NEWS ROUNDUP
Mystery beast ravages flocks of Mont. sheep Ranchers in eastern Montana have a wildlife whodunit on their hands. Livestock growers in Garfield, McCone and Dawson counties have lost about 100 sheep this year to a ravenous creature that dispatches their 170-pound animals with ease and ferocity. And that creature is? "A wolf," says rancher Mike McKeever, who found one of his pregnant ewes disemboweled last month. "A wolf or wolf hybrid," says Carolyn Sime, statewide wolf coordinator for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. "A dog or a hybrid," says Suzanne Asha Stone, the Boise-based Northern Rockies representative for Defenders of Wildlife. A hybrid is a mixture of wolf and dog. The disagreement encompasses a century of passionate feelings about wolves in the West. The distinction is important: Defenders of Wildlife reimburses ranchers for proven kills of livestock by wolves. McKeever says he believes the Montana marauder is a wolf because it preys on adult sheep. Coyotes usually kill lambs, and only one or two at a time, he says....
Oh, Give Me a Home Where Prairie Dogs Roam -- in Boulder Many people in the West view prairie dogs as disease-carrying, pasture-damaging pests that they would be happy to see go the way of the bison. Yet Boulder County just built a half-mile barrier to keep the burrowing varmints from leaving. The chicken-wire fence blocks black-tailed prairie dogs from venturing into neighboring Broomfield County, where the 15-inch-long rodents face extermination as a health concern if they wander close to homes. Boulder County has bent over backward to make itself a prairie-dog haven. The animals have dug up everything from prime development parcels to Little League fields here, yet local politics and city ordinances make exterminating them next to impossible. Animal activists have picketed extermination sites, and Boulder herbal tea-maker Celestial Seasonings several years ago endured public scorn after it poisoned prairie dogs that dug up the grounds of its headquarters. The question of how to manage prairie dogs is a divisive one in the West and Great Plains. In the past decade, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has denied petitions by wildlife groups to put three species, including the black-tailed prairie dogs common in Boulder, on the threatened list. A fourth species, the Utah prairie dog, is currently listed as threatened, but it has so stymied development in fast-growing areas of Utah that state and federal regulators are considering allowing more construction on the critter's habitat as long as it is offset with preservation elsewhere. In South Dakota's 2004 Senate race between former Democratic Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Republican John Thune, who won the election, the candidates attempted to one-up each other in their disdain for prairie dogs, the bane of the state's ranchers....
CONTROLLING PRAIRIE DOGS Mary Kanode has spent almost all her 66 years on the family ranch northeast of here, a ranch that's been in the family since 1917. Prairie dogs were never a major problem -- until a couple of years ago. Kanode said she has been told repeatedly that the forest service wants to be a good neighbor, but she's having a difficult time buying into that -- for good reason. The forest service, in its proposal to manage prairie dogs on the grasslands, estimated that the population of the rodents is expanding in acreage by about 12 percent per year. Yet on Kanode's ranch, she has from zero population in 2004 to about 60 acres presently. Less than two years ago, she had 250 holes in the pasture across from the grasslands and presently she estimates she has more than 750 holes that are expanding almost daily. That's despite the fact that she's spent at least $2,000 and countless hours on her own to control the infestation, the forest service built three-quarters of a mile of fence intended to keep the animals on forest service land and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has helped with poisoning efforts. "I asked them (the forest service) to put the fence down in the ground at least 2 feet so the prairie dogs couldn't burrow under it, but Steve (Currey, grasslands district ranger) said they would need an archeological dig before they could do that. It's not stopping them from coming across onto my pasture," Kanode said....
Environmental activist challenges BLM's power Longtime environmental activist Andy Kerr says it's time to transfer U.S. Bureau of Land Management forestlands in Western Oregon over to the U.S. Forest Service. "I hope 10 years from now you'll find the BLM only in the history books," said Kerr, one of a dozen presenters at Saturday's "Beyond Big Timber" conference in Medford. "Our national forests are better managed than the BLM lands," he said. "Not as well as we would like but better than the BLM's. "The dark days we're in now have never been darker," he said later. "I miss James Watt." The session drew some 75 environmental activists from throughout the region to discuss the BLM's ongoing Western Oregon Plan Revisions. The agency manages about 2.6 million acres west of the Cascade Range....
Report: USFS at fault in burn A report blames the U.S. Forest Service for a prescribed burn that got out of control and destroyed four cabins and a camper last month near Lander. "The principal causal factors of the escape stemmed from an underestimation of the complexity of burning so close to private property and structures, and from a mistaken determination by the assigned fire personnel that, upon completion of firing operations, the burned area posed little or no remaining risk to adjacent private land and structures," said the report, released Friday. In addition, the report noted that the Forest Service failed to follow burn plans that required fire engines to be positioned near buildings while the burn was conducted and that required firefighters to closely monitor the outer edges of the fire to make sure it didn't go beyond its intended area....
The Checkerspot Mystery: An Ecological Whodunit For one week a year the vibrantly colored bay checkerspot butterfly is in its element on Coyote Ridge, flitting from one wildflower to the next in search of sustenance. The hillside used to be covered with these creatures -- which warm themselves in the sun, mate and deposit hundreds of eggs to launch the next generation before dying off. But on Coyote Ridge's northern edge, their numbers crashed in the early 1990s as Silicon Valley's high-tech boom spurred a wave of development. The species, with its brilliant orange-and-red-flecked wings, first crashed between Palo Alto and San Francisco in the 1980s, prompting federal officials to list it as threatened with extinction. Then in the early '90s its numbers dropped on the southern edge of San Jose, around the suburban subdivisions that abut Coyote Ridge. The cause was a mystery until conservation biologist Stuart Weiss figured out that the butterfly's woes stemmed from a combination of pollution from the freeway below and, surprisingly, a cutback in local cattle grazing. Over years of research, Weiss -- who has worked for utility and waste management companies as well as conservation groups and government agencies -- documented how the nitrogen oxide emissions from cars commuting to Silicon Valley enriched the nutrient-poor serpentine-rock soil that sustains the native grasslands on Coyote Ridge. This soil enrichment allowed invasive grasses -- which flourish in more nitrogen-rich soil -- to out-compete the native plants on which the checkerspot depends. When local ranchers stopped grazing their cows on one side of the ridge, it made things worse, because grazing helped keep invasive grasses in check. "The grazed side is great butterfly habitat, the ungrazed side is lousy," Weiss said. "You end grazing in the areas and it's bye-bye butterflies."...
HOUSE PASSES DOI, EPA BUDGETS The full House approved FY 2007 budgets for the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency last week. The budgets differ little from what the House appropriations committee passed earlier this month. Both budgets are larger than what President George W. Bush recommended in February, but are smaller than those approved for FY 2006. The House approved $9.65 billion for DOI, a $211 million decrease from last year, but a $40 million increase from the President’s request. The EPA is funded at $7.56 billion, a $55 million drop from last year. The funding level, however, is $254 million more than Bush requested. Both agencies’ budgets have declined over the past four years. In FY 2003, DOI was funded at $10.5 billion and the EPA was funded at $8.1 billion. Under the current bill, five programs would be cut: Stateside Land and Water Grants, the Forest Service economic action program, the Bureau of Land Management’s rural fire program and the Asia Pacific Partnership program....
Editorial: Saving Western Culture ALTHOUGH IT receives far less attention than the National Park Service or the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management -- the Interior Department's forgotten stepchild -- controls a huge chunk of the American West: 261 million acres of federal land in 11 states, or about as much land as the holdings of the other more famous agencies put together. Unlike the national parks or the national forests, the BLM's land is specifically designated as "multiple use." That means that it can be leased for grazing or mineral extraction, can be freely used for recreation, and is not fenced off from the locals, many of whom depend on it for their livelihoods. But this vast chunk of real estate is not only oil wells and pasture. It contains landscapes of intense beauty and cultural treasures as well: Native American archeological sites, cave and rock paintings, and historic trails. Although they have been there for centuries, the National Trust for Historic Preservation recently published a report pointing out that they are suddenly threatened. An exponential increase in the popularity of off-road vehicles, the recent expansion of exurbs and the administration's policy of rapid distribution of drilling licenses have led to an increase in destruction and vandalism. Among other things, the trust points out that only 6 percent of the BLM's land has even been surveyed for cultural and archeological resources. Obviously, it isn't possible to protect things that nobody knows exists....
Ex-Lobbyist Helps Companies Green Up David Ford was on his way to becoming a top timber industry lobbyist when he decided he'd had enough of the fighting that erupted in the 1990s over forests and the northern spotted owl. He now heads a nonprofit called metaFore, which evolved from promoting sales of wood products from forests certified as environmentally sustainable to helping Fortune 500 companies green up their paper supplies. "Some of my colleagues in the forest products associations said, `You've gone to the dark side, David,'" Ford said. "I learned that the conflict wasn't getting us where we wanted to be." Improving their public image and their bottom line, major corporations are moving from using less paper to demanding the paper they use comes from environmentally sustainable sources, and letting stockholders and customers know they are doing it....
Editorial: Salvaging Timber With fingers crossed that all goes as well as the optimists predict rather than as bad as the pessimists fear, we cheer last week's passage of the salvage logging bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Brian Baird, D-Vancouver. Approval in the House of Representatives 243-182 sends the measure to the Senate, where prospects for the contentious measure are less certain. The politics and the science on this issue have been both intriguing and divisive, with shock waves felt in Baird's 3rd Congressional District, including Clark County, and on the campus of Oregon State University in Corvallis. Baird, who split from most Democrats on the issue, and principal sponsor Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., promise the bill would speed up logging of salvageable timber after fires without doing significant long-term damage to the forest. That goal is a good one and the two lawmakers deserve praise for working across party lines to reach it....
Four indicted in 1998 arson case Four people were indicted late Thursday in connection with a series of fires set at the Vail ski area in 1998. The federal grand jury in Denver handed down indictments against Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, 29; Stanislas Gregory Meyerhoff, 28; Josephine Sunshine Overaker, 31; and Rebecca Jeanette Rubin, 33. Gerlach and Meyerhoff are in federal custody in Oregon, where they face separate arson charges. Overaker and Rubin are fugitives. The indictments was revealed Friday by Bill Leone, the U.S. attorney for Colorado. The eight-count indictment alleges the four set fires that destroyed eight buildings at the ski area, including the Two Elk Lodge and two restaurants...
Archaeologists uncover lost era Archaeologists scouring the historic John Marsh House-Cowell Ranch site in Brentwood say there are American Indian artifacts and bones buried within the soil, some dating back as far as 9,000 years to the "Paleo-Indian" era. "What we've found out there is extremely rare," said archaeologist Miley Holman, who is working with Shea Homes to study land associated with a residential development project next to the Cowell Ranch state park site. The village, he said, covers both the Marsh-Cowell property and a Shea-backed project called Vineyards at Marsh Creek. Both projects are in the planning stages. "The top layers of this Native American Village yield materials dating from as recent as a few hundred years ago, to 7,000 to 9,000 years ago," Holman said. "We are systematically studying this area, and at the end of the day, we hope to learn more about the region." He said the discovered artifacts and bones will give more insight into a people called "Windmiller."....
100 Years in the Back Door, Out the Front THE Texas cotton lobbyist tried to reassure Congress that the tens of thousands of Mexicans who labored in the fields of the Southwest were not a threat to national security. There "never was a more docile animal in the world than the Mexican," he told the Senate committee. Then he offered a way around the political problem the congressmen faced in extending the program that had let the workers in. "If you gentlemen have any objections to admitting the Mexicans by law," he said, "take the river guard away and let us alone, and we will get them all right." They did — and that was in 1920. Almost a century later, the debate over illegal immigration from Mexico often makes it sound like a recent development that breaks with the tradition of legal passage to America. Quite the contrary, say immigration scholars like Aristide R. Zolberg, who relates the anecdote about the Texas cotton grower in his new book, "A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America." A pattern of deliberately leaving the country's "back door" open to Mexican workers, then moving to expel them and their families years later, has been a recurrent feature of immigration policy since the 1890's....
Ag commissioner: Colorado needs moisture now Warm weather and decreased snowpack in much of Colorado mirror conditions found in 2002's drought and could hurt farmers and ranchers across Colorado, state Agriculture Commissioner Don Ament said. Alfalfa farmers in southern Colorado's San Luis Valley stand to lose much of their alfalfa crop this year and wheat farmers on the Eastern Plains are worried their crop could dry up unless rain falls on their fields soon, he said. The Pueblo Chieftain reported Thursday that the San Luis Valley could lose $60 million because of the alfalfa losses. That includes the loss of this year's crop, damage to subsequent harvests and the drop in farmers' income, according to Merlin Dillon, a Colorado State University agronomist, who discussed the situation with the Alamosa County commissioners this week. North of Denver, 200 farmers stand to lose up to more than $3 million worth of crops after the state shut down their wells after officials realized that snow had melted faster than expected. They're asking three cities to share their water with them to save their onions, corns and sugar beets. In southeastern Colorado, at least one auction barn has been busier than normal this week as some ranchers start to sell calves because they fear there won't be enough grass to support all their cattle....
Impact of poor wheat crop felt across rural Oklahoma This spring, Oklahoma will see its worst wheat harvest in 50 years, experts predict, because of drought, wild fires, high winds, hailstorms, insects and frost damage. With the harvest under way in some parts of the state, about 68 million bushels are expected -- less than half the yearly average since 2001. With the price of wheat, at harvest, estimated at $4.75 a bushel, farmers could lose $125 million in income. The average price since 2001 is $3.20. But that's not the whole story. When farm dollars circulated in rural communities are counted, this year's short crop could bring a $314 million loss to the state, said Oklahoma State University economist Kim Anderson. That's based on research showing that every $1 in farm income produces $2.51 for Oklahoma's economy. Already, farm towns such as Kingfisher, Altus or Frederick are hurting. Some farmers aren't buying new tractors or equipment. Repair jobs are being put off. Grain elevator operators are laying off workers. Vacations are being canceled. Some producers might even lose their farms....
W. Kansas thirsts for rain "The farther west you go, the more severe the drought conditions get," Kansas State Climatologist Mary Knapp said. "It improves as you move east from the halfway point, where it's basically neutral except the extreme eastern part of Kansas, which is abnormally dry." The state's farmers and ranchers have taken the biggest direct hit from the lack of moisture, while small downtowns and medium-sized cities also face the aftereffects of meager harvests. Knapp said if past drought periods are any indication, these drier-than-normal conditions could persist another two to three years. Outlook for the summer rainfall, however, now shows equal chances of normal or dry conditions. But southwest Kansas has already suffered, seeing more wheat fields abandoned this year than it has for several years, researchers say. Spring freeze, drought and an attack by the wheat streak mosaic virus each are taking a toll....
USDA declares New Mexico a disaster area U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., says the U.S. Department of Agriculture has declared New Mexico a disaster area due to continuing drought and wind storms. The declaration means that New Mexico farmers and ranchers are now eligible to be considered for low-interest emergency loans from the USDA's Farm Service Agency. Producers have eight months from the date of the declaration to apply for emergency loans to help cover part of their actual losses, if all eligibility requirements are met. Bingaman asked USDA officials last month to approve Gov. Bill Richardson's request for a statewide drought disaster declaration....
Industry reacts to ‘damaging’ fast food film The US food industry has launched a campaign to counter the bad publicity it expects to receive from a new film linking fast food chains and the industries that support them to the nation’s health and social problems. The film, based on Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book Fast Food Nation and staring Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, is set to premiere today at the Cannes Film Festival in France. It is a fictional version of the book, which had examined the social changes resulting from the rising dominance of the fast food industry. The industry is accused of using political influence to increase profits at the expense of human health and the social conditions of its workers. But according to a goup of food industry associations, this is the latest move in a series of attacks by “critics of our food system” who are “promoting their agendas using information that is inaccurate, misleading and incomplete.” In retaliation, 18 industry organizations this month launched a website, called Best Food Nation, which claims to provide fact-based responses to the concerns raised. Members include the Food Products Association and the American Farm Bureau Federation, as well as a number of commodity trade associations....
1,000 turn out for sugar beet factory centennial t was a perfect day for a party, although a bit dry for the sugar beets, especially up the Clarks Fork valley. No matter. More than 1,000 people showed up to say "Happy 100 years" Friday as the Western Sugar Co-op refinery marked its centennial. At least 900 stayed for lunch. "This has been a helluva deal for the community," said rancher Bud Sherrodd of Pompeys Pillar. He has trucked beet pulp from the factory to his own cattle and those of his neighbors for more than a dozen years. He rents land to neighbors who raise beets. "People don't see the business it creates," Sherrodd said. "There are trucks in and out of here constantly." They haul beets to the factory, pulp to cattle and sugar to the rest of the country, he said. The sugar refinery on the south edge of Billings was built in 1906 and produced 161,000 hundred-pound bags of sugar during that first campaign. The just-completed 100th campaign produced 10 times that amount: 1.62 million hundredweights. The first crop of the second century is starting to grow....
Doyon couple raises, sells Norwegian horses DEVILS LAKE The Tangle Tree Ranch, located east of Devils Lake at Doyon, is the home of the first Norwegian Dole horse in America, according to ranchers Marte Holen Stensli and Robert Nelson. The couple bill themselves as "The Dole Horse People." The first Dole Horse, named Vollaug Silver, came to the United States because of the marriage of Marte and Bob. The horse arrived in the fall of 2001. He was joined by three more Dole (pronounced Dolly) horses in April 2003. How the first horse got to the country is a story in itself. Vollaug Silver was flown from Gotenberg, Sweden, to New York where he spent three days in quarantine. Next, he was trailered to a Wisconsin equine clinic by a transport company where he was picked up by Marte for the rest of his trip to the ranch in North Dakota. On April 12, 2003, Silver was joined by three more Dole horses that were brought to the ranch from Norway. They had to stay at a Wisconsin equine center for a month in quarantine because they are breeding stock. The Dole horse, an all-around breed, is the largest of the four native Norwegian horses. It has been called the Gudbrandsdalis Horse and the East Country Horse denoting the area where the breed was developed. The Dole horse breed is an old one. In his writings from the 1530s, Archbishop Olaus Magnus mentioned the breed. As early as the 1850s, the breed type was established....
Mini Moos Desi the heifer lolled in the shade at Bob Potter's ranch, her belly swollen by a calf she was about to produce. She looked big, but big is a relative term on this spread, where Potter raises miniature Hereford cattle. The animals grow to no more than 900 pounds, about two-thirds the size of conventional cattle, he said. They are ideal for people with small ranches, such as his 10 acres on Fisher Road, he said. "They are the most efficient feed converters in the animal world," said Potter, who has 10 head and hopes for 20 to 25. Miniature cattle are the result of decades of breeding bulls and cows that were on the small side, leading to animals distinct from the large cattle that dominate today's beef industry. Some are as little as a third the size of regular livestock. Potter, one of only a few producers in California, shows his cattle throughout the West. He also sells them to other people who want to show them or have them slaughtered for home freezers....
