Cutler Marsh in Cache Valley, Utah is a manmade wetland that has become an Important Bird Area.1 The marsh was formed in 1927 by the construction of Cutler dam, which flooded the confluence of the Bear, Logan, Spring Creek and Little Bear Rivers. Though the marsh is publicly accessible, it is not public land. It is owned by PacifCorp which manages the reservoir for agricultural water and power generation. However, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) license for the dam includes provisions to enhance habitat for wildlife and build infrastructure for recreation. Ecologically, the marsh is part of the Great Salt Lake watershed, an extension of the wetlands that surround the lake. An Audubon society report2 notes that it has a great blue heron rookery, numerous bald eagle nests, and flocks of American white pelicans that “use the area for foraging and loafing.” (I do not know if “loafing” is a scientific term for pelican behavior, or snarky judginess on the part of the report’s author).

The best guidebook to paddle Cutler Marsh is, The Bear River and Its Water Trail by Elliott R. Mott,3 who suggests that if you go into the area knows as The Maze you should use GPS so you don’t get lost. He’s right. The water trails are not well marked. Recently, my friend Emily and I launched our packrats a the Logan River Dock in order to paddle six miles to Cutler Marsh Marina. A couple of natural resources students from Utah State University were there, dressed in waders up to their armpits and coated with stinky mud. They told us that they had seen a lot of dead carp. At first it was fairly easy to follow the course of the Logan River following a line of subtle bubbles through the marsh, but after a while the river began to split around islands and cattails in giant disorienting loops and the current vanished. Forewarned, we used cell phone GPS to keep on heading toward Cutler Marsh Marina where we had dropped off a car. Lush cattails and tall grasses hid the nearby highway and other human structures from view so that we seemed to be floating in a reflective world made of murky water, vegetation, cloudy sky and distant mountains. Birds were all around in the rushes and trees, but few of them settled on the water. As we came near the Marina we encountered a few other people in kayaks and stand-up paddle boards, but mostly it was just us, splashing paddles and birds.

Nine years ago, PacifiCorp proposed raising the level of Cutler Dam three feet in order to store more water. If the dam had been raised, it would have flooded this marsh and its bird habitat. It often feels like human infrastructure is purely destructive, and Cutler dam probably looked like destruction when it first flooded the landscape. Now it has been there for a hundred years, and the marsh is full of birds and it is glorious.

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My friend Julie took this photo of me rowing Vinegar rapid on the Main Salmon river in Idaho. She had already gone through the rapid herself and was on a boat in the eddy at the bottom taking photos, incidentally ready to pull any swimmers out of the water if things went wrong. I am rowing a 16 foot rental boat named Otis.

Vinegar is at mile 78 of an 80 mile wilderness river trip— the last big rapid before you get to the cars and have to de-rig the boats and start the long drive home. It’s rated class III or IV depending on water level, but it’s not really all that technical. You line up on some obvious marker rocks then give a big shove towards river right, ideally into the thin green line between various sharp rocks and churning holes. Vinegar is also my nemesis. I have knocked oars off on rocks, taken a wrong line and washed off my boat, and once my oar tower collapsed in the middle of the rapid so that I flushed through upright but backwards out of control. On the Main Salmon I spend the whole week-long trip hoping nothing goes wrong in Vinegar.

On this occasion with low water and many exposed rocks, we stopped to scout Vinegar. It is a good feeling to analyze a rapid and then execute the plan, and that’s just what I did. Straight down the narrow line between lurking hazards. Well done, Amy!

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One thing I’m genuinely afraid of is hot weather. In the past, I’ve suffered two episodes of life-threatening heat exhaustion, both times during wilderness camping trips in triple-digit temperatures with no way to escape the heat. The symptoms are crankiness and mental confusion before I start throwing up water. Both times it happened, I was saved by friends who had first aid training.

So, when the weather report showed temperatures climbing as high as 107℉ I almost decided to bail from a long-anticipated river trip through Desolation/Gray Canyons on the Green River. I wasn’t sure a week outside in such heat was survivable, at least not by me. Nonetheless I wanted to go with my friends and I wanted to row my JPW Cutthroat.1 In the end, I convinced myself that if I didn’t stray far from the river, didn’t go hiking, drank plenty of Gatorade and slept outside with damp sheets on a well-ventilated cot I’d probably be OK.

