NEWS ROUNDUP

Voters get a say on land rights Eleven states are giving voters their first chance this fall to override last year's Supreme Court ruling that allows local governments seeking more tax revenue to seize private property and give it to developers. Thirty state legislatures have passed laws or constitutional amendments since June 2005 to negate or limit the ruling's effect in their states. Voting 5-4, the high court said the Constitution permits state and local governments to condemn a home through eminent domain powers so developers can build hotels, offices or retail centers on the site. The decision, Kelo v. New London, Conn., raised a public outcry, led by libertarians and conservatives who advocate limited government power. The spate of ballot proposals is being bankrolled largely by libertarian organizations controlled by New York City real estate investor Howie Rich. The groups, Americans for Limited Government and the Fund for Democracy, have donated $4 million to ballot drives in eight states. "It's about one of the core freedoms that our country was built on," Rich says. "People work very hard to own a small business, a home or property. The government is there to protect the right to that property, not to take it away." Cities, some environmental groups and property developers oppose the ballot measures. Using eminent domain for commercial projects is proper "as a last resort," says Paul Farmer, executive director of the American Planning Association, a group for urban planners based in Washington. "Working these things out in the legislatures is preferable to the sledgehammer approach of these measures." Larry Morandi of the National Conference of State Legislatures says momentum is building on these issues and most of the ballot measures could pass. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, says, "I'm not sure even Roe v. Wade (which legalized abortion nationwide) got so much of the country saying 'no' the way Kelo did."....
Wilderness bill comes with price Congress is on the verge of approving half a dozen bills that would protect as much as 1 million acres of wilderness areas across the West, but the move has infuriated environmentalists who charge that lawmakers are giving away too much pristine public land to real estate developers and local communities in the process. If lawmakers finish work on the legislation before adjourning -- several bills have passed the House already, and a Senate hearing is scheduled for tomorrow -- it would amount to the largest designation of new wilderness areas in a decade. But advocates and critics are in a bitter fight over the trade-offs, with opponents saying the public is paying too high a price. One pending bill would protect a 273,000-acre stretch of California's northern coast to preserve steelhead and salmon habitat -- but it would also guarantee that off-road vehicles could use an area nearby. Another measure would create a 300,000-acre wilderness area in Idaho while handing over 4,000 acres to state and local authorities to develop or manage on their own. "For a public-interest movement to succeed, it has to be supported by the public, and it has to move [forward]," said Idaho Conservation League Executive Director Rick Johnson, who teamed up with Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, to craft the Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act. "This is not the time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good." But several environmental activists, including singer-songwriter and Idaho resident Carole King and Janine Blaeloch, director of the Seattle-based Western Lands Project, said the bills would set a dangerous precedent....
Fish and Game to kill more Idaho wolves blamed for livestock deaths Three Idaho wolves have been killed by federal hunters in recent weeks and state officials have authorized the destruction of 10 more, due to recent attacks on livestock that left some 63 sheep dead and five injured. While disease and non-predator-related causes result in more than two-thirds livestock deaths in Idaho, state Department of Fish and Game officials say these wolf control actions are needed to curb future attacks. At least 43 sheep were killed since August by wolves of the Lick Creek pack, which roam western Idaho near the Snake River. Elsewhere in the state, other wolves killed 20 more sheep in the last week. So far this year, federal and state agents have killed 26 wolves in Idaho, and another nine have been legally killed by ranchers whose livestock were threatened or attacked.
In tug-of-war for space, prairie dogs losing fight It's been a bad few weeks for prairie dogs and their human champions. The Colorado Wildlife Commission declined to give the black-tailed prairie dog year-round protection from being shot, instead giving them safe harbor on public lands only between March 1 and June 14. At the same meeting, the commission approved use of a device known as the "Rodenator," which injects oxygen and propane into prairie dog holes, detonates the mixture and kills the animals within a minute. Those decisions came on the heels of the Boulder City Council approving a plan that OKs the killing of some prairie dogs and doesn't allot much money for prairie dog barriers that would keep the animals away from the humans annoyed by them. Depending on the point of view, prairie dogs are either cute, resourceful creatures that give shelter to burrowing owls and fine meals to coyotes, hawks and other prairie predators, or they're disease-ridden varmints that destroy grasslands and lawns and burrow holes that are the perfect size for spraining ankles....
