So maybe that wasn’t what you were reminded of when you saw the new crying-Indian photo that’s been popping up around the Interwebs lately — the one who is ostensibly lamenting a rainforest’s ruin. But surely you’ve seen the parodies that followed the original Keep America Beautiful ad. It was repeated move-for-move on The Simpsons. On Friends, while Chandler and his pals are stranded at a rest stop, he gets caught throwing an empty cigarette pack on the ground, and protests, “I thought maybe if I littered, that crying Indian might come along and save us.” In Wayne’s World 2, Jim Morrison’s Naked Indian Friend sheds tears upon seeing the scattered trash left over from Waynestock. He cheers up, though, when he sees Wayne and Garth picking up the mess.

Sure, the commercial was hokey — 40 years later, littering no longer rates as a notable environmental transgression, plus it starred an Italian-American actor, not a native one. But something struck a nerve, and when Americans’ nerves get struck, we start making jokes. As comedian Lenny Bruce pointed out, the equation for comedy is “laughter = pain + time.” The website TV Tropes collected no less than 30 parodies of the Crying Indian commercial, putting them under the headline, “Somewhere, an Indian is crying.”

Sure, somewhere, an Indian is crying, and somewhere else, like in the non-Indian, first-world mind, we are applying humor to further anesthetize the little sleepy zone in our brain where serious and sustained thought about native people might dwell — the part of our collective post-colonial consciousness that, if it awoke, might convince us to give it all back and move back to Krakow or Athens or Liverpool — and who wants to live there?

OK, so let’s look at a photo of an actual Indian crying, and over something a lot worse than littering. Here’s George Gillette, who in 1948 was the chairman of the Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa tribes of North Dakota, crying because the tribes’ homeland on the fertile floodplain of the Missouri River was to be inundated by construction of the Garrison Dam.

Gillette’s tribal ancestors saved Lewis and Clark’s lives in the frigid winter of 1804-5, and later that century, served as scouts for the U.S. Cavalry. The Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa assimilated into remarkably patriotic attendees of both schools and churches, and were industrious farmers who had weathered the Great Depression better than their white neighbors. They also learned a thing or two about the American legal system, and fought the Garrison Dam with extraordinary tenacity and skill. They lost that battle, however, and after the dam was constructed, the three tribes were scattered, their communities and extended families flung to different shores of the 200-mile-long Lake Sakakawea, their centuries-long agricultural practices destroyed.

I wrote an absolute tome about this photo for High Country News this May. (The story was about how diabetes did not exist among the tribespeople prior to the construction of the dam and is now an epidemic.) So I was amazed when I saw this next photo, which was taken a while ago, but has become an internet sensation lately.

This is Chief Raoni, an indigenous leader in the Amazon. Numerous blog posts and websites have claimed that he was crying because he’d just learned that the president of Brazil approved the Belo Monte dam project, an 11,000-megawatt dam that is slated to be the third biggest in the world — after the Three Gorges in China and Itaipu, which is jointly run by Brazil and Paraguay. First proposed more than 30 years ago, Belo Monte has moved forward in part because it is a hydroelectric dam and Brazil has committed to lowering its carbon footprint. But if it’s built, the dam will wipe out an unknowable amount of biodiversity and have untold effects on displaced native people. It will also wipe out part of a rainforest that itself acts as a buffer against climate change.

The picture of Chief Raoni has spread so quickly perhaps because it hits us in the same spot that old commercial did. But lest you feel the need to numb yourself with old Simpsons episodes, it turns out that the story we’ve been telling about the picture is all wrong. Amazon Watch reports that Chief Raoni was crying because he had reunited with a family member. Regarding the dam, he wasn’t sad, but angry: “I am alive and strong,” he said, “and as long as I’m alive I will continue to fight for my people!”

You see, Chief Raoni has what George Gillette did not: an international constituency rooting for his cause. He has been photographed with the musician Sting, and Sigourney Weaver is among the hundreds of thousands of people who have voiced opposition to the dam. This opposition has fomented numerous delays, and last week, the BBC reported that Judge Carlos Castro Martins has ordered a halt to any work that would interfere with the natural flow of the Xingu River.

Judge Martins’ injunction will delay construction, but it’s considered unlikely that it will stop the dam. It is telling that he did not stop the construction currently underway on accommodations for the project’s many workers.

Still, the sheer size and breadth of the opposition to Belo Monte shows we have grasped something we didn’t really get in 1948, or even in 1971: What we do to the Indians we do to ourselves. 

A recently reworked natural gas well in Delta County.

Photo: Jeremy Puckett, WSERC.

But since that meeting on April 9, the possibility that up to 600 coal bed methane wells could be drilled here has whipped up a firestorm of dissent in this quiet western Colorado valley. It has flushed hundreds of ranchers, fruit farmers, housewives, realtors, and environmentalists to public hearings, where they speak out against an economic, social, and environmental threat they fear could ruin their community and livelihoods.

Why? Because coal bed methane (CBM) mining is far more intensive than traditional natural gas extraction. CBM is a form of natural gas, but accessing it means drilling multiple wells close together, then connecting them with a network of power lines, roads, pipelines, and compressor stations.

“Of the close to 1,000 people I’ve talked to, I’ve only heard two people in favor of [coal bed methane exploration],” said Larry Jensen, who ranches near the town of Crawford (pop. 366).

