In Site

We’ve podcasted about the Lake Powell Pipeline, so we thought, as the drought continues and water levels continue to drop, let’s go have a look. We told our board about the idea and it turns out that board member Catherine Smith rafted the Colorado River through Glen Canyon as a teenager in 1955. We were so pleased that she insisted on coming along. We included David Petitt, a well-known photographer now painter, and of course, our producer and host Logan, his wife Angie, and our assistant producer Ben.The level when we took our trip in May was only 1/4 full at 3523 feet – just 33 feet above the minimum power pool of 3,490 feet, or where there’s not enough water to run the power generators. Dead pool is 120 feet lower, at 3,370 feet. Because the lake dropped about 40 feet in 2021 they have been releasing 500,000 acre-feet from Flaming Gorge to delay that moment of truth.But the big picture is that Lake Powell is really only of value to generate power, tourist economy aside. So if it drops below minimum power pool, then evaporation and rock-saturation coefficients start to play in. If preserving water is the sole priority, why expose all this surface area and let it seep into the sandstone? It starts to look like better water sense to send as much water as possible to Lake Mead. It’s an immense, critical set of decisions the water lords have to make in the face of the harshest drought in 1200 years, and due to climate change, looking like the new normal.Now suddenly the Glen Canyon Institute — premised on draining the lake and revitalizing the river and deemed “looney” by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch — is gaining prominence, with Director Eric Balken finding himself in interviews in the New Yorker. At the end of the episode, we interview him too so he can help us make sense of our observations of both beauty and tragedy inherent in Glen Canyon’s re-emergence.As we explored the re-emerging canyon, we also looked for Ancestral Puebloan evidence. Having found little, we reached out to Erik Stanfield, an archaeologist with Navajo Nation. You’ll his voice about halfway through the episode. Our trip begins with a long walk down temporary ramps as Bullfrog Marina continues to have to move deeper and deeper into the canyon as water vanishes.

For anyone concerned about the current global state of Democracy, which should be everyone, Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister, may be our greatest hope:“I’m not here to make citizens transparent to government, I’m here to make government transparent to citizens.”She has flipped Big Brother, proving that this very same unprecedented internet connectivity can be harnessed to cultivate and manifest the very best of us as well — connecting instead of isolating, confirming truths instead of spreading lies, distributing power instead of consolidating it.Very much due to Audrey’s work, Taiwan shot from 31st to 11th on the Economist’s Global Democracy Index to become a “Full Democracy,” and Asia's most advanced democracy. At the same time, the U.S. dropped from 8th to 25th, now a “Flawed Democracy,” also due very much to one man.Here’s a foundational story of how she started down this road. During the 2014 Sunflower Revolution in Taipei, students and dissidents peacefully occupied the Taiwan Yuan, or parliament, for 22 days protesting a trade deal with mainland China, or the PRC. Audrey flew in from Silicon Valley, borrowed a laptop, plugged into 300 meters of ethernet cable, and connected over 500,000 citizens and over twenty NGOs in a real-time dialogue towards what she would ultimately call “rough consensus.” The demonstration won the day and resulted in a new trade agreement, very much due to Audrey’s remarkable and unprecedented real-time connectivity. The students remained completely peaceful throughout and respectfully cleaned up the parliament before they left, unlike other Congressional occupations of late. Powerful people in Taiwan’s conservative government took note of what Audrey was doing, and called her in to talk… and so it began…I’ve listened to this interview countless times while editing, and I’m still hearing new things, so the odds are she’s going to just lose you, both with the technology and her philosophy. So here are two quick shorthands for each.Per the tech: Virtually everything referred to, from Distributed and Polycentric ledgers to Multi-dimensional spaces to reverse accountability assures transparency, and empowers citizens, inspiring openness, real-time action, and the deployment of people’s different viewpoints. It all encourages plurality as a way to demonstrate, as she puts it, “our shared values are hiding in plain sight.”     And all her philosophy, from calling herself a “post-gender, conservative anarchist” to the Lao Tzu and Taoist quotes sprinkled through this interview, are about cycling and returning power and voice to citizens, re-energizing the deepest, most fundamental precept of democracy: Power to the People.View our complete show notes here: http://zioncanyonmesa.org/podcast-archive/steer-the-wind-audrey-tang-is-saving-the-worldhttps://oftaiwan.org/social-movements/sunflower-movement/https://g0v.tw/intl/en/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tanghttps://theasiadialogue.com/2018/05/23/tsais-second-year-the-emergence-of-non-partisans-in-taiwan/https://wtfisqf.com/?grant=&grant=&grant=&grant=&match=1000https://www.snopes.com/articles/386830/misinformation-vs-disinformation/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting#:~:text=Quadratic%20voting%20is%20a%20collective,voting%20paradox%20and%20majority%20rule.

