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Semester in the West

Henry Anderson: Apple Archive: Preserving the Branches of Diversity

In the shifting shade of an orchard in the afternoon light, children dart like birds through the trees, vanishing and reappearing between withered trunks. Amber light sparkles through the gnarled branches, pooling in the soft spots along the flowering wild grasses, beaded with dew. Apples lie scattered at the base of the winding roots, bruised and bitten. A boy runs through hollow tunnels, bent and carved by deer padding through the bushes. He yells and laughs before he notices his friends have disappeared behind the walls of shrub. He crouches, before laying on his belly to hide. With the boy’s chin in the dirt, he stares at the thick blades of grass–the worms and isopods inching through the soil, exploring small forests. Mesmerized by the miniature scale of the world in front of him, he pauses, before looking up at the cover of the trees spreading earth across the sky.

That boy was me. I played in orchards as a kid, where the trees felt like cathedrals. I never thought about the apples or where they came from, because they felt permanent. Like they had always been there: as timeless as the dirt under my nails, and just as irreplaceable as the stars. It wasn’t until I spoke to an older man that I began to understand how fragile those trees really were, and what depth of history they carried with them. That history began long before I was born.

In the early days of North American orchards, apple trees flourished across homesteads, farms, and small towns. Each tree fruited unique flavors, colors, shapes, and blemishes, cultivated for their specific uses—cider, baking, fresh eating, and show. But as industrial agriculture rose in popularity, monoculture took over, and many of those trees were torn up. Ripped from the earth, to make way for standardized orchards, in neat rows. Many, forgotten and abandoned. I don’t blame them. The market demanded it. Names like Polly Sweet, Summer Ladyfinger, and White Horse disappeared, either into obscurity, or extinction.

In the hills of Montezuma County in Southwest Colorado, Jude Schuenemeyer greeted our group on a chilly day. With a patterned collar shirt and a Nature Conservancy hat, he twisted the small ring on his left hand. His soft eyes passed over us, looking up at the heirloom tree that dangled apples as green as the leaves, hanging at nose level.

“So here's something you guys have to know about apples,” he said, crouching under the tree. He pulled a short-bladed knife from his hip and reached into the branches, twisting off a twig.  “Apples are not true to type from seeds. Without human interaction, all of the cultivars that exist will go extinct.” He sliced into the branch, splitting the ends apart into a V. “There were 20,000 cultivars a hundred years ago, and we're down to about 6,000 cultivars now, which means we lost about 14,000 varieties of apples.” He paused. “We lost a lot. We lost an enormous amount of cultivar diversity in how those apples were used and what they represented to people.”

That scale is hard to grasp, until you consider what remains today. Walk through your local grocery store, and you’ll likely find only a handful of varieties–maybe ten, at most. Every apple you see has been engineered, not for individuality, but for uniformity and convenience. In many ways, this has been a success. Engineered apples are designed to thrive in large-scale agricultural systems, with higher yields. Traits like a resistance to bruising and longer shelf lives allow them to be transported long distances, to feed larger populations. For consumers, predictability in color, taste, and shape caters to busy lifestyles and allows them to be more accessible and available year-round. In a world of billions, modifying and mass-producing apples became essential, in order to keep shelves stocked.

Yet, while grocery store apples meet the demands of a fast-paced world, something irreplaceable has been left behind. Orchards with staggering variety preserved much more than just fruit. They preserved the richness of choice. Choice which connects us to our food with a much more personal connection. Diversity may well have been a luxury, but it was also resilience, culture, and creativity, nurtured by generations of farmers and apple cultivators. Each apple on a tree was a symbol of their identity, and the community that surrounds them. In the pursuit of perfection, we sacrificed that diversity, erasing a living library of flavors that once enriched our lives.

But not everything was lost. Thanks to a centuries-old technique, rare apple genetics endure.

Jude sliced off another branch from the tree above him. “To keep these things going, we graft.” He pointed at the base, buried by muddy leaves. “You see this scar across here? That's the graft line. This is the work of somebody from over a century ago.” Indeed, a faint line was visible on the bark: a trunk Frankensteined together, like patchwork. I thought about the trees I used to play around. Did they have graft marks?

With technique and precision, you could sustain a variety solely on another tree. Or, you could fuse two desirable traits into a single tree. Maybe, say, grafting a Ruby Red onto a Red June. By hand, you could combine the hardiness and adaptability of one with a uniquely sweet flavor of another, creating a new variety entirely.

He leaned forward. “I think of grafting as one of the greatest leaps of human imagination. To understand it, there was a tremendous, tremendous leap of human imagination. I put it up there with the invention of the sewing needle.” He smiled, in a deja-vu kind of way, like it’s something he’s said many times before: as if his awe still hasn’t faded. 

Jude rotated the branch in his hands and held it up for us to see. “If you have an apple that you really like, and you plant those apple seeds, you're going to get something very different from what you originally had.” In that sense, apples are quite different from other crops–they resist being shelved or frozen in a vault. Apple varieties will vanish if left to nature alone, it’s as simple as that. Each type is tied to us, dependent on human hands to keep the genetics alive. By tending to them, orchardists like Jude allow future generations to taste what we once savored, and to spit out the same seeds. As Jude said, “People and apples are very much alike.” Rather than being locked away, they need to be alive, rooted in the soil, and cared for, as though they, too, crave a hand to turn their branches and remind the world that they are still here. And so those orchards may provide that shade, one day, to those kids who ran around them and climbed across those gnarled limbs. 

Juliette Silvers: Life Divided

Over the dusty gravel of the Sonoran Desert moves a tortoise leg, scaled and wide. Then another leg. Then a third. Then a fourth. Then stop. The way is blocked. Something hard and hot. So the tortoise turns. It keeps moving forward, the corner of its shell grazing one rusty slat after another. If it never gives up, the tortoise will patiently plod along until it is too hot, too tired, too shriveled, and it will die. 

The border wall stretches miles to the east, miles to the west. It runs along highways, along rivers and canals, through parks and wildlife preserves. It runs through towns, including one called Nogales. 

It is raining in Nogales. It hardly ever rains in November, but drops are falling. They seem to pause, suspended against the gray sky, and then rush past the brown slats of the wall and clinging wheels of razored wire. The rain hits the road, slicking the concrete. A black coat is tangled in the metal overhead. Above the train tracks, someone’s shredded underwear hangs limply from the barbs. A trio of black birds dip and glide out of Mexico, into America.

Colorful, rundown storefronts are tucked into the streets beside the wall. There is a taqueria, menus taped to the front windows. The store on the corner has wedding dresses on sale for $25. There is also “Nogales Tactical,” where each laminated window holds a photograph of a man with a military-style weapon, aiming at passersby. 200 feet away, at the border crossing, a propped-up sandwich board tells south bound cars “No Guns in Mexico.”

People shop, they work, they drive home. There is a hulking divide, repelling one half of their lives from the other, but they can go through. As a line of cars inches past loitering border agents, a woman in pink fleece pants eats her afternoon snack, a man rolls down the window, spits something out, and rolls the glass back up. Their days are punctuated by the hateful, fearsome barrier, but life goes on. They are like the birds. They have paper wings. Others are not so lucky.

“In the first five months of [2024],” the Council of Foreign Relations reports, “[border] agents encountered more than nine hundred thousand migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The majority hailed from just six countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, and Colombia.” People are leaving these homes because of violence, poverty, climate change. They are coming to the U.S. because things might be better here—there are jobs, although often hard ones, and, in some ways, there is safety. Getting in, however, is far from safe. 

The wall cutting through Nogales is solid. It’s twenty feet tall. Cameras scrutinize it from every nearby rooftop—that is, on the U.S. side. There are green-clad border agents and white patrol cars. 100 years ago, the border was 6 wires, strung between fence posts. 200 years ago, Nogales did not exist. 

The wall doesn’t push migrants away. It forces them out into the desert, up into the mountains, down into rivers—to places where the wall stops and they can get through. Places that are scorching and dry, freezing cold, treacherous. The U.S. Border Patrol makes it worse. Where the wall ends, they do not. They chase migrants, trying to detain them—with dogs, cars, ATV’s, helicopters. In the dark, on jagged cliffs, towards fences, towards water. Border Patrol does this, and people get lost, get hurt, die. 

Mike Wilson is a human rights activist. For 12 years, he left water in the desert for migrants crossing the Tohono O’odham reservation, along the Mexican border. When he started, he told us, there were “a lot of undocumented migrants coming across through the reservation lands, and they were dying, and they are dying now.” 

