Dubois hunters split on losses to wolves The growing number of gray wolves and the increasing territory they roam have raised concern from many local hunters and outfitter guides that wolves are eating into their hunting experience and their business profits. Wolf advocates argue there's no evidence wolves are chewing through big game populations, calling them a victim of an underlying hostility in the West. Where one side holds the literary legend of the big, bad wolf, the other sees the Hollywood icon from the film "Dances with Wolves." In Dubois, a town of about 1,000, where many residents hunt as a way of putting meat on the table, both sides provide mostly anecdotal information to bolster their arguments on whether wolves have affected the local elk herds. Budd Betts Jr. runs a guest ranch and hunting guide operation that depends heavily on income from the fall elk hunting season. The ranch is located in a scenic mountain valley outside of Dubois where elk roam and wolves are heard howling. He said the area was known for plentiful elk that were easy to hunt. "That tradition has basically gone away," Betts said. "And for that I blame the wolf. I blame the wolf on the fact that we hardly have any late-season elk hunting anymore."....
Gray wolves face challenges in wild Nearly a decade after the federal government began its plan to bring back the Mexican gray wolf, a mere 59 are believed to be living in the wild. Though the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has reintroduced more than 90 of the endangered wolves, the complex balance of placing the animals into areas with livestock has made their comeback problematic. Fish and Wildlife is giving the public a chance to revisit its policy governing wolf reintroduction over two weeks of hearings that began Monday. A local hearing is scheduled for 5 p.m. Friday at the University of Arizona. Passions on both sides of the issue run high. Many ranchers are upset that the wolves kill their cattle and other livestock and want the wolves removed, while some environmentalists are adamant that having the wolves in the wild is necessary to maintain a balanced ecosystem. Critics say the population of Mexican gray wolves — a rare gray-wolf subspecies — has failed to thrive because of poor policy....
Wolf-Proof Shelters Go Up for School Kids Catron County parents say they're just concerned about the safety of their children. Animal activists say it's an overreaction. Reserve Independent Schools is building wolf-proof shelters for school bus stops in southwest New Mexico, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has reintroduced the Mexican gray wolf. The decision to create coop-like bus stops in this mostly rural school district stems from "numerous reports of wolf sightings and wolf activity in close proximity to our children," Superintendent Loren Cushman said in an Oct. 30 memo on the project. Enclosed wooden shelters will have wire-mesh covered windows on the front and sides. The goal is to install the first of about 20 shelters by late December, Cushman said. "Whether a person is pro or con wolf, we think it's a deterrent to build these shelters," Cushman told the Journal. "We need to do everything we can to protect our children." Cushman's memo cited two children from the Reserve area who on the last day of school in May reported they were followed by a wolf during their half-mile walk home from a school bus stop. "The situation could have become tragic very quickly," he wrote. Cushman has a 6-year-old daughter and said he worries about her when she is outside their Reserve-area home. The May report, along with other wolf sightings and attacks on livestock and pets, led the district to "take further steps in protecting our children," Cushman said. Brenda McCarty, mother of the 13-year-old boy and 11-year-old girl who reported being followed by a wolf, said her children no longer walk to or from the bus stop and are afraid to go anywhere outside the house by themselves. McCarty said she has seen wolves in the area three miles north of Reserve, and her family regularly hears a wolf howling near their home. She said her children are not as spooked as they were immediately after the May wolf sighting, but "They are very cautious. They don't go anywhere by themselves. ... Once it's dusk, nobody goes outside anymore."....Also see Glenwood School In Lockdown - Wolf At Playgound
The Grizzly and the Future of the Rocky Mountain West The one true symbol of wilderness today is the grizzly bear--ursus arctos horribilis. Grizzlies and humans (Doug Peacock, excepted) just don't get along. More humans, less bears; less bears, less wilderness. And since the larger part of American history has been that of humans subduing wilderness, the great bears have not fared well. Thirty years ago, the mighty grizzly bear of the American Rocky Mountains landed on the Endangered Species list. It was one of the first animals honored with this dubious citation. By 1973, the giant bears, which once ruled the great plains and Rocky Mountains from the Dakotas to California and struck terror into the Lewis and Clark expedition and many who followed, existed only in a few patches of isolated and still wild land in Montana and Wyoming: greater Yellowstone, Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the Cabinet Mountains, the Selkirks and the Swan Range. Even in these last remote refuges, the bear was hardly thriving. Perhaps 350 bears remained in Yellowstone. Then the Park Service closed the open dump, a stable source of food, and the population dropped. The Cabinet-Yaak, Selkirk and Swan populations totaled less than 200 bears combined....
