RECENT CASE SUMMARIES:
CTR. FOR BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY V. KEMPTHORNE
9th Circuit
Summary judgment in favor of defendants, agency officials, in a suit under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is reversed where defendants' challenged decision, regarding listing the Sierra Nevada Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog as an endangered species, standing alone, failed to make the determinations required by 16 U.S.C. section 1533(b)(3)(B) for a “warranted but precluded” finding.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/circs/9th/0416563p.pdf
AMERICAN CHEMISTRY COUNCIL V. DEP'T OF TRANSP.
D.C. Circuit
Petitions for review filed by plaintiff associations of hazardous materials manufacturers, shippers, and transporters challenging defendant's rule defining when hazardous materials are being loaded, unloaded, or stored incidental to their movement, are dismissed as plaintiffs have not demonstrated Article III standing under the U.S. Constitution to bring their challenge.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/circs/dc/031456a.pdf
Thursday, October 19, 2006
US congressmen push to allow hunting of salmon-hungry sea lions
Fishery officials have tried just about everything to keep California sea lions from munching on threatened salmon migrating up the Columbia River - from yelling at them to setting off firecrackers. But nothing has worked. On Monday, two Washington state congressmen announced at Bonneville Dam, Washington - where the pesky and portly pinnepeds have been doing most of their munching - that they are going to enlist Congress for help. Sea lions are protected by federal law. But Republican Doc Hastings and Democrat Brian Baird said they will introduce a bill that would let officials from the two U.S. states, as well as American Indians, quickly obtain permits to kill a limited number of sea lions that are going after salmon in the Columbia. "These sea lions have bellied up to an endangered salmon buffet and they will be eating thousands and thousands of fish right here this spring if we don't do something about it," Hastings said. They say numerous attempts to scare the sea lions off, including yelling at them, shocking them and exploding fireworks, have failed. When the Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed in 1972, there were about 50,000 California sea lions. Oregon officials say their numbers have grown to 300,000....
Fishery officials have tried just about everything to keep California sea lions from munching on threatened salmon migrating up the Columbia River - from yelling at them to setting off firecrackers. But nothing has worked. On Monday, two Washington state congressmen announced at Bonneville Dam, Washington - where the pesky and portly pinnepeds have been doing most of their munching - that they are going to enlist Congress for help. Sea lions are protected by federal law. But Republican Doc Hastings and Democrat Brian Baird said they will introduce a bill that would let officials from the two U.S. states, as well as American Indians, quickly obtain permits to kill a limited number of sea lions that are going after salmon in the Columbia. "These sea lions have bellied up to an endangered salmon buffet and they will be eating thousands and thousands of fish right here this spring if we don't do something about it," Hastings said. They say numerous attempts to scare the sea lions off, including yelling at them, shocking them and exploding fireworks, have failed. When the Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed in 1972, there were about 50,000 California sea lions. Oregon officials say their numbers have grown to 300,000....
Colorado Water Wars Include Spy Campaign
If some farmers in eastern Colorado felt like they were being watched this summer, they had good reason. Private investigators hired by some of Colorado's fastest-growing communities spent weeks spying on them, trying to determine if they were illegally pumping water for their crops, The Associated Press has learned. The investigators put together an elaborate database on 50 plots of land in eastern Colorado, noting things like "puddles around sprinkler perimeter" and "lush corn," and turned it over to state engineer Hal Simpson, who is investigating the claims. "There was one man taking pictures. My wife asked if she could help him and he sped off," said Steve Bruntz, who recently joined other farmers at a Wiggins gas station to talk with a reporter. Behind the fight are farmers who depend on irrigation, on one side, and cities that rely on water from the South Platte River, on the other. State water law guarantees that those with higher-priority rights get their share first. The water crisis came to a head in May when the state engineer told farmers along the South Platte to turn off 440 wells after forecasting lower-than-average river flows and well owners were unable to devise plans to replace the water they were using. Millions of dollars worth of wheat, corn, sugar beets and melons were left to die after some farmers and three cities - Sterling, Boulder and Highlands Ranch - rejected an emergency plan that would have allowed well owners to continue pumping. Water attorney Tim Buchanan, who represents farmers with senior water rights, said he ordered the spying campaign because he suspected some well owners were continuing to pump water....
If some farmers in eastern Colorado felt like they were being watched this summer, they had good reason. Private investigators hired by some of Colorado's fastest-growing communities spent weeks spying on them, trying to determine if they were illegally pumping water for their crops, The Associated Press has learned. The investigators put together an elaborate database on 50 plots of land in eastern Colorado, noting things like "puddles around sprinkler perimeter" and "lush corn," and turned it over to state engineer Hal Simpson, who is investigating the claims. "There was one man taking pictures. My wife asked if she could help him and he sped off," said Steve Bruntz, who recently joined other farmers at a Wiggins gas station to talk with a reporter. Behind the fight are farmers who depend on irrigation, on one side, and cities that rely on water from the South Platte River, on the other. State water law guarantees that those with higher-priority rights get their share first. The water crisis came to a head in May when the state engineer told farmers along the South Platte to turn off 440 wells after forecasting lower-than-average river flows and well owners were unable to devise plans to replace the water they were using. Millions of dollars worth of wheat, corn, sugar beets and melons were left to die after some farmers and three cities - Sterling, Boulder and Highlands Ranch - rejected an emergency plan that would have allowed well owners to continue pumping. Water attorney Tim Buchanan, who represents farmers with senior water rights, said he ordered the spying campaign because he suspected some well owners were continuing to pump water....
NEWS ROUNDUP
‘Roadless' advisory panel keeps working Despite a recent court ruling reinstating a 2001 rule that put millions of acres of national forest off limits to development, the Bush administration still supports an alternate - more permissive - rule established in 2005 and will work to defend it or remedy it to meet court approval, an official said Wednesday. And a federal advisory group set up to make recommendations under the 2005 rule decided Wednesday to continue its work and, in fact, to expand its scope somewhat. With numerous lawsuits pending on the roadless issue in different states, the administration will take a consistent approach in its response, said Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey. “We'll be telling the courts, whichever courts that we're appearing before, that we think the 2005 rule is a better approach, and we need to either defend it or remedy the flaws that (U.S. District Court Magistrate) Judge (Elizabeth) Laporte found in it,” Rey said. Rey made the comments to a meeting of the Roadless Area Conservation National Advisory Committee, whose members were trying to decide whether and how to proceed in light of the ruling. Rey encouraged the group to continue its work advising the department on state petitions on roadless areas, saying they could use a different authority rather than the 2005 rule to proceed....
Western oil, gas drilling will double, analysis says The number of producing oil and gas wells on Western public lands will double over the next 20 years, according to a new analysis of federal actions authorizing new drilling. In its new report "Too Wild To Drill," the Wilderness Society estimates 118,000 new wells will be drilled on public lands in Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado and Montana by 2026. Group officials say the estimate is conservative because it didn't include drilling plans still being crafted by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. "We are about to see gas drilling at a magnitude greater than anything we've ever experienced, and it threatens to forever damage many of our most treasured Western places," said William Meadows, president of the conservation group. Industry officials said the number of surface acres disturbed on federal lands by oil and gas development amounts to just a fraction of the total acreage. According to 2003 public-land statistics, less than 1 percent of the more than 261 million surface acres BLM manages is disturbed by oil and gas development....Go here to read the report.
Grassland to support, control prairie dog Pawnee National Grassland officials will allow up to more than eight times the amount of prairie dogs currently allowed on its land but will take measures to control them too, according to a decision released Wednesday. The Grassland will keep at least 200 acres, but allow up to 8,500 acres of prairie dog colonies, said Beth Humphrey, Grassland wildlife biologist. The number equals roughly 5 percent of the shortgrass prairie on the land and shouldn't affect the grazing land. That should help conserve not only the black-tailed prairie dogs but other important species, including burrowing owls, mountain plovers and ferruginous hawks. Both landowners and environmental groups weren't entirely happy with the decision. Some landowners said controlling the population might be difficult, given that the allowed amount is more than twice the number of acreage reached by the prairie dog population even at its peak a couple of years ago. Environmental groups said 200 acres was far too low....
Henderson moving to annex slice of south Las Vegas Strip The city of Henderson is moving to acquire a Las Vegas Strip address. After more than a year of negotiations with Clark County and the federal Bureau of Land Management, Nevada's second-largest city took a step Tuesday toward annexing almost 5.4 square miles of unincorporated land, including a three-quarter mile piece of south Las Vegas Boulevard. The Henderson City Council held a public hearing on the plan to add to the city some 3,455 acres now controlled by the federal government south of Saint Rose Parkway and east of Interstate 15. The area is more than 8 miles south of McCarran International Airport. The annexation could gain final City Council approval Nov. 6. It would mark the largest expansion of the 70-square-mile city since 2000, when it added 5,473 acres to its southwestern edge. Henderson had a population of about 175,000 at the time. It now has about 250,000 residents. Juan Palma, a federal Bureau of Land Management field manager, said Henderson agreed not to annex federal land that hasn't been identified for auction, and not to seek land within 800 feet of the existing I-15 right of way. Clark County wants to preserve that north-south swath of land as a transportation and utility corridor between Las Vegas and the site of a proposed Ivanpah regional airport south of Sloan....
Endangered Amphibian Species Leaps to a Minor Legal Victory A species of endangered amphibians, the Sierra Nevada Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog, leapt to a legal victory in a federal appeals court yesterday, but advocates for the frog warned that the advance could be short-lived. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Interior Department's decision to defer formally listing the frog as an endangered species. However, the three-judge panel left the door open for the agency to stall the listing again if it meets certain procedural requirements. "The decision itself was a victory for the frog, but it was decided on a fairly narrow, technical interpretation of the statute," the lawyer who argued against the government, Michael Sherwood, said. Mr. Sherwood, who works for an Oakland, Calif.-based environmental law group, Earthjustice, said the frog species lives only in high elevations of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He said listing the frog as endangered could limit grazing or timber rights in the frog's habitat, but developers are not likely to be interested in the lands where the frog is found....
Las Vegas reaching for rural water Rancher Dean Baker picks his way through greasewood and sedge to a shallow dirt depression that was once a small pond fed by a natural spring. Both have been dry for years, casualties, he says, of pumping that draws underground water to the surface to irrigate fields and water livestock. Over a half-century, agriculture's needs have lowered the water table, Baker says, but it's nothing compared to what may be in store for this arid, sparsely populated, mile-high desert near the Utah border. The Southern Nevada Water Authority wants to pump vast quantities of groundwater from rural eastern Nevada valleys and pipe it 250 miles south to Las Vegas, the nation's fastest-growing major metro area, a tourist mecca with a limited water supply strained by population and prolonged drought. After hearings last month, a decision rests with State Engineer Tracy Taylor. More hearings on plans in other valleys are pending. The water authority aims to build a pipeline by 2015 and pump nearly 30 million gallons a year from 19 wells in Spring Valley alone. At stake, ranchers say, are livelihoods and a delicate ecological balance on a landscape cursed with, at most, 8 inches of rain and snow a year....
Farmers say "whoa" to powerline A Canadian company that proposes to construct a power line from Alberta to Great Falls through eastern Teton and Pondera counties is putting the cart before the horse, say farmers along the right of way. Montana Alberta Tie Ltd. of Calgary, Alta., sent letters on Sept. 21 to property owners along the proposed route stating that its agent, SNC Consulting, has the right under the state's eminent-domain law to enter their lands to survey for a 230-kilovolt power line. Helena attorney Harley Harris signed the letters. According to state law, the right of eminent domain may be exercised for electrical energy lines, but it is silent on whether a private company that would benefit four wind farms has the same rights as a public utility. The law states, "The use must be located in the manner that will be most compatible with the greatest public good and the least private injury. Š The state or its agents in charge of the public use may, after giving 30 days' written notice to the owners and persons in possession of the land, enter upon the land and make examination, surveys, and maps of the land." A growing number of landowners are irked at the way MATL has dealt with them since it announced the $80 million project last January. The landowners say the surveyors should be cited for trespassing....
Anatomy of a Wolf Attack "Wolves are not the most efficient killers," says Nadeau. What he means is that wolves are not the cleanest killers. Mountain lions or cougars have the reputation of killing with efficiency and, if there are such things in the high desert food chain, some mercy and grace. The big cats keep bloodshed to a minimum and they kill quickly. Wolves employ far sloppier methods in their hunts. A cow might take her last breath of air amid a scene of flattened brush, trampled ground, drag marks and smears of blood--lots of blood. Nadeau calls such scenes "struggle sites." These sites can stretch hundreds of yards--a seasoned crime scene investigator might call the scene "gruesome" and the cause of death "brutal." Deb Lord found Wolfy amid such a scene. But one thing about the site was very atypical: The calf was still alive. The Lords brought who would later be called Wolfy to a vet. That's when their 14 year-old daughter, Blas, insisted that she become the wounded calf's caregiver. Blas, an all-around athlete at Mountain Home High School who had to give up showing and raising her own farm animals because of the time-consuming responsibilities that come with prep sports, describes her nursing in very G-rated terms. She cleaned Wolfy's wounds and removed the dead flesh that had accumulated around bite until the injury healed. Wolfy accepted the treatment without agitation, because, as Blas recalls, the wound was surrounded by so much dead muscle that the calf couldn't feel the pain that would normally accompany scrubbing wounded flesh....
Ag wins, loses in water debate Agriculture and energy interests won significant and conflicting victories Wednesday morning before the Wyoming Water and Waste Advisory Board, which sends its recommendations to the state Environmental Quality Council for further action. Ag interests won a point when the board endorsed bottomland protection from damages caused by coal-bed methane water contamination. The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality currently protects agricultural fields irrigated by artificial methods. Over industry protests, the board agreed to provide similar protection to naturally irrigated fields, also called bottomlands, from damage-causing salts carried in some coal-bed methane discharge water. Board member Joe Olson, an industry representative, said during the advisory board's meeting in Casper Wednesday that protecting bottomlands would be an excessive expansion of protected lands. He said many previously approved coal-bed methane permits wouldn't be granted had there been bottomland protections before. He also contended that coal-bed methane water benefits wildlife and livestock. This bottomland protection, however, would be limited to naturally irrigated lands at least 20 acres in size and 50 feet in width. DEQ officials argued that it would be too difficult to identify smaller bottomlands, but that smaller bottomlands can be identified through aerial, infrared photography. If landowners want protection for smaller bottomlands, said a DEQ official, that can be addressed in the permit-writing process, or on direct appeal to the EQC. Board member Bill Welles said many ranchers in the Powder River Basin have never used artificial irrigation, but are extremely dependent on forage grown in naturally irrigated bottomlands....
'Nobody's Horses' find home in book In the new book, "Nobody's Horses," by veterinarian Don Hoglund you'll read about how one man accepted responsibility, which reaffirmed his love for horses and for his chosen career. Well over a hundred years ago, many ranchers kept their horses on a free-range basis. The best horses were culled for work while the rest went back to the herd and eventually became untamed. Hoglund says nearly two million horses roamed western ranges in the 19th century. During World War II, the U.S. government "borrowed" lands in New Mexico for arms testing, and ranchers living on those lands were asked to leave. Some abandoned their livestock, and those animals joined wild herds. Eventually, the land became the White Sands Missile Range. It was fenced, with hundreds of wild horses inside. In 1994, a drought hit the area and 122 horses suffered gruesome and highly-published deaths. The government decided that the remaining horses needed to be moved or destroyed. Hoglund was called in to work with ranch hands, soldiers, and cowboys to move the horses to safety and adoption. Almost immediately, he became responsible for the steeds and the project....
Some say animal ID program threatens farmers, ranchers A federal program aimed at tracking livestock disease has some in the agricultural industry questioning everything from the cost of the program to the government's motive for creating the National Animal Identification System database. Judith McGeary, an Austin attorney and executive director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, disputes the claim that the main goal is to track and control disease. “NAIS does not address cause of disease; it does not address how disease is spread; and it does not address disease prevention or treatment,” said McGeary. “It does nothing to improve food safety; it plays on our fears of bioterrorism; it invades privacy; and its databases are not secure, and are a target for hackers.” McGeary also disputes NAIS claim that the program will not be expensive. “There has been no cost analysis,” said McGeary. “The costs will be higher for smaller farms and ranches because of economies of scale.” She gave examples of the costs for similar programs in other countries. For instance, in Australia the cost is about $37 to $40 per head; and, according to the British Parliamentary Report, the cost per animal is $69. According to McGeary, if and when compliance becomes mandatory, penalties for non-compliance will include fines of $1000 per day, risk of losing the business, and possible criminal charges....
‘Roadless' advisory panel keeps working Despite a recent court ruling reinstating a 2001 rule that put millions of acres of national forest off limits to development, the Bush administration still supports an alternate - more permissive - rule established in 2005 and will work to defend it or remedy it to meet court approval, an official said Wednesday. And a federal advisory group set up to make recommendations under the 2005 rule decided Wednesday to continue its work and, in fact, to expand its scope somewhat. With numerous lawsuits pending on the roadless issue in different states, the administration will take a consistent approach in its response, said Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey. “We'll be telling the courts, whichever courts that we're appearing before, that we think the 2005 rule is a better approach, and we need to either defend it or remedy the flaws that (U.S. District Court Magistrate) Judge (Elizabeth) Laporte found in it,” Rey said. Rey made the comments to a meeting of the Roadless Area Conservation National Advisory Committee, whose members were trying to decide whether and how to proceed in light of the ruling. Rey encouraged the group to continue its work advising the department on state petitions on roadless areas, saying they could use a different authority rather than the 2005 rule to proceed....
Western oil, gas drilling will double, analysis says The number of producing oil and gas wells on Western public lands will double over the next 20 years, according to a new analysis of federal actions authorizing new drilling. In its new report "Too Wild To Drill," the Wilderness Society estimates 118,000 new wells will be drilled on public lands in Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado and Montana by 2026. Group officials say the estimate is conservative because it didn't include drilling plans still being crafted by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. "We are about to see gas drilling at a magnitude greater than anything we've ever experienced, and it threatens to forever damage many of our most treasured Western places," said William Meadows, president of the conservation group. Industry officials said the number of surface acres disturbed on federal lands by oil and gas development amounts to just a fraction of the total acreage. According to 2003 public-land statistics, less than 1 percent of the more than 261 million surface acres BLM manages is disturbed by oil and gas development....Go here to read the report.
