Wardrobe Malfunction

By Joshua Zaffos

It can hardly be considered a coincidence that West Nile virus swarmed America, and then the insect-repellent garment industry had a breakthrough. Just imagine a group of investors, outdoorsmen, scientists and fashionistas assembled in the late ’90s to outfit the “swat team,” as Colorado health officials have dubbed citizens wary of disease-bearing mosquitoes. In 2001, a limited liability company formed in Greensboro, North Carolina, to manufacture and sell BUZZ OFF Insect Shield apparel.

Asian tiger mosquito, a vector of West Nile virus (photo via US CDC)

Now, L.L. Bean, Orvis and Ex Officio offer shirts, shorts, hats, pants and socks “impregnated” with bug-repelling, patent-pending technology. Fort Collins residents can buy BUZZ OFF clothes at Jax and REI.

This sounds like a godsend for Coloradans and all Americans. West Nile virus landed in the U.S. in 1999 and arrived in Colorado two summers ago. That year, 2,947 people in Colorado reported West Nile symptoms and 63 died. In Larimer and Weld counties, 948 citizens were diagnosed with the virus and fifteen of them died. Last Wednesday, the counties confirmed the first two cases of West Nile for the year statewide.

Mosquitoes spread West Nile by biting infected birds and picking up the disease. Then, one little vampire flies off, sinks her proboscis into a fleshy elbow, penetrates a blood vessel and leaves behind the virus. Symptoms include fever and body aches, but can progress to convulsions, encephalitis or meningitis—which both involve inflammation of parts of the brain—and even death.

The stats and symptoms escalate that buzzing by your ear from annoying to perilous. Sweat, induced by the heat and fear, increases your chance of infection since mosquitoes are attracted by scent. The burning sting on the back of your neck becomes exacerbated by an itchy paranoia over imminent brain swelling.

Why wouldn’t a person run out and buy BUZZ OFF clothing? A wardrobe that wards off mosquitoes bearing West Nile virus and ticks with Lyme Disease could save humanity. “How does it work?” you wonder, as you stand in line at the register of your favorite outdoor clothing store. According to the tags, “BUZZ OFF Insect Shield builds into your clothes a manmade version of a centuries-old insect repellent made from chrysanthemums.”

That kinda sounds like the campy ’70s commercial when the Asian laundry man credits an “ancient Chinese secret” for getting clothes clean, but it turns out to be the detergent additive Calgon.

Chrysanthemums do produce a natural chemical called pyrethrin. You can make it at home by crushing the dried flowers. But BUZZ OFF uses a synthetic pyrethroid called permethrin, which was engineered to be much more toxic than flower power.

Permethrin is a neurotoxin that’s applied as an industrial crop pesticide—and has been sprayed over Fort Collins in previous summers. The United States Environmental Protection Agency recognizes the chemical as a possible cancer-causing agent, which is why BUZZ OFF is the first line of clothing ever registered with the government agency. Studies reviewed by the World Health Organization show an increase in lung and liver tumors in mice exposed to permethrin. Further, some experts believe permethrin is an endocrine disruptor, meaning it can monkey around with the hormones that cue our growth and development.

An alarming example could be the 30,000 cases of Gulf War Syndrome among soldiers who fought in Iraq the first time around. The illness causes chronic muscle and joint pain, memory loss and general neurological damage. Research from Duke University suggests that Gulf War Syndrome may be linked to the use of permethrin-impregnated clothing in combination with anti-nerve gas drugs and DEET, the most popular toxic bug spray.

“Ancient Chinese secret, huh?”

None of these health risks is on the labels for BUZZ OFF. The tags sewn on the neurotoxin-laden clothing don’t even mention permethrin. The manufacturers do, however, tell consumers to wash BUZZ OFF clothing separate from the rest of the laundry and that its repellent powers wear off after 25 washings. Field data already prove that permethrin from agricultural use builds up in rivers where it’s lethal to the fish and critters that live in the waters.

Government health departments concede that West Nile virus is rare, and most infected people won’t even know they have it. Officials say the peak in transmission occurs the second year after the virus shows up, meaning Colorado and most of the country has already seen the worst of it. Last year, there were fewer than 300 cases and only four deaths in the entire state. Our counties had just 25 cases; everyone survived.

There are plenty of truly natural insect repellents, including citronella, lemongrass and tea tree oil. Public health and consumer groups are pushing for the clothing tags on BUZZ OFF to fully disclose the dangers of permethrin. But as with so many other toxic chemicals, this is probably another experiment where we’ll learn the results the hard way.

