Coyote Crossing

My piece Sea Change is up at qarrtsiluni as part of their continuing Transformation issue.

Those of you who went to the Southern Nevada Supplemental Airport Site to check out the Draft Alternatives Working Paper for the Environmental Impact Report for the proposed Ivanpah Airport, a few miles from my temporary digs here in Nipton, were likely surprised and discouraged by the nearly eighty associated PDF they expect the public to download.

Perhaps the most important of those many PDFs, the one mapping “terrain conflicts” with the Ivanpah Airport, weighed in at 233 megabytes, which represents approximately five hours and twenty minutes worth of downloading on a typical dialup connection. About 500 megs’ worth of documents in toto hardly amounts to public accessibility, especially when spread over 80 docs.

So I’ve taken most of the PDFs — the ones that contain figures for Chapters two and three of the Working Paper including the behemoth one — compressed them into some semblance of a reasonably downloadable size, and concatenated them into two documents. Chapter two is here, and Chapter three is here.

Nerdery: That behemoth one, when I optimized it in Acrobat by way of experiment, shrunk down to a reasonable 1.5 megs. I opened the original and did a space audit, which tells you how much of a document’s size is due to images, text, fonts, etc., and it turns out that “document overhead” accounted for the remaining 231.5 megs of PDF. Whether the document was deliberately inflated to discourage public participation or just prepared by careless contractors doesn’t really matter. The end result is the same: we are discouraged from making our voices heard.

Larry Hogue was kind enough to invite me to post at DesertBlog, and I’ve put a post there describing the small wilderness area a few miles from my place in Nipton.

I’ve been happy with the writing focus of this new joint, but I’ve missed the chat the old site’s comments held. And thus I’ve meant for the last few weeks to get a discussion area up and running here.

I finally did so this afternoon. I’d intended to give it a few days of beta testing and such, and then Larry Hogue up and tells me that the Ivanpah Airport project is on the march again, with public comment due October 3. The airport would utterly destroy the wildness hereabouts, and it’s a massive project with the force of Harry Reid and Nevada Developers and the gaming industry behind it.

And the discussion thingie seemed a good way to share information about the project and ways a person can get involved.

So here’s the Coyote Den, a place where regulars and new readers and former cobloggers and such can spend a little time discussing the writing here, or anything else that seems of interest. Join a thread or start your own, as I did here to discuss the Ivanpah Airport. Which is a really, really bad idea.

My piece Bighorn has been published in the Transformation issue of qarrtsiluni. Go check it out.