Legacies of War

Since 1900, United States troops have fought in more foreign conflicts than any other nation on Earth. Most Americans supported those actions, believing that they would keep the scourge of war far from our homes. But the strategy seems to have failed—it certainly did not prevent terror attacks against the U.S. mainland. The savage Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. were not the first to inflict war damage in America’s 48 contiguous states, however—nor were they the first warlike actions to harm innocent citizens since the Civil War. Paradoxically, making war abroad has always required practicing warfare in our own back yards. Today’s large, mechanized military training exercises have degraded U.S. soils, water supplies, and wildlife habitats in the same ways that the real wars affected war-torn lands far away. The saddest fact of all is that the deadly components of some weapons in the U.S. arsenal never found use in foreign wars but have attacked U.S. citizens in their own homes and communities. The relatively egalitarian universal service of World War II left a whole generation of Americans with nostalgia and reverence for military service. Many of us, perhaps the majority, might argue that human and environmental sacrifices are the price we must be willing to pay to protect our interests and future security. A current political philosophy proposes that the United States must even start foreign wars to protect Americans and their homes. But Americans are not fully aware of all the past sacrifices—and what we don’t know can hurt us. Even decades-old impacts from military training still degrade land and contaminate air and water, particularly in the arid western states, and will continue to do so far into the future. Exploded and unexploded bombs, mines, and shells (“ordnance,” in military terms) and haphazard disposal sites still litter former training lands in western states. And large portions of the western United States remain playgrounds for war games, subject to large-scale, highly mechanized military operations for maintaining combat readiness and projecting American power abroad.

Once and Future Trees

Along the Colorado Plateau’s high-standing Mogollon Rim in northern Arizona’s Coconino National Forest stands a small patch of big trees that matured well before Europeans came to North America. Massive ponderosa pines, and even pinyon pines and western junipers, tower above the forest floor, shutting out all but the most shade-tolerant competitors. Few places like this one still exist anywhere in the United States, even on national forest lands. A tourist hoping to see all the diversity that earliest European arrivals found commonplace in the western landscape must seek out a wide scattering of isolated enclaves across the region. Western forests no longer contain the grand glades and lush thickets that our forerunners encountered because most woodlands, especially those owned by the public, largely serve a wide variety of human purposes, as campsites or home sites, board-feet of lumber, potential jobs, recreational playgrounds, and even temples of the spirit. We also rely on forests to maintain habitat for endangered species and seed banks for restoring depleted biodiversity—and to provide us with clean air and water, stable hillside soils, and flood control in wet years. Forests must perform these roles while being consumed, fragmented by roads, and heavily eroded. But there is no guarantee that these most beloved and iconic of natural resources can sustain such a burden. Federal, state, and local government agencies oversee and regulate western U.S. forest lands and their uses, trying to manage the complex and only partly understood biological interactions of forest ecology to serve public needs. But after nine decades of variable goals, and five decades of encroaching development, western woodlands are far from healthy. Urban pollution and exotic tree diseases, some brought by humans, are killing pines, firs, and oaks. Loggers have more than decimated the oldest mountainside forests—most valuable for habitat and lumber alike—with clearcutting practices that induce severe soil erosion. Illegal clearings for marijuana farms are increasing.

Conclusion: The Needs of Our Posterity

In 1957, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover gave a speech of breathtaking prescience, which warned that the United States would face a resource-depleted future unless it controlled energy consumption. Speaking to an audience of American physicians, he advised that the nation needed to turn away from the allure of affluence and take a truly conservative path—that is, the path of conserving resources and carefully planning consumption levels, to keep itself rich in oil and other mineral wealth for many generations. Rickover’s warnings are especially relevant to the message that we authors hope to convey. The western states have contributed much of the nation’s timber and mineral resources, and most of its major public works projects—including damming of the region’s rivers to provide water supplies and power to western farmers and cities. The whole nation has benefited from exploiting these resources, but now the oil and mineral resources are highly depleted, and clean water also is in short supply. Rickover questioned some of the apparent benefits, however—“Much of the wilderness which nurtured what is most dynamic in the American character has now been buried under cities, factories and suburban developments where each picture window looks out on nothing more inspiring than the neighbor’s back yard,” he said. “The nation’s resources—its lumber, mineral ores, and especially its petroleum—have been used for this remaking of a once-agrarian country into a relatively sterile urban–suburban landscape.” We can add only that this transition from natural lands to sterile urban–suburban and agricultural affluence is the force that has degraded our air, water, and soils. These are nature’s gifts, open to everyone, which the lives and well-being of all creatures in the western states, including its people, depend upon. Rickover feared mindless consumption and population growth, observing, “In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the year 2000 A.D. world population will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion, with 90% of that growth taking place during the last five percent of that period. . . .

