NEWS ROUNDUP

Beauty versus power: Conservationists renew push to drain dammed valley in Yosemite After the great 1906 earthquake, searching for reliable power and drinking water, San Francisco looked at the soaring granite of Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley and saw walls for a reservoir. Conservationists like John Muir were appalled that anyone might flood what he called "a grand landscape garden, one of Nature's rarest and most precious mountain temples." But after one of the country's first major environmental battles - a struggle that transformed Muir's Sierra Club into a political force - the O'Shaughnessy Dam was completed in 1923. Today, even as the Hetch Hetchy system delivers some of America's highest quality drinking water to 2.4 million San Francisco Bay Area residents, environmentalists continue to argue for restoring the valley - a debate that was intensified in July when a state review found that the job would be "technically feasible" for an estimated $3 billion to $10 billion. Conservationists see an opportunity to restore what Muir called a "wonderfully exact counterpart" to Yosemite Valley, the park's more famous attraction, known for towering monuments like El Capitan, as well as its clogged campgrounds and roadways. They say it's possible to dismantle the 312-foot (94-meter) concrete dam, replace the lost water storage downstream on the Tuolumne River and find other sources of clean electricity....
Column - Environmental Bounty-Hunting Private prosecution of crimes has a long and sordid history, and that history isn't over. Bounty hunters no longer hound innocent people to death as some did in England in the mid-18th century, but environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council have modified the tactic. They use "citizen suits" to reap rich rewards for themselves with little positive impact on the environment. Most federal environmental statutes allow citizens to sue individuals or companies for violating the laws. Indeed, from 1993 to 2002, more than 75% of all environmental federal court decisions started as citizen suits, reports James May. Writing the Widener Law Review, he concludes that citizen suits are "the engine that propels the field of environmental law." But most of these suits are brought by environmental organizations, not individuals, and most of the filings don't end in a court decision; they end in settlements. From 1995-2002, there were 4,438 notices of intent to sue under four environmental statutes--6.6 times more than actual federal court decisions in citizen suits. Presumably most of the others were settled. Why the settlements? My research indicates a clear and compelling reason: settlements bring in money environmental groups can use to pursue other goals....
Feds begin destroying wolves attacking livestock near Sula Federal trappers shot and killed eight wolves last week as part of an effort to eliminate a pack of wolves that repeatedly chased and killed livestock near Sula, state wildlife officials said. An adult wolf, two yearlings and five pups from the Sleeping Child pack that roamed the East Fork of the Bitterroot River were killed Friday by agents from Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services, said Carolyn Sime, wolf program coordinator for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Throughout the summer, FWP and ranchers in the area have hazed the wolves, had people around livestock and even killed three that were causing problems, but the wolves continued to cause trouble. "It's one of those unfortunate situations where our best efforts to get it turned around has been unsuccessful," she said. "We have seen an escalating behavior of getting into livestock." Two weeks ago, a rancher spotted the pack chasing five horses in a pasture. A calf was found dead last Tuesday. FWP biologists picked up the signal from a collared female that was on the carcass and found numerous wolf tracks at the scene. Pups had been spotted chasing horses, indicating they were learning that livestock is prey from the adults, Sime said....
Setting the record straight With the U.S. House passage of the Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act (CIEDRA), Idaho is one step closer to realizing the benefits of the most important piece of public lands legislation proposed in the last 25 years. Having authored this legislation, I feel compelled to respond to comments made by the Sierra Club, singer Carole King and Congressman C.L. "Butch" Otter to clear up any misunderstandings about CIEDRA. CIEDRA is a carefully balanced compromise that seeks to protect the needs of the people who live and recreate in the Boulder-White Clouds while offering wilderness protection to some of Idaho's most beautiful mountains. It's unique in that it's inclusive and recognizes the needs of motorized users, the community surrounding it, the ranchers who live in the area, even creating new opportunities such as a first of its kind "primitive access wheelchair trail" into the wilderness....
Column - Let the Antelope Roam Of all the species living in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of northwest Wyoming, the pronghorn is the only one native to the American West — elk, bison and even grizzly bears moved in from Asia centuries ago — but it is by no means the least exotic. The deerlike creatures (often called American antelope, though they are not related to Old World antelope) are the fastest distance runners in the Western Hemisphere, capable of traveling 50 miles an hour. Twice a year for 6,000 years, one population of pronghorn has used that speed to travel more than 90 miles from their summer range in Grand Teton National Park to the Upper Green River basin, where they spend the winter. In recent decades, the migration has been threatened by human development. Encroaching roads, reservoirs and ranches have closed many of the pronghorn’s routes. And the one that could conceivably remain open is being squeezed in places. Though it is a mile wide most of the way, the corridor narrows to only 650 yards at one spot and 120 yards at another. Steps need to be taken to keep this last path from shrinking any more....
