NEWS ROUNDUP

Bush to look West when replacing Interior's Norton President Bush will abide by tradition and name a Westerner to replace Interior Secretary Gale Norton, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said. And the White House will look for a successor whose views mirror those of the pro-development Norton, Card said. "We will be looking West," Card told The Denver Post. "She came to the job with a real appreciation of Western lands. ... We will be looking for people who have the same appreciation." Under Norton, there has been a 22 percent increase in coal production on U.S. public lands and a 17 percent increase in natural-gas production. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, part of her agency, went from a backlog of oil and gas permits to producing them faster than companies can drill them. She also made federal lands friendlier to loggers, snowmobilers and off- roaders....
Interior's Norton had big impact on West Perhaps no one person has done more in the past five years to alter the landscape of the rural West than Gale Norton, who resigned Friday as Interior secretary. She opened the Rocky Mountains and much of the North Slope of Alaska to oil and gas development. She all but banned new protected wilderness areas on the federal land under her control. And she urged the Bureau of Land Management to seek more logging on 2.5 million acres in Western Oregon. Norton, who leaves office at month's end, personally oversaw a messy water war in Oregon's Klamath River basin in 2002 that eventually resulted in irrigation for farmers while more than 60,000 fish died. The river is still in such ill health that chinook fishing may be shut down along vast stretches of the West Coast....
Why Interior is such a difficult agency to lead Geographically speaking, no member of the Bush administration has had more impact on or responsibility for the United States than Interior Secretary Gale Norton. Secretary Norton, who announced her resignation Friday, oversaw more than 500 million acres of national parks and wilderness, water reclamation projects, most energy development, Indian tribal issues, endangered-species protection, and tracts of arid Western rangeland where cattle roam and the deer and the antelope play. The position is a challenging one that often embroils its occupants in controversy - and is likely to continue to do so. Typically run by a native Westerner, the Interior Department in recent years has swung between an emphasis on environmental protection and a philosophy of developing public lands - called "wise use" or "market-based environmentalism." To his critics, James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's lightning-rod Interior secretary, represented the latter approach at its most extreme. During the Clinton years, Bruce Babbitt - former head of the pro-environment League of Conservation Voters - fought to close old mines and dams, tried to charge users more for cattle grazing and mineral mining, and expanded national monuments and protections for other federal landscape. Ms. Norton's five-year tenure, moving Interior back to a more development-oriented agenda, gets mixed reviews....
Mystery animal killing sheep in McCone, Garfield counties Ranchers in McCone and Garfield counties, as well as federal wildlife officials, are hunting a wolf or wolf hybrid that has killed 35 sheep and wounded 70 others since late December. The attacks started near Circle more than 250 miles from the nearest known wolf territory. Five sheep were killed and 15 wounded, some of which died later. The next attack happened Jan. 10 and ended with 21 grown ewes dead and 40 injured. In both cases, agents with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services looked at tracks and other evidence and determined domestic dogs were responsible. On Jan. 12, four more sheep were killed and six injured, said Carolyn Sime, wolf program coordinator for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Word of the attacks spread, and ranchers began looking for a killer dog. On Feb. 6, Jeff Skyberg, a private trapper in Circle, got a call from a rancher who said he'd spotted large dog tracks in some fresh snow. Skyberg, who works for a local predator control district funded by ranchers, got in a small plane and followed the tracks. "When I got to the end of the tracks, it wasn't a dog," he said. He described what looked like a wolf: a big gray animal with a straight tail. Dog or hybrid tails often curl....
Zoo's wolves are Southwestern visitors Minnesota Zoo keeper Jackie Fallon has spent much of her career working desperately to save the "ghosts of the Southwest," the rarest and most endangered wolves in North America. Mexican gray wolves were wiped out in the United States by the middle of the 20th century, but the subspecies found a sliver of hope in the late 1970s after a trapper working for the government captured five wolves alive in Mexico. For more than a decade, Fallon has been part of a two-nation effort to breed those captive wolves and return their descendants to the wild, after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asked the Apple Valley zoo in 1994 to help. One of the zoo's former wolves is now at a holding facility awaiting release into the Blue Mountain Range in Arizona. "That's what I've always strived for, every day, for all of these years," Fallon said. In the meantime, Fallon cares for four male Mexican wolves, the smallest and most genetically distinct type of gray wolf....
