Mercury Merganser

Posted by david on 27 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: Coal, environment, introduction, sustainability


Misty morning in the California Hills (by David Coil)

Hello again, welcome to another guest post by David… it’s been quite awhile since my last post. For new readers, I’m a behind-the-scenes researcher for Ground Truth Trekking. I don’t go on any of the cool trips but I help write and research many of our articles such as those on coal. I’ve been living in Belgium for the last few years and have recently moved to Davis in Northern California.

While I really enjoyed living in Europe, I always missed nature… in particular large open wild spaces like those that can still be found in the Western US. I love to be able to hike without seeing much indication of people. I also like the fact that lands are often accessible to the public in the US: I can go hiking in National Parks, Wilderness Areas, BLM land etc. Europeans are always amazed when I described the concept of BLM land, truly public places where one could just go and hunt, fish, hike, camp, or whatever.


Rainbow Trout (by David Coil)

Scouting

When I first arrived here in Davis I began to happily scout the area for hiking, packrafting, fishing, and hunting possibilities. And I was excited with what I saw; Northern California is chock-full of outdoor opportunities. I’ve caught some nice fish, paddled some fun rivers, and taken a lot of pictures. The landscape here is very different than Colorado where I grew up, or Washington where I spent many years.

In addition to hiking, I also wanted to go bird hunting. Now I should mention that my version of bird hunting isn’t really typical. I have no boat, dog, camouflage, whistles, or really much of anything. I just like to hike around a likely looking area with a shotgun… which basically means I’m just hiking with an extra weight in my arms. But occasionally I get lucky.


The duck in question (by David Coil)

The hunt

A few weeks ago I spent the day scouting out a wildlife area in the hills for hunting prospects. A beautiful area, thousands of acres of BLM and State of California land, I didn’t see a soul or much sign of humans anywhere and I saw plenty of ducks, quails and rabbits. So not long thereafter I went hunting there and had a wonderful time. I wandered the hills for hours without seeing any signs of humans other than the occasional bit of windblown trash. I also shot a duck near a river and brought it home and ate it with my family.

Rude awakening

Curious to read more about this species of duck, and the area where I had been, I turned to the internet: “The common merganser is a non-migratory fish-eating duck with a serrated bill.” Cool. Then I discovered that the upstream lake which feeds the river I’d been following is an EPA superfund site due to mercury contamination! Apparently there were a large number of mercury mines in the area a long time ago, and they suspect over 100 metric tons of mercury was dumped into the lake. The fish consumption advisories for the entire watershed basically suggest that if you’re a non-reproducing male you might consider eating some very occasionally and if you’re a woman or child forget about it. I even found one study where some researchers calculated that the fish are so contaminated that the common mergansers in the area were liable to suffer reproductive harm from the bioaccumulation of mercury. I found this information to be simultaneously worrisome and extremely frustrating.


Lingering mists (by David Coil)

Having done research on the topic of mercury contamination, I’m well aware of the fact that eating a fish-eating duck downstream of a mercury mine is probably a really bad idea. Mercury bioaccumulates in the food chain, meaning that predators collect more and more mercury as they eat contaminated prey. But it never occurred to me to research the proximity of Superfund sites to my next hunting prospect.


Cache Creek (by David Coil)

Then and now

To me this is a personal example of the consequences of ongoing environmental degradation. The mercury contaminating my duck was dumped into the environment a long time ago, at a time when we didn’t know as much about the toxic impacts it would have. But looking ahead, we have similar problems waiting to happen or already happening. Toxic piles of mine tailings could eventually escape their engineered barriers, for example at a mine like Red Dog, or Pebble Mine if it is eventually built. Fish and birds in currently pristine rivers could also become unsafe to eat. In these cases we know the consequences of our actions… and still as a society we value short-term economic gain over long-term consequences.