In Part 3, we continue searching for that special something that no one can quite put their finger on; whatever it is that is drawing people to Helper like a magnet. Gary DeVincent made his way to Helper because he has an eye for quality. He has been restoring old motorcycles and cars his whole life, giving him a penchant for recognizing things that were built with care and intention. So, several years ago when he saw the beautiful but run-down buildings on Helper’s main street he saw a project. Now he is doing everything he can to shorten the distance between now and then, restoring buildings to their original look with a vision of turning Helper into a romantic getaway. Again, we see how caring—the caring construction of the early 20th century—begets caring—the intention to revitalize and honor that caring and create new opportunities in the process.The impetus behind his and many other restoration efforts often appears to be nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time when things were built with higher quality and when there seemed to be a lot of excitement and opportunity (at least for certain people). But it’s even nostalgia for a time when life was harder. This has prompted me to ask, What is it about the way we live our lives today that leaves us wanting something else? You’ll hear every one of the people I talk to in this episode, Gary DeVincent, Jaron Anderson, and Shalee Johansen, mention in their own words that Helper lacks pretense, that it feels authentic, and it’s that feeling of authenticity that is drawing them to Helper. But what happens when authenticity is ultimately obtained? When it becomes the commodity? Take a listen to find out if Helper can hang on to whatever it is that makes it so special, as the town continues to be revitalized.We ask these questions and more as a way to continue exploring the mysteries of what brings together and then maintains that elusive sense of community.  Sure, we're talking specifically about Helper, interesting enough in itself.  But we're also examining Helper in light of these broader questions. At the end of this podcast, Logan and Ben will consider what these interviewees have said to see if Helper offers itself as a microcosm to understand the slippery nature of community.

In her new book Gender(s), a new volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kathryn Bond Stockton explores the fascinating, fraught, intimate, morphing matter of gender. Stockton argues for gender's strangeness, no matter how normal the concept seems; gender is queer for everyone, she claims, even when it's played quite straight. And she explains how race and money dramatically shape everybody's gender, even in sometimes surprising ways. Playful but serious, erudite and witty, Stockton marshals an impressive array of exhibits to consider, including dolls and their new gendering, the thrust of Jane Austen and Lil Nas X, gender identities according to women's colleges, gay and transgender ballroom scenes, and much more.Stockton also examines gender in light of biology's own strange ways, its out-of-syncness with male and female, explaining attempts to fortify gender with clothing, language, labor, and hair. She investigates gender as a concept--its concerning history, its bewitching pleasures and falsifications--by meeting the moment of where we are, with its many genders and counters-to-gender. This compelling background propels the question that drives this book and foregrounds race: what is the opposite sex, after all? If there is no opposite, doesn't the male/female duo undergirding gender come undone?

