NEWS ROUNDUP

To the Supreme Court For a man widely viewed as an ungrateful troublemaker and infrequent folk hero, nestled among 100,000 or more pristine acres of ancient tribal lands and dinosaurs graves, there is a primal logic in the fact that Harvey Frank Robbins’ case before the U.S. Supreme Court Monday will beg the justices to excavate the very bones of the Fifth Amendment. Among other considerations, the high court will have to decide whether the 5th Amendment, like the 1st and the 4th, protects citizens from unlawful retaliation for exercising a presumed right. Cheyenne attorney Karen Budd-Falen argues her client has an “embedded” right under the 5th Amendment’s “Takings Clause” to exclude Uncle Sam from Robbins’ property after Robbins declined a land swap offer he judged “unjust,” which prevented the government from regaining a preexisting easement. Court documents show BLM forgot to record the right-of-way before Robbins, 52, bought the land in question. Though the national media tends to view western “get-off-my-land” disputes as another quaint, age-old comedy of manners such ornery contemporaries as Nevada rancher Wayne Hage, and now Robbins, are forcing serious jurists to wring their hands where none so high beforehand have even waved....This can only be described as a hit piece. It variously describes Robbins as "a rubber-flooring scion from a wealthy, well-connected Alabama family", as "a rogue rancher recklessly throwing his money and influence around to gratify his land-grabbing egoism", and as "arrogantly ignoring such homespun virtues as neighborly cooperation". You get the picture, and yet, this appears on the internet edition of the Casper Star-Tribune under the News tab and is unsigned by the author. The least they could have done was place it in the Opinion section. Better yet, why not produce a balanced piece that discusses this important case?
High court to hear rancher's case The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments Monday in a Wyoming case involving a rancher who has sued employees of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, claiming retaliation. Thermopolis rancher Harvey Frank Robbins maintains that BLM workers pulled his grazing permits and otherwise persecuted him to try to get him to give the government road access. The Supreme Court will consider whether the government officials can be sued personally under federal racketeering law for their official actions. If Robbins wins the Supreme Court case, he can then continue with his case in U.S. District Court in Wyoming. "I am very excited and nervous," said one of Robbins' lawyers, Karen Budd-Falen, as she traveled from Cheyenne to Washington on Friday. "The issues in this case are so important." Robbins asserts that BLM agents told him he would get a "hardball education" when he refused to give them an easement across his land. He says they revoked his grazing and business permits, trespassed on his property and filed a frivolous criminal complaint against him. He is arguing that the government violated his constitutionally protected property and due-process rights. The court will also decide whether the Fifth Amendment protects citizens against retaliation for excluding the government from private property outside the process of eminent domain, where the government has the authority to take property for public purposes....
Despite furor, Idaho elk industry won't face new regulations An attempt to boost state oversight of Idaho's $30 million elk-ranching industry is dead after a bill to license elk ranches was killed Friday by an unlikely alliance of anti-regulation Republicans and Democrats demanding stricter rules. The measure deadlocked 5-5 in the House Agricultural Affairs Committee after passing the Senate last month. That means nothing will come of the late-2006 furor after dozens of domesticated elk bolted from a private hunting preserve into the wilds of eastern Idaho near Yellowstone National Park, prompting sportsmen's groups and then-Gov. Jim Risch to call for new measures to protect wild herds from disease and genetic impurities. Friday's three-hour debate featured bickering elk ranchers who criticized the bill -- even though it had been drafted by members of their own industry association. "The industry, regardless of what you've been told, 80 percent is totally against licensing," said Charles Warner, an elk rancher from Kellogg in northern Idaho and a board member of the Idaho Elk Breeders Association....
World's most important crops hit by global warming effects Global warming over the past quarter century has led to a fall in the yield of some of the most important food crops in the world, according to one of the first scientific studies of how climate change has affected cereal crops. Rising temperatures between 1981 and 2002 caused aloss in production of wheat, corn and barley that amounted in effect to some 40 million tons a year - equivalent to annual losses of some £2.6bn. Although these numbers are not large compared to the world-wide production of cereal crops, scientists warned that the findings demonstrated how climate change was already having an impact on the global production of staple foods. "Most people tend to think of climate change as something that will impact the future, but this study shows that warming over the past two decades has already had real effects on global food supply," said Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California. The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, analysed yields of cereals from around the world during a period when average temperatures rose by about 0.7C between 1980 and 2002 - although the rise was even higher in certain crop-growing regions of the world....
