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Bark Beetles Are Decimating Our Forests. That Might Actually Be a Good Thing.

by ShennaMcmullin Posted on March 19, 2015

Mother Jones

There is an eerie feel to this grove of lodgepole pines that I can’t quite put my finger on as entomologist Diana Six tromps ahead of me, hatchet in hand, scanning the southwestern Montana woods for her target. But as she digs the blade into a towering trunk, it finally hits me: the smell. There’s no scent of pine needles, no sharp, minty note wafting through the brisk fall air.

Six hacks away hunks of bark until she reveals an inner layer riddled with wormy passageways. “Hey, looky!” she exclaims, poking at a small black form. “Are you dead? Yeah, you’re dead.” She extends her hand, holding a tiny oval, maybe a quarter of an inch long. Scientists often compare this insect to a grain of rice, but Six prefers mouse dropping: “Beetle in one hand, mouse turd in another. You can’t tell them apart.” She turns to the next few trees in search of more traces. Pill-size holes pock their ashen trunks—a sign, along with the missing pine scent, of a forest reeling from an invasion.

These tiny winged beetles have long been culling sickly trees in North American forests. But in recent years, they’ve been working overtime. Prolonged droughts and shorter winters have spurred bark beetles to kill billions of trees in what’s likely the largest forest insect outbreak ever recorded, about 10 times the size of past eruptions. “A doubling would have been remarkable,” Six says. “Ten times screams that something is really going wrong.”

Mountain pine, spruce, piñon ips, and other kinds of bark beetles have chomped 46 million of the country’s 850 million acres of forested land, from the Yukon down the spine of the Rocky Mountains all the way to Mexico. Yellowstone’s grizzly bears have run out of pinecones to eat because of the beetles. Skiers and backpackers have watched their brushy green playgrounds fade as trees fall down, sometimes at a rate of 100,000 trunks a day. Real estate agents have seen home prices plummet from “viewshed contamination” in areas ransacked by the bugs. And the devastation isn’t likely to let up anytime soon. As climate change warms the North American woods, we can expect these bugs to continue to proliferate and thrive in higher elevations—meaning more beetles in the coming century, preying on bigger chunks of the country.

BEETLEMANIA

From 2000 to 2014, bark beetles destroyed large swaths of forests in the American West—and they’re not done yet.

In hopes of staving off complete catastrophe, the United States Forest Service, which oversees 80 percent of the country’s woodlands, has launched a beetle offensive, chopping down trees to prevent future infestations. The USFS believes this strategy reduces trees’ competition for resources, allowing the few that remain to better resist invading bugs. This theory just so happens to also benefit loggers, who are more than willing to help thin the forests. Politicians, too, have jumped on board, often on behalf of the timber industry: More than 50 bills introduced since 2001 in Congress proposed increasing timber harvests in part to help deal with beetle outbreaks.

But Six believes that the blitz on the bugs could backfire in a big way. For starters, she says, cutting trees “quite often removes more trees than the beetles would”—effectively outbeetling the beetles. But more importantly, intriguing evidence suggests that the bugs might be on the forest’s side. Six and other scientists are beginning to wonder: What if the insects that have wrought this devastation actually know more than we do about adapting to a changing climate?

A BUG’S LIFE

An adult mountain pine beetle lays her eggs under the bark. On her way, she disperses fungi that turn the trees’ tissue into food for her babies, eventually killing the tree.

Though they’re often described as pesky invaders, bark beetles have been a key part of conifer ecosystems for ages, ensuring that groves don’t get overcrowded. When a female mountain pine beetle locates a frail tree, she emits a chemical signal to her friends, who swarm to her by the hundreds. Together they chew through the bark until they reach the phloem, a cushy resinous layer between the outer bark and the sapwood that carries sugars through the tree. There, they lay their eggs in tunnels, and eventually a new generation of beetles hatches, grows up, and flies away. But before they do, the mature beetles also spread a special fungus in the center of the trunk. And that’s where things get really interesting.

Six focuses on the “evolutionary marriage” of beetle and fungi at her four-person lab at the University of Montana, where she is the chair of the department of ecosystems and conservation sciences. Structures in bark beetles’ mouths have evolved to carry certain types of fungi that convert the tree’s tissue into nutrients for the bug. The fungi have “figured out how to hail the beetle that will get them to the center of the tree,” Six says. “It’s like getting a taxi.” The fungi leave blue-gray streaks in the trees they kill; “blue-stain pine” has become a specialty product, used to make everything from cabins to coffins to iPod cases.

A healthy tree can usually beat back invading beetles by deploying chemical defenses and flooding them out with sticky resin. But just as dehydration makes humans weaker, heat and drought impede a tree’s ability to fight back—less water means less resin. In some areas of the Rocky Mountain West, the mid-2000s was the driest, hottest stretch in 800 years. From 2000 to 2012, bark beetles killed enough trees to cover the entire state of Colorado. “Insects reflect their environment,” explains renowned entomologist Ken Raffa—they serve as a barometer of vast changes taking place in an ecosystem.

Under the microscope, Diana Six picks up a dead mountain pine beetle in her Missoula lab. Shawn Gust

Typically, beetle swells subside when they either run out of trees or when long, cold winters freeze them off (though some larvae typically survive, since they produce antifreeze that can keep them safe down to 30 below). But in warm weather the bugs thrive. In 2008, a team of biologists at the University of Colorado observed pine beetles flying and attacking trees in June, a month earlier than previously recorded. With warmer springs, the beetle flight season had doubled, meaning they could mature and lay eggs—and then their babies could mature and lay eggs—all within one summer.