Our first night out it rained and the dreadful heat was made more oppressive by high humidity. The next night, I couldn’t stand the prospect of sweltering in a tent, so despite dry lightning flashing in the distance I set up my cot on the beach and lay there watching the light show until I fell asleep. Sometime in that starless darkness, I was awakened by spritzing rain. Then it fell hard. I wasn’t cold, but I was drowsy and damp and a thought came to me that I should put up my tent after all. Fumbling in the dark with a headlamp, I had just inserted the poles when a ferocious gust of wind ripped the tent out of my hands. I ran after it on bare feet across sharp rocks but I wasn’t fast enough. I watched in dismay as it flew upstream and sailed into the middle of the river. There it settled into a fast current beyond the eddy and began to sink. I cursed and plunged into the water trying to grab it, but the water was already past my waist and I couldn’t reach it. Since I didn’t dare swim into the dark river, I watched it vanish. Then I remembered that I also had a rain tarp in my dry box, so I got it out, wrapped myself up, lay down on the cot and went back to sleep. The next evening when it came time to sing the river blues (cue the harmonica), it went like this:

Mean ol' Wind threw my tent into the river
Poor little tent, sank way down to the bottom
Wind stole my tent and drowned it in the water
I aint never gonna see that tent no more

I was fond of that tent, and of course it was a model that has been discontinued. Supposedly you can buy anything on the Internet these days, but it’s not quite true. I thought I had found a replacement on eBay, but when the package came it was the wrong model year. I want my same lost tent, not this sad imposter. Now I have made a little extra chore for myself to re-sell the wrong tent. In retrospect, it would be nice to rewind to a different story where I could have just deployed the rain tarp in the first place. Or better yet, a story where no matter how hot it gets, I am sensible enough to set up my tent in daylight if there is any chance of rain.

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E. O. Wilson wrote that the most dangerous worldview is a wrongheaded idea that wilderness needs to be pristine in order to serve the purpose of conserving biodiversity.1 Christopher Brown would agree. Traveling through urban edgelands by canoe and on foot, Brown finds that cities are full of places so damaged by human activities that people no longer use them. Non-human creatures have moved in. He develops an argument in favor of preserving such places, and incidentally exposes a fundamental flaw in the hubristic Anthropocene idea that human effects on nature imply human control of nature.2 To Brown, the profound lesson of empty lots is, we can see exactly what happens when humans cede control, and observation can teach us how to co-exist with other species:

I highly recommend getting lost. Personally, I am thrilled to glimpse wild creatures in empty lots, city parks, alleys, cemeteries and railroad rights-of-way; Like Brown, I sometimes follow footpaths to see where they lead and sneak under fences to find out what’s on the other side; I especially like to packraft on the urban Jordan River near my house,3 and was recently interviewed by the Salt Lake Tribune for doing so.4 In urban edgelands, I have even had transcendent experiences of oneness, similar to what Brown reports while paddling a neglected urban river that flows through industrialized neighborhoods of Austen, Texas:

A more religious person, Brown says, would call this the divine. His own takeaway is awe at the tenacity of life in aesthetically barren scraps of land left behind by human carelessness and abuse. This unexpected aliveness implies that there could be a deliberate strategy to restore right relationships with the natural world. He is so committed to this vision that he not only sits through mind-numbing city council meetings5, he purchases a decontaminated brownfield lot and commissions an architect to build him a feral house. The design, with a prairie planted on the roof, requires occupants to go outside on their way between rooms. When venomous coral snakes move in, he allows them to stay, though he says he will eject them if they menace his dogs or toddler. I laughed out loud to read, “In time we would even learn to recognize individual insects who had moved in with us for good.”6 [p.227].

Brown is a strong advocate for re-localization as well as re-wilding. He knows that the longitudinal work of placemaking is done by people who stay home and attend those dull civic meetings, and that adventure can mean exploring hyperlocal places that are not in any guidebook (in one instance when he does follow a guidebook, he finds a wildlife refuge wrecked by motorized recreation). Brown charges us with a mission to value edgelands in our own cities— highway bridges where bats and cliff swallows roost, urban rivers and train tracks that create accidental wildlife corridors7, sacred groves of remnant trees, populations of rodents that feed foxes and owls, and roadkill that feeds vultures. We glamorize travel, but running away to find a less damaged place will not save us. What might save us is learning from empty lots how to co-exist with the natural world. Brown, who is also a lawyer and a writer of speculative fiction, is fundamentally an optimist though not a sunny one. He isn’t totally sure that we will manage to do the right thing, but he truly believes that, once we learn to get lost in the places where we live, we might do better:

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This is a frustrating book about a topic I know quite a lot about. When I was an employed librarian, I published an article about an information research strategy to incorporate civic engagement and social justice.1 I cite Bears Ears National Monument in Utah as a case study for an information research strategy to investigate tension between land development and protection of an indigenous sacred places. If I had been advising Whitson’s PhD research, I would have recommended starting with some key questions:

—What laws and government policies determine how this land is managed?
—Who are the stakeholders? What do they want?
—Who drew the maps? Why are the boundaries where they are? Who named the features?
—Who has power? What voices are missing?
—Is anyone claiming to speak for a group they don’t actually represent?

