BLM rejects House Resources Committee Grand Canyon hardrock mining ban The Bureau of Land Management has published a proposed rule which rejects the House Natural Resources Emergency House Resolution enacted in June that bans uranium mining and exploration near the Grand Canyon National Park. The agency argues that the BLM "continues to believe the emergency procedure to be unnecessary. Like a withdrawal, segregation removes the lands from the operation of the public land laws, including the mining laws." "Contrary to its implication, the procedures for issuing an emergency withdrawal order do not result in the protection of public lands more rapidly than the completion of a more conventional withdrawal process. Conventional withdrawals of public lands, as necessary and appropriate, will continue." The proposed BLM rule published Friday in the Federal Register would remove regulations that provide for emergency land withdrawals, such as the one utilized by the House Natural Resources Committee ordering the Secretary of the Interior to withdraw as much as 1,068,908 acres of federal land near the Grand Canyon National Park from any new uranium mining for up to the next three years....

Investigators raise flags over road deal A controversial deal between the federal government and the nation's largest private landowner could increase residential development of forests around the country, according to Congressional investigators. The proposed agreement between the Forest Service and Plum Creek Timber Co. would allow the company to use roads on national forests in Montana to develop its adjacent private property for subdivisions. Such easements often only allow the company to use public roads for logging or forest management. The General Accountability Office, in a letter sent Friday to the two Democratic Senators who requested an investigation, said the deal could set a precedent and allow other private landowners to use forest roads to build subdivisions. The private negotiations deprived the public of any chance to weigh in, investigators said. "This report sounds all sorts of alarms about the way the Forest Service is doing business," said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., who asked for the probe along with Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M....

Wild horse advocates to meet with BLM Instead of gathering free-roaming wild horses in Southern Nevada this weekend, Bureau of Land Management officials will attend a gathering of wild horse advocates to discuss what can be done to keep horses and burros crowding Western ranges from being killed by lethal injections. That's what will probably happen, a BLM spokesman said, if the herds can't be kept in balance with the environment where they live while costly facilities to hold those captured are at capacity and adoption outlets are saturated. "Because we have the legal authority to euthanize excess horses and burros, we're saying we have to consider these alternatives because there is no indication our budget is going to go up in any substantial degree," said Tom Gorey, the BLM's spokesman in Washington, D.C., on wild horse issues. He said nearly 74,000 horses were taken off ranges in 10 Western states between 2001 and 2007. Some 44,000 have been adopted out, leaving about 30,000 in short-term and long-term holding facilities. Government cowboys have left 29,500 free-roaming wild horses on the ranges along with 3,500 wild burros. About half those animals, roughly 16,000, are in Nevada....

3 BLM workers held at gunpoint at Nev. pot patch Three federal biologists were held at gunpoint for several minutes by suspected members of a Mexican drug cartel after happening upon a large marijuana patch in a remote stretch of public land in northern Nevada, authorities said Friday. The men, conducting research for the Bureau of Land Management, were released unharmed after being held by three men Tuesday afternoon in the high desert about 200 miles northeast of Reno, near Winnemucca, said JoLynn Worley, an agency spokeswoman. Law enforcers returned to the scene Wednesday and found that the suspects had fled, leaving behind a makeshift camp indicating that as many as six people were involved. Authorities confiscated nearly 800 mature marijuana plants with an estimated wholesale value of $5 million, as well as about 150 pounds of processed buds, BLM officials said....Do you reckon the growers had complied with NEPA?

Second annual Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival planned When you think of environmentalism, do you envision granola bars, tree huggers and, more recently, owners of hybrid or electric vehicles? If so, you might be surprised to see the changing face of sustainability enthusiasts: ranchers protecting rare fish species, city dwellers participating in local sustainable agriculture, and even kids speaking out on the issues that are important to them. The Wild and Scenic Film Festival on tour will share these groundbreaking stories and encourage our community’s participation in other regional and global conservation movements. The second Annual Wild and Scenic Film Festival, presented on Saturday, Oct. 18, by Patagonia and hosted by Tuleyome and the Sierra Club Yolano Group, brings together award-winning environmental short films in a spirit of inspiration and education....

