Claire Cella

Claire Cella grew up in the subtly tamer wilds of the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, before she moved to Austin, Texas to pursue a bachelor’s degree in English and journalism, followed by a master’s in Information Science. In 2016, she decided she’d had enough of the Texas’s flat scenery and hot, humid climate and sought out Wyoming for the promise of mountains to hike, snow to ski upon and acres of public lands to explore. She joined the Wyoming Outdoor Council in 2016, working to leverage and promote the broader Keep it Public, Wyoming coalition, and now in 2017, has moved into a role where she manages the organization’s social engagement platforms as well as writes, edits and designs communications materials.

Meet the Outdoor Council’s Summer Legal Intern

Posted on by Claire Cella

Fourteen years ago, our program director, Lisa McGee, got her start at the Wyoming Outdoor Council as a legal intern, having just completed her second year at the University of Wyoming College of Law. The internship, although brief, was formative for Lisa, inspiring her to pursue a life of nonprofit conservation advocacy and providing an opportunity that has shaped her entire career.

This summer, as part of our ongoing effort to cultivate the next generation of conservation advocates, the Outdoor Council welcomes Ian Smith for a similar opportunity. Ian is working closely with Senior Conservation Advocate Dan Heilig until the end of July, when he will return to the University of Wyoming for his second year of law school.

Photo courtesy of Ian Smith

Ian is originally from Jackson, and grew up in Wyoming’s great outdoors. His parents, both former instructors for the National Outdoor Leadership School, never took Ian to Disneyland. Instead, they ventured into the wilds of the Green River Basin and the Grand Tetons during school vacations. After graduating from high school, Ian pursued a degree in business administration at the University of Colorado Boulder. But one semester he studied abroad in Italy and “never really came home.” It proved to be a productive decision: with two fellow students, he started a travel agency, which allowed him to travel throughout Europe and learn the realities of running a business.

Ian’s time abroad also helped him realize the value of wild places and the natural world he’d grown up in, which is why he eventually sought an internship with the Council.

“I spent a lot of time in the Italian and Swiss Alps, and as beautiful as they are, you can tell they are drastically overused,” he says. “Humans have taken their toll on the ecosystem and have tamed the wilderness there. I witnessed that firsthand.”

Armed with this new awareness and appreciation for public lands, Ian returned to the US in 2010 with his wife Victoria to finish his degree in international business at the University of San Francisco. Prodded by Victoria to pursue a law degree, he applied and was accepted to the University of Wyoming College of Law, where he began his studies in 2016, focusing on environmental law.

“In the first year of law school many students don’t really know what they want to do,” Ian says. He reached out to other attorneys to learn about the different paths he might pursue. Dan Heilig happened to be a close family friend—Ian’s parents and Dan both taught NOLS courses together in the early 1970s—and was one of the first people Ian spoke with.

“After hearing about what WOC does and the advocacy work that Dan was involved with, I was immediately interested,” he says.

Ian is particularly interested in Dan’s research and work related to the Clean Water Act and water quality standards in Wyoming. It won’t be the first time Ian’s been exposed to water issues. During his first year in law school, he participated in a prestigious international law competition with his university team, where they were asked to defend a problem dealing with international water rights. Ian’s team ended up advancing to the finals—the first year the school has ever done so. This experience deepened Ian’s interest in these issues and also helped prepare him for the work he is assisting Dan with this summer.

Although Ian doesn’t know the path he will pursue when he graduates, he knows that this experience will be valuable.

“Without a doubt, no matter what I do, I know I will always be an environmental advocate, whether as a private citizen or serving in some legal capacity,” Ian says.

Beyond the practical lessons on how decisions are made in Wyoming, Lisa hopes Ian will get a good sense of what day-to-day advocacy work looks like—legal analysis, talking to people about their interests, finding common ground and, of course, spending time outside, to remember why our work is so important.

 

New to the Team: RJ Pieper

Posted on by Claire Cella

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I’d like to introduce myself: I’m RJ Pieper, and I recently joined the Wyoming Outdoor Council as a Public Lands Organizer in Rock Springs. I am a lifelong resident of Sweetwater County and grew up enjoying the open spaces that I am now proud to help the Outdoor Council protect. I previously worked for Tulsa Inspection, inspecting construction projects in Wyoming’s oil and gas industry before earning an associate’s degree in Geology in 2009 from Western Wyoming Community College. With a desire to stay in Wyoming, I pursued work as an operator in the facilities I had helped construct just a couple of years earlier—the Bridger Compressor Station in the South Jonah field for Enterprise and the Blacks Fork Gas Plant R6 Expansion for Questar near Granger. I assisted in the gathering, processing, and shipping of Wyoming’s natural gas and liquids, and I was a part of the crew that kept the gas flowing every day, facing the challenges and dangers that come with working on the ground in this industry.

After spending a decade working in the oil and gas industry, I witnessed a mad rush to drill as quickly and as densely as possible in many parts of the state, and I began to feel as if I was watching my home slowly be destroyed. I soon realized that I wanted and needed to help protect the wild places that I had grown up enjoying. Becoming a part of Wyoming Outdoor Council was the perfect fit for me.

