“I can take off from the homestead and walk the beach for several miles before I get to any other habitation,” says Sallee, a fisherman who also operates a small lumber mill. “There’s two main mountain ranges on the island and a big valley of forest and muskeg.”

Yet due to funds in a new transportation bill, which President Bush is scheduled to sign Wednesday, Sallee and his neighbors may soon receive a bridge nearly as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and 80 feet taller than the Brooklyn Bridge. With a $223 million check from the federal government, the bridge will connect Gravina to the bustling Alaskan metropolis of Ketchikan, pop. 8,000.

“How is the bridge going to pay for itself?” asks Susan Walsh, Sallee’s wife, who works as a nurse in Ketchikan. She notes that a ferry, which runs every 15 minutes in the summer, already connects Gravina to Ketchikan. “It can get us to the hospital in five minutes. How is this bridge fair to the rest of the country?”

The Gravina Bridge is one of a record 6,371 special projects, or “earmarks,” in the Transportation Equity Act, a six-year $286 billion bill that rivals the recent energy bill in its homage to the pork barrel. No politician better flaunts an ability to bring home the bacon than Alaska’s Don Young. As chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and Alaska’s lone congressional representative for 32 years, the elder statesman wrangled $941 million for Alaska in the bill, making Alaska, the nation’s third least populated state, the fourth-biggest recipient of transportation funds. The money for the bill is fed by a gas tax at the pump, but this slush fund isn’t redistributed to all Americans equally: The bill spends $86 per person on a national average; it spends an estimated $1,500 on every Alaskan.

“It seems to me that Don Young let his power go to his head,” says Erich Zimmermann, senior policy analyst for Taxpayers for Common Sense. “It’s out of control. Alaska manages to do well because Young and [Sen. Ted] Stevens are in positions to get lots of dollars, but it’s taking advantage of the power they’ve been given. This bill is far too large at a time when deficits are supposed to be important.”

Neither Young nor Stevens, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, returned phone calls from Salon. However, the two Alaskans, especially Young, have been loud and proud about their prowess to harness big bucks for transportation. They have repeatedly bragged that new roads and bridges will spur development and industry in Alaska. While speaking to a crowd in Ketchikan last year, Young referred to fellow Republican Stevens’ prowess at rounding up pork, and said, “I’d like to be a little oinker myself.” Young was so proud of the House version of the transportation bill that he named it TEA-LU, after his wife, Lu. He has said of the bill, “I stuffed it like a turkey.”

Indeed. Included in the bill’s special Alaska projects is $231 million for a bridge that will connect Anchorage to Port MacKenzie, a rural area that has exactly one resident, north of the town of Knik, pop. 22. The land is a network of swamps between a few hummocks of dry ground. Although it may or may not set the stage for future development, the bridge, to be named “Don Young’s Way,” will not save commuters into Anchorage any time, says Walt Parker, a former Alaska commissioner of highways.

“I wouldn’t want the bridge named after me,” says Parker, laughing. “Neither bridge makes much sense, but a lot of people are going to make a lot of money building the bridge, and then they’ll have it, and it will have to be maintained. Alaska needs transportation money, but it needs to be spent in the right places.”

Kevin McCarty, policy director of the nonprofit Surface Transportation Policy Project, based in Washington, D.C., says that spending money on projects that won’t be widely used is irresponsible when the country has such urgent transportation problems. Throughout the nation, there are over 160,000 bridges and 34 percent of roads that need repairs, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. For $1 billion, a little more than the amount headed to Alaska, the United States could improve all the traffic lights in the country, reducing congestion by up to 40 percent, according to a 2005 report by the Institute of Transportation Engineers.

“All Americans are paying for that bridge in Alaska,” McCarty says. “If America was sitting down to the make the most of our money, is that what we’d buy?” He adds that the average household in the country spends 20 percent of its income on transportation, and that spending more on expanding public transportation would “be a good investment before we just keep throwing money out the door.” About 19 percent of the funds in the transportation bill are marked for public transit, a slight decrease from the amount authorized in the previous highway act, passed in 1998.

While Young’s haul for Alaska is a flagrant example of pork-barrel politics, it’s indicative of what nearly all legislators do in an effort to get reelected, says Stephen Slivinski, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute. Although bridges and roads may be the stuff of campaign speeches, they aren’t priorities for state highway departments, according to a 1991 Government Accountability Office report. “This shows what happens when Congress thinks it can make decisions better than folks at the local level can,” says Slivinski. “It’s the worst way to create transportation policy. If you want to summarize this bill, any synonym of ‘egregious’ will do.”

Just now, though, at one of Horizon’s dairy farms in central Idaho, the cows don’t look too happy. Perched amid a stark landscape of sagebrush and expansive brown fields, long silver barns that hold 4,000 cows are linked like barracks in some covert operation. I drive down a narrow, cracked road toward the dairy’s main office and pass open-air sheds about 20 feet away, where cows laze in crowded pens atop the brown hardpan of the Idaho desert. Just outside the milking barn, more cows are jammed into an outdoor corral. Amid clumps of dirt and snow, they are lined up, their bodies touching.

In recent weeks, as revelations of Horizon’s farming practices have come to light, a collection of consumer groups and organic dairy farmers have erupted in protest. Horizon and similar dairies are capitalizing on the boom in organic foods, they say, but diluting the true meaning of the term. Contrary to genuine organic practices, which entail raising cows on open pastures, where the animals feed on grass, experts say that a substantial percentage of cows at farms like Horizon’s are confined to pens, fed a diet of proteins and grains, and produce milk that, while free of hormones, is not as healthy as it could be.

At a recent meeting of the United States Department of Agriculture’s organic advisory board, 25 dairy farmers gave public testimony, and 8,000 farmers and consumers sent letters, claiming that by allowing “confinement dairies” such as Horizon and Aurora Organic Dairy, a 5,300-cow operation outside Denver (started by the founder of Horizon), to continue to market themselves as organic, the label’s original promise of excellence is lost.

