Quick hits: Documentary on Uvalde Leader-News shooting coverage to air; adding solar can benefit farms; wildfire prep

Front page of Uvalde Leader-News special
memorial section for Robb Elementary shooting.

A new documentary, Print It Black, that premieres on ABC News Live and Hulu at 8 p.m., E.T. on Friday, May 24, will examine how Uvalde Leader-News journalists covered the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in 2022, reports Kory Grow of Rolling Stone magazine. "A trailer for the film shows the stress and devastation the staff felt in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, beginning with reporter Kimberly Mata-Rubio, who lost her daughter, Alexandria, in the massacre." The trailer also presents the "public cries for justice that followed the massacre, which was made worse by a delay on the part of local authorities to act after the shooting began."

Some farmers are welcoming solar energy as a way to save on their electrical bills and maximize land use. "Jerry Howle was skeptical about installing a $300,000 solar panel system on his South Carolina chicken farm. Then he found out he could get it free of charge," report Amrith Ramkumar and Patrick Thomas of The Wall Street Journal. "Solar panels now sit on his two chicken houses, powering giant fans that keep as many as 60,000 birds inside cool. The panels are being paid for entirely by subsidies from the new climate law and will virtually eliminate the farm's $10,000 annual utility bill."

Wildfire season can be unpredictable, but planning and reliable tools can make managing it easier. Wirecutter has gathered a "best of wildfire preparedness" to help those who live in wildfire-prone areas be as ready as possible. "This guide to wildfire preparedness builds on the expertise of its original author, Eve O'Neill, who was forced to evacuate her California home in 2017 during the Tubbs Fire, which killed 22 people," reports Ellen Airhart of Wirecutter. "This list was also informed by interviews and research conducted for our larger guides to the best emergency-preparedness supplies and the best gear for your bug-out bag."

Solar storms knocked some farmers offline during peak
planting time. (Photo by Chris Ensminger, Unsplash)

While active solar storms knocked some farmers offline during the thick of planting season, the problem was not as dramatic as some reported. "Many farmers were forced to press pause and wait until GPS satellites came back online. . . . It seems, however, that like most things discussed online [on] social media channels perhaps made the situation seem a bit more dire than it turned out," reports Matthew J. Grassi of Farm Journal. Curt Covington from AgAmerica told Grassi, "There were some scattered reports of these storms delaying planting over the weekend, particularly in the Midwest, but no major disruptions have been reported by farmers at this time."

Many American families are facing some hard health care realities -- there aren't enough in-home care workers and those that do exist are often outside of their financial reach. As a result, many children are forced to care for aging or injured family members, reports Clare Ansberry of The Wall Street Journal. "There are an estimated 5.4 million children under the age of 18 providing care to parents, grandparents or siblings with chronic medical conditions or functional decline, up from about 1.3 million nearly 20 years ago, according to two reports from the National Alliance for Caregiving and others."

U.S. mining company Energy Fuels opened the mines last
year. (Photo by S. Hermann/F. Richter, Pixabay via MT)

To lessen U.S. dependence on Russian uranium and keep global energy promises, "Three uranium mines have gone into production along the Arizona-Utah border, with more on the way elsewhere in the Mountain West, as market conditions for the mineral needed for nuclear energy improve in response to a global push to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels to slow climate change," reports Wyatt Myskow of Inside Climate News. "The biggest problem the mining industry faces — especially with uranium—is opposition from local communities, tribes and environmentalists. The three mines that just started operations endured years of pushback and litigation."

Warmer temperatures are changing where plants and crops thrive. The USDA has new maps to help gardeners, farmers.

Regional plant hardiness often decides where any plant species or crop can thrive. "The Department of Agriculture’s 'plant hardiness zone map' was updated for the first time in a decade, and it shows the impact that climate change will have on gardens and yards across the country," reports Christina Larson of The Associated Press. "The map will give new guidance to growers about which flowers, vegetables and shrubs are most likely to thrive in a particular region. . . . Southern staples like magnolia trees and camellias may now be able to grow without frost damage in once-frigid Boston."

To use the USDA's interactive hardiness zone map with an area zip code click here. (USDA map via AP)

USDA's 2012 hardiness zone map. When compared to 2023's, the 2010 hardiness zones have shifted in some areas. (USDA map)

Forest Service creates tools to give rural towns a better chance at wildfire resiliency grants; Oct. 31 next deadline

Smoke plume from Cal-Wood fire near Boulder, Colo.
(Photo by Malachi Brooks, Unsplash)

Rural communities looking to shore up financing wildfire prevention projects may have an improved chance of gaining grant dollars during the second application window of a federal grant program. The application period is open until Oct. 31, reports Claire Carlson of The Daily Yonder. Smaller communities often lack the capacity, such as additional staffing or grant expertise, to apply for and win grants despite their need for assistance.

Applying for a grant means communities must gather and supply data, which takes time smaller staff may not have. To combat this obstacle, the Forest Service has piloted the Community Wildfire Defense Grants Tool, which calculates the wildfire risk of every U.S. county. "The tool shows whether the county is considered low-income and has had any previous disasters, and if it’s ‘underserved’ as defined by the federally managed Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool,” Carlson writes. Using the grant tool helps communities focus on getting and organizing data with few frustrations and fewer labor hours.

