Saturday, March 12, 2005
TIMED EVENT CHAMPIONSHIP
Two more performances today, so each contestant has now run 20 head. It was Cash Myers 25th birthday, and he maintained his lead during the afternoon performance. Tonight's show was a disaster for Cash, as his header Paul Petska hickied a horn causing Myers to take a 60 second time for his run in the heeling. This evenings performance was all Trevor Brazile. Brazile completed the 5 head go round in 44.6 seconds, breaking his own arena record and earning $3,000 for that. It will surely stand as the fastest go round of the TEC, earning him another $10,000, or a total of $13,000 for the one go round. His times per event were heading 6.5, tie-down 11.3, heeling 8.3, steer wresting 6.7, and steer roping 11.8.
Going into tomorrow's final round, the top four and their times are 1) Trevor Brazile, 252.5 2) Kyle Lockett 252.6 3) Chance Kelton 277.0 and 4) Luke Branquinho 320.1
There were two interesting bulldogging runs this afternoon. Chad Hiatt's doggin' horse ran wide, but Chad managed to reach out and grab the inside horn, and this somehow flipped the steer, kind of like a hoolihan. I sat right there and watched it and I still don't know how he did it. Anyway, he beat the steer up off the ground and managed to throw him in 9.6 seconds. Jimmie Cooper missed his steer, then jumped on the hazer's horse but couldn't get the steer lined up against the fence for a jump. He finally got the steer held up at the back of the arena, jumped off the hazer's horse, grabbed the steer by the tail, worked his way up to the horns and threw the steer. Unfortunately, the 60 second buzzer went off just before the steer's back hit the ground. Cooper got a great round of applause from the spectator's for his never-give-up effort. I sure wish GB had been here to see it.
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Two more performances today, so each contestant has now run 20 head. It was Cash Myers 25th birthday, and he maintained his lead during the afternoon performance. Tonight's show was a disaster for Cash, as his header Paul Petska hickied a horn causing Myers to take a 60 second time for his run in the heeling. This evenings performance was all Trevor Brazile. Brazile completed the 5 head go round in 44.6 seconds, breaking his own arena record and earning $3,000 for that. It will surely stand as the fastest go round of the TEC, earning him another $10,000, or a total of $13,000 for the one go round. His times per event were heading 6.5, tie-down 11.3, heeling 8.3, steer wresting 6.7, and steer roping 11.8.
Going into tomorrow's final round, the top four and their times are 1) Trevor Brazile, 252.5 2) Kyle Lockett 252.6 3) Chance Kelton 277.0 and 4) Luke Branquinho 320.1
There were two interesting bulldogging runs this afternoon. Chad Hiatt's doggin' horse ran wide, but Chad managed to reach out and grab the inside horn, and this somehow flipped the steer, kind of like a hoolihan. I sat right there and watched it and I still don't know how he did it. Anyway, he beat the steer up off the ground and managed to throw him in 9.6 seconds. Jimmie Cooper missed his steer, then jumped on the hazer's horse but couldn't get the steer lined up against the fence for a jump. He finally got the steer held up at the back of the arena, jumped off the hazer's horse, grabbed the steer by the tail, worked his way up to the horns and threw the steer. Unfortunately, the 60 second buzzer went off just before the steer's back hit the ground. Cooper got a great round of applause from the spectator's for his never-give-up effort. I sure wish GB had been here to see it.
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Friday, March 11, 2005
TIMED EVENT CHAMPIONSHIP
The 20 best timed event cowboys in the world are competing this weekend at the Lazy E Arena here in Guthrie, Oklahoma. There are five go rounds, and in each go round the competitor must head a steer, rope a calf, heel a steer, bulldog a steer and trip a steer. The total time for all five events is a go round. The total time on 25 head is the average. It pays $50,000 to win the average and $10,000 for the fastest go round. There is a total of $150,000 to be won over the weekend.
For those of you used to watching the NFR, this ain't that kind of rodeo. The Lazy E Arena is 450ft long....it's wider than the Thomas & Mack Center is long. There is an 18ft. score in all the events except dogging, which has a 12ft. score. They are roping all fresh cattle so when you ride in the box you better be mounted.
After the first two go rounds the leaders and their total times are:
Kyle Lockett....127.4 seconds
Cash Myers......132.5 "
Luke Branquinho.139.3 "
Chance Kelton...144.3 "
Trevor Brazile..144.7 "
The two fastest go round times were laid down during this evenings performance:
Steve Duhon......54.2 "
Trevor Brazile...54.3 "
The two highlights, for me anyway, both occurred in this afternoon's performance. Ora Taton missed his bulldogging steer, ran the length of the arena, got back on his horse and took another run at the steer and beat the 60 second cutoff. As he was walking back up the arena the announcer was making a big deal about how tired he must be after the two getoffs and running the length of the arena. Ora's contestant number had come off his shirt and was laying on the arena floor. While the announceer was still pontificating oh how wore out he must be, Ora did a cartwheel to pick up his number. The second highlight was Mickey Gee's steer tripping run. Ge tripped the steer just right and it look like it had took, but just as he got to the steer it got up. Gee just lowered his shoulder and knocked the steer back down. Now that was some good watching.
Finally, can anybody explain why GB Oliver would rather be sitting at his desk than here with me?
Brazile's the man to beat in Guthrie
In the field of 20 contestants for this weekend's Timed Event Championship of the World, one name stands out.
Trevor Brazile.
Not only has the Decatur, Texas, cowboy won the last two Timed Event titles and three overall, he's also won the last three all-around Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association world championships.
"I'm sure Trevor's still the man to beat," said Paul Peterson, a first-timer in the field a year ago. "Trevor has just one of the five events that he doesn't compete in year-round. Everybody else has two or three or more they don't compete in year-round.
"The rest of us practice for a month. He does this stuff all year round."
The unique event features contestants competing in five rodeo disciplines -- tie-down roping, steer roping, steer wrestling, heading and heeling. He's the only cowboy in ProRodeo history to qualify for the National Finals in the four roping events.
"This event is very special to me because I do every event we're doing this weekend except steer wrestling," said Brazile, 28, who won his first Timed Event title in 1998. "In preparing for this weekend, I've been working on my steer wrestling harder than I ever have."
As a ProRodeo rookie in 1996, Brazile qualified for the National Finals Rodeo as a heeler. Since then, he's qualified for the NFR in calf roping every year since 1999 and the last two years as a header. He's also been one of the top 15 at the National Finals Steer Roping every year since 1997.
"I feel really good going into the competition because I've prepared myself good," he said. "I feel better this year than any year before."
Each contestant will compete in five rounds. A run in each discipline constitutes one round, so each cowboy will either rope or wrestle 25 head of livestock over three days.
"What I like most about the competition is that it's more of a throw-back cowboy event," Brazile said. "I like that we're keeping it alive."
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The 20 best timed event cowboys in the world are competing this weekend at the Lazy E Arena here in Guthrie, Oklahoma. There are five go rounds, and in each go round the competitor must head a steer, rope a calf, heel a steer, bulldog a steer and trip a steer. The total time for all five events is a go round. The total time on 25 head is the average. It pays $50,000 to win the average and $10,000 for the fastest go round. There is a total of $150,000 to be won over the weekend.
For those of you used to watching the NFR, this ain't that kind of rodeo. The Lazy E Arena is 450ft long....it's wider than the Thomas & Mack Center is long. There is an 18ft. score in all the events except dogging, which has a 12ft. score. They are roping all fresh cattle so when you ride in the box you better be mounted.
After the first two go rounds the leaders and their total times are:
Kyle Lockett....127.4 seconds
Cash Myers......132.5 "
Luke Branquinho.139.3 "
Chance Kelton...144.3 "
Trevor Brazile..144.7 "
The two fastest go round times were laid down during this evenings performance:
Steve Duhon......54.2 "
Trevor Brazile...54.3 "
The two highlights, for me anyway, both occurred in this afternoon's performance. Ora Taton missed his bulldogging steer, ran the length of the arena, got back on his horse and took another run at the steer and beat the 60 second cutoff. As he was walking back up the arena the announcer was making a big deal about how tired he must be after the two getoffs and running the length of the arena. Ora's contestant number had come off his shirt and was laying on the arena floor. While the announceer was still pontificating oh how wore out he must be, Ora did a cartwheel to pick up his number. The second highlight was Mickey Gee's steer tripping run. Ge tripped the steer just right and it look like it had took, but just as he got to the steer it got up. Gee just lowered his shoulder and knocked the steer back down. Now that was some good watching.
Finally, can anybody explain why GB Oliver would rather be sitting at his desk than here with me?
Brazile's the man to beat in Guthrie
In the field of 20 contestants for this weekend's Timed Event Championship of the World, one name stands out.
Trevor Brazile.
Not only has the Decatur, Texas, cowboy won the last two Timed Event titles and three overall, he's also won the last three all-around Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association world championships.
"I'm sure Trevor's still the man to beat," said Paul Peterson, a first-timer in the field a year ago. "Trevor has just one of the five events that he doesn't compete in year-round. Everybody else has two or three or more they don't compete in year-round.
"The rest of us practice for a month. He does this stuff all year round."
The unique event features contestants competing in five rodeo disciplines -- tie-down roping, steer roping, steer wrestling, heading and heeling. He's the only cowboy in ProRodeo history to qualify for the National Finals in the four roping events.
"This event is very special to me because I do every event we're doing this weekend except steer wrestling," said Brazile, 28, who won his first Timed Event title in 1998. "In preparing for this weekend, I've been working on my steer wrestling harder than I ever have."
As a ProRodeo rookie in 1996, Brazile qualified for the National Finals Rodeo as a heeler. Since then, he's qualified for the NFR in calf roping every year since 1999 and the last two years as a header. He's also been one of the top 15 at the National Finals Steer Roping every year since 1997.
"I feel really good going into the competition because I've prepared myself good," he said. "I feel better this year than any year before."
Each contestant will compete in five rounds. A run in each discipline constitutes one round, so each cowboy will either rope or wrestle 25 head of livestock over three days.
"What I like most about the competition is that it's more of a throw-back cowboy event," Brazile said. "I like that we're keeping it alive."
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NEWS ROUNDUP
Man pleads guilty over role in starting deadly 2003 wildfire A lost hunter who set a signal fire that grew into the biggest wildfire in state history pleaded guilty Thursday in a deal with federal prosecutors that could put him behind bars for up to five years. Sergio Martinez pleaded guilty to one count of starting the October 2003 Cedar Fire. Driven by hot, dry winds, the fire killed 15 people and destroyed more than 2,000 homes in San Diego County. In court Thursday, the 34-year-old construction worker admitted that he set a fire after he became lost while hunting. Judge Roger T. Benitez asked him to summarize what happened....
Environmental group's appeal puts sand camping plans on hold The friction between off-road riders and the other tourists who frequent the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area has flared up again. Tensions began after the U.S. Forest Service put its launch of a new camping reservation system in the Oregon Dunes on hold after Umpqua Watersheds Inc., a Roseburg conservation group, objected to the plans. The delay places in doubt the vacation plans of many of the visitors who flock to coastal Douglas County each summer to ride and camp among the dunes. The Forest Service is to decide by April 14 whether to let the sand camping plan proceed....
Groups decry proposed hunting ban Hunters, many wearing camouflage and safety-orange hats and vests, were the overwhelming majority of the more than 250 people who packed Stanwood Middle School's gym Wednesday night. They showed up to oppose a citizen petition to ban hunting on Leque Island, a 400-acre state-owned lowland between Stanwood and Camano Island. Officials from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife called the meeting to get public comments about the petition. The only person to speak in favor of it was Camano Island resident Sharon Callaghan, who wrote the petition. According to the petition, the ban is justified because it is no longer a rural area, hunting disturbs the peace and the area is too close to wildlife areas important to the Audubon Society and The Nature Conservancy....
Montana prepares to fight wasting disease Montana is in the process of crafting a state plan to prevent chronic wasting disease from showing up here or to contain the disease if it does occur. Feldner gave an overview of the plan, which suggests an outright ban on importing any game-farmed deer and elk from states that have animals with chronic wasting disease. Right now, it is legal to import deer and elk from states with the disease if the game farm in question has not had a case of CWD in five years. The plan also suggests banning feeding deer and elk. As a state, Montana does not feed deer or elk, but citizens may as long as it doesn't unnaturally congregate animals. Feldner said Montana should consider banning the practice outright. The plan also calls for closing the state's rehabilitation center for orphaned fawns. Right now, the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks takes in about 50 fawns a year at a central rehabilitation center in Helena. The animals are taught to live in the wild and are returned to the place they were found....
Panel rejects 'Clear Skies' President Bush's bid to rewrite the nation's air pollution laws ground to a halt in Congress yesterday when Republicans were unable to overcome objections in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that the bill would weaken central pillars of environmental protection. The setback dealt a body blow to the administration's highly touted plan and handed a victory to environmental groups that viewed the "Clear Skies" bill as rolling back safeguards at the behest of industry interests. The Environmental Protection Agency will issue new rules today and next week to control the same pollutants targeted by the Bush initiative, but these rules will not change provisions in the 1990 Clean Air Act that would have been revised by "Clear Skies."....
Ecological groups sue over offshore oil leases Ten environmental groups have sued the federal government over its recent decision to extend the lives of 36 oil and gas leases offshore of the Central Coast. Last month, the federal Minerals Management Service extended the leases for as long as three years to give the oil companies that own them the chance to update their plans for exploration and development of the leases. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court of Northern California. It argues that the government failed to consider all the ramifications of extending the leases, including those caused by exploration, drilling and production. It also challenges the agency's decision not to consider alternatives to developing the leases....
Goshutes file lawsuit to stop feds from dealing with disputed leaders A group of disgruntled Goshute Indians has filed a lawsuit against federal agencies. They seek greater involvement in the process that may send 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel to a proposed storage facility on their Tooele County reservation. The suit, filed against the U.S. Interior Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, claims federal administrators have erroneously negotiated with disputed leaders and failed to take into account the concerns of the 124-member tribe. Abby Bullcreek and the other five individuals named Tuesday as plaintiffs say they have "a strong interest" in blocking Private Fuel Storage from gaining federal approval to build a nuclear storage site on their reservation....
Idaho takes steps to dry up crops for the first time For the first time, Idaho has taken steps to buy back water rights. The Idaho Water Resource Board agreed to buy all the water -- more than 74,000 acre-feet -- of the Bell Rapids Mutual Irrigation Co. of Hagerman. If approved by the state, the deal would dry up 24,500 acres of sugar beet, barley and potato fields. Instead the water would be left in the Snake River to help aid salmon migration. It could also be used to help resolve conflicts over spring flows from the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer. Critics say the move could hurt the economies of surrounding communities like Buhl. "There are going to be effects, from the grocery man to the gas man," said Mike Hamilton, president of Farmers National Bank in Buhl. The purchase would cost $300 an acre-foot, for a total of about $24 million. The money come out of the general fund and go to the farmers who own the water rights. The plan calls for paying the money back to the state by leasing the water to the federal Bureau of Reclamation so it can meet flow requirements for salmon under the Endangered Species Act...
Rivers likely won't meet irrigation needs: Projections put Columbia flow at 61%, Yakima 41% of normal From the Yakima Valley east to Spokane, communities on Washington's dry side have long marched with a banner that boasts "Where Irrigation Feeds the Nation." Now that a drought emergency has been declared, it is a concept that could be under siege by late summer as water managers tread lightly among needy user groups. The biggest water user on the state's east side is the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which extracts on average 2.5 million acre-feet of water a year from the Columbia River's Roosevelt Lake behind Grand Coulee Dam and 2.7 million acre-feet from the Yakima River. The water is sold wholesale to local irrigation districts, which peddle it to farmers who grow things such as potatoes, corn, beans and alfalfa in the Upper Columbia District, and grapes, vegetables and orchard crops in the Greater Yakima Valley....
Scarce water in Klamath Basin triggers calls for drought plan Federal reclamation officials say dry conditions in the Klamath Basin have triggered letters implementing the Klamath Basin drought management plan. The letters call for meetings between the Bureau of Reclamation and districts and individual irrigators to determine allocation in case of a drought, said Dave Sabo, area manager for the Klamath Basin Area Office of the Bureau of Reclamation. Sabo said because of low moisture and runoff levels, the bureau needs to begin now to plan water deliveries. He said that on March 1, the bureau estimated an inflow to Upper Klamath Lake of 52 percent of normal though November but that the snowpack has dropped to 38 percent and expected warm dry conditions will make it worse....
Wash. Governor Declares Drought Emergency Gov. Christine Gregoire declared a statewide drought emergency, anticipating what weather forecasters predict will be the Pacific Northwest's worst dry spell in nearly three decades. Gregoire made her announcement Thursday before an audience of farmers in the already arid Yakima Valley. The last statewide drought emergency was declared by Gov. Gary Locke in 2001. "While water shortages won't affect all areas of the state in precisely the same way, it seems very likely that all areas of our state will experience at least some level of drought this year," Gregoire said. In the declaration, Gregoire creates an interstate agency to coordinate the government's response, calls for $8.2 million more in drought-related state appropriations and orders the National Guard to prepare to combat wildfires this summer....
