NEWS ROUNDUP

Group Starts 'Give a Hoot For Owls' Campaign This weekend the Center for Biological Diversity launched a nationwide "Give a Hoot" campaign to protect imperiled owls, an event that coincided with the release of the major motion picture Hoot. Based on a novel by Carl Hiaasen, Hoot is an "eco-thriller" about teenagers who take on Florida developers that are destroying habitat for owls. As part of the campaign, more than 100 volunteers in 27 cities and a dozen states educated moviegoers about the real-life plight of vanishing owls and other endangered wildlife, and collected petition signatures supporting their protection. "Unfortunately, destruction of habitat for rare owls is not only part of a novel or Hollywood script. Imperiled owls throughout the country are threatened by bulldozers clearing land for urban sprawl and chainsaws cutting into old-growth forests," said Jeff Miller, wildlife advocate with the Center. "Give a Hoot" volunteers spread the word about the conservation of owls and the opportunities to take action to protect their last habitat. "The Center has been extensively involved in protecting owls for more than a decade. It is our hope that Hoot will help inspire a new generation to join in this effort," said Peter Galvin, Conservation Director with the Center for Biological Diversity. "It's time to stand up for the little guys and give a hoot for owls."....
Project would move brook, brown trout Some of the fish inhabiting the East Fork of the Bull River in northwestern Montana would be captured and moved, under a plan designed to help two sensitive fish species. The proposal advanced by energy company Avista Corp., and supported by federal and state agencies, calls for the capture of brook trout and brown trout in a nearly 2-mile stretch of the East Fork near Noxon. Hundreds of fish would be moved to the main Bull River several miles away. The goal is to help populations of native bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout in the lower Clark Fork River and its tributaries, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks said. The bull trout is on the federal threatened species list, and westslope cutthroat is classified in Montana as a species of special concern. Brook and brown trout, which are introduced species, compete with them. For both bull trout and westslope cutthroat, the East Fork is an important area for spawning. The fish project is part of an agreement for the federal licensing of the Cabinet Gorge Dam in Idaho and Noxon Rapids Dam in Montana....
Webcams: Witness wildlife flourishing The eggs are laid. The annual drama has begun. Across the country, from Karla Scanlon's first-grade Philadelphia classroom to a watcher in Wichita, Kan., people are revving up their computers to learn what's next for two peregrine falcons nesting on a ledge of a Harrisburg, Pa., office building. Will all five eggs hatch? Will the young survive? The answers will come via cameras perched nearby, feeding photos and video to the Internet. Focused so close you can see the birds breathing, the cameras provide an instant fix for wildlife voyeurs. By all accounts, their appetites -- the watchers', that is -- are voracious. And wildlife cams are proliferating. You can click on to a beachful of elephant seals off the California coast who look cool, even if they're only sunbathing. You can set your screen to the panda cam at the National Zoo, where 9-month-old Tai Shan might be munching bamboo. A Web celeb since his debut as a newborn last July, garnering 18 million hits in nine months, the panda gets fan mail from folks around the world, including U.S. soldiers in Iraq....
Utah attacks PFS nuclear waste plan Hundreds of comments about Private Fuel Storage hit the Bureau of Land Management Monday, the last day of a 90-day public comment period. The state of Utah, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and a reported 700 people with environmental concerns filed written statements Monday. Another 300 with environmental comments sent e-mail messages to the BLM through the same group that facilitated the 700. As of Friday morning, more than 4,300 statements had been filed on proposals to build a rail route or a loading facility to service the proposed high-level nuclear waste storage site, said Pam Schuller, planning coordinator with the BLM's Salt Lake Field Office. Among the most massive of Monday's comments was the state of Utah's official response — 40 pages of legal arguments and exhibits. The governor sent a cover letter with the state's formal comments. Huntsman noted that PFS's intermodal operations site would store nuclear fuel casks "next to Interstate 80 and under the low-altitude flight paths of military and commercial aircraft."....
