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Show Viewpoints Wed/Thurs/Fri, January 24-26, 2018 The The Park Record A-13 A-13 Park Record. Wed/Thurs/Fri, January 24-26, 2018 editorial Behind-the-scenes stars are secret to Sundance’s success T letters to the editor Letter defending Trump was shocking Editor: I was shocked to read the letter defending President Trump’s use of wording when referring to immigration from places like Haiti and African nations. I had to wonder if the author would have felt as compelled to defend the President had he chosen to say, “Haiti, African nations, and Park City, UT”? If the words used really don’t matter, and we should just focus on the issue, then is it OK to call one’s son a loser, if the issue is to get him to pursue excellence? Is it OK to call one’s daughter a whore if the issue is to encourage her to choose her boyfriends more carefully? Before reading that letter I would have been unwilling to express my opinion openly that anyone who could choose to write, or agree with, an article defending the use of the president’s language would have to be an uneducated, insensitive, racist, piece of (crap). I am so relieved to understand now that they would not take any offense since the choice of words is not really important. Jim Hogan Park City Sundance should be held accountable Editor: My fiancee and I gave up on our Sundance ticket packages last week. We had waited in line at the Gateway Center for about an hour, during which time the 9 Sundance volunteers at the ticket office had handed out about 30 ticket packages. That’s just over 3 per volunteer per hour. The inefficiency I witnessed was breathtaking. Handing over a single ticket package involved 5-10 minutes of painstaking typing into tablets and filling out paper forms, while other volunteers stood by with nothing to do. It’s not the fault of the volunteers. My fiancee was a full-time Sundance volunteer herself four years in a row, where she observed this same inefficiency throughout the organization. Organizations without accountability become inefficient. There is nobody measuring the throughput of ticket lines at Sundance, because nobody loses their job if festival-goers are inconvenienced. There is no layer of competent professional management optimizing the experience to prevent customers from being lost to the competition, because there is no competition. Sundance is like Christmas. It’s part of our culture, and people will continue to attend Sundance, because it’s Sundance. The Park Record Staff PUBLISHER ....................... Andy Bernhard Editor ................................... Bubba Brown Staff Writers ......................Jay Hamburger Scott Iwasaki Angelique McNaughton Ben Ramsey Carolyn Webber Contributing ............................. Tom Clyde Writers Jay Meehan Teri Orr Amy Roberts Tom Kelly Joe Lair Copy Editor ............................ James Hoyt Engagement Editor.........Kira Hoffelmeyer Photographer .........................Tanzi Propst Office Manager ..................... Tiffany Piper Circulation Manager ............. Lacy Brundy Accounting Manager ......... Jennifer Snow ADVERTISING Classifieds/Legals ............. Jennifer Lynch Advertising Director ........... Valerie Spung Advertising Sales ......................... Lori Gull Jodi Hecker Erin Donnelly Lisa Curley Olivia Bergmann Production Director ..................Ben Olson Production .......................... Patrick Schulz Linda Sites But perhaps there is one organization that can and should hold the Sundance Institute accountable: Park City. I occasionally hear rumblings of the possibility of Sundance abandoning Park City for another town. Maybe that discourages us from being too demanding. But maybe we are selling ourselves short. Park City is a first class city, across the board. If Sundance wants to keep their festival here, they should get their act together. The people of Park City give a lot to Sundance. We should expect more than just discounted tickets in return. Jonathan Warden Park City Green initiatives are welcome Editor: Nice to see No Name Saloon is doing paperless with no straws. Park City is doing that as well as no lids, at their resorts. This is happening at all Vail Resorts. They are going for no paper at all by 2030. This is great, need to go Green. Wayne Schreck Park City Enough with rallies during Sundance Editor: Please, please, please, no more marches or rallies during Sundance. Traffic is enough of a nightmare without bringing in thousands more people. Ellen Sherk Park City Park Record Sundance column was offensive Editor: I am writing in response to Tom Clyde’s column on the Sundance Code of Conduct. While I have appreciated his wit in the past, the January 20 column was disappointing. Sexual harassment and misconduct are real — in Hollywood, in Utah, and it has happened here in Park City during past Festivals. I am grateful Sundance is taking action to ensure a safe place for artists and attendees. The column’s attempt to mock a legitimate process for reporting such behavior is offensive; and the decision to publish this article on the same morning thousands assembled at our local Respect Rally was insensitive. The Festival’s Code of Conduct and collaboration with the Utah Attorney General’s office is an unprecedented effort to increase the safety of us all. The $150 million economic impact the Festival delivers to the people of Utah should quell any concern of incremental cost to the taxpayer. Sundance’s new Code of Conduct and the 24-hour hotline are not going to end Letters Policy The Park Record welcomes letters to the editor on any subject. We ask that the letters adhere to the following guidelines. They must include the home (street) address and telephone number of the author. No letter will