Once upon a time in the West, a WY Republican senator proposed a monorail for Yellowstone NP

Sao Paolo, Brazil, monorail -- this could have served
the Jackson to Old Faithful Inn route, if Sen
Malcolm had had his way.

Last week, I posted about the traffic congestion at I-25 and College Drive in Cheyenne. I suggested that there may be a solution in sight, as U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that Cheyenne will receive a $400,000 grant to “reduce crashes” at the interchange.

In that post, I kidded around about monorails. I couldn’t resist. Fans of “The Simpsons” know the monorail song from the fifth series episode in which a Harold Hill-style huckster talks the gullible citizens of Springfield into an ill-fated monorail project.

They’re a joke. Except in Mumbai and Tokyo and Las Vegas and Moscow and Dusseldorf and Singapore where monorails move hundreds of thousands of people a day – and hardly any of the passengers break out in the monorail song. I’ve ridden the tourist monorails in Orlando and Seattle, and people-mover versions at DFW Airport and downtown Detroit.

I was shocked to discover that a Republican U.S. Senator once proposed a monorail for Yellowstone National Park. It was 1991 and people were in an uproar over traffic congestion and pollution at our major parks. Sen. Malcolm Wallop of Sheridan was no environmentalist. But he did think the National Park Service should investigate a YNP Monorail.

I find lots of archival references to Wallop’s proposal. WY PBS did a Main Street Wyoming interview with Wallop on the subject. The Monorail Society’s newsletter lists and summer 1991 story about Wallop’s proposal. But I didn’t have the time or research skills to ferret out the details.

I did find a June 2, 1991, article in the Baltimore Sun by Associate Editor Ernest B. Furgurson. He announced that he was about to set out on an exploration of the West’s national parks:

During the next few weeks, I plan to set foot on some of the most valuable land in America. It is valuable because it is undeveloped, and if there is a heaven it will stay that way. 

--snip-- 

Environmentalists are not the only park lovers who see traffic as probably the most serious single problem. Sen. Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming, with whom they are often at odds, suggested this week that the National Park Service consider "futuristic" mass transport, such as monorails, to ease road crowding. 

His idea was immediately derided as a way to convert national parks into theme parks like Disneyland. But if even Mr. Wallop is willing to impose a slight inconvenience on the all-American motorist who wants to drive every foot of the way, there may be hope for change. 

Building monorail systems in Yellowstone, Yosemite and Denali (Mt. McKinley) parks seems at first glance too much of a project, sure to destroy terrain and mar views. But shuttle buses already are required at Denali, and available at other parks such as Yellowstone. At Yosemite, the park service is limiting the number of cars in the valley to 5,000 at a time.

This seems so long ago and far away. If a 2011 Republican senator proposed a monorail or light rail line to anywhere, he or she would be targeted by Luddite Tea Party conspiracy types who see all mass transportation as an international plot against suburban sprawl. These people have already made a stir in Casper where a few loud yet ill-informed citizens saw a zoning change as part of the nefarious UN Agenda 21 plot. Florida recently turned down millions for a high-speed rail line on its west coast. The Feds took the money and sent it to other rail projects in the northeast and California. In ten years, those blue state voters will be zipping along to the polls while commuters in Tampa and Orlando will spend election day in gridlocked traffic. They won’t be singing the monorail song. They will be singing the blues.

There’s no real reason for a Yellowstone monorail. It would be terribly expensive. Those big concrete tracks and stanchions would be a blight on the landscape. Yellowstone really only has horrible traffic two months of the year -- July and August. Many summer tourists are accommodated by shuttle and tour buses. Modern autos spew much less pollution. Besides, there’s just no way around the fact that we westerners love our cars. I do.

You never know, though. WY Sen. John Barrasso just might surprise everyone by suggesting national park monorails or light rail systems or even blimps. He’ll do anything to get an interview on Fox News.

