The Cleanest Line

Backyard Corridors: What animals do you no longer see in your area?

A while back, one of the local news outlets ran a story: “Dad Jumps Between Mountain Lion, Son.” The story was picked up by CNN and went national in just under 24 hours.

In that story we were introduced to a man who had recently moved his family to northwestern Nevada and purchased a home on the raw edge of a rapidly expanding town near some sizable - but diminishing - pieces of mountain lion habitat. We learned from the story that these folks, like many who move here, were eager to live in a land where unmediated encounters with nature are possible. The reality of such an encounter was not quite what they had imagined.

Listening to the man in the news report describe that lion was like listening to myself from 15 years ago. I moved here with a similar enthusiasm for the big, wild land around this area. Back then, I was drunk on visions of Wild America and under the spell of an early visit to Reno - when I watched a herd of 60+ mule deer grazing on mountain slopes within the city limits. I would have believed the edge of town marked the naked frontier. To a kid from the East Coast, this was big, majestic nature, and I wanted to be closer to it. Little did I know that in moving here I would be playing a part in the growth that would eventually swallow the prime over-wintering grounds that the majestic herd of mule deer depended upon for survival.

[Mountain lion photo courtesy of Chino Hills State Park website]

180° South: The Premiere, The Book and the Inspiration Behind them Both

On Wednesday, February 10, Chris Malloy's long-anticipated film 180° South will premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Hopefully those of you who live nearby will come out and join us for the screening. Details can be found on the Woodshed Films Facebook page or the SBIFF site. For those who can't make the premiere, there are a few ways you can get a taste of the story until we have more info on future screenings and the release of the film on DVD and Netflix.

Mountain of Storms, the 1968 trip that inspired 180° South, is available now on DVD. I love this movie, and if you're a fan of our company, a climber, a surfer, a skier, a travel fanatic or nostalgic for the vibe of the late sixties, chances are you'll love it too. Also, Patagonia Books has published a beautiful hardcover book entitled 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless. Within its 240 pages are chapters written by Yvon Chouinard, Chris Malloy and Jeff Johnson, along with hundreds of photographs and a revealing set of campfire interviews, conducted by Chris Malloy, with Yvon Chouinard, Doug Tompkins and Jeff Johnson.

Hit the jump for excerpts from Mountain of Storms and 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless.

Backyard Corridors: Which animals in your area might need to move through corridors to survive?

Like a majestic pack of finger-clicking primates roaming the wilds of the Internet, our migration through the Backyard Corridors series is almost complete. Thank you one and all for sharing your thoughts with us and helping to paint a better picture of local-scale corridor issues. This week's question:

Which animals in your area might need to move through corridors to survive?

Sue Halpern kicks things off with a story about her area of Vermont and how the Forest Service has put up new “corridor” signs and speed reductions on local highways. [Illustration: Jeremy Collins]

It was about three in the afternoon when the dog, sleeping soundly on a shaft of sunlight projected onto the living room floor, stood up abruptly, tail aloft, and started barking. Normally she is a quiet animal, not given to verbal outbursts unless she hears the word “ski.” But this was late summer. I followed the dog to the window that frames our meadow. The meadow is long-standing. It appears on maps dating back more than a century, an island of tall grass and wildflowers surrounded on all sides by an expansive ocean of trees. The dog pointed, I looked out, and there, not more than fifty feet from the house, were two moose, one big, the other slightly less big – a mother and child – ambling across the field. If they were rattled by the sound of a barking dog, they didn’t show it. In fact, they stopped, opposite the window, and looked our way, and waited. These were photo-op moose. They weren’t going anywhere. They looked at us, we looked at them until finally the dog got bored and lay back down on her sunny blanket. The moose nosed around in the grass, then started walking slowly to the back of the field where they disappeared into the woods, in the direction of our nearest neighbors. I called them up. “Two moose are coming your way,” I said. But the moose must have taken a detour. They didn’t show up at the neighbors’ for a month.

Freedom To Roam and Oceans As Wilderness: Eye On Aquaculture

Today's post is by Patagonia Fly Fishing Ambassador, Topher Browne, who has dedicated his energies to the protection of salmon for two decades. Says Topher, "A species that requires not one but two entirely separate ecosystems would seem a dubious proposition. The transition from fresh water to salt water and back again . . . requires some fairly elaborate plumbing within the salmon or steelhead. This adaptation is unnecessary in species of fish that do not migrate to the sea. Activism on behalf of anadromous species is a real bang for the environmental buck. As salmon and steelhead lead a bipolar life, you can focus your efforts in both fresh and salt waters. If something is wrong at any stage of their life cycle, the fish will let you know." Today, Topher's letting us know a few things about Atlantic Salmon, and why it makes sense to choose wild:

They lie glistening on beds of frozen crystals in the great food halls of North America and Europe. Bland and lifeless eyes regard busy shoppers as they push their carts in front of polished displays. Their silver-scaled bodies—plump yet strangely devoid of muscle—advertise the healthful benefits of omega-3 fatty acids and the singular bounty of the sea. Atlantic salmon, the king of fish and the food of kings, is on sale for three dollars a pound.