Every year, the aid organization Humane Borders releases a map of Arizona, peppered with red dots. Each dot is a body. Someone who died on their journey across the border into the United States. There are so many of them. “It's like the map is hemorrhaging,” says Mike. 

Photo from Humane Borders

For decades, the U.S. government has stacked fear and hatred on the southern border. And now, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there are 654 miles of barrier. The wall blocks off rivers, extends through dynamited pieces of mountain, and is flanked by barren strips of “enforcement zone.” Because of a law passed in 2005, the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Antiquities Act, and Native American Graves Protection Act, among others, can all be violated by the wall. It pries life apart where it has always been fluid, together, and connected. 

For 5 years, the Sky Island Alliance has recorded wildlife along the Arizona-Mexico border. They have seen in 100,000 photos that border fences are navigable, but the steel bollard slats of the wall leave room for only smaller creatures to crawl through. Desert tortoises, black bears, pronghorn antelope, and many others are left with their habitat sliced in half. They lose space, food, and water. Cut off from neighbor populations, they lose the strength of genetic diversity, too. And as the climate warms, creatures may be unable to flee north.

Francesca Claverie, from the Borderlands Restoration Network, explains that “from human migration to animal migration … All of this for 1000s and 1000s of years, has been migration corridors. So whenever you start messing with that, things kind of go awry.” 

Back in Nogales, a little gray cat pads along the curb. It can wind between the wall’s towering rusty bars and around the legs of people in the street. Music plays across an empty parking lot, from a stereo in Mexico. Plants unfurl between the houses on the hill. Life is beautiful, resilient, and connected. It is waiting, reaching. As long as the concrete and metal stand though, it will reach in vain. 

Additional Sources:

https://www.cfr.org/article/why-six-countries-account-most-migrants-us-mexico-border 

https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/5/headlines/biden_waives_26_laws_to_hasten_us_mexico_border_wall_construction

https://www.wildlandsnetwork.org/news/the-border-walls-cascading-impacts-on-wildlife 

https://www.britannica.com/place/Nogales-Arizona 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/raging-controversy-border-began-100-years-ago-180969343/ 

https://humaneborders.info/app/map.asp 

http://www.thedisappearedreport.org/ 

https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/border-wall/border-wall-system-frequently-asked-questions 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/some-ecological-damage-from-trumps-rushed-border-wall-could-be-repaired1/ 

https://earthjournalism.net/stories/how-the-us-mexico-border-wall-harms-wildlife 

https://skyislandalliance.org/our-work/science/borderwildlife/ 

https://www.audubon.org/magazine/winter-2020/the-border-wall-has-been-absolutely-devastating

Gwen Marbet: Perihelion

“Be ready for ceremony, it’s coming today.” 

The barely visible, arching elliptical of Tsushinchan’s orbit reaches down towards the undulating mesas of ancient river sediment just as indigo begins to streak the orange-cast sky. The comet is old, believed to have been born of the spherical veil of icy space debris on the boundary of the Kuiper belt. Tsushinchan, in an 80,000 year orbit, intersects our Earthly orbit nearly perpendicular, at 139 degrees of inclination. 

In those 80,000 years, the apsidal precession of the moon will occur nearly 9,000 times – its axis of elliptic orbit rotated to the east from the magnetic pull of the northern constellation of Draco and the southernly constellation of Dorado. It will form 8,888 overlapped orbits ringing Earth before Tsushinchan retreads her blazing path through our solar system. 

The persistent, self-perpetuating spiral of our galaxy is sent into a spin from the gravitational imbalance of the continuous cycling of interstellar life: nebulas, black holes, and stellar nurseries join together in a cavalcade of symphony. Our Earthly existence is situated in the midst of it all, on the Orion spur of the Milky Way galaxy. The outer reaches of it are the smear of stars and gasses appearing across our night sky. Looking up into its hazy depths is a rippled reflection of being, which stares right back at you, born from the very churning existence which sustains our fragile lifeforms. Within it, the recycling of molecules are embroiled in a ceremony of rebirth spinning at 515,000 miles per hour. 

Life finds a home in this constant movement and follows suit. Mimicking its mother as she stirs about the kitchen in the morning light: making the coffee, reading the newspaper, going about life. Outside, the ponderosa spirals on the ridgeside – the xylem tissues developing in windy conditions, taking on a helical shape, and sculpting the fibers into a spiral as the tree grows. As it ages, weathers many a storm and is licked by fire, it eventually becomes a snag – the bark falling away, slabbing off and sloughing down the now shiny bare wood. Piling like clothes cast off in the heat of the moment in a rumpled pool on the forest floor. What’s left is the exposure of the effort of all this growing, the spiral of wood tapering down to a single branch, made flexible by its grain. 

Downvalley, in the rivers, the salmon have returned to spawn in the cool waters – driven back to the point of their birth. Geographically, this looks like an orbit, completed once through, driven by Earth’s magnetic core. Navigating the ocean and rivers by way of the pencil-thin lateral line running from operculum to tail fin, salmon sense variations in the Earth’s magnetic field, finding their way back to their spawning grounds. But, the magnetic field of the Earth itself is not stagnant. Rather, like the moon, its telluric current is subject to geomagnetic reversal – electrical currents hummock and swale, driven by convection in the mantle. Salmon are able to sense these minute changes, adjusting the trajectory of their path to still return to their spawning grounds. An individual salmon’s journey may appear as a singular orbit, completed once before the fish spawns, its body is destined to decay aside the redd; eventually left as a

bleached skull of razor-like teeth, a snout-like jaw, and the hollow of the eye giving way to the cranial cavity. To overlap the migration trajectories of a certain group of salmon over time from the same spawning grounds may illustrate a trajectory pattern not unlike the apsidal precession of the moon over astronomical time. Thousands of skulls line the river beds. 

— 

We know processes like these to be a linear notion beginning with “life” and ending in “death.” There is vague understanding that at some point the cycle starts anew but still there is a desire to settle this matter in the linear. So, the placecards are decidedly set at opposite ends of a long mahogany table to avoid conflict. The two contrasting opposites designed to make us cherish one and fear the other take their seats. The feast shall commence, or will it end just as the gesture of beginning has ushered in its first breath? For we attach these ideas to a moment forced into stagnation by our pointing finger. The body attached to it squints and tilts its head, focusing, and wrought with hesitation at the naming of such an event, says in a wavering voice – “this is the end.” 

But is it? When two opposing forces, pressure and gravity, are in equilibrium, they create a circle: a continuous motion, self persistent, and never ending. So perhaps, we look at the agreement of life and death as we do the creation of circles – grown from the balance of two interconnected opposites. Think of it as cosmic duality. The contrary becomes the complimentary. They are set at the same pace, in the same harmony. 

Already, cyclical ideas are represented in religion: in the halos of Catholic holy figures, the Dao De Ching’s introduction of the daoist principles of Yin and Yang, Buddhist teachings of enso – perfectly empty yet completely full. Across religions and geographic boundaries there is a recurring harmony between the cyclical and the divine, and through ritual observance the cyclical divine ushers in ceremony. It’s meditation as an act of attention-giving to the universe. The inspiration that rises from attention given to the unseen and the ordinary, the brief and the drawn out, is what opens us to the principle of the cyclical as the divine. Pick it up and see what it tells you, for ceremony is birthed from the attention to the passing – the continuous vigil held for the details often overlooked. 

— 

Eons of river sediment hold one another in an embrace adorned with a filigreed arc accelerating tenfold from its center. Scientifically, spirals like these are understood as a curve emanating from a nucleus, advancing in a constant outwards motion and never once revisiting the same point. Ancient Pueblo rock art depicts them as a motif of migration. Both speak to the movement of being as a migration from a center, as a consistent solar return, or as an agreement between opposing forces. It is understood that these processes are continuously cyclical, but there is a point in which the spiral ends, the sphere stops expanding, and the orbit terminates. It is the moment of attention held that dangles these processes taut in our consciousness – which we in turn try to emulate, groping and feeling our way through murky depths. The ruination, the collapsing inwards, is the realization that it is a fleeting moment in time in which all hangs in the cyclical precession of being: at some point there will be an end, an abandonment of the continuation, if there is to be a day anew. 