And that’s enough to sting us with a really painful dose of paranoia.
Staff reporter Joshua Zaffos uses a combo of lemongrass and B.O. to ward off the skeeters.

A February 11 article in The Telluride Watch covers some local environmentalists’ concerns about the plans of the milling company, Energy Fuels Resources Corp., which has applied for a permit, and the potential impacts to the Dolores River and its flows should the project receive approval.

Mills process uranium once it is removed from the ground in order to make it usable for nuclear power plants, but the operation involves using lots of water and leaving behind tailings that can contaminate air and water. Western towns, including Cañon City, Colorado and Moab, Utah, are both still cleaning up from older mills and dealing with the toxic results; a 2006 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory fact sheet details the cleanups and regulations surrounding mill tailings.

I wrote a feature article (“CWCB’s Instream Flow Program matures”) about the Dolores and the ongoing process to protect streamflows within the river for biological, recreational and agricultural needs in the Fall 2009 issue of Headwaters Magazine, put out by the nonprofit Colorado Foundation for Water Education. The story covers the progress of the state board in charge of protecting these instream flows in rivers across the state, using the Dolores as a key example of Colorado’s evolution in considering river health.

Federal regulators will review the uranium mill application, but a decision is likely a ways off and highly dependent on other factors, namely the development of the domestic nuclear power industry. And regardless of regulators’ decision, it will undoubtedly face legal challenges.

Bivalve Blues

Report Reveals Global Risks for Oyster Reefs

Exposed oyster reef in the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia (NOAA)

Baymen harvest an average of roughly 99,000 tons of oysters each year from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. But that kind of bounty is now uncommon: Around the world, 85 percent of shellfish reefs have been lost to overfishing and habitat destruction, according to a new Nature Conservancy report, Shellfish Reefs at Risk.

“Shellfish reefs are the single most impacted marine habitat globally,” says Mike Beck, a Conservancy marine scientist and lead author of the report. Beck and his team of scientists compiled status reports from more than 144 estuaries and found that reefs were in significant decline worldwide.

While records show that even the ancient Romans exploited shellfish reefs, the pressure on oysters, mussels and clams today is unprecedented. Overharvesting has led to the functional extinction of many oyster reefs throughout Europe, North America and other continents. In fact, most of the oysters we eat now come from aquaculture.

Global condition of oyster reefs (via The Nature Conservancy report)

Other major threats include disease and parasite outbreaks; the introduction of non-native species; pollution from the filling and dredging of coastal areas; and runoff from urban development, industry and agriculture.

Most countries tend to manage oyster reefs as harvesting fields and not much more, Beck says. We underappreciate and undervalue the “ecosystem services” that shellfish reefs provide, he says, such as filtering and purifying water, controlling erosion and supporting scores of other marine species.

While providing a global assessment of the threats facing shellfish, the report also outlines steps to help protect and restore threatened reefs. The scientists recommend that governments protect some of the best remaining reefs in places like the Gulf of Mexico and Georges Bay in Australia.

Beck also calls for new and existing funding to focus on the long-term restoring of reefs, not just on oyster harvesting; many restoration projects now allow harvesting only a year or two after oysters have been replanted. “We should allow reefs to rebuild themselves. And then we should allow harvesting of just the interest, not the principal,” says Beck. “We need to see the reefs return, not just the oysters.”

-Joshua Zaffos

Howard Zinn

Among the many recorded moments of American history impacted by Howard Zinn, who died at age 87 in late January, one of the most significant is the Ludlow Massacre, a 1914 labor skirmish between Colorado’s militia and the families of striking coal miners.

Calling Ludlow a skirmish is putting it gently: In April 1914, the Colorado National Guard, called in by the mining companies, opened fire on women and children at the Ludlow tent camp, killing fourteen, and then set fire to the settlement. The incident ignited seven months of gunfights and bombings around southern Colorado’s coal fields, but the history of Ludlow remained in the shadows, partly because neither embittered families nor mining executives much wanted to remember the massacre, albeit for different reasons.

Zinn first heard about Ludlow through a Woody Guthrie song, which inspired him to learn more about the labor wars in Colorado. Here is Zinn, in his own words, talking about Guthrie’s influence and Ludlow:

Zinn later included his own telling of Ludlow in his seminal work, A People’s History of the United States (Disclosure: I’ve never read the complete tome, but have read his section on the coal labor struggle).