Mexico agrees to pay water debt Mexico has pledged to repay its entire water debt to Texas by Sept. 30 in an agreement expected to end a 12-year dispute between the United States and its southern neighbor over terms of a 1944 water-sharing treaty. Gov. Rick Perry called the accord “tremendous news” for farmers, ranchers and other residents of the Rio Grande Valley and hailed it as a turning point in what he called “probably the most contentious issue in the last 50 years” between the two countries. Mexico owes Texas about 733,000 acre-feet of water under the treaty terms — about half the 1.5 million acre-feet it owed before plentiful rain fell in 2003 and 2004. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons — enough to cover an acre a foot deep. The accord U.S. and Mexican officials reached last week guarantees that Mexico will transfer water from the Amistad and Falcon reservoirs, eliminating its water debt and raising U.S. reserves from 95 percent of storage to 103 percent of storage. Mexico also agreed to deliver at least the average minimum of 350,000 acre-feet of water per year for the remaining three years of the current cycle and pledged to end the cycle with no deficit....
Statement By Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns Regarding Guatemala's Passage Of The United States-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement "I am very pleased that Guatemala today passed the United States-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement, which follows the recent approval of this agreement by El Salvador and Honduras. "This action now brings the United States one step closer to an agreement that will significantly benefit American agriculture. Farmers, ranchers and food processors will benefit from the opening of markets to 44 million consumers and an anticipated increase of $1.5 billion in U.S. agricultural exports....
High court overturns woman's obstruction conviction A Belle Fourche woman's conviction of interfering with law officers who were trying to save strayed sheep in a blizzard was overturned Thursday by the state Supreme Court because she was not told of the perils of defending herself. Circuit Judge Warren G. Johnson should have made sure Leigh Patten, 75, understood that going to trial without an attorney can be a daunting task, the high court decided. "The circumstances did not indicate she was aware of the disadvantages and dangers of self-representation," the justices concluded unanimously. Patten was arrested Dec. 28, 2003, after trying to stop the Butte County sheriff and others from taking the sheep to shelter. The sheriff's office was called when sheep strayed onto a roadway about seven miles from Newell. Dozens of sheep had bunched up in a fence corner and were covered by blowing snow. About 150 sheep walked over the sheep-laden snowbank and onto the roadway....
Canada Puts C$50 Million in Beef Markets Campaign Canada's agriculture minister said on Thursday he will plow C$50 million ($42 million) into beef-industry efforts to diversify markets as ranchers grapple with the prospect of stalled live-cattle trade with the United States for another year or more. The money, which follows a C$37-million injection from the Alberta government, will go to helping the struggling industry find new markets and re-enter others closed since Canada found its first case of mad cow disease nearly two years ago. The beef sector wants to cut its reliance on the United States, where a group of activist ranchers were successful last week in preventing live-cattle trade starting up again for the first time since the border was slammed shut in May 2003....
It's off to Boot Hill for the last Western store in downtown Downtown's 86-year-old Palace Boot Shop is closing its doors, which raises the question: Where will Paul Newman get his boots? A longtime customer, the actor slips in inconspicuously. "He walks in with jeans and a cap, and you don't recognize him," said co-owner Lakis Xydis. It may not be trendy, but Palace Boot has history. It is downtown's last old Western store, and its closing will mark the end of a Houston era. Faded and charming, Palace Boot hasn't been remodeled since it opened, and for good reason. An Old World-style bootmaker has no need to get fancy. Outside is a metal sign emblazoned with a cowboy lassoing a bull and dusty window displays. Inside are rows of boots and a moose head above the door. "The old man shot it in Alaska,"said Lakis Xydis, referring to his late uncle Steve Panos, who founded the shop in 1919....
Charlie Goodnight, Jose Tafoya exemplify pivotal figures of Llano Estacado history In 1893 Texas ranchers including Charlie Goodnight sued the State of Texas to recover the value of horses and cattle stolen by Comanches who traded them to Comancheros from northern New Mexico. This story is what I imagine Charlie and Jose might have talked about during the hearings of that lawsuit. They probably hunkered down in the shade of one of the sapling courthouse trees in Clarendon on the afternoon of Jose's testimony, after he had recounted the numbers of cattle he received from the Comanches and later sold in New Mexico to settlers and the U. S. Army. Both had extensively traveled the Llano Estacado and Pecos River Valley when much younger. In the 1920s Goodnight told his biographer J. Evetts Haley, "Tafoya was a wonder, and knew the Plains from the Palo Duro to the Concho by heart." (Some of Goodnight's dialog in this essay comes from the Haley book.) Tafoya was fluent and literate in both Spanish and English. In the 1860's and early 1870's he had 250 wagons rolling on the Llano Estacado, hauling buffalo meat and trade goods. Tafoya became one of the U.S. Army's most sought-after scouts in the mid to late 1870's....
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Man pleads guilty over role in starting deadly 2003 wildfire A lost hunter who set a signal fire that grew into the biggest wildfire in state history pleaded guilty Thursday in a deal with federal prosecutors that could put him behind bars for up to five years. Sergio Martinez pleaded guilty to one count of starting the October 2003 Cedar Fire. Driven by hot, dry winds, the fire killed 15 people and destroyed more than 2,000 homes in San Diego County. In court Thursday, the 34-year-old construction worker admitted that he set a fire after he became lost while hunting. Judge Roger T. Benitez asked him to summarize what happened....
Environmental group's appeal puts sand camping plans on hold The friction between off-road riders and the other tourists who frequent the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area has flared up again. Tensions began after the U.S. Forest Service put its launch of a new camping reservation system in the Oregon Dunes on hold after Umpqua Watersheds Inc., a Roseburg conservation group, objected to the plans. The delay places in doubt the vacation plans of many of the visitors who flock to coastal Douglas County each summer to ride and camp among the dunes. The Forest Service is to decide by April 14 whether to let the sand camping plan proceed....
Groups decry proposed hunting ban Hunters, many wearing camouflage and safety-orange hats and vests, were the overwhelming majority of the more than 250 people who packed Stanwood Middle School's gym Wednesday night. They showed up to oppose a citizen petition to ban hunting on Leque Island, a 400-acre state-owned lowland between Stanwood and Camano Island. Officials from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife called the meeting to get public comments about the petition. The only person to speak in favor of it was Camano Island resident Sharon Callaghan, who wrote the petition. According to the petition, the ban is justified because it is no longer a rural area, hunting disturbs the peace and the area is too close to wildlife areas important to the Audubon Society and The Nature Conservancy....
Montana prepares to fight wasting disease Montana is in the process of crafting a state plan to prevent chronic wasting disease from showing up here or to contain the disease if it does occur. Feldner gave an overview of the plan, which suggests an outright ban on importing any game-farmed deer and elk from states that have animals with chronic wasting disease. Right now, it is legal to import deer and elk from states with the disease if the game farm in question has not had a case of CWD in five years. The plan also suggests banning feeding deer and elk. As a state, Montana does not feed deer or elk, but citizens may as long as it doesn't unnaturally congregate animals. Feldner said Montana should consider banning the practice outright. The plan also calls for closing the state's rehabilitation center for orphaned fawns. Right now, the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks takes in about 50 fawns a year at a central rehabilitation center in Helena. The animals are taught to live in the wild and are returned to the place they were found....
Panel rejects 'Clear Skies' President Bush's bid to rewrite the nation's air pollution laws ground to a halt in Congress yesterday when Republicans were unable to overcome objections in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that the bill would weaken central pillars of environmental protection. The setback dealt a body blow to the administration's highly touted plan and handed a victory to environmental groups that viewed the "Clear Skies" bill as rolling back safeguards at the behest of industry interests. The Environmental Protection Agency will issue new rules today and next week to control the same pollutants targeted by the Bush initiative, but these rules will not change provisions in the 1990 Clean Air Act that would have been revised by "Clear Skies."....
Ecological groups sue over offshore oil leases Ten environmental groups have sued the federal government over its recent decision to extend the lives of 36 oil and gas leases offshore of the Central Coast. Last month, the federal Minerals Management Service extended the leases for as long as three years to give the oil companies that own them the chance to update their plans for exploration and development of the leases. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court of Northern California. It argues that the government failed to consider all the ramifications of extending the leases, including those caused by exploration, drilling and production. It also challenges the agency's decision not to consider alternatives to developing the leases....
Goshutes file lawsuit to stop feds from dealing with disputed leaders A group of disgruntled Goshute Indians has filed a lawsuit against federal agencies. They seek greater involvement in the process that may send 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel to a proposed storage facility on their Tooele County reservation. The suit, filed against the U.S. Interior Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, claims federal administrators have erroneously negotiated with disputed leaders and failed to take into account the concerns of the 124-member tribe. Abby Bullcreek and the other five individuals named Tuesday as plaintiffs say they have "a strong interest" in blocking Private Fuel Storage from gaining federal approval to build a nuclear storage site on their reservation....
Idaho takes steps to dry up crops for the first time For the first time, Idaho has taken steps to buy back water rights. The Idaho Water Resource Board agreed to buy all the water -- more than 74,000 acre-feet -- of the Bell Rapids Mutual Irrigation Co. of Hagerman. If approved by the state, the deal would dry up 24,500 acres of sugar beet, barley and potato fields. Instead the water would be left in the Snake River to help aid salmon migration. It could also be used to help resolve conflicts over spring flows from the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer. Critics say the move could hurt the economies of surrounding communities like Buhl. "There are going to be effects, from the grocery man to the gas man," said Mike Hamilton, president of Farmers National Bank in Buhl. The purchase would cost $300 an acre-foot, for a total of about $24 million. The money come out of the general fund and go to the farmers who own the water rights. The plan calls for paying the money back to the state by leasing the water to the federal Bureau of Reclamation so it can meet flow requirements for salmon under the Endangered Species Act...
Rivers likely won't meet irrigation needs: Projections put Columbia flow at 61%, Yakima 41% of normal From the Yakima Valley east to Spokane, communities on Washington's dry side have long marched with a banner that boasts "Where Irrigation Feeds the Nation." Now that a drought emergency has been declared, it is a concept that could be under siege by late summer as water managers tread lightly among needy user groups. The biggest water user on the state's east side is the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which extracts on average 2.5 million acre-feet of water a year from the Columbia River's Roosevelt Lake behind Grand Coulee Dam and 2.7 million acre-feet from the Yakima River. The water is sold wholesale to local irrigation districts, which peddle it to farmers who grow things such as potatoes, corn, beans and alfalfa in the Upper Columbia District, and grapes, vegetables and orchard crops in the Greater Yakima Valley....
Scarce water in Klamath Basin triggers calls for drought plan Federal reclamation officials say dry conditions in the Klamath Basin have triggered letters implementing the Klamath Basin drought management plan. The letters call for meetings between the Bureau of Reclamation and districts and individual irrigators to determine allocation in case of a drought, said Dave Sabo, area manager for the Klamath Basin Area Office of the Bureau of Reclamation. Sabo said because of low moisture and runoff levels, the bureau needs to begin now to plan water deliveries. He said that on March 1, the bureau estimated an inflow to Upper Klamath Lake of 52 percent of normal though November but that the snowpack has dropped to 38 percent and expected warm dry conditions will make it worse....
Wash. Governor Declares Drought Emergency Gov. Christine Gregoire declared a statewide drought emergency, anticipating what weather forecasters predict will be the Pacific Northwest's worst dry spell in nearly three decades. Gregoire made her announcement Thursday before an audience of farmers in the already arid Yakima Valley. The last statewide drought emergency was declared by Gov. Gary Locke in 2001. "While water shortages won't affect all areas of the state in precisely the same way, it seems very likely that all areas of our state will experience at least some level of drought this year," Gregoire said. In the declaration, Gregoire creates an interstate agency to coordinate the government's response, calls for $8.2 million more in drought-related state appropriations and orders the National Guard to prepare to combat wildfires this summer....
Mexico agrees to pay water debt Mexico has pledged to repay its entire water debt to Texas by Sept. 30 in an agreement expected to end a 12-year dispute between the United States and its southern neighbor over terms of a 1944 water-sharing treaty. Gov. Rick Perry called the accord “tremendous news” for farmers, ranchers and other residents of the Rio Grande Valley and hailed it as a turning point in what he called “probably the most contentious issue in the last 50 years” between the two countries. Mexico owes Texas about 733,000 acre-feet of water under the treaty terms — about half the 1.5 million acre-feet it owed before plentiful rain fell in 2003 and 2004. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons — enough to cover an acre a foot deep. The accord U.S. and Mexican officials reached last week guarantees that Mexico will transfer water from the Amistad and Falcon reservoirs, eliminating its water debt and raising U.S. reserves from 95 percent of storage to 103 percent of storage. Mexico also agreed to deliver at least the average minimum of 350,000 acre-feet of water per year for the remaining three years of the current cycle and pledged to end the cycle with no deficit....
Statement By Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns Regarding Guatemala's Passage Of The United States-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement "I am very pleased that Guatemala today passed the United States-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement, which follows the recent approval of this agreement by El Salvador and Honduras. "This action now brings the United States one step closer to an agreement that will significantly benefit American agriculture. Farmers, ranchers and food processors will benefit from the opening of markets to 44 million consumers and an anticipated increase of $1.5 billion in U.S. agricultural exports....
High court overturns woman's obstruction conviction A Belle Fourche woman's conviction of interfering with law officers who were trying to save strayed sheep in a blizzard was overturned Thursday by the state Supreme Court because she was not told of the perils of defending herself. Circuit Judge Warren G. Johnson should have made sure Leigh Patten, 75, understood that going to trial without an attorney can be a daunting task, the high court decided. "The circumstances did not indicate she was aware of the disadvantages and dangers of self-representation," the justices concluded unanimously. Patten was arrested Dec. 28, 2003, after trying to stop the Butte County sheriff and others from taking the sheep to shelter. The sheriff's office was called when sheep strayed onto a roadway about seven miles from Newell. Dozens of sheep had bunched up in a fence corner and were covered by blowing snow. About 150 sheep walked over the sheep-laden snowbank and onto the roadway....
Canada Puts C$50 Million in Beef Markets Campaign Canada's agriculture minister said on Thursday he will plow C$50 million ($42 million) into beef-industry efforts to diversify markets as ranchers grapple with the prospect of stalled live-cattle trade with the United States for another year or more. The money, which follows a C$37-million injection from the Alberta government, will go to helping the struggling industry find new markets and re-enter others closed since Canada found its first case of mad cow disease nearly two years ago. The beef sector wants to cut its reliance on the United States, where a group of activist ranchers were successful last week in preventing live-cattle trade starting up again for the first time since the border was slammed shut in May 2003....
It's off to Boot Hill for the last Western store in downtown Downtown's 86-year-old Palace Boot Shop is closing its doors, which raises the question: Where will Paul Newman get his boots? A longtime customer, the actor slips in inconspicuously. "He walks in with jeans and a cap, and you don't recognize him," said co-owner Lakis Xydis. It may not be trendy, but Palace Boot has history. It is downtown's last old Western store, and its closing will mark the end of a Houston era. Faded and charming, Palace Boot hasn't been remodeled since it opened, and for good reason. An Old World-style bootmaker has no need to get fancy. Outside is a metal sign emblazoned with a cowboy lassoing a bull and dusty window displays. Inside are rows of boots and a moose head above the door. "The old man shot it in Alaska,"said Lakis Xydis, referring to his late uncle Steve Panos, who founded the shop in 1919....
Charlie Goodnight, Jose Tafoya exemplify pivotal figures of Llano Estacado history In 1893 Texas ranchers including Charlie Goodnight sued the State of Texas to recover the value of horses and cattle stolen by Comanches who traded them to Comancheros from northern New Mexico. This story is what I imagine Charlie and Jose might have talked about during the hearings of that lawsuit. They probably hunkered down in the shade of one of the sapling courthouse trees in Clarendon on the afternoon of Jose's testimony, after he had recounted the numbers of cattle he received from the Comanches and later sold in New Mexico to settlers and the U. S. Army. Both had extensively traveled the Llano Estacado and Pecos River Valley when much younger. In the 1920s Goodnight told his biographer J. Evetts Haley, "Tafoya was a wonder, and knew the Plains from the Palo Duro to the Concho by heart." (Some of Goodnight's dialog in this essay comes from the Haley book.) Tafoya was fluent and literate in both Spanish and English. In the 1860's and early 1870's he had 250 wagons rolling on the Llano Estacado, hauling buffalo meat and trade goods. Tafoya became one of the U.S. Army's most sought-after scouts in the mid to late 1870's....