Love of Land, Hate for Developers Unite Agriculturalists and Environmentalists From the time they could sit in a saddle, Cary and Layne Lightsey have enjoyed riding around the family's 6,500-acre cattle ranch near Lake Wales in wonder at its natural beauty. These days the brothers, also partners in Lightsey Cattle Co., take a special pleasure in their rides knowing they've found a way to preserve the beauty of the land for generations to come. "Our happiness comes from the land and work and the traditional lifestyle. We're preserving what makes us happy," said Cary Lightsey, a sixth-generation rancher. The Lightseys have sold the development rights to 60 percent of their 16,000acre ranch properties in Polk, Highlands and Osceola in five separate deals during the past 14 years to state and federal government conservation programs, which will keep the land in its natural state in perpetuity. Although they and future Lightsey generations will maintain physical possession of the land and can continue using it for agricultural purposes, they cannot sell the land to real estate developers for homes, stores or office buildings. Any future owners outside the family also will have to maintain the land as is....
Column: State errs on private hunting decision The recent decision by the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission to limit the general big game hunting season to five weeks is a thinly veiled effort to force more public hunting on private property. Unfortunately, limiting the season to just five weeks and not allowing early and late season hunts is unlikely to improve wildlife management and will almost certainly hurt hunters in the long run. Opening access to private property is a recurring theme for Gov. Schweitzer's administration, one that should leave landowners shaking in their cowboy boots or their wing-tips. The governor recently blamed fences, especially those built by out-of-staters, for keeping out hunters and anglers. He said that "these fences aren't fencing Angus bulls in, they are fencing Montanans out." The new rules clearly go beyond the out-of-state owners so disdained by the governor to include Montana citizens who do own Angus bulls....
Kansas is increasing efforts to get control of its wild hog population A dozen men, a half-dozen trucks and a helicopter moved across Kansas as a team last week, shooting wild hogs from the air in spots where the pigs were loathed. Shortly after listening to a landowner lament damage to fences, crops and gamebird nests Wednesday, the aircraft flushed eight hogs from thick cedars. Soon, the entire herd was dead. Sam Graham of the Kansas Animal Health Department was even happier than the rancher. His department is concerned feral swine could hold diseases that could affect livestock and humans, so the hunt gives them hogs to test. Tom Halstead, U.S. Department of Agriculture wildlife services state director, said the project was funded by the state health department, with cooperation from his agency. Not native to the U.S., and only found in Kansas within the last 15 years, wild hogs are getting a lot of attention this year....
Barriers at border go up as debate on effects goes on While politicians in Phoenix and Congress talk about building a tall fence along Arizona's border with Mexico, workers here are completing a shorter and more modest obstacle. This low-slung vehicle barrier will do nothing to stop people from walking into Southern Arizona illegally. But on public lands where the obstacles are popping up, officials say the devices have succeeded in stopping the so-called drive-throughs that can imperil law enforcement and scar the thin-skinned desert for decades. In a 2004 report by the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, congressional staff reported seeing photos of a special truck that could park perpendicular to the barrier on the Mexican side, unfold a set of rails over the barrier and unfold another set of rails behind it. "Other vehicles could then drive up the back of the modified truck, across its top and down its front, over the vehicle barrier and into the United States," the report said. To build the barriers, workers may need to widen roads, build new ones and sink wells to supply water for making concrete. Despite those impacts, biologists, land managers and environmentalists generally favor the barriers because they don't impede wildlife and can prevent even greater damage by vehicles....