Energy companies say they can live with grouse rules Some major energy companies say federal rules advanced to protect sage grouse do not impinge on their operations in northeastern Wyoming, but some drillers and service workers say they're set back by the rules. The Bureau of Land Management's seasonal restrictions ban any surface disturbance on grouse strutting and nesting grounds from March 1 through June 15. Marathon Oil Co. reports it has not seen a dramatic slowdown in its operations as a result. Lee Warren, public affairs officer for Anadarko, said the company isn't drilling at all now, because most of its leases are on federal land. He said the company saw the lull coming. Bill William, owner of Pump Pro, Inc., a pump service and repair company in Gillette, said he's seen business fall because of the restrictions....
Alternate proposal for Piñon Canyon The U.S. Army's plans to acquire as much as 418,577 acres of fragile grasslands in southeastern Colorado may face a bigger "tank trap" than the Pentagon expected when it announced its goal last February. The Army already controls 240,000 acres at the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site. Expanding to 1,000 square miles would displace ranchers who have been good stewards of these lands for generations. The reaction from most of the state's political leaders was originally meek. Gov. Bill Ritter and Sens. Wayne Allard and Ken Salazar urged the Army to only buy land from willing sellers and not to use federal eminent-domain powers. Unfortunately, such pieties are largely beside the point. Most of the land the Army covets is in the Comanche National Grasslands and is already owned by the U.S. government. To be sure, the region is a checkerboard of private and public land. But even without eminent domain, the Army could make most private landowners within or adjacent to the federal holdings an offer they couldn't refuse. The problem for many ranchers is that their private holdings are too small to be viable if they lose their grazing privileges on the adjacent public lands....
State, church "very close" to deal on bison With a congressional hearing set for Tuesday over the government's killing of bison that migrate from Yellowstone National Park, state officials are negotiating to give the animals safe travel through a sprawling, church-owned ranch north of the park. A deal would end a seven-year impasse on about 6,000 acres owned by the Church Universal and Triumphant, a religious sect that gained notoriety last decade for its predictions of impending apocalypse. Church President Kate Gordon said Friday the two parties "are very close" to a final agreement. The purchase of grazing rights on the property would give bison room to move out of the park without possibly being rounded up for slaughter, as mandated by state and federal policies. The policies were created after cattle producers expressed concern their grazing animals would become infected with brucellosis through contact with Yellowstone bison carrying the disease. In cattle brucellosis can cause the abortion of calves. Some Montana ranchers worry brucellosis in their livestock would restrict the cattle trade, including beef exports....
Park snowmobiling rises More people rode snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park this winter than in the past several years, but even the busiest day didn't approach the daily limit of 720 snowmobiles allowed in the park. On average, 299 snowmobiles entered the park between December and March 11, when the winter season ended. Last year the average was 253. Even the busiest day this season -- Dec. 28, when 542 snowmobiles entered -- fell below the daily limit that has been in place since 2004 and is the number that the National Park Service is considering for a long-term rule to reduce air pollution and noise in the park....
Ethanol's Growing List of Enemies Paul Hitch has spent his entire life raising cattle and hogs on a stretch of the Oklahoma panhandle he says is "flat as a billiard table." His great-grandfather started the ranch in 1884, before Oklahoma was a state, and now Hitch, 63, is preparing to pass the family business on to his two sons. But he worries that they'll face mounting pressures in the industry, particularly because of the soaring price for corn, which the business depends on to feed the livestock. In the past year, corn prices have doubled as demand from ethanol producers has surged. "This ethanol binge is insane," says Hitch, who's president-elect of the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. The ethanol movement is sprouting a vocal crop of critics. While politicians including President George W. Bush and farmers across the Midwest hope that the U.S. can win its energy independence by turning corn into fuel, Hitch and an unlikely assortment of allies are raising their voices in opposition. The effort is uniting ranchers and environmentalists, hog farmers and hippies, solar-power idealists and free-market pragmatists....