You must know now that the spiral arms of the Milky Way are not in fact solid arms, but rather are a mesh of interstellar fabric briefly woven for a moment in time, only to be quickly unraveled through the deft flick of the wrist that is the constant flux of stellar orbits. 

At perihelion, Tsuchinshan may feel the heat and the solar wind generated by the fiery mass of the sun, or be pulled into its magnetic field and blown apart, or perhaps sucked into a hyperbolic orbit from Jupiter and expelled to the outer reaches of interstellar space — 

but most likely she will just vanish. 

Though, in this moment, indigo and purple are daubed across the sky by the spine of Comb Ridge as she dips with grace below the horizon. 

Ben Anderson: Thacker Pass: Modern Mining Miracle or the Latest Chapter in Neocolonial Extraction?

Gary Mckinney, a Mcdermitt Pauite descendant and enrolled member of the Duck Valley Shoshone Paiute Tribes, leans forward in his chair. Chin tilted up in defiance, his dark eyes search our faces as he asks: “How come we don't matter? Why? How come our families are throwaways?...What about the cancer? What about the dirty water? What about these abandoned mines around here?... EV mandate, the green energy transition, renewable energy is all bullshit. Excuse my language, but…that's just the way I am. I'm not afraid to say what I need to say anymore. Our lives depend on it.” His words ring eerily outward, poisoning dreams of “green” futures with the reality of violence. The Thacker Pass Lithium project has been promised as a modern mining miracle, set to usher in the new era of energy. To Gary and others in his community, it's a promise filled with cracks. It’s fissures seeping toxic sludge and long silenced screams.

15 million years ago, 1000 cubic kilometers of earth took to the sky. Molten rock and ash exploded in a cataclysmic event, eviscerating everything in its path. The aftermath was a ring, 28 miles long and 22 miles wide. In its center today, lies the largest single lithium deposit in the world. But long, long before lithium ever mattered, there were people. The Mcdermit Caldera or Peehee Mu’huh, as it is known in the Numu language, has been sacred to Shoshone, Bannock, and Paiute peoples since time immemorial. Descendants of which, form twelve tribes who trace significant connections to the land.

Standing on the eastern edge of the caldera, Myron Smart addresses our group. “Good morning you all. I just wanted to say this little bit, not too much.” Myron is an elder of the Fort Mcdermitt Paiute and member of the People of Red Mountain, an intertribal activist group. He exudes a patient humility as his grandchildren listen restlessly beside him. Taking a measured breath, he begins to speak:

“Way, way back in time….You know, our people were connected to the land and to this,” he gestures towards the caldera, “the wind, the spirits and the creators.” “They lived off of the land. They did their harvesting at a certain time, and then they had the winters…They had gatherings… they sang songs to make it rain…they had certain songs for all the four seasons…everything was really good.”

There was water, and there was life. Mule deer, pronghorn antelope, sage grouse, and golden eagles called the sagebrush home. It wasn’t perfect but people had what they needed. All of that began to change when western settlers arrived. 

From where we sit on the caldera’s rim, the slope drops suddenly down into a broad basin, cheatgrass giving way to stands of old growth sage that stretch on for miles. To Myron it’s important that we know that the land below us isn't just sacred, it’s also a grave. On September 12, 1865 the 1rst Nevada Cavalry massacred 31 men, women, children, and elders there. Myron’s grandmother was one of the only survivors. “She was…12 years old at that time…she said you could hear women, children crying…screaming, people just running everywhere.”

But one massacre wasn’t enough. Next came the boarding schools, and eventually the reservation. “When the government came… they were gathering people up…like a bunch of sheep or a bunch of cattle…pushing everybody onto the fort…Afterwards…they took little kids… like my grandkids, they took them away…off out into a boarding school...They didn't want us to speak our own language at the boarding school. They didn't want us to use our songs at the boarding school. They didn't want to hear us make our prayers…They cut everybody's hair. The soldiers…raped little kids, little girls, little boys. It didn't matter to them. We didn't have anybody there to protect us…To this day, the same government is doing the same thing to us.” Myron’s last statement sits heavy in the air and its evidence lies right beneath our feet; a water pipe running west, from the Quinn River Valley straight to the beginnings of Lithium Nevada’s 2.9 billion dollar Thacker Pass mining project. 

A day earlier and about 20 miles east, Randal Burns, chief geologist for Lithium Nevada, fires up a core saw. The screeching hiss of its rotating blade explodes into the air before he quickly turns it off. “I've said it time and time again, if it can't be grown. It has to be mined, I don't think enough people appreciate that.” We’re gathered in a small concrete floored building filled with hundreds of drilled core samples from the caldera. The dust of ancient sediments flavoring the stale air. Randal has just spent the day teaching us about the geology, history, and operations of the Thacker Pass Mine. He detailed community outreach programs, environmental impact studies, and the lengthy permitting process of the mine. According to him, the mine won’t have a meaningful impact on the land, there was no massacre at Thacker Pass, and the Mcdermitt Paiute Tribe is on board, at least on paper. Randal knows mining impacts intimately and in his mind, Thacker Pass is the best it can be done. “I hope you guys walk away from here with a more positive view on mining, at least modern mining, there's no amount of apologies that can be given for some of the past environmental sins, for sure, but in the US anyway since the late 80s, when mining reform occurred, you shouldn't have any bad mines.” Randal’s sincere assurance is contagious, and hearing it from him, it all sounds pretty convincing. But even if this project is different from the mines of the past, are there truly no risks?

Steven Emerman, owner of Malach Consulting and member of the U.S. Society on Dams’ Tailings Dam Committee, is an independent hydrologist who has spent decades studying the impacts of mining projects around the world. To him, Lithium Americas’ tailings storage plan is an exercise in “reckless creativity”. In a report commissioned by the Great Basin Resource Watch, he argues that the tailings storage relies upon an untested technology, justified with data based on single input, best case scenarios, without precautions for if things go wrong. The result is that a supposedly zero discharge facility could leak “tens to thousands of gallons per minute and would continue for decades after closure with no provisions for management of the seepage”. 

To Myron and other members of his community, the consequences of water contamination hit close to home, in fact, they nearly destroyed it. Ceasing operation in 1970, the Cordero Mercury mine left a devastating legacy for the town of Mcdermitt and tribal people in the region. Mining waste was placed on roads, in playgrounds, and around dozens of homes. Cancer and poisoned water followed. It wasn’t until 2013 that the EPA removed the waste, and to this day the water remains contaminated. In their negotiations with Lithium Americas, the tribe argued that their water supply should be fixed. The corporation refused, despite the fact that it would only cost them 0.02% of one year’s profits. 

As much as one might hope that Lithium Americas is negotiating in good faith, their track record and the power dynamic at play cast an ominous tone. One of its subsidiaries, Minera Exar, has been named in a report by the Business and Human Rights Resource Center citing 4 separate allegations of human rights violations surrounding its operations in Argentina. Additionally, a report published by Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales found that Minera Exar failed to provide free and informed consent to indigenous communities impacted by their mining activities. Further, a Washington Post expose documented a consistent pattern of leaving communities impoverished while raking in massive profits. 

Bottom line, there are many concerns being levied and few answers about how things will go. Will the groundwater be contaminated? Will toxic dust blow up to the reservation? Will the already overallocated watershed be able to sustain increased withdrawal? Environmental catastrophe aside, do people in the community want this or even actually understand what’s happening? What about the 11 other tribes with cultural ties to Thacker Pass, why weren’t they consulted? There isn’t a consensus. What is clear is that Lithium Americas is willing to gamble with the lives of tribal peoples, disturbing sacred ground to extract billions in exchange for breadcrumbs. An electrified future has a price, and right now indigenous people are, once again, footing the bill. 

“They use us like a doormat. You know, if they don't want to listen to you, they'll close the door on you. They'll walk in and then they're going to wipe their feet like this on you.” Myron says, scraping his boots back and forth across the obsidian speckled gravel, “walk off, and then think it's okay. We're people too. We're all human.” 


