Community Sourced, Shared and Supported
This just seemed noteworthy. Maybe it could be replicated for other species …
Kirtland’s warbler tours will be offered daily from May 15 through May 31, 7 days a week at the Mio Ranger District of the Huron National Forest. The Kirtland’s warbler tour costs $10 per adult and is free for children. Funds from the tours help cover costs associated with the tours.
Last week, federal district judge William Alsup told California’s transportation department (CalTrans) that it had given short-shrift to the fate of several old-growth redwood trees that have the misfortune of living beside a coastal highway. CalTrans wants to widen Highway 101 as it passes through a redwood state park, thus allowing passage by extra-long trucks that currently must take long detours on their way to serve Humboldt County businesses.
The trees at issue “are thousands of years old, and can measure 300 feet tall with a diameter sixteen feet wide.” They are, as a practical matter, irreplaceable. Judge Alsup gets that and, if the final decision were his to make, he would choose trees over convenience for bigger trucks. But, as he is the first to admit, it is not his decision to make. With only NEPA processes on which to hang his judicial robe, Alsup makes the most of them!
And why not? Alsup comes from a long tradition of lawyers and judges who believe that environmental protection laws are intended to protect the environment. As a young lawyer, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas during the 1971-1972 term in which Douglas wrote his famous dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton, which kicks off with a citation to “Should Trees Have Standing,” a law review treatise now enjoying a political renaissance.
[In his 1972 dissent, Douglas noted “the Forest Service — one of the federal agencies behind the scheme to despoil Mineral King — has been notorious for its alignment with lumber companies, although its mandate from Congress directs it to consider the various aspects of multiple use in its supervision of the national forests.” Prescient and accurate, as future events proved.]
In Justice Douglas, Alsup had a good mentor who would be proud of his protege’s sound instinct for putting the public interest ahead of a CalTrans bureaucracy beholden to the trucking lobby.
John Persell raised an interesting question here. It was pretty “out there” for me to say that folks like the Center for Western Priorities are “not of our world”. Certainly I can’t speak for everyone who read on The Smokey Wire.
But most of us have been involved in federal lands issues for years. When new groups come on the scene, claiming to be non-partisan but funded by the New Venture Fund and staffed by people who worked as political staff for D candidates…er… it does raise some questions.
My experience on the Hill as a staff person, and having briefed many Congressional staff people over the years, is that some are political animals,who may not be as interested in resolving an issue as getting opportunities for their party to look good and win. That’s not to be critical, it’s just their world. I don’t think anyone who reads what the current Congress is up to, or not up to, would disagree with this. You can’t look to Congress for technical knowledge, accuracy in their statements, nor humility about their own views. That’s not what we select them for.
This is from the Hewlett Foundation’s website:
This renewal grant will continue support for the New Venture Fund’s Center for Western Priorities. The Center is a West-wide communications effort designed to educate the media, public, and decision makers about the impacts of fossil energy development on public lands. The Center builds relationships with reporters, draws from the best polling to craft persuasive messages, rapidly responds to arguments advocating for the elimination of public land protections, steadily generates reports and news, and enlists a broad array of westerners as spokespeople. The Center also works closely with conservation organizations across the West to fill gaps in communications capacities.
Here’s what the Center for Western Priorities says about themselves:
The Center for Western Priorities is a nonpartisan conservation and advocacy organization that serves as a source of accurate information, promotes responsible policies and practices, and ensures accountability at all levels to protect land, water, and communities in the American West.
Based in Denver, Colorado, the Center advances responsible conservation and energy practices in the West. We encourage open, public debate and work to advance those discussions online, in the media, and throughout Western communities by promoting responsible solutions and original research.
Have they changed what they do since their 2015 grant from the Hewlett Foundation? That sounded like a propaganda machine with a certain end in mind. Their own description sounds more like The Smokey Wire.
I do think they do a super job of generating information. I wish The Smokey Wire had those kind of bucks to investigate things, do FOIA’s, hire journalists, develop relationships with reporters, and all that. Nevertheless, we need to ask what kind of slant they put on what they do report, and how careful they are about checking facts that support their narrative. So I think it’s fair to say “communication campaigns run by political operatives” are not the usual federal lands policy suspects. I think of them as newsfeed generators. That’s definitely not like our environmental group friends, who often are seen in the trenches participating in the various policy processes, or even our litigatory environmental group friends, whom I all consider to be “part of our world.”