With the downturn of the coal mines in the 70s and 80s came a period of economic decline for Helper, Utah. The town was starting to look a little shabby, so proud residents Neida Garcia and Lois Giordano took it upon themselves to spruce things up a bit. They started planting flowers on Main Street with a hunch that caring would beget caring. They were right. Every business on Main Street wanted to be a part of it, and pretty soon there were pots of flowers outside every storefront. But it didn’t stop there. One day in the 80s, artists Dave Dornan and Marilou Kundmueller finally pulled off the freeway and onto Helper’s Main Street after one of their many trips to southern Utah for artist workshops. They had long been dreaming of hosting their own workshops, and when they passed a building for sale Marilou said, “wouldn’t it be nice to have a building like this?” Dave and Marilou bought the old Hotel Utah and began hosting artist workshops while also working on their own art. Some Helper residents were skeptical until they began to see the results of these artists’ caring. The restoration of the building improved the aesthetic of Helper and the workshops brought much-needed life to this sleepy town.In this episode, you will hear how Dave Dornan’s artwork is inseparable from this story. He’s not interested in finding the beauty in things that are decidedly valuable but in finding “the beauty in something that could become valuable.” Through painting an old useless carburetor he breathes new life into it. Through picking and painting a rose from Chris Diamanti’s incredible rose garden, he turns the retired miner’s caring into an icon through his own form of caring: art. And this is the story of Helper, Utah; caring begets caring. Soon other artists started to realize that Helper could allow them to pursue their careers in a place where they could really be a part of a community. One of the many artists to follow Dave and Marilou’s lead was Kate Kilpatrick. Inspired by people’s coal mining and railroading stories, Kate began painting portraits of Helper’s residents as a way to remember these individuals and their stories. This process developed into her “Faces of Helper” series, which has seen six installments so far, and which truly bridges worlds, uniting Helper’s coal mining and railroading past with its new economy based on the arts and tourism. Kate’s work reminds us that none of this would even be possible without Helper’s unique story. Each face immortalized on canvas holds nostalgia for the good times in their smile lines, coal dust and worries over union rations in their forehead wrinkles. Take a listen to find out how artists helped the town shift to a new economy, buoyed always by Helper’s story, forging a new chapter of community, built solidly on the old. 

What constitutes a community? What do they form around, the seed? What makes them persist over time?Helper, Utah was founded as a “helper engine” town in 1881. Here trains would pick up an extra engine to help them up the steep, relentless grade of Price Canyon and over Soldier Summit. At the beginning of the 20th century, Helper was a booming railroading and coal mining community. It was also the most diverse place in Utah, with 27 different languages spoken in the town. Coal later diminished in value, and eventually started to run out, and the community has been forced to find a new way. From flower-planting to the inception of an annual arts festival, to the revitalization of Main Street’s historic buildings, Helper is finding ways to hold onto its story, while simultaneously moving forward with an entirely new economy, one based on the arts and tourism.To understand how Helper found itself in this moment, where an economic shift is necessary, and to find out if locals are on board with this shift, we interview three Helper residents. In this episode, we speak with Jean Boyack, sometimes referred to as the “Mother of Helper”. We also talk to Richard Colombo, long-time owner of the R&A Market in Helper. He also served with the Helper Fire Department for 41 years, recently retiring from his position as Chief. And we speak with Mike O’Shea, who was born and raised in Helper and was the principal at a local elementary school. Each of these residents came from coal mining or railroading families and has observed Helper through boom times, decline, and revitalization.Listen to find out what is contributing to the apparent ease and speed with which Helper's economic shift is taking place. Is it Helper's history of diversity? Its union history? Could the name Helper play some role here? Does economic revitalization just take a few individuals who care? Are new residents and old-timers alike on board with change? Is it the creation of opportunity, gentrification, or both? What does the future hold for Helper, Utah? A few but not all of these questions we hope to answer in part one of this series on Helper, Utah.

The American West somehow still maintains its foothold in the global subconscious, its raw and alluring brew of archetypes, wide-open dreamscapes of canyons and mountains, cowboys and Indians, grizzly bears and buffalo.  As such, quote/unquote “Western Art” continues to make coin by milking these fantasies. But of course, that West is long gone, if it ever really existed. What remains?  What really happened here?  Where are we going? What is happening to the land, the indigenous peoples, the scant and ever-diminishing waters?  Who and where are the voices that will lead us forward? Diane Stewart’s Modern West Gallery has made its name by unflinchingly addressing these hard questions through art.  Diane, her family firmly grounded in the West, believes that art offers a unique path forward, and the Modern West Gallery her instrument to do so.But hold on.  This re-opening night, for a carefully curated exhibit called “Variant,” was a celebration.  We collectively just emerged from the strangest of years to gather yet again, feel human, listen to live music (thank you Reckless Gestures), and drink free wine.  Party at the Modern West!   In this podcast, we hang out with Diane and the three uniquely gifted artists she carefully chose to help us reflect on and move forward from this surreal year, Jorge Rojas, Al Denyer, and Paul Reynolds.  Though they all share a passion for social and environmental justice, they couldn’t be more different as artists.  How did they each respond to these times?  What emerged from them after a year of isolation?  How does mixing activism and art work?  How can we describe art without using impenetrable, pretentious language?  Is Pinot Noir really red wine, really?  Join us to find out.  Scroll down to view their art.

