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OH, THOSE GAS PRICES! (OR MAYBE THEY'LL SAVE THE SIERRA)

Bill Pieper — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:49:49 -0700

Am I the only one nostalgic for $4.50 a gallon gas? Kind of feels like it, but by instinct I’m a contrarian about enough in life that it’s a familiar place to be. Not that I enjoyed having to visit the ATM both before and after every fill-up of my trusty VW New Beetle earlier this summer. I mean the thing gets 32 mpg, which used to sound good, but let’s be honest. That’s only about half what current automotive technology will support, which itself won’t cure our addiction to imported oil, and I still spew more carbon into the atmosphere than anyone is entitled to be happy about.

Yet with gas at $4.50, and at the time $4.50 looked like a waystation on the road to $5.00 and beyond, you could start to smell change in the air along with all the smog. Used car lots got clogged with Hummers and other SUVs, public transit ridership soared, a new ripple of zeal swept through the alternative energy industries, miles driven per person slumped and our government sounded as though it might get serious about ceasing to subsidize rampant consumption of fossil fuels.

Much there to like, of course, but it’s nowhere near the whole story. Because embedded in "cheap" gas are a host of current land-use issues and abuses. Want the fastest way to damp down urban sprawl? Expensive gas. Want to see more farmland preserved from development? Expensive gas. Want to see inner cities truly renewed and thriving? Expensive gas. Want to see less impact on precious natural environments like our beloved Sierra Nevada from motorized recreation, second-home subdivisions and air pollution? Same answer. And the same for the pleasure of fresher fruits and vegetables grown close to home and for restoring local enterprises and manufacturing by upping the cost of globalization. Not to mention the reduced carbon emissions that go with all this.

So yeah, I was pinched at the pump when we were at $4.50, and I had to cut back and rethink my lifestyle to balance the family budget. And the idea of $5.00 or beyond was scary. But there’s an awful lot on the list of things $5.00 gas would buy that have real value and would be worth paying for.

It galls me that the oil companies, perversely, make record profits whenever the cost of their primary raw material jumps, because they don’t create those side benefits I’ve described and don’t deserve to get paid for them. But when you live in a country whose leadership is too in thrall to big oil to enact any sort of carbon tax or flex-tax to stabilize the price of gas at a rational level—a level that would bring about those benefits as well as finance R&D for energy from cleaner sources a-la France or Denmark—then you’ve got to take the bad with the good.

For my part, I’d like to have some of that good. And if gas were to stabilize at a seemingly "high" price and hold there for decade, I and many others could adjust, and adjust better than we do to the rapid-fire ups and downs of world tensions in the producing countries and a speculator-driven market. So now, as gas prices trend toward $3.80 or thereabouts, I’m nostalgic. There’s too much wastefulness and too many unintended consequences when gas is artificially cheap relative to the true costs of burning it.

Bill Pieper is the author of Belonging – A Novel of Downieville and California's Modern Gold Country (Comstock Bonanza Press, 2006) Please see his profile on this site or visit his webpage at http://stores.ebay.com/bpbooks

Goldman Awards Inspire and Support Grassroots Environmentalism

Bill Pieper — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:56:52 -0700

On April 14, I had the pleasure of attending the nineteenth annual Goldman Environmental Prize awards in San Francisco. An invitation-only crowd from around the world filled Davies Hall Opera House for the event, featuring KPIX TV’s Kate Kelley as mistress of ceremonies and a narrative describing each winner by actor Robert Redford. Afterward the honorees and audience adjourned for a gala reception in the city hall rotunda directly across the street.

The awards, each consisting of $150,000 in cash plus an Oscar-like statuette of an Ouroboros (a serpent biting its tail that is recognized in many cultures as a symbol of nature’s power of renewal), were presented by Richard N. Goldman, co-founder with his late wife Rhoda H. Goldman, of the Goldman Family Foundation. In all, the 2008 awards went to seven recipients from six regions spanning the globe.

