By Peter Barlow
Apr 8, 2025

While Washington, D.C. politicians continue to cause self-inflicted injury to our critical institutions, natural disasters persist unabated.

These dangers persist despite the work by elitist leaders to dismantle the very agencies and institutions our tax dollars support to keep us safe before, during, and after unforeseen events. Approximately 60% of the Shenandoah Valley is forested.

We are increasingly vulnerable to wildfire and must embrace codes and standards that prevent vulnerability and will proactively decrease fuel loads in what is commonly referred to as the Wildland-Urban Interface. We need local leaders to pick up the slack where our national leaders are lagging and adopt codes and standards that will help us start to be forward-thinking when it comes to these threats.

FEMA has embraced forward-thinking codes and standards for decades, and although bureaucracies have inefficiencies, they have created tools that we should use, which are based on common-sense engineering principles created by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The International Code Council developed the 2021 International Wildland-Urban Interface Code (IWUIC), among others.

In addition to wildfires, our families and communities are increasingly susceptible to hurricanes and losses from high-wind events. We can let the politicians argue over what is causing frequent storms and persistent drought while we use pragmatic, evidence-based codes and standards to make sure that our buildings, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure are up to snuff the next time a major storm comes through.

Better infrastructure doesn’t just make practical sense. It saves tax dollars. A 2019 study showed that for every dollar spent upgrading infrastructure to wildfire-ready codes, the taxpayer will save $4. The same study showed that wind retrofits to protect public infrastructure and homes save $10 for every $1 spent. If we’re paying as many taxes as we are, we should make sure that we stretch those dollars as far as possible and quit paying for repetitive damage to shoddy infrastructure.

In these times of partisan bickering and unnecessary tribalism, we can all agree that better preparedness, safety, and security for our communities cuts across the divide. We must see past the vitriol and take the steps we can agree on, simultaneously saving lives and tax dollars. We continue to be in a drought, and hurricane season begins June 1. We need local leaders to start making plans now for a safer, more proactive future.

Call your leaders, supervisors, and local politicians. Leave the nonsense to our useless congressman, who is just wasting precious time.

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June 17, 2021 | Daily News-Record

The most effective way to keep persons behind bars in the system is to first alienate them from family and friends and from their community support systems. Give those folks 15 minutes per week to hug a friend or family member, and then make it really difficult to keep in touch with anyone from outside the system. A good way to do that is to charge them unreasonable fees to communicate with those people.

The prison telecom industry grosses nearly $1.2 billion per year in the United States. Federal and state prisons have been regulated by the Federal Communications Commission to charge no more than about 21 cents per minute for inmates to call family and friends. However, county and local jails aren’t so structured. These jails charge up to a dollar per minute for inmates to call loved ones, and to remain grounded as they serve their court-mandated sentences.

Inmates at Middle River Regional Jail and other prisons at the local level are subject to these exorbitant fees. Family members and loved ones often have to make hard budgeting decisions to keep in touch with those who are important to them. You don’t have to look hard to find stories of poor families that have to make the decision between paying for electricity and paying to maintain connection with a son, daughter, mother, or father who is incarcerated.

The telecom deals between Global Tel Link or other huge conglomerate systems and local sheriff’s offices are brokered to benefit both sides. Contracts and resulting spoils are shared between the criminal justice system and the corporations. Want to maintain a secure funding base? Keep your inmates cut off. That’s the system that we have, and courageous local leaders could tackle this complicated, insidious issue. However, leaders who make tough decisions and challenge ingrained systems aren’t leaders for long. Such is the reality for maintaining a status quo.

If Augusta administrators and leadership would like to display a high regard for inmates, they might renegotiate contracts that prevent efficient, unencumbered rehabilitation of local incarcerated persons. I can’t say that I understand the best way forward on issues like the Middle River Regional Jail restoration and how to ensure safe, clean facilities for inmates while discouraging rampant expansion of punitive institutions. One thing that is clear to me, however, is that we need to get profiteering out of our criminal justice system, and one way to do that is to start questioning local systems that have bought into the destructive prison telecom world.

Although those in prison broke the law, surcharges at the commissary and for phone bills are additional unsanctioned punishment. These are immoral embellishments of our punitive system, and they need to stop. Within nine years of release, studies have shown that almost 83% of released prisoners are arrested again in the United States. With an average price tag of $31,000 to keep someone in prison, this is an economic issue as well as a moral one.

