By Heather Pilatic

In the last few weeks beekeepers have reported staggering losses in Minnesota, Nebraska and Ohio after their hives foraged on pesticide-treated corn fields. Indiana too, two years ago. What’s going on in the Corn Belt?

No farmer in their right mind wants to poison pollinators. When I spoke with one Iowa corn farmer in January and told him about the upcoming release of a Purdue study confirming corn as a major pesticide exposure route for bees, his face dropped with worn exasperation. He looked down for a moment, sighed and said, “You know, I held out for years on buying them GE seeds, but now I can’t get conventional seeds anymore. They just don’t carry ‘em.”

This leaves us with two questions: 1) What do GE seeds have to do with neonicotinoids and bees? and 2) How can an Iowa corn farmer find himself feeling unable to farm without poisoning pollinators? In other words, where did U.S. corn cultivation go wrong?

The short answer to both questions starts with a slow motion train wreck that began in the mid-1990s: Corn integrated pest management (IPM) fell apart at the seams. Rather, it was intentionally unraveled by Bayer and Monsanto.

Honey bees caught in the cross-fire

Corn is far from the only crop treated by neonicotinoids, but it is the largest use of arable land in North America, and honey bees rely on corn as a major protein source. At least 94 percent of the 92 million acres of corn planted across the U.S. this year will have been treated with either clothianidin or thiamethoxam (another neonicotinoid).

As we head into peak corn planting season throughout the U.S. Midwest, bees will once again “get it from all sides” as they:

• fly through clothianidin-contaminated planter dust;
• gather clothianidin-laced corn pollen, which will then be fed to emerging larva;
• gather water from acutely toxic, pesticide-laced guttation droplets; and/or
• gather pollen and nectar from nearby fields where forage sources such as dandelions have taken up these persistent chemicals from soil that’s been contaminated year on year since clothianidin’s widespread introduction into corn cultivation in 2003.

GE corn & neonicotinoid seed treatments go hand-in-hand

Over the last 15 years, U.S. corn cultivation has gone from a crop requiring little-to-no insecticides and negligible amounts of fungicides, to a crop where the average acre is grown from seeds treated or genetically engineered to express three different insecticides (as well as a fungicide or two) before being sprayed prophylactically with RoundUp (an herbicide) and a new class of fungicides that farmers didn’t know they “needed” before the mid-2000s.
A series of marketing ploys by the pesticide industry undergird this story. It’s about time to start telling it, if for no other reason than to give lie to the oft-repeated notion that there is no alternative to farming corn in a way that poisons pollinators. We were once — not so long ago — on a very different path.

How corn farming went off the rails

In the early 1990s, we were really good at growing corn using bio-intensive integrated pest management (bio-IPM). In practice, that meant crop rotations, supporting natural predators, using biocontrol agents like ladybugs and as a last resort, using chemical controls only after pests had been scouted for and found. During this time of peak bio-IPM adoption, today’s common practice of blanketing corn acreage with “insurance” applications of various pesticides without having established the need to do so would have been unthinkable. It’s expensive to use inputs you don’t need, and was once the mark of bad farming.

Then, in the mid-to-late 1990s, GE corn and neonicotinoid (imidacloprid) seed treatments both entered the market — the two go hand-in-hand, partly by design and partly by accident. Conditions for the marketing of both products were ripe due to a combination of factors:

• regulatory pressures and insect resistance had pushed previous insecticide classes off the market, creating an opening for neonicotinoids to rapidly take over global marketshare;
• patented seeds became legally defensible, and the pesticide industry gobbled up the global seed market; and
• a variant of the corn rootworm outsmarted soy-corn rotations, driving an uptick in insecticide use around 1995-96.

Then, as if on cue, Monsanto introduced three different strains of patented, GE corn between 1997 and 2003 (RoundUp Ready, and two Bt-expressing variants aimed at controlling the European Corn Borer and corn root worm). Clothianidin entered the U.S. market under conditional registration in 2003, and in 2004 corn seed companies began marketing seeds treated with a 5X level of neonicotinoids (1.25 mg/seed vs. .25).

… and in the space of a decade, U.S. corn acreage undergoes a ten-fold increase in average insecticide use. By 2007, the average acre of corn has more than three systemic insecticides — both Bt traits and a neonicotinoid. Compare this to the early 1990s, when only an estimated 30-35 percent of all corn acreage were treated with insecticides at all.

Adding fuel to the fire, in 2008 USDA’s Federal Crop Insurance Board of Directors approved reductions in crop insurance premiums for producers who plant certain Bt corn hybrids. By 2009, 40 percent of corn farmers interviewed said they did not have access to elite (high-yielding) non-Bt corn seed. It is by now common knowledge that conventional corn farmers have a very hard time finding seed that is not genetically engineered and treated with neonicotinoids.

Enter fungicides

In 2007, what’s left of corn IPM was further unraveled with the mass marketing of a new class of fungicides (strobilurins) for use on corn as yield “boosters.” Before this, fungicide use on corn was so uncommon that it didn’t appear in Crop Life’s 2002 National Pesticide Use Database. But in the last five years, the pesticide industry has aggressively and successfully marketed prophylactic applications of fungicides on corn as yield and growth enhancers, and use has grown dramatically as a result. This despite the fact that these fungicides work as marketed less than half the time. According to this meta-analysis of efficacy studies, only “48% of treatments resulted in a yield response greater than the economic break-even value of 6 bu/acre.”