Industry: Reject water rules The oil and gas industry hopes that Gov. Dave Freudenthal will reject rule changes adopted last month by a divided state Environmental Quality Council that would regulate impacts of coal-bed methane water on soil, vegetation and landowners. The changes are not well defined and create more paperwork for industry and landowners, which could result in slowing down coal-bed methane development in Wyoming, said John Robitaille, vice president of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming. "There's a great deal of uncertainty surrounding these rules," Robitaille said. "Any time you have uncertainty, you most likely have delay." Kate Fox, attorney for the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a Sheridan-based advocacy group that proposed the rule changes, said the rules shouldn't slow down the speed of issuing drilling permits. "I don't see it as onerous at all," Fox said Wednesday. "I don't see how anyone can complain about a requirement of decent science to support their applications."....
Split estates: Mineral, agriculture surface rights clash in field Herbert Vasseur has begun planning his spring farming activities while keeping a close eye on the Montana Legislature's split estate debates, specifically Senate Bill 19 in the current legislative session. Senate Bill 19 is in the House Natural Resource committee and if passed will benefit the surface and landowners in split estates. “Support is needed to pass this bill,” said Vasseur, a farmer, landowner and mineral owners form Chinook, Mont. As a farmer, landowner and mineral owner, Vasseur is one of few Montanans who own both the surface and mineral rights on his farm on which he raises cereal grains. Most Montana landowners aren't as fortunate and live on split estates. A split estates occurs when one person own the surface rights and another owns the mineral rights to a piece of land, explained Vasseur. “There are a lot of ways split estates came about,” he said. “When the homesteaders came to Montana in the 1930s, they would get liens put against their mineral rights to pay their bills because they didn't think they would be worth anything. There were also a lot of split estates made with tax deeds and foreclosures where the counties sold the surface rights and maintained or sold the mineral rights.”....
Whose Ox Is Gored? The media are finally catching up with Al Gore. Criticism of his anti-global-warming franchise and his personal environmental record has gone beyond ankle-biting bloggers. It's now coming from the New York Times and the Nashville Tennessean, his hometown paper that put his birth, as a senator's son, on its front page back in 1948, and where a young Al Gore Jr. worked for five years as a journalist. Last Tuesday, the Times reported that several eminent scientists "argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points [on global warming] are exaggerated and erroneous." The Tenessean reported yesterday that Mr. Gore received $570,000 in royalties from the owners of zinc mines who held mineral leases on his farm. The mines, which closed in 2003 but are scheduled to reopen under a new operator later this year, "emitted thousands of pounds of toxic substances and several times, the water discharged from the mines into nearby rivers had levels of toxins above what was legal." All of this comes in the wake of the enormous publicity Mr. Gore received after his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar. The film features Mr. Gore reprising his famous sighing and lamenting how the average American's energy use is greedily off the charts. At the film's end viewers are asked, "Are you ready to change the way you live?"....
Traffic, water may flow in tunnel The rock samples come up slowly from deep within the Earth, cylinders of stone almost unimaginably old that could be key to a future water supply for thousands of Southern Californians. Amid the peaks that separate Orange and Riverside counties, geologists from San Diego-based Kleinfelder, Inc. are working to drill nearly a half-mile into the mountains' core. Their goal is to find out what kind of rock lies along the path of a proposed Metropolitan Water District pipeline under the Santa Ana Mountains between Corona and Irvine. The pipeline would deliver up to 646 million gallons of water daily, enough to supply 1.46 million people annually. The drilling is also of interest to the Riverside County Transportation Commission, which – along with transportation officials from Orange County – is investigating the feasibility of tunneling under the mountains to link the counties....
