. #YEARSproject #theforgottensolution with the Jane Goodall Institutevia We Can Solve This

Posted by EcoWatch on Friday, September 14, 2018

Flooding from Hurricane Florence Threatens to Overwhelm Manure Lagoons

The New Yorker – Dispatch

Flooding from Hurricane Florence Threatens to Overwhelm Manure Lagoons

By Charles Bethea September 15, 2018

Young hogs at an industrial animal-feeding operation in North Carolina. As Hurricane Florence approached, many farmers near the facilities were expected to evacuate, leaving the animals behind. Photograph by Gerry Broome / AP.

Even under normal conditions, the farms’ odor penetrates the plane, three thousand feet above. “We can smell the waste,” Dove told me. “It’s been described in court proceedings as similar to the odor of dead bodies. It’s the worst smell in the world. It clings to your clothes. It burns your eyes, burns your nose and even your lips. And these swine lagoons are built right in neighborhoods.” Often, Dove said, the sprayed overflow waste ends up on or near cars and homes. (In May, five hundred neighbors of North Carolina hog farms, owned by Murphy-Brown, a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, won a fifty-million-dollar judgment against the corporation. Its hog-waste-management practices, the neighbors argued, adversely affected their quality of life. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told reporters that he considered the verdict “despicable.”)

As the storm approached, most of the farmers who live near the facilities probably evacuated, Dove told me, leaving the animals behind. “The water will go over the confinement buildings,” he said. “Most of those animals are gonna drown.” As flooding worsens on the North Carolina coast, no one I could reach has been able to observe firsthand what’s happening to the hogs—or to the hog-waste lagoons. Reconnaissance flights have been cancelled until weather conditions improve. But area environmentalists, whom I reached on Friday and Saturday, are deeply concerned about the situation.

On Saturday morning, Matt Butler, the program director with Sound Rivers, was able to drive around parts of the Tar-Pamlico River Basin, which his group oversees. The basin’s southern edge is located about a hundred miles north of Wilmington. “The thirty or so farms we keep track of have not yet experienced inundation, as of this morning,” he told me. “But some were spraying waste ahead of the storm.” Butler agreed that the real effects of Florence on the hog farms will be seen from the air. “We have a very high concern that we’ll see lagoons and farms flooded further south, distributing waste all over the place,” he said.

Kemp Burdette, the Cape Fear Riverkeeper, was born and raised in Wilmington. He now lives about twenty miles northwest, on the Black River, a flat body of water in a cypress swamp. “The human costs will be significant,” Burdette told me. “I mean, my house will probably be flooded. But the wider environmental costs will be enormous as well.” He, too, was most concerned about the flooding of factory farms. “The Black River, Northeast Cape Fear River, and the main stem of the Cape Fear River flow through three of the most swine-farm-concentrated counties, which make up the most swine-farming-dense watershed on earth,” he said. “There’s plenty of poultry farms, too.” He added, “It’s looking like a worst-case scenario here, with those rivers cresting to historically high levels.”

Burdette spent Thursday and Friday trying to save his home, which sits on stilts. “The river has started to come up,” he told me Friday night. “My girlfriend and I took a load of our most valuable stuff—pictures, kids’ art, Christmas stuff, that kind of thing—to my office, in Wilmington. Then we took our boat, which we’ll need in a few days to get out to the house, into town, too, so it wouldn’t get stranded out here.” They brought everything else up to the second floor of the home and—since flooding from Hurricane Matthew, in 2016, breached that floor—put it all on three-foot saw horses.“We just took bucket baths in the tub,” Burdette said. “We’re cooking dinner now. And we’re getting ready to lay down on our army cots and go to sleep here soon. The river is rising, though, so I’m gonna set my alarm to get up several times tonight to make sure it’s not rising too fast.”

