Yet here we are buying bottled water even by the cup. People buy teeny bottles that hold less than 8 ounces of water. Then while hiking or traveling, they drink and then toss.

Plastic marked PET and HDPE for are said to be recyclable. Said bottles are shredded and melted into “nurdles,” the picturesque name for plastic pellets used as raw material to make more plastic products.

That sounds promising, but according to the Container Recycling Institute, 70% of all bottles wind up in landfills, the ocean, or littering the landscape.  On trails in Grand Canyon National Park, I mostly pick up empty water bottles, each one probably weighing one-third of an ounce. It seems a job that will never be obsolete. Shouldn’t we have learned by now that refilling water bottles is the way to go?

We’ve all learned that plastic is nasty stuff. Yale Climate Connections cautions that each time plastic is melted and remolded it degrades, and recycled plastic is more toxic than “virgin.” The plastic can be “up-cycled” once into a fleece jacket, but eventually that jacket will get shuffled off to the landfill. 

The real reason to drink bottled water is because of its purity, right? Pure fill-in-the-blank spring water. Yet the Los Angeles Times found that about 64% of bottled water is filtered tap water, and Consumer Reports found that bottled water can contain heavy metals and bacteria. A liter of bottled water might contain an average of 240,000 plastic micro-particles.

Even if bottled water comes from a spring, it must still undergo filtration and ozonization, meaning it is no longer “pure” spring water. Most spring water is also said to be minimally treated to maintain its “natural” characteristics, whatever those are.

Let’s talk about the carbon footprint. Is it green behavior to fly water across the country from a remote Pacific island?  In areas where water is mined locally, sometimes from public land, are locals concerned about depleted aquifers? Is that water taken for bottling—in effect—stolen?

Then there’s designer water with all kinds of flavoring, hydrogen water, which adds more H2, or oxygen-enriched water.  At what point does water become sort-of-or-not-water? 

I was once on a VIP tour of a resort in the desert that boasted bespoke water. When those bottles ran out, I offered to refill them, but people told me they would drink nothing from the tap. So I took the bottles into the company van, refilled them from a huge, portable jug that had been filled from who-knows-where but probably the tap, and handed them back. I was told triumphantly: “See? This water is superior.”

At the beginning of the Bright Angel Trail in Grand Canyon one day, I saw a hiker trying to tie a flat of bottled water onto her pack. I politely ask what the Sam Hill she was doing and was told that she’d been advised to drink a liter of water every hour while hiking. I pointed out that this particular trail was popular in part because potable water was provided at several rest stops along the way. She looked offended: “I do not drink tap water.”

As long ago as 2012 it was widely reported that 20% of the waste stream in national parks was disposable water bottles, leading to sales of bottled water banned in parks. Unfortunately, that ban was rescinded by the federal government in 2017, though parks still encouraged visitors to bring and refill their own bottles. No matter—the parks estimate that most of the waste they dump each year is still plastic bottles.

Who remembers drinking from the garden hose. Anyone? Did your fingernails turn black and fall off? A character in the book, True Grit, proclaimed that he once drank water from a muddy hoof print and was glad to get it. While I might not go that far, I have drunk from a lot of questionable sources, and I’m still here to tell the tale. You might want to try the tap.

Marjorie ‘Slim’ Woodruff is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is a Grand Canyon educator.

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Such quiet is a rare gift. I haven’t been in Goodall’s Tanzanian rain forest, but recently shared Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park with a 25-year-old cousin visiting from urban America. Once in the canyons he kept pausing to say, “it’s so peaceful, so still.” He was astonished and renewed by that quiet.

This canyon country stillness is under attack. The assaults come in waves powered by motorized vehicles, engines revving.

First, the Trump administration proposes abandoning the 2023 Bureau of Land Management travel plan for Labyrinth Canyon. This 300,000-acre Utah wildland along the Green River just north of Canyonlands National Park is a gem—a fretwork of slickrock canyons along the river. Labyrinth preserves quiet for rafters, hikers, and bighorn sheep. No death-defying rapids here on this lazy, looping stretch easily paddled by families in canoes.