Legend hangs a sale sign After 40 years of working his Woody Creek ranch, George Stranahan is hanging up the shovel to tell stories. The 76-year-old heir to the Champ ion spark plug fortune has listed the 245-acre Flying Dog Ranch for $56 million. The Flying Dog Ranch, adjacent to the 2.3 million-acre White River National Forest, is among the last remaining undeveloped ranches in the Aspen area, said Ed Zasacky, managing broker of Aspen Sotheby's International Realty who is listing the property. While the ranch has been subdivided into four parcels, Zasacky said the property will be sold in its entirety. "We want to give the eventual buyer all the options possible," he said. "We don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot." Two of the parcels have conservation easements, but allow barns to be built. The other two parcels allow homes to be built on them. Zasacky is marketing the property internationally through the Sotheby's website, the company's Reside Magazine and local real estate agents....

Will Animal Biotech Bring Home the Bacon? An F.D.A. policy published for public comment on September 18 threatens the health of a promising new field: the production of animals with novel and valuable traits. After more than 20 years of deliberation, the F.D.A.'s Center for Veterinary Medicine has proposed that every "transgenic" animal crafted with gene-splicing technology will be subject to the procedures and regulations for drugs used to treat animal diseases, such as pain relievers or anti-flea medicines. But the introduction of a gene is not the same as the administration of a drug. Moreover, the F.D.A.'s approach represents a major shift in the regulation of biotechnology that will be hugely expensive to animal breeders and detrimental to consumers. What kinds of animals are we talking about? One that has been awaiting an F.D.A. policy for almost a decade is an Atlantic salmon that contains a newly introduced Chinook salmon growth hormone gene that remains turned on all year round (instead of during only the warmer months, as in nature). This cuts the time to marketable adult weight from 30 months to 18. The extra gene confers no detectable differences in the salmon's appearance, taste, or nutritional value; it just grows faster. There are numerous other applications in various stages of R&D, including livestock with leaner muscle mass, enhanced resistance to disease, or improved use of dietary phosphorous to lessen the environmental impacts of animal manure. Up till now, the F.D.A. has not regulated new lines of farm animals or, for that matter, animals used for what might be termed "medical purposes."....

Rabbi Alleges PETA Threat Over Chicken Ritual New York City police are investigating a rabbi's complaint that threatening e-mails were sent in connection with the slaughter of chickens to atone for sins before Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Rabbi Shea Hecht of the National Committee for Furtherance of Jewish Education says the e-mails were sent by supporters of a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals campaign opposing the ritual, known as kapparot. He says some people added threatening and anti-Semitic comments to an online PETA form letter. The Brooklyn-based Jewish organization slaughters about 4,000 chickens. A PETA spokesman says the ritual is abusive and unnecessary.

Many going to the country for 'haycation' The setting sun gilds the blond grasses covering the rolling hills of western Marin County, Calif. I am sitting on the front porch of the bunkhouse at Cow Track Ranch, rocking in a rickety yet comfortable chair and looking out at a herd of 160 Black Angus beef cattle. They are milling and mooing outside their barn, anticipating the evening feed. A horse watches me from an adjacent pasture. The earthy scents of grass and animal blend with the smells of ripening tomatoes, lavender, garlic and parsley growing in a garden just a few feet from my feet. I'm only 20 minutes from downtown San Rafael, yet I'm in the heart of the country, reveling in a pastoral scene so timeless it's like being inside a Grant Wood painting. Call them haycations: It's a chance to spend a night or two on a working farm or ranch and enjoy the comforts of an inn or guest home while you learn about your hosts' approach to agriculture. Traditionally, they're known as farm stays. "People are looking for authenticity in their vacations today," says Sonoma County rancher Alexa Wood, who runs Beltane Ranch in Glen Ellen with her mother and her daughter. The ranch also has a bed-and-breakfast inn....

