Coyote Crossing

Five years on Friday. Jesus Fucking Christ.

5 comments on "I hate anniversaries"

I’ve tried to hold off lately on criticizing environmental groups in this space. This is in part because once started, the practice generally has no end: the venality of the most mainstream groups runs deep. It’s also because every once in a while high-ranking staff of a group I criticize will respond in such a poorly argued fashion that it further erodes my regard for the organization, as happened on this post.

But mostly it’s because I decided this past year not to rent the sellouts space in my head. Better to write about the things I want to save, to build a fan base for them, than to spend time mired in negativity because a large organization doesn’t agree with me about those things’ value. I’d rather work to support things than oppose people. (F’rinstance: have you signed Desert Biodiversity’s petition to protect the Ivanpah Valley?)

But it’s one thing to disagree. It’s another to spread falsehoods.

I read this post on the Nevada Wilderness Project’s blog yesterday. The post itself is not particularly remarkable: it’s an update on renewable energy policy in Nevada vis-a-vis California’s repeatedly expressed intention to generate all its non-carbon power in-state. Nevada has been tying its plans to sell off its public lands wholesale to energy developers to meet Californian demand, and so the notion that California might not be buying has upset some people.

If you haven’t been following the desert solar Inside Baseball stats, you might think that the Nevada Wilderness Project would be applauding this development; it offers to lessen development pressure on the Silver State’s wildlands. As it happens, NWP has for some time been a cheerleader for remote industrial renewable development in Nevada. The group parallels in this regard its national colleagues at The Wilderness Society, but NWP has taken this support to rather absurd lengths, going so far as to sponsor a 501-mile hike along the proposed route of a huge transmission line, not to protest the line’s construction through the state of Nevada but in fact to cheer it on. IN NWP’s own words:

Adam hiked the path of the SWIP [SouthWest Intertie Project] line on foot, traveling north to south through high quality sage grouse habitat, large mammal travel corridors, canyons, valleys, along dirt roads, past ranches, and many other areas that will be changed by the construction of the line.

NWP conceded that construction would “affect the natural landscape,” but crowed over the resulting “conservation opportunities.” Which to me reads kind of like OxFam mentioning a looming famine in glowing terms because of the resulting “relief opportunities.”

Wilderness groups working on climate issues point out that if we don’t do something about climate change, there will be no wilderness areas left—or at least, the damages to the biological systems in said wilderness areas will be irrevocably and dramatically changed.

This is undeniably a valid argument. It is an argument that would be every bit as valid for groups working to support women’s crisis centers, community gardens, public broadcasting, and food banks: each of them works to achieve goals that will be utterly undermined by catastrophic climate change. Somehow out of all these groups it’s only the wilderness organizations that have rewritten their charters.

A cynic might suggest that the current popularity of climate change as an issue among major granting organizations encourages groups dependent on such funding to shift their mission so as to maximize development potential.

An even greater cynic might speculate that wilderness groups have a special incentive to hop on board the Big Solar train: mitigation. Developers seeking to destroy public lands are often compelled to “mitigate” that destruction by buying and setting aside other land for protection. Of course, if out of 100 acres of prime desert a developer destroys 50 acres but graciously “mitigates” the other 50, what we have at the end of the day is half as much prime desert as we once had. But if that mitigation involves trading development on a piece of land for protecting some other land as wilderness, then the wilderness organization can count that as a victory in their fundraising material.

Or so that cynic might say. I have been that cynic fairly often. Wilderness groups seem to think little of consigning land without “wilderness characteristics” to destruction, as long as they can thereby save land that does have those characteristics. Never mind that the land destroyed might be the best habitat for a Threatened species in the entire state of Nevada. You can see a freeway from the old-growth desert, so it’s worthless.

But I’m used to all that from certain wilderness groups; all the disregard for the value of land shielded from their vision by their ideological blinders, all the backroom horsetrading, all of it.

That’s not what prompts this complaint. What prompts this complaint is a throwaway caption on a photo accompanying the post on the Nevada Wilderness Project’s blog, which reads:

A rendering of how heliostats will look at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the California desert. According to developer BrightSource, the technology design “allows the solar field to coexist with existing vegetation.”

As it happens, the design of the plant requires that the vegetation beneath the heliostats be kept at a height of no more than 18 inches. If you’re used to pruning shrubs in a garden, 18 inches seems like a reasonable height. Boxwood hedges can live through decades of pruning to 18 inches, for instance.