In a model compromise, the current Labyrinth plan maintains access to more than 800 miles of off-highway-vehicle (OHV) routes, closing only 317 miles to vehicles. In the surrounding Moab region, more than 4,000 miles of routes remain open. OHVs have plenty of room to roam.

But moderation is never enough for Utah politicians determined to motorize every inch of our public lands. They are pushing to reopen 141 miles of closed OHV routes at Labyrinth and hoping for even more. You can comment here before October 24.

In another backtrack on conservation in Utah, the administration has solicited bids for coal leasing on 48,000 acres of BLM land, much of it on and near the boundaries of national parks. The big views from Capitol Reef, Zion, and Bryce Canyon don’t stop at the park boundaries. Visitors, many from other countries, would be horrified by such industrialization of these world-class destinations. Rural Utah depends on these tourists to survive economically.

These are lands that even the conservative second Bush administration deemed unsuitable for mines. As Cory MacNulty, with the National Parks Conservation Association, said of the proposed leasing, “It’s absurd.”

Now the OHV battalions are threatening to overwhelm Capitol Reef National Park.

Utah Republican Senators Mike Lee and John Curtis introduced a bill on October 5 to open virtually every road in Capitol Reef to off-roaders. They claim that disabled Americans need this fundamental change to park policy, though even the park’s back roads are currently accessible by moderately high-clearance cars and trucks. There’s absolutely no need to permit noisy and destructive OHVs.

The senators’ second bill would potentially open other national parks to OHV use. Lee tried to pass nearly identical bills in 2021 and encountered a buzzsaw of resistance from national park advocates.

As retired Capitol Reef superintendent Sue Fritzke said, “OHVs would denigrate the very resources those sites have been set aside to protect, with increased dust and noise and impacts on wildlife, endangered species, and visitors.”

At each mile farther into remote corners of the park, off-highway vehicles become more problematic. Even though a majority of riders obey the rules, some will go off-road. They just will. Their vehicles are designed for this exact purpose. In Capitol Reef’s considerable backcountry—as in all underfunded national parks and monuments— staffing does not allow for constant patrolling to apprehend and ticket wrongdoers.

Capitol Reef is a place to slow down, not speed up. To revel in quiet, not reach for earplugs. To share the healing land with tenderness and restraint.

Lee disrespects national park values with these twin bills, and Curtis, who likes to tout his nature sensitivity on hikes with constituents, should know better. Their misguided proposals should be left to wither in committee and die. Those of us who love the restorative peace of national parks will just keep fighting such regressive bills.

In her last interview, Jane Goodall asked us to never give up: “Without hope, we fall into apathy and do nothing. If people don’t have hope, we’re doomed. Let’s fight to the very end.”

We will.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and photographer in Utah.

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Why did few people notice this directive to dramatically increase logging from our public lands? One answer is that it got lost as an engaged public fought selling off millions of acres of public land.

Final score: We got to keep the land but not the trees.

Most people support careful logging as part of the smart management of public forests. For instance, a now-irrelevant bill called Fix Our Forests Act had been steadily advancing through Congress, gathering support from both the timber industry and dozens of green groups, ranging from The Nature Conservancy to the Citizens Climate Lobby. By targeting over-abundant small trees while leaving the hardy big ones, that bill would have increased logging while protecting habitat and reducing wildfire.

Trump’s new law eliminates those protections, freeing loggers to cut big trees and leave behind the small ones. This will worsen existing tinderbox conditions, particularly in the West.

The law also essentially outsources some public forest management to corporations. It directs the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to develop at least 45 separate, 20-year contracts with private companies. The contracts would enable companies to log across whole districts—not yet determined—or even entire national forests.

An approach this broad has a sordid history of inefficiency, waste, and environmental destruction. For example, the Skokomish River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula suffered decades of damaging floods as a result of the sweeping contract one company had for the so-called Shelton Sustained Yield Unit. That sweetheart timber deal created many bare, flood-prone hillsides and lasted from 1946 until 2022.

Perhaps it’s surprising, but even timber interests oppose 20-year contracts. Over 70 logging-related businesses sent a letter sent to the Forest Service, pointing out that by allowing a single company to tie up publicly owned timber in a national forest, “long-term contracts would harm competition, markets and prices.”

