Photo: Courtesy Aldric Ulep

Aldric Ulep will graduate from Stanford in September with a bachelor’s degree in public policy and interdisciplinary honors in environmental science, technology and policy. He developed his honors thesis topic—a case study of the Yakima River Basin Integrated Water Resource Management Plan—in conjunction with scholars from Water in the West, a joint program of the Bill Lane Center for the American West and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. The Bill Lane Center and Stanford’s Program in Public Policy supported his attendance at the American Water Resources Association’s conference “Integrated Water Resource Management—From Theory to Action,” where he presented his research.

“What’s your thesis about?”

People fighting over water and making up.

Inhale, exhale. “Broadly, it’s about collaboration in water management. More specifically, it’s about how competing stakeholders in Washington’s Yakima Valley came together to create the Yakima Integrated Plan.” I never answer that question with the same description twice because it would limit the way I understand my research.

I value research that is readily accessible and relevant. To move beyond the academic perspective and interact with those who wrestle with water management issues in their jobs, I presented my case study of the Yakima Plan at the American Water Resources Association’s 2014 Integrated Water Resource Management conference.

The AWRA is a multidisciplinary association of water resource professionals in academia, government, NGOs, and others. At its conference in July, we unpacked Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) theory through various case studies. Although it can be defined in many ways, I understand IWRM to be a mode of water planning that equitably involves a broad array of stakeholders and their interests, including social, economic, cultural, and environmental ones.

Storyboards from The Hanging Tree, Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.

Andrew Patrick Nelson, an assistant professor of film history and critical studies at Montana State University, spent several weeks as a visiting scholar at the Center this spring. He is co-editing an anthology on filmmaker Delmer Daves.

AND THE MAN WHO GETS AROUND…. Delmer Daves, who directs, writes and produces, is a veteran Hollywood craftsman. A native of San Francisco, he is a graduate of Stanford University, with his earlier schooling taking place in Los Angeles. His first studio work was as a property man with James Cruze. He became an actor in “The Duke Steps Out” with William Haines and Joan Crawford because the director thought he looked more like a college man than the film’s prop boy. He started writing scripts. In 1942, for Warners, he directed his first picture, “Destination Tokyo,” from his own script. It was for the Burbank studio that he has made some of his best films, including the recent “Parrish,” “Susan Slade” and “Rome Adventure.”

Warner Bros. production notes for Spencer’s Mountain (1963)
Delmer Daves Papers (box 65, folder 34)
Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

My time at the Bill Lane Center for the American West was dedicated to researching an anthology on American filmmaker Delmer Daves, whose extensive personal papers are held in Stanford University Libraries’ Special Collections. After graduating from Stanford with a law degree in 1927, Daves moved south to Hollywood, where he worked continuously from the late 1920s until the mid-1960s, first as a writer and then as a director and producer. Some of his best-known films include Destination Tokyo (1943), Dark Passage (1947), 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and A Summer Place (1959).

Few filmmakers created as unique a body of work in Hollywood as Daves, yet few have been as critically overlooked in existing scholarship. Daves is often regarded as an embodiment of the self-effacing craftsmanship of classical and postwar Hollywood, a competent but conventional studio man whose films lacked the kind of distinct perspectives and predilections detected by critics and scholars in the work of contemporaries like John Ford and Howard Hawks.

One of the principal aims of my work is to dispel this notion and reveal Daves for who he truly was: a supremely talented artist with a distinct worldview, whose films offered viewers a progressive portrait of masculinity and repeatedly avowed the importance of cooperation and community for the advancement of humanity. As Daves wrote—by hand—on his extensive “character notes” for the film Jubal, “Each of us must have a REASON FOR LIFE, and no man can free himself of a sense of failure…while he refuses to see or create in himself a REASON for life” (Box 41, Folder 3).

Photo: Gene Alexander, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service

Burke W. Griggs represents the State of Kansas in federal and interstate water matters and teaches natural resources law at the University of Kansas. He spent the 2013-14 academic year as a consulting professor at the Center, and remains affiliated with us and with Water in the West, a joint program of the Center and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.  

I have spent most of my legal career working on some of the most difficult water-related problems facing the American West: legal conflicts over interstate rivers, technical disputes about Native American tribal claims to water, political fights over oil and gas production, and the looming crisis over declining groundwater supplies. These are problems with difficult histories, thorny legal problems, daunting technical challenges, and enormous public consequences. Why would I retreat from these theaters of legal combat to spend a year as a consulting professor at the Bill Lane Center for the American West? The easy answer, of course, is that only a fool declines an invitation from Stanford. The better answer, however, makes nonsense of the question; the Bill Lane Center is no retreat at all, but an advance. By exploring the many and divergent aspects of these problems, the scholarly community at the Center is finding practical solutions to them as well.