Whitson simply hasn’t done this background work. He starts with a shaky premise that there is no essential difference between federal public lands and private property:

Um, no. Federal public lands are open for public use (which is the reason why an outdoor recreation industry has developed there). More importantly, laws like FLPMA and NEPA create a public process for direct citizen and stakeholder involvement to develop management plans. Building on this error, Whitson uses evidence from Instagram posts to construct a dubious thesis:

In other words, your vacation photos are complicit in genocide. A strong claim, that leads to wrongheaded discussion blaming the outdoor recreation industry for public lands woes:

Anyone who has ever seen a Patagonia catalog knows they are selling a fantasy, but it’s not the one Whitson thinks it is. His argument against wilderness is muddled by failure to distinguish between “wildernessing” which he defines as an “environmental realization of a narrative” that land is “unpeopled and unmanaged,” and capital “W” Wilderness which is a legal management strategy for public lands designated under the Wilderness Act of 1964 to be part of the National Wilderness Preservation System.2 Whitson is fixated on the word “untrammeled,” but designated Wilderness Areas don’t have to be free of human influence— they have to be roadless areas of 5,000 acres or more. In other words, Wilderness legally excludes certain kinds of technology, not human use or human management. In order to demonstrate that the Wilderness Act is ineffective, Whitson cites examples of public lands that have been stripped of conservation protection, but none of his examples were ever part of the National Wilderness Preservation System; they mainly show that alternatives to formal Wilderness designation are unfortunately easy to reverse.

Whitson assigns far too much political power to the outdoor recreation business sector and ignores competing public lands stakeholders such as mining, energy, timber and grazing. He ignores the conservative Transfer of Public Lands movement which is aggressively trying to privatize federal public lands and not incidentally, impede Tribal interests. He seems unaware of the very real threat that was posed by Utah Congressman Rob Bishop’s 2016 Public Lands Initiative (PLI) before a version of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition proposal 3 was adopted by president Obama.4 He misunderstands the motivation for the Trump1.0 administration to re-draw Bears Ears boundaries (it was done to facilitate uranium mining, not to placate rock climbers5). He cites Indigenous activists from Instagram without clearly identifying whether they represent Tribal government, specific activist groups, or just themselves as individuals.

Whitson says that his vision for environmental justice is, to create right relationships among different groups of people and the natural world, “built on respect, reciprocity, equality and self-determination.” Yet when he encountered a messy real-life example of imperfect people trying to do just that, he wrote a whole PhD dissertation and associated book about why wilderness nature reserves shouldn’t exist and why some public lands stakeholders (specifically outdoor enthusiasts in Patagonia jackets) don’t count. Misled by heated rhetoric on Instagram, Whitson frames alliances that formed between conservation groups, outdoor recreation businesses and Indian Tribes as a failure. They aren’t. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition is an unprecedented collaboration between Tribal governments; their proposal for co-management was a ground-breaking idea that still offers a workable solution to conflicts between government, Indian Tribes, and public lands stakeholders. The creation of Bears Ears National Monument has led to ongoing dialogue and lasting relationships between diverse Monument supporters and stakeholders, and these are the people who will keep working to protect it.

On July 13, 2026, president Trump signed a second proclamation to decimate Bears Ears National Monument.6 In doing so, he violated agreements with Tribal governments and tossed out a management plan that was developed though a transparent public process with countless hours of stakeholder input ; he also destroyed a new more hopeful vision of public land management that promised significant tribal influence over the future of ancestral lands. This is a travesty and a tragedy which does not advance anything Whitson claims to value. Meanwhile, on Sunday, July 19 the very same outdoor retailers that Whitson despises took out a full page ad in the Salt Lake Tribune to say “Businesses stand with Tribes to defend Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments”.

In many years of rafting, I had not yet managed to float the C Section of the Green River past Taylor Flats where I once had to bail from a trip due to severe weather. It didn’t seem like a great loss. Anglers said there are not many fish; boaters said there are no rapids. What nobody said is, Swallow Canyon is like floating through a music box of birdsong amplified by redrock cliffs. Not only were there swarms of cliff swallows, but also canyon wrens, hundreds of red-winged blackbirds and many other songs I didn’t recognize but want to learn. John Wesley Powell mentioned the remarkable swallows in his diary of the 1869-70 expedition:1

On the 1871-72 Powell expedition, Frederick S. Dellenbaugh also thought Swallow Canyon worth a mention:2

But back to those canyon wrens. They sing the redrock desert into existence. Amy Leach has heard them sing and tells us what we need to know about them in her essay “The Everybody Ensemble”:3

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I am excited to announce that my poetry chapbook, Utah Reclamation Project has been published by Moon in the Rye Press. It has my Great Salt Lake poems and more!

You can read it online for free at https://online.fliphtml5.com/gmlcg/Brunvand/. I also have a limited number of hard copies for sale. Message me if you want one ($12 Venmo).

Moon in the Rye Press is a very cool project of Lisa Bickmore, who is the current poet laureate of Utah. It is a mobile micro press designed to highlight and support literary creativity in Utah. The project funds 50 copies of each author’s work for personal sharing and local distribution. The collection of chapbooks is worth exploring. It has wonderful things.

Trip Report: Rogue River
Hog Creek- Foster Bar (49 miles)
6/20-6/24, 2026
2300 - 1700 cfs

I am back from rowing the Rogue River in Oregon, but not really back because now I want to run it again. Next time maybe I won’t pop an oar in Tyee rapid. Maybe I’ll run Blossom Bar clean. Maybe we can go a few weeks later in the year so that there will be abundant ripe blackberries. Maybe we’ll see a bear!