The New Venture Fund organizations (Center for Western Priorities and the Western Values Project) also came upon the federal lands policy scene recently (since campaign finance reform?) and seem to be mostly about oil and gas (and, of course, denouncing all things Trump Administration.) One wonders whether their interest in public lands policy will go away in 2020 if a certain event occurs..
We’ve been talking about what we might call “spats” or long-term mutual bad feelings, most notably between (some) elected officials in Utah and others (SUWA? OIA?). But as I’ve said, mostly states and feds spend their time working together successfully (not without varying levels of tension and personality conflicts.) Why does this work? I guess I’d have to say relationships (here we go, all touchy-feely again), and those are based on trust. It’s funny that if you read something like the Center for Western Priorities (funded by folks that are not of our world) you could read something bad about David Bernhardt, at least daily.
But if you talk to folks who have worked with him (those unsung heroes that work through the tedious deal-making of the day to day, year to year, decade to decade) you might hear some things like “he never promises more than he can deliver” or “he has worked hard and made concessions to get more environmentally-oriented people to agree.”
Joey Bunch points out in an op-ed here why a Coloradan makes sense to lead Interior. He doesn’t have to believe “the drumbeat of news releases” as he terms them.. he can just talk to people he knows.
The Department of the Interior, for sure, oversees our national treasures, but it’s also a big business.
The department says its work spurred more than $296 billion in economic output and 1.8 million jobs in 2015 from energy development on federal lands and waters, grazing fees, timber sales and recreation.
That was under the Obama administration, mind you. I don’t recall Colorado environmental groups issuing a drumbeat of news releases to oust Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, the CEO of the REI sporting goods chain who hailed from Washington state
Bunch detects partisan fingerprints in Senator Bennet’s shifting support of his fellow Coloradan.
Bennet voted to confirm Bernhardt as deputy Interior secretary under Ryan Zinke just two years ago, but now he doesn’t see him as fit for the top job. Democrats are in the midst of assigning purity tests for potential presidential nominees, and Bennet couldn’t afford to flunk this one.
When Bennet was for Bernhardt before he was against him, he must have been under some delusion as to what President Donald Trump’s policies would entail. He must have skipped reading Bernhardt’s bio.
I’m pretty sure the only place I read about TRCP supporting his nomination was in an article in the Colorado press. Here’s something from their website:
The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership has worked closely with Mr. Bernhardt in his roles as Deputy Secretary and Acting Secretary, and we have found him to be accessible, fair, and true to his word. He has been a steady hand during challenging times at the Department and he has worked to strengthen relationships with the states and the nation’s sportsmen and women.
Mr. Bernhardt’s nomination to be Secretary of the Interior places him in an unenviable position to balance the priorities of the Trump Administration with the mission of the Department. We have often disagreed on policies, such as the pace and siting of energy development and the failure of the department to require developers to mitigate the damage they do to the lands that belong to all Americans. At the same time we have worked productively with Mr. Bernhardt to expand recreational access to public lands and protect big game migration corridors.
We believe Mr. Bernhardt cares about the Department, and in his work with the TRCP, Mr. Bernhardt has conveyed his commitment to advance the Department’s mission and support its role as steward for the public lands and natural resources that help make America unique.
From the folks I’ve spoken with, he seems about as good as you could get under a Trump administration- knowledgeable, fair and true to his word. Reasonable people have to wonder whether much of the outrage is more about R’s running things in general, than about this particular individual. Of course, in fairness, it should be noted that some environmental groups said bad things about Salazar as well. Take this press release about Ken Salazar in 2008 by the Center for Biological Diversity. Maybe Coloradan aren’t ideologues on either side? And that would be a good thing.
In a discussion of “privatization,” Brian Hawthorne suggested here that, “It might be worthwhile discussing our perceived distinctions between what Utah’s HB 148 contemplates vs the “small tract sales” made pursuant to the SNPLMA.” That would require some knowledge of what both of these things are.
This summary of Utah’s H.B. 148 is from a review by an attorney from the conservative Federalist Society.