We need to ensure that, upon release, those exiting the criminal justice system have as many tools as possible so that they stand a chance to never go back. We mustn’t take their years, as well as their family, social support systems, and their money, and then expect a good outcome.

Let’s call on local leaders and law enforcement to have the courage to buck trends and make tough decisions that will strengthen persons in prison so that they can serve time as easily as possible, and then be released to a better future. Stop predatory contracts and engaging in systems that just serve to kick folks who are already down.

Peter Barlow lives in Weyers Cave.

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Apr 10, 2025 | Northern Virginia Daily

A mentor of mine at the Department of the Interior once told me that, if you repeat something enough times and believe it to be true, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He was referring to the vitriol that folks have been paying to the federal government for decades, saying it is broken and does not serve Americans. President Reagan, despite all of his great qualities, knew how to add fuel to a fire with cheeky phrases by deriding bureaucrats who might utter “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

By painting a wonky, bookish, or even sinister picture of the faceless bureaucrat, politicians and their minions have undermined the very workers their messy patchwork of statutes, appropriations, and hurried continuing resolutions have funded. It’s as if architects ridiculed carpenters for putting all of those darn windows and unnecessary dividing walls in buildings. It’s right there on the blueprint!

What we are currently hearing in the media is nothing new, but the actions being taken to shatter any semblance of the working class bureaucracy is an assault on the very people who depend on government services. Of course, if you are of the ultra-wealthy elites and have had the privilege in life never to have needed government-subsidized assistance, then it all looks like a game that you can tinker with. Take a department out here or there, and see what happens, and then try to put it back once you screw something up enough.

However, if you have ever needed Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security or a student loan, things look very differently. If you live in Giles or Franklin counties and lost critical services after Hurricane Helene or even your home, it’s not a joke when politicians start talking ignorantly about emergency management.

If you were anticipating a 75% grant or Small Business Administration loan for your litter shed or home repair, things start to ring with a different tenor. Amid all of this talk of the awful “federal worker,” I would posit that most of our politicians just don’t know what they’re doing and don’t read the laws they write. They’re frustrated that they have to justify keeping their jobs every once in a while, so they’re making the bureaucracy that serves the American people the scapegoats while we have to watch shallow men with deep pockets tinker around with our institutions as if it’s a game.

As you all know, this is not a game. These are our tax dollars, it’s our lives, it’s the air we breathe and the water we drink. If politicians don’t pay to enforce building codes or mitigate after disasters, it’s our tax dollars that are going to have to pay twice for things that could have just been built well once. I’d like for our state and congressional politicians to cough up their "five bullets" every week. I would imagine that it would go something like this:

• Talk

• Talk

• Talk

• Talk

• Talk.

Don’t buy into this trash about government workers and agencies. It’s a diversion from the folks on top. It always has been.

Pete Barlow lives on a farm in Augusta County. He is a life-long Shenandoah Valley resident who has worked for state and federal agencies for nearly 15 years.

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Open Forum | Peter Barlow
Aug 25, 2021

In 1922, Charles Wampler Sr. hatched his first 50 pullets, and thus the commercial poultry industry. Five years later, he went on to launch Wampler Feed and Seed Co. Fifty years later, there were nearly 1 million chickens in Rockingham County, giving rise to one of the agricultural industries that has made this area so successful and important for the food industry.

We need farms and the food that comes from them. It provides the backbone of our economy and ensures high-quality, low-cost food for others around the nation and in some other countries. As our agricultural industry expands, however, so does our collective responsibility to use diminishing resources in a sustainable manner.

Right now, 47% of the land in the lower 48 states is experiencing drought, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration considers the Shenandoah Valley to be in a moderate drought. Just before the recent rainfalls from Tropical Depression Fred, the Department of Environmental Quality was poised to declare a drought here, which would have curtailed surface water use for farms and other irrigation. With more mouths to feed and expanding agricultural use, we have to be increasingly vigilant to use best management practices for watering and irrigation. Droughts like the current one we are experiencing will increase in severity and frequency.

Our poultry industry that began with a meager 50 birds in 1922 now supports over 18.2 million in Rockingham County, according to the Agricultural Research Service statistics from 2017. Conservative estimates of 80 gallons of water per 1,000 birds per day means that poultry in Rockingham County use 1.5 million gallons per day, in addition to Rockingham’s 111,000 beef and dairy cattle, which consume about 1.75 million gallons per day. Add to that all the water we use to irrigate feed crops and pasture land.