Why didn’t industry opposition get heard? One theory is that these contracts can serve as a fig leaf masking the consequences of Trump’s high tariffs on Canadian lumber. As tariffs on Canadian timber raise homebuilding costs, the administration can claim to be offsetting the problem by providing cheaper logs from national forests.

In the meantime, the Forest Service is scrambling to meet an onslaught of new Trump executive orders. In June, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins rescinded “seven agency-specific regulations” that resulted in a 66 percent reduction of mostly environmental reviews that will offer little opportunity for public comment.

Last week, Rollins also announced her intent to roll back the 2001 Roadless Area Protection Rule, which protects 60 million acres of wildlands. Until Sept. 19, the U.S. Forest Service is taking public comments for a study on the environmental impacts of rescinding the roadless rule. Fierce legal and political fights are guaranteed in an effort to preserve the rule.

All this amounts to a lot of change for an agency ravaged by Elon Musk’s crew of cost-cutters. Some national forests here in Washington State have lost over a third of their professional staff, while regional offices may be eliminated entirely. Gone are the many experts who had the experience to plan quality timber projects that respect fish and wildlife and reduce wildfire risk.

Will Trump succeed in nearly doubling the cut from our public forests? Based on my 40 years in the field, I predict the outcome will be a modest increase—but at the high cost of a severe reduction of best practices. That means our national forests, streams, and wildlife will suffer as dry fuels keep building up.

I see more big wildfires in our future.

Mitch Friedman is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit spurring lively conversation about the West. He heads Seattle-based Conservation Northwest, which he founded in 1989 after years with Earth First!. He is the author of Conservation Confidential: A Wild Path to a Less Polarizing and More Effective Activism.

Correction: This column was corrected in the first paragraph to reflect that the amount of timber projected to be sold is almost 5 billion, not 5 million.

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The survival of spotted owls meant a lot to me as a young environmental activist. In 1985, I spent days living on a plywood platform perched high in the canopy of an Oregon Douglas fir. The tree was majestic, over eight feet wide at the base—just one of many in a stand hundreds of years old.

 If you’re a certain age you might recall the banners: GIVE A HOOT: SAVE THE SPOTTED OWL. They spawned a bumper sticker in what became a culture war: SAVE A LOGGER, EAT A SPOTTED OWL.

My 40-year career as a conservationist began in those Northwest timber wars as I joined other tree-sitters and protesters to halt the logging of gigantic old-growth trees.

The threatened survival of federally endangered spotted owls in the region’s forests became the central issue in a storm of litigation. In 1994, the dispute finally led to President Clinton protecting 24 million acres of ancient forest housing the owls. But even then, barred owls were invading from Eastern states, stealing a prey base of small animals from the spotted owls. The numbers of spotted owls continued to plummet.

Last August, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed off on a controversial Barred Owl Management Strategy that relies on hiring sharpshooters to kill up to 16,000 barred owls a year at a cost of up to $12 million. The plan aims to give spotted owls a chance to survive.

During the 1990s, President Clinton’s sweeping forest plan to save the owls by saving old-growth forests was among many highlights of my conservation career. But I also recall numerous lows-lows. The first was when I learned that loggers had chain sawed that huge tree I’d occupied.

Mostly, I’ve managed to be hopeful about conservation no matter the grief from accelerating losses on the ground. But here’s the dilemma: How are we to process the steady decline of the spotted owl? Conservationists won an epic battle against logging because of these owls, only to see their habitat becoming the arena for an owl-on-owl smackdown.

Must the solution be that we shoot one species to save another? The plan is based on research overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose experiments showed that removing barred owls in limited areas could help spotted owls survive.

When the federal agency’s plan was announced, animal welfare interests sued to block it, arguing that it would fail. They also claimed the costs would add up to more than $1 billion over three decades. Officials at the agency say they will start small and demonstrate their plan’s effectiveness and affordability.