Before Zinn’s scholarship, the labor struggles surrounding Ludlow were “taboo,” according to Thomas G. Andrews, a history professor at University of Colorado, Denver. Andrews wrote an environmental history of the Colorado coalfield wars, Killing for Coal, America’s Deadliest Labor War, which I reviewed for Earth Magazine in July 2009.

Andrews spoke to Denver Post columnist Susan Greene for her January 31 column, remembering Zinn and Ludlow. In the column, Greene offers her take on Zinn and the positive consequences for history students in Colorado and everywhere:

…Zinn’s many writings about Ludlow brought broader awareness. In several essays since the 1970s, he made it known how deep the corruption of wealth and power ran.

“The mining camps were feudal kingdoms run by the coal corporations, which made the laws; curfews were imposed, suspicious strangers were not allowed to visit the homes, the company store must be patronized, the company doctor used. The laws were enforced by company-appointed marshals. The teachers and preachers were picked by the company. By 1914, Colorado Fuel and Iron owned twenty-seven mining camps, and all the land, the houses, the saloons, the schools, the churches, the stores,” he wrote.

…

Zinn put Ludlow on the map. Not just as a place, in all its gruesome details, but as a concept. He popularized the struggle so that the name of the railroad town has become synonymous with corruption — “the firm connection between entrenched wealth and political power, manifested in the decisions of government, and in the machinery of law and justice.”

Ludlow’s uncomfortable history now is taught widely in college courses and K-12 classes. Textbooks cover it. Students take field trips to the shadowed ground that’s finally a national historic landmark.

To hear more from Andrews about his research and background with the Colorado coal wars and Ludlow, check out this video:

Good Spirits Bar and Grill

– Joshua Zaffos

The Deceased: Good Spirits Bar and Grill (a/k/a The Great Escape Pub and Eatery), Paonia CO
Born: August 2002
Died: March 2003
Cause of death: Teetotalitarianism

Good Spirits Bar, c. 2003

“Any town with more churches than bars, that town’s got a problem. That town is asking for trouble.”
- Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

When I first arrived along the North Fork of the Gunnison River, I remember reading one of the tourist rags promoting the North Fork valley. Amid the popular trail suggestions and bed-and-breakfast listings, the paper also included notes from town meetings for the small communities of Paonia, Crawford and Hotchkiss. That month in Paonia, a proprietor went before the town trustees proposing to re-open a bar along Grand Avenue, the town’s main street.

Previously known as the Great Escape, the bar had built a reputation for a roughshod roadhouse atmosphere that led to its eventual demise. At the town meeting, trustee Dave Weber remarked to the new owner: “Let me tell you a story. I was walking down the street one day and I saw blood on the sidewalk. I followed it and it led right to the door of the Great Escape. I hope you are planning on doing a better job.” Weber and the council then approved a liquor license for the new establishment, Good Spirits.

Blood on the sidewalks is a legitimate concern for any town council. But, at the same time, no local government should deny its citizens a place where they can unwind after a hard day of coal mining, farming, assembling Chaco sandals or housesitting.

For those inclined to commit righteous deeds after a day’s work, Paonia offers its 1,500 residents at least 14 churches where folks can meditate, worship or reflect. On the other hand, Good Spirits was one of only two legitimate bars serving liquor and fifty-cent pool to the public seven days a week. And it was the only bar with windows – an exercise in optimism. A few restaurants also serve alcohol, but Good Spirits had a monopoly on the weekday whiskey-drinking crowd (barely a crowd) that was interested in looking out on the bustle (rarely a bustle) of Grand Avenue in Paonia.

During my nights inside the re-opened bar, I never saw a single brawl or any other raucous incident that sent someone home bleeding. But Good Spirits never could get out of the dark and smoky shadow of its predecessor. One reason for the uninterrupted association was that the bar never actually removed the sign from its façade that read, “Great Escape.” Instead, the owner chose to just airbrush its new moniker on a window. Most people still referred to the bar as the Great Escape, or more commonly as the Great Mistake.

Great Escape façade, c. 2003

The lack of a crowd didn’t much matter to the regulars, including myself: Our attraction to Good Spirits (née Great Escape) was directly related to everyone else’s aversion to the place.