To my knowledge, based on my working familiarity with the Ivanpah Valley, boxwood hedges have been recorded from vanishingly few places within the footprint of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System. What does grow there? Creosote, Mojave yucca, buckhorn cholla, and barrel cacti are among the most common shrubs. Several of them can live to astonishing ages. None of them can withstand being sheared to 18 inches for very long. When they die, and when the desert pavement around them is destroyed, the soil around them will no longer be held in place. It will blow away or be carried off in floods, and with it the stored seeds of several dozen native annual plant species, some of them rare.

In actual point of fact, this is how the Ivanpah solar plant has been “coexisting” with native vegetation:

That Mojave yucca was around 700 years old.

Here’s the thing: the Nevada Wilderness Project knows all this. Or if they don’t, it’s because they have deliberately refused to acquire the knowledge. Yesterday morning, I asked NWP for clarification of that caption on Twitter. No reply was forthcoming.

A lot of anger here over a photo caption, you might say, and you’d be right. Except for this: They went out of their way to add it. The image doesn’t require it. And it is just a caption, but a caption here and a pullquote there and an offhand comment somewhere else and you bend your public’s perception of reality. Repeat a lie enough times and it becomes the truth. I forget who said that.

Despite my strong views on desert solar development, I still try to maintain respect for green groups that come down with different positions than mine. I have good friends that work within the Sierra Club, for instance, and continue to find the majority of the work of the Center for Biological Diversity of immense value, and hold its staff in quite high regard, despite the aching boneheadedness of their leadership on the renewables issue.

But functioning as a press release distribution arm for BrightSource goes beyond a good-faith difference of opinion. Casually spreading corporate-sponsored misinformation goes beyond agreeing to disagree.

It’s one thing to find the Ivanpah Valley not worth your time as an organization. It’s wrong-headed and ill-informed, but still: if you don’t care about endangered wildlife that doesn’t live in areas with “wilderness characteristics,” there’s not much one can really say to argue with you.

But to to spread blatant, easily debunked lies, in the service of advancing your organizational mission, even if it means collateral devastation of delicate ecosystems? That, my friends, is beyond the pale. That is not excusable.

It is, in fact, what we are supposed to be fighting against.

12 comments on "Shame on you, Nevada Wilderness Project"

How many times have I saved this rabbit’s life? Once by adopting him eight years ago, certainly, less than a week before his “deadline” at the animal shelter. Again a year later, the first time he went into GI stasis and I found him cold as death already. We microwaved a sock full of rice as a hot water bottle and rushed him to the vet. Again on the first anniversary of Zeke’s death — bladder full of sludge, that time and a painful and crotchety recovery that was. Another time in 2008 with the head tilt, in tag-team fashion with the ex-. Any number of additional times over the years chasing away feral cats ad sharp-shinned hawks. Six times? Seven?

Apparently not often enough.

He weighed three pounds seven ounces on Monday, down four ounces from October. I can glide my finger between his shoulder blades.

A twentieth of a milliliter of buprenorphine twice a day for pain, and a third of a milliliter of enrofloxacin along with it, the latter one with vitamins and foul flavor mixed in. I pick him up beneath the armpits, cradle him lying on his back in my left arm, wait until he relaxes, then wave each syringe ineffectually in the general vicinity of his mouth as he flinches. Eventually I win. The enrofloxacin is supposed to kill off the deleterious gut flora his vet thinks is keeping him on the razor edge of GI stasis, and the buprenorphine is to ease his pain. Pain from GI stasis causes GI stasis. It’s a bit of a problem.

A rabbit is an abundantly self-replicating machine designed to turn plant material into turds. It’s what they do, except when they don’t and then they die instead. Shut down a rabbit’s digestive tract for more than a couple days and it’ll never start up again. It is my job to keep that fire lit, and to that end I have been shoveling fuel into him like a locomotive fireman with a pile of cilantro-flavored coal.

I can feel every one of his vertebrae when I pet him. When he’s lying supine on my arm his hipbones press into my flesh. He’s about ten years old, and there are any number of reasons he might be losing the weight. None of them are uplifting reasons that give me hope for many future years of companionship.

PZ left a comment here a long time ago, not long after I met Thistle, that has stayed in my mind since. He referred to rabbits, from his perspective as an habitue of biology labs, as “friable… Crumbly and fragile.” I’ve kept Thistle alive for seven years since he made the comment, and yet I have to agree.

