Life After Kelo: Looking Back and Forward It’s one of the most hated Supreme Court decisions in decades, and it happened just three years ago. I’m talking about Kelo vs. New London, where a bare majority of the justices decided that it was OK for local governments looking to increase tax revenue to take land from their citizens and give it to a developer. Now, the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution permits the use of eminent domain for “public use.” But over the decades, the courts had expanded the meaning of “public use” from takings for roads, schools and hospitals—things anyone can use or benefit from—to takings for “public benefit.” That meant urban renewal efforts and other plans for economic development, the argument being that eventually the public would benefit from the increased tax revenue. Kelo took that a step further and said that governments can take land from a private citizen if the government thinks the land would be more beneficial to the public in the hands of another private entity. The decision outraged even Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote in her stinging dissent: “To reason, as the Court does, that the incidental public benefits resulting from the subsequent ordinary use of private property render economic development takings ‘for public use’ is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property—and thereby effectively to erase the words ‘for public use’ from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.” Appropriately, the aftermath of Kelo in New London itself shows the importance of the Constitutional limit on eminent domain and the absurdity of trying to determine “public benefit” based on predictions of future revenue. Three years after winning the right to take the property of Susette Kelo and her neighbors, there hasn’t been any public benefit in any form from the land that city officials took. In fact, the city doesn’t even know what to do with the land now that officials’ handpicked developer couldn’t muster the financing necessary to build anything....
Ways and Means Over four decades, Russell Means has led an insurrection, posed for Andy Warhol, aspired to be an assassin and been arguably the most influential public figure in fighting racism against the American Indian. Now, in his quest to start his own country, the road to success might run down Embassy Row. Means's life has been something like a Johnny Cash song. He has done prison time for inciting a riot, and has been stabbed, accused of murder, hit by two bullets and divorced four times. Long ago, he was a fancy dance champion and a rodeo star. Even now, at age 68, he remains a forceful presence -- a warrior. On this visit to the nation's capital, Means was, per usual, fighting the United States of America. Along with three other Lakota Indians, he had recently severed his ties with the United States and declared himself a founding member of a new, autonomous nation -- the Republic of Lakotah. Unsanctioned by their tribal government, and speaking only for themselves, the dissidents claimed dominion over more than 93,000 square miles of traditional Lakota territory -- a continuous chunk of sparsely populated dry land that includes parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming....
Agricultural Policy: The Seen and the Unseen The full long-run effects of any government program are never known in advance. To illustrate, consider U.S. farm policies. A host of “emergency” agricultural programs were enacted by President Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Although the particulars of these programs have undergone numerous changes since then, the fundamental functions and impacts of many of them remain intact even though economic conditions bear little resemblance to those of the 1930s. The New Deal programs have proven to be not only persistent, but also profligate and regressive. In recent years, more than half of all direct government farm payments have gone to the 10 percent of farms with incomes of $250,000 or more. This is not likely to change in the new farm bill. Farmers, if married, will be eligible for subsidies if their annual incomes are as high as $1.5 million. Perennial government aid to farmers with such income levels was not foreseen when farm programs were initiated! The unforeseen consequences of U.S. farm policy may be even more important in programs for specific crops. For example, the price support program for sugar restricts imports and (in some recent years) domestic production. The program increases the domestic sugar price, often to levels more than double the world price. When the sugar program began, who could have foreseen that a major corporation, Archer-Daniels-Midland Corporation (ADM), would become a major beneficiary? Although ADM does not produce sugar, it has reaped huge benefits from artificially high U.S. sugar prices, which increase demand for (and thus increase the price of) sugar substitutes. ADM is a major producer of high-fructose corn syrup, a widely used sugar substitute whose production became economical largely because of the price umbrella offered by the sugar program....
Animal-Rights Farm Should apes be treated like people? Under a resolution headed for passage in the Spanish parliament, respecting the personal rights of "our non-human brothers" won't just be a good idea. It'll be the law. The resolution, approved last week by a parliamentary committee with broad support, urges the government to implement the agenda of the Great Ape Project, an organization whose founding declaration says apes "may not be killed" or "arbitrarily deprived of their liberty." No more routine confinement. According to Reuters, the proposal would commit the government to ending involuntary use of apes in circuses, TV ads, and dangerous experiments. Proponents hail the resolution as the first crack in the "species barrier." Peter Singer, the philosopher who co-founded GAP, puts it this way: "There is no sound moral reason why possession of basic rights should be limited to members of a particular species." If aliens or monkeys are shown to have moral or intellectual abilities similar to ours, we should treat them like people....