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Thursday, March 10, 2005
Friends,
I'm on my way to Guthrie, Ok., for the Timed Even Championships. My son had to work late, so we got a late start, and have stopped for what's left of the night in Amarillo.
Time permitting, I will still try to post. However, it will look more like a traditional blog. As you are aware, I spend alot of time copying and pasting, so you really have an idea of whats in the article and can decide to hit the link or skip to the next one. I know some of you read it like a newsletter. With the slow hookups and the lack of time I won't be able to do that for you on this trip. The finals are Sunday and I will be home Monday.
Keep checking in for the latest news and I will be giving updates on the competition.
For the FS's attempt to mimic the private sector on sustainable logging, see Forest Service will try out external reviews at Mount Hood, Siuslaw
Pilot in wilderness crash flew astray, report says This is about the Sept 20 crash that killed the pilot and two FS employees.
Just blowing off a little steam at Mt. St. Helens.
Authorities arrest 11 more in southern Oregon near the Fiddler timber sale.
See Standing Up to Ecocide in Oregon for a report on the 23rd University of Oregon Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (E-LAW).
AP is reporting the Bush administration may back county payments law.
Critics fear Park Service headed down wrong path says a column in the Boston Globe.
Groups seek wilderness designation on BLM land in south-central Wyoming.
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I'm on my way to Guthrie, Ok., for the Timed Even Championships. My son had to work late, so we got a late start, and have stopped for what's left of the night in Amarillo.
Time permitting, I will still try to post. However, it will look more like a traditional blog. As you are aware, I spend alot of time copying and pasting, so you really have an idea of whats in the article and can decide to hit the link or skip to the next one. I know some of you read it like a newsletter. With the slow hookups and the lack of time I won't be able to do that for you on this trip. The finals are Sunday and I will be home Monday.
Keep checking in for the latest news and I will be giving updates on the competition.
For the FS's attempt to mimic the private sector on sustainable logging, see Forest Service will try out external reviews at Mount Hood, Siuslaw
Pilot in wilderness crash flew astray, report says This is about the Sept 20 crash that killed the pilot and two FS employees.
Just blowing off a little steam at Mt. St. Helens.
Authorities arrest 11 more in southern Oregon near the Fiddler timber sale.
See Standing Up to Ecocide in Oregon for a report on the 23rd University of Oregon Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (E-LAW).
AP is reporting the Bush administration may back county payments law.
Critics fear Park Service headed down wrong path says a column in the Boston Globe.
Groups seek wilderness designation on BLM land in south-central Wyoming.
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Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Chris LeDoux Dies After Lengthy Illness
Singer-songwriter and former rodeo champion Chris LeDoux died Thursday (March 9) following a lengthy battle with liver ailments, a Capitol Records spokesperson confirmed Wednesday afternoon (March 9). He was 56.
LeDoux underwent a liver transplant in October 2000 after being diagnosed with a rare liver disease, primary sclerosing cholangitis. In November 2004, LeDoux confirmed he had been diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a slow-growing cancer of the bile duct.
LeDoux had already recorded and marketed 22 albums on his own Lucky Man Music label before signing to Capitol Records in 1992. In large part, the major label deal was due to the support of another Capitol artist -- longtime fan Garth Brooks -- who had immortalized LeDoux in his 1989 debut single, "Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)." Through the years, Brooks would openly acknowledge that his concerts were in many ways inspired by LeDoux's high-voltage live shows.
Born Oct. 2, 1948, in Biloxi, Miss., Chris LeDoux was raised in Austin, Texas. His father was an Air Force pilot who moved the family throughout the U.S. While spending time in Texas and Wyoming, LeDoux gained an interest in music and the rodeo. In 1976, he earned the title of world champion bareback rider from the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA).
LeDoux began dabbling at songwriting while in high school and started recording and releasing his own albums in 1973. With titles such as Old Cowboy Heroes, Rodeo Songs and Wild and Wooly, LeDoux's music was aimed directly at the rodeo and cowboy subculture. Selling the tapes at rodeos, LeDoux built a devoted fan base that would continue to support him for more than three decades.
Capitol eventually reissued virtually all of the titles from LeDoux's Lucky Man catalog. His first Capitol album, Western Underground, was released in 1991. His second Capitol release, Whatcha Gonna Do With a Cowboy, featured Brooks on the title track. Peaking at No. 7 in 1992, it was LeDoux's only Top 10 single. LeDoux would later perform duets with others, including a 1994 pairing with Toby Keith on "Copenhagen" and a 1999 collaboration with Jon Bon Jovi on "Bang a Drum."
With career sales of more than 6 million albums, LeDoux is the subject of numerous compilations. Among the most comprehensive are American Cowboy (1972-94), a three-CD set highlighting his earliest work, and The Capitol Collection (1990-2000) , featuring six previously-released albums and bonus tracks.
Living with his family on a ranch in Wyoming, LeDoux was a soft-spoken man who often seemed uneasy in discussing his formidable accomplishments. During a trip to Tennessee in 2003, Capitol Nashville presented him with a plaque for his career record sales. In accepting the plaque, LeDoux told the group, "I couldn't have done this without the help of a lot of people. They gently nudged this lazy old cowboy along to get out there and do this for a living. If it weren't for them, I'd be singing to the sheep and the cows still."
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Singer-songwriter and former rodeo champion Chris LeDoux died Thursday (March 9) following a lengthy battle with liver ailments, a Capitol Records spokesperson confirmed Wednesday afternoon (March 9). He was 56.
LeDoux underwent a liver transplant in October 2000 after being diagnosed with a rare liver disease, primary sclerosing cholangitis. In November 2004, LeDoux confirmed he had been diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a slow-growing cancer of the bile duct.
LeDoux had already recorded and marketed 22 albums on his own Lucky Man Music label before signing to Capitol Records in 1992. In large part, the major label deal was due to the support of another Capitol artist -- longtime fan Garth Brooks -- who had immortalized LeDoux in his 1989 debut single, "Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)." Through the years, Brooks would openly acknowledge that his concerts were in many ways inspired by LeDoux's high-voltage live shows.
Born Oct. 2, 1948, in Biloxi, Miss., Chris LeDoux was raised in Austin, Texas. His father was an Air Force pilot who moved the family throughout the U.S. While spending time in Texas and Wyoming, LeDoux gained an interest in music and the rodeo. In 1976, he earned the title of world champion bareback rider from the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA).
LeDoux began dabbling at songwriting while in high school and started recording and releasing his own albums in 1973. With titles such as Old Cowboy Heroes, Rodeo Songs and Wild and Wooly, LeDoux's music was aimed directly at the rodeo and cowboy subculture. Selling the tapes at rodeos, LeDoux built a devoted fan base that would continue to support him for more than three decades.
Capitol eventually reissued virtually all of the titles from LeDoux's Lucky Man catalog. His first Capitol album, Western Underground, was released in 1991. His second Capitol release, Whatcha Gonna Do With a Cowboy, featured Brooks on the title track. Peaking at No. 7 in 1992, it was LeDoux's only Top 10 single. LeDoux would later perform duets with others, including a 1994 pairing with Toby Keith on "Copenhagen" and a 1999 collaboration with Jon Bon Jovi on "Bang a Drum."
With career sales of more than 6 million albums, LeDoux is the subject of numerous compilations. Among the most comprehensive are American Cowboy (1972-94), a three-CD set highlighting his earliest work, and The Capitol Collection (1990-2000) , featuring six previously-released albums and bonus tracks.
Living with his family on a ranch in Wyoming, LeDoux was a soft-spoken man who often seemed uneasy in discussing his formidable accomplishments. During a trip to Tennessee in 2003, Capitol Nashville presented him with a plaque for his career record sales. In accepting the plaque, LeDoux told the group, "I couldn't have done this without the help of a lot of people. They gently nudged this lazy old cowboy along to get out there and do this for a living. If it weren't for them, I'd be singing to the sheep and the cows still."
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NEWS ROUNDUP
Outfitters go after rogue guides Properly licensed outfitters and guides from the Dubois area have had enough: They're pushing for a crackdown on scofflaw, unlicensed outfitters who steal their customers. Three names of allegedly unlicensed outfitters have been forwarded to the Wyoming Board of Outfitters and Professional Guides in Cheyenne by the Dubois Outfitters Association -- the first time the association has taken such action. Budd Betts, president of the association, said illegal outfitters are a chronic problem for properly permitted, licensed and insured outfitters....
500 oil and gas wells eyed for Mesa County A London-based exploration company plans to drill as many as 500 oil and gas wells in an area of Mesa County that has been avoided by other companies. Maverick Oil and Gas Inc. said it has acquired a 27 percent interest in the Whitewater Project, located southeast of Grand Junction on the west slope of the Grand Mesa. The company estimates the area could contain as much as 250 billion cubic feet of natural gas. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management knows nothing Maverick's plans. "We've not received anything from them," BLM Grand Junction area director Catherine Robertson said Tuesday in the wake of reports circulating in state and Western Slope circles about the drilling plans of the company....
Agency approves plan to save endangered species The Edwards Aquifer Authority has accepted a proposal to preserve the habitat of seven endangered and one threatened species after spending seven years and $3 million drafting the plan. The habitat conservation plan will now go to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It could take several more years to review the plan and work out the details, said Carrie Thompson, a biologist with the agency's Austin Ecological Services office. The plan outlines steps the authority would take to try to preserve the species that live in the Edwards or its major spring openings at San Marcos and New Braunfels. In exchange, the wildlife agency would issue a permit that would protect the authority and those who draw from the aquifer from criminal and civil penalties if their actions during severe drought or other circumstances beyond their control killed off some individual members of the species....
Travis Air Force Base dodges vernal pool habitat designation Travis Air Force Base once again avoided getting a vernal pool critical habitat designation that some feared could hamper both routine base chores and expansions. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday announced its decision to exclude Travis and various other lands in the state. It made the same ruling in 2003, but had to take another look at the issue following a lawsuit. "This is the service's final action," agency spokesman Al Donner said. Once land is designated critical habitat, federal agencies must consult with Fish and Wildlife before allowing anything that could harm areas essential to the recovery of rare animals and plants....
SONORAN PRONGHORN: Making a comeback The Sonoran pronghorn, considered the most endangered mammal in North America, may be starting a comeback from the brink of extinction. Births of fawns late last month and so far this month on the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge is bringing hope to officials working to save the subspecies, said David Eslinger, project facilitator for the refuge near Ajo. "We have six, and we are as excited as can be," he said in a telephone interview yesterday. "They're little animals and they are adapting well to their environment. They are moving around like miniatures of the adults." Female pronghorn typically give birth annually after they reach the age of 2. The birthing season runs from February through May, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Young ones weigh 4 to 12 pounds and stand up to 15 inches tall. Within a day or two of birth, the little animals are able to run up to 25 miles per hour....
Tucson comes to terms with owl Armed with a portable CD player wired to a small bullhorn, Richardson plays a recording of the call of the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl as he prowls a residential neighborhood northwest of Tucson. It's a grating monotone that his colleague, Sherry Barrett, compares to the sound of a squeaky appliance bearing. Because only about 20 of these endangered Sonoran Desert owls are left in Arizona, it seems like a needle-in-a-haystack quest. But before long, an owl hidden in a tall ironwood tree answers Richardson's recording. It's a demonstration that pygmy owls sometimes can coexist with people under the right conditions: when enough open space and tall trees are left around homes. The Tucson area is nearing completion of an ambitious land conservation plan to preserve conditions for owls and other species. The plan offers a lesson in how to balance the needs of people and nature at a time when suburban sprawl across the USA threatens hundreds of plant and animal species....
Critics: Dam removal no `silver bullet' for salmon recovery effort Bruce Babbitt's call to remove the four dams on the lower Snake River has not gone without challenge. The stand ignores current gains in salmon numbers and the harm the dam removal would do to the region's economy, Glen Squires, a spokesman for the Washington Wheat Association, said today. In regards to the issue of transportation alone, Squires said trains simply can't replace barges when it comes to economically shipping wheat and other commodities. ``The whole (river transport) infrastructure has been constructed to export wheat by barges,' Squires said today. ``It's just an efficient system in meeting export demand.'....
ACLU considers Martin's Cove suit The American Civil Liberties Union may soon go to court to challenge a U.S. Bureau of Land Management decision to lease the Martin's Cove site to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "We're very close to making a final decision, that's all I can say at this point," ACLU attorney Mark Lopez said. The BLM signed a 25-year lease with church officials last year, giving the church management control of 933 acres about 55 miles southwest of Casper in Natrona County in exchange for annual payments of $16,000....
NM Senate votes to sue Texas over acreage The Senate voted Tuesday to sue Texas for the return of land in a move that the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Shannon Robinson, D-Albuquerque, likened to a “slap fight” between neighbors. Robinson said there are 603,485 acres of land along the north-south boundary with Texas that was erroneously appropriated to Texas due to a surveyor’s error. The bill directs the attorney general to sue for the return of land, as well as compensation for mineral rights, oil and gas royalties, property taxes and grazing privileges that have been lost due to the mistake. Sen. Carroll Leavell, R-Jal, said the land in question is well worth fighting over. “My home is less than eight miles from this line, and I can tell you that is some of the richest oil and gas country in Texas,” Leavell said. “If it wasn’t for that, the University if Texas would probably be a junior college.” Leavell said the state shouldn’t stop with just the disputed land. “While we’re after this, we ought to go after them for the water in the Ogallala (aquifer),” Leavell said....
Eco-radicals target growth in Sierra hills Most Bay Area residents know Auburn -- a quaint Gold Rush town in the Sierra foothills -- as a pit stop on the way to Lake Tahoe. Brick buildings from the 1850s dot the streets, and old-timers still gather for coffee at the marble counter of the 109-year-old Auburn Drug Company. But in the past three months, Auburn has become known for something else: ``eco-terrorism.'' The Earth Liberation Front -- the underground environmental network that has used sabotage, arson and vandalism to attack everything from logging equipment to genetically engineered crops and SUVs -- has hit the foothills town and fast-growing nearby communities. And this time, the radical group's target is sprawl....
Ready... fire... aim! There’s an old bumper sticker in Wyoming that reads, "Lord, please give me another boom. I promise I won’t piss this one away." Well, the Lord seems to have delivered. Statewide, 31,000 wells currently suck oil and gas out of the earth, and plans are laid for tens of thousands more. The state’s highways hum with trucks and drill rigs, and the landscape is riddled with roads, pipelines and wastewater ponds. Wyoming offers a taste of what’s happening across the West, as energy prices soar to near-record highs, and the Bush administration and cash-strapped governors graciously hold the doors open for industry. The Rocky Mountain News reported in January that energy companies are poised to spend more than $1 billion in 2005 to drill for oil and gas in the Rockies. For years, ranchers, landowners and environmentalists have been shouting that the drill rigs are rolling without sufficient oversight from state and federal agencies, and that the development is wrecking rangeland, clean air and water, and wildlife habitat. But two recent reports — and a number of the stories in this issue — show that the problems have only deepened....
Whose rules rule on Otero Mesa? New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, D, knows who his friends are. In 2003, speaking before the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, he told the assembled governors and industry bigwigs that they built his state’s budget surplus. And since then, New Mexico’s coffers have continued to fill: Last year, the State Land Office collected a record $32.7 million in lease sales and $236.3 million in royalties from oil and gas companies alone (HCN, 6/21/04: Oil money rules in the West’s mini-Middle East). But that cash can come with controversy. Seven years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management closed Otero Mesa in southern New Mexico to drilling and began updating its management plan. While the agency suspended existing oil and gas leases, an alliance of environmentalists, ranchers and property-rights advocates sought to keep the mesa off-limits to development (HCN, 3/29/04: New Mexicans take a stand against oil and gas). And it was in that dusty stretch of desert that Richardson drew a line, and tried to halt development on federal property that oil and gas companies are itching to explore. Now, the state is locked in a fight with the federal government over the fate of 2.1 million acres of Chihuahuan desert — and over who writes the rules for oil and gas development on public lands....
SoDak governor signs law creating state beef marketing program South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds hopes people across the nation and the world will soon choose to pay more for a steak that carries a South Dakota seal of approval. When they take that steak home, they can use a code on the label to find out on the Internet where the meat came from, even the ranch where a calf was born. Electronic records would track the critter from birth, through a feedlot and to a meatpacking plant. "We believe consumers will step forward and they will be paying premium prices for this premium product," Rounds said Tuesday. A week after the Legislature passed a bill to start the South Dakota Certified Beef Program, the governor signed the measure into law. The program is the result of an idea Rounds first proposed when he campaigned for governor in 2002....
Is Texas becoming an also-ran? Texas is horse country; always has been. On horseback, Texans drove their cattle to market. With their horses, Texans shared their land and drinking water. But, in ever increasing numbers, the horses are leaving Texas. Or, rather, they're being sent away, for greener economic pastures. Even though he has bred three Texas champions and lives in Austin, Ro Parra has sent most of his horses elsewhere in recent years. Economics, he said, forced the move. "The Texas horse industry is in trouble," explained the businessman who bred Breeders' Cup Juvenile winner Wilko. "When you look at the economics, Texas is at a huge disadvantage relative to other states."....