My sentimentality and nostalgia towards Good Spirits stems from the fact that we both arrived in the North Fork valley at the same time – and discovered ourselves together. The bar was a mistress I’d visit irregularly, but when I showed up I gave her my devotion. In return, Good Spirits offered me comfort and spontaneity – the defining characteristics of small-town romance. On any given evening, I could either drink without speaking to a soul and just listen to the jukebox or hold a conversation with a caffeinated workman lecturing me on fiber optics while watching a couple dry-humping next to us on the bar rail.

On Monday nights during football season, the bar would show the game and cater to hunters who had just returned from their weekend in the West Elk Wilderness. Fellas from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oklahoma and Texas usually demonstrated signs of chronic wasting disease of the mouth, rambling loudly to themselves and drinking Budweisers and watermelon pucker shots.

Karaoke night at the bar was Thursday and run by the North Fork madam of sing-along, Holli Karaoke. One of the regulars would sing throughout the evening, always accompanied by his dog yelping and howling along to the chorus of “Mustang Sally” or “Proud Mary.” I was the one who usually waited till the end of the night and then liked to sing Stealers Wheel or Eddie Rabbitt.

Weekends guaranteed less consistent, but equally entertaining distractions. One Saturday night, Good Spirits actually had a tattoo parlor set up in a front corner of the bar. Less than twenty people were in the establishment at any point that night, but the tattoo artist was busy the whole time (and didn’t send anyone home bleeding). The unnerving whining of his needle steadily detracted from Willie Nelson’s rendition of “Pancho and Lefty,” which played over and over on the jukebox.

Unfortunately, a small band of Tuesday night whiskey warriors and Thursday night karaoke superheroes weren’t enough to keep the bar afloat. Good Spirits shut down this March under the guise of “renovation” – but the bartender told me a week later that the doors were closed permanently.

And now our town must wait for a new bar to take over the location, and we’ll keep our fingers crossed it doesn’t fall into the hands of a local bible study group or a sinister boutique owner from Aspen. An establishment open daily – and nightly – serving liquor and natural light can do more to satisfy the all-season sanity of a small town than any church or kitschy fashion salon.

Books: Killing for Coal: A Class, Environmental and Labor War

Many more men died in shadowy mines than during gunfights in the days of the Wild West, a point that darkly underscores the true threats of the Rocky Mountain frontier. But miners’ safety and gunplay collided in April 1914 in the southern Colorado coalfields. At the tiny tent colony of Ludlow, a seven-month-long miners’ strike ignited into a fire fight with state National Guardsmen, resulting in the death of five miners, two women and 12 children. The Ludlow Massacre marked the beginning of a season-long armed struggle that transformed the Colorado coalfields “into an epicenter of class war,” according to Thomas G. Andrews’ new book, “Killing for Coal.”

In “Killing for Coal,” Andrews dives into the global and local forces that pitted desperate laborers against industry bosses, culminating in the massacre and a month of violence when more than 60 individuals were killed, including striking miners and their families, strikebreakers and hired mine guards. Ludlow and the Rocky Mountain coal wars have largely been remembered as a labor battle, earning folkloric retellings and academic history treatments from the likes of Upton Sinclair, Woody Guthrie and George McGovern. But Andrews, a history professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, reframes the story with an emphasis on the environmental conditions that influenced the miners’ behavior and actions.

In late 19th century America, coal and other fossil fuels powered impressive growth. Where the high and dry plains had promised little chance of prosperity, mineral exploration enabled factories and brick homes to rise in cities illuminated by streetlights. Mechanized tractors and chemical fertilizers changed the scale of farms. Railroads stretched across the continent without consuming forests for fuel. Andrews calls this “mineral-intensive industrialization,” and Colorado’s bountiful coal deposits fueled the unheralded development of the frontier and the entire nation.

For William Jackson Palmer, the railroad engineer who discovered Colorado’s coal outcroppings in 1867, the question was whether an industrial era for the Rockies could avoid the unscrupulous and immoral business relations that seemed to follow mineral wealth. He sketched out a utopian vision of Colorado’s future coal industry, where miners would receive fair wages and stock options, and “there would never be any strikes or hard feelings among the labourers toward the capitalists.”

