Citrus season

The oranges are the very small ones with purple-to-red skin.

The lemons are the large ones with orange skin.

The limes are the medium sized ones with bright yellow skin.

It all makes perfect sense to fans of Moro blood oranges, Meyer lemons, and Bearss limes. And they all taste delicious.

Hike On! Stewart Udall's Legacy, from Sea to Shining Sea

Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Johnson and Kennedy, passed away at the age of 90 on Saturday. Rather than repeat the biographic details found in obituaries, this post pays photographic tribute to his life's passion, our wild public lands.

Although a quintessential Westerner who began public life as an Arizona member of Congress, one of his first successes in Washington in 1960 was in New Jersey. He championed citizens who wanted to replace Newark Airport with a larger one, and the creation of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge was the result.

As Secretary of the Interior, Udall is credited with helping to pass the Wilderness Act in 1964. Legalese can make for dry, dusty reading, but the Wilderness Act's definition verges on poetry:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, public lands expanded immensely, with more than 60 additions to the park system totalling 3.85 million acres, thanks to Stewart Udall. He oversaw the creation of remote Guadalupe Mountains National Park, the highest point in Texas, featuring stark contrasts between mountain and desert and the world's finest example of a fossilized reef.

North Cascades National Park, with its high cold peaks and glowing turquoise lakes, is part of his legacy. So are the misty, mystical Redwoods National Park in California, home of the world's tallest trees (below). He also deserves credit for expanding types of units (beyond national parks and monuments), such as the National Trails System (including the Appalachian Trail) established in 1968; the country's national seashores, including Point Reyes, Cape Hatteras, Padre Island, and Cape Cod National Seashores; and national recreation areas such as the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in Los Angeles (which keeps me sane). The Land and Water Conservation Act of 1965, which funds parks as big as the Grand Canyon and as small as your kid's soccer field from federal oil lease money, shows legislative ingenuity.

The vast, gorgeous, rugged labyrinth of Canyonlands National Park was established with his help.


The next time you take a whitewater rafting trip on the Rogue River in Oregon, salute Stewart Udall. If you'd prefer to fish for sturgeon on the Wolf River in Wisconsin (shown) or float the Verde River in Arizona or the Merced River in Yosemite Valley, thank him too for his role in passing the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

Not content with reshaping the great wild lands of the United States, he also helped to save Carnegie Hall from destruction.

He played a role in the National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act of 1966, arguably the most significant refuge law since the Migratory Bird Act of 1929 first codified refuge administration. Without that law, there would be no Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, no Key West National Wildlife Refuge, nor 56 refuges between, all established during his tenure.




President Obama's statement:

For the better part of three decades, Stewart Udall served this nation honorably. Whether in the skies above Italy in World War II, in Congress or as Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall left an indelible mark on this nation and inspired countless Americans who will continue his fight for clean air, clean water and to maintain our many natural treasures. Michelle and I extend our condolences to the entire Udall family who continue his legacy of public service to this day.

In honor of work by him and his brother Morris Udall, both patriots who loved their country from sea to shining sea, the easternmost and westernmost points in the country bear their names.

Two details stand out from the New York Times obituary on a life well lived, priorities in order, optimistic, resilient and relevant to the end. From his last Grand Canyon whitewater trip, he hiked from the river to the canyon rim, refusing a mule, 10 strenuous miles uphill, to enjoy a well-deserved martini. At the age of 84. And a recent letter to his grandchildren urged them to focus on "trying to transform our society to a clean energy and clean job society."

A tiny bit of good news

Late last week, I heard that Senator John McCain (R-AZ) would propose, as early as today, an amendment to an unrelated bill that could increase the number of helicopter flights over the Grand Canyon and deprive the public of input into the noise management plan being developed by the National Park Service. I put together a quick DailyKos/FDL diary, John McCain's temper vs. Grand-Canyon: quick action alert!, asked others to call their Senators, and sent the diary to a few people, notably Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM). I also called and emailed my one Senator who might consider voting for this amendment, to be told that she was still reviewing. Later on today, I learned that Senator Bingaman gave a great speech, McCain withdrew the amendment, the unrelated bill passed 93-0, and all's well with the Grand Canyon (until the EIS will be released, in which case the noise battle can be fought all over again).

