Dedicated to advancing scholarly and public understanding of the past, present, and future of western North America, the Center supports research, teaching, and reporting about western land and life in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
As Summer Begins, Center Interns Set Off Into the West
Our summer interns have pushed off into their western experience. This year, we sent students out to Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks, the Henry’s Fork watershed, the capital of Colorado, and into our own backyard in the Bay Area to explore careers in natural history, conservation, land use, museum curation, resource management, and policy development. Internships are 10 weeks and compensated with stipends to help cover living expenses.
We’re looking forward to hearing about the interns' adventures on our Out West blog. Reports are due to trickle in over the next few weeks!
Summer 2014 Interns
| Location | Topic | Intern |
|---|---|---|
| Henry's Fork Foundation | Research and Restoration Internship | Taylor Burdge |
| Heyday Books | Marketing & Events Internship | Kristine Chen |
| Peninsula Open Space Trust | Stewardship Conservation Internship | Tori Greenen |
| San Francisco Estuary Institute | Historical Ecology Internship | Alexandra Peers |
| Yellowstone National Park | Archaeology Internship | Melanie Langa |
| Yellowstone National Park | Curatorial Internship | Fiona Noonan |
| Yosemite National Park | Archives & Records Management Internship | Kristen Stipanov |
| Yosemite National Park | Museum Internship | Heather Glenny |
| National Conference of State Legislatures | Ballot Measures Internship | Justin Lin |
From Stanford to the Sea, with Water in Mind
On May 3rd, the Bill Lane Center reprised its 20-mile hike from the edge of Stanford lands to the Pacific shore. The day-long hike began at the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve and wound through various San Mateo County parks and open spaces to reach San Gregorio State Beach, south of Half Moon Bay. Along the way, hikers had the opportunity to hear mini-lectures on water supply and drought, which sparked informal conversations along the trail.
Richard Luthy, professor of civil and environmental engineering, lectured on modern urban water use and Stanford’s upcoming stormwater capture projects; Daniel Swain, PhD candidate in environmental earth system science, discussed current and future weather patterns in California; Chris Field, professor of biology and of environmental earth system science, led a conversation on the impact of climate change and possible future solutions; and David Freyberg, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, shared details of his evapotranspiration research in the local area.
"Stanford to the Sea" was proposed in 2011 as an alternative to the Center's traditional “Walk the Farm” event, which built on the agrarian tradition of walking the perimeter of one's lands to consider such topics as land use, biodiversity, water, and climate change. Center hikers made their first attempt to reach the Pacific in 2012.
Undergraduates Meet the American West in a New Survey Course
Pony Express Route, 1860-61 (Image via History-Map.com)
How do you span the North American West – past, present, and future – in just 10 weeks? This spring, the Bill Lane Center for the American West launched a new interdisciplinary survey course for Stanford undergraduates. Taught by senior faculty from history, political science, English, art and art history, and civil and environmental engineering, the course aims to introduce undergraduates to the unique characteristics and challenges of the American West — its history, physical geography, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, economics, and public policy issues.
The course has attracted 109 undergraduates ranging from freshmen to seniors, anthropology majors to mechanical engineering majors. It is organized into five themes: borders, space, boom and bust, Native Americans, and water. The format includes ample time for discussion and debate among the professors from the perspectives of their own varying academic disciplines.
“With lectures and readings woven around large themes, students get a truly integrated perspective on the evolution and current state of this critical and endlessly fascinating region,” says Bruce E. Cain, the Charles Louis Ducommun Professor in Humanities and Sciences and the faculty director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Students might contemplate western space, for instance, by examining maps that demonstrate the extremes of basin-and-range topography, discussing the effects of suburban sprawl on rural lands, and viewing Georgia O’Keefe’s ecstatic, skyward-reaching The Lawrence Tree.