A second strategy deploys "'community navigators,' which are organizations that work directly with underserved communities to identify funding opportunities and help them through the grant application process," Carlson explains. "The navigators will also train community leaders to do this work on their own in the future." 

Grants requiring matching dollars from local coffers have kept poorer, more rural areas from accessing federal money, but waivers are an option. "Match waivers will be made available for communities that are underserved as defined by the Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool or are nationally recognized tribes or Pacific Islands communities," Carlson adds. "The grant program is giving up to $250,000 to each community to develop wildfire protection plans and up to $10 million to each community to implement wildfire resiliency projects."

The CWDG calls for "community wildfire protection plans to focus on community-wide efforts to decrease wildfire risk, like improving emergency communications or identifying water sources," Carlson reports. "A comprehensive toolkit on how to create a community wildfire protection plan can be found here. For more information and access to the application, visit the Forest Service’s website."

Facing the complex problem of too many wild horses

In Nevada, there are more wild horses than all game animals combined. (Photo by Melissa Farlow, Sierra Club)

"Wild horses couldn't keep me away" is a saying, but in real life, plenty of people would like to keep wild horses--otherwise known as mustangs--further away. "The number of horses—along with all the cattle grazing on public lands—has led to a calamity on the rangeland. Wild horses are reproducing at unsustainable rates; between 2007 and 2021, their numbers more than tripled," reports Heather Hansman of Sierra magazine. "In their search for forage, wild horses are tearing up high-desert vegetation, degrading riparian areas, and trampling fragile native plants. . . . As climate change makes the West hotter and drier, the animals are struggling to find water too. In some places, horses have been known to die of starvation and dehydration."

Solutions have proved difficult to find between land stakeholders and horse advocates. Hansman explains, "Roundups for slaughter are off the table—as a matter of humane treatment and U.S. law. Birth-control programs have shown promise, but they are difficult to carry out and are opposed by some horse advocates who express worries about horse health, genetic diversity, and unintentional sterilization. Some horse advocates complain that the Bureau of Land Management's annual roundups can be inhumane."

"One thing that horse people and ecologists agree on is that this situation is a mess. The system is so broken that Congress has called it a 'national crisis,'" Hansman writes. "... the magic and myth of the mustangs seem to collide with the realities of landscape management, policy tussles, and laws that haven't been meaningfully updated since the 1970s."

What does everyone want? "Healthy horses on healthy landscapes is what they say," Hansman reports. "But how can we reach that goal? Especially in the era of climate chaos, especially with an animal that sparks such intense emotions. . . .The story of wild horses is also the story of water and space and the ideal of wildness—the hope that the American West is still big enough for everyone who wants a slice and that last century's laws are adequate for 21st-century complexities. But on the range today, there is not enough to go around, and our ideas about wildness must be constrained by reality. How can we know what the reality is when we've been operating on stories for so long?"

A tale of two towns and dollar stores: One blocked Dollar General, one allowed it on 3-2 vote; local merchants worry

Leelanau County is the pinkie finger
of Michigan's mitt. (Wikipedia map)

What does a dollar store add to a small community, or perhaps take from it? That can be a loaded question.

In Leelanau County, Michigan, in 2019, residents got the zoning board to shut out Dollar General Corp.'s plans to build in the county seat of Empire  because the chain's reputation and look did not "fit" with their quaint, small-town vibe, and it's now the only Michigan county without a dollar store, reports Rose White of MLive, a Michigan newspaper chain. “Chain dollar stores tend to target food deserts like Empire . . . providing a limited selection of food to city neighborhoods or rural areas,” White writes, citing a report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Sperling's Best Places map

The dollar-store drama is playing out differently in Ebony, Virginia,  where some residents did not welcome Dollar General because they worried the store would "open the door to additional development that will spoil the character of their tiny, rural community of about 230 people," reports Michael Corkery of The New York Times. But not all the residents thought the chain would harm their town. "Jerry Jones grew up in Ebony. . . . He went on to manage grocery stores and later owned a gas station in Ebon. . . . Jones owns the land where the Dollar General would be built. He said the store would provide the county’s residents a convenient and affordable place to shop while also generating sorely needed tax revenue." Jones told Corkery: “You still need to have that balance between the people with nicer things and the people who live paycheck to paycheck. To me, Dollar General fits right in with that.”

The two places have some similarities; one big difference is that Empire is a summer tourist town where "quaint feel" has a financial impact. "Ebony sits on the edge of Lake Gaston and is a haven for second homes that serve as an important tax base" in Brunswick County, which has a median household income of $49,600, about the same as Leelanau's, but well under Virginia's statewide figure of $80,600, Cockery reports. "More than half the county’s population is Black." Only one-fourth of 1 percent of Leelanau County's is.

Brunswick County supervisors, by a 3-2 vote, "approved a zoning change that would allow the store to be built," Cockery reports. "The dispute in Ebony, which has been going on for more than three years, is about planning and zoning, but it also touches on a deeper issue simmering in many parts of rural America, whether the disputes are about cellphone towers or snowmobile trails. What does 'country' mean to different people in a small community?" Cockery asks.