Recent legislation passed in the State of Utah has demanded that the federal government extinguish title to certain public lands that the federal government currently holds. The State of Utah claims that the federal government made promises to it (at statehood when the federal government obtained the lands) that the federal ownership would be of limited duration and that the bulk of those lands would be timely disposed of by the federal government into private ownership or otherwise returned to the State.
On March 23, 2012, Governor Gary Herbert of the State of Utah signed into Utah law the “Transfer of Public Lands Act and Related Study,” (“TPLA”) also commonly referred to House Bill 148 (“H.B. 148”). This legislation demands that the federal government “extinguish” its title to an estimated more than 20 million (or by some reports even more than 30 million ) acres of federal public lands in the State of Utah by December 31, 2014. It also calls for the transfer of such acreage to the State and establishes procedures for the development of a management regime for this increased state portfolio of land holdings resulting from the transfer.
This is from the Southern Utah Wilderness Association, described by another poster here as “unwilling … to compromise with any other interest group.”
HB 148 requires, among other things, the federal government to transfer title of federal public lands in Utah to the state before January 1, 2015. These public lands include lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service.
- They include, among others, sensitive sites such as Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and all national wildlife refuges in the state.
- This would also include the overwhelming majority of remarkable red rock lands surrounding Moab, the San Rafael Swell, and Grand Gulch.
- The Legislature has indicated that some of these lands would be sold outright to the highest bidder while others would be kept in state ownership but opened to oil and gas drilling, off-road vehicle use and extractive industries.
- The bill does not require the transfer of national parks, wilderness areas, or certain national monuments and national historic sites.
Here is a summary of the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act (from this OIG Report).
Las Vegas, one of the fastest growing cities in the United States, is landlocked by federal lands. Over the past decade, the population has increased by more than 60,000 people per year. To accommodate this rapid growth and expedite the disposal of federal land, Congress enacted SNPLMA in 1998 (Public Law 105-263, 31 USC 6901). SNPLMA allows BLM to sell federal land (about 27,000 acres) primarily through public auctions, establish a special U.S. Treasury interest-bearing account, and use the resulting receipts for educational and environmental purposes and capital improvements. In addition, SNPLMA directed BLM to transfer ownership of about 5,200 acres of land in the McCarran Airport Cooperative Management Area (CMA) to Clark County to help the County enforce regulations concerning airport noise within the CMA. BLM is entitled to 85 percent of any receipts from the sale, lease, or other conveyance of CMA lands.
I’m afraid I don’t see much similarity. The justifications are at opposite ends of the scale from a localized problem to a disagreement about overall management policies. The difference in the affected area is huge. There are benefits returning to the American public from the Las Vegas land sale proceeds. Perhaps it’s a slippery slope (next Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Missoula …?), but H.B. 148 represents the bottom of that slope.
The following article was written by Los Padres ForestWatch.
Goleta, Calif. – On April 25, 2019, the Forest Service announced its approval of the second of two commercial logging projects in the Los Padres National Forest. The approval of the 1,600-acre project along Tecuya Ridge comes just five months after the agency authorized an adjacent 1,200-acre project allowing commercial logging in Cuddy Valley at the base of Mt. Pinos.
The agency fast-tracked both projects without preparing a standard environmental assessment or environmental impact statement, instead declaring that the projects were excluded from environmental review under a loophole in the National Environmental Policy Act. A full environmental review examines potential impacts to plants and wildlife as well as alternatives to the proposed activities. The normal review process also provides more transparency and opportunities for the public to weigh in with concerns about the project.
The logging area provides prime habitat for endangered California condors. According to condor tracking data provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, nearly fifty condor roost sites occur within a half-mile of where trees will be cut and removed. These roost sites are typically large dead or live trees that are used by condors for resting overnight between long flights. Federal standards require a minimum half-mile buffer from condor roosting sites to protect them from disturbance, given their sensitivity and importance in condor survival.
“There is simply no place for commercial logging in condor country,” said Los Padres ForestWatch Conservation Director Bryant Baker. “With approval of this project, the Forest Service is setting a dangerous precedent for shirking environmental review and public input for logging projects that can have significant impacts on endangered species in the Los Padres National Forest.”
The project would remove trees of all sizes along 12 miles of Tecuya Ridge near the northern border of the Los Padres National Forest and allow for a commercial timber sale to be offered to private logging companies. The decision states that the timber sale would make the project cheaper.