'Doc' Holliday's legend impervious to dissection He's been called "Aristocracy's Outlaw" and the "good bad man of Tombstone." But who was John H. "Doc" Holliday, really? Was he simply an innocent dentist with a predilection for gambling who just kept stumbling into tight situations, or a cold-hearted, calculating killer? Even among those who knew him well, opinions differed. Wyatt Earp remembered him as a "mad, merry scamp with heart of gold and nerves of steel." Bat Masterson was less enamored, pegging him for a mean drunk with a little-man complex. He was, Masterson wrote, "hot headed and impetuous and very much given to both drinking and quarreling, and among men who did not fear him, he was very much disliked." Like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, Doc Holliday is one of those Western historical figures who has been so completely obscured by legend and mythmaking that getting at the man himself seems an impossible task. Gary L. Roberts, emeritus professor of history at Abraham Baldwin College, is well aware of the difficulties but makes a heroic attempt in "Doc Holliday: The Life and the Legend" (Wiley, $38.99). In 414 pages of text buttressed by almost 90 pages of notes, Roberts thoroughly excavates the record, examines the legend and speculates why the latter has proved so enduring....
A Rodeo Home Where Traffic Drones and Suburbs Expand All Day This is the territory of shadow-traffic updates, a landscape of commuters who often form a bumper-to-bumper ribbon of road rage into San Francisco along Interstate 580 during rush hour. But once a year in a canyon fleetingly visible from the freeway and the Bay Area Rapid Transit line, the Peet's-Coffee-and-pinot-noir culture of the Bay Area gives way to the Jack Daniel's salute, a bottle of whiskey hoisted high in the air to celebrate the cowboys at the annual Rowell Ranch Rodeo. It is rodeo season in California, when chili cook-offs and sweat, dust and manure connect suburbs like Hayward to a past that existed before weekend soccer games and the mall. It is a time of yes ma'ams and no ma'ams, a throwback to the days before tract development, when cowboys like Cecil Jones, now 88, drove rodeo stock through the Livermore Hills down the two-lane blacktop that is now I-580. "This was big-time cowboy country," said Mr. Jones, a saddle-bronc rider who managed the ranch for the rodeo's namesake, Harry Rowell, an English-born sailor turned slaughterhouse-and-stock entrepreneur who died in 1969. "Today, the newcomers don't know what-all." The rodeo — the culmination of a week that included a parade, a dinner dance, a barbeque, the chili cook-off at the nearby Castro Village Shopping Center and the crowning of Miss Rowell Ranch Rodeo Queen 2006 — is one of the country's oldest such competitions. It is one of 45 rodeos in California, which has the distinction of being the country's second-largest rodeo stronghold, surpassed only by Texas, which has 107, according to the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association....
PRCA hasn’t exactly committed to Springs When the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association decided Tuesday to stay put after saying it would leave Colorado Springs for New Mexico, the abrupt change in direction was reminiscent of a bull’s maneuvers to buck off its rider. “I can’t get inside their brains and know what happened,” said Jon Goldstein, a spokesman for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who announced in February the PRCA was accepting that state’s $17 million offer to relocate. “All I know is, it’s unfortunate the way things played out in the end.” And while the PRCA said it’s not moving to New Mexico, it gave no guarantees it wouldn’t listen to other offers — which wouldn’t surprise some rodeo backers. Rob Alexander, Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo Foundation chairman and part of a community task force formed to try and keep the PRCA, said efforts locally and by New Mexico to woo the organization amounted to an economic development tug of war. And once word gets out a business or organization is looking, other cities circle like sharks....
On the Edge of Common Sense: ANTIs love their trees, but hinder progress Gale Norton, once Colorado's attorney general, is resigning as the nation's interior secretary. "She has been an integral part of the most anti-environmental administration we've ever seen," one of the so-called 'environmental' groups is quoted as saying. What they didn't say is, "She's been an integral part of one of the most pro-energy, pro-forest restoration, pro-multiple use, pro-rural community, pro-common sense, balanced federal lands policies in twenty years." I prefer to call the environmental groups the ANTIs. It is as if they have not noticed America's addiction to skyrocketing energy prices, our increasing dependence on foreign oil, the horrendous forest fires consuming the west, the grinding erosion of rural communities, the elimination of ranchers, lumbermen, miners, and the enmity between themselves and the citizens who actually live in the land they are trying to protect. This is the same ANTI mind-set that prevented beefing up the levees around New Orleans years ago, that stopped development of nuclear power, that still condemns the use of pesticides, antibiotics and genetically modified foods....
Monday, May 22, 2006
Sunday, May 21, 2006
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE WESTERNER
What I don't know about golf
By Julie Carter
I've learned to do a long list of jobs since becoming associated with news writing.
Small newspapers require "Girl (or guy) Friday" kind of employment and everyone does many jobs to get the newspaper to the newsstand.
A new and recent jewel in my crown is photographing golf. The sports editor went on vacation and yours truly was drafted to shoot golf tournament photos.
I'm willing, but not sure if I'm able. Surely it will add to my sports photography resume that covers basketball, football, volleyball, track, rodeo and political races.
The sports guy and I made a little practice run before he disappeared off into the California sun. Crash course is a better description.
If you know Todd, you know he rattled off the particulars of the sport at warp speed like he thought I was going to remember it all AND recall how to find four or five particular golfers in a "pasture" stocked with 75 guys in khakis and polo shirts.
He herded the golf cart down the winding paths like a NASCAR driver, pointing at green spots between little hills, peering right, left and back to find a certain golfer. All this while waving a little golf course map in my face assuring me it was not a hard assignment.
I was holding on to the cart, my camera and my concern for my safety as trees flashed by. We met other carts and the rapid U-turns indicated we were headed the wrong direction. Like I would know.
I'm certain none of this is out of the ordinary if this is your world. For me, it was a foreign land.
Mark Twain said, "Golf is a good walk spoiled." I know now why I've never heard anyone say, "Hey, let's go watch golf."
If you are a golfer, you love the sport. If you are not a golfer, you will yawn. But be sure and do it quietly. Even TV golf teaches the protocol is to be very, very quiet, as indicated by the wimpy little "golf clap" that is eventually allowed.
I'm a rowdy sport kind of girl. I like sports where, as a spectator, you can cheer, yell and holler a little to release some exuberance for what is happening on the field, track, floor or arena. If I spent very much time on the greens, I'd undoubtedly be asked to leave.
Bogeys, birdies, putts, tees, par, chip shots, in the rough, on the green, fairway --all a foreign language to me. Fortunately, I don't have to write it, just quietly and unobtrusively take pictures. Watch for me on "America's Most Un-wanted" after I've been escorted from the premises for forgetting not to cheer.
There are some similarities to this sport and my cowboy world of roping and rodeo.
Both use handicaps to give the less skilled competitors a better a chance. It brings in more entry fees for the really good guys to win a bigger pot. It just isn't polite to call it what it really is -- "Sucker, come donate your money."
Both have tours, pro's, am's, champions and hot shots with big egos.
Even the name of one of the tournaments in town, Tight Lies Tour, could just as easily be announcing a team roping event.
I know where to stand, sit or hide when I'm taking pictures at a rodeo, roping or on the ranch. It is basic instinct for me to not get hurt by the livestock, the action of the event or an irritated competitor.
I've never been whipped with a catch rope. I just hope I can always say the same about a golf club.
© Julie Carter 2006
Doomsayers
by Larry Gabriel
The news media seems to love doomsayers, based on the amount of coverage given to catastrophic forecasts like overpopulation, starvation and bird flu.
Just recently I saw a headline that read, "Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point". Sources in the story claimed, "In five of the last six years, global population ate significantly more grains than farmers produced."
In the first place, if that sentence were actually true it would mean the world had enough grain stockpiled to meet the consumption level. In the second place, people don't eat all the grain consumed. The consumption reported by USDA in its May 2006 report on world grain includes many uses of grain in addition to grain used for food.
The story concluded by laying the finger of blame on us with this quote from Darrin Qualman, research director for Canada's National Farmers Union, "North America's industrial-style agricultural system is a really bad idea and maybe the worst on the planet."
Qualman claims we can't increase production significantly, that there is little land left for expansion and new technology will increase production by only about 5 percent.
Let us assume for a moment that those alleged facts are true (which they are not), and then consider other doomsayers who claim half the world is about to be wiped out by a new mutant bird flu that does not yet exist.
What is the result? For sure one of them is wrong. More likely both of these doomsday predictions are wrong.
Population predictions have never been right over extended time. Remember the 1968 book by Paul Ehrlich entitled The Population Bomb? Our college professors sometimes scared students of that decade into believing that uncontrolled reproduction by people would destroy the world as we knew it.
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," Ehrlich predicted.
Well, guess what! He was wrong. We made big gains against starvation and world hunger in the last quarter of the century, and we did so despite the hundreds of government programs designed to stifle or reduce production.
American farming does not cause starvation in Africa. A recent news item from South Africa said three men who stole wheat worth $320 million received sentences of only one year in jail. That explains why some people are always starving despite our efforts to help them.
Bird flu is real. All human flu viruses are thought to come to us from birds. Almost certainly the next one will also.
Every prediction which assumes things will not change will eventually be wrong, because change is the only certainty.
Larry Gabriel is the South Dakota Secretary of Agriculture
Two items received via email:
Crow Flat Cowboy and the Rattlers
By Lola Gentry
Growing up on cattle ranches in the southern most part of Otero County, New Mexico, and parts of West Texas, Travis Lewis is a product of the 'old breed of cowboys'. His Dad, the late Clark Lewis, a seasoned ranch hand, taught Travis and his older brother, Scott, everything he knew about breaking broncs, roping, branding, and just about everything else a cowboy should know.
Travis also learned to watch for prairie dog holes when ridin’ the range. Holes those little critters make in the ground can break a horses' leg, or, worse yet, a fall could break a cowboy’s neck.
Being a cowboy on open range does have its problems, but, Dad and big brother prepared Travis to always keep a cool head, a strong hand, an open mind, and to be watchful at all times.
Now, Travis, G R Walden, and a couple of other young men were much in demand by the ranchers in the wide open spaces across Crow Flat and Otero Mesa. They became known as the Crow Flat Cowboys. Ranchers within a hundred mile radius hired them for roundups, branding, dehorning, breaking horses, fixing fences, and any other chores required of cowboys.
In the old days, a cowboy on the open range would often find a six foot rattler coiled up inside his bed roll at night. He would shake it out, use his pistol, and hope the intruder didn’t have a friend nearby. The cowboy would then use his grass rope to form a circle around his bed roll, assuring himself that he could enjoy a good nights' sleep under the stars.
The Crow Flat Cowboys, no different than the cowboys of old, liked keeping the open sky tradition by sleeping under the stars. But, times have changed. Most of these lucky guys have a good pickup truck or horse trailer to throw their bed rolls in.
What these modern day Crow Flat Cowboys really needed was a place to hang their hats after a hard days work. Lady luck smiled on them and they moved into an old ranch house on one of the ranches. Sharing cooking and cleaning chores was okay and they took turns.
Their cowboy'ing was done, and it was late afternoon on Saturday. G.R. decided to go to town for a while. Travis stayed home to rest and watch television. He quickly succumbed to a short nap on the sofa. Upon waking, he felt hungry and went to the refrigerator, took out sandwich makings, and made a couple of sandwiches for himself.
Back on the sofa to devour the sandwiches, Travis felt the cool air of fall creeping in. During the summer when they moved in to their abode, they pushed the sofa against the built-in wall furnace to make more room. Now, with winter coming on, Travis would have to re-arrange the living room furniture!
"No problemo" Travis thought….
Getting up, he wedged him self between the sofa back and the wall-- pushing it toward the middle of the room.
Suddenly, a deafening 'rattle' that no cowboy ever wants to hear was sounding off right in front of him!
Fear gripped Travis as he looked down. He was face to face with a huge Diamond Back Rattler rearing its ugly head with its protruding venomous fangs, and beady eyes, from within the sofa cushions! Its vibrating rattlers sticking up behind another cushion sent even more chills down Travis's spine.
His heart sank clean down to his stomach!
When asked, "What happened then?"
"You ain't never seen a white man jump as high as when I vaulted over that couch!" Travis replied.
Items for removing intruders of this sort aren't usually found lying around the house. Travis' long legs took him quickly outside to his pickup. A pitchfork would have to do!
Back in the house, the sound was as though an entire den of rattlers had moved in. To his surprise, Travis found that the rattler did in fact, have a friend--almost as large, and just as violent, squeezing its way up from between the sofa cushions!
The common question was, "What did you do?
Travis' uncommon reply was, "I kept a cool head, strong hand, an open mind, and rolled those suckers onto that pitchfork like spaghetti on a fork, tossed 'em outside, and went to town!" --
Dear Westerner Blog,
I just wanted to let you know about a unique writing workshop that I will be teaching in July which may be of some interest to you and your blog readers. The workshop will take place at Granite Creek Ranch, a guest ranch in eastern Idaho that also has a working cattle component to it. The workshop participants will spend their mornings writing and discussing literature of the "new west" and in the afternoons we will ride horses through the Idaho Tetons. The schedule will be intensive, and I see this inter-change of communal outdoor activity and private, reflective writing time as central to the ethos of the workshop.
Could you perhaps print an announcement for this workshop on a community events listing or calendar?
Thanks so much, I think it's going to be a very unique opportunity. Please email me if you have any questions or need a shortened announcement.
-Reif Larsen
Columbia University
Writing the High Country: A Fiction Workshop Intensive on a Western Cattle Ranch
Have you ever wanted to spend the morning on horseback and the afternoon writing about the quiet pull of a mountain range?
Here’s your chance: a week long fiction workshop intensive located on a working cattle ranch near the Snake River in the Idaho Tetons. We will read a selection of classic and contemporary western writing, discussing both the legacies of the mythical “old west” and the realities of the “new west” as they play out in literature. Ranching activities (trail rides, round-ups, camp fire yarns) and a rodeo will be interspersed throughout the workshop schedule. Each participant will emerge from the week with a piece of short fiction. Readings from Wallace Stegner, William Kittredge, Richard Hugo, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas McGuane, Richard Ford, Barry Lopez, Annie Proulx among others.
The Location: A working cattle ranch, Granite Creek Ranch is located in the Snake River valley in Ririe, Idaho, halfway between Jackson Hole, WY and Idaho Falls. The ranch is on a five-acre lake, surrounded by magnificent mountain vistas. Yellowstone & Teton National Parks are nearby. Accommodations are in rustic cabins. The cost of the workshop includes all meals, lodging, and activities. Participants are responsible for their own transportation to the ranch. For more info go to: www.granitecreekranch.com.
Dates: July 9-15th, 2006. Space is limited to twelve participants.
About the Instructor: Reif Larsen is a writer, filmmaker, and teacher. He has taught writing workshops in South Africa, the UK, and New York City, where he currently teaches writing at Columbia University. He is working on a novel based in Montana about cartographers, cowboys, and scientists.
For more information and an application, please email: ril2104@columbia.edu.
What I don't know about golf
By Julie Carter
I've learned to do a long list of jobs since becoming associated with news writing.
Small newspapers require "Girl (or guy) Friday" kind of employment and everyone does many jobs to get the newspaper to the newsstand.
A new and recent jewel in my crown is photographing golf. The sports editor went on vacation and yours truly was drafted to shoot golf tournament photos.
I'm willing, but not sure if I'm able. Surely it will add to my sports photography resume that covers basketball, football, volleyball, track, rodeo and political races.
The sports guy and I made a little practice run before he disappeared off into the California sun. Crash course is a better description.
If you know Todd, you know he rattled off the particulars of the sport at warp speed like he thought I was going to remember it all AND recall how to find four or five particular golfers in a "pasture" stocked with 75 guys in khakis and polo shirts.
He herded the golf cart down the winding paths like a NASCAR driver, pointing at green spots between little hills, peering right, left and back to find a certain golfer. All this while waving a little golf course map in my face assuring me it was not a hard assignment.
I was holding on to the cart, my camera and my concern for my safety as trees flashed by. We met other carts and the rapid U-turns indicated we were headed the wrong direction. Like I would know.
I'm certain none of this is out of the ordinary if this is your world. For me, it was a foreign land.
Mark Twain said, "Golf is a good walk spoiled." I know now why I've never heard anyone say, "Hey, let's go watch golf."
If you are a golfer, you love the sport. If you are not a golfer, you will yawn. But be sure and do it quietly. Even TV golf teaches the protocol is to be very, very quiet, as indicated by the wimpy little "golf clap" that is eventually allowed.
I'm a rowdy sport kind of girl. I like sports where, as a spectator, you can cheer, yell and holler a little to release some exuberance for what is happening on the field, track, floor or arena. If I spent very much time on the greens, I'd undoubtedly be asked to leave.
Bogeys, birdies, putts, tees, par, chip shots, in the rough, on the green, fairway --all a foreign language to me. Fortunately, I don't have to write it, just quietly and unobtrusively take pictures. Watch for me on "America's Most Un-wanted" after I've been escorted from the premises for forgetting not to cheer.
There are some similarities to this sport and my cowboy world of roping and rodeo.
Both use handicaps to give the less skilled competitors a better a chance. It brings in more entry fees for the really good guys to win a bigger pot. It just isn't polite to call it what it really is -- "Sucker, come donate your money."
Both have tours, pro's, am's, champions and hot shots with big egos.
Even the name of one of the tournaments in town, Tight Lies Tour, could just as easily be announcing a team roping event.
I know where to stand, sit or hide when I'm taking pictures at a rodeo, roping or on the ranch. It is basic instinct for me to not get hurt by the livestock, the action of the event or an irritated competitor.
I've never been whipped with a catch rope. I just hope I can always say the same about a golf club.
© Julie Carter 2006
Doomsayers
by Larry Gabriel
The news media seems to love doomsayers, based on the amount of coverage given to catastrophic forecasts like overpopulation, starvation and bird flu.
Just recently I saw a headline that read, "Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point". Sources in the story claimed, "In five of the last six years, global population ate significantly more grains than farmers produced."
In the first place, if that sentence were actually true it would mean the world had enough grain stockpiled to meet the consumption level. In the second place, people don't eat all the grain consumed. The consumption reported by USDA in its May 2006 report on world grain includes many uses of grain in addition to grain used for food.