But Dollar General is not winning everywhere. "The number of communities that are defeating specific dollar-store proposals or are enacting ordinances that control dollar store development is shooting up rapidly,” Kennedy Smith, a senior researcher at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, told White. Much of the opposition comes from local business owners like Mohamed Abouemara, who "moved to southern Virginia from New York to operate convenience stores and has run the Ebony General Store for nine years," Corkery reports. "He said his store, where locals can socialize and buy hot food, played an important role in a rural community. A dollar store, he said, would significantly hurt his business."

Groundwater shortage makes Arizona limit home building; it's an example of climate change reshaping the West

Voluntarily fallowed fields at the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation, home of the Quechan

Tribe, in May. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images via The Washington Post)

Water shortages in the West aren't news, but a shortage of groundwater in Arizona shows its importance and provides an example of how climate change is reshaping the region, report Joshua Partlow, Brady Dennis and Isaac Stanley-Becker of The Washington Post. 

"The decision by Arizona in the past week to limit residential construction in some parts of the fast-growing Phoenix suburbs is another major warning about how climate change is disrupting lifestyles and economies in the West," the Post reports. "Throughout the region, glaciers have receded, wildfires have expanded, and rivers and lakes have shrunk. It has been a wet winter, but the deeper trends brought on by the warming atmosphere persist."

Arizona's move signals "a critical point in our history, where we're making decisions about what's most important — housing developments or farm fields," Stefanie Smallhouse, president of the Arizona Farm Bureau, told the Post.

"Sometimes, you've got to give up some dreams to get to others. Arizona is in that situation with its water," Arizona State University water-law professor Rhett Larson told the Post. "We want to be the greatest semiconductor and microchip manufacturer in the world. We can do that. We have enough water, but our food prices are going to go up because we're not going to grow as much food."

And it's not mainly about surface water, the Post notes: "Jay Famiglietti moved to Arizona to study how the worst drought in a millennium was sapping groundwater beneath the American West. . . . He has documented that states along the Colorado River were losing their aquifers far faster than the more visible shriveling of the nation's largest reservoirs. Famiglietti told the Post: "I don't think that people and this is everyone, the general public, but right up to our water managers and elected officials, really understand now that groundwater is the key to our future."

The Post explains, "Groundwater can take thousands of years to replenish once it has been sucked out. . . Such shortages are likely to reshape, in coming decades, where people live and how much they pay to do so." The Southwest does have options, and some are working. The Post reports, "Over the past two decades, Nevada has reduced by 30 percent the portion of the Colorado River's water that it uses, even as the population has grown. Las Vegas lawns have been ripped out and replaced by cactus, gravel and artificial turf. . . . Addressing climate changes "also means more money and focus on costly solutions — facilities that remove salt from seawater; pipelines bringing in water from wetter parts of the country. Arizona's prior governor, Doug Ducey, created a $1 billion fund for pursuing such projects. His former natural resources adviser, Chuck Podolak, now leads that effort at the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority of Arizona. Podolak told the Post: "Finding new water seems like a relatively doable task compared to holding back the oceans in Miami or trying to stop hurricanes from coming into Houston."

Native plants have oodles of benefits, but there's a shortage of native seeds; getting more begins with planning

Switchgrass is native to the Northeast. (Peganum photo via The Conversation)

When spring arrives, it's "planting time for home gardeners, landscapers and public works agencies across the U.S. And there's rising demand for native plants – species that are genetically adapted to the specific regions," report Julia Kuzovkina and John Campanelli for The Conversation, a platform for journalism by academics. "Native plants have evolved with local climates and soil conditions. . . . . They generally require less maintenance ... after they become established. They are hardier than non-native species. . . . Many agencies rank native plants as a first choice for restoring areas that have been disturbed by natural disasters or human activities like mining and development. Repairing damaged landscapes is critical for slowing climate change and species loss."

Using more native plants sounds easy enough, but it's not. "There aren't enough native seeds. This issue is so serious that it was the subject of a recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report. The study found an urgent need to build a native seed supply," Kuzovkina and Campanelli write. "As plant scientists who have worked on ecological restoration projects, we're familiar with this challenge." Kuzovkina and Campanelli are working to restore New England roadsides with native plants. Their problem-and-solution approach can be applied in most areas of the country.

They explain some of the challenges: "Restoration projects require vast quantities of native seeds – but commercial supplies fall far short . . . . Developing a batch of seeds for a specific species takes skill and several years of lead time to either collect native seeds in the wild or grow plants to produce them. Suppliers say one of their biggest obstacles is unpredictable demand from large-scale customers, such as government and tribal agencies, that don't plan far enough ahead for producers to have stocks ready."

Getting enough seeds takes cooperation and planning. "To tackle this problem, our team launched a project in 2022 with funding from the New England Transportation Consortium. Our goals are to increase native plantings and pollinator habitats with seeds from local ecotypes and to make our recommendations for roadside restoration with native grasses more feasible," The Conversation reports. "This led to the launch of the regional Northeast Seed Network, which will be hosted by the Massachusetts-based Native Plant Trust, a nonprofit that works to conserve New England's native plants. We expect this network will promote all aspects of native seed production in the region, from collecting seeds in the wild to cultivating plants for seed production, developing regional seed markets and carrying out related research."