Nature’s Way

Humans have demonstrated the capacity to damage land and extinguish species from very early times (figure 13.1). Our impacts have grown immensely as populations and technological prowess increased (figure 13.2), and by the twentieth century, they had begun changing the landscape in major ways. To generations born since 1945, the pervasive human sculpting of natural landforms may even seem part of the natural scene. The effects certainly have reached a scale comparable to natural geological forces. Humans directly displace approximately 35 billion tons of soil and rock per year worldwide, exceeding the work of rivers and streams and greatly surpassing natural erosion from glaciers or wind. In the United States, road building, mining, construction, urban expansion, recreation, and military training and bomb testing move approximately 28 tons of earth per person each year—far outranking the world average of about six tons per person per year. Unintentional agricultural displacements are even greater—about 1,500 billion tons per year. Natural processes obey the physical laws of motion and energy, which never take a break. In this book, we have tried to explain how human changes add to nature’s effects (figure 13.3), in many cases multiplying the impacts of natural processes and causing severe environmental damage. Most people simply do not understand how the Earth works—but if nothing else, Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 devastation of New Orleans made it clear that ignoring or underestimating the power of natural forces can severely imperil our present and future well-being. Natural forces constantly are acting on and inside the Earth, building up land and tearing it down at the same time. Humans experience the Earth’s internal heat engine through tectonic effects, which have segmented the surface along boundaries that define mobile tectonic plates. Plate interactions at the boundaries generate faults and earthquakes, raising hills and mountains or depressing basins and troughs. Plate boundaries also contain most of the world’s volcanoes, generated by the internal melting that creates igneous rocks.

Tragedy of the Playground

“Recreation” connotes revitalization, the re-creation of spirit. In an increasingly urbanized culture, people recreate in natural settings to lift their spirits and revitalize their outlook and motivation. Public lands in the western United States, which embrace much of the nation’s remaining natural and wild areas, are especially attractive—and most are open for recreation. We authors certainly have found solace from camping, hiking, climbing, and skiing in backcountry areas. But latetwentieth- century American affluence has created a massive and unprecedented invasion of these lands, and particularly an invasion of motorized recreation. All human uses of natural areas can, and generally do, degrade soils, kill plants, and increase erosion rates, with resultant water pollution and ecosystem damage. In small numbers, and spread out widely, recreational disturbances can be minor, but millions of people regularly play on western public lands in mass gatherings that have large cumulative impacts. More now drive vehicles across forested or desert areas than pursue the less-damaging activities of hiking and small-group camping. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service (USFS) oversee the largest amount of western land available for recreation. By law, the agencies must manage public lands for multiple uses and “sustained yield.” Instead, federal land-management agencies are partitioning them to separate incompatible pursuits, including many that consume land. For example, as logging, mining, and grazing pressures ease, recreational pressures are exploding in Colorado’s White River National Forest, a short 50 miles west of Denver on Interstate Highway 70. Along with Denver’s increasing population, snowmobile registrations jumped 70% in Colorado since 1985. Off-road vehicles (ORVs) are everywhere, and mountain bike use has jumped more than 200%. Between 1990 and 2004, all ORV registrations in Colorado increased more than 650%. Ski facilities also burgeoned, along with hiker and equestrian demands for greater backcountry access. The USFS’s efforts to bring the conflicting uses under control is losing ground rapidly.