Local environmentalist Tara Thomas traces the strong outcry to the community’s unique character: “This valley is beautiful, but it’s not a ski resort,” she said. “And it’s blue collar, but it’s not a rural sacrifice zone with an interstate entrance and a Wal-Mart. People here are very connected to the land, whether they’re ranching it, farming it, hunting in it, or hiking it.”

Thomas is the executive director of the Western Slope Environmental Resource Council, the watchdog group that first brought the coal bed methane issue to the public eye. In late May, WSERC convened an all-volunteer group called the Grand Mesa Citizens Alliance, which has sworn to research every possible legal, regulatory, and constitutional avenue to safeguard its valley from coal bed methane development.

“We want to provide the county commissioners with the tools to defeat this thing,” said environmental activist John Moore, a resident of Crawford and a member of the alliance.

Not very well. A coal bed methane well in Montana.

Photo: Montana State DEQ.

The anti-coal bed methane sentiment in Delta County is heightened by stories coming from communities already affected by such development, like the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana, and nearby Garfield and La Plata counties in Colorado. Coal bed methane drilling can contaminate water supplies with salt, benzene, and other toxic byproducts. No one knows what the full extent of the hazards might be, and reclamation standards are lax. Much of the drilling process is regulated by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, whose membership is almost entirely drawn from the industry itself.

The commission has never denied a gas company’s request to increase the density of wells in a given area, according to Carl Roberts, who raises fruit and vegetables outside of Hotchkiss (pop. 968) and whose greatest concern is contaminated irrigation water.

“This is not a ‘Not in My Backyard’ kind of thing,” said Roberts. “We don’t wish this for anyone.”

Roberts should know. He grew up in Jal, N.M., the former “Natural Gas Capital of the World.”

“But it went bust, and now it’s a ghost town,” said Roberts. In 1997, he bought land in Garfield County, Colo., and was driven out by the “nonstop industrial-strength traffic” that developed after gas extraction took hold there.

“As a kid, I was told that oil and gas would be around forever,” he said. “But they were wrong, and when the end came our town was just a shell of its former self. The industry builds up communities and then lets them down. It ruins them.”

Bill Tennison, who works as a financial planner in Paonia, noted that Delta County is located between the hot real estate markets of Aspen and Telluride and said that the county’s economic growth hinges on its appeal to retiring baby boomers and others attracted to its clean air, clean water, and physical beauty.

“All we have to do is not screw it up,” he said. “And we can screw it up really fast by making Delta County the coal bed methane capital of Colorado. No one will want to live here.”

Three coal mines have been a feature of the local landscape for decades, and many local residents say that’s enough.

“We are astounded at those who tell us that as Americans we have an obligation to produce energy — we who are already producing 15 million tons of coal per year,” said Ed Marston, who has spent the last 20 years publishing High Country News, a newspaper covering natural resources in the West from its offices in Paonia, Colo.

It’s the pits: digging a coal bed methane well.

Photo: Montana State DEQ.

The alliance is moving fast, because time is short. The Delta County Commissioners may vote as early as this coming Monday (June 17) on whether to allow Gunnison Energy to take its first step — drilling five preliminary test wells.

“Five wells may not seem like much, but we’ve been told by other counties we need to stop [them] before they get their foot in the door,” said Crawford rancher Jensen. “Once they start, it’s hard to stop them.”

“The people don’t want it,” he added. “Just like in Florida. If the president wants to pull the plug on oil and gas drilling in the Everglades because it’s the will of the people down there, he should pull the plug here, too.”

Environmental activist Moore said the whole national energy policy is flawed.

“If just half the federal subsidies that go to the fossil fuel industries went to renewable energy research and development, we wouldn’t need this crazed assault on our western landscapes.”

The efforts of the group — and the community ferment from which it emerged — have won kudos from outside the area.

Actor and renewable energy advocate Dennis Weaver, who lives two hours away in Ridgeway, Colo., applauded Delta County’s “broad-based opposition to this social and environmental threat.”

Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Attorney Johanna Wald agreed: “What’s really impressive is how quickly the community came together and how well organized they are,” she said from her office in San Francisco. “In too many cases, people don’t even start organizing until they actually see coal bed methane development happen on the ground. And what they see isn’t pretty.”

Enrique Penalosa (on left).

Photo: Institute for Transportation and
Development Policy.

Did the voters of Boulder, Colo. write in the Dalai Lama as their mayor? Had George Harrison turned to city planning in the last year of his life? Nope. This speech was given in Jakarta, Indonesia, by Enrique Penalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, Colombia. Yep, that’s the Bogota you were warned not to visit because you might be kidnapped or murdered. It’s the Bogota of the 38-year-old civil war, the highly dubious War on Drugs, the corrupt politics, the paralyzing traffic jams, the choking smog. But it is also the Bogota that, for seven years, has been under the guidance of two highly unusual mayors, Penalosa and Antanus Mockus, who have helped make this city of 8 million a model of progressive urban development.

Mockus, a former mathematics professor known for such antics as hiring mimes to model civil behavior in the streets, was mayor from 1995 to 1998. As his successor from 1998 to 2001, Penalosa masterminded a new bus system and designed a network of bike paths that is the envy of Portland, Ore. Mockus was elected again last year — after staging a ceremony in a public fountain to ask forgiveness for leaving the mayor’s office in an unsuccessful bid for the presidency. Unconventional, no doubt about it, but in Colombia’s capital city, that’s par for the course.

