UP ON THE ROOFTOP
The June 2024 story, “Pronghorns among the panels,” discusses the possible impacts of industrial-scale solar farms near Farmington, New Mexico.
Missing in this article is the potential siting of solar panels in already-developed areas right in front of our noses — on the nation’s rooftops. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that rooftop siting of solar panels would provide 39% of current electrical demand. This percentage would significantly increase by including solar panels over parking lots and various rights-of-ways, closed landfills and shuttered industrial sites
Apart from minimizing consumption of open lands, this distributed rooftop siting has a number of other advantages. Because it is distributed across wider areas, it is less at risk from extreme weather and requires no new transmission lines. It also requires less regulatory process.
Policy should be adopted that first installs solar in and over the already-developed areas before industrialization of open lands. I urge HCN to explore policy alternatives that would further rooftop solar.
Rob Robinson
Wheat Ridge, Colorado
HELLA GOOD JOB
“The Tragedy of Centralia” (June 2024) was one hell of a story. Good. Good.
Mack Hitch
Sterling, Colorado
FREE-BREAKFAST ORIGINS
I very much appreciated your thoughtful article about school feeding programs (“When lunch is free,” June 2024). The need is clear and important in the many ways pointed out in your article. I was surprised, however, by your history of how free breakfast programs came about. You wrote, “In the ’60s school breakfast was added.”
These programs did not happen by magic: The Black Panther Party saw the need and set out to fill it. Without their demonstration of the need and the feasibility of providing those breakfasts, it is unlikely that they would become “the nation’s second-largest food safety net, after food stamps.”
Roger Gadway
White Salmon, Washington
WILD THINGS NEED WILD PLACES
The article “Untrammeled,” by Marissa Ortega-Welch (June 2024), triggered me to write why I, and perhaps others, need wilderness.
All Homo sapiens (no matter when they came to North America) have or have tried to manipulate, shackle and control wild lands, landscapes, ecosystems and their living and non-living residents for human benefit.
The Wilderness Act protects these wild lands, landscapes and ecosystems and allows them to evolve with all living and non-living residents with limited human interference.
I support the Wilderness Act’s requirement that humans are visitors so that all other living and non-living residents have a place to evolve via nature and ecological processes, but not human greed, manipulation and possessiveness.
The Wilderness Act is law and shouldn’t be reinterpreted to suit each of our individual desires. Leave wilderness for all living and non-living residents so that they can live and evolve under nature’s watch, not ours.
We need wilderness, but other living and non-living residents need it more, as a respite from humanity’s overbearing behavior.
Brandt Mannchen
Houston, Texas
LAND-MANAGEMENT LETDOWN
Articles in two issues inspired me to write my first letter to the editor after 38 years of being a subscriber: “Cattle Country” (May 2024) and “Water Inequality on the Colorado River” (June 2024), both by author Jonathan Thompson and illustrator Jennifer Di-Majo — both on issues that inspired me when I was a range conservationist on the Beaverhead National Forest in Sheridan, Montana.
I subscribed to High Country News in 1986, looking for supportive voices addressing rangeland grazing issues. Working with ranchers and public land grazing was an eye-opener. I don’t regret that job. In fact, it was the cornerstone of my career.
I also worked as a riparian ecologist in Arizona and New Mexico on the 3 million-acre Tonto National Forest, where 90% of the wildlife species depended on riparian areas for some part of their life cycle. With a staff of hydrologists, soil scientists and other natural resource people, we created a wealth of data that just seemed to make land managers uncomfortable, even angry. The Tonto National Forest leadership succumbed to political pressure and disbanded our staff group.
I think there have been some changes, but I remain very disillusioned about public-land range management. Well-meaning agency people remain relatively powerless. Across the street from where I now live, near the Verde River in Arizona, cattle still graze areas that have been forever changed and degraded from their historic grassland condition. The local Forest Service employees try to make changes, but the use is still entrenched.
The current High Country News addresses a broader scope of Western issues than it did in the 1980’s and ’90s. I was inspired by these two recent articles on grazing and water use. Livestock grazing is still a land-management practice that continues to degrade and damage public lands.
Janet Johnson Grove, Ph.D.
U.S. Forest Service employee, 1975-2010
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