Part of the genius of this award, which in environmental circles has come to mean much what the Nobel Prize does elsewhere, is that it recognizes solely grassroots efforts to the exclusion of government agencies, academic institutions or other foundations. An additional key aspect is that it does not pit all the regions against each other for a single prize. Rather, the prizes are co-equal and they go to carefully vetted winners, one for each of the six predetermined regions.

This year’s award for Europe was won by Ignace Schops of Genk, Belgium for his indispensable role in creating Hoge Kempen, Belgium’s first-ever national park in the northeastern Limberg province of that densely populated country. Dedicated in 2006, Hoge Kempen represents formidable public salesmanship to gain community support, political support and financial support (2/3 of the 90-million-euro total cost came from private matching funds). Schops, in English, spoke very movingly of the sacred trust national parks embody and in the process put eloquent spin on a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.

The award for North America went to Jesus Leon Santos, a Mixtec Indian leader from Oaxaca, Mexico, who has organized Mixtec campesinos to reforest and thus re-water more than 1,000 hectacres of formerly eroded and depleted agricultural land that now harbors highly productive food crops and a myriad of wildlife. In addition, Santos’ group CEDICAM has undertaken a seed bank to preserve and propagate traditional varieties of Mexican maize and to lobby the Mexican government to carve out exception zones protecting native corn from the degradation of the genome and the economic harm caused by US-subsidized GMO corn being dumped there below cost under NAFTA. Speaking entirely in Spanish, Santos pledged that the award would be used solely to further CEDICAM’s work.

The Asia award went to retired Siberian scientist Marina Rikhvanova for her extraordinary work in organizing local communities to protect Lake Baikal, a virtual Galapagos of unique species and the largest body of fresh water on the planet (it contains, in fact, 1/6 of all earth’s fresh water). At great personal danger to themselves and their families, Rikhanova and her allies forced Vladimir Putin and the Russian oil cartel to reroute a major trans-Siberian pipeline away from the Baikal drainage and to halt construction of a nuclear fuel processing plant within that drainage. She too, speaking in Russian, pledged that the award would go exclusively toward her work and her organization.

Following a brief intermission spiced by the sounds of a Taiko drum ensemble on stage, two exceptional environmental stewards from Ecuador’s Amazon Basin came forward to share the award for South and Central America. Luis Yanza, a leader of the indigenous community, and lawyer Pablo Fajardo Mendoza have tirelessly waged a legal battle for the cleanup of an area the size of Rhode Island that was turned into a toxic wasteland due to oil extraction by PetroEquador, Texaco and Chevron. The Equadorian interests have apparently settled their share and paid a multi-million-dollar fine. Texaco, and later Chevron, which purchased Texaco in 2001, have steadfastly resisted accepting blame, and the morning following the award ran full-page ads in the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times denouncing Yanza and Fajardo as opportunistic money-grubbers. At home, the two local heroes and their families have also faced death threats, but their speeches accepting the award were truly thrilling.

The award for Africa went to musician and community activist Feliciano dos Santos from Mozambique. Polio-afflicted as a youth and left with a pronounced limp, dos Santos has dedicated his life to village-level public health projects in the areas of clean drinking water and sanitary waste disposal. Composted sludge from the latter is also used to safely fertilize local crops. All manner of water-born diseases have been mitigated through these efforts, paid for in large part by concerts throughout Africa and Europe by dos Santos’ band Massuko. As part of his acceptance, he both spoke and sang in Portuguese, accompanying himself on the guitar.

The final award, for a vast region known as islands and island nations, went to Puerto Rico’s Rosa Hilda Ramos, who organized her fellow citizens to save and restore the 1,200 acre Las Cucharillas Marsh in Catano, across the bay from San Juan. In addition to protecting this vital wetlands ecosystem, she galvanized local support to require the cleanup of air quality in the San Juan basin, principally stemming from the Puerto Rico Electric Authority’s generating plants. Prior to her efforts, San Juan had some of the dirtiest air within the US EPA’s jurisdiction, with high rates of lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. Now, having formed a mutually beneficial partnership with the Bacardi Corporation, Ramos is expanding on her past successes. Speaking in both Spanish and English, she described receiving the award as the happiest moment in her life except her marriage and the births of her children.