Against the Odds …

To understand just how unusual politics-as-usual are in Bogota, it helps to grasp the big picture. First there is Colombia, a nation plagued by a 20 percent unemployment rate, widespread destitution (55 percent of Colombians live below the poverty line), declining exports (if you don’t count illegal drugs), and, to put it nicely, political instability. The nation’s environment is threatened by the usual litany of woes, most prominently deforestation, pesticide use, and air pollution — particularly in the capital city.

Then there is the condition of Latin American cities in general. Widespread urbanization in the region has lead to a proliferation of slums, many of which lack basic services. Because the growth is generally unplanned, urban areas suffer from inadequate means of disposing of wastewater, severe groundwater pollution, and water shortages. Air pollution is a serious concern, with many of the region’s largest cities — Mexico City, Santiago, Sao Paulo — suffering from some of the worst smog in the world. Lead emissions, primarily from leaded gasoline but also from industrial pollution, are also a significant problem.

Bicyling beautiful Bogota.

Photo: Institute for Transportation and
Development Policy.

This is the grim context in which Penalosa and Mockus rose to political prominence. Penalosa inherited his interest in urban issues from his father, a one-time Bogota City Council member and housing specialist for the United Nations. When Penalosa fils took office, he launched a near-obsessive crusade to reform the city’s transportation system. Penalosa declared a virtual War on Cars, restricting traffic during peak hours to reduce rush hour traffic by 40 percent and convincing the City Council to increase the tax on gasoline. Half of the revenues generated by the increase were then poured into a bus system that currently serves 500,000 Bogota residents every day.

“Every Sunday, we close 120 kilometers of main arteries to motor vehicles for seven hours,” Penalosa explained. “A million and a half people of all ages and conditions come out to ride bicycles, jog, see others, to appropriate their city. During Christmas, we close those streets one night and more than 3 million people come out just to see the Christmas lights, to be with the others as a community.”

… In the Oddest Ways

While Penalosa has been credited with the vision, Mockus won much of the citizenry over with sheer wackiness. During his first term, he strolled the streets in red and blue tights as a “Super Citizen,” giving tips on civility. He starred in a televised public service announcement to promote water conservation — while in the shower. He ran his last campaign on a platform composed almost entirely of traffic issues, has exhorted city residents to “arm themselves with love,” and has been credited with doing away with corrupt police officers.

Bogota Mayor Antanus
Mockus.

Photo: Sierra James.

The means might be goofy, but the ends are undeniably impressive. According to the New York Times, Bogota is now statistically safer than Caracas and Rio de Janiero — not to mention Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. In 2000, Penalosa was honored with the Stockholm Challenge Award for creating Bogota’s car-free day — the largest and most successful event of its kind in the world. The award focused significant international attention on Bogota and caused the United Nations, in partnership with a variety of organizations including Earth Day Network, to organize a workshop in Bogota for other mayors interested in creating car-free days in their cities.

Less than a decade ago, Penalosa told Grist, Bogota was a city “hated by its inhabitants, who felt powerless and felt that in the future things would only get worse.” Conditions could hardly be more different now, and the former mayor says much of the change is thanks to the way alternative transportation has transformed the city’s public spaces. Nowadays, Penalosa said, the people of Bogota “have a sense of belonging. They feel in control of their destiny.”

Karletta Chief, bright as a
Christmas light.

Photo: Lisa Jones.

During the pageant, Karletta Chief — 24 years old, 4 feet 10 inches tall — displayed two expressions: the first as bright as a Christmas tree light, the other as grave as a visiting empress from Japan. She may very well have been reflecting on the extraordinary path that brought her to this most unusual beauty pageant — and that would lead to her crowning as Miss Navajo Nation 2000-2001.

A Dorm Room of One’s Own

Growing up in a one-room house with five siblings, a Baptist minister father, and a mother who sold homemade mutton stew and fry bread to jewelry vendors along the highway, Chief learned to work hard.

“I had to gather wood for the fire,” she says. “I had to walk to the pump to get a bucket of water. I remember how heavy it was.”

Chief applied this hard-working discipline to other parts of her life. “She taught herself the piano,” says her mother. “She taught herself the violin, too.”

Miss Navajo works the crowd.

Photo: Lisa Jones.

When she was five, Chief learned a different kind of lesson, in a year she spent living with her grandmother. “My grandma lives about three miles from a [Peabody Coal Company] coal mine,” she says. “She had to move several times because they leased their land from the mine. Grandma didn’t really have a say. One time, during a mining explosion, her corral caught on fire. So I was exposed to a lot of environmental injustice in my family. And they couldn’t do anything about it because they weren’t educated.”

Determined to do something about the situation herself, Chief focused on her school work. At Page High School, in Page, Ariz., a counselor encouraged her to apply to Stanford University. “I didn’t think I’d get in,” she says, but the university accepted her.

As might be expected, Chief’s adjustment to college life was far from simple. “Going was a really big culture shock. I’d had a very traditional upbringing on the reservation. Now I was exposed to really affluent people. Now I had everything: Running water, electricity. I had food. Lots of it.