Spray vs. gun bear deterrent debate rages Long ago, grizzly bears thrived in Montana as did tales - some tall, some true - told by frontiersmen of a man-eater even more fearsome than the other two bogeymen of the forest, wolves and mountain lions. By the late 1800s, one of Vic Workman's great-grandfathers was among the legions of homesteaders who trapped and shot the giant bears by the thousands in an effort to make the area safe for fellow settlers. Today, the reputation of Ursus arctos horribilis - along with other major predators - is no longer that of a brutish killer, but of a keystone species decimated by overhunting and habitat loss, a symbol of America's misunderstanding of how nature works. Also changed is how people can handle encounters with grizzlies, using a chemical spray rather than guns to improve the odds that both humans and bears will escape the encounters unharmed. But Workman believes that if a bullet was good enough for his great-grandfather more than a century ago, then it's good enough for him when confronted by a charging grizzly, especially since he's wielding a modern, high-powered rifle....
UN: US Key to Any New Climate Pact Delegates and scientists from around the world opened the biggest ever climate change conference Monday, aiming to build a new international pact by 2009 to combat global warming or risk economic and environmental disaster caused by rising temperatures. Some 10,000 conferees, activists and journalists from nearly 190 countries gathered on the resort island of Bali for two weeks of U.N.-led talks that follow a series of scientific reports this year concluding that the world has the technology to slow global warming, but must act immediately. The Bali meeting will be the first major climate change conference since former Vice President Al Gore due in Bali next week and a U.N. scientific council won the Nobel Peace Prize in October for their environmental work, fueling the growing sense of urgency as ice-caps melt, oceans rise and extreme weather increases. Attendees won't be able to craft a meaningful plan to address global warming without cooperation from the United States, the top emitter of greenhouse gases, the U.N.'s climate chief said Sunday....
Turner becomes largest private landowner in US Ted Turner gave the world CNN, but the legacy he intends to leave America is not the incessant drumbeat of television news, but millions of acres of wide-open spaces teeming with wildlife and protected endangered species. Formerly known as the Mouth from the South, the patriarch of cable news is no longer in the media business, having left Time Warner in 2003. Today, he is America's biggest conservationist as well as its largest private landowner. Like many American outdoorsmen he is both a committed hunter and environmentalist, except that he has managed to turn his passion into a profit-making business. Over the past few years, Ted Turner has used his $2.3bn (£1.1bn) wealth to create wildlife sanctuaries across many of the two million acres he owns in 12 states as well as in the southern tip of the Americas, Patagonia. His mostly western lands are filled with bison, native cut-throat trout and cougars in habitat that he manages in an environmentally sensitive way....
Cactus cops struggling to keep up with saguaro thefts It took decades for these three saguaros, now shriveled skeletons, to reach 7 feet tall. Thieves ripped the cactuses from the ground, probably hoping to sell them for use in landscaping, before a rancher forced them to leave empty-handed. As a so-called "cactus cop," Mike Reimer investigates such thefts for the Arizona Department of Agriculture. But with millions of acres to patrol and strong demand for saguaros and other desert plants, it's tough for Reimer and the agency's one other native plant officer to keep up with those wanting to pinch cactuses from state land. "It's so rare to run across them lifting saguaros out of the ground," Reimer said. The Agriculture Department wants more investigators to protect native plants, but there isn't money for it, and even the money that covers Reimer's salary is drying up, officials say. Investigators face a lucrative market for stolen saguaros, which can fetch hundreds of dollars from homeowners who often don't know the cactuses are illegal, Reimer said....
Trails group, ranchers pleased with ski deal The Beartooth Recreational Trails Association, headed up by President Grant Barnard, runs the Red Lodge Nordic Center, which is located on the Aspen Ridge Ranch, privately owned by Kathy Loo and her brother Bruce Haughey. The partnership, which has lasted for several years, has benefits for both the BRTA and the Aspen Ridge Ranch. "It's horse property, so we have trails for hiking and riding," Haughey said. "In the winter, Grant and his people will be using those trails. Those people are great. They help keep the trails clean." He added, "We love working with them. It's a great service they provide because it's really family-oriented." But he doesn't downplay the Aspen Ridge Ranch's role. "Without a private landowner giving them access to some skiable, fairly flat land, they wouldn't be there," Haughey said. The Nordic Center, home for a trail system of more than nine miles, is located a couple miles west of Red Lodge, and is the perfect spot to start out on a cross-country ski trip....
