The End

Today is the last day of my fellowship. I can't believe it's already been nine months - the time went so incredibly fast. It's been a wonderful experience - I'd almost go so far as to say magical - and I'm sad to see it end. This is one of those situations in life where you get out of it what you put into it and I feel like I poured a lot of energy and time and heart and soul in. What I got out of it was an exponentially larger return on investment.

All the fellows were asked to write up an evaluation of our time here - some of my answers are below. It's hard to summarize the experience in such a small space but, suffice it to say, I feel infinitely richer for my time here.

---

1.    Courses: How do you think these might help you with your environmental journalism?

I think they help tremendously. My biggest weakness was lack of solid baseline knowledge – I feel much more comfortable with environmental subjects (especially when it comes to natural resources and energy) now that I’ve had these courses. I also now have a tremendous number of contacts I can reach out to when I have questions.

2.    Independent Project: Here is where you should describe the work you’ve done.

When I applied for the Scripps Fellowship, I said I wanted to gain a better understanding of wildfire in the American West. It has always been part of the environment here but with climate change and drought, it is permanently altering the landscape and it’s doing so in a much shorter period of time.

It was a big topic – more than I could tackle in just this year and it was very similar to the book that Michael is writing. But I ended up finding a narrower focus within this topic, looking specifically at the problem of development in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) and the repercussions that has had for both people and forests.

I wrote two articles on this topic. One was for Newsweek, about the Black Forest Fire, which was one of the most destructive in Colorado’s history, partially because of a history of forest mismanagement, partially because of where people are living and partially because of the attitudes of the locals toward mitigation and preparedness. It’s an example of what is becoming a very expensive problem all across the west. The story appeared in the February 13 edition of the magazine, as well as online.

The second article is for Outside Magazine. It looks at the issue of controlled burns, which are an incredibly useful tool for land managers but can also have some terrible consequences if they get out of control. That article is to be published in the July edition of the magazine.

Another project is unrelated to fire but grew from an interesting presentation by James Edward Mills, one of our seminar guests. He talked to us about the lack of diversity in outdoor activities. Out of that conversation, I created and pitched a series to NPR’s Code Switch Team. I’m working closely with reporter Shereen Meraji as the editor and producer on five or six stories – the first one ran in February, pegged to the National Brotherhood of Skiers and the Black Ski Summit, which was held in Aspen at the end of February. The remaining stories will run this summer on Weekend Edition with Rachel Martin – the series is called “Race + Recreation”.

3.    Please share any other comments about the program, general or specific that you might have.

This program gave me the opportunity to really dig into a subject that I care about deeply. I’d been working in general news for years and hadn’t had the time/opportunity to work on many environmental stories. This year will give me a lot more leverage to report on these kinds of topics. Additionally, I’d been doing radio for my entire journalism career. I specifically focused on doing print while at CU because I wanted to try something new. It would have been much, much harder to experiment with a different kind of journalism if I hadn’t been in this program.

In short, I can’t say enough good things. This has, hands down, been one of the best years of my life. To have the opportunity to go back to classes, to have unlimited access to professors and scientists and journalists, to have the time to think and write and reflect – it was truly a gift. I also had a great group of fellows who were enthusiastic learners (and bowlers and beer-drinkers) and game for just about anything.

4.    How do you think you might approach environmental subjects differently in light of your fellowship experiences?

With more confidence. I always felt a bit shaky on the science, given that I don’t have a science/environment background, but the fellowship helped me a) get some more basic knowledge and b) realize that it’s possible to write about these topics in a smart, interesting way – even without a PhD in physics or biology.

5.    In what other Journalism & Mass Communication/College of Media, Communication and Information activities or events have you been a participant?

I helped start a podcast with the graduate students of the CEJ. It was something of an ambitious project but the goal was to help them have an audio story as one of their clips and to have a good, final product that they could then shop around to get university support and funding. 

6.    What activities have you and/or your family enjoyed as the result of living in Boulder and in Colorado?

Oh man. Where to begin. The hiking, for starters – Chautauqua is a short walk from where my boyfriend & I are living. Mount Sanitas. The Table Mesa trail. Then there’s Eldora – we went skiing there multiple times. With the fellows (some current, some former), we took trips up to Devil’s Thumb Ranch to go cross-country skiing. We hit up the Buffalo Bill Museum in Golden. Visited multiple breweries here in town and in Longmont and Fort Collins. Went to Rocky Mountain National Park to see the elk. Took a trip to Paonia in spring. Skied at Aspen (!). Swam at El Dorado Springs. Snowshoed up to one of the 10th Mountain Division Huts at Berthoud Pass for an overnight trip. Shopped at that fantastic farmers’ market. Watched the bronc riders at the Western Stock Show. Went to Frozen Dead Guy Days in Nederland. Squeezed in a little culture at the Denver Museum of Art. Made lots of new friends and had tons of happy hours, dinners, bbqs, potlucks and parties with all of them.

7.    What do you plan to do after the fellowship program is over?

Wait – it’s over?

