Schreiner’s Media Landscape

I couldn’t believe it when I read it in the newspaper of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois where I lived before I moved to Utah. State government is closing a number of state parks, including Kickapoo State Park outside nearby Danville, to pay for their own fiscal incompetence. Residents of the area are fighting it but it’s probably a lost cause and indicative of the tragic and short-sighted attitude our so-called leaders have toward natural places and their contempt for the people who put them in power.

I used to go there often to hike, picnic and row my raft. It’s where I took my camera to practice videotaping wildlife, Nature, and work out in preparation for my grueling trip to Tibet and hike around Mount Kailash in 2005: the result being my documentary “Kora: Tibet and the Trail of Truth.” It was one of the few, remaining natural places in an area long decimated abd denuded by corporate and large-scale agriculture.

Actually, Kickapoo was far from being wild. It was reclaimed coal-mining ground that had been scarred and scraped beyond industrial use. So it was left to return to the Earth and the result was a strangely beautiful park made up of hills, forest, streams, ponds and other stuff Illinois never had much of and has even less of now. Kickapoo is ironically, unnatural.

But open or not, it’s a gleaming example of what humans can do to correct the environmental mistakes we’ve made. Sadly, it’s now also an example of how we just never learn.

It was as if Salt Lake City had suddenly become the capital of Mars. I watched the front ooze into the valley from behind the Oquirrhs last night. With it came high winds, clouds and the distinctive smell of wood burning. It was smoke from Yosemite where the fires there burn on and the tourists keep coming anyway.

Ironically, and perhaps superfluously, I puffed on my cigar as the sky and eventually everything turned a grimy shade of pinkish-red (or is pink reddish?). I hadn’t seen sky like that since the Great Inversion of January 2007. This too demanded pictures for posterity.

At the same time, I found out on the 10 p.m. news, wildfires were burning near our own airport and up City Creek Canyon to our north. As the the aromas and plumes converged along the Wasatch, I felt an eerie oneness: a sense that a fire just up the road and another hundreds of miles away affect us all. Nature is so big, vast and powerful that it overwhelms us when it wills so without having to think, plan, choose or execute anything. No matter how we try we are incapable of taming or totally destroying it. We are only capable of destroying ourselves while Nature continues disinterested.

It’s sad to see Yosemite in California, one of America’s premier national parks, threatened by fire. It was sad in 1988 when Yellowstone, our largest and most popular park, was similarly devastated. No matter that it was a human (shooting a gun) that touched off this blaze. It could’ve been lightning or a number of causes. The dry conditions due to persistent drought in the southwestern U.S., people building luxury cabins and towns too close to and actually in Yosemite, and too many people driving into and around the park have turned Yosemite into a massive tragedy no longer waiting to happen.

We should take this time to recognize humanity’s role in not only starting the fire but creating the conditions that led to it causing so much damage and threatening so much more. Forests burned millions of years before humans walked the Earth. It was part of the natural process forests need to replenish themselves and stay healthy. But because humans demand consistency and predictability from Nature, the natural processes of our planet including floods, storms, fires, earthquakes, eruptions, droughts, etc. become DISASTERS. The ultimate disaster is that without an awakening to the devastation we have caused and a reversal of our destruction, there will only be more disasters- with no one to blame but ourselves.

Just as we were forgetting how incompetent, corrupt and arrogant the Bush/Cheney War on Everything Good Team is, they’re back to inflict yet more of their boundless stupidity and violence on the world. In announcing the development of “oil shale” bearing properties on public, federal lands, this out-of-control administration has done for energy what Iraq did for Vietnam: keep failing at the same thing again and again, doing it the same way over and over. As long as it’s with taxpayer money.

Bush and his Legion of Losers are ignoring history, a la Vietnam, to follow their ideological star of Bethlehem. It was about 25 years ago that all the major oil shale projects in Colorado- at Parachute and Rifle on the western slope, abruptly shut down and were abandoned. The reasons were never fully explained (Big Oil doesn’t have to explain anything to anyone and would we believe them anyway). But it was obvious the process was too iffy, too expensive and that the environment was endlessly expendable but Big Oil’s gambling money was not.

I was a reporter for KUSA in Denver and covered that story the day it happened. Colorado instantly became a state of shock. It was like 9/11. The abandonment by Big Oil of its once-precious and gleaming venture was also an abandonment of the people of Colorado and the environment: the thousands who came there to work, the economy that built its hopes and dreams around the billions that would be produced for everybody by these wonderful oil executives. Deep scars were left on the once-beautiful mountain countryside with nothing to show for it. Almost overnight, Colorado’s economy plunged into recession. New homes were abandoned, foreclosed and bulldozed. People fled the state to find work, employment shooting skyward. The taste left in the mouths of Coloradoans by Big Oil has stuck to this day. Colorado is one of the nation’s leaders in renewable energy.