That’s not the only big change. Even as the mountain pine beetles run out of lodgepole pines to devour in the United States, in 2011 the insects made their first jump into a new species of tree, the jack pine, in Alberta. “Those trees don’t have evolved defenses,” Six says, “and they’re not fighting back.” The ability to invade a new species means the insects could begin a trek east across Canada’s boreal forest, then head south into the jack, red, and white pines of Minnesota and the Great Lakes region, and on to the woods of the East Coast. Similarly, last year, the reddish-black spruce beetle infested five times as many acres in Colorado as it did in 2009. And in the last decade, scientists spotted the southern pine beetle north of the Mason-Dixon Line for the first time on record, in New Jersey and later on Long Island. As investigative journalist Andrew Nikiforuk put it in his 2011 book on the outbreaks, we now belong to the “empire of the beetle.”

In a weird way, all of this is exciting news for Six: She is not only one of the world’s foremost experts in beetle-fungi symbiosis, but proud to be “one of the few people in Montana that thinks bark beetles are cute.” (She’s even brewed her own beer from beetle fungi.) As a child, she filled her bedroom in Upland, California, with jars of insects and her fungus collection. But as a teenager, she got into drugs, quit high school, and started living on the streets. Nine years later, she attended night school, where teachers urged her to become the first in her family to go to college. And when she finally did, she couldn’t get enough: classes in microbiology and integrated pest management led to a master’s degree in veterinary entomology, then a Ph.D. in entomology and mycology and a postdoc in chemical ecology, focused on insect pheromones.

Entomologist Diana Six, who has devoted her career to bark beetles, believes that the bugs might hold clues to saving our forests in the face of climate change. Shawn Gust

Six, 58, has light-green eyes ringed with saffron, and long silvery-blond hair streaming down shoulders toned from fly-fishing and bodybuilding. As several fellow researchers stress to me, she is the rare scientist who’s also a powerful communicator. “I think about what it means to be a tree,” she told a rapt audience at a TEDx talk about global forest die-offs. “Trees can’t walk. Trees can’t run. Trees can’t hide,” she continued, her sonorous voice pausing carefully for emphasis. “And that means, when an enemy like the mountain pine beetle shows up, they have no choice but to stand their ground.”

To a tree hugger, that might seem a grim prognosis: Since trees can’t escape, they’ll all eventually be devoured by insects, until we have no forests left. Especially since, with our current climate projections, we might be headed toward a world in which beetle blooms do not subside easily and instead continue to spread through new terrain.

But Six has a different way of looking at the trees’ plight: as a battle for survival, with the army of beetles as a helper. She found compelling evidence of this after stumbling across the work of Forest Service researcher Constance Millar, with whom she had crossed paths at beetle conferences.

Millar was comparing tree core measurements of limber pines, a slight species found in the eastern Sierras of California that can live to be 1,000 years old. After mountain pine beetles ravaged one of her study sites in the late 1980s, certain trees survived. They were all around the same size and age as the surrounding trees that the beetles tore through, so Millar looked closer at tree ring records and began to suspect that, though they looked identical on the outside, the stand in fact had contained two genetically distinct groups of trees. One group had fared well during the 1800s, when the globe was still in the Little Ice Age and average temperatures were cooler. But this group weakened during the warmer 1900s, and grew more slowly as a result. Meanwhile, the second group seemed better suited for the warmer climate, and started to grow faster.

Pine beetles have increasingly attacked fragile whitebark pine trees, whose cones are an important food source for grizzly bears, Clark’s nutcrackers, red squirrels, and other animals in the Yellowstone area. Maddie Oatman

When beetle populations exploded in the 1980s, this second group mounted a much more successful battle against the bugs. After surviving the epidemic, this group of trees “ratcheted forward rapidly,” Millar explains. When an outbreak flared up in the mid-2000s, the bugs failed to infiltrate any of the survivor trees in the stand. The beetles had helped pare down the trees that had adapted to the Little Ice Age, leaving behind the ones better suited to hotter weather. Millar found similar patterns in whitebark pines and thinks it’s possible that this type of beetle-assisted natural selection is going on in different types of trees all over the country.

When Six read Millar’s studies, she was floored. Was it possible, she wondered, that we’ve been going about beetle management all wrong? “It just hit me,” she says. “There is something amazing happening here.”

Last year, Six and Eric Biber, a University of California-Berkeley law professor, published a provocative review paper in the journal Forests that challenged the Forest Service’s beetle-busting strategies. After scrutinizing every study about beetle control that they could get their hands on, they concluded that “even after millions of dollars and massive efforts, suppression…has never effectively been achieved, and, at best, the rate of mortality of trees was reduced only marginally.”

Six points to a stand of lodgepoles in the University of Montana’s Lubrecht Experimental Forest. In the early 2000s, school foresters preened the trees, spacing them out at even distances, and hung signs to note how this would prevent beetle outbreaks. This “prethinned” block was “the pride and joy of the experimental forest,” Six remembers. But that stand was the first to get hit by encroaching pine beetles, which took out every last tree. She approached the university forest managers. “I said, ‘Boy, you need to document that,'” Six says. “They didn’t. They just cut it down. Now there’s just a field of stumps.”

