NEWS ROUNDUP

Surprise Development in Nevada Water Fight A big breakthough for Southern Nevada's plan to pipe water in from rural Nevada. The federal government announced it is dropping all opposition to the plan. The Monday announcement from the federal government came as hearings began in Carson City on the pipeline plan. The state water engineer is holding the hearings to decide whether to allow Southern Nevada to tap groundwater basins hundreds of miles to the north. At the beginning of the hearings, the Department of the Interior announced four federal agencies were dropping protests. They include Fish and Wildlife, the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Indian Affairs. In exchange, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has agreed to a comprehensive monitoring program. Opponents of the plan gathered outside of the hearings to protest what they are calling a "water theft" or a "water grab." Ranchers from rural White Pine County saying they fear for their way of life....
Outdoors group snubs southern Utah bill The Washington County Growth and Conservation Act of 2006 got a thumbs down from the Outdoor Industry Association this week. "Our public policy committee voted unanimously last week that we can't support the bill in its current form," said Amy Roberts, the association's director of government affairs. "Our main concern is the sell off of public lands and what we see as an unbalanced approach to wilderness." Washington County Commissioner Alan Gardner is in Washington, D.C., this week to testify before Congress about the bill, which is generating discussion around the nation. "If this bill becomes law, wilderness will lose absolutely no land," Gardner said. "There is nothing on the table for sale on the west side of the county. If it doesn't become law, we will lose the National Conservation Area, the off-road vehicle trail and protection for plants and so forth." The proposed legislation is slated to come before the House Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health on Thursday. Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, and Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, are sponsors of the bill....
Column - Bush’s “New Environmentalism:” What can we expect? Cooperative Conservation became an Executive Order August 26, 2004. Oh, you didn’t hear? The fanfare then was a whisper, but now it’s time to notice. Leaders of federal agencies responsible for the environment are coming to the public, holding “Listening Sessions” around the country. They’re inviting us to answer specific questions. Leaders will take responses back to Washington in the spirit of “cooperative conservation.” They say. Sounding sublime in this era of too many conflicts, some objectives may be genuine. But given the Bush Administration’s record for health, safety and environmental abuses, given that sites chosen for meetings aren’t exactly what you’d call cross-sections of the nation’s political leanings, given the national debt and an additional 13 percent 2007 budget cut to environmental protections, a cautionary, informed approach to this endeavor would seem prudent. Cooperative Conservation has been coined President Bush’s “New Environmentalism,” the honed down version of former Secretary of Interior Gale Norton’s public relations mantra, her Four C’s Credo: communication, consultation, and cooperation in service of conservation. In short, for conservation, have a conversation. An excellent goal, but define “conservation.”....
Scientists watching volcanic bulge on South Sister For a decade or so, a volcanic bulge has been pushing up over 150 square miles near the South Sister at a rate of perhaps an inch per year. Hikers and horse-riders cross it on the Pacific Crest Trail and may see sturdy metallic tripod topped by a white disk. Wires lead to a solar panel. A sign says "Volcano Monitoring Equipment: Do Not Disturb." Here, magma has pushed up the ground, which has been rising an inch or so per year since about 1997, a rise invisible to the naked eye. It began to slow last year, but scientists still watch the area, which has some of the more active magma in the Cascades. The bulge near the 10,358-foot mountain is the only rising ground along the Cascade Range, said Dan Dzurisin, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Cascade Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash. "What we think is there is a place where magma is slowly rising from deeper in the Earth," he said. "It's accumulating there, and it's inflating or causing the rocks around it to be pushed aside." It could go on for some time or be an early sign of a possible eruption....
Piñon, pine or spruce - beetles by many names deadly for trees While the causes of the aspen die-off remain unclear, the culprit behind the ongoing decimation of Colorado's conifer forests is no mystery: It's the beetles. Over the past decade, various beetles have killed more than 10 million conifers in Colorado forests, said Bob Cain, a U.S. Forest Service entomologist. The combination of aging, unnaturally dense forests and several years of severe drought allowed the mountain pine beetle epidemic to reach record levels in lodgepole and ponderosa pine forests. At the same time, bugs have feasted on other pines, spruce and fir trees across the state. According to federal and state foresters: • Mountain pine beetles attacked 1.3 million trees on 500,000 acres last year in the state, primarily in lodgepole pine forests of north-central Colorado. Ponderosa pine forests also experienced outbreaks. • Piñon ips beetles killed more than 9 million Colorado piñon pines, mainly in the southwestern and southern forests, in an epidemic that peaked two years ago....