And frankly, this writer’s feet have barely touched the ground since being exposed to these grand displays of service to our planet. My good fortune in being able to attend came through knowing landscape and nature photographer Sidney Hollister, whose work has been featured in the Goldman Foundation’s annual reports and also adorns the foundation offices at the Presidio of San Francisco. It seems fair to note as well that I was so moved during the ceremony I cried twice, although the precise points at which that occurred I’ll leave for readers to guess.

As for Saving the Sierra and the remarkable things our organization has achieved in the short period of its existence, the idea that in a few years Catherine and jesikah might be up on the Davies Hall stage receiving a Goldman Prize does not strike me as far fetched.

Sierra Nevada Conservancy Meets in Nevada City

Bill Pieper — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 17:54:22 -0800

At 6 p.m. on March 5 the Sierra Nevada Conservancy held a public input session at Miner's Foundry in Nevada City. The Conservancy (SNC) is a newly formed state agency tasked with fostering and preserving the physical and cultural environment of the entire range, comprising parts of 22 counties from the Oregon border south to Kern County. For program purposes SNC groups these counties into six sub-regions and has established its headquarters in Auburn, essentially the center of its domain. Beginning July 1, 2007 SNC will be funding projects to the tune of $17.5 million in state money plus another $54 million in Proposition 84 money derived from a 2006 bond issue. The purpose of the Nevada City meeting and another 17 like it throughout the Sierra this spring was to discuss SNC's mission and perfect the guidelines to be used in distributing the available funds. For the dates and locations of additional such meetings as well as contact information for SNC, please see www.sierranevada.ca.gov . The Nevada City session drew about 25 attendees to interact with SNC Executive Director Jim Branham and four of his staff. Among the attendees were representatives of the California Division of Forestry, the South Yuba River Citizens League, Saving the Sierra and various Placer and Nevada County neighborhood associations. Topics like the prevalence of toxic metals from abandoned mining sites, the need to define sustainable practices as meaning ecologically sustainable, dealing with urbanization pressures and ensuring balance between governmental and NGO grant recipients were advanced and kept the staff members scribbling away on their flip charts. If the other input sessions are as lively and informative as this one, the SNC and likely the Sierra itself will be well served. Bill Pieper Author of Belonging – A Novel of Downieville and California's Modern Gold Country (Comstock Bonanza Press, 2006) http://stores.ebay.com/bpbooks

Rethinking Urban Sprawl and Community

Bill Pieper — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 17:44:05 -0800

In my December 2006 posting I speculated about the likely deleterious effects of the growing influx of newcomers on established community patterns in the Sierra. Based on the comments I received, I've thought more on the subject and done a little research.

There is no doubt that community patterns and structures in the Sierra are changing and will continue to do so, but perhaps the label deleterious was too reflexive. Certain changes, after all, can be for the better, or can be better for some of those effected and worse for others. The very idea of better or worse can even be in the eye of the beholder.

Over the course of my life I have lived in a small town, a very small town, a rural setting, suburbs and big cities. Each had patterns of community, now that I reflect on it, but those patterns were certainly most tight-knit in the very small town. But whatever the setting, duration of residence and participation in voluntary organizations counts for quite a bit. You need to be around for a while, and to be associated with identifiable activities in order to get on the social radar. It could be that that just happens faster in a very small town, where everybody in the pond is a proportionally bigger frog.

The research I alluded to was reading a very provocative paper titled Social Interaction and Urban Sprawl by Jan K. Brueckner and Ann G. Largey. The former is at UC-Irvine and serves as editor of The Journal of Urban Economics. The latter is at Dublin City University in Ireland. My copy of their paper came from the Social Science Research Network website http://www.SSRN.com/abstract-946914. In it they make a convincing case for something quite counterintuitive.

The most common critique of suburban and ex-urban sprawl is that families and individuals are thrown more and more in on themselves as population density decreases, thus having less social interaction with those outside their household. In other words, urban neighborhoods would seem to promote social interaction. Multi-family housing, the availability of convenient public transportation and a rich choice of cultural activities to share should mean lots of contact with others. And it does, but it often substitutes contact that is largely anonymous for what the researchers identify as "meaningful" contact. That contact, in the form of visiting each other's homes and participating in local volunteer organizations, actually increases in an almost linear way as population density decreases.