I’ve got a number of plans in the works. I’m not ready to go back to a full-time office job yet – I’d like to continue to do more writing but also do some radio projects. I’ll be working with a former fellow who’s now at High Country News, to help develop a possible podcast. I’m also going to be collaborating on an independent radio project called “I See Change” that crowdsources climate change and marries it with data from NASA.  I’ll finish working with NPR on the “Race + Recreation” series that we launched in February – there will be 5 pieces total, running in August on Weekend Edition. I’ll be editing and producing, as well as writing web copy. And I’ve got a couple of my own writing projects in the works.

Simple Physics

Jim White - a paleoclimatologist and the director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INCAAR) - knows something about climate change. And last Thursday, he took the time to explain it to those of us who are a little less steeped in the topic.

Global climate change comes down to simple physics and depends on three factors:

1) How much energy we get from the sun (i.e. sun cycles, our orbit around the sun)
2) How much of that energy is reflected back into space (by polar ice caps, glaciers, various aerosols)
3) The amount of greenhouse gases in earth's atmosphere(water vapor, carbon dioxide, etc.), which absorb the energy that is being reflected.

Pretty basic stuff at its core. And the laws that govern climate change are the same laws that govern other natural phenomena, like gravity - they are universal.

To make his point, he gives us a demonstration he's given frequently, recently to a group of Evangelicals. He asks one person to stand on a chair and then says to the crowd, "What happens if I push this person off the chair?" 

The crowd usually says the person will jump and catch himself.

"What if I tie his legs?"

He'll catch himself with his arms, maybe break a wrist.

"What if I tie his arms?"

He'll fall and get hurt, maybe badly.

But at no point does anyone in the crowd ever say that the guy won't fall. So we do understand that there are physical laws out there that apply to all of us. Those same physical laws are involved in climate change. Whether you believe in climate change doesn't matter - it's happening. To say it's not is like saying you don't believe in gravity or thermodynamics.

It's a good argument. For many - especially for those who are religious - climate change is seen as a different type of faith that scientists are trying to convert them to. But, as White points out, this isn't about faith, which requires you to make a leap, to accept something intangible or unprovable. Climate change and the science behind it are real. They're measurable. 

That doesn't mean religion and science have to be at odds - people have accepted gravity as part of their world and adopted it into their faith-based lives. This shouldn't be any different. Scientists like White aren't concerned with if or how people work climate change into their faith - they just want to make sure everyone understands the facts - the simple physics - of it all. 

Water, Water Everywhere

Let's take a trip along the Snake River, from beginning to end, from its headwaters at the edge of Yellowstone National Park, all the way to where it joins the Columbia River, along the Idaho/Oregon border. It's a journey that author Richard Manning made for High Country News - not to take in the grandeur of the river's 1,078 miles, but to see the effects of industrial agriculture on both the waterway and the surrounding environment. 

Here's Manning's explanation:

Industrial agriculture impacts the entire planet, but the Snake's system – sizable, relatively isolated, discrete and significant – is a good place to assess the impacts at a local scale, examining the nuts and bolts as well as the weight of the whole. This accounting process is simple enough for those willing to pay attention: You begin where the water is clean and relatively natural, then follow the big river across an entire landscape defined by agriculture, to where the abused, exhausted water finally ends up.

Most of the river's journey is across the Snake River Plain; an area of high desert, where the Snake is just about the only source of water, other than the few inches of annual rain. So that river water is key to the biggest industry in this area - agriculture. It used to be potatoes and sugar beets that dominated Idaho farmland but more and more, farmers are planting corn and raising dairy cattle, two very water-intensive commodities. 

Manning gets into the politics of this - the subsidies for big agriculture, the poverty of many of the farm workers versus the wealth of factory farm owners, the fact that much of what is grown and raised on the Snake River Plain isn't exactly good for our health - and it's worthwhile to read what he has to say on these issues. 

But I want to focus on his main point - that the rise of agriculture has had a tremendously negative effect on the environment here. Much of land around the river has been converted to crop and grazing land, at the expense of native plants and wildlife. The dams and reservoirs that punctuate the water's flow prevent the natural rise and fall of the river, destroying the ability of many species to survive - I'm thinking of cottonwood trees, which rely on intermittent flooding; and salmon, which must swim upstream from the ocean to spawn in the Snake's many tributaries. 

And then there's the cow shit:

Basically, a single cow produces feces the equal of 20-40 humans. There's every reason to go with the high end of the range in the case of Holstein dairy cattle, champions in this regard, but assume a middle ground of 30. Under this math, the feedlots of southern Idaho offer to the environment the equivalent in raw sewage of 17 million people, dwarfing the effects of the state's 1.5 million human residents. 

Here's what blows my mind. That sewage isn't even treated. It's pumped out over the ground, where it filters through the porous volcanic soil back into the groundwater and back into the river itself. All those nitrogen compounds from the poop, plus the antibiotics fed to the cows to keep them healthy in unhealthy living conditions, plus the pesticides and fertilizers - all of that makes its way back into the groundwater (into people's wells) and into the river. 