Did I influence the outcome? Almost certainly not. Bingaman didn't like the amendment before getting any emails from me. My Senators never voted on the amendment. Alerts from the Sierra Club and National Parks Conservation Association and on other blogs probably generated far more phone calls than my one humble effort. Still, it feels good to be a tiny part of the larger effort.

Climate Change: On the Beach, or Going to Holland?

Climate news ranges from serious to depressing to "It's 'Game Over' For Humanity As We Know It." People pose the question: "shouldn't we just party on with the time we have left?"

In Nevil Shute's post-atomic-war On the Beach, Australian survivors of World War III wait for a cloud of radiation fallout to arrive. While waiting for certain doom, some of them attempt to lead normal lives, planting gardens that they will never see. Others in similar scenarios might turn to religion and mysticism; denial; hedonism; or contemplation of fate, possibly through the arts. Others may simply give up and surrender to despair.

Climate change does not mean certain doom for humanity. Our world will change, and we must accept its changes, but the changes do not automatically mean the end of the world. Compare being on the beach with going to Holland. This short, beautiful parable was written by the parent of a child born with a disability, analogizing it to a dream vacation in Italy. Instead of going to Italy, you learn you're going to Holland. You're angry and disappointed...until you see that Holland has tulips and windmills. It's not worse than Italy. It's just different. For the rest of your life, you will face the loss of that dream:

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Two recent reports illustrate the stark difference between choosing to live on the beach of business as usual and going to Holland.

The United Nations Environmental Programme Compendium 2009 could be summed up as Climate worse than we thought. A lot worse. Even if we enact an economy-wide cap on carbon and other countries stick with their plans to reduce carbon, we are still likely to see global temperatures rise between 1.4 and 4.3 degrees Celsius by 2100, with an equilibrium of 2.4 degrees Celsius, which will likely trigger three tipping points. The mainstream media reported that temperatures will rise 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit (but, oddly, missed the tipping point of the UNEP report).

Separately, a British conference tackled the consequences of life at 4 degrees Celsius at 2060. Computer modeling shows wildly uneven impacts all over the globe. Large parts of the inland United States would warm 10 to 12 degrees C. An average of four degrees C masks the worst increases; for example, southern and western Africa and the Arctic could each see rises of 10 degrees C. Water supplies for half the world's population would be threatened, and up to half the world's animal and plant species would die. This "plausible worst case scenario" arises from business as usual in which carbon emissions are not sharply curtailed.

Nevertheless, hope lives.

Betts said: "It's important to stress it's not a doomsday scenario, we do have time to stop it happening if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon." Soaring emissions must peak and start to fall sharply within the next decade to head off a 2C rise, he said. To avoid the 4C scenario, that peak must come by the 2030s.

In a business as usual scenario, the usual businesses continue to prosper until we all end up on the beach: game over, watching football, drinking, praying, despairing, or carrying on as if nothing has changed. We can, instead, choose to go to Holland. In Holland, we acknowledge the changes we have wrought in the world while mourning the loss of our old way of life. In Holland, there are no polar bears, and humans will be displaced by rising seas. However, Holland has tulips, and windmills, and -- most important -- polders, low lying tracts of land enclosed entirely by dikes. The ever-present threat of sea level rise has led not only to engineering marvels, but also the political marvel of the polder model, emphasizing cooperation despite differences in the face of a common natural enemy.

The choice is stark.

Climate change: Broken People in America

"Climate refugees": the term refers to people whose distance dulls the pain of hearing their stories, like Shahana Begum of Bangladesh.

Shahana's family, like more than half a million people in the impoverished nation, lost her shanty home and all her belongings when cyclone Sidr slammed into southern Bangladesh in November 2007, claiming more than 3,500 lives.

"I moved to Dhaka because there was nowhere else to go," said Shahana, for whom home is now a slum on the dry banks of the capital's biggest river.

