the reasons i'm here

Excuse my delinquency. I've been taking advantage of a flexible schedule and some outdoorsy friends to get outside and enjoy the best of Alaska. Over Halloween weekend I did another caribou hunt with my friends Ian and Trystan up on the haul road. The obligatory 5-mile hike out only added to the adventure.
This last weekend, I skied with some other friends the 11 miles out to Tolovana Hot Springs -- a few rustic cabins and natural hot tubs tucked away in a recently burned black spruce forest. It was about 10 degrees the night we stayed there, and the wind blew hard the next morning. Ice crystals formed in our hair as we soaked in the tubs

temperature change

No, not global warming, just coming back to Alaska from Virginia. I got back Sunday night and pretty much stayed inside all week. It's been unusually cold for October -- this weekend the high is about 10 degrees -- and I've been a bit of a wimp. I went out Friday night and the car started doing those wintery things -- the oil is thick like molasses, the tires are hard, the suspension stiff, and I'm pretty sure the crack in my windshield got a little longer when I turned on the defrost. Anyway, I finally went outside yesterday, first to help a friend put a roof on his cabin, then to ski around the dog mushing trails, and realized the cold isn't all that bad if you just dress for it. Today it's sunny and beautiful.

wild. wonderful. coal.

Larry Gibson isn’t impressive in stature. He’s not much more than 5 feet tall, has a bit of a belly, and was wearing Velcro shoes and a bright yellow T-shirt when we met him Thursday – so he wouldn’t get shot, he half-joked.
But he is an impressive speaker. Gibson is an advocate against mountaintop coal mining, and he apparently gets quite a bit of press. His T-shirt read, “WE ARE THE KEEPERS OF THE MOUNTAINS. LOVE THEM OR LEAVE THEM, JUST DON’T DESTROY THEM.” Then it listed a few phone numbers.
“I don’t want to just be seen,” Gibson told me and a big group of reporters on a coal-focused field trip, "I want to be heard." (I’m at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference.) We had driven about three hours from Roanoke, Virginia to eastern West Virginia and climbed a long dirt drive to a small collection of homes. Now we were standing under a tin-roofed shed and listening closely.
Gibson wanted us – and the people who read what we write – to hear how coal was fouling the air and making people sick, how it wasn’t sustainable or necessary (he’s pushing for wind turbines on mountain tops instead), and how mining jobs weren’t that great anyway.
We took notes and snapped pictures as he talked.
When Gibson finished, he introduced his friend, Chuck Nelson, a retired underground miner. Nelson had wrinkled, dark skin and big bags under his eyes, and before he spoke, I wondered if he’d been crippled in some way by his profession. (It turned out he wasn’t.)
Nelson’s case was also multi-faceted. With mountaintop mining, the jobs have shrunk dramatically; people are getting sick in awful ways (brain cancer, gall bladder problems); and mining is destroying the land. Nelson said he used to pick wild ginseng, gather nuts, and hunt – “Everything we needed, the land provided for us,” he said. Now it’s useless.
Nelson held a half-pint mason jar as he talked. He argued that coal was neither “cheap” – at least for people living here – nor clean, and said mining coal was even dirtier than burning it. He talked about sludge ponds and a particular disaster where one fell apart and spilled.
“This is some of the sludge that come outta that pond,” he said, holding up the Mason jar.
The jar got most of the way around the group before one woman unscrewed the cap and popped the lid off like it was a jar of jelly. The sludge was thick and dark and had globs of stuff in it. One reporter snapped a picture with his iPhone; another touched the substance – as if in solidarity – then wiped his finger on his sock. Nelson charged that big papers and politicians had failed to act because they were bought out by the coal industry.
It started to drizzle, so we set off to see the mine before the rain came. We hiked down a rocky road past big walnut trees and trailer homes with furniture outside, then up a slight hill till we reached a metal gate. Gibson called it the “Gate of Life." Before it was natural and alive, he said. Beyond it was dead.
Gibson explained that we’d actually be on mine property once we crossed it, adding that he personally didn’t mind getting arrested. He’d been arrested before, he said.
A man with a video camera filmed as Gibson spoke.
We climbed through the gate and followed Gibson up a grassy trail and out onto a small plateau. A little further, the land dropped off beneath us and the mine appeared below. Haul trucks rumbled along wide dirt roads with loads of rock, dumping the waste over dirt banks. The mine itself was a combination of flat spots and uniform slopes. One knob in the distance was still covered in trees.
The mine has already taken down the mountain about 900 feet in four years, Gibson told us, and has another four years of mining to go. “This mountain’s got 39 seems of coal,” he said.
Off to the right, a slope was covered with a man-made product aimed at restarting plant growth. To the left, charges were already set in the rock. In the distance, the leaves on the trees were starting to turn gold.

