FLE
U.S. Issues National ID Standards, Setting Stage for a Showdown The federal government issued national standards on Friday that states would have to meet in order for driver’s licenses they issue to qualify as identification at airports and federal buildings, setting the stage for a confrontation with states that have voted not to cooperate. Under a measure known as Real ID legislation, the states must comply by May 11, the third anniversary of the measure’s enactment, or obtain a waiver from the Department of Homeland Security. Meeting the May 11 deadline is impossible because the regulations have been delayed so long, but Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, said Friday that his department would issue a waiver to states that promised to comply later. He laid out a very long schedule, with the final deadline in December 2017, more than 16 years after the events that prompted the law, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Several states have voted not to comply. One is Washington, where the chairwoman of the Senate’s transportation committee, when asked what difference the new federal rules would make, said, “None.” In Washington and elsewhere, state lawmakers have complained that the requirements add up to a national identification card, that it is too costly, puts privacy at risk and poses severe technical challenges. The Legislature in Maine overwhelmingly passed a resolution last January vowing not to comply. The Legislature there is in its “short session” and can take up only legislation that all the leadership decides is an emergency, said Peggy Schaffer, chief of staff to the Senate majority leader. Ms. Schaffer predicted that pressure from the airlines might force the federal government to reverse itself. The airlines, in fact, are worried, because travelers with driver’s licenses from states that do not have a waiver would have to use a passport or a military ID, or face additional screening, including a pat-down. “This has the potential to be hugely problematic,” said David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, a trade association of the major carriers. “It appears as if the Department of Homeland Security is placing the burden on the traveling public for a state’s inability to comply.”....
ID Plan Is Broadly Criticized A new Bush administration plan to create national standards for driver's licenses drew heavy criticism yesterday from civil liberties groups, some Republican and Democratic lawmakers, governors, and the travel industry. The critics said the new licenses anticipated under the plan, which is aimed at screening out potential terrorists and uncovering illegal immigrants, could still be forged. They also complained that the program, known as Real ID, would be costly for states to implement, potentially restrict summer travel, and allow private companies access to the personal data of most U.S. citizens. But they also welcomed yesterday's official announcement that states have until May 2011 before they need to begin issuing licenses that meet the department's new guidelines, and until December 2014 to begin replacing current licenses. Drivers over the age of 50 will not have to obtain new licenses until the end of 2017. The deadline extensions give both Congress and future presidents time to reconsider what opponents have depicted as a national identification system that will infringe on privacy rights and leave room for large-scale identity theft....
Justice Dept. Critical Of Appellate Ruling On D.C. Handgun Ban The Bush administration told the Supreme Court last night that, although the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to own firearms, an appeals court used the wrong standards in declaring the D.C. handgun ban unconstitutional. The District's ban may well violate the Second Amendment, U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement said in a brief filed ahead of a court deadline, but the case should be sent back to lower courts for evaluation under a "more flexible standard of review." The federal government, protective of its own gun control measures, took issue with the 2 to 1 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which said because handguns are "arms" under the provisions of the Second Amendment, an outright ban is unconstitutional. "The court's decision could be read to hold that the Second Amendment categorically precludes any ban on a category of 'Arms' that can be traced back to the Founding era," the government argued. "If adopted by this court, such an analysis could cast doubt on the constitutionality of existing federal legislation prohibiting the possession of certain firearms, including machineguns." The administration's call for more judicial review -- a disposition that could continue legal wrangling over the ban until after President Bush leaves office -- was far short of an endorsement of the 1976 gun law. Still, it was more than lawyers for the District had hoped for. Peter Nickles, the District's acting attorney general, called the brief a "somewhat surprising and very favorable development."....Once again the Bushies side with Federal power over individual rights.
District attorneys nationwide ask Supreme Court to keep gun ban Prosecutors from across the country, afraid that an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court ruling could erode state gun laws, on Friday asked the high court to uphold a ban on unlicensed handguns. The district attorneys, from 18 jurisdictions, weighed in on a case in which justices will decide whether the Constitution's Second Amendment can overrule tough Washington, D.C. handgun laws. The prosecutors say a ruling against the ban could impair law enforcement and jeopardize public safety. The prosecutors, led by district attorneys Robert M. Morgenthau of New York County and Kamala D. Harris of San Francisco, say they worry that what applies in Washington might have an impact on their communities. The prosecutors submitted the papers as a friend-of-the-court brief, filed by parties who are not part of the case but who have an interest in its outcome. The district attorneys, who represent a total of more than 25 million people, come from jurisdictions that include New York, San Francisco, Boston, Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, San Diego, Oakland and Atlanta....
San Francisco Gun Ban Ruled Null and Void The California State Court of Appeals announced today their decision to overturn one of the most restrictive gun bans in the country, following a legal battle by attorneys for the National Rifle Association (NRA) and a previous court order against the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. In 2005, NRA sought an injunction against the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to prevent them from enacting one of the nation's most restrictive gun bans. NRA won the injunction, but the City's mayor and Board of Supervisors ignored the court order and approved a set of penalties, including a $1,000 fine and a jail term of between 90 days and six months, for city residents who own firearms for lawful purposes in their own homes. Today's decision came in the form of a 3-0 opinion in favor of the lower court ruling overturning the gun ban....
Federal Court Dismisses Another Lawsuit Against Gun Industry A federal court has once again invoked a 2005 law in dismissing a lawsuit filed against 25 gun manufacturers on behalf of nine "gun crime" victims. The 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act is intended to protect the gun industry from politically motivated lawsuits. The Second Amendment Foundation applauded the unanimous decision by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. "The courts, and the American public, realize that manufacturers, no matter who they are, cannot be blamed for the actions of individuals who misuse their products, whether they are golf clubs, baseball bats, automobiles or firearms," said Second Amendment Foundation Founder Alan Gottlieb said. The lawsuit was filed in January 2000, but according to the opinion written by Associate Judge Michael William Farrell, the 2005 law required the court to dismiss the case. Judge Farrell wrote that Congress, in passing the law, wanted to "prohibit [lawsuits] against manufacturers ... for the harm solely caused by the criminal or unlawful misuse of firearms products ..." Allowing the lawsuit to proceed "would, in our view, frustrate Congress' clear intention."....
Agency will no longer sedate deportees U.S. immigration agents must not sedate deportees without a judge's permission, according to a policy change issued this week. Immigration officials have acknowledged that 56 deportees were given psychotropic drugs during a seven-month period in 2006 and 2007 even though most had no history of mental problems. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit over the practice in June. An internal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo issued Wednesday and obtained Friday by The Associated Press said that effective immediately, agents must get a court order before administering drugs "to facilitate an alien's removal." "There are no exceptions to this policy," said the memo by John Torres, detention and removal director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. To get a sedation order from court, officials must show deportees have a history of physical resistance to being removed or are a danger to themselves....
Feds plan 102 suits to build fence on border The government is readying 102 court cases against landowners in Arizona, California and Texas for blocking efforts to selected sites for a fence along the Mexican border, a Homeland Security Department official said Wednesday. With the lawsuits expected soon, the legal action would mark an escalation in the clash between the government and the property owners. The Bush administration wants to build 370 miles of fencing and 300 miles of vehicle barriers by the end of the year. A number of property owners have granted the government access to their land, but others have refused. The agency sent letters to 135 of them last month, warning they had 30 days to comply. Thirty-three did so. The deadline for many passed on Monday or should expire this week for others. Resistance is most intense in Texas, which accounts for 71 cases; there are 20 in California and 11 in Arizona, said Russ Knocke, a Homeland Security spokesman....
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
Big Brother to control thermostats in homes? Add thermostats to the list of private property the government would like to regulate as the state of California looks to require that residents install remotely monitored temperature controls in their homes next year. The government is seeking to limit rolling blackouts and free up electric and natural gas resources by mandating that every new heating and cooling system include a "non-removable" FM receiver. The thermostat is also capable of controlling other appliances in the house, such as electric water heaters, refrigerators, pool pumps, computers and lights in response to signals from utility companies. The proposal, set to be considered by the commission Jan. 30, requires each thermostat to be equipped with a radio communication device to send "price signals" and automatically adjust temperature up or down 4 degrees for cooling and heating, as California's public and private utility organizations deem necessary. Claudia Chandler, assistant executive director for the California Energy Commission, told WND the new systems would be highly beneficial to residents....
Redford Takes on `Goliath' in Texas to Block Coal-Fired Plants The Sundance Kid is taking on ``Goliath'' to block the building of coal-fired electricity plants in Texas, the most power-hungry state in the U.S. Robert Redford, the actor, movie director and longtime environmentalist, narrates ``Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars,'' a documentary chronicling the efforts of a group of Texas mayors and citizens to block construction of coal-fired plants. The film will have its premiere tonight at a Waco theater hosted by the Redford Center at Sundance Preserve. ``Fighting Goliath,'' which cost $60,000 to make, features the opponents of 11 coal units planned by TXU Corp., now Energy Future Holdings Corp., the largest power producer in Texas. While eight of those generators were scrapped, Energy Future is moving ahead with three, and others including NRG Energy Inc. are planning at least five more. ``We have all our retirement in our land,'' Robert Cervenka, a 77-year-old rancher near Waco who appears in the film, said in an interview. ``I can sell off a piece of it, but I damn sure can't do it with a coal plant next door.''....
The Sonoran Institute: Conserving and Enhancing the Western Landscape With unprecedented population growth throughout the West, both its demographic and economic landscape have witnessed major changes. Committed to promoting community decisions that respect the environment and the people who live here, The Sonoran Institute strives to create a collaborative approach to protecting both the culture and the land of the West. The Sonoran Institute, Northern Rockies Office, founded in 1990, has a staff of 11 people, including land use planners, community organizers, rural development specialists, a landscape ecologist, conservationists, a communications expert and a GIS specialist, all committed to the organization’s mission of inspiring and enabling community decisions and public policies that respect the land and the people of the West. Dennis Glick, director of the Sonoran Institute’s Northern Rockies office, expands on the organization and its efforts. NewWest.Net: Why and how did your organization come into being? SI: The Sonoran Institute was created to fill the niche of a community-based conservation organization working collaboratively with citizens to address the impacts of growth and change in the West. The Institute strives to not only help communities achieve their conservation and development goals, but also to build their capacity to sustain these efforts into the future.....
GF&P preparing plan when wolves return to S.D. The South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department is preparing for wolves to venture into South Dakota. Some have already passed through the state in recent years. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife reported in 2006 that wolves were in Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains, and local officials are expecting them to wander east, at least in small numbers. "We are going to start thinking about wolves in South Dakota because we are quite certain that they are coming, and we need to be prepared to manage them when they do get here," said John Kanta, a regional wildlife manager with the GF&P. Currently the state operates under an August 1994 U.S. Fish and Wildlife contingency plan. "It's more or less to address depredations with wolves," Kanta said. "What we would like to do is put together a full-blown management plan. In other words, 'Do we want to sustain a population of wolves, and if so how are we going to do that? How are we going to respond to the problems that come with wolves considering that we have a number of ranchers out there who are raising sheep, which can certainly be an issue with wolves.'"....
We face a dilemma: too many bison, too little room Keep an eye on the margins of Yellowstone National Park this winter. Yet again, the bison-management system for the sprawling wonderland and its surroundings is setting up for a wholesale slaughter of the wooly creatures. Depending on weather conditions in the park, potential exists for an exodus well into the four-digit range, which will set off a variety of limitation techniques around Gardiner and West Yellowstone. Underlying that likelihood is the fact that the park's bison population is estimated to be about 4,700, down only slightly from the record 4,900 of just two years ago when more than a thousand bison were killed by hunters and wildlife managers. Considering that earlier estimates of the optimum sustainable bison population for the park ran closer to 2,000, we once again find ourselves faced with a quart of bison stuffed into a pint jar of range. And considering that surrounding ranchers fear the possible spread of brucellosis from bison to their cattle, we're also faced with inevitable conflicts of interest....
Grazing permits to be reconsidered The U.S. Forest Service has agreed to reconsider a new grazing management plan for a large swath of public lands along the Nevada-California line after two environmental groups complained about its impact on certain bird species, officials said Thursday. Western Watersheds Project and Forest Guardians in November appealed the grazing plan for the 641 square-mile area near the eastern Sierra that was contained in an environmental impact statement approved by the Forest Service's district ranger in Bridgeport, Calif. The area includes parts of Mineral and Lyon counties in Nevada and Mono County in California. Ed Monnig, supervisor of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, said he agreed to reconsider the plan to ensure it meets standards set by federal courts in recent rulings concerning grazing lawsuits. Monnig said he believes the plan implemented by the district ranger is sound, and took into consideration the impacts of grazing on a variety of environmental resources, including fish and wildlife. "However, we are committed to doing what we need to do to prove our case." Monnig agreed with the groups' argument that the grazing plan didn't adequately consider effects on the yellow warbler, a migratory bird. But the conservation groups maintain that concerns about the bird are only part of the plan's failure....
Forest Service cancels meeting on Bitterroot The Bitterroot National Forest abruptly canceled a public meeting in Stevensville on updating its travel management plan following a crowded and sometimes unruly meeting on the same topic the night before in Darby. People cursed during the Darby meeting, and the U.S. Forest Service is following up on reports that a man suggested someone “put a bullet in her head” as a woman spoke. The Stevensville meeting was scheduled for Thursday night at the Stevensville United Methodist Church. After more than 200 people packed into a meeting room in Darby the night before, the agency decided the proposed Stevensville venue was too small to host the expected crowd. Stevensville District Ranger Dan Ritter said the church couldn't hold many more than 50 people. Many at the Darby meeting indicated they'd be attending all the scheduled public meetings on the travel management plan update. At one point, as a woman spoke about wilderness, a man in the crowd allegedly said, “Put a bullet in her head.” His words were loud enough for a number of people to hear, including a Forest Service official. The Forest Service was able to get the man's name....Also see Heated Forest Use Meeting Results in Investigation Into Threat
Wild and scenic: Utah should start with the Green River In 1968, Congress created the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act to preserve free-flowing waterways that have outstanding scenic, wildlife and cultural values. You might think that in the 40 years since, some of Utah's magnificent rivers, particularly the Green and the Colorado, would have been protected under this special designation. Alas, that is not the case. In fact, no Utah river is protected in this way. However, several federal land management agencies, particularly the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, currently are involved in planning processes that could lead to Congress designating eligible Utah rivers as wild, scenic or recreational under the Act. It is high time, especially for the Green River. Utah counties and the state have looked with some suspicion on Wild and Scenic River designation, worrying that they could lose water rights or other economic values. They have been particularly concerned about intermittent streams. But there should be no arguments about certain sections of the Green. The 30-mile segment below Flaming Gorge Dam in northeast Utah is world-renowned as one of the great scenic trout fisheries in the nation....
