Rural News
Glacier National Park is losing its glaciers
Salon | Posted on May 30, 2017Glacier National Park is losing its namesake glaciers and new research shows just how quickly: Over the past 50 years, 39 of the parks glaciers have shrunk dramatically, some by as much as 85 percent. Of the 150 glaciers that existed it the park in the late 19th century, only 26 remain.
Oregon:Lawmakers approve 'roadkill' bill despite misgivings
Oregon Capital Insider | Posted on May 30, 2017Despite some misgivings about a "roadkill" bill permitting drivers to salvage deer and elk accidentally killed by vehicles, the House Agriculture Committee has decided to refer the proposal for a vote on the House floor with a "do pass" recommendation. Senate Bill 372, which would require Oregon wildlife regulators to create rules for such meat salvage permits, has already passed the Senate unanimously. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which will write the rules, should monitor these permits closely to ensure there's not a suspicious uptick in roadkill incidents, she said.
Elk and deer herds in danger decades after disease discovery
Capital Press | Posted on May 30, 2017In a pen surrounded by 8-foot-high fences, at a research station by the side of a winding canyon road in southeast Wyoming, stand seven elk that are going to die.The creatures don’t look sick yet. Their caramel-colored fur still covers round bodies the size of small horses. They run back and forth with each other and two bighorn sheep ewes that share their pen, greedily eating food offered at the gate. How long they’ll last is a question researchers can’t answer.Each animal has been exposed naturally to chronic wasting disease, a killer that can lie dormant for years before corroding their brains with tiny, sponge-like holes.But these female elk are unlike most others. They have rare genetics, which might just prolong their lives.The cow elk are one small piece of a complicated puzzle that has confounded researchers, scientists, wildlife managers and federal disease specialists for decades, threatening deer and elk in more than a dozen states and three Canadian provinces.
Hit Hard by Coal’s Decline, Eastern Kentucky Turns to Drones, Tomatoes, Solar Energy
Wall Street Journal | Posted on May 25, 2017With coal production on the decline, one energy company is pursuing a project that might seem heretical in this eastern Kentucky mining region: a solar-energy farm. Berkeley Energy Group and a subsidiary of the French renewable-energy company EDF Energies Nouvelles aim to begin building a $100 million facility on a reclaimed strip mine next year.
Renewing the Middle Class by Revitalizing Middle America
Center for Opportunity Urbanism | Posted on May 25, 2017The greatest test America faces is whether it can foster the kind of growth that benefits and expands the middle class. To do so, the United States will need to meet three challenges: recover from the Great Recession, rebalance the American and international economies, and gain access to the global middle class for the future of American goods and services. The fulcrum for meeting these challenges is the combination of industries and resources concentrated in the New American Heartland, the center of the country’s productive economy. Traditionally, the Heartland has been defined as the agriculturally and industrially strong Midwest, alone or perhaps together with the Upper Plains. However, the geographic distribution of US manufacturing and energy extraction has expanded through the growth of new manufacturing zones, largely in Texas, the South and the Gulf Coast. Our map of the New American Heartland includes not only the Midwest and Upper Plains, but portions of all the Gulf States — Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida — and the non-coastal southern states of Georgia, Tennessee, and Arkansas.
Changes to Visa Program Put Foreign-Born Doctors in Limbo
Pew Charitable Trust | Posted on May 25, 2017Just a few months ago, the future appeared promising and certain for Dr. Sunil Sreekumar Nair. A citizen of the United Kingdom, he was completing his residency in internal medicine at a Brooklyn hospital, and he had accepted a job in a hospital near Fort Smith, Arkansas, a rural area with a severe shortage of doctors.Then the Trump administration announced that it was suspending the 15-day expedited process to obtain an H-1B visa that allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign-born workers in specialty fields such as medicine and information technology. Now Nair may not receive his new visa for at least eight months, long after he is supposed to show up for his new job in Arkansas.The Arkansas hospital has offered to keep the job open for him, but Nair isn’t even sure he’ll be able to stay in the country after his original visa expires with the end of his medical residency next month.“To say I am frustrated would be an extreme understatement,” Nair said last week.In addition to suspending the expedited application process, President Donald Trump in April ordered a review of the entire H-1B program.For parts of the country that have difficulty attracting American-born doctors, the uncertainty swirling around the H-1B program is already creating problems, with doctors tied up in legal uncertainty rather than treating patients.“For us, this has been a very positive program that has brought health care to areas of Wisconsin that would otherwise go without,” said Lisa Boero, legal counsel for the immigration program at the Marshfield Clinic Health System, which operates more than 50 clinics through largely rural central and northern Wisconsin, areas with a shortage of doctors.Hospitals in distressed urban neighborhoods also rely on foreign-born medical school graduates to fill medical residencies that might otherwise go vacant.