Plan could mean 2,800 gas wells in Sweetwater County A proposal to extend the life of natural gas fields in southwest Wyoming could include the drilling of 2,800 new wells in Sweetwater County. Questar Exploration and Production Co., Wexpro Co. and other natural gas operators are proposing to drill new wells in Wyoming's Canyon Creek, Trail and Kinney fields over the next three decades. The active fields are located about 55 miles south of Point of Rocks in the southwest portion of Wyoming's Red Desert. The Bureau of Land Management is beginning work on an environmental impact statement, BLM spokeswoman Susan Davis said. The companies are seeking federal permission to develop natural gas resources further within the Vermillion Basin area of Sweetwater County, which includes the existing Canyon Creek and smaller Trail and Kinney natural gas fields. If the project is approved, the wells would be drilled over about a 30-year period, with as many as 200 wells possibly being drilled each year, according to company plans....
EPA Begins Cleanup of Idaho Mine Sites Steel bars block the arched opening to the Constitution Mine in Idaho's Silver Valley, a reminder that people for decades would hold beer parties in the cavernous elevator room. The former lead and zinc mine has been inactive since 1968, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this summer began the task of cleaning up the remote site to make it safe for recreational use. It's part of a massive decades-long cleanup of the Silver Valley, the second-largest Superfund site in the nation after Butte and Anaconda, Mont. "There were over 100 producing mines and 50 mill sites in this basin," said Bill Adams, manager of the Superfund project for the EPA. "A lot has been done and there is more to do." Indeed, cleanup of the entire Bunker Hill Superfund site is expected to take more than three decades and cost more than $350 million because the environmental degradation here was so immense....
Oregon community opts off the grid A twisty road leading out of Lake Billy Chinook and into a ponderosa-pine forest eventually takes you straight by the front gate of a very different kind of place. Behind the manned gate of the Three Rivers Recreation Area lie 4,000 acres of property and 450 homes, but not a single phone or power line. Residents in this subdivision of full- and part-time homeowners are entirely off the electrical and telephone grid, proud of it and wanting it to stay that way. They rely on solar power to provide houses with electricity. "You have no idea how bright the stars are," said Mary Johnson, 69, who bought property at Three Rivers with her husband in 1975 and moved there permanently in 1999. "No sirens, no trains. I would not live anywhere else." An hour from Bend, this hodgepodge of upscale houses, mobile homes, outhouses and shacks has been defying norms since the development began in the late 1960s. Until the advent of cellphones, the main mode of communication was CB radios. Some residents still have signs advertising their call names, nailed to trees at the ends of their driveways....
Idaho dam to be demolished after 89 years An aging, out-of-service dam on the Bear River in southeastern Idaho is expected to be demolished by today, a move environmentalists say will improve the habitat for dwindling numbers of Bonneville cutthroat trout. Pacificorp, the Utah-based utility that owns the 89-year-old Cove Dam near the town of Grace, says its destruction will also benefit utility customers. The 7.5 megawatt dam had not generated power for several years after a flow line broke and the cost of repairs was considered too high to justify in relation to the revenue from the electricity the dam produced. ''As the region has grown, a plant like this is a relatively small part of our resources,'' Pacificorp spokesman Dave Eskelsen told the Idaho State Journal. ''Hydroelectricity is still very valuable. It is always a hard choice to decommission a hydroelectric plant.'' Friday, two-thirds of the concrete dam built in 1917 had been removed as part of the $3.2 million project that will include site rehabilitation work that is expected to be completed in the spring....
BLM promises outfitters and others will get more attention Businesses with interests on the public lands, such as big-game outfitters, will get more attention as the Bureau of Land Management considers drilling applications. Officials once didn’t worry much about such potential conflicts, but as drilling has increased in western Colorado, “it’s a big deal now,” Catherine Robertson of the bureau’s Grand Junction field office told a Club 20 audience Saturday. Field offices are looking at ways to overlap private and public lands used by outfitters that also are prime areas for energy development, Robertson said. The bureau also tries to bring surface owners into the process when considering drill permits on their property, but it can’t force owners to participate, Robertson said. Some critics who take the bureau to task for visiting well sites annually instead of more often don’t know that the agency allocates its resources as needed, she said....
