This isn’t a USFS planning topic, but interesting nonetheless. According to an NPR story yesterday and on other dates, a “blanket of shrublands and dense juniper [eastern red cedar] woods gobbling up grassland leads to wildfires with towering flames that dwarf those generated in prairie fires.” In part, this is due to eliminating Indigenous fire-based land management.
Here’s a link to the story. Note that it is part of the Climate Desk collaboration, described here.
The reporter starts out with the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, who did not want a wind turbine project in a specific place.
That’s what happened earlier this month when the Biden administration expanded a national monument to include Molok Luyuk, joining the mountain ridge to the nearby Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, nearly 350,000 acres of coastal range in Northern California. Tribes are now working on a co-stewardship agreement for the Molok Luyuk area, but not for the whole national monument.
But the tribes that have a relationship with Molok Luyuk aren’t done with their advocacy. They’ve protected the area from energy development, but they still have little say in how the land is managed. While the federal government has pushed co-stewardship agreements over the years, national monuments are still considered property of the federal government.
Melissa Hovey is the manager at Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, and she said that co-management happens between BLM and the Forest Service. These federal agencies can enter into co-stewardship agreements with tribes, but they can’t delegate management without congressional approval.
“Co-management means decision-making authority,” she said. “Co-stewardship means one entity still has the decision-making authority.”
You would think that “co-stewardship” and “co-management” would be simple terms to define, but there are numerous federal documents that have used the two terms interchangeably over the years. Co-stewardship is a broad term that describes agreements made between federal agencies and tribal nations to hash out shared interests in the management of federal lands. Co-management refers to a stronger tribal presence and decision-making power.
Congressional action is not the only way to gain co-management powers. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition in Utah has one of the most successful stories of tribes gaining co-management status—they were given “true co-management” by an Intergovernmental Cooperative Agreement.
In 2022, the federal government agreed to co-manage Bears Ears National Monument with the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni. For the first time ever, tribal nations worked with federal agencies to draft a resource-management plan that would dictate how a national monument should be run.
I’m still a little confused, if Hovey says “co-management means decision-making authority” and Bears Ears has co-management (without Congressional action?) .. meanwhile we see this from E&E News yesterday..
Native Americans and conservation advocates on Monday rolled out a campaign urging the Biden administration to adopt a strategy that emphasizes tribal management of the Bears Ears National Monument.
The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition — composed of leaders of the Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe, Zuni Tribe, Hopi Tribe and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe — and outdoor retailer Patagonia pledge to press for adoption of a management plan that stresses resource protection along with the use of Indigenous knowledge to steward the 1.35 million-acre monument in southeastern Utah.
“Bears Ears holds deep spiritual and cultural significance, and is rich in ancestral history,” said Craig Andrews, who serves as co-chair of Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and vice chair of the Hopi Tribe. “Protecting Bears Ears ensures that future generations can continue to connect with our history and cultural identity.”
The group is urging the Biden administration to adopt a version of the management plan known as Alternative E, one of five options being weighed by the Bureau of Land Management and the Agriculture Department’s Forest Service. In a draft of the plans published in March, both agencies identified that version of the management plan as their “preferred option,” although a final selection has yet to be made.
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So if Tribes have decision-making authority, why do they need a campaign to adopt the strategy? In fact, why did they need five alternatives? They could have had “current conditions” and “preferred by Tribes” and save much money and time of agency employees and the public. Also I’m a little leery of Patagonia having a strong presence in this.. getting rid of OHVs opens up more country for those who buy their stuff. That is, the folks who can afford to buy their stuff. It looks like the spinoff charitable organization from Patagonia helps fund many groups we are familiar with.
Anyway, back to the Grist article.
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Patrick Gonzales-Rogers is a professor at the Yale School of Environment where he specializes in tribal sovereignty and natural resources. He is also the former director of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition.
Co-management allows tribes to exercise sovereignty, according to Gonzales-Rogers. “It allows them to be more assertive,” he added. And when that happens, tribes can bring in religious and spiritual practices to utilize traditional knowledge, wisdom that had been minimized by federal agencies in the past.