BLM plan would close over 700 miles of road Federal officials with the Bureau of Land Management recently approved a land management plan for Beaverhead and Madison counties that would close more than 700 miles of motorized routes. The BLM’s Dillon office in the resource management plan that covers 900,000 acres throughout the two counties also proposes to increase logging and controlled burns to reduce the risk of wildfire in forested areas and close 138,000 acres of land to snowmobiles, said Rick Waldrup, recreation planner for the BLM in Dillon. The plan would close 760 miles of routes to motorized use out of a total of 2,102 recorded roads and trails. But Waldrup said many of the routes closed were user-created and had little use....
Delicate Arch climb has park chief red in the face For almost 12 years, Dean Potter studied the tiny cracks and crevices in Delicate Arch, searching out potential fingerholds and footholds that could aid his ascent of Utah's most famous icon. On Sunday morning, Potter, a professional climber known for his speed and agility, put that research to the test, successfully scaling the 45-foot monument "free solo" - without the aid of ropes and other climbing gear. But the 34-year-old part-time Moab resident's achievement doesn't sit well with National Park Service officials and some fellow climbing enthusiasts. "I'm very sorry to see someone do this to Utah's most visible icon," said the park's superintendent, Laura Joss. "I would just ask if they think it's a good idea to encourage this." Potter believed that as long as he used no fixed anchors and did not damage the rock, he was free to climb Delicate Arch. Not so, says Joss....
Editorial: Questions for Interior choice The U.S. Senate likely will confirm Dirk Kempthorne as the next U.S. secretary of the Interior, but he shouldn't get a free pass. He didn't fully answer key questions during his confirmation hearing last week, and some of his answers conflicted with past positions. And Kempthorne, currently Idaho's governor, didn't articulate his views on balancing energy production with other values on federal lands. Wednesday, the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee is expected to send Kempthorne's nomination to the floor, so the questions should be put to him today. Under former Secretary Gale Norton, Interior officials proposed eliminating from the National Park Service's core policies several important environmental standards. For example, the proposal would all but require national parks to allow motorized off-road recreation, an activity most parks now ban. Kempthorne said he would review the proposed changes but didn't commit to allowing more public comments. U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., one of the proposal's leading critics, should withhold his support until Kempthorne commits to scuttling the proposal. Salazar also should quiz Kempthorne more closely about whether the nominee understands a need to balance energy extraction with protection of wildlife, water quality and stability of communities affected by energy projects. Those issues are particularly crucial in Colorado, as Interior soon will decide whether to OK any or all of three proposed oil shale projects proposed on the Western Slope....
'Guzzlers' plan back on The on-again, offagain plan to convert wells in the preserve to wildlife watering devices, called "guzzlers," is on again. The move is a surprise to Chad Offutt of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. With the Center for Biological Diversity, PEER sued the National Park Service, which oversees the preserve, in March of last year to stop the expansion of the guzzlers in the preserve. The groups contend the artificial watering harms native wildlife and violates Park Service policy. The lawsuit alleges that guzzlers are "known to adversely affect desert tortoise by attracting predators such as ravens, and by acting as death traps for tortoises that approach the guzzlers to drink ..." In September of 2004, the preserve had announced the guzzlers would be installed, according to Danette Woo, environmental compliance specialist at the preserve. According to Offutt, the National Park Service reversed itself and rescinded the approval of the preserve guzzlers in April 2005....
Killing Of Bear Raises Questions Over Bruin-Free Zones Animal rights groups, environmentalists, hunting organizations and even some state wildlife authorities are questioning a policy in which bears found within urban areas are killed. A 225-pound bear caught in downtown Trenton on Saturday became the first killed under the state Department of Environmental Protection's no-tolerance rules. DEP biologists euthanized the bear after it was found roaming near the department's offices. Some state wildlife authorities criticized the bear's killing, which was done because it was in a "bear exclusion zone" that covers urban northeastern New Jersey and large swaths of the central part of the state....