To develop the course, the teaching team received support from Faculty College, a program of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education that encourages teams of faculty to develop innovative curricular and pedagogical ideas. The team is an interdisciplinary group of distinguished faculty spanning five departments and two Stanford schools: Cain, a political scientist; David M. Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus and the director emeritus of the Bill Lane Center; David Freyberg; associate professor of civil and environmental engineering; Gavin Jones, professor of English; and the art historian Alexander Nemerov, the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor of Arts and Humanities.
“The strengths of the course are amazing and almost as vast as the West itself – a 'dream team' of faculty as both teachers and scholars, three dedicated and able course assistants, capacious and engaging themes, rich visual and textual material, and an infrastructure of support from the Lane Center,” says Michele Marincovich, senior advisor to the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and the former longtime director of Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Marincovich recently observed and reported on the course for the Center’s Advisory Council, and particularly praised the teaching team for modeling knowledge transfer – taking knowledge from one domain and applying it in another. “When I sat in, I saw the theme of boom and bust reverberate across historical, literary, artistic, and hydrological analyses, encompassing large-scale mineral extraction, tall tales, irrigated agriculture, and epic landscapes,” she says. “Students observe faculty taking the course themes and applying the ideas across very different disciplines. Students are encouraged to do the same.”
The Center envisions this as a portal course to the study of the region, one that may lead students to further coursework, research, internships – and to becoming future leaders in the American West.
Center Media Fellow Explores "Extinction's Greatest Hits"
Image via Wikimedia Commons
At least five times in its tumultuous history, our planet has experienced "mass extinction events" during which three-quarters or more of the Earth's species died out. The most recent of these ushered out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Now scientists are wondering if we have entered a sixth extinction period, this time caused by human activity.
With the support of a Center media fellowship, the science writer and author Mary Ellen Hannibal is exploring the scientific insights leading to our understanding of mass extinction in an upcoming six-part series in The New York Times. Dubbing these theories "extinction's greatest hits," Hannibal explains concepts like island biogeography – how fragmentation caused by development can isolate pockets of habitat for particular species; trophic cascades, by which the loss of top predators can undermine the health of a whole ecosystem; and co-evolution, how species developed in dependency with others.
Each article in the series will examine a different theory – some of them developed at Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve – and draw connections to the future of the western landscape. "The fact that so much of the research in conservation biology and extinction focuses on the West", says Hannibal, "Is testament to the wildness we still have here, the scope and scale of the landscape, and the history of its biotic inhabitants."
Hannibal, who shared in the 2012 Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism, is the author of The Spine of the Continent, a book about conservation efforts along the Rocky Mountains, and is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle, Nautilus, High Country News, and other publications.
Her stories will run in print and online in The New York Times's Sunday Review section starting later this spring. To hear more about the series and the reporting behind it, attend Hannibal's lunchtime talk at the Center on May 28. Get more details and RSVP (by May 24) on our events page.
With Digital Tools, Enhancing a Western Photography Exhibit
Carleton Watkins (U.S.A., 1829–1916), The Yosemite Valley from the “Best General View,“ 1866, from the album Photographs of the Yosemite Valley. Albumen print. Lent to Cantor Arts Center by Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries
During the mid-1860's, the renowned photographer Carleton Watkins captured the spirit and stunning geographic features of the West – places like Yosemite Valley, the Columbia River Gorge, and the Pacific Coast near San Francisco – in three albums of mammoth 18x22-inch photographs. As Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center prepares to mount an exhibition of photographs on the sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary of Watkins's work, a team of researchers and students from the Bill Lane Center for the American West is contributing a set of digital tools that will enable exhibition-goers to deepen their understanding of Watkins’s photography and geographic context.
Led by the Center postdoctoral scholar and geographer Nicholas Bauch, the undergraduate research assistants Ashley Ngu and Davis Wertheimer are developing three interactive features that will comprise part of the exhibition “Carleton Watkins: The Stanford Albums,“ which opens at Cantor in April. The applications – which technically are iPad-optimized websites – show the exact locations from which the famous Yosemite exposures were made, guide visitors on Watkins’s path paralleling the Columbia River, and offer interactive “before-and-after“ images using Watkins’s photos of San Francisco.