Western legend won't die Bob King's Cowboy School refuses to let people forget about a simpler way of life. When people type "rancher" into Google, they come up with about 6.4 million hits. When they type "rodeo," they get about 42 million. But when they type in "cowboy," almost 95 million hits return, an ironic fate for a once solitary fellow. For years, Wyoming has profited from perpetuating its image as the "Cowboy State." Yet we rarely consider the mechanics of being a cowboy - we simply latch onto a feeling. King retools that feeling. Based in Arvada for a portion of the year, King and his wife, Betty, teach students the basic of cowboy - the verb. They teach horsemanship in its "natural" form, roping technique and ranch basics. Their students include a wide array of characters: from a high--powered CEO, to the ranch hand who wants to learn to rope, to a humble journalist. Anyone who longs to learn is welcome....

Making the desert bloom, 100 years ago Today, we take the crops rising from the arid Snake River Plain for granted, but it wasn't always so. The antiquated flume, or what's left of it, was part of an ambitious plan to make the desert bloom without using a drop of Snake River water. The first settlers staked their claims to the land it would transform 100 years ago Sunday. They came from states across the country on Oct. 12, 1908 in hopes of having their names drawn from a barrel for a chance to own a piece of the land that would be watered by the new King Hill Irrigation and Power Co. None were famous, and many of their stories are forgotten, but they helped shape what became their part of Idaho. The new life for the 306 settlers had its beginnings a decade earlier, with a plan to bring water from the Malad River to the King Hill, Glenns Ferry and Hammett areas. The Snake was closer, but diverting Snake River water would have been expensive, and pumps that could lift it to where it was needed were yet to be invented. The plan called for building a siphon suspended on a trestle above the Snake River. Water from the Malad River would cross over the Snake through the siphon and flow over 20 miles through a canal-and flume-system. Conceived in the 1890s, the idea evolved over a succession of backers, competitors and modifications before the first water was delivered in 1909....

New Mexico's Ojo Caliente resort is steeped in history The greatest treasure that I found these strange people to possess are some hot springs which burst out at the foot of a mountain . . . so powerful are the chemicals contained in this water that the inhabitants have a belief that they were given to them by their gods. These springs I have named Ojo Caliente." — Cabeza de Vaca, 16th-century Spanish explorer. Situated on a 1,000-acre land grant ceded by Spain to Antonio Joseph, New Mexico’s first territorial representative to Congress, Ojo Caliente Mineral Springs Resort & Spa is surrounded by natural geologic features and history reflecting thousands of years of human presence. Long before the Spaniards discovered these springs, the waters at Ojo Caliente — with their remarkable combination of arsenic, iron, soda and lithium — have been erupting from the earth. A favorite of locals, these springs have special meaning for the descendants of those who inhabited the Ojo Caliente drainage from the late 1300s until the early 1500s....

Cowboy slapstick is alive and well
Cowgirl Sass & Savvy

Julie Carter

Always a helpful bunch, the friends of cowboys will go to great lengths to "be there for you," especially if it provides them entertainment in the process.

Dan the Team Roper's recent situation made public, the one where he was looking for a fuller-figured gal to keep him warm this winter at his drafty trailer house, spawned, at his expense, a landslide of "fun" in Comanche, Texas.

"Oh my Lord," he said, "The hunt just got started to find me a meaty woman. The search seems to involve many."

That very morning he walked into his job at the farm implement and feed store and found, taped to the coffee pot, one of those photos that circulated the Internet.

It involved a considerably oversized gal who was unable to locate her little Chihuahua dog, that could only be seen if you were standing behind her.

Dan played dumb and acted like he didn't "get it," knowing full well the boys had read the story that very morning.

As the farmers began arriving to drink coffee and harass Dan, they began helping out in a number of ways.

One even offered his "fat wife for the winter." Dan kindly declined.

An email from roping buddy Blonde Sally offered to guide Dan in "broadening his horizons" with this woman search.

She had set him up an appointment for a Brazilian bikini wax. Dan was not quite sure what all that involved, but he was absolutely certain he didn't want any part of it.

Prior to this day, it had been raining for weeks and feed sales had been bottoming out.

Folks, in their eternal rural optimism, knew they didn't need and weren't going to need feed because a growth of new grass was most certainly on the way.

However, before 9:30 that morning, 64 bags of feed had been sold as it gave folks a reason to be at the store.

Stories beget stories. And so, Dan began telling a few more.

