NEWS ROUNDUP

Ex-wildfire chief accused of setting fires The former commander of an elite wildfire team that battled the largest blaze in Arizona history and aided in recovery efforts at the World Trade Center is accused of starting two fires last year, federal prosecutors said. Van Bateman, 55, was indicted Wednesday for allegedly setting the fires in the Coconino National Forest in 2004. He faces two federal counts of setting timber afire and two counts of arson on public lands. The first charge carries a maximum prison sentence of five years, while arson is punishable by up to 20 years, prosecutors said Thursday. Bateman was a Type I incident commander, the head of a wildfire management crew that is called in for the biggest and most severe wildfires. His four-year term in that position expired in 2004 and he became leader of a slightly lower level team until he was indicted and put on paid leave, according to Forest Service officials....
‘Old Broad’ calls for wilderness Wilderness areas, which are off-limits to motorized vehicles, at some point become inaccessible to people as they age. But that’s all right, according to an official with a group formed to prove that older people could access wilderness areas. Veronica “Ronnie” Egan, executive director of Great Old Broads for Wilderness, explained the origins of the group to a crowd attending the fourth annual Wilderness Symposium on Thursday in Rapid City. Egan, of Durango, Colo., said the group formed 16 years ago in response to arguments by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, that older people aren’t able to visit wilderness areas because they can’t use vehicles. Egan, 59, said about a dozen “ladies of a certain age” who enjoyed hiking in the Escalante canyons in Utah formed Great Old Broads for Wilderness “to represent older citizens who were, first of all, dedicated to being in wilderness, and secondly, to the concept that even if they got to the point where they couldn’t get there under their own steam, that was OK. We’ve had our chance, as it were, and wilderness is valuable for its own sake and not just for the recreational proclivities of the young, buff elite,” Egan told the crowd of more than 100 people at Rushmore Plaza Holiday Inn....
Mountain lion on the prowl in Mount Madonna Park A mountain lion prowling Santa Clara's Mount Madonna County Park has killed 18 deer, descendants of a pair donated by media mogul William Randolph Hearst in the 1930s. Since March, a female mountain lion has bounded over an 8-foot fence at least eight times and into a pen where the white fallow deer call home, according to John Heenan, senior park ranger at Mount Madonna. The deer, native to Persia, were given to Gilroy cattle rancher Henry Miller, who owned property in the park, as a gift from Hearst in 1935. In addition to the 18 killed by the mountain lion, six others have died of natural causes, according to park officials. Only 27 are left in the herd....
PETA PRESIDENT SELLS FOR $43,600 ON EBAY PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk, founder of the world’s largest animal rights organization and author of several books on how to be kind to animals, gave lab chiefs and steakhouse owners a chance to get back at her when she auctioned herself off as personal assistant for a day on eBay. In an auction that ended this morning, Newkirk landed more than 40 bids, and in the end, Sandy Boss and Gary Reamer, a married couple from Encinitas, Calif., paid a whopping $43,600 to hire Newkirk for the day. Newkirk had put her services up for bid on October 31 as a novel way to help fund her campaigners’ travel to protest sites around the globe. The auction resulted in hundreds of raunchy, nasty messages, including ranchers who wanted her to "milk" bull’s semen, exotic animal dealers who thought that she should answer their company telephone, anglers who told her that she’d have to gut their fish all day, and deer hunters and pit bull breeders who were eager to put her next to a gun or an aggressive dog....
WWGA Responds To Editorial Attacks On October 31, the Casper Star Tribune published one of its nameless, faceless editorials that it is famous for wherein it chastised the Wyoming Wool Growers Association for proposing a bill to the Wyoming legislature which would enhance existing statute which provides for a penalty for anyone abandoning sheep on the open range. This proposed bill would increase the potential penalty to any worker who voluntarily walks off and abandons these animals, but would also provide penalties for anyone who entices a worker to do this, as well as penalties to those who knowingly hire anyone who intentionally abandons these animals and leaves them to fend for themselves out on the range in Wyoming. As is typical for the Casper Star Tribune, the editorial had an anti-agriculture, anti-ranching tone and feel to it. What was particularly egregious about this editorial, however, was the fact that the Casper Star did not make any attempt to contact our organization for background information, did not make any attempt (that we are aware of) to contact any rancher or herder who was potentially affected by the bill, and didn’t even bother to send a reporter to the legislative hearing at which the bill was proposed. All basic Journalism 101, but apparently not tenets that the Casper Star believes it should have to follow. In order to set the record straight, and to hopefully rectify the damage inflicted upon our Association and industry by this editorial (which we believe was the underlying and real intent of it), we ask the citizens of Wyoming to consider the following information, which was not provided by the Casper Star....