Gonzales-Rogers is hopeful that, exponentially, these choices will compound, “and may even have a nexus to say something like landback,” a reference to a movement that is not only rooted in a mass return of land to Indigenous nations and peoples, but also tribes having sovereignty to steward the land that was taken from them.
Gonzales-Rogers thinks the two terms have not been very well-defined over the years, but said co-stewardship agreements might be a good way to start building to co-management.
This is confusing, because the FS and BLM are already required, as far as I know, to use traditional knowledge in decision-making on all lands, and maybe co-stewardship as well. Is sovereignty like being pregnant, you either are or you aren’t? Or are there degrees of sovereignty? It seems to me that we won’t know what “sovereignty” really means for a place that’s co-managed until an Admin disagrees with a Tribe about management.
The reporter asserts that based on an international study. Some international studies say the same thing about local people.. Not to be unduly skeptical, but the study involved lots of different places and the authors’ own view of what is more autonomy and what is more conservation. And I just think about the Izembeck Road, the Utah oil train and so on, as Wuerthner described in a previous post:
What I call an Indian Iron Curtain exists among the media and conservation organizations. Like the old Soviet Union Iron Curtain, which attempted to promote Communism and censored anything contradicting the notion that Communism was anything but a perfect social and political system. The Indian Iron Curtain exists to promote tribal people as somehow exemplary conservationists.
Who is doing this in the media? For example, who funds the Climate Desk Collaboration? Here’s a story about how it started from Yale Climate Connections. Since I’m an alum, I thought they might let me know who funds YCC. No such luck, donor privacy invoked. But back to the Climate Desk.
To help fund The Climate Desk, including hiring freelance writers, the partners have so far secured a $100,000 grant from the Park Foundation. Other money has come from the Surdna Foundation, which has supported Mother Jones in the past.
Grant money has come without any expectations of control over editorial content, the partners said.
I’m sure that’s true, but it seems to me that funding reporters at Grist is likely to produce different copy than for example, funding reporters at the National Review.
Illegal cannabis greenhouses dot the landscape in the shadow of Mount Shasta in Siskiyou county, northern California. Photograph: Brian van der Brug/Getty
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I’ve received a few positive emails about our managed fire discussion so I’ll be continuing that in other posts. But for now, a few other interesting stories.
TRCP Preps Us for Release of FS Old Growth Policy
TRCP, who was no doubt involved in deciding, gives us an inkling that it will be a Good Thing with this op-ed in the Bend Bulletin:
Fortunately, the Forest Service’s proposed action on old growth demonstrates that the agency is listening and that it recognizes active restoration is critical to maintaining older forests in many places on the landscape. Grounded in the latest scientific research, the proposal aims to provide guidance for consistently maintaining and managing older forests while complementing wildfire risk reduction efforts. Initiatives such as the Wildfire Crisis Strategy advocate for proactive stewardship through selective thinning, prescribed burns, Tribal co-stewardship agreements, and other tools. Implemented effectively, a policy that enhances the health of Central Oregon’s old growth ponderosas coupled with existing strategies such as the Wildfire Crisis Strategy can enhance the pace and scale of managing healthy forest stands, benefiting wildlife habitat while reducing fire risk to communities.
Some Pieces of the “Public Lands Rule” to be Implemented in a More “Deliberate” Fashion Than Others
This sounds quite interesting, so thanks to Nick Smith. I’d like to see the rest of the piece, so maybe someone who has access to E&E News could send. FWIW, The Smokey Wire was not invited to the internal online webinar that E&E News was. It feels kind of creepy that reporters for an outlet regular people can’t afford (and that isn’t available in my local public libraries) have unique access to information provided by the Admin. I get a weird oligarchy vibe from all this. Here’s the summary Nick posted:
Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning and other officials Thursday outlined to staffers next steps and a timeline for implementing the sweeping new public lands rule, acknowledging that it could take years to fully incorporate all the rule’s provisions. Stone-Manning and others promised the rule will be implemented in a deliberate fashion when it goes into effect on June 10. This will include a “preliminary suite of implementation guidance” developed by “interdisciplinary and intra-organizational teams” to help guide staff, said Brian St. George, BLM’s deputy assistant director of resources and planning. The rule kicks off major changes in how BLM approaches oversight of the 245 million acres it manages. Highlights include involving Native American tribes and Alaska Native corporations as “co-leads” in project reviews, such as environmental impact statements, and proactively protecting parcels that have been nominated, but not approved, for conservation, agency officials said during the internal online webinar late Thursday that E&E News was able to listen to. (Subscription Required)
Couldn’t someone nominate all BLM lands for conservation? Where does that leave renewable energy, strategic minerals, and new transmission lines?