Ruined Rivers: To save a river, save the land The pickup truck bounced up the road, really not much more than a ledge carved into the mountainside, just wide enough to let another vehicle squeeze by without plunging down into the canyon below. Wink Crigler knew the road well enough to avoid most of the potholes. When she hit one, we could hear the cows shifting in the trailer. We were climbing up a hogsback ridge that separated the two forks of the Little Colorado River. Benny Creek flowed on the west, the mainstem Little Colorado on the east. “The ranchers are disappearing so fast, it’s scary,” Crigler said. In the backseat, Sam Udall, Crigler’s workmate for the day and fellow Round Valley Rancher, grunted agreement. “When a ranch dies, the land gets subdivided and the habitat gets fragmented.” She points to the houses carved into the hillside, houses that rely on wells for their water, that affect runoff into the creeks and river. “If ranches don’t survive, the water gets used up faster,” Crigler said. That’s the equation here: Take away ranches, the houses will fill the void....
Mines, farms put Gila River on life support The Gila River deserves better than this. Once one of the West's mightiest waterways, the Gila a century ago flowed nearly 650 miles from the high country of western New Mexico and eastern Arizona to the Colorado River near Yuma. It drained most of Arizona, collecting water from the state's southern two-thirds. Until 1853, it marked the United States' boundary with Mexico. Today, it sputters into dust long before it reaches the Colorado, most of its natural flow halted at Coolidge Dam. None of its major tributaries makes it to the mainstream. Drought, pollution and growing demand tug at a string of broken reaches that hardly resemble a whole river. The Gila has been worked nearly to death. Farmers and ranchers settled along its length and continue to dip into the river to irrigate crops and support cattle. Mining companies found rich veins of ore in the mountains that feed the river and its tributaries and staked a claim to some of the flow. Both farmers and miners left behind contaminants that poisoned stretches of the river....
Ducks unlimited offers help with water Most people might not think of this, but livestock are good for ducks. At least Ducks Unlimited, a nonprofit conservation organization, thinks so. The duck-loving organization has recently started a program to help ranchers improve their permanent water supplies by granting them up to $3,500. Preserving watering holes for livestock is not directly what the organization is interested in doing. Ducks Unlimited wants to make sure farmers keep livestock on their land. If ranchers give up on livestock and replace native grasses with crops, that would reduce the amount of habitat ducks have, according to Paul Bultsma, a Ducks Unlimited biologist. "We're trying to keep livestock in the picture," Bultsma said....
Loggers remove protester, carry on A protester was arrested Tuesday after suspending himself from a log 40 feet over the Illinois River and briefly blocking logging in a national forest roadless area. Logging had started Monday on the Mike’s Gulch timber sale, made up of trees burned by the 2002 Biscuit fire on the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. It was the first logging on a timber sale in a roadless area since the Bush administration eased the logging rules. On Tuesday, protesters placed a log across a bridge over the Illinois River to block the timber cutters’ return. To make it harder for authorities to remove the log, a protester, Laurel Sutherlin, was suspended over the river from one end of the log sticking out from the bridge. Sutherlin was on a platform dangling about six feet beneath the log. Amid shouts of “don’t murder him” and “he’s not a tree” from about 20 protesters on shore, an arborist shinnied out on the log, rigged a pulley and rope to the platform, and then cut the webbing suspending the platform from the log. Forest Service personnel slowly lowered Sutherlin to the river. He waded to shore, where he was handcuffed....
Protesters accused of illegal logging A 40-foot log used by protesters to block access to the Mike's Gulch timber salvage sale in a roadless area of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest Tuesday morning was cut from a nearby botanical area, according to forest officials. One irate activist called it a "petty" point, and said the U.S. Forest Service and John West, president of the firm that purchased the roadless sale, had cut countless trees illegally. "You don't need to be a detective to see where it came from," said Tom Lavagnino, forest information officer at the site. "You can see the fresh sawdust, and where they dragged it 500 to 800 feet to the bridge. "But the issue is finding the person who cut it," he added. "There is no doubt they used it for blockage."
Salazar: Roadless protection promise broken The Bush administration's plan to lease undeveloped national forest land in Colorado this week for natural-gas development breaks promises to protect roadless areas and give states a say in their management, U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar said. Salazar Tuesday asked the administration not to lease 20,000 roadless acres spread over three national forests in Colorado. But federal land managers made no move to remove the land from their monthly lease auction to be held Thursday. The lease sales have already been protested by a coalition of landowners, outfitters and conservation groups. Salazar, D-Colo., noted that Bush administration officials said last year that they would temporarily protect roadless areas while states developed recommendations on whether or not to continue blocking roads and development....