Alaska Coal Country (2010 expedition plans)

Posted by Erin on 06 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: trip preparation

Before I talk about our upcoming expedition… For those of you who haven’t seen it, we were in the New York Times last week. In the past few years, we’ve been in the media a number of times – so in a way, I’m kind of used to it. However, every other time, it’s been for something we’ve done (our year-long journey, the book I wrote…). This time, we’re news just for being ourselves – just for living our lives in a way that seems pretty normal to us, and many of the folks around here – but pretty unusual in the American mainstream. Anyway, back to expedition plans. :)

Alaska Coal Country

We became interested in the issue of coal in Alaska around two years ago, skiing through the site of the proposed Chuitna Coal Mine on the west side of Cook Inlet, as part of our Journey on the Wild Coast. Since then we’ve done our homework on the issue. What we need now is to see Alaska coal country up close.

Why?

In the US, when we think of coal, many people think of Appalachia, or Wyoming. But perhaps we should think of Alaska. Over 4 trillion tons of coal may lie beneath Alaska’s wilderness – perhaps 10% of the worlds total. Most of this can be found beneath the tundra in the northwest corner of the state – under the foothills of the Brooks Range, and on the coast of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

Coal was first discovered here hundreds of years ago, and small-scale mines supplied coal to power small towns, and the ships plying arctic waters. But the only mines here are small-scale remnants, shuttered long ago when the world on moved to liquid oil. The only modern exploration effort closed down shop in 2009. It would seem that the coal here is merely a piece of geologic trivia – unexplored, undeveloped, and hidden in the far reaches of the inaccessible arctic.




But oil and natural gas are becoming scarcer and more expensive, while the energy demands of an increasingly plugged in world population only grow larger. Coal supplies half of the US’s energy, and around a quarter of the world’s. Some people see Alaska’s coal as a cheap source of energy – powering the future. Shipping routes from northwestern Alaska are well placed to take advantage of shrinking arctic ice, delivering coal across the Pacific to power-hungry markets in Asia.

There is no free lunch — no way to generate energy without impacts. But coal is higher impact than almost any alterative — more polluting than oil or natural gas, with a larger footprint than hydro or wind farms… And there is little prospect of cleaning it up enough to match our other energy technologies. Mining coal destroys swaths of wild land and pollutes watersheds. Burning coal produces more of the pollutants that cause acid rain, more of the mercury that accumulates in the food chain, and more of the carbon dioxide that creates global warming and leads to ocean acidification. Global warming is already having dramatic impacts in Alaska’s arctic, from dwindling sea ice, to coastal erosion, to disrupted ecosystems.

That’s the big picture. In my opinion, an increased reliance on coal is one of the darker paths we might walk down. Now we’re looking for depth. Just what is Alaska coal country? Who lives there, and what do they think? How much coal is 4 trillion tons? We know no better way than to go there and see for ourselves.

Where?

Across tundra home to caribou, grizzly bears and wolves, over sedimentary hills with protruding layers of coal, and down meandering rivers cut through banks of permafrost… The couple hundred miles of our journey will take us across one small portion of northwestern Alaska’s vast coal fields. Exactly which portion, we’re not quite sure yet.

Where we go is determined by the intersection of the interesting, the important, and the possible. The arctic’s coal lies beneath a patchwork of land designations, with the federal government, the state, and native corporations all owning pieces. One attractive option is to travel between the native villages of Point Hope and Point Lay — dependent on the permission of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation. If anyone reading this has connections here to help us get this permission, let us know! Another possibility would take us through the National Petroleum Reserve A, home to the majority of the coal deposits. And whichever way we go, logistics are bound to be more complicated than we’re accustomed to.

How?

With just Hig and I, the journey would probably take around two weeks. But it’s no longer just Hig and I. With Katmai, we plan to spend a month on the expedition — modifying our usual style and speed to safely and enjoyably travel through the wilderness with a toddler. Our rough plan is to go in August — hopefully beyond the worst of the mosquito season, but not too far into the fall snowstorms. Some pieces of gear (water filter, satellite phone) that we’ve dispensed with for ourselves, we’ll bring for the baby. And though we’ve always embraced the logistical purity of walking from town to town, with a toddler to carry, we plan to rely on airplane food drops so that we don’t need to carry more than a week’s worth of food at a time. How we’ll manage to keep it simple enough to carry everything? We’re still figuring that out. Part of the challenge is that being first time parents, we have no idea what an 18 month old is actually like.