“People are paying more for organic products because they think the farmers are doing it right, that they’re treating animals humanely and that the quality of the product is different,” says Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association, a network of 600,000 organic consumers. “There has never been farms like Horizon or Aurora in the history of organics. Intensive confinement of animals is a no-no. This is Grade B organics.”

Cummins and other critics stress that the USDA has been lax in enforcing current organic standards, which remain vague, and in creating strict new ones. To them, federal organic standards should mandate that cows be raised on pasture and fed grass. Given the USDA’s failures, they attest, confinement dairies like Horizon continue to profit at the expense of the nation’s small, independent dairies — ones that do follow organic principles and produce the healthiest milk possible for people, cows and the environment.

Despite its folksy image, Horizon is emblematic of 21st century agriculture. It’s a brand of White Wave Foods, itself a division of $10 billion Dean Foods, the largest milk bottler in the country. Yet big business doesn’t have to be a dirty word, says Steve Demos, president of White Wave Foods and overseer of the Horizon brand, who resigned from the company not long after our interview.

“There’s a certain idealistic appreciation for a farm with 10 cows grazing on a hill at sunrise,” he offers. “But there are 280 million people in the Unites States. If moms and consumers care about avoiding hormones and antibiotics, then it’s our job to fill that need as much as possible. And if profits are rooted in noble causes and honorable intentions, then honesty pays. Long ago they said that small was beautiful; they forgot to tell you it’s not profitable.”

Here’s a little primer on the cash cow that is organic milk. It sells for nearly double the price of regular milk (approximately $4 to $2 for a half-gallon). Although it currently constitutes less than 3 percent of the American milk market, sales have increased 23 percent every year between 1997 and 2003. At its current trajectory, organic milk is poised to become 6 percent of the market by 2010 — a $2.4 billion industry. Horizon, with annual sales of $218 million, is already the country’s largest organic milk producer.

And, yes, building market share requires a clever sales pitch. “Nobody doubts the pure wholesome milk of the early American heritage dairy farms,” Demos says. “We are marketing the very myth about early milk.”

It’s a myth that has certainly caught on. “Consumers always mention the happy cow,” says Blanca Hernandez of the Hartman Group, a market research firm for natural foods. “Its brand reinforces their decision that they’re buying something that’s good for their family.” Yet mainstream consumers, she adds, aren’t aware of what qualifies as organic. “They don’t know how exactly a product should be grown to be certified. It’s not imperative to them. To them, the organic label simply means that their milk has been produced without the use of hormones or antibiotics. Those are the things they look for. It’s what gives them peace of mind.”

What most consumers don’t know is that at Horizon’s big dairies, such as the one in Idaho, the cows are raised in a manner that most experts don’t consider organic. According to former Horizon Idaho dairy workers, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of jeopardizing their current jobs, Horizon cows graze for only four or five hours a day and during only three months in the summer. While Horizon claims the cows get plenty of fresh air, that’s because the barns are open structures. Their cows can see the fields but mostly aren’t walking around in them. “Most of the time, the cows are inside the barn,” says one former employee, who worked on the Idaho farm for eight years.

Like the steady stream of Mexican immigrants who milk them every eight hours, Horizon cows work hard. In Idaho, they are fed a steady diet of alfalfa hay, oats, soybeans, and grains such as barley and corn (all organic!), according to a Horizon spokesperson. This starch diet pushes the bovines to produce extra milk. While dairy cows on many pasture-based farms are milked twice a day, Horizon’s cows produce enough to be milked three times daily.

In general, says Dr. Hubert Karreman, a dairy cow veterinarian, “grain-heavy diets aren’t good for cows.” Karreman is an animal husbandry expert who also serves on the National Organic Standards Board, a federal advisory board. Cows have evolved to eat grass, which is why their four stomachs, filled with an array of anaerobic bacteria, function like fermentation vats at a brewery. When the majority of a cow’s diet comes from grain and other readily fermentable carbohydrates, their rumen, the first of those four stomachs, becomes acidic and the cows can become sick and die prematurely.

Former employees say they have no evidence of this happening at Horizon. The company, according to its spokesperson, generally sells its cows at an average age of 6 years old to butchers, while in general many organic dairy cows can live to be 13.

“It’s fundamental to organic that cows are eating grass that’s rooted in the ground,” says Karreman, based in Lancaster County, Pa. “I’m not in favor of large confinement farms. I like to see cows out on grass, eating in the sunshine, enjoying the landscape. Organic should mean that pasture is the true source of nutrition for the animals.”

Linda Tikofsky, a veterinarian at Cornell University, agrees. “Cows are healthier when they’re out on grass,” she says. Tikofsky explains that while there’s nothing in Horizon milk that would hurt anyone, for her, an organic label would mean a sustainable system where the health of the animal and the environment is more important than manipulating cows to maximize milk production. “I feed my kids organic milk but not Horizon,” she says.

There remains a serious debate about just how good milk is for anyone. Ask any vegan. Regardless, many nutritionists say the most nutritious glass of milk comes from cows that eat fresh grass. Studies in the Journal of Dairy Science suggest that grass-fed cows produce milk that is higher in beta carotene, vitamin A and vitamin E, and has five times more cancer-fighting properties. This also contains an equal ratio of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. Even amounts of these two fats result in lower risk of cancer, allergies, obesity and diabetes, according to a 2002 study in Biomed Pharmacotherapy.

Still, while the milk from Horizon and Aurora’s confinement dairies may not be the cream of the crop, it’s far from the milk produced by conventional factory dairies such as Borden, Alta Dena and Meadow Gold, all bottled by Dean, Horizon’s parent company. These days, regular dairies can have up to 30,000 cows that are raised in huge contained barns with big lagoon ponds of manure out back. To keep all those cows healthy in such a confined space, they’re pumped full of antibiotics. They’re fed hormones to increase their milk production, and these conventional cows eat a tasty array of pesticide-laden feed. As calves, they’re fed chicken manure because it’s high in protein. Such milk is laced with a cocktail of pharmaceuticals and hormones such as rGBH, a controversial drug produced by Monsanto.