Our next stop was another mine a 45-minute drive away. This time we had permission, and guides from the mine and a West Virginia mining association.
The mine’s general manager, Rocky Hatworth (I think), got on the bus and joked about bringing a bunch of reporters to a coal mine. (The suggestion was that environmental reporters are environmental advocates, a label I try hard to avoid myself, but that’s another story.)
We drove up another dirt road to the mine site and parked on a wide, flat spot above the operations. A miner followed us there in a big haul truck, and when he parked it next to the bus, reporters went over to have their pictures taken by the giant tires. Down the hill, the ground was shaped in rigid contours, some of it with grass starting to grow back. Haul trucks carried loads of dirt and dumped them over a bank. Reforestation techniques are getting much better, the mining association guy told us.
We gathered by a small cabin parked on the dirt and met the mine’s owner, Andrew Jordon. Jordon is huge, but has a boyish and gentle look. Despite the cool air and drizzle, he wore only a T-shirt.
Jordon talked about growing up in the area and hunting in the hills around the mine. He explained how he got his degree in mining engineering, started his company, and developed the mine.
“To me, it’s very important to do this right,” he said.
Jordon said the hunting was still good around the mine and explained that the cabin was actually a hunting cabin for his employees. The cabin was built entirely of oak – from floorboards to bunk beds – that workers had rough cut from local trees. (They don’t just mine the mountain; they cut the forests on top.)
Jordon and Hatworth talked about replacing topsoil, bringing back local trees, and working with local university researchers to find the best ways to reclaim the land. In short, they argued that the impact on the land didn’t have to be that bad, or even negative at all – the woods would come back, and the valleys they filled in didn’t have real streams anyway. It seemed like they believed it.
The mine was fading into fog and drizzle, but we could still see the new shape of the land and the old shape of the hills around it.
Some, I thought, would see little more than destruction and waste in the vista. I figured Jordon saw something more like temporary disturbance.
Reporters huddled around and interviewed the coal guys, who were friendly and funny and not like the big, bad “coal industry” one hears.
I asked Jordon an admittedly vague question: If everyone agreed on the facts – the impacts on streams and forests, for instance – would there still be a battle over the more subjective things, like the importance of local jobs and the value of leaving a mountain a mountain?
Yeah, probably, he told me. People who don’t support the surface mining just don’t want things to change, he said.
A few minutes later, we boarded the bus and started back to Roanoke, surrounded, it seemed, by coal. Coal filled trucks on the road and barges in the river and thin seems in the rock cuts of the interstate.

coal country

Misty mountains, grazing cattle, golden fall colors, and rocky streams. I'm in West Virginia today on a field trip with the Society of Environmental Journalists to learn more about mountain top coal mining. We're getting a somewhat lopsided perspective on the issue from local academics and others, namely that mountain top mining and maybe even coal mining altogether needs to stop. I say lopsided because of the real value of the mining jobs and the overwhelming local political support for coal mining. That said, it's not hard to see the destruction of landscapes as a huge loss and real lack of vision.

winter

Back on the skis!

source or sink?

UAF prof Chien-Lu Ping has published new findings about the potential for arctic tundra to spew huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. Basically, Ping went around the state with a jackhammer (and willing helpers!) and dug test pits in the frozen ground -- more than 100 in all, according to a news release from the university. He found there was a layer of organic matter just above the permafrost and in the top of the permafrost that scientists hadn't accounted for and that could release large amounts of greenhouse gases under continued warming.
According to the release, Ping predicts that a 2-3 degree rise in temperature (unclear whether that's C or F) could switch the tundra from a carbon sink to a carbon source. I need to research that more, because there's been talk for a decade about the arctic tundra becoming a carbon source, although I do remember something about flaws in those old findings...
Photo courtesy of UAF.