Reality never approached Palmer’s daydream. A glut of workers, migrating from all over the United States and three dozen countries, guaranteed cheap wages and a dispensable view of labor. Coal might have built Denver as a modern city, but underground, it remained a primitive “workscape” that hardly benefited from industrial advances. Coal dust caused “miners’ asthma,” better known as black-lung disease. The release of stinkdamp (hydrogen sulfide), blackdamp (nitrogen and oxygen) and firedamp (methane and carbon monoxide) posed a range of dangers from suffocation to combustion. Fallen roofs, explosions and fires also terrorized some individuals. By 1900, Colorado mines had twice the average death rate of other American coal mines.

Ludlow Tent Colony, before the massacre, 1914 (image from Denver Public Library)

Mining had enabled technological progress for society, but the workers received few of the advantages of industrial life in the coal mines — or at home. Strikes broke out from time to time over better pay, improved ventilation or an eight-hour workday. But things didn’t get violent until the oppressive work environment moved to the surface. The construction and administration of regimented “company towns” in the 1900s gave mine owners control over stores, schools, governments and courts. When the Strike of 1913 began, miners were either exiled from these communities as union agitators or left on their own, leading to the formation of union tent camps like Ludlow.

Mining officials, including John D. Rockefeller Jr., portrayed labor unrest as the inflated whims of union leaders, not a grassroots uprising. But the “underground commonwealth” that had formed in the coal mines fed a solidarity aboveground that superseded ethnic divisions among miners and overwhelmed their bosses, who, the miners said, had no idea what was really going on. The Ludlow Massacre and the coalfield wars of 1914 are still the country’s deadliest labor rebellion since the Civil War.

Andrews dwells on the connections between geological, economic, environmental and social forces, illustrating how they combined to inflame the labor woes leading to the coal strikes and conflicts. Today, most of Colorado’s former coal towns and tent camps are ghost villages in the shadows of the Rockies. But the communities that have sprung into resort ski towns still depend on fossil fuels — and migrant labor — for their existence.

Amnesia or denial of the complex relations between our exploitation of mineral resources and management of labor probably won’t initiate a new era of violence, Andrews writes. But until we better understand and acknowledge the connection between class conflict and environmental degradation, we won’t really know what’s going on either.

– Joshua Zaffos

I wrote an article, “Mining for Reform,” on what Congress is looking at to reform the 1872 law in the Fall 2009 issue of Forest Magazine. The issue brought together several articles looking at the consequences of abandoned mines on Western public lands, under the title of “Hardrock Headache.”The mining industry has opposed regulations stricter than those within the 1872 law that would increase costs or liabilities for existing and future mine owners. But environmentalists and other public-interest groups have long argued that mining laws don’t reflect the advent of environmental regulation, so the rules should include production royalties (paid by miners who use public lands, like national forests), a cleanup fund for the abandoned sites, and a list of sensitive areas where mining is prohibited.

The abandoned Leviathan Mine in California is among the sites that could be restored through a cleanup fund (US EPA)

Here’s a rundown, from my Forest article, on the 1872 law and the somewhat surprising stance of the National Mining Association:

A sweet plum for industry, the law enables companies or individuals to mine for hardrock minerals, including gold, copper and uranium, without paying any royalties to the government. The law also allows mining corporations to pull up stakes without cleaning up the mess they leave behind. For more than a century the law allowed anyone—individual or corporation—to buy, or patent, public lands for mining for as little as $2.50 per acre. Congress approved a moratorium on new patents in 1994 and has reapproved it every year since, but existing claims can still be mined.

Provisions for site reclamation have evolved slightly over the decades, but the absence of strict remediation requirements on public lands has left thousands of abandoned mines oozing toxic metals into adjacent landscapes and streams. Taxpayers ultimately foot the bill for these cleanups, and the total tab to remediate all abandoned hardrock mines on public lands is at least $50 billion, according to Earthworks, a mining-reform advocacy group.

“Nobody can say with a straight face that this law from 1872 shouldn’t be changed,” says Velma Smith of the Pew Campaign for Responsible Mining.

Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association, agrees. “The law needs to be updated,” he says.

The change in attitude from the industry is encouraging, as it has long claimed the law’s provisions are necessary to support the domestic minerals market. But Popovich’s ideas of mining reform differ significantly from those put forth by congressional leaders and supported by environmentalists.

A more recent Associated Press story from January 3 covers the different bills that are getting consideration from Congress right now. Environmentalists, miners and Congress remain hopeful that a bill can move forward, but the larger questions is whether reform will be a giant leap, a baby step, or something still off in the distance. Passage could mean that old, toxic mine sites across the West — like this one (profiled in Forest) and this one (from a Nov. 30, 2009 story from the Colorado Independent) — could finally be restored.