The story concluded by laying the finger of blame on us with this quote from Darrin Qualman, research director for Canada's National Farmers Union, "North America's industrial-style agricultural system is a really bad idea and maybe the worst on the planet."
Qualman claims we can't increase production significantly, that there is little land left for expansion and new technology will increase production by only about 5 percent.
Let us assume for a moment that those alleged facts are true (which they are not), and then consider other doomsayers who claim half the world is about to be wiped out by a new mutant bird flu that does not yet exist.
What is the result? For sure one of them is wrong. More likely both of these doomsday predictions are wrong.
Population predictions have never been right over extended time. Remember the 1968 book by Paul Ehrlich entitled The Population Bomb? Our college professors sometimes scared students of that decade into believing that uncontrolled reproduction by people would destroy the world as we knew it.
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," Ehrlich predicted.
Well, guess what! He was wrong. We made big gains against starvation and world hunger in the last quarter of the century, and we did so despite the hundreds of government programs designed to stifle or reduce production.
American farming does not cause starvation in Africa. A recent news item from South Africa said three men who stole wheat worth $320 million received sentences of only one year in jail. That explains why some people are always starving despite our efforts to help them.
Bird flu is real. All human flu viruses are thought to come to us from birds. Almost certainly the next one will also.
Every prediction which assumes things will not change will eventually be wrong, because change is the only certainty.
Larry Gabriel is the South Dakota Secretary of Agriculture
Two items received via email:
Crow Flat Cowboy and the Rattlers
By Lola Gentry
Growing up on cattle ranches in the southern most part of Otero County, New Mexico, and parts of West Texas, Travis Lewis is a product of the 'old breed of cowboys'. His Dad, the late Clark Lewis, a seasoned ranch hand, taught Travis and his older brother, Scott, everything he knew about breaking broncs, roping, branding, and just about everything else a cowboy should know.
Travis also learned to watch for prairie dog holes when ridin’ the range. Holes those little critters make in the ground can break a horses' leg, or, worse yet, a fall could break a cowboy’s neck.
Being a cowboy on open range does have its problems, but, Dad and big brother prepared Travis to always keep a cool head, a strong hand, an open mind, and to be watchful at all times.
Now, Travis, G R Walden, and a couple of other young men were much in demand by the ranchers in the wide open spaces across Crow Flat and Otero Mesa. They became known as the Crow Flat Cowboys. Ranchers within a hundred mile radius hired them for roundups, branding, dehorning, breaking horses, fixing fences, and any other chores required of cowboys.
In the old days, a cowboy on the open range would often find a six foot rattler coiled up inside his bed roll at night. He would shake it out, use his pistol, and hope the intruder didn’t have a friend nearby. The cowboy would then use his grass rope to form a circle around his bed roll, assuring himself that he could enjoy a good nights' sleep under the stars.
The Crow Flat Cowboys, no different than the cowboys of old, liked keeping the open sky tradition by sleeping under the stars. But, times have changed. Most of these lucky guys have a good pickup truck or horse trailer to throw their bed rolls in.
What these modern day Crow Flat Cowboys really needed was a place to hang their hats after a hard days work. Lady luck smiled on them and they moved into an old ranch house on one of the ranches. Sharing cooking and cleaning chores was okay and they took turns.
Their cowboy'ing was done, and it was late afternoon on Saturday. G.R. decided to go to town for a while. Travis stayed home to rest and watch television. He quickly succumbed to a short nap on the sofa. Upon waking, he felt hungry and went to the refrigerator, took out sandwich makings, and made a couple of sandwiches for himself.
Back on the sofa to devour the sandwiches, Travis felt the cool air of fall creeping in. During the summer when they moved in to their abode, they pushed the sofa against the built-in wall furnace to make more room. Now, with winter coming on, Travis would have to re-arrange the living room furniture!
"No problemo" Travis thought….
Getting up, he wedged him self between the sofa back and the wall-- pushing it toward the middle of the room.
Suddenly, a deafening 'rattle' that no cowboy ever wants to hear was sounding off right in front of him!
Fear gripped Travis as he looked down. He was face to face with a huge Diamond Back Rattler rearing its ugly head with its protruding venomous fangs, and beady eyes, from within the sofa cushions! Its vibrating rattlers sticking up behind another cushion sent even more chills down Travis's spine.
His heart sank clean down to his stomach!
When asked, "What happened then?"
"You ain't never seen a white man jump as high as when I vaulted over that couch!" Travis replied.
Items for removing intruders of this sort aren't usually found lying around the house. Travis' long legs took him quickly outside to his pickup. A pitchfork would have to do!
Back in the house, the sound was as though an entire den of rattlers had moved in. To his surprise, Travis found that the rattler did in fact, have a friend--almost as large, and just as violent, squeezing its way up from between the sofa cushions!
The common question was, "What did you do?
Travis' uncommon reply was, "I kept a cool head, strong hand, an open mind, and rolled those suckers onto that pitchfork like spaghetti on a fork, tossed 'em outside, and went to town!" --
Dear Westerner Blog,
I just wanted to let you know about a unique writing workshop that I will be teaching in July which may be of some interest to you and your blog readers. The workshop will take place at Granite Creek Ranch, a guest ranch in eastern Idaho that also has a working cattle component to it. The workshop participants will spend their mornings writing and discussing literature of the "new west" and in the afternoons we will ride horses through the Idaho Tetons. The schedule will be intensive, and I see this inter-change of communal outdoor activity and private, reflective writing time as central to the ethos of the workshop.
Could you perhaps print an announcement for this workshop on a community events listing or calendar?
Thanks so much, I think it's going to be a very unique opportunity. Please email me if you have any questions or need a shortened announcement.
-Reif Larsen
Columbia University
Writing the High Country: A Fiction Workshop Intensive on a Western Cattle Ranch
Have you ever wanted to spend the morning on horseback and the afternoon writing about the quiet pull of a mountain range?
Here’s your chance: a week long fiction workshop intensive located on a working cattle ranch near the Snake River in the Idaho Tetons. We will read a selection of classic and contemporary western writing, discussing both the legacies of the mythical “old west” and the realities of the “new west” as they play out in literature. Ranching activities (trail rides, round-ups, camp fire yarns) and a rodeo will be interspersed throughout the workshop schedule. Each participant will emerge from the week with a piece of short fiction. Readings from Wallace Stegner, William Kittredge, Richard Hugo, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas McGuane, Richard Ford, Barry Lopez, Annie Proulx among others.
The Location: A working cattle ranch, Granite Creek Ranch is located in the Snake River valley in Ririe, Idaho, halfway between Jackson Hole, WY and Idaho Falls. The ranch is on a five-acre lake, surrounded by magnificent mountain vistas. Yellowstone & Teton National Parks are nearby. Accommodations are in rustic cabins. The cost of the workshop includes all meals, lodging, and activities. Participants are responsible for their own transportation to the ranch. For more info go to: www.granitecreekranch.com.
Dates: July 9-15th, 2006. Space is limited to twelve participants.
About the Instructor: Reif Larsen is a writer, filmmaker, and teacher. He has taught writing workshops in South Africa, the UK, and New York City, where he currently teaches writing at Columbia University. He is working on a novel based in Montana about cartographers, cowboys, and scientists.
For more information and an application, please email: ril2104@columbia.edu.
OPINION/COMMENTARY
Carbon's Kindergarten Cop
I don't know what you'd call an investor who puts lots of money into "investments" that offer no benefits, but "Schwarzenegger" might be a good label. The Governor's pledge to lower greenhouse gas emissions in California to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 will bring Californians little or no environmental benefit, while costing the citizenry a substantial amount of money. The Governor has long pandered to California's environmental interest groups, but as an earlier (and wiser) Republican Governor named Reagan observed, "Facts are stubborn things." So let's look at the stubborn facts. If it worked perfectly, the legislation now in front of the California Legislature -- largely in line with the Governor's plan -- would lower California greenhouse gas emissions by 145 million tons by the year 2020[1]. That might sound like a large reduction. But let's do some math. Global emissions of greenhouse gases in 2020 are estimated to be about 42.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent -- yes billions, with a 'b.' If California avoids emitting 145 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, that's about a 0.3 percent (three-tenths of one percent) reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions. Now let's figure out what benefit that provides. Despite people mislabeling greenhouse gases as "pollutants," greenhouse gases are non-toxic: the only benefit you get from reducing them is to avoid some degree of global warming in the future. The predicted warming by the year 2020 according to the absolute worst-case computer models of the United Nations[2] is about about 1.3 degree (Fahrenheit). If we make the assumption that California's action will knock out temperature change equal to its greenhouse gas reductions (0.3 percent) we see that California's actions will avert about four one-thousandths of a degree of warming, an amount far too little to measure, much less to offer any benefits to Californians (or anyone else, for that matter). So much for benefits, let's talk about costs. California politicians like to talk about California as if it were a country. So, let's pretend that's true, and assume the likely cost of GHG reductions in California will be similar to what's been estimated in other high-tech, economically-powerful countries. A 2002 study looked at the impact of greenhouse gas reductions on the economies of four European countries with goals about 20 percent weaker than what the Governor is proposing, so we'll call those least-cost estimates.[4] Germany, according to that study, would lose nearly 3 percent of its gross domestic product and up to 1.3 million jobs annually by 2020, and ever after. The Netherlands would lose about 2 percent of GDP, and up to 180,000 jobs, while the UK would also lose about 2 percent of GDP, which could cost them up to 750,000 jobs....
Republicans Out of Gas
It's increasingly clear that Republican politicians have zero interest in knowing anything about which they speak and no commitment to any principle beyond that of getting elected. The high-voltage debate about gasoline prices makes that point in spades. Consider a talk on energy policy given the other day by Rep. Jack Kingston (R., Ga.). The congressman was invited by the Media Research Center to provide his thoughts on the media's coverage of the recent gasoline-price spiral. Rather than do that, however, Kingston used his time to pitch his bill—HR 4409—and to ruminate on how we got into this mess. Now, Jack Kingston is thought of as a pretty conservative guy as far as these things go. He was a member of the Republican class of 1994 and is currently vice chairman of the House Republican Conference. The MRC—a long-standing member of the Washington conservative establishment—was sure that they were getting one of the most free market guys on the Hill to talk some sense to the press. Here's what they got: a pitch to have the feds establish a goal of reducing oil consumption by 20 percent by 2025. To get there, Kingston proposes to compel auto manufacturers to make flexibly fueled vehicles, to further expand the subsidies provided to those who buy hybrid-powered cars, and to unleash another avalanche of subsidies on exotic energy technologies far and wide. If we adopt this bill, Kingston believes that America will be energy independent by 2015. Let's dwell on this for a moment. Government pronouncements that the economy produce x amount of this or consume y amount of that are the characteristics for which Soviet five-year plans were famous. Unfortunately, such dictates are all the rage in Washington today. One might expect free-market Republicans to be leery of such ham-handed intervention. But one would be wrong....
CEI Launches Ad Campaign to Counter Global Warming Alarmism
The Competitive Enterprise Institute today launched a national ad campaign to counter global warming alarmism. CEI has produced two 60-second television spots focusing on the call by some environmental groups and politicians to reduce fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions. “The campaign to limit carbon dioxide emissions is the single most important regulatory issue today,” says Marlo Lewis, a CEI senior fellow in environmental policy. “Claims of looming climate disaster due to energy use are unfounded; our ad campaign is a call for balance in public discussions of global warming.” “Our ‘carbon footprints’ have become the environmentalist version of criminal fingerprints—a basis for fines, restraints, and punishment,” says Sam Kazman, CEI’s general counsel and the campaign’s script developer. One of the ads focuses on the often-forgotten benefits of the processes that produce carbon dioxide and improve our quality of life, giving us heat, light, and transportation. The second ad focuses on the disparity between the glacier-melting headlines and the actual science. The ads will run in 14 U.S. cities from May 18-28, 2006. The cities include Albany, NY; Albuquerque, NM; Anchorage, AK; Austin, TX; Charleston, WV; Dallas; Dayton, OH; Denver; Harrisburg, PA; Phoenix; Sacramento and Santa Barbara, CA; Springfield, IL; and Washington, DC....
Natural Enemies: An Anatomy of Environmental Conflict
For those who live in modern cities, nature is a haven, a refuge from an urban jungle. The frustrations of the city make it easy to feel nostalgia for a simple life that never was: days spent hiking in the Grand Canyon, nights spent curled up by the fireplace after a hot shower and something nice from the refrigerator. But nature is not a national park, as people who make their living in its midst are aware. My ancestors emigrated from Germany to North America in the 1850’s, settling in Minnesota and Saskatchewan. Like most settlers, they had mixed feelings about nature. [1] Beautiful it may have been, but it was not the innocuous beauty that city dwellers find in art galleries. Nature was wild, literally. It could be kind. It could be indifferent. Or it could be an appalling enemy, a promise of hard life and sudden death. My mother lost a brother to diphtheria. A mile down the road, her uncle watched his whole family, a wife and three children, die of diphtheria in the space of three days. She grew up on a farm that got virtually no rain for a stretch of ten years. [2] She said, "You’d see black clouds boiling on the horizon. If you didn’t know better you’d think the rain was finally coming. But it wasn’t rain. When you got up in the morning everything would be covered by a carpet of dust. Or grasshoppers." For many of the world’s people today, nature remains as it was for my ancestors–red in tooth and claw. It comes in the night to kill their children. [3] No hot shower. No refrigerator. Western civilization has given me the luxury of being an environmentalist. I am insulated against nature, and this insulation gives me the luxury of no longer needing to see nature as a threat. Unfortunately, not everyone is so insulated, and thus not everyone is in a position to join me in treating wilderness preservation as an urgent priority. Therein lies a source of conflict, a kind of conflict that is bad for the environment and that we cannot resolve unless we understand that it is not like other kinds of conflict....
The Bear Facts
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has just put the polar bear on the endangered species list because it is supposedly "facing extinction" -- mainly, it claims, as a result of global warming. But statistics show the polar bear is not facing extinction, not by a long shot. The polar bear biologist cited by the IUCN correctly states the current population of polar bears to be about 22,000-25,000. But when asked for historical data he responds that this number has not changed much in recent decades. He does not mention the fact that half a century ago there were only about 8,000-10,000 polar bears. That low number was not the result of global warming or even cooling but of overhunting. A subsequent regulation of the hunt solved the problem: the polar bear population started to increase again. While it is probably not possible to define an ideal number of polar bears that "belong" on the planet, there are indications, both from scientific studies and from traditional Inuit knowledge (called IQ for Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit) that the current number of polar bears is actually high. There are about 20 groups of these animals in the Arctic and the majority of them are thriving. The avalanche of media reports about polar bears in trouble is based on just two of these groups. The recent increase of hunting quota for polar bears in Greenland and Canada would actually indicate that their number is increasing....
Carbon's Kindergarten Cop
I don't know what you'd call an investor who puts lots of money into "investments" that offer no benefits, but "Schwarzenegger" might be a good label. The Governor's pledge to lower greenhouse gas emissions in California to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 will bring Californians little or no environmental benefit, while costing the citizenry a substantial amount of money. The Governor has long pandered to California's environmental interest groups, but as an earlier (and wiser) Republican Governor named Reagan observed, "Facts are stubborn things." So let's look at the stubborn facts. If it worked perfectly, the legislation now in front of the California Legislature -- largely in line with the Governor's plan -- would lower California greenhouse gas emissions by 145 million tons by the year 2020[1]. That might sound like a large reduction. But let's do some math. Global emissions of greenhouse gases in 2020 are estimated to be about 42.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent -- yes billions, with a 'b.' If California avoids emitting 145 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, that's about a 0.3 percent (three-tenths of one percent) reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions. Now let's figure out what benefit that provides. Despite people mislabeling greenhouse gases as "pollutants," greenhouse gases are non-toxic: the only benefit you get from reducing them is to avoid some degree of global warming in the future. The predicted warming by the year 2020 according to the absolute worst-case computer models of the United Nations[2] is about about 1.3 degree (Fahrenheit). If we make the assumption that California's action will knock out temperature change equal to its greenhouse gas reductions (0.3 percent) we see that California's actions will avert about four one-thousandths of a degree of warming, an amount far too little to measure, much less to offer any benefits to Californians (or anyone else, for that matter). So much for benefits, let's talk about costs. California politicians like to talk about California as if it were a country. So, let's pretend that's true, and assume the likely cost of GHG reductions in California will be similar to what's been estimated in other high-tech, economically-powerful countries. A 2002 study looked at the impact of greenhouse gas reductions on the economies of four European countries with goals about 20 percent weaker than what the Governor is proposing, so we'll call those least-cost estimates.[4] Germany, according to that study, would lose nearly 3 percent of its gross domestic product and up to 1.3 million jobs annually by 2020, and ever after. The Netherlands would lose about 2 percent of GDP, and up to 180,000 jobs, while the UK would also lose about 2 percent of GDP, which could cost them up to 750,000 jobs....
Republicans Out of Gas
It's increasingly clear that Republican politicians have zero interest in knowing anything about which they speak and no commitment to any principle beyond that of getting elected. The high-voltage debate about gasoline prices makes that point in spades. Consider a talk on energy policy given the other day by Rep. Jack Kingston (R., Ga.). The congressman was invited by the Media Research Center to provide his thoughts on the media's coverage of the recent gasoline-price spiral. Rather than do that, however, Kingston used his time to pitch his bill—HR 4409—and to ruminate on how we got into this mess. Now, Jack Kingston is thought of as a pretty conservative guy as far as these things go. He was a member of the Republican class of 1994 and is currently vice chairman of the House Republican Conference. The MRC—a long-standing member of the Washington conservative establishment—was sure that they were getting one of the most free market guys on the Hill to talk some sense to the press. Here's what they got: a pitch to have the feds establish a goal of reducing oil consumption by 20 percent by 2025. To get there, Kingston proposes to compel auto manufacturers to make flexibly fueled vehicles, to further expand the subsidies provided to those who buy hybrid-powered cars, and to unleash another avalanche of subsidies on exotic energy technologies far and wide. If we adopt this bill, Kingston believes that America will be energy independent by 2015. Let's dwell on this for a moment. Government pronouncements that the economy produce x amount of this or consume y amount of that are the characteristics for which Soviet five-year plans were famous. Unfortunately, such dictates are all the rage in Washington today. One might expect free-market Republicans to be leery of such ham-handed intervention. But one would be wrong....
