NEWS ROUNDUP

Tale of The Sea Ranch Ruminants The Sea Ranch has hired Falk and his flock to mow the fields and the common areas on the property. Actually, there's a fancy name for this practice. It's called prescribed grazing, and the emerging land-management technique is increasingly replacing the notoriously noisy and pollution-spewing machines that had once displaced the animals. Prescribed grazing is also thought to be beneficial in controlling noxious and invasive weeds and encouraging diversity. Falk's day-to-day routine consists largely of herding his flock from one grazing area to the next. To contain the animals, he rolls out bales of portable electrical fencing, enough to encircle a 5-acre paddock, which he and his buddy, Ira, move from field to field, sometimes twice a day, depending on how low the animals have munched the grass. The fence, which draws its power from a solar panel that feeds a battery, delivers an irritating, harmless pulse that largely succeeds in keeping the animals inside it. If that doesn't keep them contained, Tess, Falk's Border collie, is the backup plan....
Column: Burrowing Into the Mythology about Prairie Dogs A popular fiction in South Dakota and elsewhere is that one nibble, one burrow, one high-pitched chirp at a time, the black-tailed prairie dog is invading and destroying grasslands for livestock. As Blaine Harden recently reported in The Washington Post, third-generation rancher Charles Kruze even compared South Dakota's rodential downpour to a "prairie fire" sweeping across the plains. The irony of Kruze's analogy is that prairie fires, like prairie dogs, are restorative forces that keep the ecosystem healthy and balanced. A misinformed mythology of prairie dogs as apocalyptic pests, however, now threatens a nearly endangered species that is both native and beneficial to the prairie and those who graze it....
Litigation attempts to halt grazing on 800,000 acres of BLM land The little guys will suffer, too. It's not just the big-time ranchers who could find themselves without a place to graze cattle, pending the outcome of an environmental group's lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management. And, that was on the mind of one of those "little guys" at a public meeting in Twin Falls on Wednesday to discuss the Western Watersheds Project's call to put a halt to grazing on 800,000 acres of BLM lands in the Jarbidge area. The Hailey-based group alleges that BLM violated its own guidelines when granting increased grazing permits on 30 allotments. Although the lawsuit would impact one of the largest livestock producers in the country in J.R. Simplot, it will also affect ranchers like Joe Leguineche, who has been grazing roughly 100 animals in the Jarbidge region since 1962....
Eco-groups seek to lift roadless-rule injunction A Wyoming court ruling that opened the door to energy development and road-building on 58.5 million acres of national forest should be overturned, environmentalists told a federal appeals panel in Denver on Wednesday. During a hearing before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, attorneys for the Wyoming Outdoor Council and seven other conservation groups argued that U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer incorrectly interpreted the law and the evidence in the case when making his ruling of July 14, 2003. Brimmer found that the public had an inadequate chance to comment on the Clinton-era roadless rule and that prohibiting new roads was equivalent to designating new wilderness - a role reserved for Congress. He issued an injunction blocking the rule from taking effect across the country. "This regulation was the subject of more public involvement than any in the nation's history," Earthjustice attorney Jim Angell said. "If this doesn't pass muster, nothing ever will."....
Conservationists say salvage sales endanger grizzly bears Removing Flathead National Forest trees burned by wildfires in 2003 jeopardizes grizzly bears in one of the few U.S. areas they still inhabit outside of Alaska, and the projects should be blocked, two environmental groups say in a lawsuit filed in Missoula. The Swan View Coalition and Friends of the Wild Swan say the projects were approved without adequate consideration of their effect on grizzly bears, protected under the Endangered Species Act. The fire-salvage projects require forest roads and helicopter logging that stand to cause the incidental death or injury of grizzlies beyond levels the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permits, the groups said. Defendants in the lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court here include Flathead National Forest Supervisor Cathy Barbouletos, who authorized the salvage work. The Forest Service's regional office earlier denied an appeal of her decision....
USFS buys, swaps land to protect 132-acre wilderness ranch Government officials announced that 132 acres inside the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area are getting federal protection. What was once a 1908 homestead known as the Seminole Ranch has been purchased by the Forest Service in a buyout and land swap with a Virginia-based conservation group. Ranger Joe Hudson says getting control over the land will protect it from development. The 1.3 million acre wilderness is home to bighorn sheep, grizzlies and elk. In all, the Forest Service had to pay $1.5 million and swap 180 acres of timberland to get the property....