Roar of fans at cryptocurrency 'mine' makes Blue Ridge rumble; one of 12 a Calif. firm has in Southern Appalachia

The cryptocurrency "mine" is a few miles outside Murphy, N.C. (Screenshot from CNN)

The undending roar of fans cooling computer servers at a cryptocurrency "mine" in the Blue Ridge Mountains has "upended local politics" in Cherokee County, North Carolina, CNN reports, but officials there have said there is little they can do about it.

"The mine in Murphy is just one of a dozen in Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina owned by a San Francisco-based company called PrimeBlock, which recently announced $300 million in equity financing and plans to scale up and go public," CNN's Bill Weir reports.

Mine neighbor Mike Lugiewicz told Weir, “There’s a racetrack three miles out right here,” pointing toward it and away from the nearby crypto mine. “You can hear the cars running. It’s cool!” Neighbor Judy Stines interjected, “But at least they stop. And you can go to bed!

Lugiewicz takes sound readings at his home. More 30 percent have exceeded 60 decibels, Weir reports: "Estimates from the National Park Service show that expected environmental sound levels in the area should be around 41 decibels. Kurt Fristrup, a former Park Service scientist who studied noise impacts on rural environments, compared the noise near Lugiewicz’s home to living close to a very busy road without normal pulses in traffic."

Residents have complained about the noise at meetings of the Cherokee County Commission, and the commission's lack of action helped lead to the defeat of some members, CNN reports, but the county "still has not found a legal 'magic wand' to make noise from unenclosed crypto mines go away," the Cherokee Scout reports. However, Commissioners in Clay County, which borders Cherokee on the east, voted in August to ban crypto mines, the Scout reports. The Cherokee County Commission did pass a resolution asking state and federal officials to ban crypto mining in the U.S., as China has. The county "has had a noise ordinance on the books since 1999, but locals say it is unevenly enforced and does not specify a decibel threshold," The Washington Post reported in August.

Wind farms bring windfalls to rural areas, but not everyone agrees that the massive structures are a positive thing

Screenshot of interactive map from the Wind Turbine Database of the U.S. Geological Survey; its display can be filtered by tower height, generating capacity and year erected, and zoom to particular locations to view project specifications.  

Unseen. Ever moving. Wind. Across the central U.S., wind power has changed the fate of many rural areas. "Coke County, Texas, which has a population of about 3,300, had the biggest increase in economic output of any county in the country between 2019 and 2021, according to a Stateline analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis statistics," reports Stateline's Tim Henderson. "Coke County’s gross domestic product, or GDP, increased from $128 million to $235 million, or 83%. . . . Rural counties in Colorado and South Dakota saw similar increases, reflecting a record year for wind turbine construction in 2020. Landowners also get annual royalties for hosting the turbines, typically around $10,000."

County Judge Hal Spain, the top elected official in Coke County, told Henderson, "We’re just a poor West Texas county. We don’t get much economic stimulation here. We’re tickled pink about this.” Henderson reports, "Texas has used tax abatement incentives to attract wind farms, including allowing local governments to grant 10-year abatement deals like the one Coke County used."

Henderson reports, "In rural areas such as Coke County, where ranchers’ herds are suffering from drought and oil production is dwindling, wind farms are generating cash to fix roads, recreation centers, senior centers, swimming pools and other aging infrastructure, Spain said." Eric Brunner, an economics professor at the University of Connecticut who studies the economic impacts of wind farms on local governments, told Henderson, “The incentive is to use it for one-time capital costs. It doesn’t work well for buying books, recurring things.”

Not everyone is tickled; some rural residents don't like the look and sound of wind farms, and wildlife defenders note that they kill birds. Sarah Mills, a senior project manager at the Graham Sustainability Institute at the University of Michigan, told Henderson, "For communities that want to go all in on agriculture, wind fits well. For those that want to see a bunch of residential development or have economies based on tourism and the landscape, they may need to look more closely.”

Henderson reports, "The conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation opposes such tax abatements as 'corporate welfare,' arguing that the abatements have allowed wind farms to take over too much of the power capacity in Texas, said Brent Bennett of the foundation, which is partly funded by oil and gas interests. About a quarter of the energy Texas uses is generated by wind . . . . Some local residents have organized in Texas and around the country to oppose the farms, and have even sued to fight nearby installations they contend are ugly and noisy."

As of late 2022, Texas led all states in the number of wind turbines, with 18,315, followed by Iowa (6,205), California (5,981), Oklahoma (5,370) and Kansas (3,962), Stateline reports.

Couple fights for nature-friendly lawn and wins, prompting first such state law to rein in homeowners' associations

The yard (Photo by Jason Andrew, The New York Times)

A wise man once said, "The only thing more challenging than your lawn is your neighbor's lawn." Disputes over property maintenance are one reason some people prefer to live in rural areas; the disputes can range from quibbles to outright battle zones, but it's a rare lawn dispute that leads to a groundbreaking state law.