Mixed feelings like mine are shared. Madeleine Cameron, who was part of a University of Wisconsin team involved in experimental removals of barred owls, told the Seattle Times: “I personally did not decide to do owl work thinking this is where my career would be. You get there through watching all your favorite owls disappear.” Meanwhile, some biologists foresee adaptation and hybridization. “Sparred” owls already exist in the Northwest, filling the niche of displaced spotted owls.

Reluctantly, I support killing some barred owls. But like Cameron, this is not what drew me into conservation. And now the whole issue might be academic as the Trump administration disrupts scientific research and agency continuity.

Elon Musk’s cost-cutters fired more than 400 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees in March, an action the Supreme Court upheld April 8. With voluntary retirements and likely further reductions in force, it’s a real question whether the agency will have the funds or staff to carry out the shooting of barred owls.

Meanwhile, the bullies of the forest are winning.

Mitch Friedman is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit spurring lively conversation about the West. He heads Seattle-based Conservation Northwest, which he founded in 1989 after years with Earth First!. His book, Conservation Confidential: A Wild Path to a Less Polarizing and More Effective Activism, is about to be published.

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The reality is that long after I’m gone, most or all of those wells will remain unplugged. The companies and people who once owned them will have been allowed to walk away from their responsibility to clean up their mess.

Uncapped wells are what happens when the federal government enables the fossil-fuel industry to dominate energy policies, as is happening again now, both in the Interior Department and Congress. The policies emerging would allow companies, including many foreign ones, to profit from public lands and minerals that all Americans own. They would also leave taxpayers holding the bag for cleaning up leaking wells.

These abandoned wells already have consequences for wildlife, air, water and rural people. Kirk Panasuk, a rancher in Bainville, Montana, said: “I have personally experienced serious health scares after breathing toxic fumes from oil and gas wells near my property. And I’ve seen too many of my friends and neighbors in this part of the country have their water contaminated or their land destroyed by rushed and reckless industrial projects.”

Republicans and Democrats in previous administrations and Congresses took pains to reform this historically biased federal energy system because of the damage done to rural communities and American taxpayers. Now, the federal government is rolling back those reforms.

Recently, the Interior Department announced that “emergency permitting procedures” were necessary when carrying out NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act. Timelines for environmental assessments for fossil-fuel projects were changed from one year to 14 days, without requiring a public comment period. The timeline for more complicated environmental impact statements was cut from two years to 28 days, with only a 10-day public comment period.

In May, the House Natural Resources Committee unveiled its piece of the House budget bill, which enables the federal government to expedite oil, gas, coal and mineral development. It gives Americans basically no say on whether those projects should move ahead, while keeping taxpayers from receiving a fair return on the development of publicly owned lands and minerals. 

The administration’s justification for expediting permits is that we face “a national energy emergency.” No such emergency exists. The United States is currently the world’s biggest exporter of liquified natural gas and is producing more oil than any other country on Earth.

Both the House bill—just passed and now before the Senate—and the Interior Department’s policies, ignore the long-standing mandate to manage public lands for multiple uses. Instead, the new policies:

• Drastically reduce the public’s role in the permitting process.
• Allow large corporations to pay to evade environmental and judicial review.
• Exempt millions of acres of private lands with federal minerals and thousands of wells on these lands from federal permitting and mitigation requirements.

The House bill would also slash the royalty rate for oil and gas production from 16.67% to 12.5%, depriving state and local governments of funding they depend on for schools, roads and other essential services. An analysis by Resources for the Future found that the proposed lower royalty rates would result in a loss of nearly $5 billion in revenue over the next decade. 

The Interior Department’s emergency permitting procedures and the House bill are assaults the federal government has waged on public lands since January. The public has been shoved to the side as oil and gas drillers enjoy their energy dominance throughout our public lands.

Now, it’s up to the Senate to strip out these gifts to the fossil fuel industry, and it’s up to us tell our elected Senate representatives that these policies ignore the wishes of Westerners. We have told pollsters innumerable times that we support conservation, not exploitation of public lands for private interests. What’s happening now is radically wrong.

Barbara Vasquez is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. A retired PhD

biomedical researcher and semiconductor engineer, she is board chair of the Western Organization of Resource Councils and a board member of the Western Colorado Alliance.