Senators Push for Guns in National Parks Nearly half the Senate is pushing the Bush administration to let gun owners carry handguns and other firearms into national parks and wildlife refuges. Forty-seven lawmakers have signed a letter asking Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to lift Reagan-era restrictions that prevent citizens from carrying readily accessible firearms onto lands managed by the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Current regulations, developed in the early 1980s, "infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners who wish to transport and carry firearms on or across these lands," the senators wrote. The policies also differ from those of some other federal agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service. "These inconsistencies in firearms regulations for public lands are confusing, burdensome and unnecessary," said the letter, drafted by Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho. Thirty-nine Republicans and eight Democrats signed the letter, including both senators from 17 states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming....
Support Senate Bill S. 2283, to Reserve the Right to Ride on Public Land Okay trail advocates—here's your opportunity to show support for the new bill that is going through the Senate and will replace the Right to Ride bill. At this time, it has been referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. This bill aims to preserve the use and access of pack and saddle stock animals on public land administered by the National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, or the Forest Service on which there is a historical tradition of the use of pack and saddle stock animals. Sometimes other groups (hiking and biking enthusiasts for instance) who also use the these public lands want to ban the use of horses. This bill will prevent that from happening....
New Mexico Mining Claims Jump 50 Percent Since 2003 In the face of a dramatic increases in new mining claims in New Mexico, state and county officials called on Senators Jeff Bingaman and Pete Domenici, leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, to reform the 135-year-old law that governs the mining of gold, uranium and other hardrock minerals on federal lands in New Mexico and other western states. A comprehensive bipartisan package that would modernize the Civil War era statute was passed by the House of Representatives in November. The Senate will host its first mining reform hearing this month. The need for reform has also been made more urgent by the dramatic increase in new mining claims in western states, including New Mexico. According to Bureau of Land Management data analyzed by the Environmental Working Group, the total number of hardrock mining claims in New Mexico is 50 percent higher in mid-2007 than in 2003. Claims totaled 11,348 in July of 2007....
Conservation Group Files Lawsuit Against Department of Energy Over Southwest Energy Corridor On behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity, the Western Environmental Law Center today filed suit in federal court in the central district of California to challenge the Department of Energy's October 2007 designation of the Southwest National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor - a sweeping, 45-million-acre area that includes seven southern California and three Arizona counties - for failing to analyze the environmental impacts of the corridor. "The Energy Department cannot turn southern California and western Arizona into an energy farm for Los Angeles and San Diego without taking a hard look at the environmental impacts of doing so," said Amy Atwood, staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. "The Southwest Energy Corridor will have far-reaching environmental impacts that must be considered before moving forward." The Department of Energy designated the Southwest Corridor pursuant to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, allowing for "fast-track" approval of utility and power line projects within the corridor, nullifying state and federal environmental laws, and enabling energy companies to condemn private land for new high-voltage transmission lines....
Energy organization to be proposed Japan, the United States and European countries will jointly propose at this year's Group of Eight summit meeting that an international organization be established to study and evaluate the energy-saving measures of countries including China and India. The launch of the organization is part of international efforts to provide emerging large consumers of energy with the advanced energy-saving know-how of developed countries, and to study the effectiveness of such measures. The new organization would be funded by Japan, the United States and European countries, with the International Energy Agency in Paris being considered as a possible location for the new body's headquarters. Discussions on the new confederation will get under way during a preparatory meeting for the energy ministers of the G-8 countries, set to be held on Jan. 22 and 23....
Scientists: Biting Insects May Have Killed Off Dinosaurs Some of the smallest animals on Earth may have been responsible for the extinction of some of the biggest. A new book argues that the demise of the dinosaurs was due not to an asteroid impact, nor massive volcanic eruptions in India, but instead to tiny biting disease-spreading insects and arachnids — mosquitoes, mites, ticks and biting flies. "There are serious problems with the sudden-impact theories of dinosaur extinction, not the least of which is that dinosaurs declined and disappeared over a period of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years," entomologist George O. Poinar, Jr., said in a press release from Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore., last week. Poinar's new book, "What Bugged the Dinosaurs?: Insects, Disease, and Death in the Cretaceous," co-written with his wife Roberta Poinar, explains how DNA from leishmania, a single-celled organism that causes a debilitating disease in humans and other vertebrates, was found in the gut of a biting insect trapped in amber from the Late Cretaceous. "In another biting insect, we discovered organisms that cause malaria, a type that infects birds and lizards today," Poinar explained, adding that dinosaur feces also showed evidence of infection by parasitic worms and single-celled organisms....
Homeland Security defers new chemical rules for farmers The federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has reconsidered and deferred immediate application of new reporting rules for farms storing certain amounts of anhydrous ammonia or propane. “It appears that until further notice, the department is extending the deadline for farms to submit required reports,” said Nancy Erickson, Illinois Farm Bureau natural and environmental resources director. Previously, farmers had until mid-January to comply with new rules if their farms had 60,000 pounds or more of propane and 10,000 pounds or more of anhydrous ammonia stored on the premises. Farmers who had to comply based on the quantity of chemicals at a minimum had to submit an online questionnaire with information about their operation to DHS. However, DHS has not exempted farmers, ranchers, and agricultural end-users from the requirement, according to Rebeckah Adcock, congressional relations director with the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF)....
Strikeout king Ryan now does pitching for beef industry Nolan Ryan has played the role of ambassador many times before. He is baseball's strikeouts and longevity king, a down-home icon of a sport rooted in Americana. But baseball, as Ryan readily will attest, has been one of the two great passions in his amazing life. Cattle ranching and helping the U.S. beef industry thrive have been as much a part of Ryan's life as blazing fastballs and knee-bending curveballs. So when Ryan - who, among his many business interests, has overseen the rise of Nolan Ryan's Guaranteed Tender in the 14 years since his retirement from baseball - has been asked to make a pitch on behalf of the beef industry, he usually takes the ball. Last summer, that role as an ambassador for U.S. cattlemen took Ryan to Japan, where he helped make an appeal for that country to loosen the restrictions it imposed on imported beef after Mad Cow disease made international headlines in 2003. On Tuesday, that role as ambassador will bring Ryan to Denver, where he will serve as the grand marshal for the National Western Stock Show Parade....
Helicopters As Well As Horses Carried Borden County Cowboy In his 67 years, Frank Menix has punched cows across Texas as well as several other states, though he went about it in a different sort of way. He used a horse for many years, but in the late Seventies decided gathering from a helicopter was the way to go. Menix grew up in Gaines County, where his father was a farmer. His mother died when he was 10 years old, and there wasn’t enough work for him and all his brothers, though he says he wasn’t interested in farming anyway. He went to work for wages for his uncle when he was 10 and stayed for two years. He left there and went to work for the Spade Ranch on their leased Indian Canyon Ranch. During his time there, Menix met some of the oldtime Spade hands like Pink Russell and Otto Jones. Russell, though in his mid-eighties, would come to the chuckwagon and tell stories to young Menix and others. Russell told Menix of the time they were trailing pairs from Renderbrook to Colorado City to weigh and ship the calves. W.L. Elwood, the Spade owner, drove up and said to Russell, “Pink, hold these old cows up. A quart of milk doesn’t weigh much, but 500 does.”....
Redford Takes on `Goliath' in Texas to Block Coal-Fired Plants The Sundance Kid is taking on ``Goliath'' to block the building of coal-fired electricity plants in Texas, the most power-hungry state in the U.S. Robert Redford, the actor, movie director and longtime environmentalist, narrates ``Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars,'' a documentary chronicling the efforts of a group of Texas mayors and citizens to block construction of coal-fired plants. The film will have its premiere tonight at a Waco theater hosted by the Redford Center at Sundance Preserve. ``Fighting Goliath,'' which cost $60,000 to make, features the opponents of 11 coal units planned by TXU Corp., now Energy Future Holdings Corp., the largest power producer in Texas. While eight of those generators were scrapped, Energy Future is moving ahead with three, and others including NRG Energy Inc. are planning at least five more. ``We have all our retirement in our land,'' Robert Cervenka, a 77-year-old rancher near Waco who appears in the film, said in an interview. ``I can sell off a piece of it, but I damn sure can't do it with a coal plant next door.''....
The Sonoran Institute: Conserving and Enhancing the Western Landscape With unprecedented population growth throughout the West, both its demographic and economic landscape have witnessed major changes. Committed to promoting community decisions that respect the environment and the people who live here, The Sonoran Institute strives to create a collaborative approach to protecting both the culture and the land of the West. The Sonoran Institute, Northern Rockies Office, founded in 1990, has a staff of 11 people, including land use planners, community organizers, rural development specialists, a landscape ecologist, conservationists, a communications expert and a GIS specialist, all committed to the organization’s mission of inspiring and enabling community decisions and public policies that respect the land and the people of the West. Dennis Glick, director of the Sonoran Institute’s Northern Rockies office, expands on the organization and its efforts. NewWest.Net: Why and how did your organization come into being? SI: The Sonoran Institute was created to fill the niche of a community-based conservation organization working collaboratively with citizens to address the impacts of growth and change in the West. The Institute strives to not only help communities achieve their conservation and development goals, but also to build their capacity to sustain these efforts into the future.....
GF&P preparing plan when wolves return to S.D. The South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department is preparing for wolves to venture into South Dakota. Some have already passed through the state in recent years. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife reported in 2006 that wolves were in Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains, and local officials are expecting them to wander east, at least in small numbers. "We are going to start thinking about wolves in South Dakota because we are quite certain that they are coming, and we need to be prepared to manage them when they do get here," said John Kanta, a regional wildlife manager with the GF&P. Currently the state operates under an August 1994 U.S. Fish and Wildlife contingency plan. "It's more or less to address depredations with wolves," Kanta said. "What we would like to do is put together a full-blown management plan. In other words, 'Do we want to sustain a population of wolves, and if so how are we going to do that? How are we going to respond to the problems that come with wolves considering that we have a number of ranchers out there who are raising sheep, which can certainly be an issue with wolves.'"....
We face a dilemma: too many bison, too little room Keep an eye on the margins of Yellowstone National Park this winter. Yet again, the bison-management system for the sprawling wonderland and its surroundings is setting up for a wholesale slaughter of the wooly creatures. Depending on weather conditions in the park, potential exists for an exodus well into the four-digit range, which will set off a variety of limitation techniques around Gardiner and West Yellowstone. Underlying that likelihood is the fact that the park's bison population is estimated to be about 4,700, down only slightly from the record 4,900 of just two years ago when more than a thousand bison were killed by hunters and wildlife managers. Considering that earlier estimates of the optimum sustainable bison population for the park ran closer to 2,000, we once again find ourselves faced with a quart of bison stuffed into a pint jar of range. And considering that surrounding ranchers fear the possible spread of brucellosis from bison to their cattle, we're also faced with inevitable conflicts of interest....
Grazing permits to be reconsidered The U.S. Forest Service has agreed to reconsider a new grazing management plan for a large swath of public lands along the Nevada-California line after two environmental groups complained about its impact on certain bird species, officials said Thursday. Western Watersheds Project and Forest Guardians in November appealed the grazing plan for the 641 square-mile area near the eastern Sierra that was contained in an environmental impact statement approved by the Forest Service's district ranger in Bridgeport, Calif. The area includes parts of Mineral and Lyon counties in Nevada and Mono County in California. Ed Monnig, supervisor of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, said he agreed to reconsider the plan to ensure it meets standards set by federal courts in recent rulings concerning grazing lawsuits. Monnig said he believes the plan implemented by the district ranger is sound, and took into consideration the impacts of grazing on a variety of environmental resources, including fish and wildlife. "However, we are committed to doing what we need to do to prove our case." Monnig agreed with the groups' argument that the grazing plan didn't adequately consider effects on the yellow warbler, a migratory bird. But the conservation groups maintain that concerns about the bird are only part of the plan's failure....
Forest Service cancels meeting on Bitterroot The Bitterroot National Forest abruptly canceled a public meeting in Stevensville on updating its travel management plan following a crowded and sometimes unruly meeting on the same topic the night before in Darby. People cursed during the Darby meeting, and the U.S. Forest Service is following up on reports that a man suggested someone “put a bullet in her head” as a woman spoke. The Stevensville meeting was scheduled for Thursday night at the Stevensville United Methodist Church. After more than 200 people packed into a meeting room in Darby the night before, the agency decided the proposed Stevensville venue was too small to host the expected crowd. Stevensville District Ranger Dan Ritter said the church couldn't hold many more than 50 people. Many at the Darby meeting indicated they'd be attending all the scheduled public meetings on the travel management plan update. At one point, as a woman spoke about wilderness, a man in the crowd allegedly said, “Put a bullet in her head.” His words were loud enough for a number of people to hear, including a Forest Service official. The Forest Service was able to get the man's name....Also see Heated Forest Use Meeting Results in Investigation Into Threat
Wild and scenic: Utah should start with the Green River In 1968, Congress created the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act to preserve free-flowing waterways that have outstanding scenic, wildlife and cultural values. You might think that in the 40 years since, some of Utah's magnificent rivers, particularly the Green and the Colorado, would have been protected under this special designation. Alas, that is not the case. In fact, no Utah river is protected in this way. However, several federal land management agencies, particularly the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, currently are involved in planning processes that could lead to Congress designating eligible Utah rivers as wild, scenic or recreational under the Act. It is high time, especially for the Green River. Utah counties and the state have looked with some suspicion on Wild and Scenic River designation, worrying that they could lose water rights or other economic values. They have been particularly concerned about intermittent streams. But there should be no arguments about certain sections of the Green. The 30-mile segment below Flaming Gorge Dam in northeast Utah is world-renowned as one of the great scenic trout fisheries in the nation....