“Stanford was really hard. First quarter I almost dropped out. I couldn’t talk to my parents because they didn’t have a phone. But by senior year, I was able to be happy there. When I first went there, there wasn’t anybody from the reservation. By the time I was a senior there were students from here.”

There’s No Place Like Home

Today, Chief is a doctoral candidate in environmental engineering and science at Stanford. She focused her master’s research on the effects of uranium mining on water quality on her Arizona reservation.

After completing her doctorate, Chief plans to return to the reservation to start an environmental consulting firm with her brother, an electrical engineer, and her cousin, a biologist. In the meantime, during her tenure as Miss Navajo Nation, Chief will take time off from her studies to advocate for environmental causes from a Navajo perspective.

“At Stanford, the city is really polluted,” Chief told the Navajo Times after winning the Miss Navajo Nation crown. “For us, we are so far more advanced in taking care of our land. As Navajos, our culture is tied to the land and if we don’t take care of our land and don’t instill that in our children, we’ll be the same as those cities.”

Karletta Chief will work hard as Miss Navajo Nation, and it’s likely that she’ll succeed in working with Navajo communities to advocate for environmental causes. One thing: Karletta Chief will set a high bar for the winner of that other beauty pageant.

Dev Carey, flower child.

Photo: Lisa Jones.

This is something of a curse. Like Cassandra in Greek mythology, he stares unblinking at the writing on the wall, while the rest of us chatter and sigh and get into handbaskets clearly marked “Hell.” And oh, he suffers.

A few years ago, he and I dated for awhile. We’d be driving home after a perfectly nice afternoon of kayaking. He’d look at the gas gauge and then downward, his shoulders stiffening. He’d look out at the condos being built by the highway and close his eyes.

After a while, this ceased to be much fun. I felt guilty. He felt terrible that he was making me — and other friends — feel guilty.

“I felt trapped,” he says, “like I was at a party and was the only one hearing a child crying out for help, but that if I pointed it out, all those partying people would get mad at me for being a downer. So I just stood there, paralyzed. I needed a way to make my own peace without needing others to do so.”

Family Values

Moral fortitude runs in Dev’s family. He is descended from a long line of Presbyterian ministers. He and his father once took a kayaking trip on the Klamath River in Oregon that started at the mouth of the river and proceeded toward its headwaters. They paddled for a month. Upstream. Yes, they did.

Dev’s ingrained Presbyterian drive is amplified by a brain that functions perhaps a little too well. His academic career, from kindergarten through his Ph.D, was marked by honors, grants, scholarships, downright pleas that he keep hitting the books.

But the miracle about Dev is that while these elevated moral and mental capacities are what cause his suffering, they are also what can alleviate it. He thinks things through. He has trouble doing the wrong thing, but he has figured out ways of doing the right thing that don’t make his companions want to kill themselves, or him.

He is pained by the consequences of cars, so he doesn’t own one. He bikes or hitchhikes instead, or hops a ride with his wife, Merrylea, who drives a rehabbed Volvo painted to resemble a huge carton of Ben & Jerry’s.

Dev and Merrylea.

Photo: Lisa Jones.

He is also pained by modern construction material and excess, so he and Merrylea are building a house out of entirely recycled materials. I’m not talking 20 percent post-consumer-waste drywall from a groovy-looking catalog with jaw-dropping prices. I’m talking retaining walls made of old refrigerators and stucco. I’m talking windows from garage sales and beams that once held up derelict barns.

A few years ago, he decided to aim for a diet of only local, organic food. When it came to meat, he favored the ultimate in local cuisine — roadkill. He and Merrylea once arrived at a potluck with a dying deer in the back of their Volvo. It is a testament to the spirit of their hosts that the whole party went and butchered the deer before dinner.

Dev is absolutely the least consumptive person I know. Even among the earthy, vegetable-growing, Gaia-worshipping, bartering folk of his hometown of Paonia, Colo., he is a paragon of conservation.

But he became exhausted by his own standards. “I was tired of being hard on the world, and myself, and other people,” he said.

The Cabbage Manifesto

Then, this summer — after thinking good and hard about cabbage that is grown in Mexico, heavily doused with pesticides, picked by underpaid workers, and driven in refrigerated trucks all around North America — he hit upon a solution. He decided to tax himself on what he consumes. A locally grown vegetarian meal requires no taxation. But a breakfast burrito — made with local eggs, but imported tomatoes, cheese, onions, and tortilla — will require a couple dollars to be donated to an environmental organization. It’s all in his recently penned “Cabbage Manifesto,” excerpted here:

Every time a dollar leaves my pocket, I classify it by two criteria: what is the environmental ethic of what I purchased and how far did it have to travel. The cabbage from Mexico is nonlocal and non-responsible; it scores a minus/minus. The local, organic cabbage gets a plus/plus, while an organic cabbage from California gets a plus/minus. In the same way, Ben & Jerry’s gets a plus/minus, Reebok shoes get a minus/minus. A massage from a local gets a plus/plus. Of course, there are complications to all this. That local, organic cabbage might come in a plastic sack. That local restaurant buys food at Sam’s Club. But I just take my best guess. In the end, I figure, it will all average out. For every minus/minus dollar spent, I contribute another dollar to a worthy nonprofit. For every plus/minus, I contribute 50 cents. For a plus/plus, I pay no taxes.