Grassland to support, control prairie dog Pawnee National Grassland officials will allow up to more than eight times the amount of prairie dogs currently allowed on its land but will take measures to control them too, according to a decision released Wednesday. The Grassland will keep at least 200 acres, but allow up to 8,500 acres of prairie dog colonies, said Beth Humphrey, Grassland wildlife biologist. The number equals roughly 5 percent of the shortgrass prairie on the land and shouldn't affect the grazing land. That should help conserve not only the black-tailed prairie dogs but other important species, including burrowing owls, mountain plovers and ferruginous hawks. Both landowners and environmental groups weren't entirely happy with the decision. Some landowners said controlling the population might be difficult, given that the allowed amount is more than twice the number of acreage reached by the prairie dog population even at its peak a couple of years ago. Environmental groups said 200 acres was far too low....
Henderson moving to annex slice of south Las Vegas Strip The city of Henderson is moving to acquire a Las Vegas Strip address. After more than a year of negotiations with Clark County and the federal Bureau of Land Management, Nevada's second-largest city took a step Tuesday toward annexing almost 5.4 square miles of unincorporated land, including a three-quarter mile piece of south Las Vegas Boulevard. The Henderson City Council held a public hearing on the plan to add to the city some 3,455 acres now controlled by the federal government south of Saint Rose Parkway and east of Interstate 15. The area is more than 8 miles south of McCarran International Airport. The annexation could gain final City Council approval Nov. 6. It would mark the largest expansion of the 70-square-mile city since 2000, when it added 5,473 acres to its southwestern edge. Henderson had a population of about 175,000 at the time. It now has about 250,000 residents. Juan Palma, a federal Bureau of Land Management field manager, said Henderson agreed not to annex federal land that hasn't been identified for auction, and not to seek land within 800 feet of the existing I-15 right of way. Clark County wants to preserve that north-south swath of land as a transportation and utility corridor between Las Vegas and the site of a proposed Ivanpah regional airport south of Sloan....
Endangered Amphibian Species Leaps to a Minor Legal Victory A species of endangered amphibians, the Sierra Nevada Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog, leapt to a legal victory in a federal appeals court yesterday, but advocates for the frog warned that the advance could be short-lived. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Interior Department's decision to defer formally listing the frog as an endangered species. However, the three-judge panel left the door open for the agency to stall the listing again if it meets certain procedural requirements. "The decision itself was a victory for the frog, but it was decided on a fairly narrow, technical interpretation of the statute," the lawyer who argued against the government, Michael Sherwood, said. Mr. Sherwood, who works for an Oakland, Calif.-based environmental law group, Earthjustice, said the frog species lives only in high elevations of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He said listing the frog as endangered could limit grazing or timber rights in the frog's habitat, but developers are not likely to be interested in the lands where the frog is found....
Las Vegas reaching for rural water Rancher Dean Baker picks his way through greasewood and sedge to a shallow dirt depression that was once a small pond fed by a natural spring. Both have been dry for years, casualties, he says, of pumping that draws underground water to the surface to irrigate fields and water livestock. Over a half-century, agriculture's needs have lowered the water table, Baker says, but it's nothing compared to what may be in store for this arid, sparsely populated, mile-high desert near the Utah border. The Southern Nevada Water Authority wants to pump vast quantities of groundwater from rural eastern Nevada valleys and pipe it 250 miles south to Las Vegas, the nation's fastest-growing major metro area, a tourist mecca with a limited water supply strained by population and prolonged drought. After hearings last month, a decision rests with State Engineer Tracy Taylor. More hearings on plans in other valleys are pending. The water authority aims to build a pipeline by 2015 and pump nearly 30 million gallons a year from 19 wells in Spring Valley alone. At stake, ranchers say, are livelihoods and a delicate ecological balance on a landscape cursed with, at most, 8 inches of rain and snow a year....
Farmers say "whoa" to powerline A Canadian company that proposes to construct a power line from Alberta to Great Falls through eastern Teton and Pondera counties is putting the cart before the horse, say farmers along the right of way. Montana Alberta Tie Ltd. of Calgary, Alta., sent letters on Sept. 21 to property owners along the proposed route stating that its agent, SNC Consulting, has the right under the state's eminent-domain law to enter their lands to survey for a 230-kilovolt power line. Helena attorney Harley Harris signed the letters. According to state law, the right of eminent domain may be exercised for electrical energy lines, but it is silent on whether a private company that would benefit four wind farms has the same rights as a public utility. The law states, "The use must be located in the manner that will be most compatible with the greatest public good and the least private injury. Š The state or its agents in charge of the public use may, after giving 30 days' written notice to the owners and persons in possession of the land, enter upon the land and make examination, surveys, and maps of the land." A growing number of landowners are irked at the way MATL has dealt with them since it announced the $80 million project last January. The landowners say the surveyors should be cited for trespassing....
Anatomy of a Wolf Attack "Wolves are not the most efficient killers," says Nadeau. What he means is that wolves are not the cleanest killers. Mountain lions or cougars have the reputation of killing with efficiency and, if there are such things in the high desert food chain, some mercy and grace. The big cats keep bloodshed to a minimum and they kill quickly. Wolves employ far sloppier methods in their hunts. A cow might take her last breath of air amid a scene of flattened brush, trampled ground, drag marks and smears of blood--lots of blood. Nadeau calls such scenes "struggle sites." These sites can stretch hundreds of yards--a seasoned crime scene investigator might call the scene "gruesome" and the cause of death "brutal." Deb Lord found Wolfy amid such a scene. But one thing about the site was very atypical: The calf was still alive. The Lords brought who would later be called Wolfy to a vet. That's when their 14 year-old daughter, Blas, insisted that she become the wounded calf's caregiver. Blas, an all-around athlete at Mountain Home High School who had to give up showing and raising her own farm animals because of the time-consuming responsibilities that come with prep sports, describes her nursing in very G-rated terms. She cleaned Wolfy's wounds and removed the dead flesh that had accumulated around bite until the injury healed. Wolfy accepted the treatment without agitation, because, as Blas recalls, the wound was surrounded by so much dead muscle that the calf couldn't feel the pain that would normally accompany scrubbing wounded flesh....
Ag wins, loses in water debate Agriculture and energy interests won significant and conflicting victories Wednesday morning before the Wyoming Water and Waste Advisory Board, which sends its recommendations to the state Environmental Quality Council for further action. Ag interests won a point when the board endorsed bottomland protection from damages caused by coal-bed methane water contamination. The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality currently protects agricultural fields irrigated by artificial methods. Over industry protests, the board agreed to provide similar protection to naturally irrigated fields, also called bottomlands, from damage-causing salts carried in some coal-bed methane discharge water. Board member Joe Olson, an industry representative, said during the advisory board's meeting in Casper Wednesday that protecting bottomlands would be an excessive expansion of protected lands. He said many previously approved coal-bed methane permits wouldn't be granted had there been bottomland protections before. He also contended that coal-bed methane water benefits wildlife and livestock. This bottomland protection, however, would be limited to naturally irrigated lands at least 20 acres in size and 50 feet in width. DEQ officials argued that it would be too difficult to identify smaller bottomlands, but that smaller bottomlands can be identified through aerial, infrared photography. If landowners want protection for smaller bottomlands, said a DEQ official, that can be addressed in the permit-writing process, or on direct appeal to the EQC. Board member Bill Welles said many ranchers in the Powder River Basin have never used artificial irrigation, but are extremely dependent on forage grown in naturally irrigated bottomlands....
'Nobody's Horses' find home in book In the new book, "Nobody's Horses," by veterinarian Don Hoglund you'll read about how one man accepted responsibility, which reaffirmed his love for horses and for his chosen career. Well over a hundred years ago, many ranchers kept their horses on a free-range basis. The best horses were culled for work while the rest went back to the herd and eventually became untamed. Hoglund says nearly two million horses roamed western ranges in the 19th century. During World War II, the U.S. government "borrowed" lands in New Mexico for arms testing, and ranchers living on those lands were asked to leave. Some abandoned their livestock, and those animals joined wild herds. Eventually, the land became the White Sands Missile Range. It was fenced, with hundreds of wild horses inside. In 1994, a drought hit the area and 122 horses suffered gruesome and highly-published deaths. The government decided that the remaining horses needed to be moved or destroyed. Hoglund was called in to work with ranch hands, soldiers, and cowboys to move the horses to safety and adoption. Almost immediately, he became responsible for the steeds and the project....
Some say animal ID program threatens farmers, ranchers A federal program aimed at tracking livestock disease has some in the agricultural industry questioning everything from the cost of the program to the government's motive for creating the National Animal Identification System database. Judith McGeary, an Austin attorney and executive director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, disputes the claim that the main goal is to track and control disease. “NAIS does not address cause of disease; it does not address how disease is spread; and it does not address disease prevention or treatment,” said McGeary. “It does nothing to improve food safety; it plays on our fears of bioterrorism; it invades privacy; and its databases are not secure, and are a target for hackers.” McGeary also disputes NAIS claim that the program will not be expensive. “There has been no cost analysis,” said McGeary. “The costs will be higher for smaller farms and ranches because of economies of scale.” She gave examples of the costs for similar programs in other countries. For instance, in Australia the cost is about $37 to $40 per head; and, according to the British Parliamentary Report, the cost per animal is $69. According to McGeary, if and when compliance becomes mandatory, penalties for non-compliance will include fines of $1000 per day, risk of losing the business, and possible criminal charges....
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
BREAK IN CATTLE POACHING CASE There has been a break in the cattle poaching case in Madison County. After years of what seemed random poaching of cattle east of Rexburg, sheriff's deputies say they have a good lead on who might be responsible and need your help. Aaron Kunz reports on what gave them their new lead in this case. Over the last few years, many ranchers started patrolling their land, and today a rancher believes he saw the man responsible for killing yet another cow. Chief Deputy Ryan Kaufman is looking at the carcass in the most recent killing, a cow shot Monday morning has given them the best lead they've had since starting this investigation. Chief Dep. Ryan Kaufman, Madison County Sheriff's Office: "The vehicle that we have the description given to us by the hunter is an older 80s to 90's grey Jeep Cherokee. The gentleman driving it was described as a older Hispanic male, round face with a goatee and shorter black hair." There have been dozens of cows killed, most shot from the road by poachers in Madison County. Each killing is a felony offense, because each cow is worth around two thousand dollars....
Hearing tomorrow on Navy land plan The Navy wants to double the size of a training area in the backcountry where air crews and special-operations forces practice how to survive when trapped behind enemy lines. The Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape – SERE – school uses 6,158 acres in and near the Cleveland National Forest covered mostly with shrubs and light forest, said Steve Fiebing, a Coronado Naval Base spokesman. Under the proposal, the Pentagon would return about 1,700 acres to the forest service but add about 8,000 acres south and west of the existing school, Fiebing said. The new site would grow to 12,544 acres. He said no new roads or buildings are planned. Nearly all the land would be left as a wilderness, where troops would practice basic survival, navigation and reconnaissance skills....
Critics decry U.S. failure to replant burned tracts On one side of the property line, a new forest is taking root _ a glassy-green sea of waist-high pine planted by a timber company after a massive wildfire swept through six years ago. On the other side, on public land managed by the Lassen National Forest, dense mats of brush cling to a landscape dominated by charred dead trees, some standing, others not. "Nobody on the Lassen is proud of that land line," said Duane Nelson, who manages reforestation for the Forest Service in California. "We actually refer to it as our wall of shame." Reforestation _ the planting and natural regeneration of trees _ is the most critical part of forest management. But across the West, vast parcels of Forest Service land scorched by increasingly catastrophic wildfires have not been replanted. The consequences may linger for centuries. Imagine a Sierra Nevada that yields not gin-clear snowmelt but coffee-colored torrents from eroding canyons. Imagine shrub fields that stretch for miles, so dense that even birds and backpackers avoid them. That is the future Doug Leisz _ a former associate chief for the Forest Service _ envisions unless the agency replants more quickly....
Use roads or close them? A management plan for roads in the Medicine Bow/Routt National Forest, scheduled for release next month, will call for almost 100 miles of unauthorized roads to be approved for motorcycle and all-terrain vehicle use. Clint Kyhl, Laramie District ranger, said the plan would not affect some 785 miles of authorized roads in the forest. However, it would put about 100 miles out of the 265 miles of unauthorized roads to use. "We have a variety of unauthorized roads we needed to decide to use or close," Kyhl said. "(And) we have zero miles of motorized trail in the district right now. We want to provide that opportunity as well, and use some of these roads to do it." Rick Woodard, an ATV rider from Cheyenne, said he was glad to hear about the plan. "That's great that they're actually starting to make an attempt to get some trails opened up," he said. "Because right now, throughout the whole state, there are only a few trails you can go on. And the only other places you can ride are in national forests on regular vehicle roads."....
The Post-Burning Question: Log It or Leave It? Three government SUVs guarded a road to nowhere. Nearby, a middle-age couple camping out in a trailer manned a round-the-clock checkpoint next to a locked gate, on the watch for environmental protesters. A few miles beyond, the drone of chain saws rose from a deep ravine while a hovering helicopter plucked blackened logs from the floor of the burned forest and carried them to the nearest road. Begun in August, the logging is the first in the country on nearly 60 million acres of remote national forest protected by a Clinton administration decree that was set aside last year by the Bush administration. The operation was too far along to be stopped by a Sept. 19 federal court order reinstating the Clinton edict. Ever since a huge 2002 fire called Biscuit swept across the outback of southwest Oregon, burning a swath of forest the size of Orange County, this prized landscape has been at the forefront of conflict over Bush administration forest policies dealing with roadless backcountry and wildfire. One of the most contentious issues is whether government should leave a forest alone after it has burned, letting the trees decay to nurture a gradual rebirth, as conservationists advocate; or log the commercially valuable dead timber and replant, as the Bush administration desires....
Forest's old uranium mine undergoes testing Radioactive testing is now under way at an abandoned high-country uranium mine on the Stanislaus National Forest. For the past three days, contractors from Placer County have been taking soil samples from one of three waste piles at the former Juniper Uranium Mine. While the mine was active between 1956 and 1966, it produced about 500 tons of uranium ore. The 33-acre mine site is just west of Sardine Meadow at an elevation of 8,500 feet. Twenty years after the mine closed, the U.S. Forest Service took it over. Public access to the mine site was blocked in June 2003 after tests showed that erosion had elevated the radioactive exposure. Next to the 175-foot-deep mining pit are three waste piles of rock and dirt totaling 45,000 cubic yards. Each pile has a different level of radioactivity. The third pile, the one being tested, has the least because it was the original top layer of soil when the mine was dug, said Stanislaus National Forest spokesman Jerry Snyder. The Forest Service plans to put the most radioactive of the material back in the mine first. Once covered, plants and trees will be planted to make the mine area blend in and help prevent erosion....
Bush OKs wilderness protection The remote "Lost Coast" of Humboldt County, a salmon-rich river in Mendocino County and a rare cedar forest in Napa County will receive new protections under a law signed by President Bush on Tuesday, the largest federal wilderness protection measure in California in 12 years. The bill designates 273,000 acres for wilderness protections, an area 10 times the size of San Francisco. The lands affected are owned by the federal government, and are managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Now however, commercial logging, mining and motor vehicle use will be banned. "After more than five years of hard work and tremendous support from hundreds of environmentalists, outdoor enthusiasts, businesses and government officials, this beautiful and unique land has received the highest protection the law allows," said U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Napa, the author of the bill....
BLM will cite defiant ATV rider Richard Beardall is getting exactly what he wanted: a trespassing ticket from federal land managers for ignoring the rules and riding his ATV on a closed road in the San Rafael Swell. Beardall, three other ATV riders and a Jeep, moved a 10-foot barricade near an old uranium mine and made a half-mile roundtrip along the access road to the Muddy River on Saturday. The Bureau of Land Management closed the area to recreational vehicles in 1993 due to riparian damage, said Price, Utah-based BLM manager Roger Bankert. Beardall, president of the Americans with Disabilities Access Alliance knows that, but he and others are angry over the closing of public lands, Bankert said. "He wants the ticket to go to court and challenge the closure," said Bankert, who is in his fourth week on the job....
Supervisors move to save desert plan San Bernardino County supervisors announced Tuesday that they voted in closed session to join in defending a desert wildlife habitat-conservation plan from an environmental lawsuit. If the U.S. District Court in San Francisco allows the county to participate in the suit, San Bernardino County would have the right to argue in front of the court and participate in any future settlement talks on the West Mojave Plan. Stopping the suit is critical to allowing road maintenance, public-safety access and waste disposal in areas covered by the plan, said Robin Cochran, a deputy county counsel. The West Mojave Plan is the largest habitat conservation plan in the nation, regulating activities on 3.3 million acres. In return for some parts of the desert being reserved as critical wildlife habitat, the plan reduces environmental restrictions in less sensitive areas. San Bernardino County was a lead agency in the plan's design. Approved in March, the plan failed to protect the desert tortoise and several plant species, several environmental organizations have argued. In a suit filed in August, the Center for Biological Diversity alleged the plan illegally permitted disastrous amounts of off-highway-vehicle use and asked for an injunction barring the federal Bureau of Land Management from "issuing any permit, approval, or other action" for any activity that would adversely affect the desert tortoise or three plant species....
BLM expects an appeal on Over the River decision Whichever way the Bureau of Land Management rules on the Over the River project, the issue will likely end up in appeals court, BLM Field Manager Roy Masinton told Chaffee County Commissioners Monday. Masinton, delivering a report on BLM issues affecting Chaffee County during a work session in Salida, said both the artists and the opposition group are prepared to appeal if the BLM decision doesn't go their way. "I anticipate, no matter what decision is made, we'll go to court on it," Masinton said. Artists Christo and Jeane Claude are attempting to gain approval to stretch fabric over the Arkansas River in sections from Salida to Cañon City in a public art display. A group centered in Howard called Rags Over the Arkansas River is leading the opposition....