DISASTROUS BILL WILL EXEMPT THOUSANDS OF ACRES OF WILDERNESS FROM ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS The so-called “Real ID” Act, expected to pass the House tomorrow, will expose thousands of acres of public land, including national parks, forests, wildlife refuges and wilderness areas along the U.S. border to extreme environmental damage, according to Defenders of Wildlife.“By exempting the Department of Homeland Security from environmental laws within public lands along the Mexican and Canadian borders, some of our nation’s most valuable wilderness areas are now prone to a new level of destruction as new construction projects begin,” stated Rodger Schlickeisen, President of Defenders of Wildlife. “Certainly we do not need to sacrifice some of our nation's most cherished wilderness areas to protect our borders.” The “Real ID” Act will include sweeping language allowing the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to exempt the agency from all federal, state and local environmental laws when constructing walls, fences, roads and other barriers along U.S. borders. Nearly 7,500 miles of land along the U.S. International border is affected by this bill. It will also eliminate vital protections under the Endangered Species Act, National Forest Management Act and other laws intended to protect wildlife, laws that every other federal agency must obey....
Idaho closing portion of Snake River to chinook fishing Hit by paltry numbers of returning salmon, Idaho Department of Fish and Game officials say they're closing a 23-mile stretch of the Snake River near Lewiston to spring chinook sport fishing to preserve the few fish headed upstream. In a related action, four Northwest Indian tribes said they would not conduct ceremonial or subsistence fishing on part of the Columbia River this year. Sharon Kiefer, the Idaho agency's manager of anadromous fisheries, said the closure, set to begin Wednesday, protects fish headed to Snake tributaries, including the Salmon and Grande Ronde rivers....
Poachers stealing national park heritage Increasingly organized gangs of poachers are killing wildlife, yanking up plants and stealing valuable bits and pieces of the nation's parks, threatening the biological diversity and cultural heritage they were created to protect. Black bears have been slaughtered in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia for their gallbladders, used in traditional Asian medicines. Nearly every week rangers in Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida stumble upon headless carcasses of alligators butchered for their skulls and tail meat. Cactus rustlers are depleting prized saguaro and barrel cactus from Southwestern parks to feed demand from the domestic landscaping market and cactus collectors in Europe and Japan. Rocks, shells, sponges, herbs, flowers, butterflies, beetles, spiders, fish, reptiles, mushrooms, moss, fossils, Indian artifacts, human remains - if it can be found in a national park, chances are someone is trying to pilfer it....
House panel boosts national park spending A House panel cut federal aid for local water projects but boosted money for National Park Service operations in a bill that devotes $26.2 billion to natural resource programs next year. Together, the natural resources and arts programs controlled by the panel would absorb a 3 percent spending cut from $27 billion this year. A program that grants money to states, which then loan the funds to local governments for water treatment and sewage programs, was targeted for a $241 million, or 22 percent, reduction. Money to fund day-to-day operations and attack a backlog of maintenance projects at the National Park Service were both increased. Overall, the park service would see its total budget cut $137 million, the result of decisions to eliminate a $90 million grant program for state parks and virtually halt government land acquisitions....
NPCA: Drug War Spreads to America's National Parks The nation's leading park advocacy group, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), today announced that America's national parks are under assault from drug cartels and illegal drug trafficking and called on Congress to provide adequate funding and staffing to enable the National Park Service to combat this growing threat to parks and visitors. "Our national parks should be a refuge for visitors and a safe haven for wildlife and other treasures, but that is not always the case," said NPCA President Tom Kiernan. "America's national parks are under assault-and need immediate attention." The number-one national park for growing marijuana in the United States is Sequoia National Park in California, which is next to the number-one county in the nation for illegal marijuana cultivation. Since 2001, the National Park Service has attempted to thwart cultivation of more than 180 acres of marijuana gardens guarded by armed growers in dense terrain. Last year, rangers found more than 44,000 marijuana plants with a street value of $176 million....Let's see, maybe the best way to wrangle some money out of a Republican congress is to use the mantle of the war on drugs. Nice try fellas....
Fossil thief put officials between a rock and a hard place The discovery in southern Utah of a new birdlike dinosaur with an unprecedented combination of meat- and plant-eating characteristics put paleontologists in an awkward position. Researchers cannot justify the theft of fossils from public land, but they might never have found this new therizinosaur without the help of a thief. Lawrence Walker found the site in the late 1990s, said James Kirkland, Utah's state paleontologist. Walker spent a few years mining and selling the bones before realizing that he found a new species that should be studied, according to Kirkland. Through a third-party, Walker passed along rough coordinates, but Kirkland and others could not find the spot. Eventually, Walker had to walk Kirkland to the elusive location. The act of coming forward revealed Walker to federal investigators, who were trying to find the fossil thief. Walker pleaded guilty in 2002 to charges of stealing dinosaur bones - government property - from the Cedar Mountain rock formation on a Bureau of Land Management parcel. Walker, who did not want to be interviewed, was sentenced to five months in jail, 36 months of supervised release and ordered to pay restitution of $15,000....I see, Walker spends 5 months in jail but it's the Feds who are between a rock and a hard place. A great example of MSM thinking....