The decision—signed by Forest Supervisor Kevin Elliott—describes operations that would remove large trees using feller bunchers and rubber-tired or track-mounted log skidders and loading them onto logging trucks at cleared areas called landings. Up to 95% of smaller trees and shrubs would be mechanically masticated. The leftover slash would be tractor piled along with post-logging machine piling and pile burning. The agency anticipates that these activities would repeat every 3 to 7 years.
A New Low for Public Participation and Transparency
The two commercial logging projects represent a shift in how the Forest Service authorizes large tree removal projects in the Los Padres National Forest. Since 2006, officials have only approved such projects after rigorously evaluating their environmental impacts in an environmental assessment that is made available for public review and comment prior to approval.
One of the many areas along Tecuya Ridge that will be logged and masticated.
Other projects that were aimed at removing trees in the few mixed-conifer areas in the Los Padres National Forest have generally included a limit on the size of trees that can be removed. For example, a Frazier Mountain thinning project that was approved in 2012 only allowed for removal of trees smaller than 10 inches in diameter, or roughly the size of a basketball. Normally, anything larger than this would be left in place as countless scientific studies have highlighted the importance of retaining large, fire-resistant trees to reduce the risk of high-intensity fire. However, the recently-approved project on Tecuya Ridge as well as Cuddy Valley project would allow a timber company to remove massive, old-growth coniferous trees.
Logging Ineffective Against Wildfire Risk
The Trump Administration is billing the commercial logging project as a fire protection measure. However, countless studies have shown that logging is an ineffective or even counterproductive measure for reducing wildfire risk. Similar to many fires before it, last year’s tragic Camp Fire burned intensely and quickly through a large logged area in the Plumas National Forest and across private lands that had been subject to timber harvesting before it devastated the town of Paradise.
“The science is telling us that commercial logging projects like these not only damage critical wildlife habitat, they also usually make wildland fires spread faster and burn hotter,” said Dr. Chad Hanson, a forest ecologist with the John Muir Project. “The Forest Service’s logging proposals will increase threats to local communities from wildland fire,” he added.
Scientists have long-stated that the most effective vegetation management should take place directly around the home and immediately adjacent to communities. The Forest Service followed this model in planning two such projects in 2007 to establish defensible space directly adjacent to homes abutting national forest land and construct two fuel breaks directly adjacent to Frazier Park and Lake of the Woods. ForestWatch formally supported both projects. However, more than ten years later, the Forest Service has still not completed the approved fuel break work.
Research has also repeatedly shown that community-focused measures are more successful and cost-effective than landscape-level vegetation treatment. These measures include retrofitting existing structures with fire-safe materials, improving early warning and evacuation systems, creating fireproof community shelters, and curbing development in fire-prone areas.
Public Opposition Ignored
The Forest Service received over 1,000 public comments before the decision—approximately 99% were in opposition to the commercial logging proposal. ForestWatch submitted technical and legal comments highlighting several issues with both projects in partnership with the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute and the Center for Biological Diversity, and another letter requesting that the projects undergo standard environmental review joined by the California Wilderness Coalition, Kern Audubon, Sequoia ForestKeeper, Kern-Kaweah Chapter of the Sierra Club, TriCounty Watchdogs, and Earth Skills. Since the Forest Service excluded these projects from environmental review, there is no formal appeals process, leaving litigation as the only option for the public to seek changes to the project. ForestWatch and its partners at the John Muir Project and Center for Biological Diversity are currently evaluating the best course of action to take to avoid impacts to the area and to endangered California condors.
I thought I’d repost this because Peter has much experience in this area. It originally came up in the context of “what is privatization” and “why do all the big Monument designations happen in Utah? What are the dynamics of some folks picking Utah as a target, and then attacking them for reacting? What’s behind it? Brian mentioned bad blood of longstanding duration between different political figures. But what to do when there is bad blood, lack of trust, or past negative interactions? If you’re in partisan politics, or the media sources that echo them, you seek to inflame them to make yourself look better, to get more clicks or to advance your narrative. But is there an alternative path of joint story- telling, compassion and peace-making (hmm. is this touchy-feely?)