Stay tuned for more plan specifics in the coming months, as we look for funding, land permissions, and Hig works on his bizarre scheme for a baby+gear carrier.

The larger vision:

We want to connect the dots – between vast quantities of coal beneath Alaska’s wilderness, the exploding economies of Asia that would eagerly burn Alaska’s coal, and dramatic impacts of climate change. In addition to our Arctic trip, we’re planning shorter missions to the other chunks of Alaska coal country — at the Chuitna prospect, CIRI’s Underground Coal Gasification prospect, and Usibelli. All together, the Alaska coal country journeys will be the first stage of a 3-part series that will take us to Asia, and back to the Lost Coast, occurring over the next few years.


Ground Truth Trekking

Posted by Erin on 30 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: environment, home, introduction

We live outside. Snowshoes breaking trail into drifts of fluffy new snow, wet flakes swirling down to accumulate on the several layers of hats we’ve put on Katmai — who is sleeping on my back like a little snowcone. Breaking the ice on our well to dip out a jar of water. Scrambling past the toe of a glacier, days from the nearest town…

We live inside. Streaming music over the internet, sitting at our laptop-offices a few feet apart, Katmai nursing to sleep on my lap. Rain running down the rippled plastic windows of the yurt while the fire roars in the stove, and we assemble pages on Alaska coal

Our life is half remote, and half connected – half low-tech and half very high-tech. I thought I’d take a moment to write about our vision for the future of Ground Truth Trekking. In the next post, I’ll outline our next big expedition.



Ground Truth Trekking’s beginning

Officially, we founded Ground Truth Trekking in 2007, just before our year-long expedition. In reality it began slowly, several years earlier, as a natural outgrowth of our journeys.

In the summer of 2005, after a tromp around Blockade Glacier, Hig had to get back to grad school. I had already quit (after receiving my masters). So I took off toward an obscure piece of tundra west of the village of Nondalton — the site of the proposed Pebble Mine.

I didn’t know that much about the Pebble issue at the time. Not many folks did. And the bit I’d read only served to highlight how little I knew about something so large.

Expeditions are a natural way to learn. On my journey, I could measure the size of the Pebble proposal not in acres or miles, but in how many days it took me to walk through the place. I could walk past the drill rigs, and cower from the roar of the helicopters flitting between them. I could eat the berries and watch the caribou. I could meet the people in Nondalton. I could see the place as real.

I came back, and built a simple website on the Pebble Mine to share what I’d learned, filled with pictures I’d taken along the way. That “ground truth” formed the backbone of the site. But in order to make something meaningful, I needed the facts behind it. I spent uncounted hours on the internet, researching the issue, reading the mining company’s background documents, going to their meetings.

I wasn’t sure what I expected to come out of the project. I certainly didn’t have money to support it, or anyone but me working on it. But I was surprised at the response – from people requesting photos, emailing their questions and comments, linking to the site… For awhile, my website was the top hit for a ‘Pebble Mine’ google search, beating out both the mining company and the major opposition website. Since then, my own importance has dropped, but I’ve been happy to see the Pebble issue receiving a lot more attention — and am glad to have been a part of that.

Present, and future

So that’s the idea. Ground Truth Trekking is based on the belief that expeditions to see what’s on the ground help us learn about important issues. We combine that “ground truth” with “researched truth,” using our scientific backgrounds along with our adventures to come up with something we hope will further the conversation about these issues in an entertaining and informative way. Of course, we can’t hope to be experts on everything, so we focus most of our efforts on natural resource issues in Alaska.

We give presentations, write occasional articles, and of course I wrote a book. But a lot of what we do ends up on this website. Our vision is to make this into a place for virtual exploration, where people can learn about the issues, see photos, read stories, see maps, etc… So reading the story of an expedition, you might see a sidebar about an issue important in that region, and click to read a detailed informational article. From a photo, you could click to a slideshow with detailed captions and map locations, then download the photo for your own use. Reading an article about the history of coal in Alaska, you could click to a map that let you browse Alaska’s coal deposits and historic coal mines, then see photos and read stories about our expeditions to these places. Some of this you can even do now.