Agriculture often gets the brunt of the blame for water consumption, but residential use as well as golf course consumption is significant. The average 150-acre golf course consumes over 200 million gallons of water per year, so we must all work together to curb consumption where we can.

Daytime irrigation is extremely wasteful, with evaporation consuming between 30% and 50% of the water used.

We must not only remain mindful of our responsibility to consume wisely, but we should also encourage those around us to adhere to commonsense guidelines. Water consumption and surface use regulations are at 9VAC25-210-(300–390) and contain great information on the permits required for excess surface water removal and laws for how to do so in the right way. Some may not be aware, but there are pumping limits, especially during times of drought. Although many consumptive laws are hard to enforce, that does not mean that we should pump with impunity as if our consumption of resources doesn’t have a direct effect on that of our neighbors, on fishermen, and on the larger environment.

If we cannot work together to deal with water shortages and receive neighborly suggestions for how to curtail water use now, how will we ever deal with the issue when a more severe drought is upon us? Laws and best management practices are not there to impede personal freedom, but rather to put some restraint on unabated consumption from a common resource. We must remember that we are merely stewards of these resources for a short while, and the way in which we use them will affect future generations.

Peter Barlow lives in Weyers Cave.

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May 21, 2021 | Daily News-Record

In his recent article summarizing a particular perspective on climate change in Wednesday’s DN-R, Marc Thiessen’s article cited a recent book by former Department of Energy scientist Steven E. Koonin. Rarely, I suspect, has Marc paid much attention to Mr. Koonin’s scientific perspectives, or to climate scientists, but he latched on to Koonin’s convenient theories that climate change isn’t human induced and isn’t that big a deal, but merely a construct of cyclical weather, supported by far-reaching corollaries and data.

Never mind the vast majority of the scientific community that disagrees, contesting this singular, myopic perspective with mountains of data. Thiessen continues that if theories of climate change and the forthcoming disaster are true, Koonin shows economic effects of doing anything significant to avert disaster are too significant to implement.

Folks like Thiessen write about American ingenuity and our ability to overcome any obstacle, while peddling fear-based assessments that if we actually try doing anything about this problem, it will irreparably cripple the economy. These conflicting messages are getting old.

One gaping problem I find with the theories that climate change is either not real, or not actionable, is that it’s not like acceptance of this problem is convenient for anyone. It’s not as if it greatly benefits any one subset of our society to acknowledge human fault and curtail resource use. Acceptance that climate change is occurring and that it is related to human activities is not convenient for any humans.

Consider two possible alternative theories on climate change: On one hand, we have the idea that climate change is a partisan theory fomented by folks who want to make life difficult for big corporations and push their agenda of renewable energy, and carbon sequestration, and restrict personal liberties to extract or burn finite resources. Conversely, we have a theory supported by overwhelming research. On that side, there’s estimates of around 150 million persons being forced to flee their homes due to increasing storms in the next 10 to 15 years. On that side, data show that without real curtailment of our resource use, we face irreversible calamity. People are dying as a direct result of shifting weather patterns that would not be there, were it not for the human race. That’s the uncomfortable perspective.

Unlike posh lives of politicians and speechwriters, most communities who stand to lose the most from climate change are not wealthy or powerful. They don’t have prep schools and extreme wealth, and they sure can’t speak with the same gravitas as folks like Mr. Thiessen, so their voices are drowned out easily. Most of the powerful voices who opine regularly about the inconsistencies of the overwhelming climate science do not stand to lost much if they’re wrong. The people who will be washed away first by climate change’s effects are living on little unnamed archipelagos all around the world, squatting on land that’s not theirs, hoping to provide for their families just like us here in the U.S. That’s the uncomfortable perspective.

My concern with articles like Mr. Thiessen’s is that, while he is making cheeky, devil’s advocate claims based on fear of jeopardizing capital, or freedom to exploit resources, or whatever, maybe the truth lies with the uncomfortable side of this argument. Maybe every significant, well-researched theory has dissenters like Koonin who should be taken with a grain of salt. Maybe this is hard, too onerous to take seriously and maybe we like freedoms and comfort a little more than we care to admit. It’s easier to make philosophical arguments from behind laptops, pontificating about “fuzzy” science with a Grande Café Macchiato in hand, than it is to get out there and care about something hard.

This is about lives and livelihoods and just because we can’t feel it, just because we’re not acutely suffering from it, doesn’t mean this crisis and these hard questions are not at our doorstep.

Peter Barlow lives in Weyers Cave.