Republican buoyed by calls for energy exploration A top U.S. Republican cited on Monday a surge in support among liberals for increased energy exploration as a reason why the Democratic-led Congress may act soon to allow expanded drilling in the United States. President George W. Bush and many Republicans in Congress support opening up drilling as a way of taming high gasoline prices, which have hit a record $4.11 a gallon. Democrats in Congress, however, have been looking at controlling oil speculation as well advocating greater conservation. "There's clearly a dramatic shift across the ideological divide in America in favor of producing more energy here at home," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters. "I can't imagine that the majority (Democrats in Congress) is going to ignore that indefinitely," McConnell added....
New Cars in California Must Display Global Warming Score California is making it mandatory for cars to be labeled with global warming scores, figures that take into account emissions from vehicle use and fuel production.The law requiring the labels goes into effect at the start of next year for all 2009 model cars, though its expected the labels will be popping up on cars in the coming months.The labeling law forces cars for sale to display a global warming score, on a scale of one to 10, which is based on how vehicles in the same model year compare to one another. The higher the score, the cleaner a car is. The score takes into account emissions related to production of fuel for each vehicle as well as the direct emissions from vehicles.The score will be displayed next to the already-required smog score, which also rates cars one to 10 for how many smog-forming emissions they emit. For both scores, an average vehicle will have a score of five.California is the first state of pass such as law, and a similar law will take effect in New York for 2010 model year vehicles....
Official: Feds should consider Rainbow Family ban The U.S. Forest Service should consider banning the Rainbow Family from Forest Service land after a confrontation last week led to the arrest of at least eight people, a top agency official said Monday. John Twiss, director of Forest Service Law Enforcement and Investigations in Washington, D.C., said he was among the officers who responded when Rainbow Family members threw sticks and rocks at federal officers. The confrontation started when officers tried to arrest a member of the Rainbow group for an alleged drug offense. Twiss characterized the Rainbow participants as "non-compromising," "arrogant" and "anti-authority." He said this year's episode and other disturbances at recent gatherings should prompt a review of whether Rainbow Family events are allowed. "I think we have to have that discussion within the agency," Twiss said. "We spend an awful lot of time and effort on these people. And frankly, the taxpayers deserve better."....
Montana greens to loggers: Come back! For decades now, the green extreme has argued the industries that develop the nation's natural resources for commercial use ought to be forced off the West's "public" lands. And they didn't much care which tactic did the job. If sawmills could be shut down and whole towns thrown out of work to supposedly "protect" the spotted owl or some other creature -- or even some small local populace of a species found in abundance elsewhere -- that effort was "good to go." In Missoula, Mont., the environmental extremists appear to have pretty much won that battle. The Plum Creek Timber Company still owns 8 million acres of mostly forested land nationwide, including 1.2 million acres in the mountains of western Montana. But they don't cut trees on a lot of that land now. Instead, the former logging company has turned into "a real estate investment trust," The Washington Post reports. And what do real estate investment trusts do with forested land if it's no longer judged politically or economically rewarding to cut the trees for lumber? Are the environmentalists happy that they've finally convinced the loggers to do something else with those lands? What do you think?....
Public prompts changes in roadless plan Nearly 140,000 people have weighed in since January on a proposed rule for managing the more than 9.3 million acres of roadless backcountry in Idaho and the U.S. Forest Service says the comments have prompted it to make changes in the proposal. The Forest Service released a summary Thursday of public comments collected during a four-month period that ended in April. It's all part of the lengthy process of deciding how Idaho's roadless areas and other untouched lands will be managed, preserved or opened to logging and other uses. Changes to the proposed rule, stemming from public concerns, include better definitions of where road construction and tree removal is allowed in the case of threatening fire activity, said Brad Gilbert, the Forest Service's team leader on the proposed Idaho roadless plan. Other changes included strengthening protections on lands in the Boulder and White Clouds mountains of central Idaho, Gilbert said, as well as loosening restrictions in forests where road-building and tree removal has been allowed in the past. "We're making quite a few modifications to the rule based on those comments," Gilbert said....