CEI Launches Ad Campaign to Counter Global Warming Alarmism
The Competitive Enterprise Institute today launched a national ad campaign to counter global warming alarmism. CEI has produced two 60-second television spots focusing on the call by some environmental groups and politicians to reduce fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions. “The campaign to limit carbon dioxide emissions is the single most important regulatory issue today,” says Marlo Lewis, a CEI senior fellow in environmental policy. “Claims of looming climate disaster due to energy use are unfounded; our ad campaign is a call for balance in public discussions of global warming.” “Our ‘carbon footprints’ have become the environmentalist version of criminal fingerprints—a basis for fines, restraints, and punishment,” says Sam Kazman, CEI’s general counsel and the campaign’s script developer. One of the ads focuses on the often-forgotten benefits of the processes that produce carbon dioxide and improve our quality of life, giving us heat, light, and transportation. The second ad focuses on the disparity between the glacier-melting headlines and the actual science. The ads will run in 14 U.S. cities from May 18-28, 2006. The cities include Albany, NY; Albuquerque, NM; Anchorage, AK; Austin, TX; Charleston, WV; Dallas; Dayton, OH; Denver; Harrisburg, PA; Phoenix; Sacramento and Santa Barbara, CA; Springfield, IL; and Washington, DC....
Natural Enemies: An Anatomy of Environmental Conflict
For those who live in modern cities, nature is a haven, a refuge from an urban jungle. The frustrations of the city make it easy to feel nostalgia for a simple life that never was: days spent hiking in the Grand Canyon, nights spent curled up by the fireplace after a hot shower and something nice from the refrigerator. But nature is not a national park, as people who make their living in its midst are aware. My ancestors emigrated from Germany to North America in the 1850’s, settling in Minnesota and Saskatchewan. Like most settlers, they had mixed feelings about nature. [1] Beautiful it may have been, but it was not the innocuous beauty that city dwellers find in art galleries. Nature was wild, literally. It could be kind. It could be indifferent. Or it could be an appalling enemy, a promise of hard life and sudden death. My mother lost a brother to diphtheria. A mile down the road, her uncle watched his whole family, a wife and three children, die of diphtheria in the space of three days. She grew up on a farm that got virtually no rain for a stretch of ten years. [2] She said, "You’d see black clouds boiling on the horizon. If you didn’t know better you’d think the rain was finally coming. But it wasn’t rain. When you got up in the morning everything would be covered by a carpet of dust. Or grasshoppers." For many of the world’s people today, nature remains as it was for my ancestors–red in tooth and claw. It comes in the night to kill their children. [3] No hot shower. No refrigerator. Western civilization has given me the luxury of being an environmentalist. I am insulated against nature, and this insulation gives me the luxury of no longer needing to see nature as a threat. Unfortunately, not everyone is so insulated, and thus not everyone is in a position to join me in treating wilderness preservation as an urgent priority. Therein lies a source of conflict, a kind of conflict that is bad for the environment and that we cannot resolve unless we understand that it is not like other kinds of conflict....
The Bear Facts
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has just put the polar bear on the endangered species list because it is supposedly "facing extinction" -- mainly, it claims, as a result of global warming. But statistics show the polar bear is not facing extinction, not by a long shot. The polar bear biologist cited by the IUCN correctly states the current population of polar bears to be about 22,000-25,000. But when asked for historical data he responds that this number has not changed much in recent decades. He does not mention the fact that half a century ago there were only about 8,000-10,000 polar bears. That low number was not the result of global warming or even cooling but of overhunting. A subsequent regulation of the hunt solved the problem: the polar bear population started to increase again. While it is probably not possible to define an ideal number of polar bears that "belong" on the planet, there are indications, both from scientific studies and from traditional Inuit knowledge (called IQ for Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit) that the current number of polar bears is actually high. There are about 20 groups of these animals in the Arctic and the majority of them are thriving. The avalanche of media reports about polar bears in trouble is based on just two of these groups. The recent increase of hunting quota for polar bears in Greenland and Canada would actually indicate that their number is increasing....
Friday, May 19, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
House Votes to Keep Offshore Drilling Ban The House rejected an attempt late Thursday to end a quarter-century ban on oil and natural gas drilling in 85 percent of the country's coastal waters despite arguments that the new supplies are needed to lower energy costs. Lawmakers from Florida and California led the fight to maintain the long-standing drilling moratorium, contending that energy development as close as three miles from shore would jeopardize multibillion-tourism industries. The moratorium bars oil and gas development in virtually all coastal waters outside the western Gulf of Mexico, where most of the country's offshore oil and gas wells are concentrated. A measure, offered by Putnam and Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., to continue the prohibition on drilling for natural gas which some lawmakers argued was less of an environmental threat than oil was approved 217-203 and inserted into a $25.9 billion Interior Department spending bill....
Oil-patch study of cattle eases some fears A long-awaited $17-million study on cattle health and oil and gas emissions in Western Canada has provided some reassuring answers while raising a new batch of concerns in the oil patch. For the interprovincial study, the largest on-farm research project of its kind, a collection of blue-ribbon scientists looked at how air contaminants affect reproductive success and general cattle health downwind of oil and gas facilities. The work took place from 2001 to 2003, and involved 33,000 cattle from 205 herds. The 716-page report says the scientists found no links between increased risk for stillbirths, abortions and unsuccessful pregnancies and chronic low-level exposure to sulphur dioxide or volatile organic compounds, such as benzene. The researchers did not examine data on the effects of sour gas or hydrogen sulphide on reproductive health in cattle as thoroughly or on two key reproductive indicators. However, the study did find a number of surprising associations between oil and gas pollution and cattle health. For example, it found that newly born calves exposed to high levels of sulphur dioxide had death rates 1.4 times higher than those exposed to lower concentrations. It also documented severe immune function changes in calves inhaling low amounts of benzene and toluene. Newborns exposed to sour gas, a highly toxic compound found in a third of all natural gas supplies, needed more medication than non-exposed calves....
Landowners have questions about request for water well permits Landowners have questions about a company's request for 21 water well permits in an oil field where nearly 1 million gallons of salt water spilled from a cracked pipe earlier this year. The State Water Commission, which must approve the permits, has been asked to schedule a public hearing on the requests from Zenergy Inc. The Tulsa, Okla.,-based company is drilling in the Foreman Butte oil field west of Alexander. Zenergy has 10 temporary permits for water wells and wants them made permanent, along with permits for 11 new wells. It uses the well water to dilute highly concentrated salt water that comes up with the oil, to try to prevent equipment problems. The Foreman Butte oil field, estimated to be about 9,000 feet deep, is known for its salty water. The spill in January sent toxic water into Charbonneau Creek, killing creek life and forcing ranchers to move their cattle for more than two months. The creek empties into the Yellowstone River, but officials said the Yellowstone did not appear to have been harmed by the spill. Landowners want to know how the 21 wells sought by Zenergy would affect groundwater that supplies their cattle....
Column: Out-of-state animal rights activists slopping hogwash on Arizonans New York-based Farm Sanctuary has an extreme political agenda they hope to impose on Arizona. We're talking about out-of-state animal rights activists and the ballot measure they want us to support in November. Their goals have little to do with protecting animals and the environment and everything to do with reducing production and consumption of meat products grown by Arizona and American farmers. Do not be fooled, hogwash is hogwash. The hogwash they are feeding you is that Arizona farmers do not treat their animals humanely or protect the environment because of modern and safer animal confinement practices. They will play on your emotions. They ignore decades of sound science. And they smear anyone who doesn't share their radical views, all to promote their extreme animal rights agenda. They did it in Florida in 2002. Now they've come to Arizona....
Trapper Kills Suspect Gator A trapper killed an 11-foot, 5-inch alligator Thursday morning that appears to be the reptile that killed a 23-year-old woman who was snorkeling in Juniper Creek on Sunday. The male alligator was caught on the fourth large hook baited with beef lung and left along the creek east of Lake George overnight, 300 to 400 yards from where Annmarie Campbell was killed. The body of Campbell, an artist from Paris, Tenn., and a former Marion County resident, was pulled from the reptile's jaws by her ex-stepfather and another man. The large alligator has marks on its snout as if it had been in a confrontation and has a stab wound in its right eyelid....
Young promises reprisal for vote on Tongass The House voted Thursday to prohibit the Forest Service from spending federal funds to build new logging roads in the Tongass National Forest. The Forest Service has lost an average of $40 million a year -- and $48 million last year -- to subsidize a dying logging industry that employs only 300 Alaskans, the sponsors of the measure said. "Think of that: (for) every job, $150,000 in taxpayer subsidies for that one job," said Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio. He said he's all for logging "but not when the taxpayers are being ripped off." The vote was 237-181. Most of the Democrats and 68 Republicans voted for it. Alaska Congressman Don Young said he was "adamantly opposed to this sneaky amendment." He said it violated the spirit of representative government, because it affects only his state, and he didn't want it. Taking a page from Sen. Ted Stevens' playbook, Young said he would make note of who voted against him and retaliate in future legislation. "Each one of you, think about this, in this room: This should be a representative form of government, and what you're doing is dead wrong, and I shall not forget it," he said....
Fire-defense costs searing o protect people from wildfire and restore the forests' health, a report released Thursday estimates 1.5 million acres in 10 Front Range counties must be "treated" by tree thinning and prescribed burns. The price tag: At an average cost of more than $400 an acre, treatment could hit $15 million annually for 40 years - or a total tab of $600 million. "The numbers are overwhelming," said Rocky Mountain regional forester Rick Cables. Pay now or pay later, Cables said, pointing out that Colorado's largest fire - the 138,000-acre Hayman in 2002 - cost $240 million in firefighting, economic losses and rehabilition. The money, he said, instead could have been used to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. The Front Range Fuels Partnership Roundtable, a consortium of 30 organizations formed in 2002 after the state's worst fire season, spent two years developing 10 recommendations on how to focus and speed up the work....
White House wants limits on competitive sourcing out of funding bill The Bush Administration wants Congress to alter language in pending appropriations legislation that prevents several key agencies—such as the Agriculture and Interior departments—from participating in certain E-government initiatives and limits the agency’s use of competitive sourcing. H.R. 5386, the Department of the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Appropriations Act for fiscal 2007, precludes the agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, from spending more than $3.4 million on competitive sourcing programs without first submitting a proposal to the congressional appropriations committees detailing a reprogramming of funds proposal. USDA’s Forest Service may not use more than $2.5 million for competitive sourcing activities, but is exempt from having to send a report. The language also prohibits the agencies from using funds in the bill for E-government projects like SAFECOM, a program led by the Homeland Security Department to improve public safety response among all levels of government, and Disaster Management....
Lightning brings rash of wildfires As predicted, the drought, combined with an abundance of natural fuels in the Gila National Forest and a rash of recent lightning strikes, have produced the first series of wildfires for the season. Nine blazes were reported burning throughout the forest Wednesday afternoon. Five of the fires were being staffed by a total of about 75 wildland firefighters and crews, including the Silver City and Gila Hotshot crews, seven forest service engines, a helicopter based in Reserve and a C-130 slurry tanker plane. Smokejumpers, who had just practiced a jump early Wednesday morning, were dispatched in their twin-engine Otter later in the afternoon to jump one of the blazes, officials said. Fire management officials at the local, state and federal level have been predicting an active fire season since the beginning of the year. Lightning storms that passed through the area on Monday night are blamed for the new blazes. Three fires were discovered on the Quemado Ranger District, four on the Reserve, one on the Black Range and one on the Glenwood Ranger District....
House panel's vote endangers Utah's wildlife protection plan A little over six months after Utah and other states submitted action plans to the Interior Department designed to keep at-risk wildlife off the Endangered Species List, a congressional committee has approved a budget that would slash federal funding for those state programs. The House Appropriations Committee this week approved an $18.5 million cut in state wildlife grant programs, a move, that if enacted, could cost Utah's Division of Wildlife Resources nearly $320,000 - almost a 40 percent cut from the originally proposed budget. And those reductions actually slice even deeper because much of that federal money is used to leverage funding from other sources. Though Capitol Hill battles remain to be fought - 170 representatives and 56 senators have signed a bipartisan letter urging the funding be restored - Utah wildlife officials say the long-term prognosis isn't good....
Researchers can't confirm rediscovery of ivory-billed woodpecker Three seasons of searching still have not produced the icon that would forever settle the dispute: a single photograph of a clearly identifiable ivory-billed woodpecker. "We probably wouldn't be truthful if we said we weren't a little disappointed. We've put a lot of effort into this," Cornell University researcher Ron Rohrbaugh said Thursday. Last year Cornell researchers stunned bird-lovers everywhere by announcing that the ivory-bill had been rediscovered after 60 years, by happenstance, in an Arkansas swamp. Before that, the magnificent bird was thought to have vanished along with the stately hardwood forests of the southern United States where it had flourished for centuries. Cornell, this nation's Citadel of ornithology in bucolic Ithaca, N.Y., said Thursday that it still believes the ivory-bill was spotted two years ago, but it no longer plans to go on spending $1 million a year, mostly from private donations but including some federal funds, to prove it. Critics say the inability to get a photograph of the bird supports their doubts about Cornell's original announcement. Before it ended last month, the most recent effort to locate the woodpecker involved 20 full-time biologists and more than 100 amateur volunteers, plus all the technology Cornell could muster: automatic sound recorders and camouflaged time-lapse cameras hidden deep in the forest, laser rangefinders, GPS units, even ultralight aircraft....
Environmentalists divided on Bush immigration plan Environmentalists are split over the impact of the Bush administration's plan to protect the southwestern U.S. border against illegal immigration while other groups are ignoring the debate altogether. The Center for Biological Diversity says sending in the National Guard, construction of border walls, low-flying aircraft and new roads will harm the desert environment and affect endangered species. Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and former Sierra Club director, says immigration leads to an explosive growth in population, which the environment cannot sustain. The heavy hitters on the environmental scene, however, are sitting on the sidelines of the policy battle including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth and the World Wildlife Fund....
Wolf foes howl at state managers Sheep, elk and dog carcasses, bones, skulls and wolf tracks the size of a human head—that's what two Croy Canyon residents claim is scattered around their property six miles west of Hailey. "Our dogs were bitten by wolves at three o'clock in the afternoon," said Jennifer Swigert, who lives with her husband Kevin, a fifth generation Idahoan, in a remote area of Croy Canyon. "I love animals, I always have, but this is insane—people are at a total risk of getting fanged up." The Swigerts, who attended a wolf management meeting Wednesday night with Idaho Fish and Game officials in Hailey, claim wolf numbers are growing in Croy Canyon and the animals are becoming increasingly aggressive towards dogs, horses, and humans....
Gillett pledges he'll rid Idaho of wolves Ron Gillett is determined to rid Idaho of wolves, and he's pledged that he won't quit until he's accomplished that goal. Gillett, the president of the Idaho Anti-Wolf Coalition, unsuccessfully tried to place the issue on the November 2006 ballot. To do so he needed 47,881 signatures from registered Idaho voters. He claims he collected about 40,000 signatures, but only about 13,500 were from registered voters. "On this first go-around we didn't tell anybody we were going to get the signatures, we said we'll try," Gillette said. "Mark my word, on this second go-around we will get it, no question." Gillett, who lives in Stanley and owns the Triangle C Ranch lodge, said wolves are the "most cruel, vicious predators in North America," and that he's concerned about the safety of his grandchildren. He added that wolves depredate livestock and are decimating elk herds, which is ruining his livelihood....
Going to the birds An evidentiary hearing in the state's lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management over its oil and gas drilling plans for Otero Mesa took a closer look at the federal agency's provisions to protect the aplomado falcon. U.S. District Court Judge Bruce D. Black held Wednesday's hearing to examine whether the BLM consulted and planned adequately for the impact their plans could have on the raptor's habitat. In June 2003, when the BLM was still evaluating its options for oil and gas development on the stretch of Chihuahuan Desert grassland, it said it needed to consult formally with the Fish and Wildlife Service because drilling was ''likely to adversely affect'' the bird of prey. In September of the same year, the agency reversed that opinion. Andrew Smith, a U.S. Department of Justice attorney representing the BLM, has said the BLM did consult, albeit informally, with the Fish and Wildlife Service and that the few documented falcon sightings in the Otero Mesa area did not warrant changes to the BLM's contested plan. The testimony of Joy Nicholopoulos, former head of ecological services for the Fish and Wildlife Service in New Mexico, confirmed his claims, and noted decision reversals are not unusual for federal agencies....
Predators Causing Big Losses to Livestock Farmers Cattle and calf losses from animal predators and non-predator causes in the United States totaled 4.05 million head in 2005, USDA's National Agriculture Statistics Service reported. Cattle and calf losses from animal predators totaled 190,000 head. This represented 4.7 percent of the total losses from all causes and resulted in a loss of $92.7 million to cattle farmers and ranchers. Coyotes and dogs caused the majority of cattle and calf losses accounting for 51.1 percent and 11.5 percent, respectively. Cattle and calf losses from non-predator causes totaled 3.86 million head or 95.3 percent of the total losses. Respiratory problems were the leading cause of non-predator deaths accounting for 28.7 percent, followed by digestive problems at 16.8 percent. Farmers and ranchers throughout the United States spent $199.1 million on non-lethal methods to control predators....
Former Hannibalian tracking Billy the Kid Five years ago former Hannibalian Steve Sederwall moved to New Mexico to begin an investigation to determine if the man buried there in 1881 as Billy the Kid was the real William Bonney. He does not believe that he was. Since then Sederwall and Lincoln County, N.M., Sheriff Tom Sullivan have traveled to several other states to investigate the stories of more than one man who had claimed to be Billy after the death of the one buried as Billy in Lincoln County, N.M. The mystery has not been solved, but Sederwall is currently investigating the life of a John Miller, who had told people he was the real William Bonney. Sederwall explained one more incident that is being investigated. "The Kid's attorney was A.J. Fountain, and he and his 8-year-old son Henry were murdered in Lincoln County. They never found the bodies. We may be able to find those bodies."....
DNA twist to Old West case An answer to the John Wesley Hillmon mystery might be found in the DNA, after all. Work begins early today to identify the coffin's remains at the 127- year-old grave of the man at the center of an epic insurance fraud case. And now, the 11th-hour discovery of a Hillmon descendant could make the job much easier. University of Colorado law professor Mimi Wesson, who is leading the Hillmon exhumation along with CU anthropology professor Dennis Van Gerven, received a surprise e-mail last month from Sandra Hillmon. Hillmon, a rancher from Lawrence born in 1848, was reportedly shot accidentally by his traveling companion March 17, 1879, as the two were making camp near Medicine Lodge, Kan. Because Hillmon was covered by no fewer than three life insurance policies, the companies holding those policies withheld payment, suspecting an attempt at fraud by Hillmon, his wife Sallie, and Hillmon's camp mate. The dispute was the subject of six trials over 20 years, and the case twice reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In the first Supreme Court ruling in Mutual Life Insurance Co. vs. Hillmon, the court in 1892 created what endures today as the "state of mind" exception to the hearsay rule. Hearsay is an out-of-court statement presented in court as true and usually ruled not admissible....
