Click the link to read the article on the Landdesk.org website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
January 14, 2025
The latest public-land grab attempt is dead — at least for now. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Utah’s lawsuit attempting to seize control of 18.5 million acres of “unappropriated” federal lands in the state. This effectively ends Utah’s bid to take its case directly to the Supreme Court1, albeit not before it had spent over $1 million of the state taxpayer’s cash on legal expenses and a goofy PR campaign that included this bizarre ad aimed at inducing nostalgia for an era that never really was.
One might hope that this defeat at the hands of a conservative court would teach Utah’s elected officials to give up and be grateful for the abundance of public land in their state, which is actually the envy of folks everywhere. But alas, I kind of doubt they’d be that wise, because, well … Utah. So after licking their wounds, they’re likely to come back with some other strategy for purloining public lands.
Perhaps they’ll follow the lead of the Wyoming legislature, which just introduced a resolution “demanding that the United States Congress … extinguish federal title in those public lands and subsurface resources in this state that derive from former federal territory.” Which is to say that Wyoming is ordering the U.S. — i.e. all Americans — to surrender public lands within the state, with the exception of Yellowstone National Park, to the state, thus opening it up to be privatized.
Yes, the hard-right Freedom Caucus has taken control of the Wyoming legislature and, according to reporting by WyoFile, they plan to introduce “bold policies that probably have never had the opportunity to see the light of day” and that are based upon “godly principles.”
This would include public land grabs and repealing gun-free zones because, you know, Jesus was all about AR-15s. And it includes the — I kid you not — “Make Carbon Dioxide Great Again” law that would bar the state from designating or treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. It would also nix Gov. Mark Gordon’s efforts to establish the state as a leader in carbon capture and sequestration technology and actually would relinquish any primacy over carbon storage to the feds. Go figure.
And just in case Congress isn’t cowed by the threat of a Wyoming-lawmaker-led revolt, then Rep. Harriet Hageman will step in with her own federal legislation. While it doesn’t attempt to transfer public land, it is aimed at neutering the Bureau of Land Management by nullifying management plans that have been years in the making. Hageman recently introduced a bill that would block implementation of the Rock Springs and Buffalo field office resource management plans.
Stay tuned. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of these shenanigans.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
For the past few years, Western Uranium & Vanadium, based in Canada and Nucla, Colorado, has been making a lot of noise about plans to bring its Sunday Mine Complex in the Uravan Mineral Belt into production. It’s also proposing to establish a new uranium mill just outside Green River, Utah — thereby furthering the industrialization of the melon-farming town. So far, however, the mine has not produced any ore, nor has the mill progressed beyond the “baseline data collection” stage.
But that hasn’t stopped the company from keeping the hype going. Yesterday it announced it would begin data collection at the former Piñon Ridge uranium mill site in the Paradox Valley, which it’s now calling the Mustang Mineral Processing Facility.
You may recognize the Piñon Ridge name. Back in 2007, Energy Fuels — the current owner of the White Mesa Uranium Mill — purchased the site and proposed building a uranium mill there. At the time, George Glasier, who currently helms Western Uranium & Vanadium, was Energy Fuel’s CEO. A lot of locals were not so psyched about having a new radioactive site in their midst, and opposition to the proposed mill was fierce.
A twisted saga ensued, finally ending when the state revoked the mill’s permit in 2018. In the interim, Glasier had stepped down from the helm of Energy Fuels, which had acquired the White Mesa Mill, started his own company, and purchased the Piñon Ridge project. Last year, Western U&V acquired the Piñon Ridge project from Glasier’s company. And now Glasier seems to think he can get a newly designed mill permitted (he has yet to apply for a permit). Or maybe he’s just fishing for more investors’ dollars. In any case, the folks who led the resistance to the mill last time are ready to push back once again if necessary.
📖 Reading Room 🧐
Here come those Santa Ana winds again …
The National Weather Service has issued an extreme fire danger bulletin for a good chunk of the greater Los Angeles metro area, including a “particularly dangerous situation” alert, through tomorrow as the Santa Ana winds kick up again. This as the Palisades and Eaton fires continue to burn, having already taken 24 lives and an estimated 12,300 structures.