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I do see a pattern of media getting out ahead of any direct contact between the actual text and the public. Problem is, media campaigns themselves make some of us more skeptical than we would be with a straightforward public announcement with all the details for those of us more knowledgeable (than reporters) to peruse. Maybe that’s just me, and it’s now a standard way of doing business.
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Bipartisan Bill on Mining Passed in House Goes to Senate
The bipartisan support for blocking the Rosemont decision follows the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which incentivized mining companies to take advantage of the Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit to develop mining projects for critical minerals included in the law. Many of the critical minerals designated by the Biden administration, such as zinc, manganese and lithium, are integral to electric vehicle batteries and the transition toward a carbon-free economy.
“Everything from lithium-ion batteries to satellites relies on critical minerals, and we should be responsibly mining those right here in the U.S.,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), who introduced the Senate bill with Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), said in a press release. “My legislation will undo the damage of the misguided Rosemont decision and protect thousands of jobs across the West.”
There were 509 active mining plans of operation and another 806 active mining notices on federal lands in 2023, according to Steve Feldgus, deputy assistant secretary of land and minerals management at the Department of the Interior.
The Center for Biological Diversity and Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, nonprofit organizations working in Arizona, led the effort to sue the U.S. Forest Service over its decision to allow the Rosemont Copper Company to use federal lands to dump mining waste. The Tohono O’odham Nation, Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and Hopi Tribe, among others, consider the area to be sacred, ancestral land, prompting conservation groups to file suit and prevent further development.
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“What we correctly argued and the court, we think, got it right, was that if you’re going to assert rights against the United States … the agency has to check and the company has to prove that it actually has the rights under the [1872] Mining Law,” said Roger Flynn, an environmental attorney who litigated on behalf of conservation groups against the United States Forest Service in the Rosemont decision.
Before the 2022 Rosemont decision, as a legal precedent, the Forest Service often did not require proof of valid mining claims. According to Flynn, who teaches courses on mining law at the University of Colorado, the agency has historically greenlit dozens of mining projects on federal land because of its interpretation of the 1872 Mining Law.
“I think the [1872] Mining Law automatically gives rights to these companies, the agencies do not have the discretion to say no. The Rosemont mine changed that,” Flynn said. “And that’s what has caused the industry to go to their supporters and basically take away the few guardrails that actually exist in the Mining Law.”
On the other hand, this also came across my desk this morning..from the University of Michigan “Copper can’t be mined fast enough to electrify the US”. Seems like after the election might be a good time for a bipartisan reality check on all this. Right now it seems like decarbonization pathways are chosen by political forces we don’t know about, without an open public review of assumptions and alternatives. As I’ve said before, if the US has parties with different perspectives and decarb is a long-term project, doesn’t it have to have bipartisan public support?One could argue that the IRA/BIL is that, but those are about sending out more money (easy for pols) not so much about getting things done (because someone is not going to like it). Clarity about the hard choices we face seems important to me, but not to the marketers of various erstwhile solutions.
