NEWS ROUNDUP

Grazing cattle on Arizona public land complex issue At 70 and with Irish skin stippled by decades under the Arizona sun, Terry Wheeler wouldn't be mistaken for Kevin Costner. Yet Wheeler is a real rancher, and he still "rides, walks and clambers," as he puts it, over the rangeland of Gila County. He's rebuilding his herd after the drought forced him and other ranchers off their allotments in the Tonto National Forest in 2002. Many cattle were sold at a loss. Today, with beef prices high, these ranchers have little to sell and plenty of debt. Taking the herds off the Tonto produced a further complication. The old cattle were bred for the rough country. Wheeler estimates it will take five years for the new herds to become acclimatized. Yet this is not a story of white hats vs. black hats. In the new West, Wheeler is an actor in a long drama about changing conceptions of public lands and the place of a natural resources economy in 21st century Arizona....
More Mormon crickets hatching across region Mormon crickets are hatching from Elko to rural valleys north of Reno as Northern Nevada enters its sixth season of infestation by the creepy insects. A heavy winter and a couple of wintry blasts of weather this spring did not halt the infestation as hoped and continued problems now appear inevitable, Jeff Knight, Nevada’s state entomologist, said Tuesday. “It will be as bad or more than likely worse than last year,” Knight said. “We’re going to be stretched to our limits.”....
Governor asks Forest Service to hold off Biscuit salvage logging Gov. Ted Kulongoski asked the U.S. Forest Service to hold off selling timber killed by the 2002 Biscuit fire in areas that were put off-limits to logging during the Clinton administration. In a letter to Regional Forester Linda Goodman dated April 1, the governor argued that logging in so-called roadless areas before a lawsuit brought by environmentalists is decided violates the public trust at a time when tensions are already high over cutting old growth forests. Kulongoski added that his own administrative challenge to the logging plan raised issues similar to those in the lawsuit, which he felt had a good chance of prevailing in court. "He feels it would really be in Oregon's best interest and the Forest Service's best interest to wait," Mike Carrier, the governor's natural resources adviser, said Wednesday....
Colorado hopes to bolster declining numbers of sage grouse State wildlife biologists will draft a plan to try to reverse the decline in sage grouse numbers in northwestern Colorado, an effort environmentalists say is critical because of increasing oil and gas drilling. John Toolen, a biologist with the Colorado Division of Wildlife, said a conservation plan will be written for the greater sage grouse in the Roan, West Parachute and Piceance creek drainages with input from the public. Increased drilling and home construction, drought, overgrazing by livestock and fire suppression, which appears to favor pinyon and juniper trees over sagebrush, have been blamed for the drop in the bird's numbers....
Roan Plateau Lawsuit Concern Emerges A Bureau of Land Management official says she believes the agency could be sued if it recommends against oil and gas drilling on top of western Colorado's Roan Plateau, a hot spot in the debate over Western energy development. Jamie Connell, manager of the BLM's field office in Glenwood Springs, said she believes federal law leaves the agency no choice but to lease some land on top of the plateau to energy companies. "I think we would be questioned if we leased zero acres," Connell told the Glenwood Springs Post Independent....
Interior Department Affirms BLM's Record of Decision to Approve Land Exchange for Phelps Dodge Phelps Dodge Corp. (NYSE: PD - News) said today the U.S. Department of the Interior has affirmed the Bureau of Land Management's June 29, 2004, Record of Decision supporting a land exchange with the company. The action allows the development of a proposed copper mining operation near Safford, Ariz., to continue to move forward. The exchange will transfer to the public valuable, environmentally sensitive land owned by Phelps Dodge in exchange for land of equal value located next to the company's property near Safford. The land Phelps Dodge will receive will be used primarily for support facilities and as a buffer to the proposed mining operations....
BLM shortening time to protest oil, gas leases The Bureau of Land Management is issuing new requirements for protesting oil and gas lease sales in Wyoming, including shortening the time people have to file a protest, a move the agency says is intended to make the leasing process more fair to all involved. The BLM in Wyoming said the changes could become the model for a policy on leases nationwide. But some environmentalists say it will make it more difficult to raise concerns over leasing in sensitive wildlife habitat. "From where I sit, I feel that the existing leasing process overall is already dramatically tilted or stacked in industry's favor," said Peter Aengst, energy campaign coordinator with the Northern Rockies region of The Wilderness Society. "What BLM is proposing to do is stack or tilt it more to industry's favor, and possibly to the detriment of other values."....