Back to the bees. Neonicotinoids are known to synergize with certain fungicides to increase the toxicity of the former to honey bees up to 1,000-fold, and fungicides may be key culprits in undermining beneficial bee microbiota that do things like make beebread nutritious and support immune response against gut pathogens like Nosema. Fungicide use in corn is likewise destroying beneficial fungi in many cropping systems, and driving the emergence of resistant strains.

As with insecticides and herbicides, so too with fungicide use on corn: Corn farmers are stuck on a pesticide treadmill on high gear, with a pre-emptively pressed turbo charge button (as “insurance”). Among the many casualties are our honey bees who rely on corn’s abundant pollen supply.

Keeping us all tethered to the pesticide treadmill is expected behavior from the likes of Monsanto. But what boggles the mind is that all of this is being aided and abetted by a USDA that ties cheap crop insurance to planting patented Bt corn, and a Congress that refuses to tie subsidized crop insurance in the Farm Bill to common-sense conservation practices like bio-intensive IPM. Try explaining that with a waggle dance.

It follows a team of UC Berekely researchers as they climb up into the crown of a huge old-growth redwood and install monitoring equipment.

As the planet warms, will the progressive loss of coastal fog doom these beauties?

By Jonathan Thompson

In November, La Plata County Commissioner Kellie Hotter called local land-use planning “a blood sport.” She wasn’t kidding. Since last spring, as this southwestern Colorado county considered a new comprehensive land-use plan, carnage has piled up. By mid-December, casualties included a fired planning commissioner, a resigned county planning director and the plan itself — a 400-page document that took two years, $750,000 and 137 public meetings to produce.

Even planning veterans in the rural West — where it’s not uncommon for mind-numbing meetings to erupt into verbal fisticuffs — were shocked by the bloodshed in La Plata County. But perhaps most surprising was who emerged the untarnished victors: Activists who believe that smart growth, clustered development, smart meters and even bike paths are all part of a nefarious United Nations plot to rob citizens of their liberties.

They may sound like folks on the fringe. But they are increasingly influential — and they’ve sabotaged planning efforts nationwide.

The movement’s ideology isn’t new: resentment of government interference and vigilant defense of private-property rights, especially when environmental initiatives are involved. What is new is the alleged villain: Agenda 21, a two-decades-old U.N. document that encourages sustainable development worldwide. The Agenda is being foisted, opponents claim, on often-unsuspecting local governments by ICLEI, a nonprofit that offers planning tools, greenhouse gas inventory software and technical support to some 550 government members in the U.S.

The result? “Government will control how hot your shower may be, how much air conditioning or heat you may use,” writes Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center, an intellectual parent of the end-Agenda 21, or Agender, movement. “The policy of Agenda 21 comes in many names, such as Sustainable Development, Smart Growth, historic preservation … and comprehensive planning.”

La Plata County might not seem like a yeasty environment for fermenting right-wing movements. It’s voted mostly Democratic in major elections for at least 10 years. The population center is Durango, a college town with a disproportionate number of professional cyclists, lawyers and raft guides, not to mention a fabulous bike path. But remnants of the older West remain, most notably some 3,000 oil and gas wells. A far-right faction also still festers. When Colorado’s GOP was fractured by extremist and moderate infighting in 2006, the struggle was centered here.

Planning has always been contentious, and the county commission expected some controversy when, in 2009, it charged its staff and a team of consultants with developing a community-driven vision for the county’s growth over the next 20 years. The plan would contain no actual regulations, but it would provide a critical road map for rewriting the county’s land-use code.

A diverse, 17-member working group was formed to represent the community, and the public was encouraged to attend meetings. From the beginning, a vocal minority suspicious of government interference was present. At one early meeting, after a consultant spoke about preserving agriculture, possibly through zoning, sheep-rancher J. Paul Brown said: “If you’re looking for a fight, keep that crap up!”  Such sentiments were incorporated into the draft plan.

Last spring, an ambitious vision emerged to rein in sprawl, encourage bicycling and public transportation, protect agriculture and promote sustainability. Respect for private-property rights and conventional energy development were also emphasized, and the draft was sent to the planning commission, an appointed body that in Colorado has the final say on county comprehensive plans. “There wasn’t a word in that plan that wasn’t vetted by the working group,” says Charlie Deans, the lead consultant.

But around the same time, the Agender movement was slithering out of the political primordial soup. Since as early as 2003, a few far-right commentators such as DeWeese had banged the Agenda 21 drum, but few listened. Then, in 2009, DeWeese took his ideas to the Tea Party, and its branches began adopting the Agender platform. “It was a slow acceleration,” says Don Knapp, an ICLEI spokesman who has tracked the movement.

During the 2010 mid-term campaign, Dan Maes, a doomed Republican and Tea Party Colorado gubernatorial candidate, announced that Denver’s bike-sharing program was part of a U.N. plot — probably the first high-profile mention of Agenda 21. In a debate for Colorado House District 59, La Plata County’s J. Paul Brown declared that Obama had a secret army and that the U.N. is “going to control our land and our guns.” Gleeful Democrats assumed the rhetoric would kill Brown’s chances for a seat long held by moderates. They were wrong: Brown won.

Also in 2010, Rosa Koire started the Post-Sustainability Institute, which campaigns against Agenda 21 and “communitarianism.” Despite the fact that she’s a registered Democrat who looks fresh from auditions for a Gloria Steinem bio-pic, Koire, a Bay Area real-estate appraiser, has become a Tea Party YouTube hero and Agender leader. Then, last June, Glenn Beck did a 14-minute anti-Agenda 21 monologue on Fox News.