My research explores western water law, especially the historical contexts in which it reached doctrinal maturity during the 19th and 20th centuries, and the various ways in which the owners of water rights have asserted and defended their rights in the face of both increased competition and declining supplies. During my year at the Center, I completed two long articles. The first, "Irrigation Communities, Political Cultures, and the Western Public," asserts that there are important differences between surface water irrigation communities that are reliant upon reservoir and canal systems, and groundwater irrigation communities, which rose to prominence more recently alongside the groundwater revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Recognizing these differences helps to understand how and why these communities perceive, employ, and defend their water rights in different ways, and provides a useful guide to legal reform. This article began as a conference paper delivered at the Bill Lane Center’s Conference on the Rural West held at the Ogden Eccles Conference Center in Ogden, Utah, in 2012; it will be published in 2015 along with other selected conference papers in The Rural West: Common Regional Issues, edited by David Danbom (University of Utah Press). My second article confronted a worrisome contradiction in western water law. Most western water rights are permanent, real property rights, but in many parts of the West and especially over the Ogallala Aquifer, the water supplies upon which those rights depend are running out. Whether and how we decide to reconcile the claims of water rights regimes with the reality of water supplies will determine much of the West’s water future. This article, "Beyond Drought: Water Rights in the Age of Permanent Depletion," was published in the June 2014 issue of the Kansas Law Review.

Image: Map of the Rancho Llano de Santa Rosa, courtesy of Curtis & Associates, Inc.

By Alexandra Peers
M.S. in Earth Systems, 2015
Summer Intern at the San Francisco Estuary Institute

Read about our summer interns on the Out West student blog. Throughout the summer, the Center's interns and Research Assistants will be sending in virtual postcards, snapshots and reports on their summer work.

My time with the San Francisco Estuary Institute is almost up, and I’m sad to be leaving! I had a fantastic time interning at SFEI, completing my goal this summer of working on a wide range of projects for SFEI and collaborating with almost everyone in the “Resilient Landscapes” department.

In terms of my work over the second half of my internship, I continued doing historical research, searching through maps and online databases, and had the chance do take another trip out into the field to do archival research. Or maybe I should say “field,” as a coworker and I ended up at the map archive of Curtis & Associates, Inc. This archive turned out to be a hidden gem: a small firm specializing in land services, they boast one of the largest in-house collection of land surveys in the region, with some their maps being unique to their office and not found anywhere else. After being given a personal tour of the facilities and the maps stored therein, my coworker and I went to work looking for maps related to the Laguna de Santa Rosa, and managed to find a good assortment. It was amazing to realize how many of those maps were drawn before GPS and modern electronic surveying tools existed, and how much work must have gone into making sure those maps were accurate! I got back into the swing of reading scientific papers by working a literature review for a project on shoreline change in the San Pablo Bay. One of my most interesting and challenging projects was working on a wetland mapping task. Collaborating with other SFEI staff and members of the “Environmental Informatics” department, we mapped and categorized wetlands areas throughout California, to get a sense of the kinds of wetlands and their locations within the state.

Photo: Yosemite Valley circa 1865, by Carleton Watkins (Stanford Libraries)

This past spring, the Center's first formal term-time course offering drew 109 undergraduate students to an interdisciplinary survey of the unique characteristics and challenges of the American West: its history, physical geography, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, economics, and particular public policy issues. The course was taught by five professors drawn from the departments of history, literature, art history and engineering, all of whom were present at most of the sessions.

The Stanford Humanities website has published an article describing the course and the experience it gave its students:

Hearing an art historian and a hydrologist’s different perspectives on the photographs in the “Carleton Watkins: The Stanford Albums” exhibition was typical fare for students enrolled in The American West. The ambitious 10-week interdisciplinary course was taught by senior faculty from five departments and two schools. 
 

Using the framework of five major western themes—borders; space; boom and bust; Native Americans; and water—the course aimed to introduce students to the unique characteristics and challenges of the American West: its history, physical geography, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, economics, and particular public policy issues. 
 

The course was developed by the Bill Lane Center for the American West, which was founded in 2002 by the Stanford historians David M. Kennedy and Richard White to promote interdisciplinary teaching, research, and public awareness about the region. 
 

"The cultivation of future regional leaders, well-informed and engaged early in their lives with the region’s history, health, and prospects," says Kennedy, "is among our cardinal aims."

Read more at the Stanford Humanities website »

Image: Dre (left) and me with my exhibit on Mission 66 in the Heritage and Research Center.

By Fiona Noonan
B.S. Earth Systems and French Minor, 2017
Summer Intern at the Yellowstone's Heritage and Research Center

Read about our summer interns on the Out West student blog. Throughout the summer, the Center's interns and Research Assistants will be sending in virtual postcards, snapshots and reports on their summer work.

I had a roommate this year who liked to say "jump first, fear later." I always thought it was a cute saying, but I'm not sure I ever appreciated it beyond its cliché veneer until I came to Yellowstone. This summer has been entirely an experiment in jumping first, and I've loved every minute.

In the weeks following my last post I became significantly more comfortable and independent in my work at Yellowstone's Heritage and Research Center (HRC). In addition to finishing our inventory of the museum collection, Dre and I cataloged a never-ending stream of postcards, led two or three tours a week (I handled the cultural history portion of the tours), and we each created an exhibit case on different Yellowstone topics as a final project. My case focused on Mission 66, which was a National Park Service effort to modernize and reinvigorate the parks between 1956 and 1966. It was great to use the museum collection to make a coherent and educational final product, and we finished just as Dre finished her internship. After Dre left, the curator's office became lonely, but I still had the good company of Deb (the museum tech), Colleen (the head curator), and Brandon (the museum registrar).