Janet and Jeff Crouch of Columbia, Md., had "lived on their quiet cul-de-sac harmoniously with their neighbors for years, and chose native plants to help insects, birds and wildlife thrive," reports Cara Buckley of The New York Times. Then they got a letter from their homeowners' association saying, "Your yard is not the place for such a habitat." The letter gave the Crouches "10 days to convert their front yard into a lawn that looked like everyone else’s."

The Crouches were not willing to tear up their nature haven without a fight that cost them $60,000. "They hired a lawyer and contacted every wildlife and environmental group they could think of, along with local legislators," Buckley reports. They filed a lawsuit, and two months later, "a Maryland state representative asked if they would allow their case to form the basis of a new environmental law. . . . A bill was drafted that forbade homeowner associations from banning pollinator plants or rain gardens, or from requiring property owners to plant turf grass. The measure gained bipartisan support, passed with near unanimity, and became law in October 2021."

Mary Catherine Cochran, former legislative director for Delegate Terri L. Hill, told Buckley that "Maryland law was the first in the country to limit homeowner-association control over eco-friendly yards."

"Lawns make up one-third of the country’s 135 million acres of residential landscaping," ecologist Douglas W. Tallamy told Buckley. Tallamy, whose book, Nature’s Best Hope, urges homeowners to change their yards into conservation corridors told Buckley, “This idea that humans and nature cannot coexist is destroying the entire planet, which in turn is destroying humans. The only way forward is to coexist. . . . Now people know if they fight back, they can win.”

News-media roundup: 2022 opinion and research gems, predictions and advice for journalism; Alaska weeklies die

Nieman Reports has picked its five best opinion pieces of 2022: Gilbert Gaul on the need to cover land-use decisions that worsen disasters, and how arduous rebuilding after a disaster really is; Isaac Bailey's argument that objectivity is less important than transparency, accuracy and fairness; Gary Langer on the need for better vetting of poll data; Anne Garrels on the courage of Ukrainian journalists; and the argument by Mardi Link of the Traverse City Record-Eagle that media coverage of adoption (especially in the context of abortion) lacks voices of adoptees: “Adoption is a parenting decision and abortion is a reproductive decision,” wrote Link, an adoptee herself. “For reporters to equate one as a solution for the other provides nothing of value to readers and perpetuates a false equivalency.” NR also gives its 10 most-read stories of 2022.

NiemanLab collected several predictions and advice for journalism in 2023, including: Sarabeth Berman of the American Journalism Project says nonprofit news can work in smaller markets with a network model; Sue Cross of the Institute for Nonprofit News predicts more collective action among varied interests to "save the news;" Lisa Heyamoto of LION Publishers says the "independent news industry" has a roadmap to sustainability; Pia Frey and Torsten Schlegel of Opinionary say publishers should ask more questions of users as cookies die out; Kerri Hoffman of PRX says podcasting is going local; Ayala Panievsky of the University of Cambridge says "It's time for PR for journalism;" and Julia Beizer of Bloomberg says news and subscription fatigue should make publishers "focus on the value we provide our users. We must learn everything we can about who they are and what they need. And then we provide it through journalism that helps them navigate their world."

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, which does research in the U.K, the U.S. and other countries, says 22 of the findings from its research in 2022 are still relevant for 2023. They include: Many people see misinformation and harassment as big problems for digital platforms; they make snap judgments about trustworthiness of sources; people who know more about the news media use social media differently; young people increasingly use TikTok for news; and newsroom leaders are still betting on more revenue from readers.

Citing losses, Wick Communications has stopped printing the Anchorage Press and two other area weeklies, The Arctic Warrior and the Chugach Times. The anchoragepress.com website will continue, as will the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, a big weekly in an area north of Anchorage.

Honoring tribes by protecting their lands of heritage, Biden commits to make a huge tract off-limits to development

Proposed monument area (NPCA, OpenStreetMap adapted by The Rural Blog)

Spirit Mountain boasts a 5,642-foot-high summit peak, which is the highest point in the stunning Spirit Mountain Wilderness near Searchlight, Nevada. According to Fort Mojave and 11 other tribes, their ancestors emerged from the rocks and their mystical strength lives through the sacred mountains.

President Biden "pledged Wednesday to put hundreds of thousands of acres off-limits to development in southern Nevada around Spirit Mountain" under the 1906 Antiquities Act "A broad coalition backs the move, but renewable energy firms have raised concerns," reports Dan Michalski of The Washington Post.

"This expanse of Nevada offers some of the best prospects for clean energy development in the country," Michalski writes. "The canyons here produce tremendous wind, and the sun shines 292 days per year, usually without any cloud cover. The area also boasts dozens of mining claims for rare earth elements, now coveted by the clean tech sector." Solar energy firm Avantus says it supports the monument but wants an exception: a narrow path "that 'avoids all cultural and environmentally sensitive areas' so renewable energy companies can access transmission infrastructure from a long-decommissioned coal-fired plant in Laughlin."

Native Americans "have often been pressured to make concessions in the past," Michalski notes, but "this marks a rare instance in which they have driven the process — bolstered by the support of environmental groups, lawmakers and the rural business community."