“It really picked up steam after that,” says Knapp. Last month, Koire and dozens of fellow Agenders packed a planning meeting in Marin County, Calif., shouting anti-planning slogans. Agenders in Benton County, Ore., went after a plan to protect river corridors. One told the Corvallis Gazette-Times: “Riparian, sustainability — it’s the words that give ‘em away. Their goal is to take over the world by taking over the water, the land and the food.” Last fall, Newt Gingrich vowed to cut funding for “any kind of activity for United Nations Agenda 21″ if elected president.  And at least 16 communities have ended their ICLEI membership in protest.

In La Plata County, by late July the anti-planning crowd started referencing Agenda 21 in their public comments. County planner Erick Aune had never even heard of it. So he attended an “evening of Agenda 21 education” hosted by the Four Corners Liberty Restoration group, where the featured speaker masterfully laid out a 200-year conspiracy culminating in the comprehensive plan. By the end of that month, more than 100 people had signed a petition against it, saying it was “based on emotional feel-good ideas that are designed for social engineering and social equity that trample our rights as free people.”

In December, after whittling the plan down to about 40 pages and snuffing out an entire chapter on sustainable development, the La Plata County planning commission unanimously voted to scrap it altogether. Aune resigned a day later.

The reasons the planning commissioners gave were somewhat vague. The plan was too values-based; it didn’t reflect the will of the community. But there’s little doubt that the Agenders influenced the process. “I’m for planning, but I’m not for the ideological, political, social engineering that went into this document,” commissioner Steven Kallaher said in December. Earlier, of community concerns, he said, “Someone who owns hundreds of acres in the county doesn’t want someone living in the city who rides a solar-powered bicycle to tell them what to do.”

“The (Agenders) group was very organized and very focused and very intent on delivering a consistent message,” says Aune. “They wanted (the comprehensive plan) to go away because it represents government and control to them.”

The movement’s meteoric rise is probably due to the fact that it’s just the most recent incarnation of an age-old ideology. “Local debates about property rights have been around for decades,” says Knapp. “What’s new is this idea that it has to do with the United Nations or the imposition of some outside force … that there’s this tyranny at play.

“(It’s) motivated a lot of people to get involved in local politics,” he says. “It’s a really good scare story. It’s big on fear, it’s big on fiction, and it’s short on fact.”

Jonathan Thompson is a contributing editor at High Country News and a 2011-2012 Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.

By Maura Stephens (Originally published in Yes! Magazine, February 29, 2012)

In New York State, some 82 towns and counties have passed ordinances outlawing fracking, a natural gas drilling method known for causing severe water pollution. Another 35 have ordinances in the works. But until last week, no one knew quite what would happen when those ordinances were—inevitably—challenged by drilling companies.

Now, in a resounding win for activists, two different state Supreme Court justices have upheld fracking bans in two different New York towns.

Dryden gets active

This is the story of one of those townships, and how it came to be a leader in the fight against fracking. Dryden is home to some 14,000 people amid the rolling hills and glacial valleys of central New York. There, the economy has been sluggish for decades, farmers struggle, and people work hard yet barely make ends meet—making communities ripe for exploitation by an unscrupulous industry.

But the industry didn’t bargain for Hilary Lambert, or Judy Pierpont, or Marie McRae, or any of the tens of thousands of activists, or the dedicated pro bono attorneys who have mobilized to ban fracking in townships across the state before it begins. (New York currently doesn’t allow fracking, pending a review of the practice’s safety by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.)

Dryden residents began mobilizing around fracking in 2009, when a small group began meeting to discuss the issue. Dryden Resource Awareness Coalition (DRAC) evolved; its 10 to 20 most active members would become the core of the town’s efforts, but the organization has no real hierarchy or structure. And that’s the way they like it.

“We set biweekly meetings, reserved space in Town Hall, and people just started showing up,” says Judy Pierpont, a retired professor. “It’s a very loose group. People found their niche and contributed in whatever ways they could. Anyone can participate. We have no officers. We work by consensus. People volunteer for things, and people emerge as leaders.”

That was a new experience for everyone, perhaps no one more so than Joe Wilson, who retired in 2009 from his long-time role as a high school principal.

“All my experience,” says Wilson, “had been in hierarchical organizations with formal planning. We even had plans on how to execute plans. I learned that significant things can be accomplished by people operating as a collaborative with virtually no hierarchy, coming to consensus on both what’s the right thing to do and on how to get it done. I also learned there’s power in such groups. It’s not futile to find grassroots groups that want what you want, band together, and lean on elected officials to move in the direction you favor.”

“We didn’t think we had a right to ban fracking.”

By early 2010, says Jason Leifer, a town board member who has served since 2007, at least some members of the board knew fracking was not something they wanted for Dryden. “I’d been reading blogs by people from other shale plays, in Texas, Wyoming, Colorado, who were writing about the bad things happening in their areas,” he says. “Spills, too many trucks, the trend toward suburban drilling. This was nothing like the old vertical wells.”

But in New York law, towns didn’t have the right to regulate drilling. Leifer and town supervisor Mary Ann Sumner began talking about how the town might deal with fracking if it were to come. “It seemed odd to me that we could have a say in cell towers — which have far less of an impact than a gas well,” says Leifer. “It made no sense. We should have some say in where these things go, if they go anywhere.”