Denton's wild pig problem is nothing to snort at A few bloodstains dotted the back of Robert Stalbaum's pickup. The blood belonged to the feral hogs he trapped the night before. "Feral hogs have become a huge problem throughout the state," said Mr. Stalbaum, a wildlife biologist for the Texas Cooperative Extension Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "We'll never get rid of pigs; they breed too fast. But we want to alleviate the problems they are causing for farmers and ranchers." But feral hogs aren't just wild animals out in the country anymore, he said. They're starting to move into the city, too. In the last month, Mr. Stalbaum trapped 16 inside the city limits in the Lakeview Estates subdivision on the south side of U.S. Highway 380 in east Denton....
Ranch sale will allow park near Morgan Hill An 868-acre cattle ranch in the hills on San Jose's southern edges will become a new public park under a deal between a Palo Alto land preservation group and a longtime Santa Clara County farming and ranching family. The Peninsula Open Space Trust has signed an agreement to pay $8.68 million to the Blair family to purchase Blair Ranch, a rolling expanse of grasslands, oak trees and rocky outcroppings along Uvas Road near Calero Reservoir. The deal blocks future construction in a part of Santa Clara County where ranchettes and large homes have spread in recent years. It also brings open space groups closer to a long-held dream of building a trail that would connect up to 10 parks from Lexington Reservoir near Los Gatos to the Coyote Valley area in south San Jose - a distance of about 15 miles. "Looking forward, more linkages are going to occur. The stars are going to align," said Audrey Rust, president of the Peninsula Open Space Trust....
Climate change predicted to drive trees northward The most extensive and detailed study to date of 130 North American tree species concludes that expected climate change this century could shift their ranges northward by hundreds of kilometers and shrink the ranges by more than half. The study, by Daniel W. McKenney of the Canadian Forest Service and his colleagues, is reported in the December issue of BioScience. McKenney’s study is based on an extensive data-gathering effort and thus more comprehensive than studies based on published range maps. It includes data from Canada as well as from the United States. Observations of where trees are found are used to define the “climate envelope” of each species. If the trees were assumed to respond to climate change by dispersing their progeny to more favorable locations, McKenney and colleagues found, ranges of the studied species would move northward by some 700 kilometers and decrease in size by an average of 12 percent (with some increasing while others decreased). If the species were assumed unable to disperse, the average expected range shift was 320 kilometers, and “drastic” range reductions of 58 percent were projected. The authors believe that most species will probably fall somewhere between these two extremes of ability to disperse. The climate measures studied were chosen to represent important gradients for plants: heat and moisture....
Groups battle over Bitterroot forest timber The subject of U.S. Forest Service appeals on the Bitterroot National Forest has become a hot topic on Internet blogs, mass e-mails and guest editorials in newspapers over the last month or so. The controversy flared following statements made by a brand new Bitterroot Valley-based group calling itself the Big Sky Coalition: Environmentalists with Common Sense. The group contends that appeals and litigation are keeping the Forest Service from accomplishing fuel reduction work in the woods. Their critics, led by Matthew Koehler, executive director of Missoula's WildWest Institute, and fueled by a report by Friends of the Bitterroot, say relatively few timber sales on the Bitterroot National Forest have been appealed in relation to what's been offered. As for litigation, Koehler said there had only been two cases filed against timber sales on the Bitterroot National Forest from 1985 to present. Bitterroot National Forest Service officials say the figures Koehler uses are flawed. "This stuff is very complicated because the rules are continually changing," said Sue Heald, the Bitterroot National Forest's planning and recreation staff officer. "It's easy to play games with the numbers." For instance, the two lawsuits filed against the Bitterroot National Forest weren't over individual timber sales, Heald said. Instead, environmental groups, including Koehler's, filed suits against projects that included more than one timber sale....