“There’s a spiritual connection that makes us Mojave people,” Tim Williams, chair of the tribal council told Michalski. “If it’s not protected, our generation will not have done our job.”

Neal Desai, a senior project manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, who has been spent more than a decade working to protect the area, told Michalski, "This is the missing link connecting the Mojave Desert and the Colorado Plateau. . . . Wind and solar companies will have to stay on the other side of the monument boundaries."

Many activists feel the land can support the people through "businesses related to camping, hunting, birding, hiking, stargazing and other forms of outdoor recreation," Michalski writes. It is also an area that will protect animals. "This 700-square-mile expanse will allow desert tortoises, bighorn sheep, golden eagles and dozens of other species to live and migrate uninterrupted."

Bourbon boom has downsides for neighbors who don't want aging whiskey feeding unsightly fungus and posing risks

Buffalo Trace Distillery built these warehouses at Frankfort, prompting complaints from neighbors. Now it wants to build a similar group of warehouses in the nearby Elkhorn Creek valley. (Photos by Ryan C. Hermens, Lexington Herald-Leader)

Fungus on a nearby sign

The boom in bourbon has been a boon to Kentucky economically, but now rural residents in a swath of the western Bluegrass region are fighting the warehouses that turn whiskey into bourbon. They object to the fungus that is fed by the aging alcohol escaping into the air from barrels in the warehouses, worry about the storage of so much flammable material, and dislike what they call an industrial invasion of bucolic landscapes.

Residents of Henry, Franklin and Anderson counties point to the black fungus that is obvious on signs, homes and other surfaces. Distillers pooh-pooh those concerns, citing studies that show the fungus is harmless, but they acknowledge it's unsightly. And the concerns are more than cosmetic.

Wendell Berry

“What I fear is this will be a continuation of an old Kentucky story, in which outsiders come in, take as nearly as they can what they can, what they want, and give as little back as they possibly can,” farmer-author-poet-activist Wendell Berry, 88, told Janet Patton of the Lexington Herald-Leader. Near the farm where Berry grew up, Angel’s Envy has won Henry County Planning Commission approval to turn a 1,200-acre cattle farm into a "bourbon campus" with up to 25 warehouses, lodging, an amphitheater, a visitors center, a helicopter pad and more.

“We are being asked to sacrifice this land to tourism and whiskey,” Berry told the commission last month. The commission voted 6-3 for the zone change; the final decision is up to the county's legislative body, the Fiscal Court, on Sept. 20.

One the other side of the argument is "Connie Blackwell, a Lawrenceburg real estate agent who lives in Tyrone in the valley below the Wild Turkey distillery," Patton reports, quoting her about the fungus: “It is a mess; you do have to pressure-wash your house once a year. You get used to it. Everybody down here in Tyrone tolerates it. It’s just no big deal … for the taxes they bring into our county, it’s worth it, to me. . . . I don’t believe the whiskey fungus hurts us. Honest to god, for the amount of taxes . . . it really is a fair exchange.” But Patton notes that distillers are lobbying for the local tax on aging whiskey to be reduced, which would be the latest in a series of tax breaks that have helped fuel the boom.

Study proves that people who were raised in rural areas have a better sense of direction than city dwellers

A player navigates a boat in Sea Hero Quest

"People who grew up in the country have a better sense of direction and navigational skills than those raised in cities, a study has found," Agence France-Presse reports. This is something many rural people have long believed about urbanites; now we have proof.

"To find out how childhood environment influences navigation ability, scientists looked at how almost 400,000 people from 38 countries played a mobile video game designed for neuroscience research," AFP reports.

According to the study, which was published in Nature, players of the Sea Hero Quest game navigated a boat to find checkpoints on a map. The game was created in 2016 to study Alzheimer's disease, but has since been played by nearly 4 million people, AFP reports.

"We found that growing up outside cities appears to be good for the development of navigational abilities, and this seems to be influenced by the lack of complexity of many street networks in cities," lead researcher Hugo Spiers of University College London told AFP.

Co-lead author Antoine Coutrot of France's University of Lyon noted that people from cities with complicated layouts such as Paris and Prague fared much better than those from grid-based cities like Chicago: "Growing up somewhere with a more complex layout of roads or paths might help with navigational skills as it requires keeping track of direction when you’re more likely to be making multiple turns at different angles, while you might also need to remember more streets and landmarks for each journey."

That has implications in the United States, where most of the landscape is overlaid with rectangular grids, but not most of the Eastern U.S. -- except the states north of the Ohio River that were part of the Northwest Territory, governed by the Northwest Ordinance, which divided the land into grids of townships, a system used as Americans migrated west. Next time you fly over the Ohio, notice the difference in how the landscape is laid out. Here's a Google map example:

The researchers also developed and tested users on a new game called City Hero Quest to see how well rural and urban people navigated in cities. "People raised in cities did manage better in grid street plans than those who grew up in the country – but the difference was nowhere near as stark as the other way around," AFP reports. Coutrot noted that adult urbanites can improve their sense of direction if they work at it, but said it's much easier when one is young.