House Votes to Keep Offshore Drilling Ban The House rejected an attempt late Thursday to end a quarter-century ban on oil and natural gas drilling in 85 percent of the country's coastal waters despite arguments that the new supplies are needed to lower energy costs. Lawmakers from Florida and California led the fight to maintain the long-standing drilling moratorium, contending that energy development as close as three miles from shore would jeopardize multibillion-tourism industries. The moratorium bars oil and gas development in virtually all coastal waters outside the western Gulf of Mexico, where most of the country's offshore oil and gas wells are concentrated. A measure, offered by Putnam and Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., to continue the prohibition on drilling for natural gas which some lawmakers argued was less of an environmental threat than oil was approved 217-203 and inserted into a $25.9 billion Interior Department spending bill....
Oil-patch study of cattle eases some fears A long-awaited $17-million study on cattle health and oil and gas emissions in Western Canada has provided some reassuring answers while raising a new batch of concerns in the oil patch. For the interprovincial study, the largest on-farm research project of its kind, a collection of blue-ribbon scientists looked at how air contaminants affect reproductive success and general cattle health downwind of oil and gas facilities. The work took place from 2001 to 2003, and involved 33,000 cattle from 205 herds. The 716-page report says the scientists found no links between increased risk for stillbirths, abortions and unsuccessful pregnancies and chronic low-level exposure to sulphur dioxide or volatile organic compounds, such as benzene. The researchers did not examine data on the effects of sour gas or hydrogen sulphide on reproductive health in cattle as thoroughly or on two key reproductive indicators. However, the study did find a number of surprising associations between oil and gas pollution and cattle health. For example, it found that newly born calves exposed to high levels of sulphur dioxide had death rates 1.4 times higher than those exposed to lower concentrations. It also documented severe immune function changes in calves inhaling low amounts of benzene and toluene. Newborns exposed to sour gas, a highly toxic compound found in a third of all natural gas supplies, needed more medication than non-exposed calves....
Landowners have questions about request for water well permits Landowners have questions about a company's request for 21 water well permits in an oil field where nearly 1 million gallons of salt water spilled from a cracked pipe earlier this year. The State Water Commission, which must approve the permits, has been asked to schedule a public hearing on the requests from Zenergy Inc. The Tulsa, Okla.,-based company is drilling in the Foreman Butte oil field west of Alexander. Zenergy has 10 temporary permits for water wells and wants them made permanent, along with permits for 11 new wells. It uses the well water to dilute highly concentrated salt water that comes up with the oil, to try to prevent equipment problems. The Foreman Butte oil field, estimated to be about 9,000 feet deep, is known for its salty water. The spill in January sent toxic water into Charbonneau Creek, killing creek life and forcing ranchers to move their cattle for more than two months. The creek empties into the Yellowstone River, but officials said the Yellowstone did not appear to have been harmed by the spill. Landowners want to know how the 21 wells sought by Zenergy would affect groundwater that supplies their cattle....
Column: Out-of-state animal rights activists slopping hogwash on Arizonans New York-based Farm Sanctuary has an extreme political agenda they hope to impose on Arizona. We're talking about out-of-state animal rights activists and the ballot measure they want us to support in November. Their goals have little to do with protecting animals and the environment and everything to do with reducing production and consumption of meat products grown by Arizona and American farmers. Do not be fooled, hogwash is hogwash. The hogwash they are feeding you is that Arizona farmers do not treat their animals humanely or protect the environment because of modern and safer animal confinement practices. They will play on your emotions. They ignore decades of sound science. And they smear anyone who doesn't share their radical views, all to promote their extreme animal rights agenda. They did it in Florida in 2002. Now they've come to Arizona....
Trapper Kills Suspect Gator A trapper killed an 11-foot, 5-inch alligator Thursday morning that appears to be the reptile that killed a 23-year-old woman who was snorkeling in Juniper Creek on Sunday. The male alligator was caught on the fourth large hook baited with beef lung and left along the creek east of Lake George overnight, 300 to 400 yards from where Annmarie Campbell was killed. The body of Campbell, an artist from Paris, Tenn., and a former Marion County resident, was pulled from the reptile's jaws by her ex-stepfather and another man. The large alligator has marks on its snout as if it had been in a confrontation and has a stab wound in its right eyelid....
Young promises reprisal for vote on Tongass The House voted Thursday to prohibit the Forest Service from spending federal funds to build new logging roads in the Tongass National Forest. The Forest Service has lost an average of $40 million a year -- and $48 million last year -- to subsidize a dying logging industry that employs only 300 Alaskans, the sponsors of the measure said. "Think of that: (for) every job, $150,000 in taxpayer subsidies for that one job," said Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio. He said he's all for logging "but not when the taxpayers are being ripped off." The vote was 237-181. Most of the Democrats and 68 Republicans voted for it. Alaska Congressman Don Young said he was "adamantly opposed to this sneaky amendment." He said it violated the spirit of representative government, because it affects only his state, and he didn't want it. Taking a page from Sen. Ted Stevens' playbook, Young said he would make note of who voted against him and retaliate in future legislation. "Each one of you, think about this, in this room: This should be a representative form of government, and what you're doing is dead wrong, and I shall not forget it," he said....
Fire-defense costs searing o protect people from wildfire and restore the forests' health, a report released Thursday estimates 1.5 million acres in 10 Front Range counties must be "treated" by tree thinning and prescribed burns. The price tag: At an average cost of more than $400 an acre, treatment could hit $15 million annually for 40 years - or a total tab of $600 million. "The numbers are overwhelming," said Rocky Mountain regional forester Rick Cables. Pay now or pay later, Cables said, pointing out that Colorado's largest fire - the 138,000-acre Hayman in 2002 - cost $240 million in firefighting, economic losses and rehabilition. The money, he said, instead could have been used to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. The Front Range Fuels Partnership Roundtable, a consortium of 30 organizations formed in 2002 after the state's worst fire season, spent two years developing 10 recommendations on how to focus and speed up the work....
White House wants limits on competitive sourcing out of funding bill The Bush Administration wants Congress to alter language in pending appropriations legislation that prevents several key agencies—such as the Agriculture and Interior departments—from participating in certain E-government initiatives and limits the agency’s use of competitive sourcing. H.R. 5386, the Department of the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Appropriations Act for fiscal 2007, precludes the agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, from spending more than $3.4 million on competitive sourcing programs without first submitting a proposal to the congressional appropriations committees detailing a reprogramming of funds proposal. USDA’s Forest Service may not use more than $2.5 million for competitive sourcing activities, but is exempt from having to send a report. The language also prohibits the agencies from using funds in the bill for E-government projects like SAFECOM, a program led by the Homeland Security Department to improve public safety response among all levels of government, and Disaster Management....
Lightning brings rash of wildfires As predicted, the drought, combined with an abundance of natural fuels in the Gila National Forest and a rash of recent lightning strikes, have produced the first series of wildfires for the season. Nine blazes were reported burning throughout the forest Wednesday afternoon. Five of the fires were being staffed by a total of about 75 wildland firefighters and crews, including the Silver City and Gila Hotshot crews, seven forest service engines, a helicopter based in Reserve and a C-130 slurry tanker plane. Smokejumpers, who had just practiced a jump early Wednesday morning, were dispatched in their twin-engine Otter later in the afternoon to jump one of the blazes, officials said. Fire management officials at the local, state and federal level have been predicting an active fire season since the beginning of the year. Lightning storms that passed through the area on Monday night are blamed for the new blazes. Three fires were discovered on the Quemado Ranger District, four on the Reserve, one on the Black Range and one on the Glenwood Ranger District....
House panel's vote endangers Utah's wildlife protection plan A little over six months after Utah and other states submitted action plans to the Interior Department designed to keep at-risk wildlife off the Endangered Species List, a congressional committee has approved a budget that would slash federal funding for those state programs. The House Appropriations Committee this week approved an $18.5 million cut in state wildlife grant programs, a move, that if enacted, could cost Utah's Division of Wildlife Resources nearly $320,000 - almost a 40 percent cut from the originally proposed budget. And those reductions actually slice even deeper because much of that federal money is used to leverage funding from other sources. Though Capitol Hill battles remain to be fought - 170 representatives and 56 senators have signed a bipartisan letter urging the funding be restored - Utah wildlife officials say the long-term prognosis isn't good....
Researchers can't confirm rediscovery of ivory-billed woodpecker Three seasons of searching still have not produced the icon that would forever settle the dispute: a single photograph of a clearly identifiable ivory-billed woodpecker. "We probably wouldn't be truthful if we said we weren't a little disappointed. We've put a lot of effort into this," Cornell University researcher Ron Rohrbaugh said Thursday. Last year Cornell researchers stunned bird-lovers everywhere by announcing that the ivory-bill had been rediscovered after 60 years, by happenstance, in an Arkansas swamp. Before that, the magnificent bird was thought to have vanished along with the stately hardwood forests of the southern United States where it had flourished for centuries. Cornell, this nation's Citadel of ornithology in bucolic Ithaca, N.Y., said Thursday that it still believes the ivory-bill was spotted two years ago, but it no longer plans to go on spending $1 million a year, mostly from private donations but including some federal funds, to prove it. Critics say the inability to get a photograph of the bird supports their doubts about Cornell's original announcement. Before it ended last month, the most recent effort to locate the woodpecker involved 20 full-time biologists and more than 100 amateur volunteers, plus all the technology Cornell could muster: automatic sound recorders and camouflaged time-lapse cameras hidden deep in the forest, laser rangefinders, GPS units, even ultralight aircraft....
Environmentalists divided on Bush immigration plan Environmentalists are split over the impact of the Bush administration's plan to protect the southwestern U.S. border against illegal immigration while other groups are ignoring the debate altogether. The Center for Biological Diversity says sending in the National Guard, construction of border walls, low-flying aircraft and new roads will harm the desert environment and affect endangered species. Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and former Sierra Club director, says immigration leads to an explosive growth in population, which the environment cannot sustain. The heavy hitters on the environmental scene, however, are sitting on the sidelines of the policy battle including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth and the World Wildlife Fund....
Wolf foes howl at state managers Sheep, elk and dog carcasses, bones, skulls and wolf tracks the size of a human head—that's what two Croy Canyon residents claim is scattered around their property six miles west of Hailey. "Our dogs were bitten by wolves at three o'clock in the afternoon," said Jennifer Swigert, who lives with her husband Kevin, a fifth generation Idahoan, in a remote area of Croy Canyon. "I love animals, I always have, but this is insane—people are at a total risk of getting fanged up." The Swigerts, who attended a wolf management meeting Wednesday night with Idaho Fish and Game officials in Hailey, claim wolf numbers are growing in Croy Canyon and the animals are becoming increasingly aggressive towards dogs, horses, and humans....
Gillett pledges he'll rid Idaho of wolves Ron Gillett is determined to rid Idaho of wolves, and he's pledged that he won't quit until he's accomplished that goal. Gillett, the president of the Idaho Anti-Wolf Coalition, unsuccessfully tried to place the issue on the November 2006 ballot. To do so he needed 47,881 signatures from registered Idaho voters. He claims he collected about 40,000 signatures, but only about 13,500 were from registered voters. "On this first go-around we didn't tell anybody we were going to get the signatures, we said we'll try," Gillette said. "Mark my word, on this second go-around we will get it, no question." Gillett, who lives in Stanley and owns the Triangle C Ranch lodge, said wolves are the "most cruel, vicious predators in North America," and that he's concerned about the safety of his grandchildren. He added that wolves depredate livestock and are decimating elk herds, which is ruining his livelihood....
Going to the birds An evidentiary hearing in the state's lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management over its oil and gas drilling plans for Otero Mesa took a closer look at the federal agency's provisions to protect the aplomado falcon. U.S. District Court Judge Bruce D. Black held Wednesday's hearing to examine whether the BLM consulted and planned adequately for the impact their plans could have on the raptor's habitat. In June 2003, when the BLM was still evaluating its options for oil and gas development on the stretch of Chihuahuan Desert grassland, it said it needed to consult formally with the Fish and Wildlife Service because drilling was ''likely to adversely affect'' the bird of prey. In September of the same year, the agency reversed that opinion. Andrew Smith, a U.S. Department of Justice attorney representing the BLM, has said the BLM did consult, albeit informally, with the Fish and Wildlife Service and that the few documented falcon sightings in the Otero Mesa area did not warrant changes to the BLM's contested plan. The testimony of Joy Nicholopoulos, former head of ecological services for the Fish and Wildlife Service in New Mexico, confirmed his claims, and noted decision reversals are not unusual for federal agencies....
Predators Causing Big Losses to Livestock Farmers Cattle and calf losses from animal predators and non-predator causes in the United States totaled 4.05 million head in 2005, USDA's National Agriculture Statistics Service reported. Cattle and calf losses from animal predators totaled 190,000 head. This represented 4.7 percent of the total losses from all causes and resulted in a loss of $92.7 million to cattle farmers and ranchers. Coyotes and dogs caused the majority of cattle and calf losses accounting for 51.1 percent and 11.5 percent, respectively. Cattle and calf losses from non-predator causes totaled 3.86 million head or 95.3 percent of the total losses. Respiratory problems were the leading cause of non-predator deaths accounting for 28.7 percent, followed by digestive problems at 16.8 percent. Farmers and ranchers throughout the United States spent $199.1 million on non-lethal methods to control predators....
Former Hannibalian tracking Billy the Kid Five years ago former Hannibalian Steve Sederwall moved to New Mexico to begin an investigation to determine if the man buried there in 1881 as Billy the Kid was the real William Bonney. He does not believe that he was. Since then Sederwall and Lincoln County, N.M., Sheriff Tom Sullivan have traveled to several other states to investigate the stories of more than one man who had claimed to be Billy after the death of the one buried as Billy in Lincoln County, N.M. The mystery has not been solved, but Sederwall is currently investigating the life of a John Miller, who had told people he was the real William Bonney. Sederwall explained one more incident that is being investigated. "The Kid's attorney was A.J. Fountain, and he and his 8-year-old son Henry were murdered in Lincoln County. They never found the bodies. We may be able to find those bodies."....
DNA twist to Old West case An answer to the John Wesley Hillmon mystery might be found in the DNA, after all. Work begins early today to identify the coffin's remains at the 127- year-old grave of the man at the center of an epic insurance fraud case. And now, the 11th-hour discovery of a Hillmon descendant could make the job much easier. University of Colorado law professor Mimi Wesson, who is leading the Hillmon exhumation along with CU anthropology professor Dennis Van Gerven, received a surprise e-mail last month from Sandra Hillmon. Hillmon, a rancher from Lawrence born in 1848, was reportedly shot accidentally by his traveling companion March 17, 1879, as the two were making camp near Medicine Lodge, Kan. Because Hillmon was covered by no fewer than three life insurance policies, the companies holding those policies withheld payment, suspecting an attempt at fraud by Hillmon, his wife Sallie, and Hillmon's camp mate. The dispute was the subject of six trials over 20 years, and the case twice reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In the first Supreme Court ruling in Mutual Life Insurance Co. vs. Hillmon, the court in 1892 created what endures today as the "state of mind" exception to the hearsay rule. Hearsay is an out-of-court statement presented in court as true and usually ruled not admissible....
Thursday, May 18, 2006
FLE
Legal loophole emerges in NSA spy program An AT&T attorney indicated in federal court on Wednesday that the Bush administration may have provided legal authorization for the telecommunications company to open its network to the National Security Agency. Federal law may "authorize and in some cases require telecommunications companies to furnish information" to the executive branch, said Bradford Berenson, who was associate White House counsel when President Bush authorized the NSA surveillance program in late 2001 and is now a partner at the Sidley Austin law firm in Washington, D.C. Far from being complicit in an illegal spying scheme, Berenson said, "AT&T is essentially an innocent bystander." AT&T may be referring to an obscure section of federal law, 18 U.S.C. 2511, which permits a telecommunications company to provide "information" and "facilities" to the federal government as long as the attorney general authorizes it. The authorization must come in the form of "certification in writing by...the Attorney General of the United States that no warrant or court order is required by law." Information that is not yet public "would be exculpatory and would show AT&T's conduct in the best possible light," Berenson said. But he did not acknowledge any details about the company's alleged participation in the NSA's surveillance program, which has ignited an ongoing debate on Capitol Hill and led to this class-action lawsuit being filed in January by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Some legal experts say that AT&T may be off the hook if former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in office at the time the NSA program began, provided a letter of certification. (Other officials, including the deputy attorney general and state attorneys general, also are authorized to write these letters.) Injecting additional complexity is 18 U.S.C. 2511's prohibition on disclosure. It says that telecommunication companies may not "disclose the existence of any interception or surveillance or the device used to accomplish the interception or surveillance"--except if required by law. Unlawful disclosures are subject to fines....
Bush denies eavesdropping on U.S. phones President Bush insisted Tuesday that the United States does not listen in on domestic telephone conversations among ordinary Americans. But he declined to specifically discuss the government’s alleged compiling of phone records, or whether it would amount to an invasion of privacy. “We do not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval,” Bush said in an East Room news conference with Australian Prime Minister John Howard. “What I’ve told the American people is we’ll protect them against an al-Qaida attack. And we’ll do that within the law,” Bush said. The president’s new press secretary, Tony Snow, later insisted that Bush’s comments did not amount to a confirmation of published reports that the NSA’s surveillance was broader than initially acknowledged and that it included secretly collecting millions of phone-call records. Bush said, “This government will continue to guard the privacy of the American people. But if al-Qaida is calling into the United States, we want to know, and we want to know why.” However, he did not respond directly when asked whether it was a violation of privacy for the National Security Agency to seek phone records from telephone companies....
Verizon denies giving NSA phone records Verizon Communications Inc. says it did not give the government records of millions of phone calls, joining fellow phone company BellSouth in disputing key assertions in a USA Today article. The denials leave open the possibility that the National Security Agency requested customer calling data from long-distance companies like AT&T, Sprint and MCI in 2001, but not from companies that were mainly local phone companies, such as Verizon. Verizon has not provided customer call data to the NSA, nor had it been asked to do so, the company said in an e-mailed statement Tuesday. The statement came a day after BellSouth Corp. issued a similar denial. "One of the most glaring and repeated falsehoods in the media reporting is the assertion that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Verizon was approached by NSA and entered into an arrangement to provide the NSA with data from its customers' domestic calls," the statement read....