be published under an assumed name. Letters must not contain libelous material. Letters should be no longer than about 300 words (about 600 words for guest editorials) and should, if possible, be typed. We reserve the right to edit letters if they are too long or if they contain statements that are unnecessarily offensive or obscene. Writers are limited to one letter every seven days. Letters thanking event sponsors can list no more than 6 individuals and/or businesses. Send your letter to: editor@parkrecord.com he first half of the Sundance Film Festival went off without any unexpected snags. And it’s not because of pure luck that the festival’s opening days, annually one of the most hectic stretches of the year in Park City, avoided playing out like a big-budget disaster flick. It was due to the tireless efforts of hundreds of people whose names won’t be spelled out in the marquee at the Egyptian Theatre or listed in the end credits of any of the films screening here. Behind the scenes, they played critical roles as the first week of the festival unfolded, and their efforts are deserving of acclaim from festival-goers and Parkites alike. Dozens of police officers, for instance, directed traffic on the packed roads, helped hundreds of people get to and from the Respect Rally on Saturday morning and ensured the revelry throughout the weekend never got out of hand. Likewise, devoted Park City and Summit County public works staffers were out in force, clearing the roads throughout a significant snowstorm so festival attendees, skiers and residents could safely reach their destinations (after making their way through the congestion that is a mainstay this time of year). Sundance volunteers, easily identifiable in their blue jackets, distributed tickets and manned merchandise shops, shepherded thousands of festival-goers into screenings throughout Park City, helped out-of-towners navigate an unfamiliar bus system and, in general, ensured people actually got to see the films that are the reason for all the hubbub in the first place. Then there are the folks whose efforts are even less visible to the crowds, but no less critical to the success of Sundance. They include people like staffers at the Summit County Health Department, which is tasked with ensuring the restaurants and catering services feeding thousands of people during the festival are meeting food safety regulations. It’s a service most Sundance attendees likely have never even thought about, but it’s hard to imagine anything wrecking the good time quicker than these two words: foodborne illness. The list of vital contributors goes on and includes restaurant employees, hotel workers, bus drivers and scores of others. Without their hard work, Sundance could never be what it is. None of them are earning the recognition of an A-list actor for their work, nor do they ask for a red carpet to be rolled out in their honor. But anyone who values the festival, with its massive financial impact on Park City and cultural influence on our town, owes them a debt of thanks. Of course, you just might have to wait a few more days to give it to them. For now, they’ll be far too busy making sure the rest of Sundance is a success. guest editorial Slaughter of Yellowstone bison must stop JEANINE PFEIFFER Writers on the Range This winter, hundreds of bison will be slaughtered in Yellowstone and Grand Canyon national parks — again — and we shouldn’t let it happen. We owe a lot to the American bison (Bison bison), the West’s original engineers. When herds of these 1,000-2,000-pound animals graze, paw the ground, take dust baths or wallow in the mud, they help create fertile prairie mosaics. In the winter, snow trails made by bison open up grazing areas for their fellow herbivores. In spring, bison wallows host migrating waterfowl and amphibians. In summer, the foraging that bison do helps prevent catastrophic fires and encourages the growth of shrubs, favored nesting sites for prairie chicken and sparrows. And in the fall, their dried-up wallows shelter prairie dogs and plovers. For the First Peoples, bison are considered spiritual family members. Their existence on the land shapes memory and speech, song, ceremony and prayer. Bison-centric words and sayings and an encyclopedic understanding of the animal are represented in hundreds of Native languages. Before modern supermarkets, every scrap and smidgen of bison killed by tribal hunters was eaten, drunk, smoked, dried, pounded, carved, scraped, stitched, woven or worn. There was no American creature with greater ecological and cultural significance — until we exterminated 99.999997 percent of them. Seven generations later, the killings continue. Of the 600,000 so-called buffalo extant in North America, most are “beefalo,” an artificial mix of wild bison with domesticated cattle. The Yellowstone National Park herd — around 4,800 animals — is the largest remnant of genetically pure bison, the final guardians of ancient DNA and environmental memories stretching back for millennia. These animals know how and where to migrate, how to communicate with each other and search for food, and how to withstand adverse conditions and care for one another. The wholesale slaughter of bison to deprive the Plains tribes of sustenance is well documented. Less well known is the Park Service’s annual winter culling of Yellowstone bison the moment the animals step outside park boundaries and onto national forest lands — lands that are held in trust by the federal government for the sake of all U.S. citizens. The Park Service does this despite the agency’s clearly stated mandate to “preserve, unimpaired, the natural and cultural resources and values of the park system … for current and future generations.” Stray bison not killed outright by hunters are