NEWS ROUNDUP

Class prepares hunters for bison season The five men said little as the slides, narrated by state wildlife officials, clicked along - revealing the dos and don'ts of hunting bison that leave Yellowstone National Park. Do bring a handful of friends to help tend to the carcass. Don't bring any hotheads who might escalate tensions with potential protesters. “We don't know what's gonna happen here; we just want to be prepared,” Harold Guse, a warden captain at the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, told the men during a recent hunter training class here. Hunting restrictions, the proper way to shoot bison and tips for dealing with or avoiding news reporters were also covered during the nearly one-hour class, which wildlife officials say all 50 hunters must attend before participating in the state's first bison hunt in 15 years. The three-month season opens Nov. 15....
Editorial: Ranchers as environmentalists Usually environmentalists and ranchers get along as well as the Hatfields and McCoys. But in southern Utah, they are forming an alliance to beat back growth. Near Zion National Park, the Utah Nature Conservancy signed an agreement with four ranchers to preserve 2,500 acres of land as open space in perpetuity. The agreement allows the ranchers, one of whom is the brother of former Gov. Mike Leavitt, to continue ranching on the land. For the ranchers, it was a way to protect their family land from being developed into housing in a fast-growing market. For the environmentalists, it was an opportunity to preserve some of Utah's wild lands in their natural state. It's not the first time something like this has been done. In 2002, the state's Quality Growth Commission and Provo purchased a development easement protecting the Despain Ranch from developers. The easement allows the Despain family to continue using the land for agriculture, but keeps developers at bay. But the Nature Conservancy deal in southern Utah represents private people coming together for the public good. In the end, everyone wins....
Court backs Helena-area timber sale A federal appeals court on Monday upheld the Helena National Forest's plans to log and burn about 1,500 acres in the Jimtown Road area near Canyon Ferry Dam east of here to reduce the risk of wildfires. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected arguments by the Native Ecosystems Council that the U.S. Forest Service broke two federal acts in drafting the project. The environmental group claimed the project would further limit prime habitat for the goshawk, a small raptor, in an area already damaged by the Cave Gulch fire of 2000, the Jimtown fire of 2003 and the logging and prescribed burning done in nearby Bull Run and Sweats Gulch in 1996. The group also claimed the Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act, saying analysis of the project was incomplete and that it called for logging on land where it would not be appropriate. Sara Johnson of the Native Ecosystems Council was out of town Monday and unavailable for comment. In March, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy of Missoula ruled that the Forest Service took the necessary ''hard look'' at the project through its Environmental Assessment, and didn't need to do a full-blown Environmental Impact Statement, as the Native Ecosystems Council had requested. The appeals court upheld Molloy's ruling unanimously....
Automated firefighting plan tested Federal fire managers and IBM researchers are announcing the second phase of a $36 million system to computerize the process of dispatching wildfire crews and equipment, a move intended to boost efficiency and cut costs. The first module of the Fire Program Analysis software automates firefighting resources in the initial attack phase of a blaze. Completed by IBM in October 2004, it's now being tested by the Department of Interior, Forest Service, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs. In the second phase, IBM researchers plan to work with federal officials to design a similar program to calculate suppression needs when fires burn for an extended period of time and over a large area. The 1995 federal wildland fire policy called for creating an interagency system for fire management planning. In 2002, Congress inserted language into spending bills that ordered the Interior and Agriculture departments to create a common program for calculating fire readiness and estimating suppression costs....
Diverse group fights to help environment Bill Coates remembers when loggers and environmentalists in Quincy hated each other so much, they wouldn't eat in the same restaurant. "You couldn't go to a Little League game or down the aisle in Safeway without insults being traded," Coates said Saturday at the second portion of the Forest Sustainability Conference in Grass Valley. But that has changed in the past 10 years, thanks to the former Plumas County supervisor and others bringing the factions and community members together to form The Quincy Library Group. The group, which first met in the library to keep the argument noise down, now has projects going for habitat and economic growth in the Plumas and Lassen national forests and the Sierraville District of the Tahoe National Forest. The group's common goal brought all of its members to the negotiating table....
Snowbird drilling Euro-style ski tunnel The light at the end of Snowbird's tunnel is still a year away. But mining crews are nearly finished excavating a 595-foot tunnel between Peruvian Gulch and Mineral Basin back bowl, the most intriguing of a busy offseason of projects for the Little Cottonwood Canyon ski resort. Of more interest to government regulators and environmentalists was the reconfiguration of the resort's lower parking levels and the construction nearby of a day lodge with large bay windows and a heated deck. Those projects will serve customers and reduce silt and salt runoff into Little Cottonwood Creek, a drinking water source for Salt Lake City. The tunnel, by contrast, is a more fanciful idea that emerged less than a year ago and left Jim Baker, Snowbird's director of mountain planning and development, initially skeptical. "The more we got into it and got into the ground, the better it seemed. Next thing we know, we're standing at the end of a tunnel at Mineral Basin," he said. Six feet from the end, technically. Snowbird is leaving that much ground uncut until summer to let a related improvement catch up. Down in the Salt Lake Valley, Doppelmayr CTEC is building a $5.6 million high-speed lift that will replace the creaky, vintage Peruvian chair lift, which is on its last winter moving skiers to mid-mountain....