Conservation Groups Defend California's Right to Regulate Gold Mining Today, Sierra Club and Earthworks, represented by Earthjustice and the Western Mining Action Project, filed a submission opposing the Canadian gold mining company Glamis Gold's efforts to use an international trade panel to force the United States to pay $50 million for mining restrictions that protect the environment and Native American cultural resources. "This is about a foreign-owned company using a NAFTA trade panel to bully the state of California and the United States into letting them destroy public lands," said Margrete Strand Rangnes, with Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Program. "This case should be a wake-up call to the Bush administration as it negotiates new trade agreements." The trade panel, created under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), is considering the case involving a series of open pit gold mines in the California desert roughly 45 miles northeast of El Centro, California. The land is sacred to the Quechan Indians, a Colorado River Indian tribe living near the California-Arizona border. The Canadian mining company filed a proposed plan of operations with the federal Bureau of Land Management to mine 1,600 acres in 1994. In 2001, Clinton Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt refused to approve Glamis's mining plan because it would have destroyed the sacred tribal lands. California later passed a law requiring open pit mines to be refilled after mining was completed, a process the company argues is too expensive to make the mine profitable....
Bill Fighting Mine Not Intended to Pass Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon may have introduced a bill aimed at crippling a planned cement mine in Soledad Canyon several months ago, but he never intended to see it passed this year, a spokesman said. Introduced late last spring by McKeon, R-Santa Clarita, the "Soledad Canyon Mine Leases Adjustment Act" would cancel the Cemex Inc.'s leases - providing the company with other mining options instead - and prohibit the federal Bureau of Land Management from re-leasing the land except at historic extraction levels of about 300,000 tons per year. Since 1999, Santa Clarita has been locked in a legal battle over the Mexican cement giant's proposed 20-year mine, which - starting in 2008 - would extract some 69-million tons of sand and gravel from the mine in Soledad Canyon, about one mile from some Canyon Country housing tracts. The city owns the unincorporated county property, but the company has been granted federal mining permits. The intention was never to see the bill passed this year, McKeon spokesman Scott Wilk said. Rather, it was introduced this year "to see what kind of red flags it may have generated" among the members of Congress....
Gas firm positive about meeting standards EnCana Oil and Gas USA, the main natural gas producer on Wyoming's Jonah Field, says it's confident it can comply with new, more stringent federal air quality regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency last month tightened its regulation of "PM 2.5s," meaning particles that are 2.5 micrometers or smaller in diameter. Officials say such small particles cause health problems and are a component of smog. Previous federal air quality regulations enacted in 1997 allowed emissions of up to 65 micrograms per cubic meter of PM 2.5s in a 24-hour period. The new EPA standards reduce the allowable amount to 35 micrograms per cubic meter. According to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the maximum concentration of PM 2.5s during the operation of the Jonah Field project would be 44 micrograms per cubic meter. During the early stages of development, the agency predicts that emissions from the field would be 49.2 micrograms per cubic meter. Combined with other emissions, the total maximum would be 69.2 per 24-hour period - nearly double the maximum acceptable level under the new standard....
DeGette, 14 groups protest BLM plans for Roan Plateau A management plan for western Colorado's Roan Plateau promoted by state and federal officials as balancing demands for energy with protecting the environment drew protests Monday from Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and 14 conservation, hunting and fishing groups. The formal protests filed with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management will be considered as the agency finalizes the decision on managing the 73,602 acres of federal land on and around the plateau. The plateau, which straddles Garfield and Rio Blanco counties, is rich in natural gas and oil shale. It's also home to a variety of wildlife - elk, deer, mountain lions, peregrine falcons, bears and rare, native Colorado trout. Several area communities, hunters, anglers and environmentalists have urged the BLM to keep drilling off the top of the plateau....
New blood for the breed Big eyes, Big ears, Big teeth. Five Mexican gray wolf pups are coming to Heritage Park Zoo. Executive Director Kim Disney said Sunday afternoon that the Mexican Wolf Species Survival Plan designated Heritage Park Zoo as a "premier designation for wolves" in the survival program. "I am thrilled to announce that we have been awarded five young pups from Columbus, Ohio. The pups are about 1 year old. Hopefully, we can keep them comfortable and introduce them into the breeding pool. The pups are some of the most genetically pure Mexican gray wolves in the country," Disney said. Mexican gray wolves are among the most endangered mammals in the world. They are smaller than their cousins, the gray wolf. Currently, about 300 Mexican gray wolves exist in captive programs and experts believe only 37 exist in the wild....
Pombo keeps species act in his scope Tracy Republican Richard Pombo took office vowing to change the Endangered Species Act. In the 14 years since, he has delivered speeches, staged events and written bills. He has enjoyed perfect positions to pursue his signature issue, including, for the past four years, chairmanship of the House Resources Committee while his party has controlled the House and Senate. The Endangered Species Act, though, remains unchanged since the day Pombo took office in January 1993. The same 22,300 words in the U.S. Code are intact. Which raises the fundamental election-year question: What does failing to revise the Endangered Species Act say about Pombo's legislative skills? The answer is complicated, in part because the question can validly be asked in another way: Why is it so hard to change this 1973 law, when so many people want it updated? "It's the sacred cow," Pombo said. "It is the big environmental law; that takes precedence over everything."....
Model San Diego Multiple Species Plan Doesn't Conserve Rarest Species In a precedent-setting ruling, a federal judge has agreed with conservationists' contentions that a San Diego regional habitat conservation plan does not do enough to protect endangered and threatened species that depend on a type of wetland that has nearly vanished from southern California. Late on Friday October 13, District Court Judge Rudi Brewster, a Reagan appointee, released a 61-page opinion halting damage to wetlands in undeveloped areas within the city of San Diego. The ruling criticizes the San Diego Multiple Species Conservation Plan for its failure to conserve seven imperiled vernal pool wetland species including two fairy shrimp and five plants. The ruling also rejects a related lawsuit by developers and sends the plan back to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the agency to try again....
Looking Back: Sage Grouse Studies (1942)-Predation and the Sage Grouse: A Sage Grouse Nesting Study The Wyoming Game & Fish Department has been publishing their magazine, Wyoming Wildlife, monthly since 1935. The early editions offer interesting insight into wildlife issues faced by managers and biologists over the years in Wyoming. We found a copy of several Wyoming Wildlife issues from 1942. Below is a reprint of an article entitled “Predation and the Sage Grouse: Sage Grouse Nesting Study” written by Warren J. Allred, Wyoming Pittman-Robertson Range Specialist. Many of the same issues and concerns mentioned in this article studying sage grouse nesting in the Big Piney area more than 65 years ago are similar to what are being discussed today....
Hispanics Show Growing Clout in Environmental Debate Maria Valdez didn’t consider herself an environmentalist when she pressed this city east of Los Angeles to buy land ringed with factories and railroad tracks for a new neighborhood park. The trash lot is now on its way to becoming a green oasis with a butterfly sanctuary and community garden _ and Valdez is undergoing a transformation of her own. Next month she will be sworn in as president of the El Monte chapter of Mujeres de la Tierra, a two-year-old environmental group that caters to Hispanic immigrants and translates as “Women of the Earth.” “When you get involved and you know that you could make it happen, it feels good,” said Valdez, a stay-at-home mother of six. “I’m interested in the water, the air _ for our kids.” Spurred by high rates of asthma and lead poisoning among their children, Hispanic immigrants such as Valdez, a U.S. citizen who left Mexico as a child, are embracing green values like never before _ on their own terms. Hispanic activists and politicians talk openly about building a unique green movement that distances itself from mainstream environmental groups, even as those organizations hope to tap into newfound Hispanic political clout....
Walk-In to the Western Slope One of the state’s most popular hunter access programs is expanding to the Western Slope. The Colorado Division of Wildlife’s Walk-In Access program, which pays farmers and ranchers to open private land to public hunters, this year offers participants more than 200,000 acres along the eastern plains to hunt pheasants and scaled quail, starting on the season opener, Nov. 1. Now, a sister program targeted on goose hunting is about to open in western Colorado
Despite an initial hesitation by landowners in signing up for the program, local DOW officials said a handful of farms have agreed to allow waterfowl hunters on their property once the season begins Nov. 1....
No more cows: Giacomini sells the herd About 250 head of cattle from Rich and Darlene Giacomini’s dairy in Point Reyes Station were loaded onto semi trucks last Wednesday morning, then driven to their new owners at Tavares Dairy in Merced. On early Thursday morning, the trucks were back to continue the operation. Five hundred fifty acres of the prosperous dairy ranch was sold to the Park Service in 2000 for $4.5 million. Under the terms of the sale, the Giacomini family held on to several properties at the ranch’s periphery. The lease allows operations to continue until March 2007, said National Park Spokesman John Dell’Osso. At that time, the park hopes to begin restoring the pastures to tidal marshland. “As an organization that is trying to help preserve agriculture as a viable industry in West Marin, we’re sorry to see the dairy close,” said Robert Berner, Executive Director of Marin Agriculture Land Trust. “The dairy has been one of the most productive in the county. “Part of the historic identity of the town is being lost and there is something to regret about that,” said Berner....
Conservation partners protect critical block of South Dakota breeding grounds More than 10,300 acres of South Dakota native prairie grasslands and wetlands have been permanently protected with a nearly $3 million grant. This is thanks to the efforts of a broad coalition of conservation partners including Ducks Unlimited (DU), the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the North American Wetland Conservation Act (NAWCA) and 13 private landowners in central South Dakota. DU received a grant from NFWF that provided a springboard to purchase grassland easements on native prairie grassland and wetland complexes that supply critical breeding habitat for a diversity of grassland birds including waterfowl, shorebirds, raptors and songbirds. The native prairie and wetlands of Hand County have long been recognized as a prime breeding area for a diversity of bird species but, unfortunately, these populations are increasingly threatened by conversion of the grassland to cropland....
Land-use measure tackles 'eminent domain' debate When the U.S. Supreme Court, on a 5-4 vote, said last year that a city could force people to sell their property so that the government could turn it over to another private owner, activists and legislators across the country cried foul. More than two dozen states moved to enact laws prohibiting such use of the government's condemnation powers, but bills introduced in the California Legislature failed last spring. On Nov. 7, California voters will have a chance to restrict such government actions when they decide on Proposition 90. But Proposition 90 does not just address the court's landmark decision on ``eminent domain,'' the type of reform that even opponents of the ballot measure concede has popular appeal. Proposition 90 -- which largely has been financed by a New York real estate magnate and libertarian activist -- also contains a broad restriction on the ability of local and state agencies to enact regulations on the use of property, including common zoning rules that might have wide community acceptance....
Water fees prod action from farmers In a state where water disputes often have played out like old Sunday morning Westerns, Kevin Taylor is one of those who tries to keep the peace. Taylor, a government "water cop," enforces court-decreed water rights under the state watermaster program. But his job and the program itself may be in for big changes as farmers and ranchers faced with the prospect of soaring water-use fees fight to wrest control from the state and put it in the hands of individual counties. "I'm not against people looking to save money, but I'm not sure if they realize how complicated this can be," said Taylor, a watermaster in Northern California. "When you regulate water, you are taking food off a man's table and clothes off his kids' backs." The effort is a response to one of several recent attempts by the state Department of Water Resources to create revenue through consumer-financed programs....
USDA and EPA Ink Deal on Water Quality USDA Natural Resources and Environment Under Secretary Mark Rey and Benjamin Grumbles, Assistant Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Water, signed a partnership agreement Friday to establish and promote water quality credit trading markets through cooperative conservation. The agreement features a pilot project within the Chesapeake Bay basin to showcase the effectiveness of environmental markets. "Water quality credit trading is a flexible, cost-effective approach for implementing conservation practices that reduce runoff, help producers meet water quality standards, and pursue water quality improvement goals in watersheds," Rey said. "We believe that voluntary, incentive based approaches are the most effective way to achieve sound resource management and conservation on private lands." "Trading for upgrading water quality is the wave of the future," said Grumbles. "We are committed to giving good stewards credit and partnering with agriculture to accelerate restoration and protection. This agreement is a big step forward." Water quality credit trading uses a market-based approach that offers incentives to farmers and ranchers who implement conservation practices that improve water quality. While reducing pollution, they can earn credits they can trade with industrial or municipal facilities that are required by the Clean Water Act and other laws to reduce the amounts of pollution in wastewater....
Time to cash in? Over the years, Wyoming's agricultural industry has proven to be at least resilient in the face of increasing development pressures. Agriculture continues to be the third-leading industry in Wyoming, generating $1.5 billion annually in economic revenue. Because agriculture is the dominant private land use in Wyoming -- controlling more than 95 percent of the private land in the state -- much of the concern about maintaining open spaces focuses on private ranchlands and farms. Those lands often include bottom lands along rivers and other important areas for wildlife habitat, especially during winter. The future of a vast majority of the state's open spaces will depend to a large extent on the retention of agricultural land in Wyoming. But more and more, agricultural land is being subdivided and developed. Escalating land values and marginal returns from agricultural endeavors are making it harder for ranchers and farmers to operate. And many ranchers are facing retirement but find it difficult to pass their ranches down within the family. It took Preston, for example, about 15 years to pay off the inheritance tax when he assumed ownership of the ranch....
Eastern ranchers feel pinch, too People once looking to live in city centers for the amenities are now looking for a more rural experience, and living 30 miles away from towns is more appealing. That far-away land was once a haven for ranchers, but now is a haven for homeowners, too. Wyoming Stock Growers Agricultural Land Trust executive director Glenn Pauley noted that just in the past year, 13,000 acres within unincorporated Laramie County have been bought and sold in 35-plus-acre tracts. By contrast, just over 9,000 acres were split up and sold between 1995 and 2004. And a recent University of Wyoming study found that more than 145,000 acres of ranchlands in Sublette County and more than 218,000 acres of ranchlands in Fremont County changed hands between 1990 and 2001. Since beginning his work as director of the wildlife trust fund board a year ago, Budd has traveled to all corners of the state. He has been helping evaluate requests for funding from the new state trust fund, intended to protect and improve habitat for wildlife -- much of it on private ranchland. While vast expanses of sagebrush still cover most of the state, Budd said he also has noticed significant residential development in many areas. There's "overflow" from South Dakota's Black Hills in the northeast corner, from Colorado in the southeast. Areas around Casper, Cody, Lander, Dubois and Pinedale are also seeing major growth....
Canadian farmer launches mad cow class action lawsuit A Quebec farmer asked a court for permission to launch a class action suit against the Canadian Government and an Australian feed producer, saying their negligence sparked a recent mad cow crisis in Canada. If approved, the case would be the first in Canada since a case of mad cow disease was discovered in Canada in May 2003, prompting more than 30 countries to ban Canadian beef imports. It could also lead to similar lawsuits across the country. Rancher Donald Berneche said in court documents that embargoes on Canadian beef cost him about $C100,000 ($A116.4). Some 20,000 Quebec farmers likely to be represented in the suit could claim as much as $C20 billion ($A23.29 billion). Mr Berneche blames Canada's agriculture ministry and Ridley, which makes animal feed from bone meal and brain meal in North America and is a subsidiary of Australia's Ridley, for "their inaction and their negligence". He laments that Canadian authorities waited until August 1997 to ban brain or spinal tissue from other cattle or ruminant animals in feed, while several European countries took this step in the early 1990s. For its part, Ridley continued to sell feed that contained brain or spinal tissue in Canada until August 1997, even though in Australia, the parent company conformed to stricter feed production practices as of May 1996....
FDA may OK meat from clones The government said Tuesday it is moving closer to approving meat and milk from cloned animals, drawing protests from consumer groups. The Bush administration is currently reviewing Food and Drug Administration plans to regulate cloned animals and food derived from them, the agency said in a statement. A draft of the plans should be released by the end of the year, FDA said. The agency has "studies that show that the meat and milk from cattle clones and their offspring are as safe as that from conventionally bred animals," the FDA statement said. The biotech industry says cloning lets breeders do what they've always done: select the best animals from the herd for reproduction....
Amarillo artisan honored for saddle craftsmanship The sweet smell of leather permeates Bob Marrs' Amarillo garage, an artisan's workshop packed with fond memories, great stories and the well-worn tools of a dedicated craftsman's trade. For decades, Marrs has handcrafted saddles for cowhands, world champion steer ropers Shoat Webster and Tuffy Thompson, country-western singer Randy Travis and "Hank the Cowdog" author John Erickson. He even did bridle work for famed Western actor Ben Johnson. Sandra Herl, a spokeswoman for the Academy of Western Artists, an organization dedicated to preserving and promoting Western heritage, said Marrs' legendary saddles earned him the academy's Don King Lifetime Saddlemaker Award last month. "I've been making saddles over 50 years," he said. "It was really a surprise to me because I had no idea. It was an honor for them to do that." The academy honored Marrs at its 11th annual Will Rogers Awards and handed him its trademark figurine, a white statue of Oklahoma's adored humorist. It was Marrs' second academy award. He won the academy's annual saddlemaker award in 1996....
It's all Trew: Fires have some quirks Since the range fires of March, most everyone in the burned areas have spent a lot of time hauling off burned fences and other charred items. At the Trew Ranch, we have carried the “essence of smoke” odor in our nostrils, hair and clothes everywhere we go. Those driving the blackened ranges have to service the air cleaners on their vehicles and equipment to remove the particles of blowing sand and embers. Others old enough recall the dirty days of the Dust Bowl when howling winds brought dark clouds of dust from dawn to dusk. Those dark clouds, like the heavy smoke of the range fires, reminded all that the end could be near. In looking back and visiting with neighbors, we find there are many quirks of circumstance happening during the raging firestorm. While some homes and many outbuildings were destroyed totally, nine homes of neighbors in the exact path of the fire were spared. One home totally surrounded by cedar trees and heavy brush was spared, yet our shop and gallery with only one lonely cedar tree at the front caught fire and burned to the ground....
BREAK IN CATTLE POACHING CASE There has been a break in the cattle poaching case in Madison County. After years of what seemed random poaching of cattle east of Rexburg, sheriff's deputies say they have a good lead on who might be responsible and need your help. Aaron Kunz reports on what gave them their new lead in this case. Over the last few years, many ranchers started patrolling their land, and today a rancher believes he saw the man responsible for killing yet another cow. Chief Deputy Ryan Kaufman is looking at the carcass in the most recent killing, a cow shot Monday morning has given them the best lead they've had since starting this investigation. Chief Dep. Ryan Kaufman, Madison County Sheriff's Office: "The vehicle that we have the description given to us by the hunter is an older 80s to 90's grey Jeep Cherokee. The gentleman driving it was described as a older Hispanic male, round face with a goatee and shorter black hair." There have been dozens of cows killed, most shot from the road by poachers in Madison County. Each killing is a felony offense, because each cow is worth around two thousand dollars....