Keystone 'stoking' area riders Downhill mountain bikers who crave fast, steep descents marked with ladders, bridges and jumps will have two more reasons to ride at Keystone by the end of the month. Last week, the Forest Service approved Keystone's application to build seven new downhill trails on the frontside of Dercum Mountain, two of which are slated for completion by the end of August. "These will all be expert only downhill trails, that's what we've been hearing people want," Keystone communications manager Amy Kemp said. "I'm pretty stoked," said Boulder resident David Holick, who was waiting on his bike for friends near the River Run Gondola Tuesday....
Bush administration agrees to support payments to timber counties The Bush administration has agreed to hold off selling some national forest lands and will support one more year of payments to rural counties hurt by cutbacks in federal logging, lawmakers said Monday. Western lawmakers have been seeking up to $401 million to maintain payments next year to 700 rural counties in 41 states, primarily in the West, which lost revenues from the sale of federal timber when logging was cut back to protect the northern spotted owl, salmon and other fish and wildlife. The administration had proposed selling 300,000 acres of national forest lands around the country to raise $800 million toward continuing the payments over five years, but it had run into tough bipartisan opposition. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, agreed in a letter to support a one-year extension of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, which has pumped $2 billion into counties the past six years and is set to expire at the end of September....
Forest Service seeks input on prairie dog population boom The number of acres in the Pawnee National Grassland home to black-tailed prairie dogs grew almost tenfold between 2000 and 2005. Now U.S. Forest Service officials are asking the public to comment on five options to control the population of the black-tailed prairie dog in the area. “It’s like anything,” said Mary Ann Chambers, spokeswoman for Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests and Pawnee National Grassland. “Too much of a good thing is too much of a good thing.” The Pawnee National Grassland, located in northeast Weld County about 35 miles northeast of Greeley, is about 193,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land mixed with private farms, ranches, Colorado state lands and other federally owned land. Historically, the grasslands have had between 200 and 750 acres of prairie dog colonies, Chambers said. Between 2000 and 2005, that number increased from between 350 and 750 acres to about 3,500....
Butterfly status to be studied Federal officials agreed Tuesday to conduct a yearlong review of whether a rare Nevada butterfly at one of the largest sand dunes in the West should be protected under the Endangered Species Act. More than two years after conservationists petitioned for a listing, and after a lawsuit was filed, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ruled there is enough scientific data to justify a formal review of the Sand Mountain blue butterfly. The decision comes over the objections of off-road enthusiasts, but was hailed by environmentalists who want to protect the 4,750-acre Sand Mountain Recreation Area, about 80 miles east of Reno along U.S. 50, managed by the Bureau of Land Management. "I don't think this was expected because it has been very, very difficult to get any kind of pro-conservation decision out of the Bush administration," said Daniel Patterson, a desert ecologist for the Center for Biological Diversity based in Arizona....
Editorial - Fencing off more public land As the Bureau of Land Management and other federal agencies have progressively barred off-road travel from more and more of the vast landscapes of Colorado and California, all-terrain vehicle owners from those states have shrugged and retreated -- increasingly packing up their stuff for the week or the weekend and repairing to Utah's desolate Factory Butte area, 180 miles south of Salt Lake City. Of course, the extremists who would fence off all the wild lands have long complained that these vehicles are noisy despoilers, cutting trails that encourage erosion -- as though erosion isn't what gave these lands their distinctive character in the first place. Ah, but while environmental degradation by "natural" wild horses (what?) and other creatures must be accepted, the works of man are a blight upon the earth, the nature cultists explained. When that didn't work, the extremists played their trump card: They went plant-hunting. Sure enough, the little Wright fishhook cactus, listed as "endangered" in 1979, and the equally diminutive Winkler cactus, actually a succulent listed as "threatened" in 1998, turned up in the Factory Butte area. Game, set and match....
Commission OKs fish toxin in streams A state commission has approved using toxins in more than 150 miles of streams and rivers in Northern New Mexico to kill non-native fish in hopes of helping the Rio Grande cutthroat trout. The Water Quality Control Commission on Tuesday passed a controversial petition from the state Department of Game and Fish to use toxins in the Rio Costilla watershed to kill such fish as rainbow trout and brown trout. "I think it's interesting we're a water-quality commission, and we're voting on whether to introduce toxins into state waters," said Howard Hutchinson, the only commissioner on the 12-member panel to oppose the petition. Under the proposal, more than 150 miles of stream from Comanche Creek in the Valle Vidal down Rio Costilla to Latir Creek would be poisoned in sections using antiymicin or Rotenone. Two dozen lakes and Costilla Reservoir will also be poisoned....
Feds asking for public's thoughts on 'cooperative conservation' Leaders of the Bush administration's "cooperative conservation" effort will hold their first public meeting in Spokane on Wednesday to gather ideas on how disparate groups can work together to protect the environment. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne will attend the meeting, dubbed a "listening session" that is intended to foster cooperation on thorny environmental issues. The Bush administration, which held a conference on the topic last year, defines cooperative conservation as the efforts of landowners, communities, conservation groups, industry, and government to work together to preserve the environment. The Spokane meeting is the first of several across the country that have been scheduled by the secretaries of Interior, Commerce and Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Council on Environmental Quality....
