BY TRUST STAFF
This summer, Salt Lake City’s hospitality industry bid farewell to the twice-yearly Outdoor Retailer trade shows. After 22 years in Utah, the Outdoor Industry Association, whose shows had infused $45 million annually into the capital city, carried through on its promise to leave the state after Governor Gary Herbert refused to back off on his openly hostile policies to public lands and national monuments, including Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears. The Outdoor Industry Association is moving its shows to Denver, Colorado, which, unlike Utah, has recognized the economic importance of public lands. At least two other outdoor trade shows have declined to consider staging in Utah. Outdoor business is not trivial, accounting for 110,000 direct jobs and $12.3 billion in spending annually in Utah, according to the Outdoor Industry Association. We hope Utah voters will remember the intransigence of their elected officials come election day, and send a message that protecting public lands is not only popular, it means business.
A 20-mile stretch of Highway 64 connects the Navajo community of Cameron to the east entrance of Grand Canyon National Park. It’s along this scenic tourist corridor that the DinéHózhó L3C is gearing up to support a suite of projects, including making small loans to over 50 Native American vendors to improve their plywood booths, ramp up marketing, and increase their inventory of turquoise, silver, and beaded jewelry, pottery, and other souvenirs. The DinéHózhó L3C is also getting ready to invest in traditional food vendors selling blue-corn and sumac-berry mushes, healthy tortillas, Navajo tea, and other snacks, and in visitor attractions, like cultural dances, storytelling, and short interpretive trails, as well as several eco-lodges and a hogan visitor center at Second Overlook, with its breathtaking views of the Little Colorado River Gorge. At a time when nearly 6 million visitors must be spread out around the Grand Canyon, this corridor is poised to offer the western Navajo Nation a pathway to economic independence.
One of only three alpine areas on the Colorado Plateau rises to 12,800 feet in the La Sal Mountains above Moab, in southern Utah. As a population of 35 exotic mountain goats helicoptered in from the goat-overpopulated Tushar Mountains by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources inches up toward the division’s goal of 200, damage to the delicate Mount Peale Research Natural Area is becoming more and more obvious. Unsure whether the courts will reverse the Forest Service’s decision to ignore its own regulations requiring all national forests to remove exotic species from research natural areas, we are revisiting plots the Forest Service surveyed in 2015 to document dusty goat wallows and other damage. It’s a climb to 12,500 feet, but there are pikas squeaking, butterflies visiting the rare Abajo daisy, and a 360-degree view. One day we hope to see cushion plants and other fragile, high-altitude plants return to areas depleted by the goats.
Livestock fences help ranchers manage herds and let pastures rest, but they can be dangerous barriers for wild animals that should be allowed to roam freely. Fences stop American pronghorn, one of the fastest land animals on the continent, in their tracks. Unlike deer, which often leap over, pronghorn won’t jump fences; instead, they crawl underneath them. If the bottom strand of a wire fence is barbed or too close to the ground, pronghorn can find themselves cut off from food and water on the other side. Over the last decade, we’ve been working with volunteers to fix hazardous fences. Thanks to the help of volunteers from the Arizona Antelope Foundation this spring, we made another 1.6 miles of fence pronghorn-friendly, bringing our total to nearly 20 miles of improvements across the ranches on the north rim of the Grand Canyon.
Along with partner organizations, we’re appealing a decision by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to give Enefit American Oil, an Estonian company, five more years to work toward commercial-scale oil shale production in northeastern Utah. The company has already spent the last decade failing to prove the economic viability of its technologies on a 160-acre research tract. The Estonian company seeks eventually to expand exceptionally dirty oil shale mining onto public and private land that’s more than 30 times the size of its current research operations. If it succeeds, the foreign company would hold the first-ever right to commercially mine oil shale, and American taxpayers would effectively subsidize the company’s profits. That’s a big deal. The BLM should reconsider the burden such a destructive operation would undoubtedly place on the shoulders of the American public.
Growing up, Jack Pongyesva made many trips to visit family on the Hopi reservation, where coal royalties have made up as much as 80 percent of the Hopi Tribe’s budget, and where coal heats the stove, provides jobs, and casts a long shadow on air and water quality. So when, as an intern in the Trust’s Energy Program, Jack found himself researching the future of coal on the Colorado Plateau, he also began reflecting on coal’s presence in his family’s life. Like Jack, many of the young people starting out careers in conservation through the Trust’s new internship program come from communities that are vulnerable to a changing political and ecological climate. Working side-by-side with Trust staff, the voices and contributions of interns like Jack help the Trust consider new angles and work smarter to protect and conserve the Colorado Plateau.
The Navajo families of Save the Confluence are winning their fight against the plan to build a tourist resort and tramway into the Grand Canyon. Earlene Reid runs cattle where the 420-acre development would be built on the canyon’s east rim, near where the tram would carry up to 10,000 tourists a day down to the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers. Four committees of the Navajo Nation Council have reviewed the tramway bill since it was introduced in August 2016. After the bill lost the final committee vote 14 to two, the bill’s sponsor pulled it from the agenda before it could move on to the full Navajo Nation Council for a final up-or-down vote. Earlene, her Save the Confluence relatives, and residents opposed to the project were pleased to stop — at least temporarily — something which their political leaders said in 2012 “could not be stopped.” The bill is now expected to be brought before the 24-member Navajo Nation Council for a final vote in October 2017.
With forests overly dense and wildfires growing by the year, the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (known as 4FRI) aims to protect wildlife and fish habitat. That requires selectively thinning trees to starve wildfires of the fuel they need to grow out of control. So, in June, counties, cities, the Forest Service, the Grand Canyon Trust, and other 4FRI players sat down to figure out how to move things along faster. The result was a new strategic plan that will keep the public up-to-date and bring in small timber companies to restore forests. The end goal: ramp up thinning from 15,000 to 50,000 acres per year.
Advocate Magazine
Fall/Winter 2017
Also in this issue:
Breathing life into vendor booths on the east rim of the Grand Canyon. Read now ›