Six and Biber’s paper came as a direct affront to some Forest Service researchers, one of whom told me that he believes changing forest structure through thinning is the only long-term solution to the beetle problem. Politicians tend to agree—and beetle suppression sometimes serves as a convenient excuse: “It is perhaps no accident that the beetle treatments most aggressively pushed for in the political landscape allow for logging activities that provide revenue and jobs for the commercial timber industry,” Six and Biber wrote in the Forests review.

Take the Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act, proposed in 2013 by then-Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) and championed by then-Rep. Steve Daines (R-Mont.). The bill sought to designate “Revenue Areas” in every national forest where, to help address insect infestations, loggers would be required to clear a certain number of trees every year. Loggers could gain access to roadless areas, wilderness study areas, and other conservation sites, and once designated, their acreage could never be reduced. The zones would also be excluded from the standard environmental-review process.

Six and other scientists vehemently opposed these massive timber harvests—as did environmental advocates like the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife, the latter warning that the harvests would take logging to “unprecedented and unsustainable levels.” The bill passed the House but died in the Senate last year. But Daines, now a senator and one of 2014’s top 10 recipients of timber money, vows to renew the effort so as to “revitalize Montana’s timber industry” and “protect the environment for future generations.”

This summer, Six plans to start examining the genes of “supertrees”—those that survive beetle onslaughts—in stands of whitebarks in Montana’s Big Hole Valley. Her findings could help inform a new kind of forest management guided by a deeper understanding of tree genes—one that beetles have had for millennia.

If we pay close enough attention, someday we may be able to learn how to think like they do. University of California-Davis plant sciences professor David Neale champions a new discipline called “landscape genomics.” At his lab in Davis, Neale operates a machine that grinds up a tree’s needles and spits out its DNA code. This technology is already being used for fruit tree breeding and planting, but Neale says it could one day be used in wild forests. “As a person, you can take your DNA and have it analyzed, and they can tell you your relative risk to some disease,” Neale says. “I’m proposing to do the same thing with a tree: I can estimate the relative risk to a change in temperature, change in moisture, introduction to a pathogen.”

Signs of beetle invasion on a whitebark pine tree in Montana’s Big Hole Valley Maddie Oatman

Right now, foresters prune woodlands based on the size of trees’ trunks and density of their stands. If we knew more about trees’ genetic differences, Neale says, “maybe we would thin the ones that have the highest relative risks.” This application is still years off, but Neale has already assembled a group of Forest Service officials who want to learn more about landscape genomics.

Six, meanwhile, places her faith in the beetles. Whereas traditional foresters worry that failing to step in now could destroy America’s forests, Six points to nature’s resilience. Asked at TEDx how she wants to change the world, she responded, “I don’t want to change the world. We have changed the world to a point that it is barely recognizable. I think it’s time to stop thinking change and try to hold on to what beauty and function remains.”

Diana Six in her lab at the University of Montana Shawn Gust

This story was supported by a Middlebury College Fellowship in Environmental Journalism.

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Bark Beetles Are Decimating Our Forests. That Might Actually Be a Good Thing.

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This Machine Turned Colorado Blue. Now It May Be Dems’ Best Hope to Save the Senate.

by alka24 Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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“It’s eerie how much 2014 is like four years ago,” says Craig Hughes, a Denver-based political consultant who ran Democrat Michael Bennet’s successful 2010 Senate campaign. It’s just after 10 a.m., and we’re sitting in a coffee shop called Paris on the Platte. Hughes recounts how, back in 2010, all but one of the final 18 public polls conducted before Election Day showed Bennet losing. In recent weeks, Democratic Sen. Mark Udall has trailed Republican Rep. Cory Gardner in 11 of 12 polls. In 2010, pundits said that Bennet’s campaign ran too many pro-choice advertisements; political commentators these days deride Udall as “Mark Uterus” because his campaign has relentlessly focused on reproductive rights and women’s health. And Udall’s campaign is betting, like Bennet’s 2010 effort did, on the changing composition of the Colorado electorate. Also, just like four years ago, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who is seeking a second term, is facing a strongly conservative challenger, and in the state Legislature, Colorado Democrats are fighting to protect their majorities in both chambers.

So if there are so many parallels, do Democrats in Colorado have reason to believe they can again buck the political tide?

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This Machine Turned Colorado Blue. Now It May Be Dems’ Best Hope to Save the Senate.

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How a Pro-Gun, Anti-Gay “Political Terrorist” Could Help Keep Colorado Democrats in Power

by SamaraLetters Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Colorado gun-rights crusader Dudley Brown has a simple political philosophy: “No compromise.” He says the NRA is spineless. (An NRA official once tagged him the “Al Sharpton of the gun movement.”) He loathes middle-of-the-road politicians. For show, he occasionally drives a Pinzgauer, a bulky Austrian-made troop transport vehicle, which he describes as his “political pain delivery vehicle.” His opponents—Democrats and Republicans alike—call him “poison” and a “political terrorist.” After Democratic lawmakers in the state passed new gun-control laws in response to the Aurora and Newtown mass shootings, Brown told NPR, “There’s a time to hunt deer. And the next election is the time to hunt Democrats.” But, as it turns out, Brown’s bid for political revenge has upped the odds that Democrats will hold on to power in the state legislature.