NEA"s "Our Town" grants supports creativity in our towns

Artist's rendering of Casper's Sunshine II development that will include an arts space for resident and neighbors

Here's a whole lot of creative placemaking that will be supported by almost $7 million in "Our Town" grants from the National Endowment for the Arts: http://www.arts.gov/grants/recent/11grants/Our-Town.html

One of those is a $50,000 grant for Casper to develop a public art space alongside the 26-unit Sunshine Apartments II development now under construction. The site is across from the Nicolaysen Art Museum and just west of where the now-demolished KC Apartments were located. Some of you may remember the rundown KC Apartments as a slumlord-run blight on the neighborhood that mercifully was closed down by the city and then demolished.    

The new Sunshine II low-income development feature LEED-certified buildings and now an arts space. 

Project organizers envision the space as a gathering spot for apartment residents and the surrounding community. The museum also intends to create educational and outreach programs for the site. 

“It’s part and parcel with a whole mindset or plan for downtown Casper on how to integrate arts with our everyday lives,” said museum Curator Lisa Hatchadoorian. 

--clip--

Hatchadoorian isn’t aware of any other public art spaces in Wyoming tied to low-income housing. Organizers hope their project will encourage similar efforts in other parts of the state.

“It’s a community-building experience,” she said. “A lot of times, when you have a public art space where people can interact, it just brings everyone ... it makes the community more available to each other. It just makes a better place to live.”

Read more: http://trib.com/news/local/casper/article_b59063b2-7991-51f2-8698-204d1b7b01fc.html#ixzz1RxrMkUst

Another one of the NEA's "Our Town" grants goes to a neat "arts incubator" project just down the road from Cheyenne in Fort Collins, Colo.:

To support the creation of the Rocky Mountain Regional Arts Incubator (RMRAI) in the historic Carnegie building in downtown Fort Collins. The RMRAI will offer students and professionals a multitude of services to assist them in creating, redefining, and sustaining their creative careers in the new economy, including educational courses, internships, continuing education for practicing artists, and gallery and performance spaces.

The project is a collaboration among the non-profit Beet Street, the City of Fort Collins Cultural Services Department and the Colorado State University School of the Arts. The incubator will be located in the Carnegie Building in the city's Library Park.

The Beet Street web site doesn't say, but the org's name probably trades on Fort Collins' aggie reputation, namely its years as a center of sugar beet production. CSU got its start as Colorado A&M, home of a fantastic veterinary school and lots of farming and ranching courses. That's what the big "A" up on the mountain stands for. CSU grew into a place where the arts shared a campus with the aggie arts. What's interesting is that the university (my alma mater) now is investing heavily in green technology and sustainable agriculture, putting the A&M back into the name in new and interesting ways.

High Plains gardening is a waiting game

Ogallala strawberries (mine kind of look like these)

Something to say about picking fresh Ogallala and Quinalt strawberries in the garden, combining them with a handful of fresh mint, and passing this around to your guests.

Hand-picked dessert.

Washed down with an Old Belgium Ranger IPA. A Belgian White like White Rascal, the one made by Avery of Boulder, might be better -- maybe even a red wine. But I don't know my wines like I know my beers.

The garden grows well. Tomatoes appearing on the vine and they'll be ripening eventually. Lettuce and rocket and spinach galore. Wait for the rest. That's what high-plains gardeners do a lot of -- waiting.

I'm a gardener in training, spending every summer learning more about what grows best. I'm also nurturing my soil with lots of compost -- can't have too much of that. Soon my soil will be comparable to those in the more hospitable growing climes, places like eastern Iowa and Missouri. I'll live so long...

The rains have been a Godsend but my garden needs a bit more hot days to really produce. That's what we lack -- long, hot days for the tomatoes and beans and squash. I wither under that kind of heat but mid-summer garden veggies thrive.

Now if we can just keep the hail at bay...