Editorial - Equal access to injustice, more like it Americans have a pretty keen sense of justice. For example, most people would agree that the ability to protect your rights shouldn't be limited to the wealthy. We even have a federal law allowing people to recover their legal expenses after they sue the government and win. The purpose of that Equal Access to Justice Act is to level the playing field - to make sure the immense power and wealth of the federal government doesn't prevent people from having their day in court. But if it's justice we want, Congress ought to tweak that act. As the Missoulian illustrated in a March 11 article, “Forest Service struggles to finish restoration,” the Equal Access to Justice Act has become a self-funding mechanism for environmental groups fundamentally opposed to prevailing national forest management direction. As our article detailed, the Lolo National Forest spent more than $1 million in recent years on a proposal to use salvaged timber harvested in the wake of the fires of 2000 to help pay for extensive forest restoration. The proposal called for logging 4,600 out of a total of 74,000 acres burned in 2000. The high cost of trying to launch the project is largely attributable to the extensive planning and detailed environmental analysis required to justify and defend any significant Forest Service undertaking. To make the long story short, the project didn't get far. The Sierra Club and Alliance for the Wild Rockies stole the momentum with a lawsuit objecting to harvesting trees in unroaded patches, and a subsequent lawsuit by a group now known as the WildWest Institute brought the whole thing to a halt. Based on the Equal Access to Justice Act, the Forest Service agreed to pay $75,000 in legal fees to the first two groups and is negotiating over the latter's demand for $110,660 in legal fees. The money will rob from funds the agency could better use managing the forests. This is nothing unusual. That's the problem....
Fighting Vail's future fires Mother Nature can be quite the arsonist. Maybe next summer, maybe in 50 years, she'll get the urge to burn down much of the White River National Forest and clear out hundreds of miles of beetle-killed pine trees. She historically likes a clean slate, and a big burn is inevitable, said Phil Bowden, a wildland fuels management specialist with the U.S. Forest Service. Vail just has to be ready when that happens. This summer, the town and the forest service will continue clearing out dead and dying pine trees surrounding Vail, much like they've done the past three years. The trees shed their needles and branches then fall to the forest floor, contributing to a large and volatile fuel load. The pines, filled with sticky, combustible pitch, make great fuel for wildfires and are dangerous to residents and buildings, especially those on the edge....
Report blames forest supervisors for letting 2006 canyon blaze grow A June fire that led to the voluntary evacuation of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon grew out of control because of errors by fire managers and senior supervisors who let the lightning-caused blaze burn in dangerous conditions, a U.S. Forest Service report says. The Warm Fire ended up charring 59,000 acres on the Kaibab Plateau between June 8 and July 4, with some of the area scalded so badly the soil was sterilized. The report, obtained this week by the Arizona Daily Sun newspaper, blames supervisors and Kaibab National Forest District Ranger Jill Leonard for a series of mistakes, including inaction when the fire flared out of control, making decisions on the fly and allowing the fire to burn unfought during the peak Arizona fire season. A spokeswoman for the Forest Service said Saturday that only a few of the report's findings relate specifically to Leonard, who now is assigned to the Washington D.C. headquarters, and that blaming her alone would be simplistic....
Logging halted on 72,000 acres in Oregon Logging in spotted owl habitat is coming to a halt on 72,000 acres of federal lands in Western Oregon until government biologists come up with a better scientific basis to saying that cutting the trees will not harm the threatened species. Based on an appeals court ruling last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week pulled five documents known as biological opinions that authorized the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to log in owl habitat stretching from Mount Hood to the California border, Fish and Wildlife spokesman Phil Carroll said Friday. The biological opinions gave BLM and the Forest Service authority to kill some spotted owls in the course of logging on the Mount Hood, Willamette and Rogue River-Siskiyou national forests and the Salem, Eugene, Roseburg and Medford districts of BLM and the Columbia River gorge national Scenic Area, Fish and Wildlife spokesman Phil Carroll said Friday. The ruling pertained to a challenge of logging on BLM's Medford District, but the same reasoning was used in all five documents, which are also being challenged in court. Carroll said those were withdrawn in expectation they would be struck down as well....
