NEWS ROUNDUP

Oil, gas auction breaks records The federal government set a record with its June oil and gas lease auction in Utah, offering 281,000 acres of Utah lands for development as part of the Bush administration's push toward more domestic energy production. Records are made to be broken, though. The next quarterly lease auction slated for Sept. 8 easily outpaces the June sale, with 362,665 acres spread across 223 parcels. Among the leases up for purchase, all or portions of 21 of the parcels - 19,338 acres in all - contain wilderness characteristics, according to the Bureau of Land Management, inspiring howls from conservationists both inside and outside of Utah....
Judge lifts injunctions on Biscuit Fire salvage logging A federal judge has lifted injunctions that had temporarily barred salvage logging of the 2002 Biscuit Fire in southern Oregon, but the legal battle is not yet over. The Forest Service said logging in theory could start now, but environmentalists' lawyers said they would try to stop it pending an appeal. The fire, which burned across some 500,000 acres in southwestern Oregon, was the worst wildfire in the nation that summer. It has led to one of the larger timber salvage sales of modern times....
Rainbows leave a clean forest Little damage was done to forest lands used by an estimated 20,000 people who attended the Rainbow Family Gathering in July, Forest Service officials say. Edith Asrow, the Warner Mountain Ranger District's ranger, said damage caused by campers in the Modoc National Forest's Bear Camp Flat was negligible....
Bidder protests recreation contract award Spherix Inc. of Beltsville, Md., has filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office over the Agriculture Department's award to ReserveAmerica of the $128 million contract for the consolidated National Recreation Reservation System. Under the contract awarded earlier this month, ReserveAmerica of Ballston Spa, N.Y., will develop a single, interagency federal recreation information and reservation service for the Forest Service to be ready later this year. It will offer centralized shopping for more than 57,000 campgrounds, cabins, parks, and tours of national sites, historic homes and caves....
Wildfire Grows To 1,200 Acres, Rushes Close To Gas Wells Authorities shut down gas wells Monday afternoon near Mesa Verde National Park as they battle a 1,200-acre wildfire that was sparked by lightning last week. Nearly 200 firefighters are battling the wind-fed fire in southwest La Plata County. The blaze exploded from 10 acres to 1,200 acres since Sunday. It is only 20 percent contained....
Editorial Big cats: We need balance IF wildlife lovers (and who isn't) think the problems with mountain lion attacks come from people, they're right. Only it's not folks horning in on lion territory. No, it was overzealous environmentalism that convinced voters to make the magnificent cats a protected species in 1990. Because wildlife officials can no longer manage the lions, which sometimes entails killing them, lions have multiplied to the point where there are just too many cats for the habitat and food source. While there have been no definitive counts of lions in the state, other factors lead wildlife officials to conclude the lions have increased dramatically....
EarthTalk: Do urban trees really help reduce pollution and clean the air? While Olmsted's statement may have been more philosophical than scientific, researchers have since found that city trees do indeed perform important environmental functions like soaking up ground-level pollutants and storing carbon dioxide, which helps offset global warming. Each year in Chicago, for example, the windy city's urban tree canopy removes 15 metric tons of carbon monoxide, 84 metric tons of sulfur dioxide, 89 metric tons of nitrogen dioxide, 191 metric tons of ozone and 212 metric tons of particulates, according to David Nowak, project leader of the U.S. Forest Service's Urban Forest Ecosystem Research Unit....
No proof conditions improving for Klamath salmon, opponents seek compromise There is no hard evidence that conditions have improved for Klamath River salmon, but many of the people fighting over sharing scarce water between fish and farms said Monday they are tired of the battle and moving closer toward the compromises necessary to find long-term solutions. About 120 people filled the Eureka City Council chambers for a forum sponsored by U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., to assess the status of salmon in the Klamath River two years after a die-off blamed on low water killed an estimated 35,000 to 70,000 fish, mostly adult chinook salmon and bring interest groups together....
Letter asks for priority on Klamath water storage Six members of the U.S. House of Representatives called on the Bush administration Friday to place a priority on developing extra water storage in the Klamath Basin and to seek external reviews of sucker fish populations. Rep. Richard Pombo, chairman of the House Committee on Resources, sent letters outlining the requests to administration officials....
Prairie dogs get new digs There’s a town being built on Bureau of Land Management property in Mesa County, and new inhabitants arrived to their desert home Saturday and Sunday. They didn’t come in moving vans or trailers. They came by pet carrier. White-tailed prairie dogs were relocated from private land to public land this past weekend by the Prairie Dog Relocation Project. The citizens group, sponsored by the Sierra Club, went through a rigorous permitting process with the state and federal government to move the prairie dogs from land where people viewed the animals as pests to federal land....
