NEWS ROUNDUP

Mountain Lions Move East, Breeding Fear "Iowa is the state with the highest mountain lion hysteria." So explained Ron Andrews, furbearer resource specialist for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. His standing-room-only audience was mostly farmers and their wives, weatherworn men with feed caps, sturdy women with sensible shoes. They looked more suspicious than hysterical. They had crowded into a community center here in the heart of hog and corn country to find out the skulking particulars on the world's fourth-largest cat. State records show that mountain lions disappeared from Iowa in 1867. But with increasing and unnerving regularity, the ambush predator -- which will kill and eat house pets, livestock and humans but much prefers deer -- is back on the prowl across the Midwest. It's turning up on farms, in suburbs and even in occasional appearances downtown....
Barton grateful for court "blessing" The woman who started the Hayman fire, Terry Lynn Barton, didn't realize at first the magnitude of Thursday's ruling by the Colorado Court of Appeals, which threw out her 12-year state prison sentence. Her attorney assured her that it was a big deal. "He said: 'Merry Christmas. No one deserved it better than you,"' Barton said in a telephone interview Friday from a Fort Worth, Texas, prison....
‘Gateway to paradise’ might be sold A lake and private enclave east of Lake Tahoe could be sold to the federal government for $75 million under a proposal recently submitted to the Bureau of Land Management. The sale of Incline Lake near the Mount Rose summit is one of about $120 million worth of sensitive land acquisitions in Northern Nevada proposed in the latest round of land deals under the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act....
Family accused of misusing trust A lawsuit filed this week by the state attorney general's office accuses a Big Bear family of mishandling hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funds that were supposed to go to an environmental trust. The directors of the Natural Heritage Foundation, a nonprofit environmental group with more than $2 million in assets and land holdings, include Christian Lindblad and his parents Robert L. Lindblad and Samantha Lindblad, who are also involved in an attempted murder case from June 2002. The organization received about $600,000 in state grants to maintain a nature preserve in the Big Bear Valley over the past decade but has failed to account for more than $400,000 of that money, said Tania Ibanez, a deputy attorney general....
Feds propose reducing critical habitat for western snowy plover The federal government proposed Friday to protect smaller but more numerous sections of West Coast beaches as habitat for the western snowy plover, saying it hoped to reduce conflicts between the tiny shore bird and people playing in the sand. The new critical habitat proposal, prompted by a federal court order won by Coos County commissioners on grounds the original did not include a proper economic impact statement, comes as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is also considering petitions to lift Endangered Species Act protection for the bird. Paul Henson, assistant manager of the agency's California-Nevada Operations Office, said he hoped to use the critical habitat process to open as much beach as possible to recreation while providing what the plover needs to recover, without having to resort to heavy-handed regulation....
Anthropologist Pleads To Selling Parts Of Endangered Animals A cultural anthropologist who sold her Brazilian tribal art collection to the future head of the Smithsonian Institution pleaded guilty to selling parts of animals protected as endangered species. Rosita Heredia pleaded guilty Wednesday to violating federal law protecting endangered species by selling her collection to Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lawrence M. Small. He paid $400,000 in 1998 -- two years before he took over at the Smithsonian -- for the headdresses, ceremonial clothing and weapons for his private gallery in Washington, D.C. Heredia had permits to own the artifacts -- which included body parts and feathers of protected animals including harpy eagle, jaguar, leopard and giant armadillo -- for an educational purpose....
California activists call for lead ammunition ban to aid condors A coalition of environmentalists, American Indians and hunters is asking regulators to issue an emergency ban on lead ammunition in the condor's feeding territory and eventually statewide. "This is imperative to get this going. We feel this is an emergency issue for the condor," said Jeff Miller, a researcher with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups filing the petition with the state Fish and Game Commission. The move comes 18 months after state wildlife managers started a voluntary plan to protect California condors from lead poisoning. Separate studies for the state and federal wildlife agencies last year found condor lead poisoning increased during the fall hunting season.....
Government wants to open trails at former weapons plant The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service endorsed a plan Friday that would let visitors roam 16 miles of trails across a scenic, wind-swept plateau that once housed the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. A state health official said the 6,240-acre site will be safe for public use after a $7 billion cleanup of plutonium, but an activist disagreed. The cleanup of the site, set against the foothills northwest of Denver, is expected to be complete in 2006, and the refuge could open in 2008. Parts would remain off-limits because of buried wastes, but officials say the cleanup will remove surface contamination....
Coalbed leases to face new scrutiny Prompted by court and administrative rulings, federal land managers will review more than 400 coalbed methane leases issued before management plans were updated to reflect the industry's impact on air and water - a decision that could halt some existing development in the Powder River Basin. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Buffalo Field Office on Thursday issued two separate notices providing for environmental assessments in the basin, the state's most productive gas field. One is a review of 421 leases issued before the office's 1985 resource management plan was updated in 2003 to take into account unique effects of coalbed methane development, an industry federal land managers had not foreseen in the 1980s. The second assessment is a review of the impacts of those leasing decisions and the potential for changing the way methane leases on federal property are permitted in the future....