Government has failed to protect northern spotted owl, suit says he northern spotted owl, an icon of the Northwest's environmental movement, was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, but federal officials still have not bothered to come up with a plan for protecting it, said a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court on Monday. "They've been telling us for years they were going to do it," said Alex Morgan, conservation director at the Seattle Audubon Society, which joined the Kittitas Audubon Society in filing the suit. "This is 15 years late." Joan Jewett, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, acknowledged that federal officials never completed a final recovery plan for the northern spotted owl....
Deal May Be Near on Power Plant Southern California Edison Co. is close to reaching a deal with two Indian tribes and the world's largest coal company that would bolster the utility's effort to keep open a Nevada power plant that provides cheap electricity to Southern California — but is a major source of air pollution. Closed-door talks among Edison, the Hopi and Navajo tribes of northern Arizona and mining giant Peabody Energy Corp. are aimed at resolving water-use issues that threaten the future of Peabody's coal-mining operations on Indian land, tribal leaders said. The Black Mesa mine is the only source of coal for the giant Mohave power plant near Laughlin, Nev., and is a vital pillar of the Hopi economy. "Essentially, the parties are very near to some agreements" on how best to share the region's scarce water supply and other issues related to the mine, Hopi Chairman Wayne Taylor said. Ensuring a steady supply of coal and water is crucial to Edison's attempt to keep the 1,580-megawatt plant open despite a court-ordered Jan. 1 deadline requiring the utility to either install costly pollution-control equipment or shutter the 34-year-old generating facility....
Column: Why environmentalists should embrace economics: Part one Economics is largely the study of incentives, resource distribution, and how institutional arrangements affect behaviors and outcomes -- and therefore, economics is largely the study of trade-offs. Above all, economics is based on simple principles of how people generally act in the real world, not necessarily how we would like them to act. Let us begin with the primary problem surrounding open-access resources. Open-access resources are those for which there are no clear and enforceable property rights and to which it is very difficult to limit access. The world's ocean fisheries and much of the world's largest forests are prime examples. Unless there is some type of agreement by the parties who access the resources to better manage and preserve them, rational individuals acting in their own self-interest will exploit them (catching fish or cutting down trees) until the resources are exhausted. In this way they obtain all the benefits from their efforts while the costs (the ultimate degradation of the resources) are dispersed among the entire population. So what are the solutions?....
Column: Where is Ansel Adams When We Need Him? Ansel Adams came to the White House in 1975 to deliver a print of a photograph from Yosemite National Park desired by President Ford and Betty Ford. Adams, still smarting from President Nixon's neglect of public lands, asked Ford to redefine the meaning of our parks, maintain their funding, and put a 'new emphasis on preservation and environmental responsibilities." In 1983, Adams met with President Reagan, and not to deliver a photograph. He was a vocal critic of Reagan's rollbacks on environmental protection and preservation of wild areas. He said Reagan's land policies were ones of 'rape, ruin, and run!" According to Adams, had the nation been under the vision in the 1930s of Reagan's infamous Interior Secretary James Watt, Kings Canyon National Park would today 'look like part of the outskirts of Las Vegas." After Adams told Playboy magazine in 1983, 'I hate Reagan," an embarrassed White House had the beloved photographer sit with Reagan for nearly an hour. Adams left unimpressed, borrowing from Oscar Wilde to say, 'They know the price of everything and the value of nothing." One can only guess what sparks would fly if Adams, who died in 1984, could witness President Bush's resurrection of Reagan's rape, ruin, and run....
Forest Service reflects changing America Fred and Cherie Cooper joined the U.S. Forest Service in the early stages of its boom. During the next 30 years, the couple saw the federal agency through hiring spikes and downturns, changes in forest practices and philosophies, and differences in the roles of female employees. But the work experiences of the Coopers don't simply tell a story about the inner workings of a federal agency, which marked its 100-year anniversary this year. The Coopers' careers reflected the major changes in society. "It is eye-opening to me the way in which one agency helps explain American culture and vice versa," said Char Miller, a history professor at Trinity University in San Antonio and an expert on the U.S. Forest Service....
Kane readies monument suit Kane County is planning to sue the Interior Department over two elements of the management plan for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The County Commission discussed the issue in executive session Monday. Under the statute of limitations in the Administrative Procedure Act, commissioners said they have until Monday to file a protest to the plan formed six years ago to guide the management of the 91-million-acre monument in Kane and Garfield counties. The two counties have been at odds with the monument and the anticipated action is the latest in a legal web involving the county, state, environmental groups and Bureau of Land Management, the agency under the auspices of the Interior Department that manages the monument. Much of the controversy has evolved out of differences on access to roads on the monument, and that was one of the reasons cited by the commission for deciding to file the suit in U.S. District Court....
