NEWS ROUNDUP

Pickens spends $50 million on water rights Boone Pickens is putting up $50 million dollars to buy water rights in Roberts, Gray and Hemphill Counties. Pickens, president and CEO of Mesa Water Inc., sent out letters this month to landowners in those counties offering to buy an undivided one-half interest of landowners' water rights. Many of those getting the offers were part of a Roberts County landowners group that had sided with Mesa Water in trying to gain permits during the last few years from the Panhandle Ground Water Conservation District, the body that regulates ground water in Roberts County. "Everybody that has been with us," Pickens said, "we made an offer to." The offers went to about 200 individuals and range from $525 to $350 an acre. Pickens said last week that the average offer is more than $450 an acre. The differing figures reflect the amounts of water available from individual properties....
Editorial - Crying wolf: A good foundation for easing the return of wolves to Utah Utah used to be home to thousands of wolves that ranged everywhere but the salty desert. Eight years before statehood, the territorial government began rewarding wolf kills at a buck a head. Annihilation took 42 years. Now, 75 years on, the return of gray wolves to Utah is expected in the next decade, as individuals branch off from up around Yellowstone, where more than 700 are thriving. When the federal government eventually strips the wolf of the endangered status that has aided its recovery in the northern Rocky Mountains, management of Canis lupus will fall to the states. So the Legislature in 2003 wisely ordered up a management plan that was made public this past week following two years of sometimes ferocious wrangling. The 96-page result is a solid, reassuringly complex, framework to build upon. It is void of the shoot-on-sight simplicity of its territorial antecedent, though it could be a bit kinder to the newcomers....
PG&E must lose 140,000 acres, but how is a complex matter It's been called one of the biggest land deals in California's history. Under an agreement stemming from its bankruptcy four years ago, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. must rid itself of 140,000 acres of watershed lands the utility had acquired piece by piece dating back to the Gold Rush. Now those lands are scattered over 21 counties -- nearly 1,000 separate parcels worth $300 million altogether. PG&E bought all this land to prevent erosion into streams and rivers the utility needs to produce hydroelectric power. But under its bankruptcy pact with the state Public Utilities Commission, the lands will either be donated to nonprofit groups or government agencies, or be set aside through conservation easements for a range of "beneficial public uses."....
Global warming allows beetles to attack whitebark pines There's an incredibly effective predator in the woods, a real life giant killer. And it is marching, taking new life and succor from the hot, dry climate that vexes so much of the West. For most plants and animals, such weather is an enemy. But mountain pine beetles are different. For them, it's time to breed and feast, to colonize new places. And that's exactly what they're doing. In Canada, the beetles are killing millions of acres of trees. Officials say they've never seen anything like it. "It's the worst ever, anywhere in the world, as far as anyone knows," said Jesse Logan, an insect specialist at the U.S. Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station in Logan, Utah. Logan is the lead author of a recent scientific report that says an onslaught of the voracious, predatory insects could devastate whitebark pine trees, a species already suffering. And if the whitebarks go, that will mean trouble for grizzly bears, which could translate into more dangerous encounters with people, a potential reversal of many years of grizzly conservation, and setting up some contentious legal and social battles....
Lots of logs, not enough loggers When the U.S. Forest Service received no bids on two small timber sales in Eagle County earlier this year, the agency's local rangers encountered what is becoming a problem throughout the intermountain West. The federal agency got a lesson in market economics and the three-way tug of war over lumber in national forests. There were no bidders for the timber "salvage" sales designed to remove trees killed by infesting pine beetles. The Forest Service also wants to sell the dead trees so they won't add extra fuel to wildfires. "We think the market is just flooded with all the beetle-killed trees," said Cal Wettstein, district ranger of the forest lands surrounding Eagle County. "The long-term concern for us is every (dead) tree that doesn't come out of the woods eventually is going to burn."....