captured by the Park Service and then sent off to slaughter. The agency’s rationale is both complex and simple — complex because of contradictory state and federal policies, and simple because we allow it. During the Great Depression, the U.S. government leased national forest lands surrounding Yellowstone as inexpensive feeding allotments to help ranchers survive economically. Almost a century later, U.S. taxpayers continue to subsidize private ranchers on these publicly owned lands. Cattle ranchers leasing those lands argue that brucellosis — an exotic disease that can cause spontaneous abortions in cows — is spread by bison, despite the lack of any scientific proof. Elk, deer, moose and bear populations also carry brucellosis and range freely throughout cattle lands. Yet no similar killing campaigns are waged against those animals. When ecologists justify the culling by pointing to the limited carrying capacity of Yellowstone ecosystems, they ignore basic genetics. Countless generations must occur for beneficial traits to be fixed in a genome. For bison to persist as a species, their genetic diversity needs to remain intact, or we risk inbreeding. When bison subpopulations with crucial traits are indiscriminately killed, it’s the equivalent of tearing out and obliterating entire chapters of the bison’s survival manual. Goodshield Aguilar, a Lakota activist with the nonprofit Buffalo Field Campaign, has tried to halt the Yellowstone bison culls for two decades. “I want my grandkids to be able to see buffalo, to eat buffalo, to be with buffalo,” Aguilar says. “The Lakota and the buffalo have a symbiotic relationship. At the turn of the century, when 99 percent of the buffalo died, 99 percent of the Lakota died as well. We belong together, on this path, right now.” We have better options than slaughter. We can ban the culls in favor of transporting all excess, disease-free Yellowstone bison onto tribal lands. This will make it easier for the 63 tribes composing the InterTribal Buffalo Council to restore buffalo culture in their communities. We can offer incentives to ranchers to encourage them to accept bison grazing on cattle lands. We could also gradually eliminate subsidies like the ones in the current grazing system, which privilege a small number of businesses over our irreplaceable heritage. With climate change, bison — and the enormous range of species and habitats they support — will face longer droughts, extra-cold winters and other extreme weather events. Our national mammals deserve all the help they can get. sexual assault on their own, but with the support from all of us, it’s a step in the right direction! a complex issue and leading a step in the direction of important societal (and indeed cultural) change. Nancy Garrison Sundance Institute Utah Advisory Board member Robin Marrouche Park City Sundance Code of Conduct is laudable Editor: I want to applaud the organizers at Sundance Film Festival for instituting their new Code of Conduct this year. There was an article in your January 20th issue by Tom Clyde criticizing its methods which I felt missed the point. Sundance Institute continues to be a leader as an organization by setting a national example with its swift and explicit action to make public safety a priority. A speaker at a Sundance panel this week discussed how HR departments across the U.S. instituted harassment policies after Anita Hill’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991. She deliberated on why those policies were largely ineffectual and surmised that “policy can only succeed if culture evolves with it.” Bravo to Sundance Institute and to the AG’s Office for taking a stand on We must do more for climate Editor: According to the International Electrotechnical Commission’s “Efficient Electrical Energy Transmission and Distribution” (2007) we receive 55 to 60% of the energy burned at Utah coalfired electricity generation plants due to transmission and conversion losses. All-electric vehicles play NIMBY (not in my back yard) moving pollution and greenhouse gas releases to southern Utah, exacerbating climate change. Hybrids are better. According to Park City and Summit County Short Range Transit Development Plan, Appendix A: Technical Memorandum Demographics, Land Uses and Travel Patterns (2016) 60% of people who work in Summit County commute from outside the county (51% from Salt Lake, 33% from Wasatch) and 29% of people residing here work outside Summit County. This economic jobs/housing imbalance and continued sprawling single family development cause massive daily releases of 1 pound of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, for each mile for each commuting vehicle. According to Utah professor Stephen Goldsmith, it takes 40 gallons of water to make one gallon of gas. This increasing traffic kills local wildlife in collisions, which, in turn, dries out local forests, decreasing plant biodiversity, increasing the likelihood of beetle blight on live trees and of forest fires that cause land to turn into desert, and, thus, climate to heat up. Voila! The end of our winter ski season is approaching if PCMC and Summit County policies and practices do not change. Low-cost planning practices employed in Europe produce lower greenhouse gases per capita. E.g., form-based zoning (height, volume, setback, … restrictions but few use-based restrictions) and safer intersection designs create multi-use, walk-able, and bikeable neighborhoods. This allows property owners to create multi-use neighborhoods with mixed income housing and small retail and grocery stores. High-density development in mixeduse areas does not increase traffic or kill wildlife, but sprawling single-family developments with cul-de-sacs and anti-wildlife privacy fencing do. Kathy Dopp Park City |