Growing populations and the altering climate and weather patterns are placing more people in risky situations, and making more individuals vulnerable to natural disasters. After attending a talk by Lori Peek, a sociology professor at Colorado State University, about the lag in research on how traumatic events affect families, I started pursuing this story to understand what we know — and what we have dispelled — when it comes to protecting and meeting the long-term needs of disaster victims and refugees.

My article, “After the Aftermath,” appears in the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Miller-McCune magazine. I spoke with university researchers and nonprofit officials who have worked with and studied the impacts of the Sichuan earthquake, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and several other major tragedies and disasters. One of the key pieces that has researchers’ attention is the lack of understanding toward helping children through such events:

Hurricane Katrina didn’t flatten hundreds of schools, as happened last year in China, but the 2005 storm and subsequent flooding displaced 163,000 children 19 years old or younger. The hurricane flung kids across the country during the haphazard evacuation; 5,100 juveniles were reported missing in the weeks that followed, and it would take seven months to reunite them with their families.

Children are a particularly understudied population in terms of disaster research, and while some people believe kids can prove exceptionally resilient, the harsh consequences of Katrina suggest less promising outcomes. “We have very little good research on mass displacement and natural disasters,” says Lori Peek, a sociology professor at Colorado State University. “But I think we’re going to see a lot more of it, so I think we need to learn more about what went wrong.”

Peek has conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with adults and children who landed in Colorado after Katrina. She’s also spoken to individuals who have returned to the Gulf region. Field studies of displaced children by a dozen researchers, including Peek, reveal magnified risks of emotional and social suffering, not to mention increased mental health problems.

Children displaced by Katrina face overcrowding at new schools and discrimination from new peers. They are tuned in to their families’ financial instability and crave the friends and relatives who once formed their social network. “In Colorado, people want to know, ‘Are they better off?’ That’s really difficult [to say] because what does ‘better off’ mean?” Peek says.

“The Legacy of Katrina’s Children,” a paper authored by David Abramson and colleagues at Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, found that children affected by the storm were more likely to exhibit reduced academic performance, to lose access to health care and to develop clinical mental health problems and behavioral disorders than other children.

“We think [disasters and displacement] have an enormous impact on kids,” Abramson says.

Congress has heeded warnings from researchers like Abramson and Peek, creating a National Commission on Children and Disasters that first met in October 2008. During an August 2009 Senate hearing, the commission chair, Mark Shriver, an official with Save the Children, told policymakers, “We’ve spent more time, energy and money on pets than we have on kids.”

And the panel isn’t even set to make policy recommendations until late 2010. (The commission did share some initial recommendations in a October 2009 draft report for the president and Congress.)

Government intervention on reservations across the country dates back more than a century, when policies unwittingly entangled many families’ land ownership so that the default and simplest form of management is through federal leasing programs. The short-sighted decisions of the time contributed to initiation of a landmark class-action lawsuit, Cobell v. Salazar, that accussed the federal government of mismanaging billions of dollars in royalties and other leases. First filed in 1996 and passed on by both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, President Obama and Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar announced a settlement this week. The government has agreed to pay $3.4 billion to Native Americans, although officials don’t know how many individuals qualify for the payout because lease records are in a state of disarray.

On Pine Ridge, some families are trying to sort through their relatives’ fractionated land claims (divided among heirs of the original owner) and remove land from the government program that leases the parcels for cattle grazing. Instead of getting a few hundred dollars to allow a non-Indian to raise cows, these families are returning bison to the land, taking part in a buffalo meat co-operative and, more importantly, reestablishing a major component of their traditional culture.

As part of my reporting, I was fortunate enough to visit with a family raising a small herd of bison and to witness a family ceremony based around a buffalo kill. As part of the prayers of thanks to the animal for giving its life, each member of the family dipped a finger into a cup of blood collected from the dying buffalo’s throat. It didn’t taste much different than a scrape on my knee, although it lingered on my tongue for hours.

My story, “A new land grab,” appeared in the August 31 issue of High Country News, and it was recently liberated from behind the paper’s subscribers-only firewall. I also recorded an audio interview with associate editor Marty Durlin, talking about my reporting experiences.