Some Pieces of the “Public Lands Rule” to be Implemented in a More “Deliberate” Fashion Than Others
This sounds quite interesting, so thanks to Nick Smith. I’d like to see the rest of the piece, so maybe someone who has access to E&E News could send. FWIW, The Smokey Wire was not invited to the internal online webinar that E&E News was. It feels kind of creepy that reporters for an outlet regular people can’t afford (and that isn’t available in my local public libraries) have unique access to information provided by the Admin. I get a weird oligarchy vibe from all this. Here’s the summary Nick posted:
Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning and other officials Thursday outlined to staffers next steps and a timeline for implementing the sweeping new public lands rule, acknowledging that it could take years to fully incorporate all the rule’s provisions. Stone-Manning and others promised the rule will be implemented in a deliberate fashion when it goes into effect on June 10. This will include a “preliminary suite of implementation guidance” developed by “interdisciplinary and intra-organizational teams” to help guide staff, said Brian St. George, BLM’s deputy assistant director of resources and planning. The rule kicks off major changes in how BLM approaches oversight of the 245 million acres it manages. Highlights include involving Native American tribes and Alaska Native corporations as “co-leads” in project reviews, such as environmental impact statements, and proactively protecting parcels that have been nominated, but not approved, for conservation, agency officials said during the internal online webinar late Thursday that E&E News was able to listen to. (Subscription Required)
Couldn’t someone nominate all BLM lands for conservation? Where does that leave renewable energy, strategic minerals, and new transmission lines?
Environmental and Human Trafficking Impacts of Illegal Cannabis Grows in Shasta County, California or Legalizing Provides Cover for Illegal Operations
Policies made with the best of intentions can have unintended consequences. Proponents (whether driven by self-interest or ideology) tend to assume away and downplay them. Some are downright surprises to anyone; some are easily foreseen or experienced by other government entities who have tried that policy. What’s interesting about this Guardian article is that it’s not really clear how much of this is federal land, possibly due to the fact that the reporter is located in London, and so our detailed land ownership patterns are unnecessary detail (and relatively unimportant for the Guardian’s audience, I guess):
The wilderness around Mount Shasta is protected by law, sheltering spotted owls, Pacific fishers and rare plants such as the Shasta owl’s clover. The Medicine Lake Volcano, 30 miles from Mount Shasta, is an important drinking water resource for the state that captures snowmelt from the surrounding area.
“We’ve gone down there on the ground and there’s really no wildlife. You’re lucky to find a lizard,” says Rick Dean, the community development director for Siskiyou’s environmental health division. Along with helping local people rebuild from the region’s enormous wildfires, Dean is spending ever more of his time on the consequences of illegal cannabis production.
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Illegal production continues on federal land and forest ecosystems, sometimes with links to organised crime groups. There are fines for illicit growers but most amount to a few hundred dollars, which authorities say is little deterrent. By contrast, commercial growers in the legal market are obliged to follow restrictions covering the use of pesticides and chemicals, with dispensaries testing cannabis products before they go on sale.
Standing on a hill looking over the makeshift greenhouses and partially buried rubbish, local sheriff Jeremiah LaRue says authorities do not have enough resources to clear the illicit operations. Pickup trucks can be seen patrolling the site. “There’s a lot of concern about environmental damage. We see the labour trafficking of the people that come in here and work; water use concerns; and the marijuana is essentially being cultivated with pesticides that are not supposed to be on the plant.
“The marijuana goes to anywhere … to licensed facilities. We’ve tracked it to other states. It’s a public health issue,” he says.
While his team do issue fines after raids, they largely go unpaid. When a growing site is abandoned or cleared, Siskiyou county estimates the cleanup costs to be about $30,000 an acre, with workers routinely finding illegal pesticide that could be fatal to people who breathe it in.
“The idea was that [legalisation] would combat the illegal side of things,” says LaRue. “This exploded around the same time as legalisation. All the costs associated with doing it legally are way more than to do it illegally. It’s not about whether the plant is bad. If this was corn, or strawberries, or cherries, whatever, it would still be wrong.”
Considering it seemed to start during the drought, it could be that the trees were so weakened by a lack of water and the extreme heat (associated with climate change), that the beetles were able to take advantage, similar to what happened in conifer forests across the Sierra Nevada. It can take sequoias multiple years to recover once rain returns.
As beetle attacks progress, trees tend to die from the top down.
(Nate Stephenson/U.S. Geological Survey)
Fire could also be playing a role, according to Brigham. There seems to be a correlation between beetle attacks and severe fire scars at the base of the trees. While sequoias need fire to survive, extreme fires like those that we’ve seen in recent years, can damage their roots and trunks, compromising their ability to transport nutrients to the demanding, full green crown several hundred feet off the ground.