Additional Resources:

https://gbrw.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Exhibit-4-Thacker_Pass_Report_Emerman_Revised2.pdf

https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/howardcenter/lithium/stories/indigenous.html

Lithium extraction in Argentina: a case study on the social and environmental impacts

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/tossed-aside-in-the-lithium-rush/

Final Environmental Impact Statement: https://eplanning.blm.gov/public_projects/1503166/200352542/20030633/250036832/Thacker%20Pass_FEIS_Chapters1-6_508.pdf

Owen Schott: Terrorists and Angels, Water Caches in the American Southwest 

“I forgot to bring my death maps,” said Mike. An off-hand comment, as if a map marking is dead humans is a normal thing to leave on the kitchen counter. Mike Wilson is a human rights activist and is Tohono O’odham, living on tribal land. He emulates a warm father-like energy--dad humor mixed with a dose of realism. He is the type of guy to give you the shirt off his back, regardless of the blue pen stain on his breast pocket. His land, a home from time immemorial, has been disrupted, and splintered by the U.S.-Mexico border wall. 

The Humane Borders death map confronts and quantifies the incomprehensible amount of deaths along the border. Each red dot on this map denotes a body, a life, a story. Mike witnessed migrants passing through the Baboquivari Valley, dying on tribal land by the hundreds. He estimates over half of all migrant deaths in the Tuscon area, occur on tribal land. For twelve years, he provided life-preserving aid, by putting out water for migrants. He maintained a water cache, a strategically placed water supply. His actions caught the attention of his tribal council and the Border Patrol. Mike faced fierce opposition and intimidation from both groups, reasoning that his water would encourage more migrants to come. Mike is a true hero. His life and actions should be celebrated, but instead are despised.

A few hundred miles west of Mike's water caches, a different journey begins. The Pacific Crest Trail is a long-distance hike from Mexico to Canada, starting at the US-Mexico border. The scorching sun settles on a wall of steel slats, heat waves slipping through the gaps. Hikers stick an arm or leg through the wall’s towering bollards, then head north. Thru-hiking is an adventure of endurance and privilege. For undocumented migrants, the journey north is one of necessity and survival. 

It’s in The United States government's best interest to dehumanize migrants. Aiming to decrease unauthorized crossings, in 1994 the US Border Patrol implemented the Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD) policy. Making the journey more hazardous, they Militarized border towns and pushed migrants to endure more dangerous routes, like the Sonoran desert. The U.S. government knew the consequences; they knew it would increase migrant deaths. Temperatures reaching 120 degrees, beat down on the rugged landscape, and on those attempting to cross it. Since implementing the policy, the government has reported over 10,000 deaths. Many remains are never recovered, The true total is much higher. 

Traversing the valleys in the Tohono O’odham’s sacred Baboquivari Mountains, Mike points his Dodge pickup towards Highway 86 to refill his water caches. His tank labeled “Agua” sloshes on the dirt road, dancing with the potholes. He steps out of his truck, it’s dust-caked and battered from a decade's worth of weekly trips. 

He unloads clear water jugs and positions them to form a cross, a sign of hope for migrants. Mike is a lifeline in the desert, like a river replenishing hope, where it runs dry. In the blistering afternoon heat of the Southern California Desert, I walk north on the Pacific Crest Trail. Barrel Cacti, Cholla, and Creosote fill the slopes. Faced with a bout of food poisoning, I needed water: the nearest reliable source, a day’s hike in either direction. My stomach was a washing machine, running with the lid open. Tumbling towards the Highway 78 underpass, I was satiated in its shade. Shade is not the only offering here. Under the support beam of the underpass, is a water cache. Gallons of water for hikers, neatly arranged, often replenished. Relief, renewal, and rejuvenation ooze from the liquid life. This water is not here by luck. A group of eclectic volunteers, resupply this cache. Known in the hiking community as trail angels, they are celebrated as such. 

Photo from Human Rights Watch

Mike and others providing humanitarian aid are considered enemies of the state. “My tribe was going to label me a domestic terrorist as if my water was a weapon of mass destruction.” Since when do terrorists work to preserve human life? Despite his resilient efforts, he isn’t labeled an “angel”. 

Aid groups have been fined and prosecuted for engaging in humanitarian work. Volunteers for the activist group No Mas Muertes were putting out water in the Buenos Aries National Wildlife Refuge when they were charged with “dumping of waste”. Other volunteers  have faced fines for “abandonment of property” This is retaliation against humanitarian aid, exposing the government’s priorities. Human life and compassion come second to ruthless border enforcement on federal lands, while trail angels on the PCT—also on federal lands—face no such consequences. 

Mike drove every Sunday, for 624 weekends, with a truck full of water to his water caches. This time, he arrived to find the gallons placed meticulously the week prior, had been cut. One hundred desert life preservers, destroyed as if they were bombs. Mike said, “Here is a history of border patrol agents in the field destroying water barrels… I had those slashed by the hundreds.” A universal experience for aid groups. A human rights violation by the United States. 

When trail angels assist strangers attempting a difficult, but chosen journey, they receive love. When aid groups assist strangers migrating for their lives, they are criminalized. Hiking and forced migration do not have the same consequences, the action of putting water out is the same, but the reaction is different. Border aid groups are treated unjustly for providing basic survival needs. Where policy and society want to create divisions, our humanity seeks commonalities. Mike Wilson is a border angel.

Antonia Prinster: Silent Ceremonies

This is a story about hatcheries and the celebration of salmon.

There’s a hammer on a table outside, a metal hook hanging inside, tables where the collecting occurs, and a window that leads to nothing. A female Chinook salmon is given a number. She’s bludgeoned to death with the hammer, hung on the hook, slashed open; eggs spew out of her abdomen and gush into a plastic bucket. Guts pulled out, kidneys inspected for disease. Her eggs are put into a numbered baggie. Saturated with drugs, she’s thrown out the window to be taken to a landfill, buried beneath mountains of trash. After cutting, squeezing, and hammering, the eggs are fertilized. Formalin is used to disinfect the popping boba-like spheres. The fertilized eggs are trucked up a paved hill to the incubation facility, hundreds of shelves lay at the ready, home for the millions of future salmon. The scene is reminiscent of a kitchen: messy, wasted ingredients and a hodge-podge mix of utensils lie around. The scent of something delicious hangs in the air. 

This reality binds our feet to the concrete below and our eyes to the concrete across the river. Chief Joseph Dam stands tall and squat, plugging the entirety of the Columbia River, supplemented in eagerness by the Chief Joseph Hatchery, the object of our groups’ collective curiosity. The late summer sun reflects off the slow moving reservoir. Pelicans sit silent and ready at the chute-mouth that spits hatchery-reared smolt into the Columbia. Once released, they make a journey to the ocean; many, most, do not survive. Hatchery-reared salmon die far more in number than the dwindling wild salmon populations. They swim to shadows, preyed upon by watching birds and seals. 

Salmon have survived and evolved for millions of years, creating incredible biodiversity. Raised in confinement and spoon-fed, hatchery-reared salmon are seen by some as genetically inferior. Released hatchery salmon are an unwelcome introduction of poorer genes into the wild gene pool, muddling the waters, out-competing wild salmon for food. 

On top of this, salmon survive within a system that is extremely expensive. The federal government has pumped more than $2.2 billion into salmon hatcheries over the last 20 years. Despite this, hatcheries along the Columbia and tributaries are failing to fulfill their promise. The federal government signed treaties with the tribes over a century ago, promising to preserve their access to salmon; their way of life. They are failing. Less and less salmon, wild or hatchery, are caught each year.

Chief Joseph Fish Hatchery is 545 miles from the mouth of the Columbia River; it sits above the last water to hold spawning salmon before nothingness. Owned and operated by the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the hatchery began production in 2013. The hatchery releases young salmon into the Columbia in order to replenish the waters below the concrete blockade of Chief Joseph dam. 

Large groups of corralled salmon bump up against one another in concrete ditches beneath nets hanging slack. Holes riddle the nets, allowing birds to squeeze in and scoop up small salmon. The hatchery manager explains to us how they need to replace the nets soon, or else they’ll lose more fish. Someone in the group asks why salmon hatcheries are worth it, the manager replies with a hint of resignation, “I’m going to try to be simplistic here. It’s worth it because salmon tastes good.” Salmon does taste good. To orcas, osprey, otters and bears. They are a keystone species for many animals. Including humans. For the Columbia Plateau tribes, salmon are life. 

Colville and Nez Perce tribal members describe that before dams, the Columbia was a free-flowing river cradling millions of salmon returning to the place of their birth by unknown forces, salmon backs glistening in the heavy sunlight. One could venture across this river, over rapids and falls and rocks, solely on the shoulders of those plentiful and strong salmon. The First Salmon ceremony of the Columbia Plateau tribes honors the pivotal role that salmon and water play in the health and culture of their people. The winding rivers cutting through hills of yellow grass and basalt sustained the tribes with salmon for millenia. A factory of wealth; spears and nets hang in hands from above wooden platforms, thrusted into the frothy water below. 