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There’s the extinction crisis affecting animals and plants that’s 1,000 to 10,000 times the regular rate of extinction. Then there’s the erosion of soil, as half of the planet’s topsoil has been lost in the past 150 years.

Water pollution has increased because about 80% of untreated wastewaters worldwide get discharged into waterways that supply communities.

Worse is the elephant in the room—climate change—causing ever more major floods, violent hurricanes and extreme wildfires. Last year was also the first year the world exceeded the climate threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, at which climate impacts are expected to significantly increase.

These are just the headlines. It seems so grim today on Planet Earth that archaeologists, biologists and other ologists want to name this epoch the “Anthropocene”

for our human-dominated, hopeless present.

Is there an alternative to this gloom and doom? To function, I think there has to be, and much of that certainty comes out of a freshman course I teach called Environmental Conservation at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

A hundred or more students enroll each semester, representing majors from pre-business to interior design, and the students are just three months out of high school when they arrive in the fall. The world they’ve begun studying seems anything but stable.

At the beginning of the semester, I ask them if their generation can “save the world.” There are always optimists who say “yes,” though in recent years fewer and fewer hands reach for the ceiling.

Over the course of the semester, we discuss the losses on the land and to wildlife, as well as the impacts of human population growth, the starkly different levels of per-capita global consumption, and the unintended consequences of technology. 

We also gain familiarity with our local and regional watershed. We do that by participating in “ecological restoration” workdays, going to work on ranches with conservation easements. There the young students use their hands and tools to protect water sources, build wildlife-friendly crossings, and slow soil erosion by filling in gullies, among other solutions.

Watershed-based experiences like this can cut through the murky esoteric to the pragmatic: There are ways to live on our home planet without spoiling it. The best part is seeing students shifting away from a sense of despair.

Colorado has over 150 collaborative conservation groups—  collaborativeconservation.org—that bring people together where they live, work, recreate and worship. Their aim is to improve the health of soil, water, plants and wildlife. This movement has grown West-wide, spanning 11 states.

The antidote to our planet’s illnesses also has global reach. Paul Hawken, in his book, The Blessed Unrest, describes the more than one million bottom-up groups around the globe working toward environmental sustainability and social justice. Unlike traditional movements, this network is decentralized, collaborative, diverse and not driven by a single ideology or leader.

This good news applies to climate change as well, even though President Trump has, for the second time, removed the United States from the Paris Climate Accord. That leaves our country in the company of Yemen, Libya and Iran.

But people concerned about global warming reacted by going public and objecting. More than 3,800 leaders from America’s city halls, state houses, boardrooms and college campuses have signed the “We Are Still In” declaration  (https://www.wearestillin.com/we-are-still-declaration). Signers represent more than 155 million Americans and $9 trillion of the U.S. economy.

My gut tells me that many of us refuse to give in to hopelessness. But can young people, inheriting our mistakes and the determination of some to deny there’s even a crisis, “save the world”? That’s a gigantic ask.

But can they make the watershed where they live better? If the state of one watershed after another improves, might the Earth over time become healthier, one watershed at a time? All we can do where we live is to get involved in conservation locally, regionally or nationally, joining a group or starting our own.

We can also contact our elected representatives to protest this administration’s intent to maximize extractive uses on public lands.

Let’s choose hope, get our hands dirty, and make our optimism real.

Richard Knight is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He works at the intersection of land use and land health in the American West.

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As for Trump’s pick for Interior Secretary, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum: If Burgum tries to turn America’s public lands into an even bigger cash cow for the oil and gas industry, or tries to shrink America’s parks and national monuments, he’ll quickly discover he’s on the wrong side of history.

Public lands have strong bipartisan support in the West. The annual Conservation in the West Poll, last released by the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project in February 2024, found that nearly three-quarters of voters—including Republicans—want to protect clean water, air quality and wildlife habitats, while providing opportunities to visit and recreate on public lands.

That’s compared to just one-quarter of voters who prefer maximizing the use of public lands available for drilling and mining. According to the poll, which surveyed voters in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—80 % of Westerners support the national goal of conserving 30 % of land and waters in America by the year 2030.