I also tax my earnings by the same criteria, although at half the rate. For every two dollars I earn selling Coors Beer, for example, I will contribute one to a nonprofit. Two dollars for my local teaching efforts I keep to myself. If I work for the locally owned deli that sells some nonlocal cheese and meat but local greens (a plus/minus overall in my book), I contribute 50 cents of that two dollars.

It’s all guesswork, of course. Who knows if a dollar to the Nature Conservancy will make up for a dollar to Nike. But it feels like it’s possible. If everyone were to start this system, the world would change drastically.

The most exciting thing is that the system is working. I am balancing my budget, even saving. Already I feel lighter. There is no need to torture myself with guilt after each bad purchase in an effort to find the courage to do better on the next one. I just buy, and if I run out of money, I run out. I can deal with that. I follow my inclinations and search for the best deal, the most bang for the buck like any other consumer. Those local, organic cabbages now make sense, and so, sometimes, does a hammer from Wal-Mart. I like that this tax system is easy to explain to other people, and that anybody could begin the method any time. I like the fact that I can just do it quietly without moralizing.

I am also having fun contributing to worthy causes. I have realized that with all these donations to nonprofits and the subsequent write-offs, I will owe no taxes come April 15. It’s an uplifting thought. I have control over how my money is used.

When I buy cabbage from Mexico, I still think about it. I see the images of overworked fields and locals made sick by pesticides. The difference is that it’s easier now to feel thanks instead of guilt, and I know my life is part of the solution. It’s time to delight in some coleslaw.

 

Eli Wolcott (the mug’s just a prop).

Photo: Lisa Jones.

Specifically, Eli wonders whether he can help coffee workers in the remote hills of southern Mexico improve their quality of life and cause less environmental damage. He’s working with them to revamp their operations from the ground up — from processing the beans in a way that protects the local watershed to marketing mushrooms grown on coffee waste.

What he’s telling me is a mouthful, and to help myself take it all in, I gulp from my mind-expanding French Roast. All I can think is, I’ve known Eli since he was 10 years old. Now he’s 20, and this endeavor is his college senior project. A Paonia native, he will graduate from Prescott College in Arizona in December.

The bean trees.

Photo: Dorie Hagler,
courtesy Coffee Kids.

To hear Eli tell it, the status quo in coffee production is an environmental and economic nightmare. Coffee has become second only to oil as the most commonly traded commodity on the planet. As a result, tropical forests (read: critical habitat for birds and other wildlife) have been cleared to make way for coffee fields. Workers pick coffee fruit and take it to local processing plants, where the bean is removed from the fruit. A huge amount of water is used in the separation process, then returned to local streams loaded with nutrients, causing fish-killing bacterial blooms. The fruit is then discarded to rot, while farmers buy chemical fertilizers to help keep their coffee monocultures alive.

The coffee business is lucrative for the traders, but the coffee pickers earn a pittance. This makes it hard for them to buy food, so many subsist on what they can grow themselves, and too often this results in malnutrition.

High on ‘Shrooms

The world is your oyster
mushroom.

Enter the mushroom. “Its ecological role is to break down waste!” says Eli. And it turns out that the fungus takes particularly well to coffee waste. Mushrooms, rich in vitamins, minerals, and protein, can be grown on the waste and then consumed locally or sold on the international market.

Eli developed an interest in raising mushrooms years ago along with Johanes Colby, a childhood friend. After contacting Bill Mollison, a noted permaculture expert, the pair started toying with the idea of raising mushrooms on coffee waste. A series of activist groups pointed Eli to the tiny town of Guzmantla in the forested foothills of Mt. Orizaba, in the Mexican state of Vera Cruz. Growing coffee is the main business in this town of about 1,000, and a nearby ecological institute was already experimenting with growing mushrooms on coffee waste in laboratory conditions. But Eli, who spent a month there last fall, wanted to develop a more grassroots approach — raising mushrooms on coffee waste heaped on the ground.

Cool beans.

Photo: Dorie Hagler,
courtesy Coffee Kids.

In February, he returned to Guzmantla to work with local scientists, extension agents, and coffee workers to establish two kinds of coffee-waste test plots: one on which was grown Pluerotus, or oyster mushrooms, and another on which earthworms composted waste into fertilizer. The worms are easier to care for than mushrooms, and Eli figured it was a good fallback project if the higher-maintenance mushroom effort didn’t work out.

“The people were very welcoming and friendly,” says Eli, who stayed with local families. Education in the town went only through grade school. There were no flush toilets, and just a few homes had glass windows. “There was one telephone in town, at a little store,” he says. “They announced over the loudspeaker who the call was for.

“It was really amazing for me to see how coffee is produced,” Eli says. “I took a sustainable ag class in Costa Rica, and we spent a lot of time talking to industries. There are so many impacts that American and European consumers don’t see. You don’t see rainforests being destroyed, you don’t see workers being exploited. You don’t see how huge corporations come in and control these countries. The corporations get tax breaks, customs relief. The army is guaranteed if they need to kick out squatters. Most of the profits leave the country. Rarely are there any workers’ rights.”

Eli has been heartened to hear word from Guzmantla that the test plots have been a success — they are being well tended to and enthusiasm for the project has remained high. The mushrooms will likely be marketed by Colby, who already sells mushrooms to restaurants in Chicago and New York City.

A mug shot.