Maine’s highest court rules ranked-choice voting is unconstitutional
Portland Press Herald | Posted on May 25, 2017Maine’s highest court concluded Tuesday that the nation’s first statewide ranked-choice voting system violates the Maine Constitution even though it was approved by the state’s voters in a referendum in November. In a unanimous advisory opinion, the seven justices on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court acknowledged the validity of citizen-initiative ballot questions but noted that even citizen-enacted laws can be unconstitutional. The court opinion itself doesn’t negate ranked-choice voting, which was supported by 52 percent of Mainers who cast ballots last fall. The justices instead spelled out the Legislature’s options, noting that lawmakers can now vote to repeal the measure or to initiate the process that leads to a constitutional amendment to allow for ranked-choice voting.
Monarch butterfles: The problem with herbicides
Michigan State University | Posted on May 25, 2017Monarch butterfly populations are shrinking. New research makes a strong case that the reasons for this decline go far beyond what's happening on the wintering grounds and addresses a current controversy about the primary causes of the specie's decline.Unlike other migratory species, which have distinct summer and winter grounds, monarchs take multiple generations to travel from Mexico to Texas, from Texas to the Midwest, from the Midwest and into Canada, and finally, back from the upper Midwest and Canada to Mexico.The team's research could generate answers that eventually help reverse the nearly 20-year decline of monarch butterflies observed in Mexico. It gives hope to anyone, scientists and the public alike, who has ever witnessed the mass of overwintering butterflies in Mexico or cheered a flitting monarch as it traverses vast distances across the United States.
An Oregon rancher is charged for an elk slaughter.
High Country News | Posted on May 25, 2017Larry Harshfield was arrested and charged with 12 counts of unlawful take of elk in a closed season, and 12 counts of waste of elk. In a press release, Pam Harshfield maintains that the couple had no choice. The harsh winter brought hordes of hungry elk to their haysheds. The elk ate hay intended for their cattle, and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife wouldn’t help out, she said in a statement, leaving them out of options. The crime, investigation and impending trial have revealed tensions over Oregon’s elk management and over land management. For the last 40 years, the Harshfields have run cattle and grown hay on their 450-acre spread, located just outside Wallowa, a burg of 800 people nestled between the granite mountains of the Eagle Cap Wilderness and the grasslands of the Zumwalt Prairie. In years past, elk and other wild game were rarely a problem, as hunters kept populations in check. Over the past few decades, however, elk populations in Oregon have ballooned. In the area where the Harshfields live, ODFW says this is due to landowners limiting hunting access on private land. In a written statement, Pam Harshfield, who did not admit to their involvement with the slaughter, explained they became frustrated with that increase. Twenty years ago, a small herd of 15 to 20 elk began visiting their ranch. The herd grew over the years, reaching around 200 this last winter by the Harshfields’ estimates. But by then, the elk were eating directly from their haysheds. Unlike in neighboring states like Washington and Idaho, in Oregon private property owners are not compensated for losses incurred by elk. ODFW will give property owners alfalfa seed, fencing and netting to keep elk away.They also offer mitigation tactics like hazing permits, emergency hunt tags and kill permits to private property owners. The kill permits require the owner dress and deliver the meat so it can be distributed to needy families. The Harshfields, who have a hazing permit, turned down a kill permit because it was too time consuming, according to Pam Harshfield’s statement.
A Road Trip Through Rusting and Rising America
New York Times | Posted on May 24, 2017I just took a four-day car trip through the heart of that landscape — driving from Austin, Ind., down through Louisville, Ky., winding through Appalachia and ending up at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to try to answer that question.Trump is half right in his diagnosis, but his prescription is 100 percent wrong. We do have an epidemic of failing communities. But we also have a bounty of thriving ones — not because of a strongman in Washington but because of strong leaders at the local level.Indeed, this notion that America is a nation divided between two coasts that are supposedly thriving, pluralizing and globalizing and a vast flyover interior, where jobs have disappeared, drug addiction is rife and everyone is hoping Trump can bring back the 1950s, is highly inaccurate.The big divide in America is not between the coasts and the interior. It’s between strong communities and weak communities. You can find weak ones along the coast and thriving ones in Appalachia, and vice versa. It’s community, stupid — not geography.