NEWS ROUNDUP

Gov. wants separate wolf lawsuits Gov. Dave Freudenthal warned Friday that merging two anti-wolf lawsuits could bog down efforts to reinstate Wyoming’s controversial plan to manage wolves as predators. Freudenthal told ranchers in Jackson that he did not want to tie a state lawsuit to a similar legal challenge put forward by the Wolf Coalition, which represents 27 groups, including some county commissions who want to keep wolves out of their jurisdiction. Freudenthal explained that the state’s suit makes a very narrow legal claim that the federal government erred in rejecting Wyoming’s wolf plan. In contrast, the Wolf Coalition raises many more questions, including whether the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s handling of wolf recovery in general has violated federal law....
Threats to Rare U.S. Jaguar Increase Along with Sightings As the number of sightings of wild jaguars increases in southeastern Arizona, the endangered cat faces a host of unexpected new threats from drug smugglers, border patrol officers and builders of a proposed power line. Popularly linked to the jungles of Latin America, a small population of jaguars once roamed wilderness areas of the West from California to Texas. Ranchers and hunters were believed to have wiped them out by the mid-20th century. Since 1996, however, there have been a dozen confirmed sightings of the feline in Arizona and New Mexico. Five times since last June, photos and tracks have documented the presence of jaguars between Tucson and the Mexican border....
Man's grizzly encounter is featured on 'Nature' Stop a minute, close your eyes, and try to imagine your head inside a female grizzly bear's mouth. Try to imagine that one of her canines has pierced your skull and the other has ripped part of the skin from your face. You would be as certain as Mark Matheny was that you were going to die. Matheny, president of UDAP Industries Inc. of Bozeman, Mont., is one of the people who populate "The Good, the Bad and the Grizzly," an episode of the Nature series airing Sunday on PBS. Oscar winner Chris Cooper narrates this hour, the focus of which is the icon of Yellowstone National Park, the grizzly bear. The burning question? Should they be removed from the endangered species list?....
Judge says FEMA needs to consider salmon protections A federal judge has ruled the Federal Emergency Management Agency sidestepped its duty to consider how its flood insurance program might harm Puget Sound chinook salmon. U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly said FEMA violated the federal Endangered Species Act by not formally consulting with the National Marine Fisheries Service to make sure the flood insurance program didn't jeopardize salmon habitat. Plaintiffs, who had filed a lawsuit accusing FEMA of threatening the federally protected fish by encouraging development in flood plains, called Zilly's ruling "a victory for salmon over strip malls.''....
Bush's second-term stamp on environment With the newly reelected Bush administration backed up by a tighter GOP grip on Congress, the coming political season could become a watershed mark for environmental protection and energy policy. As a result, federal laws and regulations dealing with everything from endangered species and forest protection to air and water pollution to oil and gas drilling, are likely to see a rigorous shaking out. The administration is eager to achieve things denied it during President Bush's first term: pumping oil out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), allowing loggers access to millions of acres of roadless national forest land, easing Clean Air Act restrictions on some pollutants, making it easier to extract oil and gas in the Rocky Mountains, and passing an energy bill put together by Vice President Dick Cheney with help from the energy industry....
Kick the Habitat: GOP has set its sights on revamping the Endangered Species Act The newly empowered Republican majority on Capitol Hill will grease the skids for plenty of legislation that's sure to gall environmentalists and delight developers, but the most galling and delighting of all could be sweeping changes to the 30-year-old Endangered Species Act. Business leaders, top Bush officials, and many Republicans in Congress have been arguing for the past four years, if not longer, that this cornerstone environmental law is outdated and ineffective, in particular its critical-habitat provision, which constrains development in certain biologically sensitive areas deemed necessary to species rehabilitation....
Predator control helps threatened snowy plovers For the second year in a row, the Western snowy plover has had a strong nesting season on Oregon beaches, in large part due to wildlife managers killing the foxes, crows and ravens that eat the threatened birds' eggs and young. This year the adult population of about 140 plovers in Oregon produced 107 young that survived long enough to learn to fly — known as fledglings — compared to 60 in 2003 and an average of 37 since monitoring began in 1990, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service....
Pacific Lumber opens first major California sawmill in a decade Pacific Lumber Co. unveiled its new state-of-the-art sawmill in Humboldt County on Wednesday, the first major sawmill built in California in a decade. The $25 million facility, which can process logs two to three times faster than standard mills, will reduce waste, boost productivity and improve worker safety, company officials said. State and community leaders were invited to tour the facility during a dedication ceremony in Scotia, about 30 miles south of Eureka. When operating at full capacity, the new facility will process 260 million board feet of finished lumber each year, making it one of the country's most productive sawmills....
