Wyoming's historic struggle: preserving vs. trashing its environment

We heard from Kate Wright of Wyoming Conservation Voters at a house gathering last night in east Cheyenne.

Kate talked about the WCV's 2011 Conservation Scorecard for the Wyoming Legislature. As expected, most legislators of both parties came up short when it comes to voting to preserve and protect one of the most beautiful environments in the world. Not surprisingly, the big money wielded by the energy speaks very loudly in the halls of the State Capitol. Severance taxes on coal, oil and gas pay Wyoming's bills. Legislators know it. When they forget, lobbyists from Encana and Peabody are there to remind them.

This will always be the case until Wyoming figures out alternative ways to pay the bills.

Tourism comes close. And tourism depends less on scenic oil wells and open pit mines than it does on towering mountains, crystal clean trout streams and waist-deep powder.

This is a traditional struggle in Wyoming. We're an "energy colony" for the U.S. and, increasingly, the rest of the world (coal for Australia and China). Tourists from China now make Wyoming a destination. A new housing development in China, located two hours north of Beijing, is called Jackson Hole and is based the the cute little Alpine village of Jackson, Wyoming. Or some sort of re-imagined version of Jackson. Isn't it fun to imagine a Wyoming-coal-fired suburb in China filled with people who can't wait to go to the Wyoming-coal-and-natural-gas powered village of Jackson, Wyo. While in our quaint energy colony, these tourists might want to take a side trip to the open pit coal mines of Campbell County. Industrial tourism is a growing trend. I know a number of people who've taken the coal mine tours and have been down into the deep trona mines of southwestern Wyoming. As a curious human being, how can you not be interested in the origins of the material that powers our laptop computers. I'm typing on one right now!

For the most part, tourists want scenic vistas. When they travel to scenic Sublette County, they want to ogle the Wind River or Gros Ventre Mountains, fish in Fremont Lake, hunt elk in the Upper Green River Basin. They also want to be able to breathe, which hasn't been easy with air pollution caused by oil and gas development in the Pinedale Anticline. Last winter, air pollution levels in Pinedale topped those in L.A.

Back to the Wyoming Conservation Voters. Check out its web site at www.wyovoters.org. Get a copy of the scorecard. In the Senate, some Repubs such as Tony Ross (Laramie), John Schiffer (Johnson/Sheridan) and Leland Christensen (Teton/Fremont) top those of Democrats Marty Martin (Sweetwater/Fremont) and Chris Rothfuss (Albany). In the House, however, Dems lead the way. You can't find a sorrier, more anti-environment group of Tea Party Republicans than those in Natrona County, home of Casper, "Oil City." These Natrona County Repubs are regressive in almost every imaginable way, so this is no surprise.

WCV will again be keeping score as the 2012 Legislature rolls into town. The org also will lobby for upcoming legislation, including the Aquatic Invasive Species Act, increased funding for the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust, and bills promoting Public Records and Public Meetings.

WCV is a 501(c)4 and works for all of us. It also has an education arm, a 501(c)3.

Go to the web site and contribute. You'll be glad you did.

Butte, Montana, native Barbara Ehrenreich: Dem establishment has abandoned OWS

Barbara Ehrenreich, 2008 photo by Jay Westcott/Rapport

Barbara Ehrenreich knows something about America’s working people. She grew up in the hard-knock western mining town of Butte (Wyomingites know something about tough mining towns). Her best-known book is “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.” She’s a life-long Democrat and an advocate for the “get out and vote” school of social change.

After watching the Democratic Party’s weak-kneed, lily-livered support for the Occupy movement, she may be changing her tune. I’ve been thinking along these same lines. Why should I support Pres. Obama when he turns a blind eye to those of us taking risks to advocate for real “change.” Why should America’s young people work for Obama’s reelection when he seems to be complicit in the overreaction to peaceful street protests, some of them visible from the White House? Why should I turn out to vote for any of those Democratic mayors and governors (I’m looking at you, John Hickenlooper of Colorado) who have used heavy-handed tactics against Occupiers?

Go to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/15/barbara-ehrenreich-occupy-wall-street

Also read Ehrenreich’s essay about OWS in Oct. 12 issue of The Progressive: http://www.progressive.org/one_percent_barbara_ehrenreich.html

Toxic tulipmania in a Wyoming national forest?

Daily Kos going crazy with posts about Wyoming (see earlier one from today). This one is about the rush to obtain unobtainium and other assorted strategic stuff known as "rare earths" in the Black Hills National Forest. Strip mines are planned. Go to Toxic tulipmania in a Wyoming national forest?

Tell it like it is M.L. and Wanda and Walt and Eminem and Maria and...

Nice review of the anthology "Working Words" in Hot Metal Bridge, the litmag at University of Pittsburgh. The reviewer, Amanda Brant, points out that "tell it like it is" seems to be the touchstone holding the many pieces together." Who can argue? Not every day that Eminem and Walt Whitman and Jim Daniels and Wanda Coleman and Emily Dickinson and Michael Moore and Maria Mazzioti Gillan get to share the same stage.