The Wild and Scenic Rogue Rogue River1 runs 34.5 miles from Grave Creek to Foster Bar, but in order to make the trip a bit longer, we tacked on the 14.5 mile recreational section from Hog Creek to Grave Creek. We did not stop for ice cream at the Galice store, even though it is the only ice cream shop on the river. Thanks to the Summer Solstice, days were long and hot, but the river is splashy enough to want wetsuits in small boats. Near Grave Creek it gets quite a lot spicier. Rainey Falls is the first major obstacle. We all ran the Fish Ladder, which washes your boat down a channel too narrow to row. I shipped my oars and hoped for the best, but got stuck (briefly) on a rock at the bottom.

We saw turtles, bald eagles and an uncommonly large number of grounded turkey vultures who seemed to be holding some kind of parliament. Side hikes follow drainages through a mystical forest full of mosses and ferns. The Rogue River National Recreation Trail2 runs the length of the river so you can reach it from most river campsites for a day hike. There were salamanders in the chilly swimming holes. We stopped to see Zane Grey’s fishing cabin where an interpretive sign recommends his book “Rogue River Feud”.

On the fourth day we rowed through Mule Creek Canyon, a dramatic narrow channel of volcanic rocks full of unpredictable currents and swirling eddies. I had been reading the guidebook3 about big class IV rapids there, but somehow went through Coffeepot rapid without even noticing it. Suddenly we were at the famously technical Blossom Bar rapid which is nothing but rocks all the way down. We climbed up a ridge to scout and watched a commercial rafting group go through, but I was unable to see the crux move because there is a big rock named “Goalpost” in the way (all of the rocks in Blossom Bar have personal names). When it was my turn to run the rapid, I deftly pulled into the “Entrance Eddy,” shot for the “Beaver Slide” and failed to go far enough left with the result that I got briefly hung up on a smooth, barely submerged rock named “Sandstone Boulder”. If only the water had been a bit higher, I would have sailed right over it! Or really, I could have simply rowed at the proper angle to avoid it. Next time.

I loved this book so much that when I finished I went back to the beginning and read it again.

George Saunders takes on climate change with a ghostly nod to Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”. Oil tycoon K.J. Boone is dying. He has zero regrets for harm caused by his well-financed campaign of climate denial, and therefore, no use for the comfort offered by our narrator, the ghost of Jill “Doll” Blaine, a blithe spirit guided by a blameless philosophy similar to Dr. Pangloss in Candide. A third participant at this death watch is the ghost of a Frenchman who is eternally haunted by the unintended consequences of his role in inventing the internal combustion engine. Other ghosts appear and vanish, as Boone remains impervious to both scientific and moral arguments. The rules of this spirit world are vaguely Buddhist. Some of the dead have moved on to other places, some are tethered to Earth by unfinished business. Ghost Jill believes herself to be on a mission from God, seeking a kind of glorified perfection that she calls “elevation,” but she can’t quite let go of the physical desires she felt on Earth. Worries about climate change came after her time, and she still recalls the perfect happiness of her teen-aged self driving a lime-green Chevelle. Still, even Jill can see that something is terribly amiss:

“Some tendency suppressed and kept within decent bounds in my time had been unleashed and any shame about it so intensely rationalized that it no longer occurred to anyone that the swollen ugliness everywhere was a direct result of the heedless indulgence of some pervasive acquisitive hunger. If I might say it that way.” [p.69]

The interaction of characters is so absurd that it sneaks up on you when the novel raises Big Questions about personal responsibility, predetermination and the nature of good and evil. The reader takes sides then shifts allegiance as characters cross ethical lines. Whose fault is it? And what good does it do if people have to die before they can see the truth of what they have done on Earth?

Last winter I bought a raffle ticket from the American Packrafting Association and to my delight I won a prize — a three day packrafting workshop generously donated by Four Corners Guides in Mancos, Colorado.

I’m actually a little afraid of workshops. I don’t like the sense that someone is watching and judging. At the same time, if the Forces of the Universe think I need a packrafting lesson I had better listen up. The only problem was, due to the worst snowpack on record, there is not much water anywhere in Colorado this year. A week before the workshop, an email arrived to say, “with low water levels, we cannot do an overnight on the river. It was just high enough last weekend, but sadly it has been really dry.”

Luckily, the Santa Rita Whitewater Park on the Animas river in Durango was still navigable. I drove to Colorado and camped at a National Forest campsite where I was chased by a ferocious mama turkey who flared her wings and made angry dinosaur noises, warning me not to eat her chicks. The packraft instructor was a skinny, bearded guy named Thad with Edward Abbey tattoos— Hayduke on one arm and Bonnie Abzug on the other. He radiated a kind of intense self-assured athleticism that I have never possessed, and spoke of a Near Death Experience that had changed the focus of his life from rock climbing to packrafting1 The other three students in my group all turned out to be 60-something people just like me (Yay! No worries that I’d be the weak link). In three days of practice, I learned that I have been wrongly treating the packraft as a tiny raft. I should practice better paddling technique.