U.S. Accused of Changing Drilling Rule The Sierra Club alleges in a lawsuit that the Bush administration changed a rule so oil and gas producers could more easily drill under national parks from outside their boundaries. The environmental group alleges in the suit filed Wednesday that the change affects 14 national parks that have privately owned minerals beneath them. The suit asks the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia for an immediate injunction to reverse the change it alleges, which it said was done without public input, and also to drop drilling....
Column: Faith-Based Parks? Two-thirds of the way across the continent, some four million people annually visit Grand Canyon National Park, marveling at the awesome view. In National Park Service (NPS) affiliated bookstores, they can find literature informing them that the great chasm runs for 277 miles along the bed of the Colorado River. It descends more than a mile into the earth, and along one stretch, is some 18 miles wide, its walls displaying impressive layers of limestone, sandstone, shale, schist and granite. And, oh yes, it was formed about 4,500 years ago, a direct consequence of Noah’s Flood. How’s that? Yes, this is the ill-informed premise of “Grand Canyon, a Different View,” a handsomely-illustrated volume also on sale at the bookstores. It includes the writings of creationists and creation scientists and was compiled by Tom Vail, who with his wife operates Canyon Ministries, conducting creationist-view tours of the canyon....
Bill targets settlement of land claims Alaska Natives have waited almost 100 years for land promised by the federal government. And the state of Alaska still hasn't got the land that Congress pledged a half a century ago, back when Elvis Presley was a sergeant in the U.S. Army. Congress on Wednesday acknowledged the slow settlement of land claims is a problem and passed a bill meant to speed things up. A huge chunk of Alaska, almost 90 million acres, is affected by the bill. That is about three times the size of the state of Pennsylvania. The Alaska Statehood Act of 1958 promised the state 104.5 million acres. The state, 46 years later, is still waiting to get final title on more than half that....
Congress Approves Nevada Public Lands Bill Congress gave final approval Wednesday to wide-ranging lands legislation that sells off federal holdings in one of Nevada's least-populated counties, creates more than a dozen wilderness areas in the state and eases the way for a controversial water project. Returning this week after an election recess, the House passed a Senate-amended version of a public lands bill that rewards an array of Nevada interests, including water utilities, wilderness buffs and developers. The bill was sent to President Bush for his signature....
Column: A Lesson in Consensus from Idaho Three years ago, he recommended that the county seek federal legislation to address wilderness and grazing issues before a future president did so unilaterally. He told commissioners they would have to work with environmentalists to succeed. In October, in that same courtroom, Owyhee County Commission Chairman Hal Tolmie and Shoshone-Paiute Tribal Chairman Terry Gibson handed Idaho Republican Sen. Mike Crapo a proposal for protecting 517,194 acres of wilderness and 384 miles of rivers protected as "wild and scenic." Every public-lands rancher in the county had individually signed off on wilderness creation in his area. Conservationists and ranchers hugged. Then, they and motorized recreationists gave Grant a standing ovation for his remarkable mediation of a deal that gives ranchers additional peer review of BLM actions and a locally driven program for landscape management....
Company says coalbed methane fields are renewable Gas-producing bacteria munching on Wyoming coal may be a key solution to the nation's energy future, a Denver company claimed Tuesday. While much of the world's natural gas took millions of years to make, some new gas is being created every day and can be managed to produce a long-lasting supply, according to Luca Technologies Inc. The prolific Powder River Basin in northern Wyoming, the site of thousands of coal-bed methane wells, is producing natural gas in "real time," Luca's researchers said, citing laboratory research....
14 Nations to Participate in Plan to Reduce Methane Thirteen countries agreed yesterday to join a global plan proposed by the Bush administration to curb methane emissions by capturing the greenhouse gas and using it as an energy source before it is released into the atmosphere. Methane ranks second to carbon dioxide among human-generated contributors to global warming: Carbon dioxide accounts for 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, methane for about 16 percent. The administration pledged to spend as much as $53 million over the next five years to encourage companies to provide participating countries with technologies that can trap the gas and make it available to power utilities, private homes and even pottery kilns....
Bill Would Redefine Indian Tribe Campbell (R-Colo.) is sponsoring a bill innocuously titled "Native Americans Technical Corrections Act of 2004," which proposes in Section 14 to amend the definition of Native American in a 1990 law requiring the repatriation of remains to modern indigenous tribes. Instead of defining Native American as "of, or relating to, a tribe, people, or culture that is indigenous to the United States," the law would read "is, or was indigenous to the United States." Scientists intent on studying the Kennewick remains say the bill, if passed, would effectively overturn an appeals court ruling allowing their research to go forward and instead cede control of the bones to a coalition of four northwestern tribes that want to rebury them....
