NEWS ROUNDUP

Column: Bush likes forest industry, but not the trees The president's fondness for the timber industry is well documented. Even his forest fire prevention bill -- the so-called Healthy Forests Initiative -- is tilted toward timber industry interests. But now the Bush administration is poised to issue its radical rewrite of the National Forest Management Act regulations, which have protected our national forests, including the Olympic and Wenatchee forests in Washington, for decades. A key amendment scheduled for a vote today in the House, co-led by Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Tacoma, can stop these regulations in their tracks. We better hope it does, because the latest draft of President Bush's scheme is frightening.... Fight against wildfires chronically underfunded As America’s forests and public lands burn this year, the federal government likely will spend whatever it takes to fight the wildfires. The policy sounds good, but watchdog groups and critics of the Forest Service's “suppress at all costs” mentality toward wildfires say that because firefighting is chronically underfunded, money is siphoned from other agencies, hurting efforts to prevent wildfires in the first place. “The federal land agencies, and especially the Forest Service, have a blank check to put out fires and thus have no reason to control their costs,” says Randal O’Toole of the Thoreau Institute in a report called Reforming the Fire Service(pdf).... Three face criminal charges in grizzly bear deaths Two dead grizzly bears have landed three Flathead Valley residents in trouble, the men charged with illegally killing the protected bruins. James Fisher and his 14-year-old son Zachary were charged with killing a grizzly, and with shooting from a public roadway, in relation to a May 22 case of mistaken identity. The Fishers were reportedly hunting black bears on the west side of Hungry Horse Reservoir when they shot the grizzly by mistake. Black bear hunters are required to pass a bear-identification test prior to receiving a license. Fisher reported the accident to officials, who later filed charges.... Promotion affects key player on Klamath For Klamath River fisheries advocates fighting the Bush administration over water flows for salmon, Sue Ellen Wooldridge has been a calming influence as Interior Secretary Gale Norton's top assistant. But just as the fight over the river's fishery shows signs of heating up again, the former Sacramento lawyer has been thrust into the middle of another raging controversy that will mean less time for the Klamath River battle. While the Senate was away on its Memorial Day recess, President Bush used his executive powers to appoint her as the Interior Department's solicitor, or top lawyer.... Electrical plant haze a concern As Americans planned last month for summer vacations in the national parks, two federal agencies began raising concerns with the Utah Division of Air Quality's plans to approve a new coal-fired power plant in Delta. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Park Service warned that pollution from the proposed Unit 3 of the Intermountain Power Plant (IPP) will further obscure the vistas in Capitol Reef, Canyonlands and other national parks in the West. The Utah Chapter of the Sierra Club and other environmental groups share the concern, and they have joined the agencies in criticizing the state's evaluation of Unit 3. The groups want tougher emission controls and a tougher pollution evaluation.... Column: Lying about Yosemite Yosemite National Park is one of the beauties of nature that has brought me back every year for more than 20 consecutive years. But, in recent years especially, there seem to be two Yosemites -- the one discussed in the media and the one I see with my own eyes. On the first day of my visit this year -- June 6th -- there appeared one of the standard propaganda pieces on Yosemite in the San Francisco Chronicle, illustrated with the standard propaganda photographs. They say the camera doesn't lie but it can do some serious misleading. A standard lie of the environmental extremists is that Yosemite is "over-crowded" and choked with bumper-to-bumper traffic. True to form, the San Francisco Chronicle shows a line of cars and a couple of pedestrians scooting between them.... BLM OTERO MESA PLAN FAILS TO PROTECT N.M. GROUNDWATER A new study finds that the controversial U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) drilling plan for Otero Mesa could jeopardize the potential of the aquifer beneath the Mesa to meet the water needs of 800,000 people in drought-stricken New Mexico. That conclusion is based on the fact that the BLM plan "makes no special provisions for protection of ground-water resources" including existing and proposed public water wells. The study by the Albuquerque-based water-resource consulting firm John Shomaker & Associates, Inc. was conducted for the Otero Mesa Coalition and the Campaign to Protect America's Lands and was released just two days before a June 17, 2004 hearing on more environmentally sensitive rules proposed by the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division at the direction of Governor Bill Richardson.... Hearing begins on former Box O grazing A U.S. Department of Interior administrative law judge began hearing an appeal Monday morning from a rancher whose request to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to allow her cattle to graze on the former Box O Ranch has been repeatedly denied. Jennifer Walt, whose family owns the Box D Ranch adjacent to the former ranch in the Jenny Creek drainage of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, wants Judge William E. Hammett to overturn the BLM’s denial. Hammett is based in Sacramento with the interior department’s hearings and appeals office.... Greenpeace Blocks Timber Road in Oregon The environmentalist group Greenpeace opened its summer campaign to protect old growth forests in southern Oregon with a mixture of low-tech tactics and a high-tech way to tell the world what it was doing. Three protesters were arrested Tuesday after being dislodged from a 20-foot shipping container that had been plopped down in the middle of a logging road to block workers from getting to 236 acres of forest designated for a timber sale. Two men equipped with a video camera and a laptop computer with a satellite Internet connection were locked inside the steel container, giving updates. Another protester sat outside the container, her arm through a hole in one side and locked inside a concrete-armored box.... Column: A win for Gale Norton Environmental group leaders have found it very easy to criticize Interior Secretary Gale Norton. The former Colorado Attorney General has taken a lot of heat during her tenure in Washington and has more than once been pictured as a Westerner who is all too willing to sell out the interests of the West. Because of that history, it is all the more important now to give some credit where credit is clearly due. Norton was on the winning side of a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a case that had challenged her alleged lack of concern about off-road vehicle use in land designated as potential wilderness.... Government asks energy industry for help in fighting lawsuits A Justice Department official asked the energy industry for help in battling a record number of lawsuits, most of them environmental challenges of oil and gas drilling on public land. About 7,100 cases are being litigated by the department's Environment and Natural Resources Division, said Thomas Sansonetti, an assistant attorney general of the Justice Department. More than two-thirds of the cases originated west of the Mississippi River, most of them in the Rockies. "When these lawsuits come up, when they sue the federal agencies like EPA or BLM, intervene if possible," Sansonetti told executives at the Independent Petroleum Association of America conference Monday. "The fact is, we need help. Sometimes, two or three of our attorneys are matched up against entire law firms." The department handled 3,200 cases during the Reagan administration and was litigating 4,500 in 1992 at the beginning of the Clinton administration....