Senators Push for Guns in National Parks Nearly half the Senate is pushing the Bush administration to let gun owners carry handguns and other firearms into national parks and wildlife refuges. Forty-seven lawmakers have signed a letter asking Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to lift Reagan-era restrictions that prevent citizens from carrying readily accessible firearms onto lands managed by the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Current regulations, developed in the early 1980s, "infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners who wish to transport and carry firearms on or across these lands," the senators wrote. The policies also differ from those of some other federal agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service. "These inconsistencies in firearms regulations for public lands are confusing, burdensome and unnecessary," said the letter, drafted by Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho. Thirty-nine Republicans and eight Democrats signed the letter, including both senators from 17 states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming....
Support Senate Bill S. 2283, to Reserve the Right to Ride on Public Land Okay trail advocates—here's your opportunity to show support for the new bill that is going through the Senate and will replace the Right to Ride bill. At this time, it has been referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. This bill aims to preserve the use and access of pack and saddle stock animals on public land administered by the National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, or the Forest Service on which there is a historical tradition of the use of pack and saddle stock animals. Sometimes other groups (hiking and biking enthusiasts for instance) who also use the these public lands want to ban the use of horses. This bill will prevent that from happening....
New Mexico Mining Claims Jump 50 Percent Since 2003 In the face of a dramatic increases in new mining claims in New Mexico, state and county officials called on Senators Jeff Bingaman and Pete Domenici, leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, to reform the 135-year-old law that governs the mining of gold, uranium and other hardrock minerals on federal lands in New Mexico and other western states. A comprehensive bipartisan package that would modernize the Civil War era statute was passed by the House of Representatives in November. The Senate will host its first mining reform hearing this month. The need for reform has also been made more urgent by the dramatic increase in new mining claims in western states, including New Mexico. According to Bureau of Land Management data analyzed by the Environmental Working Group, the total number of hardrock mining claims in New Mexico is 50 percent higher in mid-2007 than in 2003. Claims totaled 11,348 in July of 2007....
Conservation Group Files Lawsuit Against Department of Energy Over Southwest Energy Corridor On behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity, the Western Environmental Law Center today filed suit in federal court in the central district of California to challenge the Department of Energy's October 2007 designation of the Southwest National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor - a sweeping, 45-million-acre area that includes seven southern California and three Arizona counties - for failing to analyze the environmental impacts of the corridor. "The Energy Department cannot turn southern California and western Arizona into an energy farm for Los Angeles and San Diego without taking a hard look at the environmental impacts of doing so," said Amy Atwood, staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. "The Southwest Energy Corridor will have far-reaching environmental impacts that must be considered before moving forward." The Department of Energy designated the Southwest Corridor pursuant to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, allowing for "fast-track" approval of utility and power line projects within the corridor, nullifying state and federal environmental laws, and enabling energy companies to condemn private land for new high-voltage transmission lines....
Energy organization to be proposed Japan, the United States and European countries will jointly propose at this year's Group of Eight summit meeting that an international organization be established to study and evaluate the energy-saving measures of countries including China and India. The launch of the organization is part of international efforts to provide emerging large consumers of energy with the advanced energy-saving know-how of developed countries, and to study the effectiveness of such measures. The new organization would be funded by Japan, the United States and European countries, with the International Energy Agency in Paris being considered as a possible location for the new body's headquarters. Discussions on the new confederation will get under way during a preparatory meeting for the energy ministers of the G-8 countries, set to be held on Jan. 22 and 23....
Scientists: Biting Insects May Have Killed Off Dinosaurs Some of the smallest animals on Earth may have been responsible for the extinction of some of the biggest. A new book argues that the demise of the dinosaurs was due not to an asteroid impact, nor massive volcanic eruptions in India, but instead to tiny biting disease-spreading insects and arachnids — mosquitoes, mites, ticks and biting flies. "There are serious problems with the sudden-impact theories of dinosaur extinction, not the least of which is that dinosaurs declined and disappeared over a period of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years," entomologist George O. Poinar, Jr., said in a press release from Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore., last week. Poinar's new book, "What Bugged the Dinosaurs?: Insects, Disease, and Death in the Cretaceous," co-written with his wife Roberta Poinar, explains how DNA from leishmania, a single-celled organism that causes a debilitating disease in humans and other vertebrates, was found in the gut of a biting insect trapped in amber from the Late Cretaceous. "In another biting insect, we discovered organisms that cause malaria, a type that infects birds and lizards today," Poinar explained, adding that dinosaur feces also showed evidence of infection by parasitic worms and single-celled organisms....
Homeland Security defers new chemical rules for farmers The federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has reconsidered and deferred immediate application of new reporting rules for farms storing certain amounts of anhydrous ammonia or propane. “It appears that until further notice, the department is extending the deadline for farms to submit required reports,” said Nancy Erickson, Illinois Farm Bureau natural and environmental resources director. Previously, farmers had until mid-January to comply with new rules if their farms had 60,000 pounds or more of propane and 10,000 pounds or more of anhydrous ammonia stored on the premises. Farmers who had to comply based on the quantity of chemicals at a minimum had to submit an online questionnaire with information about their operation to DHS. However, DHS has not exempted farmers, ranchers, and agricultural end-users from the requirement, according to Rebeckah Adcock, congressional relations director with the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF)....
Strikeout king Ryan now does pitching for beef industry Nolan Ryan has played the role of ambassador many times before. He is baseball's strikeouts and longevity king, a down-home icon of a sport rooted in Americana. But baseball, as Ryan readily will attest, has been one of the two great passions in his amazing life. Cattle ranching and helping the U.S. beef industry thrive have been as much a part of Ryan's life as blazing fastballs and knee-bending curveballs. So when Ryan - who, among his many business interests, has overseen the rise of Nolan Ryan's Guaranteed Tender in the 14 years since his retirement from baseball - has been asked to make a pitch on behalf of the beef industry, he usually takes the ball. Last summer, that role as an ambassador for U.S. cattlemen took Ryan to Japan, where he helped make an appeal for that country to loosen the restrictions it imposed on imported beef after Mad Cow disease made international headlines in 2003. On Tuesday, that role as ambassador will bring Ryan to Denver, where he will serve as the grand marshal for the National Western Stock Show Parade....
Helicopters As Well As Horses Carried Borden County Cowboy In his 67 years, Frank Menix has punched cows across Texas as well as several other states, though he went about it in a different sort of way. He used a horse for many years, but in the late Seventies decided gathering from a helicopter was the way to go. Menix grew up in Gaines County, where his father was a farmer. His mother died when he was 10 years old, and there wasn’t enough work for him and all his brothers, though he says he wasn’t interested in farming anyway. He went to work for wages for his uncle when he was 10 and stayed for two years. He left there and went to work for the Spade Ranch on their leased Indian Canyon Ranch. During his time there, Menix met some of the oldtime Spade hands like Pink Russell and Otto Jones. Russell, though in his mid-eighties, would come to the chuckwagon and tell stories to young Menix and others. Russell told Menix of the time they were trailing pairs from Renderbrook to Colorado City to weigh and ship the calves. W.L. Elwood, the Spade owner, drove up and said to Russell, “Pink, hold these old cows up. A quart of milk doesn’t weigh much, but 500 does.”....
NAIS - PREMISES REGISTRATION
Go here for the latest statistics on premises registration by state. Conneticut has the lowest percentage of registrations at 0.7%, the national average is 30.6% and New Mexico is 10.4%.
Go here for the latest statistics on premises registration by state. Conneticut has the lowest percentage of registrations at 0.7%, the national average is 30.6% and New Mexico is 10.4%.
Federal Department of Light Bulbs & Toilets How many congressmen does it take to change a light bulb? 400. That’s how many members of Congress recently voted for a bill to force Americans to change the 50-cent incandescent light bulbs they’re currently using and replace them with expensive new, $3 “energy-efficient” light bulbs. As Shane Cory of the Libertarian Party sarcastically put it, "If you outlaw light bulbs, then only outlaws will have light bulbs.” The ban, which takes effect in 2014, was included in the 2007 energy bill which 314 members of the United States House of Representatives and 86 members of the United States Senate voted for. Nevada Sen. Harry Reid said he thought the light bulb ban was an appropriate exercise of federal power. Interesting company Reid’s keeping. Because when the bill was originally introduced by California Rep. Jane Harman last March, CNS News reported that two other countries had already taken similar steps to eradicate inexpensive incandescent light bulbs from the planet: Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Unfortunately, this is nothing new for Congress. The light bulb ban is simply the latest example of an increasingly intrusive federal government butting into the day-to-day affairs of the average citizen. Remember the 1992 energy bill, in which Congress banned the 3.5 gallon toilet? It mandated that that Americans no longer use more than 1.6 gallons per flush. Of course, per the immutable Law of Unintended Consequences, the new 1.6 gallon toilets turned out not to be enough to, er, get the job done. So folks found themselves flushing two and three times per visit, thus using the same amount of water, if not more, than they did before Congress stuck its nose into our bathrooms. And make no mistake. Congress has no intention of stopping here. Still under active consideration is a new federal ban on top-loading washing machines, as well as a federal ban on disposable diapers. Seems some of our elected officials won’t be satisfied until we’re again washing out our cloth diapers on rocks by a stream in the pitch dark....
Thursday, January 10, 2008
FLE
Mexican soldiers found invading United States A federal document obtained and released by Judicial Watch reveals that there were dozens of armed incursions by Mexican soldiers and police into the United States during Fiscal Year 2007. The report was obtained by the Washington-based organization that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and it documents 29 confirmed incidents along the U.S.-Mexican border involving Mexican military and/or law enforcement personnel during that time. "These documents not only show the dangerous and chaotic situation at the Mexican border, but also the complicity of some Mexican government agents in violating U.S. law," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "The U.S. government must begin to take these incidents more seriously, publicize them and take measures to bring the crisis at our border under control," he said. The report documents incidents such as the one at the Fort Hancock Station in El Paso. "[Troopers] attempted to apprehend three vehicles believed to be smuggling contraband on I-10 … As the vehicles approached the border, [troopers] stated that a Mexican Military Humvee armed with a .50 caliber weapon and several soldiers were seen assisting smugglers return to Mexico … Officers then noticed several armed subjects dressed in fatigue type clothing unload the contraband into the Humvee. These subjects set fire to the stalled vehicle before leaving the area." Judicial Watch noted that of the 29 documented instances, 17 involved armed Mexican government agents....
FBI Wiretaps Are Cut Over Unpaid Bills Telecommunications companies have repeatedly cut off FBI access to wiretaps of alleged terrorists and criminal suspects because the bureau did not pay its phone bills, according to the results of an audit released yesterday. The report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said that more than half of nearly 1,000 FBI telecommunications bills reviewed by investigators were not paid on time, including one invoice for $66,000 at an unidentified field office. The report cited a case in which an order obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- which covers clandestine wiretaps of terrorism and espionage suspects -- was halted because of "untimely payment." "Late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence," Fine said in a seven-page summary of the audit's findings. The audit is the latest in a string of reports from Fine's office over the past seven years to detail chronic financial and inventory management problems at the bureau, including a persistent failure to account for hundreds of guns and laptop computers....
Ashcroft Deal Brings Scrutiny in Justice Dept. When the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey needed to find an outside lawyer to monitor a large corporation willing to settle criminal charges out of court last fall, he turned to former Attorney General John Ashcroft, his onetime boss. With no public notice and no bidding, the company awarded Mr. Ashcroft an 18-month contract worth $28 million to $52 million. That contract, which Justice Department officials in Washington learned about only several weeks ago, has prompted an internal inquiry into the department’s procedures for selecting outside monitors to police settlements with large companies. The contract between Mr. Ashcroft’s consulting firm, the Ashcroft Group, and Zimmer Holdings, a medical supply company in Indiana, has also drawn the attention of Congressional investigators. The New Jersey prosecutor, United States Attorney Christopher J. Christie, directed similar monitoring contracts last year to two other former Justice Department colleagues from the Bush administration, as well as to a former Republican state attorney general in New Jersey....
Inside the Martial Law Act of 2006 Martial law is perhaps the ultimate stomping of freedom. And yet, on September 30, 2006, Congress passed a provision in a 591-page bill that will make it easy for President Bush to impose martial law in response to a terrorist "incident." It also empowers him to effectively declare martial law in response to what he or other federal officials label a shortfall of "public order" -- whatever that means. It took only a few paragraphs in a $500 billion, 591-page bill to raze one of the most important limits on federal power. Congress passed the Insurrection Act in 1807 to severely restrict the president's ability to deploy the military within the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened those restrictions, imposing a two-year prison sentence on anyone who used the military within the United States without the express permission of Congress. (This act was passed after the depredations of the U.S. military throughout the Southern states during Reconstruction.) But there is a loophole: Posse Comitatus is waived if the president invokes the Insurrection Act. The Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act aim to deter dictatorship while permitting a narrow window for the president to temporarily use the military at home. But the 2006 reforms basically threw any concern about dictatorial abuses out the window. Section 1076 of the Defense Authorization Act of 2006 changed the name of the key provision in the statute book from "Insurrection Act" to "Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act." The Insurrection Act of 1807 stated that the president could deploy troops within the United States only "to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy." The new law expands the list of pretexts to include "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition" -- and such a "condition" is not defined or limited....