Hearing tomorrow on Navy land plan The Navy wants to double the size of a training area in the backcountry where air crews and special-operations forces practice how to survive when trapped behind enemy lines. The Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape – SERE – school uses 6,158 acres in and near the Cleveland National Forest covered mostly with shrubs and light forest, said Steve Fiebing, a Coronado Naval Base spokesman. Under the proposal, the Pentagon would return about 1,700 acres to the forest service but add about 8,000 acres south and west of the existing school, Fiebing said. The new site would grow to 12,544 acres. He said no new roads or buildings are planned. Nearly all the land would be left as a wilderness, where troops would practice basic survival, navigation and reconnaissance skills....
Critics decry U.S. failure to replant burned tracts On one side of the property line, a new forest is taking root _ a glassy-green sea of waist-high pine planted by a timber company after a massive wildfire swept through six years ago. On the other side, on public land managed by the Lassen National Forest, dense mats of brush cling to a landscape dominated by charred dead trees, some standing, others not. "Nobody on the Lassen is proud of that land line," said Duane Nelson, who manages reforestation for the Forest Service in California. "We actually refer to it as our wall of shame." Reforestation _ the planting and natural regeneration of trees _ is the most critical part of forest management. But across the West, vast parcels of Forest Service land scorched by increasingly catastrophic wildfires have not been replanted. The consequences may linger for centuries. Imagine a Sierra Nevada that yields not gin-clear snowmelt but coffee-colored torrents from eroding canyons. Imagine shrub fields that stretch for miles, so dense that even birds and backpackers avoid them. That is the future Doug Leisz _ a former associate chief for the Forest Service _ envisions unless the agency replants more quickly....
Use roads or close them? A management plan for roads in the Medicine Bow/Routt National Forest, scheduled for release next month, will call for almost 100 miles of unauthorized roads to be approved for motorcycle and all-terrain vehicle use. Clint Kyhl, Laramie District ranger, said the plan would not affect some 785 miles of authorized roads in the forest. However, it would put about 100 miles out of the 265 miles of unauthorized roads to use. "We have a variety of unauthorized roads we needed to decide to use or close," Kyhl said. "(And) we have zero miles of motorized trail in the district right now. We want to provide that opportunity as well, and use some of these roads to do it." Rick Woodard, an ATV rider from Cheyenne, said he was glad to hear about the plan. "That's great that they're actually starting to make an attempt to get some trails opened up," he said. "Because right now, throughout the whole state, there are only a few trails you can go on. And the only other places you can ride are in national forests on regular vehicle roads."....
The Post-Burning Question: Log It or Leave It? Three government SUVs guarded a road to nowhere. Nearby, a middle-age couple camping out in a trailer manned a round-the-clock checkpoint next to a locked gate, on the watch for environmental protesters. A few miles beyond, the drone of chain saws rose from a deep ravine while a hovering helicopter plucked blackened logs from the floor of the burned forest and carried them to the nearest road. Begun in August, the logging is the first in the country on nearly 60 million acres of remote national forest protected by a Clinton administration decree that was set aside last year by the Bush administration. The operation was too far along to be stopped by a Sept. 19 federal court order reinstating the Clinton edict. Ever since a huge 2002 fire called Biscuit swept across the outback of southwest Oregon, burning a swath of forest the size of Orange County, this prized landscape has been at the forefront of conflict over Bush administration forest policies dealing with roadless backcountry and wildfire. One of the most contentious issues is whether government should leave a forest alone after it has burned, letting the trees decay to nurture a gradual rebirth, as conservationists advocate; or log the commercially valuable dead timber and replant, as the Bush administration desires....
Forest's old uranium mine undergoes testing Radioactive testing is now under way at an abandoned high-country uranium mine on the Stanislaus National Forest. For the past three days, contractors from Placer County have been taking soil samples from one of three waste piles at the former Juniper Uranium Mine. While the mine was active between 1956 and 1966, it produced about 500 tons of uranium ore. The 33-acre mine site is just west of Sardine Meadow at an elevation of 8,500 feet. Twenty years after the mine closed, the U.S. Forest Service took it over. Public access to the mine site was blocked in June 2003 after tests showed that erosion had elevated the radioactive exposure. Next to the 175-foot-deep mining pit are three waste piles of rock and dirt totaling 45,000 cubic yards. Each pile has a different level of radioactivity. The third pile, the one being tested, has the least because it was the original top layer of soil when the mine was dug, said Stanislaus National Forest spokesman Jerry Snyder. The Forest Service plans to put the most radioactive of the material back in the mine first. Once covered, plants and trees will be planted to make the mine area blend in and help prevent erosion....
Bush OKs wilderness protection The remote "Lost Coast" of Humboldt County, a salmon-rich river in Mendocino County and a rare cedar forest in Napa County will receive new protections under a law signed by President Bush on Tuesday, the largest federal wilderness protection measure in California in 12 years. The bill designates 273,000 acres for wilderness protections, an area 10 times the size of San Francisco. The lands affected are owned by the federal government, and are managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Now however, commercial logging, mining and motor vehicle use will be banned. "After more than five years of hard work and tremendous support from hundreds of environmentalists, outdoor enthusiasts, businesses and government officials, this beautiful and unique land has received the highest protection the law allows," said U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Napa, the author of the bill....
BLM will cite defiant ATV rider Richard Beardall is getting exactly what he wanted: a trespassing ticket from federal land managers for ignoring the rules and riding his ATV on a closed road in the San Rafael Swell. Beardall, three other ATV riders and a Jeep, moved a 10-foot barricade near an old uranium mine and made a half-mile roundtrip along the access road to the Muddy River on Saturday. The Bureau of Land Management closed the area to recreational vehicles in 1993 due to riparian damage, said Price, Utah-based BLM manager Roger Bankert. Beardall, president of the Americans with Disabilities Access Alliance knows that, but he and others are angry over the closing of public lands, Bankert said. "He wants the ticket to go to court and challenge the closure," said Bankert, who is in his fourth week on the job....
Supervisors move to save desert plan San Bernardino County supervisors announced Tuesday that they voted in closed session to join in defending a desert wildlife habitat-conservation plan from an environmental lawsuit. If the U.S. District Court in San Francisco allows the county to participate in the suit, San Bernardino County would have the right to argue in front of the court and participate in any future settlement talks on the West Mojave Plan. Stopping the suit is critical to allowing road maintenance, public-safety access and waste disposal in areas covered by the plan, said Robin Cochran, a deputy county counsel. The West Mojave Plan is the largest habitat conservation plan in the nation, regulating activities on 3.3 million acres. In return for some parts of the desert being reserved as critical wildlife habitat, the plan reduces environmental restrictions in less sensitive areas. San Bernardino County was a lead agency in the plan's design. Approved in March, the plan failed to protect the desert tortoise and several plant species, several environmental organizations have argued. In a suit filed in August, the Center for Biological Diversity alleged the plan illegally permitted disastrous amounts of off-highway-vehicle use and asked for an injunction barring the federal Bureau of Land Management from "issuing any permit, approval, or other action" for any activity that would adversely affect the desert tortoise or three plant species....
BLM expects an appeal on Over the River decision Whichever way the Bureau of Land Management rules on the Over the River project, the issue will likely end up in appeals court, BLM Field Manager Roy Masinton told Chaffee County Commissioners Monday. Masinton, delivering a report on BLM issues affecting Chaffee County during a work session in Salida, said both the artists and the opposition group are prepared to appeal if the BLM decision doesn't go their way. "I anticipate, no matter what decision is made, we'll go to court on it," Masinton said. Artists Christo and Jeane Claude are attempting to gain approval to stretch fabric over the Arkansas River in sections from Salida to Cañon City in a public art display. A group centered in Howard called Rags Over the Arkansas River is leading the opposition....
Conservation Groups Defend California's Right to Regulate Gold Mining Today, Sierra Club and Earthworks, represented by Earthjustice and the Western Mining Action Project, filed a submission opposing the Canadian gold mining company Glamis Gold's efforts to use an international trade panel to force the United States to pay $50 million for mining restrictions that protect the environment and Native American cultural resources. "This is about a foreign-owned company using a NAFTA trade panel to bully the state of California and the United States into letting them destroy public lands," said Margrete Strand Rangnes, with Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Program. "This case should be a wake-up call to the Bush administration as it negotiates new trade agreements." The trade panel, created under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), is considering the case involving a series of open pit gold mines in the California desert roughly 45 miles northeast of El Centro, California. The land is sacred to the Quechan Indians, a Colorado River Indian tribe living near the California-Arizona border. The Canadian mining company filed a proposed plan of operations with the federal Bureau of Land Management to mine 1,600 acres in 1994. In 2001, Clinton Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt refused to approve Glamis's mining plan because it would have destroyed the sacred tribal lands. California later passed a law requiring open pit mines to be refilled after mining was completed, a process the company argues is too expensive to make the mine profitable....
Bill Fighting Mine Not Intended to Pass Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon may have introduced a bill aimed at crippling a planned cement mine in Soledad Canyon several months ago, but he never intended to see it passed this year, a spokesman said. Introduced late last spring by McKeon, R-Santa Clarita, the "Soledad Canyon Mine Leases Adjustment Act" would cancel the Cemex Inc.'s leases - providing the company with other mining options instead - and prohibit the federal Bureau of Land Management from re-leasing the land except at historic extraction levels of about 300,000 tons per year. Since 1999, Santa Clarita has been locked in a legal battle over the Mexican cement giant's proposed 20-year mine, which - starting in 2008 - would extract some 69-million tons of sand and gravel from the mine in Soledad Canyon, about one mile from some Canyon Country housing tracts. The city owns the unincorporated county property, but the company has been granted federal mining permits. The intention was never to see the bill passed this year, McKeon spokesman Scott Wilk said. Rather, it was introduced this year "to see what kind of red flags it may have generated" among the members of Congress....
Gas firm positive about meeting standards EnCana Oil and Gas USA, the main natural gas producer on Wyoming's Jonah Field, says it's confident it can comply with new, more stringent federal air quality regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency last month tightened its regulation of "PM 2.5s," meaning particles that are 2.5 micrometers or smaller in diameter. Officials say such small particles cause health problems and are a component of smog. Previous federal air quality regulations enacted in 1997 allowed emissions of up to 65 micrograms per cubic meter of PM 2.5s in a 24-hour period. The new EPA standards reduce the allowable amount to 35 micrograms per cubic meter. According to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the maximum concentration of PM 2.5s during the operation of the Jonah Field project would be 44 micrograms per cubic meter. During the early stages of development, the agency predicts that emissions from the field would be 49.2 micrograms per cubic meter. Combined with other emissions, the total maximum would be 69.2 per 24-hour period - nearly double the maximum acceptable level under the new standard....
DeGette, 14 groups protest BLM plans for Roan Plateau A management plan for western Colorado's Roan Plateau promoted by state and federal officials as balancing demands for energy with protecting the environment drew protests Monday from Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and 14 conservation, hunting and fishing groups. The formal protests filed with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management will be considered as the agency finalizes the decision on managing the 73,602 acres of federal land on and around the plateau. The plateau, which straddles Garfield and Rio Blanco counties, is rich in natural gas and oil shale. It's also home to a variety of wildlife - elk, deer, mountain lions, peregrine falcons, bears and rare, native Colorado trout. Several area communities, hunters, anglers and environmentalists have urged the BLM to keep drilling off the top of the plateau....
New blood for the breed Big eyes, Big ears, Big teeth. Five Mexican gray wolf pups are coming to Heritage Park Zoo. Executive Director Kim Disney said Sunday afternoon that the Mexican Wolf Species Survival Plan designated Heritage Park Zoo as a "premier designation for wolves" in the survival program. "I am thrilled to announce that we have been awarded five young pups from Columbus, Ohio. The pups are about 1 year old. Hopefully, we can keep them comfortable and introduce them into the breeding pool. The pups are some of the most genetically pure Mexican gray wolves in the country," Disney said. Mexican gray wolves are among the most endangered mammals in the world. They are smaller than their cousins, the gray wolf. Currently, about 300 Mexican gray wolves exist in captive programs and experts believe only 37 exist in the wild....
Pombo keeps species act in his scope Tracy Republican Richard Pombo took office vowing to change the Endangered Species Act. In the 14 years since, he has delivered speeches, staged events and written bills. He has enjoyed perfect positions to pursue his signature issue, including, for the past four years, chairmanship of the House Resources Committee while his party has controlled the House and Senate. The Endangered Species Act, though, remains unchanged since the day Pombo took office in January 1993. The same 22,300 words in the U.S. Code are intact. Which raises the fundamental election-year question: What does failing to revise the Endangered Species Act say about Pombo's legislative skills? The answer is complicated, in part because the question can validly be asked in another way: Why is it so hard to change this 1973 law, when so many people want it updated? "It's the sacred cow," Pombo said. "It is the big environmental law; that takes precedence over everything."....
Model San Diego Multiple Species Plan Doesn't Conserve Rarest Species In a precedent-setting ruling, a federal judge has agreed with conservationists' contentions that a San Diego regional habitat conservation plan does not do enough to protect endangered and threatened species that depend on a type of wetland that has nearly vanished from southern California. Late on Friday October 13, District Court Judge Rudi Brewster, a Reagan appointee, released a 61-page opinion halting damage to wetlands in undeveloped areas within the city of San Diego. The ruling criticizes the San Diego Multiple Species Conservation Plan for its failure to conserve seven imperiled vernal pool wetland species including two fairy shrimp and five plants. The ruling also rejects a related lawsuit by developers and sends the plan back to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the agency to try again....
Looking Back: Sage Grouse Studies (1942)-Predation and the Sage Grouse: A Sage Grouse Nesting Study The Wyoming Game & Fish Department has been publishing their magazine, Wyoming Wildlife, monthly since 1935. The early editions offer interesting insight into wildlife issues faced by managers and biologists over the years in Wyoming. We found a copy of several Wyoming Wildlife issues from 1942. Below is a reprint of an article entitled “Predation and the Sage Grouse: Sage Grouse Nesting Study” written by Warren J. Allred, Wyoming Pittman-Robertson Range Specialist. Many of the same issues and concerns mentioned in this article studying sage grouse nesting in the Big Piney area more than 65 years ago are similar to what are being discussed today....
Hispanics Show Growing Clout in Environmental Debate Maria Valdez didn’t consider herself an environmentalist when she pressed this city east of Los Angeles to buy land ringed with factories and railroad tracks for a new neighborhood park. The trash lot is now on its way to becoming a green oasis with a butterfly sanctuary and community garden _ and Valdez is undergoing a transformation of her own. Next month she will be sworn in as president of the El Monte chapter of Mujeres de la Tierra, a two-year-old environmental group that caters to Hispanic immigrants and translates as “Women of the Earth.” “When you get involved and you know that you could make it happen, it feels good,” said Valdez, a stay-at-home mother of six. “I’m interested in the water, the air _ for our kids.” Spurred by high rates of asthma and lead poisoning among their children, Hispanic immigrants such as Valdez, a U.S. citizen who left Mexico as a child, are embracing green values like never before _ on their own terms. Hispanic activists and politicians talk openly about building a unique green movement that distances itself from mainstream environmental groups, even as those organizations hope to tap into newfound Hispanic political clout....
Walk-In to the Western Slope One of the state’s most popular hunter access programs is expanding to the Western Slope. The Colorado Division of Wildlife’s Walk-In Access program, which pays farmers and ranchers to open private land to public hunters, this year offers participants more than 200,000 acres along the eastern plains to hunt pheasants and scaled quail, starting on the season opener, Nov. 1. Now, a sister program targeted on goose hunting is about to open in western Colorado
Despite an initial hesitation by landowners in signing up for the program, local DOW officials said a handful of farms have agreed to allow waterfowl hunters on their property once the season begins Nov. 1....
No more cows: Giacomini sells the herd About 250 head of cattle from Rich and Darlene Giacomini’s dairy in Point Reyes Station were loaded onto semi trucks last Wednesday morning, then driven to their new owners at Tavares Dairy in Merced. On early Thursday morning, the trucks were back to continue the operation. Five hundred fifty acres of the prosperous dairy ranch was sold to the Park Service in 2000 for $4.5 million. Under the terms of the sale, the Giacomini family held on to several properties at the ranch’s periphery. The lease allows operations to continue until March 2007, said National Park Spokesman John Dell’Osso. At that time, the park hopes to begin restoring the pastures to tidal marshland. “As an organization that is trying to help preserve agriculture as a viable industry in West Marin, we’re sorry to see the dairy close,” said Robert Berner, Executive Director of Marin Agriculture Land Trust. “The dairy has been one of the most productive in the county. “Part of the historic identity of the town is being lost and there is something to regret about that,” said Berner....
Conservation partners protect critical block of South Dakota breeding grounds More than 10,300 acres of South Dakota native prairie grasslands and wetlands have been permanently protected with a nearly $3 million grant. This is thanks to the efforts of a broad coalition of conservation partners including Ducks Unlimited (DU), the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the North American Wetland Conservation Act (NAWCA) and 13 private landowners in central South Dakota. DU received a grant from NFWF that provided a springboard to purchase grassland easements on native prairie grassland and wetland complexes that supply critical breeding habitat for a diversity of grassland birds including waterfowl, shorebirds, raptors and songbirds. The native prairie and wetlands of Hand County have long been recognized as a prime breeding area for a diversity of bird species but, unfortunately, these populations are increasingly threatened by conversion of the grassland to cropland....