But Peter Williams has experience in trying to work through conflicts and here’s what he thinks:
What to do about “bad blood” is an interesting question in this discussion, as well as a crucial challenge in any collaborative effort. Brian Hawthorne, Sharon, and Jon all touch on it. In my experience, which I assume others can attest as well, not only can there be bad blood, there can be different stories about why it happened. And Sharon reminds us of another related problem, which is that folks may not ever talk with you about those past issues. Some call those “the undiscussables,” a pretty apt name.
This thread has strong examples of the challenges of bad blood. Taking just one, we can look at how Utah residents and others have been affected by the Utah Wilderness battles, the subsequent declarations of National Monument status, and, twenty years from when it flared up, the boundary changes and subsequent business reactions of some in the outdoor recreation industry. And that doesn’t even get into the background history going to the 19th century at least.
Maybe a question is how to find a way forward when history is hot, alive, and emotional. From a collaboration perspective, combined with ideas from conflict management, I find it helpful to recognize as early as possible what I call “competing histories” because finding a competing history tells me I need to look for the frames or lenses through which people receive their story, their version. Those frames are the source of the bad blood and, with the right approach, folks will tell you enough, even if most of the story is still largely undiscussable. If successful, I also know I reached the stage of “sufficiently trusted outsider”, not always easy, sometimes not even possible, always worth trying.
Then I do at least two things with those competing histories. First, I find ways to acknowledge those in my discussions with folks, to speak to the undiscussables myself so they don’t have to, because, as a sufficiently trusted outsider, I can do it with less emotion, less baggage. This is all part of what I call “re-humanizing” the discussion, getting beyond caricatures and stereotypes enough to have a conversation about a joint future. Folks who do collaboration work, like me, sometimes need to take on a “third-party” role of sharing what we’ve heard–with permission–because that relieves the actual participants from doing it themselves with all the emotion that can conjure.
Second, I find ways to document the history, like in presentations or documents, which acknowledges it has been heard and, where possible and needed, gets at facts instead of stories. This is a way to use validation to accomplish some needed de-escalation.
Let me leave you with this idea: Finding ways to distinguish “bad blood between people” from the history of events that produced that bad blood may give the people a better chance of finding a way forward. With hot issues, like debates about privatizing public lands, this could be helpful because you can create space between undiscussables and whatever really needs discussion.
There sometimes seems to be an undercurrent here of the idea that environmental groups are rich bullies, and extractive industries are working for the common good, or at least are benign. Here’s some evidence otherwise regarding the latter.
One of the industry tactics is SLAPPs, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, wherein corporations try to intimidate their opponents by filing truly frivolous lawsuits – that they can afford but the defendant can’t. Matthew posted about one involving a forest products company here.
But your friendly oil and gas industry seems to be a leader in this field. Meaning that when you pay for your heat and transportation you’re also paying for this; “Using lawsuits to shut people up has long been a part of the oil industry’s playbook…” They lost a notable case recently when they sued youth groups (among others) after the groups won protections against neighborhood oil drilling in Los Angeles.
Many states have passed legislation to prevent this kind of intimidation of free speech, and a proposal is pending in Colorado, as described here, by an anti-drilling activist who has been SLAPPed:
I accept the urgency of climate change, and I am a proud advocate for our public lands. Many here agree with me, and together we have stood up to limit oil and gas development from expanding across the national forest and BLM lands.
The particulars of my case are unimportant here, although they can be easily researched. And I have already been found by a Colorado District Court to not have committed any actionable offense, and also awarded attorney fees for the “frivolous” and “vexatious” complaint made against me.
But all that is under appeal, and so I am still, over two years later, unduly burdened by and defending myself against this action.
Free speech is protected in our republic for good reason. Citizen input is grist for the mill of representational democracy. Dialogue and debate is a plus in pluralistic society. And this value is shared by Americans across the political spectrum. Free Speech allows people to participate robustly in government, speak truth to power, and to challenge the status quo.