Preparedness under fire: Federal firefighting system understaffed, report shows The federal firefighting system is "imploding" in California, due to poor spending decisions and high job vacancy rates, as the region struggles to keep pace with what looks to be a historic fire season, a firefighters' advocacy group charges. As a result, the firefighters say, small fires have exploded into extended, multimillion-dollar conflagrations because the U.S. Forest Service has been unable to contain them during the early "initial attack" stage. "The federal fire system is imploding in California. They are crossing their fingers and just hoping they get through the season without a disaster," said Casey Judd, who represents government firefighters from five agencies through the Federal Wildland Fire Service Association. As the "sheer number" of California wildfires pushed the nation to its worst measurable level of wildland-fire preparedness last week — Level 5 — a national multiagency coordinating group announced in a memo Monday that firefighter staffing levels in Northern California "cannot be maintained." Of all the agencies battling California wildland fires — including the region's two largest, the Indians and Basin fires in Monterey County's Los Padres National Forest — it is U.S. Forest Service crews that suffer the highest vacancy rates, entering this year's season with an estimated shortage of 500 firefighters, Judd said....
Rodent plague threatens ferrets The area of plague-infected black-tailed prairie dogs has more than doubled in western South Dakota since mid-May, and the disease could begin to seriously hurt the state's population of endangered black-footed ferrets. Plague is almost always fatal to infected prairie dogs and has killed a large number of the rodents, wildlife experts said. Black-footed ferrets hunt and dine almost exclusively on prairie dogs. "When ferrets eat an infected prairie dog, they'll get a massive dose" of plague, said Kevin Atchley, Wall District ranger for the U.S. Forest Service. "It's likely that some ferrets have perished." The infected area has bloomed from 4,000 acres to 9,100 acres as of last week, Atchley said. Plague is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The disease, also known as bubonic plague, spread through the West after it appeared in San Francisco in 1902....
Enviros seek options to fight Roan drilling As the clock counts down for the planned lease of the top of the Roan Plateau for natural gas drilling, environmentalists are pinning their hopes on the courts, Congress and administrative actions to delay or block it. Gov. Bill Ritter, who has criticized the Bureau of Land Management plan and offered his own alternative, said his office does not plan to protest the Aug. 14 leases formally. Ritter said Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., is working on including his plan in the defense authorization bill pending in the Senate. Salazar, who also attended the event, confirmed that he is trying to submit legislation to make Ritter’s plan law before the lease sale. Environmentalists say none of those plans goes far enough to preserve the surface of the Roan Plateau, which has become a key battleground in the fight between energy development and environmental protection on public lands in the West. They are preparing to file a lawsuit arguing that the BLM failed to address the environmental and fiscal impacts of its plan adequately, and will ask a U.S. district court in Denver to block the leases until the lawsuit is resolved. Environmentalists are also planning to file a written protest of all the leases on top of the Roan, a move likely to delay any drilling, if not the actual issuing of the leases. According to BLM rules, no leasing can take place until the protests are resolved....
Suit attacks relocation effort Two environmental groups have filed a federal lawsuit against the Army and the Bureau of Land Management alleging that proper environmental studies were not conducted before nearly 800 desert tortoises were relocated for Fort Irwin's expansion. The Center for Biological Diversity and Desert Survivors, which filed the lawsuit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, allege the federally endangered tortoises were moved to inferior habitat that included numerous roads and pockets of diseased tortoises. They also allege that illegal off-roading and dumping occurs at the site east of the Calico Mountains and south of Coyote Lake. "It's time to overhaul Fort Irwin's disastrous tortoise relocation program," said Ileene Anderson, a biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity, in a news release. "Though we can't stop the fort's expansion, we can ensure that the relocation of these rare animals is done right." The National Training Center and Fort Irwin initiated the tortoise relocation efforts in order to expand its borders to train soldiers being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress authorized the expansion in 2001, and the Army has spent more than $8.5 million on research and relocation of the tortoises....
Noisy national parks A lot of us seek out national parks to absorb that careful balance of natural sounds and breathtaking quiet. And even though the parks get more popular every year, we can usually find our silent spot — at least until a jet comes roaring overhead or an engine hums in the distance. But we might have to get used to it: America's flagship national parks are getting louder and louder, according to the Park Service's "natural sounds" office. Yes, the National Park Service actually has a "natural sounds" office, based in Ft. Collins, CO, dedicated to preserving the natural noises of a park — like howling wolves, roaring waterfalls, and even music from sanctioned events. They've discovered intrusive noises are among the things that annoy national park visitors most, and noise becomes a central concern for issues like helicopter tours over the Grand Canyon or snowmobiles in Yellowstone. Extraneous noise also interferes with wildlife, making it harder for animals to hear predators and generally raising their stress levels. The Coalition of National Park Service Retirees maintains a list of particularly threatened parks....