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See our special reports on mass shootings and child gun deaths

Brown—who is widely referred to just as “Dudley”—is the face and voice of the absolutist gun-rights movement, which opposes any and all gun-related restrictions. A frequent guest on Fox News, Brown founded an outfit called Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO); it’s Colorado’s more extreme version of the NRA. He also runs a group called the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR), which butts heads with the NRA and is allied with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Brown’s groups have spent millions lobbying state and federal politicians and trying to sway Republican primaries in favor of hard-line pro-gun candidates. As Brown’s organizations bolster their membership lists and war chests, they could play a key role in the 2016 Republican presidential primary contest—but perhaps at a price for the party. In Colorado, Brown’s take-no-prisoners tactics have splintered the state GOP. And this year, RMGO helped three far-right candidates win Republican state Senate primaries, which has boosted the chances for the Democrats in those races and given the Ds a good shot of retaining control of state Senate.

Born in Wyoming, Brown studied at Colorado State University and chaired the College Republicans of Colorado with the confrontational style that would become his trademark. “The College Republicans were having doughnuts with the College Democrats, even during Reagan’s re-election year,” Brown told Denver’s 5280 magazine. “I didn’t want to have doughnuts with them. I wanted to beat them over their heads.” After college, he kicked around state politics working for US Sen. Bill Armstrong, the state House’s GOP caucus, the Firearms Coalition of Colorado, and the Colorado Conservative Union. In 1996, he struck out on his own and formed Rocky Mountain Gun Owners.

Those were the halcyon days for Colorado Republicans. They had enjoyed almost uninterrupted majorities in the state House and Senate since the 1970s. After the 1998 elections, the GOP controlled the governorship, the legislature, both US Senate seats, and four of six congressional districts. And it was conservative Republicans who were ascendant in the state. Using RMGO, Brown took aim at GOPers who did not pass his pro-gun ideological test. In one early instance, RMGO attacked a Republican congressional candidate named Don Ament, who for Brown was insufficiently pro-gun, with a mailer showing Ament purportedly leaving a Denver strip club. The mailer declared, “Send Denver Don home to his wife.” But the state Republican Party’s office was located down the street from the strip club, and the photo of Ament was a set-up. Ament lost in the Republican primary to a far-right challenger.

After the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, Colorado voters approved a ballot measure mandating that buyers at gun shows undergo a background check first. (Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had obtained their guns illegally from a straw buyer.) Bill Owens, Colorado’s newly elected Republican governor, backed the measure, putting him in Brown and RMGO’s sights. RMGO badgered Owens at public events, blitzed his office with angry mail, and bird-dogged him at public events. Sean Tonner, Owens’ deputy chief of staff, told 5280, “All Dudley wanted to do was create controversy. He makes his money when there’s turmoil, real or perceived, because that’s what gets his members to write him checks.”

But Colorado’s political landscape has shifted in the past decade. The state has attracted large numbers of young people and Hispanics, turning the state “greener and browner,” as local political consultants put it. Colorado progressives organized in the early 2000s and soon took back the legislature and the governorship. Still, gun rights (or gun safety) has remained a contentious issue, essentially a proxy battle in a changing Colorado, pitting new Coloradans against old. And Brown has capitalized on this intense fight to expand RMGO’s profile and political clout.

Brown’s controversial tactics have drawn national attention. In a 2012 GOP primary, conservatives sought to oust state Sen. Jean White, a Republican who had voted twice in favor of civil unions. So Brown and a right-wing group out of Virginia crafted a mailer showing two men kissing with the tagline, “State Senator Jean White’s idea of family values?” Here was the rub: The two men in the photo lived in New Jersey, and, through some clever editing, Brown’s team had replaced the Manhattan skyline with snowy pine trees reminiscent of Colorado. (The two men sued the conservative group that distributed the mailer; a judge ruled in April that RMGO had a right to use the photo under the First Amendment.) White ended up losing her primary to an RMGO-backed state representative and rancher named Randy Baumgardner.

As Brown stoked his supporters’ fears of gun-grabbing Democrats and as RMGO’s bank account grew, the group became a potent force in Republican primaries—and a headache to the state GOP. “He’s exactly what’s wrong with the Republican Party all rolled up into one guy,” Sean Duffy, a former spokesman for Bill Owens, told 5280. “He’ll say or do anything to destroy viable candidates and legislators who agree with him 90 percent of the time, because you’re either 100 percent with him, or you’re 100 percent against him.”

The mass shootings in 2012 at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, did nothing to slow Brown. In an email blasted out to RMGO supporters, he sent condolences to the families of those affected and then attacked “the Washington, DC, gun control lobby”—calling it “circling vultures”—for “shamelessly using the blood of innocents to advance their anti-gun agenda.” When told that Aurora gunman James Holmes had 6,000 rounds with him the night he shot 70 people, killing 12, Brown replied: “I call 6,000 rounds running low.” His National Association of Gun Rights spent $6.7 million in 2013 lobbying against new gun-control measures in Congress—nearly twice what the NRA spent on lobbying. NAGR has gone far beyond the NRA in its gun-rights advocacy, fighting reauthorization of the Patriot Act (because it allows “unconstitutional” gun searches) and suing to overturn the ban on firearms in post offices. Sen. Rand Paul, who was endorsed by the NAGR in 2010, has signed fundraising appeals for the group.