The Animas river was named around 1765 at a time when Spain claimed ownership over that part of North America. Locally, people will tell you that the river’s full name is El Río de las Ánimas Perdidas— “river of lost souls,” though this may be mostly folk etymology. The largest manmade rapid at the whitewater park is called “Smelter” after a uranium mill and pile of radioactive tailings that used to be located right next to the river before it was cleaned up by the government-funded UMTRA project. A site remediation fact sheet notes, “as a dog-friendly park, the LM site manager’s dog, Drake, is able to join site inspections.”2 (An accompanying photo shows a happy golden retriever.) On my bookshelf, I have a book about the Animas river that I have not yet read because I think it will make mad.3 It is about the Gold King Mine disaster in 2015, when an abandoned mine in Silverton, Colorado blew out, releasing 3 million gallons of poisonous yellow-orange wastewater that flowed a hundred miles down the watershed from Cement Creek, to the Animas River, to the San Juan River and finally into Lake Powell reservoir. The reason so much toxic mine waste was just lying there is, antiquated federal hardrock mining laws don’t require mines to clean up after themselves. Nonetheless, anti-regulation Republicans pinned the blame on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for causing the disaster. The History Colorado website says, “the spill had little to no long-term effect on the river, largely because it already contained high levels of heavy metals from thousands of old mines in the region. This contamination causes stretches of the river to be virtually devoid of aquatic life and renders the fish populations inhabiting the river near Durango incapable of reproducing.”4 TheAnimas river actually has good trout fishing, but they are stocked hatchery fish. After the disaster, mines in the Animas river headwaters were declared Superfund sites, so now taxpayers are paying to prevent future disasters. Trout Unlimited says that mine waste remediation can be considered a success the day a fly shop opens in Silverton, Colorado.5

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Tilt. Emma Pattee. 2025.

The source material for this novel about collapse includes various geological documents about the earthquake potential of the Cascadia fault line in Oregon1 and Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. When we meet the narrator, Annie, she is in essentially the same situation as Edward Norton’s Fight Club character — shopping at IKEA trying to buy her way out of the malaise of late-stage capitalism. However, Annie is also 37 weeks pregnant and ambivalent about impending motherhood. The whole house of cards collapses (literally) when the Big One strikes and she is buried in a pile of un-constructed IKEA baby cribs (what a great metaphor!). When she digs out from under the rubble, she finds herself with no cellphone, no money and no car in a suburban hellscape of crumbled infrastructure and frantic people, walking towards the ruins of downtown Portland, Oregon. She is fixated on finding her husband Dom, who she imagines will save her. As she walks, Annie talks to her baby, whom she calls “Bean.” Her rumination keeps circling back to failed ambitions. Annie’s one big success, now 14 years in the past, was producing an autobiographical play about a girl dropping out of art school:

This is the natural progression of the artist. At first you think it’s only you. Born a star! Then you get out in the world and think, alright, there’s a few of us. But just us. Meant to be! And then course you realize, it’s not just you and your friends, it’s everyone. Hundreds of thousands of millions of people. Who want to be stars. Who think they have what it takes. [p. 35]

The central joke in Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy is that survivors of collapse have zero practical knowledge or survival skills since they were educated to live in a technological society. Likewise, Annie’s art education, self-absorption and injured sense of personal failure stand in contrast to the immediate emotional and physical demands of the unfolding disaster. Despite that she has actually taken classes to prepare for an earthquake and for childbirth, she is in no way prepared for either one. As everything around her falls apart, what will emerge from underneath the rubble?2

I picked up this anthology after reading an article in the Salt Lake Tribune about how one of the editors, Darcie Little Badger, had cancelled an appearance at Weber State University due to Utah’s objectionable anti-DEI laws.1 The article says:

Under the heading “additional information about Weber State University,” the Ogden school provided a list of “prohibited words and concepts” for visiting speakers. Included among them: equity, diversity and inclusion, anti-racism, bias, oppression and intersectionality.

Little Badger told the reporter, “How are we supposed to talk about the reality of being Native without talking about these words?”

I read banned books because I’m always curious to know what censors are afraid of. This time they are afraid of poems and stories written by indigenous women who imagine a future revival of indigenous cultural values and practices, sometimes as an antidote to collapse brought on by late-stage capitalism. Some of the people in the stories are queer. Shield your eyes!

My favorite story in the collection is “Witches” by Shaina A. Nez (Diné), in which an evil spirit from Navajo folklore shows up as a student in a creative writing class taught by a Navajo professor. It’s a satisfying supernatural story that makes an explicit argument for why an anthology like this is necessary — colonizer witches are trying to make sure that their own perspective is the only one written down and published, metaphorically, of course.

This book of poetry about climate grief won the National Book Foundation Science + Literature prize in 2025. It is structured around a series of erasures, all titled “Meltwater,” all wrung from the same article, “How to Mourn a Glacier.” Lacy M. Johnson, New Yorker, 10/20/2019. The poet explains her process, No word appears in more than one erasure— in other words, the size of the pool decreases with each erasure.” [p.105]. The remaining words become a visual rain of water droplets sprinkled on the page.