Column: Environmental Heresies Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power. Reversals of this sort have occurred before. Wildfire went from universal menace in mid-20th century to honored natural force and forestry tool now, from “Only you can prevent forest fires!” to let-burn policies and prescribed fires for understory management. The structure of such reversals reveals a hidden strength in the environmental movement and explains why it is likely to keep on growing in influence from decade to decade and perhaps century to century. The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces—romanticism and science—that are often in opposition....
Column: Greens Go Nuclear? The environmental movement was largely built on opposition to nuclear power. Who can forget the high seas adventures of Greenpeace's flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, in the 1970s and 80s, sailing its ragtag crew into danger zones in the Pacific to stop US and French nuclear tests? Or the anti-nuke campaigns of the German Green Party, whose members laid themselves across train tracks to block shipments of nuclear fuel and radioactive waste? No issue is as integral to the identity of modern environmentalists. No issue, that is, except perhaps global warming; which is why a number of prominent environmentalists have begun to rethink their positions on nuclear power. In the past year, British scientist James Lovelock, developer of the Gaia theory, futurist Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Hugh Montefiore, longtime trustee of Friends of the Earth, and others have publicly called for massive new investments in nuclear energy....
US House Committees OK Energy Legislation House committees moved forward Wednesday with legislation to update US energy policy, allowing oil drilling in an Alaskan refuge and providing $8 billion in tax breaks for energy-saving technology. The committees approved parts of an energy package that will be folded into a broad bill that aims to boost domestic oil and natural gas supplies, which will be sent to the House floor for a final vote next week. Despite objections from Democratic lawmakers, the House Resources Committee voted to allow oil companies to drill in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Giving oil companies access to the refuge's 1.5-million acre coastal plain and billions of barrels of crude oil is a key part of the Bush administration's national energy plan to help reduce US oil imports. The committee voted 30 to 13 against a Democratic-sponsored amendment to drop the ANWR drilling language.....
US House Panel Rejects Boost in Car Mileage Rule A US House committee on Wednesday voted against requiring US automakers to ratchet up fuel efficiency to a fleet average of 33 miles per gallon by 2014 from the current 27.5 mpg for passenger cars. The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 36 to 10 against the proposal to raise federal mileage requirements, which was offered as an amendment to a broad energy bill. Democrat Edward Markey of Massachusetts, who sponsored the proposal, said higher fuel standards were needed to reduce oil demand and make the United States less dependent on foreign petroleum suppliers like OPEC. But committee Democrats from Michigan, where the auto industry is based, said Congress can't mandate what type of automobiles Detroit should make....
Alaska Native corporation a lead player for oil on wildlife refuge Along a flat expanse of tundra, a wooden post marks the spot where a drill rig bit more than three miles into the sandstone rock beneath the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's coastal plain. This is the only well ever drilled inside an area once ranked by many geologists as the best oil prospect in North America. It was sunk on an island of private land within the federal refuge, and the results remain secret. The owner of the land is an Inupiat Eskimo corporation that could emerge as one of the big winners if Congress agrees to open ANWR to drilling, a move environmentalists have long opposed. The Inupiat corporation is called Arctic Slope Regional Corp., and it owns 92,160 subsurface acres. Its executives impatiently await the congressional action needed to extract oil from inside the refuge....
Fill 'er up — Lake Powell set for runoff from deep snowpack It's only a few inches higher now, but rising . . . upwards of 45 feet is the prediction. That, at least, is the latest forecast on the rise of Lake Powell over the next few months. The April hydrologist report from the Bureau of Reclamation states there is enough snowpack in the Upper Colorado Basin to take the lake level from its current elevation — 3,555.4 — to its expected peak sometime in July at 3,600 feet, which, if conditions allow, would raise the level of the lake 44.6 feet. This report, which came out April 6, does not include precipitation that will fall between now and the end of the rainy season, which would include the last two storm fronts that moved through Utah and into lower Colorado this week. Nor does it address the possibility that the release of water from the Glen Canyon Dam could be reduced. Current requirements are that 8.23 million acre-feet of water be released downstream annually. In a tug-of-war for water, the upper basin states want the total release lowered, while the lower basin states want it to remain at 8.23 million acre-feet, despite the fact that the lower states had an exceptionally wet winter and received more than 2 million acre-feet of additional water. A decision on the release figure is expected later this month....