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Peter Barlow
Feb 13, 2017 | Daily News-Record

Published on Dec. 20, 2016, the federal Stream Protection Rule would prohibit coal companies from dumping the spoils of mountaintop removal into streams and other waterways. The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement published the rule to protect more than 6,000 miles of waterways. The law simply said that there should be a buffer between mining fields and streams.

But due to fear mongering that suggested it would mean fewer jobs for the wealthy coal industry, the law was repealed along partisan lines.

The political parties differ ideologically on some fundamental issues. But this one—protecting our bodies and those of future generations from mining waste—should not be one of them. Proponents of the rescission said the rule might cost jobs. More than likely, it wouldn’t have caused any job losses for the highly automated coal industry. The rule might have meant a dent in the bottom line.

I’ll wager that the vast majority of those pushing this bill wanted to ensure that industry could squeeze every dollar it could out of our coal-rich Appalachians.

Clean water and a safe environment should not be secondary to making money. But the potential for loss of a little revenue was enough to do away with a rule that would protect streams for anglers, wading children, and anyone who likes to drink from the tap.

Many have decided to jump on a generalized platform before thinking about what it is they are supporting. Short-sighted politicians, including Rep. Bob Goodlatte, voted to repeal the law in the name of dividends and toeing a party line, instead of considering safe drinking water for those downstream from coal fields.

Amid our divisive discourse, folks are settling comfortably along lines of good and bad, rich and poor, educated and stupid, hardworking and lazy. Yet every one of us is complex, with a rich background of experiences and relationships, and we can’t just be divided into two groups on these issues.

Some issues unify us. We all have families and friends. We care about those around us. The environment should not be politicized. No one wins when we limit earth’s vitality.

Call local representatives and speak up for the health of our water.

Peter Barlow lives in Rockingham.

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Open Forum | Peter Barlow
Jul 1, 2021

Although I appreciate George Will’s incisive writing and provocative delivery, I found his recent Viewpoint article on meritocracy and equity overly simplistic. Will conflates the ideas—as do so many of us—of “diligence, industriousness, and deferral of gratification” with inherent success in our “open society.” Although the former qualities can all contribute to success and, by implication, wealth, it takes much more in our current society to get ahead.

It doesn’t matter how industrious or diligent a child in a marginalized community is if they don’t have equal access to two things: capital and credit. Without access to one or both of those, many persons work for generations to see little more than rented housing and myriad systemic obstacles. If a crediting system is historically weighted toward a particular segment of the population, that population will build wealth more quickly than any other. This is just the reality of our financial system.

The superficial perspective that hard work and “deferral of gratification” will lead to more success isn’t only wrong—it’s offensive to the millions of people who work day in and day out but who were born without the family ties or connections to capital and credit it takes to build the kind of wealth Mr. Will believes is so easily attainable. Not only that, but decades, if not centuries, of systemic discrimination contribute to inherited poverty for many.

Meritocracy, as we use it in this context, is a misnomer. The United States’ meritocracy is not based upon actual merit, but rather on entrenched systems of inherited wealth and privilege. It’s one thing to avail oneself of this system—cognizant of inequities, but motivated for incremental change—but it is another to act as though these structural problems don’t even exist.

Almost half of the world’s billionaires attained their primary wealth through inheritance. Many more had help with credit or capital investments to initiate their empires. Millionaires, according to research, tend to pull income from multiple streams and retain much of their wealth in property or stocks, which are not liquid and can’t be taxed—streams that require little to no work. Millionaires and the upper-middle class leverage assets because that’s the currency of capital.

That’s just working within the laws that we have. It’s not illegal to make money or to build upon assets to achieve more monetary success. It’s also not wrong or illegal for the marginalized among us to expect that they should receive the same rewards for their risks as others receive for theirs. What is illegal, though, is upholding crediting systems that are unjust and don’t give everyone the same opportunities to borrow in the first place. And it’s just plain false to assume talent and hard work are directly correlated to wealth.

If we really had a meritocracy, that would be fine with me. But what we have is a system where wealth begets more wealth, and the disadvantaged must work twice as hard to achieve the same dividends as those more fortunate among us.

Will indignantly states that progressives believe in “redistribution of the rewards of talented to the less-talented.” Well, sorry to bust your bubble, George, but it doesn’t take talent to earn interest. That just takes time.

