NEWS ROUNDUP

Column: Slapstick politics make slipshod roadless policy "It's a fine mess you've gotten us into again, Stanley." That famous line from the comedy team Laurel and Hardy is reminiscent of the slapstick political maneuvers of the Bush Administration in its seemingly never-ending struggle to build roads into and develop the last slivers of America's wild lands. In a six-year long farcical, on-again-off-again waste of time and taxpayer money, the administration has merrily proceeded down one dead end after another in its whimsical undertaking to undermine the insistence of the American people that our still unroaded public lands remain just as they are-wild. The amateurish high jinks of the current administration began shortly after the swearing in ceremony of George W. Bush. With the sudden announcement that the new president intended to overturn "The Roadless Rule" and at the urging of the extractive industries, the "Rule" was hauled into court. Venue shopping for a friendly judge began. Following several years of legal machinations, an embarrassing loss to Bush before a federal circuit court and on the very eve of a second federal circuit court decision, the White House has rushed to announce its latest convoluted decision....
Drought crimps grazing on federal grasslands Drought is again prompting the U.S. Forest Service to sharply reduce the number of cattle allowed to graze on federal land in western South Dakota this summer. The Forest Service is cutting back on grazing in an attempt to encourage recovery of the grass and other vegetation on the nearly 2 million acres of federally owned land in two national forests and three national grasslands in western South Dakota, range management officials say. The grazing cutbacks will affect more than 600 private ranchers who will have to find other pasture or feed for thousands of head of cattle....
Forest bill altered; governor signs it this time around Nearly one month after vetoing a forest bill, Gov. Janet Napolitano signed an altered version into law Thursday. The bill provides a variety of tax breaks to entice industry to tackle the job of thinning out Arizona's overgrown forests. But unlike last month, when environmentalists cheered the governor's veto, the Sierra Club jeered her approval of Senate Bill 1283. The group said the bill is not targeted at getting rid of the smaller trees and brush that are clogging the forests and would extend the tax breaks to larger trees....
Why Are Coyotes Getting More Aggressive? Coyotes tend to avoid human contact. But recently, coyotes have been getting increasingly aggressive in the eastern United States, including southeastern New York state, attacking neighborhood pets on the fringe of urban and suburban areas. "This kind of aggressive behavior is usually the last stage before coyotes actually start attacking humans -- such as small children that are perceived by the coyotes as a potential food source," says Paul Curtis, associate professor of natural resources at Cornell University. He notes that in the past two decades, several dozen attacks on humans have been reported in California. Coyotes, which are closely related to dogs and wolves, are ubiquitous in North America, but they rarely have been a danger to humans. Fearful of being hunted and trapped, these large carnivores have typically stayed in wooded areas and away from humans. But now that coyotes have started foraging in suburban areas, more research is needed to find out why and how to prevent potential conflicts with people. Curtis and his colleagues are launching a five-year study of coyote ecology and behavior in urban and suburban areas of New York state, thanks to a grant of $428,000 from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC)....
Defenders of Wildlife Releases "Living with Black Bears" DVD In celebration of Bear Awareness Week, May 15-21, Defenders of Wildlife is releasing its newest DVD, entitled "Living with Black Bears in the Tahoe Region." This DVD, which includes both English and Spanish versions of the program, was produced for use in employee and volunteer trainings, U.S. Forest Service ranger stations, and elementary school curriculum. "The 'Living with Black Bears' DVD will enhance bear awareness for those who visit and live in bear country," said Cynthia Wilkerson, California Representative for Defenders of Wildlife. "This presentation includes simple tips that residents and visitors can use to minimize conflicts with black bears in the Tahoe area. We hope that people will take responsibility for sharing habitat with bears by adopting these guidelines into their daily lives. Increasing bear awareness in Tahoe will improve the quality of life for both bears and humans."....
Tracking of mysterious wolverines sheds light In the gathering darkness, four biologists wearing headlamps surround an unconscious wolverine that is flat on its back, legs akimbo. They check a transmitter implanted in its belly and fit another, larger one on a collar around its heavily muscled neck. Then they inject the animal with the antidote to the drug that knocked it out and place it in a box trap. An hour or so later, when the lid of the trap is opened, the animal clambers out and runs into the forest. Every two hours the position of the wolverine -- known as M-1 -- is fixed by a geopositioning satellite and recorded in the collar. A few weeks later, the wolverine is recaptured, and a record of its travels is downloaded from the collar into a laptop. The result confirms data that the researchers have accumulated over three years: Wolverines are wildly peripatetic....
Meager chinook run leaves fishing industry high and dry Fertilizer salesman Rex Harke had planned to take 12 of his most loyal clients on a salmon-fishing expedition down the Columbia River this week. Usually at this time, the spring chinook are charging up the river in the tens of thousands, heading from the Pacific Ocean to their spawning beds. But in a phenomenon that has puzzled environmentalists and government biologists, this season the fish have failed to appear. The low numbers prompted officials to halt sport and commercial fishing on the river — and Harke reluctantly called his guide to cancel....
Prison program trains wild horses for new homes Inmate Dean Kruk of Reno reined in the wild horse he was riding Wednesday at the Warm Springs Correctional Center’s training area and paused to talk about the prison’s gentling program. “It has changed my life,” the 47-year-old Kruk said as he stroked “Buddy,” a 3-year-old sorrel gelding rounded up by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management from the Jackson Mountains northwest of Winnemucca. The saddle-trained horse, and 11 others gathered by the BLM and Nevada Department of Agriculture throughout the state, are set to be adopted Saturday in a public auction at the Carson City minimum security prison....
