The Land Desk

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Catchup on your Land Desk reading
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Catchup on your Land Desk reading

Jonathan P. Thompson
Dec 6, 2021
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Catchup on your Land Desk reading
www.landdesk.org

It occurs to me, as my hands clench up into keyboard claws, that maybe I’ve been overloading my keyboard—and my cherished readers—with words as of late. So here I offer you a post to allow you to pause a bit and catch up on your reading. But first, a quick and kind of distressing visual of the ill health of the southern San Juan Mountain snowpack. It’s early in the season with plenty of time for a turnaround. Still: Ooof!

And now, for the catching up part. About a month ago, I ran a three-part essay on the Dolores River in southwestern Colorado, arguably the most imperiled river in the West, and a raft trip some friends of mine and I made down it during a year when that was still possible. I put the three parts into one place and took it out from behind the paywall, so anyone can read it here:

The Land Desk
Our River of Sorrow
On the morning of May 29, 1998, three friends of mine launched a canoe, a kayak, and a raft from the Bradfield Ranch put in along the Dolores River below McPhee Dam on a three day tour. I, the only non-pro boater in the group, tagged along for the ride. The trip would turn out to be fairly typical for the lower Dolores, which is to say it was incredible…
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7 months ago · 4 likes · Jonathan P. Thompson

And then I went on a bit of a rant about backcountry skiers’ resistance to a plan for a winter closure of some parts of the Teton range to help a beleaguered herd of bighorn sheep:

The Land Desk
Wreckreation vs. wildlife
THE NEWS: After years of collaborative effort, a working group releases its strategy for saving the remaining native bighorn sheep of the Teton Range in Idaho and Wyoming, proposing the winter closure of 21,233 acres to humans. Even though this only would affect about 2,000 acres of hi…
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7 months ago · 7 likes · 5 comments · Jonathan P. Thompson

And here’s a long read on the complicated question of whether California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant should be kept running past its 2025 closure date to fight climate change and keep the grid from crashing

The Land Desk
The Diablo's in the details
… but first … The Biden administration plans a 20 year ban on federal oil and gas leasing within 10 miles of northern New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park. It’s yet another sign that Biden is beginning to deliver on his beginning-of-term promises regarding climate change and oil and gas development. He announced the mineral withdrawal as part of a larger initiative to build “a new era of nation-to-nation engagement,” tribal nation that is. The…
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7 months ago · 4 likes · 6 comments · Jonathan P. Thompson

And, uggh, as the pandemic continues, it’s worth looking back on another pandemic: the 1918 flu, which wiped out about 10 percent of Silverton, Colorado’s population while largely sparing Gunnison County (which put a strict quarantine into place)

The Land Desk
The Blackest Week: A pandemic comes to Colorado's high country--in 1918
Editor’s Note: I was really hoping this piece, excerpted and adapted from River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster, would lose its relevance. But as each successive wave of the COVID pandemic crashes down on the globe, and as the politicization of public health grows ever more egregious, it becomes clear t…
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7 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Jonathan P. Thompson

And I talk about the radicalization of the GOP through the lens of a meeting my High Country News colleagues and I had with Mark Gordon, the current Republican governor of Wyoming, back when he was a coalbed methane-fighting moderate:

The Land Desk
The radicalization of the GOP
THE NEWS: Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, tweets an animation of himself killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Harriet Hageman—a Sagebrush Rebel lawyer and proponent of transferring public lands to private hands—is gunning for arch-conservative Rep. Liz Cheney’s House seat, because the latter failed to show adequate fealty to Donald Trump. And …
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7 months ago · 7 likes · 3 comments · Jonathan P. Thompson

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And how about some history of the New Deal and an overview of the “new New Deal” and the bounty it holds for the West?

The Land Desk
The new New Deal is a pretty good deal
Editor’s Note: Portions of the following story originally appeared in my High Country News writeup on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act…
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7 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Jonathan P. Thompson

Don’t miss the Land Desk rundown and data dump on the Biden administration’s oil and gas leasing report, which was a letdown to many an environmentalist, and which the aforementioned Gov. Gordon derided as an assault on the West.

The Land Desk
Fed leasing review: raise royalties; ignore climate
THE NEWS: The Interior Department finally releases its report on the federal oil and gas leasing program, concluding that the program falls short of serving the public interest, “provides insufficient opportunities for public input, shortchanges taxpayers and states, and tilts toward opening up low-potential lands without adequately considering competin…
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6 months ago · 2 likes · Jonathan P. Thompson

And, finally, a piece about efforts to unearth the memories of Lake Powell’s voluminous silt

The Land Desk
The Silt Remembers
In June 1975, as winter clung stubbornly to the high San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, a heavy rain fell on the still-icy tailings containment ponds at Standard Metal’s Mayflower Mill, just outside of Silverton. The combination of rain and ice caused one of the impoundments’ sand walls to give way, allowing some 75,000 tons of sludge within to break free and flow into the Animas River…
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6 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Jonathan P. Thompson

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Brendan Trimboli
Dec 6, 2021Liked by Jonathan P. Thompson

Cue the grimacing emoji for that snowpack data. Any idea how this compares to 2017/2018 (winter leading up to the 416 fire)?

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