Big oil beefs up across West in search for gas Big oil companies are flexing their muscle once again in the Rocky Mountains, buoyed by the Bush administration's efforts to open the West to more oil and natural gas drilling. This time, the companies have set their sights on conventional natural gas instead of oil shale, which failed many of them decades ago. The construction of pipelines, which carry natural gas from the Rockies to far-flung markets in the Midwest and on the East Coast where the commodity fetches higher prices, also is propelling the jump in activity. Exxon doesn't disclose its planned investment in the Rockies. But Rio Blanco County officials say the company plans to build a gas processing plant near Meeker that will employ 450 workers at the peak of construction. Meanwhile, Chevron is testing wells on 100,000 acres north of Debeque near Grand Junction to see if it wants to develop that field. Chevron has been in Colorado for more than 75 years and owns the Rangely oil field, which continues to produce oil. BP is set to pour nearly $3 billion into Wyoming and millions more into Colorado. BP is Colorado's largest gas producer. Shell has plans to drill more wells in Wyoming's Pinedale area, where it owns about 20,000 acres....
As Cuba Plans Offshore Wells, Some Want U.S. to Follow Suit In 1977, the United States and Cuba signed a treaty that evenly divided the Florida Straits to preserve each country's economic rights. They included access to vast underwater oil and gas fields on both sides of the line. Now, with energy costs soaring, plans are under way to drill this year — but all on the Cuban side. With only modest energy needs and no ability of its own to drill, Cuba has negotiated lease agreements with China and other energy-hungry countries to extract resources for themselves and for Cuba. Cuba's drilling plans have been in place for several years, but now that China, India and others are involved and fuel prices are unusually high, a growing number of lawmakers and business leaders in the United States are starting to complain. They argue that the United States' decades-old ban against drilling in coastal waters is driving up domestic energy costs and, in this case, is giving two of America's chief economic competitors access to energy at the United States' expense....
An activist-turned-informant The arsonists hit before dawn, laying down fuel-soaked sheets and jugs of gasoline to torch 35 SUVs at a Chevrolet dealership. The communiqué from the saboteurs — acting under the banner of the Earth Liberation Front — proclaimed a new, more militant era, when the sins of the "rich who parade around in their armored existence" would no longer go unchallenged. Federal, state and local officials converged on the scene after the March 2001 attack, sifting through charred wreckage for evidence — just as they had in more than a dozen other major arson attacks around the West claimed by the ELF or the Animal Liberation Front. The investigation hit a dead end. Three years after the Eugene fires, investigators finally got their break: A sinewy, tattooed heavy-metal guitarist named Jake Ferguson agreed to cooperate and donned recording wires to meet with other activists. Soon, the secrets of the underground network thought responsible for the attacks began to be exposed....
For archaeologists, term 'Anasazi' becoming an artifact During a wide- ranging, three-day symposium celebrating Mesa Verde National Park's centennial, one word with deep-rooted ties to the park and to the history of Southwestern archaeology was rarely uttered: Anasazi. More than 30 research talks were presented during the meeting, and none of the titles included Anasazi, a word some American Indians find offensive. During the past decade, the word has been phased out of the park's museum exhibits, its brochures and its interpretive signs. Some even claim that books containing the word rarely make it onto the shelves of the park's visitor center. Today's preferred term - at least among National Park Service employees - to describe the prehistoric pueblo-building farmers of the Four Corners region is Ancestral Puebloan. To many Southwestern archaeologists, the switch has resulted in a sort of professional schizophrenia. They continue to use Anasazi when writing scholarly articles or when speaking with other researchers. But when addressing the general public or a group of American Indians, they revert to Ancestral Puebloans....
Ethanol Takes More Energy Than It Gives The truth about ethanol, the wonder fuel that is supposed to replace U.S. dependence on "foreign oil," is that it takes more energy to produce the ethanol, than the resulting ethanol fuel will provide. And to replace imported oil with ethanol would require covering more than half the land area of the United States in corn or other biomass. One of the strongest arguments against the use of ethanol comes from Prof. David Pimentel of Cornell University, a longtime low-technology advocate. He and a colleague, Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, conducted a detailed analysis of energy input-yield ratios of producing ethanol from corn, switchgrass, and wood biomass. Their findings, published in Natural Resources Research (Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 65-76), are that * ethanol from corn requires 29% more fossil fuel energy than the fuel produced; * ethanol from switchgrass requires 45% more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and * ethanol from wood biomass requires 57% more fossil energy than the fuel produced....