Animas-La Plata: Digging done, construction begun The digging for the Animas-La Plata Project pumping plant is over. The construction phase began Monday. "This is a huge milestone for us," said project construction engineer Rick Ehat as he watched the first bucket of concrete being dumped into forms for drain channels that will lie beneath the floor of the pumping plant. "We've been waiting for this since July when the contract to come up out of the hole was let."....
Editorial: Due Process on Dams IT'S NO SECRET that the Bush administration wants to tilt environmental rules to favor business interests. But the Interior Department has recently taken that approach to a new level of brazenness. The issue involves environmental requirements imposed on hydropower companies when dams come up for license renewal -- in other words, what steps they must take to protect fish and other natural resources. Under Interior's proposed regulation, hydropower companies would have the exclusive right to appeal to the department's political appointees to try to change or loosen conditions imposed by more junior officials. Others affected by the license renewal -- states, Indian tribes, anglers, environmental groups -- could respond to the power company's arguments, but they wouldn't have any parallel right to this interim appeal....
Utilities sue Montana over riverbed compensation issues Three utilities that own hydroelectric dams here have sued the state, urging a Helena district judge to declare that Montana has no legal basis to be compensated for their use of state lands on state-owned riverbeds. They asked Honzel to declare that the Federal Power Act pre-empts the state's 1931 hydroelectric resources law. What's more, the utilities asked Honzel to rule that the federal government's navigational easement precludes the state from seeking compensation for their use of streambeds for federally licensed hydroelectric projects. In addition, the utilities asked that Honzel rule that the state's course of conduct and statements regarding the hydroelectric resources law, together with the utilities continuous and uninterrupted occupations of the riverbeds, bars the state's claims for compensation....
Congress OKs settlement empowering tribes Arizona secured a surer but leaner water future Wednesday with final congressional approval of the most far-reaching Indian water settlement in U.S. history. The settlement, which now goes to President Bush for his signature, would cede to Indian tribes nearly half the Colorado River water originally set aside for Phoenix and Tucson and allow those tribes to lease it back to growing cities for a profit. The cities would be able to claim a small amount of new water to add to their existing shares of the river. Some central Arizona farmers would eventually lose water to satisfy the tribal claims, but it would be a gradual loss. The deal wouldn't take any water from cities or private water companies and wouldn't raise water rates unless cities signed huge tribal leases in the future....
Greens Paint Grim Picture of Future, Warmer World Environmentalists forecast a grim future for planet Earth Thursday, predicting that droughts, heatwaves and hurricanes will become increasingly common and more severe if global warming is allowed to continue unchecked. A coalition of eight of the world's largest conservation organizations said Russia's recent ratification of the Kyoto protocol on carbon dioxide emissions had given fresh impetus to the drive to cut global output of greenhouse gases. However, they said more had to be done if the world's average temperature was going to stop short of a critical two degrees Celsius rise above its mean in the pre-industrial era....
California's mammoth farm sector ponders life after Veneman Far from Washington, D.C., and growing crops unfamiliar in many agricultural states, California's farmers are eyeing winter without the comfort of a U.S. secretary of agriculture from their own soil. Monday's resignation of Modesto native Ann M. Veneman from the federal government's top farm post leaves the state without an agriculture secretary who intimately understands its unique crops, climate and pests, say officials who preside over a farm economy that produced $32 billion last year....
Republicans push to repeal law for food country-of-origin labels Telling consumers where their meat, fruit and vegetables came from seemed such a good idea to U.S. ranchers and farmers in competition with imports that Congress two years ago ordered the food industry to do it. However, meatpackers and food processors fought the law from the start, and newly strengthened Republicans now plan to repeal it before Thanksgiving....
Powell mercantile serves as model for others The people running the Powell Mercantile didn't expect their downtown clothing store to become a tourist destination, but people come to The Merc by the busload. The answer to the first part of the question is "pretty good." It has been three years since 800 community investors plunked down one or more $500 shares to put The Merc in business. Last year, the community-owned business cleared $560,000 in gross sales and shareholders should see "sizeable" dividends in the next few years, said Ken Witzeling, a retired pharmacist who sits in the president's chair on The Merc's Board of Directors. "We've made money since day one," Witzeling said....
After hard work, Ely sees dream come true Never give people in Ely a challenge because they will reach up and meet it, said Beverly J. Cornutt, a member of the Community Owned Mercantile Project Inc. board of directors. With those words, the town of 4,000 celebrated a major moment of life, as COMP opened the Garnet Mercantile Monday, filling the void left when J.C. Penney closed the town’s only department store — which opened in 1910. After exploring a variety of alternatives, such as trying to lure another chain store to town, the group heard about how the town of Powell, Wyo., handled a similar problem....