Rare Bugs Arrest a Development In the coming weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide whether to hear Purcell's lawsuit against the federal government, which he brought in 1999 after determining that he would not be able to develop his land, largely because the cave bugs are protected under the Endangered Species Act. The case is more than another skirmish pitting a developer against an obscure critter. Purcell and his partners have taken aim at the Endangered Species Act. His case argues that the government should have never been given the right to protect a number of rare species in the first place. Legal observers say the case, if Purcell wins, could throw out the protection of more than half of the 1,264 species covered by the law. Environmentalists say it would gut a central plank of conservation, threatening a host of cherished species, such as the Florida panther. Purcell's lawsuit argues that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should have never been given the right, through the Endangered Species Act, to regulate the cave bugs. The act was created in 1973 through the Constitution's commerce clause, which gives Congress the right to regulate commercial activity "among the several states." Many conservatives believe commerce clause regulation has inflated the role of the federal government beyond what the authors of the Constitution intended. Purcell's lawsuit argues that cave bugs cannot be regulated through the clause because they have no commercial value and are found only in a tiny area of Texas — meaning they do not cross state lines....
Logging, pesticides curtail monarchs Homero Aridjis, a poet and naturalist, can remember years when monarch butterflies filled the streets here in his hometown like a living torrent of orange and black and stayed all winter on the fir-covered mountain rising above the village. Not this year. The colony of butterflies that arrived in November was tiny and retreated up the mountain, as far away as possible from the lower slopes where loggers have thinned or destroyed the forest that the butterflies depend on. "There used to be rivers of butterflies, but now there are years when there are no butterflies at all," Aridjis said as he climbed the mountain of his youth recently. "This is a village full of ghosts, not of people, but of nature, a paradise lost." Not only are there comparatively few monarchs in Contepec, but the numbers that came to weather the winter at five other forest sanctuaries in central Mexico also dropped sharply this year....
Devils Tower heritage woven into fight over name change Jutting more than 1,200 feet into the air in northeastern Wyoming, Devils Tower National Monument draws athletes and tourists as well as movie buffs seeking the setting of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." The monument's name threads through the nearby town of Hulett, from the Devils Tower Golf Course and Devils Tower Forest Products to the high school team's Hulett Red Devils. Today, that name is part of a symbolic struggle over land that once belonged to American Indian tribes and now is owned by the federal government. The monument's superintendent wants to add the name "Bear Medicine Lodge" to the site, recognizing what tribes called the monument before it became a national monument. If the plan succeeds, the monolithic rock formation would have two names. A U.S. congresswoman from Wyoming has introduced a bill to prevent that change from happening....
Column: Want fries with that mustang? In a twist of fate and palate, Americans do not pull up to the drive-thru window and order McMustangs instead of beef McRibs. Although 50,000 domestic horses are killed each year in U.S. slaughterhouses, Americans retain a collective revulsion at the thought of Seabiscuit Stew and My Friend Fried Flicka. Not so in France. It is ironic that our president stands tall in his cowboy boots as special interests ride off into the sunset to butcher one of the remaining icons of the American West. That France will consume most of these wild horses adds another level of irony....
Toxic mine sites need securing, bureau is told A new report from the Interior Department's Inspector General's Office says the federal government has failed to protect hikers, four-wheelers and mountain bikers from toxic metals in the soil of some old mining sites here. The Bureau of Land Management has allowed unrestricted access for many years to arsenic and lead soil contamination at levels of 17 to 20 times the allowable or recommended federal limits, according to the report issued March 15. The sites, mined from the late 1800s into the 1950s, are in an area known as Saginaw Hill on Tucson's southwest side. The report said that as recently as May 2003, BLM officials classified the site as "high risk."....
Border crossers' environmental damage bemoaned Land managers for Arizona's borderlands are overwhelmed by a rise in the environmental damage caused by people sneaking into the country from Mexico. Stretches of land in southwestern Arizona are pockmarked with the debris of illegal immigration from rusting cars to the rutted trails that migrants and their U.S. Border Patrol pursuers cut into the desert. Conservationists complain that Border Patrol activities have pushed too far into the desert interior and are critical of a plan that proposes to expand off-road operations, introduce towering stadium-style lights in critical enforcement areas and build more roads and fences....
