Environment

New Yorker - The winding turns and breathtaking coastal cliffs of California’s Highway 1 are iconic. They’ve been memorialized by writers such as Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller and in the opening credits of “Big Little Lies.” But, for the past decade, the highway has existed in a state of uncertainty, largely owing to our changing climate. In a rigorously reported new piece, Emily Witt travels to Big Sur, an idyllic hamlet situated in the central coast of California—and home to one of the most fragile stretches of the road. “From above, the mountains erode toward the sea, causing landslides; from below, waves pound at the cliffs, compromising their stability,” Witt writes. The highway is currently the only way in and out of the town, so many residents keep a stock of food, in case a closure cuts them off from the rest of the world. And yet Big Sur, to the chagrin of many locals, is more popular with tourists than ever before, causing further strain on the area’s infrastructure. “As in Venice, or Kyoto, residents have started discussing methods to limit the influx,” Witt discovered, including “capping the number of vehicles allowed in per day and, controversially, reducing access to the beach.” Most people seem to agree that, as climate conditions worsen, the area’s situation is unlikely to improve. But one thing remains true: Big Sur is a magical place. As one resident put it, “it’s a partnership between human and spirit.”

 High Country News - Melissa Shawcroft spent more than 30 years managing 250,000 acres of publicly owned grazing lands in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. A veteran employee of the Bureau of Land Management, Shawcroft retired earlier this month after years of working to reform the agency from within. She can now share her concerns in public without fear of reprisal, and her assessment of the agency is not pretty. The BLM, she believes, is failing to protect America’s public lands. She saw it in San Luis, she said: Despite her best efforts, many of the region’s rangelands are in a bad state — their springs running dry, native grasses depleted, and allotment boundaries relentlessly violated by trespassing ranchers who graze livestock without permission.  In an interview with High Country News, Shawcroft described a culture of complacency at the agency, which administers roughly 245 million acres of federal surface land across the nation and allows livestock grazing on some 155 million acres of it. "From what I have seen of the grazing program, even if I tell my supervisor that I think that an allotment is getting beat up, that it is not meeting land health standards, they don’t want to hear it,” she said. “They won’t do anything about it.” The troubled state of BLM grazing lands is not confined to Shawcroft’s corner of Colorado. According to data released today by the nonpartisan Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, 56.7 million acres of BLM rangeland fail to meet the agency’s land health standards, primarily owing to livestock grazing. Particularly hard-hit are the high, cold deserts of Nevada, Wyoming and southern Idaho; In Nevada alone, approximately 22 million acres of public grazing land do not meet health standards.