NEWS ROUNDUP

Wildfires Reset Rock Clocks Wildfires are resetting the atomic clocks of some rocks, geologists say. The confirmation of the long-suspected wildfire effect could also give archeologists and fire historians a new way to date ancient fires. By heating up rocks and releasing helium that has been building up in the common mineral apatite ever since the rock first cooled, wildfires essentially erase the "cool-down" record within rocks, said Sara Mitchell of the University of Washington...Skiers again mapping out Nordic trail plan The White River National Forest is accepting comments on the West Elk Multi-Use Club application to mark and groom up to 20 miles of existing roads and trails for cross-country skiing near the Buford/New Castle Road northwest of New Castle. "Any approved marking and grooming would comply with Forest Service standards for winter trails," said a White River National Forest notice. If approved, the project would be implemented this winter...Column: The price of preservation: Does environmental value of land trusts justify big tax breaks? Between 1990 and 2000, the acreage of land protected by local, state and regional land trusts increased 226 percent to 6.2 million. When added to larger, national land trusts the acreage increases to more than 20 million acres -- more land than all of the national parks in the lower 48 states. But private land trusts, and particularly conservation easements, are facing increased scrutiny. Critics cite conflicts of interest on some trust boards and wealthy landowners trading land of questionable environmental value for big tax breaks as evidence of a system they say can be abused. The Washington Post published reports of a Florida golf course consultant who boasted online about an investor saving $4.8 million in taxes by agreeing not to build homes along fairways. In another published incident, luxury home builders in North Carolina reportedly paid $10 million for land only to receive a $20 million tax deduction for only building on a third of the tract. A developer in Pennsylvania was reported to have gotten a break for enacting building restrictions in portions of a subdivision that were unfit for building in the first place...Are U.S. Landowners Killing Rare Species to Avoid Regulation? Critics of the animal's protected status, including those representing farmers, ranchers, and developers, among others, have presented evidence that the mouse does not qualify as a threatened species. These landowners feared regulation of agriculture, development, and leisure activities on their land, all of which could have been curtailed as potentially damaging to the mouse's habitat. "The Endangered Species Act is one of the major tools in the U.S. to conserve species," said Amara Brook, psychologist and lead author behind the study. "But in some cases it may not be enough."...Arsenal nears milestone in transition to refuge Nearly one-third of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal Superfund could become a wildlife refuge by the end of next year. The Environmental Protection Agency is expected in 2004 to recommend that 5,000 of the 17,000 acres within the arsenal are clean enough to be taken off the Superfund National Priority List. The arsenal outside Denver already is among the best places in North America to see trophy mule deer bucks...A paleontologist stalks a mass murderer The Gorgon was the top predator of its day, taking down strange beasts the size of a modern hippopotamus. The first man to find one called it Gorgonopsid, after the mythical Gorgon, a creature so horrible that all who gazed upon it were turned to stone. The animal stood 10 feet from tip to tail. Its head was tiger-like, with four-inch teeth designed for slashing prey. And yet it was eerily not like a tiger at all because the eyes were set at the sides of the head like those of a lizard, and the huge body was covered with scales. In a tale of science and discovery that reads like a whodunit, Peter Ward tracks the answer to the question: Who killed the Gorgon? It's an important question, because the Gorgon was snuffed in the largest mass-murder in history: the Permian extinction of 250 million years ago that killed 95 percent of the species on earth. It was so extraordinary that it makes the Cretaceous extinction - the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago - look like a decidedly second-rank disaster...Final Spending Bill Shortchanges Parks The Department of Interior's final 2004 spending bill, signed into law recently by President Bush, allowed the administration's process for privatizing park jobs to proceed and left parks and public lands vulnerable to harmful road construction. The final bill requires the Department of Interior to spend no more than $2.5 million on job outsourcing studies and related expenses this year and to extensively report back to Congress on how studies are going. The first privatization studies are expected to examine Park Service jobs at Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, and more studies are expected next year...Massacre site given to tribes Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal leaders prayed when a Colorado casino owner handed over the deed to the Sand Creek Massacre site in southeastern Colorado. The ceremony, which took place at the Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribal Headquarters in Concha, Okla., earlier this month, included the story of the slaughter: On Nov. 29, 1864, Col. John Chivington ordered 700 soldiers to attack a sleeping village of about 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho, mostly elderly people, women and children. Laird Cometsevah, president of the Southern Cheyenne Sand Creek Descendants, said that a white flag of surrender and a U.S. flag given to tribal leaders by Abraham Lincoln were flying over the camp that day...Energy Department wants land to build railroad to Yucca The Energy Department wants to reserve more than 482 square miles of public land to build a rail line stretching to a national nuclear waste dump in the Nevada desert. The Bureau of Land Management issued a public notice Monday on the Energy Department request to withdraw 308,600 acres of public land from surface entry and mining for the next 20 years. The department would study the land for construction, operation and maintenance of a rail line to Yucca Mountain... Precipitation deficits loom There are two kinds of drought, according to BLM soil scientist and plant ecologist Bill Volk - agricultural drought, which gets the most press, and hydrologic drought, which should get a little more. Agricultural drought can be resolved quickly with a