Tom Butler (no relation to Matt) runs a factory farm a hundred and ten miles northwest of Wilmington, with about eight thousand hogs. “It’s a medium-sized farm,” he told me on Saturday afternoon. “We have about a hundred thousand contract hogs in my county, while the next county over, Sampson, has two million. I’ve had a concentrated animal-feeding operation here for twenty-three years. I’m familiar with bad weather and lagoons.” So far, he’s had about eight or nine inches of rain fall on his farm. But he’s taken precautions that, he says, most other hog farmers don’t. “I’m an advocate for better waste management,” he said, “and have been for ten years. The industry doesn’t like me very much. We have high-density-plastic covers for our lagoons—only about seven or eight farms out of two thousand in North Carolina do that—which excludes the rainwater and prevents inundation or whatever. As far as hog protection, we just lower the curtains to keep off the wind. We cut off the feeders so the feed won’t get wet. We stay with that mode until the wind and rain goes by.”

Butler went on, “We have no idea what’s gonna happen with the residual flooding from this storm. Most folks are just praying, as far as controlling the lagoon problem. Even if a grower had his lagoons pumped down to the regulatory amount of nineteen inches, it would still overflow when you have twenty to thirty inches of rain predicted. That amount of rain is a real problem. Fifteen inches many can get by with. Twenty inches is a real problem.”

Florence’s rains: Coal ash landfill collapses in Carolinas’

Associated Press

Michael Biesecker, Associated Press September 16, 2018

In this June 23, 2014 file photo, the dried-up bed of an inactive coal ash pond is seen at Duke Energy’s Sutton plant in Wilmington, N.C. Duke Energy says heavy rains from Florence have caused a slope to collapse at a coal ash landfill at a closed power station near the North Carolina coast.

Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said Saturday night, Sept. 15, 2018, that about 2,000 cubic yards of ash have been displaced at the L. V. Sutton Power Station outside Wilmington. (Mike Spencer/The Star-News via AP)

Heavy rains from Florence caused a slope to collapse at a coal ash landfill at a closed power station near the North Carolina coast, Duke Energy says.

Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said late Saturday about 2,000 cubic yards (1,530 cubic meters) of ash were displaced at the L. V. Sutton Power Station outside Wilmington and that contaminated runoff likely flowed into the plant’s cooling pond.

The company has not yet determined whether the weir that drains the lake was open or if contamination may have flowed into the Cape Fear River. That’s roughly enough ash to fill 180 dump trucks.

Florence slammed into the North Carolina coast as a large hurricane Friday, dumping nearly three feet (1 meter) of rain and swelling the region’s rivers. The resulting flooding forced swift-water rescues and left several people dead.

Sheehan said the company had reported the incident to state and federal regulators “out of an abundance of caution.”

Duke has been under intense scrutiny for the handling of its coal ash since a drainage pipe collapsed under a waste pit at an old plant in Eden in 2014, triggering a massive spill that coated 70 miles (110 kilometers) of the Dan River in gray sludge.

In a subsequent settlement with federal regulators, Duke agreed to plead guilty to nine Clean Water Act violations and pay $102 million in fines and restitution for illegally discharging pollution from coal-ash dumps at five North Carolina power plants. The company is in the process of closing all of its coal ash dumps by 2029.

Spokeswoman Megan S. Thorpe at the state’s Department of Environmental Quality said state regulators will conduct a thorough inspection of the site as soon as safely possible.

“DEQ has been closely monitoring all coal ash impoundments that could be vulnerable in this record breaking rain event,” Thorpe said. She added that the department, after assessing the damage, will “hold the utility accountable for implementing the solution that ensures the protection of public health and the environment.”

There are at least two other coal-fired Duke plants in North Carolina that are likely to affected by the storm.

The H.F. Lee Power Station near Goldsboro has three inactive ash basins that flooded during Hurricane Matthew in 2016, exposing a small amount of coal ash that may have flowed into the nearby Neuse River. The old waste pits are capped with soil and vegetation intended to help prevent erosion of the toxic ash beneath.

The Neuse is expected to crest at more than nine feet (3 meters) above flood stage Monday and Sheehan said the company expects the same ash basins are likely to be inundated again.

At the W. H. Weatherspoon Power Station near Lumberton, Sheehan said it had already rained more than 30 inches (75 centimeters) by Saturday evening, causing a nearby swamp to overflow into the plants cooling pond. The Lumber River is expected to crest at more than 11 feet (3.3 meters) above flood stage Sunday, which would put the floodwaters near the top of the earthen dike containing the plant’s coal ash dump.