Nevada Loses Decision on Atomic Waste Nevada was set back in its effort to avoid housing a radioactive waste dump as a federal appeals court rejected arguments against transportation plans. Nevada had said that the Energy Department overstepped its authority and violated environmental rules in deciding to rely mostly on trains to carry 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel from around the country to Yucca Mountain. “We conclude that some of Nevada’s claims are unripe for review, and the remaining claims are without merit,” said a decision written by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson for a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Global Warming: Focus on Utah's Climate J.L. Crawford stopped regarding climate change as a debate a long time ago. To the 92-year-old, who grew up in Oak Creek Canyon here, the proof is in the missing ice. As a boy, he would help his great-uncle harvest ice in the winter. They dammed a creek, flooded a nearby pond and sawed out slabs from the icy surface. They laid the blocks in layers of sawdust and stored them in a roofless shed, Crawford recalls. "That way he could save the ice pretty well all summer" - long enough to serve summer tourists "plain old vanilla" ice cream. Crawford doubts now that the winters are cold enough to keep up the tradition. He blames a planet that's heating up. Global climate change. "It scares the heck out of me," says Crawford....
Penn submits resignation as undersecretary of agriculture Dr. J.B. Penn, undersecretary of agriculture for farm and foreign agricultural services and one of the few members of USDA’s top hierarchy with ties to the Mid-South, has submitted his resignation, effective at the end of August. A native of Lynn, Ark., and a graduate of Arkansas State University, Penn had overseen the activities of the Farm Service agency, the Foreign Agricultural Service and the Risk Management Agency since being sworn in as undersecretary in May 2001. His resignation letter said only that he planned to return to the private sector. Penn was serving as senior vice president and manager of the Washington, D.C., office of Sparks Companies, Inc., when he was tapped by then-Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman to become undersecretary for farm and foreign agricultural services, the third highest-ranking post at USDA....
Kansas corn crop shriveling amid triple-digit temperatures Ottawa County farmer Steve Baccus plans to cut most of his dryland corn for silage - trying to salvage what he can as triple-digit temperatures and drought decimate corn fields across the state. Baccus, who also serves as Kansas Farm Bureau president, said his fields are among the last dryland fields in the county still standing. Most of his neighbors already have chopped theirs for silage. His own no-till practices let his fields hang on to moisture a little longer than most - until finally succumbing as well to the scorching temperatures. Corn under irrigation systems in the county also has shown signs of "tipping," meaning the corn plant is drawing moisture out of its kernels to survive. Smaller kernels hurt yields. "Even irrigation systems are not able to keep up in this situation, with these kinds of winds," Baccus said....
USDA extends comment period on BSE study R-CALF USA was pleased to learn today that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has granted the organization's request for an extended time period for public comments on the most recent Harvard Risk Assessment on bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as Docket Number FSIS-2006-0011. "We appreciate the FSIS' quick action in extending the comment period on this comprehensive study," R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard said. "The cattle industry needs to review the Harvard Risk Assessment very carefully because it is the principle resource used by USDA to decide what level of risk the United States is willing to assume when trading with countries that have a BSE problem." R-CALF USA submitted a formal request to USDA last week to extend the comment period....
USDA Announces New Insurance Tools for Pasture, Forage Lands Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns today announced the availability of two new risk management tools for pasture, rangeland and forage, beginning with the 2007 crop year. "These new insurances tools will help farmers and ranchers, especially with operations located in drought impacted areas, to improve their risk management capabilities," said Johanns. "Designed to operate in a variety of range and pasture environments, these products utilize innovative technology to determine when a producer has suffered a loss." The new insurance products, the Rainfall index insurance program and theVegetation index insurance program, are offered by the Risk Management Agency (RMA) and are available through approved insurance providers. These programs will provide livestock producers the ability to purchase insurance protection for losses of forage produced for grazing or harvested for hay....
Elliott takes a break from playing cowboys to voice a cow Listening to Sam Elliott's easy baritone makes you want to eat a steak. It must be the lingering effect of hearing his mouth-watering pitch in all those beef ads. So it's kind of ironic that in his first animated feature, "Barnyard," the actor is the voice of Ben, a patriarchal cow. "One wouldn't think of me doing this," said Elliott, best known for his rugged cowboy roles. "It's something I've always been intrigued by, and the opportunity came my way, and I jumped at it." The film centers on Otis, voiced by Kevin James, a real party cow who, like many young adult creatures, isn't as responsible as his father, Ben, would like. There's also a wise old mule with the voice of Danny Glover....