He used to be an asshole, this rabbit. One day not long after Zeke died I was lying on the papasan cushion I’d bought him to comfort his old dog bones, and Thistle walked into the room. He’d grown to like sitting on the papasan cushion, looking for all the world like a raisin on a slice of pita bread, and he wanted to do it some more, but I was in the way. He grunted at me from the edge of the cushion. I petted him and said something insufficiently submissive. He turned, walked to the far side of the room, then pivoted and leapt at me, biting me on my septum. It hurt like hell, especially when I laughed. Which I couldn’t not do.

Maybe it was his aging that mellowed him, or maybe it was my going away for a year and a half with no explanation, and then showing up again. He is sweet now and spends most of each day with me in his cage next to my desk. Even when he’s feeling well, he sometimes fails to eat if I’m not sitting next to him. For someone that once had the run of an entire house and his own expensively planted garden, he now shows little interest in leaving his cage. He’s happier if I take him out once a day and fuss over him, but sitting next to me in his cage as I work is enough. He’s good company.

Exercise works to get the gut moving, so I’ve been making him run around the house anyway. After loading each dose of painkiller and antibiotic into him, I put him on the hardwood floor and he ambles slipperily off to see what the cat is up to. The cat only outweighs Thistle by a factor of five and thus is easily pushed around. Yesterday morning the front door was open and desert sunlight streamed in through the metal security door. Thistle headed straight for it, gazed out across the apartment complex’s patio with cloudy eyes. Annette questioned whether his memory was good enough, but I’m certain I know what he wanted on the other side of that door. Though he might have been confused about where it had gotten to.

8 comments on "Thistle, again"

I just updated my environmental work resume because I needed to for a grant proposal I just submitted, and I realized the one I had on this site was somewhat out of date. So I’ve uploaded it here. I know: you’re thrilled.

2 comments on "Self-promotion"

1) In the first hour or so of the year, as Annette and I celebrated at our local gaybar-cum-Chinese restaurant,* I suggested that 2012 is the year in which we should make it legal. She agreed. We are happy. Details regarding the wedding are completely up in the air, though Los Angeles is the likeliest location.

1)a: squee.

2) At about the same time I became not-employed by the Desert Protective Council, by my choice. The DPC ate up about 1/2 my time and about 5/3 of my emotional energy, so it was a necessary decision. Nonetheless, the money that came in as a result of the job was, for the last three or four months, just enough to keep us from sliding farther into debt. I need to replace that. Therefore, the job hunt starts now. I’m accepting offers of employment either piecemeal-short-term editing and web design jobs, as well as leads for longer term payrolly kinda deals. Also, if you’ve been putting off tossing a five-spot into the ol’ PayPal jar, or buying a copy of the Zeke book, now would be an okay time for that.

3) In the meantime, I am pleased to announce that Desert Biodiversity has a website, and we are busily assembling an impressive Board of Advisors and will subsequently apply to some 501(c)3 for non-profit status. You can check out the site, sign up, and even toss some cash in toward expenses if you like. (Of course since we’re not a 501 (c)3 yet any donations are not tax-deductible. But they will be much appreciated, and help keep my current cash flow problems from stunting the organization’s growth.)

I’ll have more news on Desert Biodiversity here shortly. Even with a full-time job search I’ll still end up having more time and emotional energy now that I’ve left that job referenced up there.

Oh, and confidential to Sven DiMilo: tried to send you email. Don’t know if I have a good address for you. Ping me if you didn’t get it. Thanks.

* The gaybar-cum-Chinese restaurant is, naturally, called “Wang’s.”

6 comments on "Three Announcements"

As it turns out, I’m kind of taking a bath on offering shipping for free when people buy the Zeke book here at the cover price. Once I sat down and did the actual math, I figured out that I make a few cents on each copy that way, not including the gas for the drive to the post office.

So I’ve bumped the price up by five bucks to 22.99 to cover the cost of priority mailing a padded envelope of the correct size, which is—not at all coincidentally—4.95.

Presumably people who buy the book here are mainly interested in supporting writers, because you can get it used online for less, so this is probably a completely wise marketing strategy that won’t deter potential buyers in the slightest.

But if you were planning to buy the book at the previous price of 17.99, you have a bit of time: I’ll keep the price there until I get back from my birthday trip to Tucson, which should be January 6 or so.

Of course it’s worth noting that one Amazon reseller has a used copy in “like new” condition listed at around thirty bucks. So 23 bucks for an “IS new” book, signed by the author, turns out the be a pretty good bargain, all things considered.

2 comments on "Walking With Zeke price adjustment"

Q: Dear Jesse: My girlfriend has several children by a previous marriage. We get along well, but from time to time I find myself possessed of a desire to kill them and roast them up. I think most men do. Not only would this provide me with needed sustenance, but it would also free my girlfriend up to nurture any potential future offspring that I father, thus ensuring the survival of my genes. I think this makes perfect evolutionary sense. What’s your take?