“Initially, like the other communities, we didn’t think we had a right to ban fracking,” says Marie McRae, who owns and operates a small private horse boarding facility in Dryden. She had signed a gas lease in 2008 after being “chased by a landman for nine months,” she says. “He told me that all the other land around was leased, and if I didn’t sign they’d come and take the gas from my land anyway. ‘This lease is your last chance to have a say about what happened to your land,’ he told me. That’s a lie, as I later learned, but I signed. Then I curled up in a fetal position, mentally, for about six months.”

But then McRae, who had never been interested, let alone involved, in politics, woke up — and she has long since made up for any lost time. She joined DRAC, becoming a core member and frequent spokesperson.

The idea that an outright ban might be possible came via neighboring towns, including Ulysses, Danby, Ithaca, and Middlefield, which were pursuing their own bans. All were basing their work on the research of Ithaca attorneys Helen and David Slottje, who found that, while towns are not permitted within New York State law to regulate the natural gas drilling industry, prohibiting the activity of the industry in the first place avoids the problem of interfering in the industry’s conduct of its business.

“These gas companies are waging war on people, on communities,” says Helen Slottje. “You see this kind of bullying all over. In West Virginia, Morgantown passed a ban, and Chesapeake [Energy Company] took away the money they were donating for the school band. The corporations get communities dependent on them, and then they use that dependence to buy silence. And many towns don’t have good legal representation, so they get bullied, beaten up. The gas companies launch smear campaigns and make people’s lives miserable. That makes me angry. That’s what motivates me.”

Through their Ithaca law firm, Community Environmental Defense Council, Inc., the Slottjes have counseled more than 50 municipalities around the state, doing all the work pro bono and relying on donations from individuals and foundations to help support the efforts.

All the towns were trying something totally new, blazing new ground, and with the Slottjes’ counsel, each community was trying to customize what would work for its own unique character and needs.

Convincing the community

After some Ulysses residents came to Dryden and gave pointers about how to petition for a ban, DRAC wrote a simple ban statement and began going door-to-door to collect signatures.

“We started out with about eight of us,” recalls Pierpont, “but then friends, and friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends joined. We also had an online petition, which was very helpful.” The canvassers found that 80 to 85 percent of those they approached were ready to sign the ban petition. But if people’s minds were made up on the other side, some would not even engage in conversation.

The people who believed fracking is “safe, clean, and domestic” shared their views and opinions in language that was straight out of gas company commercials, Wilson notes. They’d heard industry ads and thought of them as news.

“What people see on TV and in major publications is shaped by the gas companies’ ability to get broadcasters and reporters to use a position favorable to energy companies as a point of departure,” Wilson says. “They think they know facts, and therefore they disagree with us. Mainstream media are very powerful in creating frames of reference which we then have to deal with.”

During four months of canvassing, DRAC was also hosting community forums on fracking, where people could hear perspectives not generally available to those getting their news from mainstream media. That helped change some minds, reports Wilson.

“People who seemed to move opinion best were the physicians and scientists, considered bound by their professions to be even-handed, unbiased,” Wilson recalls. “People were also ready to sign if they’d gotten their information from [non-mainstream] sources, such as reading a letter to the editor from someone trusted in the community, or if the veterinarian they’ve been going to for a long time says fracking will harm animals.”

And the Slottjes, who patiently explained complicated legal matters over many visits to Dryden, were influential with residents as well as with the Town Board. They recommended that Dryden and other municipalities adopt a zoning law or amendment that specifically prohibits high-impact industrial use, which should be defined as “encompassing unconventional gas drilling and any other use they considered inimical to the municipality’s character and goals.”

The Dryden Town Board held two official public hearings, where the majority of speakers spoke against fracking. On April 20, 2011, at a board meeting packed with more than 100 residents, almost all of whom supported the ban, DRAC announced that it had gotten 1,594 signatures on the petition. Thirty of thFose signers got up to speak for two minutes each. Longtime resident and former Dryden Planning Board member Buzz Lavine said, as DRAC reported, “The federal and state governments cannot protect us. The power to do that is right here in this room.”

At that meeting an audience member warned that the town might be sued by a big gas company. David Slottje assured the board and the crowd that long legal precedent existed for towns to zone out undesired uses.

Industry fires back

On August 2, 2011 the Town Board voted unanimously for a ban on fracking, fully aware that a lawsuit might ensue.

It did. On September 16, 2011 Anschutz Energy Corporation, which had spent about $4.7 million on leases in Dryden, filed a lawsuit against the town to overturn the ban. They claimed that state law supersedes all local regulations relating to oil and gas activities except as applied to local roads and real property taxes.

But Judge Phillip Rumsey of the New York State Supreme Court ruled on February 21, 2012 that Dryden does indeed have the right to prohibit fracking in the town.

Some people think it’s likely Anschutz will appeal within the 30-day time limit. But, says Mahron Perkins, who has served as Town of Dryden attorney for 33 years and who presented the town’s case, “Judge Rumsey gave a very reasoned, well researched, well articulated decision. I think it’s going to stand up on appeal.”

Moving forward

In the meantime, at Wilson’s urging, DRAC members are also planning to get the town board to put in place secondary protections: road, air quality, critical environmental area designations, rules about setbacks around wellheads. “Our county’s council of governments has a spreadsheet that lists 15 or 16 different municipal tools to enhance the protection of citizenry against fracking,” says Wilson. “We’ll be working on model regulations for the so-called gathering lines, pipes taking the gas from wellheads to compressor stations. No one regulates them now—not the feds, or the state, or municipalities. Perhaps this is something municipalities can claim.”