Poll says Montanans support Buffalo hunt, delisting of wolves Montanans strongly favor the new bison hunt scheduled to start next week, and like the idea of removing the gray wolf from federal protection and opening up the state for more coal mining, results of a new poll shows. The bison hunt, set to make a comeback next week, had the support of 73 percent of the poll's respondents. Only 18 percent opposed the hunt, and 9 percent were undecided. Among men, 80 percent supported the hunt, while 65 percent of women liked the idea. A question asking if the gray wolf should be desisted, a hot topic among ranchers in the state, found that 57 percent said it is time to remove protections for the wolf. Twenty-eight percent opposed delisting the wolf, and 15 percent were undecided. Republicans and people living in rural areas were a little more likely to support delisting the wolf. A large majority, 68 percent, also support the idea of more coal mining in the state, while 19 percent oppose it and 14 percent are undecided. Coal mining had support from across the political spectrum, but Republicans were the most likely to support the idea, the poll found....
Natural wonder sits precariously atop valuable methane Oscar Simpson scrabbles up a sandstone wall 1,000 feet above the forest floor and rests at the top, looking. Below him, nearly 40,000 acres of the Valle Vidal stretch out with mint and olive greens, slivers of rusty reds and cornstalk yellows, dots of chocolaty browns. It's photogenic terrain superior to what any landscape painter could depict, home to thousands of Rocky Mountain elk, Rio Grande cutthroat trout and microscopic fairy shrimp. Simpson, president of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, takes a breath, looking across the slice of northern New Mexico framed by some of the state's highest peaks. To him, the eastern section of the 101,000 acres of the Carson known as the Valle Vidal Unit is a treasure that provides once-in-a-lifetime elk hunts, fishing, camping and horseback riding. Others see it as a potential site for coal-bed methane drilling....
NEPA process shouldn’t be allowed to drive cattle off public lands “Businesses, families, and communities cannot fail because the government does not complete paperwork,” says Brenda Richards, a ranch operator from Murphy, Idaho speaking about the procedural requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Representing the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) and the Public Lands Council (PLC), Richards testified today before the House Resources Committee on the problems with NEPA. “It is hard to imagine that the authors of NEPA would have intended to harm personal businesses, lives, and communities,” says Richards. “But the cumbersome consideration of environmental consequences mandated by NEPA leaves public land ranchers on a precipice of uncertainty.” NCBA and PLC have historically worked with agency officials and called for congressional legislation that would prevent interruption of grazing permits while federal agencies struggle to meet environmental documentation obligations required by the grazing permit renewal process....
Column: When a forest goes feral, it's time for volunteers Wallace Stegner once wrote that the worst thing that can happen to a piece of land, short of coming into the hands of an unscrupulous developer, is to be left open to the unmanaged public. His great fear seems to be coming true. With the downsizing of the federal workforce and the increasing mountain of unfunded federal regulations, our public lands are witnessing the kind of neglect that befell the thousands of victims of hurricane Katrina. During a recent Senate hearing, while I was waiting to speak about the declining health of the West's public lands, I heard a Western senator berate a Forest Service staffer for failing to work with ranchers who had grazing leases on federal land. To the official's credit, he reminded the senator that his employees did not choose to spend their days in government offices grinding out federal documents. These natural resource managers, the agency official pointed out, wanted to be out on the land, exercising the stewardship skills they had learned....
Forest Service chief praises bill to speed salvage logging A bill to speed up logging dead timber and planting new trees after storms and wildfires won praise Thursday from the head of the U.S. Forest Service. In fact, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth said he wished the bill were already in effect, so the agency could better restore Southern forests damaged by Hurricane Katrina. "It would allow us to move more quickly to respond to the needs on the ground after the hurricane," he said. Even under current law, plans are moving relatively quickly, Bosworth said. Clean-up efforts to repair huge swaths of forests damaged or destroyed in the hurricane are well underway, and an environmental assessment for long-term restoration should be completed within a few weeks. Work on projects to restore Southern pine forests in Mississippi and Louisiana should begin early next year, he said....