The collaboration extends beyond the Bill Lane Center and the Cantor, as it includes cartographers from the Branner Earth Sciences Library, as well as geographers at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), who helped design and produce the interactive maps for each of Watkins’s albums. And the Center's involvement with the exhibition extends beyond the cartographic accompaniments, as former Center faculty co-directors David M. Kennedy and Richard White, along with other Center-affiliated faculty and graduate students, contributed essays to the exhibition catalogue, published by Stanford University Press.
The Center’s RAs worked with an eclectic team of design professionals from the beginning, hunting down and plotting Watkins’s photograph locations, making videos through virtual landscapes that demonstrate the spatial relationship among the photos, and writing text for the digital features. "Contributing to the realization of these interactives has been a rewarding experience that has taken me through the entire design and development process," says Ngu. "I’m eager to see how the public receives and interacts with our work.“ Wertheimer adds, “The whole project has been incredibly interesting, especially having the chance to look at these photos from so many different angles, as so much more than just frames on a wall. I think that’s what the entire team is hoping to convey in the exhibit, above all else.“
Summer 2014 Student Opportunities
As we leave winter behind, the Bill Lane Center gears up for a busy spring as we prepare for a summer of exploration. While the summer internship application deadlines have passed (and we are excited to announce our summer interns, soon), we have a number of opportunities for students to engage with the Center during the Spring and Summer terms. Whether this is your first time or your third time, we hope you will join us as we dive into the North American West.
Click read more to find out about:
- Course Assistants needed for Energy in the West
- Research assistants needed for Mexican Water Governance and California Coastal Commission research
- Student-Initiated Research Projects
New Technologies Bolster Shoe-Leather Journalism
By Robin Evans
John S. Knight Fellowships
Journalists who are curious and determined are still the key to investigative stories that expose wrongdoing and hidden problems. But new technologies can help lower the costs that discourage media investment. And social media can strengthen and lengthen an investigation’s impact.
At the Knight-Risser Prize Symposium at Stanford, which is co-sponsored by the Center and the John S. Knight Fellowships, a panel of journalists and experts discussed the current opportunities and challenges for investigative environmental journalism. The $5,000 prize for the best in western environmental journalism is awarded at the annual symposium.
Pulitzer-winning environmental journalist James V. Risser, for whom the award is named, presented the 2013 prize to Tom Knudson of the Sacramento Bee. Knudson, also a Pulitzer winner, won the Knight-Risser Prize for his 2012 series, “The Killing Agency.”
Shedding Light on a Little-Known Agency
Knudson’s series showed a federal agency in overdrive in its duty to protect livestock on ranches and farms in the Northwest. Knudson documented “predator control” efforts that were brutal, poorly controlled and resulted in the deaths of far more animals than suspect coyotes.
Chemical snares, leg traps and other killing methods also caught endangered species and family pets. Knudson found former trappers for the U.S. Wildlife Services who confirmed they were told not to report deaths of dogs because it would hurt agency funding. Instead, they buried dogs killed in their traps and threw the collars away. And he traced efforts for reform back to 1931 – all unsuccessful.
With many traditional news organizations cash-strapped and cutting back on investigative projects, Knudson considers himself lucky his editors gave him six months to work on the project. He’d been pursuing it off and on over the years, enticing editors as he gathered more evidence.
Few media organizations today are willing to let reporters spend that much time on one story, said James T. Hamilton, director of the Journalism Program at Stanford and a leader in the field of computational journalism. The panel, moderated by Stanford environmental journalism lecturer Thomas Hayden, also included Ngoc Nguyen, Health and Environment Reporter/Editor for New America Media and Susanne Rust, Environment Reporter for the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Panelists at the Knight-Risser Prize Symposium, from left to right, were James T. Hamilton, Susanne Rust, Ngoc Nguyen and Knight-Risser prize winner Tom Knudson. On the far right is moderator Tom Hayden.