“Some people say that to say ‘No’ to natural gas makes you a NIMBY,” says Hilary Lambert, steward of the Cayuga Lake Watershed Network, who spent 16 years as a coal activist in Kentucky before moving back to her childhood home in Dryden. “We’re very concerned about this. It’s a crowded world, and it’s getting more crowded. We know we have to take care of everybody’s water, everywhere. We work with everyone across borders, across Appalachia and every other part of the country. Without clean water, we don’t have anything.”

In fact, some of the Dryden activists are already helping other towns build their case for a ban. “We’ve learned so much,” says Pierpoint. “We want to use that knowledge to help other communities.”

She adds, “It feels like affirmation that when you have integrity in a legal system, things can work. We were besieged by somebody with a lot of money and a certain ill will, and we were lucky to get an honest, reasonable judge who looked at this very fairly. We’re fighting to keep our communities safe, but also for the viability of our system of democracy. If we don’t defend it, it goes down.

“In this case, it worked.”

A concurring opinion

Middlefield, New York, a few hours to the east of Dryden, also outlawed fracking last year, with a zoning law banning heavy industry uses of land, including drilling for shale gas. Jennifer Huntington, a dairy farmer who had leased 380 acres of her land for drilling, sued the town, claiming that the ban caused her economic harm.

Three days after the Dryden ruling, another New York Supreme Court judge, Donald Cerio Jr., upheld Middlefield’s ban, finding strong merit in the argument that municipalities have the right to keep harmful activities out.

New York’s Little Revolution
How the state’s fight for clean water is reshaping its political landscape.

Attorney Helen Slottje saw it as a clear win, and wrote to her allies congratulating them for the hard work so many people had put into making local laws to protect their communities.

“We have been saying for some time now that towns had the right to zone out drilling activities,” she wrote on hearing the news from Middlefield.

“Industry has, and surely will, continue to engage in bullying, intimidation, and scare tactics against the citizens of the state of New York. But local elected officials across the state have stood strong and stood together, with the unflinching backing of so many of their residents in the face of these strong-arm threats.”

“Because the members of the town boards in Dryden and Middlefield were willing to exercise their right to protect their citizens and stood firm in their convictions, we now have definitive answers from two separate courts that clearly support local community rights.”

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CLICK PICTURE FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT WOLF CREEK COMMUNITY ALLIANCE

(Note from Sierra Voices Editor: Many of us opposed to the re-opening of the Idaho-Maryland Mine here in Nevada County, CA, have warned of well failures due to mine de-watering, 24×7 truck traffic congestion, arsenic contamination of water, increased flow burden in local streams, etc., and have been called alarmists by Emgold’s CEO, David Watkinson. In the following article you will read that every one of these concerns have borne out in the actual case of the re-opening of the old Drum Lummon mine in Helena, Montana by Toronto-based RX Gold & Silver Inc).

By Eve Byron

MARYSVILLE — A standing-room-only crowd on Wednesday outlined impacts to their daily lives to Lewis and Clark County officials from the renewal of operations of the historic underground Drumlummon gold mine, less than half a mile from the formerly sleepy hamlet.

County officials had called the meeting to hear concerns of area residents, and they got an earful from the crowd, largely made up of frustrated neighbors.

Noise from mining rigs backing up and rocks being dumped into trucks wakes Roger Nolte multiple times at night. Heavy truck traffic on Marysville Road, mixed with recreational vehicles going to the Great Divide Ski Area and residents going into Helena, frightens commuters, noted Karen Marble.

Silver Creek, which used to dry up in August, is running year round and causing flooding downstream along Applegate Drive, said Larry Michaelson. He attributes the consistent water flows and flooding to mine operators treating, pumping and discharging 300 gallons per minute into the stream out of the lower mine depths.

Meanwhile, wells in town are drying up due to that pumping, said Earl Fred, because it allows mine operators access to historic drillings of past owners. The springs that supply residential water on his property dried up, and a new well drilled last December by the mine owners, RX Gold & Silver Inc., already has had its static water level drop by 30 feet.

“I’m particularly disappointed that public officials at all levels are not protecting our right to a peaceful environment,” said Nolte, whose house is directly across from the mine, which restarted exploration work in 2008. “It’s enough to make me go insane.”

Lainie Christensen added that the renewed mining exploration and

excavation are enough to make anybody crazy.

“Their operating hours when they were doing core drilling outside the mine were 24/7, all the time, unless they were changing drill bits,” she said.

County commissioners said they’re trying to work with the Canadian-based mine operators. The company submitted an application for an operating permit to the state Department of Environmental Quality on Dec. 28, and that state agency has 90 days to review it. The DEQ is expected to issue a deficiency letter to Toronto-based RX Gold & Silver Inc., since mining applications typically are lacking in one area or another.

While county officials and the public can comment on the proposed mining operations via DEQ, commissioners said they have a better opportunity to mitigate impacts via the Hard Rick Mining Act, which is under the state Department of Commerce.

“This law forces local government and the mine operator to sit down and negotiate in good faith and determine how the mine will mitigate impacts caused by the mine to local government,” said Harold Blattie with the Montana Association of Counties. “It looks at road, law enforcement … and schools. To do that, the mine has to give a plan laying out how many employees it will have, how it will grow, what their production expectations are, the basic plan and intentions.”

