SPOT | A Bio/Visual Study of 39° 44′ 49″ N 105° 10′ 21″ W

I’ve begun a new project, inspired by the photographers involved with the Images for Conservation Fund and their Pro-Tour events. Those photographers compete over 30 days on selected ranches in Texas; the prizes are substantial and their work is excellent.

My project has a few differences: I will be photographing over the course of a year (at a minimum) and I will be focusing on a particular spot, rather than thousands of acres of ranch land. It is, essentially, a study of the diversity of life, both plant and animal, and of the visual variety to be discovered at a single location with latitude and longitude of 39° 44′ 49″ N 105° 10′ 21″ W. I began in September 2010 and will make weekly visits until August 2011. Then, we’ll see how satisfied I am with the work, the diversity of life, and the spot.

The chosen location sits at the urban-wildlands interface on South Table Mountain in Golden, Colorado. Though it seems to be great habitat for things like deer, multiple bird species, and myriad insects and plants, it is also surrounded by developed areas. To the south sits the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and, to the north, there is a test track for the Colorado State Police. The choice of such a location, on the margins between urban development and rich habitat  was deliberate.

The site has already provided interesting experiences–and, I believe, some interesting photography.

San Juan-Canyonlands Proposed Wilderness

I’d do most anything to help protect Southern Utah. It’s serpentine canyons, abstract geology, and rich archaeological holdings are hard to surpass. So, when I approached the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance about how I could help their cause to establish new wilderness areas in and around Canyonlands National Park and San Juan County, I was delighted to know they were looking for images from some of the most threatened and most incredible portions of the proposed wilderness area. One of them was White Canyon. So I set out to immerse myself in its phenomenal twists, slots, and pools, if only for a week.

When I returned from my brief excursion, I immediately contacted SUWA and let them know I would be happy to donate some of my images for their work. “That’s excellent,” they said. “Can we download some tonight? We’re meeting with a Senator tomorrow to make a presentation to him on our wilderness proposal. Your images would really help us make the case for its protection.” It was an incredible feeling, actually, knowing that my work would play even a small role in the area’s eternal protection by passing before the eyes of someone who has the power to sponsor such a bill in Congress. “By all means,” I said. “Take as many images as you need.” Let’s hope that the wilderness proposal soon becomes wilderness reality.

Entering the narrows of White Canyon, Utah, part of the San Juan-Canyonlands proposed wilderness area.

White Canyon makes a gorgeous, serpentine cut through Cedar Mesa, near Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. It lies at the heart of the proposed Glen Canyon Wilderness, where the vast expanse of Paleozoic-era sandstone known as Nokai Dome eases its way to the upper reaches of Lake Powell in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. This region also includes the soaring Wingate Cliffs of the Red Rock Plateau, Mancos Mesa, Moqui Canyon with its meandering stream, Red Canyon, and the serpentine side canyons of White Canyon. This is one of the most remote regions of the state, but it lacks protection and is threatened by increasing ORV use.

It is all part of the San Juan-Canyonlands region of Southeastern Utah is one of the most iconic landscapes recommended for protection in America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, boasting dramatic geologic features wrought by elemental forces, as well as internationally significant cultural sites of the Ancestral Puebloans and the Mormon Pioneers. Adorned with buttes and arches, vast stretches of slickrock deposited over 250 million years ago, ancient pinyon-juniper forests and an artist’s pallet of red-hued sandstone, the San Juan-Canyonlands region has inspired explorers since the days of John Wesley Powell, and its wonders represent some of the greatest unprotected wilderness in the country.

See more photography at www.chriscasephoto.com.

As Thoughtful As Zahniser

This article first appeared in Trail & Timberline magazine, in an issue devoted entirely to the subject of wilderness. To see the entire magazine, including the below article, CLICK HERE.
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“The wilderness…is indeed intensely human, and perhaps after all it is the human association with the wilderness—so intense, so remote from the artificial distractions of all our machines and contrivances—that gives to these wildlands their supreme value and gives to their preservation for still other human beings the ultimate justification and imperative.”
– Howard Zahniser

We could learn a lot from Howard Zahniser, and not just about the value of wilderness. His name is not often mentioned alongside the likes of Muir and Leopold, but his legacy may be more profound. Without the Wilderness Act that he authored—uniting the most wild of places into a system of wilderness reserves—the world might still be grappling with “a sequence of overlapping emergencies, threats, and defense campaigns,” the battleground against which he rallied in 1951.