But our reality is that we’re just a few people, with limited resources, and limited time. So the vision is slowly clicking along towards reality, with new content and features appearing as we make them. So far, we’ve spent a lot of effort on our Journey on the Wild Coast (though we have so much content there, that only a limited amount is on the web right now). And more recently we’ve been exploring the issue of coal in Alaska. Right now there’s not a lot of adventure in that section, but stay tuned! We’re planning our next major expedition to the Northwest Arctic (Alaska Coal Country) this summer. More on that in the next post.

Ground Truth Trekking is an official 501c3 nonprofit, which means we’ve been able to get a few small grants to support our work (it also means your donations are tax-deductible :) ). In addition to supporting our expeditions, that has helped us to bring David Coil on board to help with researching and writing coal articles, and is helping us with getting programming support for the website. We’re also looking into branching out to include other “ground truth” expeditions done by other adventurers. More on that soon too.


Yurt sweet yurt

Posted by Erin on 11 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: book, home

ballard library talk
Interesting neighbors… (pic from Joseph Reeves)

I’m typing by the roaring woodstove and looking out our rippled windows at the volcanoes, while the baby’s busy rolling our canned goods across the floor and getting into every enticing object he couldn’t reach when we left on book tour 6 weeks ago. 1 boat ride, 7 car drives, 4 train trips, and 9 plane rides later, I’m happy to be home.


ballard library talk
Katmai exploring the kitchen

Absent for the fall, we arrived to a sudden winter. Everything is covered with a couple feet of snow, and I’ve been taking advantage of it by going snowshoeing with our crowd of Seldovia friends. Up on the ridge, we caught the low-angle sun that barely touches town in December, we set up a winter camping spot in a nearby valley…. After 3 separate Thanksgivings worth of pie, I need the exercise!

ballard library talk
warmth

Although I’m not sorry to be done with the traveling logistics, I enjoyed the book tour. And it went really well! Mountaineers is already sold out of the first printing and expecting the second printing to arrive in a few weeks. I ordered their last copies though, so I still have some to sell if anyone’s still short of Christmas presents. In fact, it went so well that we’ll be doing it again in spring – visiting California, Colorado, Montana, as well as a few other Alaska and Washington spots we didn’t get to the first time. Hopefully Katmai will be as flexible and cheery of a traveler as he was the first time.

ballard library talk
between all the Thanksgivings there were 8 pies

The fog has rolled in… As soon as it clears up and the planes can fly, we’re headed to pick up a New York Times reporter at the airport. More on that later.

ballard library talk
Working on the road (pic from Joseph Reeves)


On Book Tour – making our way South

Posted by Erin on 07 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: book

ballard library talk

We’ve been gone from home more than 3 weeks, currently camping out in my mom’s house in rainy Seattle. It’s been a whirlwind of book tour events. We’ve given our presentation 11 times already, so for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, we’ll have it down pat by the time you do. Katmai has been doing great at the presentations too. Here in Seattle, we’ve had helpful grandmas at nearly every talk, but when we don’t, Hig usually wears Katmai – joining in for as much of the presentation as the baby allows. A couple times I’ve even found myself nursing him while answering questions after the talk!

For those of you who missed our 4 Seattle events, there’s still one more on November 18!

I’ve been really happy to see the great response I’ve gotten to the book so far! We’ve had enthusiastic crowds overfilling nearly all of our talks so far, and the people who’ve gotten back to me say they’ve really enjoyed reading the book. Perhaps that’s a biased sample though… If you read the book and would like to let people know what you think, it’d be really helpful to have more reviews on Amazon. :)

Tomorrow we’re heading down to Portland for a week, then Eugene, Seattle again, Minneapolis, Juneau, and then we’ll finally be back home. Since this trip is going so well, we might well head out on another book tour later this winter to hit California, Colorado, and some more of the western states…


For anyone who’s interested, you can hear our radio interview on KUOW’s Weekday,
buy the book, or see the Book Tour schedule.

Burning coal while it’s still underground?