Michigan sees fewer gun deaths -- with more permits Six years after new rules made it much easier to get a license to carry concealed weapons, the number of Michiganders legally packing heat has increased more than six-fold. But dire predictions about increased violence and bloodshed have largely gone unfulfilled, according to law enforcement officials and, to the extent they can be measured, crime statistics. The incidence of violent crime in Michigan in the six years since the law went into effect has been, on average, below the rate of the previous six years. The overall incidence of death from firearms, including suicide and accidents, also has declined. More than 155,000 Michiganders -- about one in every 65 -- are now authorized to carry loaded guns as they go about their everyday affairs, according to Michigan State Police records. About 25,000 people had CCW permits in Michigan before the law changed in 2001. John Lott, a visiting professor at the University of Maryland who has done extensive research on the role of firearms in American society, said the results in Michigan since the law changed don't surprise him. Academic studies of concealed weapons laws that generally allow citizens to obtain permits have shown different results, Lott said. About two-thirds of the studies suggest the laws reduce crime; the rest show no net effect, he said. But no peer-reviewed study has ever shown that crime increases when jurisdictions enact changes like those put in place by the Legislature and then-Gov. John Engler in 2000, Lott said....
Mexican soldiers found invading United States A federal document obtained and released by Judicial Watch reveals that there were dozens of armed incursions by Mexican soldiers and police into the United States during Fiscal Year 2007. The report was obtained by the Washington-based organization that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and it documents 29 confirmed incidents along the U.S.-Mexican border involving Mexican military and/or law enforcement personnel during that time. "These documents not only show the dangerous and chaotic situation at the Mexican border, but also the complicity of some Mexican government agents in violating U.S. law," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "The U.S. government must begin to take these incidents more seriously, publicize them and take measures to bring the crisis at our border under control," he said. The report documents incidents such as the one at the Fort Hancock Station in El Paso. "[Troopers] attempted to apprehend three vehicles believed to be smuggling contraband on I-10 … As the vehicles approached the border, [troopers] stated that a Mexican Military Humvee armed with a .50 caliber weapon and several soldiers were seen assisting smugglers return to Mexico … Officers then noticed several armed subjects dressed in fatigue type clothing unload the contraband into the Humvee. These subjects set fire to the stalled vehicle before leaving the area." Judicial Watch noted that of the 29 documented instances, 17 involved armed Mexican government agents....
FBI Wiretaps Are Cut Over Unpaid Bills Telecommunications companies have repeatedly cut off FBI access to wiretaps of alleged terrorists and criminal suspects because the bureau did not pay its phone bills, according to the results of an audit released yesterday. The report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said that more than half of nearly 1,000 FBI telecommunications bills reviewed by investigators were not paid on time, including one invoice for $66,000 at an unidentified field office. The report cited a case in which an order obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- which covers clandestine wiretaps of terrorism and espionage suspects -- was halted because of "untimely payment." "Late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence," Fine said in a seven-page summary of the audit's findings. The audit is the latest in a string of reports from Fine's office over the past seven years to detail chronic financial and inventory management problems at the bureau, including a persistent failure to account for hundreds of guns and laptop computers....
Ashcroft Deal Brings Scrutiny in Justice Dept. When the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey needed to find an outside lawyer to monitor a large corporation willing to settle criminal charges out of court last fall, he turned to former Attorney General John Ashcroft, his onetime boss. With no public notice and no bidding, the company awarded Mr. Ashcroft an 18-month contract worth $28 million to $52 million. That contract, which Justice Department officials in Washington learned about only several weeks ago, has prompted an internal inquiry into the department’s procedures for selecting outside monitors to police settlements with large companies. The contract between Mr. Ashcroft’s consulting firm, the Ashcroft Group, and Zimmer Holdings, a medical supply company in Indiana, has also drawn the attention of Congressional investigators. The New Jersey prosecutor, United States Attorney Christopher J. Christie, directed similar monitoring contracts last year to two other former Justice Department colleagues from the Bush administration, as well as to a former Republican state attorney general in New Jersey....
Inside the Martial Law Act of 2006 Martial law is perhaps the ultimate stomping of freedom. And yet, on September 30, 2006, Congress passed a provision in a 591-page bill that will make it easy for President Bush to impose martial law in response to a terrorist "incident." It also empowers him to effectively declare martial law in response to what he or other federal officials label a shortfall of "public order" -- whatever that means. It took only a few paragraphs in a $500 billion, 591-page bill to raze one of the most important limits on federal power. Congress passed the Insurrection Act in 1807 to severely restrict the president's ability to deploy the military within the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened those restrictions, imposing a two-year prison sentence on anyone who used the military within the United States without the express permission of Congress. (This act was passed after the depredations of the U.S. military throughout the Southern states during Reconstruction.) But there is a loophole: Posse Comitatus is waived if the president invokes the Insurrection Act. The Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act aim to deter dictatorship while permitting a narrow window for the president to temporarily use the military at home. But the 2006 reforms basically threw any concern about dictatorial abuses out the window. Section 1076 of the Defense Authorization Act of 2006 changed the name of the key provision in the statute book from "Insurrection Act" to "Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act." The Insurrection Act of 1807 stated that the president could deploy troops within the United States only "to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy." The new law expands the list of pretexts to include "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition" -- and such a "condition" is not defined or limited....
Michigan sees fewer gun deaths -- with more permits Six years after new rules made it much easier to get a license to carry concealed weapons, the number of Michiganders legally packing heat has increased more than six-fold. But dire predictions about increased violence and bloodshed have largely gone unfulfilled, according to law enforcement officials and, to the extent they can be measured, crime statistics. The incidence of violent crime in Michigan in the six years since the law went into effect has been, on average, below the rate of the previous six years. The overall incidence of death from firearms, including suicide and accidents, also has declined. More than 155,000 Michiganders -- about one in every 65 -- are now authorized to carry loaded guns as they go about their everyday affairs, according to Michigan State Police records. About 25,000 people had CCW permits in Michigan before the law changed in 2001. John Lott, a visiting professor at the University of Maryland who has done extensive research on the role of firearms in American society, said the results in Michigan since the law changed don't surprise him. Academic studies of concealed weapons laws that generally allow citizens to obtain permits have shown different results, Lott said. About two-thirds of the studies suggest the laws reduce crime; the rest show no net effect, he said. But no peer-reviewed study has ever shown that crime increases when jurisdictions enact changes like those put in place by the Legislature and then-Gov. John Engler in 2000, Lott said....
Candy Magnate Loses Bid to Bar Drilling on Ranch A state judge has ruled that an energy company has the right to explore and drill for natural gas on a sprawling cattle ranch owned by the billionaire candy magnate Forrest E. Mars Jr., despite his opposition. The company, Pinnacle Gas Resources, began drilling 90 minutes after the judge issued his ruling Tuesday, because its leases were set to expire this week if Pinnacle did not act. “The company expects to learn a lot by drilling this first well,” said Chris Mangen, a lawyer who represented Pinnacle. “I expect they hope to find lots of gas.” Lonnie Wright, the son-in-law of Forrest Mars and the manager of the 82,000-acre Diamond Cross ranch, said he had no choice but to let the company in. “I don’t contemplate any other action,” Mr. Wright said. “I got lots I could add but nothing that would help the situation.” On Monday, ranch officials prevented Pinnacle workers from entering the property, telling them they would be in a “breach of the peace” if they tried to do so. The conflict is the latest skirmish in a long war between ranchers and energy companies over a natural gas known as coal-bed methane. Technology created in the 1990s allowed producers to cheaply tap natural gas that occurs near the surface in underground coal deposits. That prompted a boom in the West, especially in Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming. The technology has also generated controversy in cattle country because of something called split estate. The Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 gave land to ranchers, but reserved the mineral rights underneath for the federal government, which leased it to energy companies. There are about 60 million acres of split-estate land in the West....
Livestock Lobby Pressures to Retain Wildlife Poisons As a public comment deadline looms, the livestock industry is ramping up to fight growing calls to ban two of the most deadly poisons used to kill wild mammals, according to documents released today by Sinapu and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The two poisons are sodium cyanide (used in M-44 ejectors) and sodium fluoroacetate, commonly called Compound 1080, used in “livestock protection collars” strapped onto the heads of sheep and goats. The poisons are distributed by Wildlife Services of the U.S. Department of Agriculture which used these two agents during 2006 to “dispatch” an average of 1.6 animals every hour. The poisons are part of a $100 million Wildlife Services’ program that killed more than 1.6 million animals during 2006. Last week, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) also introduced legislation outlawing production and use of the two agents, which EPA classifies as having the highest degree of “acute toxicity.” The basis for the proposed bans is growing reports of accidental poisonings of pets and “non-target” wildlife, including endangered species, and environmental damage. Nonetheless, the ranching lobby has opened a vigorous double-barreled campaign to block the poison bans. For example, nearly a month before Rep. DeFazio introduced his bill, the industry recruited Rep. John Salazar (D-CO) to circulate a letter discouraging co-authors....
Injured horse in Arizona confirmed as having been attacked by wolves A horse in Nutrioso, Ariz., was allegedly attacked by wolves Sunday. Jess Carey, Catron County wolf investigator, gave the first report, saying that seven chunks had been bitten out of a horse belonging to Cindy Sessions. Sessions said she called Wildlife Services to report the attack and a representative investigated. She said he told her that the size of the bite marks indicated that they were caused by a wolf or wolves.
Chris Carrillo, district supervisor of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services and Animal and Plant Services, confirmed that “based on the evidence at the scene, the attack was consistent with a wolf attack.' Session said that during the winter she and her family throw feed out to the horses in a 37-acre pasture adjacent to the house. She said they went out about 7:30 or 8 Sunday morning, and four of their five horses came up to the fence. When the fifth one, Captain, didn’t move, they went to check on him. “His right front leg from the low shoulder down, and both rear legs from the knee down were covered in blood, and, although he was standing up, he was unresponsive,' Sessions said....
Wyden calls for thinning Sen. Ron Wyden has announced that he is working on legislation to overcome gridlock in national forest logging projects designed to reduce wildfires. Wyden, who plans to introduce a bill next month, identified two key issues to break the thinning gridlock: the U.S. Forest Service lacks the funding it needs to do major thinning projects, and too many projects that log large trees to pay for thinning are being delayed by appeals and lawsuits. He noted that less than 100,000 acres of forest have been thinned since the 2003 Healthy Forest Restoration Act appropriated $760 million to reduce hazardous fuel buildup on 20 million acres of national forests. According to Wyden, he was heavily influenced by the testimonies of K. Norman Johnson and Jerry F. Franklin at a recent subcommittee meeting to make a legislative change. ...in their Dec. 13 testimony Johnson and Franklin stated, “We will lose these forests to catastrophic disturbance events unless we undertake aggressive active management programs.” They called for a focus on "forest restoration" and active management in the national forests of Oregon and Washington with an emphasis on reducing stand densities that can contribute to catastrophic wildfires and Western pine beetle infestations in old-growth stands. “To conserve these forests, we need to modify stand structure (e.g., treat fuels) on one-half to two-thirds of the landscape,” they testified....
Environmentalists Score Victory The Bush administration has dropped its appeal of a 2007 court decision that had overturned new management rules for 191 million acres of national forests. Opponents to the rules had argued they weakened protection for wildlife and the environment to the benefit of the timber industry. The Justice Department notified the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this week that it was withdrawing its appeal, saying that the other parties, including the timber industry, would do likewise. "We are glad the Bush administration has thrown in the towel," said Trent Orr, an attorney for Earthjustice, one of the environmental advocacy groups that had challenged the new forest management rules in court. The court papers, filed Monday, were made available to reporters Tuesday by Earthjustice and the Western Environmental Law Center, both of which were involved in the case. Last March, a federal district court in California found that the U.S. Forest Service had bypassed required environmental reviews and provisions under the Endangered Species Act in its overhaul of the management rules, including changes in logging limits, for its national forests....
Enviros Object To Gas Line In Roadless Area An environmental group says it will sue to block construction of a natural gas pipeline through roadless forest land in western Colorado. The 25.5-mile Bull Mountain pipeline is planned south of Silt on the White River and Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison national forests. The U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management gave final approval Monday to the project to be used by Gunnison Energy and SG Interests in northern Gunnison County. The pipeline will run through three roadless areas: two in the White River forest and one in the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison forest. Sloan Shoemaker of the Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop said the pipeline would violate a 2001 federal ban on development of roadless national forest land. BLM spokesman David Boyd said no roads will be built and the new pipeline will parallel an existing pipeline. Federal officials explored building the line around the roadless areas but concluded that would have greater environmental impacts because the route would be longer and go through riparian areas, Boyd said....
Shooting one owl to save another Biologists grappled Tuesday with the realities of shooting barred owls that invade the older forest habitat of federally protected northern spotted owls, a strategy critics say the Bush administration employs to help spotted owls while also trimming away at their preserves in an effort to open up logging. A scientist who experimented with barred owl control in Northern California said it proved relatively easy, at least in limited areas of accessible forests, and removing some adult barred owls before nesting season could control the broader population and open a window for spotted owls to come back. The cost would be relatively minor, Lowell Diller, a biologist with Green Diamond Resource Co. in Northern California, told researchers meeting Tuesday in Portland. He cautioned he wasn't trying to make light of it, but said, "This is almost like a redneck sport -- you do it from the tail of your pickup." The researchers are reviewing the scientific basis for a spotted owl recovery plan drafted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The plan is the Bush administration's attempt to lay out a blueprint for the resurrection of the spotted owl, which suffered from intensive logging in past decades and is now being shouldered out of forests by the barred owl....
Rabbit review It should take about a year for the federal government to decide whether the pygmy rabbit receives protection under the Endangered Species Act. In the meantime, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department will conduct and share research with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to assist in making a decision, a Game and Fish spokesman said Tuesday. “The Wyoming Game and Fish Department is conducting monitoring and research to learn more about this species,” Eric Keszler said. “We will be providing our data to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as they proceed with their status review.” In Wyoming, the pygmy rabbit is located primarily in Sweetwater, Uinta, Lincoln and Sublette counties. It has been identified as a "species of concern" by Game and Fish. Habitat for the rabbit is fairly secure today, Keszler said, but there are potential threats from oil and gas development. The Fish and Wildlife Service's Tuesday decision, commonly known as a 90-day finding, is based on scientific information about the species provided in a petition requesting listing of the species under the Endangered Species Act. The agency had earlier determined that the pygmy rabbit didn’t warrant protection, but will now undertake, under court order, a more thorough review to determine whether to list the species....
