University of California Press Blog

Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America

As a Writer, Photographer, and Naturalist, Stephen Trimble explains the battle over open land in the American West in his book, Bargaining for Eden. (UC Press, June 2008). You can check out his website here, as well as his blog below.

By Stephen Trimble

As Bargaining for Eden approaches publication, I’ve been looking back on my ten-year immersion in these stories with both nostalgia and astonishment at just how much territory I’ve covered.

My journey began in 1997, when I drove up the winding road on Mount Ogden for the first time (just over the rocky ridgeline from Ogden, Utah), on assignment to photograph funky Snowbasin ski area before it became a mega-resort. The Salt Lake City Winter Olympics would transform the place.  As a writer, I saw an intriguing story.

In seeking answers to a simple question—“what will it take to bring an Olympic downhill racer to the finish line in 2002?”—I found myself reporting a chronicle, scene by scene, character by character—that captured the history of the Public-Lands West, from overused commons to reclaimed national forest to beloved local ski area, and finally, the transformation to corporate showplace and a resulting loss of community.

Earl Holding, owner of Snowbasin, wanted to craft his own version of the mountain.  His fierceness and ambition were implacable. And the United States Congress gave him what he wanted—by passing a bill to privatize public lands in the national forest at the base of Snowbasin.  To make that happen, Earl used the Olympics as an excuse.  And nearly every institution in our society fell in line. 

Every town in America has someone like Earl whose desires often trump community interest. He isn’t as bad as many other tycoons, but he gets his way. 
Earl Holding is a fabulously successful entrepreneur whose power grows—straightforwardly—from his $5 billion and his connections. Earl Holding owns the Little America hotels, Sinclair Oil, Sun Valley and Snowbasin ski resorts, and 500,000 acres of land in the West—making him the 63rd richest American.

If I expected to understand Earl’s dream for the mountain and penetrate to the roots of his values, I had to understand my own. I looked to my childhood and my family just as I poked around in Earl’s past, to comprehend why we had such contrasting visions of caring for landscapes.

And, then, in the middle of tracking these stories in the northern Utah mountains, my wife and I fell in love with a mesa just outside Capitol Reef National Park, near the village of Torrey in southern Utah.  To make our own dream of ownership financially feasible, we split the land, selling an existing house and a few acres.  And so I became a land developer, too.  On a tiny scale, I became Earl—and had to face Earl’s values within myself.

The tension I felt when confronting this irony became the dramatic core of the book.  It wasn’t just a theoretical acknowledgment of the old line, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” It was much more startlingly personal: I had become the enemy, and my story became much more complex and nuanced as I turned from observer to actor and struggled to come to terms with my new identity as a second-home owner in The New West, a newly-minted citizen of rural Utah.

Note: the caption to the picture to the right is:

The Henry Mountains framed by the author’s contractor as he positions a window in the bedroom of Trimble's house, Torrey, Utah, 2002.

Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything

As Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, Doug Macdougall writes about his findings while still in school about the earth's evolution and human prehistory in his blog below. Furthermore, you can check out Doug's latest book, Nature's Clock: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything (UC Press, July 2008). In addition to Nature's Clock, Doug is the author of Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages (UC Press, 2004).

By Doug Macdougall

Time is a sometimes elusive concept, but it’s crucial for understanding history, and that goes for everything from very recent history to the history of the universe.  Geologists are especially attuned to concepts of time, because the rocks they study – especially the layers of sedimentary rocks – contain a record of the earth’s history, ordered in time.
   

But until the discovery of radioactivity, there was no way to measure the earth’s history quantitatively.  Geologists studying layers of sedimentary rocks knew that the top layer was younger than the bottom layer, but they had no idea whether the difference in ages was a year, a few thousand years, or millions of years.  All that changed when they realized that the naturally occurring radioactive isotopes in the rocks act like built-in clocks.
   

When I was an undergraduate studying geology – it seems like an embarrassingly long time ago – dating rocks was in a fairly rudimentary state compared with today.  We touched on the topic briefly in our courses, but it was only when I was studying for a master’s degree that I really learned the details of dating and isotope geology.  From that point on I was hooked.  What could be more exciting than working out the exact timing of events in the earth’s distant past?  Much of my research since then has concerned geological time.
   

Radioactivity was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie, and another French scientist, Henri Becquerel, near the end of the nineteenth century.  For their discovery they were awarded the Nobel Prize, but they didn’t really understand the phenomenon they had identified.  And they didn’t realize its potential for measuring the ages of natural materials.  It was another scientist, the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford, who, a few years later, discovered that radioactive isotopes decay at a constant rate and used this knowledge to date several rock samples from the earth’s crust.  His results – he determined the rock ages to be around 500 million years – were a shock to many scientists who thought the earth was much younger.
   

In Nature’s Clocks I’ve tried to bring some of the excitement of geological age measurements to life by delving into the discoveries of scientist like Rutherford and the Curies, and also by outlining some of the amazing techniques scientists have developed more recently to make accurate time measurements of the distant past.  It is a fascinating field, and it’s at the heart of our understanding of planet earth and everything that it has experienced over its long history, from plate tectonics to climate change and the evolution of life.

Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science, and Society

Author and Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis, Ben Orlove writes in his blog about glacier retreat and how it effects inhabitants in surrounding areas. For more information, check out his blog, Darkening Peaks. The University of California Press published the February 2008 edited collection, Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science, and Society, edited by Ben Orlove, Ellen Wiegandt, and Brian H. Luckman.

The Power of Laughter

Who was it who said nothing forbids us from telling the truth, laughing? It must have been some old-souled Roman or such (OK, it was Horace), but the preference for many educated Americans today is to mix their serious interests with a good dose of levity. It's a yin-yang sort of thing that some pundits just don't get.

This past Sunday, in an article from the New York Times, Julie Bosman noted that fans of fake-news comedy shows such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report seem to be big buyers of non-fiction work. Online sales for a book normally skyrocket after an appearance on one of these shows. As Julie mentions, such shows "have become the most reliable venues for promoting weighty books whose authors would otherwise end up on 'The Early Show' on CBS looking like they showed up at the wrong party."

So what's going on here: publicists and authors opting for Jon Stewart over Charlie Rose and Jay Leno? It's all a reflection of the audience demographics. Who else, for instance, would want to talk to a scholarly author, an anthropologist and paleontologist, about sweaty skin, lubricated, pierced and tatooed? The Early Show? Please.

No longer dismissed as marginalized slackers or YouTubeheads, those who patronize the world of comedy represent a diverse spectrum of the population—and that spectrum is quite erudite and salty.

Stephen Colbert gets under Nina Jablonski's Skin with his interview discussing her book on the same subject.