NEWS ROUNDUP


Nez Perce Tribe opposes Idaho's plan to kill wolves to help elk An Indian tribe that's helped with gray wolf recovery efforts since their reintroduction to Idaho in 1995 says the state is moving too quickly with a plan to kill dozens of wolves to help restore elk herds on the border with Montana. Rebecca Miles, chairwoman of the Nez Perce in Lapwai, said tribal wolf managers aren't convinced studies of elk herds in the Clearwater River basin support a plan by state Department of Fish and Game to reduce wolf numbers in region to as few as 15, from about 60 animals now. According to the agency, wolves are responsible for about 35 percent of recorded elk cow deaths since 2002 in two hunting units in the region....
Groups Present 'Green Budget' Recommendations to Congress, President Citing chronic underfunding of vital public health and environmental safeguards, fifteen environmental groups today called on President Bush and the Congress to invest critically-needed funds to ensure Americans have clean air and water, and to preserve our natural landscapes and the wildlife that depend on them. The groups released a budget blueprint outlining their priorities and recommendations for the federal government's FY07 budget. The blueprint, titled "A Green Budget for a Healthy America," addresses repeated funding cuts of almost $1.3 billion (adjusted for inflation) that have plagued many important initiatives in recent years. To view the document, go to saveourenvironment.org....
Acres for the future When thinking of protecting wild places, one need only look to southern New Mexico to see large tracts of wild public lands that have the potential to be part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. From the Boot Heel to Otero Mesa and north to the Apache Kid and Magdalena Mountains, southern New Mexico has, in many ways, some of the wildest country left in the Rocky Mountain West. Yet, like so many other places, these wild lands face a myriad of threats. From oil and gas drilling to off-road vehicles and urban sprawl, the threats are real. And, in some cases, they're growing. These threats make wilderness designation essential. Despite the tough political climate for wilderness these days, there is a bipartisan wild-lands coalition of ranchers, hunters, developers, conservationists and local politicians working with the Bureau of Land Management, and staff members in the offices of New Mexico Senators Pete Domenici, the Albuquerque Republican, and Jeff Bingaman, the Silver City Democrat. The objective: to protect more than 300,000 acres of wild public lands in Doña Ana County....
North Dakota boosts BLM oil, gas lease sale record Federal oil and gas lease sales in the Dakotas and Montana set a record in fiscal 2005, with parcels in western North Dakota's booming oil patch garnering the overwhelming bulk of interest, the Bureau of Land Management says. Oil and gas lease sales totaled slightly more than $36 million for the three-state region in the fiscal year, with North Dakota accounting for $35.1 million, the BLM said Thursday. Montana had $785,000 in leases, while South Dakota tallied $62,485. Most lease sales in the three-state region have occurred on U.S. Forest Service land in western North Dakota's Williston Basin, said Karen Johnson, who head's BLM's oil and gas leasing division in Billings, Mont....
Property Rights Improve Environment, Book Says Re-Thinking Green: Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy edited by Robert Higgs and Carl P. Close. The American public has shown significant concern for environmental quality since the first Earth Day in 1970, yet the maze of environmental laws and regulations enacted since then has fostered huge government bureaucracies better known for waste and failure than for innovation and success. In Re-Thinking Green, 22 economists and political scientists explain how environmental quality can be enhanced more effectively by relying less on government agencies, which are increasingly politicized and unaccountable, and more on environmental entrepreneurship and the strict enforcement of private property rights. The environmental bureaucracy has grown in size and scope because of a misguided belief that unless mankind reduces consumption of natural resources, cataclysmic environmental disasters will occur. "Sustainable development" is the fashionable but nebulous term associated with proposals to deal with the limiting of growth the environmentalists call for. It focuses primarily on limiting, if not eliminating, private land ownership. The authors of Re-Thinking Green brilliantly describe the fallacy in this type of thinking, and along the way they completely defrock unfounded concerns regarding population growth and the biggest environmental scam of them all: global warming....
R-CALF USA, NCBA presidents debate cattle industry issues Trade policies, country-of-origin labeling and common ground topped issues discussed by presidents of the nation's two largest cattle and beef organizations during the Montana Winter Fair's farm forum debate, held last Thursday in Lewistown. R-CALF USA president Chuck Kiker, a Texas rancher, and NCBA president-elect Mike John, a Missouri cow-calf producer, went head to head answering questions and debating issues presented by some of the more than 500 farmers and ranchers attending the high caliber debate. Kiker and John addressed approximately 20 questions during the 70-minute debate. The recent setback in Japanese beef trade spurred a couple questions regarding the trade policies of R-CALF USA and NCBA....
A poem on the range It's Deep West, this mining town of 16,000 residents by the foothills of the Ruby Mountains, and the cowboys have come to recite their verse at the 22nd annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. One of the best of the these poets — she has won the Will Rogers Award, which is the equivalent of an Oscar for cowboy poets — is Doris Daley, 50, who lives just outside of Calgary by the Bow River and comes from a four-generation ranching family. Don't ask somebody in the Toronto literary world who she is. They won't know. "They weep with emotion over their wordsmithing, to get something just right — and more power to them," Daley says of poets who publish in literary journals that nobody reads except fellow poets. "The strength of what all of us do, of our poetry, is that it's a living, breathing expression of a real way of life."....

Blogger.com was down for quite awhile tonight, so this is a shortened version of The Westerner.