“The wilderness that has come to us from the eternity of the past we have the boldness to project into the eternity of the future,” he wrote.

But to unite wilderness, he first had to unite opposing forces. His relentless promotion and justification for a wilderness bill was surpassed in significance only by his enduring pursuit of the broadest possible consensus around the bill. This may have been Zahniser’s greatest success. His dream was not to achieve any type of protection, but to forge a method of permanence, something he reasoned could only be achieved with respect and consideration for views unlike his own.

He searched for the virtues in the arguments of those who opposed wilderness, attempted to meet their objections with reason, and respected the integrity and sincerity of those on the other side of the wilderness line.

He did this not for himself but for wilderness. He genuinely yearned to reach some agreement whereby his interests and the interests of the opposition could be reconciled, for the benefit of wild places, wild things, and wild ideas.

It was his cloak of humility.

“Working to preserve in perpetuity is a great inspiration.
 We are not fighting a rear-guard action, we are facing a frontier.
 We are not slowing down a force that inevitably will destroy all the wilderness there is. We are generating another force, never to be wholly spent, that, renewed generation after generation, will be always effective in preserving wilderness.
 We are not fighting progress. We are making it.
We are not dealing with a vanishing wilderness.
 We are working for a wilderness forever.”

We want our Colorado to remain wild, like he wanted his wilderness to last forever. If you have no wild spaces in which to roam free, then how will you find yourself? If you can’t find calm in the singular tranquility of an alpine meadow, then what do you call serenity? If your views are muddied brown or your quiet shattered, then how will you ever think clearly?

Let us strive to be as thoughtful as Zahniser in whatever we do: meet opposition with wisdom, consider the opposition with admiration, stand true to our convictions and keep Colorado wild.

See more photography at www.chriscasephoto.com.

What’s Wilderness Worth?

This article first appeared in Trail & Timberline magazine, in an issue devoted entirely to the subject of wilderness. To see the entire magazine, including the below article, CLICK HERE.

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What’s wilderness worth? Listen to the eloquence of John Muir and Wallace Stegner; feel the passion of David Brower and study the methodical ethic of Aldo Leopold. Their words define wilderness. Yet, their thoughts never amounted to a sum value. Worth can—and in the case of wilderness, should—mean so much more.

Now, however, in an era of caustic debate falsely pitting land against man—landscape preservation against economic salvation—the answer to the question of what wilderness is worth has taken on new power.

“People opposed to wilderness began raising the economic question,” says John Loomis, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at Colorado State University. “Mining, timber, livestock grazing, even the chamber of commerce will say, ‘Oh my god, these are elitists that want wilderness.’”

So, after Loomis and other economists considered the question, we have wilderness economics—and can place a value on protected places, if we so feel the need.

Most of us know better than to rely on private enterprise to tell us the value—both tangible and intangible—of wilderness. The argument placed forth by extractive industries—that removal is the only use that yields wealth—is an epic lie. Theirs is a penchant for converting the natural wealth contained in the nation’s pristine forests, deserts, canyons, and mesas into a fleeting boon of corporate profit. It never lasts. Indeed, it can’t last.

Ultimately, the choice is not, and never has been, between mining (and money) and preservation (and poverty).

John Muir used powerful words to express the value of Yosemite Valley. Now, words aren't enough. Wilderness preservation has been positioned by some as the opponent of economy salvation, albeit falsely. Still,wilderness economics begs the question: How much would you pay to see a place like Yosemite last for eternity? How much would you pay to make sure your grandchild had a chance to witness mists rise from the valley floor?

As many people are now realizing— politicians, boards of tourism, and county commissioners alike—wilderness means money, too. And wilderness lasts.

As many of the early wilderness proponents—trained scientists—knew, wilderness protection was about far more than recreation. “There is economic value just by preserving it,” Loomis says, referring to those less tangible benefits that have for so long been ignored. “Economic valuation provides some balance to the environment versus people dichotomy, which is a false comparison.”