Editorial: BLM should exclude petroglyphs from list offered for drilling There is still time for the Bureau of Land Management to exclude the archaeologically sensitive Parowan Gap from its list of land parcels to be included in a May 17 auction of oil and gas drilling leases. We fervently hope that it does. Parowan Gap, 10 miles west of Parowan in Iron County, contains an irreplaceable collection of Native American rock art images so numerous that it has been called the Newspaper Rock of the West Desert. The petroglyphs are recognized on the National Register of Historic Places. Survivors of thousands of years of exposure to the elements, they should be protected against the intrusion of modern man. Since 1982, about 34 million acres of Utah land have been made available for oil and gas development leases - 61 percent of the state. Nearly 3.8 million acres of public and private land are currently under lease, but oil and gas are being extracted on just 1 million acres....
Oil driller claims big strike in Utah A tiny oil company has snapped up leasing rights to a half-million acres in central Utah that it says could yield a billion barrels or more of oil. Geologists are calling it a spectacular find -- the largest onshore discovery in at least 30 years, located in a region of complex geology long abandoned for exploration by major oil companies. It's turning out to contain high-quality oil already commanding a premium at refineries. At today's prices, the oil reserve could bring Utah $5.6 billion in royalties, state auditors conservatively estimate. Although the discovery still is playing out, the oil will take years to recover, and some skeptics question the company's projections for a region yet to be fully surveyed....
Editorial: Water decision disappointing The U.S. Interior Department's decision to maintain the current rate of water released from Lake Powell could spell future problems for Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. Most troubling, Interior Secretary Gale Norton didn't strongly signal seven states that share the Colorado River about the need for long-term drought plans. Norton said she won't reduce the amount of water released from Lake Powell for the rest of 2005. Snowmelt projections in the upper Colorado River indicate that by year's end, Lake Powell should fill to 48 percent of capacity. That's better than the 34 percent of normal the lake had this spring. Even so, Powell likely will end the year behind Lake Mead, which could reach 57 percent of normal, thanks to an unusually wet year in the lower river basin. Norton's decision not to take steps to refill Powell rests largely on the assumption that another year of near-normal moisture will bless the West in 2006. If that turns out to be wrong, her decision could spell trouble. We wish she had chosen the more prudent course....
The Climate of Man Wherever Weiss and his team dug, they also encountered a layer of dirt that contained no signs of human habitation. This layer, which was more than three feet deep, corresponded to the years 2200 to 1900 B.C., and it indicated that, around the time of Akkad’s fall, Tell Leilan had been completely abandoned. In 1991, Weiss sent soil samples from Tell Leilan to a lab for analysis. The results showed that, around the year 2200 B.C., even the city’s earthworms had died out. Eventually, Weiss came to believe that the lifeless soil of Tell Leilan and the end of the Akkadian empire were products of the same phenomenon—a drought so prolonged and so severe that, in his words, it represented an example of “climate change.” Weiss first published his theory, in the journal Science, in August, 1993. Since then, the list of cultures whose demise has been linked to climate change has continued to grow. They include the Classic Mayan civilization, which collapsed at the height of its development, around 800 A.D.; the Tiwanaku civilization, which thrived near Lake Titicaca, in the Andes, for more than a millennium, then disintegrated around 1100 A.D.; and the Old Kingdom of Egypt, which collapsed around the same time as the Akkadian empire....
Column: Reports of Environmentalism’s “Death” May be Exaggerated Clearly, we’re dealing with a more conservative population today than we were a dozen years ago, and environmental positions do not enjoy the same level of support they did in the 1990s. If polls weren’t enough to enforce that point, the 2004 election cycle made it abundantly clear. Those results have caused a good deal of soul-searching, not only among Democrats and liberals generally, but also in the environmental movement. The tragedy, say many green leaders, is that Americans are tuning out the environment at the very time that big-ticket crises—from global warming to endangered species loss and overfishing of the oceans—need immediate attention. Activists who had thought that President Bush couldn’t get away with simply ignoring the clear evidence that climate change was real were stunned to see that he could…and did....
Column: Ego Gates Get My Goat So, my neighbor finally got a ranchette. Whether it's five acres or 40, the next step is apparently the perfect entrance gate. Rancheteers have made these huge gates the latest symbol of affluence in the West. They boast uprights bigger than my house, flanked by imported decorative boulders. The crossbar seems sometimes to be a whole tree. The majestic sign in the middle may perpetuate some notion of Western myth: Misty Mustang Meadow Ranch. Or the place is named for the wildlife driven out by building: Dancing Deer Development. Honesty would call it Gone Grizzly or Elk Eradication Estates. Some folks try to be clever: Poverty Pastures. An immodest rancher might reveal his first name on his belt -- but not in letters a foot high. We prove our financial worth by supporting our community directly -- no billboard boasts. Antique machinery sometimes gets piled next to these self-important gates, turning tools into décor or even worse, planters for geraniums. This array is exhibitionism, a thug flaunting victory over the vanquished. You might as well decorate a driveway with the tombstones of neighborhood ranchers, or hang their heads in your den....

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