Salt City Sinner

Photo by Briana Scroggins, Utah Investigative Journalism Project,  posted on 7/14/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Perhaps you always hurt the one you love , and conservatives really do love the great outdoors. More likely, this professed love is simply a conveniently outdated one, like the perennial reminder given us that the Republican Party is the “party of Lincoln.” Maybe, right-wing rapport with nature is just an outright lie, and always has been. In any case, this summer brought a fresh example of a folksy, sagebrush-lovin’ maverick who wrought destruction that would make the oil monster from Ferngully jealous. It seems that Bert Smith, one of the founders of Smith and Edwards, sold an old building he owned to Ogden city in the years before his death. After he expired in 2016, the city got their first close look at what they had purchased – what Bert, as it turned out, had been stashing there since the 1960s. The Salt Lake Tribune has the incredible story , whic...

posted on 5/7/2013 by the Salt City Sinner   “Excuse me, but did you drive a car here today?” a man asked, his voice loaded with the combination of theatrically weary sarcasm and belligerence that I’ve come to think of as The Talk Radio Voice. “Call ‘em out, Paul!” a man crowed on from the crowd. “You’re just a hypocrite!” Paul continued. “A hypocrite !” It was a little after one in the afternoon on a beautiful Tuesday, and the view from the sixth floor of Rice-Eccles Stadium’s press and VIP tower was exquisite – a sweeping vista of Salt Lake City that is in my experience unrivaled (in one of my many previous incarnations, I booked a gala event for a nonprofit I was working for in this very room for that very view). Against the light streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows, framed against that view, were a band of   brave souls  who had come to interrupt Juan Palma, the Bureau of Land Management's Utah State Director, as he delivered an address ti...

posted 4/1/2013 by the Salt City Sinner "don't worry, folks, your climate is safe with me" Chris Stewart is an upstanding Utahn -- as Utahns measure such things. He's a businessman, a veteran, a New York Times bestselling author with a book that has been   endorsed  by no less an intellectual titan than Glenn Beck, and as of 2012, a Congressman, representing Utah's 2nd congressional district. As a freshman Congressman, Stewart had the good fortune to recently become appointed the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology's Subcommittee on Environment -- not too shabby for a scrappy kid from the Great State of Deseret. The only problem with this scenario is that Utah's proud new head of a subcommittee devoted to science is a climate change denier. Just as one might expect from a man who earned the Glenn Beck Solid Gold Seal of Approval, Stewart earned his seat the "conservative grassroots" way: he bought it wit...

posted 3/8/2013 by the Salt City Sinner The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in domin...

posted 9/14/2012 by Flora Bernard Larry Gibson and Tim DeChristopher ignoring the "No Trespassing" sign on Kayford Mountain, WV What do you have, in your own circle of life, that is so precious that you cannot put a price on it?  What would it be?  And if someone tried to come and take it from you, what would you do... how far would you go, to stand for it?  For me, it was my land. For me, it was my mountain. --Larry Gibson   A couple of years ago, I took a road trip to West Virginia with some close friends, one of whom was incarcerated environmental folk hero Tim DeChristopher . Tim was born in West Virginia, and watched his mother fight mountaintop removal mining through his early upbringing through every legal channel. After lobbying, petitioning, appealing permits, and otherwise doing her damndest to create the political will necessary to stop MTR for as many years as she could stand, she moved her family out of West Virginia. Decades later, coal c...

Most (if not all) prisons have a "Special Housing Unit" (SHU). Previously known as "the Hole," or, in cases where occupancy is one, by the good old standby " solitary confinement ." The use of SHUs is controversial, with many organizations claiming (and research backs them up ) that it constitutes psychological torture. You may remember climate activist and political prisoner Tim DeChristopher. I certainly do. I've written about Tim before ( here  ,   here  and   here ), but a quick recap may be in order. In 2008, Tim DeChristopher attended an oil and gas lease auction held in the hideous, radioactive sunset years of the Bush Administration, when public lands were being ruthlessly auctioned off in an extremely legally questionable last-minute fire sale. DeChristopher "posed" as Bidder 70 (actually, he was mistaken for a bidder by staff and just went along with it), and purchased 14 parcels of land for a cool $1.8 million, w...