Bi-partisan effort to remove livestock manure from Superfund Back in 1980 Congress passed the “Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act” (CERCLA - also knows as the Superfund Law) to address the growing concerns about the need to clean up uncontrolled, abandoned hazardous waste sites and to address future releases of hazardous substances into the environment. Lately some environmentalists have been demanding, with some support from isolated judicial cases, that livestock manure should be classified as a hazardous waste and thus come under the Superfund Law. To counteract this move, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation on March 8 that would clarify the Superfund Law that has unintentionally impacted America's farmers and ranchers. The bipartisan “Agricultural Protection and Prosperity Act of 2007” would clarify that livestock manure is not classified as a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant under CERCLA. Those introducing the legislation contend that if normal animal manure is found to be a hazardous substance under the Superfund Law, then virtually every farm operation in the country could be potentially exposed to liabilities and penalties under the Super-fund Law, and this is an outcome that Congress never intended....
Horse-meat export fight resumes in Texas After hearing of reports several years ago that 1986 Kentucky Derby winner Ferdinand had been slaughtered for food in Japan, legions of American horse lovers were outraged. The famed racehorse's death also fanned a battle that was renewed this month in the Texas Legislature and could end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. Not everyone in Texas is opposed to killing horses for food. State Rep. Sid Miller, R-Stephenville, has introduced a bill legalizing the export of horse meat from Texas for consumption in countries such as France and Belgium, where it is considered a delicacy. Miller's filing came after a March 6 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals not to reconsider its own January ruling in which it upheld a 1949 Texas law banning the slaughter of horses in the state for human consumption anywhere....
Artful cowboys (and girls) The Wild West comes to St. Petersburg in two exhibitions opening Friday at the Arts Center. "The Wild Bunch: Cowboys in Contemporary Art" will feature works by contemporary artists that use the iconography of the cowboy in fresh and unexpected ways. The exhibition includes installations and video work as well as paintings and sculptures by artists including Jenny Rogers, Jennifer Zackin, James Michaels, Gordon McConnell, Fort Guerin, William Schenk, David Rathman and Bernard Williams. "Cracker Country: Florida's Cowboy Culture" features works by three local photographers, Beth Reynolds, Carlton Ward Jr. and Rachel Turner, who have documented some aspect of the Florida Cracker cowboy culture....
The cowboy way They just don't make 'em like they used to. That's what Don Walker would say about the machines used to make the kind of cowboy boots ranchers and cattle hands wear day in and day out, swearing they'd never put anything else on their feet. "It's made out of iron," Walker said as he described his prized machine at the 10th annual Cedar City Cowboy Gathering on Friday. "I don't even think you can find one of these anymore." Much like the way his sturdy machine was made, Walker said his boot-making profession is also a dying tradition. But he wasn't alone in his attempt to promote his disappearing craft. Many other vendors tried their best to preserve the Old West during the Cowboy Gathering by selling rare, handmade items you simply wouldn't see in a modern retail store. "It's funny," Walker said. "Our society just doesn't understand custom anymore." Like the bootmaker from Spring City, Dick Levitz, of Cedar City, said he also struggles to earn a living building saddles from scratch. But it isn't about the money, he said. He just likes doing what he does even though the demand for his services isn't what it used to be....
It's All Trew: Coffee history from the West Presenting the history of coffee since its beginnings as a wild berry would require pages. Coffee history in the Great American West could not be told without using the word "Arbuckles," which just might be the most famous name in the West. Before Arbuckles came along, coffee could only be made by roasting raw coffee beans, grinding by some method and then boiling in water. John Arbuckle changed this process. First, he roasted raw beans professionally, coated them with a mixture of eggs and sugar, sealing in the flavor, then placed the beans into paper packages. Customers merely ground the beans and boiled the brew. At first the coated beans came in a sack, and later the already-ground beans were packaged. The Arbuckle Company initiated many new ideas for sales including offering prizes, coupons for trade and even placing "hard rock candy" into the wooden cases holding packages of coffee. None of these incentives quite matched that of a cowboy acquiring the paper sack in which the coffee came packed. At that time, toilet paper was unheard of on roundups and trail drives. The actual taste of country coffee varied because of the many different types of water used....