A week earlier, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland had ordered her department to remove the derogatory word “squaw” from any place names on federal lands. It means new names are coming for this bay and over 600 other features on public lands across the country.

A year earlier, while working with a local nonprofit, I moderated a Facebook group page about the popular national forest surrounding the bay. The page is a place to trade stories and information. One morning my friend Dave, a local charter boat captain, posted a picture from the bay and commented, “nice place for a name change.” This was before the Biden administration, and Dave was only musing.

Name changes are not uncommon here. In recent years, streets, mountains, and a whole city have adopted Alaska Native names. And in 2015, as he prepared to visit Alaska, then-President Obama issued a famous – and popular – order renaming the state’s highest peak from McKinley to Denali, a nod to the Athabaskan people who have lived here for millennia.

I didn’t think anything of Dave’s comment, but when I checked back later, I saw he’d been dog-piled. Scores of people, mostly men, puffed up their online chests and hurled insults. They cursed, called him a snowflake or far worse, and lamented Alaska’s descent into “wokeness.”

I think I was a weak moderator. I deleted some abusive comments, kicked out a few people, and politely called for civility. But later, when Dave read the comments, he deleted his post and left the group. With that, our page lost a great source of local history and science.

There’s a lot to untangle from this little squall in Alaska’s remote corner of the Internet, including the tenor of today’s culture wars, which normalizes bullying.

Then there’s the word itself. Some commenters schooled Dave on etymology, citing a popular theory that squaw evolved from an Algonquin term meaning “woman.” But it was a selective take. No one mentioned that for centuries the Americanized usage was contemptuous and dehumanizing.

Like any racist slur, the term still causes pain and fuels bias. These things matter, especially when we consider the violence disproportionately inflicted against Indigenous women and girls, an issue still unfamiliar to many. In recent years, tribes, states, and others have identified thousands of unsolved cases of missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls and shown that a mix of bias and jurisdictional issues on tribal lands feeds a disparity in justice.

In response, many Western states, including New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, and Washington have assigned task forces or taken other actions. Congress and both the Biden and Trump administrations have also acted with the 2020 Savannah Act, which improves Justice Department coordination on the issue, and the creation of a new Bureau of Indian Affairs unit for such crimes.

Haaland’s name-change order skips past these specifics and simply states that squaw is a racist term. But she does remind the public of the federal government’s long-standing efforts to wipe racial slurs from place names. In 1962, for instance, efforts began to remove a racist term for African American people. In 1974, the same occurred for a slur against Japanese people that originated in the World War II internment era. And beginning in 1999, state laws in Montana, Oregon, and elsewhere outlawed squaw from place names.

It reveals decades of bipartisan work to remove names that alienate subsets of Americans from their public lands. That long view would have been handy on our Facebook page, where many disparaged Dave’s comment as politically correct faddishness.

Ultimately, a name change won’t solve bigger issues. But at over 600 sites, it will stop a slur and prompt a dialog that’s overdue. That’s true for my local bay too. But even with a new name, it will still be a serene place surrounded by forest and snow-clad mountains, where in late fall you can stand around all day and never see a deer.

Tim Lydon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes from Alaska.

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With the United States among the world’s top methane polluters, and the Biden administration promising tighter nationwide rules, these two Western states set a bar for other states to follow.

For decades, the oil and gas industry has freely discharged the colorless pollutant from tens of thousands of wells as a cost-savings measure. Then this March, New Mexico banned the wasteful venting and flaring of natural gas, which is comprised almost entirely of methane. New Mexico is only the third state, after Colorado and Alaska, to ban the practice.

This May, New Mexico also proposed a final rule to staunch leaking of methane from across the state’s oil and gas supply chain, which includes part of the mammoth Permian Basin it shares with Texas. The leaking occurs at well pads, pipelines, compressors, storage facilities and more.

It’s a system-wide problem that generates methane plumes large enough to detect from space.

The proposed rule on leaking, now up for public comment, improves on a December draft that offered broad loopholes. When it’s made final, it will require regular inspection and repair of leaky equipment, which today goes largely unmitigated as yet another industry cost-savings measure.

The state effort means New Mexico is catching up with Colorado. In 2014, Colorado became the first state to regulate methane and has twice strengthened its original rule. Colorado has also modernized its oil and gas regulatory agency’s mission so that it includes safeguarding public health. And it is reworking oil and gas bonding requirements so taxpayers don’t get burdened with plugging leaky “orphan wells” abandoned by producers.

Colorado’s rules were a model for the first national methane regulations, implemented under President Obama in 2016. Unfortunately, the Trump administration dismantled those rules.

Controlling methane is a climate imperative. Because the gas has 80 times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide, it’s a potent driver of climate change. NASA says it has fueled a whopping 25 percent of the human-caused global warming that today increasingly jeopardizes Western water, agriculture and recreation.

Research also shows that methane is entering the atmosphere from sources such as wetlands or thawing permafrost. In the latter, warming tied to methane begets more methane. It is the ominous type of feedback loop that global warming alarmists have warned us about for decades.

But the good news is that methane only survives in the atmosphere for about 10 years, unlike the centuries-long lifespan of carbon dioxide. Consequently, methane rules today could produce swift returns on climate as the world grapples with the harder problem of carbon dioxide.

But methane and associated pollutants also contribute to harmful ground-level ozone, which is linked to premature birth, respiratory sickness and other illnesses. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham made this part of her campaign for regulation, pointing out that poor air quality disproportionately harms poor communities.

That concern helped build support from Indigenous and other groups, outweighing fears that new regulations would detract from drilling royalties, which provide over a third of New Mexico’s revenue for education, health and other services.

Part of the New Mexico governor’s strategy in winning support for methane control was focusing on fiscal accountability. Venting, flaring, and leaking — all monumentally wasteful practices — send an estimated $43 million in potential state revenue into New Mexico’s thin air every year.

At the national level, President Biden campaigned on restoring federal methane regulations rolled back under Trump. Biden issued executive orders on his first day in office that set a September goal for proposing a new strategy. Crafting new federal rules are expected to take years, but New Mexico and Colorado now offer strong examples. By applying rules to both new and existing oil and gas infrastructure, they exceed the original Obama regulations, which only addressed new permits.

Today, Western states, along with heavy oil producers Texas and North Dakota, offer only a patchwork of tax incentives and voluntary targets. Limited rules, however, often tilt in industry’s favor. Now, with fossil fuel production ramping back up and global temperatures rising, New Mexico and Colorado show that tougher regulations are the way to go.

Tim Lydon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes from Alaska.

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