Non-native people have devastated salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest for over a century. Rivers and creeks dredged, logged, overfished, dammed. Today, hatcheries are becoming unable to produce meaningful numbers of salmon because so few return up the Columbia from the ocean. Blocked by dams, salmon trudge up fish passageways, unguided and confused. Waterfalls of white froth cascade over and through, a highway of wheat prevails.

We watch as the wind pushes white caps across a great expanse of reflected sky. A river turned lake, barges chug across, sink through locks and trudge slowly across the tumultuous, un-moving water. Wheat moves across this expanse. Salmon hit their heads against structures that tower above, aimlessly wandering throughout pools of warming water. The hatchery system was built to slow down the ever-continuous decline of salmon since the beginning of the 20th century. Hatcheries give salmon to a world without. A temporary lifeline, a stop gap, pumping borrowed blood weakly into the veins of the river, back into the heart of the tribes, until the real problem is recognized, addressed, and fixed. Empty rivers and plates, solemn, silent, ceremonies of extinction and death ensue.

In the rays of the rising sun, an unnaturally still and wide river holds a wealth of hatchery-reared salmon. Full of ocean nutrients and depleted at the end of their journey, these salmon are ready to die. A boat rests on this same river. A Chinook salmon wanders the vastness of the reservoir. Perhaps a hatchery salmon, perhaps not. Despite this, she’s caught, thanked, and hauled up to the surface of the boat. Killed along with many others and put into a cooler, saved for a purpose. Her body is cut into pieces, long and thin, planted onto dogwood skewers, sizzled on a barbecue rack, flames tickling her flesh. Hands flip a rack full of salmon, deer and elk smolder nearby above fires moving with grace. In this kitchen, upon white paper plates and tule mats rest pink salmon, surrounded by moving colors and voices, bells and songs, solemn then festive. Her body nourishes and strengthens the hearts, minds, and bodies of the creatures who give thanks to her, water flowing over it all. 

Cambria Barlett: Fire Debt

“Many of these people make these management decisions that are short-sighted. They're thinking about 5-10 years. We're talking about in perpetuity, generations after us.” Nakia Williamson's voice cut through the thick air, each word spoken with slow, steady intention. He faced east, the direction of his tribe’s buildings, the Nez Perce direction of insight and wisdom. He stood in the center of a circle of students sitting in sun-bleached camp chairs. We looked at him intently, not breaking our attention for a moment despite the smoke that filled our lungs, forming a heavy oppressive veil swallowing the landscape in all directions. The polluted air hung around us, perfectly illustrating the short-sighted land management decisions he referred to. The next day we left the reservation, relieved to escape the smoke.

We sat in a small clearing, a few miles down a trail in the San Juan National Forest. In our hands, we hold round slabs of tree trunks. Each cut of wood is cold and smooth, polished by the many fingers of students who learned from them before us. The tree’s life is documented in each concentric circle. Looking back at a collection of tree rings from a forest, one can discover that they tell decades-long stories about the forest's health. Small scars run through the wood, memorializing times when wildfire flames and smoke had licked up the tree trunks. The scars reveal a rhythm of small, frequent wildfires. These fires are necessary to the health of the ecosystem, shaping the landscape, clearing undergrowth, and making room for new life. The quiet consistency of fire documented in the rings continues up until a moment when everything stops. Halted by relentless fire suppression strategies established by the United States Forest Service. In the early 1900s, the Forest Service created their friendly mascot: Smoky Bear. His fuzzy face and yellow fedora, impress a narrative of fear to the general public surrounding fire. Those efforts to suppress fire are demonstrated clearly in the tree rings, that is until the forest eventually demanded an intense reckoning. Fueled by years of neglect, fires began growing in scale and intensity, burning hot as a reminder that we must repay our debt.

Across the West more intense fires spread through forests and communities, leaving them to suffer the consequences of suppression. From a small dirt road outside of Winthrop, Washington we look out at a canyon, the aftermath of the Cub Creek 2 fire that had burned over 70,000 acres in 2021, lies below us. Only a few green trees survived amongst the trunks of standing dead that blanketed the land in every direction. Dr. Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist from the University of Washington, stands with us. She had greeted us with a friendly smile, a happy floppy-eared dog running circles around her feet. But now she is solemn as she describes the burn site with deep familiarity and knowledge. As we talked to Susan about her research the wind howled through the valley. We could hear the crashing of trees, breaking clean in half and falling to the ground below. The snapping became so frequent and loud that we all fell into a motionless silence. In that moment it felt as though the urgency of addressing the issue of unnaturally catastrophic burns echoed, quite literally, through the landscape. Susan looked out at the forest with genuine concern. “I worry also about the future of some forests…When you have this much tree mortality, you have to worry a little bit about where the seeds are coming from.” She explains that the Ponderosa pine forest is in danger because fires, as big as this one, sweep through entire watersheds burning their seeds and undergrowth. Even huge ancient trees which used to be able to survive smaller fires, are now falling to the ground, losing their opportunity to replenish the forest and leaving soils to erosion. High severity fires are pushing ecosystem to the brink of ecological collapse.

It’s not just the forest at risk. Susan asked our group how many of us had been impacted by wildfires. We looked around at each other to find that more than half of us were raising our hands. Susan paused for a moment, she was saddened by our answer but not even the slightest bit surprised. Her voice wobbled with emotion as she talked about a particularly grim fire that swept through her community in 2014. “So many people lost homes,” she said “We lost power for eight days, as well as any communication, like the cell tower. And so we literally got to the point where we were all going to the post office and looking at whose house burned down like there were just lists.” In the wake of such tragedies, there is a growing awareness of the necessity to manage our forests more effectively, to repay the debt we owe.

The solution to catastrophic wildfires is tantalizingly obvious. We must bring back more frequent, less detrimental fires. Susan’s research reflected this necessity; she found that reintroducing fire through prescribed burns worked like “a magic wand.” She exclaimed that it was “actually the most satisfying study I've ever done because the results were just so clear.” Her study was about this area but similar conclusions are being drawn across the West. The reintroduction of fire is connected to a long history of burning. It's about becoming part of the ecosystem again instead of working against it. Susan emphasizes this countless times, “there's been a big busting of the myth that fire ecology is not just about Western science, it's also about indigenous knowledge.” Understanding indigenous knowledge is a crucial part of introducing prescribed burns. However, this knowledge has been forced away by colonizers for so long that many ancient land stewardship practices are lost. Nakia echos the challenge, “So this is the type of knowledge [oral histories] that we still carry forth, and we still try to hold on for the benefit of our children, and to also try to communicate it to people that are making decisions without the same history that we have, and some knowledge of how this land works and how it has changed over time.” Now starts the long journey of rediscovering our relationship with land. Susan said, “I think that there's actually quite a bit that we can do, and it's also very disrespectful to indigenous people to say that we're not part of these ecosystems and we don't have a responsibility to act.”

There is of course resistance to the reintroducing fire, especially in communities that have experienced a great deal of fire trauma. We are attempting to apply old methods in a new context, but luckily people have found methods that work effectively and safely. We are up against a 100-year narrative of fear that has been ingrained into us by Smokey Bear. We are slowly learning how to undo this mistaken belief and come back to an understanding where fire is seen positively again. Susan thinks that people will start to understand the solution through education. She distinctly recalls a moment when she was teaching a group of young kids, some of whom had lost their homes to fire. When asked if the fire was good or bad, they all wrote similar answers in their notebooks: “Nature needs fire and sometimes it's bad for humans.” The shift in understanding is well underway.

The issue is clear, it is written in the rings of trees, the forests of standing dead trunks, and the emotion on the faces of affected communities. The solution is clear too, the forest has asked us to repay the debt that we have created through fire suppression. And, most importantly we know how to do it, indigenous knowledge and research have given us the answers. We must once again be in a relationship with nature where we can take care of the forests just as they take care of us.

Kiana Potter: Energy Follows Thought

With his left hand cupped around his ear, he leans forward in his eroding camp chair that has held so many bodies over so many years. He repeats our names under his breath with a subtle nod of his head, holding the words in his mouth, willing them into memory. Wrinkles drawn like the drainage bed of a dried desert river fan from soul-soaked pockets of deep blue reverence. Strands of long white hair curl over the cliff of his chin. His small stature, held together by the cloth of sun-stained skin, contrasts an enormous spirit in humble grandeur.  