 “WOOOOO!  To see the beauty. To see the beauty.  It feels like you want to put all that beauty on top of you like that in the morning when the sun comes up and everything, you know?...and then at night, to be able to stand on Mother Earth to look out among the stars…so then things have changed and I’ve been baptized a bunch of times you know, but all that has gone…”  - Henry Real Bird on Zion National ParkHenry was born in 1948 and raised on the Crow Indian Reservation; he spoke only Crow until entering first grade.  Those cultural rhythms and traditions remain the primary influence on his poetry. He earned his Master’s in Education and has taught everything from kindergarten, 4H and Head Start to serving as president of Little Big Horn College. He rode bucking broncs in rodeos until he busted his hip, which somehow led him to poetry. He has written six anthologies, four poetry collections, and twelve children’s books, which he also illustrated.  He served as Montana’s Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2011, was named the 2011-2012 Academy of Western Artists Cowboy Poet of the Year, and his poetry collection “Horse Tracks” was named 2011 Poetry Book of the Year by the High Plains Book Awards.Henry lives on his ranch along Yellow Leggins Creek in the Wolf Teeth Mountains: "Now I'm raising bucking horses, writing, and dreaming."  “I’m amazed with some of the thoughts that I’m blessed with.”  - Henry Real BirdWe’d like to thank the Western Folklife Center for allowing us to use on-site recordings of Henry’s thoughts while at a Sun Dance and while horseback riding.

“I’m interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value.” C. Thi NguyenThis podcast is the first of a series on “The Anthropology of Truth.”  Today in the U.S., truth, facts, and science are under unprecedented assault.  What is happening?  Is this just old news for us, perhaps forever stuck in Plato’s Cave, mesmerized by the shadows?  Or is there something about our high-tech and social media landscapes that act as accelerants and multipliers of our flaws?  Throughout this series, we’ll explore different aspects of the Truth to see if we can figure something out.  We can’t think of a better way to start laying these issues on the table than with the philosopher Thi Nguyen.With a solid background in classic Western Philosophy, Thi unleashes Descartes’ “Evil Demon” onto our current tech and social media landscape, then considers the resulting mayhem.  The Demon disrupts our lines of trust, and at every turn offers us a clearer, easier but flattened interpretation of reality. Thi brings the current assault on truth, facts, and science into focus by combining the dynamics of echo chambers, “moral outrage porn,” game theory, and the hazards of quantifying complex environments.  “I'm associate professor of philosophy at University of Utah. I’m interested in the ways in which our rationality and agency are socially embedded – about how our ways of thinking and deciding are conditioned by features of social organization, community, technology, and art practices. I’m also interested in the structures and nature of the interdependences we have with one another – and with our artifacts, practices, and institutions.” C. Thi Nguyen

It’s impossible. A horn section in Burkina Faso backs a string quartet in Lyon, France, together with guitarists in Nepal and Madrid while a choir in Manila supports the singer in Haiti and an African kora soloist, and we aren’t halfway through the video. Everyone plays outside, in city streets, courtyards, in front of temples, in marketplaces, train yards, beaches, jungles and deserts, visuals that immediately impart a compelling sense of that place. Each player brings nuances from their own musical culture, resulting in a fresh and distinct feel. One could write a book just about these rhythmic confluences. As a Playing For Change Foundation school teacher observed, “it’s where all cultural diversities collide into one beautiful harmony.”Informed by years of recording studio experience and powered by his love and utter faith in music, Mark Johnson pursued his vision of traveling songs around the world to bring people together.  Along with co-founder Whitney Kroenke Silverstein, they’ve grown a single such video, “Stand By Me,” into an international movement. It’s a new art form, a sound engineer’s vision. And in this moment that finds us isolated by Covid and wounded by the toxins coursing through our social media, they prove that such technology can also unite through the intimacy and immediacy of music.The hundreds of songs he’s recorded and filmed take many forms. Some for the pure joy of  music, some for healing by embracing different sides within a violence-torn country like Colombia, or between musicians at home and expatriated across the world as with Cuba, or between Israelis and Palestinians, or only with children. In the process they have recorded more than 1200 musicians in over sixty countries, generated over a billion YouTube hits, created a touring band, founded the Playing For Change Foundation — a separate 501(c)(3) organization that currently supports fifteen music and arts schools in eleven countries,  and partnered with the UN for a global virtual event in celebration of their 75th anniversary.Today we talk with Mark about how he made all this happen, building schools, producing concerts and especially his trust in music and what it’s like to circle the globe with songs in search of musicians and dancers.Please check out both their organization and foundation websites (links in the show notes below) to read about their many awards, videos, partners, and supporters.   “It’s an unbroken chain of human connectivity, one to the next that keeps going around and around the world.”