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Daily News-Record | Jun 4, 2019

It is important these days that we assume positive intent from others. We must believe that politicians are doing their best to serve the constituency that has sent them to their office. Personally, I’m working to look for the best in all of our representatives, whether red or blue, liberal or GOP. I strive to resist my primitive urge to pick a side but first to learn what politicians are working to do, regardless of their party affiliation.

We have an election coming up and I love the Shenandoah Valley. I have deep roots here as do many of my neighbors. The mountains to the east and west provide the backdrop to more than 10 generations of my family on both sides. I want those mountains, the rivers, and the scenery to be here for my children and theirs. For these reasons, I’m disheartened when I see that local politicians are putting their names on bills that will imperil these streams and mountains, making them vulnerable to unfettered development or waste. We have to be good stewards of this land.

Tony Wilt has a long history of siding with unfettered, unsustainable development of this land I love. In 2011, Wilt authored a bill that would provide stormwater management fee waivers to state and federal agencies. In 2016, he again co-authored a bill that would provide for certain municipalities to get a pass and opt out of erosion and stormwater management programs. In 2014, Wilt co-authored legislation to reduce clean air standards for energy producers. In 2015, he authored a bill that would take enforcement power of the Scenic Rivers Advisory Committee away providing for less oversight on all projects.

Scenic rivers in Virginia include the Calfpasture, the South Fork of the Shenandoah River, the Rapidan River, as well as many others. I’ve shed and camped and paddled those rivers as have many of my friends and family members. Removing simple, commonsense protection for these rivers could change them forever. If we neglect good stewardship of our land and water, it will be gone in perpetuity. Native trout are hard to bring back, as are old-growth forests and meandering rivers. These aren’t just bad policies. They’re threats to the very character of the Valley.

Wilt is a lifelong Shenandoah Valley resident, but for some reason, he lacks either the desire or the acumen to promulgate legislation that will protect the scenic value of the Valley for generations hence. Even worse, he’s worked for years to repeal good ideas from the Code of Virginia that will ensure smart, well-reasoned progress. We must assume the best of intentions from our politicians in both parties, but when they show us time and time again that they don’t have the Shenandoah Valley’s best interests at heart, it is our responsibility to vote them out of office.

Peter Barlow lives in Rockingham.

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Aug 26, 2018 | Daily News-Record

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline issue is an issue of shared natural resources, corporate greed, and politics as usual. In our democracy, I’m appalled that singular corporate interests and those political cronies whose campaigns they help fund can overwhelm the majority collective voice of the people. The ACP was sold to constituents as an employment boon to the state and the natural gas was touted to augment our domestic fossil fuels and reduce the price of heating for Americans. Both of these talking points were lies and, amid the permits and hearings and public discourse, we’ve all but forgotten the initial prevarications upon which the case for the ACP was built.

National forests belong to all of us, and we have a public process to fairly determine what activities the collective believes are legitimate for those lands. If you take the time to look at those western slopes, you can see that there’s already a utility corridor there, so at some point, we determined that the need for electricity to homes necessitated it.

In contrast to those power lines, the ACP will take fracked natural gas from shale beds in West Virginia and deliver it to ports in Hampton Roads so that Dominion can sell it at a premium for export.

This is not where I deride capitalism or corporate interests, but it is the point at which we all should begin a conversation about the politics and money behind this and other projects that aren’t in constituents’ best interests. Our economy is built upon fossil fuels and natural resource exploitation and we all understand that those resources must come from somewhere but we must not make decisions based upon lies and deceit as was the ACP project.

Who stands to gain from the ACP? Terry McAuliffe made $190,000 from Dominion, Emmett Hanger made $25,000, Ben Cline made $15,000 and Tony Wilt made $10,000. That’s how much it costs to sell out our forests, our heritage, and get Valley residents to buy into an idea that won’t make jobs or put a dime in their pockets. Do environmentalists stand to gain anything from speaking out against the project?

After 15 years working for state and federal conservation agencies, I can guarantee that we don’t. Although the message is often imperfect, environmentalists are advocating for the land that we all love, regardless of the financial implications. What about the politicians whose campaigns are buoyed with Dominion’s corporate funds?

It is time that we educate ourselves about the interests driving the consequential decisions that affect our landscape. Buildings rise and fall, trees grow and topple, and politicians will come and go. The ACP and other projects like it, however, will remain a scar on our Shenandoah Valley landscape forever. Long after all of our local politicos are gone, the ACP will still cascade clumsily down those verdant slopes on the Western horizon.

Peter Barlow lives in Rockingham.

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