In the belly of Butler Wash, just outside of Bluff, Utah, Joe Pachack led us to experience the remnants of Ancestral Puebloan homesites. Originally from Colorado, Joe was drafted as a high schooler in 1968. During his time as a helicopter guard, he flew over Bluff, Utah. Feeling a pull he recalls as “metaphysical”, he reveres that first sight as “an oasis in the desert”. It took him 20 years, but when he finally made it back he never left. Now Joe has spent decades in Bluff as an artist recording rock art and artifacts. 40 miles directly south of Butler Wash, Joe was the first person to rediscover rock art of a mammoth or bison, suspected to have been drawn by the Clovis people who inhabited the Bluff area as early as 14,000 years ago. 

Arid ground plumes below the impact of many steps as we chase heels on a tight single-track trail. Misunderstood as lifeless, the desert floor springs into a virdescent jungle, demonstrating what is possible where just a few fleeting drops of water flow. Primrose greets my lower legs with a gentle tickle while the yellow flourish of Rabbit Brush speckles the landscape. Red star explosions of Scarlet Gilia found communities between Ash Berry. I introduce Horehound Mint to my tastebuds for the first time, bitter over a quick goodbye. Pale sticky spikes of cocklebur cling to the legs of wandering pants as Joe playfully identifies them as porcupine eggs. Gently taking a plant in his hand, he invites us to the smell of a Wormwood branch. I hold it to my nose, inhaling until I can no longer separate the scent from the air. I consider the label of sweet citrus and sage qualities, struggling to find the words to understand a new smell, like trying to imagine a color I have never seen before. As he talks, a wave of inspiration bathes me in urgency. In the presence of such a library, the holes in my knowledge are a humbling infinity between the things I know. 

The succession of human civilizations in the area shaped the landscape. While speculation plays a large role in the interpretation of the area’s history, Ancestral Puebloan Basketmakers were the first to establish permanent homesites in Butler Wash around 650 A.D.. Throughout history, the homesite in Butler Wash has been occupied by an evolution of Puebloan Tribes. Puebloan Basketmakers I, II, and III walked in the footsteps of their predecessors, sharing the same Kivas and carving stones. By 1300 A.D. they are assumed to have migrated out of the area. 

On the hillside, crumbling walls sewn together by adobe clay stand below the roof of a water-carved alcove. Goosebumps diffuse down my arms as I stare into a time capsule. We gather around a disintegrating rectangular Kiva, speculated to have been built by the first Basketmakers to settle the alcove for ceremonies or burials. The Kiva’s original architecture was almost indistinguishable from the carnage. Its sandstone building blocks eroding back to dust, rubble strewn across the floor in hurried chaos. Joe explains that pot hunters, archeologists, and other heedless guests had stolen artifacts, tearing the homesite apart. “What we’re seeing here is a truly amazing site that has been ripped to holy hell. It has been disregarded.” He states matter-of-factly. The remains are fenced off by bent rebar stakes and a sagging thin chain, a barrier of morality rather than physicality. “I bent a lot of these,” Joe said gesturing. “Donated my rebar bender and welder to the BLM to do things like this. And it's helped.” In another homesite, we see modern words branded over irrecoverable petroglyphs. “MIKE WAS HERE” along with a hundred other names and initials announcing their personal negligence, covering up the only form of written history for the first people in the area. “If we don't have reverence for it, it doesn’t mean anything to us.” Joe’s words heavy in the hot air as he draws our eyes to the overlooked details. Smoke stains older than time and memorial shadow the alcove’s walls. Faint fingerprints preserved in clay grout fossilize forgotten people, their energy still here. But amongst that beauty, looters saw the money that comes from stealing a hand-coiled pot and a collector found their newest piece of home decor, something to show off at dinner parties.  

 As I write this my head spins. I want to tell you how meaningful it was to be around Joe, how unsettling it is to see the extractive destruction of homesites. But my mind teeters on eggshells as I unpack the complex dichotomy of Joe as a non-native person, who has dedicated his life to holding reverence for these places, and the simultaneous ruination of them by others. Feigning for a conclusion, I am humbled by my missteppings. When trying to do justice to this topic, don’t paint Joe as a savior. Address the flawed and violent history of archeology. Don’t romanticize the Puebloan people and do not generalize Native folks across different landscapes and time periods. Explain how non-native people should coexist with the homesites of Butler Wash but remember, you don’t have the answers. Maybe walking through the homesites, despite doing it in the most respectful way we knew how, was wrong. Maybe we should be doing it because what will happen to the history if we do not? Where is the reciprocity? What does that look like? Profit and preservation do not go hand in hand. If they did, maybe textbooks would tell uncensored stories of violent colonialism. Kids could be taught to care when they were taught to read. Maybe as adults we wouldn’t be swimming in the world of righteous academia, struggling to keep our heads above water, wondering why we didn’t stop and listen for the answers to these questions a long time ago. My brain is muddled, my tongue swollen with the taste of a lifetime infused with the narratives of settler colonialism. 

The reality of the situation specific to Butler Wash, is that the descendants of the Ancestral Puebloan Basketmakers have moved out of the Bluff area. There weren’t many people who could credibly guide Joe on his endeavor in Butler Wash, so Joe approaches things with a humble curiosity. Amongst an epidemic of white-saviorism, skepticism is a healthy reaction. I am not in a position to make claims of the correctness of his actions, but well-intentioned people are looking for examples. In a world where the paralysis of perfection is the death of progress, Joe is moving. I heard his voice quake under the weight of his words, the crack in the back of his throat that makes the hairs on your neck stand up because you know he is trying not to cry. “If I teach you an ethic, it is that another person’s culture can be as sacred as yours, and it’s not possession. It’s a concept. It’s an idea. It grew over time and has evolved into something magnificent.” His words echo. 

Joe steps around the cryptobiotic soil, admires the ants, and tastes the wind. He doesn’t seem afraid of doing it wrong, but of not doing it at all. When faced with the decision to think critically of the role of non-native stewardship, we must resist the complacency of non-action. “It’s the opposite of living in ignorance, believe me, energy follows thought. So think it, and you can invent it, and you can help a community gather around it.” With credit to Willie Nelson, this is Joe’s mantra. There will always be things lost in the separation of an outsider, but the knowledge that Joe has dedicated his life to is worth something. In a time, desperate for change, can Joe be an example of reverence?

Jackson Schroeder: The Importance of Environmental Education

On a sunny October day, the Semester in the West (SITW) crew drove 10 minutes down from our camp in the Jeffery Pine Forest to the South Tufa Area at Mono Lake. 21 Westies hopped out of three Jeep Wagoneers and stood in the gravel parking lot. The saline lake glittered under the snow-capped Sierra Nevada. Ryan Garrett, the Education Director at the Mono Lake Committee (MLC), met us with a beaming smile. He was in his late twenties and sported a black jacket that read “Mono Lake Committee” on the chest, a green beat-up Patagonia daypack, and a weathered pair of Blundstones. He began his tour by stating, “The story of Mono Lake can be characterized as striking a balance between… the needs for fresh, clean drinking water and the ecological and cultural value that is found here.”

In 1941, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), trying to provide water to its growing population, extended its aqueduct into the Mono Basin, diverting water from four creeks. At the time, salt lakes were seen as disposable wastelands, too salty to host fish and corrosive to boat engines. LADWP faced little resistance to diversions. The MLC website recounts, “Over the next 40 years, Mono Lake dropped 45 vertical feet, lost half its volume, and doubled in salinity– threatening the survival of the nesting California Gull population, air quality with toxic dust storms, and this unique and critical ecosystem.”

In 1976, Stanford Teaching Assistant David Gaines led the first ecological study of Mono Lake. The study found that continued diversions would raise salinity levels, wiping out brine shrimp and alkali fly populations, thus eliminating the food source for millions of birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway every year. These birds positively impact the Pacific Flyway area by performing nutrient and seed transfer, serving as habitat indicators, and feeding predators like larger birds, small mammals, and reptiles. Without Mono Lake, migratory bird populations would decrease, contributing to the decline of ecosystems that people rely on. Hoping to save Mono Lake, MLC and other environmental groups sued the LADWP under the Public Trust Doctrine in 1979. Nonprofits are often on the front lines of legal battles, and their success often hinges on public opinion. 