Salazars offer compromise on Roan Plateau drilling U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar and his brother, U.S. Rep. John Salazar, both Colorado Democrats, said Tuesday they will drop their opposition to natural gas drilling atop the state's majestic Roan Plateau, while they work to minimize environmental impacts. The Salazars said their new stance is in the spirit of compromise, after they previously sought a one-year moratorium or even an outright ban on drilling on the Western Slope landmark. Those efforts were killed in the Senate version of the energy bill. "We may not get everything we want, but this is a pretty good compromise," Rep. Salazar said Tuesday in a news conference at the state Capitol. The Salazars' approach aligns them with Gov. Bill Ritter, who last month said he would work with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to minimize the impact of gas drilling atop the plateau....
F.T.C. Asks if Carbon-Offset Money Is Well Spent Corporations and shoppers in the United States spent more than $54 million last year on carbon offset credits toward tree planting, wind farms, solar plants and other projects to balance the emissions created by, say, using a laptop computer or flying on a jet. But where exactly is that money going? The Federal Trade Commission, which regulates advertising claims, raised the question Tuesday in its first hearing in a series on green marketing, this one focusing on carbon offsets. As more companies use offset programs to create an environmental halo over their products, the commission said it was growing increasingly concerned that some green marketing assertions were not substantiated. Environmentalists have a word for such misleading advertising: “greenwashing.” With the rapid growth of green programs like carbon offsets, “there’s a heightened potential for deception,” said Deborah Platt Majoras, chairwoman of the commission. The F.T.C. has not updated its environmental advertising guidelines, known as the Green Guides, since 1998. Back then, the agency did not create definitions for phrases that are common now — like renewable energy, carbon offsets and sustainability....
Livestock Lobby Pressures to Retain Wildlife Poisons As a public comment deadline looms, the livestock industry is ramping up to fight growing calls to ban two of the most deadly poisons used to kill wild mammals, according to documents released today by Sinapu and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The two poisons are sodium cyanide (used in M-44 ejectors) and sodium fluoroacetate, commonly called Compound 1080, used in “livestock protection collars” strapped onto the heads of sheep and goats. The poisons are distributed by Wildlife Services of the U.S. Department of Agriculture which used these two agents during 2006 to “dispatch” an average of 1.6 animals every hour. The poisons are part of a $100 million Wildlife Services’ program that killed more than 1.6 million animals during 2006. Last week, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) also introduced legislation outlawing production and use of the two agents, which EPA classifies as having the highest degree of “acute toxicity.” The basis for the proposed bans is growing reports of accidental poisonings of pets and “non-target” wildlife, including endangered species, and environmental damage. Nonetheless, the ranching lobby has opened a vigorous double-barreled campaign to block the poison bans. For example, nearly a month before Rep. DeFazio introduced his bill, the industry recruited Rep. John Salazar (D-CO) to circulate a letter discouraging co-authors....
Injured horse in Arizona confirmed as having been attacked by wolves A horse in Nutrioso, Ariz., was allegedly attacked by wolves Sunday. Jess Carey, Catron County wolf investigator, gave the first report, saying that seven chunks had been bitten out of a horse belonging to Cindy Sessions. Sessions said she called Wildlife Services to report the attack and a representative investigated. She said he told her that the size of the bite marks indicated that they were caused by a wolf or wolves.
Chris Carrillo, district supervisor of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services and Animal and Plant Services, confirmed that “based on the evidence at the scene, the attack was consistent with a wolf attack.' Session said that during the winter she and her family throw feed out to the horses in a 37-acre pasture adjacent to the house. She said they went out about 7:30 or 8 Sunday morning, and four of their five horses came up to the fence. When the fifth one, Captain, didn’t move, they went to check on him. “His right front leg from the low shoulder down, and both rear legs from the knee down were covered in blood, and, although he was standing up, he was unresponsive,' Sessions said....
Wyden calls for thinning Sen. Ron Wyden has announced that he is working on legislation to overcome gridlock in national forest logging projects designed to reduce wildfires. Wyden, who plans to introduce a bill next month, identified two key issues to break the thinning gridlock: the U.S. Forest Service lacks the funding it needs to do major thinning projects, and too many projects that log large trees to pay for thinning are being delayed by appeals and lawsuits. He noted that less than 100,000 acres of forest have been thinned since the 2003 Healthy Forest Restoration Act appropriated $760 million to reduce hazardous fuel buildup on 20 million acres of national forests. According to Wyden, he was heavily influenced by the testimonies of K. Norman Johnson and Jerry F. Franklin at a recent subcommittee meeting to make a legislative change. ...in their Dec. 13 testimony Johnson and Franklin stated, “We will lose these forests to catastrophic disturbance events unless we undertake aggressive active management programs.” They called for a focus on "forest restoration" and active management in the national forests of Oregon and Washington with an emphasis on reducing stand densities that can contribute to catastrophic wildfires and Western pine beetle infestations in old-growth stands. “To conserve these forests, we need to modify stand structure (e.g., treat fuels) on one-half to two-thirds of the landscape,” they testified....
Environmentalists Score Victory The Bush administration has dropped its appeal of a 2007 court decision that had overturned new management rules for 191 million acres of national forests. Opponents to the rules had argued they weakened protection for wildlife and the environment to the benefit of the timber industry. The Justice Department notified the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this week that it was withdrawing its appeal, saying that the other parties, including the timber industry, would do likewise. "We are glad the Bush administration has thrown in the towel," said Trent Orr, an attorney for Earthjustice, one of the environmental advocacy groups that had challenged the new forest management rules in court. The court papers, filed Monday, were made available to reporters Tuesday by Earthjustice and the Western Environmental Law Center, both of which were involved in the case. Last March, a federal district court in California found that the U.S. Forest Service had bypassed required environmental reviews and provisions under the Endangered Species Act in its overhaul of the management rules, including changes in logging limits, for its national forests....
Enviros Object To Gas Line In Roadless Area An environmental group says it will sue to block construction of a natural gas pipeline through roadless forest land in western Colorado. The 25.5-mile Bull Mountain pipeline is planned south of Silt on the White River and Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison national forests. The U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management gave final approval Monday to the project to be used by Gunnison Energy and SG Interests in northern Gunnison County. The pipeline will run through three roadless areas: two in the White River forest and one in the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison forest. Sloan Shoemaker of the Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop said the pipeline would violate a 2001 federal ban on development of roadless national forest land. BLM spokesman David Boyd said no roads will be built and the new pipeline will parallel an existing pipeline. Federal officials explored building the line around the roadless areas but concluded that would have greater environmental impacts because the route would be longer and go through riparian areas, Boyd said....
Shooting one owl to save another Biologists grappled Tuesday with the realities of shooting barred owls that invade the older forest habitat of federally protected northern spotted owls, a strategy critics say the Bush administration employs to help spotted owls while also trimming away at their preserves in an effort to open up logging. A scientist who experimented with barred owl control in Northern California said it proved relatively easy, at least in limited areas of accessible forests, and removing some adult barred owls before nesting season could control the broader population and open a window for spotted owls to come back. The cost would be relatively minor, Lowell Diller, a biologist with Green Diamond Resource Co. in Northern California, told researchers meeting Tuesday in Portland. He cautioned he wasn't trying to make light of it, but said, "This is almost like a redneck sport -- you do it from the tail of your pickup." The researchers are reviewing the scientific basis for a spotted owl recovery plan drafted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The plan is the Bush administration's attempt to lay out a blueprint for the resurrection of the spotted owl, which suffered from intensive logging in past decades and is now being shouldered out of forests by the barred owl....
Rabbit review It should take about a year for the federal government to decide whether the pygmy rabbit receives protection under the Endangered Species Act. In the meantime, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department will conduct and share research with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to assist in making a decision, a Game and Fish spokesman said Tuesday. “The Wyoming Game and Fish Department is conducting monitoring and research to learn more about this species,” Eric Keszler said. “We will be providing our data to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as they proceed with their status review.” In Wyoming, the pygmy rabbit is located primarily in Sweetwater, Uinta, Lincoln and Sublette counties. It has been identified as a "species of concern" by Game and Fish. Habitat for the rabbit is fairly secure today, Keszler said, but there are potential threats from oil and gas development. The Fish and Wildlife Service's Tuesday decision, commonly known as a 90-day finding, is based on scientific information about the species provided in a petition requesting listing of the species under the Endangered Species Act. The agency had earlier determined that the pygmy rabbit didn’t warrant protection, but will now undertake, under court order, a more thorough review to determine whether to list the species....
Salazars offer compromise on Roan Plateau drilling U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar and his brother, U.S. Rep. John Salazar, both Colorado Democrats, said Tuesday they will drop their opposition to natural gas drilling atop the state's majestic Roan Plateau, while they work to minimize environmental impacts. The Salazars said their new stance is in the spirit of compromise, after they previously sought a one-year moratorium or even an outright ban on drilling on the Western Slope landmark. Those efforts were killed in the Senate version of the energy bill. "We may not get everything we want, but this is a pretty good compromise," Rep. Salazar said Tuesday in a news conference at the state Capitol. The Salazars' approach aligns them with Gov. Bill Ritter, who last month said he would work with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to minimize the impact of gas drilling atop the plateau....
F.T.C. Asks if Carbon-Offset Money Is Well Spent Corporations and shoppers in the United States spent more than $54 million last year on carbon offset credits toward tree planting, wind farms, solar plants and other projects to balance the emissions created by, say, using a laptop computer or flying on a jet. But where exactly is that money going? The Federal Trade Commission, which regulates advertising claims, raised the question Tuesday in its first hearing in a series on green marketing, this one focusing on carbon offsets. As more companies use offset programs to create an environmental halo over their products, the commission said it was growing increasingly concerned that some green marketing assertions were not substantiated. Environmentalists have a word for such misleading advertising: “greenwashing.” With the rapid growth of green programs like carbon offsets, “there’s a heightened potential for deception,” said Deborah Platt Majoras, chairwoman of the commission. The F.T.C. has not updated its environmental advertising guidelines, known as the Green Guides, since 1998. Back then, the agency did not create definitions for phrases that are common now — like renewable energy, carbon offsets and sustainability....
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
NOTE TO READERS
Was late getting home from a meeting of People for Preserving Our Western Heritage.
If you are interested in wilderness, grazing in wilderness, law enforcement in wilderness, access to wilderness, etc., then click on the link above and you may find something of interest.
You will also find proposed legislation providing an alternative to wilderness.
Will try to catch up on the news tomorrow.
Was late getting home from a meeting of People for Preserving Our Western Heritage.
If you are interested in wilderness, grazing in wilderness, law enforcement in wilderness, access to wilderness, etc., then click on the link above and you may find something of interest.
You will also find proposed legislation providing an alternative to wilderness.
Will try to catch up on the news tomorrow.
OPEN Government Act Signed into Law On Dec. 31, 2007, President Bush signed the OPEN Government Act (S. 2488)(pdf), which includes long-sought reforms of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Though some important provisions were dropped in order to reach bipartisan agreement in Congress, the bill creates incentives to reduce agency backlogs of FOIA requests, increases reporting requirements, and increases the scope of who can make requests and what entities are covered by FOIA. In an effort to reduce agency backlogs and improve FOIA procedures, President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13392 on Dec. 14, 2005. The order, though, did little to relieve agency backlogs. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently reported, "Despite increasing the numbers of requests processed, many agencies did not keep pace with the volume of requests that they received." The OPEN Government Act, sponsored by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and John Cornyn (R-TX) in the Senate and Rep. Henry Waxman☼ (D-CA) in the House, seeks to resolve some of these problems....
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Deadline Postponed on Polar Bear Listing Citing the complexity of the decision, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Monday it would not meet a deadline for a recommendation on listing polar bears as a threatened species due to global warming under the federal Endangered Species Act. The deadline for a listing decision by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is Wednesday. A listing could trigger restrictions on development that affect polar bears or their habitat. Dale Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the agency hopes to have a recommendation within weeks so that Kempthorne can announce his decision within a month. The department has never declared a species threatened or endangered because of climate change, Hall said, and the issue complicated the decision. "That's why this one has been so taxing and challenging to us," he said. Environmental groups, however, said that law calls for a decision unless there is "substantial scientific uncertainty" — and that there is none....
Candy Billionaire Fights Energy Firms A reclusive billionaire whose family owns the Mars candy empire is emerging as a formidable opponent to the energy industry's plans to expand development of some of the country's most productive coal and gas deposits. Forrest E. Mars Jr., the former chief executive of Mars Inc., owns a sprawling ranch along Montana's Tongue River — directly in the sights of companies hoping to tap the area's extensive coal and natural gas reserves. Through his previously undisclosed ownership of the 82,000-acre Diamond Cross ranch, Mars is bringing his $14 billion fortune to bear on the side of ranchers and conservationists trying to curb the companies' ambitions. The Mars family has a long-standing reputation for secrecy, and Forrest Mars' name is not listed as a party in any of the lawsuits pitting Diamond Cross against coal and natural gas developers. His ownership in the ranch was revealed in a Dec. 28 court affidavit reviewed by The Associated Press. O'Toole said Mars' opposition to energy development stemmed from the vast amounts of water such projects can consume. In the arid West, water is essential to keeping working cattle ranches such as Diamond Cross alive. Under a property regime known as split estates, landowners in many Western states do not necessarily control the minerals beneath their property. In the Diamond Cross case, Fidelity and another company, Pinnacle Gas Resources, have oil and gas leases on the ranch that predate Mars' ownership, according to public records and company officials. State law gives the companies the right to enter Mars' land to drill on those leases. So far, however, he's held them at bay....
Canyon bighorns lose most of their lambs Disease killed about 80 percent of the lambs born last spring to the bighorn sheep in Hells Canyon, and biologists call it the worst die-off since the breed was reintroduced there in the early 1970s. Researchers believe the deaths were triggered by one bacterium that inhibits the bighorns' ability to fight off another bacterium that leads to bronchopneumonia. Lambs appear to be most vulnerable because of undeveloped immune systems, said Vic Coggins, an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist. "This was the worst year I've ever seen for lambs," said Neil Thagart, spokesman for the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep in Cody, Wyo. The canyon of the Snake River is home to about 900 Rocky Mountain bighorns. Thagart has visited it after lambing season for about 10 years. The river separates Idaho from Oregon and Washington. The die-off appears to have spared a big share of the wild adult rams and ewes, Coggins said....