Horizon is on a populist mission to produce milk without hormones and make it accessible and affordable to everyone. In Idaho and at a 3,000-cow farm in California, from which Horizon buys milk, cows eat feed produced without pesticides; while producing milk, they are given no hormones or antibiotics. Horizon also buys milk from several hundred small dairies where cows do graze on pasture. A company spokesperson estimates that 30 percent of its milk comes from the company’s farm in Idaho and a similar operation in Maryland.

But because that figure doesn’t include the additional milk it purchases from the California dairy, and a 5,300-cow dairy in Colorado, critics say that’s a low figure. Based on its own market analysis, the Cornucopia Institute, an agricultural think tank, says it’s more likely that nearly 50 percent of Horizon’s milk comes from cows that are not raised on pasture.

Given that significant percentage, critics say the dairy is disregarding the intention of the organic laws. “Factory dairy farms are playing loose with the organic rules,” says Mark Kastel, director of the Cornucopia Institute. “We cannot allow corporate profiteering to besmirch the organic marketplace. When consumers buy organic, they think they’re supporting family farms with a higher environmental and animal husbandry ethic.”

Over the past several months, the institute has filed three formal complaints with the USDA, alleging that the agency is being lax in its enforcement of the pasture regulation at Horizon’s dairy in Idaho and at the other dairies in Colorado and California, where Horizon buys milk. While there is no timeline for when the USDA must respond, if the government fails to take this issue seriously, Kastel says his group may sue.

His position was bolstered this past March at the meeting of the National Organic Standards Board. A federal advisory panel recommended that the USDA clarify its regulations so that they more explicitly state that organic dairy cows be confined in bad weather to protect the safety of animals, often during birthing. It also advised the USDA to interpret the pasture rule to mean that all animals over six months of age graze grass for at least 120 days of the year.

This rule is controversial because big dairies like Horizon’s Idaho operation currently don’t meet that standard. It would also require big dairies to invest in more land and new milking procedures. It is now open to public comment and will be voted on in August. Yet whether the USDA will heed these recommendations is another matter entirely. Horizon has been able to get away with a creative interpretation of the pasture standard because the USDA hasn’t been clear with the public or farmers about just what it means to be an organic cow.

The USDA doesn’t actually go out to every farm and give it a stamp of organic approval. Rather, such grunt work is done by a hodgepodge of state agricultural agencies, nonprofit groups and for-profit companies; there are 97 different organic certifiers in total. These entities verify all aspects of a dairy’s organic plan by inspecting records to ensure, for example, that the fields have been chemical free for at least three years and by visiting the farm to examine the conditions of the cattle, the milking parlor and the surrounding pasture.

While there are hefty federal penalties for illegally stamping a dairy organic, the system is fraught with potential conflict of interest. Kevin Elfering, a director of dairy food and meat inspection for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, states that the pell-mell certification process lacks rigorous and transparent oversight. He says it’s too easy for certifiers to bend the rules, allowing dairies to stay in business and keep the certifiers in the black as well. “There are always a small percentage of people looking to amass higher profits without following the rules,” Elfering says. “You have any number of certifying organizations and they want business. The certifier would be biting the hand that feeds them if they enforce the regulations.”

Indeed, John Cleary, certification director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, a 20-year-old nonprofit certification organization, says he would never stamp Horizon with an organic label. “It doesn’t appear to me that they [Horizon] have access to pasture in the way we understand the rules,” he says. “Organic is about balancing the amount of land with the amount of animals and the health of the animals. I don’t see how these confinement operations can do that.”

Cleary faults the USDA for not doing a better job of overseeing the certification process. “I’ve asked [Horizon and Aurora] how they’re meeting these standards and they say, ‘We’re certified and we couldn’t be doing this if we weren’t meeting the standards.’ The USDA needs someone with a backbone to stand up and say if you don’t raise your cows on pasture, it just doesn’t qualify as organic. There’s an uneven playing field out there now.”

According to Cleary and a host of consumer groups, the USDA has been about as vigilant as cops at a doughnut shop. Since the final organic rule was released in December 2000, the USDA hasn’t implemented any of the organic standards board’s more than 50 policy recommendations. It has yet to create a peer review panel to oversee the accreditation process, as is required by law, or to create a program manual for certifiers that specifies all of the rules and regulations.

“The staff at the USDA that is running the organic program continues to be cagey. The lack of transparency makes us wonder what they have to hide,” says Urvashi Rangan, of the Consumers Union. Rangan wonders whether certifiers all follow the same standards for ensuring that milk is organic. “The quality of some milk may be less than others and the USDA needs to rectify the situation. I think the envelope is being pushed as wide as it actually can.”

Even without overalls or a red barn (his are green), third-generation dairy farmer Jon Bansen evokes the days when milk really did arrive on our doorsteps at dawn. With his wife and four young blond children, Bansen raises 200 Jersey cows in the shadow of Oregon’s coastal mountains. On a recent clear morning, as frost melts beneath a bright sky, cows with names such as Eileen and Trish crowd around Bansen, rubbing their noses on his jeans.

“I’m a grass farmer first — if I don’t grow grass well, there’s nothing for the cows,” Bansen explains. “It’s all about the health of the cow; it starts with healthy soil, and that relates to a healthy plant, and it just goes all the way up the food chain. Really, if people just use common sense, it’s an absolute no-brainer. If an animal is healthier, what they produce will be healthier.”

Bansen describes how he rotates his cows to graze different sections of his 310 acres of grass so that the land isn’t overgrazed and trampled. During the winter months, when the Oregon rains make grazing dangerous for the cows, Bansen feeds the animals pickled grass that he cut last season. Today, Bansen sells his milk to Organic Valley, a cooperative owned and run by nearly 700 families with an emphasis on pasture. In 2004, it sold $208 million worth of milk, butter and yogurt. He and his wife make an income comparable to that of doctors or lawyers and he has three employees who make up to $35,000 annually.

Yet if the USDA continues to allow big companies like Horizon to play by different standards, Bansen says his livelihood will be at stake. If large dairies don’t invest in the cost of land for pasture, they can sell their milk for less. While the large demand for a limited supply of organic milk has kept prices high for everyone, Bansen worries that when more large confinement dairies like Horizon enter the market, they will dictate cheaper prices.