The Last Drops

The western United States has low overall rainfall and snowfall levels, few rivers, and many deep groundwater basins. Small Native American populations once lived within the restraints of aridity by seeking harmony with nature. But owning land in such an arid region means little or nothing without a supply of fresh water. Instead of limiting population growth in the face of scarce and unpredictable rainfall, however, the west’s aridity challenged the newcomers to redirect water supplies and make the rich desert soils bloom. The region’s localized precipitation, generally doled out on boom-and-bust schedules, has made water “the most essential and fought over resource in the western United States.” Raising a lone voice of warning in 1893, western explorer John Wesley Powell foresaw that irrigating western lands would pile up “a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights for there is not sufficient water to supply the land.”2 That Powell was right about conflicts goes without saying, for the west’s bitter heritage of water wars speaks for itself.3 Invading Americans used legal doctrines of first appropriation and “beneficial use” to take water from Indians’ lands and then turned to taking it from each other, oblivious to the effects on wildlife and natural habitats. Today’s depleted river flows and overpumped groundwater basins indicate that Powell probably was right about water supply limits, too. Expanding populations and increasing water contamination have strained supplies of fresh, clean water, even as per capita water demands decrease. By the 1970s, degraded natural settings, rising water pollution, and disappearing native fauna had lowered the quality of western life and built a constituency for environmental protection. But the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act and 1973 Endangered Species Act simply pitted environmental groups and courts against irrigators, cities, and states. In an ironic reversal, recently enriched Native Americans are poised to exercise their primary legal claims to many western rivers.

Raiding the Range

“Home on the Range” evokes a western landscape “where the deer and the antelope play.” But even at the song’s debut in the 1870s, deer and antelope were declining in numbers and cattle grazing was degrading rangelands across the American west. In their natural state, arid North American lands are robust and productive, but they recover exceedingly slowly from heavy grazing. By 1860, more than 3.5 million domesticated grazing animals were trampling arid western soils, causing severe erosion and lowering both water quality and water supplies in a water-poor region. The early start and persistence of grazing over such a long period of time invaded every nook and cranny of the public lands, making livestock grazing the most pervasively damaging human land use across all western ecosystems. Today, grazing affects approximately 260 million acres of publicly owned forest and rangelands, mostly in the 11 western states—about equivalent to the combined area of California, Arizona, and Colorado. Those acres include Pacific Northwest - r and ponderosa forests; Great Basin big sagebrush lands; the richly H oral Sonoran Desert; magni- cent high-desert Joshua tree forests; varied shrub associations in the low-elevation Mojave, Great Basin, Chihuahuan, and other southwestern deserts; and extensive Colorado Plateau pinyon–juniper forests stretching from northern Arizona and New Mexico to southern Colorado and Utah and decorating the arid inland plateaus of Washington, Oregon, and northeastern California. Proponents of public lands grazing argue that cattle have not changed anything. They just replace the immense herds of hooved native herbivores—bison, deer, antelope, and elk—that once dominated western ranges. But in pre-European settlement times, natural forces, including unlimited predators and limited fodder, effectively controlled the native animal populations. Unlike cattle, the herds of deer, antelope, and elk wintered in generally snow-free lowland areas and used much less than their full range each year. And those animals were easier on the land, especially the rivers. Immense bison herds ranged over vast areas, never staying very long on any range. Bison rarely visited the sites of today’s major livestock grazing problems in Great Basin and southwestern deserts, however. On northern ranges, bison obtained winter moisture from eating snow and did not cling to creeks and streams the way cattle do.

Introduction: Obeying Nature

This book focuses on the human-caused environmental woes of America’s 11 contiguous western states, its mostly arid western continental frontier. In the nineteenth century, penny pamphlets and dime novels mythologized the American west, making icons of its prospectors, “cowboys,” northwestern loggers, and wide open spaces. The west was free of encroaching neighbors and government controls, open to fresh starts. As Robert Penn Warren wrote, in All the King’s Men, “West . . . is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach . . . when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire . . . when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. . . . ” But the “West” was more than gold and oil bonanzas—it was also a land of rich soils, bountiful - sheries, immense, dense forests, desert wonders, and sparkling streams. It is no myth that the western states were America’s treasure house. The romantic myths related to “winning” the west tend to obscure both its basic objective of resource exploitation and the huge public expenditures that supported every aspect, bestowing fortunes on a few. Western resources supported U.S. industrial growth and affluent lifestyle, but now they are highly depleted or largely gone, and the region is in danger of losing the ability to sustain an even moderately comfortable future. Much of what we have done to these magni- cent lands opened them to devastating erosion and pollution. Today, whole mountains are being dismantled to produce metals from barely mineralized zones. Entire regions may be devastated in the attempt to extract the last possible drops of petroleum. We soon could cut down the last remnants of ancient western forests, along with the possibility of ever again seeing their like. Large-scale farming has opened vulnerable western soils to erosion by water and wind, perhaps inviting another dust bowl era. Irrigating vast crop acreages has converted many of them to salt farms, perhaps resembling the conditions that spelled doom for the ancient Babylonian Empire.