In my role as Public Lands Organizer, I will be working to connect with, engage, and mobilize Sweetwater County residents and help prepare them to participate as the Bureau of Land Management creates a new land-use plan for public lands in the Rock Springs area.

We’ll especially be looking to protect three important landscapes: the Northern Red Desert’s Jack Morrow Hills area (where the Oregon Buttes and the historic trails are), the incredible Adobe Town area, and the hunter’s paradise known as Little Mountain. These are places that locals know and love and that nearly everyone would agree deserve protections. They are important hunting and outdoor recreation spots, and we believe they are the key to achieving balanced management within the Rock Springs land-use plan. Protecting these areas will conserve Wyoming wildlife, open spaces, and cultural heritage—all of which are a big part of our quality of life here.

I’ll be out talking to folks at public events throughout the summer and organizing events for members and prospective supporters who identify with our cause. I’ll also be working locally with elected officials and management agencies to ensure they keep conservation in mind as they plan and manage our lands. This is a crucial time for our public lands, and now more than ever they need our protection from all kinds of threats like overdevelopment, overuse, mismanagement, and privatization. As an American, each one of us owns 640 million acres of public land, and that’s definitely something I take pride in. If anything is worth protecting, this is it. I am excited to be working to be working with this fantastic team and on an issue that is so worthwhile to me and so many others.

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Safeguarding our Skies and Protecting our People

Posted on by Claire Cella

For Air Quality Awareness Week we enlisted our very own Mary Flanderka—recently hired to work on air pollution issues in Wyoming—to tell us more about air quality in the state and its importance in our lives.

“Many folks in Wyoming tend to assume we do not have an air pollution problem, because we have a small population and lots and lots of wind,” she said. “But the wind does not solve all of our problems. And in some parts of Wyoming, like the Pinedale area, the air pollution can get bad enough some days that it’s dangerous for the people who live there.”

Even though much of Wyoming enjoys clear blue skies, there are still impacts throughout the state on the environment, tourism, and human health that we should try to fix, she said.

“Sometimes I wonder if I—if we—realize how much of our days are filled with free stuff that we take for granted: water, sun, air,” Mary said. “About every five seconds we take a breath, free of charge. That adds up to 17,000–30,000 breaths per day. When we walk around, or exercise, our breathing rate goes up and we take even more breaths. So if you ask me, protecting something we use—and rely on for life—every five seconds, should be high on our priority list.”

In Wyoming, most of our air pollution comes from oil and gas development, trona mining, and coal-fired power plants. The good news is, there are some commonsense rules that, if adopted, could significantly reduce this pollution.

“The state of Wyoming can take a major step toward protecting the air we breathe by requiring oil and gas companies to reduce flaring and perform quarterly inspections to find leaks and promptly repair them,” Mary said. “Controlling gas leaks at oil and gas development sites is critical to protecting our air quality.”

Leaking infrastructure in oil and gas fields accounts for the second largest source of methane pollution in Wyoming, according to data from oil and gas companies themselves. These leaks are also a significant source of volatile organic compounds, which can have a harmful impact on human health.

For more than a decade, the Outdoor Council has helped citizens in Pinedale in their efforts to protect the air they breathe. Pinedale is in the Upper Green River Basin—where the Jonah, LaBarge, and Pinedale Anticline fields are located. In the winter, a temperature inversion in the mountain valley causes cold air to compress lower-lying warm air—and to concentrate any lingering air pollution. When snow covers most of the ground, the sun reflects off the snow and interacts with the oil and gas pollutants in the air for a second time, which often leads to dangerous ozone pollution.

During the winters of 2009 and 2011, the town of Pinedale made national headlines because of dangerous ozone and accompanying smog concentrations. During these periods, the Upper Green River Basin witnessed short-term spikes of ground-level ozone in some places at 120-140 parts per billion. The current standard for safety, set by the Environmental Protection Agency, is 70 ppb.

“Ground-level ozone, unlike ozone in the upper atmosphere that serves to protect us, is harmful and can cause permanent and irreversible damage to people’s lungs,” Mary said. “And it’s especially dangerous for children, the elderly, and people with existing respiratory conditions.”

These dramatic spikes in pollution were met with tremendous public outcry. Residents formed the Citizens United for Responsible Energy Development and began to look for solutions. The EPA determined that the Upper Green was not meeting national air quality standards. It designated the region in “nonattainment” of Clean Air Act standards. This designation was the impetus for the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality to create and enforce better practices for oil and gas development in the area.

The DEQ created a task force—comprised of residents and CURED members, industry representatives, an Outdoor Council staffer, and local officials—to generate recommendations for reducing emissions. In 2013, based on these consensus recommendations, the DEQ began implementing stronger pollution controls for oil and gas development and more rigorous air quality monitoring.

Today, although Pinedale and the Upper Green are still in “nonattainment” of the Clean Air Act’s standards, ozone levels have improved—thanks to important strides the DEQ and industry have made.

“The state and industry deserve a lot of credit for beginning to improve things in the Pinedale area,” Mary Flanderka said. “But everyone also realizes there is still a lot of work to be done—as was made evident this past winter when the region again experienced short-term spikes in dangerous ozone pollution.”

