NEWS ROUNDUP

Senators say fire danger is emergency With tall stands of pines surrounding them, Tahoe's senators called for a temporary emergency declaration in the Lake Tahoe Basin to override regulations that hinder fuels reduction. "The number one issue facing the basin is fire," Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev) said. "It's time to cut through the red tape." Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) suggested declaring a temporary emergency in the Tahoe Basin after hearing a presentation in Glenbrook by the Nevada Fire Safe Council. Senators Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and John Ensign (R-Nev.) immediately responded to the idea and asked U.S. Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell to set up a meeting in September in Washington for the three senators to meet and discuss the action, along with Kimbell and Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne. Declaring an emergency in the Tahoe Basin would allow the U.S. Forest Service and other fire agencies to reduce the forest fuels in the basin without going through regulatory agencies and their requirements....
Editorial - Light a fire under basin regulations The South Shore wildfire, ignited by a campfire, started June 24 and destroyed 254 homes and burned 3,100 acres of forest before it was extinguished. The nearness of the wildfire gave pause to many homeowners and communities, forcing them to assess their personal and neighborhood defensible space. The wildfire's devastation caused angry voices to point fingers at regulations of the agencies which govern the Tahoe Basin. Whether they are fair or unfair accusations, it has fueled an ongoing debate over forest health practices in the Tahoe Basin. The effects of the wildfire and the health of Lake Tahoe's forests were at the forefront of this week's visits to the Tahoe Basin by our Senators Harry Reid and John Ensign, and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. With the Lake Tahoe Forum prompting appearances by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne, Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark E. Rey and U.S. Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell, the issue was of uptmost concern this week. While listening to a presentation in Glenbrook by the Nevada Fire Safe Council, the senators expressed frustration at how regulations slow the ability to complete forest health projects in the basin, especially with funding already approved, but unspent. Right there among the Glenbrook trees, the senators made plans to meet in September to discuss what can be done to speed things up - even considering a temporary emergency declaration so federal, state and local forestry and fire officials can thin out and clean up the basin's forests. One agency, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency has heard the criticism, loud and clear....
Firefighting tab: $828M and counting The U.S. Forest Service has spent $828 million fighting wildfires across the country since last Oct. 1, with new cost containment measures having a real impact, agency officials said Thursday. That figure, current as of Monday, is higher than the $750 million the agency had spent on fire suppression at the same point last year. But many more acres have burned this fire season, said Tom Harbour, the agency's director of fire and aviation management. "It's been an extraordinary season," Harbour said. "We've burned to date about 300 percent, three times the numbers of acres that we would typically burn based on a 10-year average. We've burned about 170 percent of the acres we burned at this time last year." The total money the Forest Service has banked to spend on fire suppression this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, is $1.2 billion. The agency is working hard to stay within that amount, but it's "tough for me to know" whether it will, Harbour said....
Howl: Living precariously with wolves and cattle Through the end of June last year, we got along fine with the wolves. I was working on a ranch in Montana’s Madison Valley, where the wolves ran elk to exhaustion in the high country while yearling cattle fattened on the lower pastures of the ranch. Peaceful coexistence with predators seemed within our grasp, and that was our goal, just to get along. Near the middle of July, we gathered 780 heifers from the grassy flats by the river and drove them onto the Squaw Creek Allotment, a crumpled tablecloth of tree-covered draws, bare ridges and seeps at the base of the Madison Range. We settled our herd and left them munching Forest Service grass. Within 24 hours, we were in trouble. On the first morning, a heifer stood apart. As I walked her up the fence, I saw the bloody stripes just under her tail, gaped at the rip in her bag that opened to darkness with every step. From then on, life accelerated to a blur. What I recall clearly is that the animal corpses appeared with maddening frequency. One lay bloated in a stream. Two others were gnawed to bare bone. I couldn’t help it: My rage grew with the body count. I thought of Aldo Leopold’s famous line about a fierce green fire in a wolf’s eye, and I wanted to see it die. After performing an autopsy on one of the cows, Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks issued a shoot-on-sight permit for two wolves. A few days later, with a borrowed 30-30, I filled half of it....