Water to be cut off for some To help their downstream neighbors in Nebraska, water users along the North Platte River in east-central Wyoming will face more restrictions due to the continued drought, now stretching into its sixth year. Because of the needs of irrigators and water consumers in the Inland Lakes of western Nebraska and due to continued low runoff forecasts, Wyoming State Engineer Patrick Tyrrell announced that water use will be limited to holders of senior rights older than Dec. 6, 1904, upstream from Guernsey Reservoir. The limits will remain in place until May 1. The restrictions will allow four Nebraska Panhandle lakes - Big and Little Lake Alice, Winters Creek Lake and Lake Minatare - to accrue water they are entitled to under a U.S. Supreme Court decision....
Proposal to replace river locks moves forward in Senate A long-debated plan to replace locks on the upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers survived a key test on Wednesday after skirting a divisive battle to reform the Army Corps of Engineers. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., declined to join Democrats pushing for new controls on the corps and instead voted with Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond of Missouri and other Republicans in helping pass the $2.5 billion river proposal through the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The Mississippi-Illinois river proposal, hampered by scandal and scorned by environmentalists, moves next to the Senate floor, where would-be reformers will be adding more muscle to efforts to add provisions that would rein in the corps. Chief among them is Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. The Midwestern project is the biggest in cost and scope in a multi-billion-dollar Water Resources Development Act, which would be the nation's first full-scale water projects legislation in five years....
Rough on the range A solar collector sits beside the little trailer where Saul Sanchez lives, catching energy that powers the lights, the radio and the small television in his home, set in the middle of a fallowed field where he tends a flock of hundreds of sheep. At one time, the trailer may have been used for weekend getaways. Now it is Sanchez's home for about eight months out of the year and moves with the sheep. Though modest at best, some would say it's a palace compared to the abodes of other sheepherders scattered throughout the Central Valley. It has running water, a toilet that works, lights, heating and cooling. But he may be the exception. California's rural sheepherders lack many of those amenities, according to a new report, "Watching Sheep and Waiting for Justice," issued last month by the Central California Legal Services Inc....
Judy Alter Honored With Wister Award From Western Writers of America Judy Alter, award-winning writer and director of TCU Press, will receive the prestigious Owen Wister Award from Western Writers of America for lifetime achievement. "I never even dreamt of such an honor," says Alter, 66. "It puts me in the company of people I'm in awe of and also some of my good friends like Elmer Kelton, Dale Walker, Jeannie Williams, Don Worcester and others." The nonprofit Western Writers of America (www.westernwriters.org) was founded in 1953 to promote and honor Western literature. The Wister Award, previously called the Levi Strauss Saddleman Award, is presented annually to a living author. Previous winners include Mari Sandoz, A.B. Guthrie Jr. and Robert M. Utley....
Local cowboy carves his horses He is known for a lot of things - his days as a marine in World War II, as a gardener - but he takes special pleasure in talking about his days as a cowboy. Naturally, Skip carves horses ... quarter horses, mules, anything that a cowboy might associate himself with. This time Skip had a number of new horses to show me. Carved from basswood, which was supplied by a brother from Minnesota, they are as true to form that it is humanly possible to make them. They are carved, scraped, and polished into fine pieces that he sells or gives to other cowboys, westerners that he rodeoed with or rode with. He's nearly 79, by his own admission not able to ride like he used to, but one gets the impression that if you showed up at his Grand Coulee house with a horse, he'd climb on and ride away. Skip says, "the birthdays now come faster than the paydays."....
Breakin' horses Shoop was raised in Colorado where he spent most of his formative years near Trinidad. He wasn't very old when his bronc-busting dad taught him, his two brothers (Ray and Zeke) and even the boys' two younger sisters to saddle-break horses, Shoop said. "Dad taught us all how to break horses as a means to have something to fall back on," Shoop said, while leading a 4-year-old colt to the circle pen. "Well, I guess I've been falling back on it my whole life." Shoop married a local girl, Diana Ritter (now Shoop) and settled down and has been breaking and training horses on his land northwest of Pryor for 12 years. Diana is a barrel racer, Shoop said, and even the couple's children are beginning to take dad's lead by getting active in the business. Shoop led the colt that he said someday will be his roping horse into a circle pen constructed of an outer rail and lined entirely with split hard wood logs standing 10 feet or more....

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