Bipartisan support for more conservation and balanced energy development has been a cornerstone of the poll’s findings since it began in 2011. Under the leadership of President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the current administration has made progress over the past four years in bringing public land management in line with the preferences of Western voters. That includes better protecting the Grand Canyon, increasing accountability for oil and gas companies that operate on public land, and putting conservation—at last—on par with drilling and mining on public land.

The President-elect may find it hard to immediately block what Westerners want. After Trump took office in 2017 promising to transform public land management, his team was unprepared and used its power to benefit its own interests, ignoring the wishes of the American people.

Trump’s first Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, misused his position to advance his dream of owning a microbrewery in Montana. Trump’s second Interior secretary, oil and gas industry lobbyist David Bernhardt, put his finger on the scale in the interest of a former client. Trump’s choice to run the Bureau of Land Management, William Perry Pendley, served illegally without being confirmed by Congress.

We worked hard to shed light on this corruption and defend public lands from Trump’s attacks. Still, Trump’s Interior department allowed oil and gas companies to lock up millions of acres for bargain basement prices.

In his second term, Donald Trump will attempt to shrink national monuments like Bears Ears in Utah and permit drilling and mining in inappropriate areas. The president-elect has already committed to undoing President Joe Biden’s energy and environmental policies.

Project 2025, the policy handbook written by former Trump

officials, clearly lays out a plan to gut the Interior Department and remove environmental safeguards that ensure the health of our public lands.

Project 2025 would give extractive industries nearly unfettered access to public lands, severely restrict the power of the Endangered Species Act, open millions of acres of Alaska wilderness to drilling, mining and logging and roll back protections for spectacular landscapes like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. It would also remove protections for iconic Western species such as gray wolves and grizzly bears.

What can we do about this assault? The law and public opinion are on our side. Public land protections are stronger today than ever, thanks in large part to the grassroots efforts of Tribes, local community leaders and conservation organizations.

We know much of what’s in Trump’s public lands playbook, and we will fight back. We’ll continue to shine a light on corruption within the Trump administration and hold it accountable.

Our partners will work in Congress to stop bad policies and projects from going forward. We are ready to take action in the courts and in the streets. And we’re not waiting until Inauguration Day to start.

Jennifer Rokala is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about Western issues. She is executive director of Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan public lands advocacy group.

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In June up high, the forest floor is lit by the spires of flowering vanilla-leaf spangled with starflowers, along with coralroot orchids. The towering conifers and mountain river lined with vine maples and dogwoods are a world apart from the cottonwood-shaded creeks of my home ground in the valley.

Visiting in fall, it’s a far more colorful spectacle. Down in the valley, the oak leaves manage a rusty orange brown, but up in the mountain forests, trees along the river prepare for winter with a blaze of glory.

The dogwoods now bear leaves tinged with delicate salmon pink, while the wild hazel glows yellow and vine maple leaves flame orange and red.  In places, the trail passes through a tunnel of these trees, and I can feel my body soaking up the luminous colors, as if storing light for the dark winter ahead.

Everyone who is attuned to the natural world experiences and anticipates seasonal delights. For most of us, these are simply opportunities for appreciating the beauties of nature. But the reliability of nature is something that every living thing depends on and responds to in timeframes both long—evolutionary adaptations—and short—ecological strategies. 

This reliability has shaped the flowering and fruiting times of plants, the migratory patterns of birds, and the yearly cycles of nomadic people, who knew the seasonal availability of resources in exquisite detail.

But what would it mean if nature were no longer reliable? I’m afraid that we and every organism on Earth are finding that out through much hotter days and more frequent floods. The reason, of course, is global climate change. But that phrase has become so familiar that it has lost much of its power. 

It seems to promise some orderly change from one climate to another, admittedly less desirable, one. But what the planet will really be experiencing in the coming decades can better be described as climate chaos.

Climate chaos could manifest in two very different ways. The first, and most terrifying, is that global warming will trigger one or more “climate tipping points” that cause “abrupt, irreversible and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity,” reports Science magazine.

Its 2022 investigation identified no fewer than nine tipping points that could be activated this century, including collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, failure of the Indian summer monsoons, and breakdown of the Atlantic Ocean circulation that delivers the warm Gulf Stream to northern Europe. 