Bob LeResche: "Wyoming needs to raise mineral royalty rates"

A good column by Clearmont, Wyo., rancher Bob LeResche about mineral royalty rates in Wyoming. It's not a subject I know much about so appreciate the insight by a man who was Alaska's Commissioner of Natural Resources from 1976-81, during which time he rewrote that state’s oil and gas leasing statutes and engineered many successful lease sales. Here's a snippet:

Wyoming is known throughout industry as a pushover when it comes to regulating and permitting exploration and production. CBM producers are allowed almost unfettered pollution rights to discharge produced water — and everybody knows it. Eminent domain takings by industry for pipelines and powerlines are easy in our state. We join industry to fight federal attempts to enforce the Clean Water Act, the Clean Drinking Water Act, the Air Quality Act, and the Endangered Species Act when they affect the energy industry. Wyoming collaborates with industry to fight Montana’s water quality rules. Our environmental and permitting policies are worth many millions to industry. We should not add to our largess by charging below-market royalties.

Read the rest on the CST web site

A shame that the State of Wyoming is so cozy with the energy industry that it works against itself and its own citizens. 

UW prof Christine M. Porter receives huge grant to build sustainable community food systems

The following comes from a University of Wyoming press release. I'm going to reprint the whole darn thing not only because this is such a cool project but also because it is spring and getting close to planting season and I'm in a pretty good mood.

A University of Wyoming professor is leading a $5-million, multi-state project to build community food systems that nourish populations in both current and future generations.

Christine M. Porter, assistant professor in the College of Health Sciences Division of Kinesiology and Health, leads the five-year "Food Dignity: Action Research on Engaging Food Insecure Communities and Universities in Building Sustainable Community Food Systems," project. It is funded by the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) Competitive Grant program.

This is the largest USDA grant the university has received, says Bill Gern, UW vice president for research and economic development. Porter’s project has three facets: extension, research and education.

The project's extension portion includes five community food initiatives. Each will create a local steering committee to disperse small grants that invest in citizen solutions to their own food system issues.

Two of the initiatives are in Wyoming -- Gayle Woodsum of Action Resources International is organizing the Albany County project and Virginia Sutter of Blue Mountain Associates, Inc. will lead the Wind River Indian Reservation initiative. The others are Dig Deep Farms and Produce in Alameda County, Calif.; Whole Community Project of Cornell Cooperative Extension, Tompkins County, N.Y.; and East New York Farms!, Brooklyn, N.Y.

The research focuses on developing case studies of what each community has already done and during the next five years will make clear what factors influence their successes and failures as they work to create sustainable community food systems that provide ample and appropriate food for all, Porter says.

The education portion aims to create new cross-disciplinary undergraduate minors in sustainable food systems to prepare UW and Cornell University graduate students to engage in this work.

"At UW, the team developing the minor is considering nesting this within a more generic sustainability program of study," Porter says.

She says the project comes at a crucial time in today's economy.

"We are close to peak oil and peak soil, are enduring the greatest wealth and income inequality in decades, and somewhat ironically, face soaring rates of both food insecurity and obesity," Porter says.

While there is no single cure-all for these problems, Porter and her team view community food system development as a core part of the solution.

"We'll never compete with China in making plastic buckets or tennis shoes," she says, "But we can grow, process and sell our own food. The more we localize food systems, the more local jobs we create and the fresher our food is when it reaches our plates."

She also says research shows that medium-sized producers are more productive than industrial-scale farms and also tend to be more attentive to ecological and community sustainability.

While finishing her doctoral degree work, Porter says AFRI had a call for proposals to foster food security and local economic development through a blend of research, extension and education.

That pushed her to "dream bigger than I ever would have before dared." She assembled a team of more than two dozen top-notch community food practitioners and UW and Cornell University representatives for the "Food Dignity" proposal.

Many UW faculty, staff and students are involved in the project, including Urszula Norton, Kent Becker, Bill Gribb, Cole Ehmke, Deborah Paulson, Jill Lovato, Cheryl Geiger, Leslie Darnall and Peggy McCrackin. 

For more information about the project, contact Darnall at (307) 766-2141, email ldarnall@uwyo.edu or visit the website at www.fooddignity.org .