RX has been extracting ore from the Drumlummon since 2009. While it employs about 120 people and has pulled millions of dollars of gold from the mine, it’s been operating under a “Small Miners Exclusion Statement,” and an exploration license from the DEQ. Under those documents, the company could only disturb 5 acres or less and extract up to 10,000 tons of ore.

State and county officials have noted that while the mine is operating within the strict parameters of the law, they’ve questioned whether it is in fact a “small mine” and noted that the actual operating permit, along with mitigation mandates, could be years off.

Many at the meeting said the mine’s impacts already are being felt, and they urged the county to become involved as early as possible in the process.

“Sure we get emotional … but this is our homes, and lives and for some a life investment in this place, and we stand to be impacted the most by RX operations,” Christensen said.

Commission members agreed that was important to work with the company to try to lessen impacts to Marysville residents, as well as those downstream in the Helena valley.

“We are here, and will be by your side,” said Commissioner Andy Hunthausen, who added that they’ll meet with residents again in a month, and also with Canyon Creek residents to talk about possible impacts. “But there are some things we have impact over and something we don’t, because some things are state law.

“But we can work through this and do the best we can to try to come up with solutions.”

The underground Drumlummon Mine was created more than a century ago, with 29 miles of shafts that were drilled, chipped and blasted into a honeycomb maze. After a lengthy legal dispute, water flooded the lower levels, the mine closed and few paid attention to the mine that made Marysville and millionaires.

Yet RX Gold & Silver believes there’s still pay dirt left, missed by the previous miners who removed 586,000 ounces of gold and almost 5 million ounces of silver from 1 million tons of ore. The company, formerly named RX Exploration, plans to pump out and treat an estimated 100 million gallons of arsenic-tainted water, then use the latest available technology — which basically involves more powerful drills and equipment than that of the late 1800s— to search for precious metals.

Darryl James, a representative of RX, was at the meeting but didn’t comment.

More information:

World leaders are stalling on climate action at the 2011 Climate Summit in Durban, South Africa. What needs to happen to get things moving and make a change before it’s too late?

By Jamie Henn

The U.N. climate talks desperately need a crisis. For the last 10 days, negotiations here in Durban, South Africa, have made little progress on the fundamental challenge these talks were set up to confront: how the world can come together to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Instead, the pace of negotiations has been set by the one country the rest of the world should be turning their back on: the United States.

The U.S. never signed the Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding international agreement designed to reduce emissions, but it is allowed to take part in the negotiations in a separate track dedicated to securing a long-term climate agreement. After President Obama’s election, the international community had high hopes the new administration would bring a new sense of ambition and commitment to talks.

Instead, the only thing the U.S. brought to the table was a wrecking ball. Rather than standing out of the way and letting the rest of the world get on with setting up an international architecture to facilitate cutting emissions, stopping deforestation, and investing in renewable energy, the U.S. has spent the years since Copenhagen attempting to systemically dismantle the U.N. process.

Highest on the U.S. hit list is the Kyoto Protocol, an imperfect treaty (thanks in large part to U.S. recalcitrance), but currently the best instrument in the global climate toolbox. Next on the list is the very idea of legally binding commitments—the U.S. would prefer a “pledge and review” world where countries make their own voluntary commitments and then report out on what they’ve decided.

Here in Durban, however, the U.S. has taken on an even more insidious role by pushing a proposal that the international community adopt a “mandate” to negotiate a new climate treaty that will take effect in—wait for it—2020.

This isn’t just a delay, it’s a death sentence. Scientists have stated over and over that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, emissions must peak by 2015 or 2020 at the absolute latest. (For a closer look at the scientific reasoning, read David Roberts.)

It is especially callous and cold-hearted for the U.S. to be pushing the 2020 timeline here in Durban. Africa is already seeing the devastating impacts of the climate crisis, from the deadly drought still ravaging the Horn of Africa to terrible flooding, including here in Durban where heavy rains killed at least eight people just last week.

But instead of being recognized as yet another delay tactic from the world’s biggest historical emitter, the 2020 timeline seems to be gaining traction here at the talks. Brazil and India have vaguely expressed support, China has made cryptic comments about the proposal, and the European Union has yet to stand up clearly and strongly against the delay. If the talks here in Durban are allowed to simply stumble to the closing gavel, there’s a chance that the U.S. proposal could become the new mandate for the U.N. climate talks.

It’s time for a crisis moment. The world has successfully stood up to the United States at the U.N. climate talks before. On the final day of the talks in Bali in 2007, delegates actively booed Bush administration negotiators over their repeated attempts to hold up progress. Finally, the delegate from Papua New Guinea challenged the U.S.: “If you’re not willing to lead, get out of the way.” Minutes later, the U.S. negotiators relented and allowed a deal to move forward.

Civil society needs to do everything we can to create a similar crisis moment here in Durban. If African nations stand up to the U.S. and are backed up by Brazil, India, and the E.U., there’s a chance that the world can save Kyoto, beat back the 2020 delay, and set a mandate for new agreements within the next year or by 2015 at the latest.

The world stood up to the U.S. in Bali, it can do it again in Durban. In the words of a South African freedom-fighter-turned-president, “It’s always impossible until it’s done.”

Interested?

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Coming to a Theater Near You: The Greatest Water Crisis in the History of Civilization

By William deBuys

Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust, and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), biggest fire ever in New Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history (3,697,000 acres).

The fires were a function of drought.  As of summer’s end, 2011 was the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat.  It was the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.

