Calif. Fire Started by Arsonist Kills 4 A wind-whipped wildfire started by an arsonist killed four firefighters Thursday and stranded up to 400 people in an RV park when flames burned to the edge of the only road out, officials said. "Everybody is hunkered down here. They're fighting the fire around us. It's across the street from us," said Charles Van Brunt, a ranger at the station at the entrance to Silent Valley Club, the recreational vehicle park near Palm Springs. The residents were in no immediate danger, he said. Authorities asked people in the RV park to stay put to leave roads clear for firefighters. Hundreds of others in the area were forced from their homes. Fire officials said the blaze was deliberately set around 1 a.m. and had blackened 10,000 acres within 12 hours. Fire Chief John Hawkins said the arson "constitutes murder."....
TXU surprises homeowners with rail survey Some eastern McLennan County landowners are on edge as TXU scopes out a route for more than 20 miles of rail to serve its proposed coal-fired power plants. TXU has not yet won state permits to build new plants at Tradinghouse Lake and Lake Creek Lake, but it has sent letters to landowners along the proposed rail route, seeking access for environmental surveys. TXU says the final route has not been chosen for the railroad, which will carry three 150-car trains a day of Wyoming coal to the power plants. But many landowners along the proposed route are concerned that the railroad and its traffic will split their land and spoil their rural lifestyles. “It’s going to have an impact on real estate values,” said Fred Swaner Jr., an information services manager who lives near Axtell along the proposed route. “If you want to live in the country, are you going to want to go to a place with railroad traffic?” Robert Cervenka, a Riesel rancher who heads a local group that is fighting the proposed coal plants, said his land also is along the proposed route. “People are more upset about the railroads than the power plants,” said Cervenka, whose group is called Texans Protecting our Water, Environment and Resources. “We all assumed they were going to use existing railroad lines. We never dreamed they would be building all these new tracks.”....
On the Trail of Wisconsin’s Icy Past GREAT white sheets of glacial ice commandeering land is the perpetual and age-old story of the North. The comings and goings of recent ice ages — the last one retreating from mid-North America 10,000 years ago — were rapid-fire Pleistocene calamities in the creaking eons of geologic time. Today, the aftereffects of all that drifting ice are revealed in landscapes from Montana to Maine, a ubiquitous mishmash of moraines, tussled stone, talus, deep valleys, lakes, rushing rivers, ridgelines and bedrock scraped bare. But in few places is the power of global climate change celebrated as it is in Wisconsin, where the Ice Age National Scenic Trail was established by Congress in 1980 to tell the story of the recent icy past via the educational medium of a hiking trail. When completed, the Ice Age Trail will snake more than 1,000 miles through the state, winding in and out of deep woods, tracking glacial features and connecting hundreds of trailheads from the shores of the Green Bay to the Minnesota border....
These Lands Are Your Lands This is the 15th anniversary of the publication of Free Market Environmentalism by Terry L. Anderson and Donald R. Leal, the magnum opus for those who view property rights, local initiative, and economic incentives as friends, not enemies, of the natural world. Max Borders of TCSDaily has said that this is "the book that changed the way many people look at environmental issues." It is "the book that defined a generation of newer environmentalists, a generation that is friendly to markets, to green values, and to the idea that these are not mutually exclusive." For Anderson and Leal, "At the heart of free market environmentalism is a system of well-specified property rights to natural resources." "Whether these rights are held by individuals, corporations, non-profit environmental groups, or communal groups, a discipline is imposed on resource users because the wealth of the owner of the property right is at stake if bad decisions are made," argued Anderson and Leal, who are part of PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center, in Bozeman, Montana, which is in the vanguard of free market environmentalism....
How collaborative really is “cooperative conservation”? "Cooperative conservation" has been touted as the future-is-now approach to solving public lands and natural resource issues in the West. Conservation groups support it; government and agencies like it; even the Western Governors Association (PDF) and the Bush administration are behind it. In fact, it has become somewhat of a mantra for the Interior Department and Department of Agriculture. Loosely defined, cooperative (or collaborative) conservation is a process by which a diverse group of stakeholders are brought together to first define an issue and then collectively create a path to solving it. The process acknowledges that there may be more sides to an issue than just a “pro” and a “con”; it gives a voice to people not in a position of power or significant influence; and it plays into the idea of the wisdom of the crowd — the notion that the collective mind is better at solving problems than individual ones, even expert ones. Much of the discussion about cooperative conservation involves what it should be used for and how we make it work. For example, should it be used to guide the restoration of a major Western watershed that is now a Superfund site, and if so, how do we plug the right people into the process? The resounding answer to the first part of that question is “yes” and the second answer was part of the theme behind the University of Montana’s Public Lands Law Conference, which was the subject of a recent column on Headwaters News, by Sarah Van de Wetering. Though challenges still exist in the restoration and remediation process for the upper Clark Fork River watershed, which was damaged by a century of hard rock mining in its headwaters, many who were part of the collaborative process say the incredible amount of work already completed to outline a restoration and a remediation program should be a model to others around the country for how such a large-scale issue can be addressed....