Photo: Alexa Naschold admires cabbage at a community garden. Her mother, Christine M. Porter, UW Department of Kinesiology and Health assistant professor, received a $5 million grant for a multi-state sustainable community food project study. (Photo by Christine Porter)

"Gasland" film at UW includes Q&A with ranchers John & Catherine Fenton

Lifted this from Nancy Sindelar's excellent weekly e-mail newsletter:


Wednesday, April 6th, Laramie:  "Gasland" (2010) What happens with hydraulic fracturing when it's done around real people. Ranchers John and Catherine Fenton, who are featured in the Oscar-nominated film, will answer questions after the screening. 6 p.m., Education Auditorium, UW Campus.  Info:  www.gaslandthemovie.com, Jamie, 307-721-3097, jamie@wyomingoutdoorcouncil.org. Free.

Reports from the Cul-De-Sac Preservation Society

Are Liberal city dwellers trying to take away Conservative suburbanites’ God-given right to a cul-de-sac?

In November,  I wrote about the Tea Party’s latest bugaboo – "sustainable development." Tea Partiers, most of whom live in suburbs, are afraid that Liberal city dwellers are going to roust them from their cul-de-sac neighborhoods and stuff them into tiny Hobbit homes surrounded by light rail stations and Starbucks and pushy minorities. Sustainable development is the catch-all term for this alarming trend.

One of the scarifiers is Ed Braddy in Gainesville, Florida. He leads the American Dream Coalition. 

Another is Virginia activist Donna Holt (from Mother Jones):.

In Virginia, Holt is trying to whip up tea party opposition to a comprehensive development plan being drafted in Chesterfield County, where she lives near Richmond. She believes such plans will, among other things, ban cul de sacs, and she happens to live on one. So far, though, she hasn't made much progress with the county. "They don't want to hear from us," she says. "They think we are wackos with tinfoil hats."

After a recent trip to Florida, I have a bit more empathy for their cause.

Imagine that you are one of the millions of Americans who have worked very hard for a house in the suburbs. It’s a big house, bigger than you need for your two kids, but it’s an investment, right?  Americans want big houses with many bathrooms along tree-lined streets in family-friendly, low-density neighborhoods.  

Commercial development should be located far away, as convenience stores and big box stores bring in the riff-raff. You can walk the neighborhood but you can’t walk to work or school or the store.  That’s part of the charm. It’s what Americans want in their lifestyles.

That was the zeitgeist from the 1950s until now. That’s changing. Younger people (older types, too) want to live in the city surrounded by light rail and Starbucks and farmers' markets. They think that minorities make for a lively cityscape, as long as those minorities aren’t crackheads. New Urbanism has taken hold, even in the burbs. Developers want multi-use zoning that allows for more compact neighborhoods and local shopping and walkable schools and alternative energy. Public transportation is a sought-after commodity, not one to be feared.  

Meanwhile, housing prices have dropped precipitously. So much for that two-story, many-bathroomed mini-manse. Several foreclosures have cropped up in the neighborhood. Jobs are threatened. Surefire Wall Street investments don’t look so hot. Pensions are not a sure thing. People with foreign-sounding names are in the White House.

Some of the fears are real. They are stoked by the Tea Party and Fox News. Pretty soon you believe that government types are out to remove your cul-de-sac and put you in a hobbit home.

After spending a week in suburbs in north and central Florida, I understand that fear a bit better.  Without a GPS, I’d be challenged to find the homes of my sisters’ families in Tallahassee. In fact, GPS may have been invented for suburban sprawl. In olden times, streets were laid out in grids using numbers and letters. Almost every city has at last a remnant of that design.

Suburbs, especially in hilly Tallahassee, follow the terrain. Names are confusing, too. Winding Hills Street leads to Winding Hills Lane leads to Winding Hills Court which, of course, is a cul-de-sac. When you reach this dead end, you have to backtrack through the Winding Hills names to get to Forest Vista Street to Forest Vista Lane to Forest Vista Court and – you guessed it – another cul-de-sac. I imagine cars circling like the Flying Dutchman, searching for a way out of this confusion. Before GPS, of course. Now it’s a snap.

