From: TomDispatch
by Chip Ward
If you want to be unnerved, just pay a visit to the U.S. Drought Monitor
and check out its map of the American West with almost all of
California stained the deep, distressing shades of red that indicate
either “extreme” or “exceptional” drought. In other words, it could
hardly be worse. California is now in its third year of drought, with
no end in sight; state agricultural losses are estimated at $2.2 billion for 2014 alone; most of its reservoirs are less than half full; the Colorado River basin, which supplies water
to "about 40 million people and 4 million acres of farmland in seven
states," including California, is compromised; and California's first
six months of 2014 have been the “hottest ever...
nearly five degrees warmer than the twentieth century average.” The
drought’s arms extend north through Oregon ("severe") into Washington,
where it’s already been the fire season from hell -- and it’s just beginning. They also reach east through Nevada as far as Utah and straight across the Southwest in various shades of yellow, orange, and deep red.
TomDispatch’s western contingent, environmentalists Chip Ward and William deBuys,
have had the stresses of climate change, rising heat, drought,
wildfires, desertification, and someday the possible abandonment of
parts of the Southwest on their minds (and so on the minds of TD
readers) for years now. These days, the chickens are coming home to
roost -- but not, it seems, the beavers. Ward, a Utah environmentalist
and the former assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library System, has long focused not just on how our American world is being ravaged, but on how to protect and restore
it. In today’s post, he offers a reminder that sometimes such
restoration can come in small packages and that even the most modest of
natural geo-engineering can disturb vested interests. Tom
The Original Geo-Engineers
Or How to Save the Iconic West from the Cow
By Chip Ward
The great novelist Wallace Stegner sorted the conflicting impulses in his beloved American West into two camps. There were the “boomers” who saw the frontier as an opportunity to get rich quick and move on: the conquistadors, the gold miners, the buffalo hunters, the land scalpers, and the dam-building good ol’ boys. They are still with us, trying to drill and frack their way to Easy Street across our public lands. Then there were those Stegner called the “nesters” or “stickers” who came to stay and struggled to understand the land and its needs. Their quest was to become native.
That division between boomers and nesters is, of course, too simple. All of us have the urge to consume and move on, as well as the urge to nest, so our choices are rarely clear or final. Today, that old struggle in the American West is intensifying as heat-parched, beetle-gnawed forests ignite in annual epic firestorms, reservoirs dry up, and Rocky Mountain snow is ever more stained with blowing desert dust.
The modern version of nesters are the conservationists who try to partner with the ecosystems where they live. Wounded landscapes, for example, can often be restored by unleashing nature’s own self-healing powers. The new nesters understand that you cannot steer and control an ecosystem but you might be able to dance with one. Sage Sorensen dances with beavers.
Dances with Beavers
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