Column: Clouds of Global-Warming Hysteria Ever since the debate broke out over climate change, the world’s attention has been riveted on computer-driven horror stories and the positively silly idea of establishing global-weather control by actively managing the atmosphere’s greenhouse-gas emissions. This focus has gathered up a lethal coalition of people with diverse motivations for promoting it. I call it a lethal coalition because, for nearly 20 years, this coalition has killed off any attempt to look at climate change through a rational lens, and to look at climate policy in a pragmatic way. Environmentalists, who have long espoused a version of humankind as an energy-powered cancer on the Earth, see greenhouse-gas controls as a way to starve out the tumor of humanity. Many scientists, unable to look beyond linear thinking, can’t get past the idea that the only answer to change is to impose stability. Temperance fiends of all stripes--who’ve hated fossil fuels, cars, large houses, urban sprawl, highways, rich people, fat people, industrial economies, airplanes, meat consumption, non-recycled paper, and just about everything else that might make someone smile--see energy rationing via greenhouse-gas controls as the answer to their prayers. One-worlders and other socialist sorts have seen the potential for finally giving the U.N. control over all the “commanding heights” of the world by giving them control of a key driver of development. Hollywood, of course, has always known that disaster sells movie tickets. And rent-seeking companies and governments that compete with the U.S. seek to use greenhouse-gas controls to give them an edge over their competition....
Environmentalists get measure on ballot Moving closer to a November showdown over open space and property rights, environmentalists on Monday turned in nearly double the number of signatures needed to qualify a ballot measure to set strict new development rules for hillsides, ranches and large farms across Santa Clara County. The group delivered 61,906 signatures -- 19 cardboard boxes full -- to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters in San Jose. That virtually assures the measure will appear on the Nov. 7 countywide ballot; it needs 36,040 signatures from registered county voters to qualify. Elections officials will verify the signatures in the coming weeks. The ballot campaign sets up what is expected to be a bruising battle between environmental groups and farmers, ranchers and real estate interests, each with a different basic vision of how the county's open lands should evolve. The environmentalists argue tougher rules are needed to protect the county's remaining rural landscape. Many rural landowners counter that the rules won't help preserve agriculture; in fact, they say the measure will harm them financially and hamper their ability to hand down family farms from generation to generation. Voters approved similar measures in 1986 in San Mateo County and in 2000 in Alameda County after high-profile campaigns. A San Benito County measure failed in 2004....
'King of West' continues to influence local rodeos The Rowell Ranch Rodeo, now an important stop on the professional rodeo circuit, owes its start to a former British seaman who spent nearly half of the 20th century promoting the sport throughout the West. Harry Rowell arrived in the Bay Area in 1912, at 21, and became known as the "Rodeo King of the West" before dying at his camp in the Livermore hills in 1969. The annual rodeo at his Dublin Canyon ranch, between Castro Valley and the Dublin-Pleasanton area, helped set the standards for modern-day rodeos, said friend and attorney, Jack Smith. The Rowell Ranch Rodeo started in 1921, when Rowell herded cattle to the site of the current Burbank Elementary School, just west of downtown Hayward. Later, local cowboys and the mainstays of professional rodeos would come to the ranch for three days of riding, steer wrestling, bronc riding and other events. Rowell was a cattleman and rancher who provided bucking horses and bulls for western rodeos, and was rodeo arena director for the Grand National Exhibition at the San Francisco Cow Palace from 1941 to 1952....
It's All Trew: Water defines local historical events When researching the Panhandle and adjacent areas, it’s interesting to note most historical sites and happenings occur along our creeks and rivers. Our earliest towns of Fort Elliott, Tascosa and Old Clarendon are located alongside streams. The Red River Wars were named after the many tributaries of our largest river. The Alibates Flint Quarries are near the Canadian River. The early Indian ruins of Ochiltree County lie near Wolf Creek and the prehistoric bison and Indian finds near Folsom, N.M., lie alongside Wild Horse Arroyo. Common sense tells us this coincidence is because man and beast need water daily. The various wars, battles, historical happenings and settlements came about because that is where the animals and people gathered. By studying a relief map of our area, we find that all creeks and rivers in the Panhandle mostly run from west to east and are located about 20 to 30 miles apart. This fact was significant to the Indians, comancheros, soldiers, buffalo hunters and trail drivers because they knew if they were going north or south, water was just ahead....