This year, RMGO helped three far-right candidates win Republican primaries in crucial Colorado state Senate races in Jefferson County, west of Denver. These were major victories for the RINO-bashing RMGO. But the result could be good news for the Democrats. Had the more moderate Republicans won those primaries, political handicappers observed, the GOP would have had a good chance of winning those seats in the general election and regaining control of the Senate. (Democrats currently have a one-seat majority in the state’s upper chamber.) But with Brown-preferred (and die-hard) candidates on the ballot, Democrats may be able to eke out victories in these critical races. “Dudley Brown could be the Democrats’ savior this year,” says Laura Chapin, a Democratic consultant based in Denver.

While Brown’s brand of take-no-prisoners politics has earned him enemies in both political parties, among his fellow conservatives he’s a rock star. Last Wednesday, in a packed hotel ballroom, Brown introduced his old friend David Bossie, who runs the conservative group Citizens United, at the premiere of Bossie’s latest propaganda film, Rocky Mountain Heist. The film purports to tell the story of how a secret cabal of liberal donors hijacked Colorado beginning in the 2000s, and warns that this model could turn other states deep blue. Brown stars in the movie.

Afterward, I introduced myself to Brown and asked for an interview. The smile disappeared from his face. “I don’t talk to leftists like you,” he snarled. “My guys don’t read your crap.” He brushed past me, yelled “Pravda” over his shoulder, and moved into the crowd.

For more of Mother Jones’ reporting on guns in America, see all of our latest coverage here, and our award-winning special reports.

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How a Pro-Gun, Anti-Gay “Political Terrorist” Could Help Keep Colorado Democrats in Power

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Coordinates: A Mountain to Honor Thoreau

by Myrna Posted on October 6, 2014

A group of writers recently made the trek to the summit of an unnamed mountain for a minor act of civil disobedience: a ceremony to name it for Thoreau. Read original article:  Coordinates: A Mountain to Honor Thoreau ; ; ;

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Coordinates: A Mountain to Honor Thoreau

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Why You Should Appreciate the Humble Beaver

by LorieDacre Posted on July 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

The great novelist Wallace Stegner sorted the conflicting impulses in his beloved American West into two camps. There were the “boomers” who saw the frontier as an opportunity to get rich quick and move on: the conquistadors, the gold miners, the buffalo hunters, the land scalpers, and the dam-building good ol’ boys. They are still with us, trying to drill and frack their way to Easy Street across our public lands. Then there were those Stegner called the “nesters” or “stickers” who came to stay and struggled to understand the land and its needs. Their quest was to become native.

That division between boomers and nesters is, of course, too simple. All of us have the urge to consume and move on, as well as the urge to nest, so our choices are rarely clear or final. Today, that old struggle in the American West is intensifying as heat-parched, beetle-gnawed forests ignite in annual epic firestorms, reservoirs dry up, and Rocky Mountain snow is ever more stained with blowing desert dust.

The modern version of nesters are the conservationists who try to partner with the ecosystems where they live. Wounded landscapes, for example, can often be restored by unleashing nature’s own self-healing powers. The new nesters understand that you cannot steer and control an ecosystem but you might be able to dance with one. Sage Sorensen dances with beavers.

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Why You Should Appreciate the Humble Beaver

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Your Almond Habit Is Sucking California Dry

by VictorF32nso Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

California farmers will reap a record 2.1 billion pounds of almonds this year, the USDA estimates—about three times as much as they did in 2000. That’s great news for the world’s growing horde of almond eaters, because the state’s groves supply 80 percent of the global harvest. As this chart shows, California has been planting more and more almonds over the past two decades:

And those almonds are miniature cash cows:

But in the long term, the almond boom may prove bad news for everyone who relies on California’s farms for sustenance. You might have heard that the state, supplier of half of US-grown produce, is locked in its worst drought on record. Meanwhile, it takes 1.1 gallons of water to produce a single almond, as my colleagues Alex Park and Julia Lurie have shown. You don’t have to scramble to figure how many almonds make up 2.1 billion pounds to realize that that’s a hell of a lot of water.

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Your Almond Habit Is Sucking California Dry

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Here’s What the Battle Over Iraqi Oil Means for America

by MarianneTejada Posted on June 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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As deadly sectarian violence continues to sweep through Iraq, the country’s oil industry is reeling from a brazen attack on one of its key domestic refineries. Here are five things you need to know about the role of oil in the current conflict, and what it means for the United States and the global economy.

UPDATE Thursday, June 19, 2:50pm EST: In a press conference this afternoon in which he announced the deployment up to 300 additional military advisers to Iraq, President Obama was asked how Iraq’s civil war affects the national security interests of the United States. In response, Obama listed several factors, including “issues like energy, and global energy markets.”

1. Oil infrastructure is a major flash point in the Iraq crisis. After a week-long siege, Sunni extremists from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS, fought their way into Iraq’s largest oil refinery in the northern city of Baiji on Tuesday and Wednesday. There are conflicting reports about how much of the facility was seized by the militants in the ensuing chaos, and whether Iraqi forces have in fact repelled the attack, as Iraqi military officials claim. Previously, repeated attacks shut down the major Turkey-bound Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline in the north.