Column - ANWR: Dump Lamar's billion-dollar-boondoggle Not all the ANWR news is good. At the last moment, Tennessee's liberal Republican Senator Lamar Alexander, dredged up a provision from the old failed Conservation and Recovery Act (CARA) and attached a requirement that $350 million of oil revenues be set aside for three years for grants to green organizations and the acquisition of private property. How dumb is it to designate $350 million per year to the very organizations that have prevented the use of ANWR oil for decades? How dumb is it to designate even more money for the government and green groups to buy up even more of the remaining private property in this country. Governments already own almost 45 per cent of the total land area -- besides the land already acquired by The Nature Conservancy and thousands of other "land trusts?" Liberal Lamar's billion-dollar-boondoggle can be stripped from the budget bill in conference committee, but this could upset the delicate vote in the Senate, and ANWR oil could be denied for another decade. Both green and blue Senators should recognize two glaring facts: (1) America needs to develop all of its energy reserves to minimize dependence on foreign sources; and (2) governments and land trusts have already taken too much land out of the private sector, and should begin returning this treasure to private owners....
Column: State of the Rockies Some of us here in Colorado see things differently. Beyond our Hollywood image, prominent observers struggle with more serious allegations that the eight-state Rockies region lacks regional sovereignty and has inland colony status. In talking about sovereignty, observers are mostly referring to lack of participatory management for the Rockies. And without control of, or at least a significant say about the region's land, politics, and economy, Westerners do not dictate the region's destiny. The harsh truth, according to Ed Marston, former editor of the High Country News, is that we live as southerners did during Reconstruction, occupied an often federal force, and for many of the same dismal reasons. Because we have so far proven ourselves to be inadequate stewards of the region's vast public land holdings, the rest of the country does not trust us to control our own destiny. And, ads Marston, they are right....
Eastwood building plan leads to environmental battle It's Clint Eastwood's half-billion-dollar baby - a sweeping development plan for Monterey Peninsula's fabled Del Monte Forest. So far the "baby" is garnering both jeers and plaudits. In one corner: environmental activists and the California Coastal Commission staff. In the other: the Pebble Beach Co. and Monterey County's elected officials. And both sides are digging in for the long haul. The Pebble Beach Co., owned by Eastwood, golfer Arnold Palmer, ex-baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth and other investors, wants to build a championship 18-hole golf course and driving range in the area's signature Monterey pine forest. The 150-acre development would also include a new equestrian center, 33 luxury homes and 160 hotel rooms and suites. In exchange, the company is offering to preserve more than 800 acres as permanent open space - most of it in Pebble Beach, a 5,200-acre gated community that is home to the 17-Mile Drive, seven 18-hole courses and one nine-hole course....
Owners forced to give ground, study indicates The increasing cost of logging regulations may prompt more landowners to sell their timberland for development and other uses, particularly in areas where property values are rising, according to a new study. The Cal Poly San Luis Obispo study released Wednesday finds the average cost of meeting the regulations has increased 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, and now tops $30,000. But the study also is triggering criticism of the researchers for accepting partial funding from the timber industry. Gov. Schwarzenegger's administration, environmentalists and some state lawmakers have said the price of a timber harvest plan isn't high enough to cover the state's costs in regulating the timber industry. Plans to increase state regulatory fees have consistently failed, however, and the administration dropped its attempt to raise fees last year....
Book Review: Still caught in the dammed current The debate over Hetch Hetchy Resevoir in Yosemite National Park presents us with an extraordinary opportunity not only to re-examine our past but also to relive the past and remake it in our image. This is a dangerous temptation. When people speak of correcting "the mistakes of history," they seldom mean they want to understand the past better. What they're usually doing is using a particular judgment of history to short-circuit an argument about the present and where we should go from here. We're going to be hearing a lot of that as San Francisco and Peninsula communities that share water from Hetch Hetchy embark on a multibillion-dollar project to repair and upgrade the system that brings water from Yosemite National Park to our taps, and as environmental groups take this opportunity to push for draining the reservoir and restoring the valley about which John Muir once protested: "Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man." Reading "The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy" gives that strange sensation of deja vu all over again. Robert W. Righter has done a workmanlike job of reconstructing the political battles that accompanied San Francisco's struggle to secure a source of Sierra Nevada water -- from 1882, when an aqueduct from Tuolumne River was first proposed, to 1934, when water from the Hetch Hetchy system finally flowed into the city....