Interior official urges cooperation on land restoration Nature doesn't recognize the difference between public and private ground. It doesn't see the lines on the map where one state starts and another ends. And it certainly doesn't know the difference between Forest Service green and Bureau of Land Management yellow. So when the talk turns to restoration of natural ecosystems, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Interior Lynn Scarlett said its time to search out the partnerships that will allow for those efforts to occur across the landscape. On Monday, Scarlett shared that vision as the keynote speaker of the 30th annual Public Land Law Conference at the University of Montana in a talk entitled “From Resource Damages to Restoration: An Evolution Toward Partnerships.” On Monday night, Scarlett was espousing the virtues of the Bush program. Cooperative Conservation works to bring citizens, communities and companies together to work on protecting and restoring the environment where they all live, work and play. It is incentive based, depends on collaboration and cooperation, has an experiential component and is entrepreneurial, Scarlett said....
Business Influence Over Environmental Policy and Regulation Is Targeted, Says Author of New Book Business influence over environmental policy and regulation in the United States is strategic and focused, says the author of the new book "Corporate America and Environmental Policy: How Often Does Business Get Its Way?" Business interests are more selective about exerting their influence than is commonly believed, and when they do get involved it's on issues that have high stakes for them and for the public, said author Sheldon Kamieniecki, a professor of politics and dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "We've underestimated the strict approach business has taken to environmental politics," said Kamieniecki. "It isn't fair to say they've been involved in everything and are single-handedly responsible for our lack of progress. They have limited resources and choose their fights accordingly." The book is the first major investigation of business influence over environmental policy in all three branches of government. Through quantitative analysis, as well as six in-depth case studies of such hot-button topics as the management of old-growth forests, toxic dumping in the Hudson River, and the environmental impacts of coal mining, Kamieniecki examined the influence of business since 1970 on Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service, and the federal court of appeals....
Editorial - Interior on the hot seat The U.S. Interior Department has much to worry about, and perhaps much to answer for, on key questions about how it's doing its job. Two weeks ago, Interior's Inspector General, Earl Devaney, told a congressional committee, "Simply stated, short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior." Devaney was particularly concerned about handling of oil and gas leasing, going back to the Clinton administration in the 1990s, and by the activities of former deputy secretary J. Steven Griles, who was suspected of favoring former lobbying clients. Flawed Gulf of Mexico oil and gas leases signed during the late 1990s may have lost the government more than $1 billion in royalties. And lawsuits pending in Oklahoma City claim the department's Minerals Management Service has failed to collect full payment of other royalties. In Wyoming, both outside critics and internal memos say the department's Bureau of Land Management is failing to enforce environmental standards on energy development around Pinedale. Such problems will require a strong response from new Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, a former Idaho governor, if the department is to repair its credibility and properly fulfill its mission of both conservation and recovering appropriate value from development....
Judge Halts Petroleum Reserve Lease Sale A federal judge has halted the sale of federal oil leases on a portion of Alaska's North Slope that environmentalists have pinpointed as a haven for migratory birds and calving caribou. The decision Monday blocks the sale of about 1.7 million acres that the Bureau of Land Management had planned for Wednesday. The sale would have included the Teshekpuk Lake area, which sits above 2 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Environmental groups have argued that a 600,000-acre section of the reserve at Teshekpuk Lake contains some of the most important wetlands in the Arctic. The decision by Judge James K. Singleton echoed a decision he had issued on Sept. 7 that temporarily halted the sale. Government environmental studies, Singleton wrote, were too narrow in scope because they did not consider how leasing in the northeastern part of the reserve would affect land and wildlife in the northwestern section of the 23-million acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The government is fighting hard put at least a portion of the lease up for bid. The Interior Department had offered last week to temporarily abandon the sale of oil leases near the lake, asking the court to allow the leases outside the Teshekpuk region to proceed....
Chevron again eyes Colo. shale Thirty years after quitting one of the nation's most promising yet costly energy resources, Chevron Corp. wants to take another crack at unlocking shale oil from western Colorado's Piceance Basin. Chevron announced its return - which will come with help from scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico - on Monday at a petroleum engineers conference in San Antonio. Oil companies have struggled for decades to unlock the solid organic kerogen from sediment layers ranging from surface outcrops to deep underground. Now, with rising oil prices and instability with overseas supplies making such endeavors more attractive, Chevron is turning to chemists at Los Alamos to determine how this fuel can be liberated at the molecular level. Chevron chief technology officer Don Paul said the venture with Los Alamos could enable the company to tap some of the estimated 1 trillion barrels of oil locked in the shale, four times the holdings of Saudi Arabia....