The country's leading climate change scientist says it is a sign of things to come. "It used to be that we would have a big cyclone every 15 to 20 years. We are getting a big one now every two or three years," said Atiq Rahman, who was on the UN's Inter-government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Nobel Prize-winning IPCC predicts 20 million Bangladeshis will be displaced by 2050 because of sea level rises and an increase of natural disasters caused by changing weather patterns.

This tragedy could never happen in America.

Bangladesh, population 160 million, is among the countries most hard hit by climate change; an estimated 20 million people -- 1 in every 8 -- will need to be relocated by 2050 because of climate. Poverty and geography cause fragility: the country sits within the Ganges River delta, and 50% of the country would disappear if sea levels rise one meter. The news seems to be always bad -- famine, floods, erosion, lather, rinse, repeat. It's easy to become numb to words on a page. So we take pictures to explain what words cannot.

Shishmaref: "We are worth saving!"

We are worth saving! begged the island village of Shishmaref, before abandoning their homeland altogether.

A villager who has lived most of his life in Shishmaref pleads: "This is our home, this is where we live, where I grew up. Over 100 years we have been at this site as Shishmaref, starting with the school and everything, but it’s been thousands of years since the Shishmaref people have been using this island as a pasture point for the ocean."


Note the placement of the trash can in the center of the "before" and "after" pictures. Erosion occurs along the entire island chain, but exacerbated at Sarichef Island in part because of the hydrographic impacts of hard armoring of a sandy shoreface and permafrost degradation, accelerated by human infrastructure. The island now plans to relocate to the Alaska mainland. Yes, you read that right: Shishmaref is a part of the United States, not Bangladesh.

Isle de Jean Charles: Deliberately abandoned by the Army Corps
At the opposite end of America, Louisiana loses land: 30 square miles every year. A long-planned Army Corps of Engineers project, Morganza to the Gulf of Mexico Hurricane Protection Project (also known as the Great Wall of Louisiana), would protect parts of Louisiana from storm surges and climate change. However, it was designed to abandon the Native American people of Isle de Jean Charles. In 2006, a levee district director explained that it was simply a question of money:

"The problem is, based on the cost-benefit ratio, it would cost too much to include that sliver of land. For the cost, you could buy the island and all the residents tenfold."

In effect, the government had to ask itself: is it worth $100 million or more to protect a shrinking spit of an island, its only road, its modest homes, some of them little more than shacks, and its 250 residents, whose families have lived here for generations? Its conclusion: no.

By fall 2009, the same tribe announced plans to abandon its island home, instead using 12 million dollars in federal aid to move 230 people 10 miles inland. The Great Wall of Louisiana may not even work, and there may come a time to abandon places larger than Isle de Jean Charles. The Army Corps of Engineers' chief recently acknowledged as much when asked whether New Orleans should be abandoned entirely? Without answering that question, he told a reporter: "Protect the city, no. Reduce the risk, yes."

Kivalina: Climate cover-up succeeds
This photo shows the impact of sea level rise on Kivalina, Alaska far better than any words can:

Kivalina's residents decided to fight back. They hired prominent lawyers to sue 24 large polluters. More important, the suit also accused eight of the firms (American Electric Power, BP America, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Duke Energy, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Southern Company) of conspiring to cover up the threat of man-made climate change, in much the same way the tobacco industry tried to conceal the risks of smoking (as detailed in Jim Hoggan's recent, thoroughly researched Climate Cover-Up). On October 16, a federal district court judge dismissed (24 pg pdf) Kivalina's complaint (for legalnerds, the ruling was on political question and standing grounds). The plaintiffs plan to appeal to the Ninth Circuit.

Newtok: Broken people
Newtok, Alaska is a village being squeezed between two rising rivers. It's lost an average of 72 feet a year to the water between the 1950s and 2005. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) compares the villagers to American Indians losing their ancestral homes:

"But what we're talking about here is the existence of a people. When they are separated from their land, they lose their language. They lose their culture. They lose their identify. And what do we have for it? Broken people."

"We saw that, to certainly an extent, with the American Indian when we took them away from the land and gave them reservations and said, 'Here, here's how we're going to make it even,' " she said.