Although reared in the ocean, these salmon live a life behind bars. They are raised in cages along the coasts of the United States, Canada, Chile, Scotland and Norway. They are genetically modified to accelerate their growth and liberally dosed with antibiotics and pesticides to mitigate the spread of rampant disease and parasites. They are fed a diet of ground-up fish containing chemical dyes to give their flesh a rosy hue. Some of their tribe escape through holes in their cages and enter rivers where they compete with wild salmon. It’s an old story—greed, disinformation, a willful disregard for the health of our most sensitive and bounteous ecosystems—and one that is unlikely to be told as the butcher hands you a carefully wrapped filet.

[A British Columbia Salmon Farm, photo courtesy of the BC Salmon Farmers Association. ]

Sounding Off for Ocean Activism

Josh Berry, environmental director for Save the Waves Coalition and the man behind All Points South, just released a new video with Captain Paul Watson (Sea Shepherd) and Dave Rastovich (Surfers for Cetaceans) sounding off on the continued need for ocean activism. The video also features surfing from Timmy Turner, Ramón Navarro, Brett Schwartz and Patagonia ambassador Keith Malloy.

[Soundings via YouTube. Video: Josh Berry for Save the Waves. Music: Kapakahi]

After last week's heavy rains here in Ventura it's easy to relate to Rasta's statements about tasting, smelling and feeling the sea on your skin, about being sick when the ocean is sick. For years now, health agencies in Southern California have issued a blanket statement when it rains: stay out of the ocean for 72 hours because of pollution caused by runoff. And pollution is just one of many problems our oceans are facing.

Please consider supporting Save the Waves and their crucial work. We'll be sharing more from them in the not-so-distant future. Captain Watson's Sea Shepherd organization also needs help as they deal with the aftermath of getting rammed by a whaling ship.

Backyard Corridors: Do you see evidence of climate change affecting animals in your area?

While humans debate the degree, extent and (still) the mere existence of climate change, scores of species are left to deal with its realities. We don't all live at the seething edge of a major wildlife migration route, but many of us have observed subtle changes in the behaviors of the animals that live (or used to live) in our Backyard Corridors. In these changes lies a message; thus our question for this week: 

Do you see evidence of climate change affecting animals in your area?

Please share your observations in the comments on our blog, The Cleanest Line, or on Patagonia’s Facebook page. Author and wildlife biologist Douglas Chadwick offers this take on some of the changes taking place in his back yard as a result of global warming:

Rationalization is an overwhelming human force. Once you form opinions, your mind works overtime, often subtly and even subconsciously, to select information that supports your biases while ignoring or purposefully giving less weight to observations that threaten to prove you wrong. Hey, I think I just described the cult of Climate Change Denial. But that wasn't the point I wanted to make. In fact, I set out to admit that I'm probably biased the opposite way, believing that climate change is happening. I'm pretty sure that global warming is real and potentially devastating to the ecosystems we know and depend upon. Consequently, I'm that much more likely to interpret what could be ordinary variation in weather cycles and wildlife activity as evidence of an overheating planet. I find myself in a constant struggle to tell hints and hunches and unusual sightings -- anecdotal stuff -- apart from the kind of solid information that someone could test and verify.

I'm a wildlife biologist, but I'm not trying to play the cautious scientist here. I'm just trying to be honest. So I'm not going to tell you that what I report below is due to climate change, only that it sure looks like it might be. After all, I live in the Montana Rockies and spend most of my outdoor time in nearby Glacier National Park, home to 150 glaciers when founded in 1910. The reserve now has no more than a couple dozen and is expected to lose its last one within the next 15 years or so. Having watched great, grinding landforms of ice blue as lapis lazuli shrink in a relatively short time to pieces that barely qualify as dirty snowfields, I'm not too sympathetic to arguments that climate change is strictly tree-hugger propaganda.

[Photo: From The Wilderness Society website, A pika, which is a species threatened by global warming, in the wild. Photo by William C. Gladish]

Backyard Corridors: Does Your Area Have Any Wildlife Corridors?

Freedom to Roam wants to preserve and protect big wildways for large animals. The "preserve" part of that statement reminds us that wildlife corridors exist already and that leads into our question this week:

Does your area have any wildlife corridors?

We'd love to hear from you on our blog, The Cleanest Line, or on Patagonia’s Facebook page.