“We can’t compete with somebody milking 6,000 cows who’s doing it in a manner that doesn’t cost as much,” he says, sitting in his living room that overlooks a broad green field. “Big dairies threaten the structure of rural America, which is contingent on living-wage jobs. Organic has provided for small family businesses.”

Already, some small dairy farmers say the big dairies are squeezing them off the shelf. About 30 miles southeast of Bansen’s farm, Franz Wenz, owner of Noris Dairy Inc., the only independent organic milk producer and bottler in the Northwest, says only large operations like Organic Valley and Horizon can afford to spend big bucks on flashy marketing and offer supermarkets exclusive deals at lower prices.

“The big guys can bury us,” says Wenz, an Austrian native with bushy eyebrows and heavy jowls. “They can make exclusive deals and say, ‘You just take our product and we’ll give you a good deal.’ The stores don’t understand that they’re hurting themselves when they depend on just one company that can then control the price.”

To stay in business, Wenz and his family have carved out a niche by selling and personally delivering their glass-bottled milk, yogurt, cheese, ice cream and sour cream directly to more than 300 customers in the Portland and Eugene area. Wenz says he and his family intend to stick it out, despite hard financial times.

As the sun rises high above the morning’s cloak of white fog, before us stretches the mythic American heritage dairy. Happy cows graze in a broad pasture of green grass. Only this time the picture is real.

But these trees were not dead; they were green and broad, providing good habitat for the wildlife in the area Shull was charged to monitor. Even so, her manager wanted Shull to sign off on an analysis that said the trees were dying and were not providing habitat for animals. When Shull balked, she says, her superiors in the agency repeatedly asked her to change her assessment. One told her that if she didn’t “get this done,” she’d lose her job. When she snickered at the comment, she says he slapped his hand on the table and said, “I mean it.” Shull didn’t change her mind, but the pressure at work did not let up. She was told she wouldn’t receive an expected raise, and for months she was ignored by her supervisors and some of her co-workers. Ultimately Shull developed high blood pressure, and her doctor recommended a month of medical leave.

While she was out of the office, her supervisor signed off on the sale — the single largest amount of logging the forest had seen in a decade. “I was just so stressed; I’d never had my job threatened. I was afraid of retaliation. I don’t deal very well with that kind of pressure and the threats were very scary,” Shull told Salon. “This has become a hostile work environment; there’s harassment and threats, and nothing is ever done.”

Under the Bush administration, a disturbing number of biologists, botanists and ecologists who work for the Forest Service are reporting stories similar to Shull’s — more than a dozen spoke to Salon about their experiences. Fearing retaliation, almost none of the current Forest Service employees contacted for this story were willing to talk on the record. But they were desperate to tell their stories behind a veil of anonymity, and from their muffled voices a clear trend emerges. Scientists are routinely pressured to not do their jobs: to not stand up for the resource they were hired to protect so that timber, the old cultural icon of the agency, can continue to fall for the benefit of industry.

Forest Service “staff officers will tell you until the Earth goes cold that they follow the latest science, but we know that we can’t give them too much data if we want to keep our jobs. Really, they could give a rat’s behind about science,” says a Forest Service employee who spoke on condition of anonymity. She recently received a $15,000 pay cut and demotion, she says, because she was “agitating other botanists” by disseminating information about laws they could use to protect plants. D.J. Evans, a former ecologist for the Hiawatha National Forest in Michigan, says: “I just wanted to do my job,” counting on her fingers the eight botanists, biologists and ecologists who left the agency in eight years. “It was really stressful and discouraging. I don’t think I’ve ever stayed up so many nights.”

With government scientists pressured to abandon the native plants and wildlife they were charged to defend, the outlook is distressing for America’s national forests. Along with this general assault on the land, the Bush administration is also not ensuring additional protection for declining species. It hasn’t listed a single endangered species for protection from timber sales or other habitat-destroying actions, such as ski areas and hydropower dams, except under court order, court settlement or citizen petition, bringing the administration’s total to a mere 31 species. Bill Clinton listed 521 species; Ronald Reagan listed 253.

This situation is only likely to get worse over the next four years. During the 2000 presidential campaign, the timber industry caught the Republican Party’s attention with a $1.5 million fundraiser in Portland, Ore. Over the past two years the industry contributed nearly $600,000 to Bush’s reelection campaign.

In response, the Bush administration has opened up the national forests: Last year it offered the timber industry approximately 30 percent more timber than it did in 2000 — that’s about 100,000 additional log trucks. And in early December, Mark Rey, undersecretary of agriculture, announced in Idaho at the annual meeting of the Intermountain Forest Association, a timber group, that the administration plans to double its efforts to thin Western forests. Said Rey: “We’re going to be active; we’re nowhere near the end of what we want to do.” Meanwhile, a slew of new weakened environmental regulations and policies means that scientists who try to protect plants and wildlife are in for one hell of a ride.

“The whole apparatus of the Bush administration is a revolving door and then some with industry. What they’re doing [in changing scientists' reports and opinions] is so egregious. I don’t see any explanation other than to intentionally mislead the public,” says Robert S. Devine, author of the 2004 book “Bush Versus the Environment.” “If environmental policies are not guided by science and are instead guided by this corporate-oriented administration, the environment will be in trouble for a long time beyond this second term.”

If the administration does indeed double the amount of logging over the next four years, botanists say there will be no way to conduct the required surveys of rare plants and animals prior to all timber sales because there simply is not enough staff. In the entire U.S. Forest Service there are only 179 botanists, and of those, fewer than 100 are actually out walking the ground. (In comparison, the agency employs over 10,000 foresters and forestry technicians.) With an average of one botanist per 1.5 million acres, often wildlife biologists and even foresters conduct botanical surveys. These employees are not required to attend botany-specific trainings or even to have any educational background in plant knowledge. “That’s just not right,” says a Colorado botanist who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s so critical to have areas that are preserved. If you don’t care for the plants, there’s no wildlife — but nobody else seems to be looking out there for these sorts of things.”