Tilting at windmills The Horicon Marsh was a respite for migrating birds long before Thomas Edison helped bring electric lights into American homes. Today the massive wetland and neighboring countryside are at the center of a controversy over plans to build one of the largest electric-generating wind farms east of the Mississippi River. Two green groups that normally see eye-to-eye are sharply divided over a proposal to string 133 wind turbines on nearby hilltops in Dodge and Fond du Lac counties - a landscape that offers some of the best sustained winds in the state. Are the windmills good or bad for the environment?...
Brazile seeks another crown at Timed Event ree-time and reigning world all-around champion Trevor Brazile (Decatur, Texas) headlines the 20-man roster for of the Wrangler Timed Event Championship (March 11-13) at the Lazy E Arena in Guthrie, Okla. The event is a true test of versatility and skill. Each contestant is required to compete in all five timed events — tie-down roping, steer roping, team roping heading and heeling and steer wrestling. ProRodeo's hottest talents make up the most exciting field of competitors ever invited. Besides Brazile, who won $52,000 in defending last year's Wrangler Event Championship title and becoming the first cowboy to win the title in consecutive years, a handful of other champions will be on hand. That list includes Guy Allen (Santa Anna, Texas), the reigning world steer roping champion who holds the PRCA record for total world titles with 18; Jimmie Cooper (Monument, N.M.), the 1981 world all-around champion and three-time Wrangler Timed Event champion; and Paul Tierney (Rapid City, S.D.), the 1980 world all-around champion and four-time Wrangler Timed Event champion. Other contestants scheduled to compete include 10-time Wrangler NFR team roping qualifier Daniel Green (Oakdale, Calif.); Wrangler NFR two-event qualifier Cash Myers (Athens, Texas); and reigning world steer wrestling champion Luke Branquinho (Los Alamos, Calif.)....
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Outfitters go after rogue guides Properly licensed outfitters and guides from the Dubois area have had enough: They're pushing for a crackdown on scofflaw, unlicensed outfitters who steal their customers. Three names of allegedly unlicensed outfitters have been forwarded to the Wyoming Board of Outfitters and Professional Guides in Cheyenne by the Dubois Outfitters Association -- the first time the association has taken such action. Budd Betts, president of the association, said illegal outfitters are a chronic problem for properly permitted, licensed and insured outfitters....
500 oil and gas wells eyed for Mesa County A London-based exploration company plans to drill as many as 500 oil and gas wells in an area of Mesa County that has been avoided by other companies. Maverick Oil and Gas Inc. said it has acquired a 27 percent interest in the Whitewater Project, located southeast of Grand Junction on the west slope of the Grand Mesa. The company estimates the area could contain as much as 250 billion cubic feet of natural gas. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management knows nothing Maverick's plans. "We've not received anything from them," BLM Grand Junction area director Catherine Robertson said Tuesday in the wake of reports circulating in state and Western Slope circles about the drilling plans of the company....
Agency approves plan to save endangered species The Edwards Aquifer Authority has accepted a proposal to preserve the habitat of seven endangered and one threatened species after spending seven years and $3 million drafting the plan. The habitat conservation plan will now go to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It could take several more years to review the plan and work out the details, said Carrie Thompson, a biologist with the agency's Austin Ecological Services office. The plan outlines steps the authority would take to try to preserve the species that live in the Edwards or its major spring openings at San Marcos and New Braunfels. In exchange, the wildlife agency would issue a permit that would protect the authority and those who draw from the aquifer from criminal and civil penalties if their actions during severe drought or other circumstances beyond their control killed off some individual members of the species....
Travis Air Force Base dodges vernal pool habitat designation Travis Air Force Base once again avoided getting a vernal pool critical habitat designation that some feared could hamper both routine base chores and expansions. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday announced its decision to exclude Travis and various other lands in the state. It made the same ruling in 2003, but had to take another look at the issue following a lawsuit. "This is the service's final action," agency spokesman Al Donner said. Once land is designated critical habitat, federal agencies must consult with Fish and Wildlife before allowing anything that could harm areas essential to the recovery of rare animals and plants....
SONORAN PRONGHORN: Making a comeback The Sonoran pronghorn, considered the most endangered mammal in North America, may be starting a comeback from the brink of extinction. Births of fawns late last month and so far this month on the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge is bringing hope to officials working to save the subspecies, said David Eslinger, project facilitator for the refuge near Ajo. "We have six, and we are as excited as can be," he said in a telephone interview yesterday. "They're little animals and they are adapting well to their environment. They are moving around like miniatures of the adults." Female pronghorn typically give birth annually after they reach the age of 2. The birthing season runs from February through May, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Young ones weigh 4 to 12 pounds and stand up to 15 inches tall. Within a day or two of birth, the little animals are able to run up to 25 miles per hour....
Tucson comes to terms with owl Armed with a portable CD player wired to a small bullhorn, Richardson plays a recording of the call of the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl as he prowls a residential neighborhood northwest of Tucson. It's a grating monotone that his colleague, Sherry Barrett, compares to the sound of a squeaky appliance bearing. Because only about 20 of these endangered Sonoran Desert owls are left in Arizona, it seems like a needle-in-a-haystack quest. But before long, an owl hidden in a tall ironwood tree answers Richardson's recording. It's a demonstration that pygmy owls sometimes can coexist with people under the right conditions: when enough open space and tall trees are left around homes. The Tucson area is nearing completion of an ambitious land conservation plan to preserve conditions for owls and other species. The plan offers a lesson in how to balance the needs of people and nature at a time when suburban sprawl across the USA threatens hundreds of plant and animal species....
Critics: Dam removal no `silver bullet' for salmon recovery effort Bruce Babbitt's call to remove the four dams on the lower Snake River has not gone without challenge. The stand ignores current gains in salmon numbers and the harm the dam removal would do to the region's economy, Glen Squires, a spokesman for the Washington Wheat Association, said today. In regards to the issue of transportation alone, Squires said trains simply can't replace barges when it comes to economically shipping wheat and other commodities. ``The whole (river transport) infrastructure has been constructed to export wheat by barges,' Squires said today. ``It's just an efficient system in meeting export demand.'....
ACLU considers Martin's Cove suit The American Civil Liberties Union may soon go to court to challenge a U.S. Bureau of Land Management decision to lease the Martin's Cove site to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "We're very close to making a final decision, that's all I can say at this point," ACLU attorney Mark Lopez said. The BLM signed a 25-year lease with church officials last year, giving the church management control of 933 acres about 55 miles southwest of Casper in Natrona County in exchange for annual payments of $16,000....
NM Senate votes to sue Texas over acreage The Senate voted Tuesday to sue Texas for the return of land in a move that the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Shannon Robinson, D-Albuquerque, likened to a “slap fight” between neighbors. Robinson said there are 603,485 acres of land along the north-south boundary with Texas that was erroneously appropriated to Texas due to a surveyor’s error. The bill directs the attorney general to sue for the return of land, as well as compensation for mineral rights, oil and gas royalties, property taxes and grazing privileges that have been lost due to the mistake. Sen. Carroll Leavell, R-Jal, said the land in question is well worth fighting over. “My home is less than eight miles from this line, and I can tell you that is some of the richest oil and gas country in Texas,” Leavell said. “If it wasn’t for that, the University if Texas would probably be a junior college.” Leavell said the state shouldn’t stop with just the disputed land. “While we’re after this, we ought to go after them for the water in the Ogallala (aquifer),” Leavell said....
Eco-radicals target growth in Sierra hills Most Bay Area residents know Auburn -- a quaint Gold Rush town in the Sierra foothills -- as a pit stop on the way to Lake Tahoe. Brick buildings from the 1850s dot the streets, and old-timers still gather for coffee at the marble counter of the 109-year-old Auburn Drug Company. But in the past three months, Auburn has become known for something else: ``eco-terrorism.'' The Earth Liberation Front -- the underground environmental network that has used sabotage, arson and vandalism to attack everything from logging equipment to genetically engineered crops and SUVs -- has hit the foothills town and fast-growing nearby communities. And this time, the radical group's target is sprawl....
Ready... fire... aim! There’s an old bumper sticker in Wyoming that reads, "Lord, please give me another boom. I promise I won’t piss this one away." Well, the Lord seems to have delivered. Statewide, 31,000 wells currently suck oil and gas out of the earth, and plans are laid for tens of thousands more. The state’s highways hum with trucks and drill rigs, and the landscape is riddled with roads, pipelines and wastewater ponds. Wyoming offers a taste of what’s happening across the West, as energy prices soar to near-record highs, and the Bush administration and cash-strapped governors graciously hold the doors open for industry. The Rocky Mountain News reported in January that energy companies are poised to spend more than $1 billion in 2005 to drill for oil and gas in the Rockies. For years, ranchers, landowners and environmentalists have been shouting that the drill rigs are rolling without sufficient oversight from state and federal agencies, and that the development is wrecking rangeland, clean air and water, and wildlife habitat. But two recent reports — and a number of the stories in this issue — show that the problems have only deepened....
Whose rules rule on Otero Mesa? New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, D, knows who his friends are. In 2003, speaking before the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, he told the assembled governors and industry bigwigs that they built his state’s budget surplus. And since then, New Mexico’s coffers have continued to fill: Last year, the State Land Office collected a record $32.7 million in lease sales and $236.3 million in royalties from oil and gas companies alone (HCN, 6/21/04: Oil money rules in the West’s mini-Middle East). But that cash can come with controversy. Seven years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management closed Otero Mesa in southern New Mexico to drilling and began updating its management plan. While the agency suspended existing oil and gas leases, an alliance of environmentalists, ranchers and property-rights advocates sought to keep the mesa off-limits to development (HCN, 3/29/04: New Mexicans take a stand against oil and gas). And it was in that dusty stretch of desert that Richardson drew a line, and tried to halt development on federal property that oil and gas companies are itching to explore. Now, the state is locked in a fight with the federal government over the fate of 2.1 million acres of Chihuahuan desert — and over who writes the rules for oil and gas development on public lands....
SoDak governor signs law creating state beef marketing program South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds hopes people across the nation and the world will soon choose to pay more for a steak that carries a South Dakota seal of approval. When they take that steak home, they can use a code on the label to find out on the Internet where the meat came from, even the ranch where a calf was born. Electronic records would track the critter from birth, through a feedlot and to a meatpacking plant. "We believe consumers will step forward and they will be paying premium prices for this premium product," Rounds said Tuesday. A week after the Legislature passed a bill to start the South Dakota Certified Beef Program, the governor signed the measure into law. The program is the result of an idea Rounds first proposed when he campaigned for governor in 2002....
Is Texas becoming an also-ran? Texas is horse country; always has been. On horseback, Texans drove their cattle to market. With their horses, Texans shared their land and drinking water. But, in ever increasing numbers, the horses are leaving Texas. Or, rather, they're being sent away, for greener economic pastures. Even though he has bred three Texas champions and lives in Austin, Ro Parra has sent most of his horses elsewhere in recent years. Economics, he said, forced the move. "The Texas horse industry is in trouble," explained the businessman who bred Breeders' Cup Juvenile winner Wilko. "When you look at the economics, Texas is at a huge disadvantage relative to other states."....
Tilting at windmills The Horicon Marsh was a respite for migrating birds long before Thomas Edison helped bring electric lights into American homes. Today the massive wetland and neighboring countryside are at the center of a controversy over plans to build one of the largest electric-generating wind farms east of the Mississippi River. Two green groups that normally see eye-to-eye are sharply divided over a proposal to string 133 wind turbines on nearby hilltops in Dodge and Fond du Lac counties - a landscape that offers some of the best sustained winds in the state. Are the windmills good or bad for the environment?...
Brazile seeks another crown at Timed Event ree-time and reigning world all-around champion Trevor Brazile (Decatur, Texas) headlines the 20-man roster for of the Wrangler Timed Event Championship (March 11-13) at the Lazy E Arena in Guthrie, Okla. The event is a true test of versatility and skill. Each contestant is required to compete in all five timed events — tie-down roping, steer roping, team roping heading and heeling and steer wrestling. ProRodeo's hottest talents make up the most exciting field of competitors ever invited. Besides Brazile, who won $52,000 in defending last year's Wrangler Event Championship title and becoming the first cowboy to win the title in consecutive years, a handful of other champions will be on hand. That list includes Guy Allen (Santa Anna, Texas), the reigning world steer roping champion who holds the PRCA record for total world titles with 18; Jimmie Cooper (Monument, N.M.), the 1981 world all-around champion and three-time Wrangler Timed Event champion; and Paul Tierney (Rapid City, S.D.), the 1980 world all-around champion and four-time Wrangler Timed Event champion. Other contestants scheduled to compete include 10-time Wrangler NFR team roping qualifier Daniel Green (Oakdale, Calif.); Wrangler NFR two-event qualifier Cash Myers (Athens, Texas); and reigning world steer wrestling champion Luke Branquinho (Los Alamos, Calif.)....
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Tuesday, March 08, 2005
NEWS ROUNDUP
Idaho rancher first to kill wolf under new federal rule A rancher in remote central Idaho shot a wolf he said was harassing his cattle – the first time one of the federally protected predators has been killed under new guidelines that took effect Feb. 2. The rancher shot the female gray wolf on private property late Sunday. He watched it and another larger wolf chasing his cattle, the rancher told officials. The other wolf escaped. Under the new rule that affects Idaho and Montana, people can shoot wolves that pursue their livestock. Before, ranchers had to wait until a wolf had actually bitten one of their animals....
South Dakota Bill Targets Prairie Dogs Gov. Mike Rounds has signed a bill giving South Dakota ranchers some extra ammunition in dealing with prairie dogs that invade from neighboring private property. The measure will conditionally reinstate prairie dogs on a state list of pests and allow for local control methods in certain circumstances. If that is done, county weed and pest boards could poison prairie dogs in one-mile buffer zones. The rodents could only be poisoned if sylvatic plague is found in prairie dogs east of the Rocky Mountains, if state officials determine that more than 145,000 acres are infested with the animals, and if adjacent landowners have not maintained a one-mile buffer zone or other mutually agreed border area where control measures are taken. The new law is intended to work in conjunction with a comprehensive state prairie-dog management plan that was approved by the Legislature....
Panther Advocate Fights to Get Job Back This helps explain why an introvert with a tendency to speak in a barely audible monotone has swelled into a force to be reckoned with. Quite plainly, he does not have much to lose. Freed from most of the usual temporal worries, Eller has mounted a one-man campaign against what he says is a corrupt system within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that favors politically wired real estate developers over, well, fish and wildlife. So far, it has not gone so well. Eller was dismissed from his biologist job the day after November's presidential election. He was escorted out of his 18-year career carrying a pile of papers, a sweater and a frame holding postcards of paintings by the renowned Florida landscape artist A.E. "Bean" Backus. Jeff Ruch of the national advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) says the firing turned Eller into Exhibit A in an underground war between Fish and Wildlife scientists and upper management....
10 arrested protesting fire salvage Loggers began falling trees inside an old growth forest reserve burned by the 2002 Biscuit fire on Monday after authorities hauled away protesters trying to block access while waiting for legal challenges in federal courts. Five timber fallers toting chainsaws, axes and fuel cans hiked past the protest site on the Siskiyou National Forest and a short while later the roar of chainsaws and trees crashing to earth could be heard. Authorities arrested 10 people and towed away a disabled pickup draped with an Earth First banner. About 50 protesters assembled on the Siskiyou National Forest before dawn, first at a bridge across the Illinois River, and later at the pickup truck barricade in an attempt to stall logging that had been made possible by the expiration of an injunction....
Major shift possible in century-old wildfire suppression policy A major shift in the century-old policy for suppressing the wildfire danger in Southern California's national forests could be coming this summer. Unchecked growth has left the region's woodlands dangerously overgrown and the new plans will be part legacy of 2003's deadly firestorms, part science and part popular opinion. U.S. Forest Service planners have worked three years on the new management guidelines and they are now poring over nearly 11,000 separate concerns contained in more than 3,000 letters and e-mails sent in response to an initial draft released last year. Plans for the San Bernardino, Cleveland, Los Padres and Angeles national forests should be complete this summer, project leader Ron Pugh said. It will be an aggressive strategy of thinning forests and controlled burns to restore the forests to a more natural state. Tightening restrictions on recreation and expansion of wilderness areas are also possible, Pugh said....