Bears by the numbers Whether a grizzly bear becomes famous or infamous, or lives anonymously in some remote wilderness, often depends on location and luck. Some bears live out their lives without ever getting into trouble with people. Others become habituated as cubs to associate people with food. These are often doomed to untimely death. Other bears operate between these two extremes, alternating between the high country when there are good crops of whitebark pine nuts and army cutworm moths, to cruising valley floors, farmyards, backyards and trash bins when seeds and moths are poor. "When there's a good food year, we don't have many problem bears," said Mark Bruscino, head of the grizzly recovery program for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. The department is up to bear No. 550 -- all the bears that have been radio-collared, tracked and studied since 1975....
Problem bears: Two case histories Some bears never learn to coexist with people or livestock. For example, meet bear No. 212 -- first captured in 1993 as a sub-adult male, weighing 150 pounds. "We first ran into him in the Meeteetse area," said Mark Bruscino, who heads Wyoming's grizzly recovery efforts. The young male had developed an early and ultimately fatal habit: killing and eating livestock. He was captured and moved away from grazing allotments in 1997, but found his way back and graduated from mutton to beef on the hoof, killing at least 20 cattle before he was killed by game wardens in 2000. Curiously, the Meeteetse community dubbed the bear "Little Wahb," after the orphan bear in the novel "Biography of a Grizzly" by Earnest Thompson Seton. By then, No. 212 was a lot bigger, weighing between 600 and 700 pounds....
Wild horse herd wins reprieve Hundreds of wild horses and burros slated for roundup at a national wildlife refuge along the Nevada-Oregon line will continue to roam free, at least for now, to the relief of wild horse advocates and dismay of some other environmentalists and wildlife officials. After the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service canceled a planned gather last month under pressure from horse advocates and a House committee chairman, horse groups applauded. But wildlife officials fear the herds will gobble up scarce resources and destroy habitat for the animals the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge was created to protect. The victory for horses endangers pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, pygmy rabbits, sage grouse, mule deer and untold species found in isolated springs, they say. Other environmental groups, while not necessarily opposed to wild horses, argue too many will significantly degrade the delicate western Great Basin ecosystem and pillage the refuge's financial resources. "We simply can't put the needs of horses above all other wildlife, especially when law requires these refuges be managed for specific species," said Evan Hirsche, president of the National Wildlife Refuge Association, an independent nonprofit organization that advocates for refuges....
Odd coalition looks to protect Idaho open spaces A coalition of ranchers, environmental groups, timber growers and farmers worried about disappearing open spaces in Idaho say they will again push the 2008 Legislature to enact tax breaks for conservation easements. The Idaho Working Lands Initiative wants an income tax credit for lands protected from development. The conservation easements could be with government or private land trusts. A measure last year that set the tax credit at 50% of the appraised value of the lands failed. But sponsors say they will revive it in 2008....
Modern day 'Gold Rush' threatens Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Iconic locations in the western United States such as the Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon risk being intensively mined, according to a new study conducted by a Washington DC based non-profit research group. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) cited data from the US Bureau of Land Management to identify 2900 new mining claims that have been staked within five miles of national parks since 2003. "This is a modern-day land rush," said Dusty Horwitt, one of the authors of the report. Horwitt said, though mining is prohibited within national parks, nearby activity could damage ecosystems inside the protected areas....