The effects of passing any of these tipping points are almost too momentous to contemplate. Let’s instead focus our attention on the other, seemingly less all-encompassing aspect of climate chaos: spring wildflowers and autumn leaves.

Even if global warming doesn’t send the planet over a tipping point into an entirely new climate reality, it will affect the distribution of every organism and the seasonal timing of every natural phenomenon. To quote a report by the National Climate Adaptation Science Center, “… not all species are responding at the same speed or in the same ways. This can disrupt the manner in which species interact and the way that ecosystems function overall.”

In other words, the ecological effects of climate change are chaotic. The reliable pleasure of mountain wildflowers may fade as the complex ecology of the forest breaks down in the face of changes in snow cover, spring temperatures and soil moisture. The spectacle of autumn colors may be muted.

To be sure, these are small losses in comparison to, say, the reversal of the Gulf Stream. But as you hike through your corner of the world, or as you tend your home garden, you might spare a moment of gratitude for the reliability of nature that you have experienced in your life.

What’s coming is bound to change everything.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a biologist and writer based in Ashland, Oregon.

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The metallic color came from the Gold King Mine, near the town of Silverton in the San Juan Range. The abandoned mine had been plugged by an earthen and rock dam known as a bulkhead, behind which orange, highly acidic drainage water accumulated. But after a federal Environmental Protection Agency employee accidentally breached the plug during an unauthorized excavation, 3.5 million gallons of additional runoff rushed downstream.

The worker and the EPA came in for a slew of outrage and blame. Alarmed Tribal Nations and towns halted drinking water and irrigation operations; tourists fled the region during the height of tourist season.

But here’s the surprising opinion of Ty Churchwell, the mining coordinator for Trout Unlimited: “Looking back, this can be taken as a positive thing because of what happened afterward.” He sits on a community advisory group for the Bonita Peak Mining District, a Superfund site that contains the Gold King mine.

“We’ve got federal Superfund designation, and it’s the only tool at our disposal to fix this problem,” he said. The “problem” is unregulated hard-rock mining that began 160 years ago.

“I know this isn’t conventional wisdom,” Churchwell said, “but no fish were killed in Durango (30 miles downstream) because of the spill. It was ugly and shocking, but a lot of that orange was rust, and the acidic water was diluted by the time it hit Durango and downstream.”

EPA’s website points out that over 5.4 million gallons of acid mine runoff enters the Animas River daily.

The way Churchwell tells it, water quality and numbers of fish had been declining in the Upper Animas River since the early 2000s. That’s when the last mining operation ended and closed its water treatment plant.

Six months after the news-making spill almost a decade ago, EPA geared up to make sure untreated mine waste would not head for the river again.

Reid Christopher, a 62-year-old former electrician and mountain guide, became the Gold King Mine’s restoration whiz, taking over an old wastewater treatment plant in the area in 2019. Now, he said, only treated water leaves the 11,439-foot elevation mine. 

This July, Christopher took me on a tour of the wastewater plant. In a nutshell, cleanup begins when the constantly flowing wastewater gets shuttled into settling ponds.

Christopher then pumps hydrated lime into the water, boosting its pH to 9.25. The high pH unlocks the heavy metals from suspension, and an added flocculant causes the heavy metals to clump together inside football field-sized textile filtration bags.

Clear—surprisingly clean—water streams from the bags into Cement Creek, Christopher said, and the process is so effective he said he’d like to treat the drainage from other major mineshafts in Bonita Peak.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency remains gun-shy about talking to the press. It was deluged with bad publicity following the 2015 blowout, though as Churchwell points out, “it wasn’t the EPA that mined the San Juan Mountains and left their mess behind.”

The messes from abandoned mines, at Gold King and around the entire West, have never received much attention from Congress. Until the Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the EPA depended on annual appropriations. That meant for almost four decades, the agency never got enough money to thoroughly clean up the heavy-metal mine waste flowing out of hard rock mines like Gold King.

And because the mess was buried deep in the mountains at elevations from 10,500 feet to over 12,500 feet, the agency couldn’t compete for federal dollars until it grabbed all the environmental disaster headlines of summer 2015.