Bush agrees to full NSA oversight by Congress The White House, in an abrupt reversal, will allow the full Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees to review President George W. Bush's domestic spying program, congressional officials said on Tuesday. Two days before the program was expected to dominate Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden's Senate confirmation hearing as CIA director, the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House panels said separately that Bush had agreed to allow full committee oversight of his Terrorist Surveillance Program. The program, which allows the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens without first obtaining warrants, has stirred an outcry in Congress among lawmakers who believe Bush may have overstepped his constitutional authority. Up to now, the White House has sought to avoid full committee oversight by limiting briefings to subcommittees from each panel. Initially, the administration shared program details only with the chairmen and vice chairmen of the committees and party leaders in the House and Senate....
The Right Call on Phone Records On Thursday, USA Today reported that three U.S. telecommunications companies have been voluntarily providing the National Security Agency with anonymized domestic telephone records -- that is, records stripped of individually identifiable data, such as names and place of residence. If true, the architect of this program deserves our thanks and probably a medal. That architect was presumably Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and President Bush's nominee to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The potential value of such anonymized domestic telephone records is best understood through a hypothetical example. Suppose a telephone associated with Mohamed Atta had called a domestic telephone number A. And then suppose that A had called domestic telephone number B. And then suppose that B had called C. And then suppose that domestic telephone number C had called a telephone number associated with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The most effective way to recognize such patterns is the computerized analysis of billions of phone records. The large-scale analysis of anonymized data can pinpoint individuals -- at home or abroad -- who warrant more intrusive investigative or intelligence techniques, subject to all safeguards normally associated with those techniques. Clearly, there is a compelling national interest in understanding and penetrating such terrorist networks. If the people associated with domestic telephone numbers A, B and C are inside the United States and had facilitated the Sept. 11 attacks, perhaps they are facilitating a terrorist plot now. The American people rightly expect their government to detect and prevent such plots. The Telecommunications Act of 1934, as amended, generally prohibits the release of "individually identifiable customer proprietary network information" except under force of law or with the approval of the customer. But, according to USA Today, the telephone records voluntarily provided to the NSA had been anonymized. In addition, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 explicitly permits telecommunications companies to provide customer records to the government if the government asks for them. So it would appear that the companies have been acting not just in the public interest, but also within the law and without encroaching on the privacy of any of their customers....
Nothing Personal When I shop at the Giant, because the bar code on my Bonus Card is no longer readable, I instead use an "alternate ID": my phone number. When I call my cable company, the service rep can use my phone number to find my records. When I get a new credit card in the mail and call to activate it, the credit card company can tell it's me because of the phone line I'm using. According to defenders of the Bush administration's domestic phone call database, which includes regularly updated information about the calls made and received by some 200 million Americans, my grocery store, my cable company, and my credit card company can identify me based on my phone number, but the National Security Agency can't. At least, that's the implication when people say the database is legal because the information in it has been "anonymized"--i.e., stripped of names and addresses. But as USA Today pointed out when it revealed the existence of this program, phone numbers can readily be linked to names and addresses using publicly available information. The claim that there's really nothing personal or private about the phone call records--which tell the NSA who calls whom, when, and for how long--is therefore a tenuous basis for defending the legality of data collection that ordinarily requires a court order or the customer's consent. Tenuous legal arguments are what we've come to expect from the Bush administration when it defends controversial measures aimed at fighting terrorism, including coercive interrogation techniques, improvised military tribunals, and the indefinite detention of unilaterally identified "enemy combatants." The arguments are weak partly because President Bush doesn't really think he needs them. When it comes to terrorism, as Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch observe in a new Cato Institute analysis of the president's constitutional record, "the Bush administration comes perilously close" to Richard Nixon's position: "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." Officials at Qwest, the one major phone company that refused to give the NSA its customers' records, were not persuaded by that argument. They knew they could face hefty penalties under at least two statutes, the Communications Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, if they revealed this information without their customers' consent unless they were legally required to do so....
Judge Keeps Papers Sealed in AT&T Spy Suit Secret documents that allegedly detail the surveillance of AT&T phone lines under the Bush administration's domestic spying program can be used in a lawsuit against the telephone giant, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, but the records will remain sealed. U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker rejected a bid by AT&T Inc. to return the records that were given to the privacy advocate Electronic Frontier Foundation by a former AT&T technician. But Walker said the records would remain under seal until it can be determined whether they reveal trade secrets. ``The best course of action is to preserve the status quo,'' Walker said. The hearing is the first in a lawsuit challenging the administration's secretive domestic surveillance program. The lawsuit, filed by EFF in U.S. District Court, accuses AT&T of illegally cooperating with the National Security Agency to make communications on the company's networks available to the spy agency without warrants. ``They are asking this court to suppress evidence of AT&T's criminal activity,'' EFF lawyer Maria Morris said in arguing that the records remain part of the case....
Congress may make ISPs snoop on you A prominent Republican on Capitol Hill has prepared legislation that would rewrite Internet privacy rules by requiring that logs of Americans' online activities be stored, CNET News.com has learned. The proposal comes just weeks after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Internet service providers should retain records of user activities for a "reasonable amount of time," a move that represented a dramatic shift in the Bush administration's views on privacy. Wisconsin Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is proposing that ISPs be required to record information about Americans' online activities so that police can more easily "conduct criminal investigations." Executives at companies that fail to comply would be fined and imprisoned for up to one year. Until Gonzales' speech, the Bush administration had explicitly opposed laws requiring data retention, saying it had "serious reservations" about them. But after the European Parliament last December approved such a requirement for Internet, telephone and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers, top administration officials began talking about it more favorably....
The Ultimate Net Monitoring Tool The equipment that technician Mark Klein learned was installed in the National Security Agency's "secret room" inside AT&T's San Francisco switching office isn't some sinister Big Brother box designed solely to help governments eavesdrop on citizens' internet communications. Rather, it's a powerful commercial network-analysis product with all sorts of valuable uses for network operators. It just happens to be capable of doing things that make it one of the best internet spy tools around. "Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls." Narus' product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It's renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they race by at up to 10 Gbps. Internet companies can install the analyzers at every entrance and exit point of their networks, at their "cores" or centers, or both. The analyzers communicate with centralized "logic servers" running specialized applications. The combination can keep track of, analyze and record nearly every form of internet communication, whether e-mail, instant message, video streams or VOIP phone calls that cross the network....
Bush stomps on Fourth Amendment THE ESCALATING controversy over the National Security Agency's data mining program illustrates yet again how the Bush administration's intrusions on personal privacy based on a post-9/11 mantra of ''national security" directly threaten one of the enduring sources of that security: the Fourth Amendment ''right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." The Supreme Court held in 1967 that electronic eavesdropping is a ''search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, recognizing that our system of free expression precludes treating each use of a telephone as an invitation to Big Brother to listen in. By 2001, the court had come to see how new technology could arm the government with information previously obtainable only through old-fashioned spying and could thereby convert mere observation -- for example, the heat patterns on a house's exterior walls -- to a ''search" requiring a warrant. To read the Constitution otherwise, the court reasoned, would leave us ''at the mercy of advancing technology" and erode the ''privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted." This decision, emphasizing the privacy existing when the Bill of Rights was originally ratified in 1791, was no liberal holdover in conservative times. Its author was Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the dissent. This issue should not divide liberals from conservatives, Democrats from Republicans. These two decisions greatly undermine the aberrant 1979 ruling on which defenders of the NSA program rely, in which a bare Supreme Court majority said it doubted that people have any ''expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial," since they ''must 'convey' [such] numbers to the telephone company," which in turn can share them with others for purposes like ''detecting fraud and preventing violations of law." Unconvincing then, those words surely ring hollow today, now that information technology has made feasible the NSA program whose cover was blown last week. That program profiles virtually every American's phone conversations, giving government instant access to detailed knowledge of the numbers, and thus indirectly the identities, of whomever we phone; when and for how long; and what other calls the person phoned has made or received. As Justice Stewart recognized in 1979, a list of all numbers called ''easily could reveal . . . the most intimate details of a person's life."
Mexico vows to sue if Guard detains Mexico said yesterday that it would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if National Guard troops on the border become directly involved in detaining migrants. Mexican border officials said they worried that sending troops to heavily trafficked regions would push migrants into more perilous areas of the U.S.-Mexico border to avoid detection. President Bush announced Monday that he would send 6,000 National Guard troops to the 2,000-mile border, but they would provide intelligence and surveillance support to U.S. Border Patrol agents, not catch and detain illegal aliens. "If there is a real wave of rights abuses, if we see the National Guard starting to directly participate in detaining people ... we would immediately start filing lawsuits through our consulates," Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez told a Mexico City radio station. He did not offer further details. Mexican officials worry that the crackdown will lead to more deaths. Since Washington toughened security in Texas and California in 1994, migrants have flooded Arizona's hard-to-patrol desert, and deaths have spiked. Migrant groups estimate that 500 people died trying to cross the border last year. The Border Patrol reported 473 deaths in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. In Ciudad Juarez, Julieta Nunez Gonzalez, local representative of the Mexican government's National Immigration Institute, said yesterday that she would ask the government to send its migrant protection force, known as Grupo Beta, to more remote sections of the border....
Bush Turns to Big Military Contractors for Border Control The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders. Using some of the same high-priced, high-tech tools these companies have already put to work in Iraq and Afghanistan — like unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment — the military contractors are zeroing in on the rivers, deserts, mountains and settled areas that separate Mexico and Canada from the United States. It is a humbling acknowledgment that despite more than a decade of initiatives with macho-sounding names, like Operation Hold the Line in El Paso or Operation Gate Keeper in San Diego, the federal government has repeatedly failed on its own to gain control of the land borders. Through its Secure Border Initiative, the Bush administration intends to not simply buy an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders — a tactic it has also already tried, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, with extremely limited success. It is also asking the contractors to devise and build a whole new border strategy that ties together the personnel, technology and physical barriers....
Legal loophole emerges in NSA spy program An AT&T attorney indicated in federal court on Wednesday that the Bush administration may have provided legal authorization for the telecommunications company to open its network to the National Security Agency. Federal law may "authorize and in some cases require telecommunications companies to furnish information" to the executive branch, said Bradford Berenson, who was associate White House counsel when President Bush authorized the NSA surveillance program in late 2001 and is now a partner at the Sidley Austin law firm in Washington, D.C. Far from being complicit in an illegal spying scheme, Berenson said, "AT&T is essentially an innocent bystander." AT&T may be referring to an obscure section of federal law, 18 U.S.C. 2511, which permits a telecommunications company to provide "information" and "facilities" to the federal government as long as the attorney general authorizes it. The authorization must come in the form of "certification in writing by...the Attorney General of the United States that no warrant or court order is required by law." Information that is not yet public "would be exculpatory and would show AT&T's conduct in the best possible light," Berenson said. But he did not acknowledge any details about the company's alleged participation in the NSA's surveillance program, which has ignited an ongoing debate on Capitol Hill and led to this class-action lawsuit being filed in January by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Some legal experts say that AT&T may be off the hook if former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in office at the time the NSA program began, provided a letter of certification. (Other officials, including the deputy attorney general and state attorneys general, also are authorized to write these letters.) Injecting additional complexity is 18 U.S.C. 2511's prohibition on disclosure. It says that telecommunication companies may not "disclose the existence of any interception or surveillance or the device used to accomplish the interception or surveillance"--except if required by law. Unlawful disclosures are subject to fines....
Bush denies eavesdropping on U.S. phones President Bush insisted Tuesday that the United States does not listen in on domestic telephone conversations among ordinary Americans. But he declined to specifically discuss the government’s alleged compiling of phone records, or whether it would amount to an invasion of privacy. “We do not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval,” Bush said in an East Room news conference with Australian Prime Minister John Howard. “What I’ve told the American people is we’ll protect them against an al-Qaida attack. And we’ll do that within the law,” Bush said. The president’s new press secretary, Tony Snow, later insisted that Bush’s comments did not amount to a confirmation of published reports that the NSA’s surveillance was broader than initially acknowledged and that it included secretly collecting millions of phone-call records. Bush said, “This government will continue to guard the privacy of the American people. But if al-Qaida is calling into the United States, we want to know, and we want to know why.” However, he did not respond directly when asked whether it was a violation of privacy for the National Security Agency to seek phone records from telephone companies....
Verizon denies giving NSA phone records Verizon Communications Inc. says it did not give the government records of millions of phone calls, joining fellow phone company BellSouth in disputing key assertions in a USA Today article. The denials leave open the possibility that the National Security Agency requested customer calling data from long-distance companies like AT&T, Sprint and MCI in 2001, but not from companies that were mainly local phone companies, such as Verizon. Verizon has not provided customer call data to the NSA, nor had it been asked to do so, the company said in an e-mailed statement Tuesday. The statement came a day after BellSouth Corp. issued a similar denial. "One of the most glaring and repeated falsehoods in the media reporting is the assertion that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Verizon was approached by NSA and entered into an arrangement to provide the NSA with data from its customers' domestic calls," the statement read....
Bush agrees to full NSA oversight by Congress The White House, in an abrupt reversal, will allow the full Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees to review President George W. Bush's domestic spying program, congressional officials said on Tuesday. Two days before the program was expected to dominate Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden's Senate confirmation hearing as CIA director, the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House panels said separately that Bush had agreed to allow full committee oversight of his Terrorist Surveillance Program. The program, which allows the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens without first obtaining warrants, has stirred an outcry in Congress among lawmakers who believe Bush may have overstepped his constitutional authority. Up to now, the White House has sought to avoid full committee oversight by limiting briefings to subcommittees from each panel. Initially, the administration shared program details only with the chairmen and vice chairmen of the committees and party leaders in the House and Senate....
The Right Call on Phone Records On Thursday, USA Today reported that three U.S. telecommunications companies have been voluntarily providing the National Security Agency with anonymized domestic telephone records -- that is, records stripped of individually identifiable data, such as names and place of residence. If true, the architect of this program deserves our thanks and probably a medal. That architect was presumably Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and President Bush's nominee to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The potential value of such anonymized domestic telephone records is best understood through a hypothetical example. Suppose a telephone associated with Mohamed Atta had called a domestic telephone number A. And then suppose that A had called domestic telephone number B. And then suppose that B had called C. And then suppose that domestic telephone number C had called a telephone number associated with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The most effective way to recognize such patterns is the computerized analysis of billions of phone records. The large-scale analysis of anonymized data can pinpoint individuals -- at home or abroad -- who warrant more intrusive investigative or intelligence techniques, subject to all safeguards normally associated with those techniques. Clearly, there is a compelling national interest in understanding and penetrating such terrorist networks. If the people associated with domestic telephone numbers A, B and C are inside the United States and had facilitated the Sept. 11 attacks, perhaps they are facilitating a terrorist plot now. The American people rightly expect their government to detect and prevent such plots. The Telecommunications Act of 1934, as amended, generally prohibits the release of "individually identifiable customer proprietary network information" except under force of law or with the approval of the customer. But, according to USA Today, the telephone records voluntarily provided to the NSA had been anonymized. In addition, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 explicitly permits telecommunications companies to provide customer records to the government if the government asks for them. So it would appear that the companies have been acting not just in the public interest, but also within the law and without encroaching on the privacy of any of their customers....
Nothing Personal When I shop at the Giant, because the bar code on my Bonus Card is no longer readable, I instead use an "alternate ID": my phone number. When I call my cable company, the service rep can use my phone number to find my records. When I get a new credit card in the mail and call to activate it, the credit card company can tell it's me because of the phone line I'm using. According to defenders of the Bush administration's domestic phone call database, which includes regularly updated information about the calls made and received by some 200 million Americans, my grocery store, my cable company, and my credit card company can identify me based on my phone number, but the National Security Agency can't. At least, that's the implication when people say the database is legal because the information in it has been "anonymized"--i.e., stripped of names and addresses. But as USA Today pointed out when it revealed the existence of this program, phone numbers can readily be linked to names and addresses using publicly available information. The claim that there's really nothing personal or private about the phone call records--which tell the NSA who calls whom, when, and for how long--is therefore a tenuous basis for defending the legality of data collection that ordinarily requires a court order or the customer's consent. Tenuous legal arguments are what we've come to expect from the Bush administration when it defends controversial measures aimed at fighting terrorism, including coercive interrogation techniques, improvised military tribunals, and the indefinite detention of unilaterally identified "enemy combatants." The arguments are weak partly because President Bush doesn't really think he needs them. When it comes to terrorism, as Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch observe in a new Cato Institute analysis of the president's constitutional record, "the Bush administration comes perilously close" to Richard Nixon's position: "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." Officials at Qwest, the one major phone company that refused to give the NSA its customers' records, were not persuaded by that argument. They knew they could face hefty penalties under at least two statutes, the Communications Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, if they revealed this information without their customers' consent unless they were legally required to do so....
Judge Keeps Papers Sealed in AT&T Spy Suit Secret documents that allegedly detail the surveillance of AT&T phone lines under the Bush administration's domestic spying program can be used in a lawsuit against the telephone giant, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, but the records will remain sealed. U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker rejected a bid by AT&T Inc. to return the records that were given to the privacy advocate Electronic Frontier Foundation by a former AT&T technician. But Walker said the records would remain under seal until it can be determined whether they reveal trade secrets. ``The best course of action is to preserve the status quo,'' Walker said. The hearing is the first in a lawsuit challenging the administration's secretive domestic surveillance program. The lawsuit, filed by EFF in U.S. District Court, accuses AT&T of illegally cooperating with the National Security Agency to make communications on the company's networks available to the spy agency without warrants. ``They are asking this court to suppress evidence of AT&T's criminal activity,'' EFF lawyer Maria Morris said in arguing that the records remain part of the case....
Congress may make ISPs snoop on you A prominent Republican on Capitol Hill has prepared legislation that would rewrite Internet privacy rules by requiring that logs of Americans' online activities be stored, CNET News.com has learned. The proposal comes just weeks after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Internet service providers should retain records of user activities for a "reasonable amount of time," a move that represented a dramatic shift in the Bush administration's views on privacy. Wisconsin Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is proposing that ISPs be required to record information about Americans' online activities so that police can more easily "conduct criminal investigations." Executives at companies that fail to comply would be fined and imprisoned for up to one year. Until Gonzales' speech, the Bush administration had explicitly opposed laws requiring data retention, saying it had "serious reservations" about them. But after the European Parliament last December approved such a requirement for Internet, telephone and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers, top administration officials began talking about it more favorably....
The Ultimate Net Monitoring Tool The equipment that technician Mark Klein learned was installed in the National Security Agency's "secret room" inside AT&T's San Francisco switching office isn't some sinister Big Brother box designed solely to help governments eavesdrop on citizens' internet communications. Rather, it's a powerful commercial network-analysis product with all sorts of valuable uses for network operators. It just happens to be capable of doing things that make it one of the best internet spy tools around. "Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls." Narus' product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It's renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they race by at up to 10 Gbps. Internet companies can install the analyzers at every entrance and exit point of their networks, at their "cores" or centers, or both. The analyzers communicate with centralized "logic servers" running specialized applications. The combination can keep track of, analyze and record nearly every form of internet communication, whether e-mail, instant message, video streams or VOIP phone calls that cross the network....