Book Review: The Making of an Eco-Revolutionary For all its faults—and there are more than enough to fill Kate Coleman’s eminently readable new book, The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Car Bomb, the Fight for the Redwoods, and the End of Earth First!—the radical environmentalist group Earth First! was a proponent of truth in advertising. The group’s notorious rallying cry said it all: “No compromise in defense of Mother Nature!” Few embodied the ideological rigidity of that cri de couer like the group’s legendarily volatile leader, Judi Bari. Born in 1949 to communist parents who once harbored the Soviet spy Morton Sobell, Bari seemed destined for the radical life. Recounted in investigative journalist Kate Coleman’s crisp, Newsweek-style reportage, Bari’s life takes a particularly interesting turn in the early '70s. It was then that Bari, trapped in a loveless, wooden marriage, spied salvation in the ancient redwoods that dotted the Northern California countryside. Bari the eco-radical was born. Coleman traces Bari’s rise through ranks of then-budding environmentalist group called Earth First!, transforming it from a ragtag jumble of delinquent pranksters, drug-dazed hippies, and back-to-nature enthusiasts, into a nettlesome cadre of professional saboteurs....
Column: Replanting the environmental garden Many of us around the nation look to Oregon for environmental inspiration. For example, since 1973, Oregon has led the nation in the prevention of urban sprawl. But in December, Measure 37 went into effect, requiring money-strapped Oregon officials either to compensate landowners retroactively for regulations that reduce a property's value or to waive those restrictions. As the reality of the Oregon retrenchment set in, I spoke with Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute in El Cerrito, Calif. He and his associate, Ted Nordhaus, vice president of Evans/McDonough, an opinion-research firm, had just released a broadside called "The Death of Environmentalism." To Shellenberger, Oregon's Measure 37 was one more nail in the coffin of the environmental movement. He and Nordhaus contend that, after a string of stunning successes in the 1970s and '80s, environmentalists are losing ground. Their thesis: "The environmental community's narrow definition of its self-interest leads to a kind of policy literalism that undermines its power." What the movement needs most, they say, is to take a collective step back to rethink its strategy and tactics. Response by many environmentalists has been less than enthusiastic. Instinctively, they prefer solidifying and marshalling their base; considering the intense challenges posed by the Bush administration, this is no time for a wave of self-doubt or analysis-paralysis. And they point to such positive achievements as the growth of the land conservancy movement....
Column: The 500 mpg solution Soaring oil prices -- crude is more than $55 a barrel and unleaded gasoline more than $2 a gallon -- are not much of an economic or political issue. Yet. In absolute terms, today's prices are still half of the 1970s peaks, and the U.S. economy depends much less on petroleum than then. (Computers run on electricity, not gasoline.) But imagine what would happen if al Qaeda hit the giant Ras Tanura terminal in Saudi Arabia, where a tenth of global oil supplies are processed every day. Prices could soar past $100 a barrel, and the U.S. economy could go into a tailspin. As it is, high oil prices help Saudi Arabia subsidize hate-spewing madrassas and Iran to develop nuclear weapons. Both Democrats and Republicans know this, but neither party is serious about solving this growing crisis. Democrats who couldn't tell the difference between a caribou and a cow grandstand about the sanctity of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, even though 70 percent of Alaskans are happy to see a bit of drilling in this remote tundra. Republicans pretend tapping ANWR will somehow solve all our problems. If only....