I can still taste it today myself. I was there and lived through the tough years from 1982-1987 until I too left. Much like Michael Moore’s documentary “Roger and Me” where General Motors abandoned the people of Flint, Michigan, the the Black Sunday oil shale disaster is a tragic story of Big Oil hoodwinking government and sticking it to the people of Colorado. The question now is are the people of Utah and the other states affected by the resurrection of this unproved, expensive, environmentally destructive process similar to Canada’s tar sands in which it takes two tons of sand to make one barrel of oil ready to face the possibility of TOTAL ABANDONMENT after MILLIONS OF ACRES OF PRISTINE PUBLIC LANDS ARE DESTROYED?

If you are, then get ready to go back in time to 1982 in Colorado. It ain’t pretty, folks.

As the Bush Regime desperately tries to give even more zillions away to Big Oil and destroy millions of acres of public lands in the dubious development of so-called “oil shale”, here are some illuminating facts from our friend Drew Bush at the Wilderness Society:

White House Promises False Hope; Oil Shale Technology Remains Decades Away

Interior Department Oil Shale Rules Ignore Reality, Will Not Lower Gas Prices

(Washington, D.C.)—Ignoring the wishes of two Governors and numerous Members of Congress, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne today will outline the Bush Administration’s draft regulations for commercial oil shale production on more than 2 million acres of public lands in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah.  These draft regulations are expected to lay out the rules governing royalty rates, evaluation of lease bids, mitigation requirements, and other technical and procedural elements of oil shale leasing and production. 

A congressional moratorium on finalizing these regulations, which does not affect research and development already underway, remains in place until October. “Today’s announcement is designed to give the American people the false impression that oil shale has some hope of lowering gasoline prices,” Chase Huntley, energy policy advisor for The Wilderness Society (TWS), said. “But practical and technological impediments cannot be overcome by fiat.  Instead of gambling our resources on unproven fuel sources, such as oil shale, we should invest in proven options that will reduce prices such as higher fuel economy standards, energy efficiency and renewable generation technologies.”

Oil shale development depends on turning rock into oil but the oil shale industry is years away from establishing the technical, economic, and environmental viability of the technologies needed to extract and process oil from shale.  Corporate representatives acknowledge a commercially-viable technology for squeezing oil from rock remains a decade or more away.  In light of these knowledge gaps, Congress voted last year and the president approved legislation that included a limitation on the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) implementation of a commercial oil shale leasing program.

“Creating commercial regulations when we know so little about the technology puts the cart before the horse and puts the West at great risk,” Elise Jones, executive director of the Colorado Environmental Coalition (CEC), said. “Folks out here remember Black Sunday of 1982 when Colorado’s economy was devastated by the collapse of a major oil shale project. Haven’t we learned anything?” Commercial oil shale development poses dangers for the landscape, and raises concerns that not enough water, let alone water rights, exist in this arid climate to sustain an oil shale industry, according to a 2005 RAND Corporation report. Such a huge demand on the region’s water resources would hold serious consequences for agriculture and wildlife, particularly those animals inhabiting the lands and waters in the area.  

Furthermore, a recent review of the technologies under consideration found that fuels derived from oil shale would result in upwards of five times more global warming pollution than conventional oil and gasoline. With our country poised to cap carbon dioxide emissions, the principal pollutant driving global warming, the lifecycle emissions of shale fuels raise questions about the long-term economic viability of the industry and the soundness of policy to pursue a fuel source significantly more polluting than those it replaces.

Other Quotes: “Allowing our public lands in the west to be sacrificed for commercial oil shale development is a tragic misuse of some of the best wildlife habitat in the United States,” Denise Ryan, legislative representative for Public Lands, National Wildlife Federation, said. “It is not a choice the American people would make if they understood how much would be lost, for generations, for so little gain. Americans need better choices than to be asked to stick with failed energy policies at the expense of mule deer, elk, mountain lion, black bear and bald eagles. The wholesale industrialization of these public lands would forever change the way of life of surrounding communities whose economies depend on bountiful wildlife for hunting, fishing, wildlife viewing, outfitters and guides.

“In Utah, industry has thousands of acres of oil shale resources found on federal, state and private under lease already,” Stephen Bloch, conservation director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), said. “If they could produce oil cost-effectively at today’s prices they’d be doing so already. Leasing federal lands has nothing to do with allowing those activities to move forward, but everything to do with fattening those companies’ bottom lines.”