American Indians Given Veto Power Over Federal Land This month, the entire U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments in its reconsideration of a three-judge panel’s ruling in favor of American Indian religious practitioners. On March 12, 2007, in Navajo Nation v. U.S. Forest Service, the panel ruled that a plan by a ski resort located on federal land to make snow using reclaimed water, thus offending the religious sensitivities of American Indians who believe the resort is situated on sacred land, violated federal law. On June 21, 2007, the ski resort and the U.S. Forest Service urged the Ninth Circuit to rehear the case, petitions that were granted on October 17, 2007. The Arizona federal district court rejected the challenge and thus upheld the decision by the Forest Service to approve the plan. After all, similar objections by American Indian religious practitioners, under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, to a 1977 plan to expand the Arizona Snowbowl were denied by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1983. Moreover, in 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected demands by American Indians “to exclude all human activity but their own from sacred areas of [a California national forest].” “Whatever rights the Indians may have to the use of the area,” wrote the Court, “those rights do not divest the Government of its right to use what is, after all, its land.” The Ninth Circuit panel, relying on the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA), reversed the district court and invalidated the Forest Service’s decision. After a lengthy discussion of the religious beliefs of various American Indian tribes, the panel held that, by adopting RLUIPA, Congress had expanded the Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause and implicitly overturned earlier court rulings that had rejected similar demands by American Indian religious practitioners. In the panel’s view, using federal land as proposed by Snowbowl and approved by the Forest Service is tantamount to a government edict that Christian “baptisms be carried out with ‘reclaimed water.’”....
Rules Bring Worries on Southwest Logging Changes in Forest Service rules designed to protect an endangered bird and its prey have brought objections from conservationists worried they may lead to increased logging, but federal officials say the concerns are overblown. Critics of the new regional rules say more aggressive thinning in the southwest's national forests could result, leaving more open ground and fewer shaded areas needed for the northern goshawk and its prey to nest. The complaints have delayed one forest-thinning project. Such logging projects are common across the West, aimed at lessening the risks of devastating wildfires by cutting small trees to reduce dense stands. But the new guidelines have wildlife advocates worried that larger stands may be targeted. "Our concern is that the new regionwide guidelines are going to result in a sharp increase in mature and old growth forest logging," said Taylor McKinnon, a Center for Biological Diversity spokesman in Flagstaff....
Nevada Learns to Cash in on Sales of Federal Land When it opens in 2009, the Clark County Shooting Park will be something to behold, through a scope or otherwise: hundreds of acres devoted to all things gun and bow, complete with a rifle range, a skeet center and an R.V. “host area.” The coming Craig Ranch Regional Park, due in 2010, should be impressive too, with plans calling for an amphitheater, an aquatics center and sand volleyball courts, all wound around native gardens and wetlands. Much of the financing for the projects has not come from familiar sources, like local taxes, bond issues or private donations. Instead, they are being paid for through the sales of public lands owned by the federal government. Tens of thousands of acres of federal lands in the Las Vegas area have been sold under an unusual law pushed through Congress nearly a decade ago by the Nevada delegation. The sales have grossed nearly $3 billion and counting. Because of a stipulation created by the Nevada legislators, the money has not been deposited into the general federal Treasury, but rather put in a special Treasury account to be spent almost exclusively in Nevada on a something-for-everyone collection of projects....
Companies squeezing power from sun, deserts in Southern California Vincent Signorotti's power plant sits on the edge of the Salton Sea, surrounded by irrigated cropland in the middle of a scorched desert. Beyond the lake, beyond the patch of green fields, the desert seems empty. But it holds all the energy Signorotti's plant will ever need - energy that could play a key role in California's fight against global warming. The plant runs on hot water, pumped from deep underground and flashed into steam to turn turbines. With 10 generators near the lakeshore, the facility produces enough electricity for 255,000 homes, and the company that owns it wants to expand. Other companies are drilling nearby, hoping to build their own geothermal plants. "We're very lucky," said Signorotti, a vice president with CalEnergy Operating Corp., as he considered all the energy beneath his feet. "This is really the crown jewel of undeveloped renewable resources." A renewable-energy boom is under way in the Southern California desert. The region's open, empty spaces have room for big projects - such as vast solar energy farms - that can generate energy on a grand scale while producing few, if any, greenhouse gases....
Endangered Species: Political assault Even as it admits inappropriate political influence ruined seven endangered species decisions, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is resolutely endeavoring to ignore the skewing of science, law and policy in decisions involving Northwest species. The public deserves a wider review of tainted decision-making. To its credit, the agency last week said it would reconsider findings in the seven cases where a former top official, Julie MacDonald, twisted the science. Congress can help with additional money. But the seven are a pitifully small sampling of the cases where the ideologically driven MacDonald set up industry to ravage wildlife habitat. The Earthjustice law firm, the Union of Concerned Scientists and various members of Congress have complained about the agency's absurd narrowing of what decisions to review. The scientists' group suggests the agency establish a hot line to hear from employees about improper practices. In addition to requesting a report from the congressional Government Accountability Office on improper influence on several other species decisions, U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee has asked the Interior Department for a new spotted owl recovery plan. Scientists have denounced the plan....