He launched into the tale of his honeymoon with his first ex-wife.

He had taken her to a farm auction in the Panhandle so he could buy a grain drill.

He regaled the coffee pot bunch with details of the adventure.

He told them that his blue heeler dog had hidden under the toolbox in the bed of the pickup and ended up going with them on the honeymoon.

Then the pooch proceeded to bite some guy at the motel in Plainview.

To top off the eventful trip, Dan said he ran over a parked Volkswagon in the motel lot in Lubbock.

"It was a very long two days and a large combo supper at Whataburger did nothing to soothe the situation. But I did get the grain drill home safe," he said.

Dan recalled that he didn't even really know she was mad about it all until seven months later when she made him go to counseling with her.

There he found out she had wanted to go to Cancun.

"What? And miss all this fun?" he asked.

The marriage didn't last long after that.

This story came on the heels of another roper celebrating his 30-something wedding anniversary by buying his bride eight new Corriente roping steers.

"Well, I guess it is his anniversary, too," she chuckled.

In the meantime, Dan is extremely happy.

Some guy wandered into the store and asked for his recipe for Tater Tot Casserole.

The recent culinary notoriety has moved Dan to take his cooking quite seriously.

Two days ago, he upgraded his kitchenwares with a crock-pot. Proudly he announced that it even came with a lid.

It's The Pitts: Goin’ Into Town

If I were to make a list of my all-time favorite people NOT to get behind in the grocery check out line that list would include:

#1- The unmarried lady who crowds in front of you with ten kids and then buys cola, candy and chips with food stamps. #2- The lawyer who complains to the checker about the rising cost of foreign cheese, as if the clerk was the one who raised the price. #3- The lonely lady who lives alone and views grocery shopping as a social occasion. While she tells the checker about her arthritis I am standing there holding a freezing carton of ice cream. #4- The shopper who remembers she forgot her checkbook after the checker has rung up $250 worth of groceries. #5-The consumer who asks if she can go ahead of you in the check out line because she only has a few items. And then she pays for them with coins from her piggy bank... one penny at a time. And finally #7- the ranch wife.

Just last week I arrived at the checkstand at the exact moment as the ranch wife with three overflowing carts. She offered to let me go first but she had three little kids that desperately needed to get out of that store. Those little darlings had already destroyed the Twinkie display and were working on a pyramid of canned goods. By letting her go first I was a big hit with the store management.

While in line I took a quick assessment of the ranch family's provisions and counted 14 cases of beer, 6 cartons of cigarettes, 4 bags of disposable diapers, 150 pounds of dog food and a case of motor oil. And that was just the first cart. The seasoned grocery checker had immediately recognized the shopper and tried to fake a sudden illness before checking her out, but it didn't work. She was the only one on duty as the grocery baggers and management were hiding in the back room. "Doing your monthly shopping I see?" asked the checker, resigned to her task.

"Yes, my husband made me do it," replied the ranch wife. "We live two hours out of town on a ranch so I only get to shop once a month. And for the trip into town my husband makes me take the flat bed truck and our three kids along. Have you ever tried keeping 22 bags of groceries balanced on a flat bed over 50 miles of dirt road with three kids screaming in your ear?"

"Can't say that I have," replied the compassionate checker. "It must be difficult shopping for a month at a time. What do you do for milk and vegetables?"

"My husband forces me to grow a garden and milk a cow twice a day," said the ranch wife. "Everything else we buy in bulk once a month."

As the checker strained to pick up a case of soup and a gallon of whiskey she asked, "I suppose eating out at a nice restaurant is out of the question?"

“What’s a restaurant?” answered the ranch wife, and I don’t know if she was kidding or not.

The checker chuckled and then asked, "What do you do if you forget something on your shopping list?"

"We do without. I'll never forget that month I forgot the Right Guard."

“Who could forget that?" said the checker as she rang up a gallon of ketchup and four dozen eggs. "These sure are good looking grapes you bought."

"Oh yes, my husband just loves grapes and we can't grow them in the garden. He'll probably kill me but I just couldn't resist buying those grapes for him. By the way, do you know if those grapes have been sprayed with any kind of poison?"