Environmentalists have been warning for decades that Duke’s coal ash ponds were vulnerable to severe storms and pose a threat to drinking water supplies and public safety.

“In this instance, it appears that Duke Energy has not done enough to ensure that its new Wilmington landfill safely stores coal ash. After this storm, we hope that Duke Energy will commit itself to removing its ash from all its unlined waterfront pits and, if it refuses, that the state of North Carolina will require it to remove the ash from these unlined pits.”

Here’s what would happen if the Sahara was covered in solar and wind farms

Digital Trends – Science

Luke Dormehl, Digital September 11, 2018

Covering the entire 3.6 million square miles of Sahara desert with wind and solar farms wouldn’t just solve the world’s energy requirements — it would transform the region’s climate, too.

With swirling dust storms, barely any rain, and daytime temperatures reaching up to 104-degrees Fahrenheit, the Sahara desert is one of the world’s least hospitable environments. But the 3.6 million square mile stretch also represents a whole lot of untapped prime real estate — which a new study suggests could be used for housing the biggest solar and wind farms in the world. As it turns out, not only would covering the entire area in solar and wind farms more than meet the world’s energy demands, it would also transform the local climate. According to a team of international researchers, this could more than double local rainfall and result in a moderate “greening” of the region. What’s not to like?

“The Sahara is quite dry and its surface is covered with little vegetation,” Yan Li, a postdoctoral researcher in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois, told Digital Trends. “The additional rainfall and vegetation would certainly provide a much-needed relief to this dry, bare desert.”

In their study, the researchers simulated the effects of covering the entire area with these solar and wind farms. They concluded that wind farms would generate, on average, around three terawatts of power and 79 terawatts through solar farms. This is significantly more than the 18 terawatts that made up the 2017 global energy demand.

This climate modeling study is one of the first times that researchers have modeled the effects of wind and solar installation, along with the ways that vegetation changes with heat and precipitation. The reasons for the changes in climate are complex, but they are related to effects like wind farms’ turbine blades pulling warm air down to the desert’s surface, along with solar farms increasing surface reflectiveness.

Of course, building this many solar and wind farms probably isn’t going to happen anytime soon. But it may not need to. As noted, doing this would produce far more energy than we currently require. It also wouldn’t take this major an intervention to get the beneficial effects on local precipitation and vegetation. When the researchers conducted experiments for farms of smaller scales, their results suggested that covering only the northwest quadrant of the Sahara would have almost the same climate benefits as covering the entire thing.

A paper describing the research was recently published in the journal Science.

Trump administration rushes to lease federal lands

Yahoo News

Alexander Nazaryan September 11, 2018

White House rushes to lease federal lands

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and Donald Trump. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News, photos: AP (2), Helen H. Richardson/Denver Post via Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The Department of Interior is quietly preparing to offer hundreds of thousands of acres of public land for leasing to energy companies, a move critics have charged is being undertaken with minimal public input and little consideration for ecological and cultural preservation.

According to data compiled by environmental groups, the Bureau of Land Management will put 2.9 million acres up for potential leasing in the next four months. Because the land in question — in states including New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona — lacks designation as a national park or monument, it can be used for commercial purposes such as mining for minerals and drilling for oil and gas. Supporters say that bolstering the extractive industries will ensure energy independence for the United States, though shifting energy preferences and falling oil prices appear to undermine that assertion.

Some 250 million acres of land are under the bureau’s control nationwide, with the overwhelming majority of the parcels concentrated in a dozen Western states, which sometimes chafe at what they regard as Washington’s inept oversight. That tension was most dramatically on display in 2014, when federal agents engaged in an armed standoff with the family of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher with extreme right-wing views. The dispute arose from Bundy’s insistence on allowing his cattle to graze on public lands, a practice that saw him accrue some $1 million in fines, which he refused to pay.

