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....