This Oregon magistrate judge’s decision (“findings and recommendations” that must be confirmed by full judge before they are effective) is sure to delight Jon and infuriate Sharon. The case challenges BLM’s proposal to “treat” 684,185 acres on the Medford District. Plaintiffs prevailed on most of their FLPMA and NEPA claims.
I recommend reading the full decision. It is not long and well-written. Here are a few highlights:
BLM’s argument, at its core, is that because its actions are not intended to aid the development of habitat, its actions do not need to comply with the standard that requires BLM’s actions aid the development of habitat That reasoning is
circular. If the prohibition on treatments that preclude or delay habitat development by 20 years or more only applies to treatments intended to accelerate habitat development, it would render the direction superfluous.
In simply electing its chosen alternative without fully exploring the conflicting research on the issue through a formal EIS, BLM effectively reduces its findings to only the
positive outcomes, while discounting the coinciding negative possibility that treatments would exacerbate forest fires.
BLM adopted an intentionally non-specific approach in the EA to allow the plans to proceed flexibly under a “programmatic”
framework. By design, the Program has an inherently high degree of uncertainty about the proximate environmental impacts of the approved program of work.
BLM tiers to a global EIS that omits any site-specific analysis and explicitly pushes review to later implementation-level projects. Yet, when faced with a later implementation-level project, like the Late Mungers Project, BLM relies on a DNA, a non-NEPA document which cannot substitute for NEPA analysis, to conclude no further NEPA analysis is required. In this way, site-specific analysis is never completed, and it breeds problems for public participation, transparency, and establishing any sort of concrete certainty as to impacts.
As to relief, the court notes the parties agree on the non-commercial treatments and asks them to seek a resolution of the commercial logging aspects in light of the court’s opinion.
The Rocky Mountain Station sends out a newsletter called Roundup; this one’s on “Science for Forest Planning” so should be of interest. The above is just a screenshot, if you go to this site, the links are active and there’s more good stuff, including podcasts.
This Memorial Day, I was looking for Forest Service or tree-related history and found this memorial at the State Capitol in California.
The Civil War Memorial Grove pays tribute to the thousands of men who lost their lives in the American Civil War.
The Grove was originally planted with trees from the Manassas, Harpers Ferry, Savannah, Five Forks, Yellow Tavern, and Vicksburg battlefields. Some trees came from other Civil War-related sites, including the tombs of Presidents McKinley and Lincoln.
The idea for the Memorial Grove dates to 1896, 31 years after the Confederate Army’s surrender marked the end of the American Civil War. Mrs. Eliza Waggoner and the Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of veterans’ wives and daughters, led the effort to create the memorial. Although California had sided with the Union Army, they felt the grove should represent all those who fought in the four-year war. Their concept was a living memorial featuring trees from important battlefields and other sites connected to the war.
The Civil War Memorial Grove was the first monument in Capitol Park. Nearly a year went into planning, fundraising, and assembling trees from around the country. On May 1, 1897, the Grove was dedicated in a ceremony attended by several thousand onlookers. As children waved American flags, Judge Walling, Past Department Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, shared these words:
At the time of the ceremony, the trees were just saplings, each marked with a tag naming the battlefield from which it came. A sapling from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania stood beside one from Shiloh, Tennessee; a sapling from Lexington, Kentucky next to one from the Wilderness Battlefield in Virginia. In all, 40 different battlefields were represented. At the center stood “a tree of Peace” transplanted from Appomattox, the Virginia town where the Confederate Army surrendered in 1865.
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The Civil War was one of the most traumatic periods of American history, dividing families, friends, and neighbors. The Civil War Memorial Grove honors the many soldiers who lost their lives during the Civil War.
This essay in Undark describes a “a citizens’ jury” designed “to ask whether the U.K. government should allow scientists to edit the DNA of human embryos in order to treat serious genetic conditions. Convening a jury was a non-traditional approach to involving the public in decision-making on a complicated scientific topic that could affect public policy.” Such a “science court” might help the public understand forest health/resilience treatments and could perhaps increase the forestry community’s social license to actively manage national forests.
