NEWS ROUNDUP

Measure pits oil and gas drillers against Colo. farmers, ranchers Bitter battles have been fought over what fair compensation is. Currently, if drillers and landowners can't agree on what's fair, the driller can post a bond and start work, while the dispute goes to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. House Bill 1219 states that if a company wants to drill, it must try to negotiate a contract with the surface owner for 60 or 90 days. If no agreement is reached, the parties hire an appraiser, and if that doesn't end the dispute, they go to binding arbitration. Oil and gas company officials say the bill would give a reluctant property owner months more to delay a permit, and that's enough to sink the whole narrow-margin business. "This is the most extreme bill I've seen," attorney Brian Tooley said. But Mary Ellen Denomy, a petroleum accountant, said the current law is weighted too heavily in favor of oil and gas companies....
Wolves' future may be gloomy Three out of five panelists discussing the future of wolves in Colorado predicted there would be no wolves in the state in 100 years. It was based, they all said, on projected development in the state. "If you see we now have 4.5 million people here, in 100 years there will be no room left for large predators like wolves," Skiba said. Tina Arapkiles, a biologist with the Sierra Club, disagreed and said there would be 1,000 wolves a century from now, based on available habitat and prey base. "I'm a far better historian than a prophet," Bangs said, "but the entire possibility of wolves in Colorado depends solely on the culture and acceptance by the livestock industry." He said in Italy, large carnivores are accepted, but in England, people go to great lengths to find and kill them. "The people who settled America came from the parts of Europe where wolves were mostly considered in the negative," he said....
Water, ag officials express concerns about proposal Water resources and agricultural officials are concerned about the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposal to designate critical habitat along the Verde River for the endangered southwestern willow flycatcher bird. If someone wants to sever and transfer water rights on land within the critical habitat and the project involves federal money or action, the project would need to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service and possibly pay for mitigation of the impacts, a water committee memo states. “This has the potential to reduce the water management options available to the region,” the background memo states....
Group seeks to shield polar bear A conservation group filed a formal petition yesterday seeking to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act. Polar bears could become extinct by the end of the century because global warming is melting away their sea-ice habitat, contends Kassie Siegel, lead author of the 154-page petition submitted by the Center for Biological Diversity. She contends the United States must quickly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to a fraction of current levels or polar bears will become extinct....
Justice balks at letting museum head spend his sentence reading up on law he broke More than a year after he was convicted of violating a federal endangered species law, Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lawrence Small is still negotiating with the Justice Department over what kind of "community service" he must perform as part of his sentence. The Smithsonian's chief executive wants to use the 100-hour punishment to lobby Congress to change the "outmoded" law he violated, while prosecutors argue that Small's proposal doesn't match the severity of his crime....
Bill would require compensation for land-use regulations Critics say a proposal requiring cities and counties to compensate property owners for land-use regulations would gut local governments' ability to protect landowners from their neighbors' bad decisions. "There are a lot of laws this would affect, and we all live downstream and downwind from someone and this will be a detriment to neighbors and taxpayers," Janet Ellis of Montana Audubon told the House Local Government Committee Tuesday. House Bill 594 is modeled on a law enacted by Oregon voters last year requiring local governments to pay landowners for any devaluation in property caused by land-use regulations....
Norton's Yellowstone tour touts snowmobiles With a jaunty orange pennant waving from the back of her black snowmobile, Interior Secretary Gale Norton tootled through a snowscape of hills, steaming rivers and indifferent bison this week, giving an unusual personal endorsement to the machines that some consider a blight and others a blessing. The secretary's three-day show of solidarity with snowmobiles, for which she was decked out in an all-black snowsuit and white scarf, was unambiguous as she gave one mini-news conference after another in the subzero temperatures, the last of them yesterday. Norton gave only faint praise to the snowmobile's competition. Emerging from a short ride in a vanlike snow coach, the mode of transport that is becoming an increasingly robust rival for snowmobile outfitters at the edges of the park, she said, "This is a much more ordinary kind of experience," adding, "it's not as special as a snowmobile."....
Peabody wins coal lease with record bid Competition is stiff for the Powder River Basin's relatively high-heating-value coal in southern Campbell County. Competing interest for the 327 million-ton West Roundup lease brought a record bid of 97 cents per ton on Wednesday, shattering the previous high of 92 cents per ton, according to the Wyoming Bureau of Land Management. Peabody Energy paid $317.6 million for the lease. The bid was somewhat of a surprise in the coal industry. It marks $1.69 billion in federal coal lease sales in the basin in the past year....
Churches unite for the environment Four local church leaders are among 88 from Oregon and more than 1,000 religious leaders nationwide who want to remind the Bush administration and Congress that when it comes to protecting the environment the mandate that comes from God is more important than any they might receive from various religious groups. In a statement titled "God's Mandate: Care for Creation" released Feb. 11, representatives from a variety of faith communities are calling on lawmakers to reconsider actions they believe will "reverse and obstruct programs that protect God's creation in our land and across the planet."....
Environmental History and Ecosystem Management A MANAGERIAL APPROACH to environmental manipulation recently has been enshrined in federal policy as "Ecosystem Management" and has become one of the nation's primary conservation strategies, adopted by the United States Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and agencies responsible for implementation of the Endangered Species Act. Ecosystem management is vaguely defined as the application of ecological principles to natural resources for the purpose of achieving both conservation and social needs. Despite its importance in policy, however, and over a thousand articles since 1983 describing it in the scientific literature, ecosystem management as a process remains poorly understood. Environmental historians, who have just begun to examine ecosystem management, can provide critical analysis of this increasingly dominant way of understanding and managing nature. Historians have examined natural-resource management during the early history of conservation, but more work remains to be done to connect ecosystem management to its historic antecedents in forest, range, and river management....
Being Inducted into the Barbed Wire Hall of Fame Jim Goedert of Kearney, Nebraska is editor of "The Barbed Wire Collector," a magazine devoted to the 'fine points' of barbed wire. "People from all over the world actually collect barbed wire. Most of them are farmers or ranchers or have been farmers or ranchers in their lifetime and they've been associated directly with the wire and so therefore they still maintain an interest. However, we do have doctors and lawyers and these types of people that do collect wire, and for what reason they collect it I don't know. I suppose they enjoy the historical part of it," he said. Barbed wire was first patented, and first mass produced, in the United States. Its use in large quantities began only about 150 years ago....