The DEQ to issued “ozone action days” during the winter of 2017, the first in almost six years, which asked oil and gas producers in the Upper Green for temporary, precautionary changes to reduce ozone-forming pollutants.

The Wyoming Outdoor Council is urging the DEQ to protect Wyoming citizens and implement strong protections not just in the Pinedale area, but statewide. The good pollution controls adopted in the Pinedale area offer a model for a uniform statewide approach. In recent years, more than 80 percent of new drilling in Wyoming has occurred in the eastern half of the state. Although there haven’t been dangerous ozone spikes in eastern counties yet, we advocate a precautionary approach. The DEQ should require operators to take the same reasonable and responsible steps to curb pollution as operators in western counties now do.

Posted in Air

Spring and Birds Come to Wyoming

Posted on by Claire Cella

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“Just look out the window and notice what you see, notice what you hear, “ Jazmyn McDonald told me as the small grey truck bounced along the gravel road toward Lucky Pond in Lander, just a few minutes outside of town.

Jaz, a member of the Wyoming Outdoor Council, agreed to sit down with me to discuss birding in the local area and wider Wyoming now that spring seems that it has finally agreed to settle in. But instead of talking indoors, we went outside to experience birding first-hand. She said she didn’t expect we would see much, but as we pulled up to the pond, she was overjoyed with the sounds we heard through the windows.

“You hear that song?” Jaz said. “That’s the Western Meadowlark, Wyoming’s state bird. To a birder, that’s a wonderful sound to hear, that means spring has come.”

The arrival of spring in Wyoming also means the arrival of many migratory birds that had left for for the winter or for non-breeding season. By the end of May, Wyoming should have all these birds back—everything from small songbirds—think: warblers, sparrows, and swallows—to shorebirds, waterbirds, hawks, owls, and eagles, says Andrea Orabona, a non-game bird biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. Local Wyoming Game and Fish offices have pocket field guides available to the public that detail the familiar birds of Wyoming.

 

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When we reached Lucky Pond, Jaz and I quietly slipped out from the truck, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible so as not to disturb any birds. To my untrained eye, the pond appeared to be host to only a handful of brown-headed female mallards. But within a few minutes, armed with a pair of binoculars and Jaz’s enthusiastic tutelage, we were able to spot nine other species, including: Canada geese, American wigeons, sandhill cranes, a common goldeneye, Franklin’s gulls, ring-billed gulls, a northern flicker, a Say’s Phoebe, a red-winged Blackbird, and the western meadowlarks we had heard upon arrival.

“Not a bad day at all for your first time!” Jaz exclaimed as we made the final tally for the day. Both she and I were impressed by the diversity we had seen, especially for an unplanned trip to this humble little Lander pond.

Wyoming has six Audubon chapters throughout the state (in Cheyenne, Laramie, Lander, Casper, Cody, and Sheridan), in addition to a bird club in Jackson. These groups are a great way to connect to your local birding community and get resources related to the birds in your area, Jaz says. Each chapter usually hosts multiple outings throughout the spring, summer, and fall that are open to the public to join.

Mark your calendars for May 13th, the North American Migration Count, which happens each year on International Migratory Bird Day. To find out how you can participate, visit migratorybirdday.org, or contact Andrea at the Wyoming Game and Fish Department at acorabona@gmail.com.

Another event on May 13 will take place in Grand Teton National Park. Join rangers for a ranger-led bird-watching caravan to visit areas throughout the park that provide the best opportunities to find, identify, and record birds.

Jaz also plans to lead an outing in Lander, and you can contact her for more information at jzmc@wyoming.com.

From now until the end of May, the Greater sage-grouse will be performing their world famous ritual mating dance on leks throughout Wyoming.

 

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The Wyoming Outdoor Council has worked for decades with citizen conservationists, bird lovers, other conservation groups, and the state of Wyoming to protect the Greater sage-grouse and its habitat. This noble and iconic species plays a vital role in its ecosystem and, like all birds and other wildlife, is a huge contributor to our quality of life in Wyoming, and on this planet. In addition to viewing the sage-grouse’s enchanting dance, Orabona recommends a trip to the Red Desert later in the spring as a way to view the diversity of life present in Wyoming’s sagebrush habitat—what she called the “sagebrush sea.” Some of the species that live there are sagebrush sparrows, thrashers, brewer’s sparrows, and various raptors, among others.

 

Birds serve as important ecological indicators of the health of ecosystems and habitats, and are often highly sensitive to harmful events both natural and human-made, and other activities that encroach upon these systems—including climate change, habitat loss, pollution, energy development, and disease. Birds contribute to the viability of many other species through nutrient cycling, seed distribution, pest regulation, and waste decomposition (through scavenging). And let’s not forget how birds enhance and enrich our appreciation of nature when we’re out in it. The value we gain from birds warrants the continued study, conservation, and respect for these animals.

 

 

 

 

For more information about birding in the local Lander area, contact Jaz McDonald, or visit your local Audubon or Wyoming Game and Fish Department office. Audubon also has a list of Important Bird Areas (IBA) in the state.

All photos by Scott Copeland.

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