In the article, I give a quick review of the history of land tenure on reservations:

Under the Dawes Act of 1887, the federal government doled out 160 acres of land to the head of each Indian family at Pine Ridge and other reservations. Congress could sell off any un-allotted lands, while the Bureau of Indian Affairs would maintain a tribal trust fund of revenues from mineral, oil, timber and grazing leases. (That trust fund is the subject of the ongoing lawsuit brought by Blackfeet tribal member Elouise Cobell in 1996.)

Then, in 1906, Congress passed the Burke Act, which allowed the BIA to measure Native Americans’ “competence” to handle their homestead lands, based on ancestry, cultural assimilation — even the length of a person’s hair. The assessments at Pine Ridge underscored official prejudice: By 1915, government agents had classified 56 percent of the Oglala Lakota living on the reservation as “incompetent,” and 700,000 additional acres were sold off before the practice ceased in 1934. Other parcels allotted to “incompetent” Indians were shifted into the leasing system, which has served mostly non-Native ranchers. But “competent” Indians didn’t make out much better, since they were forced to pay taxes on their allotments. Ninety-five percent of these lands were eventually sold to non-Natives for a fraction of their real value.

And the allotment system had lasting cultural impact: By chopping up the land base, it effectively ended communal hunting practices. As the original allottees died and their children inherited the land, parcels were fractionated among dozens — sometimes hundreds — of heirs.

People who have followed the Cobell lawsuit consider the settlement a major step forward in relationships between the federal government and tribes, which have been characterized by distrust for centuries. The settlement includes provisions to create a $1.4 billion Accounting/Trust Administration Fund and a $2 billion Trust Land Consolidation Fund, both of which should help alleviate some administrative shortcomings. But the problems over Indian land tenure remain a massive headache that needs to be treated with solutions that increase Indians’ control of their own lands.

For instance, the land-consolidation fund intends to eliminate fractionated land claims through government acquisition. The program could reduce some family’s problems, but it will reduce the land base owned by tribe members and not do anything to address land tenure and use concerns.

Following the recent release of  U.S. Department of Agriculture data on farming on reservations, the nonprofit group Village Earth, based in Fort Collins and active on these issues at Pine Ridge,  crunched the numbers to reveal an alarming disparity:

According to Village Earth’s study of the USDA data, in total numbers, Native Americans represent only 1.6% of the farmers and ranchers operating on Reservation lands. Today, for most Native American Reservations in the United States, more than two-thirds of the farms and ranches are controlled by non-natives. As might be expected, this disparity in land use has had a dramatic impact on the ability of Native Americans to fully benefit from their natural resources. Statistics on income reveal that the total value of agricultural commodities produced on Native American Reservations in 2007 totaled over $2.1 Billion dollars, yet, only 16% of that income went to Native American farmers and ranchers.

The new funds could move the government beyond its standard practices. But based on the past, the tribes and officials will have to remain wary that the money isn’t just churned into the bureaucratic boondoggle that led to the present situation.

High Country News has released two books this year that collect some of the publication’s past stories on Western water issues. The volumes complement each other: I think they offer a very readable recent history of the forces — natural, political, industrial — at play in shaping the development and conservation of the Western landscape around the single most valuable resource. Some respected and admired colleagues are among the contributors, including Matt Jenkins, Michelle Nijhuis, Alan Kesselheim, Laura Paskus, Tony Davis, Jane Braxton Little and Becca Clarren.

Water in the 21st Century West collects stories that address aspects of the region’s limited water supplies and the stories tackle topics such as tribal water rights, pollution and cleanup of rivers and lakes, urban water development and groundwater management. The editors included an opinion essay I wrote in 2004, “The Terrifying Saga of the West’s Last Big Dam,” on the cost overruns and questionable security funds surrounding the Animas-La Plata dam project in southwestern Colorado.

The second collection, titled River Basins of the American West, is organized around several major watersheds, namely the Rio Grande, the Colorado, the Klamath and the Columbia. A last section focused on river restoration stories has two articles that I wrote for HCN. The first, “Catch-22″ was the first longer story I wrote for the publication as an intern in December 2002 about the tough choices between managing for lunker trout and endangered native fish on the San Juan River. I got to go fishing for the story. It was pretty great.

The other piece, “‘Restoration Cowboy’ Goes against the Flow,” is a November 2003 profile of Dave Rosgen, a hydrologist who trains resource managers to evaluate and restore damaged streams using a system he designed and which has its fair share of critics. For that story, I spent a whole week tailing after Rosgen during one of his workshops in Pagosa Springs. It was pretty great.

The books are available through the HCN website.