Suit aims to stall Alaska oil development Environmental groups are suing the Interior Department to block expanded oil and gas exploration in an ecologically sensitive area of Alaska's North Slope. The 18-page lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Juneau focuses on the government's decision in January to allow drillers to lease previously closed acreage in the northeast corner of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The Bush administration's decision opens up 389,000 acres for leasing, giving drillers a chance to find and produce an estimated 2 billion barrels of oil and 3.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the tundra north and east of Teshekpuk Lake. The plaintiffs contend the Bureau of Land Management, an Interior agency, violated the Endangered Species Act and other federal laws in failing to properly analyze the potential impacts of oil and gas activity in a region that is a magnet for thousands of migratory geese. They contend the agency paid inadequate attention to the potential for industrial sprawl that could chop up an Arctic haven for animals of great importance to subsistence hunters....
Editorial: Oil and gas leasing moving too quickly Colorado resources will help meet the nation's energy needs, but oil and gas development should respect other public values such as clean air, clean water and wildlife. There is a risk that the frenetic pace of oil and gas activity in the West is running roughshod over other public goals. And the leases now being granted could dictate the fate of our public lands and national forests for decades. The Bush administration long has pushed for expanded drilling on federal lands, even in ecologically sensitive areas. As a result, if a future Congress wants to someday protect those areas, it may be too late. Mineral leases are property rights, so once oil and gas companies obtain them they have all but guaranteed their ability to move in drill rigs, usually within a 10-year window. Oil companies also must apply for drilling permits, but that approval is very likely. Ironically, energy outfits already have more federal land under lease than they can drill in the foreseeable future. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management's 2004 data show that energy companies have leased 35 million acres of public lands, but only about a third, or 11.6 million acres, are producing any oil or gas. Energy companies have more than 4,300 leases on federal lands in Colorado, but in 2004 sought permission to drill on just 378. The backlog of untapped leases means that oil and gas companies have locked in their right to drill on public lands well beyond this administration. The companies say there's so much drilling taking place that they can't get enough rigs - they're even bringing in rigs from China....
Evangelicals, Scientists, Environmentalists Fight for Endangered Species Act As the Senate prepares to take up revisions to the Endangered Species Act this month, evangelicals, scientists, environmentalists, and environmental-evangelical-scientists launched a nationwide effort to raise awareness among their supporters about the threat to the landmark law and to urge policymakers to preserve scientific protections in the act. The Noah Alliance, an interfaith group of Evangelical Christian, Protestant and Jews, began running about $200,000 of advertisements on hundreds of radio, print and television media since Mar. 8. Organizers hope the ads, which will run through Mar. 13, will serve to alert people of faith to the potential dismantling of the Endangered Species Act – legislation they call “America’s modern-day ark to save God’s creatures.” “As Evangelical Christians in our time, we see a most profound threat to God's creation in the destruction of endangered species and their God-given habitat,” said Calvin DeWitt, environmental professor at the University of Wisconsin and president of the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists. “We want the public to see the risk we face if Congress weakens the Endangered Species Act.” The Academy, which includes nearly 70 Evangelical scholars from Baptist, Pentecostal, Reformed, and other churches and from 35 Christian colleges and universities in 19 states, is one of several faith-based groups that formed Noah’s Alliance last year specifically to bring a religious voice in the movement to protect endangered species....
Raging Texas Wildfires Blamed for 7 Deaths Massive wildfires raced across the Texas Panhandle and South Plains early Monday, burning more than half a million acres, leaving at least seven people dead and injuring at least seven more. Four of the victims were killed in a chain-reaction crash on Interstate 40 east of Groom as smoke obscured the road. Three others died in fires near Borger, northeast of Amarillo. "This is probably one of the biggest fire days in Texas history," said Warren Bielenberg, a spokesman for the Texas Forest Service. The fires scorched more than 663,000 acres - about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island - far eclipsing the deadly wildfires that prompted Gov. Rick Perry to declare a statewide drought disaster in January. The earlier blaze charred more than 455,000 acres, destroyed more than 340 homes and killed three people in Texas....
200 ordered to flee N.M. grass fire A 70,000-acre grass fire burned Sunday near homes and farms in two southeastern New Mexico communities, prompting evacuation orders for up to 200 people and injuring one man. The fire burned the post office in McDonald and several other buildings, officials said. A state road was closed and residents in McDonald and Prairie View were told to leave their homes. A man who suffered burns while trying to put out the fire was taken to a Lubbock, Texas, hospital where he was in stable condition, Lovington Fire Department Capt. Robert Morris said. About a dozen fire departments fought the blaze and dug fire lines to protect homes and buildings as winds gusted to 60 mph, Morris said....
