Fixers

It’s been said that a bad day fishing beats a good day working, but Ron King is one guy who doesn’t see it that way. Not that he doesn’t love to fish. He does. It’s that he also loves his work. Ron has built a business running big machinery, which means he moves a lot of dirt. At the end of the day, he likes how he can see the headway he’s made.

“It’s doing what I love to do,” he says. “My happy place is sitting in a piece of equipment.”

Last summer found him revving his diesel-powered excavator at the 51-square-mile Zumwalt Prairie Preserve, where TNC began its stewardship 25 years ago. It’s earthwork, but it’s about fish, too. A stream called Camp Creek is where a lot of steelhead trout once got their start in life. But after a century of settlement, this tributary stream of the Snake River was in trouble.

There was a ranch road running right down the middle of what had been streambed. Thickets of willows and hawthorn had disappeared and along with it, the cooling shade of a streamside forest. Camp Creek had lost its meanders and pools of cool water, making it more of a deep ditch. Hardly a stream.

“It just wasn’t capturing, storing and releasing water in a way that was helpful to wet meadows, helpful to things like Columbia spotted frogs and steelhead trout. What that means downstream is that you’ve got less water in the stream later in the year, and in some cases fish that are stuck in these disconnected pools,” says Jeff Fields, TNC’s Zumwalt Prairie Preserve manager. He oversees the multi-year project alongside restoration ecologists and in partnership with the Nez Perce Tribe and Trout Unlimited.

Forest fires are a fact of life in the Mountain West. They may not burn every year, or even every century. But the history of fire in these forests is clear.

“It’s always been here,” says Liz Davy.

Liz is a retired U.S. Forest Service ecologist in Idaho. She still sees the forest with the eyes of a curious scientist, but lately she’s come to be known as a helpful neighbor. Make that a helpful neighbor to many.

Liz’s home isn’t far from Yellowstone National Park. In her town and many others like it, she’s been busy showing how relying on neighborly connections to share simple actions is the best way to keep neighborhoods safe amid the growing risk of living in and around western forests.

Even if fire has always been a part of the forest, Liz says the world around us is changing. For one, homes now occupy places that used to be nothing but forest. In areas like this, where low-intensity fires on the ground that don’t burn hot enough to reach into the treetops are a natural part of the ecosystem, building homes has always brought some risk. But now, after a century of aggressive firefighting, many forests have more trees than ever before—they’re actually too crowded. All that stored-up woody fuel combined with warming temperatures mean fires burn hotter. That's making fires more destructive than ever before.

Look around a place like Nevada and it might seem like something’s missing. Not so many lakes. Or rivers. It’s rare to see a raincloud. Even so, if you’re like Laurel Saito, a water scientist at TNC who knows where to look, there’s water to be found.

“In arid regions like Nevada, the closest water to you is often a few feet beneath you rather than in a nearby lake or river,” she says.

The water hidden beneath your feet has a name. It’s called groundwater. Because groundwater is often where drinking water comes from, it’s what brings life to many towns and cities. Groundwater is what allows a grove of aspen trees, its roots capable of reaching deep into the soil, to flourish on a desert hillside. Farms rely on irrigation water pumped from the ground to grow the food we eat. Is it any wonder, then, that Laurel likes to call groundwater the “unsung hero of life on Earth?”

“Even though it’s hidden underground, groundwater sustains us and the natural places that we care about,” she adds.

In a place like Nevada—home to a sea of sagebrush and pine forests and animals like desert pupfish and leopard frogs—life has a way of adapting to limits. And where there’s water to be found, nature makes use of it.

There are coal mines of one kind or another operating in 21 U.S. states. But of these, there’s just one heavyweight, and that’s Wyoming. Coal is king in the Powder River Basin, source of more than 40% of the nation’s output. That’s how it’s been since most Wyomingites were even born. Not forever, not at all, but it can feel that way.

Which is why the downturn in coal has felt like an emergency on a slow-burn for Gillette, a city of 33,000 known as “energy capital of the nation.”

Even though trains hauled off almost 1.7 million rail cars of Wyoming’s subbituminous coal to power plants in 26 states last year, that’s just half of what it was two decades ago. Wyoming still has the coal, that hasn’t changed. But the nation’s energy mix has: It’s cheaper to generate electricity from natural gas. Utilities aren’t building coal-fired power plants anymore. Plus, renewable energy like wind and solar, along with battery storage, is more economical than ever.