A 2003 photo shows a guard tower outside the Baiji oil refinery. Ivan Sekretarev/AP

2. The Iraq crisis is already affecting oil and gasoline prices. Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the country has steadily increased its oil production. It’s now the second biggest producer of crude oil in OPEC, exerting a growing influence on the global price of oil. And while the White House said Wednesday that there have been no “major disruptions in oil supplies in Iraq,” the crisis has clearly spooked the global market. Bloomberg reported last week that one international benchmark used by traders surged above $114 a barrel for the first time in nine months.

USA Today reported that even before the battle over the Baiji refinery, Iraq’s oil production had already fallen by about 10 percent, or 300,000 barrels a day, since March. The China National Petroleum Corporation, the giant state-run company that is the biggest foreign investor in Iraq’s oil industry, is now nervously watching for any threats to its $4 billion worth of oil interests.

And there are signs that oil market worries are already being reflected at your local gas station.

“I warned people on my Facebook, friends and family,” says Robert Rapier, an energy analyst and regular columnist for the Wall Street Journal. “I said: If you need to get gasoline, go get it now, because gasoline prices will be going up this week.”

3. But long-term impacts on global oil supply are unlikely, unless the insurgency spreads. For now, the insurgency is limited to the part of the country north of Baghdad. Unless there’s an increased threat of instability in the south, deeper and longer-lasting seismic shocks to the world energy market are unlikely, according to Luay al-Khatteeb, an energy and politics analyst with the Brookings Doha Center and a senior adviser to the Iraqi parliament. While Baiji is the country’s largest refinery, the overwhelming bulk of oil production in Iraq is centered around the city of Basra, in the country’s south, “far from the fault lines,” he said. Khatteeb called the recent oil price increases “baseless,” adding that “there is zero threat whatsoever to oil production.”

But if the conflict does spread south, the effect on oil markets could be severe. “If all Iraq’s production got taken off line, for example, I’m pretty sure you’d see oil prices rise very quickly to $120, $130, maybe even higher,” Rapier said.

Moreover, the battle for the Baiji plant is likely to make the situation in Iraq worse because Baiji mainly refines oil for the domestic market. “The lack of oil products is likely to further the misery and discontent and my prediction is that a lot of that will be directed toward the central government,” said James F. Jeffery, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former US envoy to Baghdad, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

President Barack Obama speaks about energy security and his climate plan at a Walmart in Mountain View, California. Jeff Chiu/AP

4. America imports much less Iraqi oil than it used to. When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he said that America’s dependence on the “tyranny of oil” helped fund terrorism in both Iraq and around the world. “One of the most dangerous weapons in the world today is the price of oil,” he said. “We ship nearly $700 million a day to unstable or hostile nations for their oil. It pays for terrorist bombs going off from Baghdad to Beirut.” His opponent that year, John McCain, said at a town hall that his plan to “eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East” would “prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.”

As president, Obama has continued to emphasize independence from foreign oil. “Today, America is closer to energy independence than we have been in decades,” he told an audience at Walmart in Mountain View, California, last month. “And for the first time in nearly 20 years, America produces more oil here at home than we buy from other countries.”

Indeed, in October, domestic crude oil production surpassed imports for the first time since 1995. More specifically, even though Iraq’s oil production has increased, the US now imports far less Iraqi oil than it did around the time of the 2003 invasion.

That’s not just the story in Iraq. America is now importing less oil overall—20 percent less, in fact—than in 2003. “We’re getting more of that oil domestically,” Rapier said, pointing to increased local production facilitated by the fracking boom, especially in Texas and North Dakota.

And America’s own neighbors are also chipping in to help, says Rapier, pointing to Canadian crude. “We’ve got lower cost production in our neighborhood here.”

This means the United States is now somewhat insulated from big shocks to the market like the 1970s oil crisis, in which oil-producing Arab states imposed a crippling embargo against the US.

“The increase of unconventional oil supplies from new emerging assets in the US, all of this has created some sort of a comfort zone,” said Khatteeb from the Brookings Doha Center.

John Duffield, who authored a 2008 book called Over a Barrel: The Costs of US Foreign Oil Dependence agrees: “I would say we are not as much over the barrel.”

5. But the United States is still tied to global oil markets, and that means what happens in Iraq can have an economic impact here. One thing every expert I spoke to agreed on is this: Even with decreasing oil imports, the US is inextricably linked to world markets. That means that if the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, the US economy may not be immune.

“The cost to the United States of a big oil shock…will be lower than they were in the past,” Duffield said. “Our main vulnerability is not so much the direct impact on oil, but the impact on the rest of the world’s economy, if there’s a big oil supply disruption.” He added that “as long as the world oil market is pretty highly integrated, the US is vulnerable to an oil supply disruption in the Middle East or the Persian Gulf, regardless of the amount of oil it imports from the region.”

Why? Because even though the United States has reduced its use of Middle Eastern oil, many of America’s key trading partners have not. “The oil production in Iraq has risen for seven years in a row,” Rapier said, and that oil is going somewhere. Much of it’s going to Asian economic powerhouses whose economies are deeply tied to our own.

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A US soldier stands guard at a burning oil well at the Rumeila oil fields after the 2003 American invasion. Ian Waldie/Pool/AP

“The United States, strategically, is a major trading power,” said Anthony Cordesman, an energy analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It is particularly dependent on the import of manufactured goods from three countries which are extremely dependent on energy imports. Those happen to be China, South Korea, and Japan.”