Bush stomps on Fourth Amendment THE ESCALATING controversy over the National Security Agency's data mining program illustrates yet again how the Bush administration's intrusions on personal privacy based on a post-9/11 mantra of ''national security" directly threaten one of the enduring sources of that security: the Fourth Amendment ''right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." The Supreme Court held in 1967 that electronic eavesdropping is a ''search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, recognizing that our system of free expression precludes treating each use of a telephone as an invitation to Big Brother to listen in. By 2001, the court had come to see how new technology could arm the government with information previously obtainable only through old-fashioned spying and could thereby convert mere observation -- for example, the heat patterns on a house's exterior walls -- to a ''search" requiring a warrant. To read the Constitution otherwise, the court reasoned, would leave us ''at the mercy of advancing technology" and erode the ''privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted." This decision, emphasizing the privacy existing when the Bill of Rights was originally ratified in 1791, was no liberal holdover in conservative times. Its author was Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the dissent. This issue should not divide liberals from conservatives, Democrats from Republicans. These two decisions greatly undermine the aberrant 1979 ruling on which defenders of the NSA program rely, in which a bare Supreme Court majority said it doubted that people have any ''expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial," since they ''must 'convey' [such] numbers to the telephone company," which in turn can share them with others for purposes like ''detecting fraud and preventing violations of law." Unconvincing then, those words surely ring hollow today, now that information technology has made feasible the NSA program whose cover was blown last week. That program profiles virtually every American's phone conversations, giving government instant access to detailed knowledge of the numbers, and thus indirectly the identities, of whomever we phone; when and for how long; and what other calls the person phoned has made or received. As Justice Stewart recognized in 1979, a list of all numbers called ''easily could reveal . . . the most intimate details of a person's life."
Mexico vows to sue if Guard detains Mexico said yesterday that it would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if National Guard troops on the border become directly involved in detaining migrants. Mexican border officials said they worried that sending troops to heavily trafficked regions would push migrants into more perilous areas of the U.S.-Mexico border to avoid detection. President Bush announced Monday that he would send 6,000 National Guard troops to the 2,000-mile border, but they would provide intelligence and surveillance support to U.S. Border Patrol agents, not catch and detain illegal aliens. "If there is a real wave of rights abuses, if we see the National Guard starting to directly participate in detaining people ... we would immediately start filing lawsuits through our consulates," Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez told a Mexico City radio station. He did not offer further details. Mexican officials worry that the crackdown will lead to more deaths. Since Washington toughened security in Texas and California in 1994, migrants have flooded Arizona's hard-to-patrol desert, and deaths have spiked. Migrant groups estimate that 500 people died trying to cross the border last year. The Border Patrol reported 473 deaths in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. In Ciudad Juarez, Julieta Nunez Gonzalez, local representative of the Mexican government's National Immigration Institute, said yesterday that she would ask the government to send its migrant protection force, known as Grupo Beta, to more remote sections of the border....
Bush Turns to Big Military Contractors for Border Control The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders. Using some of the same high-priced, high-tech tools these companies have already put to work in Iraq and Afghanistan — like unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment — the military contractors are zeroing in on the rivers, deserts, mountains and settled areas that separate Mexico and Canada from the United States. It is a humbling acknowledgment that despite more than a decade of initiatives with macho-sounding names, like Operation Hold the Line in El Paso or Operation Gate Keeper in San Diego, the federal government has repeatedly failed on its own to gain control of the land borders. Through its Secure Border Initiative, the Bush administration intends to not simply buy an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders — a tactic it has also already tried, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, with extremely limited success. It is also asking the contractors to devise and build a whole new border strategy that ties together the personnel, technology and physical barriers....
PLF UNVEILS THE RAPANOS BLOG
Oral argument has been held, and a decision is pending, in Rapanos v. United States, Pacific Legal Foundation's latest case before the United States Supreme Court. In order to keep the media and public up to date on this landmark environmental law litigation, PLF today goes "live" with the RAPANOS BLOG dedicated to news and commentary on the case. In Rapanos, PLF is challenging an astonishing federal power grab, a scheme that could have the feds micromanaging private property nationwide. Traditionally, zoning has been the prerogative of local governments, in keeping with the Constitution's limits on the national government in our federal system. But in recent years, federal regulators have attempted to become arbiters of land use through a contorted interpretation of the Clean Water Act. The Act's plain language gives the federal government oversight over property that abuts "navigable waters." In defiance of common sense, the feds have now defined that term to mean almost any water, anywhere. As Investors Business Daily puts it, "If collected rainwater drains into a gully, thence into a ditch, thence into a river, it's now deemed under government control." Thus, the predicament of PLF's client, John Rapanos: The feds claim the right to nix his plans to develop his property in Michigan--even though it is miles from the nearest "navigable water." The Christian Science Monitor calls Rapanos "a landmark case over the scope of federal power" to regulate private property....
Oral argument has been held, and a decision is pending, in Rapanos v. United States, Pacific Legal Foundation's latest case before the United States Supreme Court. In order to keep the media and public up to date on this landmark environmental law litigation, PLF today goes "live" with the RAPANOS BLOG dedicated to news and commentary on the case. In Rapanos, PLF is challenging an astonishing federal power grab, a scheme that could have the feds micromanaging private property nationwide. Traditionally, zoning has been the prerogative of local governments, in keeping with the Constitution's limits on the national government in our federal system. But in recent years, federal regulators have attempted to become arbiters of land use through a contorted interpretation of the Clean Water Act. The Act's plain language gives the federal government oversight over property that abuts "navigable waters." In defiance of common sense, the feds have now defined that term to mean almost any water, anywhere. As Investors Business Daily puts it, "If collected rainwater drains into a gully, thence into a ditch, thence into a river, it's now deemed under government control." Thus, the predicament of PLF's client, John Rapanos: The feds claim the right to nix his plans to develop his property in Michigan--even though it is miles from the nearest "navigable water." The Christian Science Monitor calls Rapanos "a landmark case over the scope of federal power" to regulate private property....
NEWS ROUNDUP
Plan protects both wild, domestic sheep The recent decision on bighorn sheep in the Medicine Bow Forest Plan shows that participatory democracy is not for sissies. Nor for fools. Laramie’s Biodiversity Associates was vocal regarding the outcome of a decision on bighorn sheep habitat, but its opinion expressed more heat than light. If this small group had prevailed in its appeal of the Forest Plan, the result would have been less habitat for Wyoming’s wildlife, a decrease in the likelihood that Wyoming citizens would lend their time and expertise to collaborative problem-solving, and the loss of an important economic and management component provided by several long-time ranching families and their communities. As it is, the group further alienated the folks who should be its allies in trying to preserve the state’s healthy ecosystems, habitat and trademark vistas in the face of massive energy development. The issue is the management of domestic sheep herds, and their potential conflict with wild bighorn sheep. The two subspecies do not compete for habitat, but some studies have shown disease transmission from domestic sheep to bighorns. A natural separation is the best way to keep the animals apart. For three and a half years, the Wyoming Statewide Bighorn/Domestic Sheep Interaction Working Group met and labored in order to craft a sensible and operable plan to manage for a healthy future for Wyoming’s bighorn sheep population, while maintaining the viability of domestic sheep ranches. The members, who were wildlife biologists, environmentalists, ranchers and government officials, produced a thoughtful and practical set of recommendations....
Living on the fence – Catholic rancher copes daily with illegal immigration Spread out on 42,000 acres of beautiful mountains and high desert valleys in southern Cochise County, the Krentz family ranch sits just miles from the International Border. A rancher all her life and having grown up in the area, Susan Krentz knows every square inch of the property like the back of her hand. The ranch has been in the family for generations dating back before Arizona became a state. Standing about five and a half feet tall, Susan’s dusty boots and jeans tells the story of hard work on a ranch. Taking on the responsibility of working such as large ranch is shared by her husband, and daughter. In the forest above her home where she hiked as a child, signs posted by the United States government warn people that illegal immigration and human smuggling may be encountered in the area. For the last decade, she has seen a major increase in the number of immigrants on her property. In the first week of May, Krentz said Border Patrol removed more people from her ranch than the number of cattle that graze the land. “In eight days, we had 500 people removed from our ranch. That is a tremendous amount of people to find. Border Patrol tells us for every person that they find an estimated five to 10 slip into the desert,” she said....
Ranchers say border boundaries not always clear s it possible to accidentally end up in Mexico? Some cattle ranchers in Southern Arizona say, "Yes." They say there are no clear borders on their land and it's hard to tell when you've stepped into another country. "If I fix it, they'll just cut it again," says cattle rancher Bob Heilig who owns 13,000 acres. That's about nineteen square miles of land that borders Mexico; land that, he says, is hard to contain. "Snip, snip, snip and they just go right on through," Heilig says of illegal immigrants who travel his ranch daily, carrying wire cutters. Helig took News 4 on a tour, showing how easy it is to get lost because there are no clear markings dividing the border. Heilig says the most frustrating part for ranchers when fences are cut is that it's up to them to either fix the wire or lose their cattle....
Air Force: Range fire caused by air training munitions There is no vegetation to hold the dusty land in place after a fire burned about 27,000 acres of rangeland in southeastern New Mexico. A heavy coat of dirt sticks to the windows and covers the floors of Jeff Essary’s home. Reminders of the fire that devoured more than 700 acres of his land are nearly constant, he said. Essary, his newborn son, his daughter and his wife were among 100 families evacuated from their Floyd homes Nov. 30 after a fire spread from the Melrose Bombing Range. The wind-driven fire was caused by training munitions, according to an Air Force press release issued Tuesday. A B-1B bomber from Texas on a training flight over the Melrose Bombing Range released a bomb dummy, and its spotting charge — roughly equivalent to the charge of a shotgun shell — sparked the blaze in the arid grassland....
Wild-horse activists seek to halt roundup Mustang advocates and Gov. Bill Richardson want the Carson National Forest to stop a scheduled summer roundup of wild horses from the Jicarilla Ranger District, and instead use chemical contraception to control herd size. One concern is the possible sale to slaughterhouses of older animals that go unadopted, said Patience O’Dowd , founder of the Wild Horse Observers Association in Placitas. Also, darting the horses with a chemical contraceptive saves on the cost of transporting and feeding the animals until adoption time, she said. “It makes sense on a taxpayer level, and it makes sense on a humane level,” O’Dowd said. Kendall Clark, acting forest supervisor for the Carson National Forest, said the agency is willing to consider using contraception , but that the plan to gather 75 horses this summer from the Jicarilla district — between the Jicarilla Apache tribal lands and Bernalillo — will go forward....
Walden-backed forest bill approved U.S. Rep. Greg Walden's controversial bill to speed the ability of federal forestland managers to make timber salvage decisions is now on its way to the Senate. The Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act HR 4200, co-authored by U.S. Reps. Brian Baird, D-Wash., and Stephanie Herseth, D-S.D., passed the House by a vote of 243 to 182. "Thousands upon thousands of foresters, scientists, firefighters, local government officials, and private landowners agree: Federal forestland managers need the authorities provided by the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act for the future of America's national forests," Walden, a Republican from Hood River and chairman of the Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, said in a prepared statement. The bill gives natural resource managers 30 days after a wildfire or other natural catastrophe affecting more than 1,000 acres of public lands to come up with a plan, followed by a 90-day public comment period, Walden said. Administrative or judicial appeals still would be allowed following the comment period, he said....
Definition of ‘road’ travels gray area But amid the discussions over the future of Colorado's roadless areas, there's confusion over what exactly a road is and what kind of motorized vehicles will be allowed in roadless areas if they're protected. Some roads in the national forest may not be considered a road at all and could still legally carry motor vehicle traffic through a roadless area. Many off-road vehicles are welcome in roadless areas because they use trails, not roads. So, what kind of road comes to mind when people talk about roadless areas? "The general public thinks about it the way you'd look it up in Webster's," said Vera Smith, conservation director for the Colorado Mountain Club. "A paved road or a dirt road you can take a regular vehicle on." The definition of a road depends on which Forest Service regulation you're reading. The 2001 Clinton-era Roadless Rule, which under its 2005 rewrite still protects 58 million acres of national forestland nationwide until states make recommendations to the Forest Service for roadless areas' fate, defines a road according to a definition under Title 36 in the Federal Register: A road must be a motor vehicle travelway over 50 inches wide unless designated or managed as a trail. The Roadless Area Task Force also uses the definition for a road found in Title 36. The WRNF 2002 forest plan says that roadless areas have no motor vehicle paths greater than 50 inches wide. There is "nothing that prohibits a motorized trail (in a roadless area) that is for vehicles under 50 inches," said WRNF forest planner Rich Doak....
USDA FOREST SERVICE LAUNCHES NATIONAL EFFORT TO DEVELOP CONSERVATION LEADERS OF TOMORROW U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service today launched its new and improved Junior Forest Ranger (JFR) program by enrolling nearly 100 fifth-grade students from Denver’s Ellis Elementary School into the conservation education program. "The future of our natural resources and their management will one day be in the hands of today’s youth," said Kent Connaughton, Forest Service associate deputy chief for state and private forestry, at an event here at Recreation Equipment Inc.'s flagship store. "The new JFR program can help prepare our young people for this important responsibility by connecting them to the land and fostering their interest in effective land stewardship." First introduced in 1954 as part of a public service campaign for the Smokey Bear fire prevention program, the JFR program was designed to encourage a fire prevention ethic in children. Within three years, one million children were recruited, which led to Smokey being assigned his own zip code. The updated program includes more components to enrich children’s (ages 7 to 13) understanding of the spectrum of land management activities, covering topics such as fire ecology and ecosystem management. Upon enrolling in the program, children will receive an Adventure Guide designed to stimulate their enthusiasm for outdoor activities and their understanding of the environment. The guide will also provide kids with information on Forest Service programs and volunteer opportunities and youth programs in their area. Participants will also receive an embroidered badge, an agency pin, an individual oath pledge card and a program card to permit access to the web-based JFR Clubhouse....
Study leaps to defense of Colorado jumping mouse Echoing a study released in January, a newly published research paper concludes that the Colorado- dwelling Preble's meadow jumping mouse is a distinct subspecies that deserves federal wildlife protections. The new paper, published May 10 in the online edition of the journal Animal Conservation, concludes that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service erred in February 2005 when it proposed rescinding Endangered Species Act protections for the mouse, which is currently classified as "threatened." The agency's decision to delist the Preble's mouse - potentially removing a costly barrier to Front Range development projects - was based on the findings of a genetic study by biologist Rob Roy Ramey, who was working at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science at the time. Ramey announced in 2003 that Preble's is genetically indistinguishable from another mouse common to the region. But in January of this year, a team led by Tim King of the U.S. Geological Survey concluded that Ramey was wrong and that the mouse is genetically distinct. In response to King's findings, the Fish and Wildlife Service delayed its planned Feb. 2 delisting decision until Aug. 2. The federal agency also reopened the public comment period on the Preble's issue. The comment deadline is today....
They're Not Just Passing Through The ospreys have landed. Finally. A pair of the birds, which apparently migrated to Upper Newport Bay during the winter, are among the first of the raptors to nest in Southern California in recent decades, environmentalists say. And officials who watch over the Upper Newport Bay Ecological Reserve in Newport Beach said they couldn't be more enthused. "I never thought that it would happen," said Russ Kerr, a volunteer naturalist at the reserve who built the nest in 1993 in hopes ospreys would settle in. "They always migrate here in the winter, but they would always fly back to wherever they came from." Kerr's nest sits on a 4-foot-wide platform atop a telephone pole on Shellmaker Island, a small, brushy outcropping in Upper Newport Bay. But the man-made nest sat vacant for the most part. A single osprey once settled in but left a few days later. Last year, a pair were spotted eyeing the nest but were driven away by possessive gulls. This year, a pair were able to secure the nest for themselves, and three osprey chicks hatched this month....
Last male purebred Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit dies The last male purebred Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit has died, leaving just two females in a captive breeding program created to try to save the endangered species from extinction. The tiny rabbits are found only in Douglas County in north-central Washington. None is believed to exist in the wild, which means that the two females -- Lolo and Bryn -- are the only known purebred pygmy rabbits left in existence. "This is a population that has existed since before the last ice age in Eastern Washington. The loss is something we can never calculate," said Jon Marvel, executive director of the Idaho-based Western Watersheds Project, which works to protect pygmy rabbit populations across the West. "Any time we lose a species, it diminishes us all." Biologists captured 16 rabbits in a remote area of Douglas County in 2001 to start the captive breeding program. The last of those rabbits, Ely, died March 30 at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, said Dave Hays, an endangered-species biologist who oversees the program for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife....
Foundation files lawsuit to remove federal protection of fish A conservative foundation filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging Endangered Species Act protection for Central California tiger salamanders, two years after the federal government declared the animals were threatened. The Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation filed its lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on the grounds that government's designation was invalid and illegal. The foundation filed the complaint on behalf of the Home Builders Association of Northern California, the California Building Industry Association and the Building Industry Legal Defense Foundation. "The Central California tiger salamander has not been shown to be in danger," said foundation attorney Reed Hopper. "To the contrary, it has more breeding sites in Central California than the government claims." The foundation said the listing violated federal law because the agency failed to use the best scientific data available, did not estimate the current population of adult salamanders, and ignored existing regulatory programs for protecting the fish....
Wrap artists to discuss Colorado river installation Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artists who have wrapped everything from the Reichstag in Berlin to the Pont Neuf in Paris, will speak about their latest controversial project Tuesday at Severance Hall in Cleveland. The 7 p.m. lecture and discussion, organized by the Womens Council of the Cleveland Museum of Art, will focus in part on "Over the River," a long-delayed and as-yet unapproved project to suspend seven miles of transparent fabric over sections of the Arkansas River in Colorado. The project is tentatively scheduled for a two-week period in the summer of 2009. But first, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who go by first names only, need approvals from the federal Bureau of Land Management and other government agencies. The proposal has aroused controversy over whether it would deface the canyon flanking one of the most rafted rivers in the West and whether it would turn rural Fremont County into a massive traffic jam....