We stood on the sandy shore and looked out at the lake over black clouds of alkali flies. “If you leave with one thing, it's this: the healthy management level of Mono Lake is 6,392 feet above sea level,” said Ryan. “In 1994, the State Water Board issued Decision 1631. It said by the year 2014 that the lake was supposed to reach the healthy management level.” Ryan produced a telescoping pole and put one end at the water’s edge, stating, “It is currently 2024, and for the lake to be at the healthy management level, it needs to be at the top of that pole.” The pole was eight feet, seven inches tall. “Ryan’s probably the most engaging speaker of the program so far,” I thought. But he wasn’t always this passionate about Mono Lake. 

Ryan was born in 1995 in Modesto, California, which he described in an email to me as “a farming hub surrounded by endless agricultural fields and suburbs.” He wrote, “I felt lost, but I thought that if I could get a scholarship to play college football, I might secure a ticket to

somewhere new.” Ryan was a strong offensive guard and became a captain in his senior year. That fall, a friend told him about an environmental club that organized trips to Mono Lake. Ryan wasn’t environmentally inclined at the time and had no idea what or where Mono Lake was. “My friend spoke so highly of his experience, and I trusted his opinion,” he wrote. However, visiting Mono Lake with the club would cause Ryan to miss his senior homecoming game. His coaches said if he went to Mono Lake, he would lose his captaincy. 

After much anguish, Ryan decided to chase his dream and visit Mono Lake. He wrote, “I arrived at Mono Lake angry and bitter, focused only on the football status I had lost. But everything changed after sleeping under the stars, learning about the lake’s natural and political history, and experiencing the transformative power of environmental education. I realized I didn’t want a life centered around being a jock. Instead, I wanted to dedicate myself to this place…When football scholarships came through, I turned them down, a decision that those close to me struggled to accept.” 

Nevertheless, Ryan followed his passion. He applied for the Mono Lake Committee summer internship four times over the next seven years. He studied philosophy and environmental ethics at Whitman College and started pursuing teaching in grad school at the University of Alberta. Finally, in December 2020, MLC offered Ryan the summer internship, which he gladly accepted. At the end of the internship, MLC offered him a full-time position as a Project Specialist. Over the next two years, he combined his academic knowledge and vocational training by leading naturalist tours. In 2023, MLC offered Ryan his current position as Education Director. “I couldn’t be happier,” Ryan wrote. “My younger self would be proud to see the person older Ryan has become.” 

Environmental educators like Ryan play a critical role in the Mono Lake environmental movement. In another email, Ryan told me that MLC founder David Gaines “raised awareness about the lake through a variety of educational programs up and down the state. He would deliver educational slideshows to schools, Audubon chapters, and environmental organizations to spread the word about Mono Lake. Most people had no idea about how important the lake was to avian life nor knew where their source of water was…Additionally, David would lead environmental education programs at Mono Lake: backpacking trips, bird tours, and canoe tours, to name a few. Any chance he got to educate someone about Mono Lake, he took it.” MLC’s hard work paid off as they won multiple lawsuits against LADWP to protect tributary streamflows. In 1984, David compiled some of his research in the Mono Basin and co-wrote a chapter in the book California Riparian Systems, which helped bring scientific attention to Mono Lake. David passed away in a car crash in 1988, but MLC continued his legacy of education. They’ve run education programs for schools and the public since their inception. Additionally, MLC’s Outdoor Education Center has connected Los Angeles youth to Mono Lake since 1994. 

Today, the MLC website reads, “Mono Lake’s future depends on public recognition, understanding, and support.” According to Ryan, MLC’s education programs “bridge the knowledge gap between the public and Mono Lake. Most folks who come up here are just touring the state or doing a day stop en route to Yosemite. If they join any one of our tours, they …often feel compelled to do something on behalf of the lake (write a letter, become a MLC member, contribute a donation, etc.).”

MLC’s education efforts have transformed the public opinion of Mono Lake from a wasteland into an ecosystem worth protecting. As we wrapped up our South Tufa tour, Ryan shared the future of Mono Lake water policy. He described a clause in Decision 1631 that says, “If the lake does not reach the healthy management level by the year 2014, then all the parties need to come back together to renegotiate… a new stream diversion criteria to ensure that Mono Lake reaches the healthy management level.” Ryan recounted how in 2024, the California State Water Board elevated Mono Lake to its priority list of concerns, leading to a new hearing expected in Spring 2025. “There's never been a more exciting time to learn about this issue, because the next fight to save Mono Lake is about to begin,” he stated. 

While the fight to save Mono Lake has been somewhat successful, the fight to save Pacific Flyway birds relies on saving saline lakes up and down the Flyway. “Mono Lake is, legally speaking, the most protected saline lake anywhere in the world. Yet we are 10 years overdue and Mono Lake is still not saved,” Ryan stated. Nonetheless, Mono Lake is a model for other saline lakes, like Nevada’s Walker Lake, Utah’s Great Salt Lake, and Argentina’s Laguna Mar Chiquita. “We are in constant communication with groups working [at other saline lakes], sharing ideas and resources,” Ryan wrote. 

On our second and final day with Ryan, our caravan rolled up to Lee Vining Creek, at the very top of the LA Aqueduct. We ate our Tupperware lunches on a flat patch of ground between the gravel road and a small pond, looking out towards Tioga Pass. Ryan passed out job descriptions for MLC summer internships, proudly stating, “Yosemite is your backyard. Mono Lake’s your front yard. You can't ask for a better place to be.” My peers and I chatted about how we could see ourselves working for the Mono Lake Committee.

Carlie Johnson: A Rock and a Hard Place

Lasers slice through the twilight, illuminating the white spillways of Grand Coulee Dam. Through a loudspeaker, a woman’s smooth voice swallows the visitor’s center lawn. She speaks about hydroelectric power, and a cartoon beaver made of yellow lasers marches across the silky sheen of water. A surfing salmon glides across the dam, waving his fins as the woman explains the recreational real estate the reservoir provides. Acres of green and red apple trees fill the screen, and the virtues of agriculture ring through the loudspeaker. The Grand Coulee Dam Laser Light Show has it all. 

Neon blues and yellows dance on the screen, becoming first a river, then fire, then exploding into multicolored rays that bleed onto the dim lawn and splash over the trees. And behind the lasers, behind the water streaming down the spillways, behind the concrete, the turbines, and the concrete again, Lake Roosevelt slumbers in the bed of the Columbia. 

To many, the story of Lake Roosevelt inspires. Through American strength and American labor, we stopped the mighty Columbia in its tracks with, in 1942, the largest dam ever built. Grand Coulee Dam quickly became known as the 8th wonder of the world. Besides the dam’s power supply, which can provide electricity to 2 million homes per year, the dam also created Lake Roosevelt, a reservoir that holds back the Columbia and deals it out to half of Washington state’s farms. It’s big. It's impressive. And it’s dam(n) powerful. 

The glittering surface of Lake Roosevelt stretches 151 river miles back from Grand Coulee’s massive wall of concrete. At the 130th mile, though, there is another stone— much smaller, but no less monumental.

D.R. Michel, executive director of the Upper Columbia United Tribes, gazes out at the flat expanse of the lake. He smiles and rests his hand on a small amphibolite boulder, different from the craggy chunks of basalt that line this section of river. The rock is marked with hundreds of grooves, gashes, and lines… where tools have been sharpened. Despite its size– no larger than a picnic table— the stone has a magnetic weight: They call it the Sharpening Stone, and the tribes of the Columbia have used it during salmon runs for more than 9,000 years. 

One can imagine the stories embedded in this rock: here, a young boy clumsily sharpened a knife for his first salmon run. There, an old woman wore a deep groove with the surety and practice of age. As D.R. 's weathered fingers caress the gouges, he sighs. 

Since time immemorial, the tribes came to this place when the salmon did, fishing in the powerful whitewater of Kettle Falls. “Back in the day…  ten miles downriver you could start to hear the roar,” D.R. explains, pointing out the falls. There isn’t much to see, since the falls now lay under 90 feet of water. If they hadn’t moved it farther up the bank in 1940, the tribes would have also lost the Sharpening Stone to the rising waters of Lake Roosevelt.