Land-use measure tackles 'eminent domain' debate When the U.S. Supreme Court, on a 5-4 vote, said last year that a city could force people to sell their property so that the government could turn it over to another private owner, activists and legislators across the country cried foul. More than two dozen states moved to enact laws prohibiting such use of the government's condemnation powers, but bills introduced in the California Legislature failed last spring. On Nov. 7, California voters will have a chance to restrict such government actions when they decide on Proposition 90. But Proposition 90 does not just address the court's landmark decision on ``eminent domain,'' the type of reform that even opponents of the ballot measure concede has popular appeal. Proposition 90 -- which largely has been financed by a New York real estate magnate and libertarian activist -- also contains a broad restriction on the ability of local and state agencies to enact regulations on the use of property, including common zoning rules that might have wide community acceptance....
Water fees prod action from farmers In a state where water disputes often have played out like old Sunday morning Westerns, Kevin Taylor is one of those who tries to keep the peace. Taylor, a government "water cop," enforces court-decreed water rights under the state watermaster program. But his job and the program itself may be in for big changes as farmers and ranchers faced with the prospect of soaring water-use fees fight to wrest control from the state and put it in the hands of individual counties. "I'm not against people looking to save money, but I'm not sure if they realize how complicated this can be," said Taylor, a watermaster in Northern California. "When you regulate water, you are taking food off a man's table and clothes off his kids' backs." The effort is a response to one of several recent attempts by the state Department of Water Resources to create revenue through consumer-financed programs....
USDA and EPA Ink Deal on Water Quality USDA Natural Resources and Environment Under Secretary Mark Rey and Benjamin Grumbles, Assistant Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Water, signed a partnership agreement Friday to establish and promote water quality credit trading markets through cooperative conservation. The agreement features a pilot project within the Chesapeake Bay basin to showcase the effectiveness of environmental markets. "Water quality credit trading is a flexible, cost-effective approach for implementing conservation practices that reduce runoff, help producers meet water quality standards, and pursue water quality improvement goals in watersheds," Rey said. "We believe that voluntary, incentive based approaches are the most effective way to achieve sound resource management and conservation on private lands." "Trading for upgrading water quality is the wave of the future," said Grumbles. "We are committed to giving good stewards credit and partnering with agriculture to accelerate restoration and protection. This agreement is a big step forward." Water quality credit trading uses a market-based approach that offers incentives to farmers and ranchers who implement conservation practices that improve water quality. While reducing pollution, they can earn credits they can trade with industrial or municipal facilities that are required by the Clean Water Act and other laws to reduce the amounts of pollution in wastewater....
Time to cash in? Over the years, Wyoming's agricultural industry has proven to be at least resilient in the face of increasing development pressures. Agriculture continues to be the third-leading industry in Wyoming, generating $1.5 billion annually in economic revenue. Because agriculture is the dominant private land use in Wyoming -- controlling more than 95 percent of the private land in the state -- much of the concern about maintaining open spaces focuses on private ranchlands and farms. Those lands often include bottom lands along rivers and other important areas for wildlife habitat, especially during winter. The future of a vast majority of the state's open spaces will depend to a large extent on the retention of agricultural land in Wyoming. But more and more, agricultural land is being subdivided and developed. Escalating land values and marginal returns from agricultural endeavors are making it harder for ranchers and farmers to operate. And many ranchers are facing retirement but find it difficult to pass their ranches down within the family. It took Preston, for example, about 15 years to pay off the inheritance tax when he assumed ownership of the ranch....
Eastern ranchers feel pinch, too People once looking to live in city centers for the amenities are now looking for a more rural experience, and living 30 miles away from towns is more appealing. That far-away land was once a haven for ranchers, but now is a haven for homeowners, too. Wyoming Stock Growers Agricultural Land Trust executive director Glenn Pauley noted that just in the past year, 13,000 acres within unincorporated Laramie County have been bought and sold in 35-plus-acre tracts. By contrast, just over 9,000 acres were split up and sold between 1995 and 2004. And a recent University of Wyoming study found that more than 145,000 acres of ranchlands in Sublette County and more than 218,000 acres of ranchlands in Fremont County changed hands between 1990 and 2001. Since beginning his work as director of the wildlife trust fund board a year ago, Budd has traveled to all corners of the state. He has been helping evaluate requests for funding from the new state trust fund, intended to protect and improve habitat for wildlife -- much of it on private ranchland. While vast expanses of sagebrush still cover most of the state, Budd said he also has noticed significant residential development in many areas. There's "overflow" from South Dakota's Black Hills in the northeast corner, from Colorado in the southeast. Areas around Casper, Cody, Lander, Dubois and Pinedale are also seeing major growth....
Canadian farmer launches mad cow class action lawsuit A Quebec farmer asked a court for permission to launch a class action suit against the Canadian Government and an Australian feed producer, saying their negligence sparked a recent mad cow crisis in Canada. If approved, the case would be the first in Canada since a case of mad cow disease was discovered in Canada in May 2003, prompting more than 30 countries to ban Canadian beef imports. It could also lead to similar lawsuits across the country. Rancher Donald Berneche said in court documents that embargoes on Canadian beef cost him about $C100,000 ($A116.4). Some 20,000 Quebec farmers likely to be represented in the suit could claim as much as $C20 billion ($A23.29 billion). Mr Berneche blames Canada's agriculture ministry and Ridley, which makes animal feed from bone meal and brain meal in North America and is a subsidiary of Australia's Ridley, for "their inaction and their negligence". He laments that Canadian authorities waited until August 1997 to ban brain or spinal tissue from other cattle or ruminant animals in feed, while several European countries took this step in the early 1990s. For its part, Ridley continued to sell feed that contained brain or spinal tissue in Canada until August 1997, even though in Australia, the parent company conformed to stricter feed production practices as of May 1996....
FDA may OK meat from clones The government said Tuesday it is moving closer to approving meat and milk from cloned animals, drawing protests from consumer groups. The Bush administration is currently reviewing Food and Drug Administration plans to regulate cloned animals and food derived from them, the agency said in a statement. A draft of the plans should be released by the end of the year, FDA said. The agency has "studies that show that the meat and milk from cattle clones and their offspring are as safe as that from conventionally bred animals," the FDA statement said. The biotech industry says cloning lets breeders do what they've always done: select the best animals from the herd for reproduction....
Amarillo artisan honored for saddle craftsmanship The sweet smell of leather permeates Bob Marrs' Amarillo garage, an artisan's workshop packed with fond memories, great stories and the well-worn tools of a dedicated craftsman's trade. For decades, Marrs has handcrafted saddles for cowhands, world champion steer ropers Shoat Webster and Tuffy Thompson, country-western singer Randy Travis and "Hank the Cowdog" author John Erickson. He even did bridle work for famed Western actor Ben Johnson. Sandra Herl, a spokeswoman for the Academy of Western Artists, an organization dedicated to preserving and promoting Western heritage, said Marrs' legendary saddles earned him the academy's Don King Lifetime Saddlemaker Award last month. "I've been making saddles over 50 years," he said. "It was really a surprise to me because I had no idea. It was an honor for them to do that." The academy honored Marrs at its 11th annual Will Rogers Awards and handed him its trademark figurine, a white statue of Oklahoma's adored humorist. It was Marrs' second academy award. He won the academy's annual saddlemaker award in 1996....
It's all Trew: Fires have some quirks Since the range fires of March, most everyone in the burned areas have spent a lot of time hauling off burned fences and other charred items. At the Trew Ranch, we have carried the “essence of smoke” odor in our nostrils, hair and clothes everywhere we go. Those driving the blackened ranges have to service the air cleaners on their vehicles and equipment to remove the particles of blowing sand and embers. Others old enough recall the dirty days of the Dust Bowl when howling winds brought dark clouds of dust from dawn to dusk. Those dark clouds, like the heavy smoke of the range fires, reminded all that the end could be near. In looking back and visiting with neighbors, we find there are many quirks of circumstance happening during the raging firestorm. While some homes and many outbuildings were destroyed totally, nine homes of neighbors in the exact path of the fire were spared. One home totally surrounded by cedar trees and heavy brush was spared, yet our shop and gallery with only one lonely cedar tree at the front caught fire and burned to the ground....
Monday, October 16, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
Battle line drawn Many who live off the land here cast the debate in the starkest terms. In the first 10 years after their reintroduction in the Rockies, gray wolves killed 505 head of cattle and 1,306 sheep, and the numbers are rising. It's us or them, ranchers say. Incredibly adaptable, the animals hunt together, with older wolves teaching younger ones. Packs have spread quickly into Idaho's central valleys and north into the panhandle, and along the fingerlike mountain ranges that stretch from Yellowstone south and east deep into Wyoming. A popular bumper sticker here reads: "Wyoming wolves, smoke a pack a day." On most ranches, the wolf is seen as not a noble beast but a brutal killer, one of the few things on the range that can compete with man for dominance. The Danas have seen cattle so frightened by wolves, they've ripped through three fence lines before they could be brought under control. A sheep rancher in the area says she has seen a pack kill 42 sheep in 12 hours. "If you don't like wolves, watching them kill something will fit right in with your worldview," Jimenez said. "They have powerful jaws that bite into (the) throat and hindquarters of their prey, often sending them into shock. "They basically rip their prey apart. There's a lot of blood on the snow after a wolf kill."....
Water experts wary of N.M. proposal If sharing Colorado River water isn't a contentious enough issue now, Southwest Colorado water interests say a recent New Mexico proposal could lead to them being left high and dry because of the need to protect endangered fish. According to calculations by New Mexico and the federal Bureau of Reclamation, there's an extra 220,000 acre-feet of water available annually to Upper Colorado River basin states because less water is evaporating from its reservoirs than previously thought. (That's enough water to fill nearly two reservoirs the size of Lake Nighthorse - the Animas-La Plata Project reservoir under construction just west of Bodo Industrial Park.) "It's going to be controversial," Steve Harris, the engineer for the Southwestern Water Conservation District, said of the New Mexico proposal. "We learned about it only in March." All future users of water in Southwest Colorado, even a rancher who wants to create a stock pond, could be affected, Harris said. The situation is critical, Harris said, because thirsty New Mexico is using all the water available to it in the Laws of the Colorado River, which allocates Western water among seven states. New Mexico currently receives about 675,000 acre-feet of water from several sources - a tunnel that transfers Colorado water from the upper San Juan River through the Continental Divide to the Rio Grande River, Navajo Reservoir and the San Juan, Animas and La Plata rivers. Under the water-sharing formula, New Mexico stands to gain 25,000 acre-feet of the 220,000 acre-foot windfall. Officials there want to use the additional water to help meet future needs of the yet-unauthorized Navajo-Gallup Project and allow full development of the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project, a slowly developing project to irrigate up to 110,000 acres south of Farmington....
Trout Unlimited plan snags criticism A bill designed to help Utah's trout ran into a few rapids Wednesday when a legislator wondered if environmental groups could use it to hijack water, such as the Provo River. The bill would allow private entities to lease water rights and allow the water to remain in streams for the specific purpose of improving trout habitat. Current law permits water rights for in-stream flows to be held only by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and the Utah Division of State Parks and Recreation. Otherwise, private water rights can only be granted for actual use, such as diverting water to irrigate cropland. The bill, supported by the fishing and conservation group Trout Unlimited, carries a bundle of restrictions. Water rights can be granted only for a term of less than 10 years, and must be reapplied for following that; the purpose must be to protect trout; no other existing water right may be impaired. But Rep. David Ure, R-Kamas, co-chairman of the task force, worried that the law could be the means to speculate in water, or if leases might not run up the cost of water for municipalities or agriculture....
Demonstration project to test grasslands grazing plan The Forest Service plans to test new rules for livestock grazing on North Dakota's national grasslands, a project that will take at least 10 years. The project is part of the final management plan for the grasslands, which include more than 1 million acres in the Little Missouri National Grasslands in the west and Sheyenne National Grasslands in the southeastern part of the state. Some grazing rules, such as those affecting prairie dog habitat, are being changed to guidelines, which at least one environmental group worries might be less strictly enforced. The grasslands project "moves the argument away from the hypothetical and esoteric, to practical field application," regional U.S. Forester Gail Kimbell said in documents released Friday. The Forest Service had estimated overall grazing cuts of 9 percent as a result of its plan. Ranchers said the estimates were low by as much as 60 percent. The grazing portion was put on hold in 2002 while a team of independent scientists spent the next two years studying it. The scientists last year concluded that the Forest Service's projected grazing cuts were more accurate than the ranchers' estimates. However, the team also said the Forest Service projections were based on too many assumptions....
Army taking comments on Pinon Canyon study U.S. Army officials on Friday released a draft environmental impact study for the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site, which is an assessment of what impacts will occur if the Army sends thousands of additional troops to train at the current 230,000-acre site. For Fort Carson officials, the report was just part of the process of having an additional 8,500 troops assigned to the post over the next few years - as planned by the Pentagon's Base Realignment and Closure process. For ranchers opposed to the Army's plan to expand its maneuver site by 418,000 acres in the future - the draft report is just another shot in what they expect to be a long war to stop any expansion. "Anyone looking for an assessment of the planned expansion of PCMS, won't find it here," said Robin Renn, the PCMS environmental coordinator. "This is simply an impact study of what we would expect by training more soldiers at the current maneuver site."....
Wolverine roams Yakama reservation Believed to be living only in the remote northern Cascades and in the dense forests of Idaho and Montana, a wolverine has been spotted near Mount Adams on the Yakama reservation. While state Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists say it's not clear whether wolverines once lived in the southern Cascades, Yakama wildlife officials have little doubt about the animal. "They've always been here on the Yakama reservation, especially in the primitive areas," said Yakama wildlife manager Arlen Washines in an e-mail. "We've had many sightings by tribal members, even within the last few years." Tribal biologists placed a camera northeast of Mount Adams that photographed a wolverine in August, but the camera wasn't retrieved until a month later. It was the first documented sighting of a wolverine in the southern Cascades, according to the tribe. Often called a skunk bear because of its ability to emit a noxious smell and its skunklike appearance thanks to the white stripes running down its sides, the wolverine is the largest member of the weasel family....
Snowmobilers want trails in caribou recovery zone reopened U.S. Forest Service officials and groups that want caribou habitat in northern Idaho protected from snowmobiles plan to meet to decide which trails could be reopened for snowmobile enthusiasts. The trails were closed last month when U.S. District Judge Robert H. Whaley banned snowmobiles throughout nearly 470 square miles of national forest land in northern Idaho in an effort to save the last mountain caribou herd in the contiguous 48 states. The caribou recovery zone in the Idaho Panhandle National Forests remains closed to snowmobiles until the Forest Service develops a winter recreation strategy taking into account the impact of snowmobiles on the herd. Forest Service officials and caribou advocates plan to work on the issue in the next several weeks. On Friday, snowmobilers organized a rally that drew riders from around the region to protest the snowmobiling ban....
Places to play, space for refuge On many weekends, Pojoaque resident Jorge Bencomo and his children, 13 and 11, ride their dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles on U.S. Bureau of Land Management property near Alcalde. "It's a sport I've always liked," said Bencomo, 40. "I've ridden since I was a child. I raced in Mexico. Now I'm teaching my children how to ride." Bencomo and his children enjoy an increasingly popular pastime -- exploring public land on off-highway vehicles. The U.S. Forest Service says the number of visits to national forests across the country involving off-highway vehicles grew from about 5 million in 1975 to 51 million in 2005. And the number of off-highway vehicles in the U.S. rose from less than 400,000 in the early 1990s to more than 8 million by 2003, according to a 2005 national survey on off-road recreation. New Mexico public land managers say the state mirrors the nationwide trend....
Forest plan backs use of now-illegal roads A management plan for roads in the Medicine Bow/Routt National Forest, scheduled for release next month, will call for almost 100 miles of unauthorized roads to be approved for motorcycle and all-terrain vehicle use. Clint Kyhl, Laramie District Ranger, said the plan would not affect some 785 miles of authorized roads in the forest. However, it would put about 100 miles out of the 265 miles of unauthorized roads to use. "We have a variety of unauthorized roads we needed to decide to use or close," Kyhl said. "(And) we have zero miles of motorized trail in the district right now. We want to provide that opportunity as well, and use some of these roads to do it."....
Feds: Mine will benefit bears Grizzly bears stand to benefit if a copper and silver mine is developed beneath Montana's Cabinet Mountains Wilderness, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Friday in a rewritten opinion. The proposed underground mine involves a "conservative approach" and mitigation measures, such as buying land to be protected as bear habitat, that would leave grizzlies in better condition than if the mine was not developed, the service said. "We really think this is a good thing for bears," Mark Wilson, a Fish and Wildlife Service administrator in Helena, said Friday. The Fish and Wildlife Service's findings are in a biological opinion rewritten after a federal judge last year sided with environmental groups that charged the agency conducted inadequate studies before finding the mine would not jeopardize bears and trout. The agency Friday also endorsed mine measures for protection of sensitive bull trout. Both the trout and grizzlies are federally protected as threatened species....
Copper mine plan aims at santa ritas It's no secret there's copper deep under the foothills of the Santa Rita Mountains southeast of Tucson. Rosemont Ranch, off Arizona 83 going to Sonoita, has been the occasional focus of mining companies large and small for decades. Asarco was the last company to talk of putting the mining claims at Rosemont into production, but sold off the property in 2004. Now, an upstart Canadian firm is again touting Rosemont as a good candidate for large-scale mining. The Rosemont deposit has been explored before, but Augusta is doing detailed drilling to better define the ore body and design a mine. It could produce more than 4 billion pounds of copper, 100 million pounds of molybdenum and 100 million ounces of silver over 20 years, Augusta says. At today's high metal prices, that's more than $13 billion for just the copper — enough to stimulate some interest in the project. When might Rosemont transition from ranch to mine? As soon as 2010, says one Augusta official, if the company's plan is well-received by the U.S. Forest Service and other regulators. Rosemont is surrounded by the Coronado National Forest and the use of public land is essential to the mine's development....
Troubled waters Logging trucks once rumbled up this narrow creek valley 30 miles northeast of Coeur d'Alene. Today, there's not even a trace of road left. The biggest creatures now roaming the banks of Yellow Dog Creek are the pair of moose that have recently taken up residence in the quiet valley. Only a well-trained eye would notice the signs of the recent $400,000 restoration project just completed here: the flecks of surveyor's tape, the hidden cables anchoring massive logs to bedrock along the stream, the faint tracks from the heavy machinery that removed the dirt logging road. District Ranger Randy Swick hiked up the valley on a crisp September morning, showing off the stream as if it were a once-troubled kid who just earned a spot on the honor roll. It's a small but important part of the U.S. Forest Service's long-term plan to fix hundreds of square miles of damaged watersheds in the region, he said....