Court rules timber sale can proceed A federal appeals court has ruled the U.S. Forest Service can proceed with a controversial timber sale near Gardiner. The Darroch Eagle sale has been in and out of court for almost six years. This week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that it can be harvested. The court ruled against three environmental groups trying to halt the project. They are the Gardiner-based Bear Creek Council and the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and the Ecology Center, both based in Missoula. The groups had argued that the harvest of 2.9 million board feet on 195 acres in the Jardine area would harm grizzly bear habitat and that the Forest Service used "arbitrary and capricious" methods in its accounting and its calculations of old growth. They also argued that the timber shouldn't have been sold before the legal case was solved. The Forest Service sold the logs to RY Lumber for $840,000. The court sided with the Forest Service on all counts....
How to un-cut a tree Yes, the Forest Service will talk openly about the mistake it made this summer fighting the Cedar Fire on the Clearwater National Forest. No, it didn’t volunteer the information to the general public; and no, it evidently hasn’t been previously reported by Montana or Idaho media. In early August, lightning sparked a fire about a half-mile inside the wilderness boundary and a couple of miles from Elk Summit Road, which spurs off Idaho’s Highway 12 and climbs about 20 miles before ending at Hoodoo Lake. Wilderness fires are treated differently than most, due to the 1964 Wilderness Act, which declares that designated wilderness, unlike most of the planet, “is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Practically speaking, this means federal agencies need approval for each and every incursion, from deciding whether to suppress a fire to determining which tools can be used to get the job done, says Chris Ryan, who’s charged with overseeing wilderness management in the Northern Region....
Is “wild” too mild? What’s in a name? It’s a tough question if you’re asking anyone familiar with the Kootenai National Forest’s new draft management plan. Bob Castaneda, supervisor of the Kootenai National Forest, decided Oct. 17 to change all Kootenai lands formerly designated as “recommended wilderness” to “wild lands.” The change affects 124,000 acres. According to Castaneda, there is no difference between “recommended wilderness” and “wild lands.” He says recommended wilderness, wild lands and federally recognized wilderness all prohibit use of motorized vehicles, logging, most chainsaw use and other high-impact activities. He says he changed the name to alleviate tension between environmental and multiple-use groups over the phrase “recommended wilderness.” “It’s still a gain for wilderness values,” Castaneda says, noting that the new management plan protects an additional 50,000 acres in the same manner as recommended wilderness. But not everyone thinks the name change is so benign, and the Montana Wilderness Association (MWA) is calling it a sham....
Feds to announce proposal to remove grizzly bears from endangered list Grizzly bears in areas surrounding Yellowstone National Park would be removed from the endangered species list under a proposal to be announced next week, officials said Thursday. The Interior Department and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to comment on the proposal, but a congressional official and a state government official who were each informed of the announcement confirmed the government's plan. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because the proposal has not yet been made public. Mike Volesky, a policy adviser to Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, said an announcement on grizzly bears was planned, but he did not have details. Federal wildlife officials estimate that more than 600 grizzly bears live in the region surrounding Yellowstone in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Those numbers represent a significant recovery. Only 200 or 250 grizzlies were in that region in 1975, when grizzly bears in the lower 48 states were listed under the Endangered Species Act....
Pitching Legend Hits Home Run on the Grill; Nolan Ryan Offers Line of Signature Steaks With higher prices at the gas pump and in stores, the National Retail Federation is predicting more and more consumers will by-pass the hassle and go online for a chunk of their holiday shopping. "While I don't know much about online shopping I do know a lot about baseball, ranching and great steaks," says baseball legend Nolan Ryan, who not only puts his name on a line of gourmet beef products, but also oversees their production. Beefmaster Cattlemen and the Nolan Ryan's Tender Aged Beef brand are owned by Nolan Ryan and other participating ranchers. Ryan decided the only way he could guarantee beef that was tender and good every time was to start his own brand. "Cattle in the program only come from licensed facilities and adhere to strict production standards," says Ryan. "Our products are minimally processed with no artificial ingredients to ensure a great-tasting and tender steak. Every bite. Every time."....