Cattlemen's philosophies deepen split There is a split down the middle of the U.S. cattle industry that runs deep, although it can be difficult for city and town folks to fathom. On one side are R-CALF USA and state affiliates such as the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association. On the other side are the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and state affiliates such as the South Dakota Cattlemen's Association. They disagree sharply on issues such as foreign trade agreements, country-of-origin labeling, mandatory animal identification and opening the U.S. border to Canadian cattle after that country's mad cow disease problem. It's hard to tell the difference between these groups simply by appearances. They all typically wear cowboy hats and boots. They all make their living from cattle. The two sides are so sharply split that they don't even agree on why they are split....
Most recent rift between cattle groups began in the 1990s The growing rift in the cattle and beef industry began coming to a head in 1999, although various livestock associations have been battling each other since the turn of the 20th century. R-CALF was formed out of frustration with the National Cattlemen's Beef Association on the part of some of its members. Among them was Leo McDonnell, a Columbus, Mont., rancher who chafed when the group, in his view, wasn't battling hard enough on behalf of independent ranchers. McDonnell, along with Herman Schumacher, a sale-barn operator from Herreid, and Kathleen Kelley of Meeker, Colo., founded the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund in 1998. McDonnell became its president. The group became a membership organization in 1999. The Stockgrowers were becoming split, with some favoring what they saw as the more progressive philosophy of the NCBA and others complaining that the NCBA was favoring the feeders and big meatpacking companies over the interests of independent ranchers....
Mixing saddles and spas Once considered the "dude ranch capital of the world," Tucson sometimes seems to have traded in its boots and spurs for multivitamin facials and golf carts. But now, it's mixing them. Two of Tucson's three surviving guest ranches are offering services such as tai chi and yoga classes, hot rock massages, full-service manicures and fitness centers. The third, the Lazy K Bar Guest Ranch in Marana, doesn't have a spa, but it is joining the others in offering new programs such as cowgirl camps and Nature Conservancy programs to attract new demographic groups. "We're doing better than we have in the last number of years by adjusting our focus on getting different types of people to the ranch," Lazy K Sales Manager Mikki Gries said....
Payson's oldest cowboy still has swagger at 90 Charlie Henderson is the oldest cowboy in Payson -- although he'd probably never admit it. He's much too classy for that sort of bravado, even for an old rancher. But that doesn't stop his friends from crowing the news. Back when Highway 260 was still a dusty drag heading east, Duke Wilbanks worked cattle with Henderson on nearby Little Green Valley Ranch. "He made one of the best ranches in Arizona," Wilbanks said. "He had a lot of common sense and took care of the land better than the Forest Service." And at 90, Henderson's still got that cowboy swagger. His dusty, black-felt cowboy hat, curling at the edges, sits low on his head, obscuring his cornflower blue eyes. He wears a flannel shirt and faded Levi's, threadbare in the knee....
San Juan Capistrano: Living History in Spanish West Mission San Juan Capistrano, is one in a chain of 21 settlements founded by the Spanish missionaries during the middle 1700s. On November 1, 1776, Father Junipero Serra founded the San Juan Capistrano Mission, in what is now Orange County. San Juan Capistrano is best known for where the swallows once migrated each March after wintering 7,000 miles away in Goya, Argentina. However, before the swallows' annual return was first recorded at the San Juan Capistrano Mission, the grounds had fallen to opportunists, government turnovers, and to violent Pacific storms. Serra built a self-contained adobe fort in the 1770s in what had been a valley of several hundred Juaneno Indians. They used local materials to construct the San Juan Capistrano Mission on a knoll, north of where two salmon-plump rivers merged. In 1794, forty adobe homes were built, housing Mission workers and ranch hands, along Los Rios Street --the oldest residential street in California. In 1797 construction began on a stone church designed to hold hundreds of parishioners. The massive structure took nine years to complete and towered above the valley floor....