critical habitat on the way - maybe

Conservation groups have reached agreement with the feds on one big issue related to the polar bear listing -- the designation of critical habitat -- although it's still unclear what will come of it. The agreement came Monday in the form of a settlement between the Center for Biological Diversity and two other green groups on one side and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and the US Fish and Wildlife Service on the other. Basically it forces the feds to make a final determination on critical habitat by June 2010 and issue final guidelines for bear deterrence procedures by March 2010 (and issue proposed guidelines and determination in time to meet those deadlines). Conservation folks say the feds were supposed to do the habitat listing already (the law actually allows an extra year in cases where critical habitat is "not then determinable") and say they've been slacking on designations with other species listed under the Endangered Species Act. The agreement is essentially an affirmation of existing law, but an important one, according to conservation groups.
That said, it's still unclear whether any habitat will be designated.
"The difficulty is that the ocean per se is not the habitat, the sea ice on the ocean is the habitat," FWS spokesman Bruce Woods told me last month. And the sea ice is constantly moving.
Conservation folks, meanwhile, say it would be a complete violation of the law not to designate any habitat.
The designation of critical habitat steps up protection for the animal by barring activities that would jeopardize the habitat (and not just the species), and by extending Sec. 7 consultation requirements "from the critter to the critical habitat," as Woods put it. Federal agencies would be barred from doing anything, such as permitting oil and gas exploration, in a designated area if the action would result in "destruction or adverse modification" of the critical habitat.
"It could have a pretty big impact," an attorney for CBD told me last month.
But the Interior Secretary also has some discretion in designating habitat. Critical habitat is defined as areas within the species' range "on which are found those physical or biological features (I) essential to the conservation of the species and (II) which may require special management considerations or protection." (The Secretary can also designate some areas outside the species' range if those are found "essential for the conservation of the species.")
Unlike with the listing itself, the Secretary can -- and must -- consider economic impacts of designating critical habitat. "The Secretary shall designate critical habitat . . . on the basis of the best scientific data available and after taking into consideration the economic impact, and any other relevant impact, of specifying any particular area as critical habitat." The Secretary is only required to designate a certain area if he determines, based on the best science available, that failure to do so "will result in the extinction of the species."
The other part of the settlement forces the feds to come up with guidelines for the non-lethal deterrence of bears that pose a threat to public safety.
The conservation groups are still seeking to have the bear listed as endangered rather than threatened and to overturn the special rule issued along with the listing.
For what it's worth, the settlement is technically a victory for the conservation groups. Under the agreement, the feds acknowledge the plaintiffs (the three enviro groups) are the "prevailing parties" regarding the two issues and agree to pay for plaintiffs' legal costs.

parsing palin's language

Palin offered a few more clues last night on her position on climate change, although she spoke so generally as to not really say much at all.
In response to Gwen Ifill's question, Palin first acknowledged that the climate was changing. Then she said she's "not one to attribute every man -- activity of man to the changes in climate." (Isn't that backwards?) "There is something to be said also for man's activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet," Palin said.
Biden was more direct. "The cause is man-made. That's the cause. That's why the polar icecap is melting," he said.
Taken simply at face value, I bet most scientists would be more comfortable with Palin's conclusion -- at least here in Alaska, it's pretty clear that cyclical patterns are playing a significant role in the recent warming. But in the context of the climate "debate," Palin's language signifies skepticism of the current scientific understanding while Biden's signifies trust in it.
Palin also echoed the idea she offered to Katie Couric, namely that the causes don't matter so much as the solutions. But those solutions don't make sense without an acknowledgement of the causes, and Palin's subsequent statements demonstrated that she at least sees human activities as a factor in climate change. Palin said she supports capping emissions of greenhouse gases and wants to ensure that other countries are also subject to caps. "We've got to reduce emissions," she said.
Andy Revkin at the NY Times had some good points on the vagueness of both candidates' comments on cap-and-trade legislation and "clean coal."

palin v polar bear

Palin might point out that her beef is with the Interior Secretary (for listing the bears as threatened) and not with the bears themselves, but here's a witty analysis from the Guardian on how Palin might fare in a battle with a bear -- pretty well, it concludes, "unless the Alaska Legislature suddenly decides to uphold the right to arm bears." Read the whole thing here.
The polar bear listing is a legal mess right now. Palin has sued Secretary Kempthorne in an effort to overturn it completely. The oil group API (et al.) and the Center for Biological Diversity have both sued over the special rule Kempthorne wants to use, although with different requests. The CBD also wants the bear listed as endangered rather than threatened, which would require stronger protections.
The special rule was implimented immediately at the time of the listing in May, but only on an interim basis because it hadn't gone out to public comment. The public comment period is done now, but the Interior Department has yet to issue a final special rule.
I wrote a summary of the bear listing last week for Petroleum News.

palin and climate

I was too busy grabbing quotes from folks at the Big I tonight to hear Palin's comments on climate change, but I did write something yesterday about her record on the subject. Basically, I argued that her hesitation to blame human activities could partly be populist politics, and that, whatever her motivation and beliefs, she's actually done some meaningful stuff. (And that a time will come when she really has to act or not.)
Anyway, that's at Alaska Dispatch.
A blogger at the Christian Science Monitor also looked into Palin's record and particularly the question of how one can address climate change without acknowledging its causes.