Baucus proposes ways to meet rising firefighting costs U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., on Monday outlined two potential strategies for paying the growing costs of wildfires. He has introduced the Stable Fire Funding Act, which would establish a trust fund with $600 million in seed money for the Forest Service and $200 million in seed money for the Bureau of Land Management. The funds, which would generate interest, would be used to cover 80 percent of firefighting costs that exceed the agencies' appropriated budgets every year, he said. Baucus' other strategy would be funded by a provision he included in the Climate Security Act, which is aimed at curbing greenhouse gases and combating climate change. The bill was passed by a Senate committee in December. The provision would provide up to $1.1 billion annually to combat catastrophic wildfires, or the yearly cost to the federal government of the largest 1 percent of wildfires. Those severe fires account for 85 percent of wildfire suppression costs. Currently, the Forest Service and BLM borrow emergency fire suppression funds from their own budgets, which reduces funding for thinning the hazardous fuels that feed the fires. As of late October, the Forest Service and BLM had spent $1.7 billion on fire suppression in 2007, a figure that doesn't include the total cost of the California wildfires....
Federal Protection Sought for Rare New Mexico Butterfly Conservation groups Forest Guardians and the Center for Biological Diversity filed suit in Washington, D.C. today against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its failure to grant federal protection to the Sacramento Mountains checkerspot butterfly in response to a June 2007 petition filed by the groups. Under the Endangered Species Act, the Service is supposed to respond to a petition within 90 days. The butterfly occurs on less than 2,000 acres of private and Lincoln National Forest land within a six-mile radius around the village of Cloudcroft, New Mexico, and faces many threats in its narrow range. The most significant threats are insecticide spraying, climate change, habitat destruction from urban sprawl, off-road vehicles and livestock grazing, fire suppression, and exotic weed proliferation. In 2007, the heart of the butterfly’s range was targeted for insecticide spraying while butterfly larvae were actively feeding . In the face of this threat and new evidence on impacts from the climate crisis, Forest Guardians and the Center for Biological Diversity filed the June petition and requested emergency listing, which helped force Otero County and the U.S. Forest Service to hold off on spraying until the checkerspots were no longer feeding. But the narrowly averted disaster for the butterfly underscores the species’ vulnerability and need for federal protection....
Nature Overrun Nearly 40 years ago, President Richard Nixon issued an executive order calling for a national strategy to protect wildlife by restricting off-road vehicles to carefully designated trails. President Jimmy Carter later gave the interior secretary the authority to ban such vehicles from sensitive lands. Unfortunately, except for a brief and encouraging crackdown during the Clinton administration, nobody has paid much attention to these directives since. There are now nine million off-road vehicles, meaning all-terrain vehicles and dirt bikes (snowmobiles are a separate category). And their owners, with little resistance from the authorities that ought to be policing them, are transforming some of America’s most sensitive public lands into their personal playgrounds. Utah is an alarming case in point. The bureau is presently drafting six new land-use plans for Utah that would allow about 15,000 miles of designated trails. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an environmental group, points out that many of these routes have been lifted straight from maps provided by the off-road vehicle associations and have not been independently surveyed to assess their potential damage to the soil, animal habitat and archaeological sites. Worse, some of the trails would crisscross about 2.5 million acres of breathtakingly beautiful country that the Clinton administration thought worthy of permanent wilderness protection....
BLM: Tar sand development may hurt parks Tar sands development could severely affect Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and a stretch of the San Rafael Swell along Interstate 70, according to a Bureau of Land Management report. The 1,400-page government report, called the Oil Shale and Tar Sands Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, was released in December and outlines the landscape-altering changes that could occur when the BLM’s congressionally mandated commercial oil shale and tar sands leasing program for Utah, Colorado and Wyoming gets going. More than 100,000 acres of wilderness-quality land could be industrialized, construction of reservoirs would alter natural streamflow patterns, hydrocarbons and herbicides could cause “chronic or acute toxicity” in wildlife and habitat for 20 threatened or endangered species could be lost, the report says. If the BLM settles on the development scenario it prefers, nearly 25,000 acres in the “Tar Sands Triangle” adjacent to both Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Canyonlands National Park’s Maze District would be open to industrial tar sands development....
Japan's 34th BSE case reinforces fact that Canada's risk mitigation measures have serious shortcomings Japan recently announced its 34th case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease, in a 15-year-old beef cow - the oldest case of all the BSE cases in Japan. Fortunately, because Japan tests every head of cattle for BSE before allowing the beef into the human food chain, none of the products from this animal will harm anyone. However, because BSE has an incubation period of up to eight years, it will be many, many years before Japan completely removes this disease from its cattle herd. While Japan is doing a much better job testing for BSE than Canada, R-CALF USA remains extremely concerned that policies implemented by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that allow more high-risk Canadian cattle into the United States are putting the U.S. cattle herd and U.S. beef consumers at risk for this incurable and always fatal disease. "Countries like Japan that started out only detecting a few cases in the first few years continue to find even more cases now that those countries are testing more cattle for BSE," he said. "When applying that knowledge to Canada, we find Canada is following the same track - only detecting a few from the outset, but then the numbers begin to increase. "However, Canada is not testing near the numbers of cattle that Japan is, and Canada only has a voluntary testing program, which means there's likely numerous cattle in Canada that are going undetected for BSE, and that puts the U.S. cattle industry at risk because currently we are commingling Canadian cattle and beef with U.S. cattle and beef," Thornsberry pointed out....
Tucson Dude Ranch Industry Becoming Dud Another dude bit the dust in 2007. Citing difficulty in sustaining a dude guest ranch, the owners of Lazy K Bar Guest Ranch in Marana have leased the property and changed its focus to a venue for weddings and corporate gatherings. Its departure from the dude ranch scene leaves Tucson with just two spots where guests can check in, saddle up and play cowboy, or cowgirl. ``We are one generation away from no dude ranches existing in the way that we know today,'' said Russell True, co-owner of White Stallion Ranch in Tucson. ``I've watched Tucson go from 30-plus dude ranches to two.'' Although Tucson's tourism image is always evolving, interest in the rustic West is still high, said Jonathan Walker, president and CEO of the Metropolitan Tucson Convention & Visitors Bureau. ``The dude ranch and the Wild West culture is still an important part of what we are,'' he said. And, it's an image that the visitors bureau actively promotes, especially in Europe, Walker said. He lamented the latest closure but predicts Tucson will always have some form of dude ranch presence. The state has 11 dude ranches from Wickenburg to Patagonia, according to the Arizona Dude Ranch Association. In the 1940s, there were close to 50 just in the greater Tucson area....
It's All Trew: Captain lived criminal highlife My recent column about "No Man's Land" in the Oklahoma Panhandle brought in a great true story from Roy McClellam of Spearman. Reading like a novel by Louis L'amour, this tale tells of a Robber's Roost located right here in the Panhandle area. No Man's Land was created after Kansas, Texas and New Mexico were admitted to the Union of States. This little corner, 35 miles wide by 168 miles long, was not included in any state and was left without law and order, for years making it a Mecca for outlaws. One of the earliest and most notorious was Captain William Coe, who established his Robber's Roost in the late 1860s. Located strategically on a long high ridge jutting southwest from a large mesa near the town of today's Kenton, Okla., the outlaw headquarters was large, made of rock walls three feet thick, was topped with a thick sod roof, had portholes instead of windows, sported a fully stocked bar, a piano and bevy of sporting ladies. His gang of outlaws numbered 30 to 50 members who pillaged and raided from Fort Union to the south, Denver to the north and Taos to the west. They stole both civilian and military mules and horses, changed the brands, then sold them in Missouri to settlers. A special canyon still exists today named Blacksmith Canyon, where the stolen stock were rested, the brands changed and their feet shod with equipment and supplies stolen from wagons raided along the nearby Santa Fe Trail. In 1867, the gang attacked a large sheep operation from Las Vegas, N.M., killing the men then driving the herds of sheep to Pueblo, Colo., to sell. This brutal outrage brought complaints to the U.S. Army at Fort Lyons located on the Arkansas River near Las Animas, Colo. No doubt the Army did intervene but the stories vary. Several versions exist telling of what happened when the Army attacked Robber's Roost....
Candy Billionaire Fights Energy Firms A reclusive billionaire whose family owns the Mars candy empire is emerging as a formidable opponent to the energy industry's plans to expand development of some of the country's most productive coal and gas deposits. Forrest E. Mars Jr., the former chief executive of Mars Inc., owns a sprawling ranch along Montana's Tongue River — directly in the sights of companies hoping to tap the area's extensive coal and natural gas reserves. Through his previously undisclosed ownership of the 82,000-acre Diamond Cross ranch, Mars is bringing his $14 billion fortune to bear on the side of ranchers and conservationists trying to curb the companies' ambitions. The Mars family has a long-standing reputation for secrecy, and Forrest Mars' name is not listed as a party in any of the lawsuits pitting Diamond Cross against coal and natural gas developers. His ownership in the ranch was revealed in a Dec. 28 court affidavit reviewed by The Associated Press. O'Toole said Mars' opposition to energy development stemmed from the vast amounts of water such projects can consume. In the arid West, water is essential to keeping working cattle ranches such as Diamond Cross alive. Under a property regime known as split estates, landowners in many Western states do not necessarily control the minerals beneath their property. In the Diamond Cross case, Fidelity and another company, Pinnacle Gas Resources, have oil and gas leases on the ranch that predate Mars' ownership, according to public records and company officials. State law gives the companies the right to enter Mars' land to drill on those leases. So far, however, he's held them at bay....
Canyon bighorns lose most of their lambs Disease killed about 80 percent of the lambs born last spring to the bighorn sheep in Hells Canyon, and biologists call it the worst die-off since the breed was reintroduced there in the early 1970s. Researchers believe the deaths were triggered by one bacterium that inhibits the bighorns' ability to fight off another bacterium that leads to bronchopneumonia. Lambs appear to be most vulnerable because of undeveloped immune systems, said Vic Coggins, an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist. "This was the worst year I've ever seen for lambs," said Neil Thagart, spokesman for the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep in Cody, Wyo. The canyon of the Snake River is home to about 900 Rocky Mountain bighorns. Thagart has visited it after lambing season for about 10 years. The river separates Idaho from Oregon and Washington. The die-off appears to have spared a big share of the wild adult rams and ewes, Coggins said....
Baucus proposes ways to meet rising firefighting costs U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., on Monday outlined two potential strategies for paying the growing costs of wildfires. He has introduced the Stable Fire Funding Act, which would establish a trust fund with $600 million in seed money for the Forest Service and $200 million in seed money for the Bureau of Land Management. The funds, which would generate interest, would be used to cover 80 percent of firefighting costs that exceed the agencies' appropriated budgets every year, he said. Baucus' other strategy would be funded by a provision he included in the Climate Security Act, which is aimed at curbing greenhouse gases and combating climate change. The bill was passed by a Senate committee in December. The provision would provide up to $1.1 billion annually to combat catastrophic wildfires, or the yearly cost to the federal government of the largest 1 percent of wildfires. Those severe fires account for 85 percent of wildfire suppression costs. Currently, the Forest Service and BLM borrow emergency fire suppression funds from their own budgets, which reduces funding for thinning the hazardous fuels that feed the fires. As of late October, the Forest Service and BLM had spent $1.7 billion on fire suppression in 2007, a figure that doesn't include the total cost of the California wildfires....
Federal Protection Sought for Rare New Mexico Butterfly Conservation groups Forest Guardians and the Center for Biological Diversity filed suit in Washington, D.C. today against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its failure to grant federal protection to the Sacramento Mountains checkerspot butterfly in response to a June 2007 petition filed by the groups. Under the Endangered Species Act, the Service is supposed to respond to a petition within 90 days. The butterfly occurs on less than 2,000 acres of private and Lincoln National Forest land within a six-mile radius around the village of Cloudcroft, New Mexico, and faces many threats in its narrow range. The most significant threats are insecticide spraying, climate change, habitat destruction from urban sprawl, off-road vehicles and livestock grazing, fire suppression, and exotic weed proliferation. In 2007, the heart of the butterfly’s range was targeted for insecticide spraying while butterfly larvae were actively feeding . In the face of this threat and new evidence on impacts from the climate crisis, Forest Guardians and the Center for Biological Diversity filed the June petition and requested emergency listing, which helped force Otero County and the U.S. Forest Service to hold off on spraying until the checkerspots were no longer feeding. But the narrowly averted disaster for the butterfly underscores the species’ vulnerability and need for federal protection....
Nature Overrun Nearly 40 years ago, President Richard Nixon issued an executive order calling for a national strategy to protect wildlife by restricting off-road vehicles to carefully designated trails. President Jimmy Carter later gave the interior secretary the authority to ban such vehicles from sensitive lands. Unfortunately, except for a brief and encouraging crackdown during the Clinton administration, nobody has paid much attention to these directives since. There are now nine million off-road vehicles, meaning all-terrain vehicles and dirt bikes (snowmobiles are a separate category). And their owners, with little resistance from the authorities that ought to be policing them, are transforming some of America’s most sensitive public lands into their personal playgrounds. Utah is an alarming case in point. The bureau is presently drafting six new land-use plans for Utah that would allow about 15,000 miles of designated trails. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an environmental group, points out that many of these routes have been lifted straight from maps provided by the off-road vehicle associations and have not been independently surveyed to assess their potential damage to the soil, animal habitat and archaeological sites. Worse, some of the trails would crisscross about 2.5 million acres of breathtakingly beautiful country that the Clinton administration thought worthy of permanent wilderness protection....