Posted by Erin on 13 Oct 2009 | Tagged as: Coal, environment, southcentral alaska

As Hig and I have been scrambling to get ready to leave on our Book Tour
this week, CIRI came out with the news that they’re planning an underground coal gasification
project on the west side of Cook Inlet (near the proposed Chuitna coal mine).

Which provided the kick in the pants to get our Underground Coal Gasification
article put together. So if you’ve been wondering what the heck underground coal gasification is, and what its benefits and drawbacks are, you’re not alone.

Underground coal gasification

Here you go (first paragraph of the article pasted below, click for more):

Underground Coal Gasification
(UCG) involves igniting coal in the ground, then collecting and using the gases that result from its partial combustion. Although the idea dates back over a century, very few UCG plants have ever been built. Underground gasification could potentially allow the use of coal that is currently uneconomical to mine. Underground gasification eliminates the need for strip mining
and might make carbon capture and sequestration
more practical. However, UCG produces more CO2 per unit energy, and thecoal combustion wastes
that are left behind can leach pollutants into nearby groundwater, and have caused major contamination in UCG pilot projects….Read more

The book is nearly here!

Posted by Hig on 22 Sep 2009 | Tagged as: trip preparation

We’re expecting books in hand before October 14, and are now accepting pre-orders! Also we’re looking for help figuring out our book-tour schedule. Here’s what we’ve got so far:

  1. October 13-14: Seldovia (details to be determined)
  2. October 15 at noon: Soldotna Rotary club
  3. October 15-16: Homer (details to be determined)
  4. October 17, 1-3 pm: Cover To Cover Books in Seward
  5. October 21 at 6 pm: Title Wave books in Anchorage
  6. October 22 at 6 pm: REI in Anchorage
  7. October 29 at 8 am: Interview with King 5 news in Seattle
  8. October 29 at 7 pm: REI in Seattle
  9. October 30 at 9 am: KUOW Seattle public radio interview (Weekday)
  10. October 30 at 7 pm: Bellingham Village Books
  11. November 5 at 6:30 pm: Ballard (Seattle) Public Library
  12. November 9 at 7:30 pm: Powell’s Books in Portland
  13. November 11 at 7 pm: REI in Portland
  14. November 13-18: Eugene (details to be determined)
  15. November 20-22: Midwest Mountaineering expo in Minneapolis (two presentations, times to be determined)
  16. December 1: Juneau (details to be determined)

As things get figured out, we’ll do our best to keep the book page up to date so you can check there. If you have ideas about venues, or if you can help us get the word out, we really appreciate it! Post a comment here, or email us if you want to help. Depending on what we manage to get lined up on the Kenai Peninsula for mid-Oct., we may do something at the beginning of December on our way back.

A Long Trek Home

The Dead and the Dying

Posted by Erin on 13 Sep 2009 | Tagged as: environment, southcentral alaska, trip reports

Jagged spine
Ice shrinks from the flanks of this jagged spine
Click on any image to go to the slideshow

Last winter’s meager snowfall was followed by volcanic ash, then a warm sunny spring, melting the mountains back to bare ice and rock. Even amongst high peaks, the usual snow slopes were boulders and scree, bare rock fields with barely a hint of vegetation. Some of the dime-sized patches of moss might not have seen sun in years. Some of the rock might never have seen sun at all. It was a good time to visit the dead and the dying – the glaciers not long for this world.

We were walking through brand new country. From a viewpoint on a gravel ridge, we stared across the crevassed expanse of a glacier that might melt away without ever being given a name. On our maps, the white blobs of glaciers crisscrossed our route. Once imposing obstacles, but now only withered remains.

We walked on ice. We walked past newborn lakes. We skated down slopes of sharp scree, past cliffs scratched by vanished ice.

We were scrambling high in the passes above Tutka Bay, on a route chosen mostly for my mother Niki, who was visiting from Seattle. We were initially planning to backpack with a crowd of friends from Seldovia, but all of them had to duck out at the last minute, so we canceled our plans and schemed a new trip with Niki.

Bushwhacking

She’s an avid kayaker, trail hiker, and international wanderer – and bushwhacking is her one complaint about Alaska. In every phone conversation, she impressed upon us how much she disliked bushwhacking, and how she wasn’t willing to tolerate more than a tiny dose of the steep alder and devil’s club morasses we’d dragged her through on previous visits.