Evangelical Christians Called to Tackle Global Warming The Rev. Richard Cizik, vice-president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), is pushing to persuade evangelical Christians to care about global warming. But while most U.S. evangelical Christians tend to vote Republican, the environmental cause is more associated with the Democratic Party, Cizik said in a Reuters interview. Cizik notes that since the 60 million or so American evangelicals tend to be more concerned with such social issues as abortion and the war in Iraq, getting them into tackling global climate change or other environmental problems is not an easy task. "There are people who disagree with what I'm doing ... within the evangelical community of America," he said. "Simply for standing up and saying, 'Climate change is real, the science is solid, we have to care about this issue because of the impact on the poor' -why would that be controversial? Well, I'm sorry to say, it is controversial and there are people who want to take my head off." Cizik is part of an overall ecological push by evangelical Christians known as "creation care," the notion that the environment is a divine creation and must be protected by humans....
Global Temperature Highest in Millennia The planet's temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals, researchers report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36 degree Fahrenheit per decade for the last 30 years, according to the research team led by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. That brings the overall temperature to the warmest in the current interglacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago. The researchers noted that a report in the journal Nature found that 1,700 plant, animal and insect species moved poleward at an average rate of about 4 miles per decade in the last half of the 20th century. The warming has been stronger in the far north, where melting ice and snow expose darker land and rocks beneath allowing more warmth from the sun to be absorbed, and more over land than water. Water changes temperature more slowly than land because of its great capacity to hold heat, but the researchers noted that the warming has been marked in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. Those oceans have a major effect on climate and warming that could lead to more El Nino episodes affecting the weather....
Demands for Fish Ladders Ignored In a tentative ruling Monday that was criticized by environmentalists and Indian tribes, a federal commission that regulates hydropower brushed aside U.S. wild-life agency demands for fish ladders to help dwindling Klamath River salmon runs cross dams that block upriver spawning grounds. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved a draft environmental review of the four dams, which are operated by PacifiCorp of Portland, Ore., as part of a license renewal process that is slated to be concluded early next year. Environmentalists, tribes and commercial fishermen have long battled for removal of the dams, which they believe have played a critical role in the decline of chinook, the highly prized king salmon of the marketplace, while putting the disappearing coho salmon on the endangered species list. Steve Rothert of the environmental group American Rivers said the commission "overstepped its regulatory powers" in bypassing federal wildlife agency recommendations for fish ladders. Instead, the regulators in principal agreed with a plan by PacifiCorp to transport salmon around the dams to get them to upper parts of the river that have been blocked for more than half a century....
A Editorial - Blind Forest Road Policy ROAD-BUILDING IN NATIONAL forests is a double whammy for taxpayers. Not only do they have to pay the cost of the actual roads, which are used mostly by the timber and mining industries, but taxpayers must also bear the less quantifiable cost of the environmental damage to the forests they own. That's why decisions to build new roads in pristine forests should be made only after careful study and deliberation. That was the policy adopted in the Clinton administration, which, after three years of study and public input, in 2001 banned road-building in 58 million acres of forest. But the Bush administration, in a decision marked by neither study nor deliberation, suspended the so-called roadless rule later that year. The mad dash to open the forests to more roads — and, oddly, to give states more control over national forests — was what undid the Bush administration's plans. A federal judge ruled last week that the administration had failed to do the environmental studies required under the Endangered Species and National Environmental Policy acts before disregarding the roadless rule in the Lower 48 states....
Kempthorne, Gov. Bush, environmentalists leaders meet Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and Gov. Jeb Bush promoted cooperation between government and the private sector on environmental conservation Monday during a tour designed to gather input from citizens on federal environmental programs. Kempthorne, Bush and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen L. Johnson said the 24-city tour designed to forge new partnerships between groups - business, government and environmental activists - that haven't always agreed during environmental debates. The concept of cooperative conservation was President Bush's idea to move "away from the old environmental debate that pits one group against another," Kempthorne told a crowd of over 100 people. But environmental activists, who said previous tour stops have featured "hand-picked opponents" of protection laws, dominated Monday's hearing with pleas that President Bush's administration fully fund and enforce existing laws such as the Endangered Species Act....