BLM: Tar sand development may hurt parks Tar sands development could severely affect Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and a stretch of the San Rafael Swell along Interstate 70, according to a Bureau of Land Management report. The 1,400-page government report, called the Oil Shale and Tar Sands Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, was released in December and outlines the landscape-altering changes that could occur when the BLM’s congressionally mandated commercial oil shale and tar sands leasing program for Utah, Colorado and Wyoming gets going. More than 100,000 acres of wilderness-quality land could be industrialized, construction of reservoirs would alter natural streamflow patterns, hydrocarbons and herbicides could cause “chronic or acute toxicity” in wildlife and habitat for 20 threatened or endangered species could be lost, the report says. If the BLM settles on the development scenario it prefers, nearly 25,000 acres in the “Tar Sands Triangle” adjacent to both Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Canyonlands National Park’s Maze District would be open to industrial tar sands development....
Japan's 34th BSE case reinforces fact that Canada's risk mitigation measures have serious shortcomings Japan recently announced its 34th case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease, in a 15-year-old beef cow - the oldest case of all the BSE cases in Japan. Fortunately, because Japan tests every head of cattle for BSE before allowing the beef into the human food chain, none of the products from this animal will harm anyone. However, because BSE has an incubation period of up to eight years, it will be many, many years before Japan completely removes this disease from its cattle herd. While Japan is doing a much better job testing for BSE than Canada, R-CALF USA remains extremely concerned that policies implemented by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that allow more high-risk Canadian cattle into the United States are putting the U.S. cattle herd and U.S. beef consumers at risk for this incurable and always fatal disease. "Countries like Japan that started out only detecting a few cases in the first few years continue to find even more cases now that those countries are testing more cattle for BSE," he said. "When applying that knowledge to Canada, we find Canada is following the same track - only detecting a few from the outset, but then the numbers begin to increase. "However, Canada is not testing near the numbers of cattle that Japan is, and Canada only has a voluntary testing program, which means there's likely numerous cattle in Canada that are going undetected for BSE, and that puts the U.S. cattle industry at risk because currently we are commingling Canadian cattle and beef with U.S. cattle and beef," Thornsberry pointed out....
Tucson Dude Ranch Industry Becoming Dud Another dude bit the dust in 2007. Citing difficulty in sustaining a dude guest ranch, the owners of Lazy K Bar Guest Ranch in Marana have leased the property and changed its focus to a venue for weddings and corporate gatherings. Its departure from the dude ranch scene leaves Tucson with just two spots where guests can check in, saddle up and play cowboy, or cowgirl. ``We are one generation away from no dude ranches existing in the way that we know today,'' said Russell True, co-owner of White Stallion Ranch in Tucson. ``I've watched Tucson go from 30-plus dude ranches to two.'' Although Tucson's tourism image is always evolving, interest in the rustic West is still high, said Jonathan Walker, president and CEO of the Metropolitan Tucson Convention & Visitors Bureau. ``The dude ranch and the Wild West culture is still an important part of what we are,'' he said. And, it's an image that the visitors bureau actively promotes, especially in Europe, Walker said. He lamented the latest closure but predicts Tucson will always have some form of dude ranch presence. The state has 11 dude ranches from Wickenburg to Patagonia, according to the Arizona Dude Ranch Association. In the 1940s, there were close to 50 just in the greater Tucson area....
It's All Trew: Captain lived criminal highlife My recent column about "No Man's Land" in the Oklahoma Panhandle brought in a great true story from Roy McClellam of Spearman. Reading like a novel by Louis L'amour, this tale tells of a Robber's Roost located right here in the Panhandle area. No Man's Land was created after Kansas, Texas and New Mexico were admitted to the Union of States. This little corner, 35 miles wide by 168 miles long, was not included in any state and was left without law and order, for years making it a Mecca for outlaws. One of the earliest and most notorious was Captain William Coe, who established his Robber's Roost in the late 1860s. Located strategically on a long high ridge jutting southwest from a large mesa near the town of today's Kenton, Okla., the outlaw headquarters was large, made of rock walls three feet thick, was topped with a thick sod roof, had portholes instead of windows, sported a fully stocked bar, a piano and bevy of sporting ladies. His gang of outlaws numbered 30 to 50 members who pillaged and raided from Fort Union to the south, Denver to the north and Taos to the west. They stole both civilian and military mules and horses, changed the brands, then sold them in Missouri to settlers. A special canyon still exists today named Blacksmith Canyon, where the stolen stock were rested, the brands changed and their feet shod with equipment and supplies stolen from wagons raided along the nearby Santa Fe Trail. In 1867, the gang attacked a large sheep operation from Las Vegas, N.M., killing the men then driving the herds of sheep to Pueblo, Colo., to sell. This brutal outrage brought complaints to the U.S. Army at Fort Lyons located on the Arkansas River near Las Animas, Colo. No doubt the Army did intervene but the stories vary. Several versions exist telling of what happened when the Army attacked Robber's Roost....
Rural Landowners Declaration of Rural Independence
It is abundantly apparent that high-dense urban areas, known as cities, have an unfair electoral advantage in passing laws and deciding social and environmental policy.
This electoral advantage disenfranchises rural landowners who have no say in such policy and strips them of their constitutionally protected freedoms, their dignity and their property rights. In far too many cases, rural landowners are deprived of their rights of due process and just compensation, as required under the 5th Amendment.
Again, this electoral advantage allows cities to elect politicians that pass laws and dictate policy that ONLY affects rural landowners but leaves city folk virtually un-scathed. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Clean Water Restoration Act (CWRA) are just two examples of tens of thousands of laws, acts and ordinances that only affect rural landowners, while urban dwellers get off scot-free.
Rural landowners have come together to demonstrate just how important rural land is to the city's existence and to communicate to them that our disenfranchisement shall not stand.
Rural landowners have come together in the spirit of solidarity to stage a silent protest against the tyranny of the majority (cities) and their government counterparts that have sold rural landowners and this country, literally down the river.
We, the rural landowners of America, hereby declare the week of June 30th through July 6th, 2008 (including July 4th, "Independence Day") and each 4th of July week each year thereafter, as a declaration of rural independence.
Starting at 12:01 AM, Monday, June 30th, 2008 and ending at midnight July 6th, 2008, rural landowners, all across America, unite in the following actions, or in actions, as the case may be....
It is abundantly apparent that high-dense urban areas, known as cities, have an unfair electoral advantage in passing laws and deciding social and environmental policy.
This electoral advantage disenfranchises rural landowners who have no say in such policy and strips them of their constitutionally protected freedoms, their dignity and their property rights. In far too many cases, rural landowners are deprived of their rights of due process and just compensation, as required under the 5th Amendment.
Again, this electoral advantage allows cities to elect politicians that pass laws and dictate policy that ONLY affects rural landowners but leaves city folk virtually un-scathed. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Clean Water Restoration Act (CWRA) are just two examples of tens of thousands of laws, acts and ordinances that only affect rural landowners, while urban dwellers get off scot-free.
Rural landowners have come together to demonstrate just how important rural land is to the city's existence and to communicate to them that our disenfranchisement shall not stand.
Rural landowners have come together in the spirit of solidarity to stage a silent protest against the tyranny of the majority (cities) and their government counterparts that have sold rural landowners and this country, literally down the river.
We, the rural landowners of America, hereby declare the week of June 30th through July 6th, 2008 (including July 4th, "Independence Day") and each 4th of July week each year thereafter, as a declaration of rural independence.
Starting at 12:01 AM, Monday, June 30th, 2008 and ending at midnight July 6th, 2008, rural landowners, all across America, unite in the following actions, or in actions, as the case may be....
Monday, January 07, 2008
Navy's Use of Sonar Is Severely Limited A federal judge yesterday severely limited the Navy's ability to use mid-frequency sonar on a training range off the Southern California coast, ruling that the loud sounds would harm whales and other marine mammals if not tightly controlled. The decision is a blow to the Navy, which has argued that it needs the flexibility to train its sonar operators without undue restrictions. In her decision, however, U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper said the Navy could conduct productive training under the limitations, which she said were required under several environmental laws. In particular, Cooper banned the use of the sonar within 12 nautical miles of the California coast, expanded from 1,100 yards to 2,200 yards the Navy's proposed "shut down" zone in which sonar must be turned off whenever a marine mammal is spotted, required monitoring for the presence of animals for one hour before exercises involving sonar begin, and required that two National Marine Fisheries Service-trained lookouts be posted for monitoring during exercises. The judge also forbade sonar use in the Catalina Basin, an area with many marine mammals. Cooper's ruling comes as the Navy is in the midst of a two-year series of training exercises off Southern California that involve extensive use of active sonar, which is used to find a new generation of harder-to-detect submarines now operated by 41 nations....
Ranchers, farmers keep nature in and feds out Southern Colorado ranchers are setting aside land for conservation and inviting scientists on their property to study the imperiled Gunnison sage grouse. On the Eastern Plains, farmers are flagging nesting sites of the mountain plover to avoid plowing over them. The goal of the ranchers and the farmers is the same — to avoid strict regulations under the federal Endangered Species Act by helping animals at risk of extinction. These days, the embattled federal law that is designed to prevent the extinction of plants and animals often accomplishes its purpose in Colorado without ever being invoked. Local and state officials — and often private landowners — are scrambling to keep imperiled plants and animals off the endangered-species list by protecting habitat voluntarily rather than under the restrictions of federal law....
Drilling boom spurs demand for landmen Today, they're all working the Barnett Shale as landmen -- people who collect and manage mineral-rights leases. By most accounts, there are perhaps 1,000 landmen in Tarrant County and at least that many more throughout the region. The figure is hard to pin down because there are no licensing requirements and the vast majority are independent contractors, not employees of energy companies. The natural gas drilling boom in the vast field underlying Tarrant County and many surrounding areas has sparked demand for landmen to handle everything from researching deeds to gaining signatures from homeowners. Lured by pay that can top $450 a day for experienced landmen -- more than $100,000 a year -- hundreds of workers, many of them young people, have flocked to North Texas for a chance to get a piece of the Barnett action. They're jumping into a market that bears little resemblance to the past. "In the old days, you went out and talked to the farmer or rancher, came back and wrote up a report," said Terry McInturff, director of the Center for Energy Commerce at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. "You could do it so much more quickly. When you need, say, 160 acres for a well, a rancher with 10,000 acres is pretty sweet," he said. All that has changed now that drilling has moved into urban areas....
Regulating the wind The high winds that are part of life in southeast Wyoming make it a prime target for the development of systems to turn the gusts into a usable source of electricity. To prepare for the expected influx of towers and turbines that may dot the landscape, Laramie County is creating rules to monitor the future installation, operation and potential abandonment of wind energy systems. County officials say the proposed regulations are designed to ensure the orderly development of the systems. They also seek to protect public infrastructure and the quality of life for residents while encouraging the growth of this alternative energy source for personal and commercial uses. The proposal sets limits on how close wind towers can be to houses, utility lines and public roads as well as other wind energy systems. Also, power lines serving the systems would have to be buried, and advertising on the towers would be prohibited. Restrictions on the noise and light from the towers are also included. Many ranchers and large landowners say the rules make sense. But they caution that the final form of the regulations should be considered carefully, particularly because of the potential revenue wind farms can bring....
Big oil casts big shadow over Colorado's water future No one has ever rowed a boat across Stillwater Reservoir. Or caught a fish at Fourteenmile Reservoir. Or stood on the beach of Roan Creek Reservoir. These are all imaginary lakes. They exist only in the minds of oil company executives and attorneys. But the oil companies own legal rights to build and fill these reservoirs, which would be in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties. And as the companies take another look at Colorado's oil- shale deposits, which would require vast amounts of water to develop, they might make those imaginary lakes a reality. Their water rights are huge, and getting bigger. Shell has been buying large water rights on the Western Slope for the last five years and just completed a major purchase in July. State leaders are watching. "I've seen estimates that oil shale, if it is developed, would consume 100 percent of the remaining water in the Colorado River system," said U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar....
Supreme Court won't hear water rights case (subscription) Chalk one up for Goliath (in this case, the federal government), even though he got whupped by David (two Idaho ranching families). By refusing to hear a landmark Idaho water rights case, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it official: An individual can defeat the U.S. government in court in every major battle but lose the war. The court declined to hear a case involving two Idaho ranching families who fought the government for nearly a decade over federal rangeland water rights. That means the two families, who were victorious in their cases, cannot recover attorney fees. Essentially, they've reached the end of their road in legal terms and face a bleak financial outlook after a long battle to defend their stock-watering rights. The two ranches were vindicated earlier this year when the Idaho Supreme Court ruled the federal government does not hold federal rangeland water rights. The ranches won on every major point and the court even said the government's argument reflected "a serious misunderstanding of water law." However, in a serious setback to the ranching operations, the court also ruled they could not recover attorney fees from the government. Considering they owe about $1.5 million combined - an amount roughly equal to the value of the ranches - that's no small matter. The two Owyhee County ranches, Joyce Livestock Co. and LU Ranching Co., appealed the court's decision not to award them attorney fees to the U.S. Supreme Court. They found out Oct. 31 the court would not hear their appeal. "We knew going in the Supreme Court took a mighty small percentage of cases," said LU Ranching owner Tim Lowry. "We were hoping against hope they'd take this one. But they didn't." Lowry said their next step would be "to figure out how to get the attorneys paid. Our options are pretty limited." The Idaho Supreme Court agreed with the ranches on virtually every point in their battle with the federal government over water rights on land covered by federally administered grazing allotments....
Bison market on the move “In the past five years, the bison industry definitely has rebounded,” said Russ Miller, who manages media mogul Ted Turner's 15 ranches, all but one of which run bison. With 45,000 animals, Turner is by far the biggest bison rancher in the nation. The next largest is a Wyoming operation that runs about 3,000 head. Just on Turner's Flying D Ranch south of Bozeman, about 3,500 bison roam, Miller said. Turner has played a large role in the turnaround of the bison industry, in part through the construction of 54 Ted's Montana Grill restaurants around the country, places where people are encouraged to sink their teeth into a slab of bison meat. The restaurants have introduced bison to a wide swath of diners. “They provide a good job of providing a good quality first bite of bison,” said Jim Matheson, assistant director of the National Bison Association. Turner's high profile celebrity status clearly helps bring people in the doors, and they get a dose of Turner's environmental ethic as well, which is part of marketing bison. Turner and other bison ranchers maintain that the shaggy giants are easier on the land than nonnative beef cows, plus the meat is higher in protein and lower in fat than most other meats. The restaurants help move a lot of bison but they also have a secondary effect. If customers enjoy their meal, they start looking a little more closely at the bison meat they're starting to see more regularly in supermarket coolers....