Now where, you might ask, is the federal government in all of this? Aren't there limits on pollution? Something called the Clean Water Act? The state hasn't shown much interest in dealing with this but, according to Manning, the federal government believes Idaho has 13,057 miles of stream that fail to meet clean water standards. 204,091 acres of lakes/reservoirs. Agriculture - surprise! - is the biggest contributor to this pollution. But there are a lot of bureaucratic and legal loopholes that allow big ag to keep doing what they're doing - and regulators have no real recourse.

So all this nasty stuff ends up at the western end of the river, in the last few reservoirs before the Snake joins the Columbia. There it sits in what could be considered giant-sized sewage treatment lagoons, these reservoirs that are slowly filling up with toxic sludge. These are reservoirs are used for both recreation (swimming, fishing) and water supply, but there's no plan in place to clean them up or stop the ongoing pollution that stretches back across the state.

Drink up.

Burning Through Cash

Timothy Egan has a great opinion piece on wildfire prevention in today's New York Times. What it boils down to is that we - meaning the nation - have become increasingly bad at thinking long-term. 

Egan writes, "Smart foresters had been warning for years that climate change, drought and stress would lead to bigger, longer, hotter wildfires. They offered remedies, some costly, some symbolic. We did nothing. We chose to wait until the fires were burning down our homes, and then demanded instant relief."

Those bigger, longer, hotter wildfires are a lot more expensive to combat and the Forest Service has, ahem, burned through its firefighting budget over and over again in recent years. That means they've had to borrow money from other projects such as logging, removing dry, hazardous fuels, and restoring damaged forest land. 

All of those projects are components in preventing future wildfires. So siphoning money from them only increases the risk of more fires. But Congress (God bless them, no one else will) chose to reject President Obama's request for emergency supplemental wildfire funding, saying the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior should be able to pay for firefighting out of the money they have. 

Between those two agencies, there's $886 million left to fight fires this fiscal year. That request from Obama was for additional monies because, as I mentioned earlier, the costs of fighting fires has exceeded the budget multiple times in the past decade. That extra money would have meant enough money to fight this year's fires without borrowing against those other programs that serve as preventative measures. 

Now, so far, this year has unexpectedly been one of the mildest fire seasons in the past decade. But it's only the beginning of August. Dozens of fires are currently burning in the West. There are at least two months of fire season left this year and probably more in California, where the season really lasts all year. There's still plenty of time for things to get worse. And the Forest Service is already putting projects on hold, anticipating that they'll need to money by the end of August. Just this week, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack predicted that the firefighting budget would be depleted by then. 

Congress obviously had its doubts, which is why they denied that extra funding. And that brings me back to Egan's point about how the nation isn't exactly thinking about the long-term. Yes, if it's a mild year, the Forest Service won't need extra money. But think for a minute. The budget for firefighting has been exceeded many times in the past decade, there's an ongoing drought throughout the west, and the average temperatures continue to climb - even if this year is mild, the trend is still toward those longer, hotter wildfires. 

It's time to really think about how and when we want to fight fires and what kinds of resources we allocate to those programs. The less we do in advance, the bigger those fires - and the bills - are going to be. 

The Not-So-Great Salt Lake

Reuters published a piece earlier this week on how water in the Great Salt Lake is at its lowest level in at least 50 years. 

The lake is fed by 4 rivers and several streams but the recent mild winters have meant a smaller snowpack. That means less water to begin with and then much of that was also diverted for other uses, leaving leaves miles and miles of lake bed currently exposed.

I read a few articles on this issue, all of which mentioned the effect this has on boaters - Reuters points out that 70 boats in the 320-slip marina have had to be pulled from the water - but there's been nothing on the repercussions for wildlife in the area.

So I called up John Luft - he's the manager for the Great Salt Lake Ecosystem Program, part of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources - to see what he had to say.

Luft told me his program is really geared toward managing and monitoring the lake's brine shrimp population. They also keep an eye on the brine fly, as well as parts of the bird population - certain shore birds and water birds, although not game birds.

He said that the decreased water levels means a higher saline content but it's unclear exactly what effect that will have on the brine shrimp. They feed on algae and the salinity will definitely affect the algae growing in the Great Salt Lake. But there are other elements that also factor in to algal growth - like water temperature. So if the conditions are right and certain kinds of algae do well - the kind the brine shrimp like - the brine shrimp will be fine. But if it's not the kind of algae favored by brine shrimp, that could mean a drop off in population. It's still too soon to tell.

The brine fly, though, looks like it will have a rougher time. During the fly's larval stage, it attaches to the bioherms - which are calcium carbonate deposits on the bottom of the lake, kind of like coral. But as the water drops, those bioherms are exposed to air, making them uninhabitable for the brine fly larvae. That means fewer brine flies...

...and less food available for birds. Luft says that when the lake levels drop like this, he often sees birds bypass the lake altogether when they're migrating. That can be very taxing on them - they're used to getting such an abundant food source from the Great Salt Lake and when it's not there, the birds can die because they're unable to sustain themselves during the winter. 

Not much can be done except to hope for enough snow next year (and the year after that) to increase the runoff and help replenish the water levels. Fingers crossed. But in the meantime, it might be nice if reports on this issue pointed out that it's not just the poor boaters that are having a rough time.