Eli recently formed a nonprofit corporation, Wild Forests Forever, and applied for a grant to get him back to Mexico for a few months later this year. He wants to expand the test plots into a project that can use all the coffee waste the pickers produce. He also wants to help upgrade the coffee separation process so it will use far less water, as well as help Guzmantla’s cooperative find ways to market their beans directly to the United States. And finally, Eli wants to document the whole process in both English and Spanish, so that other small coffee-producing towns can profit from Guzmantla’s experiment.

On one hand, it drains one of the most beautiful valleys on the planet — its headwaters tumble from the Ragged and West Elk mountains into the broad, gentle North Fork Valley.

The Gunnison River — ain’t it pretty?

Photo: Lisa Jones.

On the other hand, the river has been used hard for decades. Coal mines, ranches, and orchards dot the valley, each of them diverting water, often with cheap and ecologically destructive methods. There are three gravel operations in the 12-mile stretch of river between the little towns of Paonia and Hotchkiss. (Colorado is one of the handful of states that still allow in-stream gravel mining.) From 1948 until about 1980, the county controlled flooding and secured land for agriculture and housing by bulldozing a deep channel straight down the river. The result is a badly degraded waterway whose natural meanders have been erased and whose banks have been severely eroded.

Good thing there’s a supernaturally energetic and cheerful engineer named Jeff Crane working to rehabilitate the North Fork. On a recent afternoon, he bounces across Hotchkiss’s Main Street in rubber boots and Carhartt jeans, fairly leaps into his Pathfinder, and drives to the riverbank.

“This river has so much potential!” he shouts happily. He loves his job, and it’s easy to see why. The sun is high. The reconfigured banks are fringed with red willows that Jeff transplanted himself. The water, low and clear, is making its way through mounds of gravel being rearranged by a septet of heavy vehicles, under Jeff’s careful guidance. And under an exuberant blue sky, the West Elk Mountains are dusted with new snow.

How It All Began

Jeff first got involved with this project in 1996, when a rancher named Calvin Campbell convened a group of locals concerned about the state of the North Fork. Everyone — ranchers, environmentalists, kayakers, orchardists, gravel miners, irrigators, riverfront landowners, and average concerned citizens — agreed they wanted to reduce erosion. They formed the North Fork River Improvement Association and hired Jeff, a civil engineer, to conduct a morphological study of the riverbed.

Jeff Crane — you’d grin too if you had his job.

Photo: Lisa Jones.

He completed the study, but didn’t stop there. The longtime outdoorsman was hooked. He started raising money to do more, garnering some $340,000 in cash and in-kind contributions from 24 sources, ranging from government agencies to environmental groups to coal mines. He talked to the gravel-pit operators and got two of the three to move their operations out of the streambed and into the floodplain.

He has involved as many local people as possible. Students at Mesa State College in nearby Grand Junction can take a one-credit course in bioengineering, which involves working with Jeff for four days and taking a day-long workshop from an expert Jeff brings in. Local high school kids have made documentaries and web pages on the project.

A Healthy Diversion

Today Jeff is overseeing the construction of a new irrigation structure, which will efficiently divert the amount of water allocated to local farmers and ranchers. Up until now, water was diverted by driving bulldozers into the middle of the river and plowing out a big dike. This method was quite inefficient, though, and it diverted about twice as much water as the locals were entitled to. The excess water not owned by farmers and ranchers would eventually flow back into the river, but the fact it was taken out at all stressed the ecosystem.

“It’s not that the people don’t care,” says Jeff. “It’s that they didn’t have any money.” He solved that problem by securing a $100,000 grant for constructing the new diversion structure.

Keeping the kayakers happy.

Photo: Lisa Jones.

Jeff is also reconfiguring sections of the river to have meanders, wetlands, backwaters, and floodplains, all made stable with willows and cottonwoods. He makes undercuts and arranges rocks to create trout habitat. He is saving one big rock to make a wave for local kayakers.

“I’m looking to strike a balance — fish habitat, boating habitat, wildlife habitat,” he says. “And to divert water to sustain agriculture in this valley, so we don’t have a bunch of condominiums lining this river.”

He knows what he’s talking about. Before moving to the area in 1994, Jeff was a project engineer who platted lots and developed roads for a luxury development on a golf course outside Denver. “I got disgusted,” he says. He went to Africa for a few months, spent some time in Alaska working in a salmon cannery, moved to Vermont, and finally landed in the North Fork Valley, determined to make a life here even if he had to pick apples. But it didn’t come to that. Jeff found some development work and attended numerous river-restoration courses.

It all paid off. Now he’s got the perfect job — designer of a new river. He gets to spend his days outdoors, planting willows and cottonwoods, moving rocks, talking to people. “I’m trying to prevent the same thing I spent 15 years building,” he says. “I’m as happy as could be.”

The Murphy family, home on the range.

Photo: Lisa Jones.

Sanity. He and his wife Sheryl didn’t want to raise four-year-old Hayden and seven-year-old Ginger in suburban Dallas.

Dale had a key experience one day while walking across a bridge on a job near Great Falls, Mont. A truckful of teenagers drove by and yelled at him explosively, in unison. “I was just about hurled off the bridge,” recalls the slender, bespectacled Murphy. “I remember thinking, ‘If this was a really small town, this wouldn’t happen,’” he says. “Small towns engender civility, I think, because you can’t just vanish into a mall. In a city, people can act like jerks with impunity.”