Virtually every city in the region experienced unprecedented temperatures, with Phoenix, as usual, leading the march toward unlivability. This past summer, the so-called Valley of the Sun set a new record of 33 days when the mercury reached a shoe-melting 110º F or higher. (The previous record of 32 days was set in 2007.)

And here’s the bad news in a nutshell: if you live in the Southwest or just about anywhere in the American West, you or your children and grandchildren could soon enough be facing the Age of Thirst, which may also prove to be the greatest water crisis in the history of civilization.  No kidding.

If that gets you down, here’s a little cheer-up note: the end is not yet nigh.

In fact, this year the weather elsewhere rode to the rescue, and the news for the Southwest was good where it really mattered.  Since January, the biggest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead, backed up by the Hoover Dam and just 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas, has risen almost 40 feet. That lake is crucial when it comes to watering lawns or taking showers from Arizona to California.  And the near 40-foot surge of extra water offered a significant upward nudge to the Southwest’s water reserves.

The Colorado River, which the reservoir impounds, supplies all or part of the water on which nearly 30 million people depend, most of them living downstream of Lake Mead in Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Tijuana, and scores of smaller communities in the United States and Mexico.

Back in 1999, the lake was full. Patricia Mulroy, who heads the water utility serving Las Vegas, rues the optimism of those bygone days.  “We had a fifty-year, reliable water supply,” she says. “By 2002, we had no water supply. We were out. We were done. I swore to myself we’d never do that again.”

In 2000, the lake began to fall — like a boulder off a cliff, bouncing a couple of times on the way down. Its water level dropped a staggering 130 feet, stopping less than seven feet above the stage that would have triggered reductions in downstream deliveries. Then — and here’s the good news, just in case you were wondering — last winter, it snowed prodigiously up north in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

The spring and summer run-off from those snowpacks brought enormous relief. It renewed what we in the Southwest like to call the Hydro-Illogic cycle: when drought comes, everybody wrings their hands and promises to institute needed reform, if only it would rain a little. Then the drought breaks or eases and we all return to business as usual, until the cycle comes around to drought again.

So don’t be fooled.  One day, perhaps soon, Lake Mead will renew its downward plunge.  That’s a certainty, the experts tell us.  And here’s the thing: the next time, a sudden rescue by heavy snows in the northern Rockies might not come. If the snowpacks of the future are merely ordinary, let alone puny, then you’ll know that we really are entering a new age.

And climate change will be a major reason, but we’ll have done a good job of aiding and abetting it. The states of the so-called Lower Basin of the Colorado River — California, Arizona, and Nevada — have been living beyond their water means for years. Any departure from recent decades of hydrological abundance, even a return to long-term average flows in the Colorado River, would produce a painful reckoning for the Lower Basin states.  And even worse is surely on the way.

Just think of the coming Age of Thirst in the American Southwest and West as a three-act tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions.

The Age of Thirst: Act I

The curtain in this play would surely rise on the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which divided the river’s water equally between the Upper and Lower Basins, allocating to each annually 7.5 million acre-feet, also known by its acronym “maf.” (An acre-foot suffices to support three or four families for a year.) Unfortunately, the architects of the compact, drawing on data from an anomalously wet historical period, assumed the river’s average annual flow to be about 17 maf per year.  Based on reconstructions that now stretch back more than 1,000 years, the river’s long-term average is closer to 14.7 maf.  Factor in evaporation from reservoirs (1.5 maf per year) and our treaty obligation to Mexico (another 1.5 maf), and the math doesn’t favor a water-guzzling society.

Nonetheless, the states of the Lower Basin have been taking their allotment as if nothing were wrong and consequently overdrafting their account by up to 1.3 maf annually.  At this rate, even under unrealistically favorable scenarios, the Lower Basin will eventually drain Lake Mead and cutbacks will begin, possibly as soon as in the next few years.  And then things will get dicier because California, the water behemoth of the West, won’t have to absorb any of those cutbacks.

Here’s one of the screwiest quirks in western water law: to win Congressional approval for the building of a monumental aqueduct, the Central Arizona Project (CAP), which would bring Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona agreed to subordinate its Colorado River water rights to California’s.  In that way, the $4 billion, 336-mile-long CAP was born, and for it Arizona paid a heavy price. The state obliged itself to absorb not just its own losses in a cutback situation, but California’s as well.

Worst case scenario: the CAP aqueduct, now a lifeline for millions, could become as dry as the desert it runs through, while California continues to bathe. Imagine Phoenix curling and cracking around the edges, while lawn sprinklers hiss in Malibu. The contrast will upset a lot of Arizonans.

Worse yet, the prospective schedule of cutbacks now in place for the coming bad times is too puny to save Lake Mead.

The Age of Thirst: Act II

While that Arizona-California relationship guarantees full employment for battalions of water lawyers, a far bigger problem looms: climate change. Models for the Southwest have been predicting a 4ºC (7.2ºF) increase in mean temperature by century’s end, and events seem to be outpacing the predictions.

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We have already experienced close to 1º C of that increase, which accounts, at least in part, for last summer’s colossal fires and record-setting temperatures — and it’s now clear that we’re just getting started.

The simple rule of thumb for climate change is that wet places will get wetter and dry places drier. One reason the dry places will dry is that higher temperatures mean more evaporation. In other words, there will be ever less water in the rivers that keep the region’s cities (and much else) alive. Modeling already suggests that by mid-century surface stream-flow will decline by 10% to 30%.