New Jersey township must pay Muslim group $3.25 million for rejection of application to build mosque

An Islamic group is finally able to build a new mosque in New Jersey after 39 public hearings and two lawsuits that dragged out over five years, and the story is a cautionary tale for other communities.

“Municipalities around the country should pay close attention to what happened in Bernards Township,” Adeel A. Mangi, lead counsel for the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge, told My Central Jersey. “The American Muslim community has the legal resources, the allies and the determination to stand up for its constitutional rights in court and will do so.”

Worshipers at the Bernards Township Community Center (AP photo by Julio Cortez)

"On Tuesday, the U.S. Justice Department announced the terms of a settlement between the federal government and Bernards Township, the local body that refused to let the Society begin construction on a proposed house of worship based on alleged issues with minor details of its proposal, including the size of the parking lot," Emma Green reports for The Atlantic.

In addition to allowing construction to move forward, the township must pay the group $3.25 million in damages and attorney fees, and town officials must complete diversity and inclusion training.

While religious discrimination is not unique, this case has been particularly nasty, Green writes. "Before the Society had even filed a formal application, evidence of anti-Muslim bias in the community started emerging. Its mailbox was smashed," Green writes. "A neighbor accosted Mohammad Ali Chaudry, the Society’s president, in a parking lot after a township meeting, saying, 'Eleven brothers died on 9/11 and now you want to put a mosque next to my house with the insignia of the people who did that,' according to a complaint filed against the township by the Society."

Anti-mosque lawn signs and flyers were distributed throughout the town. Negative comments were spread online. Large crowds attended hearings. One community member asked whether the facility would be used for animal sacrifices, according to the complaint.

The township officially rejected the mosque's application in December 2015. In March 2016, the Society sued the township, "arguing that its rejection of the mosque proposal reflected the 'religious and cultural animus against Muslims' on display in Basking Ridge," Green notes. "An uncommonly wide range of religious groups came to the Society’s support—from groups that lean left, like the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the Sikh Coalition, to more conservative groups, including the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention," Green noted.

The Justice Department filed its own suit in November 2016, "alleging that the township had violated one of two core federal religious-freedom laws: the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which prohibits local communities from using vague ordinances and bureaucratic procedures to discriminate against religious groups," Green writes.

Rural town refuses to allow Muslim burial ground

A proposed Muslim burial ground in rural Dudley, Mass., has drawn the ire of locals, Jess Bidgood reports for The New York Times. The burial ground, planned for 50 acres of unused farmland, "was denounced at meetings and ultimately turned down by the Zoning Board of Appeals, prompting charges of bigotry and drawing scrutiny from the United States attorney for Massachusetts, who announced a civil-rights investigation on Aug. 18 into the town’s actions." Similar scenes have played out in other areas, most recently over a proposed mosque in Covington, Ga.

Officials in the town of 11,500—95 percent of residents are white—deny any wrongdoing, Bidgood writes. They say "they have been unfairly portrayed as biased against the Muslims, and say the society did not have standing to seek a permit for the cemetery because of a provision giving the town the right of first refusal for the tract, which belongs to a private landowner."

The Muslim group "says it would most likely bury 10 to 15 people a year (although an early estimate mentioned 16,000 plots) and has agreed to comply with applicable burial regulations and to accommodate some of the town’s concerns, like using only a small part of the land for the cemetery," Bidgood writes. "But at a meeting in June, the Zoning Board refused to grant the group a permit, saying that the town had a right of first refusal on the land, which had once been used for agriculture, and that proper procedure for the sale had not been followed." (Read more)

Big bourbon-making town puts the brakes on new whiskey warehouses close to residential areas

Warehouse at Barton 1792 Distillery
(Photo from KentuckyTourism.com)

A Kentucky town whose name has been almost synonymous with whiskey making has had about enough of the bourbon boom, or at least a piece of it.

"The Bardstown City Council has voted down the Planning Commission’s recommendation to allow distilled spirits warehouses on agricultural tracts of 20-100 acres as a conditional use," Randy Patrick reports for The Kentucky Standard. "Recently, the Nelson County Fiscal Court tabled an identical proposal for rural and suburban areas outside Bardstown so that the magistrates could have more time to consider the regulation change and possible ramifications."

"Councilman Bill Buckman said the council’s no vote . . . lets the county know it doesn’t want craft bourbon distilleries and rickhouses too close to the city," Patrick writes. "Those distilleries and warehouses, he said, bring with them problems such as whiskey mold, which gets on people’s houses and cars and is hard to remove. He said that pending on the outcome of Louisville court cases about the mold, more whiskey makers are looking south toward Bardstown to build their warehouses."

Only 2% of farmland will be available to new farmers, USDA survey finds

More families are creating trust investments to make sure farm land remains in the family, leaving less land for beginning farmers, Daniel Enoch reports for Agri-Pulse. A U.S. Department of Agriculture survey shows that about a 10 percent "of the 911 million farmland acres outside of Alaska and Hawaii—about 91.5 million acres—is slated for ownership transfer in the next five years, not including farmland that is in or expected to be put into wills."