Utah's delegation optimistic on plan to block nuke dump One of Utah's best options for blocking a nuclear waste dump on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation will probably not be part of a Defense Department policy bill before the Senate this week. But Utah's delegation says the chances for passage of the Cedar Mountain Wilderness provision, which would block rail access to the reservation, are the best they have ever been. The Cedar Mountain language would create a new wilderness area near the reservation, preventing the Bureau of Land Management from approving a rail line to deliver waste to the dump proposed by Private Fuel Storage, a group of electric utilities that wants to store 44,000 tons of waste at the site. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, got the wilderness designation included in the House version of a Defense Department policy bill passed earlier this year....
Uranium deposits on Arizona Strip attract miners Prospectors are rushing to a remote stretch of northern Arizona in search of uranium. Prices for the metal are soaring, leading to renewed interest in mining on the Arizona Strip, a stretch of Arizona cut off from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon. "The Strip mines are still, I think, some of the richest mines in the United States," said Ron Hockstein, president of International Uranium Corp., which has four mines there. "We'd like to put those into production as quickly as we can."....
Power crunch in the desert National energy problems have driven prices painfully high at the gasoline pump, and huge bills for winter heating are predicted. The next energy pinch may grow out of this area's blazing summer heat. Phoenix added more people - and more air-conditioners - than any other city in the country last year. As a result, on a typical 100-degree-plus day, Phoenix and surrounding communities use more electricity than Manhattan. "I would say in the West over the next few years you've got some substantial problems with having enough electricity available to satisfy the demand," said Lester Lave, a Carnegie Mellon University economist and co-director of the Pittsburgh university's Electricity Industry Center....
Yellowstone study shows pollution levels within limits The levels of air and noise pollution that Yellowstone National Park workers were exposed to declined after new limits on the number and type of snowmobiles allowed in the park went into effect, a new study shows. But researchers say further study is needed before any direct correlation can be made between the declines and the new snowmobile rules. "We'll see if (the results) change this winter," said Terry Spear, the study's lead author and head of the Safety, Health and Industrial Hygiene Department at Montana Tech in Butte. The study, commissioned by the National Park Service, is one of several that park officials say they will take into account as they develop a long-range plan for winter use in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks....
Interior won't release names of juvenile fatalities The Department of the Interior, which oversees about 500 million acres of public lands in the United States, says it will not release the names of juveniles who die in accidents on the public lands. The ruling comes in response to a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by The Salt Lake Tribune and is an apparent departure from Interior's previous practice of releasing names of fatal juvenile victims. From December to July, Interior's National Park Service publicly identified at least 10 people under the age of 18 who died in accidents in national parks around the country. Among them was Luke Sanburg, a Boy Scout from Montana who disappeared June 24 after falling into the Yellowstone River in Yellowstone National Park. But when The Tribune requested reports on two fatal accidents involving juveniles at Lake Powell this summer, the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area's chief ranger redacted the victims' names....
Series Gives Unprecedented Access Into the Lives of Professional Bull Riders TLC executive vice president and general manager David Abraham announced today that the network will debut a new 10- part series BEYOND THE BULL, to premiere on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 9 PM (ET/PT). "In launching a series like BEYOND THE BULL, we turn our lens on a group of men who have a passion for life -- and risk it -- each and every weekend," noted Abraham. "BEYOND THE BULL is a natural addition to TLC's programming slate as these stories touch viewers and ignite an appreciation for living life to its fullest while engaging in one of the world's most dangerous sports." Based on a Scarborough Sports Marketing survey, the number of people who watched or attended a Professional Bull Rider (PBR) event ballooned by 52 percent from 2002 to 2004, making it the fastest-growing professional sport in America. And -- with a fan base of 16 million -- the dynamic sport that officially broke off of the rodeo circuit in 1992 is commanding new audiences across the nation and the world. BEYOND THE BULL spotlights three riders as they compete, chase the purse and tempt fate. Each leads a hectic life -- balancing careers, families and children, and battling personal demons and fears. And with every bull he mounts, each rider risks broken bones, dashed dreams and a crushed ego. Viewers will meet dashing young Australian Brendon Clark, who navigates through his sophomore season on the circuit; cattle rancher and newly engaged J.W. Hart, who has been successful but hasn't reached the championship pinnacle; and veteran family man and Brazilian native Adriano Moraes, who is vying for an unprecedented third crown. In addition to the riders themselves, BEYOND THE BULL also follows PBR medical director Dr. Tandy Freeman; J.W.'s fiance LeAnn Stilley; Adriano's wife Flavia Moraes; and Brendon's girlfriend Anna Hunt....
It's All Trew: Past can continue to serve the present No doubt time marches on with progress as inevitable as tomorrow's sunrise. This seems to be more evident in the rural areas as our small towns and older communities slowly disappear or change identities. From time to time, Ruth and I note where favorite old houses or barns we have passed by and admired for years, are torn down, bulldozed into a pit and covered. We know that many families have lived within those walls for many years. We also know from experience most of these places could still be serving their owners if they had been kept in good repair. I know of three places on our ranch where depressions in the soil designate the location of an old dirt cellar. This structure means that at some time or another people lived nearby, using it for shelter, storage and protection. What a story these old cellars could tell if they could talk. Our ranch home dates back to 1918 when a young man built two rooms for his new bride-to-be....