We drove long distances through Tallahassee neighborhoods without seeing a store, not even a convenience store, which are ubiquitous. Zoning and neighborhood groups hold stores at bay. The price you pay is that everyone in the family needs a car. The price we all pay is that all those cars pollute and lead to global warming.

As long as I’ve been alive – 60 years – the move has been to this sort of development and not the clustered, walkable, open-zoned, public transportation and locavore-friendly type being promoted  now. If these crazy ideas catch hold, how am I going to sell my house in 10 or 20 years? Could my neighborhood become a dead zone, with foreclosed falling-down houses and bad roads and crime and squatters? That old phrase of location location location would turn out to be a curse rather than a bonus.

Many of my friends around the U.S. live in old-style suburban developments. Many people I know in Cheyenne live out north and east so they can have peace and quiet and property and horses. They are unfettered by city zoning rules.

I live in a near-suburb, I guess you’d call it. I can walk to work but don’t. If needed, I could walk to stores to buy groceries, pastries, fast food, building supplies, beer, tires, pizza, sandwiches, tacos, insurance. I can walk to my credit union. During the summer, there’s a weekly farmer’s market nearby, although it’s moving downtown this year. When they were young, my kids walked or rode their bikes to school. The excellent Cheyenne Greenway is only blocks from our house. I could walk to the airport if needed, although there’s plenty of free parking.

You can probably guess that there are trade-offs. I live close to two of the busiest streets in Cheyenne – Dell Range and Yellowstone. The interstate is a half-mile away but I can hear the Harleys roar down it on August mornings. C-130s make a racket operating out of the Air National Guard base – its entrance is three blocks from my house. We have rental properties in the neighborhood. One of them is an eyesore. The other looks like a used car lot. We’ve had a few broken windows and robberies but nothing substantial, crime-wise.

I like my neighborhood. But I’m a city boy. I don’t want to live on the windy prairie. Or on a suburban cul-de-sac. These people are spitting into the wind. The age of cheap oil and the internal combustion engine and sprawl is drawing to a close. It's just a fact. And I'm not scared. 

Except of the Cul-De-Sac Preservation Society activists. They're a bit spooky. In their fears of being left behind, they may do some crazy things, such as elect a horde of Tea Partiers to Congress. 

City boy says: Let food freedom ring!

Today, I'm thinking about food.

No surprise. Yesterday was our annual eating extravaganza. I enjoyed Thanksgiving -- always do -- although I didn't do much beside cook two pies and take them to our friends' house where the rest of the goodies resided.

I didn't ask any annoying foodie questions, such as "were these sweet potatoes raised within 100 miles of Cheyenne?" That's the problem with foodies -- always asking annoying questions while we're trying to eat.

I ate some root crops: sweet potatoes, potatoes and onions. I ate wheat: dinner rolls, gravy and stuffing. I ate nuts: pecan topping on the mashed sweet potatoes. I ate turkey, of course, and cranberries. Green beans from the usual casserole. I ate apples and pumpkin in the pies. Olives.

Most of this could have been grown or raised in the general vicinity. Wyoming is known more for cattle and sheep than for its turkey ranching. But you could do it on a small scale. If not, maybe it's time to switch our local Thanksgivings to beef or lamb or elk or goose. You can get those locally. Alas, turkey is traditional and usually comes from big turkey farms located far away.

According to an article by Keith Goetzman in Utne Reader, more than 50 percent of Thanksgiving turkeys come from the Willmar Poultry Farm in Willmar, Minn. The Humane Society recently screened a video filmed secretly at the plant. Not a pretty picture. If you have the stomach for it, you can see it at http://www.utne.com/Politics/Where-Turkeys-Come-From.aspx.

Goetzman also recounts how meat-eaters and vegetarians square off across the Turkey Day table. He ends his piece by making a case for squash lasagna as a holiday main course.