Rich J. noted yesterday that public land laws are antiquated, which reminded me of this CU Law School conference at the 40th Review of the Land Law Review. At that time, the thoughtful and talented planner John Rupe and I helped our Regional Forester, Rick Cables with this presentation. This was during the period of the 2005-2008 Planning Rule. Many thanks to CU Law for keeping all this posted on their website.
John Rupe posted an excellent summary of the conference at TSW here.
Here’s one paragraph from John’s post:
The 1970 report led to the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA). According to Charles Wilkinson, FLPMA was a textbook example of Congress taking the long view – carefully studying the problem through a commission, and then crafting a bill which addressed those concerns. He noted that the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) was very different – it went through Congress in less than a year because of a timber cutting crisis.
The speakers at the conference generally concluded that today’s political environment makes it difficult to repeat a 1970-type commission. Congress is too polarized. We may be too impatient to repeat the process that took six years from 1964 to 1970. There may not be a political sponsor like Wayne Aspinall, the Congressman from Colorado who pushed for the formation of the Commission as part of a 1964 compromise legislative package which enabled the package of the Wilderness Act. In addition, the problems today with public land management may not be grabbing the attention of the public, more concerned with the economy and other pressing matters.
Hmm… “too polarized” 14 years ago. I wonder (certainly I run in less political circles) if the idea of “we are too polarized” keeps us from taking steps, perhaps incremental, to hash out and perhaps heal disagreements. Words themselves have power, I believe, to lay tracks in our consciousness. I’d instead ask “how can we design a system to get away from polarization?”. If we had started with a small effort in 2010, where might we be today?
We could start with “what behaviors would we like to see in the next Admin that could help with that? or “what would be a tiny step that could be taken to develop a bipartisan process to remove the most problematic aspects of the current “mess o’ statutes”.
Anyway here’s a link to the conference, it’s full of interesting powerpoints and videos. Reflecting from 14 years on, we seem to have all the same issues.
Well, David Bernhardt (he of the Trump Admin) talked about oil shale, you don’t hear about that anymore. But not much about renewable and transmission buildout, and minerals were not strategic at the time.
There’s also a set of slides of that presentation, with some quotes people might want to borrow for their own presentations. Note how the Solum quote is related a bit to our discussion earlier this week of litigation as policy setting.. rights talk rather than justice talk. Anyway, take a look at anything at the conference that interests you and we can discuss below.
Interesting essay in Grist. Not directly applicable to national forests, but there are some insights here to consider when pondering call for setting aside national forest lands as “climate forests.”
“The conversation about how to manage forests “has been overtaken by the climate discussion,” said Daniela Kleinschmit, an author of the report and the vice president of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, the network behind the research. The result? Indigenous peoples are getting pushed out of their lands because of carbon offset projects. Native grasslands are getting turned into forests, even though grasslands themselves are huge, overlooked reservoirs of carbon. And offset projects in forests, more often than not, fail to achieve all of the emissions benefits their backers had promised.”
A link in Nick Smith’s email today goes to a press release about the USFS’s Climate Action Tracker, which I have not yet explored. The release also mentions “A revised Mature and Old growth Definition and Inventory revised report released today has new charts that include lands managed by both the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service.”
From the exec summary:
Based on the working definitions used in this initial inventory, Forest Service and BLM lands collectively contain 33.1 +/- 0.4 million acres1 of old-growth and 80.8 +/- 0.5 million acres of mature forest. Old-growth forest represents 19 percent and mature forest another 45 percent of all forested land managed by the two agencies. This initial national-scale inventory was conducted by applying the old-growth and mature working definitions to Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) field plot data.
Like all of the Nation’s forests, old-growth and mature forests are threatened by climate change and associated stressors. The initial inventory and definitions for old-growth and mature forests are part of an overarching climate-informed strategy to enhance carbon sequestration and address climate-related impacts to forests, including insects, disease, wildfire risk, and drought. Initial inventory results will be used to analyze threats to these forests, which will allow consideration of appropriate climate-informed forest management, which is also required by E.O. 14072.
Illegal cannabis greenhouses dot the landscape in the shadow of Mount Shasta in Siskiyou county, northern California. Photograph: Brian van der Brug/Getty