“The customers are just changing what they want,” says Justin Loyka, who directs the energy program for The Nature Conservancy in Wyoming.

That hasn’t gone unnoticed in coal country.

“There are hundreds of jobs that existed in 2009 that do not exist now,” says Justin, who, as a former mining engineer, knows the industry well.

The best way to get a feel for Montana’s shortgrass prairie is to take a walk. Do it on a spring morning. Listen for the meadowlark’s warbling. And, if you can, try to take in all the grass. There’s bluebunch wheatgrass, needle-and-thread, little bluestem and plenty more, each one a species all its own.

This is home for rancher Laura Nowlin, who raises cattle here with her family. It’s calving season, with work to be done, but just now she’s catching her breath at the kitchen table.

“It’s pretty hard this time of year, when there’s new babies being born and the birds are coming back and the grass is growing, to not just kind of marvel at the miracle of it all,” she says.

Laura leads a local non-profit organization called Winnett Agricultural Community Enhancement and Sustainability, or ACES, and The Nature Conservancy has been a partner in its efforts since it launched 10 years ago.

“At the end of the day, our goal is keeping family ranchers on the land,” Laura says.

The group’s guiding question, the one that keeps them on track, Laura says, asks “How do we maintain and improve working lands for the benefit of livestock, people, and wildlife, and how do we do that together?”

The health of the grasslands means so much in the middle of Montana. There’s the way prairie grasses give nesting cover to wildlife like greater sage-grouse and many grassland songbirds.

When you look at bluebunch wheatgrass, the grass you can see above-ground is like the tip of an iceberg—most of the plant’s biomass is underground. In their deep roots, prairie grasses absorb and store carbon from the atmosphere. In this way, working ranches are part of a virtuous cycle: Grass provides a livelihood, and that healthy livelihood helps ensure grasslands aren’t lost to development—namely, plowed up for growing crops. It would be like losing a forest. Wildlife—mule deer, prairie dogs, burrowing owls and more—take a hit, too.

Diana Apresa grew up playing in a lush tangle of zucchini vines and plump watermelons in her family’s garden. There were flowers, too, and trees. But one tree, a weeping willow with a curtain of branches reaching to the ground, was her favorite. “Mi arbol,” a young Diana called it, and her family knew that inside its shaded veil is where she could often be found.

“It would just embrace you,” Diana says. “It was like my refuge.”

Today, Diana is raising two sons in Phoenix, Ariz., and in their home, trees are like family. A neighborhood community garden offers the same kind of lush paradise she knew as a girl. There are pomegranate and peach trees. Lemon trees, too—even the leaves have a fragrance, Diana says.

“I grew up with nature all around me,” Diana says, “and that’s what I wanted my kids to have.”

Diana loves trees so much she notes what’s missing when they’re absent. As a jogger, she notices when her route takes her along a city block where there are no trees to offer shade.

Phoenix is the hottest metropolitan area in the country—and getting hotter. On some days, there are neighborhoods that are as much as 13 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than others. The hottest neighborhoods have fewer trees and more pavement.

Rivers have always drawn him in. With only oars to guide his raft, Aaron Derwingson reads the water—watching currents, adjusting in real time. It’s like the mindset he brings to his work at The Nature Conservancy, where he works alongside farmers to help agriculture work in a more arid West.

There’s a reason flowing water demands so much of Aaron’s attention. Rivers bring something essential to farms, towns, wildlife and entire ecosystems. In the Colorado River basin, where Aaron works, more than 40 million people depend on the basin for their drinking water. Rainfall on its own isn’t enough to sustain crops, so farms and ranches supply water by other means. In fact, currently, more than 70% of the water drawn from the vast Colorado River system for human use goes to agriculture. But lasting drought shows there are limits to what the Colorado River can deliver.

“The Colorado River is already stretched beyond what it can reliably provide,” says Aaron, who directs water projects for TNC’s Colorado River Program.

For an entire region, the shift has been occurring over time. Agriculture, as a sector, is identifying ways of adapting.

“We’re going to have less and less. I think of it as the new normal,” says farmer Greg Peterson, who is also president of the Colorado Ag Water Alliance, a group representing farmers and ranchers reliant on irrigation water.