Wyden pushes expanded species probe Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is continuing to hunt big game at the Department of the Interior. He and other congressional Democrats have been hounding the agency for months over the manipulation of endangered species decisions by Julie MacDonald, a Bush administration appointee (who has since been pushed out of the department). Earlier this week, the agency announced it was reconsidering seven decisions involving the protection of six endangered species. Wyden said he thought that was just the tip of the iceberg - his thinking being that the agency offered up reversals on the small cases in hopes it would appease critics. So Wyden, who chairs a Senate subcommittee on public lands and forests, quickly requested that the department's inspector general, Earl Devaney, investigate further. On Friday, Devaney said he'd examine whether "improper political influence" also affected 18 other endangered species - including the northern spotted owl, marbled murrelet and bull trout in the Northwest....
Treat me like a Delta smelt We who live in Los Angeles know we live on the edge of the desert. Our city could not exist if we did not import huge volumes of water every day. Yet in August, U.S District Judge Oliver Wanger ordered state and federal water managers to reduce pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a move that could cut the supply of water flowing from Northern to Southern California by 30%. Why? To protect the Delta smelt, a thin, almost translucent fish threatened with extinction. His Honor ruled that the gigantic pumps of the California Water Project were trapping and disorienting the poor little fish. Cutting back our water supply will give the 3-inch fish a chance to recover, as required under the Endangered Species Act. It may be good for the fish, but what about the people who need that water? Don't we have any rights? For that matter, consider the people of drought-stricken Atlanta, where, in order to protect the Gulf sturgeon and three mussel species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service requires the Army Corps of Engineers to spill 5,000 cubic feet of water per second from a dam on Lake Lanier on the Chattahoochee River -- a man-made reservoir that provides water for the city. Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue calls that a "nonsensical action" that favors "mussel and sturgeon species over Georgia citizens."....
Rio Grande silvery minnow population growing The endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow is making a comeback. Jennifer Parody is the Middle Rio Grande Endangered Species Act coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She says there's many indications that silvery minnow populations are growing and healthy. She says long-term monitoring shows that fish are appearing in new sites along the river. A century ago, the tiny fish was abundant in the Rio Grande and some of its tributaries. Today, it survives only from Cochiti Dam to Elephant Butte. The plummeting population prompted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the minnow as endangered in 1994. But Interstate Stream Commission hydrogeologist Grace Haggerty says the fish still lives in only about 7% of its historical habitat and continued drought could put it at risk.
Kill the Cat That Kills the Bird? I had come to find out why Jim Stevenson had become the most notorious cat killer in America. The story went something like this: On the evening of Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006, Stevenson took a break from watching the election returns to look at some birds at San Luis Pass, a ripply channel connecting Galveston Bay to the gulf. Stevenson parked his white Dodge van with “Galveston Ornithological Society” bannered on its side, near the end of the San Luis Pass bridge, a tollway that connects Galveston Island to Follets Island. He found a spot in the low grass-speckled dunes and waited. Soon enough, he saw a handful of piping plovers, a federally listed endangered species. Then he saw something else: a scraggly cat stalking the plovers. A colony of about a dozen feral cats had been sleeping under the bridge. The cats liked to wander into the dunes for the same reason Stevenson did: the birds. “Piping plovers are tame, abiding little creatures,” Stevenson told me. “They roost in the dunes and can’t see or hear a cat creep up on them.” With one shot of his rifle, Stevenson found himself cast as the Bernhard Goetz of birders. His cat slaying became a national flash point in the strange Sylvester-and-Tweety feud between birders and cat fanciers, which the resolution of Stevenson’s case last month has done little to pacify. For more than 20 years, the two sides have exchanged accusations and insults over the issue of cats killing birds. Depending on whom you talk to, cats are either rhinestone-collared mass murderers or victims of a smear campaign waged by lowdown cat haters....
