More Beavers, More Water. Utah Southern Forest Progress

Kirsten and I spent the first week in October up on the Fish Lake Plateau with Mary O'Brien, the Utah Forest Program Director for the Grand Canyon Trust.  Mary is out dogging the Forest Service to live up to their own guidelines and regulations.  It's a never ending battle for her and not always successful.  The Forest Service managers seem to not have much to gain by enforcing the regs and perhaps their job to lose if they do.  It's one of the reasons for Torrey House Press, to help make the public more aware of what she is fighting and get them to care enough that the public employees who are the range managers will be accountable to do their jobs.

Mary just sent out an encouraging email to the volunteers outlining progress for the year.  See her letter here after the jump . . .

Your House is Sitting on the Environment

     I had a long lunch with Zach Frankel, executive director of The Utah Rivers Council yesterday.  Like me, Zach grew to believe that telling stories might be the way to catch the attention of a greater mass of citizen voters and orient them toward some action on protecting the nest they live in.  Zach started off thinking he and the River Council would focus on stream ecology and spread the word about their beauty and peril and what could be done about it.  Now, with the same goal in mind of saving the streams, he is making documentaries on Real Estate.  Zach often comments that his evolution as an activist has led from ecology to economy.  Now he believes changing that the way we lobby for, build and live in our homes could have as much impact on saving streams as direct activism.  For instance, he says, the laws changed in the 1970's to allow for lower energy efficiency make the housing stock today about 40% less efficient than it would have been. Zach also points out the preponderance of Real Estate motivated folks in politics.  Interesting stuff.   Zach is still manning the helm at the River Council but he's well on the way with the film making. 

     In music today albums are often given away to promote a band's tour.  Used to be the other way around.  I have wondered what the parallel is with books.  So Zach's idea of using the films he makes to also promote a companion book is intriguing.  I noticed this morning that Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert is touted on the book cover as being, "The companion to the PBS documentary."  

     I'll get Zach to write a little summary of his Real Estate theme and we'll post it in "Plateau Palaver."

Independent Book Stores

     I had lunch today with my old money manager friend, Andy Nelson.  In catching up on each other's news I told Andy a bit about Torrey House Press.  Andy asked me what I thought the future of publishing was, how I thought I would read the news five years from now.  I chuckled and shook my head.  That world is changing so fast it seems dumb to even try to guess.  I suggested to Andy that he probably did not have many investments in publishers.  He laughed too.  He doesn't.  Andy's son works at a still standing independent book store in downtown Salt Lake and Andy worries about his son's job.  Will we still read printed books five years from now?

     After lunch Andy graciously emailed me an article from the Wall Street Journal published this past September.  Peter Funt, the author of the piece, suggests that Mom and Pop Main Street stores will make a comeback as the big box stores get clobbered by internet sales.  If there are many people out there like me I expect he is right.  For a small press like Torrey House we will be happy to sell both printed and electronic books, but I hope there are still some independent books stores without 50 acre parking lots in front where a reader can go to hold and buy a book.  In fact, I hope there are more in five years than there are now.

     Tomorrow I am having lunch with Zach Frankel, founder and executive director of Utah Rivers Council.  Zach has some experience and ideas about multimedia publishing we want to discuss. I also hope to hear a bit about keeping the Bear River intact and about how farmers on the Colorado Plateau get their water.  What does it cost to get the water to the farmers, what are they paying for it, what are they earning as a result?  Does any of it make sense?

Free a Rancher

A lot could be done economically and environmentally on the Colorado Plateau with a couple changes in the law.  It's a main theme of Torrey House Press, something we hope our writers pick up and characterize.  Both water and grazing practices could be greatly improved, without forcing anybody to do anything, with the good old market and pricing mechanism.  Currently ranchers are not allowed to sell their grazing rights to a conservation agency to retire them.  Primarily the Cattleman's Association, a classic special interest group, blocks the possibility via political means.  What I enjoy is the Cattleman's brash Tea Party Sagebrush Rebellion style noises about being for rancher's individual rights and so against the federal "guvment."  Hypocrisy is always a bit painful to witness.  But I wonder what might result if we can manage to publicly get this special interest group to acknowledge they aren't in fact for rancher's individual right to make his own choices but rather think they know best.  Such a sweet, socialistic notion. Conservation agencies like the Grand Canyon Trust are standing by with fists full of cash, and at least some ranchers would rather have that money than continue grazing cows on public land.  The rural communities would stand to gain a capital infusion, from private willing sources no less, not from a guvment handout, and the land would benefit immensely from the relief of being hammered by grazing while the public would save on future subsidies to ranchers.