Yes, even in the suburbs and exurbs, often portrayed as dead zones, as well as in rural areas. Who'd'a thunk it? Population dispersal creating net gains in community, at least among those undergoing dispersal. Of course, people already in the receiving locations, who may find their population density increasing, could experience the reverse, a loss of the kind of community they've previously known. But since no two people are interchangeable, and none of us live forever, community patterns are changing all the time anyway. And while some individuals are negatively effected by those changes, I have to admit that I find the process itself fascinating.

In fact, what may at first seem like losses may be incidental breakage associated potential net gains. Or not. For now, though, I plan to be more cautious about inferring that all community change in the Sierra is bad.

Bill Pieper, Author of Belonging – A Novel of Downieville and California's Modern Gold Country (Comstock Bonanza Press, 2006) and other fiction titles http://stores.ebay.com/bpbooks

Micro and Macro in the Sierra Nevada

Bill Pieper — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 19:23:21 -0800

At the atomic level, probably not much in the Sierra has changed over the last two hundred years. There is marginally less gold, of course, because miners hauled tons of it away, but the great majority must still be around, as inac-cessible as ever. Other atomic elements would be diminished, too, through erosion. Something has silted up the lower riverbeds of all the major streams, and where that came from is obvious. Wind likely works both ways. In addition to erosion, it has carried in and deposited lots of atoms of native and non-native elements during that time, some originating from human activities, some not. Still, compared to the vast storehouse of atoms originally comprising the range, any percentage of change has been slight.

At the molecular and cellular levels, change would be more noticeable, especially with regard to surface features. Many of the new molecules, however, would classify as pollutants—phosphates, hydrocarbons and the like—directly or indirectly introduced by man. No sample from a stream or lake today would resemble a water analysis from back when. Air samples the same. Then there's all the asphalt, concrete and steel used in highways, railroads, damns and ski lifts, as well as exotic flora and fauna. Any number of interlopers, from Scotch broom to fruit trees, and from wild pigs to livestock and Northern Pike, have arrived, taken up residence and multiplied. As with the human population, including a virtual elimination of indigenous peoples and their replacement by Caucasians.

Indeed, the more we get away from the micro level, the more evident the changes become. Glaciers receding and gone from global warming, smog and acid rain, altered precipitation patterns and native forests reduced by eighty percent and more. But our Sierra remains beautiful, nonetheless. A beauty that draws ever more people wanting to enjoy her, for retirement, for a vacation, for a weekend, or for a day—on foot, in boats, on bikes, on horses, on snowboards, or on some motorized variant of these.

As a result, I think the most realistic way to understand California's dominant mountain range is this: as a macro-level Central Park. Fly over in a plane and you see it immediately. For Harlem and the Upper East Side, we have the rapidly growing Reno/ Carson City conurbation. For the Upper West Side, we have California's clotted sprawl of valley cityscapes from Marysville to Fresno. And for the luxury addresses with park views, we have suburban and ex-urban development at the lower elevations along both sides boasting visual amenities galore.

Of course New York City is a single polity with a clear sense of the key role its park plays. The Sierra is administered by an overlapping array of federal, state, local and private jurisdictions, as are the sprawl cities along its flanks. Not that any of this is new. The Sierra has long been a recreation bank, along with being a resource bank and a dramatic landscape. Nearby urban growth has been going on since California and Nevada came into existence. It's just that the resource bank aspects, other than those relating to watershed, are largely exhausted, while the urbanization and attendant recreation trends have accelerated enormously.

In terms of policy, how do we balance all this for the greatest public benefit? I don't know, but recognizing and accepting the validity of a macro-framework for looking at it might be a good start. An atomized view misses too much that's important.