Without trails, some bushwhacking is inevitable. On our way up from the water at Tutka Bay, we wove through the devils club and sickly-looking blueberry bushes (devastated by last winter’s low snow) beneath the spruce forest. On our way down to the water at Tutka Bay, we scrambled down steep gullies of slippery grass and brush. Our chunk of the Kenai Peninsula is a lushly vegetated place. But in between, our route was high above the brush in the ice and rock – high in the land of yesterday’s glaciers.

Weaving through the puzzle

“What do you mean it doesn’t look too bad?”

“What do you mean there’s probably a way?”

Minimal straightforwardness. Maximal uncertainty. I tried to explain to Niki that the fact that we had no idea if our proposed route was possible wasn’t really a problem. It just meant that for every climb, and every descent, we’d just have to wait and see. 100 foot contour lines are much too vague to show a 30 foot cliff. And if the map marked ice, we might find walkable ice. Or un-walkable crevasse-filled ice. Or walkable rock. Or un-walkable cliffs. There was no way to know, really, except to go there.

It had been a while since we’d done a trip like this. On our Journey on the Wild Coast, we almost never went anywhere so complicated. In the big picture of walking from A to B, it rarely makes sense. But the Tutka trip was just four days, and all we had to do was get back to where we’d started.


Warming world – shrinking ice

I still remember the first time I looked out over a corner of the Harding Icefield, in the summer of 2000. In my childhood of backpacking in Washington State, glaciers were only minor decorations on the flanks of giant mountains. But here, it was reversed. I saw tiny mountains poking out of a giant sheet of ice. I was awestruck. I still am. But the glaciers spilling out over the edges of the icefield are shrinking quickly. Where our map marks “Southern Glacier,” we know a rocky saddle we call “Southern Glacier Pass.” We know tricky routes that would have been impossible without glacier gear a few decades ago.

Walking the edges of shrinking glaciers, I feel like an explorer. In some places, we’re probably leaving the very first human footsteps, on very new land. Sharp rocks and mud pile on the edge of patches of dead ice, slippery underfoot. Tiny spots of green speckle the edge of rock fields, where lichens and grasses are spreading.

From the alpine ridges, it’s hard to see the negatives of global climate change. We can see the shrinking ice, but not the ocean acidification, or the erosion, or the sea level rise, or the shifting weather patterns that leave both crops and native species struggling where they used to thrive. We’ve been spewing ever increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution got rolling. The climate is already changing.

There will be some winners. Perhaps the alpine lichens that take over the former realm of the glaciers will thrive. But most of us – plants, animals, people, civilizations – are adapted to the way things are now. Change brings pain and extinction, upheaval and hardship. Our fossil-fuel intensive society seems stuck in a hopelessly entrenched pattern. We’ve been doing this for a long time compared to a human life. But it’s a short time compared to the life of humanity. We can’t escape climate change altogether – but if we jump on it now, we might soften the blow.


A delightful encumbrance

This time we counted. About 17 pounds for a diapered and dressed baby. 1 pound for the wrap to carry him in. Another 4 pounds of extra clothes, diapers, and sleeping gear for Katmai. Altogether, it was 22 pounds of additional weight to add to the 65 pounds or so we were already wearing or carrying between the two of us (food for 4 days, water, packrafts, clothing, camping gear, etc…). And he’s only getting bigger…

Katmai loves hiking. He doesn’t bat an eye when daddy skates down a steep scree slope with him. He doesn’t notice or care about the difficult terrain. He trusts us to keep the bushes out of his face, not to fall on the boulders or ice, to keep him warm and fed and dry. He rides in his snuggly spot, watching the world go by, occasionally being set down to play in it. And what an interesting world it is! Always new bushes, always new rocks (why won’t mommy and daddy let me stick those little ones in my mouth?). Packrafting is more boring – I suppose he’ll have to be a little older to truly see the light on that one. I wonder what impression our adventures are leaving on his little brain.