Independent studies at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in California and the University of Colorado evaluated the viability of Lake Mead and eventually arrived at similar conclusions: after about 2026, the risk of “failure” at Lake Mead, according to a member of the Colorado group, “just skyrockets.” Failure in this context would mean water levels lower than the dam’s lowest intake, no water heading downstream, and the lake becoming a “dead pool.”

If — perhaps “when” is the more appropriate word — that happens, California’s Colorado River Aqueduct, which supplies water to Los Angeles, San Diego, and the All-American Canal, which sustains the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, will go just as dry as the Central Arizona Project aqueduct. Meanwhile, if climate change is affecting the Colorado River’s watershed that harshly, it will undoubtedly also be hitting the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

The aptly named Lester Snow, a recent director of California’s Department of Water Resources, understood this. His future water planning assumed a 40% decline in runoff from the Sierras, which feeds the California Aqueduct. None of his contemplated scenarios were happy ones. The Colorado River Aqueduct and the California Aqueduct make the urban conglomerations of southern California possible. If both fail at once, the result will be, as promised, the greatest water crisis in the history of civilization.

Only Patricia Mulroy has an endgame strategy for the demise of Lake Mead. The Southern Nevada Water Authority is, even now, tunneling under the lake to install the equivalent of a bathtub drain at close to its lowest point. At a cost of more than $800 million, it will drain the dregs of Lake Mead for Las Vegas.

Admittedly, water quality will be a problem, as the dead pool will concentrate pollutants. The good news, according to the standard joke among those who chronicle Sin City’s improbable history, is that the hard-partying residents and over-stimulated tourists who sip from Lake Mead’s last waters will no longer need to purchase anti-depressants. They’ll get all the Zoloft and Xanax they need from their tap water.

And only now do we arrive at the third act of this expanding tragedy.

The Age of Thirst: Act III

Those who believe in American exceptionalism hold that the historical patterns shaping the fate of other empires and nations don’t apply to the United States. Be that as it may, we are certainly on track to test whether the U.S. is similarly inoculated against the patterns of environmental history.

Because tree rings record growing conditions year by year, the people who study them have been able to reconstruct climate over very long spans of time. One of their biggest discoveries is that droughts more severe and far longer than anything known in recent centuries have occurred repeatedly in the American Southwest. The droughts of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, of the 1950s, and of the period from 1998 to 2004 are remembered in the region, yet none lasted a full decade.

By contrast, the drought that brought the civilization of the ancestral Puebloans, or Anasazi, centered at Chaco Canyon, to its knees in the twelfth century, by contrast, lasted more than 30 years. The one that finished off Mesa Verdean culture in the thirteenth century was similarly a “megadrought.”

Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona who played a major role in the Nobel-Prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, tells me that the prospect of 130° F days in Phoenix worries him far less than the prospect of decades of acute dryness. “If anything is scary, the scariest is that we could trip across a transition into a megadrought.” He adds, “You can probably bet your house that, unless we do something about these greenhouse gas emissions, the megadroughts of the future are going to be a lot hotter than the ones of the past.”

Other scientists believe that the Southwest is already making the transition to a “new climatology,” a new normal that will at least bring to mind the aridity of the Dust Bowl years. Richard Seager of Columbia University, for instance, suggests that “the cycle of natural dry periods and wet periods will continue, but… around a mean that gets drier. So the depths — the dry parts of the naturally occurring droughts — will be drier than we’re used to, and the wet parts won’t be as wet.”

Drought affects people differently from other disasters. After something terrible happens — tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes — people regularly come together in memorable ways, rising above the things that divide them. In a drought, however, what is terrible is that nothing happens. By the time you know you’re in one, you’ve already had an extended opportunity to meditate on the shortcomings of your neighbors. You wait for what does not arrive. You thirst. You never experience the rush of compassion that helps you behave well. Drought brings out the worst in us.

After the Chacoan drought, corn-farming ancestral Puebloans still remained in the Four Corners area of the Southwest. They hung on, even if at lower population densities. After the Mesa Verdean drought, everybody left.

By the number of smashed crania and other broken bones in the ruins of the region’s beautiful stone villages, archaeologists judge that the aridifying world of the Mesa Verdeans was fatally afflicted by violence. Warfare and societal breakdown, evidently driven by the changing climate, helped end that culture.

So it matters what we do. Within the limits imposed by the environment, the history we make is contingent, not fated. But we are not exactly off to a good start in dealing with the challenges ahead. The problem of water consumption in the Southwest is remarkably similar to the problem of greenhouse gas pollution. First, people haggle to exhaustion over the need to take action; then, they haggle over inadequate and largely symbolic reductions. For a host of well-considered, eminently understandable, and ultimately erroneous reasons, inaction becomes the main achievement. For this drama, think Hamlet. Or if the lobbyists who argue for business as usual out west and in Congress spring to mind first, think Iago.

We know at least one big thing about how this particular tragedy will turn out: the so-called civilization of the Southwest will not survive the present century, not at its present scale anyway. The question yet to be answered is how much it will have to shrink, and at what cost. Stay tuned. It will be one of the greatest, if grimmest, shows on Earth.

William deBuys

William deBuys is the author of seven books, including the just published A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), and The Walk (an excerpt of which won a Pushcart Prize). He has long been involved in environmental affairs in the Southwest, including service as founding chairman of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the 87,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which deBuys discusses the water politics of the American West click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Copyright 2011 William deBuys