White House Expands Hunting, Fishing Lands The Bush administration said Monday it will give people who hunt and fish new access to hundreds of thousands of acres of lands and streams within 17 national wildlife refuges and wetlands. The decision as the Republican National Convention was opening in New York was announced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Hunting and fishing, along with observing and photographing wildlife, have long been allowed in the 95-million-acre refuge system. That includes 544 national wildlife refuges and thousands of small wetlands and other specially managed areas. Currently, more than 300 wildlife refuges and about 3,000 small wetlands are open to hunting, and more than 260 wildlife refuges are open to fishing....
NMOGA president blasts regulators, permitting process The Permian Basin and southeastern New Mexico may be “joined at the hip” geographically and geologically. But the two oil-and-gas rich regions become two distinctly different beings over the issue of governmental regulation and environmental activism, the head of a trade association says. Bob Gallagher, president of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, told a meeting of the area chapter of the Natural Gas Producers Association that much is happening related to oil and gas activity in New Mexico, “a lot of it good and a lot of it bad.” In New Mexico, the “bad” relates to the overwhelming amount of land owned by the federal government, which owns nearly 60 percent of the minerals, Gallagher said....
Republican landowners spout off over drilling during visit with Norton Rifle rancher Joan Savage doesn't consider herself to be an environmentalist. She's also a Republican, and confrontation was the last thing on her mind last week when she got the chance to talk to Interior Secretary Gale Norton about natural gas development in the West. Rather, Savage simply wanted to make Norton aware of concerns she and other landowners have about the industry. Savage joined a group of Republican landowners from Wyoming and New Mexico in chartering a plane and flying to Albuquerque, N.M., to speak with Norton Wednesday. And she's pleased with the reception she got....
Earth First! Then spread the carnivores Old monkeywrenchers never die, they just change tools. That's a successful strategy for Dave Foreman anyway. Foreman, a co-founder of Earth First! once known for his radical eco-terrorist approach, is now relying on science to accomplish his environmental agenda....
Seashore drilling: Ruination or salvation? Hidden from tourists' view in Padre Island National Seashore is a two-acre patch of hard-packed dirt and rock scraped from the lush sea oats and hardy shrubs that make up the island's interior. From that barren patch sprouts a metal wellhead — about 7 feet high — built to pump natural gas from the nearby Laguna Madre, a fragile super-saline bay tucked between the island and the Texas mainland. To state Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, the site is a perfect example of how industry can capitalize on the state's increasingly valuable energy resources while causing only minimal harm to the environment. To the Sierra Club, the drilling is a nightmare — the state inviting heavy industry into a national park for money....
Mr. Sandman, Bring Me Some Oil The geologists, roughnecks and recently minted M.B.A.'s being ferried north by the Suncor jet are all focused on one objective: an unconventional approach to producing oil by sucking the viscous tar out of the sandy soil around Fort McMurray, a city of 50,000 where the temperature can dip to 40 degrees below zero in the winter. Their output is already crucial to the United States' energy supply. The flow of oil extracted from Alberta's tar sands, also called oil sands, surpassed one million barrels a day at the end of 2003, and it is expected to double to two million barrels by 2010, matching the output of significant members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries like Libya and Indonesia. Much of the oil goes south across the American border....
Plaintiffs seek cattleman who hoofed it out of town Eight plaintiffs in a lawsuit are alleging rancher Tim Jacobsen and Herd Management LLC owe them $106,855.77 and 116 head of cattle from the Chirikof Island herd. In 2000, the federal government ordered the cattle removed from the island, at the south end of the Kodiak archipelago, where the unique stock have lived for more than 100 years. Jacobsen, holder of a ranching lease on Chirikof, formed Herd Management to evacuate the herd. But the remote location, severe weather and public controversy have dogged removal attempts....
Historic rancho eyed for future development The owner of what may be the last intact Mexican rancho in the state is considering developing the land, which stretches across thousands of acres east and south of Escondido. On Wednesday evening, the Pala-Pauma Sponsor Group will hear about the potential development of the historic 22,000-acre Rancho Guejito. The 22,000 acres stretch from Valley Center to the Wild Animal Park in San Pasqual Valley, and is the only completely undeveloped Mexican land grant rancho left in the state, said Bob Lerner, Valley Center History Museum historian. Lerner said there were originally 800 Mexican land grants in California but they have all seen some kind of development over the years. Rancho Guejito was given to Jose Orozco, the land's original owner, in 1845 by then-California governor Pio Pico. Rancho Guejito is still intact with the exception of a home built on the land in the 1990s, Lerner said....
It's All Trew: Early-day harvesting involved bangboard Since this was before tractors, teams and wagons hauled the grain to the barns. Most farm wagons had one to three sideboards around the bed. A bangboard was created by removing one or more of the sideboards from one side of the wagon and placing them atop the opposite sideboards, making a wall to throw the maize heads or ears of corn against while harvesting. A well-trained work team pulled the wagon alongside the men cutting and tossing. A "giddyap" moved the wagon forward and a "whoa" halted its progress. Two or more hard-working men and a good team could cover a lot of ground in a day keeping the bangboard "banging constantly."....