Sounds good. My 17-year-old daughter, the vegetarian, would like it. So would I. But, alas, my daughter also likes the traditions of the day which include the succulent odors of cooking turkey. Good smells make good memories. And let's face it -- vegetarians have plenty of choices on the traditional table. Turkey and gravy are the only items that they can't eat. Dressing isn't stuffed into the bird any more and, if you don't add giblets to it, it's O.K. for vegetarians.

I strive to eat locally produced foods. My garden provides some during the warm season. It probably could provide more, according to the University of Wyoming Extension Service. And not by expanding my acreage. I could get additional growing time by taking advantage of my yard's microclimates. I also could invest in a small high tunnel or a small greenhouse. These people know their biz. They even have a magazine called Barnyards & Backyards which features farm/ranch/garden tips and interesting articles. You can subscribe by going to http://www.barnyardsandbackyards.com/.

A couple more food-related items. For one, I think it's time to invest in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). We now have a half-dozen farms within 100 miles which offer CSAs. I've been putting off joining because I thought I could grow all of my own but that isn't possible. I was checking out the web page for Meadow Maid Foods in Yoder, which is in Goshen County. The Ridenour family grows natural veggies and raises grass-fed beef. I've bought veggies and beef at the farmer's market and all of it was great. Meadow Maid has also leaped on the agri-tourism bandwagon, with tours of the property and workshops. Some places, such as Grant Farms in Wellington, Colo., bring their CSA customers in to help plant and weed and harvest. Agri-tourism could join the ranks of ranches offering hands-on experiences in trail drives and branding. This trend could eventually be huge in rural Wyoming.

And then there's Wyoming Food Freedom. In its proposed legislation, terms such as agri-tourism and farmers' markets come up often. WFF proposes to do away with onerous state and federal regulations that prevents "informed consumers" buying directly from "trusted producers." I support this. In fact, I find it a place where libertarians and liberals can meet without yelling and screaming. WFF realizes that Big Ag products are making us sick. I want to buy more products from local farmers and ranchers. I want to spend less time at the grocery store. I'm not sure about this whole raw milk thing. That seems to be a big issue -- buying unpasteurized milk directly from small dairies. Some of the rhetoric around this issue harkens back to "poisoning of our precious bodily fluids" days. But there may be some truth in what the raw-milkers say.

Our family bought raw goat's milk from a local producer for years. It was great, but I don't drink much milk so, when our milk-consuming son moved away, we stopped getting it. But there are many who swear by the stuff. We also know that pathogens can breed in milk if it's not handled correctly.

Meanwhile, I'm going to support Rep. Sue Wallis and WFF. On its web site, WFF contends that freeing up food commerce can add a billion dollars worth of stimulation to the state's ag economy. It would really beef up rural areas hit hard in the past few decades. It also might regenerate family farms, which are disappearing fast.

At yesterday's dinner, a man my age -- a local pharmacist -- spoke about the small family farm he grew up in in Scotts Bluff County, Nebraska, which is just across the border from Goshen County, Wyoming. The family ran the farm until it grew too expensive. His parents both got jobs in town. They sold some of the land to the railroad. They leased out the rest. Pretty soon they weren't farming any more. He said that he loves the way he grew up but that it's almost impossible to do so now.

It should be possible. So says this city boy.

Local food and local products at Cheyenne Winter Farmers' Market

The Wyoming Business Council sponsors the Cheyenne Winter Farmers Market on six Saturdays throughout the winter. The market will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. inside the Historic Train Depot in downtown Cheyenne. Dates are November 6 (missed this one), December 4, January 8, February 5, March 5, and April 2.

Some of the locally raised and produced products are all-natural eggs, meats from free-range animals (beef, lamb,  bison, chicken and turkeys), winter vegetables, salsa, soup mixes, local jams and honey, gourmet pasta, mushrooms, natural hand-crafted body care products, and much more.

For further information contact:
Kim Porter, Farmers Market & Education Program Manager
Phone: 307.777.6319
Fax: 307.777.2838