Column - An endless journey For more than a century, our national forests have served the nation's needs for timber, minerals, forage and other resources. At the same time, they have provided millions of people with an unparalleled recreational and aesthetic resource, and with the satisfaction that comes with knowing that our society has preserved vast natural landscapes more or less intact. The 386,000 miles of existing roads in our national forests are more than adequate to ensure that the forests will continue to be used to help supply our nation's need for resources. Far less secure and far more valuable to future generations are those remaining tracts of undeveloped land that have managed to survive in our forests. If we lose these lands now, we will never get them back. We should bear that in mind as we engage in the ongoing debate over the protection of forest roadless areas. That debate, thanks to a recent court decision, seems destined to drag on for several more years, prolonging the uncertainty about the future of our forests. Use of the forests has been debated for more than a century, but the current round kicked off on Jan. 5, 2001, in the waning days of the Clinton administration....
Researchers hope tree vole discoveries will prompt buffer zones It was the fir needles that gave the red tree vole away. Researcher Nathaniel Mitchell thought he might be onto the trail of the small nocturnal rodents when he spotted the rice-sized scat. But the fir needles were the real giveaway for scientists working to protect the species' old-growth habitat, since voles both feed on the needles, and use their resin ducts to make nests. Mitchell is a member of the Northwest Ecosystem Survey Team, who are trained to survey for voles by researchers at Oregon State University. Since 2000, Mitchell has spent summers searching for the little rodents, who spend most of their life high above the ground. This summer, he and fellow researcher Laura Beaton found 122 new red tree vole sites on federal forest in southwestern Oregon. Researchers hope uncovering new red tree vole sites will convince federal agencies to set aside buffers on timber sales where the nests have been located....
BLM mulls study on effects of winter natural gas drilling Bureau of Land Management officials are considering a study that would examine the effects of natural gas drilling in the winter, a practice restricted to protect wildlife such as deer and elk foraging for food in snowy weather. If approved, the multiyear study would be conducted on up to three of Williams Production's federal leases in the Rulison and Grand Valley gas fields outside of Parachute, said David Boyd, spokesman for the BLM's Glenwood Springs field office. "This is something we've talked about very extensively with the (state Division of Wildlife) and BLM," Williams spokeswoman Susan Alvillar said. "Right now, I think were all on the same page." Winter drilling restrictions traditionally last from Dec. 1 to March 1, but certain rigs might be allowed to remain in operation throughout the winter during the study. DOW West Region Manager Ron Velarde said the study will help wildlife biologists and others see the impacts in a specific drainage area....
EPA tightens emission regs Energy companies around Wyoming may have more work ahead reducing certain air pollutants, as a federal agency has tightened allowable emissions to protect human health. The Environmental Protection Agency last month reduced the amount of so-called "PM 2.5s" that can be in the air before standards are violated. Those tiny particles can cause aggravated asthma, lung and heart diseases, and are a major cause of smog. The definition of "PM 2.5" refers to unhealthful fine particles that are 2.5 micrometers in diameter or smaller, according to the EPA. They are derived from combustible and industrial activities. The new rules will affect how companies operate nationwide. In Wyoming, the attention is on the Jonah natural gas field southeast of Pinedale, where the Bureau of Land Management released a study earlier this year of predicted air quality impacts. Some of the predicted emissions of PM 2.5s will violate the new federal standards. Steven Hall, spokesman for the BLM, said the agency will not revise the Jonah Infill Record of Decision document in light of the new standards, but the agency will comply with all federal regulations....
'We're going to feel it' The news is not that oil and gas development is ramping up throughout the state. Instead, the news is that the Wyoming Game and Fish Department is increasingly taking notice. The department itself has mapped projections for oil and gas development across the state, and overlapped those projections with wildlife habitat, showing a grim picture for wildlife's future. "This has really gotten our attention," said Vern Stelter, statewide habitat protection coordinator for Game and Fish. "Obviously, we're very focused on this as a department, trying to moderate impacts as much as we can." The agency has highlighted areas including the Powder River Basin, Jonah and Pinedale Anticline fields, Moxa Arch, Continental Divide and Atlantic Rim areas, which are projected to see increases of up to 10 times more oil and gas wells. Sage grouse and big game are identified as primary users of habitat eyed by energy. The department is working with energy companies and the Bureau of Land Management -- the primary public lands agency permitting the energy development -- to minimize impacts to wildlife, Stelter said....
Energy Bill Is a Boon to Oil Companies Tucked into a massive energy bill that would open the outer continental shelf to oil drilling are provisions that would slash future royalties owed to the federal government by companies prospecting in Rocky Mountain oil shale deposits. Sponsored by Rep. Richard W. Pombo (R-Tracy) and passed by the House earlier this year, the bill would amend an existing requirement that the federal government receive a "fair return" from oil companies that hold oil shale leases on public lands. Instead, Pombo's bill, modeled after a Canadian law, would reduce royalties from the customary 12.5% of annual revenue to 1%. Further, the bill could cut the reduced rate by as much as 80% if the price of oil fell. Over many years of oil production, the royalty discounts could amount to tens of billions in lost federal receipts, said James T. Bartis, an analyst at the Rand Corp. who wrote a widely used study of the economic prospects of the developing oil shale industry. Pombo and others argue that oil companies need incentives to invest in the unproven billion-dollar technology, which squeezes oil from deep rock formations. Colorado, Utah and Wyoming have the world's largest known oil shale deposits, with estimates of up to 2 trillion barrels, although only about 800 million barrels are believed to be recoverable....
Alternative energy proponents push piñon pellets U.S. Rep. John Salazar, D-Manassa, and other officials touted pellets made from piñon trees as a local, renewable source of heating for Southwest Colorado during a visit to the Avon Hotel on Friday. Rob Davis, president of Forest Energy Corp. of Show Low, Ariz., helps U.S. Rep. John Salazar, D-Manassa, open a bag of piñon pellets at the Avon Hotel in Silverton on Friday. Salazar was in town touting renewable energy. Forest Energy Corp. of Show Low, Ariz., recently began producing what are believed to be the first pellets made from piñon. The trees were harvested on Bureau of Land Management property on the Uncompahgre Plateau. Salazar poured a bag of the pellets into a 65,000-BTU wood stove used to heat the 2,500-square-foot first floor of the historic hotel. "That truly is a Colorado resource heating Colorado," said Rob Davis, president of Forest Energy. Davis said the pellets were whole-tree pellets that incorporate needles, cones, bark and whatever else comes along with the trees. "Anything that gets into the truck, we make a pellet out of it," Davis said. Officials involved in the piñon project said it required a great deal of cooperation, from the prison crew that cut the trees, to the BLM that allowed the project to go forward, to Forest Energy for producing the pellets and even ZE Supply in Silverton for selling them....
Trouble in the air: How Government flights pumped out 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide The inevitable head-on collision between Britain's climate change and aviation policies moves a step closer today with figures showing the total distance flown by the Government's own ministers and senior officials last year alone is equivalent to 14 return trips to the Moon. Tony Blair, his cabinet colleagues and their officials clocked up 6.5 million air miles, according to the Cabinet Office's list of flights during the 2005-2006 financial year - and in doing so pumped almost 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, analysis shows. Environmental groups went on the attack last night over the huge scale of the emissions. The figures starkly underline the fact that, although the Blair Government is talking ever more loudly about the problem of global warming, it cannot itself get to grips with its fastest-rising cause - emissions of greenhouse gases from aircraft engines....
A Power-Grid Report Suggests Some Dark Days Ahead Companies are not building power plants and power lines fast enough to meet growing demand, according to a group recently assigned by the federal government to assure proper operation of the power grid. The group, the North American Electric Reliability Council, in its annual report, to be released Monday, said the amount of power that could be generated or transmitted would drop below the target levels meant to ensure reliability on peak days in Texas, New England, the Mid-Atlantic area and the Midwest during the next two to three years. The council was established in 1965 after a blackout across the Northeast, and has since set voluntary standards for the industry. After the blackout of 2003, which covered a vast swath of the Midwest, Northeast and Ontario, Congress set up a process that would eventually give the council the authority to fine American companies that did not follow certain operating standards. It is seeking a similar designation in Canada, since — electrically speaking — the border is irrelevant. For years, the council has produced often-gloomy annual reports, but this is the first to be officially filed with federal agencies, and to recommend specific action....
Investigation finds farmers double-dipping in federal funds In spring 2000, Congress decided to do something about its costly and politically driven practice of giving farmers a disaster payment each time a storm damaged their crops. The lawmakers voted to use $8 billion in new taxpayer subsidies to help farmers buy crop insurance to protect against losses. The insurance would replace the disaster payments and reduce government costs. But shortly after passing the Agricultural Risk Protection Act, Congress lost its fiscal will. One week before the presidential election, it passed a new $1.8 billion disaster bill to assist farmers hurt by bad weather. Two others followed in subsequent years, totaling more than $6 billion. Today, after a searing drought in the plains, farm-state legislators are pushing for billions more in aid. The result is that farmers often get paid twice by the government for the same disaster, once in subsidized insurance and then again in disaster assistance, a legal but controversial form of double-dipping, a Washington Post investigation found. Together, the programs have cost taxpayers nearly $24 billion since 2000. The government pays billions to help farmers buy cheap federal insurance, billions more to private insurance companies to help run the program and billions more to cover the riskiest claims. On top of all that, it spends billions more on disaster payments....
Japanese rules prompt cattle ID tag use Japanese consumers aren't just asking, "Where's the beef?" They want to know: "Where's the beef from?" That question is proving to be a good opportunity for cattle businesses to test a new national system for tracking animals that federal officials hope to have operative on a voluntary basis by 2009. The Japanese government is making sure that any U.S. beef it imports can be traced to its origins and comes from cows not more than 20 months old. "It creates an opportunity for ranchers or producers that can verify the age of the calves they are selling," said Todd Clemons, president of Okeechobee Livestock Market in Okeechobee. Local ranchers get a premium of about $20 per animal. Since April, the Okeechobee Livestock Market has sold 25,000 cattle through online auctions; 80 percent of those were calves with tags that make it possible to verify their age and birthplace. The calves are shipped to feedlots in states such as Texas, and some are eventually sold to Japan and other export markets....
Stray cows hit on road: Who gets ticket? If a cow wanders onto a four-lane highway, who, if anyone, gets the ticket if it then gets run over - six times? This is no hypothetical. In fact, the question was raised this week before the Cache County Council. On Sunday evening, several cows escaped from a Utah State University-owned pasture near the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station South Farm, 3580 S. U.S. 89-91, in Wellsville. The unluckiest member of the stray herd was hit by six vehicles, yet caused only minor injuries to drivers and passengers, according to Utah Highway Patrol Sgt. Tony Hutson. The officer verified that a 62-year-old USU farmer, who arrived at the accident scene a few moments later, was cited with a class C misdemeanor because the animals were loose. A subsequent phone call from a Farm Bureau representative to County Council member Darrel Gibbons prompted a discussion about who is prosecuted and why in these situations. "He wanted to know if it is the policy to issue citations whenever that happens," Gibbons said....
Squeezed in Star Valley It's 1 in the afternoon on a rainy Thursday, and Jody Bagley is doing something he'd rather you not know. Bagley, a regional vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, is herding lambs onto a truck. He's a cattleman, but his work as a rancher has him dabbling in all kinds of activities, including helping a friend load lambs on this day. Bagley raises some sheep and was filling the truck with some of his stock as well. Bagley is well known in Star Valley. He's on the Star Valley Land Trust and from the Bagley Ranch, which has been in the family for generations. But all that may change for the 48-year-old father of three. Soaring land prices and increased costs in fuel, feed and drought have Bagley and other longtime western Wyoming ranchers looking to leave for different, if not greener, pastures. "We're looking at trading one acre for 23 acres north of Lusk," he said. "One cow for three cows." Bagley and many other ranchers are feeling the pinch. Big-money land offers stemming from residential development in picturesque pockets of Wyoming are prompting many longtime ranchers to consider selling to developers. Maintaining livestock herds in fierce winters and fending off multimillion-dollar offers for land becomes more difficult each passing year, even when livestock prices are high....
Dispute over property deed lives on in Imperial County A stocky rancher with a reputation for stretching the truth breezed into this desert town about 40 years ago with big news. The way several people recall it, Robert Earl Harvey Sr. announced he owned about a quarter of eastern Imperial County and had the paperwork to prove it. County officials allowed him to record a deed on the land, largely sand dunes and wheat-colored badlands. Some of it was near Harvey's ranch in Blythe. But nearly all of the property – roughly 760,000 acres – was, and still is, owned by the federal government. Harvey deeded the land in 1992 to a Palm Desert businessman. County records show that eight years later, it was deeded to a Massachusetts business named HHH Investment Trust. And there are signs that HHH is trying to profit from it....
Pearce trying to save Mexican Canyon trestle Congressman Steve Pearce isn't just one of those politicians who try to fix every problem by throwing money at it. At least, that's not his only tool. In fact, the Roswell Republican is leading an initiative to save the Mexican Canyon trestle through statesmanship. Rebuffed in his efforts to get federal money to save the sagging railway bridge in Cloudcroft, Pearce decided to see what he could get done without cash. In that vein, he has met with local leaders in Cloudcroft, the Mescalero Apache Nation, the Forest Service and the engineering department at the University of New Mexico. All this talk has resulted in a loose-knit coalition to shore up the trestle. "It's a visual symbol of the past and if we don't save it we're going to lose that connection to the past," Pearce said. The Mexican Canyon trestle is one of the few remaining pieces of the long defunct Alamogordo-Sacramento railroad's 32-mile track. That track once ran between Alamogordo and Cloudcroft, spawning the then-lucrative logging business in the area....
On the Edge of Common Sense: Farming a partnership between man, wife Farming is a partnership: man and wife engaged in the century's old "business" of raising livestock and coaxing a crop from the ground. And yes, there really are moments that inspire the romantic images poets and artists portray: the couple sitting on the porch swing watching the sun set over a dark green field of soybeans; or mom in her apron holding a steaming platter of biscuits as hubby and the haying crew look up from the breakfast table smiling; or the wife chatting pleasantly as she explains to the implement dealer exactly what part her husband sent her to town for; or the joy on her face as she stands ankle deep in mud next to her stuck pickup holding her dead cell phone, waiting for hubby to arrive. Yes, these are the ties that bind....
Battle line drawn Many who live off the land here cast the debate in the starkest terms. In the first 10 years after their reintroduction in the Rockies, gray wolves killed 505 head of cattle and 1,306 sheep, and the numbers are rising. It's us or them, ranchers say. Incredibly adaptable, the animals hunt together, with older wolves teaching younger ones. Packs have spread quickly into Idaho's central valleys and north into the panhandle, and along the fingerlike mountain ranges that stretch from Yellowstone south and east deep into Wyoming. A popular bumper sticker here reads: "Wyoming wolves, smoke a pack a day." On most ranches, the wolf is seen as not a noble beast but a brutal killer, one of the few things on the range that can compete with man for dominance. The Danas have seen cattle so frightened by wolves, they've ripped through three fence lines before they could be brought under control. A sheep rancher in the area says she has seen a pack kill 42 sheep in 12 hours. "If you don't like wolves, watching them kill something will fit right in with your worldview," Jimenez said. "They have powerful jaws that bite into (the) throat and hindquarters of their prey, often sending them into shock. "They basically rip their prey apart. There's a lot of blood on the snow after a wolf kill."....
Water experts wary of N.M. proposal If sharing Colorado River water isn't a contentious enough issue now, Southwest Colorado water interests say a recent New Mexico proposal could lead to them being left high and dry because of the need to protect endangered fish. According to calculations by New Mexico and the federal Bureau of Reclamation, there's an extra 220,000 acre-feet of water available annually to Upper Colorado River basin states because less water is evaporating from its reservoirs than previously thought. (That's enough water to fill nearly two reservoirs the size of Lake Nighthorse - the Animas-La Plata Project reservoir under construction just west of Bodo Industrial Park.) "It's going to be controversial," Steve Harris, the engineer for the Southwestern Water Conservation District, said of the New Mexico proposal. "We learned about it only in March." All future users of water in Southwest Colorado, even a rancher who wants to create a stock pond, could be affected, Harris said. The situation is critical, Harris said, because thirsty New Mexico is using all the water available to it in the Laws of the Colorado River, which allocates Western water among seven states. New Mexico currently receives about 675,000 acre-feet of water from several sources - a tunnel that transfers Colorado water from the upper San Juan River through the Continental Divide to the Rio Grande River, Navajo Reservoir and the San Juan, Animas and La Plata rivers. Under the water-sharing formula, New Mexico stands to gain 25,000 acre-feet of the 220,000 acre-foot windfall. Officials there want to use the additional water to help meet future needs of the yet-unauthorized Navajo-Gallup Project and allow full development of the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project, a slowly developing project to irrigate up to 110,000 acres south of Farmington....
Trout Unlimited plan snags criticism A bill designed to help Utah's trout ran into a few rapids Wednesday when a legislator wondered if environmental groups could use it to hijack water, such as the Provo River. The bill would allow private entities to lease water rights and allow the water to remain in streams for the specific purpose of improving trout habitat. Current law permits water rights for in-stream flows to be held only by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and the Utah Division of State Parks and Recreation. Otherwise, private water rights can only be granted for actual use, such as diverting water to irrigate cropland. The bill, supported by the fishing and conservation group Trout Unlimited, carries a bundle of restrictions. Water rights can be granted only for a term of less than 10 years, and must be reapplied for following that; the purpose must be to protect trout; no other existing water right may be impaired. But Rep. David Ure, R-Kamas, co-chairman of the task force, worried that the law could be the means to speculate in water, or if leases might not run up the cost of water for municipalities or agriculture....