Bill Pieper

Author of Belonging – A Novel of Downieville and California's Modern Gold Country (Comstock Bonanza Press, 2006) and other fiction titles

http://stores.ebay.com/bpbooks

Individualism and Community in the Modern Sierra

Bill Pieper — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 14:15:59 -0800

It's no longer news that the Sierra foothills and the Sierra itself have experienced significant waves of in-migration since the 1970s. At first the newcomers were mainly retirees taking advantage of low real estate values and year-round good weather, especially at the lower elevations.

But as the area's traditional resource economy based on logging, mining and ranching faded, then largely disappeared, new residents arrived to work in or found businesses related to tourism and outdoor recreation. Kayaking, snowmobile treks, hunting, fishing, hiking, skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing and whitewater rafting, along with motels and restaurants, became economic lynchpins. Already developed areas like the Tahoe Basin drew this population initially, then similar demographic influences began to be felt throughout the range.

Other newcomers braved long commutes to jobs in Reno, Carson City and California's Central Valley cities. More recently, as the Internet has allowed workers to settle anywhere and telecommute, the appeal of mountain living increased. By far the majority of these commuters, telecommuters and service economy entrepreneurs, however, come from urban areas and bring with them urban sensibilities and attitudes.

But urban attitudes are often quite individualistic, particularly regarding questions of lifestyle, culture and schools, and conflict with the community norms of established Sierra population centers. One the other hand, those community norms typically favor a greater individualism than the former urbanites are comfortable with concerning property rights and environmental issues. In many places this has led to resentment and a fracturing of community.

The bonds holding communities together has been an interest of mine for quite a while, especially since reading a 1985 sociological study Habits of the Heart – Individualism and Communitarianism in American Life by Robert N. Bellah, which I rank among the handful of books that have most influenced me.

Additional thinking and reading about the concept of community led me to the essays of Wallace Stegner, who famously said, "I hate cowboys." By which he meant the cowboy myth that unbridled individualism has been the foundation of our national experience. It was cooperation, he insists, in the form of communal water projects, shared labor, shared equipment, and neighbor looking after neighbor that shaped the westward expansion and won the American west.

After Stegner my next stop was Isaiah Berlin, whose work centered on understanding civilization and totalitarianism. This quote from his work is an example: "One of the fundamental human needs, as basic as those for food or shelter… is to belong to identifiable communal groups, each possessing its own… traditions, historical memories, style and outlook. Only if we truly belong to such a community, naturally and unselfconsciously, can we… lead full, creative, spontaneous lives…"

Or, back to Stegner: "… American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has often developed without its corrective, which is belonging." Yet both Berlin and Stegner recognized that belonging has multiple dimensions: there is the community of the barn raising and the threshing bee as well as the community of the lynch mob or the Hitler Youth.

What came to fascinate me, though, was the natural, day-to-day tension between individualism and community, and the tradeoffs necessary to reconcile the two in some lasting way. How much of one must people cede in order to gain the other? Yet all cultures, whether communitarian like Japan's or nominally individualistic like our own, have ways of downplaying this tension, of pretending that it doesn't exist. My goal here, and in my 2006 novel Belonging is to acknowledge it and see it more clearly.

The story is set in Downieville, the seat of Sierra County government, where I once lived and still have many friends. The timeframe is the mid-1970s, chosen to capture the beginning of the demographic wave discussed earlier. Moreover, I'm told that the conflicts I portrayed as fiction are now more pointed and more relevant in fact. Not only have newcomers driven property values up, creating housing pressure on local families, but newcomers have a great deal more disposable income these days, relatively speaking, so increasingly rely on imported urban pleasures enjoyed privately rather than on community activities.

While I know this decrease in community to be true of Downieville, Nevada City and Auburn, the places with which I am most familiar, and I suspect it applies more broadly throughout the Sierra, I'm not certain. Hence I especially invite comments and thoughts on this theme from readers elsewhere in the range. Does anyone but me find the inevitable tradeoffs between individualism and community in mountain California society now weighted more toward the former and less toward the latter than they were ten, twenty or thirty years ago?

Bill Pieper, Author of the novel Belonging (Comstock Bonanza Press, 2006)

http://stores.ebay.com/bpbooks