- Deep-Thinking Hebephage

A: Whenever society screams about cannibalism, it’s probably just caught an especially alarming sight of itself in the crockpot. There are few among us who aren’t the direct descendents of those who were roasted in a fine honey glaze. Naturally I abhor the notion of killing or eating anyone without their consent, and I want to make that clear at the outset. That being said, A humanitarian diet certainly isn’t rare, and as I’ve argued previously, there’s some reason to believe that a cannibalistic orientation would have been biologically adaptive in the ancestral past. Killing and eating the young of a rival male is well-documented mammal behavior, in species ranging from Ursus arctos to the Felis domesticus that lived in my uncle’s dairy barn. Even our nearest relatives the bonobos, Pan promiscuous, have been known to kill and eat the young of others in their troop. Of course, it was a rival female in the one documented case of which I’m aware, and the killer was also a female, but this nonetheless provides support to your assertion in some unspecified way.

As you very likely live in a jurisdiction in which the kind of behavior you wish to practice is frowned upon, I would advise you to have your girlfriend hide her young in the highest, most inaccessible part of my uncle’s hayloft. Most of the kittens that grew up there survived. Though my telling you might have made that plan less effective. Thanks for writing!

Q: Dear Jesse: I spend most of my time in my basement by myself, and I’m generally just perfectly content with that arrangement. I think most men are. Every now and then, though, I feel a powerful urge to go out and find female humans. I have done this in the past by finding potential mates and explaining to them why it is in their best interests to engage in carnal relations with me. This approach, however, has been less than successful. Is there an evolutionary explanation for why they react improperly to my importuning?

—Deep-Dwelling Herb

A: Herb: Though I officially find your behavior a phenomenon to be met with merciless fury and disdain, it would seem you are on solid ground in an evolutionary sense. Consider the genus Magicicada, the well-known periodic cicadas of eastern North America. Every 13 or 17 years, depending on species, males of this species emerge from the ground and start making incredibly annoying sounds in an attempt to attract willing females.

Of course, Magicicada females also spend that long period underground and emerge at the same time. It may be in your best interests to look for female humans who share your periodic-emergence lifestyle. Joining Mensa or the Society for Creative Anachronism might do the trick.

Q: Dear Jesse: I am a woman of childbearing years with a gratifying sex life and a loving family, but I find myself fighting the urge to enslave thousands of adult females in some sort of celibate warrior caste that exists only to bring me sweet, sweet plant materials, while finding a like number of males who wish only to serve and impregnate me. I think most men do. Is this wrong?

- Deep-Packed Chirpra

A: You are, of course, describing the social structure of quite a number of species of ants, and our even closer relatives, the bees. Some psychologists have challenged the popular notion that being enslaved into armies of drones to serve a single absolute despotic ruler is uniformly negative for all in such relationships.

Q: Dear Jesse: Whenever I see a heterosexual couple making love, I kind of want to stab the man in the scrotal area and ejaculate into the wound, thus increasing my chances of passing on my genes by impregnating his mate to his detriment. I think most men do. My question is, do you have plans for Friday next?

- Derp-Hurfing Evo-Psycho

A: Traumatic insemination is widely practiced in the invertebrate world, so evolution certainly doesn’t argue against it. In most species of bedbugs, however, the traumatic insemination does not involve a male intermediary, but rather a strictly diadic pairing between male and female. In short, you should do what your conscience tells you to.

Q: Dear Jesse: I am a 45-year-old man married to a woman two years older. My spouse and I struggle against what would seem to be generations’ worth of social programming, which programming constricts each of us in this society into performing stereotyped roles, keeping each of us from truly attaining the fully realized human being we each deserve to be. My question is, does evolution really prescribe any kind of moral evaluation of our behavior? We aren’t blank slates, of course, but how do we tease out the genetic from the ingrained social strictures? Isn’t the real lesson of human history that cultural evolution produces change at a much more rapid pace than does Darwinian evolution, and that as a result we are free to guide that cultural evolution—to the extent we can—to make the society we would most like our grandchildren to live in?

—Deke Henson

A: I’m sorry, but there really is no evolutionary rationale for you to be involved with a woman in her late forties with diminishing mate value in the throes of intense intrasexual competition with potential rivals for a desirable mate. You say she’s two years older than you are? EW.

16 comments on "Dear Jesse: I Want To Eat My Stepchildren. Is This Normal?"