Recent policy proposals by the administration will further strip scientists’ power to protect fish and wildlife. While the National Forest Management Act sounds about as exciting as a Honda sedan, this law has been key to environmental oversight of the country’s forests. Yet the administration today announced changes to this nearly 30-year-old law so that when specific forests want to revise or amend long-term management plans, they would not have to consider how new timber sales or ski areas or other actions would impact the environment.

More troubling, changes to current law include relaxing a Forest Service requirement to protect all viable populations of native fish and wildlife species — called the single most important legal tool for protecting wildlife in national forests. The new rule will undermine the legal basis for protecting old-growth habitat and could result in much more logging of ancient forests. “This would take away the main tool that Forest Service wildlife biologists have had for 20 years,” says Mike Anderson, a senior resource analyst for the Wilderness Society. “A lot of species probably will be pushed toward extinction. It’s a pretty bleak outlook on all fronts.”

In this hostile political climate, many agency scientists look ahead to the next four years with despair. They know what politicians and timber lobbyists would like to ignore: that when rare plants no one has ever heard or species few people care about disappear, the entire ecosystem — even water quality — is affected. Such ripple effects and long-term impacts have made even career scientists like Shull rethink whether they want to continue to work for the federal government. “They’re going a way I don’t agree with. My principles and morals don’t fit anymore with the people in charge here. When I bring up an issue of protecting species, it’s met with anger,” says Shull, her voice heavy. “Since Bush has been in office it’s just this feeling that they [upper management] can say and do anything and get away with it.”

It’s the second time they’ve blossomed this year. Given an atypically long season of warm weather, the flowers are confused, thinking spring is here again.

“It’s a bad strategy for them because they’ll lose their seeds to the frost,” says Bret-Harte, looking worried behind large gold-rimmed glasses. Flowers only make one set of buds each year so if they spend next year’s buds now, they’ll be out of luck next spring. If the warming trend continues, the flowers may go extinct.

Lean and tall with a long black braid down her back, an intellectual Olive Oyl, Bret-Harte has spent the past 10 summers studying Arctic plants at this research site in Toolik Lake, Alaska. While it’s too soon to prove statistically, she and Ray suspect that these confused flowers are just one more example of the phenomenon threatening the entire planet: global warming.

Over the past century, Bret-Harte explains, due to the increase in oil and gas consumption, carbon dioxide and methane emissions have skyrocketed. Such gases hover above the earth, trap the sun’s heat, and cause the planet to warm up. In just the past three decades, this warming has heated the Arctic by nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Since the mid-1950s, Alaska’s glaciers have lost about 3,300 cubic kilometers of melted ice and snow — enough to submerge the entire state of Texas in 15 feet of water. Due in part to this influx of fresh water combined with warmer temperature, computer models predict that the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice could completely disappear within 70 years.

While it’s unlikely the four horsemen of the apocalypse are saddled up and ready to ride, global warming will likely have an enormous and dire impact on human populations in the Arctic and beyond. Already, native communities that dot Alaskan shorelines are seeing villages crumble. Waves, unhindered by large ice chunks, now swell and break against the shore with a ferocity never seen before. Banks are eroding and high water has consumed so many homes and buildings that two villages have been forced to move inland.

Alaska is not alone. In his alarming book “Boiling Point,” Ross Gelbspan writes that global warming is disrupting “the normal flow of deep-water currents that determine climactic conditions in much of the world.” For instance, Gelbspan reports, extreme effects of the weather phenomenon, El Niño, have caused China’s Yangtze River to overflow, killing more than 3,000 people, leaving 230 million people homeless, and generating $30 billion in damages. Worldwide, warmer weather means more extreme floods and drought, which creates breeding grounds for countless disease-carrying insects.

“There’s strong consensus now in the scientific community that global climate change is caused by human activities,” says Bret-Harte in her kind, matter-of-fact manner. “There are always a few folks that disagree. But mostly they work for the oil and gas industry.”

And apparently for the Bush administration. Claiming the jury is still out on what causes global warming, the president has written a climate change policy that is about as aggressive as a tortoise. Loath to enact measures that would reduce our addiction to oil and gas — and income to his friends and campaign supporters — the Bush administration has spent the past several years misrepresenting the science on climate change in order to justify a path of inaction. For the Arctic researchers who are watching a landscape in flux, this is beyond infuriating.

“We see the possible consequences of no action and the consequences are looking graver and graver and more and more imminent,” says John Hobbie, the tough co-founder of the Institute of Arctic Biology Toolik Field Station and director of the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Lab. “We scientists realize that climate change is more than just vague words and models.”

A funky hodgepodge of old military trailers, canvas tents and a helicopter (to transport scientists to remote lakes and streams), the Toolik Field Station looks like some sort of 21st century “MASH” set. Established by the National Science Foundation in 1975 as a long-term ecological research facility, the site, nestled on the edge of Toolik Lake, has since attracted an annual crew of up to 100 scientists, graduate students and technicians from universities and institutions throughout the country. Each year they spend weeks at a stretch analyzing the changing landscape, isolated by the empty terrain from what they fondly call “their real lives.”

Because the Alaskan Arctic is warming faster than any other place in the world, it offers an ideal natural laboratory to study climate change. Unlike the rest of the world, which has warmed about 1 degree over the past century, the Arctic’s unique landscape of mostly ice and snow magnifies temperature changes because as ice and snow melt, the terrain stops reflecting sunshine and starts absorbing heat. With this trend in a dizzying rate of motion, computer models predict that during the next century the Arctic will warm an additional 7 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit. Considering that the last ice age was spurred by a temperature difference of 13 degrees, such climate change means that the flowers aren’t alone in their strange behavior.

The tundra that Bret-Harte and Ray study is a patchwork of ancient grasses, berries, moss and woody shrubs. Due to the intense cold and the limitations of a two-month-long growing season, the plants are miniature — 400-year-old tussocks are no bigger than a pie tin. Yet as the climate has warmed, the woody species like birch, willow and alder shrubs are not quite so shrublike these days. Compared with aerial photographs taken on oil exploration missions in the mid-1950s, the woody plants have taken off like a case of bad acne. In each of the 200 comparison photos, not only did individual shrubs increase in size, but the patches of alder and birch have spread into areas that weren’t shrubby before. This trend is likely to continue, says Bret-Harte.