Landlords are expect to keep or put nearly 48 percent of these acres in trusts, Enoch writes. "Some 26 million acres are expected to be sold to a relative or given as a gift, and only 21 million acres are expected to be sold to a non-relative. This means that only a small percentage of farmland—just over 2 percent—will be available for new entrants into the farming sector."

"The survey showed that 353.8 million acres of land were rented out for agricultural purposes by more than 2 million landowners last year," for about 39 percent of total farmland, Enoch writes. "Of the 2 million or so landowners, 13 percent were farmers and ranchers, and 87 percent were landlords who do not operate a farm."

Joseph T. Reilly, administrator for USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service, said "the total value of the land and buildings on the rented acres was $1.1 trillion," Enoch writes. "About 63 percent of the total land rented was for cropland, and 34 percent was for pasture. Non-operator landlords leased oil and gas rights on 31.9 million acres and sold those rights on 4.1 million acres. Out of total farmland, oil and gas rights were leased on 61 million acres and sold on 11.3 million." (Read more)

Vermont town votes to leave zoning changes up to the old-fashioned town meeting

Residents in a small town in Vermont have spoken loud and clear that they want to be classified as rural so they can retain direct control over land-use planning. The state allows towns with populations between 2,500 to 5,000 to choose whether they want to be designated as urban or rural, and residents in Shaftsbury (right) voted down an amendment from "the planning commission and select board that the town switch to an urban designation," which would leave zoning decisions up to the Board of Selectmen rather than meetings open to all town residents, in the New England tradition. Derek Carson reports for the Bennington Banner. The amendment failed 493-242.

"The issue of rural versus urban designation came up when Town Administrator Margy Becker discovered that the town had been adopting zoning bylaws incorrectly," Carson writes. "In 1987, Shaftsbury voted to switch from an urban to a rural town. At some point in the late 2000s, Shaftsbury had begun adopted bylaws by select board vote rather than by town vote." Board members argued that leaving the town's designation as rural would mean residents could be voting on issues they don't understand, but residents argued that remaining rural means the townspeople have the final say on issues concerning Shaftsbury. (Read more)

Western states eye Farm Bill as way to regain payments for federal land, but bill faces obstacles

House Republicans presented a proposal Tuesday to help save the farm bill by using it "as a lifeline for Western towns and counties surrounded by vast stretches of tax-exempt federal lands," David Rogers reports for Politico. "The Interior Department now distributes about $400 million annually to 1,900 such local governments under a program known as PILT, or payments in lieu of taxes. But PILT’s funding authorization has expired with no clear replacement ahead." All counties with federal land get PILT, but the amounts are much greater in the West, where most federal land lies.

Rep. Rob Bishop

The current Farm Bill draft "is expected to generate in the range of $25 billion in 10-year savings from changes in commodity and nutrition programs," Rogers writes. When officials in Western states found out Monday that they weren't included in the proposed $1.012 trillion budget plan, they came up with a new solution to their problems—the Farm Bill. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) told Rogers, “They are thinking about a commitment to make sure we fund it some way. If the farm bill becomes untenable, then there will be a plan B. So they have a commitment that it will be taken care of.”

Bishop said he "was skeptical that using Farm Bill savings to pay for PILT would get more Western votes that the bill already has," Rogers writes. Bishop told him, “When I look at the roughly 30 Westerners, who are primarily interested in this, most of them voted for [the Farm Bill] anyway. So, I don’t know if you pick up more than a half-dozen votes.” But he said, “I was for a Farm Bill. Now I am even more so.” (Read more)

Prospects for passage of the bill this month have dimmed because of an impasse over dairy programs between most lawmakers and House Speaker John Boehner. Both the House and Senate bills have "a new margin insurance initiative for dairy farmers which would include supply management tools to guard against over production," Rogers noted in a story last week. Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) "has argued that the supply controls are vital to keep down the cost of the insurance program," but Boehner "believes the increased government role amounts to a bridge-too-far in a world of dairy policy which the speaker is already fond of comparing to the former Soviet Union."

"Dairy farmers usually respond to decreasing prices by producing more, resulting in even lower prices. The new program would pay farmers less for losses on milk that's above their normal production," Ana Radelet reports for The Connecticut Mirror. "The current dairy program—the Milk Income Loss Contract program, known as MILC—gives subsidy payments to dairy farmers when prices are low." There are more than 100 dairy farms in Connecticut, and those farmers "received more than $1.5 million from the MILC program in 2012, less than half of what they got in 2009, when milk prices slumped severely. But the MILC program favors smaller farms. Connecticut dairy farmers, while they don’t have huge herds, generally produce too much milk to benefit greatly from the subsidy." (Read more)

There are other obstacles to passing the Farm Bill. Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley's "language to tighten the definition of 'actively engaged' for the purposes of farm-program payments was used as 'one of the selling points in the Senate,' and now "they are having a tough time backing off of it'," in the face of objections from mainly Southern farm interests, reports Agri-Pulse, a Washington newsletter. Agri-Pulse is subscription only, but a free trial is available by clicking here.

Given these and other issues, the "Washington Insider" column of DTN/The Progressive Farmer said "It is becoming ever more likely that another extension of the 2008 farm law will become necessary" by the end of the month, Keith Good reports for Farm Policy.