I love my city! Even though we are flush with no coast pride here, our lack of, say, a gulf coast or a scenic, reef-bejeweled shoreline  didn't stop us from catching an oil spill right in the chops back in 2010 . Yes, Red Butte Creek and the Jordan River were the recipients of a generous helping of 33,000 US gallons of Chevron's finest crude. Chevron's leak lasted a few hours, and they performed a pretty extensive cleanup operation that could be seen mucking around in Liberty Park for what felt like ages. To their credit, Chevron ate the bill in its entirety. From the Tribune back in 2010 : Chevron is pledging to pay all public invoices - expected to reach into the millions - for cleanup services rendered to Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County, and state agencies.  Unlike the BP Gulf disaster, in which federal hand-wringing has politicized the reparations, the cleanup of Salt Lake City's environmental crisis appears straightforward. And pay they did. The ...

Kudos to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, scourge of Governor Herbert's most fevered, sweat-drenched dreams. The BLM sent Herbert a love letter , and listen to Herbert whine and sputter: "This nonsensical, bass-ackwards, peekaboo policy is nothing more than political posturing by overreaching federal bureaucrats. With no science and no data [Oh, really, Governer? - Ed.], and with a wave of their federal bureaucratic magic wand, they can just take the bulk of the acreage off the market, stifle innovation, and demonstrate, yet again, that this administration is patently hostile toward even the possible development of much-needed resources." I've included that gem in its entirety for two reasons: first, it amuses me when a shovel-faced, colorless goblin like Herbert loses his temper, because it's invariably both quite a sight and prompted by the oddest things. Is Utah faced with an epidemic of sick kids due to air pollution by Rio Tinto? Herbert probably hums...

The air quality in Salt Lake City has been truly awful lately - much worse than the usual winter inversion that moseys through. At the same time, our legislators (who claim  to be actual humans with actual lungs) relax regulations so that companies like Kennecott-Rio-Tinto can defile the air even more. Actual, undoctored photo of SLC air It was only January of 2010, almost two years ago exactly, that Salt Lake City experienced the legendary inversion that led to record-setting bad air - the very worst, in fact, in the United States of America ( I wrote about it at the time ). It has gone beyond a little "kaff-kaff" at the nasty diesel fumes as the delivery truck rumbles past. This is chemical warfare, and the corporate god-kings whose greed is more lethal than hatred are waging it against us, quite literally at the cost of our very lives. I received an e-mail from Cori Redstone, a fellow activist and friend of mine. She writes: How bad is this air? As I type th...

Judy Fahys and Thomas Burr at the Salt Lake Tribune have a story up as of yesterday  regarding a new bill that has wended its way through the US House of Representatives: Utah's three representatives supported the "Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act," which passed by a convincing 268 to 150 in the GOP-dominated House, but likely faces tougher going in the Senate, controlled by Democrats.   ...Some say the bill would stymie the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ability to protect public health from dust pollution.  Let's pause for a moment here. God alone knows it hasn't been an easy run for the staff of the Salt Lake Tribune. "Utah's independent news source since 1871" (independent compared to the Mormon Church-owned Deseret News) was bought by MediaNews Group in the 90s - due to my mom's past life in journalism, we've heard a lot of hard times stories from a lot of family friends as the newspaper business in general ha...

Photo by Laimis Urbonas If you were to ask a group of ten long-time Utahns why they love this state, I'm willing to bet that at least eight of them would say "the natural beauty" or some variant thereof. It's a gorgeous place to live - the mountains, the canyons, the red rock, all of it. We have a diverse and amazing assortment of natural goodies, valuable both for their own sake and for the tourism and recreation revenues they haul in. Photo by Robert Riberia Unfortunately, Utah is also a state dominated by extremely right-wing politics. One of the longest-standing divides in the state is between outdoorsy types (environmentalists, recreation enthusiasts and hunters/fishers) and developers. The belittling shorthand used to dismiss people who kick up a fuss when corporations lay waste to natural landscapes used to be NIMBY - an acronym for "Not In My Back Yard" - as though opposing the destruction of your own back yard  were somehow unusual ...