It’s been stunning to watch the destruction from afar and heartbreaking to imagine the collective sense of loss rippling across the sprawling metropolis of 18 million. The immensity of it all, the rate at which the fires spread, and the way the Santa Anas send flaming embers into the air to spawn their own blazes miles away is horrifying. Equally baffling is the way the tragedy seems to have opened up a firehose of stupidity, finger-pointing, and grandstanding, issuing forth from the President-elect, Elon Musk, political pundits, and and even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who asked: “Why don’t they use geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down on the wildfires in California? They know how to do it.”2
I considered spending a bunch of words explaining how and why these folks are wrong. But even acknowledging their existence and repeating their inane lies makes me vomit a bit in my mouth, and trying to debunk even a fraction of the claims is to play a futile game of whack a mole, though that’s not stopping California’s government from trying. As an antidote, I’ve been reading some smart things about the fires, the Santa Ana winds, and Los Angeles, and I figured it would be nice to share some of them with you.
Start out with Joan Didion’s essay on the Santa Ana winds, in which she reminds us that this month’s raging Santa Anas aren’t entirely unprecedented. A two-week long Thanksgiving-time Santa Ana event in 1957 included 100-mph gusts that toppled oil derricks, propelled heavy objects through the air (some of which killed people), and drove a blaze through the San Gabriels for well over a week. She writes:
Then check out the opening lines of Raymond Chandler’s Red Wind (and how can you stop reading after this!?):
And the late Mike Davis’s “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” should be required reading in these times. And yes, it’s quite a bit more nuanced than the title might suggest. Davis gives a good history of post-colonial fires in the Malibu area and explains how in 1930 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., called for turning 10,000 acres there into a public park (that could have burned in natural cycles, without destroying homes).
Alas, that didn’t happen. Instead, Malibu was developed, and fires roared through there in 1930, 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1938. The city had the opportunity to acquire 17,000 acres for just $1.1 million and turn it into a preserve in 1938 — it passed up the chance. Housing came, instead, along with more destructive fires. He writes:
Each fire, then, was followed by reconstruction on a larger, more exclusive scale. Malibu went from being a ranching, rural area, to a bohemian enclave, to a high-end suburb. “Two kinds of Californians will continue to live with fire:,” Davis writes, “those who can afford (with indirect public subsidies) to rebuild and those who can’t afford to live anywhere else.”
Joshua Frank mentions Davis’s essay in a poignant piece for CounterPunch in which he asks folks to stop their victim-blaming and have a bit of compassion, even if they don’t like L.A.. He writes:
At his Public Lands Media Substack, George Wuerthner talks about how these are really urban wildfires, not forest fires, and so the old mitigation and prevention techniques don’t necessarily apply.
He argues that prescribed burns and thinning wouldn’t have worked, because the fires started in the chaparral, which has a natural fire regime of about 30 to 100 years. Prescribed burns tend to eliminate native species that are then replaced by more flammable grasses.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, fire experts Jack Cohen and Stephen Pyne also talk about how these fires don’t fit into conventional notions of wildfire. In both the Palisades and Eaton fires, there were unburned trees sitting right next to homes that had been totally destroyed. Cohen:
Here’s hoping for an ember-free day for Los Angeles.
1 This was corrected from saying it effectively ended their legal bid. As reader Slickrock Stranger pointed out, that’s not necessarily the case. Utah could still take its case to the lower courts and keep losing until it ends up at the Supreme Court (which could again decline to hear the case, or something else). But SCOTUS did shoot down this particular strategy of going straight to the Supreme Court for a decision.
2 Oh, that’s right, because “they” modified the weather so that Hurricane Helene would wreck the southeast and keep all those Republicans from voting. Yeah. No. First off, Marge, while the theory behind cloudseeding is legit, there is scant evidence that it significantly increases precipitation. And, even so, it only works if there are already moisture-laden clouds present to seed. Thus the name. Now, maybe if They sent a hurricane to L.A. blowing inland from the Pacific, it would cancel out the Santa Anas, which blow toward the ocean, and then we’d be fine. Alas, They can’t control the weather.