America's broken and abandoned people are not limited to these four villages. In Alaska alone, 31 villages are imminently threatened by erosion, with 178 more communities -- including its largest city, Anchorage -- vulnerable to erosion. Even if they're all relocated, they're not legally "climate refugees" because they're not moving from one country to another. Climate refugees have been described as the third rail of climate policy. Under the Geneva Convention, a "refugee" is a person who flees from one country to another, such as the millions who have fled drought between Kenya and Somalia. The United States has no long-term relocation policy for people whose homelands become unlivable due to climate change. Instead, affected villages have been clamoring for federal and state money on an ad hoc basis.

The broken people of villages such as Shishmarek and Isle de Jean Charles have more in common with Shahana Begum and other Bangladesh people than they do with the average middle-class American: native people, practicing a subsistence lifestyle in a fertile land, being harmed by forces far away. To this middle-class American observer, they're the 21st century equivalent of Native Americans being forced off their homelands, through no fault of their own, and herded on to reservations.

The Senate Environmental & Public Works Committee begins hearings tomorrow on the Kerry-Boxer bill, Most of the debate this week will be on its dollars-and-cents costs and benefits. Will Senators Murkowski and Begich of Alaska, and Landrieu and Vitter of Louisiana, demand justice for their people, or will they vote for their shares of oil contributions? Rising seas will not respect their votes.

Our treatment of poverty-stricken villages sets a precedent for how we will treat others affected by sea level rise. Will the residents of Dade County, Florida plead "We are worth saving!" or will they simply allow themselves to be meekly herded off their land? Will the Army Corps of Engineers ultimately decide that the costs of storm surge barriers and seawalls around this city are too high?
Or will we treat people with money different from people at the margins of American society?

Twittering away

I always said I refuse to twit, trying to condense thoughts into arbitrary tiny character limits. I'm not an early adopter of new technologies. It's time.

Follow me: RL_Miller on Twitter.

Monumental Follies: Utah Says No to New Jobs

The guvmint-hatin' Utah state legislature has just declared a preemptive strike against creating new jobs and revenue in the state. Today, the state senate passed a resolution opposing federal creation of new monuments. A few weeks ago, a Department of the Interior memo brainstorming 14 possible national monuments, including two in Utah, was leaked to a national park-hating member of Congress, creating a firestorm of manufactured controversy throughout the West. In response, Republican-dominated state legislatures are railing against an entirely chimerical federal land grab. Consider it a Sagebrush Rebellion 2.0.

Just how bad for Utah would those new national monuments be?

The Utah state senate's resolution, following a similar one in the state house of representatives, is not binding on the federal government. The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives the President the power to declare monuments regardless of the opinion of any state legislature. Instead, the resolution is part of a larger Sagebrush Rebellion 2.0, being cynically manufactured by western Republicans.

Consider what impact the national parks and monuments have on Utah.
* In 2008, the last year studied (53 pg pdf), non-local visitors spent $548,251,000 in Utah. The Park Service employed 971 people, and national park-related businesses employed an additional 11,340 people, in Utah.
* The state's official travel site invites the visitor: "Welcome to Utah, paradise for outdoor enthusiasts! From National Parks to ski resorts..." with a page devoted just to Utah, "America's National Parks capital" and another page extolling the virtues of Utah's national monuments.
* These numbers don't do justice to the pride that Utahns take in their land. The state license plate shows Delicate Arch in Arches National Park (formerly Arches National Monument). Utah has some of the most spectacular scenery in the country, and much of it is conserved as national parks and monuments.

One of the two proposed national monuments is the San Rafael Swell (pictured), geologically and geographically similar to Capitol Reef National Park. Capitol Reef's non-local visitors spent $27,842,000 in 2008, and the federal government spent an additional $1,141,000 on payroll. If the San Rafael Swell becomes a national monument, similar numbers should be expected. Currently, it's managed by the Bureau of Land Management, has no visitor services, and is used only by off road vehicles and very intrepid hikers.

After all, the Utah state legislature can easily afford to say no to jobs and revenue, right? The latest draft of the state budget cuts education by $21 million, adds a cigarette tax, and cuts the Utah State Hospital's budget by $500,000.

But what's mere money when Republicans can stand on principles against a socialist federal guvmint land grab?