Column: It's Decision Time for J.P. Morgan Chase's CEO Living in gated communities may soon become a necessity rather than an option for corporate managers. Social activists are escalating their anti-business campaigns by taking them into management's own backyards — well, make that front yards. Last week, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) expanded its jihad against the financial services industry into tony Greenwich, CT — to the very street where J.P. Morgan Chase's CEO, William Harrison, lives. RAN activists put up old-fashioned Wild West-type "Wanted" posters featuring Mr. Harrison and calling him "Billy the Kid." The posters criticized the bank for "reckless investment in environmentally and socially destructive projects in dozens of countries" and urged Mr. Harrison's neighbors and friends to "ask him to do the right thing." Although this may sound like harmless and perhaps even prankish activism, the stakes are much higher than that....
Wild dog attacks spook desert equestrians Despite his long experience as a horseman, Dick Holt was scared when a vicious dog broke its chain and attacked his horse, Spooky, as they passed a rural home near the Calico Mountains northwest of Yermo. The 12-year-old gelding, bitten three times by the pit bull, panicked and bucked. "That dog grabbed Spooky's underbelly and was hanging in the air until he tore loose," Holt said. Holt was accompanied by two young girls from his neighborhood, who rode a second horse named Cody. "It was a dangerous situation for me, the girls and the horses," the 58-year-old Yermo area man said. "I stood the dog off so the kids could get away. That's when the dog attacked." In the wake of incidents such as Holt's, a dozen federal and state agencies are looking into complaints throughout Southern California about uncontrolled or feral canines in the region....
Hand spinners create lucrative market for fleece au naturel Like most ranchers, wool growers who produce fleeces for the handspun fiber market spend a lot of time mending fences, pitching alfalfa and cleaning out water troughs. They also spend hours washing and mending coats. Hand spinners generally prefer to buy their fleeces in a "raw" or uncleaned and unprocessed state, the better to observe and preserve the natural quality of the fibers. At shearing, wool growers may "skirt" or cut off the dirtiest belly and rump hair from the fleece, but aside from this bit of trimming, hand spinners purchase their wool fibers in the same state as the sheep wore them. So, the cleaner the fleeces remain between shearings, the better, and the higher price the fleeces will earn....
Lifetime on the land On Feb. 2, 1905, a boy was born in a sod house on his father's homestead near Rushville, Neb. Louis Aime Wuthier was the second son of a French/Swiss couple, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Wuthier. As he grew up, L.A., known as "Aim," worked closely with his father on the Rushville ranch. "Life wasn't easy then," the now 100-year-old rancher says. "Dad couldn't speak a word of English when he came to the United States, but he made up his mind to learn the language by himself, and he put a lot of effort into doing that. I've always been proud of him for learning to read and write so well." Aim took over the ranch operation and remembers the tough years of the Great Depression. "I sold cows for $10 a head," he says. "Calves were only bringing 4 or 5 cents a pound. It wasn't easy surviving, but we managed....
A cowboy's last hand The funeral for Chase County cowboy Dan Matile wouldn't start for more than an hour but mud-streaked pickups, flat-bed trucks and a few sedans were already filling Charter Funerals' parking lot just west of downtown Emporia. Most of the men behind the wheel, middle-aged and older, wore their western headgear low, barely above their ears, the way they were made to be worn. Most shook hands and traded smiles and stories in the parking lot with hands buried in the front pockets of their fresh blue jeans or in the side pockets of stitched, western jackets. There were boots, lots of boots. Small talk covered January's bad ice storm and the mud it left behind. Some talked pasture burning and fence mending and one mentioned Don Matile's mules. "He always had them damned big, old mules around," one man said....
On The Edge of Common Sense: 'Humane' killing is touchy issue for all involved There is nothing pretty about killing a horse. Nobody knows that more than those of us who have done it. There are people who are actively attempting to get a federal bill passed that will "prevent the slaughter of horses in and from the U.S. for human consumption and other purposes." Those supporting this bill seem to fall into two groups: (1) those that have very little knowledge of the horse industry, of the problems facing the BLM Wild Horse Program, and the practical realities of burying a dead horse, and (2) people who are very knowledgeable about horses yet find the slaughter of them using packing house methods inhumane. Both of these groups are sincere and are not always raving animal-rights lunatics....

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