The collection opens with the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood, and a poem with fair warning in the title, You will Soon Enter A Land Where Everything Will Try to Kill You. This word of caution is addressed to a fetus: Inside me, you’re an eel, a whipping ghost… you are already prey and everything out there means you harm. The child is born, and the poems spiral into the depleted, waterless future that the child will inherit. As glaciers melt, the poet waits behind a velvet rope at a futuristic ice museum where, our tickets could only guarantee a weeklong window, to see the glacier calve. She hopes to taste the ice, and drink meltwater into her human body. The child would like to see more rabbits, and her mother remembers regretfully, We used to kill them like they were nothing. Dreams are haunted by animals that have gone extinct. The poet observes that we are going to miss autumn, and the fact that, There used to be bees, though she writes, I am mostly glad about most things, even /the future. The unfolding disaster seems so far beyond human scale that mother love hardly matters. In more cynical moments, Scientific reductionism turns life itself into nothing but the mindless reproductive drive of Richard Dawkin’s selfish gene, a thing that wouldn’t exist, except by cosmic mistake:

There is no reason for me to be alive any more. / Having borne my code into the future,/ even if only by another lifetime,/ I could not matter less.

By the end we are deep into in a future shaped by anthropogenic climate change when poems have titles like, Poem With No Children in It, The Empty Universe, and XYZ at the end of the alphabet. Is this book a downer? Yes it is. But out in the real world glaciers really are melting and the mess we are leaving for our children is inexcusable. Grief is necessary. Let’s allow ourselves to mourn.

NOTE: In my head, Meltwater is in conversation with two other books:

Vigil: a Novel. George Saunders, 2026.
Ghosts much like the ones in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” harass a dying oil executive/climate change denier for his sins on Earth. Saunders says he is Buddhist, but the sensibility seems Unitarian/Universalist.

The Book of Drought: Poems. Rob Carney, 2024.

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We hoisted heavy backpacks and set off. After a brief hike through pinyon-juniper forest, a vista opened before us of undulating white sandstone with improbable Ponderosa pines towering from the barren rock. In this hallucinatory landscape, deep time collapses into the present. Scalloped cross-bedding in the Navajo sandstone remembers shifting winds that blew across a vast field of dunes during the arid Jurassic. Now that the dunes have turned to stone, structures formed by those ancient winds channel and collect water, and where water goes, Ponderosas follow. The heat-loving trees moved in after the Ice Age and have managed to keep on adapting. Some of them stand straight and tall; others are twisted bonsai dwarves. Pocket gardens bloom where the rock has managed to collect scraps of dirt— claret cup cactus, indian paintbrush vibrating on the edge of visible red, penstemons beloved by hummingbirds, tiny purple asters, and yuccas about to flower.

NOTE: Senator Mike Lee (UT) and Representative Celeste Maloy (UTCD-2) have introduced legislation to overturn the Management Plan for Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in order to use the Congressional Review Act to write a new Management Plan with no public scoping or stakeholder input. This would throw out countless hours of citizen participation that shaped the existing plan and open the doors for corruption and mismanagement. Worse, it would make all federal public land everywhere vulnerable to similar attacks. The Union of Concerned Scientists links to a signed letter urging Congress to reject this very bad legislation. Do you belong to any of the organizations that signed the letter? https://www.ucs.org/about/news/over-125-groups-oppose-utah-politicians-attempt-undo-management-plan-grand-staircase

NOTE: That’s me in my yellow packrat on the front page of Salt Lake Tribune! There is also a story that interviewed me on KSL TV: https://www.ksl.com/article/news/utah/environment/dead-fish-algal-blooms-and-e-coli-more-attention-turns-to-the-jordan-rivers-water-quality/51493030

I filled out a survey about the generally un-beloved and under-appreciated Jordan River, and had a lot of opinions. To my surprise, a reporter emailed me for an interview, so I met them by the Little Confluence where there is a big eddy. A photographer took pictures of me paddling around in a circle. Here is a related piece that I wrote a little while ago about my relationship with the Jordan River.

ABSTRACT
The preservation mission of libraries means that all librarians are futurists. When librarians curate collections,we have to make guesses, and those guesses tell a story about what we value and what we hope for. A dominant story about the Anthropocene is about a globalized, technological future in which libraries and librarians will become obsolete. An alternative, more human story is suggested by place-based scholarship regarding the relationship between human beings and the places we live. A place-based library is more than simply a portal or container for information; the library itself becomes part of a story about place and an active participant in cultural sustainability. Libraries exist as local nodes within a global information network, each with unique community concerns that should be reflected in collections and services.

NOTE
This is a fringe view of librarianship. The people in charge are mostly techno-optimists who think robots are coming to save us. I waver between doomerism and hope for sustainability. Since I wrote this, the demise of local journalism and rise of AI generated slop has made the problem of how to get information about the place where you live even worse.

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Janisse Ray, who made a name for herself with “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood” (1999), writes, “I belong to a tribe of nature writers,” citing Stanley Kunitz’ poem, The Layers:

Oh I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?