The Bureau of Land Management is part of the Department of the Interior, which is today headed by Ryan Zinke, a Montana native who has styled himself a rugged conservationist, even as he maintains close ties to private enterprise. Many of his closest advisers at Interior have ties to the oil and gas industry, either as lobbyists or executives. His top deputy, for example, is David L. Bernhardt, a veteran Republican operative who has also lobbied on behalf of California agribusiness.

Protesters on horseback ride on the hills above a rally site in Bunkerville, Nev., April 12, 2014. (Photo: Jim Urquhart/Reuters).

During his confirmation hearing, Zinke said that he was “absolutely against transfer and sale of public lands.” But that claim would not prevent him from issuing leases for oil and gas companies, as the land would technically remain under public control, even as it was being used for private gain. Such leases are issued for 10 years at exceedingly favorable terms, often for the minimum bid of $2 per acre at a competitive sale, after which they are available for two years at the even-more-discounted price of $1.50 per acre if they do not sell at that first sale.

Leasing land was a common practice before Trump. What’s different now, detractors say, is that the Bureau of Land Management is moving with uncommon speed to make improper determinations without allowing public to comment. That has led, these critics say, to widespread damage to the environment of the American West.

Gas wells and facilities at a Jonah Energy field, outside Pinedale, Wyo. (Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images)

“We can’t just get it back,” says Nada Culver, a leader in the Wilderness Society’s land-use division. “Mistakes are made when you’re rushing.”

The Obama administration offered plenty of land to energy and mineral prospectors, but it did so in far more considered fashion. In 2016, the Obama administration put 1.9 million acres up for leasing, down from a high of 6.1 million acres offered in 2012. In its first year, the Trump administration offered 11.9 acres, the vast majority of them in Alaska. In the end, only 792,000 acres were leased, which represented just 7 percent of the offerings. In 2016, conversely, the Obama administration offered a much smaller total number of acres (1.9 million), but sold a far greater share: 47 percent, or 921,240. That suggests the Obama administration was more judicious in determining lands that would be desirable to industry.

Those numbers, however, do not tell the full story. Less important than the amount of land offered, conservationists say, is where those parcels are located, as well as their significance as either natural resources or cultural landmarks. In this, too, the Obama administration appears to have been significantly more successful than its successor. In 2012, for example, only 17 percent of the parcels offered by the Obama administration were “protested” by the public (those figures are for fiscal years, where as the compilation of acres offered is for calendar years; the two correlate closely, if not exactly). Conversely, of the parcels offered in 2017, a full 88 percent were contested, suggesting the Trump administration has been largely indiscriminate in the land it is offering.

An even higher percentage of lands could be contested this year, given how close they are to protected areas in some of the country’s most rugged, cherished regions. The greatest share of offerings are in Wyoming, where about 1.1 million acres are being offered for lease. There were also 721,705 acres offered in Nevada, 329,826 in Utah and 230,944 in Colorado, along with smaller parcels in New Mexico, Montana and Arizona. Some of these are near national monuments and national parks, including Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, Canyonlands National Park in Utah and Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado.

Many of the lands also represent habitat of the sage grouse, a bird whose native habitat is the high desert of the West. The sage grouse’s numbers have been drastically diminished by commercial and residential development.

President Obama considered protecting the grouse under the Endangered Species Act. Similar protection for the spotted owl in 1990 had laid waste to many a logger’s plans. Instead, in 2015, his Interior Department struck a deal with Western states. The sage grouse remained off the endangered species list, but there were 98 separate plans across the region to protect the bird —and, just as importantly, the landscape it lived on.

Zinke ordered those plans reviewed in the fall of 2018, indicating that he was preparing to offer some of the land set aside for sage grouse to energy or mineral-extraction companies. It’s unlikely that Zinke had personal animosity towards the bird. Rather, the sage grouse stands in the way of greater development of open lands across the West.

Aware that leasing land across the West could prove highly unpopular, the bureau canceled a 30-day comment period on any proposed lease, and the time to appeal a proposed lease already in the works was reduced to a mere 10 days. During the Obama administration, the total time for both comment and appeal had been 60 days.