That’s why Middle Eastern oil still plays an important role in US policy, says Cordesman. “It is precisely because US security is global. It is not a matter of direct US dependence on foreign oil,” he said. “Because what really counts is global prices, and what counts is the steady and predictable flow of oil to a global economy.â&#128;&#139;”

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Here’s What the Battle Over Iraqi Oil Means for America

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The Himalaya shows off how fast it can melt, too

by Jeff Howard Posted on May 21, 2014

The Himalaya shows off how fast it can melt, too

By

Adarsh Thakure

Last week, we got the news that the West Antarctic ice sheet is ditching us. Then, on Sunday, another fresh study told us that Greenland is also melting away rather fast. And now glaciology brings us a new report, on what’s going on at the so-called “third pole” (so called because it has more snow and ice than anywhere outside of the polar regions): the Himalaya mountain range. Seemingly unwilling to get left behind, it’s been shedding its icy stocks, too.

The report, from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICMOD), found that Nepal’s glaciers lost 24 percent of their volume between 1977 and 2010. It did also find that the number of glaciers increased by 11 percent over that period, but it turns out even that’s not good news! It attributes the increase to the fact that the big glaciers tend to break into smaller ones once they become weak.

While the big concern surrounding the melting of the true poles is what it means for sea-level rise, the impact of the Himalayan thaw will stay a bit more local — but that doesn’t necessarily make it better. It translates into things like wiping out villages through glacial lake outbursts, and making for a less reliable water supply for drinking, agriculture, and power. “The third pole region is home to some of the people most vulnerable to these changes in the world,” ICMOD says.

And, just to top it all off, “The rate of warming in the Third Pole region is significantly higher than the global average, and the rate is higher at altitude.”

So, which of the poles is going to win this twisted race? All bets are on: It looks like all three are gunning for the finish.

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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The Himalaya shows off how fast it can melt, too

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Novelist Larry McMurtry’s Last Kind Words

by Rafael40Ru Posted on May 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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AFTER MORE THAN five decades trying, Larry McMurtry—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Brokeback Mountain, and creator of Booked Up, one of the planet’s largest used bookstores—still can’t escape the enduring mythologies of the Old West, which he set out to debunk with the publication of his first novel, Horseman, Pass By, back in 1961.

The son and grandson of cattlemen, McMurtry, 77, was raised on the plains near Archer City, Texas, whose landscape and small-town mentality inform so much of his work—he left at 18 for college, returning decades later with the unlikely dream of transforming his hometown into a book lovers’ mecca. Among his 32 novels and 14 nonfiction works, you’ll find fictional accounts of Calamity Jane, Billy the Kid, and other legends brought back to earth. In 1997, he told the New York Times Magazine he was “bored to death with the 19th-century West,” and figured Comanche Moon, the last installment of the Lonesome Dove series, would be his final say on it. But in his new novel, The Last Kind Words Saloon, fans will recognize that familiar pace, that spare diction, those somnolent settings—fading frontier towns with their ignorant, stoic cowboys and ranchers, beat-down Indians, whores, rustlers, drunks, schemers, and desperately lonely wives.

Mother Jones: I thought you were done with the Old West. What happened?

Larry McMurtry: I changed my mind. I got an idea and I followed it.

MJ: The Last Kind Words Saloon follows Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, among others. Yet their famous gunfight at the OK Corral seemed almost incidental.

LM: I don’t think I was that ambitious. It seems like the OK Corral is a good place to stop. I paid it much less attention because it was kind of a throwaway, an event that wasn’t supposed to happen. Neither side wanted to fight, and yet guns started going off and a fight ensued.

MJ: You’ve described Old West mythologies as destructive. Which ones particularly grate?

LM: The Western notion of masculinity goes back a long way. It doesn’t allow for women, and it’s also racist—it doesn’t allow for other cultures.

MJ: In your antipathy partly rooted in your own childhood run-ins in small-town Texas?

LM: It was more like the culture that I lived in and absorbed by osmosis: It was a racist, anti-feminist culture, and it had been throughout the whole period of settlement. It was still all that when I was a little boy.

MJ: To what degree have you succeeded in your demythologizing mission?

LM: I haven’t succeeded at all. It’s just as racist and misogynistic as it ever was. The image of the cowboy is one of the dominant images in American culture.

MJ: In the book, a brief sub-plot involves a group of ruthless Indians who do horrible things to a group of white travellers, and are in turn dispatched by the white authorities. What were your intentions with that episode?

LM: It was timely. For one thing, it actually happened during the period and in the places I was writing about. It was the last massacre on the southern plains. It was the final breakaway band of Kiowa who did it. It took place about 20 miles from my family home in Texas. General Sherman was on a tour of the western forts. He was there early in the morning and didn’t see the Indians. But they saw him, and waited until he left for Jacksboro. In the afternoon, seven teamsters came along that route and were massacred.

MJ: Much like Woodrow Call from Lonesome Dove, the men in this book lack introspection; certainly they are reserved in their self-expression. The women are lonely and miserable and hungry for attention. What kind of men were your rancher father and grandfather, and how did they relate to their own wives?

LM: One of the reasons I wrote Lonesome Dove was to try to understand my father. My father’s reaction to the hardships his mother endured marked him for life. They left Missouri and came to our family home. There was nothing there when they arrived, but there was a stream. My father saw his mother carry bucket after bucket after bucket of water up from that stream to the house. She had 12 children. It made him intolerant of my mother, because she was not as competent as his mother.