To further predict the outcome of future warming, in 1988 Bret-Harte’s former postdoctoral advisor, Gaius Shaver, perched greenhouses directly atop the tundra. Inside the enclosed plot, the plastic structure increased the temperature by 3.5 degrees Celsius, the predicted regional warming for the next century. In less than 20 years, the birch has squeezed out the mosses and berries, growing from an average height of 8 inches to almost 4 feet.

“They’re trying to become trees,” says Bret-Harte, balancing on a boardwalk beside the crowded plastic greenhouse. While currently the birch lie down beneath the snow’s weight, if and when the shrubs stay standing throughout the winter, they will trap snow. While it’s hard to think of snow as bikini weather, for the soil in the north, snow actually acts as a thick blanket, creating a layer of insulation from the frigid wind and air. With more snow, soils could warm, releasing more carbon and other nutrients into the atmosphere and, that’s right, contribute to more global warming.

A shrubbier landscape devoid of moss and grass could spell hard times for wildlife such as caribou, which feast on ground willow and cotton grass. Already caribou are feeling the proverbial heat: With warmer springs, plants are blooming earlier and then drying up earlier — by as much as 10 to 20 days. That means less food in the fall, the critical time when caribou fatten up for the winter.

“Without ample forage, caribou aren’t as able to conceive offspring or survive the long, cold winter,” says Brad Griffith, an associate professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Griffith suspects this shift in seasons is why the Porcupine caribou herd, the wildlife poster child in the fight over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, has dropped from 178,000 to 123,000 in the past decade.

Across the dusty Dalton Highway, in another watershed near Toolik, the landscape offers one more sign that global warming may already be having an impact. A wide hole, large enough to consume a helicopter, gapes from the tundra. Climb down into the pit and an underground world is exposed. A dense layer of rich soil and roots rests atop a slab of what looks like brown concrete. Called permafrost, this soil layer froze thousands of years ago, but as temperatures have warmed, it’s melting. As these ancient slabs of ice dissolve, the spongy tundra tears off in large chunks and sinks a good 10 feet into the crater left by former permafrost. At the hole’s lip, a small stream forms a waterfall, carving a new path, dense with soil and sediment under the landscape above.

“We’ve been walking around out here for 20 years and have never seen one of these things, and all of a sudden we’ve got four in our backyard,” says William “Breck” Bowden, a professor of watershed science and planning at the University of Vermont, who has logged countless hours slogging across the tundra to study Arctic streams. For Bowden, these new formations are the biggest news of the summer — the influx of mud is enough to smother the moss, algae and insects for up to 60 miles of river. While scientists aren’t exactly a rash group, he makes a prediction: “This may be a tangible indication of the warming of the Arctic environment.”

Not all permafrost melting results in such mud pits but, says Jon Benstead, a postdoctoral scientist from the Marine Biological Lab, the thawed soil is dumping additional nutrients into lakes and streams throughout the region. Benstead stands by the Kuparuk River in boots held together with duct tape.

As a heavy rain falls, he explains that to measure the impact of permafrost thaw, Toolik scientists have, for 20 years, been adding phosphorus to this river to mimic the nutrients that melting soil releases into the ecosystem. So far, the results have shown that with additional phosphorus, the river’s algae flourish like an athlete on steroids. More plants translate into insect habitat and more food for fish. In this case, the changes of climate warming are beneficial for the plants and animals in the ecosystem.

Still, there’s not a lot to throw a party over. Benstead adds that they’re also seeing a trend: The Arctic grayling, one of only a handful of fish species sturdy enough to withstand the frigid winters, don’t do well in warmer summers. He and his colleagues predict that if and when streams heat up to a measurable amount, the Arctic grayling may become extinct.

“There is no doubt that climate change is rewriting the rules that have governed these ecosystems for millennia,” says Stan Senner, executive director of Alaska Audubon.

About 150 miles north of Toolik Lake, the impact of oil and gas dependence translates into more than just an abstract notion of global warming: Here lies the unappealing landscape that accompanies energy development. Welcome to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, home to one of the largest oil and gas reserves in North America.

Clinging to the edge of the Arctic Ocean, the small town of temporary employees is an industrial wasteland of oil wells, semis and high security clearance areas. Every day, nearly 1 million barrels of oil flow out of here; that’s less than 10 percent of U.S. consumption. The Bush administration and the state of Alaska are hoping to significantly increase production within the next 10 years.

“I can’t say specific numbers, but I know we want a whole lot more [oil and gas development],” says Harry Bader, northern regional manager of Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources.

Environmental standards mandate that massive seismic trucks, which search for new oil deposits, can cross the fragile tundra only when there is a thick layer of ice and snow. Over the past 30 years, rising temperatures have cut the frozen season in half, from 208 days down to 98. Now the state is reassessing the standard and hoping it can rewrite it to allow more days on the ice hunting for oil.

In addition, Alaska is pushing for state ownership of federal land that abuts massive swaths of natural gas. If the state of Alaska gets its way, and it’s looking pretty good that it will, such energy development could be headed toward Toolik Lake. With a state dependent on oil and gas for 90 percent of its budget, the state is paving the Dalton Highway, which slices through the 55 million acre North Slope, and roll out a natural gas pipeline. The irony of locating such a massive extraction project in the fastest-warming region of the globe doesn’t faze Bader.

“I don’t think anyone doubts that global warming is happening — at least not up here — but the question is whether it’s anthropogenic or not, and that’s not my job to figure out,” says Bader with a grin. “My job is to maximize the amount of oil and gas drilling on the North Slope while protecting the Arctic tundra.”

Industrial activities here will not only produce more global warming; they also threaten to destroy the very studies of global climate change. New roads and gas wells could scar the currently empty watershed and tundra where the Toolik researchers conduct their research.

“Oh my God, this will have a huge impact,” says Bret-Harte, shaking her head. “I’m hopeful the station will be able to survive, but all the reserves of gas are here in the foothills.” With a wry laugh, she adds: “At least we’ll have the chance to study the impacts of oil and gas development up close.”