Traditional media is underinvesting in investigative journalism – because it's hard to see the link with revenues, Hamilton said. There are no inherent “eyeballs or advertisers.” One six-month project at a McClatchy newspaper cost $200,000, he said. Most large newspapers can “do two or three (investigations) a year – if they’re fortunate,” he said.
Universities can help by finding ways to make newsgathering and data analysis more efficient and less costly, he said. A turning point in Knudson’s project was finding an agency document listing each animal death in the predator control program from 2000 to 2012. But the data had to be painstakingly transferred to a spreadsheet before it could be analyzed.
A Summer in the West
Summer 2014 Internships
Applications due February 7, 2014 at 5pm!
Chau Ho ('09, on right) spend her 2013 summer on the Henry's Fork rivers, tracking rainbow trout and their habitat selection habits for a behavioral study. The Henry's Fork Foundation has hosted a Bill Lane Center intern since 2009, and continues to share its unique eastern Idaho experience with new undergraduates students.
Every summer the Bill Lane Center for the American West offers a multitude of opportunities for undergraduates and graduating seniors to work with organizations throughout the West exploring careers in natural history, conservation, land use, museum curation, resource management, and related fields. All internships include a generous stipend, and are open to current Stanford students including undergraduates, graduating seniors, and co-terminal students. Each internship lasts 10 weeks with flexible start dates, and housing is provided for some. Students may apply up to three internships and rank their preferences.
The following 2014 summer internship positions are currently accepting applications:
| Position | Organization |
|---|---|
| Research and Restoration Intern | Henry' Fork Foundation |
| Marketing & Events Intern | Heyday |
| Ballot Measures Intern | National Conference of State Legislatures |
| Stewardship Conservation Intern | Peninsula Open Space Trust |
| Historical Ecology Intern | San Francisco Estuary Institute |
| Curatorial Intern | Yellowstone National Park |
| Archeology Intern | Yellowstone National Park |
| Archives & Records Management Intern | Yosemite National Park |
| Museum Intern | Yosemite National Park |
For more information:
Upcoming Event: Uncovering a Little-Known Agency's Toll on Wildlife
Poster for the Knight-Risser Prize Symposium, to be held at Stanford on February 5.
Amid the national debate about the National Security Agency's aggressive surveillance measures, and as the federal government continues to crack down on media leaks by public employees, a recent series by Tom Knudson in the Sacramento Bee raises a complementary question: how can reporters keep government transparent and accountable?
Knudson's series, "A Killing Agency," focuses on a little-known part of the Department of Agriculture called Wildlife Services. Founded during the first World War to help protect farmers and ranchers from wolves, Wildlife Services' mandate now includes trapping and killing animals that pose a threat to agriculture, transportation and the environment. Since 2000 alone, the agency has killed millions of animals, from hundreds of species, and all too often its indiscriminate use of traps and poisons has killed endangered species like wolverines and bald eagles, as well as house pets.
"A Killing Agency" was recognized by the judges of the Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism as the finest story of 2013. Based on dozens of interviews and many Freedom of Information Act requests, Knudson compiled an exhaustive record of an agency driven to extremes.
To learn more about how Tom Knudson got the story, and to be part of a larger discussion of the future of government accountability reporting, please join us for the Knight-Risser Prize Symposium at Stanford University on Wednesday, February 5 at 4:15pm. We'll honor the Sacramento Bee's report and hold a panel discussion with a group of educators and journalists. The panel will be followed by a reception. Attendees are welcome to register on the symposium event page, and are asked to please RSVP by January 28.
The Knight-Risser Prize and Symposium are jointly administered by the Bill Lane Center for the American West and the John. S Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford.
RSVP for "Deadly Measures: Uncovering a Little-Known Agency's Toll on Wildlife" »