In a way, this confession breaks a 3rd wall. Nature writers tend to write as if they were having a pure, unadulterated inspirational experience in nature, albeit with the entire content of several field guides stored in their heads. They seldom admit that they took a notebook along on the hike and were scribbling notes to outline their next essay all the while out-of-doors. Ray makes no such pretense and forthrightly describes her own agenda:

Nature writing has been called a marginal literature. If culture is a set of stories we tell about life in a place and how to navigate that life, then nature writing is literature at its most essential. Its tenets are that humans are biological; that we are dependent on the earth; that places are vital to our psyches; and that humans have volumes to learn from nature. [p.122]

By calling attention to writing, Ray calls attention to craft. Sure enough, if you look at Ray’s website you can sign up for a course she teaches on nature journaling (I know someone who has done this, and she says it was a wonderful experience).

In order to learn from nature, writers need to be still and listen. Engaging in this kind of radical listening shifts the message from the writer’s own personal experience (which is travel and adventure writing) to the voices beyond humans. Nonetheless, even Ray seems a bit startled to hear the voice of a manatee. Before describing the encounter, she dissembles: I shouldn’t tell you what happened. It’s too precious, really, to reveal something like this so randomly. But of course, revealing things is what makes good writing:

A manatee’s spirit is big, and it will merge with a human spirit which is likewise big. Then I hear the manatee mother speak. She is beseeching me.
”You must help us,” she says. “You must help us.”
I hear her distinctly: “You must help us.” [p.142]

And surely we must listen to manatees, because we are all dependent on the Earth. Ray includes an intention for this kind of listening in her New Year’s resolution, and this should should be the resolution of any nature writer:

I will listen better to what the Earth is saying and I will write it down, When it needs help, I will help it”. [p.164]

In the Utah desert, you can sit in bright sunshine watching a storm cell sail in over the landscape, dark black clouds heavy with rain that hangs down in wispy purple streaks. When the wind comes up, you still have time to find shelter before a fierce cloudburst suddenly fills dry washes and pourovers with running water. As soon as the sun comes out again, the moisture vanishes just as suddenly as it arrived except for in a few filled potholes.

It had been raining on and off the day before. Now that the rain had stopped, I went looking for some ancient pictographs painted on a rock wall more than 1000 years ago. I knew where to find them, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able climb up the steep cliff to visit them. Through binoculars, I could see two painted anthromorphs high on a rock wall. The obvious way up was a sloping ramp of slickrock leading to their ledge, but from up close it was steeper than I expected — no problem to climb up, but scary to come back down. If I slipped, I’d tumble over a cliff. I badly wanted to be up there with them in the magic place, but after a few attempts I simply did not have the nerve to smear up the steep rock face. Back in the old days when I used to do a lot of rock climbing, I wouldn’t have thought twice about scrambling up something this easy. Now, my body is older and more wobbly so that I’m never quite sure of my limits. What part of climbing was skill that I still have? What part was just me being young and strong? I wondered if I might feel braver if there were someone with me to spot footholds. A little further away I could see rockfall crossing the cliff band. I went to check it out because I thought if the route went, it might have less exposure. To my surprise, there was a cairn at the base of a crack. In fact, the scary face climb was totally unnecessary. There was an easier way up.

From up close I could see that the bodies of both ghostly figures are made of rain, painted in streaks like the storm I had seem the day before. One of them floats on a fringe of rain; veils of painted rain fall from a cloud above their heads. The figures are accompanied by snakes whose bodies undulate like lightning. I poured a splash of water from my bottle onto the ground to honor them, and then sat down to see the landscape through their eyes. Nowadays, a paved road in the canyon carries a stream of cars to Canyonlands National Park. What do the rain spirits think to see all of those people passing by, and almost none of them bother to stop in order to ask for a blessing of rain?

The pages of this witty, idiosyncratic book of poetry contain Wenstrup’s personal word museum, for which she is both the curator and the exhibit: See what she sees! Feel what she feels! For the tour, we are in the company of a trickster raven named Ggugguyni1 who is not here for the art, but to scavenge goldfish crackers and other detritus of civilization that falls from minivans in the parking lot. Another museum docent is Half-Human-Woman, but We can / call her Sally, a familiar / and short name. The museum displays the plastic debris of modern girlhood like Barbie dolls, Polly Pocket, fairy wands, and sequins. Displays feature ghost pixels of dead “blue” (i.e. televised white) girls such as JonBenét Ramsey or Princess Diana. It loops an interpretive film called Becoming Blue that wrestles with pressure to conform to Western beauty standards. In this museum, there are endless reruns of Star Trek and, in order to establish seriousness, there are footnotes!2

On brand for a writer who loves footnotes, Wenstrup constantly annotates her own poetry. In the Acknowledgements she says, When this book first began to take shape, I threw a pity party. I didn’t want to engage with the project before me because I thought writing a book that circled alienation would necessitate writing from a space of isolation. How wonderful it is to be wrong. The museum, she says, is not housing artifacts, but rather the possibility of an encounter. The Alaskan Indigenous part of her heritage has been exiled to museums, libraries, cassettes and online catalogues, detached from living culture — when Winstrup draws a Tarot card it is the Ten of Swords, but instead of a human body the blades impale a bison. In a future exhibit, the curator will exchange the Becoming Blue film loop for one featuring her Indigenous great-grandfather distributing dried salmon, moose and berries. In the meantime, the displays are of chicken nuggets, Captain Chakotay from Star Trek and Captain Cook’s sketches of Aluet women labeled savage.