Join Teresa Jordan and Kim Stafford in an ongoing conversation about practice. They talk about the benefits of cultivating a daily practice, not just for the purpose of becoming a better artist or writer, but also because it can improve one’s life. As Kim puts it, you may not write something good every day, but if you write every day “it will be a better day.”Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, where he has taught writing since 1979. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and A Thousand Friends of Rain: New & Selected Poems.  His most recent books are 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared, and Wind on the Waves: Stories from the Oregon Coast. In 2016 the 30th anniversary edition of his collections of essays, Having Everything Right, came out from Pharos Editions. His most recent book is Singer Come from Afar (Red Hen Press, 2021). From 2018-2020 he served as Oregon’s Poet Laureate, and he has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan.Teresa Jordan is an artist, author, and storyteller who grew up in a house full of books on an isolated ranch in Wyoming. The love of learning she acquired in the local one-room school carried her to Yale and into a lifetime of inquiry.Her books include the memoir Riding the White Horse Home and two illustrated journals, Fieldnotes from Yosemite: Apprentice to Place, and Field Notes from the Grand Canyon: Raging River, Quiet Mind. Her first book, Cowgirls: Women of the American West, was one of the earliest books to give voice to contemporary women working on the land. Her newest book is The Year of Living Virtuously, Weekends Off, inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s list of thirteen virtues and the seven deadly sins. It was awarded the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, the Utah Book Award and the da Vinci Eye Award for Cover Art, and is being translated into both Hindi and Korean.The recipient of several awards including a literary fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Western Heritage Award from the Cowboy Hall of Fame, Teresa lives in a historic pecan orchard in southern Utah where she and Hal raise a small band of Navajo Churro sheep.

Craig Childs makes a point of going to the very places he’s writing about and immersing himself in them. In The Secret Knowledge of Water, he traces his very being into the rock itself by mapping waterholes in the Cabeza Prieta. In House of Rain, he follows the Ancestral Puebloans across the desert, walking in their footsteps to gain a particular kind of understanding. In Virga and Bone, he immerses himself in aridness and walks through it with curiosity directed at his very affinity for it. In Apocalyptic Planet he backpacks through cornfields in Iowa, among other similarly wild trips, because, as he puts it, “that’s the way I prefer to be in the world.”In this episode, Craig joins us from the front porch of his home in western Colorado, with snowflakes swirling around him and ravens croaking in the junipers. He talks about how stories are not the place but show the shape of a place. He shares several examples of how stories tend to repeat in the same places over and over again simply because of the geology, or other mysterious (but possibly simple) factors science hasn’t yet caught up to. We decided to save ghost stories for another time. We ask Craig to share his thoughts on the many obstacles that can keep us from connecting deeply to place today. He touches on social media, the internet, and other things that can remove us further and further from the land. This removal results in disassociation, Craig says. “We won’t remain disassociated as a species and survive,” he continues, “because then you don’t care about anything.”We discuss the conundrum of being descendants of white colonizers, while at the same time being rooted in the places where fate has deposited us. Craig believes that we have a responsibility to give back to these places and their people who have given so much to us. Much of his work is an effort to do this. “I’ll be dead and gone before I ever really figure out what needs to be fed back to this place and the people of this place,” he says. “But at least I can get close, at least I can do my best.”Finally, Craig reads from his journal, excerpts that may or may not make it into Tracing Time, his forthcoming book about rock art, to be published by Torrey House Press. Craig Childs has published more than a dozen books. He has won the Orion Book Award and has twice won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, and the Spirit of the West Award for his body of work. He is contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men's Journal, and Outside. He is a contributor to the blog “The Last Word on Nothing.” He has a B.A. in Journalism from CU Boulder with a minor in Women's Studies, and from Prescott College, an M.A. in Desert Studies. An occasional commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, he teaches writing at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and the Mountainview MFA at Southern New Hampshire University. He lives outside of Norwood, CO.He is interviewed by Zion Canyon Mesa’s Ben Kilbourne.

