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Going Green: How the West could be lost
Sonoma geologists spent a decade examining the effects of 20th-century American land abuse

by Samantha Campos

When three geologists from Sonoma County set out to examine the environmental challenges of America's 11 arid Western states, they had little idea how much perpetual destruction they would discover had been taking place since wagon wheels first rolled across the great frontier.

It's been 10 years in the making, with the three authors taking turns with research, editing and illustrations. But now Howard Wilshire, Jane Nielson and Richard Hazlett feel confident their findings have been cast in a way that people can read, and that journalists could understand, as well as lawyers and people who have "problems in their backyard." Their book, The American West at Risk: Science, Myths, and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery, is being released June 6, by Oxford University Press.

At their home in Sebastopol, the Pacific Sun spoke with Wilshire and Nielson—a husband and wife team and both former U.S. Geological Survey research geologists—about U.S. nuclear testing, the depletion of natural resources and the need to protect the Great American West.

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What research findings surprised you most?

Howard Wilshire: After 9/11, there was a big surge of interest in biochemical warfare. And supposedly, we have this big program for studies in defense—we can't, according to treaty, study offensive weapons of these types; we've agreed to their ban. But we're doing it anyway. The human face of nuclear testing was a surprise to me. We conducted war on ourselves; there've been huge numbers of people exposed—not necessarily deliberately, but by fallout from the radioactive clouds that emanated from the Nevada test site. The whole country has been subjected to that. It's in the soils.

Jane Nielson: Some of the stories of the nuclear [tests]—the abuses that spread this stuff around and prevented people from being told or from defending themselves—that was a much more surprisingly negative story than [we imagined] when we first started.

Wilshire: There's an appendix, "Biochemical War and You," and that's just a table of things that they did under a project called SHAD [Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense]. These were deliberate exposures of U.S. citizens, both in the military and out, to dangerous substances: nerve gases, lethal nerve gases and various radioactive elements. There were a lot of things done in the name of research.

Was Project SHAD relegated to Nevada only?

Nielson: No, that was everywhere. San Francisco got sprinkled—it was supposed to be a simulate of a biological pathogen that they could attack people with. But the thing that we're just really beginning to understand now is that people have different levels of sensitivity. You know they'll always say things like, "Well, this is safe; there's really a low risk." Well, that means there's a subpopulation that's at risk. So some people actually died from that experiment in San Francisco. And a lot of people still carry that bacteria in their bloodstream.

How did these findings affect you or your work?

Nielson: This book really sort of changed my optimistic outlook. I thought there were some problems that we could probably focus on and talk about healing the land. I knew about government subsidies to farmers. I knew a certain amount about building roads in national forests. But until we started working and putting all these chapters together, the pattern was never clear to me that every single one of these very destructive activities are subsidized by taxpayers. And not only that, but the negative impacts—and healing those negative impacts—are also subsidized by taxpayers. We give a lot of money to very rich people to destroy our public lands and, in some ways, damage our health by the things that they do on their private lands. And this is a story I never really wanted to look at, or understand.

What else caught you off-guard?

Nielson: Our nation's major product is garbage—is waste. And essentially our system is digging up, cutting down, leveling off, creating all kinds of havoc to natural systems. And it will just keep expanding and tearing down the land and making the water less pure and making the air less pure and turning those materials into consumable products that we want people to use up as fast as possible so that they become garbage so that they will consume more. And when you look at it that way, it's clearly a dead-end process. There's no real future for that. And we're reaching the limit of it now because we're reaching the limit of inexpensive energy.

Do you see any kind of immediate solution?

Wilshire: It is the addict's quandary: How do you find something to give you a fix and a high without doing you damage? So we explained what the different "methadones" that we're seeking are. It has been said, and quite accurately, that energy is the key that unlocks all resources. So as we go down the slope of availability of cheap energy—that's not all energy, just that which is cheap that our whole society is dependent on—everything else, all other resources show the effect of the decline in source and the increase in price. And we're seeing that now. Everything else is increasing in price, too, for the obvious reason that it takes more energy to produce it, and the energy costs more.

What does that mean for us, ultimately?