Abstract from a new paper in Ecosphere, “The missing fire: quantifying human exclusion of wildfire in Pacific Northwest forests, USA.” Full text is online, free:
Western U.S. wildfire area burned has increased dramatically over the last half‐century. How contemporary extent and severity of wildfires compare to the pre‐settlement patterns to which ecosystems are adapted is debated. We compared large wildfires in Pacific Northwest forests from 1984 to 2015 to modeled historic fire regimes. Despite late twentieth‐century increases in area burned, we show that Pacific Northwest forests have experienced an order of magnitude less fire over 32 yr than expected under historic fire regimes. Within fires that have burned, severity distributions are disconnected from historical references. From 1984 to 2015, 1.6 M ha burned; this is 13.3–18.9 M ha less than expected. Deficits were greatest in dry forest ecosystems adapted to frequent, low‐severity fire, where 7.2–10.3 M ha of low‐severity fire was missing, compared to a 0.2–1.1 M ha deficit of high‐severity fire. When these dry forests do burn, we observed that 36% burned with high‐severity compared to 6–9% historically. We found smaller fire deficits, 0.3–0.6 M ha, within forest ecosystems adapted to infrequent, high‐severity fire. However, we also acknowledge inherent limitations in evaluating contemporary fire regimes in ecosystems which historically burned infrequently and for which fires were highly episodic. The magnitude of contemporary fire deficits and disconnect in burn severity compared to historic fire regimes have important implications for climate change adaptation. Within forests characterized by low‐ and mixed‐severity historic fire regimes, simply increasing wildfire extent while maintaining current trends in burn severity threatens ecosystem resilience and will potentially drive undesirable ecosystem transformations. Restoring natural fire regimes requires management that facilitates much more low‐ and moderate‐severity fire.
IMHO, Restoring the historic role of fire will require prior mechanical fuels reduction in many areas where fuel loads are higher than historically. That means commercial and non-commercial harvesting, and paying for it, and that spells controversy.
One of our goals at The Smokey Wire is to hear both sides of issues. Sometimes that’s easy, as we can simply call and ask. Sometimes, the FS is in litigation, and the cone of silence has descended, and we have to make do with reading EIS’s RODs and objection letters. Sometimes people of all stripes don’t return our phone calls or emails. Many of us know something about whatever the issue is from our work lives, and have a knowledge base to build on. Sometimes we have to start from scratch. One of us (Steve Wilent) is a professional journalist, and most of the rest of the usual crowd are not.
So I’d like to encourage readers to help out with this. In looking for grants to support our effort, I found that what we do is called “citizen journalism” and is actually part of a movement. One of my favorite write-ups on it is by Mark Glaser in 2006, called Your Guide to Citizen Journalism.
Here’s a quote: One of the main concepts behind citizen journalism is that mainstream media reporters and producers are not the exclusive center of knowledge on a subject — the audience knows more collectively than the reporter alone. Now, many of these Big Media outlets are trying to harness the knowledge of their audience either through comments at the end of stories they post online or by creating citizen journalist databases of contributors or sources for stories.
Some of the citizen journalism literature focused on the death of local newspapers and the need for local news. Our situation is different. Our issues are very complex and to hear both sides fairly may take weeks/months/years of research and more space than a standard news article or blog post. Of course, citizen journalists can be as, or more biased, than professional journalists. That’s why it’s both key, and difficult, to get both sides. I don’t mind if we get one side from a press story and present our own info to get the other side. I just want to encourage readers to write their own stories about news that isn’t covered in the press for whatever reason.
Here’s an example of how that works in East Lansing, Michigan.
Below is a quote from Kenneth Neil Cukier, a technology correspondent for The Economist in London (in the Glaser piece):
I acknowledge the problems but welcome the development of the ‘amateur journalist,’ akin to the ‘gentleman scientist’ of the 18th century, which did so much to advance knowledge. I believe journalism is undergoing its ‘reformational moment.’ By that I mean that the Internet is affecting journalism just as the printing press affected the Church — people are bypassing the sacrosanct authority of the journalist in the same way as Luther asserted that individuals could have a direct relationship with God without the intermediary of the priest. The Internet has disintermediated middlemen in other industries, why should journalism be immune?
The tools of broadcast media have gone from owning paper mills, presses, million-dollar transmitters and broadcast licenses, to having a cheap PC or a mobile phone in one’s pocket. That gives everyone the ability to have a direct rapport with the news as either a consumer or a producer, instantaneously. This is like the advent of literacy: it threatened elites and sometimes created problems. But it empowered individuals and led to a far better world. The new literacy from digital media will do the same, even as it creates new problems. Ultimately, I believe it is a positive thing for journalism, because it enables something journalism has lacked: competition from the very public we serve.