Leaner Pastures: As Horses Multiply,Neglect Cases Rise Across the U.S., the number of horses whose owners won't or can't properly care for them is mushrooming. Spurred by retiring baby boomers and their penchant for second homes in the country, horse ownership boomed in the U.S. over the past decade. Americans own more than nine million horses today, up from just over six million horses in the mid-1990s, according to the American Horse Council, a trade association. Along with the boom came backyard breeding, as owners without the discipline or financial muscle to obtain award-winning genes settled for whatever nature produced. More than two million Americans own horses, and more than a third of those owners have a household income of less than $50,000. As the horse population soared -- and the economy ceased to gallop -- selling the animals became more difficult. Some owners could no longer afford their investment. Until recently, a little-advertised market for unwanted horses existed at equine slaughterhouses, which in 2004 killed an estimated 65,000 horses, largely for human consumption in Europe and Japan. But the last three such plants closed in 2007, under pressure from animal-rights groups. "Animal lovers with big hearts and no idea what's required to take care of a horse have shut down slaughterhouses that were needed," says C.J. Hadley, publisher of a cowboy magazine called Range, based in Carson City, Nev. Calling horse lovers who oppose slaughterhouses "innocent," Ms. Hadley says, "Ranchers love their horses enough to put them down when the time comes." Now, some unwanted American horses wind up at Mexican and Canadian slaughterhouses. But others linger and starve, often ending up at rescue homes and other charities....
Iconic Stetson First Made At Base Of Pikes Peak National park rangers proudly wear them. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have donned them for more than a century. Colorado State Patrol troopers wear them, too. Boy Scout leaders, military drill sergeants and even Smokey Bear, the renowned champion of forest protection, wear Stetson Boss of the Plains ranger hats. Perhaps they should be standard issue for Colorado Springs police, given that the distinctive flat-brimmed, felt hat with the "mountain peak" crown and leather band was conceived and created by John B. Stetson at a campfire at the base of Pikes Peak in 1862. Stetson, the son of a New Jersey hatmaker, was diagnosed with tuberculosis, so he left the family business and went to explore the West before he died. He worked as a brickmaker in St. Joseph, Mo., before joining a Pikes Peak gold-mining expedition. According to historical accounts, he was camped with a dozen men near Pikes Peak when he drew on his skills to fashion a hat out of beaver fur to protect him from the sun, rain and wind. Stetson wore his wide-brimmed, domed hat throughout the expedition that year -- at a time when bowlers and smaller hats were popular. He sold his first hat for a $5 gold piece to a cowboy on horseback in a mountainside mining camp....
Rancher Kenedy's known as more than just a pretty face As historic figures go, Petra's must have been terrific. Her looks stunned frontiersmen. And after researching her for years, biographers Jane Clements Monday and Frances Brannen Vick concluded that Petra (1825-1885) was beautiful not merely physically, but spiritually as well. Forever helping friends, kin and her Catholic church, she gave away a wagonload of money to charities way before such acts earned tax credits. Historian John Henry Brown called her "a woman of superior accomplishments and great natural intelligence." He noted, "She was considered one of the handsomest women of her day." Indian warriors killed her father, ex-governor of Spanish Texas, and carried off three of her sisters, one of whom was never rescued. After marrying a Mexican army colonel, Petra Vela de Vidal had six children. Widowed, she then married steamboat tycoon Mifflin Kenedy and had six more children. She helped the captain build a ranching empire whose tall bunchgrasses and mesquites adorned oil deposits unknown to them that today are worth untold millions. If it weren't footnoted, Petra's Legacy: The South Texas Ranching Empire of Petra Vela and Mifflin Kenedy (Texas A&M Press) might be mistaken for soaring fiction. It is chockablock with crooked politics, cattle rustlers, land fraud, warfare, and enough illicit sex to populate South Texas courtrooms for generations. There were once about 300 claimants to the Kenedy estate....
Ranchers, farmers keep nature in and feds out Southern Colorado ranchers are setting aside land for conservation and inviting scientists on their property to study the imperiled Gunnison sage grouse. On the Eastern Plains, farmers are flagging nesting sites of the mountain plover to avoid plowing over them. The goal of the ranchers and the farmers is the same — to avoid strict regulations under the federal Endangered Species Act by helping animals at risk of extinction. These days, the embattled federal law that is designed to prevent the extinction of plants and animals often accomplishes its purpose in Colorado without ever being invoked. Local and state officials — and often private landowners — are scrambling to keep imperiled plants and animals off the endangered-species list by protecting habitat voluntarily rather than under the restrictions of federal law....
Drilling boom spurs demand for landmen Today, they're all working the Barnett Shale as landmen -- people who collect and manage mineral-rights leases. By most accounts, there are perhaps 1,000 landmen in Tarrant County and at least that many more throughout the region. The figure is hard to pin down because there are no licensing requirements and the vast majority are independent contractors, not employees of energy companies. The natural gas drilling boom in the vast field underlying Tarrant County and many surrounding areas has sparked demand for landmen to handle everything from researching deeds to gaining signatures from homeowners. Lured by pay that can top $450 a day for experienced landmen -- more than $100,000 a year -- hundreds of workers, many of them young people, have flocked to North Texas for a chance to get a piece of the Barnett action. They're jumping into a market that bears little resemblance to the past. "In the old days, you went out and talked to the farmer or rancher, came back and wrote up a report," said Terry McInturff, director of the Center for Energy Commerce at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. "You could do it so much more quickly. When you need, say, 160 acres for a well, a rancher with 10,000 acres is pretty sweet," he said. All that has changed now that drilling has moved into urban areas....
Regulating the wind The high winds that are part of life in southeast Wyoming make it a prime target for the development of systems to turn the gusts into a usable source of electricity. To prepare for the expected influx of towers and turbines that may dot the landscape, Laramie County is creating rules to monitor the future installation, operation and potential abandonment of wind energy systems. County officials say the proposed regulations are designed to ensure the orderly development of the systems. They also seek to protect public infrastructure and the quality of life for residents while encouraging the growth of this alternative energy source for personal and commercial uses. The proposal sets limits on how close wind towers can be to houses, utility lines and public roads as well as other wind energy systems. Also, power lines serving the systems would have to be buried, and advertising on the towers would be prohibited. Restrictions on the noise and light from the towers are also included. Many ranchers and large landowners say the rules make sense. But they caution that the final form of the regulations should be considered carefully, particularly because of the potential revenue wind farms can bring....
Big oil casts big shadow over Colorado's water future No one has ever rowed a boat across Stillwater Reservoir. Or caught a fish at Fourteenmile Reservoir. Or stood on the beach of Roan Creek Reservoir. These are all imaginary lakes. They exist only in the minds of oil company executives and attorneys. But the oil companies own legal rights to build and fill these reservoirs, which would be in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties. And as the companies take another look at Colorado's oil- shale deposits, which would require vast amounts of water to develop, they might make those imaginary lakes a reality. Their water rights are huge, and getting bigger. Shell has been buying large water rights on the Western Slope for the last five years and just completed a major purchase in July. State leaders are watching. "I've seen estimates that oil shale, if it is developed, would consume 100 percent of the remaining water in the Colorado River system," said U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar....
Supreme Court won't hear water rights case (subscription) Chalk one up for Goliath (in this case, the federal government), even though he got whupped by David (two Idaho ranching families). By refusing to hear a landmark Idaho water rights case, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it official: An individual can defeat the U.S. government in court in every major battle but lose the war. The court declined to hear a case involving two Idaho ranching families who fought the government for nearly a decade over federal rangeland water rights. That means the two families, who were victorious in their cases, cannot recover attorney fees. Essentially, they've reached the end of their road in legal terms and face a bleak financial outlook after a long battle to defend their stock-watering rights. The two ranches were vindicated earlier this year when the Idaho Supreme Court ruled the federal government does not hold federal rangeland water rights. The ranches won on every major point and the court even said the government's argument reflected "a serious misunderstanding of water law." However, in a serious setback to the ranching operations, the court also ruled they could not recover attorney fees from the government. Considering they owe about $1.5 million combined - an amount roughly equal to the value of the ranches - that's no small matter. The two Owyhee County ranches, Joyce Livestock Co. and LU Ranching Co., appealed the court's decision not to award them attorney fees to the U.S. Supreme Court. They found out Oct. 31 the court would not hear their appeal. "We knew going in the Supreme Court took a mighty small percentage of cases," said LU Ranching owner Tim Lowry. "We were hoping against hope they'd take this one. But they didn't." Lowry said their next step would be "to figure out how to get the attorneys paid. Our options are pretty limited." The Idaho Supreme Court agreed with the ranches on virtually every point in their battle with the federal government over water rights on land covered by federally administered grazing allotments....
Bison market on the move “In the past five years, the bison industry definitely has rebounded,” said Russ Miller, who manages media mogul Ted Turner's 15 ranches, all but one of which run bison. With 45,000 animals, Turner is by far the biggest bison rancher in the nation. The next largest is a Wyoming operation that runs about 3,000 head. Just on Turner's Flying D Ranch south of Bozeman, about 3,500 bison roam, Miller said. Turner has played a large role in the turnaround of the bison industry, in part through the construction of 54 Ted's Montana Grill restaurants around the country, places where people are encouraged to sink their teeth into a slab of bison meat. The restaurants have introduced bison to a wide swath of diners. “They provide a good job of providing a good quality first bite of bison,” said Jim Matheson, assistant director of the National Bison Association. Turner's high profile celebrity status clearly helps bring people in the doors, and they get a dose of Turner's environmental ethic as well, which is part of marketing bison. Turner and other bison ranchers maintain that the shaggy giants are easier on the land than nonnative beef cows, plus the meat is higher in protein and lower in fat than most other meats. The restaurants help move a lot of bison but they also have a secondary effect. If customers enjoy their meal, they start looking a little more closely at the bison meat they're starting to see more regularly in supermarket coolers....
Leaner Pastures: As Horses Multiply,Neglect Cases Rise Across the U.S., the number of horses whose owners won't or can't properly care for them is mushrooming. Spurred by retiring baby boomers and their penchant for second homes in the country, horse ownership boomed in the U.S. over the past decade. Americans own more than nine million horses today, up from just over six million horses in the mid-1990s, according to the American Horse Council, a trade association. Along with the boom came backyard breeding, as owners without the discipline or financial muscle to obtain award-winning genes settled for whatever nature produced. More than two million Americans own horses, and more than a third of those owners have a household income of less than $50,000. As the horse population soared -- and the economy ceased to gallop -- selling the animals became more difficult. Some owners could no longer afford their investment. Until recently, a little-advertised market for unwanted horses existed at equine slaughterhouses, which in 2004 killed an estimated 65,000 horses, largely for human consumption in Europe and Japan. But the last three such plants closed in 2007, under pressure from animal-rights groups. "Animal lovers with big hearts and no idea what's required to take care of a horse have shut down slaughterhouses that were needed," says C.J. Hadley, publisher of a cowboy magazine called Range, based in Carson City, Nev. Calling horse lovers who oppose slaughterhouses "innocent," Ms. Hadley says, "Ranchers love their horses enough to put them down when the time comes." Now, some unwanted American horses wind up at Mexican and Canadian slaughterhouses. But others linger and starve, often ending up at rescue homes and other charities....
Iconic Stetson First Made At Base Of Pikes Peak National park rangers proudly wear them. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have donned them for more than a century. Colorado State Patrol troopers wear them, too. Boy Scout leaders, military drill sergeants and even Smokey Bear, the renowned champion of forest protection, wear Stetson Boss of the Plains ranger hats. Perhaps they should be standard issue for Colorado Springs police, given that the distinctive flat-brimmed, felt hat with the "mountain peak" crown and leather band was conceived and created by John B. Stetson at a campfire at the base of Pikes Peak in 1862. Stetson, the son of a New Jersey hatmaker, was diagnosed with tuberculosis, so he left the family business and went to explore the West before he died. He worked as a brickmaker in St. Joseph, Mo., before joining a Pikes Peak gold-mining expedition. According to historical accounts, he was camped with a dozen men near Pikes Peak when he drew on his skills to fashion a hat out of beaver fur to protect him from the sun, rain and wind. Stetson wore his wide-brimmed, domed hat throughout the expedition that year -- at a time when bowlers and smaller hats were popular. He sold his first hat for a $5 gold piece to a cowboy on horseback in a mountainside mining camp....
Rancher Kenedy's known as more than just a pretty face As historic figures go, Petra's must have been terrific. Her looks stunned frontiersmen. And after researching her for years, biographers Jane Clements Monday and Frances Brannen Vick concluded that Petra (1825-1885) was beautiful not merely physically, but spiritually as well. Forever helping friends, kin and her Catholic church, she gave away a wagonload of money to charities way before such acts earned tax credits. Historian John Henry Brown called her "a woman of superior accomplishments and great natural intelligence." He noted, "She was considered one of the handsomest women of her day." Indian warriors killed her father, ex-governor of Spanish Texas, and carried off three of her sisters, one of whom was never rescued. After marrying a Mexican army colonel, Petra Vela de Vidal had six children. Widowed, she then married steamboat tycoon Mifflin Kenedy and had six more children. She helped the captain build a ranching empire whose tall bunchgrasses and mesquites adorned oil deposits unknown to them that today are worth untold millions. If it weren't footnoted, Petra's Legacy: The South Texas Ranching Empire of Petra Vela and Mifflin Kenedy (Texas A&M Press) might be mistaken for soaring fiction. It is chockablock with crooked politics, cattle rustlers, land fraud, warfare, and enough illicit sex to populate South Texas courtrooms for generations. There were once about 300 claimants to the Kenedy estate....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)