So while he was investigating drilling a well near Steamboat Springs, Colo., he and his family hit the road in search of small-town America. They investigated all kinds of hamlets, and then found Paonia, a tiny fruit-farming and coal-mining town in western Colorado. “We stumbled here, came over the pass,” he says from the living room of the small white house that the family has occupied for four years.

“Sheryl could stay home with the kids, home school ‘em,” he says. Dale, then 42, worked in a fruit-packing shed, then started a job as a cashier at the local supermarket, for minimum wage.

“Suddenly, we were on an extremely tight budget,” he says. “We only shop at garage sales, we don’t do cable TV (which is the only way to get reception in Paonia), and we wouldn’t want to anyway. We even make homemade birthday cards.” He animatedly explains how they fashioned a Christmas ornament that sums up their new, scaled-down Christmas celebration: a clothespin holding a penny. I struggle, and fail, to get it. “Pinching a penny!” he says happily, his immaculately behaved son Hayden, now eight years old, bouncing discreetly on the couch next to him.

The family had gone from suburban splendor to rural frugality. The next step was environmentalism.

A couple of years after the Murphys moved to Paonia, Theo Colborn gave a talk in town. Theo, formerly Paonia’s town pharmacist, had gone on to graduate school and then become a World Wildlife Fund scientist, an expert on the hormonal side effects of pollution, and author of the best-selling book Our Stolen Future. For Dale, who had been weaned on the journals of the oil and gas industry, Theo’s talk was a mind-bending experience.

“You can’t escape it,” Dale says. “They’re everywhere — chemicals that are influencing our hormonal and reproductive systems. They’re in the blubber of seals above the Arctic Circle, in sea birds. There are over 500 measurable chemicals in our bodies that were not there prior to 1920, affecting our bodies in many ways. For example, they promote earlier sexual maturity in humans and influence the reproductive systems of many animals.”

Now this Oklahoma-raised former geologist has purchased a piece of hillside outside of town and is looking forward to building a “straw-bale, rammed earth, cob, mud, and straw” house that’s as environmentally benign as possible. His family is turning toward vegetarianism. They buy locally grown organic produce when possible, but Dale gets a discount at work, so they stick mostly to supermarket fare.

Recently, Sheryl started working full-time at Chaco, a local sports sandal factory, and Dale started playing Mr. Mom while staying on part-time at the supermarket. “I saw him one day, on his knees, scraping tape off the window of the freezer at the store, and I thought, ‘What a waste,’” says Sheryl. “Here’s a man with a master’s degree in geology and a great love of children. It was time for a change.”

And they’re happy with it. “We love it here,” says Dale. “What matters to me now is how to change the world a little bit at a time. I can do it by raising our kids right, in the right kind of place. This is not a materialistic town. I’ve been there, done that, and it doesn’t interest me any more.”

Cheatgrass never prospers?

Photo: Russel Stevens/Chuck
Coffey, Noble Foundation.

Because cheatgrass (aka: downy brome, junegrass, and broncograss — it’s the stuff that gets stuck in your socks when you walk in the desert) provides some forage early in the spring, most ranchers haven’t recognized it as a significant threat. But the problem is that cheatgrass, while flammable, tolerates fire beautifully. Native shrub lands don’t. So when cheatgrass infiltrates an area, often after a long history of abusive grazing, it’s only a matter of time until the native plants are turned to charred embers and a cheatgrass desert has sprung up in their wake. Cheatgrass, in turn, paves the way for worse weeds — knapweed and jointed goatgrass, which are inedible and difficult to eradicate.

There aren’t many soldiers in the war against cheatgrass. A handful of them are sequestered near the campus of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, in a nondescript building that houses the USDA Forest Service Shrub Lab. There, ecologist Susan Meyer and colleagues have spent the last three years trying to develop a cheatgrass biocontrol method using a fungus called a “smut” that renders cheatgrass sterile.

Susan Meyer, crusader against
cheatgrass.

Photo: Lisa Jones.

“The good thing about this disease is it’s already out there,” Meyer says of smut. “But different strains of cheatgrass take turns being infected, because they are susceptible to different strains of smut. It’s very hard to get an epidemic because there’s this dynamic equilibrium going on.” Her job, which she started three years ago, is to come up with a blend of smut strains that can attack all strains of cheatgrass at once.

The Spore the Merrier

Smut takes over the reproductive apparatus of a cheatgrass plant, which then stops producing seeds and starts producing knobs made of black powder called smut bullae.

“All that comes out is spores!” says Meyer. “I’m really psyched up about this stuff. Smut spores germinate along with the seeds of cheatgrass plants that escaped infection. It’s very important that their germination matches the germination of the seed. We know more about when cheatgrass germinates than anyone in the world.”

But the battle isn’t won yet. “Whether we can get full infection in the field remains to be seen,” she says. “There are certain variables that can interfere. Cheatgrass can come up at different times in the season, depending on the available moisture. The smut has to germinate at the same time. For instance, some cheatgrass is coming up now [January], and winter’s not good for smut germination.”

Such obstacles won’t be surmounted a moment too soon, says Meyer. “I think [cheatgrass] could easily be the death of natural ecosystems in the Intermountain West,” says Meyer, who got her PhD in botany from Claremont Graduate School near Los Angeles. “People just don’t know that low-elevation ecosystems are going down the tubes. We’re already talking 40 million hectares [about 100 million acres] in the West where cheatgrass is the dominant grass species.