"I don't think so dear," said the checker sympathetically. "But I think you can buy some over at the hardware store."

Oil Companies Could Be Funding Mystery Account for Pan Am 103 Victims A senior Bush administration official Thursday left open the possibility that American and other oil companies who want to do business with Muammar el-Qaddafi are secretly paying off his debt to victims of the Pan Am 103 and Labelle discotheque bombings. The Bush administration, pressured by Congress, has made full satisfaction of the $1.5 billion debt a prerequisite for restoring full diplomatic and commercial relations with Libya, which renounced its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003. The payments were supposed to be completed in September, but a first installment arrived "just ... overnight," David C. Welch, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, said during a hastily arranged telephone conference Thursday with reporters. Welch would not say how much was paid, who it came from, where it was deposited, or when the balance would be forthcoming....

Scientists question terrorist-hunting techniques Two methods the federal government wants to use to find terrorists -- "data mining" and "behavior detection" -- are dubious scientifically and have "enormous potential" for infringing on law-abiding Americans' privacy, a consortium of scientists said. Data mining involves searching databases for suspicious and revealing relationships and patterns. But while the technique is useful in commercial settings to detect credit card fraud, it is questionable whether data mining can detect and pre-empt terrorist attacks, the National Research Council said. Behavior detection, used by the Transportation Security Administration and some police departments to isolate possible criminals from crowds, likewise falls short of meeting scientific standards, the group said. "There is not a consensus within the relevant scientific community" that behavior detection is "ready for use ... given the present state of the science," the group said. The group cautioned that "inappropriate ... responses to the terrorist threat ... can do more damage to the fabric of society than terrorists would be likely to do." The 352-page report by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, does not evaluate the TSA or any other specific government program. Instead, it explores issues related to data mining and behavior detection techniques and attempts to advise lawmakers how to appropriately balance security with privacy....

Judge approves ACLU lawsuit against ATF ACLU Director of Communications Brandon Hensler says the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida received an early victory today when Senior Federal Judge Lacey A. Collier denied the ATF’s motions for summary judgment in Kilpatrick v. U.S. The ACLU filed the case on April 18, 2006, on behalf of Karen J. Kilpatrick, who claimed that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) violated her Free Speech rights. Kilpatrick was driving her blue van in Pensacola on April 19, 2004, with the slogans “Remember the Children of Waco” and “Boo ATF” written on some of the windows when she was pulled over by police for questioning by the ATF. The ACLU argues in the lawsuit that her First Amendment Rights to Free Speech and her Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure were violated when officers detained her for an hour, searched her car without consent, and ordered her to remove the writing on the side of her van. “The ATF’s actions were unconstitutional and there was no legal justification to stop and question Ms. Kilpatrick. We believe that the ATF was trying to silence Ms. Kilpatrick and the 911 call substantiates this position,” said Bert Oram, ACLU cooperating counsel....

SAF Settles New Orleans Lawsuit The Second Amendment Foundation has reached an agreement with the City of New Orleans in a 2005 federal lawsuit that stopped the city from seizing firearms in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The landmark lawsuit, a joint effort by SAF and the National Rifle Association, was filed in September 2005 after police and National Guardsmen began confiscating firearms without warrant or probable cause from citizens who were not suspected of committing any crimes. Under terms of the settlement, which now awaits a judge's signature, the city must try to return all firearms that were seized. Gun owners will be notified by mail within 30 days of the court's approval that they can retrieve their guns. "While we are delighted that this case is now settled," said SAF founder Alan Gottlieb, "it should never have been necessary. When a disaster strikes, no government entity or official should arbitrarily decide that citizens must be disarmed and left defenseless, and that is what happened in New Orleans....

Md. Police Put Activists' Names On Terror Lists The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday. Police Superintendent Terrence B. Sheridan revealed at a legislative hearing that the surveillance operation, which targeted opponents of the death penalty and the Iraq war, was far more extensive than was known when its existence was disclosed in July. The department started sending letters of notification Saturday to the activists, inviting them to review their files before they are purged from the databases, Sheridan said. "The names don't belong in there," he told the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. "It's as simple as that."....