The experts agree on an equivalent of the IPCC for biodiversity The specialists are hoping such a structure can be set up by the end of 2008. In November, almost 80 of them met in Montpellier and agreed on the remit for such a panel: to provide both independent and credible expertise, build regional and local scientific capacity, make knowledge more accessible and improve the interface between science and policy. These conclusions are the fruit of two and a half years of international and regional deliberations, organized on all five continents by the Steering Committee for an IMoSEB (International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise on Biodiversity)*. The specialists are planning to organize an intergovernmental conference in 2008, in conjunction with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which should serve to determine how the structure could be set up. One idea is to set up a panel of experts drawn from the range of existing networks. International bodies and NGOs need to be involved in the process. All the multilateral agreements are also concerned: the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), the World Heritage Convention, the Ramsar Convention on wetlands, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), that on Migratory Species (CMS), and regional agreements, not forgetting the conventions on climate change and desertification. Everyone needs to realize the merits of setting up a heavyweight federative structure to ensure that nobody - politicians, scientists, economic players or public opinion - can say in future "we didn't know". The French government is backing the initiative....
Glacier National park officials: Howitzer ban in limbo Glacier National Park officials want to deny a railroad's request to bomb the park's avalanche alleys with howitzers, but that denial is on hold and many blame political interference from Washington, D.C. The railroad - Burlington Northern Sante Fe - asked park officials for authority to shell Glacier's southern boundary, to protect commercial rails in the U.S. Highway 2 corridor. The park, after conducting an exhaustive environmental review, concluded howitzers were a bad idea, and ruled the railroad would be better served by building snow sheds, or roofs, over the tracks at key spots.
The railroad, however, didn't like that relatively expensive answer, and now the public process has been stalled for months without explanation. “We've made requests to Washington, asking why the decision is being delayed,” said Mary Riddle. “So far, we've not had any response to our inquiries.” Riddle is Glacier Park's environmental protection and compliance specialist, and it's her job to make sure public processes stay on track. When she couldn't get an answer from Washington, she bumped the issue up to the National Park Service's regional office in Denver, “but they haven't received a response either.”....
High court considers access suit Papa Pilgrim may be going to prison, but his lawsuit is going to the Supreme Court. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court will discuss whether to hear the case brought by the family of Robert Hale over access to their remote homesite inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. A decision on whether the case will be accepted is due Dec. 10. The Hale family, who used to call themselves the Pilgrims, first drew attention with a 2003 battle against the national park over their right to use a bulldozer on an overgrown mining road to their land. The case attracted the support of national land-rights activists, with one organization vowing to make the Pilgrims their "poster child." Papa Pilgrim's unmasking as a child-abusing religious fanatic has not exactly helped the cause, which once inspired a volunteer-run airlift to beat a park service blockade. In court last week, his children said their father encouraged them to lie, steal and defy government authority. "Public relations-wise, it couldn't be worse," said Paula Easley, who chairs the Alaska Land Rights Coalition. But none of that should detract from the principles at stake, property rights advocates say. The lawsuit, which is now in the names of the three older Hale children, was handled for free by the nonprofit Pacific Legal Foundation. Their claims have been rejected by a federal district judge and several times by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The courts have said that while the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act guarantees access to private land in Alaska's national parks, that access is subject to reasonable regulation. The Supreme Court challenge raises questions about ANILCA and the National Environmental Protection Act....
Fair makes premise ID mandatory Exhibitors at the 2008 Colorado State Fair will be required to register the location where the animal was raised with the controversial National Animal Identification System. The Fair's board of commissioners voted 8-1 to stand by the policy it set forth last year, which drew controversy. Future Farmers of America and 4-H members will have to register with the NAIS their premise identification or the physical location to show in the Junior Livestock Sale. The board's decision came here Friday at its monthly meeting, held at the state Department of Agriculture....
Evolution of a brand Family historians in some parts of the United States might be programmed to look for an ancient crest when trying to find something distinctive about their clans. But in the West, it is more likely that families can identify their place in history by looking for ancestral brands, going back to the days when running horses, cattle or sheep was more lucrative than designing a fancy shield. This fall, the Utah State Archives posted online the popular, historic Utah livestock brand books from about 1849 to 1930. The archives' Digital Collections also has a free, full-text search and name index link to the newly available images. Aside from their historical significance, brands still play an important role in modern-day agriculture. Although that industry makes up much less of Utah's economy than it once did, today's operations dwarf those of early farms and ranches, and they rely on brands for many uses. In 1867, when the Utah Territory took its first livestock inventory, 225,000 cattle and sheep were listed, compared 140 years later with the total of 1.2 million head. Utah ranchers today have registered more than 20,000 brands and earmarks....