National Park Service impresses online with WebRangers site The National Park Service is reaching out to kids with an innovative Web site that gets them excited about visiting our nation's parklands before they've even left home. WebRangers, a program managed by the NPS Division of Interpretation and Education at http://www.nps.gov/webrangers/ is the recently added online companion to the Park Service's successful "Junior Ranger" program. Every year, over 450,000 children take part in Junior Ranger activities at one of the 290 national parks, where they can explore nature, learn about U.S. history, and take part in each park's special activities designed to really get their hands dirty. WebRangers enables children across the country and around the globe to explore the parks from the comfort of their couch---with the hope that they will be inspired to slip on a pair of hiking boots and go visit one....
Yellowstone fires 20 years later: National attention brought sensational coverage Twenty years ago, Bob Ekey couldn't believe what he was seeing on television. Just outside his room at the Three Bears Lodge in West Yellowstone, a CNN reporter was broadcasting live that ash from fires burning in Yellowstone National Park was falling as he spoke. It was snow. “I wanted to go out and tackle the guy,” said Ekey, a Billings Gazette reporter covering the 1988 fires. “He sensationalized an already sensational story.” Most of the fires started outside the park in May and June. Media interest in the fires was local. “This was a regional story with small national interest until it kicked into August,” said Al Nash, the Yellowstone National Park spokesman, who in 1988 was news director at a Billings television station. “The networks and big newspapers weren't here until August.” By that time, some of the park's treasured places, such as Old Faithful Inn, were threatened, and national news crews poured in. Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis even made an appearance in West Yellowstone, declaring that the event was the only game in town. But according to accounts, some members of the national media were clueless about the restorative role of fire....
Yellowstone fires 20 years later: Back after the burn In a spot severely burned by the 1988 North Fork fire, a National Park Service interpretive sign notes that the area surrounding the boardwalk may be a meadow for decades. Instead, spring-green lodgepole pine trees up to 15 feet high have taken root across the hillside. The sign points out the misconceptions held by many after the 1988 fires burned almost one-third of Yellowstone National Park - that the landscape would take a long time to rejuvenate, that meadows might replace forests in some places and that some soils were so badly burned they were sterilized and no plants could take root. “There's just a lot of myth around the fires that's taken for truth,” said Don Despain, 67, a retired fire ecologist who worked in the park in 1988. “All of (the theories) have been proved wrong. By 1988, I knew that those were not true. The '81, '79 and '76 fires were just as hot as 1988.” During the summer of 1988, when 794,000 acres of Yellowstone burned, Despain was criticized for advocating fire as a natural part of the northern Rocky Mountains' ecology. He helped write Yellowstone's first fire management plan in 1972, which allowed naturally ignited fires to burn in two areas. By 1975, the policy was updated to allow natural fires in all but developed areas. “Fire in a forest that's dependent on fire, it's not destructive, it's recycling itself,” said Bob Barbee, Yellowstone superintendent in 1988. “It's a fact of life, like rain and sunshine.” Barbee wrote Yosemite National Park's first natural resource management plan, which included the use of prescribed fires, or fires set intentionally to burn fuels and reduce the risk of larger, more destructive blazes. Unfortunately for the Park Service, the summer of 1988 proved to be unusual. A dry spring was followed by a drier-than-usual July accompanied by lightning storms and high winds. Initially, lightning-caused fires were allowed to burn in remote areas, but by July 21, as seven fires burned in Yellowstone, federal officials ordered full suppression of all fires....
Yellowstone fires 20 years later: Foliage regrowth defied forecast Within days of the fires, new grasses and plants like fireweed had sprouted. Lodgepole pines - which produce conventional pine cones and also serotinous cones that release seeds only when exposed to great heat - dispersed from 15,000 to 2 million seeds per acre. An average of 2,000 to 12,000 later germinated in each acre. About 24 percent of the park's whitebark pine forest burned, but by 1995, whitebark pine seedlings had been found in every one of 275 study plots established to chart regrowth after the fire. “We were very concerned about the spread of non-native vegetation in the burned areas,” Renkin said. But besides Canada thistle - a temporary post-fire success thanks to its small, wind-borne seeds and deep roots - few invasive species took hold in significant numbers. That first winter was a stark, black-and-white portrait of burned trees and snow, Renkin said, but the following summer brought “the greatest wildflower show ever.” “Boom! The purple lupine came out. Then the daisies would come on,” he said. After widespread news reports on the fires, throngs of curious people showed up the next summer, and 1989 was the busiest year of the decade. Some predicted a grim future for the park, especially along a 660-acre site known as Blowdown, accessible from the road between Norris Junction and Canyon Village....