Demonstration project to test grasslands grazing plan The Forest Service plans to test new rules for livestock grazing on North Dakota's national grasslands, a project that will take at least 10 years. The project is part of the final management plan for the grasslands, which include more than 1 million acres in the Little Missouri National Grasslands in the west and Sheyenne National Grasslands in the southeastern part of the state. Some grazing rules, such as those affecting prairie dog habitat, are being changed to guidelines, which at least one environmental group worries might be less strictly enforced. The grasslands project "moves the argument away from the hypothetical and esoteric, to practical field application," regional U.S. Forester Gail Kimbell said in documents released Friday. The Forest Service had estimated overall grazing cuts of 9 percent as a result of its plan. Ranchers said the estimates were low by as much as 60 percent. The grazing portion was put on hold in 2002 while a team of independent scientists spent the next two years studying it. The scientists last year concluded that the Forest Service's projected grazing cuts were more accurate than the ranchers' estimates. However, the team also said the Forest Service projections were based on too many assumptions....
Army taking comments on Pinon Canyon study U.S. Army officials on Friday released a draft environmental impact study for the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site, which is an assessment of what impacts will occur if the Army sends thousands of additional troops to train at the current 230,000-acre site. For Fort Carson officials, the report was just part of the process of having an additional 8,500 troops assigned to the post over the next few years - as planned by the Pentagon's Base Realignment and Closure process. For ranchers opposed to the Army's plan to expand its maneuver site by 418,000 acres in the future - the draft report is just another shot in what they expect to be a long war to stop any expansion. "Anyone looking for an assessment of the planned expansion of PCMS, won't find it here," said Robin Renn, the PCMS environmental coordinator. "This is simply an impact study of what we would expect by training more soldiers at the current maneuver site."....
Wolverine roams Yakama reservation Believed to be living only in the remote northern Cascades and in the dense forests of Idaho and Montana, a wolverine has been spotted near Mount Adams on the Yakama reservation. While state Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists say it's not clear whether wolverines once lived in the southern Cascades, Yakama wildlife officials have little doubt about the animal. "They've always been here on the Yakama reservation, especially in the primitive areas," said Yakama wildlife manager Arlen Washines in an e-mail. "We've had many sightings by tribal members, even within the last few years." Tribal biologists placed a camera northeast of Mount Adams that photographed a wolverine in August, but the camera wasn't retrieved until a month later. It was the first documented sighting of a wolverine in the southern Cascades, according to the tribe. Often called a skunk bear because of its ability to emit a noxious smell and its skunklike appearance thanks to the white stripes running down its sides, the wolverine is the largest member of the weasel family....
Snowmobilers want trails in caribou recovery zone reopened U.S. Forest Service officials and groups that want caribou habitat in northern Idaho protected from snowmobiles plan to meet to decide which trails could be reopened for snowmobile enthusiasts. The trails were closed last month when U.S. District Judge Robert H. Whaley banned snowmobiles throughout nearly 470 square miles of national forest land in northern Idaho in an effort to save the last mountain caribou herd in the contiguous 48 states. The caribou recovery zone in the Idaho Panhandle National Forests remains closed to snowmobiles until the Forest Service develops a winter recreation strategy taking into account the impact of snowmobiles on the herd. Forest Service officials and caribou advocates plan to work on the issue in the next several weeks. On Friday, snowmobilers organized a rally that drew riders from around the region to protest the snowmobiling ban....
Places to play, space for refuge On many weekends, Pojoaque resident Jorge Bencomo and his children, 13 and 11, ride their dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles on U.S. Bureau of Land Management property near Alcalde. "It's a sport I've always liked," said Bencomo, 40. "I've ridden since I was a child. I raced in Mexico. Now I'm teaching my children how to ride." Bencomo and his children enjoy an increasingly popular pastime -- exploring public land on off-highway vehicles. The U.S. Forest Service says the number of visits to national forests across the country involving off-highway vehicles grew from about 5 million in 1975 to 51 million in 2005. And the number of off-highway vehicles in the U.S. rose from less than 400,000 in the early 1990s to more than 8 million by 2003, according to a 2005 national survey on off-road recreation. New Mexico public land managers say the state mirrors the nationwide trend....
Forest plan backs use of now-illegal roads A management plan for roads in the Medicine Bow/Routt National Forest, scheduled for release next month, will call for almost 100 miles of unauthorized roads to be approved for motorcycle and all-terrain vehicle use. Clint Kyhl, Laramie District Ranger, said the plan would not affect some 785 miles of authorized roads in the forest. However, it would put about 100 miles out of the 265 miles of unauthorized roads to use. "We have a variety of unauthorized roads we needed to decide to use or close," Kyhl said. "(And) we have zero miles of motorized trail in the district right now. We want to provide that opportunity as well, and use some of these roads to do it."....
Feds: Mine will benefit bears Grizzly bears stand to benefit if a copper and silver mine is developed beneath Montana's Cabinet Mountains Wilderness, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Friday in a rewritten opinion. The proposed underground mine involves a "conservative approach" and mitigation measures, such as buying land to be protected as bear habitat, that would leave grizzlies in better condition than if the mine was not developed, the service said. "We really think this is a good thing for bears," Mark Wilson, a Fish and Wildlife Service administrator in Helena, said Friday. The Fish and Wildlife Service's findings are in a biological opinion rewritten after a federal judge last year sided with environmental groups that charged the agency conducted inadequate studies before finding the mine would not jeopardize bears and trout. The agency Friday also endorsed mine measures for protection of sensitive bull trout. Both the trout and grizzlies are federally protected as threatened species....
Copper mine plan aims at santa ritas It's no secret there's copper deep under the foothills of the Santa Rita Mountains southeast of Tucson. Rosemont Ranch, off Arizona 83 going to Sonoita, has been the occasional focus of mining companies large and small for decades. Asarco was the last company to talk of putting the mining claims at Rosemont into production, but sold off the property in 2004. Now, an upstart Canadian firm is again touting Rosemont as a good candidate for large-scale mining. The Rosemont deposit has been explored before, but Augusta is doing detailed drilling to better define the ore body and design a mine. It could produce more than 4 billion pounds of copper, 100 million pounds of molybdenum and 100 million ounces of silver over 20 years, Augusta says. At today's high metal prices, that's more than $13 billion for just the copper — enough to stimulate some interest in the project. When might Rosemont transition from ranch to mine? As soon as 2010, says one Augusta official, if the company's plan is well-received by the U.S. Forest Service and other regulators. Rosemont is surrounded by the Coronado National Forest and the use of public land is essential to the mine's development....
Troubled waters Logging trucks once rumbled up this narrow creek valley 30 miles northeast of Coeur d'Alene. Today, there's not even a trace of road left. The biggest creatures now roaming the banks of Yellow Dog Creek are the pair of moose that have recently taken up residence in the quiet valley. Only a well-trained eye would notice the signs of the recent $400,000 restoration project just completed here: the flecks of surveyor's tape, the hidden cables anchoring massive logs to bedrock along the stream, the faint tracks from the heavy machinery that removed the dirt logging road. District Ranger Randy Swick hiked up the valley on a crisp September morning, showing off the stream as if it were a once-troubled kid who just earned a spot on the honor roll. It's a small but important part of the U.S. Forest Service's long-term plan to fix hundreds of square miles of damaged watersheds in the region, he said....
Column - An endless journey For more than a century, our national forests have served the nation's needs for timber, minerals, forage and other resources. At the same time, they have provided millions of people with an unparalleled recreational and aesthetic resource, and with the satisfaction that comes with knowing that our society has preserved vast natural landscapes more or less intact. The 386,000 miles of existing roads in our national forests are more than adequate to ensure that the forests will continue to be used to help supply our nation's need for resources. Far less secure and far more valuable to future generations are those remaining tracts of undeveloped land that have managed to survive in our forests. If we lose these lands now, we will never get them back. We should bear that in mind as we engage in the ongoing debate over the protection of forest roadless areas. That debate, thanks to a recent court decision, seems destined to drag on for several more years, prolonging the uncertainty about the future of our forests. Use of the forests has been debated for more than a century, but the current round kicked off on Jan. 5, 2001, in the waning days of the Clinton administration....
Researchers hope tree vole discoveries will prompt buffer zones It was the fir needles that gave the red tree vole away. Researcher Nathaniel Mitchell thought he might be onto the trail of the small nocturnal rodents when he spotted the rice-sized scat. But the fir needles were the real giveaway for scientists working to protect the species' old-growth habitat, since voles both feed on the needles, and use their resin ducts to make nests. Mitchell is a member of the Northwest Ecosystem Survey Team, who are trained to survey for voles by researchers at Oregon State University. Since 2000, Mitchell has spent summers searching for the little rodents, who spend most of their life high above the ground. This summer, he and fellow researcher Laura Beaton found 122 new red tree vole sites on federal forest in southwestern Oregon. Researchers hope uncovering new red tree vole sites will convince federal agencies to set aside buffers on timber sales where the nests have been located....
BLM mulls study on effects of winter natural gas drilling Bureau of Land Management officials are considering a study that would examine the effects of natural gas drilling in the winter, a practice restricted to protect wildlife such as deer and elk foraging for food in snowy weather. If approved, the multiyear study would be conducted on up to three of Williams Production's federal leases in the Rulison and Grand Valley gas fields outside of Parachute, said David Boyd, spokesman for the BLM's Glenwood Springs field office. "This is something we've talked about very extensively with the (state Division of Wildlife) and BLM," Williams spokeswoman Susan Alvillar said. "Right now, I think were all on the same page." Winter drilling restrictions traditionally last from Dec. 1 to March 1, but certain rigs might be allowed to remain in operation throughout the winter during the study. DOW West Region Manager Ron Velarde said the study will help wildlife biologists and others see the impacts in a specific drainage area....
EPA tightens emission regs Energy companies around Wyoming may have more work ahead reducing certain air pollutants, as a federal agency has tightened allowable emissions to protect human health. The Environmental Protection Agency last month reduced the amount of so-called "PM 2.5s" that can be in the air before standards are violated. Those tiny particles can cause aggravated asthma, lung and heart diseases, and are a major cause of smog. The definition of "PM 2.5" refers to unhealthful fine particles that are 2.5 micrometers in diameter or smaller, according to the EPA. They are derived from combustible and industrial activities. The new rules will affect how companies operate nationwide. In Wyoming, the attention is on the Jonah natural gas field southeast of Pinedale, where the Bureau of Land Management released a study earlier this year of predicted air quality impacts. Some of the predicted emissions of PM 2.5s will violate the new federal standards. Steven Hall, spokesman for the BLM, said the agency will not revise the Jonah Infill Record of Decision document in light of the new standards, but the agency will comply with all federal regulations....
'We're going to feel it' The news is not that oil and gas development is ramping up throughout the state. Instead, the news is that the Wyoming Game and Fish Department is increasingly taking notice. The department itself has mapped projections for oil and gas development across the state, and overlapped those projections with wildlife habitat, showing a grim picture for wildlife's future. "This has really gotten our attention," said Vern Stelter, statewide habitat protection coordinator for Game and Fish. "Obviously, we're very focused on this as a department, trying to moderate impacts as much as we can." The agency has highlighted areas including the Powder River Basin, Jonah and Pinedale Anticline fields, Moxa Arch, Continental Divide and Atlantic Rim areas, which are projected to see increases of up to 10 times more oil and gas wells. Sage grouse and big game are identified as primary users of habitat eyed by energy. The department is working with energy companies and the Bureau of Land Management -- the primary public lands agency permitting the energy development -- to minimize impacts to wildlife, Stelter said....
Energy Bill Is a Boon to Oil Companies Tucked into a massive energy bill that would open the outer continental shelf to oil drilling are provisions that would slash future royalties owed to the federal government by companies prospecting in Rocky Mountain oil shale deposits. Sponsored by Rep. Richard W. Pombo (R-Tracy) and passed by the House earlier this year, the bill would amend an existing requirement that the federal government receive a "fair return" from oil companies that hold oil shale leases on public lands. Instead, Pombo's bill, modeled after a Canadian law, would reduce royalties from the customary 12.5% of annual revenue to 1%. Further, the bill could cut the reduced rate by as much as 80% if the price of oil fell. Over many years of oil production, the royalty discounts could amount to tens of billions in lost federal receipts, said James T. Bartis, an analyst at the Rand Corp. who wrote a widely used study of the economic prospects of the developing oil shale industry. Pombo and others argue that oil companies need incentives to invest in the unproven billion-dollar technology, which squeezes oil from deep rock formations. Colorado, Utah and Wyoming have the world's largest known oil shale deposits, with estimates of up to 2 trillion barrels, although only about 800 million barrels are believed to be recoverable....
Alternative energy proponents push piñon pellets U.S. Rep. John Salazar, D-Manassa, and other officials touted pellets made from piñon trees as a local, renewable source of heating for Southwest Colorado during a visit to the Avon Hotel on Friday. Rob Davis, president of Forest Energy Corp. of Show Low, Ariz., helps U.S. Rep. John Salazar, D-Manassa, open a bag of piñon pellets at the Avon Hotel in Silverton on Friday. Salazar was in town touting renewable energy. Forest Energy Corp. of Show Low, Ariz., recently began producing what are believed to be the first pellets made from piñon. The trees were harvested on Bureau of Land Management property on the Uncompahgre Plateau. Salazar poured a bag of the pellets into a 65,000-BTU wood stove used to heat the 2,500-square-foot first floor of the historic hotel. "That truly is a Colorado resource heating Colorado," said Rob Davis, president of Forest Energy. Davis said the pellets were whole-tree pellets that incorporate needles, cones, bark and whatever else comes along with the trees. "Anything that gets into the truck, we make a pellet out of it," Davis said. Officials involved in the piñon project said it required a great deal of cooperation, from the prison crew that cut the trees, to the BLM that allowed the project to go forward, to Forest Energy for producing the pellets and even ZE Supply in Silverton for selling them....
Trouble in the air: How Government flights pumped out 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide The inevitable head-on collision between Britain's climate change and aviation policies moves a step closer today with figures showing the total distance flown by the Government's own ministers and senior officials last year alone is equivalent to 14 return trips to the Moon. Tony Blair, his cabinet colleagues and their officials clocked up 6.5 million air miles, according to the Cabinet Office's list of flights during the 2005-2006 financial year - and in doing so pumped almost 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, analysis shows. Environmental groups went on the attack last night over the huge scale of the emissions. The figures starkly underline the fact that, although the Blair Government is talking ever more loudly about the problem of global warming, it cannot itself get to grips with its fastest-rising cause - emissions of greenhouse gases from aircraft engines....
A Power-Grid Report Suggests Some Dark Days Ahead Companies are not building power plants and power lines fast enough to meet growing demand, according to a group recently assigned by the federal government to assure proper operation of the power grid. The group, the North American Electric Reliability Council, in its annual report, to be released Monday, said the amount of power that could be generated or transmitted would drop below the target levels meant to ensure reliability on peak days in Texas, New England, the Mid-Atlantic area and the Midwest during the next two to three years. The council was established in 1965 after a blackout across the Northeast, and has since set voluntary standards for the industry. After the blackout of 2003, which covered a vast swath of the Midwest, Northeast and Ontario, Congress set up a process that would eventually give the council the authority to fine American companies that did not follow certain operating standards. It is seeking a similar designation in Canada, since — electrically speaking — the border is irrelevant. For years, the council has produced often-gloomy annual reports, but this is the first to be officially filed with federal agencies, and to recommend specific action....
Investigation finds farmers double-dipping in federal funds In spring 2000, Congress decided to do something about its costly and politically driven practice of giving farmers a disaster payment each time a storm damaged their crops. The lawmakers voted to use $8 billion in new taxpayer subsidies to help farmers buy crop insurance to protect against losses. The insurance would replace the disaster payments and reduce government costs. But shortly after passing the Agricultural Risk Protection Act, Congress lost its fiscal will. One week before the presidential election, it passed a new $1.8 billion disaster bill to assist farmers hurt by bad weather. Two others followed in subsequent years, totaling more than $6 billion. Today, after a searing drought in the plains, farm-state legislators are pushing for billions more in aid. The result is that farmers often get paid twice by the government for the same disaster, once in subsidized insurance and then again in disaster assistance, a legal but controversial form of double-dipping, a Washington Post investigation found. Together, the programs have cost taxpayers nearly $24 billion since 2000. The government pays billions to help farmers buy cheap federal insurance, billions more to private insurance companies to help run the program and billions more to cover the riskiest claims. On top of all that, it spends billions more on disaster payments....
Japanese rules prompt cattle ID tag use Japanese consumers aren't just asking, "Where's the beef?" They want to know: "Where's the beef from?" That question is proving to be a good opportunity for cattle businesses to test a new national system for tracking animals that federal officials hope to have operative on a voluntary basis by 2009. The Japanese government is making sure that any U.S. beef it imports can be traced to its origins and comes from cows not more than 20 months old. "It creates an opportunity for ranchers or producers that can verify the age of the calves they are selling," said Todd Clemons, president of Okeechobee Livestock Market in Okeechobee. Local ranchers get a premium of about $20 per animal. Since April, the Okeechobee Livestock Market has sold 25,000 cattle through online auctions; 80 percent of those were calves with tags that make it possible to verify their age and birthplace. The calves are shipped to feedlots in states such as Texas, and some are eventually sold to Japan and other export markets....
Stray cows hit on road: Who gets ticket? If a cow wanders onto a four-lane highway, who, if anyone, gets the ticket if it then gets run over - six times? This is no hypothetical. In fact, the question was raised this week before the Cache County Council. On Sunday evening, several cows escaped from a Utah State University-owned pasture near the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station South Farm, 3580 S. U.S. 89-91, in Wellsville. The unluckiest member of the stray herd was hit by six vehicles, yet caused only minor injuries to drivers and passengers, according to Utah Highway Patrol Sgt. Tony Hutson. The officer verified that a 62-year-old USU farmer, who arrived at the accident scene a few moments later, was cited with a class C misdemeanor because the animals were loose. A subsequent phone call from a Farm Bureau representative to County Council member Darrel Gibbons prompted a discussion about who is prosecuted and why in these situations. "He wanted to know if it is the policy to issue citations whenever that happens," Gibbons said....
