A man, a plane, a very big picture

Gas rigs pocket the Jonah field outside Pinedale, Wyoming. A few decades ago it was unbroken sage grouse habitat. Photo © Ecoflight.

9 October 2009

From his Cessna, Bruce Gordon provides politicians, reporters and others with an eye-opening view of an American West increasingly fractured by energy and resource development.

By Daniel Glick
For the Daily Climate

Wearing a headset and Serengeti sunglasses, Bruce Gordon banks his Cessna 210 to give his passengers a better look at the constellation of roads and drilling pads crisscrossing the New Mexican landscape like an ambitious spider web. 

Up nearly every valley and draw, an energy company has carved a road and planted a rig or a compressor or a wellhead. Gordon veers the plane south as dawn light ignites the Four Corners region where Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah meet.  Smoke plumes from two of the country's dirtiest coal-fired power plants, pointing the westerly direction of the light winds.

"You'd never be able to see all this from the ground," Gordon tells a six-seater plane full of observers seeing this panorama for the first time. "You need to get up here to take in the scale of it."

A sense of scale is central to Gordon's mission, what he has dubbed "conservation flying." For more than 20 years, Gordon has piloted Pipers and Cessnas, single engines and turboprops across the western United States to provide people with a pilot's-eye view of changing landscapes – a view that won't come into focus through the windshield of a pickup truck.

That awareness of scale, over both time and vast distances, is what gives Gordon – and his many passengers – the ability to piece together a startling and disturbing picture. Whether it's clear-cut forests in the Pacific Northwest, coal bed methane development in Wyoming, pine beetle blight across the Western Slope of Colorado, giant open-pit gold mines in Nevada, scars from a decades-long natural gas boom in New Mexico or melting Montana glaciers, his vantage point connects the disparate dots that reveal a tattered Western tapestry.

The 64-year-old Gordon has borne airborne witness to the enormous changes that humans have wrought on some of the world's most famously wide-open spaces. "It's a visual aerial educational tool," he says of his flights.

Since 2002, the gregarious Gordon has run Ecoflight, an Aspen, Colo.-based non-profit with a mission to use small plane flight to illuminate and educate.  With donations from foundations and private individuals, Gordon merges his pilot's enthusiasm for flight with a conservationist's passion for wild places by taking people to see what can only be seen from on high. His view, both decades long and thousands of feet high, reveals a landscape that is increasingly being carved up by development, and incrementally altered because of climate change.

"The light has dimmed," he says. "The whole landscape has been fragmented.  It's flat-out dramatic." 

Growing up in New Jersey, you wouldn't have picked Gordon out as a likely conservationist – or pilot.  Aimless after graduating from Ithaca College in 1966, Gordon heard the siren song of California and headed west, hoping to be a Hollywood stunt man. The Vietnam War interrupted, and Gordon – "neither political enough or smart enough" to avoid the draft – served in the Army in Germany.

After the war, he found his way to Colorado to sample the skiing and climbing life.  An acquaintance invited Gordon on a Himalayan climb, and soon he was back and forth to Asia to attempt Makalu and Manaslu, Tirich Mir and Baruntse. Then, after assisting on a dramatic alpine helicopter rescue near Aspen, he used Veterans Affairs benefits to train to be a pilot, figuring he might be a search and rescue flier.

In a way, that's what he became.

He started flying in the early 1980s with Lighthawk, an all-volunteer organization founded by conservation pilot and Gordon's mentor Michael Stewart, whom Gordon describes as "a real hero." In Aspen, Gordon met singer and fellow pilot John Denver. The two of them flew regularly together, and even attended the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and flew over the Amazon. Denver was killed in a plane crash in 1997.

"I still miss him," Gordon says. In Ecoflight's modest office in an industrial park near the Aspen airport, a photo of Gordon, Denver and President Bill Clinton adorns a desk, next to a pile of ski gear and climbing equipment.