MJ: What was it like for a studious kid like you growing up in small-town Texas?

LM: I didn’t realize that it was as limited as it was until I got to places that weren’t limited, like Houston. The only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore.

MJ: How did your father feel about you going off to college and becoming a writer?

LM: He didn’t oppose it. We visited Rice and he saw what a wonderful school it was. He had some vain hope that I would change my mind and become a veterinarian.

MJ: Is your family still in the cattle business?

LM: Unfortunately, they are, and for nostalgic reasons. My two younger sisters both worshipped my father.

MJ: You studied under Wallace Stegner at Stanford, right?

LM: Actually, I didn’t. He was in India the year of my scholarship. I studied under Malcolm Cowley and Frank O’Connor. Mr. Cowley came in and turned off his hearing aid and let us all squabble among ourselves. But we knew he had value, because he came from the world of Hemingway, Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Fitzgerald. He knew all of them. He wrote a wonderful book called Exile’s Return about that generation. In the end, Hemingway turned against him. Frank O’Connor was an Irish short story writer. He didn’t like teaching, and he was irascible. I mentioned once that I had read Smollett, and he exploded. But he was an exceptional writer, a beautiful short story writer.

MJ: You felt that Lonesome Dove was misinterpreted, that you’d intended it as an anti-Western. In what sense?

LM: Would you like your menfolk to be that way? The Western myth is a heroic myth, and yet settling the West was not heroic. It ended with Custer; it was the end of the settlement narrative, which had been going on since 1620.

MJ: Were you surprised when you learned that it had won the Pulitzer?

LM: I was teaching in Uvalde, Texas, the day I won. I gave six speeches that day. My friend Susan Freudenheim told me I had won the prize. I was too busy to have much of a reaction to it. I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath. If I hadn’t won the Pulitzer, I doubt I would have been president of PEN.

MJ: Do you find it strange being so closely identified with a book you wrote almost 30 years ago?

LM: That’s just the way it was and the way it is. Many people are identified with one book. Philip Roth with Portnoy’s Complaint. Joseph Heller and Catch-22. Tennessee Williams and A Streetcar Named Desire. Strangely enough, Norman Mailer never wrote a novel that identified him. I think The Executioners Song is a great book.

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Novelist Larry McMurtry’s Last Kind Words

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Was the Los Angeles Earthquake Caused by Fracking Techniques?

by VictorF32nso Posted on March 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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The epicenter of today’s L.A. quake was 8 miles from oil waste injection wells Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance

Was the 4.4-magnitude earthquake that rattled Los Angeles this morning caused by fracking methods? It’s hard to say, but what’s clear from the above map, made by Kyle Ferrar of the FracTracker Alliance, is that the quake’s epicenter was just eight miles from a disposal well where oil and gas wastewater is being injected underground at high pressure.

Don Drysdale, spokesman for the state agency that oversees California Geological Survey, told me that state seismologists don’t think that the injection well was close enough to make a difference (and the agency has also raised the possibility that Monday’s quake could have been a foreshock for a larger one). But environmental groups aren’t so sure.

In other states, injection wells located 7.5 miles from a fault have been shown to induce seismic activity, points out Andrew Grinberg, the oil and gas project manager for Clean Water Action. “We are not saying that this quake is a result of an injection,” he adds, “but with so many faults all over California, we need a better understanding of how, when, and where induced seismicity can occur with relation to injection.”

“Shaky Ground,” a new report from Clean Water Action, Earthworks, and the Center for Biological Diversity, argues that the close proximity of such wells to active faults could increase the state’s risk of earthquakes. According to the report, more than half of the state’s permitted oil wastewater injection wells are located less than 10 miles from an active fault, and 87 of them, or about 6 percent, are located within a mile of an active fault.

Scientists have long known that injecting large amounts of wastewater underground can cause earthquakes by increasing pressure and reducing friction along fault lines. One of the best known early examples took place in 1961, when the US Army disposed of millions of gallons of hazardous waste by injecting it 12,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado. The influx caused more than 1,500 earthquakes over a five year period in an area not known for seismic activity; the worst among them registered at more than 5.0 on the Richter scale and caused $500,000 in damage. Geologists later discovered that the Army well had been drilled into an unknown fault.

As Mother Jones‘ Michael Behar detailed in-depth last year, fracking is now a leading suspect for a spate of serious earthquakes in places that hardly ever see them, such as Oklahoma, where in 2011, a 5.7-magnitude temblor destroyed 14 homes and baffled seismologists.

“In some locations of the US, the disposal of wastewater associated with oil/gas production, including hydraulic fracturing operations, appears to have triggered some low-magnitude seismic activity,” concedes Drysdale, Geological Survey spokesman. But in California, he adds, oil companies are required to evaluate surrounding geology before disposing of wastewater underground, and can’t inject it at dangerously high pressures.

Yet Grinberg, a co-author of the “Shaky Ground” report, says that the existing regulations don’t go far enough now that quake-prone California is poised for a fracking boom. Though he’d like to see a moratorium on fracking while the risks are studied, he wants any eventual regulations to at least require seismic monitoring at or near injection wells and to look at the cumulative earthquake risk of entire oil fields.

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Was the Los Angeles Earthquake Caused by Fracking Techniques?

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