Every tree has a story to tell From a secret location 10,000 feet high in the White Mountains of California, its thick, gnarled limbs stretch skyward. "Methuselah" is the oldest living tree found on earth. It's a 55-foot-tall bristlecone pine that's nearly 5,000 years old. It's as old as the great pyramids of Egypt. Older, by a thousand years, than Hammurabi's reign in Babylon. Far from being a silent witness to history, Methuselah and other old trees have stories to tell. They are stories that scientists are now able to read more clearly - stories about huge volcanic eruptions, forest fires, and droughts. But trees can also tell gentler stories about log cabins, precious violins, and even three-part paintings that may have been split up long ago....
Officials visiting homeowners along Nevada nuclear waste route Federal and Nye County officials have been making door-to-door visits in parts of Nevada where a proposed rail line would be built to haul radioactive waste to a national nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain. Energy Department officials have been to about 35 homes since June to explain the plan to transport highly radioactive waste through their backyards, officials and residents said. Reactions at kitchen tables have included shock, anger and cautious curiosity, said Susan Moore, an official with the Nye County Department of natural resources and federal facilities. Rancher Joe Fellini, who has grazing rights to a large areas of Nye County, said the train route would limit access to about 20 of his springs and wells. "They don't care," said Fellini, who said he was considering a lawsuit. "They're going to do whatever they want."....
Lawsuits cause methane uncertainty After more than seven months, U.S. District Judge Alan Johnson in Cheyenne is still deliberating two lawsuits against the Bureau of Land Management for its authorization of 51,000 coal-bed methane wells in the Powder River Basin. If the BLM position is upheld, it could restore confidence in the coal-bed methane industry and spur drilling and production in northeast Wyoming. If Johnson determines the BLM didn't live up to its duty to fully analyze impacts, the industry could face a series of injunctions, delays and additional studies. That uncertainty, combined with a series of other related legal upsets in recent months, is cause for a lot of heartburn among those in the industry. "There are a lot of issues out there on the table, yet," said Bruce Hinchey, president of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming. "I think it causes a lot of uncertainty, because you never know where it's going to end up if (drilling is) going to be shut down later, or even shutting in existing wells. Hopefully neither."....
Column: Freeing up federal lands But the inventory should not stop at the District's borders. The same federal land inventory is needed nationwide. The federal government owns more than 670 million acres, almost one-third of the land in the America. What is not known is whether that land is being put to its best use. In September 2003, the General Services Administration identified more than 5.1 million acres of federal land as "vacant" with no federal purpose. The Bureau of Land Management alone has more than 3 million acres that have been identified as surplus and suitable for disposal. Furthermore, the General Accountability Office has found that the federal government owns hundreds of thousands of real property assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars which are no longer consistent with agency missions and are no longer needed. Many of those assets are in an alarming state of neglect and disrepair. GAO also found that little is known about this property. Federal ownership often carries unintended consequences. For example, in the District, where 26.3 percent of the total acreage is owned by the federal government, the District loses an estimated $400 million to $1.1 billion a year in tax revenue. While that is significant, I ask D.C. dwellers to imagine the revenues being lost in my home state of Utah, where 66.5 percent of the land is federally owned. In fact, there are 12 Western states that rank above the District in federal land ownership, and they are losing billions in potential tax revenue each year. The enormous economic burden on local governments throughout the West is unbearable....
Babbitt: Fix economies not dams Bruce Babbitt wants to stop spending money fixing the Snake River dams and use it instead to fix people and economies affected by breaching. During a visit to Lewiston Sunday, the former secretary of the Interior during the Clinton administration called for removing the dams and shifting $6 billion of salmon recovery funding to farmers, transportation systems and renewable energy. "I'm quite confident these dams are going to be removed. I think the argument is so strong and it will only get stronger in time," he said. "The reason to do it now is there is money to make people whole."....
Drop in fish count puzzles scientists The number of juvenile endangered fish recovered in the Colorado River declined dramatically after officials flooded the Grand Canyon in an effort to aid them and their fragile ecosystem. But scientists aren't sure what the fish decline means or why it happened. "We're trying to get the same answer," said Jeff Lovich, chief of the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center in Flagstaff. "We don't know what their fate is." Following a 90-hour experimental water release from Glen Canyon Dam into the canyon in November, 63 percent fewer endangered humpback chub juveniles were trapped than before flooding. Lovich said there are three possible explanations: The fish were washed downstream, they died, or they're still in the river and scientists couldn't accurately sample them after the simulated flood. During the flooding, the Bureau of Reclamation released as much as 41,000 cubic feet of water a second from four of the dam's giant steel tubes. Scientists hoped to redistribute 800,000 metric tons of sediment to create beaches, substrate used by plants and backwaters and pools to help the fish breed....
GAO: EPA slanted mercury analysis to favor Bush plan he Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) distorted the analysis of its controversial proposal to regulate mercury pollution from power plants, making it appear that the Bush administration's market-based approach was superior to a competing plan supported by environmentalists, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office said yesterday. Rebuking the agency for a lack of "transparency," the report said the EPA had failed to document the toxic impact of mercury on brain development, learning disabilities and neurological disorders. The GAO urged that these problems be rectified before the EPA takes final action on the rule....
Carbon dioxide levels threaten prairie life Rising carbon dioxide levels could mean higher feed costs for ranchers and fewer wild ruminants such as antelope and deer, suggest studies by a U.S. Department of Agriculture research team in Fort Collins. The team, from the USDA's Agricultural Research Service, is close to launching a second experiment near Cheyenne, Wyo., to study carbon dioxide increases on rangelands. The first, a five-year study done east of Fort Collins near the Pawnee National Grassland, showed that heightened carbon dioxide levels stimulated plant growth but diluted nitrogen in the thicker foliage. A byproduct of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide concentrations have increased from 280 parts per million since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to about 370 parts per million now. That number is projected by some scientists to exceed 600 parts per million by the end of the century. "This has huge implications for grasslands all around the world," said Jack Morgan, a research leader and plant physiologist with the Agricultural Research Service in Fort Collins....
R-CALF bought cheap cows in Canada; group's president says it's no 'big deal' Members of R-CALF, the U.S. ranchers' group that sued - on safety grounds - to keep the border closed to Canadian cattle, bought up cheap cows in Canada after the devastating ban, the group's president acknowledged Monday. "I don't see anything ironic about it," Leo McDonnell said from Columbus, Mont. "I didn't see it as a big deal. "There's a couple of them that have bought and fed cattle up there, three or four at most," a figure disputed by a Canadian feedlot owner who says it's higher. Three of those U.S. ranchers have been significant contributors to R-CALF's litigation fund, McDonnell said, an endeavour focused squarely on keeping the border shut. Some in Canada are furious, saying R-CALF members have exploited a crisis they helped to create....
Soothing touch - Masseuse helps animals feel better with acupressure massage JoMarie Indovina doesn't talk to the animals, but she knows when she hits the right spot while massaging away the aches and pains of our four-legged friends. "It feels really, really good to them," she said. "They move closer to you. Horses will look right into your eyes, as if to say, 'How do you know this?'" Indovina doesn't just massage horses, dogs and cats - she applies the principles of acupressure, a Chinese medicine massage that is actually older than the better-known acupuncture. Acupressure, a form of massage aimed at unblocking and rebalancing the electromagnetic energy - called chi by the Chinese - in the body, has been used to treat human ailments for thousands of years. The technique was also used on animals, but it didn't surface in the United States until a veterinarian brought the knowledge back from China in the 1960s....
Cows hold grudges, say scientists ONCE they were a byword for mindless docility. But cows have a complex mental life in which they bear grudges, nurture friendships and become excited by intellectual challenges, researchers have found. Cows are capable of strong emotions such as pain, fear and even anxiety about the future. But if farmers provide the right conditions, they can also feel great happiness. The findings have emerged from studies of farm animals that have found similar traits in pigs, goats and chickens. They suggest such animals may be so emotionally similar to humans that welfare laws need to be reconsidered. The research will be presented to a conference in London next month sponsored by animal welfare group Compassion in World Farming....
It's All Trew: Greasing the wheels of progress time-consuming Once upon a time the rural world turned on the squirts of oil from an oil can. If you wanted to keep your equipment running smoothly, you had better squirt some heavy oil into the little funnel-shaped oilers located above the working parts. This chore became obsolete when replaced with the invention of grease cups. These small mushroom-shaped umbrellas had a removable cap that could be filled with lubricating grease, replaced with a twist to the right forcing grease down into the bearing below. After working an hour or two, it was best to twist the cap again forcing new grease through the stem. This was a great improvement over the oil cans. About the time I was born in 1933, another invention appeared in the form of a grease zerk....
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Idaho rancher first to kill wolf under new federal rule A rancher in remote central Idaho shot a wolf he said was harassing his cattle – the first time one of the federally protected predators has been killed under new guidelines that took effect Feb. 2. The rancher shot the female gray wolf on private property late Sunday. He watched it and another larger wolf chasing his cattle, the rancher told officials. The other wolf escaped. Under the new rule that affects Idaho and Montana, people can shoot wolves that pursue their livestock. Before, ranchers had to wait until a wolf had actually bitten one of their animals....
South Dakota Bill Targets Prairie Dogs Gov. Mike Rounds has signed a bill giving South Dakota ranchers some extra ammunition in dealing with prairie dogs that invade from neighboring private property. The measure will conditionally reinstate prairie dogs on a state list of pests and allow for local control methods in certain circumstances. If that is done, county weed and pest boards could poison prairie dogs in one-mile buffer zones. The rodents could only be poisoned if sylvatic plague is found in prairie dogs east of the Rocky Mountains, if state officials determine that more than 145,000 acres are infested with the animals, and if adjacent landowners have not maintained a one-mile buffer zone or other mutually agreed border area where control measures are taken. The new law is intended to work in conjunction with a comprehensive state prairie-dog management plan that was approved by the Legislature....
Panther Advocate Fights to Get Job Back This helps explain why an introvert with a tendency to speak in a barely audible monotone has swelled into a force to be reckoned with. Quite plainly, he does not have much to lose. Freed from most of the usual temporal worries, Eller has mounted a one-man campaign against what he says is a corrupt system within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that favors politically wired real estate developers over, well, fish and wildlife. So far, it has not gone so well. Eller was dismissed from his biologist job the day after November's presidential election. He was escorted out of his 18-year career carrying a pile of papers, a sweater and a frame holding postcards of paintings by the renowned Florida landscape artist A.E. "Bean" Backus. Jeff Ruch of the national advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) says the firing turned Eller into Exhibit A in an underground war between Fish and Wildlife scientists and upper management....
10 arrested protesting fire salvage Loggers began falling trees inside an old growth forest reserve burned by the 2002 Biscuit fire on Monday after authorities hauled away protesters trying to block access while waiting for legal challenges in federal courts. Five timber fallers toting chainsaws, axes and fuel cans hiked past the protest site on the Siskiyou National Forest and a short while later the roar of chainsaws and trees crashing to earth could be heard. Authorities arrested 10 people and towed away a disabled pickup draped with an Earth First banner. About 50 protesters assembled on the Siskiyou National Forest before dawn, first at a bridge across the Illinois River, and later at the pickup truck barricade in an attempt to stall logging that had been made possible by the expiration of an injunction....
Major shift possible in century-old wildfire suppression policy A major shift in the century-old policy for suppressing the wildfire danger in Southern California's national forests could be coming this summer. Unchecked growth has left the region's woodlands dangerously overgrown and the new plans will be part legacy of 2003's deadly firestorms, part science and part popular opinion. U.S. Forest Service planners have worked three years on the new management guidelines and they are now poring over nearly 11,000 separate concerns contained in more than 3,000 letters and e-mails sent in response to an initial draft released last year. Plans for the San Bernardino, Cleveland, Los Padres and Angeles national forests should be complete this summer, project leader Ron Pugh said. It will be an aggressive strategy of thinning forests and controlled burns to restore the forests to a more natural state. Tightening restrictions on recreation and expansion of wilderness areas are also possible, Pugh said....
Every tree has a story to tell From a secret location 10,000 feet high in the White Mountains of California, its thick, gnarled limbs stretch skyward. "Methuselah" is the oldest living tree found on earth. It's a 55-foot-tall bristlecone pine that's nearly 5,000 years old. It's as old as the great pyramids of Egypt. Older, by a thousand years, than Hammurabi's reign in Babylon. Far from being a silent witness to history, Methuselah and other old trees have stories to tell. They are stories that scientists are now able to read more clearly - stories about huge volcanic eruptions, forest fires, and droughts. But trees can also tell gentler stories about log cabins, precious violins, and even three-part paintings that may have been split up long ago....
Officials visiting homeowners along Nevada nuclear waste route Federal and Nye County officials have been making door-to-door visits in parts of Nevada where a proposed rail line would be built to haul radioactive waste to a national nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain. Energy Department officials have been to about 35 homes since June to explain the plan to transport highly radioactive waste through their backyards, officials and residents said. Reactions at kitchen tables have included shock, anger and cautious curiosity, said Susan Moore, an official with the Nye County Department of natural resources and federal facilities. Rancher Joe Fellini, who has grazing rights to a large areas of Nye County, said the train route would limit access to about 20 of his springs and wells. "They don't care," said Fellini, who said he was considering a lawsuit. "They're going to do whatever they want."....
Lawsuits cause methane uncertainty After more than seven months, U.S. District Judge Alan Johnson in Cheyenne is still deliberating two lawsuits against the Bureau of Land Management for its authorization of 51,000 coal-bed methane wells in the Powder River Basin. If the BLM position is upheld, it could restore confidence in the coal-bed methane industry and spur drilling and production in northeast Wyoming. If Johnson determines the BLM didn't live up to its duty to fully analyze impacts, the industry could face a series of injunctions, delays and additional studies. That uncertainty, combined with a series of other related legal upsets in recent months, is cause for a lot of heartburn among those in the industry. "There are a lot of issues out there on the table, yet," said Bruce Hinchey, president of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming. "I think it causes a lot of uncertainty, because you never know where it's going to end up if (drilling is) going to be shut down later, or even shutting in existing wells. Hopefully neither."....
Column: Freeing up federal lands But the inventory should not stop at the District's borders. The same federal land inventory is needed nationwide. The federal government owns more than 670 million acres, almost one-third of the land in the America. What is not known is whether that land is being put to its best use. In September 2003, the General Services Administration identified more than 5.1 million acres of federal land as "vacant" with no federal purpose. The Bureau of Land Management alone has more than 3 million acres that have been identified as surplus and suitable for disposal. Furthermore, the General Accountability Office has found that the federal government owns hundreds of thousands of real property assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars which are no longer consistent with agency missions and are no longer needed. Many of those assets are in an alarming state of neglect and disrepair. GAO also found that little is known about this property. Federal ownership often carries unintended consequences. For example, in the District, where 26.3 percent of the total acreage is owned by the federal government, the District loses an estimated $400 million to $1.1 billion a year in tax revenue. While that is significant, I ask D.C. dwellers to imagine the revenues being lost in my home state of Utah, where 66.5 percent of the land is federally owned. In fact, there are 12 Western states that rank above the District in federal land ownership, and they are losing billions in potential tax revenue each year. The enormous economic burden on local governments throughout the West is unbearable....
Babbitt: Fix economies not dams Bruce Babbitt wants to stop spending money fixing the Snake River dams and use it instead to fix people and economies affected by breaching. During a visit to Lewiston Sunday, the former secretary of the Interior during the Clinton administration called for removing the dams and shifting $6 billion of salmon recovery funding to farmers, transportation systems and renewable energy. "I'm quite confident these dams are going to be removed. I think the argument is so strong and it will only get stronger in time," he said. "The reason to do it now is there is money to make people whole."....
Drop in fish count puzzles scientists The number of juvenile endangered fish recovered in the Colorado River declined dramatically after officials flooded the Grand Canyon in an effort to aid them and their fragile ecosystem. But scientists aren't sure what the fish decline means or why it happened. "We're trying to get the same answer," said Jeff Lovich, chief of the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center in Flagstaff. "We don't know what their fate is." Following a 90-hour experimental water release from Glen Canyon Dam into the canyon in November, 63 percent fewer endangered humpback chub juveniles were trapped than before flooding. Lovich said there are three possible explanations: The fish were washed downstream, they died, or they're still in the river and scientists couldn't accurately sample them after the simulated flood. During the flooding, the Bureau of Reclamation released as much as 41,000 cubic feet of water a second from four of the dam's giant steel tubes. Scientists hoped to redistribute 800,000 metric tons of sediment to create beaches, substrate used by plants and backwaters and pools to help the fish breed....
GAO: EPA slanted mercury analysis to favor Bush plan he Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) distorted the analysis of its controversial proposal to regulate mercury pollution from power plants, making it appear that the Bush administration's market-based approach was superior to a competing plan supported by environmentalists, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office said yesterday. Rebuking the agency for a lack of "transparency," the report said the EPA had failed to document the toxic impact of mercury on brain development, learning disabilities and neurological disorders. The GAO urged that these problems be rectified before the EPA takes final action on the rule....
