This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.
Month: September 2010
Dispatch from the West
Our latest assignment is to write a dispatch from the West, 250 words or less on one of four topics: wolf at the door, aspen, incised channels or water out of place.
Incised Channels
We were raised by a generation that doesn’t know what a stream looks like. We were taken hiking and told: this is nature. We were lied to.
They’re spread out like scars across the dried skin of meadows and desert sagebrush. In summer, heat evaporates moisture and the skin cracks, but there is no blood. The channels run straight and dry, banks trampled by cattle, aspen eaten away by elk. The groundwater is thirsty, praying for rain, but it doesn’t rain in the desert. When the snow from distant mountains finally melts, the water runs quickly, hurried without sinuous curves that used to slow it down. The stream is our journey West, the frenzied rush to build railroads and conquer the continent. We called it Manifest Destiny, and it manifested itself in beaver pelts, smallpox blankets and dams. It’s been a long time since beaver ponds told the water to slow down, stay a while. When you’re trying to squeeze profit out of dry land, water gets squeezed out too. A cow pie, a solitary puddle at the bottom of a canyon and acres of cheatgrass: this is our destiny, manifested.
We see the lie. We walk across the scars under the heat of a desert sun and fall asleep dreaming of the breeze playing with a yellow aspen leaf as it falls onto the surface of a pond built by beavers, the only animal that has ever been successful in its efforts to bring more water to the desert.
Uncomfortable truths in Nevada
Las Vegas is still growing. Las Vegas is in the middle of the desert. Las Vegas is running out of water.
Cows graze on almost all the public lands in Nevada. Land grazed by cows is easy to spot, covered in invasive grasses, cowpies, stream banks cut deep and straight with muddy hoof prints all the way to the bottom. The cost to run a cow and calf for a month on these lands is $1.35. On the allotment we visited today, 15,000 cows graze and the Bureau of Land Management takes in about $22,000 per year from the permitee. A recently constructed irrigation trough and pipeline on this land cost $400,000, paid for by the BLM. It’s full of algae with a dead bird wing buried somewhere under the muck.
Las Vegas wants to build a pipeline to Spring Valley to pump water from an underground aquifer. This water will go to feed its green lawns and the rainforests built inside casinos.
Nevada has a Senate seat up for reelection this fall. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, will face off against Sharon Angle. Reid has consistently supported gold mining in Nevada, pushing hard against reform of the General Mining Act of 1872. Because of this act, prospective gold miners can acquire a claim for $5 an acre on federal lands. If gold is found, they pay no royalties to the government.
Between 1951 and 1992, there were a total of 1,021 test of nuclear weapons conducted at the Nevada Test Site. One hundred of these were above ground. The radioactive fallout blew downwind into Utah and southern Nevada. Some of it ended up in Spring Valley.
In the East, where is rains, you measure land in cows per acre. In the West, where there is a desert, you measure in acres per cow. The math will give a solution between 25 and 150 acres.
A dumptruck full of gold ore will yield about one ring’s worth of gold. To get it out of the rock, you use cyanide. The waste from this process sits in ponds, sometimes lined, sometimes not. If the original prospector goes broke or can’t be found, the government pays to clean up the mining waste.
If Las Vegas takes the water out of Spring Valley, the land will dry up. The soil will become dust and the dust will become airborne. The dust is volcanic soil and is full of a carcinogen as potent as asbestos. The dust blew into the valley as fallout from the Nevada Test Site. The dust is full of tiny particles which have a knack for working their way into the moist linings of human lungs and staying there.
Sharon Angle, the Republican challenging Harry Reid for Senate, has called the separation of church and state “unconstitutional.”
Cows need water to drink. Cows need hay to eat and hay needs water to grow. You get water in the West by damming rivers or pumping it out of the ground.
Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in the United States. The Strip is covered in homeless men too resigned to ask for spare change. The neighborhoods outside feature fences topped with barbed wire and billboards advertising attorneys who can fight DUIs.
As climate change occurs, the West will become hotter and drier. Reservoirs will evaporate faster. River and stream flows will decrease because the glaciers on the mountains that feed them are disappearing.
About ninety percent of the population of Nevada lives in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, or in Reno. You can’t get elected in Nevada unless you support what Clark County and Reno want. And right now, they want their pipeline.
Cows trample biotic soil crusts. These crusts are made of mosses, lichens and microorganisms. They hold soil together, retain moisture, increase the productivity of adjacent plants and fix nitrogen and carbon into the soil. Without them, the soils blow away and water evaporates faster. Without them, the land becomes more desert and less water. Cows need water. Las Vegas needs water. The people of Spring Valley need water.
Pando Clone and conservation
This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.
Grazing: learning to see
This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.
Manzanar
As I mentioned the other day, we did a day excursion last week to Manzanar, one of about a dozen Japanese internment camps which were open during World War II. Manzanar is near the town of Lone Pine, California, in the shadow of the Sierra Nevadas. There’s a guard tower and some reconstructed barracks which are supposed to resemble the ones present in the 1940s. There is also a plaque describing the site, which, quite uncharacteristically for the National Park Service, describes internment clearly as a mistake and a demonstration of inhumanity. Because of this, the plaque has been cut with knives and shot multiple times, and another plaque has been posted on the private land directly behind it affirming the courage of American soldiers.
Seeing the site reminded me quite a bit of my visit to a slave fort in Cape Coast, Ghana. There, thousands of captive Africans waited packed like cattle in tiny, dark and filthy rooms, until they boarded a ship for a journey across the Atlantic which one-third of them would not survive. Japanese internment isn’t quite as unfathomable in its scale and inhumanity, but it still brought tears to my eyes to think about the things we’ve done to fellow people during the worst moments of our history. I read several pages of the visitor’s log, and there were several entries which said something like, “This is my first visit to Manzanar since I was released in 1945.” What really got to me was the exhibit about Japanese soldiers during World War II, including one man who dove on top of grenade to prevent it from killing his entire squad. He was killed and awarded a medal for valor, while his mother and the rest of his family was locked up in Manzanar.
I realized, walking around there, that so much of our history involves fencing away things we don’t like. The West especially has been defined and controlled by fences. Systematically murder Native Americans, then fence the once who survive in reservations. Dam rivers, fence them into reservoirs, so Los Angeles and Las Vegas can continue to grow. Put Japanese people in camps during the war because they might hurt the war effort. Anything contrary to growth, Manifest Destiny, war, America or God, we put inside a neat little fence and forget about. And now, it’s gotten to the point where we fence off the things we want to preserve. Fence the stream so cattle can’t trample the willow and aspen. Fence off the vegetation so it can keep growing undisturbed. Fence off Yellowstone and Yosemite to assuage our guilt as we mine uranium and clear cut forests everywhere else on our public lands.
I hope that we can take a lesson from history and never do this again, but our reactions to 9/11 suggest otherwise. Still, I hope next time we’re confronted with a crisis of national security, our first reaction isn’t to deprive people of their Constitutional rights.
The importance of water
This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.