Building and maintaining corridors often requires a lot of creative thinking as bestselling author Ted Kerasote reminds us. [All photos: Ted Kerasote]

Rethinking The Fence

I’ve always likened the ninety-person village in which I live to a rock in a river. Kelly faces the Tetons, between Grand Teton National Park, the National Elk Refuge, and the Gros Ventre Wilderness. We split the currents of elk and moose, deer and bison, antelope and wolves, lions and coyotes and bears.

Wild and Scenic Film Festival Opens This Weekend

The Wild & Scenic Environmental Film Festival (WSEFF) was started in the Sierra Nevada foothills by the watershed advocacy group, the South Yuba River Citizen's League. In 1983, a small group of citizens banded together to form SYRCL and fight for the protection against several proposed dams. In 1999, their successful lobbying earned Wild & Scenic status for 39 miles of the South Yuba River. After twenty-six years, 3,500 supporters and 700 active volunteers later, SYRCL is the largest single river organization in the nation. It is not surprising that the film festival is now the largest of its kind in the U.S. Held annually the second week of January, the 3-day event features award-winning films, plus speakers, celebrities, and activists who bring a human face to the environmental movement and the actions being taken in our communities. SYRCL is now sharing their success with other environmental groups to host tour venues nationwide. It is building a network of grassroots organizations connected by a common goal, to use film to inspire activism. The opening festival held annually each January kicks-off the national tour to 90 communities reaching over 22,000 people. This year's opening festival is this weekend - January 15-17th, 2010 in Nevada City, California.

Entering its eighth year, the opening festival has become a gathering place for a global community, and this year promises to deepen those connections through its focus on a theme that touches every culture: “Fresh, Local…Wild!” embodies the essence of what food should be and is the heart of WSEFF’s 2010 theme – FOOD! Over 20 films at this year’s opening festival will look closely at our food production system and the future of farming. It's WSEFF's belief that if we address the issues facing our agricultural industry, we will build a more resilient food system, manage our water resources more effectively, cure the root of our health care system and have a dramatic impact on climate change. And so this year's stories celebrate taste and the universal right to quality, healthy, safe and flavorful food.

Check out WSEFF's complete tour schedule to find a venue near you, and find out how environmental film speaks to the heart and soul (and the stomach!) and how it has the  power to inspire people to make changes in their lives. Check out their promo video for an inside look at a fun WSEFF venue.

Hit the jump for a preview of some of this year's featured films.

[The Wild&Scenic Environmental Film Festival promo video may also be viewed here]

Rick Ridgeway Makes the Case for Freedom to Roam at Copenhagen Climate Change Conference

Before all the memories from Copenhagen fade from our collective consciousness, Santa Barbara Independent reporter Ethan Stewart and freelance photographer Kodiak Greenwood remind us of one very positive presentation they witnessed at the conference.

Last month, the whole world was watching Copenhagen as the United Nation’s held their much hyped Framework Convention on Climate Change. Anticipated by many to be the biggest environmental moment of our lives, the two-week bureaucratic rodeo of world leaders and eco-minded experts concluded just a few days before Christmas without accomplishing much towards its goal of establishing sharp toothed, earth saving carbon emissions policy. However, despite this crucial failure, the COP15 was by no means a lost cause. In fact, even the most cynical observers hanging out in Denmark’s capital city for the groovy green get together had to see hope everywhere they looked. From the passion of 100,000 people strong protests in the streets to the countless mindboggling presentations going down each and every day in the Bella Center about the various ways we can, and are already, trying to heal Mother Earth, the path to a better tomorrow was on full display for all who cared to look and listen.

[Patagonia's Vice President of Environmental Initiatives, Rick Ridgeway. Photo: Kodiak Greenwood]

Competitors Working Together Toward A Common Environmental Good

It’s rare when industry competitors get together to collaborate. It’s even more unusual when they get together to discuss ways they can lessen their environmental impact. Yet that’s what happened as a result of our relationship with bluesign® technologies, an independent third party that screens the dyeing and finishing of textiles.

We recently met with other outdoor companies, including brands like MEC, REI and The North Face, at REI's Seattle offices to find ways to spread the benefits of bluesign membership. We discussed ways to educate other brands, encourage manufacturers and demonstrate how environmental progress can be rewarding and beneficial for all parties involved. Since we were all working toward the same environmental goals in our supply chains, working together was helpful for everyone. “By 5pm my brain was fried, but I was happy that we had accomplished a lot,” said participant Todd Copeland, Patagonia’s Strategic Environmental Materials Developer. “I realized other brands struggle as we do to do the right thing in a competitive industry and an uncertain economy.”

When Patagonia started our relationship with bluesign technologies, we knew we had found something good to help our understanding of environmental chemistry. I first met its founder, Peter Waeber, in 2000...