Even now, said Churchill, and despite available funding, “The EPA has 48 mine-impacted locations in the Upper Animas River and only so many dollars to work with. They have to get the most bang for their buck.”

Commercial use of metals in the sludge might possibly make some money for the EPA. The Colorado School of Mines has taken water samples to see what—if anything—can be retrieved from the mine waste.

But even if mine sludge is worthless, cleaning acidic water at the top of the watershed is worthwhile for every living thing downstream.  

For now, Christopher is always looking to hire locals for dirt work and hauling. He said the jobs could last a lifetime.

Dave Marston is publisher of Writers on the Range, Writersontherange.org, the independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively debate about Western issues. He lives in Durango.

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Virtually everything most Americans think they know about glyphosate—the active ingredient in products like Roundup—is wrong. That’s because social media and ads by lawyers offering to sue Bayer (owner of Monsanto, glyphosate’s original manufacturer) are rife with misinformation.

What most Americans don’t know about glyphosate is that it’s often the only option for saving native fish and wildlife from alien plants. When non-native infestations replace habitat, the animals don’t go somewhere else. They die. That’s why boots-on-the-ground environmental groups like The Nature Conservancy depend on glyphosate.

But fear of glyphosate has created big business for lawyers and a fundraising bonanza for some environmental outfits.

In 2015, with no original research, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)—an appendage of the World Health Organization (WHO)—placed glyphosate on its speculative list of “probable carcinogens” along with “red meat” and “very hot beverages.” It did so even though all scientific authorities that have done original research, including its parent WHO and the United States EPA, report no link to cancer. 

Some studies that review existing research do report possible links to cancer. But the study subjects are farm workers who used large quantities of Roundup for years, frequently without protective gear. Roundup is applied by wildlife managers in relatively tiny amounts.

Still, based on IARC’s speculation, there have been glyphosate bans or restrictions in 28 nations as well as municipalities and counties in 15 U.S. states. And Bayer has paid $11 billion to settle lawsuits brought by cancer victims blaming their illnesses on Roundup.

California responded to the IARC review by requiring that glyphosate products carry cancer warnings. But a federal judge struck it down, ruling it “inherently misleading …when apparently all other regulatory and governmental bodies have found the opposite.”

According to the international news agency Reuters, IARC “edited findings from a draft of its review of the weedkiller glyphosate that were at odds with its final conclusion.”

And this from Dr. Lee Van Wychen, science director for the National and Regional Weed Science Societies: “IARC’s review was such a crooked scam. I’ve never seen anything like it. IARC cherry-picked a couple studies and on top of that fudged the results… Now there are people on the conservation side who are afraid to use glyphosate.”

Utah Lake’s brackish water and extensive wetlands make it one of North America’s most important staging areas for migratory water birds. The watershed also provides vital habitat for other birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, including the federally threatened June sucker.

Fifteen years ago, this biodiversity appeared doomed by an explosion of phragmites, a non-native, deep-rooted reed that spreads through wind-blown seeds and rhizomes. It grows out to four feet in water and all the way to the transitional zone of dry land.

So thick was Utah Lake’s infestation that wildlife couldn’t move through it, and people couldn’t access the lake. Phragmites created fire hazards, sucked vast amounts of water from the already diminished lake, and generated swarms of mosquitoes by blocking water flow.

Large infestations of phragmites can’t be cut or bulldozed, leaving herbicide as the only option. Dead stalks are then crushed or burned to make new growth visible for retreatment.

Spraying with glyphosate formulations began in 2009. “Each year, managers would focus on a different area,” reported the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food. Every area of the lake got three consecutive years of the spray and trample treatment.

Today, fish, wildlife, and human access have been largely restored. Glyphosate has eradicated 70 percent of the phragmites and future applications will kill most of what’s left.

Revegetation started this spring. With help from local organizations, the Utah Lake Authority has planted 7,500 native seedlings. “Planting parties” of 400 volunteers will plant 10,000 more native plants by year’s end.

“For the lake,” said Luke Peterson, director of the Utah Lake Authority, “this is a turning point.”

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes exclusively about fish and wildlife.

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