The environmental load of 300 million: How heavy? A flotilla of 100 fishing boats, rafts, and kayaks crossed the Willamette River to a downtown park in Portland, Ore., the other evening to rally for the Pacific Northwest's reigning icon: wild salmon, now plummeting toward extinction due to development across much of the Columbia River basin. It was a typical event for a "green" city that has one of the best records in the United States for recycling, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, using alternative energy, and providing public transportation and bike paths. But Portland's amenities - its natural setting along the Willamette River and its youthful techie vibe - are drawing a surge of new people, threatening to erode the very qualities that drew people here in the first place. As the US approaches 300 million people, that's the story of the nation as well. In many ways, Americans have mitigated the impact of their increasing presence on the land. Since reaching the 200 million mark back in 1967, they have cut emissions of major air pollutants, banned certain harmful pesticides, and overseen the rebound of several endangered species. Despite using more resources and creating more waste, they've become more energy efficient. The danger, experts say, is that the US may simply have postponed the day of reckoning....
Landowners fight lynx habitat designation About one-third of the state could soon be classified as critical habitat for endangered Canada lynx. But the companies that own most of northern Maine and use the forests for logging and for development have asked to have their land exempted from the habitat area. No one is certain how the designation would affect future land uses in what is the richest lynx habitat in the United States, but the Maine landowners, along with wildlife conservation groups that support the habitat designation, are making their final appeals to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as the Nov. 1 decision approaches. "We have concerns about lynx (in Maine), and here they are, trying to get exempted," said Jen Burns, attorney for Maine Audubon. The group is filing arguments opposing the landowners' exemption requests. The proposal to designate 10,633 square miles in Maine shouldn't be reduced simply because the owners want to be left out, she said....
20% drop in campers at parks over decade National parks are seeing 20 percent fewer campers than 10 years ago, and officials say causes may include a slumping economy, higher gas prices, more competition for people's time and changing demographics. "The long weekend is replacing the two-week time off," said Jim Gramann, a professor at Texas A&M University and a visiting social scientist for the National Park Service. "That means fewer overnight stays in the national parks." Gramann said population changes may also have an impact because of the growth among some groups that are not traditional park-goers, such as minorities. Census projections show that by 2050, ethnic minority groups will compose more than 47 percent of the U.S. population. The Park Service reported that overnight stays in national park fell by 13.8 million, or 20 percent, between 1995 and 2005 and have fallen an additional 4.3 percent in the first eight months of this year. The Park Service said tent camping dropped 23 percent, backcountry camping 24 percent and RV camping 31 percent in the 10-year period.
Sheep Burned in Yolo County Fire Receiving Care The sight of hundreds of sheep burned in last Friday's fire near Zamora is hard to see, even for those used to dealing with injured animals. Yet there are signs of encouragement with each passing day. The fast-moving blaze scorched approximately 10,000 acres, destroyed three homes, several outbuildings and downed power lines. A large flock of sheep didn't escape the flames either. Sheep rancher Bill Slaven said there was little he could do when the fire ripped through his ranch. "It was worse than I thought. I thought there'd be some place where they could maybe get out a little area or something, but there wasn't any place for them." Slaven, whose family has owned the land for about 100 years, said he expects he'll lose as many as 600 sheep, a painful blow that will also be hard financially. "Just have to kind of go through the year and see if we make it through," he said....
It's All Trew: Artist draws on past in a jab at LBJ In 1963, after JFK’s untimely death put LBJ into the presidency, Peter Hurd, the famous New Mexico artist, was chosen to paint the official White House likeness of LBJ. Like the bust sittings, Johnson did not cooperate. After all, he was a busy man. Hurd was allowed only one sitting, during which Johnson fell asleep, then woke up and abruptly left the room, not to return. The artist had to complete the portrait from photographs. Most thought the finished work was excellent and even flattering to the president. When LBJ viewed the portrait he declared it, “the ugliest thing I ever saw.” Hurd was not your average man. He descended from a famous military family, attended West Point and served as a Life Magazine war correspondent during World War II, all the while becoming a world-class artist of great distinction. LBJ’s denouncement of his portrait barely ruffled Hurd’s feathers. He joined in the puns and jokes, making the rounds because he knew in spite of what Johnson said, the work was good and would hang in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Hurd eventually became the best-known artist in the southwest with work hanging only in famous museums and galleries. Recently, While Ruth and I visited an antique store in Farwell, we saw a small pen and ink illustration signed by Hurd. We know the work was a copy and don’t know if the signature on the original drawing was authentic. The subject was a well-drawn donkey running toward the back of the illustration. In clear view, the rear of the donkey was drawn in a way LBJ’s face could be instantly recognized, and I must say the resemblance was remarkable. Perhaps if the signature is authentic, Hurd took his revenge after all....