“Oil shale in Wyoming is a pipe dream,” Erik Molvar, wildlife biologist with Biodiversity Conservation Alliance of Laramie, said. “If we ever see large-scale oil shale production, the water demand alone could suck the West dry of water, an even more precious resource than oil.”

Please find quotes form experts on oil shale attached. For more information, please visit our Web site at: http://www.wilderness.org/NewsRoom/Statement/20080610.cfm

As a member of The Nature Conservancy, I’m really proud of the research our organization does to show not only how important maintaining our wild places is but how much damage and death is caused by encroachment of humans on our environment. This new study proves the harmful effects of air pollution on Nature, just in time to head off the attempt by the Bush Regime to allow the building of more coal-burning power plants next to wilderness areas and national parks. Of course, Bush’s people never read, listen to or follow even their own research results. This study will likely only be good in dsicouraging yet another disastrous policy mistake that will end up getting overturned by a federal court.

In yet another reversal of a Bush Regime environmental assault, a Montana federal judge has put grey wolves in the Yellowstone area back on the endangered species list. There were any one of a number of reasons for the reversal. The Regime ignored scientific evidence showing that the wolves are not safe now, instead buying the argument of ranchers and state authorities who said a hunt was needed to “thin” the pack. Of course, we all know that the Regime always does this because they have an aversion to anything right and/or good when it comes to Nature and will believe anything or just make it up themselves in order to achieve their reckless goals.

Another argument anti-wolf forces use is that the elk herd around Yellowstone is too small because of wolf predation, threatening ecological balance, and doesn’t leave enough for hunters. But as new and continuous information has shown, the reality is exactly the opposite. The lack of wolves is not only bad for the elk for the ranchers and their precious livestock. The latest shows that the Yellowstone elk herd is out of control, due to the lack of predation, giving rise to a deadly disease that, ironically, is spreading to the livestock that the ranchers have fought so hard to “protect” from the big, bad wolves.

This is what happens when politicians, acting either out of payback to special interests or reckless and ignorant ideology, try to play God. Like everything else Bush and his people have done, they screw it up and someone who really knows what they’re doing has to come in and fix it. Too bad a judge can’t just fix similar Bush decisions on air quality, Iraq, and other monumental policy disasters.

Ranchers and other nuts who successfully got grey wolves taken off the endangered species to allow hunting of the few that remain in the west used a dwindling elk herd as one of their primary justifications. Despite strong evidence to the contrary, the Bush Administration again ignored the facts and gave the anti-wolf people what they wanted. The irony is as great as the problem they’ve created.

Now, everyone sees as many of us have known for years that the anti-wolf forces were lying and the Bush Regime was (typically) stupid. Elk are dying from a disease caused by too many of them. Their population would be under control if wolves hadn’t been extirpated decades ago. The disease is spreading to the very ranch animals being “protected.” Without wolves, grizzlies and other predators, effectively wiped out by ranchers, bum legislation and development, the ecosystem is SNAFU and now we’ve got to come up with some other expensive and misguided plan to bail out the ranchers from a problem THEY CREATED. Your tax dollars at work.

A similar problem is occuring right now as well in Nevada with their wild horse herd. Too many of them means disease, environmental destruction caused by over-browsing and the invention of yet another stupid government program to bail out hunting groups and ranchers: this time, horse birth control. I’m not kidding.

The controversy over the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to stop taking applications for solar projects on federal land and take no action on the ones they have will not go away. Treehugger, a great eco-blog, is spurring on the discussion as the Bush Regimists take their final, extended summer vacations before going back to work under a new president who might actually care about America. Bottom line: no matter who takes over from Bush, the moratorium will be lifted because solar makes sense. It’s the Bush Administration and its relentless and unjustifiable protection of the oil, gas and coal industries that don’t.

It was only a matter of time before the federal government’s new  policy of fighting forest fires wherever and whenever they broke out would break down. That’s what’s happened in California where there are too many fires to fight, not enough people, money or time to fight them all. But the redirection of nearly the entire national park management budget into fighting fires to protect the zillion-dollar luxury homes ill-advisedly built right next to our national parks now appears a clearly expensive, unsustainable and destructive policy. But we can’t blame Bush for it. We can just blame him for not doing anything about it when he had the chance.

What we need is a federal law that says if you build your fantasy home next to a national park, YOU’RE RESPONSIBLE for protecting your home, not Uncle Sam. Why did the US Forest Service become the national fire department?