Everyone tells us it’ll get harder before it gets easier. Toddlers are heavy. And not very inclined to walk long distances. But we’re planning on taking him to the Northwest Arctic for a 2+ week trip next year. We’ve done a lot of improbable things already – I suspect we can find some way to make it work.


Alaska’s Wild Resource Web

Posted by Hig on 25 Aug 2009 | Tagged as: Coal, Energy issues, Fossil fuels, environment, introduction, maps, sustainability

We’ve made a few oblique references to it in the past… some mysterious new website we’ve been working on that includes information about coal in Alaska. Well, you can check it out now. It’s not done by any means, but there’s enough there that it’s worth checking out.

Hig carries his packraft across the icy tide flats at Controller Bay.
Hig carries his packraft across the icy tide flats at Controller Bay.

Complex issues

All this started with a love of wandering around the Alaska wilderness, and with a drive to understand the hard decisions that Alaska and America need to make about that wilderness. Is it possible to capture nuanced trade-offs between different options in a web site that is still interesting and understandable? Can that web site tie together the gritty on-the-ground experiences that form the foundation of our interest with the detailed research that broadens and deepens our understanding? Is it possible for our tiny organization to do the research needed to do justice to these complex issues?

We decided to give it a shot. But we had to start somewhere. We decided to first look at coal. Alaska has a good portion of the world’s remaining coal, but only a little bit of it is currently being mined. Coal is a major source of CO2, the most important human-generated greenhouse gas… and Alaska is experiencing dramatic changes from global warming. Coal also stores vast amounts of energy—energy that we can use to run industry. And many are still unaware of the huge decisions we have before us in Alaska about coal. Depending on whether, where, and how we mine coal in Alaska, we move toward dramatically different futures. Which of those futures is best, and how do we get there?

So we turned our attention away from other urgent issues surrounding metals mining, fisheries, forests, renewable energy, and climate change to focus on coal. We broke down the issue into manageable pieces. There were background issues, like carbon capture and sequestration, coal to liquids, and mercury pollution. There was the existing coal infrastructure, like Usibelli coal mine, the Seward coal dock, and coal fired power plants in Alaska’s interior. And there were possible future developments, like the Chuitna coal mine, western arctic coal mining, and Beluga coal-to-liquids.

At the same time we had to gain the capability to build the web page. The old aphorism, “If you want something done right, do it yourself” is one we live by, and we took on learning the XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and Python programming languages needed to build the site we wanted. We’re still learning, still making plenty of mistakes, but the pieces are starting to fit together. We also anticipate interactive maps maps will be a crucial aspect of the site, and are collaborating with Skytruth to build an open-source “WebMapper” software suite. WebMapper will be built on top of the Google Maps and OpenLayers APIs using Django. This is still in its initial phases, but we hope to start using its basic functionality in the next two months.

Biased?

In this age of activist-journalism like that emblemized by Fox News, bias is certainly a touchy issue. We certainly have our own perspective on these issues. We love the wilderness, and see many of the excesses of our consumerist society as unnecessary and unsustainable, which leads to a skepticism of unbridled industrial development. And of course you should follow the money. We do have a small grant from the Alaska Conservation Foundation. It payed for less than half of what we’ve done so far… the rest is volunteer effort.

That said, we try very hard to give a true, broad treatment of the issues. Erin, David, and I are all scientists, and in developing the content we present here we turn the critical philosophy that gives science its power on each of these issues. Because we’re striving to approach completeness in our coverage, we can’t repeat the research that we reference here, but we do question each piece of information we incorporate.

And we welcome critique and criticism. Our “help out” page provides basic instructions for providing feedback. We listen to everyone who contacts us (I’ve already made changes in this blog based on a 7 am call from a Chevron spokesperson.)

The vision

So what will this site be when it’s “done?” We see it as a marriage between four aspects.

The first is content presenting basic information about issues. This includes articles, graphics, and links to outside sources, much in the style of Wikipedia. For example, if you go to our article on mercury from coal, you’ll find a detailed article, a figure summarizing some key points, and links to further reading and references. If you click on the figure, you can see details of where the data came from, and also download other versions of the graphic if you want to edit it and use it yourself.