Carbon dioxide levels threaten prairie life Rising carbon dioxide levels could mean higher feed costs for ranchers and fewer wild ruminants such as antelope and deer, suggest studies by a U.S. Department of Agriculture research team in Fort Collins. The team, from the USDA's Agricultural Research Service, is close to launching a second experiment near Cheyenne, Wyo., to study carbon dioxide increases on rangelands. The first, a five-year study done east of Fort Collins near the Pawnee National Grassland, showed that heightened carbon dioxide levels stimulated plant growth but diluted nitrogen in the thicker foliage. A byproduct of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide concentrations have increased from 280 parts per million since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to about 370 parts per million now. That number is projected by some scientists to exceed 600 parts per million by the end of the century. "This has huge implications for grasslands all around the world," said Jack Morgan, a research leader and plant physiologist with the Agricultural Research Service in Fort Collins....
R-CALF bought cheap cows in Canada; group's president says it's no 'big deal' Members of R-CALF, the U.S. ranchers' group that sued - on safety grounds - to keep the border closed to Canadian cattle, bought up cheap cows in Canada after the devastating ban, the group's president acknowledged Monday. "I don't see anything ironic about it," Leo McDonnell said from Columbus, Mont. "I didn't see it as a big deal. "There's a couple of them that have bought and fed cattle up there, three or four at most," a figure disputed by a Canadian feedlot owner who says it's higher. Three of those U.S. ranchers have been significant contributors to R-CALF's litigation fund, McDonnell said, an endeavour focused squarely on keeping the border shut. Some in Canada are furious, saying R-CALF members have exploited a crisis they helped to create....
Soothing touch - Masseuse helps animals feel better with acupressure massage JoMarie Indovina doesn't talk to the animals, but she knows when she hits the right spot while massaging away the aches and pains of our four-legged friends. "It feels really, really good to them," she said. "They move closer to you. Horses will look right into your eyes, as if to say, 'How do you know this?'" Indovina doesn't just massage horses, dogs and cats - she applies the principles of acupressure, a Chinese medicine massage that is actually older than the better-known acupuncture. Acupressure, a form of massage aimed at unblocking and rebalancing the electromagnetic energy - called chi by the Chinese - in the body, has been used to treat human ailments for thousands of years. The technique was also used on animals, but it didn't surface in the United States until a veterinarian brought the knowledge back from China in the 1960s....
Cows hold grudges, say scientists ONCE they were a byword for mindless docility. But cows have a complex mental life in which they bear grudges, nurture friendships and become excited by intellectual challenges, researchers have found. Cows are capable of strong emotions such as pain, fear and even anxiety about the future. But if farmers provide the right conditions, they can also feel great happiness. The findings have emerged from studies of farm animals that have found similar traits in pigs, goats and chickens. They suggest such animals may be so emotionally similar to humans that welfare laws need to be reconsidered. The research will be presented to a conference in London next month sponsored by animal welfare group Compassion in World Farming....
It's All Trew: Greasing the wheels of progress time-consuming Once upon a time the rural world turned on the squirts of oil from an oil can. If you wanted to keep your equipment running smoothly, you had better squirt some heavy oil into the little funnel-shaped oilers located above the working parts. This chore became obsolete when replaced with the invention of grease cups. These small mushroom-shaped umbrellas had a removable cap that could be filled with lubricating grease, replaced with a twist to the right forcing grease down into the bearing below. After working an hour or two, it was best to twist the cap again forcing new grease through the stem. This was a great improvement over the oil cans. About the time I was born in 1933, another invention appeared in the form of a grease zerk....
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Monday, March 07, 2005
MAD COW DISEASE
Judge rejects meatpackers' bid to resume Canadian beef imports
A federal judge on Monday rejected an effort by American meatpackers to lift all mad cow-related barriers to Canadian beef shipments. The ruling by U.S. District Judge John Garrett Penn was the latest rebuff to supporters of reopening the northern border to Canadian cattle. The United States banned Canadian cattle when mad cow disease turned up in May 2003 in Alberta. The import ban was to have been lifted Monday on Canadian cows under 30 months of age, but a federal judge in Montana last week granted a request from U.S. ranchers to keep the border closed. The Senate also voted last week in favor of a resolution against the Bush administration's decision to allow Canadian cows back into the country. The developments are "a blow to free trade," said Mark Dopp, senior vice president and general counsel to the American Meat Institute, the packers' trade group. "The U.S. meat industry continues to believe as strongly as ever that full trade in beef and cattle products with Canada is justified by both the science and world animal health guidelines," Dopp said Monday. The Agriculture Department was pleased with Monday's ruling, spokesman Ed Loyd said. "USDA has decided to consider this issue through a separate rule-making process," Loyd said. The department currently is determining whether there is risk in allowing shipments of Canadian cattle older than 30 months and meat from older Canadian animals....
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Judge rejects meatpackers' bid to resume Canadian beef imports
A federal judge on Monday rejected an effort by American meatpackers to lift all mad cow-related barriers to Canadian beef shipments. The ruling by U.S. District Judge John Garrett Penn was the latest rebuff to supporters of reopening the northern border to Canadian cattle. The United States banned Canadian cattle when mad cow disease turned up in May 2003 in Alberta. The import ban was to have been lifted Monday on Canadian cows under 30 months of age, but a federal judge in Montana last week granted a request from U.S. ranchers to keep the border closed. The Senate also voted last week in favor of a resolution against the Bush administration's decision to allow Canadian cows back into the country. The developments are "a blow to free trade," said Mark Dopp, senior vice president and general counsel to the American Meat Institute, the packers' trade group. "The U.S. meat industry continues to believe as strongly as ever that full trade in beef and cattle products with Canada is justified by both the science and world animal health guidelines," Dopp said Monday. The Agriculture Department was pleased with Monday's ruling, spokesman Ed Loyd said. "USDA has decided to consider this issue through a separate rule-making process," Loyd said. The department currently is determining whether there is risk in allowing shipments of Canadian cattle older than 30 months and meat from older Canadian animals....
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NEWS ROUNDUP
Western legislators bemoan firefighting budget A crust of snow still blankets parts of the West, but federal land agency leaders are already getting scorched by members of Congress nervous about the coming wildfire season. Western lawmakers have used recent Interior Department and Forest Service 2006 budget hearings to criticize proposed cuts to wildland firefighting funds and delays in removing insect-ravaged stands of tinder-dry timber. There's also bipartisan sentiment to get rid of the Bush administration's traditional method of determining wildfire suppression budgets. The federal agencies base funding requests to Congress on the average annual firefighting costs from the last 10 years, then later ask lawmakers for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of "emergency" supplemental funds if the account is drained by a busy fire season....
Fourteen years in making, Sierra plan still challenged In the thick timber just beyond this Gold Rush town lives a football-sized brown bird whose fate has been punted back and forth through 14 years of studies, debates, legal and bureaucratic wrangling - with no end in sight. The future of the white-mottled California spotted owl is entwined with 11.5 million acres of national forests running more than 400 miles the length of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Planning for the 11 national forests began 14 years ago with a three-paragraph memo seeking research on the reclusive owl. Planning documents now pile about three feet tall - not counting administrative appeals and the five lawsuits stacked against the most recent decision, still undergoing review by President Bush's top forestry official, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey....
AZ: Judge Confirms $600,000 Libel Award and Finds Fault with Environmentalists Judge Richard Fields entered formal judgment on March 2, 2005 against the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental activist corporation, and found that they must pay $600,000 in actual and punitive damages to Arizona rancher Jim Chilton and the Chilton Ranch and Cattle Company. The formal judgment confirmed a Tucson jury’s verdict, delivered on January 21, 2005, finding the Center for Biological Diversity guilty of making “false, unfair, libelous and defamatory statements” against Jim Chilton, a fifth generation Arizona rancher whose pioneering ancestors drove cattle into Arizona in the 1880’s. The jury awarded Chilton $100,000 in actual damages and $500,000 in punitive damages because the Center for Biological Diversity defamed him and his family business in a two-page press release which included links to 21 photographs posted on the Center’s website, from July 2002 until July 2003....
Key Senator Defends ANWR Strategy The U.S. Senate Energy Committee chairman on Sunday defended Republican plans to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge through a provision in a pending budget bill, although critics say the strategy is underhanded. Sen. Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, told a news conference that budget bills were not subject to parliamentary rules requiring 60 votes to break a filibuster, a hurdle environmentalists who oppose oil development in the Alaska refuge want to keep intact. "We say, 'Why not a majority?' It's going to turn out if they have 51 votes, they win. We don't have ANWR. If we have 51 votes, we win. We have ANWR," he said. "I think that's pretty American. I don't think we're denying anybody anything." Domenici was among five pro-drilling Republican senators, two Cabinet members and a White House official who traveled over the weekend to the North Slope to observe winter conditions and the oil industry's seasonal operations there....
Food at heart of tribe's dam dispute The tribe now is challenging a new operating license for four small hydroelectric dams on the Klamath owned by the Northwest utility PacifiCorp. The tribe wants the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to recognize that the high levels of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease can be blamed on the high-fat, high-sugar and high-sodium diet that replaced their lost salmon. "Government bureaucrats look at you a little bit sideways when you raise the issue of human rights," said Leaf Hillman, tribal vice chairman. "It's only credible when you raise the issue in Sudan or South America. "But whenever you deny or taint the food source for a people, it really is about human rights."....
City will push for EPA exemption By summer's end, new federal regulations could force Portland and its suburban water customers to spend at least $60 million to kill cryptosporidium, a nasty and occasionally lethal parasite that resists chlorine and medical treatment. You would think that would be a major victory for local public health officials. You would be wrong. For Dr. Gary Oxman, Multnomah County health officer, cryptosporidium is a blip on the radar screen of health risks. In the past six years and one month, 95 illnesses -- and no deaths -- have been attributed in the county to cryptosporidiosis, the gastrointestinal ailment associated with the fecal microbe. On Wednesday, Portland's City Council authorized an 11th-hour, long-shot lobbying effort to persuade the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to let the city skip building a plant to deal with cryptosporidium....
Texas is set to supersize highways Texans are known for doing things in a big way. But the state is planning a futuristic highway system that's gargantuan even by Texas standards: 4,000 miles of expressways, mostly toll lanes. The Trans-Texas Corridor, almost a quarter-mile wide, would carry cars, trucks, trains and pipelines for water, oil, natural gas, electricity and fiber optics. The roads would be built over the next 50 years at a cost of up to $185 billion, mostly with private money. The network eventually would crisscross the state, diverting long-distance traffic onto superhighways designed to skirt crowded urban centers. Trucks and trains carrying hazardous materials also would use the highways. But criticism is rolling in from farm groups, environmentalists and some local politicians, targeting the project's proposed route, width and financing — and even the need for it....
Column: Facts versus fears on biotechnology GM crops are created in laboratories, using highly precise techniques. They have been tested repeatedly, and they are regulated by the EPA, FDA, USDA and other agencies. Americans have collectively eaten over a trillion servings of food containing one or more GM ingredients, without a single case of harm. Indeed, as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore and others have demonstrated, every single claim of risk to people or the environment -- from monarch butterfly deaths to destabilized insect ecology and diminished biodiversity -- has been refuted by scientific studies. And still Dr. John and his fellow radicals place ultra precaution against minor, distant, theoretical risks to healthy, well-fed Westerners above the very real, immediate, life-threatening risks faced by our Earth's poorest and most malnourished people....
Column: Bush's EPA pick comes with outsider insight Stephen Johnson may be an expert on toxic substances and hazardous wastes. But as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, this trained scientist can only hope that his 24 years as an EPA professional will have prepared him for the murky, gritty world of Washington politics. Over its 35-year history, the agency has become one of the tallest lightning rods in federal government. Environmentalists see it as their best official friend - when they're not suing it, that is. Some industrialists, builders, and farmers deride it as one of the greatest impediments to economic development and the free market. EPA bureaucrats - especially those who write the regulations meant to define and enforce such fundamental US environmental laws as the Clean Air and Clean Water acts - have been likened to the Gestapo. The current chair of the Senate environment committee has said the agency should be done away with. Into this political thicket comes Mr. Johnson, the first EPA administrator to rise from the ranks of agency professionals....
Local cowboy brings 'Deadwood' to life At the center of each stands one man, bringing the spirit of each to life: Gary Leffew, 1970 world bull riding champion, mentor to aspiring rodeo cowboys at his Nipomo ranch and muse to David Milch, creator of the award-winning HBO television series "Deadwood." The link between the two towns was forged more than three years ago in one of those typically unlikely Hollywood encounters. Milch was searching for inspiration for a script that kept falling flat to his ears. Leffew was searching for a master to sculpt his emerging talent for and love of writing. The rodeo king and screenwriter met through a mutual friend, a horse trainer who had worked with Milch in the past. The connection was instant; so was the birth of "Deadwood."....
TV's BIG guns Peering into the West, you can spot two approaching cowboy figures on the television horizon. The first is HBO's acclaimed Western series, "Deadwood," which begins its mud-soaked, blood-drenched, profanity-filled second season at 9 tonight. Farther off in the distance is the 50th anniversary of TV's longest-running drama, "Gunsmoke." It was on Sept. 10, 1955, that 6-foot-7 Marshal Matt Dillon started keeping the streets of Dodge City safe for CBS. "Gunsmoke" had been on the radio since 1952. Also saddling up and heading west is Steven Spielberg, an executive producer of a 12-hour cable miniseries, "Into the West," which TNT will air in June. The opening of the American West is told on an epic scale with a cast that includes Matthew Settle, Skeet Ulrich, Rachel Leigh Cook, Josh Brolin, Graham Greene, Zahn McClarnon, Simon Baker, Michael Spears, Sean Astin, Tom Berenger, Wes Studi, Beau Bridges, Gary Busey, Lance Henriksen, Russell Means, Matthew Modine, Keri Russell and Will Patton....
Whittet's Store and Cowboy Grill bids farewell It's headline news when any town loses half its businesses and all of its restaurants at the same time but, in the tiny town of Dacoma, Oklahoma that's exactly what's happening. The famous Whittet's Store and Cowboy Grill is closing after almost a half century of business. They hung on longer than a lot of folks thought they might. Billy and Floy Whittet ran a meat locker and cowboy grill for close to fifty years in the town of Dacoma, just south of Alva. Even in goodbye, there are still so many hellos. Billy Wayne Whittet, his wife Floy, his daughter, his son, his longtime waitress Lily and Nettie the cook, they've all been saying hello and goodbye for weeks now. Billy has decided it was time to close the store and cowboy grill....
Rodeo takes city back in time The nation's largest rodeo and livestock show blows into this city with a transformational wind, turning the cosmopolitan city into a cowboy town for three weeks every spring. As much spectacle as big business, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, running through March 20, makes hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, brings in as much money for the city as a Super Bowl and draws such diverse big-name entertainment as Alicia Keys and Brooks & Dunn to its nightly concerts. "It's pretty amazing how people embrace everything that is country during rodeo time," said Skip Wagner, the show's chief operating officer. "The whole city goes back to its Western roots." Despite its rural flavor, surveys show more than 80 percent of the event's visitors are from the greater Houston area and fewer than 1 percent live in rural, agricultural households....
On The Edge Of Common Sense: You say Tayassa tajacu, I say pig family "These are javelina," pointed out the zoo tour guide, "Tayassu tajacu, the collared peccary." "Pig family," I commented, in an effort to dazzle the 6th graders on the tour. "No," stated the guide, "A common mistake by the ill-informed unknowledgeable ranger groupies who cover up their ignorance of the species with self-important and completely wrong pompous pontifications." "Well, they look like a pig," I said defensively. "Only to amateur wildlife wannabes," he said with a sneer. "Okay, Bambi Buns," I challenged, "describe a javelina to me without using the word pig, pork, snout, oink, grunt, root, swine, University of Arkansas, boar blunt or BLT! He couldn't....
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Western legislators bemoan firefighting budget A crust of snow still blankets parts of the West, but federal land agency leaders are already getting scorched by members of Congress nervous about the coming wildfire season. Western lawmakers have used recent Interior Department and Forest Service 2006 budget hearings to criticize proposed cuts to wildland firefighting funds and delays in removing insect-ravaged stands of tinder-dry timber. There's also bipartisan sentiment to get rid of the Bush administration's traditional method of determining wildfire suppression budgets. The federal agencies base funding requests to Congress on the average annual firefighting costs from the last 10 years, then later ask lawmakers for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of "emergency" supplemental funds if the account is drained by a busy fire season....
Fourteen years in making, Sierra plan still challenged In the thick timber just beyond this Gold Rush town lives a football-sized brown bird whose fate has been punted back and forth through 14 years of studies, debates, legal and bureaucratic wrangling - with no end in sight. The future of the white-mottled California spotted owl is entwined with 11.5 million acres of national forests running more than 400 miles the length of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Planning for the 11 national forests began 14 years ago with a three-paragraph memo seeking research on the reclusive owl. Planning documents now pile about three feet tall - not counting administrative appeals and the five lawsuits stacked against the most recent decision, still undergoing review by President Bush's top forestry official, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey....