“Were operating under a new guidance that has radically cut out opportunities for public input,” says Culver of the Wilderness Society.

Not only that, but Interior officials who worked in parks and national monuments were pressured to make land available for leasing, even when it was clear that studding that land with oil derricks and mining equipment would destroy the landscape and drive away the millions of tourists, both foreign and domestic, who came to see it each year.

“Why in the world, for a short-term gain, would you jeopardize those places by doing something stupid?” wonders Walt Dabney, who served as a park ranger for many decades and is now retired and living in Utah. He says that Moab, Utah, where he lives, is full of tourists and that French and Mandarin are commonly heard in local stores. The tourists bring millions to the local economy, and they “don’t boom-bust like the oil and gas business.”

Energy-related development will drive them away, according to Dabney, who says he’s not against energy. He is only against doing things quickly, and without consideration.

Among those challenging the Bureau of Land Management lease offerings is Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship, a group whose members lean red — and green. Its president, David Jenkins, has called for 117,000 acres across five states to be set aside by Interior. “It certainly makes no sense to lock up these important public resources,” Jenkins said, since the “oil and gas industry has shown no interest in them,” a reference to the tepid response to 2017’s offerings. The fear, of course, is that the non-Alaska offerings of 2018 will be more enthusiastically received.

Legislators and conservationists have had little recourse but to prepare for the next round of BLM offerings. The two Democratic U.S. Senators from New Mexico, Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, have introduced legislation that would prevent leasing within 10 miles of of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Previous administration had informally honored such a buffer; the Trump administration does not.

Udall, ranking member on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Department of the Interior’s budget, told Yahoo News, “It is the height of folly to take this ‘drill everywhere all the time’ approach at a time when domestic production from public lands is already at near record levels and U.S. action on climate change is stalling. The Trump administration’s corporate giveaways won’t lead to more energy security — they’ll just lead to more litigation, since the communities and tribes were not consulted. The American people have a right to comment on the management of their lands, and they will fight back against attempts to exploit these special places that belong to all of us.

At the Utah State Capitol, protesters demonstrate against President Trump’s plan to shrink protected areas across the country. (Photo: Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The Department of Interior says such concerns are unfounded. “Congress specifically requires regular lease opportunities for energy and mineral production on federal lands,” department spokesperson Heather Swift told Yahoo News. “President Trump promised the American people that he would restore the balance of multiple use of federal lands, make America energy dominant, and generate economic growth. Federal lands play a huge part of that.”

The leasing of public lands represents “real money that will go to state governments for education, roads and public safety,” she added.

But because the funds from leased lands are shared between states and the federal government, and because the Trump administration has so far struggled to lease lands, those proceeds are not likely to be especially great. For example, of the 900 lots in Alaska offered by the Department of Interior in 2017, only seven found a leasor.

In all, Alaska received nearly $580,000. That is about a fifth of what the American taxpayer pays for each of Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago.

Climate Change Could Completely Transform Earth’s Ecosystems

By Olivia Rosane September 1, 2018

Lake Atescatempa in Guatemala has dried up due to drought and high temperatures. MARVIN RECINOS / AFP / Getty Images

Fifty two million years ago, crocodiles swam in the Arctic. Twenty thousand years ago, an ice sheet covered Manhattan. Earth’s ecosystems have changed dramatically as the climate has shifted, and now scientists are trying to determine how they might respond to the current era of human-caused climate change.

Forty-two scientists contributed to a study published in Science Friday that examined how land-based plants had responded to temperature changes of four to seven degrees Celsius since the height of the ice age in order to predict how land-based ecosystems might respond to similar temperature changes predicted for the future.

They found that, if we do not act quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the earth’s entire terrestrial biome is 75 percent likely to change completely, impacting biodiversity and making life difficult for anyone whose livelihood is based around an ecosystem as it exists now.

“Having this kind of change occur at such a massive scale in such a short period of time is going to create unprecedented challenges for natural-resource management,” study author and U.S. Geological Survey climate scientist Stephen Jackson told The Atlantic.

The researchers looked at 594 examples of ecosystem change over time to get an understanding of what sorts of changes we could expect from unmitigated global warming.