Burning Man tries to cope with cash Inside the Alamo Square apartment of Larry Harvey, the co-founder and impresario of Burning Man, there is a wooden statuette of Ganesh, the Hindu deity known for his patronage of arts and science. The expensive artifact was part of a splurge Harvey allowed himself three years ago, when he finally was able to redecorate his rental apartment and turn it from the paper-infested swamp he'd lived in for the past 22 years to the elegant bachelor pad it is today, adorned with Far Eastern decor and inhabited by a man who, by his own definition, has done well for himself. Harvey, 59, politely declined to share how much he paid for the item. "If I tell you," Harvey said, "they'll think me rich." Appearing rich has become a problem for Harvey and his 21-year-old counterculture arts festival. This Labor Day weekend, Burning Man is expected to generate $10 million in revenue from 45,000 ticket-buying customers, each of whom will pay $195 to $280 for entrance to a patch of Nevada desert called Black Rock City. And Harvey's ex-partner is suing him for either a cut of the festival's worth or an agreement to turn over the Burning Man trademark "to the public domain." In art circles and around the blogosphere, Burners are asking: Is this famously anti-monetary event getting ruined by too much cash?....
Scientists hail ‘frozen smoke’ as material that will change world A MIRACLE material for the 21st century could protect your home against bomb blasts, mop up oil spillages and even help man to fly to Mars. Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C. Scientists are working to discover new applications for the substance, ranging from the next generation of tennis rackets to super-insulated space suits for a manned mission to Mars. It is expected to rank alongside wonder products from previous generations such as Bakelite in the 1930s, carbon fibre in the 1980s and silicone in the 1990s. Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said: “It is an amazing material. It has the lowest density of any product known to man, yet at the same time it can do so much. I can see aerogel being used for everything from filtering polluted water to insulating against extreme temperatures and even for jewellery.” Aerogel is nicknamed “frozen smoke” and is made by extracting water from a silica gel, then replacing it with gas such as carbon dioxide. The result is a substance that is capable of insulating against extreme temperatures and of absorbing pollutants such as crude oil....
Dead Men Farming By now you've probably heard that a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report states: From 1999 through 2005, the USDA "paid $1.1 billion in farm payments in the names of 172,801 deceased individuals. ... 40 percent went to those who had been dead for three or more years, and 19 percent to those dead for seven or more years." One dead farmer got more than $400,000 during those years. And they say you can't take it with you. Defending the USDA, the GAO adds, "The complex nature of some farming operations -- such as entities embedded within other entities -- can make it difficult for USDA to avoid making payments to deceased individuals." Exactly. The agricultural section of the U.S. code is nearly 1,800 pages. There's an easy way to avoid such absurdities: Abolish all farm subsidies....
Disaster looms for cattle ranchers Utah ranchers devastated by recent wildfires have lost nearly eight times the number of cattle previously thought - and need more than 1,600 semitrailer truckloads of hay to feed surviving herds moved from burned-out ranges. The disaster facing the state's No. 1 agriculture industry is told in the numbers of a Utah Department of Agriculture and Food survey of ranchers released Friday: Nearly 300 cattle and calves were killed by fire, 90 were injured and 1,285 are unaccounted for. Initial reports had placed the number of cattle killed at 200. Fires and drought have pushed nearly half of all cattle in the state off summer ranges - forcing ranchers to sell off herds or find the money to buy hay, says a U.S. Statistical Service report. Some 78 ranchers affected by wildfires say they need at least 38,500 tons of hay to feed nearly 9,700 displaced animals, according to the Agriculture Department survey. Those numbers don't include other producers in 25 of the state's 29 counties coping with severe drought, Utah agriculture officials say....
Buyers prize boards that have been aged by the elements It has the character of barn wood, without the destructive down side. Pull a barn down in order to sell the wood, and the barn is gone for good. But pull the face boards off a snow fence, and the boards can easily be replaced. Then a decade or so later, the next generation of aged wood is ready to harvest. Such is the business approach of Centennial Woods Inc. of Laramie, whose focus is exploiting the market potential of old snow fences. Tearing down a barn is a salvage model, said Gene Klawetter, president and CEO of Centennial Woods. His company follows a recycling, or even a farming model. When the snow fence wood is ripe, it's time to harvest and replant. And Wyoming is fertile ground for such a crop, with an estimated 15 million to 18 million linear feet of snow fence, which is perhaps 95 percent of all the snow fence in the nation, thanks to the state's harsh weather and ferocious wind....