Having created historical context for the pipeline in two previous podcasts, In Site now explores the pipeline itself.  Jane Whalen, board member of Conserve Southwest Utah and Coordinator of the Lake Powell Pipeline Coalition, was the primary architect of their collective, incredibly thorough and detailed one hundred and eighty-six page objection to the pipeline (see link below).  Quite simply, nobody involved with the pipeline understands it better than Jane. We focused on the pipeline because the Zion Canyon Mesa intends to actively participate in critical issues directly facing our home here in Washington County.  In these strange, unmoored and disturbing times, it seems that part of the problem is we simmer too long in disconnected online ethers, then break into reality off kilter, and with increasing violence.  We believe that rooting firmly in our chosen landscapes and communities will provide an immediate level of stability and sanity, and suggest a path forward as well.We prioritized the pipeline issue because it was one of about sixty projects nationwide that the Trump administration placed on their Fast Track.  This greatly compressed some review processes and outright dismissed others; approval seemed imminent.  However, that suddenly and utterly changed when the six other states of the Colorado River Compact  (see the previous podcast with Eric Kuhn) submitted a joint letter to Utah threatening lawsuits, saying there were any number of Compact issues needing resolution before even entering a Fast Track.  Utah’s two pipeline proponents, the Utah Department of Natural Resources and the WCWCD, responded by immediately withdrawing for at least two years to address the Compact concerns. To Jane’s credit, the issues she helped raise in the Coalition review match those expressed by the other Compact states, so our review here will touch on these comprehensive concerns.Finally, we want to act as an honest broker for respectful dialogue about such issues.  As such, this podcast was originally going to feature a dialogue between Jane and WCWCD representatives Zach Renstrom, General Manager, and Karry Rathje, their Communications & Government Affairs Manager.  We want to really thank them for their willingness to participate in this discussion.  However, recent events allow us all to step back and take a deep breath.  We hope that Zach and Karry will join us soon so they can speak for themselves.  At stake: do we, the citizens of Washington County, collectively want to invest perhaps $2Billion of our tax dollars into this project?

“A map of the American West is a Rorschach test; people see what they want to see as reflections of who they are.” Betsy Gaines QuammenBetsy’s conservation work in Mongolia with Buddhist monks on fisheries and in Bhutan for snow leopards centered on finding common ground between religion’s ancient roots and the modern precepts of conservation.  After continuing such work with Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders in the U.S., she was drawn to the idea of exploring these possibilities with a uniquely American, relatively recent religion, Mormonism.  Writing her PhD dissertation on the early, successful collaboration of the federal government and LDS leaders to create Zion National Park in 1919 led her to explore the Mormon principles emerging in current public land battles.  She discovered a heady, distinctly American brew that sits of the intersection of religion and prophesy in Mormonism and cowboy mythology.  This culminates in the emerging militia movement and the Bundy’s belief that the U.S. Constitution is sacred text, that their public lands crusade is divinely inspired and those who oppose them are not just wrong but evil.     Betsy Gaines Quammen is interviewed by Zion Canyon Mesa board member Kirsten Allen. Kirsten is Co-Founder, Publisher and Executive Director of Torrey House Press, where American Zion was published this March."This book is like a skeleton key, unlocking so many complicated, and largely unquestioned, myths of the West."  —ANNE HELEN PETERSEN, BuzzFeed News