New Book Pokes Fun at Endangered Species Do environmentalists have a sense of humor? We're about to find out, because this book is aimed right where their funny bone ought to be. The Hunter's Guide to Endangered Species by "The Old Biologist" is a humorous and satirical take on endangered species and environmental protection. It covers the gamut, poking fun at the science behind the endangered species issue, then explaining how and where (zoos and wildlife refuges, of course) to hunt these hapless creatures. It also looks at particular species, and describes the very human character flaws that got them into trouble in the first place. To top it off, the book has recipes for cooking them (the California Condor Soup is a real crowd pleaser). Smart and witty, The Hunter's Guide to Endangered Species is designed to poke fun at a topic which is usually about as much fun as a heart attack, with everybody involved taking themselves way too seriously. This is the environmental/endangered species issue as seen through the eyes of a crotchety, politically incorrect old-time biologist, from the era when naturalists studied rare animals by shooting them....
Report Praises Effectiveness of Endangered Species Act Recovery Plans Although recovery of endangered species depends on a variety of factors, species with recovery plans fare better than those without, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The report detailed that recovery plans are a critical part of the government's implementation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and suggests that efforts to reform the law should keep the provision at the center of the statute. The ESA requires the federal government's two wildlife agencies - the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service - to list species determined to be threatened or endangered, to designate critical habitat and to develop recovery plans for the conservation and survival of listed species. The agencies are required to develop recovery plans unless officials determine a plan will not promote conservation of the species....
Restoration of Bay salt ponds might threaten snowy plover A plan to turn hundreds of acres of sun-baked salt ponds back into marshland will attract the California clapper rail and the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse, two endangered species that used to thrive in the South Bay in the late 19th century before the first salt ponds were constructed. On the other hand, desalinating the ponds and adding new vegetation could spell trouble for the western snowy plover, a skittish, threatened bird that has begun laying its eggs on the dry, salty beaches. Several other birds also depend on the supply of brine shrimp the salt ponds produce, including avocets, western sandpipers and cormorants. Some biologists worry that the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, a plan to open 15,000 acres of former Cargill salt ponds to Bay tides, could have unintended negative consequences for those birds while benefiting other species. Officials with the Coastal Conservancy and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service face a difficult decision in choosing how much tidal action to let into the salt ponds, which stretch across the Bay to Redwood City and San Jose, acquired from Cargill in 2003....
USDA miscalculates cattle numbers in figuring drought aid A top official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency apologized Monday to Kansas cattlemen for a miscalculation that will mean $3.8 million fewer dollars for a livestock drought assistance program than the state had been promised. John Johnson, deputy administrator for farm programs at the Farm Service Agency, said the error was discovered Friday when officials realized they had used Agricultural Statistics Service data that included the numbers of feedlot cattle for Kansas, Wyoming and Arizona. The Agriculture Department recalculated the allocations after it discovered it had erroneously credited Kansas for livestock in feed yards. The program is designed to help cattlemen who are struggling to pay for feed or find places for cattle to graze during a drought. "We apologize for the error - unfortunately it means a major reduction in Kansas and a minor adjustment in Wyoming and Arizona," Johnson said. Under revised figures the department received late Friday, Kansas' share of the $50 million program will be $948,511. That is significantly lower than the $4.78 million previously promised the state....
National Commission to Study Health, Environmental Impact of Industrial Farm Animal Production The challenges all livestock, dairy and poultry producers face with the reemergence of avian influenza and other zoonotic diseases will be one of the topics of a two-year study by the National Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (NCIFAP), members of the commission announced here today. The independent NCIFAP was formed by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. The NCIFAP will conduct a two-year study of the public health, environmental, animal health and well-being and rural sociological impacts of concentrated animal feeding operations. The commission, chaired by former Kansas Governor and Archivist of the United States John Carlin, brings together accomplished individuals from a variety of backgrounds, including academia, public health, agricultural production, the food industry, veterinary medicine and the general public. At the end of the two-year study, the commission will release a report to the nation, outlining its findings and making recommendations to policy makers.....
On the Edge of Common Sense: Stuck calf makes for muddy mission It was a case of naked dedication. Dick had been to the state meeting. His committee had run late and it was after midnight when he got back to the ranch. They were practicing fall calving in his part of the Umpqua Valley of western Oregon. Rains had been making things mucky. As he mounted the steps, he stopped in his tracks. There in a pile, under the harsh porch light were his wife's clothes. Right down to the daintys. He looked around. He wasn't sure why he looked around, he just did. Earlier that evening at twilight, Mo - short for Maureen - his wife, had made the heifer check. She found none in the process of calving and was about to go to the house when she heard a plaintive bawl down by the pond. Working her way thorough the fresh cow pies and mud, shuck, she called it, she saw a 2-day-old black bally calf. He was standing elbow deep in the dark water. Mo looked down at her tennis shoes, looked up at the drizzling rain, gritted her teeth and stepped into the shallow end....