AZ: Judge Confirms $600,000 Libel Award and Finds Fault with Environmentalists Judge Richard Fields entered formal judgment on March 2, 2005 against the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental activist corporation, and found that they must pay $600,000 in actual and punitive damages to Arizona rancher Jim Chilton and the Chilton Ranch and Cattle Company. The formal judgment confirmed a Tucson jury’s verdict, delivered on January 21, 2005, finding the Center for Biological Diversity guilty of making “false, unfair, libelous and defamatory statements” against Jim Chilton, a fifth generation Arizona rancher whose pioneering ancestors drove cattle into Arizona in the 1880’s. The jury awarded Chilton $100,000 in actual damages and $500,000 in punitive damages because the Center for Biological Diversity defamed him and his family business in a two-page press release which included links to 21 photographs posted on the Center’s website, from July 2002 until July 2003....
Key Senator Defends ANWR Strategy The U.S. Senate Energy Committee chairman on Sunday defended Republican plans to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge through a provision in a pending budget bill, although critics say the strategy is underhanded. Sen. Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, told a news conference that budget bills were not subject to parliamentary rules requiring 60 votes to break a filibuster, a hurdle environmentalists who oppose oil development in the Alaska refuge want to keep intact. "We say, 'Why not a majority?' It's going to turn out if they have 51 votes, they win. We don't have ANWR. If we have 51 votes, we win. We have ANWR," he said. "I think that's pretty American. I don't think we're denying anybody anything." Domenici was among five pro-drilling Republican senators, two Cabinet members and a White House official who traveled over the weekend to the North Slope to observe winter conditions and the oil industry's seasonal operations there....
Food at heart of tribe's dam dispute The tribe now is challenging a new operating license for four small hydroelectric dams on the Klamath owned by the Northwest utility PacifiCorp. The tribe wants the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to recognize that the high levels of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease can be blamed on the high-fat, high-sugar and high-sodium diet that replaced their lost salmon. "Government bureaucrats look at you a little bit sideways when you raise the issue of human rights," said Leaf Hillman, tribal vice chairman. "It's only credible when you raise the issue in Sudan or South America. "But whenever you deny or taint the food source for a people, it really is about human rights."....
City will push for EPA exemption By summer's end, new federal regulations could force Portland and its suburban water customers to spend at least $60 million to kill cryptosporidium, a nasty and occasionally lethal parasite that resists chlorine and medical treatment. You would think that would be a major victory for local public health officials. You would be wrong. For Dr. Gary Oxman, Multnomah County health officer, cryptosporidium is a blip on the radar screen of health risks. In the past six years and one month, 95 illnesses -- and no deaths -- have been attributed in the county to cryptosporidiosis, the gastrointestinal ailment associated with the fecal microbe. On Wednesday, Portland's City Council authorized an 11th-hour, long-shot lobbying effort to persuade the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to let the city skip building a plant to deal with cryptosporidium....
Texas is set to supersize highways Texans are known for doing things in a big way. But the state is planning a futuristic highway system that's gargantuan even by Texas standards: 4,000 miles of expressways, mostly toll lanes. The Trans-Texas Corridor, almost a quarter-mile wide, would carry cars, trucks, trains and pipelines for water, oil, natural gas, electricity and fiber optics. The roads would be built over the next 50 years at a cost of up to $185 billion, mostly with private money. The network eventually would crisscross the state, diverting long-distance traffic onto superhighways designed to skirt crowded urban centers. Trucks and trains carrying hazardous materials also would use the highways. But criticism is rolling in from farm groups, environmentalists and some local politicians, targeting the project's proposed route, width and financing — and even the need for it....
Column: Facts versus fears on biotechnology GM crops are created in laboratories, using highly precise techniques. They have been tested repeatedly, and they are regulated by the EPA, FDA, USDA and other agencies. Americans have collectively eaten over a trillion servings of food containing one or more GM ingredients, without a single case of harm. Indeed, as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore and others have demonstrated, every single claim of risk to people or the environment -- from monarch butterfly deaths to destabilized insect ecology and diminished biodiversity -- has been refuted by scientific studies. And still Dr. John and his fellow radicals place ultra precaution against minor, distant, theoretical risks to healthy, well-fed Westerners above the very real, immediate, life-threatening risks faced by our Earth's poorest and most malnourished people....
Column: Bush's EPA pick comes with outsider insight Stephen Johnson may be an expert on toxic substances and hazardous wastes. But as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, this trained scientist can only hope that his 24 years as an EPA professional will have prepared him for the murky, gritty world of Washington politics. Over its 35-year history, the agency has become one of the tallest lightning rods in federal government. Environmentalists see it as their best official friend - when they're not suing it, that is. Some industrialists, builders, and farmers deride it as one of the greatest impediments to economic development and the free market. EPA bureaucrats - especially those who write the regulations meant to define and enforce such fundamental US environmental laws as the Clean Air and Clean Water acts - have been likened to the Gestapo. The current chair of the Senate environment committee has said the agency should be done away with. Into this political thicket comes Mr. Johnson, the first EPA administrator to rise from the ranks of agency professionals....
Local cowboy brings 'Deadwood' to life At the center of each stands one man, bringing the spirit of each to life: Gary Leffew, 1970 world bull riding champion, mentor to aspiring rodeo cowboys at his Nipomo ranch and muse to David Milch, creator of the award-winning HBO television series "Deadwood." The link between the two towns was forged more than three years ago in one of those typically unlikely Hollywood encounters. Milch was searching for inspiration for a script that kept falling flat to his ears. Leffew was searching for a master to sculpt his emerging talent for and love of writing. The rodeo king and screenwriter met through a mutual friend, a horse trainer who had worked with Milch in the past. The connection was instant; so was the birth of "Deadwood."....
TV's BIG guns Peering into the West, you can spot two approaching cowboy figures on the television horizon. The first is HBO's acclaimed Western series, "Deadwood," which begins its mud-soaked, blood-drenched, profanity-filled second season at 9 tonight. Farther off in the distance is the 50th anniversary of TV's longest-running drama, "Gunsmoke." It was on Sept. 10, 1955, that 6-foot-7 Marshal Matt Dillon started keeping the streets of Dodge City safe for CBS. "Gunsmoke" had been on the radio since 1952. Also saddling up and heading west is Steven Spielberg, an executive producer of a 12-hour cable miniseries, "Into the West," which TNT will air in June. The opening of the American West is told on an epic scale with a cast that includes Matthew Settle, Skeet Ulrich, Rachel Leigh Cook, Josh Brolin, Graham Greene, Zahn McClarnon, Simon Baker, Michael Spears, Sean Astin, Tom Berenger, Wes Studi, Beau Bridges, Gary Busey, Lance Henriksen, Russell Means, Matthew Modine, Keri Russell and Will Patton....
Whittet's Store and Cowboy Grill bids farewell It's headline news when any town loses half its businesses and all of its restaurants at the same time but, in the tiny town of Dacoma, Oklahoma that's exactly what's happening. The famous Whittet's Store and Cowboy Grill is closing after almost a half century of business. They hung on longer than a lot of folks thought they might. Billy and Floy Whittet ran a meat locker and cowboy grill for close to fifty years in the town of Dacoma, just south of Alva. Even in goodbye, there are still so many hellos. Billy Wayne Whittet, his wife Floy, his daughter, his son, his longtime waitress Lily and Nettie the cook, they've all been saying hello and goodbye for weeks now. Billy has decided it was time to close the store and cowboy grill....
Rodeo takes city back in time The nation's largest rodeo and livestock show blows into this city with a transformational wind, turning the cosmopolitan city into a cowboy town for three weeks every spring. As much spectacle as big business, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, running through March 20, makes hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, brings in as much money for the city as a Super Bowl and draws such diverse big-name entertainment as Alicia Keys and Brooks & Dunn to its nightly concerts. "It's pretty amazing how people embrace everything that is country during rodeo time," said Skip Wagner, the show's chief operating officer. "The whole city goes back to its Western roots." Despite its rural flavor, surveys show more than 80 percent of the event's visitors are from the greater Houston area and fewer than 1 percent live in rural, agricultural households....
On The Edge Of Common Sense: You say Tayassa tajacu, I say pig family "These are javelina," pointed out the zoo tour guide, "Tayassu tajacu, the collared peccary." "Pig family," I commented, in an effort to dazzle the 6th graders on the tour. "No," stated the guide, "A common mistake by the ill-informed unknowledgeable ranger groupies who cover up their ignorance of the species with self-important and completely wrong pompous pontifications." "Well, they look like a pig," I said defensively. "Only to amateur wildlife wannabes," he said with a sneer. "Okay, Bambi Buns," I challenged, "describe a javelina to me without using the word pig, pork, snout, oink, grunt, root, swine, University of Arkansas, boar blunt or BLT! He couldn't....
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Sunday, March 06, 2005
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE WESTERNER
Talking to the animals-- the sounds of the new moo
By Julie Carter
It is one of the few places where a full grown man will chose to look and even sound like a fool. If he ever gives it a thought, he doesn’t care. It comes with the job.
Trying to outsmart Mother Nature and in this case, a cow, is a talent honed over generations of cattlemen. One of the jobs that come to all cowmen is fine tuning his own personal replica of the “baby calf cry.”
Wandering around in the pasture alone and bleating like a newborn calf is not something portrayed by the glossy magazines when detailing the cowboy’s life on the western range.
It is almost Spring and new baby calves are hitting the ground (being born) all over cow country. The “hide the baby” game that momma cows play so well presents an annual challenge to the rancher who wants to move, tag or otherwise check the new little one.
After hours of searching trying to find where momma cow stashed her offspring, and they can and do hide them amazingly well, the cowman will resort to imitating the cry of a baby calf.
His intent is to trick the cow into thinking she needs to check the safety of the hidden calf, or at least look in its direction. That gives a clue to its hiding place.
This bleating and blatting noise can go on for a long time, hours in some cases. If civilization were to drop in for a visual at that time, like a candid camera moment, that full grown seemingly sane responsible human being would appear to have none of those characteristics.
Every now and then, the old biddy will actually make a small mistake and give up the location of the new baby. The little one will be curled up tight under a yucca, cedar tree, or a cholla cactus daring not to move as per the instruction given by Mom.
Often none of it works. The cowman is resigned to leave for home with the score Cow 1, Cowboy 0. He will return to the challenge again tomorrow.
Calling cows to the feed ground is another “noise” made by the cowman that defies description. Sounding somewhere along the lines of Tarzan’s call to the jungle animals, a rancher will bellow a tone repeatedly that will echo through the pasture. The intent is to alert the cows in the distance that it is “chow time.”
Each call is unique to the caller. My grandfather’s cow call was much different than my father’s. The many I have heard over my lifetime have sounds of their own and the source could be identified sight unseen.
Standard equipment to replace the vocal chords has been the honking of the pickup horn until it is worn out. Then they return to the “beller.”
More modern ranching techniques have brought in the use of the air horn or the siren to alert the cattle. There is nothing more disconcerting than to be in what you think is the middle of nowhere, tuning into nature’s sounds on a cool crisp morning, and then be blasted with what sounds like a semi truck on approach or the cops in hot pursuit, siren blaring.
Cattle seem to adapt to any and all methods used to “call to chow”, as long as they are fed when they get there. Now that I think about it, that same concept works for the cowboys too.
Julie can be reached for comment at jcarter@tularosa.net
© Julie Carter 2005
Email me your submissions for this feature. We can't all be a Julie Carter, but send me stories of ranch life, horses, mom, grandpa, etc. Also send a nonfiction piece if that is your preference.
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Talking to the animals-- the sounds of the new moo
By Julie Carter
It is one of the few places where a full grown man will chose to look and even sound like a fool. If he ever gives it a thought, he doesn’t care. It comes with the job.
Trying to outsmart Mother Nature and in this case, a cow, is a talent honed over generations of cattlemen. One of the jobs that come to all cowmen is fine tuning his own personal replica of the “baby calf cry.”
Wandering around in the pasture alone and bleating like a newborn calf is not something portrayed by the glossy magazines when detailing the cowboy’s life on the western range.
It is almost Spring and new baby calves are hitting the ground (being born) all over cow country. The “hide the baby” game that momma cows play so well presents an annual challenge to the rancher who wants to move, tag or otherwise check the new little one.
After hours of searching trying to find where momma cow stashed her offspring, and they can and do hide them amazingly well, the cowman will resort to imitating the cry of a baby calf.
His intent is to trick the cow into thinking she needs to check the safety of the hidden calf, or at least look in its direction. That gives a clue to its hiding place.
This bleating and blatting noise can go on for a long time, hours in some cases. If civilization were to drop in for a visual at that time, like a candid camera moment, that full grown seemingly sane responsible human being would appear to have none of those characteristics.
Every now and then, the old biddy will actually make a small mistake and give up the location of the new baby. The little one will be curled up tight under a yucca, cedar tree, or a cholla cactus daring not to move as per the instruction given by Mom.
Often none of it works. The cowman is resigned to leave for home with the score Cow 1, Cowboy 0. He will return to the challenge again tomorrow.
Calling cows to the feed ground is another “noise” made by the cowman that defies description. Sounding somewhere along the lines of Tarzan’s call to the jungle animals, a rancher will bellow a tone repeatedly that will echo through the pasture. The intent is to alert the cows in the distance that it is “chow time.”
Each call is unique to the caller. My grandfather’s cow call was much different than my father’s. The many I have heard over my lifetime have sounds of their own and the source could be identified sight unseen.
Standard equipment to replace the vocal chords has been the honking of the pickup horn until it is worn out. Then they return to the “beller.”
More modern ranching techniques have brought in the use of the air horn or the siren to alert the cattle. There is nothing more disconcerting than to be in what you think is the middle of nowhere, tuning into nature’s sounds on a cool crisp morning, and then be blasted with what sounds like a semi truck on approach or the cops in hot pursuit, siren blaring.
Cattle seem to adapt to any and all methods used to “call to chow”, as long as they are fed when they get there. Now that I think about it, that same concept works for the cowboys too.
Julie can be reached for comment at jcarter@tularosa.net
© Julie Carter 2005
Email me your submissions for this feature. We can't all be a Julie Carter, but send me stories of ranch life, horses, mom, grandpa, etc. Also send a nonfiction piece if that is your preference.
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OPINION/COMMENTARY
Property Rights
When Eastern Europe began to open up in the late 1980s, one of the great shocks was the severity of its environmental problems. Journalists reported on skies full of smoke from lignite and soft coal, children kept inside for much of the winter because of unsafe air, and horses that had to be moved away from the worst areas after a few years or they would die. Many of the environmental ills reflected an abysmally low level of technology. Old, polluting factories of the kinds that are dim memories in the United States were the mainstay of socialist industry. Smelly, sluggish automobiles polluted the roads. Energy waste was tremendous. Their own statistics showed that socialist economies were using more than three times as much steel and nearly three times as much energy per unit of output than market economies. One cannot look about in Warsaw or Moscow, Budapest or Zagreb, Krakow or Sarajevo, wrote economist W. W. Rostow in 1991, without knowing that this part of the world is caught up in a technological time warp. Not everyone realized it at the time, but the state of the environment was directly connected to the absence of property rights in the Soviet system. The authorities had refused to allow most resources to be privately owned. Most market exchanges were criminal acts, and entrepreneurship of most kinds was declared to be criminal behavior. Production was centrally planned, with land and other resources owned by the state, not individuals....
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Property Rights
When Eastern Europe began to open up in the late 1980s, one of the great shocks was the severity of its environmental problems. Journalists reported on skies full of smoke from lignite and soft coal, children kept inside for much of the winter because of unsafe air, and horses that had to be moved away from the worst areas after a few years or they would die. Many of the environmental ills reflected an abysmally low level of technology. Old, polluting factories of the kinds that are dim memories in the United States were the mainstay of socialist industry. Smelly, sluggish automobiles polluted the roads. Energy waste was tremendous. Their own statistics showed that socialist economies were using more than three times as much steel and nearly three times as much energy per unit of output than market economies. One cannot look about in Warsaw or Moscow, Budapest or Zagreb, Krakow or Sarajevo, wrote economist W. W. Rostow in 1991, without knowing that this part of the world is caught up in a technological time warp. Not everyone realized it at the time, but the state of the environment was directly connected to the absence of property rights in the Soviet system. The authorities had refused to allow most resources to be privately owned. Most market exchanges were criminal acts, and entrepreneurship of most kinds was declared to be criminal behavior. Production was centrally planned, with land and other resources owned by the state, not individuals....