Water is the other law that needs a change.  Right now if a hay grower leaves water in the stream he is legally wasting it and stands to lose his water rights.  Most hay is watered at a cost to the grower of five or six dollars an acre-foot in the rural West.  In Salt Lake we pay around $300 an acre foot for water on average.  In LA they sometimes pay $5,000 and more.  How would a grower on the Colorado Plateau turn his $6 water into $5,000 water?  Turn off his sprinklers.  Downstream flow does the rest.  It's a compelling idea, it's just not legal.  The grower would benefit, the land would benefit, the streams and riparian areas would benefit, the state would benefit.  Seems just dumb and stubborn to insist on keeping it the way it is.  We are going to see what we can do for our part to change it.  -Mark Bailey

Environmentalist

To many self-described conservatives in the West the word "environmentalist" a pejorative.  Aware of that we have debated how neutral or aggressive of a stance we want to take at Torrey House Press on the environment, not wanting to be unnecessarily offensive.  Clearly, the radical edges of both sides are well represented and we would like to pursue a less emotional, more sane approach.  Yet, I have easily decided, if I would have a term applied to me, I would be happy with environmentalist.  I like to think that back in the day I would have been for American independence and thus a Tory, or for the unalienable rights of mankind and thus an abolitionist, or for the rights of women and thus a suffragette.  Folks who thought freedom and rights for all were good things were, and are, dismissed as "activists and extremists."  As though that is a bad thing.  All were pejorative terms at first.  I've decide to quit worrying about offending the rather small but powerful group that's bent on using the natural public resources until they are gone without regard to the environment they leave behind for their progeny.  The Colorado Plateau is uniquely fragile in its beauty.  It's worth doing something about and I hope the literature we publish at Torrey House Press will spread that sentiment.   I will be happy and proud to have my grandchildren remember me as a proactive environmentalist.

New Small Press: More Nature, Less Cowshit

Launching a new small press in 2010 might be thought by some to be a dubious adventure. We are still caught in the downdrafts of The Great Recession with consumers holding tight to their wallets, publishers retrenching, newspapers fast shutting down and independent bookstores closing. I think it might be fun and instructive, at least in hindsight, to share our thoughts and aspirations about starting up in this environment. Later we can look back and see how our ideas turn out, either how visionary we were or how naive and well meaning but misguided we were.

I have a history of getting started in a dying industry. Right out of high school in 1974 I went to work for a summer job for a start-up company, Documation, Inc., where my father had been recruited to help get the place going. Documation was building better, faster, cheaper IBM card readers at a time when everyone already knew IBM cards were going the way of the dinosaur. Yet, many large companies and institutions were still using the cards and needed readers. The new card readers found a neglected market, Documation soon reached $100 million in sales and went public. I bought stock, financed my college career with the proceeds and changed majors from engineering to finance because the stock market part of the thing was so fascinating. Most of my subsequent career happily ended up in investment management with Wasatch Advisors, Inc. in Salt Lake City. Dinosaurs can make good stepping stones.

Our mission at Torrey House Press, LLC, is to increase awareness of and appreciation for the land, history, people, economy, and cultures of the Colorado Plateau and the American West through the power of pen and story.(See the website at www.torreyhouse.com.) I retired from Wasatch Advisors at the end of 1999. That same year I finished up building a second home in Torrey, Utah and proceeded to get to know the red rock country around Capitol Reef National Park better. I loved the clear air, the mix of desert canyon and alpine plateaus and forests. The vistas were ever more amazing and every turn and the light show was constant with sunrises and sunsets, thunderstorms and blazing, starry nights. I loved the fact, and still do, that there was no stoplight in all of Wayne County where Torrey is. But early on I noticed that all was not what it could be in paradise. I noticed on hikes all the constant, pervasive damage that cows cause to the meadows and forests, how non-stop irrigation of alfalfa drained and polluted the tiny desert rivers and streams, and how year after year the air became ever more hazy. The thought grew on me over time that for my "second-half" career I might like to do something that resulted in more water in the streams, grass on the mountains and pollution out of the air.

As I came to see it, the land management issues in the arid West are the result of archaic laws and of practices that are stuck in their ways and need a little boost to move into the modern century. But who wants to hear about that, who cares and why should anybody care? These are remote places that from 10,000 feet up or from a mile away out your car window are still stunning to behold. It sure doesn't look like there is anything wrong. The last thing anybody wants to hear is another rabid environmentalist ranting on and on about the sky falling. So, if it's not self evident today that much of the land on the Colorado Plateau is now worth more to the public that owns it in its natural state rather than in its subsidized extractive state, how shall we teach folks about it? Good literature, I thought, could do the trick.

With the help of my wife, Kirsten Allen, and my friend and ecologist, A.J. Martine, we are launching Torrey House Press. In subsequent entries I want to blog about the process, about our ideas and obstacles, about our experiences and aspirations. I have learned that I think better when I write. Even if I am about the only person reading the posts, I hope to gain something from it. In the meanwhile, as a ranching friend jokes to his neighbor environmentalist types, let's have "more nature, less cowshit!" -Mark Bailey