Image: The Roosevelt Arch, dedicated in 1903 by then President Theodore Roosevelt, marks the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park. The inscription on the front of the arch reads "for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."

By Melanie Langa
B.A. History, 2016
Summer Intern at the Yellowstone National Park

Read about our summer interns on the Out West student blog. Throughout the summer, the Center's interns and Research Assistants will be sending in virtual postcards, snapshots and reports on their summer work.

Yellowstone is often cited as the country's oldest national park (its 1872 dedication is commemorated with the arch I drive through every day to get to the archaeology lab in Gardiner, Montana). The park is famous for its size, abundant and rare wildlife. and extraordinary variety of landscapes. Yellowstone has been steadily attracting more and more visitors since 1872 (the numbers are up to over three million in the last several seasons), but the history of human interaction with this amazing place does not begin with the arch that Teddy Roosevelt dedicated in 1903, or even the early written accounts by travelers like Thomas Moran, John Colter and Jim Bridger. Humans have been present in Yellowstone for at least 12,000 years, and that is what my summer is all about.

As the archaeology intern I help the park archaeologist with field tasks and the careful documentation, cataloguing and writing that goes along with fieldwork. In my first few weeks I've gotten to participate in a number of different projects, giving me different windows into the particulars of the purpose and practice of archaeology in a national park. Much of the archaeology at Yellowstone is for the purpose of what you might call "compliance." Any time an entity within the park service (a campground, a trail crew, the fire-safety team etc.) plans a project that disturbs the ground, they call my boss. It's his job to make sure the plans won't adversely affect a site that has the potential to yield valuable archaeological information or to minimize any possibly harmful effects. My fieldwork experience has been in preparation for these kind of ground-disturbing projects. We examine the area using shovel test probes to look for evidence of artifacts and make determinations from there.

Image: The Heyday offices at 1633 University Avenue.

By Kristine Chen
B.S. Product Design, 2016
Summer Intern at the Heyday

Read about our summer interns on the Out West student blog. Throughout the summer, the Center's interns and Research Assistants will be sending in virtual postcards, snapshots and reports on their summer work.

Standing two stories tall and coated in textured wood shingles, the Heyday office building presents a façade utterly incongruous with its crouching neighbors sporting storefront windows. Yet despite its rather conspicuous appearance along University Avenue, it provides little to no indication of what the organization actually does. Based in Berkeley, Heyday is a non-profit, independent book publisher with a primarily regional focus. It aims to promote local stories, particularly those underrepresented in the mainstream. Topics that have traditionally been featured include indigenous peoples, Californian history, and the natural environment. In line with these values, Heyday also publishes a magazine called, News from Native California. When asked how one manages to sustain such an operation, proprietor Malcolm Margolin offers "a bottomless pit of delusion." One can only imagine what an interminable wellspring that must be, as Heyday stands poised to celebrate its 40th birthday this fall.

I work alongside a roughly ten person staff, a dynamic group of people with a vast reserve of literary, design, sales, and editorial experience, who have welcomed me with open arms. My daily activities consist mostly of event coordination and marketing. I conduct market research for various upcoming titles, all the while gaining an intimate knowledge of California's landscapes and political boundaries (you really wouldn't believe the proliferation of counties in North California alone). Sprinkle in database updates, a quest for search engine optimization on the interwebs, the acquisition of staff opinions on how to makeover the current website and you have the makings of a marketing and events coordination intern.

Image: A historical map (cropped), drawn in 1901, of the Tijuana Estuary between the border of California and Mexico.

By Alexandra Peers
M.S. in Earth Systems, 2015
Summer Intern at the San Francisco Estuary Institute

Read about our summer interns on the Out West student blog. Throughout the summer, the Center's interns and Research Assistants will be sending in virtual postcards, snapshots and reports on their summer work.

Whenever I tell people I'm interning at the San Francisco Estuary Institute, they usually ask, "What does SFEI do?" When I tell them that I'm working at SFEI researching the historical ecology of California, they always ask, "Wait, what's historical ecology?" Before starting my internship, I had a theoretical idea of what historical ecology meant - looking at the ecological patterns of a historical environment and seeing how landscapes functioned in the past - but as to what actually went into researching historical ecology, I wasn't so sure. Finishing up my 4th week at SFEI, I'm now starting to have more of a concrete answer to that inevitable "historical ecology?" question.

SFEI's work is split up into three major programs: Clean Water, Environmental Informatics, and Resilient Landscapes. I'm the intern specifically for Resilient Landscapes, and most of my work falls within the research area of "historical ecology" within the department. The Resilient Landscapes team researches a variety of past environments, from the San Joaquin River to the San Francisco Delta region, to understand the environmental history of these places. They then shares that research with policy makers and environmental managers, to help them create better future environmental policies.