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OPINION/COMMENTARY
Migratory Birds & Invasive Species
News Item: “The Fish and Wildlife Service has drawn up a list of 113 birds it is proposing to exclude from protection under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. As required by the 2004 Migratory Bird Treaty Reform Act passed by Congress in the Omnibus Appropriations Bill, FWS will exclude non-native birds from protection under the law.” Translation: Federal bureaucrats and appointees in the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture want what the environmental radicals want. That is Federal authority to embark on a Federal program of mammoth proportions that will dwarf the Endangered Species Act in so far as growing the Federal bureaucracy. They want to transfer the remaining State jurisdiction over plants and animals to Federal agencies, and in the name of Native Ecosystem restoration (which is synonymous with Invasive Species eradication) generate unimagined new Federal authority over citizens and property owners. The abuses and results of this will be the harms of the Endangered Species Act times 10. Every time the subject of Federal Invasive Species or Native Ecosystem legislation comes up, it is rejected on the facts. United Nations bureaucrats are involved in such efforts as they look for an opening to convene a UN meeting to discuss a Treaty or Convention to give the UN bureaucracy and US Bureaucrats who would implement such a Treaty the same sort of Constitution-trumping Federal authority as was done with the Endangered Species Act....
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Migratory Birds & Invasive Species
News Item: “The Fish and Wildlife Service has drawn up a list of 113 birds it is proposing to exclude from protection under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. As required by the 2004 Migratory Bird Treaty Reform Act passed by Congress in the Omnibus Appropriations Bill, FWS will exclude non-native birds from protection under the law.” Translation: Federal bureaucrats and appointees in the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture want what the environmental radicals want. That is Federal authority to embark on a Federal program of mammoth proportions that will dwarf the Endangered Species Act in so far as growing the Federal bureaucracy. They want to transfer the remaining State jurisdiction over plants and animals to Federal agencies, and in the name of Native Ecosystem restoration (which is synonymous with Invasive Species eradication) generate unimagined new Federal authority over citizens and property owners. The abuses and results of this will be the harms of the Endangered Species Act times 10. Every time the subject of Federal Invasive Species or Native Ecosystem legislation comes up, it is rejected on the facts. United Nations bureaucrats are involved in such efforts as they look for an opening to convene a UN meeting to discuss a Treaty or Convention to give the UN bureaucracy and US Bureaucrats who would implement such a Treaty the same sort of Constitution-trumping Federal authority as was done with the Endangered Species Act....
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OPINION/COMMENTARY
ENVIRONMENTAL PROPAGANDA NOW TARGETS TYKES
Environmental misinformation is finding its way into children’s books, says Jay Lehr of the Heartland Institute. A recent publication, “The Future of the Earth,” by Yann Arthur-Bertrand, targets children between the ages of 10 and 12 with blatant falsehoods about the environment.
Some examples:
* Arthur-Bertrand predicts that air pollution from cars will increase 25 percent in the next 10 years; in reality, it is significantly declining although the number of cars is increasing.
* It also proclaims that twelve percent of all species are endangered; while there is no scientific evidence to support this number, it is estimated that less than 1 percent are endangered.
* Arthur-Bertrand mentions that more than 20,000 square miles of ice are disappearing annually, although this figure fails to take into account growing ice fields in other regions.
* The book also claims that 50,000 square miles of forest land are disappearing every year around the world, but the fact is that forest land has increased over several decades in all developed countries.
Finally, the book warns that radical dietary changes are needed in order to provide enough to feed the entire planet. He recommends eliminating commercial animal herds and industrial fishing.
While the book uses attractive and colorful pictures to entice children, virtually every page contains blatant distortions, says Lehr.
Source: Jay Lehr, “Environmentalist Propaganda for Kids,” Heartland Institute, January 2005; and Yann Arthur-Bertrand, “The Future of the Earth: An Introduction to Sustainable Development for Young Readers,” Harry N. Abrams, Inc., September 2004.
For text:
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=16210
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ENVIRONMENTAL PROPAGANDA NOW TARGETS TYKES
Environmental misinformation is finding its way into children’s books, says Jay Lehr of the Heartland Institute. A recent publication, “The Future of the Earth,” by Yann Arthur-Bertrand, targets children between the ages of 10 and 12 with blatant falsehoods about the environment.
Some examples:
* Arthur-Bertrand predicts that air pollution from cars will increase 25 percent in the next 10 years; in reality, it is significantly declining although the number of cars is increasing.
* It also proclaims that twelve percent of all species are endangered; while there is no scientific evidence to support this number, it is estimated that less than 1 percent are endangered.
* Arthur-Bertrand mentions that more than 20,000 square miles of ice are disappearing annually, although this figure fails to take into account growing ice fields in other regions.
* The book also claims that 50,000 square miles of forest land are disappearing every year around the world, but the fact is that forest land has increased over several decades in all developed countries.
Finally, the book warns that radical dietary changes are needed in order to provide enough to feed the entire planet. He recommends eliminating commercial animal herds and industrial fishing.
While the book uses attractive and colorful pictures to entice children, virtually every page contains blatant distortions, says Lehr.
Source: Jay Lehr, “Environmentalist Propaganda for Kids,” Heartland Institute, January 2005; and Yann Arthur-Bertrand, “The Future of the Earth: An Introduction to Sustainable Development for Young Readers,” Harry N. Abrams, Inc., September 2004.
For text:
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=16210
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OPINION/COMMENTARY
Green War Gets Radical
This book is a reality check for those who still view the environmental movement through rose-tinted glasses. While it does not sketch the rise of environmentalism and the launching of Earth Day on Lenin's birthday on April 22, 1970—it delivers one into a mature, popular and well-funded 25-year old movement. It paints a vivid picture of the Greens in action in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest that is so different from the conventional view of environmentalism, that all but the least reflective reader will ask: What is going on here? "The Secret Wars of Judi Bari" documents the efforts of left-wing, radical environmentalist and Earth First! leader Bari to organize the Redwood Summer in 1990. Her goal was to gather thousands of people from across the nation in the California coastal counties of Mendocino and Humbolt and shut down the timber industry, especially the harvest of redwood trees. Large corporations, their sawmills and logging jobs were specifically targeted. Their tactics involved confrontational marches and blockades, trespass, chaining themselves to trees and trucks and the destruction of logging equipment. This escalated into continuous confrontations and near-violence. Loggers and sawmill workers were deeply angry at the efforts to destroy their industry, jobs, families and communities. Although opposed by traditional natural resource users, the Greens got support from liberals, soccer moms, hippies, artists and an army of marijuana growers and users. Fears of violence and concerns about ecoterrorism brought in police departments, the California Highway Patrol and the FBI....
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Green War Gets Radical
This book is a reality check for those who still view the environmental movement through rose-tinted glasses. While it does not sketch the rise of environmentalism and the launching of Earth Day on Lenin's birthday on April 22, 1970—it delivers one into a mature, popular and well-funded 25-year old movement. It paints a vivid picture of the Greens in action in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest that is so different from the conventional view of environmentalism, that all but the least reflective reader will ask: What is going on here? "The Secret Wars of Judi Bari" documents the efforts of left-wing, radical environmentalist and Earth First! leader Bari to organize the Redwood Summer in 1990. Her goal was to gather thousands of people from across the nation in the California coastal counties of Mendocino and Humbolt and shut down the timber industry, especially the harvest of redwood trees. Large corporations, their sawmills and logging jobs were specifically targeted. Their tactics involved confrontational marches and blockades, trespass, chaining themselves to trees and trucks and the destruction of logging equipment. This escalated into continuous confrontations and near-violence. Loggers and sawmill workers were deeply angry at the efforts to destroy their industry, jobs, families and communities. Although opposed by traditional natural resource users, the Greens got support from liberals, soccer moms, hippies, artists and an army of marijuana growers and users. Fears of violence and concerns about ecoterrorism brought in police departments, the California Highway Patrol and the FBI....
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OPINION/COMMENTARY
More Fishing Chicanery
I have written several articles recently that concerned the ongoing campaigns to eliminate most of the excise taxes that support State fishing management programs. Here is a quick summary of what I have said. State fish and wildlife agencies are the government entities responsible for the management of all sport fishing in the United States with but a few exceptions. Certain Federal lands (a tiny minority) where the Federal government has Exclusive Jurisdiction and coastal waters on oceans or the Great Lakes are areas where State authority is limited but still requires active State cooperation with Federal agencies to maintain sport fishing and the annual harvest of fish species. A major portion of all State fish and wildlife fishing program budgets (20 to 35%?) comes from the collection of excise taxes and import duties on fishing tackle and motorboat fuel taxes. The funds are collected by the IRS and Customs and transferred to the US Fish and Wildlife Service where they are held and apportioned annually to State agencies for SPORT (per the law) fishing programs based on criteria such as area of the State, population, and fishing license sales. The current collections of such taxes and import duties total $400 to $500 Million each year. Last year (2004) tackle box manufacturers silently lobbied successfully to have the 11% excise tax on tackle boxes reduced to 3%. This resulted in an unmentioned loss of funds probably in the neighborhood of $6 to $10 Million annually. Archery manufacturers (who pay an excise tax on bows and arrows that similarly goes to State agencies for hunting programs) silently “partnered” with the tackle manufacturers in lobbying Congress and were also successful in having the excise tax removed entirely from certain bows and arrows. These excise taxes had been in place and supporting fishing and hunting programs for over half a century. The US Fish and Wildlife Service knew what was going on but remained silent. Hunting and fishing organizations were likewise silent about what they knew was going on....
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More Fishing Chicanery
I have written several articles recently that concerned the ongoing campaigns to eliminate most of the excise taxes that support State fishing management programs. Here is a quick summary of what I have said. State fish and wildlife agencies are the government entities responsible for the management of all sport fishing in the United States with but a few exceptions. Certain Federal lands (a tiny minority) where the Federal government has Exclusive Jurisdiction and coastal waters on oceans or the Great Lakes are areas where State authority is limited but still requires active State cooperation with Federal agencies to maintain sport fishing and the annual harvest of fish species. A major portion of all State fish and wildlife fishing program budgets (20 to 35%?) comes from the collection of excise taxes and import duties on fishing tackle and motorboat fuel taxes. The funds are collected by the IRS and Customs and transferred to the US Fish and Wildlife Service where they are held and apportioned annually to State agencies for SPORT (per the law) fishing programs based on criteria such as area of the State, population, and fishing license sales. The current collections of such taxes and import duties total $400 to $500 Million each year. Last year (2004) tackle box manufacturers silently lobbied successfully to have the 11% excise tax on tackle boxes reduced to 3%. This resulted in an unmentioned loss of funds probably in the neighborhood of $6 to $10 Million annually. Archery manufacturers (who pay an excise tax on bows and arrows that similarly goes to State agencies for hunting programs) silently “partnered” with the tackle manufacturers in lobbying Congress and were also successful in having the excise tax removed entirely from certain bows and arrows. These excise taxes had been in place and supporting fishing and hunting programs for over half a century. The US Fish and Wildlife Service knew what was going on but remained silent. Hunting and fishing organizations were likewise silent about what they knew was going on....
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OPINION/COMMENTARY
WHY KYOTO WON’T WORK
As the Kyoto Protocol goes into effect there has been little or no discussion about the causes of global warming, the implications of implementing the treaty or whether the treaty is an appropriate response, according to NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett.
“Whether or not human actions are causing the current warming trend,” Dr. Burnett said. “The greenhouse gas reductions required under the Kyoto Protocol will not prevent it.” Why won’t Kyoto work?
* Even if all signatories meet greenhouse gas emission targets, the effect on global temperature would be insignificant.
* Fast growing, non-developed countries, such as China, India, South Korea and Indonesia, are exempt from emission reductions.
* According to the International Energy Agency, as much as 85 percent of the projected increase in CO2 emissions over the next 20 years will be produced in exempt countries.
* Signatory countries, such as Canada and Japan, are not likely to meet Kyoto’s emission cuts, and the European Union is on a path to exceed its commitments.
The Bush Administration has been severely criticized for not signing the treaty even though economic forecasts show that compliance would hurt the U.S. economy. During the Clinton Administration the Energy Information Administration, the official forecasting arm of the Department of Energy, issued a report predicting that meeting Kyoto greenhouse gas limits would:
* Increase gasoline prices by 52 percent and electricity prices by 86 percent.
* Decrease gross domestic product (GDP) by 4.2 percent and reduce disposable income by 2.5 percent.
Furthermore, an NCPA study written by Dr. Stephen Brown of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank determined that compliance would reduce GDP by as much as 4.3 percent in 2010, representing a loss of up to $394.4 billion, or $1,320 per person.
“Rather than spending time and resources slowing the increase in greenhouse gases, which may not be the cause of global warming, we should prepare for a warmer world and all its effects, regardless of the cause,” Dr. Burnett added.
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WHY KYOTO WON’T WORK
As the Kyoto Protocol goes into effect there has been little or no discussion about the causes of global warming, the implications of implementing the treaty or whether the treaty is an appropriate response, according to NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett.
“Whether or not human actions are causing the current warming trend,” Dr. Burnett said. “The greenhouse gas reductions required under the Kyoto Protocol will not prevent it.” Why won’t Kyoto work?
* Even if all signatories meet greenhouse gas emission targets, the effect on global temperature would be insignificant.
* Fast growing, non-developed countries, such as China, India, South Korea and Indonesia, are exempt from emission reductions.
* According to the International Energy Agency, as much as 85 percent of the projected increase in CO2 emissions over the next 20 years will be produced in exempt countries.
* Signatory countries, such as Canada and Japan, are not likely to meet Kyoto’s emission cuts, and the European Union is on a path to exceed its commitments.
The Bush Administration has been severely criticized for not signing the treaty even though economic forecasts show that compliance would hurt the U.S. economy. During the Clinton Administration the Energy Information Administration, the official forecasting arm of the Department of Energy, issued a report predicting that meeting Kyoto greenhouse gas limits would:
* Increase gasoline prices by 52 percent and electricity prices by 86 percent.
* Decrease gross domestic product (GDP) by 4.2 percent and reduce disposable income by 2.5 percent.
Furthermore, an NCPA study written by Dr. Stephen Brown of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank determined that compliance would reduce GDP by as much as 4.3 percent in 2010, representing a loss of up to $394.4 billion, or $1,320 per person.
“Rather than spending time and resources slowing the increase in greenhouse gases, which may not be the cause of global warming, we should prepare for a warmer world and all its effects, regardless of the cause,” Dr. Burnett added.
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OPINION/COMMENTARY
Nuclear future coming together?
Representatives of the United States, Japan and Europe will sign an agreement Monday that, in a best-case scenario, will lead to a future in which nuclear power is seen as a boon to the environment and less of a risk to world security. Known as the International Forum Framework Agreement, the pact being signed at the French Embassy in Washington will encourage further technical research into the development of the next generation of reactors on which a possible renaissance in nuclear power will be based. "Nuclear technology can play a key role in the future by providing a means of supplying people all over the world with a safe, proliferation-resistant, and economic means of producing electricity -- and eventually hydrogen -- without harming the environment in which we all live and breathe," the Energy Department declared in a tidy summation of the so-called Generation IV Nuclear Energy System. Generation IV is a collection of a half-dozen designs for different types of reactors. The names will likely ring a bell with engineering types: lead-cooled fast-reactor system, molten-salt reactor, super-critical water-cooled reactor system, and so on. These designs, however, are all pointed at replacing aging reactors starting in 2030 and fostering a resurrection of an industry that has been stalled since the 1970s, even though it is capable of generating large amounts of electricity with virtually nothing in the way of emissions that can pollute the air or aggravate the problem of global warming. The 2030 timetable is not unreasonably long when considering the enormous lead time needed to complete the design work and draw-up plans for actual electricity-generating plants....
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Nuclear future coming together?
Representatives of the United States, Japan and Europe will sign an agreement Monday that, in a best-case scenario, will lead to a future in which nuclear power is seen as a boon to the environment and less of a risk to world security. Known as the International Forum Framework Agreement, the pact being signed at the French Embassy in Washington will encourage further technical research into the development of the next generation of reactors on which a possible renaissance in nuclear power will be based. "Nuclear technology can play a key role in the future by providing a means of supplying people all over the world with a safe, proliferation-resistant, and economic means of producing electricity -- and eventually hydrogen -- without harming the environment in which we all live and breathe," the Energy Department declared in a tidy summation of the so-called Generation IV Nuclear Energy System. Generation IV is a collection of a half-dozen designs for different types of reactors. The names will likely ring a bell with engineering types: lead-cooled fast-reactor system, molten-salt reactor, super-critical water-cooled reactor system, and so on. These designs, however, are all pointed at replacing aging reactors starting in 2030 and fostering a resurrection of an industry that has been stalled since the 1970s, even though it is capable of generating large amounts of electricity with virtually nothing in the way of emissions that can pollute the air or aggravate the problem of global warming. The 2030 timetable is not unreasonably long when considering the enormous lead time needed to complete the design work and draw-up plans for actual electricity-generating plants....
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