Nielson: We can't continue using energy at the level we have been for the last eight years or less. The kinds of sources of energy that we're looking at—like biofuels; they don't provide as much energy as the fossil fuels, and they also produce carbon emissions. So if we're going to dodge the global warming bullet, we'd have to stop consuming at such a high level anyway. And we're just going to have to find ways of consuming a lot less energy.

Wilshire: And in different forms than we're using.

Nielson: It's going to mean not everyone can aspire to be a rich person. It's going to mean simpler lifestyles; it's going to mean a lot more public transit, it's going to mean living closer to your work.

Wilshire: Probably the more feasible, environmentally less costly sources are wind and solar. Those are not free of environmental costs—nothing is. But they're better than a lot of others. And what they produce is electricity, and you can't put electricity in the tank of your car. But we have to go to a lot more electrically powered machinery and transit. Our one big problem is that our electrical grid is many decades old and decrepit and inefficient.

What is the most important thing we can do now?

Nielson: Getting rid of plastic bags is a great first step. And preserving our lands that are not developed—even salvaging lands that have been developed. There's a movement to try and decimate public lands with roads because there are people who believe there should not be any public lands. People need to know about these movements. People need to start being aware of the real threats of what's evolved from the Sagebrush Rebellion, this idea of putting roads through any kind of a wilderness area, letting off-road vehicles ride in wilderness areas is a way of making roads—there's this law, called RS 2477, which allows people to claim something they think they can identify as a route as being a road, and further developing it. That could wipe out national parks.

And yet more people are concerned about the price of gas.

Wilshire: Of course there's a lot of public pressure to drill our way out of this problem. And the pressure on our public lands—in the West especially—is huge. The Bureau of Land Management's main job now is issuing permits to drill for oil and gas. What the public doesn't realize, by and large, is that the amounts that are available are trivial, compared to our consumption. We can go and mess up a lot of countries, but it isn't gonna change the shortages that we're facing. And drilling ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is another fantasy that isn't going to change anything.

Nielson: We doubled our consumption of oil every decade, from the 1940s to the 1950s to the 1960s. And in the 1970s, that had to stop because that's when we peaked. So Reagan came in saying that we were going to achieve energy independence, at a time when the oil companies had to have known that we'd peaked in 1970. And even now, when you listen to people talking about the high prices of gasoline and protesting about it, in the U.S. they are not talking about the fact that we have reached the peak of oil production in the world. You can go to Canadian sites and see that discussed—but not in the U.S. So we're still in great denial.

It seems that in trying to compensate for our depleted resources, we're creating more damage.

Wilshire: When we disturb the natural balances of nature in any of our activities, it accelerates natural processes in degrading the earth, like erosion. Farmers are very resistant to protecting water courses. They think of it as, if you can't plant your crops right up to the edge of the creek, this constitutes a taking of their land and they should be compensated for it, if you wanna have any setbacks in which you protect the riparian corridor. What they don't recognize is that planting right up to the edge of the creek is a taking of the public water resource—it's a taking of the purity of the water because soil is going to erode right into the water and that's a very expensive contaminant to get rid of.

Nielson: Nearly all North Coast rivers are listed as impaired for sediment, partly because of that.

Wilshire: So everything we do has a consequence. And the natural forces are in a quasi-balance, if we leave them alone. And so the rates at which natural erosion would contaminate water are quite slow so that it isn't a real problem for humans and other forms of life. It's when we upset those balances that nature tries to correct for it. For example, if you have a hillside like this and you want a road to cross it, you gotta cut a notch in it. Well, nature abhors the notch—it wants to fill it up. So that causes landslides and debris flows and things like that, with nature trying to compensate for what we've done to it.

Isn't that just common sense?

Wilshire: It is. But we go hellbent for leather without bothering with applying common sense to these problems and we're very dependent on natural processes to provide us with clean air and clean water and food.

Nielson: And soil. Soil we call the most underappreciated of our resources. One of the things we emphasize over and over in the book is that if we could leave a certain amount of land untouched, if our economic model was different, if development wasn't what powered us and motivated us, then we would get a lot of stuff for free that we're having to spend money on—cleaning up the sewage, the huge landfills and contaminated water from landfills. If we weren't such consumers, we would not have such deep holes that contaminate groundwater. These are huge problems that public money goes to help clean up, when possible. And it's not always possible.

For more info about the book or to order a copy, visit online at www.losingthewest.com .