The reviewer excerpted the end of Gillan's long poem, “Daddy, We Called You.” Because it is much easier to cut-and-paste than actually type, here it is:

Papa,
silk worker,
janitor,
night watchman,
immigrant Italian,
better than any “Father Knows Best” father,
bland as white rice,
with your wine press in the cellar,
with the newspapers you collected
out of garbage piles to turn into money
you banked for us,
with your mousetraps,
with your cracked and calloused hands,
with your yellowed teeth.

Papa,
dragging your dead leg
through the factories of Paterson,
I am outside the house now,
shouting your name.

Read the entire review at Hot Metal Bridge.

Buy "Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams" at Coffee House Press or from your local bookstore.

Writers of West and South "immersed in loss"

"Westerners are immersed hourly in loss."

So said Rick Bass, Southern-born and now a citizen of the Rocky Mountain West. He was one of the guest writers Oct. 8 at the annual Literary Connection at Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne.

It’s an old script. Extractive industries remove our timber, coal, trona, gold, copper, uranium and oil. Access roads criss-cross our wild lands, leading to loss of animal habitat.

When each stake is played out, or expenses and regulations outdo profits, "the industries withdraw, blaming environmentalists, but never taking responsibility for their actions," Rick says.

The jobs leave with the industries. Anger and loss follow.

Rick bemoans the “trashing of our wild gardens” in the West. He doesn’t just “bemoan.” He writes angrily about the loss. He works vigorously to defend the wild places, notably his own Yaak Valley in western Montana. He has served on the board of the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies.

“The biota of the Yaak is the ecological equivalent of a Russian novel,” he says. “Not one species in the Yaak has gone extinct since the Ice Age. Maybe it’s the only valley you can say that about.”

His life as a writer and hunter suits the Yaak. He describes how the predator-prey relationship speaks to the conflict inherent in a short story or novel.

“In the Yaak, everything eats meat and is searching for it,” he says. “What is the hunt but story in pursuit of story?”

The predator may move through the landscape, he adds, but it is “the prey which directs the hunter’s movements.” Both are moving through a landscape which is both horizontal and vertical and filled with impediments.

“The hunted shapes the hunter – the dramatic tension between them is story.”

The hunting culture is vastly different from the farming culture down on the prairie. “Corn is not trying to elude you,” he says. “When you step into the woods, there’s nothing in you but imagination.”

I am not a hunter but I can imagine the hunt. Not the same thing as actually doing it. I know that there is a huge difference between stalking the frozen “fecal-drenched chicken” (Rick’s term) to the pursuit of a wild deer in the wild woods.

But thinking metaphorically, I can relate to the act of stepping into the woods of a story. Writer in pursuit of a story, moving through a complicated landscape. I start the pursuit but often the “prey” takes me on a wild ride that I didn’t anticipate when I started.

Rick is convinced that “there is a river of spirit that flows shifting and winding between me and the land.” This is some sort of “third spirit – a spark that ignites between us and the landscape.”

So the landscape is crucial to Rick Bass the writer and the hunter. So is the sense of loss that occurs when that landscape is plundered.

“The narrative is in full crisis now,” he says. There’s also a strange diminishment of time and space evident now. Is this sense of loss going away?

“I still can imagine a happy ending.”

Rick’s stories, of course, don’t necessarily have happy endings. He read sections of several – “Her First Elk;” “The Hermit’s Story;” “The Cave.”

He read the full text of “The Canoeist,” a story told mostly in the conditional tense – “would.” That’s a rarity. Very short – and a love story, too.

After the reading, emcee and fiction writer Laura Pritchett of Colorado said that she likes Rick’s “really funky odd love stories.”

Many of his stories are “funky odd,” going back to the stories set in the South in “The Watch.”

Stories riven with loss and dark humor. Two traits of writers I admire, whether they be West or South. As a passport-carrying member of both places, I know.

Mrs. P rides again in "unabashedly political" Working Words anthology from Coffee House Press

Word came yesterday that Coffee House Press has released the anthology "Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams," edited by Detroit's M.L. Liebler. It includes one of my stories set in Cheyenne. M.L. has been to Wyoming several times. I still remember fondly (and with some disbelief) the 2002 poetry and music performance by M.L. and Country Joe MacDonald at the old Zen's Coffee House on Lincolnway. M.L. may travel this way again soon -- stay tuned). Check out the book at http://www.coffeehousepress.org/working-words.asp.

The Detroit Metro Times had this to say about the book

“Unabashedly political. Tea-partiers beware. Working Words delivers more than 500 pages of unadulterated and unabridged working-class word art. . . . A heavy anthology . . . which suits the mission of Working Words just fine.”

The story, "The Problem with Mrs. P," was in my first collection, "The Weight of a Body," from Ghost Road Press.

You say Unobtanium, I say Molybdenum

Does the Unobtanium in James Cameron's "Avatar" have anything to do with the struggle over Molybdenum minining in Crested Butte, Colo. during the 1970s? Unobtanium=Molybdenum? Interesting report tonight on Denver's Channel 7. Go to http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/22770743/detail.html

You chemistry and/or sci-fi geeks can get your Unobtanium T-shirts at http://www.bustedtees.com/unobtanium