LDS church, BLM, ACLU settle Martin's Cove case An agreement has been reached on the management of Martin's Cove, a stretch of federal land where many Mormon handcart pioneers died in a blizzard 150 years ago. The Bureau of Land Management announced the agreement between the agency, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday afternoon. The settlement calls for the BLM and the church to use separate and distinct signs to clearly identify public land and public access. Last year, four Wyoming residents filed a lawsuit arguing that the BLM should not have entered a 25-year lease with the LDS church to manage the site, which is west of Casper. The lawsuit claimed that LDS tour guides at Martin's Cove proselytized to visitors. Attorneys for the BLM and the church have denied those charges. Megan Hayes, the Laramie attorney who filed the federal lawsuit, said the agreement ensures that people can have access to public lands without having to go through the church visitor center area that is nearby....
Energy working group faces uncertainty What was once hailed as a model in cooperation is now mired in chaos and confusion as a community advisory board in Pinedale is being revamped again by a federal agency, and members are wondering about their role. The Pinedale Anticline Working Group, or PAWG, was developed six years ago as energy development began booming in the area. The group, developed by the Bureau of Land Management, was designed to bring community members and others together to monitor the development and make recommendations. But this month, many of the members' terms expire, and rather than renew their terms -- as BLM has done in the past -- the agency has allowed the terms to expire and is seeking new nominations. The PAWG's federal charter expires in August but is expected to be renewed, but now there is a gap between all but two members' terms and when the charter runs. Bob Barrett, a PAWG member representing the public at large, said the group has become "window dressing."....
Shoulda been a cowboy Some cooks today have rediscovered chuckwagon cooking in their interest in the history of the American West and out of a nostalgia for the most primal of cooking. Tom Perini is at the forefront of that movement. Born into a family of true cowboys, Texas rancher Perini realized that he preferred cooking to working cattle, and in 1983 turned his family's ranch into a destination restaurant. Perini's fascination with chuckwagon cooking is an important part of the Buffalo Gap, Texas, steakhouse. "The type of food we serve is very much like what you might have eaten from the chuckwagons," Perini said. Perini will give lectures on what life was like on the cattle drives, and will give cooking demonstrations during
the Chuck Wagon Gathering and Children's Cowboy Festival in Oklahoma City on Memorial Day weekend. Through his association with Pace Foods, Perini travels the country with chuck wagon in tow, giving lectures and demonstrations on cowboy cooking life....
Rodeo association bucks $17 million offer to relocate The ProRodeo Hall of Fame and Museum of the American Cowboy will not be relocating to Albuquerque after all. New Mexico had offered a $17 million deal in February to have both the headquarters for the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association and the museum move from Colorado Springs. But Monday, the board of trustees for the ProRodeo Hall of Fame voted unanimously to stay in Colorado Springs, prompting the association board to vote Tuesday to suspend its decision to relocate. "The state is withdrawing the offer, and the deal is now off the table," said Jon Goldstein, spokesman for Bill Richardson, New Mexico's governor. The news was greeted with relief at the ProRodeo Hall of Fame. "Everyone is pretty happy about it," said Larry McCormack, executive director for the museum. "I wanted it to stay here all along. We'll just keep doing what we're doing." In February, Richardson announced that the PRCA's headquarters and the ProRodeo Hall of Fame, both of which had been in Colorado Springs since 1979, would be relocating to Albuquerque. The move would bring 85 full-time jobs, a $3.35 million payroll and about 50,000 annual visitors to New Mexico. However, the decision to relocate came as a surprise to the trustees for the museum....
Plan protects both wild, domestic sheep The recent decision on bighorn sheep in the Medicine Bow Forest Plan shows that participatory democracy is not for sissies. Nor for fools. Laramie’s Biodiversity Associates was vocal regarding the outcome of a decision on bighorn sheep habitat, but its opinion expressed more heat than light. If this small group had prevailed in its appeal of the Forest Plan, the result would have been less habitat for Wyoming’s wildlife, a decrease in the likelihood that Wyoming citizens would lend their time and expertise to collaborative problem-solving, and the loss of an important economic and management component provided by several long-time ranching families and their communities. As it is, the group further alienated the folks who should be its allies in trying to preserve the state’s healthy ecosystems, habitat and trademark vistas in the face of massive energy development. The issue is the management of domestic sheep herds, and their potential conflict with wild bighorn sheep. The two subspecies do not compete for habitat, but some studies have shown disease transmission from domestic sheep to bighorns. A natural separation is the best way to keep the animals apart. For three and a half years, the Wyoming Statewide Bighorn/Domestic Sheep Interaction Working Group met and labored in order to craft a sensible and operable plan to manage for a healthy future for Wyoming’s bighorn sheep population, while maintaining the viability of domestic sheep ranches. The members, who were wildlife biologists, environmentalists, ranchers and government officials, produced a thoughtful and practical set of recommendations....
Living on the fence – Catholic rancher copes daily with illegal immigration Spread out on 42,000 acres of beautiful mountains and high desert valleys in southern Cochise County, the Krentz family ranch sits just miles from the International Border. A rancher all her life and having grown up in the area, Susan Krentz knows every square inch of the property like the back of her hand. The ranch has been in the family for generations dating back before Arizona became a state. Standing about five and a half feet tall, Susan’s dusty boots and jeans tells the story of hard work on a ranch. Taking on the responsibility of working such as large ranch is shared by her husband, and daughter. In the forest above her home where she hiked as a child, signs posted by the United States government warn people that illegal immigration and human smuggling may be encountered in the area. For the last decade, she has seen a major increase in the number of immigrants on her property. In the first week of May, Krentz said Border Patrol removed more people from her ranch than the number of cattle that graze the land. “In eight days, we had 500 people removed from our ranch. That is a tremendous amount of people to find. Border Patrol tells us for every person that they find an estimated five to 10 slip into the desert,” she said....
Ranchers say border boundaries not always clear s it possible to accidentally end up in Mexico? Some cattle ranchers in Southern Arizona say, "Yes." They say there are no clear borders on their land and it's hard to tell when you've stepped into another country. "If I fix it, they'll just cut it again," says cattle rancher Bob Heilig who owns 13,000 acres. That's about nineteen square miles of land that borders Mexico; land that, he says, is hard to contain. "Snip, snip, snip and they just go right on through," Heilig says of illegal immigrants who travel his ranch daily, carrying wire cutters. Helig took News 4 on a tour, showing how easy it is to get lost because there are no clear markings dividing the border. Heilig says the most frustrating part for ranchers when fences are cut is that it's up to them to either fix the wire or lose their cattle....
Air Force: Range fire caused by air training munitions There is no vegetation to hold the dusty land in place after a fire burned about 27,000 acres of rangeland in southeastern New Mexico. A heavy coat of dirt sticks to the windows and covers the floors of Jeff Essary’s home. Reminders of the fire that devoured more than 700 acres of his land are nearly constant, he said. Essary, his newborn son, his daughter and his wife were among 100 families evacuated from their Floyd homes Nov. 30 after a fire spread from the Melrose Bombing Range. The wind-driven fire was caused by training munitions, according to an Air Force press release issued Tuesday. A B-1B bomber from Texas on a training flight over the Melrose Bombing Range released a bomb dummy, and its spotting charge — roughly equivalent to the charge of a shotgun shell — sparked the blaze in the arid grassland....
Wild-horse activists seek to halt roundup Mustang advocates and Gov. Bill Richardson want the Carson National Forest to stop a scheduled summer roundup of wild horses from the Jicarilla Ranger District, and instead use chemical contraception to control herd size. One concern is the possible sale to slaughterhouses of older animals that go unadopted, said Patience O’Dowd , founder of the Wild Horse Observers Association in Placitas. Also, darting the horses with a chemical contraceptive saves on the cost of transporting and feeding the animals until adoption time, she said. “It makes sense on a taxpayer level, and it makes sense on a humane level,” O’Dowd said. Kendall Clark, acting forest supervisor for the Carson National Forest, said the agency is willing to consider using contraception , but that the plan to gather 75 horses this summer from the Jicarilla district — between the Jicarilla Apache tribal lands and Bernalillo — will go forward....
Walden-backed forest bill approved U.S. Rep. Greg Walden's controversial bill to speed the ability of federal forestland managers to make timber salvage decisions is now on its way to the Senate. The Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act HR 4200, co-authored by U.S. Reps. Brian Baird, D-Wash., and Stephanie Herseth, D-S.D., passed the House by a vote of 243 to 182. "Thousands upon thousands of foresters, scientists, firefighters, local government officials, and private landowners agree: Federal forestland managers need the authorities provided by the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act for the future of America's national forests," Walden, a Republican from Hood River and chairman of the Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, said in a prepared statement. The bill gives natural resource managers 30 days after a wildfire or other natural catastrophe affecting more than 1,000 acres of public lands to come up with a plan, followed by a 90-day public comment period, Walden said. Administrative or judicial appeals still would be allowed following the comment period, he said....
Definition of ‘road’ travels gray area But amid the discussions over the future of Colorado's roadless areas, there's confusion over what exactly a road is and what kind of motorized vehicles will be allowed in roadless areas if they're protected. Some roads in the national forest may not be considered a road at all and could still legally carry motor vehicle traffic through a roadless area. Many off-road vehicles are welcome in roadless areas because they use trails, not roads. So, what kind of road comes to mind when people talk about roadless areas? "The general public thinks about it the way you'd look it up in Webster's," said Vera Smith, conservation director for the Colorado Mountain Club. "A paved road or a dirt road you can take a regular vehicle on." The definition of a road depends on which Forest Service regulation you're reading. The 2001 Clinton-era Roadless Rule, which under its 2005 rewrite still protects 58 million acres of national forestland nationwide until states make recommendations to the Forest Service for roadless areas' fate, defines a road according to a definition under Title 36 in the Federal Register: A road must be a motor vehicle travelway over 50 inches wide unless designated or managed as a trail. The Roadless Area Task Force also uses the definition for a road found in Title 36. The WRNF 2002 forest plan says that roadless areas have no motor vehicle paths greater than 50 inches wide. There is "nothing that prohibits a motorized trail (in a roadless area) that is for vehicles under 50 inches," said WRNF forest planner Rich Doak....
USDA FOREST SERVICE LAUNCHES NATIONAL EFFORT TO DEVELOP CONSERVATION LEADERS OF TOMORROW U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service today launched its new and improved Junior Forest Ranger (JFR) program by enrolling nearly 100 fifth-grade students from Denver’s Ellis Elementary School into the conservation education program. "The future of our natural resources and their management will one day be in the hands of today’s youth," said Kent Connaughton, Forest Service associate deputy chief for state and private forestry, at an event here at Recreation Equipment Inc.'s flagship store. "The new JFR program can help prepare our young people for this important responsibility by connecting them to the land and fostering their interest in effective land stewardship." First introduced in 1954 as part of a public service campaign for the Smokey Bear fire prevention program, the JFR program was designed to encourage a fire prevention ethic in children. Within three years, one million children were recruited, which led to Smokey being assigned his own zip code. The updated program includes more components to enrich children’s (ages 7 to 13) understanding of the spectrum of land management activities, covering topics such as fire ecology and ecosystem management. Upon enrolling in the program, children will receive an Adventure Guide designed to stimulate their enthusiasm for outdoor activities and their understanding of the environment. The guide will also provide kids with information on Forest Service programs and volunteer opportunities and youth programs in their area. Participants will also receive an embroidered badge, an agency pin, an individual oath pledge card and a program card to permit access to the web-based JFR Clubhouse....
Study leaps to defense of Colorado jumping mouse Echoing a study released in January, a newly published research paper concludes that the Colorado- dwelling Preble's meadow jumping mouse is a distinct subspecies that deserves federal wildlife protections. The new paper, published May 10 in the online edition of the journal Animal Conservation, concludes that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service erred in February 2005 when it proposed rescinding Endangered Species Act protections for the mouse, which is currently classified as "threatened." The agency's decision to delist the Preble's mouse - potentially removing a costly barrier to Front Range development projects - was based on the findings of a genetic study by biologist Rob Roy Ramey, who was working at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science at the time. Ramey announced in 2003 that Preble's is genetically indistinguishable from another mouse common to the region. But in January of this year, a team led by Tim King of the U.S. Geological Survey concluded that Ramey was wrong and that the mouse is genetically distinct. In response to King's findings, the Fish and Wildlife Service delayed its planned Feb. 2 delisting decision until Aug. 2. The federal agency also reopened the public comment period on the Preble's issue. The comment deadline is today....
They're Not Just Passing Through The ospreys have landed. Finally. A pair of the birds, which apparently migrated to Upper Newport Bay during the winter, are among the first of the raptors to nest in Southern California in recent decades, environmentalists say. And officials who watch over the Upper Newport Bay Ecological Reserve in Newport Beach said they couldn't be more enthused. "I never thought that it would happen," said Russ Kerr, a volunteer naturalist at the reserve who built the nest in 1993 in hopes ospreys would settle in. "They always migrate here in the winter, but they would always fly back to wherever they came from." Kerr's nest sits on a 4-foot-wide platform atop a telephone pole on Shellmaker Island, a small, brushy outcropping in Upper Newport Bay. But the man-made nest sat vacant for the most part. A single osprey once settled in but left a few days later. Last year, a pair were spotted eyeing the nest but were driven away by possessive gulls. This year, a pair were able to secure the nest for themselves, and three osprey chicks hatched this month....
Last male purebred Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit dies The last male purebred Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit has died, leaving just two females in a captive breeding program created to try to save the endangered species from extinction. The tiny rabbits are found only in Douglas County in north-central Washington. None is believed to exist in the wild, which means that the two females -- Lolo and Bryn -- are the only known purebred pygmy rabbits left in existence. "This is a population that has existed since before the last ice age in Eastern Washington. The loss is something we can never calculate," said Jon Marvel, executive director of the Idaho-based Western Watersheds Project, which works to protect pygmy rabbit populations across the West. "Any time we lose a species, it diminishes us all." Biologists captured 16 rabbits in a remote area of Douglas County in 2001 to start the captive breeding program. The last of those rabbits, Ely, died March 30 at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, said Dave Hays, an endangered-species biologist who oversees the program for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife....
Foundation files lawsuit to remove federal protection of fish A conservative foundation filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging Endangered Species Act protection for Central California tiger salamanders, two years after the federal government declared the animals were threatened. The Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation filed its lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on the grounds that government's designation was invalid and illegal. The foundation filed the complaint on behalf of the Home Builders Association of Northern California, the California Building Industry Association and the Building Industry Legal Defense Foundation. "The Central California tiger salamander has not been shown to be in danger," said foundation attorney Reed Hopper. "To the contrary, it has more breeding sites in Central California than the government claims." The foundation said the listing violated federal law because the agency failed to use the best scientific data available, did not estimate the current population of adult salamanders, and ignored existing regulatory programs for protecting the fish....
Wrap artists to discuss Colorado river installation Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artists who have wrapped everything from the Reichstag in Berlin to the Pont Neuf in Paris, will speak about their latest controversial project Tuesday at Severance Hall in Cleveland. The 7 p.m. lecture and discussion, organized by the Womens Council of the Cleveland Museum of Art, will focus in part on "Over the River," a long-delayed and as-yet unapproved project to suspend seven miles of transparent fabric over sections of the Arkansas River in Colorado. The project is tentatively scheduled for a two-week period in the summer of 2009. But first, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who go by first names only, need approvals from the federal Bureau of Land Management and other government agencies. The proposal has aroused controversy over whether it would deface the canyon flanking one of the most rafted rivers in the West and whether it would turn rural Fremont County into a massive traffic jam....
LDS church, BLM, ACLU settle Martin's Cove case An agreement has been reached on the management of Martin's Cove, a stretch of federal land where many Mormon handcart pioneers died in a blizzard 150 years ago. The Bureau of Land Management announced the agreement between the agency, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday afternoon. The settlement calls for the BLM and the church to use separate and distinct signs to clearly identify public land and public access. Last year, four Wyoming residents filed a lawsuit arguing that the BLM should not have entered a 25-year lease with the LDS church to manage the site, which is west of Casper. The lawsuit claimed that LDS tour guides at Martin's Cove proselytized to visitors. Attorneys for the BLM and the church have denied those charges. Megan Hayes, the Laramie attorney who filed the federal lawsuit, said the agreement ensures that people can have access to public lands without having to go through the church visitor center area that is nearby....
Energy working group faces uncertainty What was once hailed as a model in cooperation is now mired in chaos and confusion as a community advisory board in Pinedale is being revamped again by a federal agency, and members are wondering about their role. The Pinedale Anticline Working Group, or PAWG, was developed six years ago as energy development began booming in the area. The group, developed by the Bureau of Land Management, was designed to bring community members and others together to monitor the development and make recommendations. But this month, many of the members' terms expire, and rather than renew their terms -- as BLM has done in the past -- the agency has allowed the terms to expire and is seeking new nominations. The PAWG's federal charter expires in August but is expected to be renewed, but now there is a gap between all but two members' terms and when the charter runs. Bob Barrett, a PAWG member representing the public at large, said the group has become "window dressing."....
Shoulda been a cowboy Some cooks today have rediscovered chuckwagon cooking in their interest in the history of the American West and out of a nostalgia for the most primal of cooking. Tom Perini is at the forefront of that movement. Born into a family of true cowboys, Texas rancher Perini realized that he preferred cooking to working cattle, and in 1983 turned his family's ranch into a destination restaurant. Perini's fascination with chuckwagon cooking is an important part of the Buffalo Gap, Texas, steakhouse. "The type of food we serve is very much like what you might have eaten from the chuckwagons," Perini said. Perini will give lectures on what life was like on the cattle drives, and will give cooking demonstrations during
the Chuck Wagon Gathering and Children's Cowboy Festival in Oklahoma City on Memorial Day weekend. Through his association with Pace Foods, Perini travels the country with chuck wagon in tow, giving lectures and demonstrations on cowboy cooking life....
Rodeo association bucks $17 million offer to relocate The ProRodeo Hall of Fame and Museum of the American Cowboy will not be relocating to Albuquerque after all. New Mexico had offered a $17 million deal in February to have both the headquarters for the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association and the museum move from Colorado Springs. But Monday, the board of trustees for the ProRodeo Hall of Fame voted unanimously to stay in Colorado Springs, prompting the association board to vote Tuesday to suspend its decision to relocate. "The state is withdrawing the offer, and the deal is now off the table," said Jon Goldstein, spokesman for Bill Richardson, New Mexico's governor. The news was greeted with relief at the ProRodeo Hall of Fame. "Everyone is pretty happy about it," said Larry McCormack, executive director for the museum. "I wanted it to stay here all along. We'll just keep doing what we're doing." In February, Richardson announced that the PRCA's headquarters and the ProRodeo Hall of Fame, both of which had been in Colorado Springs since 1979, would be relocating to Albuquerque. The move would bring 85 full-time jobs, a $3.35 million payroll and about 50,000 annual visitors to New Mexico. However, the decision to relocate came as a surprise to the trustees for the museum....
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