The second is photographs illustrating the issues and the places they affect. For example, in our article on the Seward coal loading facility, you’ll find several photos. If you click on one, you see a larger version of the photo, along with a map of where it was taken and a way to download the photo at different resolutions. We’ve put some photos into slideshows… so far one on Seward coal, a more general one showing pictures of Alaska coal country, one of “Ground Truth Trekking at work,” and one just for fun of Shipwrecks. What’s missing at the time of this blog posting are more flexible ways of browsing images and searching through them… coming soon!

The third is information about ground truth expeditions. The people and places behind what we discuss on this site are very real, and there are some things that can only be learned by actually being there. We like to do this by walking across the land and by staying with people who know and care about the issues. We’ve done this on our existing pages about the Pebble prospect and about our Long Trek in ‘07-’08, but we haven’t yet integrated this sort of content into Alaska’s Wild Resource Web.

A thread winding through all these aspects are maps. It’s possible to overlay data on interactive maps that allow scrolling and zooming, and to have the map provide links to other information. For example our article on Chuitna Coal prospect includes a map of salmon streams near the proposed mine. Click on the “ENLARGE” link in the caption to see a large version of this map. We see the potential of interactive maps as huge, and hope to greatly expand our use of them over the next year.

Beta testers

So take a look, and let us know what you think. Are we headed in the right direction? What other features do you want to see in Alaska’s Wild Resource Web? Do you have photos or other content that would help flesh out the site? We’re excited to hear what you think!


A Long Trek Home: 4,000 Miles by Boot, Raft, and Ski

Posted by Erin on 03 Aug 2009 | Tagged as: book, events, home, trip reports

A Long Trek Home

I’m not just writing a book. I have written a book.

Hig and I recently saw a movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly about a man who had been entirely paralyzed except for one eye, and still managed to write an entire book that he dictated by blinking – one letter at a time. I tried to remind myself of this during the hours I spent pecking out words one-handed, trying to combine book-editing with baby nursing. Now that Katmai is a bit older, he can hold himself in place, allowing me to type this blog two-handed.


Nursing and typing
Multitasking

When we finished our journey, I had a bean-sized baby in my body, and the seed of a book in my mind. The first draft was due at the same time as Katmai. And it seemed as if both of my “babies” developed in parallel. At the beginning, progress was slow – the physical baby so small as to not even be a bump, while the book was not much more than a jumbled set of notes from my nightly journals. Towards the end, both were gigantic, and imminent. I sat in the hotel room in Homer, laptop on the far side of my enormous belly, hurriedly finishing the book as I waited for Katmai to arrive. I sent off that draft the day before his due date. He was born four days later. I was lucky he didn’t come early.

Chapter 1: Civilization
Chapter 1: Civilization
Chapter 9: Ice
Chapter 9: Ice


Chapter 15: Awakening
Chapter 15: Awakening

I pushed the book out of my mind, waiting for the editors at Mountaineers Books to get back to me, focusing on setting up life with this new little person. Until it landed back on my lap, a few months later. I had a bit less than three weeks to edit an entire book. So back in May, while everyone in Seldovia was digging in their gardens and enjoying the wonderful spate of hot sunny weather, I was stuck at my computer – editing. I would occasionally click over to Amazon – noting that it was already possible to buy the book that I was currently editing. It was a good reminder that the whole thing was in fact really happening, and that I’d better keep focused if I wanted what was in that book to be any good!

It seemed like it would never be done. After the editing phase, there was a proofing phase. Hig labored over the route maps. We picked out photos for each chapter. And then there were more questions, more things to check and reword…

Fall Map
Fall Route Map

But at each stage, it seemed more and more official. Instead of a plain word document, it was now a pdf, laid out like a real book, with pictures and maps, and chapters. I was so close…

And now I’m done. The book comes out in October, and Hig and I will be doing a small book tour in October/November, through Homer, Anchorage, Seattle, Portland, and maybe a few other places along the way. Stay tuned for details! I’ll be selling signed copies here at Ground Truth Trekking when it’s out (and I’ll probably post a sample chapter), so sign up to get a reminder email if you want to know when the book comes out or when I might be through your town!


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