Ramirez didn’t die in the manure pit — a fate met by three workers in California — but as he waded through the waste of 380 cows, it slid into his knee-high boots. Because it’s impossible to completely scrub away the bacteria from manure, Ramirez passed a skin infection on to his wife and her two daughters. “I felt like a slave; it was like my boss had a whip,” says Ramirez, 27, who relocated to this lush rural valley from the desert of central Mexico.

Arturo Ramirez is not his real name, and he has a new job at a different dairy, but he worries he’d be fired if his boss discovers he has talked to a reporter. Ramirez can’t afford to be out of work. When his father died 12 years ago, he crossed the border through the Arizona desert to find work to help support his mother and four younger brothers and sisters. Without the $400 he sends home every month, his family would barely survive.

It’s not an easy sacrifice: Ramirez works 12 to 16 hours a day, six days a week, for minimum wage and no overtime pay. Until this past February, when Oregon passed a new law, dairy workers were afforded no lunch or rest breaks. In more than 40 states no such law exists, leaving many employees no choice but to eat lunch while working. Ramirez, like other dairy workers, is regularly kicked by cows and is exposed to toxic gases in the manure, such as hydrogen sulfide, that may cause permanent neurological damage.

“I worry every day that I will break my hand or get hurt, but I never say anything for fear I’ll lose my job,” says Ramirez, who uses a fake Social Security number. “No American would do this job. This is a shit job, for shit money.” Yet Ramirez, like most other dairy workers, has few other employment options besides agriculture. Since the vast majority are non-English-speaking immigrants, and none are unionized, relatively few complain to state or federal agencies for fear of losing their jobs or being deported, according to legal aid organizations in Oregon and California and the United Farm Workers of America. Even if they were speaking up about working conditions, fighting for protection would still be an uphill battle.

The workers, who on average make between $5.15 and $7.06 per hour, can’t compete with the wealth and political power of their employers. In 2002 the dairy industry gave more than $5 million to state and federal campaigns. “Dairymen have a good ear when it comes to approaching the legislature,” says George Gilman, an Oregon state representative and recently retired dairy owner. “The industry is really well represented in legislators around the United States. There’s enough people that understand the challenges of our industry.”

The federal government collects no statistics about dairy workers, no advocacy groups work solely for dairy worker protection, and federal law has lagged as family farms have been consolidated into more-corporate enterprises. This failure to develop and enforce even the most rudimentary health and safety standards goes unnoticed because immigrant workers are among the most exploitable members of the workforce. “Despite the fact that the conditions amount to near slavery, dairy workers tend to get ignored,” says Brent Newell of the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, based in San Francisco. “This industry is extremely powerful.” And with consumers mostly concerned about the availability of cheap milk and cheese, there’s no public clamor for an improvement of the dairy workers’ labor conditions. Says Charlie Tebbutt of the Western Environmental Law Center: “Who’s going to fight milk? It feeds and nourishes babies; it’s Chevrolets and apple pies.”

Dairy work is a repetitive and debilitating dance. Hundreds of times a day dairy workers attach hoses from automated milkers to the teats of cows. They also lift hay bales, carry or shovel grain, and attach equipment to tractors. All these motions can cause chronic sprains, strains and lower back pain.

Over time, repetitive motion injuries can cause permanent, crippling damage. “While these men are young, if they continue this work for the next decade they can end up with lifelong pain and permanent disability,” says James Meyers, an agriculture and environmental health specialist at UC-Berkeley’s School of Public Health. “These types of injuries are very painful, very limiting and very expensive to treat. This side of fatalities, musculoskeletal disorders are the most debilitating occupational injury.”

Aside from chronic problems, dairy workers often break bones from being kicked by cows or from slipping in the muck-covered concrete floors of dairy barns, explaining why the rate of injury on dairy farms is higher than in all other types of agriculture and all private industry, according to a 2003 report in the Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health. Furthermore, dairy workers exposed to toxic-gas-releasing manure may experience nausea, diarrhea, sore throats, stress and alterations in mood, according to a 2000 study published in the Journal of Agromedicine.

Workers are not getting the treatment they need, says Tillamook County (Ore.) Health Department case manager Diane Barnes. Immigrant workers rarely file workmen’s compensation insurance claims for fear they will lose their jobs, Barnes says. Such insurance covers medical costs and wages lost due to injury-caused time off, but they also cost employers as much as $2,000 per worker. “The guys with documentation don’t work in the dairies, and there’s a huge fear of retribution because there are people just waiting to take their job,” says Barnes. “Whether spoken or unspoken there appears to be some kind of agreement that they aren’t going to make waves. Everyone seems to acknowledge that the employer has them there to make money, not cost money.”

Yet workmen’s compensation claims are one of the prime ways that the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the state agency charged with protecting workers, prioritizes what companies to investigate. With only 75 field officers to regulate more than 80,000 employers in Oregon, a state more than twice as large as New England, the agency admits there’s no way it can be a watch-dog. Due to the dearth of worker’s comp claims, last year the agency investigated only 17 of the state’s 343 dairies. That figure earns Oregon a better than average grade: In 2003, state and federal agencies inspected 51 of the nation’s 86,300 dairy farms.

“There’s no way we can be everywhere at once. We want employers to be self-sufficient,” says Trudi Tyler, an Oregon OSHA compliance officer. “We’ve gone a long way to create an atmosphere to not create an adversarial position within the industry.”

Even when agents do conduct inspections, the regulations are marginal. Unlike the meat packing or construction industries, the dairy industry has no specific standards; nearly a century ago, Congress caved in to powerful Southern rural politicians and exempted agriculture from most worker-protection laws. As the farming industry has expanded into an industrialized enterprise, the laws haven’t changed. Today, dairy owners are held to the same weak regulations governing farms, with no specific guidelines for how workers should be specifically protected from milking machines or general interaction with cows. In the 24 states that defer to federal regulations, dairies with fewer than 10 employees are exempt from inspections unless an employee dies or at least three people are hospitalized.