Garbage of the Golden West

In May 1970, Look magazine ran an International Paper Company advertisement, “The Story of the Disposable Environment,” which envisioned a time when “the entire environment in which [we] live” would be discarded. “Colorful and sturdy” nursery furniture “will cost so little, you’ll throw it away when [your child] outgrows it,” the ad enthused, adding for the socially conscious, “experimental lowbudget housing developments of this kind are already being tested.” International Paper never addressed where the disposable housing, furniture, and hospital gowns, or the toxic chemicals used for processing raw materials and manufacturing products— or the fossil fuel emissions—would end up. More than 30 years later, we live with the consequences of that vision, which has transmuted the real environment that we depend on into a nightmarish one, dominated by colossal and increasingly hazardous wastes. For nearly all of human history and prehistory, people dropped their wastes where they lived, expecting the discards would largely disappear. When wastes were relatively minor and all natural materials, many of them did disappear through “natural attenuation”—the diluting or neutralizing effects of natural processes. But even after tens of thousands of years, many items in ancient garbage remain recognizable, and poking through prehistoric dumps can reveal significant details about long-gone people and their ways of life. History shows that soils and waters have limited capacities for processing even natural wastes. Garrett Hardin underscored these lessons in his 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons.” From Roman urbs urbii (cities) to nineteenth-century industrial complexes, the refuse dumped in and around larger population centers issued foul odors and helped spread diseases. Public health concerns eventually forced towns and cities to provide sewers, “sanitary” dumps, water treatment, and more recently, sewage treatment. Nowadays, however, our sewers and dumps receive a sizable proportion of synthetic chemicals with unknown properties as well as millions of tons of toxic wastes, hazardous to humans and other living things.

No Habitat but Our Own

Americans tend to think of the western United States as open spaces and the east coast as urban and crowded. After all, the northeast corridor from Washington, DC to Boston, Massachusetts, exempli- es the modern “mega-conurbations” of cultural historian Lewis Mumford—”nearly unbroken belt[s] of residential and commercial development, dotted with isolated parklands but little actual countryside.” Ironically, the eastern urban centers melded together in imitation of Los Angeles, California, that haphazard collection of zoning-de- ant industrial-residential-commercial melanges. By now, Los Angeles’s cement-and-asphalt environment has become the very model of a modern human habitat and the nation’s poster child for suburban sprawl. In an attempt to emulate its glittery lifestyle, every prosperous American town has snaked strip developments out along major highways, spraying cheap commercial-residential urban–suburban developments in all directions. Supported and encouraged by enormous public investment in roads, highways, and other infrastructure, the sprawl constantly expands until it displaces all other land uses and human habitat becomes the dominant or only habitat. We seem to have little concept that clean environments, and clean air and water in particular, support the physical, mental, and economic health of human societies (see chapter 1). This is why environmental guru Paul Hawken and co-authors termed them “natural capital.” Sprawling urban–suburban habitats are not very healthy because they foul the air and make numerous contributions to water pollution. Developments are dominated by gas-belching automobiles, gas stations with leaky underground storage tanks, and asphalt roads and parking lots. Residential suburbs shed megatons of lawn fertilizers and pesticides into local streams and lakes. All these relatively uncontrolled chemical releases make cities and suburbs into sources of land, water, and air pollution, which damage both human health and livelihoods. Urban wastes come back to haunt us through our air and water and also come floating onto our beaches. Urban and suburban areas depend on nonurban areas for food, clean water and air, and raw and manufactured materials. Our Earth simply cannot support human life if urban growth continues wiping out all its agricultural land, isolating wildlife in limited preserves, taking clean water from rural areas, and spreading pollution from the mountains to the shore. All of these habitats people need for survival.