NOTE:

In my head, this book is in conversation with two other books about museums and archives:

Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media. Heid E. Erdrich, University of Michigan Press, 2017.

The Archive of the Bureau of Suspended Objects. Jenny Odell, 2015 https://www.blurb.com/b/6670649-the-archive-of-the-bureau-of-suspended-objects
Exhibits from the of the Archive are also available online at https://www.suspended-objects.org

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I recently spent two days listening to lawyers talk about the future of America’s public lands. Here is a summary of what I learned.

The key question at the 2026 Wallace Stegner symposium was, are laws and policies that protect America’s federal public lands strong enough to withstand assault from the Trump administration? Are we seeing an irreversible reordering of public lands law, policy and priorities?

Law professor Bob Keiter pointed out that the era of public lands conservation began relatively recently around 1964 with laws such as the Wilderness Act (1964), National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) (1970), Endangered Species Act (1973), and so on. These laws form a basis for public land management and stakeholder input. Generally, the Trump administration is trying to shift public land management away from environmental stewardship towards monetizing assets. Public lands are not seen as valuable to people. Keiter identified periods of distinct public land policy:

• 1789-1810: Acquisition

• 1810-1891: Disposal / Privatization

• 1891-1964: Utilitarianism

• 1964-Now : Conservation

• Going forward: A new era of privatization?

“It’s a five alarm fire,” said Sally Jewell (Secretary of the Interior from 2013-17 in the Obama Administration). The Trump administration is breaking laws and undermining courts. It may take generations to recover from mass firing of knowledgeable employees. Once valid existing rights are granted, it is virtually impossible to get them back. Policy decisions have long-term effects and major accomplishments are based on long-term groundwork.

Speakers focused on various aspects of public lands management such as politics, mining and critical minerals, recreation, fire, roads, and energy.

Danger! We are not assured of a future conservation agenda!

• Trump might make law or policy changes that cause permanent damage.

• Future presidents might follow Trump’s example to seize power from citizens.

• Hollowing out of federal agencies means loss of knowledgeable, skilled staff

• Downsizing is hard to reverse.

• There are poison pills in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that mandate inflexible targets for timber, grazing and mineral production.

• Conservatives tell a false story that public lands deprive locals from generating wealth.

• Trump is threatening the Roadless Rule, using institutional structures to make things worse. The wildfire crisis is a forest health crisis

• Clean energy needs strategic minerals, which are vulnerable to the supply-chain.

• Outdoor recreation is not conservation and it is not a silver bullet.

• Senator Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy (UT-2) keep on introducing new ways to sell off federal public lands and shut down stakeholder input.

But things are not hopeless…

• The abuses of the Trump administration could jump-start a new conservation movement.

• Conservation proposals are both popular and durable. They keep being reintroduced in Congress until they succeed.

• 50% of federal public lands have some kind of protected status.

• People are horrified when they find out trails and campgrounds are not protected.

• So far, the public has strongly opposed selling off public lands.

• Public lands are the basis of a tourism and recreation economy in rural areas. Industrial activity does not create rural jobs.

• There is an emerging Native American voice.

• Conservation organizations are expanding.

• Conservation is popular (Congress is not passing conservation bills because they are not passing many bills at all).

• Just 1% of the tax burden buys all Americans access to public lands.

• The current urban/rural partisan divide is not historical.

• The story that permitting mines takes too long in the USA is mostly make-believe.

• The Supreme Court rejected Utah’s lawsuit to seize control of federal public lands.

• Nobody likes Project 2025.

• The Roadless Rule is a huge success story that is incredibly popular. Roadless areas do not make wildfires worse because they are not close to human development.

Activist priorities..

#1 Stay in the Game. Your voice matters. Talk to the opposition and to people who are different from you. Remember that policy change can take many years to happen.

#2 Oppose privatization. Retaining federal ownership is essential to conservation because it means that there can be stakeholder input into public land management. If lands are sold, citizen stakeholders lose both access and influence.

#3 Support existing conservation laws. These laws may be imperfect, but they are the tools we have. They should not be “reformed” by breaking the system. A bi-partisan Public Lands Commission could be a useful way to address some of the issues.

#4 Include Indigenous perspectives. Tribes not only have unique cultural and stewardship perspectives, they have a legal ability to consult on public lands as government. They are not just stakeholders.

#5 Join citizen activist groups. Non-profit activism is essential to counteract the influence of business, industry and big donors.

#6 Don’t forget to go outside. Recreation is how we come to know and love public lands.

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