Today we talk with Daniel Kemmis. Daniel studied both philosophy and political science, and names Plato, Rousseau, Jefferson, and Gandhi as his primary influences. He was minority leader and speaker of the house in the Montana State Legislature during the ‘80s, when the Sagebrush Rebellion was at its height. Later, he served as Mayor of Missoula. The intense dysfunction of those times, together with the fiercely contested land issues, inspired Kemmis to write the seminal book Community and the Politics of Place, and develop the Kemmis method for finding compromise.Some years back, Zion National Park’s gateway community of Springdale was deeply divided from intense growing pains, verging on violence to where county sheriffs needed to attend town meetings.  Zion Canyon Mesa’s Chairperson Louise Excell, together with artist Lynn Berryhill, created the “Embracing Opposites” conferences to address this division and invited Daniel to share his methods. Here, Louise interviews Daniel to discuss those ideas, the remarkable repercussions of “Embracing Opposites," then dive into his latest book Citizens Uniting to Restore Our Democracy, which he wrote as a response to these even more contentious times.We recorded this episode on the eve of the 2020 election, but even after, it is clear that our country is divided, and our democracy begs for a practical path forward. One of Kemmis's lodestones is Jefferson's vision of educated citizens deeply involved in public life. He argues that our loss of capacity for public life parallels our loss of sense of place. "A renewed sense of community, rooted in place, and of people dwelling in that place in a practiced way can shape politics into a more cooperative, productive, and satisfying enterprise." Daniel says that this sense of place and sense of community is made more difficult by the failure of citizens to insist that corporations adhere to certain standards for the common good. He argues that corporations cannot be citizens in a true sense and that their power over our lives thwarts our own efforts at active citizenship. “If a corporation is going to call itself and claim the advantages of being a corporate citizen, it must put its shoulder to the wheel, and help build. Left to themselves, of course, corporations are not going to practice citizenship in this way. The main reason is that they are not inhabitants in the same way that other residents of a place are. The corporations’ chief loyalty is not to the place but to the shareholders and executives who almost always live somewhere else.”

The Spanish enslavement of Indigenous peoples across the Southwest was an immense market in humans, second only to that of African Americans. Severed from their lands and cultures, how did some of them create a path forward? Who are the Genízaro? How can Catholicism and Indigenous traditions coexist, perhaps even synergize, in one community? And how can photography act as medicine?Today we talk with documentary photographer Russel Albert Daniels. He begins with the incredible story of his great great Grandmother Rose, who was captured from her Diné homeland by a band of Utes and sold to a Mormon settler in the Uinta Basin. We will talk about how this story led Russel to the Genízaro people in northern New Mexico. This project titled "The Genízaro Pueblo of Abiquiú" is in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and can be viewed here. It's Part One of Russel's series exploring Native American slavery in the Southwest.He is interviewed by Zion Canyon Mesa’s Ben Kilbourne.

Here we explore the ongoing repercussions of slavery, observed through the microcosm of Natchez, Mississippi, with Richard Grant, in his fifth book “The Deepest South of All.”   Moving from England to Mississippi, Richard brings this distinct perspective and keen, compassionate eye to try to understand the “sleight of mind” that America still maintains about our greatest original sin. In Natchez, he found a town that both studiously maintains its Confederate “Gone with the Wind” mythology but also elected a gay black man for mayor with 91% of the vote.  In its time, it was the site of both the second largest slave market in the U.S. and the most millionaires per capita; of course, those two are directly related.  Richard never intended to be a writer; we talk at first about his path from England to becoming a New York Times best-selling author. Then we address the multi-layered, deeply human complexities that enable both slavery and collective forgetfulness, and its ramifications for today.  In this moment of Black Lives Matter and an America in perhaps our most disturbing identity crises since the Civil War, Richard’s insights couldn’t be more timely.   Please see the Show Notes for links to Richard and his works, and feel free to comment.

