Grouse: Oil and Gas

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Heid E. Erdrich is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Poetry Series, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Bush Foundation, Loft Literary Center, First People’s Fund, and other honors. Erdrich has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Heid edited the 2018 anthology New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press. Her forthcoming poetry collection is Little Big Bully, Penguin Editions, out Oct. 6th, 2020. Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Read along with the poems below as you listen to the episode.

Timothy Steele is an American poet who has received numerous awards and honors for his poetry, including a Lavan Younger Poets Award, the Los Angeles PEN Center Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Robert Fitzgerald Award for Excellence in the Study of Prosody. He has taught at Stanford University and the University of California in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. Since 1987, he has been a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. Stele is known for his love of rhyme, meter, and traditional forms of poetry. He loves birds, and has had a number of poems inspired by encounters with them. Read along with the poems below as you hear them in the episode:

A native of Minnesota, Traci Brimhall is an Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Kansas State University. Her first published collection, Rookery, features many poems about birds. “Birds just seem to have a kind of spiritual or symbolic weight,” Traci explains. “They feel somehow ancient or ethereal – timeless in a way, and I think poets are often attracted to things that have that sort of feeling.” But her interest in birds began with a common bird, the Red-winged Blackbird. “Perhaps that's part of the greatness of common things,” she says. “They’re so accessible, so ever-present.” You can read along with the poems featured in the episode on our website.

Wendy S. Walters is a non-fiction writer and poet, who holds a MFA/PHD in Poetry and Literature from Cornell University. She is the former Associate Dean of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, The New School. Currently she serves as Director of the Nonfiction Concentration and Associate Professor of Writing, Nonfiction in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. While Walters was living in L.A. during the early 2000s, she wrote a chapbook, or short collection of poems, about the city called The Birds of Los Angeles. A number of themes are woven through the collection, including the Iraq War, trying to make sense of images, how we treat the things and people we love, and the birds that caught her attention. Prophet as Slow Bird Hollywood Finches Either I Watch a War on TV You can read the poems in today's episode on our website

This episode we're sharing "Timber Wars," from OPB. The show explores the fight over old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. And at the center of that fight was… a bird! The spotted owl became a lightning rod and a symbol of the divisions between timber interests and environmentalists back in the 90s. And there are some interesting parallels between the spotted owl and the greater sage-grouse and the fights it has sparked in sagebrush country, today. This is the third episode of the series, you can find the rest by searching "Timber Wars" wherever you get your podcasts. 

A new podcast from BirdNote about about the enduring connections between birds, people and landscapes. Join host Ari Daniel for an escape to the natural world — and a glimpse into the lives of the people working to protect it. Subscribe to Threatened in your podcast app.

In the final episode of Grouse, Ashley returns to a lek in Washington with biologist Michael Schroeder and finds it scorched by recent wildfire. Michael cries as he looks out over an area that was once home to one of the largest remaining pockets of sage-grouse in the state. But he says he’s not ready to retire yet — there’s more work to be done. We’re all looking for hope right now, but Ashley says what we really need is the courage to keep fighting, loving and dancing, as the sage-grouse have shown us. We may not be able to save this bird, but that doesn’t mean we can’t cherish it and do our small part — whatever that may be — to try to keep these birds around.

Back in 2015, the Obama Administration hammered out a deal with leaders and land managers across the west that avoided listing the Greater Sage-Grouse under the Endangered Species Act. It was a grand compromise that protected key sage-grouse habitat while allowing for continued access to sagebrush country for a diverse set of stakeholders, from ranchers and energy developers to recreational users. There were pats on the back and photo opps with folks in cowboy hats next to folks in Patagonia. And yet sage-grouse populations continue declining. Compromise makes us humans feel good, but does the sage-grouse have time for it?

Western Wyoming is home to many sage-grouse mating and nesting sites. And, in recent years, it’s also become a hub of oil and gas extraction. Matt Holloran knows this all too well. He did his PhD - back in 2000 - on sage-grouse and how natural gas drilling affects them, and has been studying the birds ever since. Ashley Ahearn heads to oil and gas country to visit a lek with Matt Holloran, and interview Paul Ulrich, VP of Jonah Energy, who says there’s “more work to be done” and it will involve bringing people together to look for shared solutions to keep sage-grouse around.