Genetic Research: Protecting A Plant's "Dignity" For years, Swiss scientists have blithely created genetically modified rice, corn and apples. But did they ever stop to consider just how humiliating such experiments may be to plants? That's a question they must now ask. Last spring, this small Alpine nation began mandating that geneticists conduct their research without trampling on a plant's dignity. "Unfortunately, we have to take it seriously," Beat Keller, a molecular biologist at the University of Zurich. "It's one more constraint on doing genetic research." Dr. Keller recently sought government permission to do a field trial of genetically modified wheat that has been bred to resist a fungus. He first had to debate the finer points of plant dignity with university ethicists. Then, in a written application to the government, he tried to explain why the planned trial wouldn't "disturb the vital functions or lifestyle" of the plants. He eventually got the green light. The rule, based on a constitutional amendment, came into being after the Swiss Parliament asked a panel of philosophers, lawyers, geneticists and theologians to establish the meaning of flora's dignity. "We couldn't start laughing and tell the government we're not going to do anything about it," says Markus Schefer, a member of the ethics panel and a professor of law at the University of Basel. "The constitution requires it." In April, the team published a 22-page treatise on "the moral consideration of plants for their own sake." It stated that vegetation has an inherent value and that it is immoral to arbitrarily harm plants by, say, "decapitation of wildflowers at the roadside without rational reason." On the question of genetic modification, most of the panel argued that the dignity of plants could be safeguarded "as long as their independence, i.e., reproductive ability and adaptive ability, are ensured." In other words: It's wrong to genetically alter a plant and render it sterile....Does this mean I can no longer castrate cacti and that we will soon have a People for the Ethical Treatment of Alfalfa? Of course, it won't be so damn funny when or if this policy comes to our shores. Baxter Black's routine about "screaming" vegetables will take on a whole new meaning.

Army suspends Fort Irwin tortoise relocation plans after deaths of 90 animals The U.S. Army has suspended plans to relocate more than 1,000 desert tortoises from Fort Irwin expansion areas this fall and next spring because at least 15 percent of the tortoises moved earlier this year have died. About 90 of the 556 tortoises moved in the spring are dead, mostly as a result of coyote attacks. Army and federal wildlife officials said this week that a timeout is needed to determine how many of the tortoises, a threatened species, would have died anyway and how many deaths should be attributed to the relocation effort. "We didn't foresee this amount of coyote predation," said Roy Averill-Murray, desert tortoise recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in a phone interview Thursday. Fish and Wildlife granted the permit that allows the tortoises to be moved and has the power to stop the relocation or require changes to ensure the species is not jeopardized....

Western group petitions for species protection A tortoise, a hare, a mouse and a half-dozen mussels. These are just some of the animals and plants that a Western conservation group is seeking protections for under the Endangered Species Act as part of several in-depth petitions filed Thursday with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. WildEarth Guardians said the petitions—filed as part of its "Western Ark" project to gain protections for more species in the region—cover a diverse group of 13 plants and animals with ranges that span more than a dozen states and stretch into Mexico and Canada. "We deliberately wanted to petition at once for a variety of plants and animals and this is to underscore that the Endangered Species Act really is like Noah's ark," said Nicole Rosmarino, wildlife program director for WildEarth Guardians. "We want as many species that are in need to board the ark as possible." Nearly all the species listed in the petitions filed Thursday face a common threat of climate change, including the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse, the Jemez Mountains salamander, the white-sided jackrabbit and the Sonoran desert tortoise. The tortoise, which ranges across southern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, is the focus of one petition filed jointly by WildEarth Guardians and the Western Watersheds Project. The groups say the tortoise's population has been reduced by more than half since 1987, and that urban sprawl, off-roading and grazing continue to put pressure on the species....