little well-timed moisture, he said. Billings and much of Montana suffered extreme precipitation deficits in 2003, but adequate spring moisture and cooler spring temperatures gave Montana its first good grass, hay and winter wheat crops in years. It's the hydrologic drought that worries Volk. "Hydrologic drought is looming larger and larger every day and will take a long time to turn around,'' he said. More than a single reasonably wet spring will be needed replenish streams, springs, aquifers, sub-soils and reservoirs... Column: The Right to Be Wild It was a long list, though not as long as the dossier I find myself compiling about the current chief executive, also from the nether regions of Texas. I'm not going to cover the waterfront, won't tell you everything, but as a Texas native and ex-petroleum geologist who has some thoughts on the subject of wilderness, I'd rather try to posit why the Bush administration's death knell for wilderness is wrong in a fundamental way: It strips away or eradicates not just a cultural cornerstone, but yet another of our rights -- the biological and utterly democratic right to know a piece of wild country will always exist under its own awesome powers of grace and logic. With his public-lands antics, Bush is stealing both our history and our future. He started in Utah, in Orrin Hatch-land, where residents of that state had spent years using a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) tool known as the Wilderness Handbook to inventory areas of the state's incredibly remote federal lands that had never been identified as wilderness. They found 3.2 million acres' worth, and 22 million acres of noninventoried BLM lands nationwide that were in need of federal protection. But in April, the administration slashed back: Interior Secretary Gale Norton announced that her department would no longer consider any public lands -- in Utah or anywhere else -- for new wilderness protection. The administration further argued that although it would manage these lands for other values -- oil and gas production, coal extraction, irrigation and hydroelectricity, timber, grazing, etc. -- it no longer had the authority to designate any of the public's lands as wilderness...Sierra counties face air cleanup: Rural regions must join in effort of smoggier neighbors Mountain-county residents east of the murky San Joaquin Valley are upset over the news that their fresh air soon will be classified as dirty, but that's only part of their bad news. Amador, Calaveras, Tuolumne and Mariposa counties also will be pulled into the massive smog cleanup campaign for the Valley, the second-dirtiest air basin in the country. And the real downer: Their problem is not home-grown. The Valley is the biggest source of their pollution, sending smog to the mountains on prevailing summer breezes...A Free Trade Boom or an Environmental Bust? Metales y Derivados has become a symbol of what many environmentalists consider the failure of the North American Free Trade Agreement to adequately protect natural resources since it dismantled trade barriers among the United States, Mexico and Canada one decade ago on Jan. 1. "By increasing trade, NAFTA was supposed to create more resources to protect the environment," said Constance García of the Border Environmental Justice Campaign, a San Diego-based group that is lobbying to clean up the Metales y Derivados site. "Ten years later, that promise hasn't been kept." NAFTA's defenders counter that Mexico's environmental record is better now than it was before the pact. They note that many factories created in Mexico under NAFTA pollute less than their older, U.S. counterparts do. What's more, a bi-national NAFTA bank and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have poured more than a half-billion dollars over the past decade into such projects as cleaning contaminated water and improving air quality in border areas that have grown under NAFTA...Plan in the works to unite Mexican, U.S. governors on Rio Grande water issues With that in mind, a plan is in the works to bring the governors of New Mexico, Texas and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila and Tamaulipas together to draft a water agreement. The goal: to help future generations on both sides of the border manage the basin. "I'm very concerned by the lack of attention Mexico's federal government and the U.S. government are giving to water issues at the border," said New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who is behind the effort. Richardson wants the five governors to draft an agreement that would cover water use, conservation and management of the river. He hopes to rally the leaders as chairman of the U.S.-Mexico Border Governors Conference. If successful, Richardson and others say the agreement would be a breakthrough for the border...An odd lizard lives in huge numbers nearby. Why? Only one kind of lizard lives on Santa Barbara Island, and that's plenty. As many as 1,300 occupy a single acre on the rocky outpost, the highest known density of any ground-dwelling lizard on Earth. Imagine lizards waiting nose to nose to snap up the next available fly. Jammed claw to claw under prickly-pear cactuses. Skittering over sleeping bags in the dark. But Schwemm, a Channel Islands National Park wildlife biologist, repeats the warning of experts: This is not an easy reptile to hunt. For decades, scientists have traveled 38 miles out to sea to study Xantusia riversiana, or the island night lizard, and each discovery is more peculiar than the last. Like a Lewis Carroll creation, this species is at once familiar and strange...Western author continues living life the cowboy way Max Evans apologized to director Sam Peckinpah for breaking the latter's ankle in a brawl. Max only intended to break his neck. When it comes to the cowboy way of life, authenticity is what Evans is about. He likes Western films and the myths they perpetrate just fine, but he's always prided himself on portraying the reality behind the West whether that reality deals with the land, the animals, the cowboys, the bartenders, the artists or the hookers...PBS Bucking Horse film nearly done The annual Miles City Bucking Horse Sale is being used to demonstrate the culture of Eastern Montana in a documentary film being prepared for public television. "We are using the Bucking Horse Sale as a state of affairs for small ranches. ... It's a more intimate look at what life is like in Eastern Montana," said Ian Kellett, co-producing the film with Jon Dodson. The annual three-day sale and rodeo in May usually brings 200 to 300 unbroken horses to be viewed in a rodeo setting by buyers from around the country...