Billing glitch terminates oil and gas leases Glitch or no glitch, the federal government demands yearly rental payments on oil and gas leases, or the leases may be terminated and re-sold into the market. Richard Ryan of Cheyenne said he and many others with mineral leases in Wyoming and across the West are paying for the Mineral Management Service's failure to send out lease rental notifications in 2002. Without the notification, many lease holders failed to make the $2-per-acre rental payment for that year. However, the federal government considers the notification a courtesy. The Interior Board of Land Appeals ruled in February that regardless of notification, it is up to mineral lessees to make timely rental payments. Ryan and others who failed to make their 2002 rental payments were asked by the Minerals Management Service to either pay a five-fold increase rental fee or lose their leases....
America's unheralded water cleanup With little fanfare, counties, states, and the federal government have collectively spent an estimated $14 billion or more - at least $1 billion a year since 1990 - to restore rivers and streams to their natural condition, not including dollars spent on Goliath restoration projects like the Everglades. Ironically, the move to clean up America's unheralded rivers comes at a time when the condition of the nation's waterways overall is starting to deteriorate. That finding is tempered by growing signs that the nation's rivers are getting dirtier overall - after decades of getting cleaner, the same study notes. From about 1973 to 1998, rivers and lakes in the United States were getting cleaner, but that's now reversed itself, according to American Rivers, which helped organize the new study....
Nevada water bill pits rural governments against urban lawmaker Governments couldn't sell water rights at market value, under a bill debated Wednesday in an Assembly panel - and opposed by rural Nevada officials who said it will keep them from getting what the water's really worth in this arid state. Sen. Warren Hardy, R-Las Vegas, said he introduced SB466 to keep local government agencies from sales of water rights at inflated prices that would "drive the fair-market value of water through the roof." Hardy's bill, reviewed by the Assembly Government Affairs Committee, would prohibit state and local government agencies from selling or leasing a water right for more than the appraised value. Currently, the price of the water is left to the market - and scarce supplies and rapid growth have typically kept the price well above the appraised value....
Mouths Where Their Money Is Yesterday, nearly 400 people met at the United Nations headquarters to talk about changing the world. They were upbeat and enthusiastic about their power to get corporate America's attention, and to demand that it take climate change seriously. And not just take it seriously, but do something about it. Who were these people? Global activists? International diplomats? No. They were American state treasurers, city and state comptrollers, and managers of pension and mutual funds, joined by a smattering of their European colleagues. They gathered for the second Institutional Investor Summit on Climate Risk, cosponsored by the United Nations Foundation -- established by billionaire Ted Turner in 1998 to support U.N. causes -- and Ceres, a Boston-based investor-environmentalist coalition. These financial managers collectively control trillions of dollars in investments in U.S. public corporations, and are responsible for seeing to it that millions of retired steelworkers, teachers, state employees, and others do not wake up one day and find themselves not just elderly, but poor. As far as these professionals are concerned, climate change is creating huge investment risks -- but it also holds the potential for enormous financial rewards. It is their professional responsibility to see to it that U.S. corporations deal with both....
Bottlenecks Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond. Are our dealings with nature sustainable? Can we expect world economic growth to continue for the foreseeable future? Should we be confident that our knowledge and skills will increase in ways that will lessen our reliance on nature despite our growing numbers and rising economic activity? Jared Diamond, a professor of geography in California, looks for answers to these big questions by examining the societies that collapsed. The body of his book contains accounts of four such societies: the Easter Islanders; the Anasazi; the Mayans; and the Norse in Greenland, who died out six hundred years ago. Diamond demonstrates that the proximate cause of each collapse was ecological devastation brought about, broadly speaking, by one or more of the following: deforestation and habitat destruction; soil degradation (erosion, salinisation and fertility decline); water management problems; over-hunting; over-fishing; population growth; increased per capita impact on the environment; and the impact of exotic species on native species of plants and animals. As might be expected, the relative importance of these factors differs from case to case....
Escape from Ecotopia In the afterword to the 30th-anniversary edition of his 1975 novel, Ernest Callenbach writes, "Looking back, it seems clear that Ecotopia was the first attempt to portray a sustainable society, and that this, more than its modest literary merit, explains its durability." Sadly, there is no false humility in that statement. Ecotopia is ostensibly about a secessionist Northwest -- northern California, Oregon, and Washington -- founded on ecological principles. In this independent land, cars are abolished, everybody recycles, and sewage is turned to fertilizer. More fundamentally, Ecotopia is a "stable-state" society, where old notions of economic progress are retired and "biological stasis" becomes the ultimate goal. That sounds good, as far as it goes; however, the vision is weighed down by so much extraneous cultural baggage -- Marxism, paganism, free love, ritual warfare, communal living, abortion on demand, legalized drugs, gamelan orchestras -- that readers coming to Ecotopia for the first time will find both more and less than they bargained for....
A farewell tribute to Mary Dann On Saturday morning, April 30, 2005, Dann family members, relatives, friends and supporters gathered at the Dann family ranch in Crescent Valley, in the Western Shoshone Territory (Nevada), to honor Mary Dann. As white billowing clouds hovered in the distance above beautiful desert mountain peaks, people gathered to honor Western Shoshone elder Mary Dann, who died on Earth Day, April 22, in an all-terrain vehicle accident while checking a fence line at the Dann ranch. Western Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney said a prayer in the Shoshone language and blessed the food. He reminded everyone that Mother Earth provides us with all the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe and the land we live on. He advised everyone to stay mindful of this fact. A number of Mary's immediate family members reminisced about Mary's life and told everyone how much they had learned from her life, her wisdom, and from the powerful example that she set, with her quiet and plainspoken style....

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