“We have these fires and people don’t know that’s why it’s happening. People just don’t have a clue. I didn’t have a clue. I was trained as an ecologist in another part of the country and I came here and it was like, ‘Where’s the desert? It’s gone.’”

Meyer is a self-described radical environmentalist, but because she lives in “a very conservative place,” she tempers herself. “If you actually want to change people’s hearts, you can’t do it by being adversarial. I just inculcate my values into people. I don’t say, ‘I hate cows.’ I say, ‘I love native plants.’” And she hopes the locals will come around someday.

Costas Christ — miracle worker?

Costas Christ, who had been on the trip with us, calmly came to our rescue. A loose-limbed man with an explosion of curly hair and an easy laugh, he was one of the only ecotourism experts at the time who was familiar with Africa. He had spent 20 years living and working on the continent and operated an ecotourism business called Tamu Safaris. He collected our passports and tickets and shuttled to different desks in the airport, returning with stamps, customs forms, and bits of comforting information. He got us all safely on our plane and headed home.

I ran into Costas again at a conference in Venezuela and was impressed by his genuine desire to make ecotourism — a field that is rich in theory and poor in on-the-ground successes — really work. He believes ecotourism is the best means for making environmental protection economically possible in the Third World.

In the summer of 1998, Costas made a career switch and became head of the Peace Corps in Uganda. Within weeks of his arrival, the situation in the country got tense. “The rebels in Congo were vowing to do everything possible to undermine the movement of Uganda,” he says. “What better way to do this,” he recalls thinking to himself, “than to attack Bwindi National Park, the last great mountain gorilla sanctuary in Africa, where researchers, tourists, and Peace Corps volunteers were all located? Bwindi was Uganda’s economic and conservation success story. To me, it seemed like a dream target for the rebels.”

In the jungle, the mighty jungle —
Bwindi National Park, Uganda.

Photo: Art Wolfe, Inc.

Costas was convinced that the Peace Corps should suspend its operations in the park, but no one else was. “The terrain was too mountainous, people argued with me; the jungle too thick,” he says. “And the rebels had never been sighted anywhere near Bwindi. Everyone agreed that the rebels would never strike there.” Costas took a lot of flak from conservationists and volunteers alike, but he removed the park’s three Peace Corps volunteers anyway.

Four months later, at daybreak on March 1, 1999, the rebels attacked at Bwindi, kidnapping and murdering ecotourists at the park headquarters, killing Ugandan park rangers, and burning buildings to the ground, including those that had formerly housed Peace Corps volunteers.

“It was a nightmare,” said Costas. As the war escalated, he closed more than 20 Peace Corps projects, and eventually evacuated all of the group’s volunteers from Uganda. But he misses the country. “There’s incredible wildlife and wonderful people there,” he said. “The truth is, much of Africa is very peaceful.”

You Better Belize It

Now Costas has taken the helm of the Peace Corps in Belize. “Belize has a lot of environmental issues to hold my attention, and the nearby escapes to nature that I crave and need to survive,” he says.

He envisions two key roles for the Peace Corps when it comes to the environment in Belize. The first is educational outreach.

One Peace Corps volunteer has created a “watershed classroom” that goes from village to village along the Sibun River, with hands-on educational activities and “science experiments” geared toward teaching about river ecology and conservation.

Belize has incredible rivers, some of which are in pristine condition. The villagers who live on their banks depend on the rivers, but many of them have no real understanding of what a watershed is. “When there was a large fish kill in the New River in northern Belize, villagers didn’t understand what it was about,” he says. “Chemical and pesticide runoff from sugar-cane fields and waste from a timber factory on the river were dumping directly into the water and there is some very real likelihood that the fish kill was related to this pollution.”

A white-throated capuchin swings from
the trees in Belize.

Photo: Art Wolfe, Inc.

Costas’s second environmental goal in Belize is to help rural communities support themselves through wildlife conservation. Last fall, and again in January, manatees were slaughtered by villagers for meat in a poor, rural region of southern Belize. At the same time, tourists were visiting more developed parts of the country hoping to catch sight of one of these large marine mammals. Costas would like the Peace Corps to work with local conservation groups to set up the economic plumbing to funnel money from tourists to poor, rural residents in exchange for wildlife preservation.

Peace Corps volunteers have already played a key role in getting Hol Chan Marine Reserve established on Belize’s famous barrier reef, and many former fishers in the area have now become guides in the reserve. And near San Ignacio in western Belize, one volunteer helped create a farm that breeds iguanas for food, establishing an alternative to the hunting of wild iguanas, which are steadily disappearing.

“Ecotourism — responsible travel that conserves nature and sustains the well-being of local peoples — remains one of the few ways that a country like Belize, economically poor but rich in natural resources, can bring income into impoverished rural communities,” Costas says. “It’s not an exact science, but there have been a few significant successes along the way that have led to positive impacts on rural peoples’ lives and the nature that surrounds them. If I can build on those successes and contribute to them in my own work with the Peace Corps and beyond, then I’ll sleep better at night.”

Editor’s note: As of 2001, Costas Christ had changed jobs to become senior director for ecotourism at Conservation International.