“Five miles from where I sit is the middle of the Sonoran Desert and Saguaro National Park,” Jackson told The Atlantic from his desk in Tucson, Arizona. “Today, there’s big saguaro cacti, mesquite trees, ironwood trees. If we were to roll back the calendar 20,000 years, and we went to the same place, we would find a woodland of evergreen trees.”

Jackson gave another example of how the area around Washington, DC has changed from boreal forest like that found today in Canada to hardwood forest, featuring species like oak.

But while the period the researchers studied spanned around 21,000 years, similar temperature changes could occur within the next 100, and the speed of change could have a major impact.

“If you’re a wildlife manager and your ecosystem changes, if you’re a forest manager trying to respond to wildfires, if you’re a water manager who is responsible for converting rainfall estimates into reservoir levels,” Jackson told The Atlantic, “then the old rules are not necessarily going to apply.”

Another study, published Thursday in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, looked at how the individual species within ecosystems might respond to these dramatic temperature changes.

The study, led by the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, looked to the past to see how plants and animals had responded to changes in their environment over the past million years.

“From fossils and other biological ‘archives,’ we have access to a nearly limitless number of case studies throughout Earth’s history. This provides us with valuable knowledge of how climate changes of various rates, magnitudes and types can affect biodiversity,” Jackson, who also co-authored the second study, said in a University of Copenhagen press release.

Scientists had previously believed species would simply migrate in response to changing climates, but the historical examples reviewed for this study showed they often adapted over time by changing their behavior or body color or shape.

However, researchers were concerned the pace of current climate change might be too fast for evolution to keep up.

“We know animals and plants have prevented extinction by adapt or migrate in the past. However, the models we use today to predict future climate change, foresee magnitudes and rates of change, which have been exceptionally rare in the last million years,” co-author Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez from the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) said in the university release.

Rodriquez-Sanchez said more research was needed to predict how species might respond to current climate change, but hoped the past examples of successful adaptation could help policy makers craft effective conservation decisions.

Stunning Victory for Indigenous Nations as Canada Halts Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion

EcoWatch

Stunning Victory for Indigenous Nations as Canada Halts Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion

By Lorraine Chow August 30, 2018

Pipeline intended to cross Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Robert McGouey / Getty Images

A Canadian court “quashed” approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion on Thursday, a major setback for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose government agreed to purchase the controversial project from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion Canadian dollars (U.S. $3.5 billion) in May.

It’s a stunning victory for Indigenous groups and environmentalists opposed to the project, which is designed to nearly triple the amount of tar sands transported from Alberta to the coast of British Columbia.

The Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the National Energy Board’s review—as explained by the Canadian Press—”was so flawed that the federal government could not rely on it as a basis for its decision to approve the expansion.”

The project has been at the center of widespread protests from environmental groups and First Nations ever since November 2016, when Trudeau approved a $7.4 billion expansion of the existing Trans Mountain pipeline that would increase the transport of Alberta tar sands oil from the current 300,000 barrels per day to 890,000 barrels per day and increase tanker traffic nearly seven-fold through the Burrard Inlet.

Specifically, the court said it was an “unjustifiable failure” that the National Energy Board did not consider the environmental impacts of the increased tanker traffic.

The court additionally concluded that the government “fell well short” with properly consulting with the Indigenous groups involved in the case, including the Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish on British Columbia’s south coast.

The ruling will force the National Energy Board to redo its review of the pipeline and the government to restart consultations with the Indigenous groups. It also means that the construction that has already began in central Alberta must cease.

In effect, the court has halted the 1,150-kilometer project indefinitely and it will remain in “legal limbo until the energy regulator and the government reassess their approvals to satisfy the court’s demands,” CBCwrote about today’s decision.

Notably, the decision was made the same day Kinder Morgan’s shareholders voted to approve the $4.5 billion sale to Canada, which means the country owns a proposed pipeline project that could be subject to years of further review, the publication pointed out.

The court’s judgment could be appealed a final time to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Minister of Finance Bill Morneau said that the government has received the ruling and will review the decision.