Indeed, basic labor laws found in other industries don’t even apply to dairy industry workers. Like all other agricultural employees, dairy workers are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act. But because dairy work is year round, they are also omitted from the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act. Protected by neither of those two laws, dairy workers are exempt from overtime pay and the right to form a union or to confront an employer with workplace concerns as a group, and they have no general safeguard against employer misrepresentation. This makes dairy workers the least protected laborers in the country, says attorney Mark Wilk of the nonprofit Oregon Law Center.

“Dairy folks are legally in the worst of all worlds. There really is no federal law at all to protect them,” Wilk says. Nearly one-third of his 89 clients are Hispanic dairy workers, and Wilk says their Mexican and Guatemalan origin is part of why the laws remain weak. “This is the last bastion of feudalism. The ugly reality of the world that my clients live in is shocking. We’re the richest country in the history of the world. We can do a better job making sure all workers have minimum standards of decency.”

Over the craggy Cascade Mountains, the arid plateau of eastern Oregon is a lonely landscape of sagebrush, power lines and ochre dust. Just south of the Columbia River, down a long narrow road, Threemile Canyon Farm stretches across 93,000 acres, housing 35,000 cows. This massive enterprise is one of the most extreme examples of the corporatization that has steadily been swallowing small dairies throughout the country. In just little over a decade, the number of dairies nationally has declined by half but the average size has increased by 73 percent.

A joint venture between R.D. Offutt, one of the largest potato growers in the country, based in Fargo, N.D., and John Bos Family Farms, a Bakersfield, Calif., dairy operation, Threemile Canyon Farm’s three dairies produce 1.3 million pounds of milk per day — enough to serve nearly the entire population of Idaho. Such size is a good business model: Threemile, which also grows potatoes and alfalfa and has a composting operation, generates an estimated $250 million for the local economy. Critics say the poor working conditions for the dairies’ 140 employees help spell this fat bottom line. In rural Boardman, about 20 miles from the dairy, a group of workers just finishing an 11-hour shift spill into Gerardo Castellano’s three-room apartment. As the smell of frying tortillas wafts from the kitchen and a young boy all belly and dark eyes runs through the room, the men fold their exhausted forms into sagging couches and explain in Spanish why they feel like second-class citizens.

They often work as many as 12 hours a day, six days a week, and are paid a weekly salary of $550. If there are 31 days in a month, they are not paid for the 31st day. While they would like a weekend, and more than one week off a year, they say if they miss a day, even for a family emergency or visit to the doctor, they will be fired. “We’re disposable to them. We’re like a machine. I don’t think they see us as real people,” says Julio Arturo Sepulveda. “I need this job. I feed my family with this job, but it’s not right.”

As the men joke and tease each other over who works the hardest, they all list the same woes: bruises from kicking cows, chronic coughs and asthma from the dust, achy joints, and lower back problems. Castellano, who once worked in an accounting office in Mexico, says, laughing, “Pick a place — it all hurts.”

Paradoxically, this trend toward corporatization may offer dairy workers a small slice of hope. No dairies in the country are unionized, largely because the majority of dairies are small, decentralized operations with only a handful of employees. Dairy workers at Threemile Canyon say that with numbers comes strength. In January 2003, a group of 100 dairy workers stormed the United Farm Workers local in southern Washington, outraged at sudden wage cuts, says Erik Nicholson, the union’s regional director. Since then, change has been tangible. Union organizers, effective at beating the drums, have spurred articles in the local and regional media, written letters to Oregon legislators and the Mexican consulate, and instigated an OSHA investigation, which resulted in 12 citations.

Subsequently, the dairy has increased wages by $200 a month, provided health insurance to its workers, and has started to provide the required safety equipment and training for the use of hazardous chemicals, Nicholson says. “These guys have come to experience firsthand the power of collective action,” says Nicholson, sitting on the tailgate of his truck, parked in Boardman. “Now they understand their rights and they’re overcoming their fear.”

Indeed the tone of the workers congregated at Castellano’s apartment is miles from the hopeless and anxious tenor of isolated workers in western Oregon. Rather, their voices are strong and determined. “I have faced a lot of discrimination because I’m a union supporter, but I want to stay and fight until they understand that we have rights,” Sepulveda says. He and 68 other workers recently settled claims against the dairy for failure to pay minimum wage. “I want the best for my kids, and so the abuses, the discrimination, it has to stop.” Still the process is slow. After over a year of repeated attempts at negotiation, the company still does not recognize the union. It has hired consultants and lobbied at the state Legislature for a bill that would outlaw harvest strikes and allow farm owners to negotiate union contracts for an unlimited amount of time. According to the company, its size makes it a union target.

“It’s economically efficient for them to try and unionize because we’re a large-scale enterprise,” says Len Bergstein, a spokesman for Threemile Canyon. The company has a letter signed by 100 dairy workers saying they don’t want a union. “This is no more than a series of attempts to ruin a business enterprise that workers depend on.” Industry insiders take a broader view, explaining that this fight is just part of the growing pains the entire industry has experienced over the past decade.

As Hispanic immigrants increasingly replace young family members or other local teenagers, dairy owners are working to meet the needs, such as insurance and benefits, of this new population of workers, says Agnes Schafer a vice president of the Dairy Farmers of America, based in Kansas City, Mo. “Throughout the U.S. we are going through an evolution of understanding,” says Schafer. “Farmers in general are pro-Hispanic because it’s economical and it’s people who want to work and who value agriculture, but we’re going through a cultural shift.”

While the industry is not working on any legislative efforts that would supply insurance or other services to undocumented workers, industry lobbyists say that President Bush’s proposal to grant some farmworkers citizenship would help. Yet in the short term there is little on the horizon that offers much solace for immigrant dairy workers.

Even if Threemile Canyon Farms is eventually unionized, the thousands like Ramirez who work in dairies with just a few employees will continue to work despite low pay and dismal conditions. “Back there [in Mexico], you work for $5 a day. All we had in my town was one donkey,” says Ramirez, shaking his head at the memory. “My mom misses me; she cries sometimes when we talk on the phone, but I can’t go back to Mexico. I’m afraid to die in the Arizona desert.”