Over the years, Gordon has flown governors and city councilmen, network anchors and U.S. Senators, high school students and ranchers, National Geographic photographers and wildlife biologists.  Paul Newman scouted "A River Runs Through It" territory with Gordon, and Woody Harrelson helped spur protection of Costa Rican forests after an over flight. Gordon flew candidate (now Montana Governor) Brian Schweitzer over the Rocky Mountain Front, where conservationists were trying to convince the government to withdraw oil and gas leases. Gordon recalls that he took Schweitzer over the Canadian border to see a similar landscape in Alberta that had been heavily industrialized. Schweitzer mentioned the unsightly Canadian development in his support for curtailing energy development in Montana. 

Gordon has taken loggers in the Pacific Northwest to see the extent of clear-cutting obscured by the infamous "beauty strips" left by timber companies near roads. He's helped wildlife researchers track gray wolves and Gray whales, pronghorn antelope and grizzly bears, spotted owls and Canada lynx. And he's shown Alaska Native leaders what a new gold mine near Bristol Bay might mean for their watersheds and forests and salmon runs.

Peter Aengst, deputy regional director for The Wilderness Society, who has flown with Gordon more than a dozen times, praises the "first-hand experience" that Gordon offers his passengers. Even in the age of Google maps and satellite imagery, Aengst says, "being in a place is different than seeing it in front of a computer screen." He admires Gordon's mix of a pilot's precision and his mission-oriented ability to be flexible when weather and schedules are challenging.

Gordon acknowledges "some people don't like to fly," and had his share of riders who turned green – which doesn't mean they became conservation minded. But he's convinced, by the "aha" moments when people have exclaimed or gasped or gape-mouthed stared, that he is showing people things they need to see. 

"You can see 12 (gas) rigs from Interstate 70," he says. "You can see 2,000 from up there."

Increasingly, Gordon notices the slow-motion effects of climate change creeping across the West. The most visible is the spread of pine bark beetle, notably in western Colorado.  Scientists believe beetles are proliferating because nighttime winter temperatures have heated up, allowing a higher survival rate of pine bark beetle larvae. The annual advance of rust brown forests marching across the landscape is palpable from the air.

He's also watched glaciers melt, reservoirs shrink, ponds change color, and the big Western sky become less azure.  The drought that has plagued the West this century is turning the normal dun color of the summertime West into increasingly desiccated vistas.  Flying repeatedly over Glacier National Park for 20 years, the receding ice and changing colors are as apparent as watching a Popsicle melt on a July day.

Last year, I flew with Gordon out of Farmington, New Mexico to survey the Four Corners area, home to a proposed and controversial coal-fired power plant on the Navajo Nation.  From a few thousand feet over the parched southwestern landscape, we saw vast piles of fly ash produced by two existing power plants, looking like miniature gray mountain ranges. As our eyes swept the sky, we took in the haze and plumes of smoke from the Four Corners Plant and the Navajo Generating Station. People who live in the area – Navajo and Hopi, Anglo and Hispanic – complain that the abundance of coal plants, uranium mills and natural gas wells affects their health. Their conviction that the sun-baked region offered an invitation for solar energy development became even more convincing from the air. 

Few people can claim such an intimate knowledge of such expansive territory. From Gordon's Cessna, it's clear that the West, which 19th-century explorer John Wesley Powell called "a region of wildest desolation," is being carved up.  Gordon worries that too few people seem to notice the landscape-sized changes that are cumulatively destroying the ecological integrity of an entire region. Even though he flies low, his is the proverbial 30,000-foot view.

Gordon hopes to "bring back images that tell the story and compel people to make more informed decisions and choices."

The common thread among many of his passengers has been an almost involuntary reaction to the aerial view of this expansive country: the "I had no idea!" moment, as Gordon calls it.

Gordon knows it when he sees it: "There's a subtle light that goes on in people's eyes,” he says. 

"I look for projects that can be illuminated by flight, so the land can speak for itself." 

Daniel Glick, a former Newsweek correspondent, is co-founder of the Story Group.

© Daniel Glick. All Rights Reserved.

To reach Daily Climate editor Douglas Fischer email dfischer@dailyclimate.org

Photos, top to bottom: Bruce Gordon; Dust billows from coal mining near Four Corners, Colo.; Smog obscures Shiprock in Utah; Gordon with then-Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo.; Beetle kill in Yellowstone National Park; the Colorado River delta. All photos © Ecoflight and used with permission.

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