Eric digs into how politicians ignored drought data to create the 1922 Colorado River Compact, and how that intentional myopia continued for almost a century.  Today, the entire basin must finally reckon with what has been true all along; that the allocated water just is not there.  He busts two foundational myths along the way, one about the science and data, and the other about water use.  He then situates the Lake Powell Pipeline (LPP) into the present moment of truth, setting the stage for our next, perhaps final podcast about the LPP itself.  We say “perhaps,” because if this story continues to unfold as dynamically as in the last couple weeks, we will need another podcast later to keep up.  To wit: ALL the other basin states just signed a letter threatening court action unless Utah commits to resolving key LLP issues through the Compact itself, per the agreement. Utah responded by asking the Bureau of Reclamation to extend the deadline for their environmental study, giving everyone more time and breathing room. This steps the LLP back from President Trump’s “Fast Track,” which he has conferred on about sixty other projects nationwide, including Washington County’s Northern Corridor Highway.  Stay tuned…Eric Kuhn is the co-author of Science be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River. He was General Manager of the Colorado River Conservation District (CRCD) for twenty-two years.  The CRDC is a government entity formed in 1937 which oversees Colorado River basin issues for the state.  He is also author of any number of papers about Colorado River water use and law, including an excellent piece linked in our Show Notes about the crux, upcoming 2026 Compact summit.Eric Kuhn1922 Colorado River CompactInkstain BlogScience Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River by Eric Kuhn and John FleckThe Colorado RiverImperial ValleyAll American CanalImage from space Rivers of Empire by Donald Worster Pat Mulroy and the “Valentines Day Massacre” for Las Vegas water - (the “Massacre” bit is about ¾ the way down, but the whole article is worth reading) Royce Tipton 2007 Interim Agreement - Record of Decision and American Rivers Article2019 Drought Contingency PlanTesting the Drought Contingency Plan 2026 Colorado River Compac

“No one can miss the alarm now in the air.”  Barry Lopez, “Horizon”He was born on the Epiphany of 1945 and died this Christmas. During a reading years ago, he created a spell of silence over the crowd with a particularly compelling piece. He could have taken a personal bow, but instead simply said; “English is a beautiful, powerful language, isn’t it.”  He kept a “piece of eight” from a 17th century Spanish shipwreck on his desk, not because it was cool; “I keep this coin to remind me of the capacity of human beings to destroy other human beings on a massive scale for money.”  Almost immediately after our interview, the Holiday Farm fire in Oregon razed his property on the banks of the McKenzie River, arguably a result of climate change he so passionately wrote about.  Soon after, he died. On a recent springtime walk surrounded by budding vine maples, well into his prostate cancer, he talked about these disturbing times and, on losing hope, said; “how embarrassing to give up when everything around you is growing.”He spent thirty years writing his final book, the masterwork “Horizon.”  Somehow, he recognized its ending back then, just an old man walking down a narrow road in Port Famine, Patagonia, with crested caracara falcons inexplicably spaced evenly along the way in quarter-mile increments, watching from fenceposts.Some “Horizon” quotes and unfinished phrases as enticements:·       “The treacherous void between ourselves and the world…” ·       "The neurosis of consumerism…"·       "…the weight of the horror we force on one another in our manic quests for greater satisfaction."·       “We are creating our own evolutionary pressures…” ·       Of destroyed indigenous tribes: “Each eventually became another torn prayer flag, snapping in the wind over burnt ground.” ·       “As our own cultures continue to unfold around the riptides of aggressive commerce and heedless development…”·       Our survival demands an “unprecedented level of imagination…some capacity hinted at but not yet realized.”·       We are “…creating a spatial and temporal dysfunctionality, that increasingly produce despair instead of hope.”·       The storyteller creates “a place where wisdom reveals itself.”  ·       We need to adapt to technology without “pharmaceutical help.” ·       “…cynical corporate manueverings to secure the last waters…” ·       “… we shimmer with intentionality, erotic grace and balletic capability…”Farewell Barry.

This is Part One of a three-part series on the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline (LPP). The first two podcasts explore the historical roots of the complex issues underpinning the pipeline proper. Here, Historian Greg Smoak joins us to discuss the origins of water law in the West, beginning with, appropriately enough, the lake’s namesake John Wesley Powell, and his populist perspective on how water in this arid region might be equitably managed. Professor Smoak is a Professor of History at the University of Utah and the director of the American West Center. He’s the author of many articles and essays on various American west topics including water rights, Native American law, environmental policy, and American Indian policy among other things. He’s the author of the book Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century.To submit comment and for information: https://lpputah.org/