But why has it taken so long for people to realize the sum value of wilderness? It may have to do with the complexity of economic valuation.

We can all see (and many of us take part in) the direct use benefits: things like hiking and hunting. Furthermore, the science community needs wilderness as a baseline for research and education. We all benefit from wilderness’ capacity to improve the resources most precious for life: air and water. These and other ecosystem services, as they are known, continue to gain prominence in the grand scheme of land protection, as we learn more about the benefits of carbon storage, nutrient cycling, and waste treatment provided by wilderness. Still, these things only constitute a portion of the total value of wilderness and wild landscapes.

The difficulty in understanding and calculating the sum value comes from things economists call passive-use values. They’re often broken into three categories: option values, bequest values, and existence values. The option value is akin to an insurance policy: people are willing to pay for more than their expected recreation benefits to maintain the option—for themselves or for their children—of visiting wildlands in the future. Similarly, the bequest value of wilderness protection represents what we would be willing to pay to bequest wildlands to our kids. Hardest to grasp, perhaps, is existence value, the notion that there is a psychological value a person enjoys from just knowing that a wilderness exists—regardless of whether the person will ever visit an area.

Politicians have tended to ignore the wilderness economics numbers. Preferring to cater to extractive priorities, they have chosen to view profit dollars through the short-term lens—that which is present and understandable—rather than employing more complex arithmetic to determine the economic value of a place over generations.

Yet, the figures for simple recreation—something that is tangible and profit-based—are stunning. In 1995, U.S. Forest Service economists measured the agency’s holdings and found that national forests generated $125 billion a year in economic activity. An astounding 75 percent of that figure was based on recreation economy. Timber and mining, by contrast, amounted to 15 percent. By 1995, it had become all too apparent that recreation, and not timber, was the Forest Service’s main product.

Furthermore, recently developed economic models have shown that public lands benefit more from quiet recreation—the hunting, fishing, hiking, and camping that take place so often in wilderness—than from motorized recreation. In Colorado’s Arapaho and Roosevelt national forests, for example, nonmotorized recreation provided 1,228 jobs and $37.8 million in income, compared with 244 jobs and $11.7 million for motorized recreation.

So, what does this all mean for a place like Colorado?

No case study may be more applicable than Kane County, Utah, which lies about 210 miles south of Salt Lake City. That’s because Kane County, home to much of the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, was once the site of one of Utah’s most intense wilderness battles. It started in 1996, when the Clinton administration designated the 1.7 million-acre monument. That made Bill Clinton in Kane County about as popular as George Bush in Berkeley.

Alarmist predictions of economic disaster coursed through the small town and county seat of Kanab after plans to open a coal mine on the monument’s grassy Kaiparowits Plateau were halted by the designation. Instead of visions of boom, there were omens of bust.

Contrary to the residents’ worst fears, the bust never came. Instead, economic findings suggest that Kane County began to thrive. A comparison of data from the four years prior to the monument’s creation (1992–1996) with data from the four years after showed that the unemployment rate in the county dropped by more than half, while labor income rose faster than it had in the pre-monument period. Per-job earnings, which fell 7 percent before the monument, rose 13 percent after it was created. Property values rose significantly, too (after seeing a decline in years leading up to the designation). And, on Main Street, the average wage per job went up.

With the fortunes of the county hitched to the well-being of the mining industry and, therefore, at the mercy of globally determined price trends, Kane County could have suffered a roller coaster economic ride.

Instead, there was a path to sustainable growth. It wasn’t from a short-term influx of coal mining revenues. Word migrated that the area had a new monument. Some started visiting; others moved their businesses to Kanab, population 4,500, or decided to retire in Kane County.

An influx of retirees spurred growth in health-care jobs. Recreation boomed, of course. And, services that cater to the traveler grew, too.

Best of all, the landscape that drew all of this attention is never going to pack up and leave the area.

It, like all federally designated wilderness areas, lives on like the words of Muir, Stegner, Brower, and Leopold: forever.

See more photography at www.chriscasephoto.com.