Column: A grandfather's tales of wild horses come true No man is allowed to live here, in the restricted area of the Yakama. Just the wind, and wild horses. Fifty years ago, my grandfather told me what I might see today, and in the rustle of the wheatgrass this afternoon I hear his Alabama twang: "Cayuses everywhere -- you know, mustangs, boy! There's enough wild hosses up in Horse Heaven Hills a whole damn horizon couldn't hold 'em." I am here to prove to myself these horses exist -- the feds insist that they do not -- and I am here because the same government has given me reason to worry for their future....
Letter: Controlling wild horses part of balanced range management Wild horses are in conflict with healthy rangelands, rather than with ranchers and their livestock. In this time when current range management theory dictates that public land ranchers need to have some grazing system, some method for rotating the areas his or her livestock use in order to provide periods of rest for the range, it is simply no longer acceptable that large herds of horses graze the same range all year, every year. No one is proposing that all the wild horses be removed from the ranges; the sale of older horses is simply the most practical way to allow for the reduction of horse numbers to levels which approach a balance with the health of their ranges....
Government finds no bias by consultant in Steens case Federal investigators found no bias in the work of a consultant tied to the mining industry who helped the U.S. government draft a new blueprint for the protected Steens Mountain region in south-central Oregon. However, the review by the U.S. Department of Interior's Office of Inspector General showed the government was two years late in making sure its contract with the consultant included provisions to guard against conflicts of interest. The review was conducted at the request of Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. He made the request after The Oregonian reported last year that officers of a Nevada company hired by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to work on the Steens Mountain blueprint were leaders of pro-mining groups....
Water users urged to consider 'worst-case scenarios' The commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation had a message for Western water officials on Friday: Get ready to make do with less. Just in case. John Keys told the Colorado River Water Users Association here that the bureau is developing "worst-case scenarios" should the current six-year drought persist. And among those scenarios are water allocation reductions from Lake Powell, perhaps as early as 2006, and from Lake Mead in early 2007. Mexico's water take beyond the 1.5 million acre-feet it receives as part of the Colorado Compact could be put on the table as well. "What I must emphasize is that this is only an example of the trade-offs we will have to make," Keys told the group, which wrapped up two days of meetings on Friday. "You all have an interest in how these issues are resolved, in a way that meets the needs of the entire [Colorado River] basin, while also following the Law of the River."....
Locke unveils Columbia River proposal In what is likely one of his last acts before leaving office, Gov. Gary Locke announced a new plan for managing the Columbia River, seeking to provide more water for farmers and cities in Eastern Washington while protecting fish and wildlife. Water users and conservationists have been battling for decades over water rights for the Columbia and its tributaries, with one side seeking more water for communities and commerce while the other side fights for sufficient water for threatened fish. Locke made finding a solution a priority in his second term, working to resolve hundreds of water-rights applications and reduce litigation on the issue....
Salt Lake City mayor pushes green crusade Attending a conference in Argentina this week, Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson wore his beliefs around his neck with a lanyard that read: "Yes to Kyoto. No to Bush." Under the Democratic mayor, Salt Lake City said "yes" in 2002 to the international agreement to cut carbon-dioxide emissions that President Bush rejected because, the White House said, it would harm the economy. On Thursday, a day after returning from the U.N. climate conference in Buenos Aires, Anderson said local governments have an important role in protecting the environment, especially in the face of Bush's "irresponsible" policy....
Western Governors' Wildfire panel says plan is working poorly Three years after Western governors and the Bush administration agreed on a plan to reduce wildfire danger, money is still lacking and the partnership between the federal government and state and local agencies isn't working well. A report by the Western Governors' Association advisory committee outlined how the plan is going. ''The central message of the report is that the federal government talks the talk on collaboration, but doesn't walk the walk,'' said Niel Lawrence, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's forestry project and a member of the panel that wrote the report. The plan, approved in 2001, called for improved fire prevention and suppression, fuels reduction, a long-term strategy for restoring wildlife habitat and community involvement....
Agency opted not to use DNA test on feed The Canadian Food Inspection Agency decided against using a DNA test on contaminated cattle feed that one expert says would have allowed it to determine if the feed contained banned cattle parts, The Vancouver Sun has learned. On Thursday, The Sun reported that a series of secret CFIA tests on vegetable-based cattle feed and feed ingredients found that 41 of the 70 samples (59 per cent) contained "undeclared animal materials." The CFIA has stressed that those tests -- conducted by looking at feed samples under a microscope -- do not allow it to determine whether cattle remains were fed to other cattle, the primary method in which mad-cow disease is spread....