 Moving the stone from its historical resting place caused a cry of grief from the tribes of the Upper Columbia. For many, watching Kettle Falls flood was like watching a loved one drown. As the falls were inundated, the tribes lost not only the rush of the falls themselves, but also thousands of acres of root and berry grounds, access to cultural artifacts, and an entire Colville Reservation town called Inchelium. The greatest loss of all, though, was the loss of the salmon that used to pass Kettle Falls by the millions. Because of its height, Grand Coulee Dam does not have a fish ladder to allow migratory Chinook salmon to return to their spawning grounds. So, in 1940, just before the completion of Grand Coulee Dam, the Colville tribes organized the Ceremony of Tears to bid farewell to the falls, and to begin a wait for the salmon’s return that has lasted nearly five generations.

Hours before the Grand Coulee Laser Light show and days before we spoke to D.R. Michel, we took a tour of Grand Coulee Dam. Two Bureau of Reclamation tour-guides with shirts tucked into their belts drove our group across the top of the dam, which is nearly a mile long. Reciting memorized speeches and facts, the guides took us to the powerhouses, to the crane, and finally, to the edge, where we looked over the spillways at the Columbia. Mighty, a word so often used to describe this river, was not the word that came to mind as we peered at the scummy froth of water 350 feet below us. Beneath the foam, a gray shape moved— a fall Chinook salmon, swimming first to one side of the dam, then the other. Our eyes followed the fish back and forth, watching a doomed tennis match. 

During construction of the dam in 1937, there was a temporary fish ladder to allow Chinook salmon and Steelhead across the growing foundation, but the foundation is where the luck of the fish ended. Now, the incredible height of the dam means that a traditional fish ladder would have to stretch ¾ of a mile long. “There are some newer technologies that show promise, but like most things, they’re just not big enough for the Grand Coulee Dam,” our tour guide said, with a touch of smugness— understandable if you’re employed by the eighth wonder of the world. 

Like so many environmental issues, bringing salmon back to Kettle Falls seems impossible. To keep swimming upstream against money, bureaucracy, and time feels exhausting. But like the salmon, people keep trying. 

Traditional fish passage (i.e. a fish ladder) isn’t a possible solution at the current time. However, there are ways salmon can return to Kettle Falls. There are many developing technologies in fish passage, especially technologies focusing on high-head dams like Grand Coulee. One of these is a helix fish ladder, essentially a spiral staircase for fish. This type of ladder has been used in Cle Elum Dam, and its success there gives hope for a similar passage at Grand Coulee. The trapping-and-trucking method, used by the Colville Tribes, has also shown promise for bringing salmonids upriver of Grand Coulee. D.R. Michel and the Colville Tribes have already released 200 salmon this year alone in a cultural release program that continues to draw interest and support from the community. 

Some might say salmon are caught between a rock and a hard place. In reality, the hard place stops them so definitely that they haven’t made it to the rock in almost a century. At the Sharpening stone, whose history has been carved into it by loving hands for millenia, the salmon were appreciated and honored. At Grand Coulee dam, whose history is played upon its surface in the neon reds and greens of 20th century progress, they swim back and forth ceaselessly, hopelessly. 

The loss of the Kettle Falls fishery and the salmon that populated it was a great tragedy. Greater even than that is the tragedy of the narrative. In the eyes of the government and the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit it each year, Grand Coulee Dam is a testament to this country. It’s a monument to be proud of, a triumph to celebrate. This narrative, though, does not account for the pain the dam has caused. Lake Roosevelt can’t just be looked at as a place for recreation, or as a convenient source for irrigation water. If we break out of the colonial narrative, we can see that Lake Roosevelt is an oppressive and destructive presence that has been occupying indigenous land for almost a century. 

Still standing by the Sharpening Stone, D.R. Michel looks back on the ghost of Kettle Falls. “We’ve still got some opportunities to correct some of these historic wrongs, but we’re running out of time,” he says. “It’s time for us to start to do some things here.”

Annika Schwartz: Looking for Lamprey

Preceding the rings of Saturn, there is an organism who calls the ocean and river a home. A slimy squiggling body, two feet in length with a face of circular teeth. To the Nimiipuu in the Southeastern Columbia River plateau: hé·su. Asúm in upper Columbia Sahaptin, Ksuyas in the lower. Indigenous people refer to them in English as eels. Today, I will speak to them as Pacific lamprey. 

My face is almost drowned in cold water, my diaphragm is shocked and it takes a minute for it to relax and breathe through the snorkel. I’m fully submerged in the Methow River that flows through the valley. My eyes scan the bottom of the almost fifteen foot deep pool and catch on white fish, trout, chinook. Many fish spiral around each other, but I'm pursuing a creature buried deeper in the eddy. 

Kristen Kirkby, the ecologist with me on the river, has told me about an individual slightly less attractive than the pink flesh of a tributary bound chinook. She tells of lamprey living in the freshwater tributaries of the Methow like an old prophecy. To Columbia Basin ecology, lamprey are essential. Throughout their reproductive journey back to their birth waters, they bring ocean nutrients into the basin, feed wildlife, and improve water quality. In larvae stages they feed on organic matter in the sediment, cleaning the substrate for salmon roe to thrive. Kristen said I could comb the sands for lamprey larvae that filter feed in at the head of the pool. 

The swirling waters push me to the edge of a smaller input stream, with fine sediment along the shallow bottom. The waves gently rock me as rays of sun filter through the scalloped surface and land on the pale yellow sand. I thread my fingers into the bed and grab a handful, letting the current drift grains away until there are just a few. My eyes strain to see a minuscule movement in between my fingers. I'm looking for Pacific Lamprey larvae. 

Six dams lay between the small pool I am floating in and the ocean. Six disruptions of flow with lakes backing them, six almost stagnant pools of warming water and six hundred foot tall waterfalls. A series of diversions have never disrupted the Columbia River system like in this, even when the Columbia carved away the Horse Heaven Hills. 

Lamprey live in the ocean as parasites. Their circular diphyodont sucker mouths latch onto the backs of larger fish and marine mammals, feeding off of their flesh. Pacific Lamprey do not often kill their host, and, as an anadromous species, they complete their life cycle by swimming back upriver to spawn. Right here, among the hundreds of miles of habitat in the Methow river.

Again and again, I search the river bed. Scoop and filter. The larvae are tiny, the sun is bright and I must not be looking hard enough. I squint my eyes till they start to ache, my toes have gone numb in the fall snowmelt river. 

Lamprey as a species have survived multiple mass extinction events. Their round, toothed suckers, and long slippery bodies are ecologically older than trees. Lamprey have survived, evolved, persisted for nearly 450 million years, and yet 90-degree angles of concrete, an oversight on the part of dam engineers in the Columbia Basin, makes it almost impossible for them to complete their journey home and reproduce. A bottleneck for both lamprey and salmon species on their way to a vast expanse of spawning grounds in Idaho and Oregon. 

Since the beginning of the transformation of the Columbia river basin to farming and hydropower, salmon have been an ecological focus. Hatcheries implemented to mitigate ocean fishery harvests are the sole savior of the post-dam basin. Habitat reconstruction of streams for salmon. These efforts have been beneficial to lamprey as well. Salmon started the wave of ecological river habitat restoration, and lamprey latched onto their backs to survive in their watershed. 

Pacific Lamprey larvae are one of the scarcest members of the Methow River ecosystem. Once abundant in the valley, they are now considered critically imperiled. If this system existed in its natural state, the small wiggly babies would be abundant. Again and again I search the river bed. No luck. 

On the banks of the Chewuch river, a tributary of the Methow, I spoke with Cyndy Miller on the property of a land back project- called x̌ʷnámx̌ʷnam. Cyndy is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Her ancestors cared for this land 150 years ago, fishing in the Chewuch and collecting tule reeds in the meadows. 

I ask about her experience with lamprey in the valley. She beams with excitement as she shows me pictures of a Pacific Lamprey release she took part in last week. Buckets of eels raised in tribal hatcheries are released by the reservation. 

“My brothers would catch lamprey when I was younger, but this is my first time seeing them.” 

Cyndy is in her late 60s. The tribes have been disconnected from their homelands for so long that this is Cyndy’s first interaction with the ancient gray eels. Lamprey have historically been a part of First Food feasts, making them an important cultural resource. Indigenous tribes across the Columbia Basin are working to bring lamprey back to their original home. Reintroduction is slow, but all progress counts. When referencing the reconnection Cyndy experiences with her culture, she says;

“It just feels good.” 

As for me, I dream of the time this river system is restored and I can find little squirming eels burrowed in the sand. Until then, I will keep looking.