Squeezed in Star Valley It's 1 in the afternoon on a rainy Thursday, and Jody Bagley is doing something he'd rather you not know. Bagley, a regional vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, is herding lambs onto a truck. He's a cattleman, but his work as a rancher has him dabbling in all kinds of activities, including helping a friend load lambs on this day. Bagley raises some sheep and was filling the truck with some of his stock as well. Bagley is well known in Star Valley. He's on the Star Valley Land Trust and from the Bagley Ranch, which has been in the family for generations. But all that may change for the 48-year-old father of three. Soaring land prices and increased costs in fuel, feed and drought have Bagley and other longtime western Wyoming ranchers looking to leave for different, if not greener, pastures. "We're looking at trading one acre for 23 acres north of Lusk," he said. "One cow for three cows." Bagley and many other ranchers are feeling the pinch. Big-money land offers stemming from residential development in picturesque pockets of Wyoming are prompting many longtime ranchers to consider selling to developers. Maintaining livestock herds in fierce winters and fending off multimillion-dollar offers for land becomes more difficult each passing year, even when livestock prices are high....
Dispute over property deed lives on in Imperial County A stocky rancher with a reputation for stretching the truth breezed into this desert town about 40 years ago with big news. The way several people recall it, Robert Earl Harvey Sr. announced he owned about a quarter of eastern Imperial County and had the paperwork to prove it. County officials allowed him to record a deed on the land, largely sand dunes and wheat-colored badlands. Some of it was near Harvey's ranch in Blythe. But nearly all of the property – roughly 760,000 acres – was, and still is, owned by the federal government. Harvey deeded the land in 1992 to a Palm Desert businessman. County records show that eight years later, it was deeded to a Massachusetts business named HHH Investment Trust. And there are signs that HHH is trying to profit from it....
Pearce trying to save Mexican Canyon trestle Congressman Steve Pearce isn't just one of those politicians who try to fix every problem by throwing money at it. At least, that's not his only tool. In fact, the Roswell Republican is leading an initiative to save the Mexican Canyon trestle through statesmanship. Rebuffed in his efforts to get federal money to save the sagging railway bridge in Cloudcroft, Pearce decided to see what he could get done without cash. In that vein, he has met with local leaders in Cloudcroft, the Mescalero Apache Nation, the Forest Service and the engineering department at the University of New Mexico. All this talk has resulted in a loose-knit coalition to shore up the trestle. "It's a visual symbol of the past and if we don't save it we're going to lose that connection to the past," Pearce said. The Mexican Canyon trestle is one of the few remaining pieces of the long defunct Alamogordo-Sacramento railroad's 32-mile track. That track once ran between Alamogordo and Cloudcroft, spawning the then-lucrative logging business in the area....
On the Edge of Common Sense: Farming a partnership between man, wife Farming is a partnership: man and wife engaged in the century's old "business" of raising livestock and coaxing a crop from the ground. And yes, there really are moments that inspire the romantic images poets and artists portray: the couple sitting on the porch swing watching the sun set over a dark green field of soybeans; or mom in her apron holding a steaming platter of biscuits as hubby and the haying crew look up from the breakfast table smiling; or the wife chatting pleasantly as she explains to the implement dealer exactly what part her husband sent her to town for; or the joy on her face as she stands ankle deep in mud next to her stuck pickup holding her dead cell phone, waiting for hubby to arrive. Yes, these are the ties that bind....
Sunday, October 15, 2006
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE WESTERNER
WHO IS A GOOD STEWARD?
by Welda McKinley Grider
It rained in l997. I remember it clearly since it’s only been recently that it’s rained since. One year total rainfall on this ranch was 3 inches and that was in 1/10ths increments. The wind blew so hard that it did no good.
We did it right. We rotated the pastures, we cut down on numbers, I even burned cactus one spring, then we fed. We finally leased a ranch and moved the cows.
As discouraging as it was, I didn’t lose hope. I am a rancher by birth. Ranching goes back four generations on both sides. Droughts have come and gone. This too would pass or so I thought.
My father once told a BLM employee, “If it rains, then I am a good manager – if it doesn’t….then I am a poor manager”.
We did have one good rain last fall. Grass grew briefly and hope raised and we re-stocked lightly. Didn’t rain again. We again went through the process of protecting the land. It looked hopeless – even for those of us who are programmed from birth to have hope and “wait for next year”.
My grandmother once said, “They said smile it could get worse. I smiled and sure as hell it got worse”!
It got worse. Over the years I would find hope that there was still something alive at the roots of the grass. I would pull a clump and find the roots alive and have hope.
Until June 2006. I went out and pulled grass and there were no live roots. The countryside was dead. Despair overtook me. The well – our only well (860 ft) went dry. There is nothing that will cause despair like watching 300 head of cattle bawl for water. Family stepped in and hauled water through several days and through the nights. I sat on the drinker in the middle of the night – keeping the cows off the float while I waited for the truck to return with more water as rain sprinkled on me. Not enough to do any good – just enough to make me cold and miserable in the dark. There are no words to describe June of 2006 unless you’ve been through it.
I am a religious person and part of what I believe in is that you give thanks always. I got to tell you…I had to LOOK for something to give thanks for. I found it. The broom weed was dying. You got to REALLY be trying to find something when all the hope you have is the broom weed is dying!
The first rain came. As happy as that made me…(the dirt tanks filled up) I knew with all the knowledge a lifetime of ranching gives – it would be three years if all went well for the land to recover. Turns out I was wrong. I forgot who the real steward of the land is.
The rains continued. The water gaps washed out. The tank dams washed out. The roads washed out. The well rejuvenated. Not that the cows needed water at that point but we do like clean sheets and dishes in this house! The grass is stirrup leather high. The gramma grass is heading out. This is not gramma grass country. Don’t know where that came from. The grass and weeds are so tall in the draw that seriously you can only see the cow’s backs as they graze. Even our “old girls” have slick hair and frisky babies.
Only a rancher can understand the joy of watching full-grown cows and their calves buck around acting silly in the brisk early morning air.
There is grass abundantly on the sides of the hills. We’ve got grass to last a couple of years if it doesn’t rain again. That is the beauty of this land we live in.
Science can’t do this. Good planning can’t do this. I don’t even think rain can do this much. Only the Good Lord himself can. He is the steward of this land we only live on.
I do have to tell you….half of the broom weed is still dead.
Welda ranches near Carrizozo, New Mexico. Amongst the other problems she faced during the drought she is married to Jim Grider.
Famous next-to-last cowboy words
By Julie Carter
The mindset of never turning down a rain when you ranch in the southwest has been pushed to the limits this year as ranchers saw almost double their annual average rainfall arrive all at once in a month's time.
Slow, if never, to grumble, ranchers have fixed water gaps that have been solidly in place since the last millennium, repaired washed-out roads repeatedly, and found leaks in the roofs of homes, barns and outbuildings that didn't exist until of course, it rained.
And still the rains came. Most recently, the moisture that was so welcome this year was falling on the backs of newly-weaned calves with the threat of bringing on job security to the guy in charge of doctoring sick ones and hauling off dead ones.
The tens of hundreds of cattle trucks scheduled for dirt road destinations will be standing by waiting to see if it is really going to happen the morning after Mother Nature has again dumped inches of rain on ranches that now have more grass than anyone has seen in their lifetime.
Making fall gathering and other assorted seasonal cattle work cold, miserable and hard to plan, the misery is simply accepted as part of the business. No one in the business dares wish it would stop raining. Who would accept the responsibility for such a bold statement if indeed it did stop raining for too long, again.
You can count on a few things as a cowboy and usually they have to do with those types of off-the-cuff statements followed by results that become legendary.
"Weatherman says there is a storm coming today but we'll be finished long before it gets here." Result: The hundred year blizzard hits just as the cowboy crew arrives at the backside of the ranch and 20 miles from headquarters.
"Send the city kid that came to help to the north end. No cattle ever go up there." Result: One pilgrim struggling with the entire bunch of cows and calves while the real hands hunt for cattle.
“It'll be a good day to ride the colt. We don't have any serious cowboying to do." Result: Hunters left the gates open on four pastures and 600 head of cattle are mixed or missing.
"Don't worry, they can't get plumb away. There's an ocean on both sides." Result: Four hard days of looking for wild cattle in heavy brush-covered country.
"Don't worry, they won't get away. They're afoot and we're horseback." Result: A corral of ridden-down horses, tired riders and cattle still running wild and free.
"The break-even on these cattle won't pencil out right now, but the market is bound to improve before shipping time." Result: The bank says they will extend the operating note one more time.
"That colt never saw a day he could buck me off." Result: The wife getting quite handy at doing all the riding, doctoring and feeding while he heals-up.
Another list for another day is the really incredibly "un-wise" things a cowboy will say, without thinking of course, that will land him in the dog-house and eating bologna sandwiches for an undetermined amount of time.
That list belongs in the "last cowboy words" category and usually starts with some brilliance like "What that woman doesn't know won't hurt her..."
© Julie Carter 2006
Did we dodge the bullet
by Larry Gabriel
Arctic air and fall hunting seasons have arrived in the Northern Great Plains. Geese and ducks from the north will soon follow.
However, the much feared deadly bird flu apparently will not be coming with the birds after all. At least, not this year.
Last year Congress appropriated $350 million to prepare for the possibility of a deadly pandemic that experts said could kill millions of people if the current Asian strain of bird flu (H5N1 virus) mutates to a human flu.
The federal government sent biologists in droves to Alaska to test migrating birds that could carry the strain from Asia and Russia. No deadly version of the virus was found. A milder version (low pathogenic H5N1) has been found in North America.
The big fear was that wild birds migrating south over the continental United States could spread the high pathogenic virus that has killed many thousands of birds, more than a hundred people, and a few dogs, cats and other mammals throughout Asia and Europe.
It appears that did not happen. Experts are saying this fall's American hunters have nothing to fear from the bird flu.
The other big fear constantly discussed by the media is the fear of a worldwide epidemic of human bird flu. So far, the world has dodged that bullet too.
What the media really means when it talks about "human bird flu" is a fear that the current bird virus will mutate when a mammal (usually a human or a pig) catches the H5N1 deadly strain from a bird while already sick with another highly contagious flu strain. If the two strains were to combine, they might produce something new and deadly like the 1918 Spanish flu that killed millions of people.
All human flu viruses are thought to have originated from bird flu viruses. So why is this one such a big deal? There are several reasons this so-called "bird flu" is so popular with the media and governments.
First, our technology is vastly improved, and scientists can track minute genetic changes related to virus mutation. When we did not know those things, we did not worry about them.
Secondly, the highly pathogenic version of H5N1 kills half the people who get sick with it. The theory is that a similar death rate might accompany a mutated human virus derived from it.
There are many horrible diseases in this world. I sometime wonder if fear of them does not do more damage to society than the actual disease.
It has always been wise to stay away from sick (or dead from unknown causes) birds.
In my book, just a little wisdom is worth more than a mountain of information any day of the week.
Larry is the South Dakota Secretary of Agriculture
WHO IS A GOOD STEWARD?
by Welda McKinley Grider
It rained in l997. I remember it clearly since it’s only been recently that it’s rained since. One year total rainfall on this ranch was 3 inches and that was in 1/10ths increments. The wind blew so hard that it did no good.
We did it right. We rotated the pastures, we cut down on numbers, I even burned cactus one spring, then we fed. We finally leased a ranch and moved the cows.
As discouraging as it was, I didn’t lose hope. I am a rancher by birth. Ranching goes back four generations on both sides. Droughts have come and gone. This too would pass or so I thought.
My father once told a BLM employee, “If it rains, then I am a good manager – if it doesn’t….then I am a poor manager”.
We did have one good rain last fall. Grass grew briefly and hope raised and we re-stocked lightly. Didn’t rain again. We again went through the process of protecting the land. It looked hopeless – even for those of us who are programmed from birth to have hope and “wait for next year”.
My grandmother once said, “They said smile it could get worse. I smiled and sure as hell it got worse”!
It got worse. Over the years I would find hope that there was still something alive at the roots of the grass. I would pull a clump and find the roots alive and have hope.
Until June 2006. I went out and pulled grass and there were no live roots. The countryside was dead. Despair overtook me. The well – our only well (860 ft) went dry. There is nothing that will cause despair like watching 300 head of cattle bawl for water. Family stepped in and hauled water through several days and through the nights. I sat on the drinker in the middle of the night – keeping the cows off the float while I waited for the truck to return with more water as rain sprinkled on me. Not enough to do any good – just enough to make me cold and miserable in the dark. There are no words to describe June of 2006 unless you’ve been through it.
I am a religious person and part of what I believe in is that you give thanks always. I got to tell you…I had to LOOK for something to give thanks for. I found it. The broom weed was dying. You got to REALLY be trying to find something when all the hope you have is the broom weed is dying!
The first rain came. As happy as that made me…(the dirt tanks filled up) I knew with all the knowledge a lifetime of ranching gives – it would be three years if all went well for the land to recover. Turns out I was wrong. I forgot who the real steward of the land is.
The rains continued. The water gaps washed out. The tank dams washed out. The roads washed out. The well rejuvenated. Not that the cows needed water at that point but we do like clean sheets and dishes in this house! The grass is stirrup leather high. The gramma grass is heading out. This is not gramma grass country. Don’t know where that came from. The grass and weeds are so tall in the draw that seriously you can only see the cow’s backs as they graze. Even our “old girls” have slick hair and frisky babies.
Only a rancher can understand the joy of watching full-grown cows and their calves buck around acting silly in the brisk early morning air.
There is grass abundantly on the sides of the hills. We’ve got grass to last a couple of years if it doesn’t rain again. That is the beauty of this land we live in.
Science can’t do this. Good planning can’t do this. I don’t even think rain can do this much. Only the Good Lord himself can. He is the steward of this land we only live on.
I do have to tell you….half of the broom weed is still dead.
Welda ranches near Carrizozo, New Mexico. Amongst the other problems she faced during the drought she is married to Jim Grider.
Famous next-to-last cowboy words
By Julie Carter
The mindset of never turning down a rain when you ranch in the southwest has been pushed to the limits this year as ranchers saw almost double their annual average rainfall arrive all at once in a month's time.
Slow, if never, to grumble, ranchers have fixed water gaps that have been solidly in place since the last millennium, repaired washed-out roads repeatedly, and found leaks in the roofs of homes, barns and outbuildings that didn't exist until of course, it rained.
And still the rains came. Most recently, the moisture that was so welcome this year was falling on the backs of newly-weaned calves with the threat of bringing on job security to the guy in charge of doctoring sick ones and hauling off dead ones.
The tens of hundreds of cattle trucks scheduled for dirt road destinations will be standing by waiting to see if it is really going to happen the morning after Mother Nature has again dumped inches of rain on ranches that now have more grass than anyone has seen in their lifetime.
Making fall gathering and other assorted seasonal cattle work cold, miserable and hard to plan, the misery is simply accepted as part of the business. No one in the business dares wish it would stop raining. Who would accept the responsibility for such a bold statement if indeed it did stop raining for too long, again.
You can count on a few things as a cowboy and usually they have to do with those types of off-the-cuff statements followed by results that become legendary.
"Weatherman says there is a storm coming today but we'll be finished long before it gets here." Result: The hundred year blizzard hits just as the cowboy crew arrives at the backside of the ranch and 20 miles from headquarters.
"Send the city kid that came to help to the north end. No cattle ever go up there." Result: One pilgrim struggling with the entire bunch of cows and calves while the real hands hunt for cattle.
“It'll be a good day to ride the colt. We don't have any serious cowboying to do." Result: Hunters left the gates open on four pastures and 600 head of cattle are mixed or missing.
"Don't worry, they can't get plumb away. There's an ocean on both sides." Result: Four hard days of looking for wild cattle in heavy brush-covered country.
"Don't worry, they won't get away. They're afoot and we're horseback." Result: A corral of ridden-down horses, tired riders and cattle still running wild and free.
"The break-even on these cattle won't pencil out right now, but the market is bound to improve before shipping time." Result: The bank says they will extend the operating note one more time.
"That colt never saw a day he could buck me off." Result: The wife getting quite handy at doing all the riding, doctoring and feeding while he heals-up.
Another list for another day is the really incredibly "un-wise" things a cowboy will say, without thinking of course, that will land him in the dog-house and eating bologna sandwiches for an undetermined amount of time.
That list belongs in the "last cowboy words" category and usually starts with some brilliance like "What that woman doesn't know won't hurt her..."
© Julie Carter 2006
Did we dodge the bullet
by Larry Gabriel
Arctic air and fall hunting seasons have arrived in the Northern Great Plains. Geese and ducks from the north will soon follow.
However, the much feared deadly bird flu apparently will not be coming with the birds after all. At least, not this year.
Last year Congress appropriated $350 million to prepare for the possibility of a deadly pandemic that experts said could kill millions of people if the current Asian strain of bird flu (H5N1 virus) mutates to a human flu.
The federal government sent biologists in droves to Alaska to test migrating birds that could carry the strain from Asia and Russia. No deadly version of the virus was found. A milder version (low pathogenic H5N1) has been found in North America.
The big fear was that wild birds migrating south over the continental United States could spread the high pathogenic virus that has killed many thousands of birds, more than a hundred people, and a few dogs, cats and other mammals throughout Asia and Europe.
It appears that did not happen. Experts are saying this fall's American hunters have nothing to fear from the bird flu.
The other big fear constantly discussed by the media is the fear of a worldwide epidemic of human bird flu. So far, the world has dodged that bullet too.
What the media really means when it talks about "human bird flu" is a fear that the current bird virus will mutate when a mammal (usually a human or a pig) catches the H5N1 deadly strain from a bird while already sick with another highly contagious flu strain. If the two strains were to combine, they might produce something new and deadly like the 1918 Spanish flu that killed millions of people.
All human flu viruses are thought to have originated from bird flu viruses. So why is this one such a big deal? There are several reasons this so-called "bird flu" is so popular with the media and governments.
First, our technology is vastly improved, and scientists can track minute genetic changes related to virus mutation. When we did not know those things, we did not worry about them.
Secondly, the highly pathogenic version of H5N1 kills half the people who get sick with it. The theory is that a similar death rate might accompany a mutated human virus derived from it.
There are many horrible diseases in this world. I sometime wonder if fear of them does not do more damage to society than the actual disease.
It has always been wise to stay away from sick (or dead from unknown causes) birds.
In my book, just a little wisdom is worth more than a mountain of information any day of the week.
Larry is the South Dakota Secretary of Agriculture
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