BLM wants to increase logging in Oregon Federal officials said Thursday that they want to double logging allowed on 2.6 million acres of forests in western Oregon, a move that would doom more old-growth trees but boost timber-related payments to 18 rural Oregon counties and create an estimated 1,200 new jobs. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management stepped back from an earlier proposal to triple logging in its western Oregon holdings, most in the Coast Range south of Salem. The agency, hit with a critical scientific review earlier this year, also increased buffer zones around streams and said it would defer logging of trees 160 years or older for 15 years to help the threatened northern spotted owl. The timber industry doesn't like the scaled-back plan, saying reduced management of forests will end up hurting county coffers and wildlife as well as loggers and mills. Each year, 1.2 billion board feet of timber grows on the BLM lands, said Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council. But the plan calls for harvesting 502 million board feet annually, which is down from 727 million proposed last year. "We really hate to see that number slide," Partin said. Environmental groups say the plan is still too aggressive....

What Water Rationing Will Look Like Last September, when a federal judge cut water deliveries from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a major source of Southern California's drinking water, the Long Beach Water Department bucked convention: It immediately instituted mandatory restrictions on consumption. As San Diego water agencies have called on residents to voluntarily conserve water, Long Beach has written it into the law. San Diego residents have cut consumption about 6 percent; Long Beach's have cut 9 percent. That small increase in savings has been the difference between meeting conservation goals in Long Beach and missing them here. With water agencies in San Diego County currently considering how they'll handle an expected cut in supplies next year -- what would be the first water rationing since 1992 -- Long Beach's steps offer a glimpse of what may be in store. Endangered species protections in the Sacramento Delta and prolonged drought on the Colorado River, arid San Diego's two main drinking water supplies, threaten to make 2009 a tough water year. Local water agencies are planning for a 10 percent cut in deliveries from the Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District, the wholesaler that delivers a majority of San Diego's supply. If that cut comes, the 24 local agencies that supply drinking water to county residents will have to deliver savings or face significant fines....

Guzzling the West’s Water When people think of California and water, they often imagine sprawling cities dotted liberally with swimming pools and watered lawns; legions of vain auto owners washing their SUVs, sports cars, and minivans; and endless acres of verdant golf courses - all sucking down rivers both near and far. This image is partly correct - rivers are going dry. But the major reason is not direct consumption by humans - urbanites running sprinklers on their front yards and the like. In California, the major user of water is agriculture, and within agriculture, the thirstiest commodity is the cow. Overall, agriculture accounts for 83 percent of all water used in California. It’s true that California grows the majority of America’s fruits and vegetables, so liberal use of water by its agricultural sector would not be unexpected. However, few people would suspect that growing feed for cattle are the predominant agricultural use of water in California. In 1997, 1.7 million acres of the state were planted to alfalfa alone. Irrigated pasture and hayfields consume more water than any other single crop in California - more than a third of all irrigation water. Together, alfalfa and hay and pasturage account for approximately half of all water used in the state....

Judge rules for BLM in NM gas well challenge A federal judge has denied a conservation group's effort to require the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to put more work into a plan for nearly 10,000 new gas wells in the San Juan Basin of northern New Mexico. U.S. District Judge Judith C. Herrera, in a 39-page decision last week, said the BLM followed the National Environmental Policy Act and other federal laws in developing a 2003 management plan for drilling over 20 years in the 16,000-square-mile basin that straddles the border of New Mexico and Colorado. "Having exhaustively reviewed the voluminous record ... the court finds the BLM acted appropriately," she wrote in the Sept. 30 decision. Steve Henke, district manager for the BLM's Farmington field office in northwestern New Mexico, said agency officials were pleased by the ruling. The BLM has been working under the plan for five years, since there was no injunction on development while the lawsuit by the San Juan Citizens Alliance was pending. Henke said nearly 3,000 natural gas wells have been drilled in the area since the plan's approval, with about half the production coming from coal bed methane near Fruitland. The resource management plan authorizes nearly 27,000 acres of new surface disturbance on land under the Farmington office, increasing total acreage for oil and gas infrastructure to 110,400. The plan's preferred alternative could increase carbon monoxide emissions by 42,000 tons a year and nitrogen oxides by more than 43.5 tons a year by 2024....

Devil's Hole pupfish count rebounds Tiny neon-blue pupfish that are struggling to survive in a spring-fed cave in Nye County have rebounded this fall to 126 adult fish, 34 more than last fall's count and the highest number recorded since 2004, a federal biologist said Wednesday. "We're feeling pretty good," said Bob Williams, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service field supervisor for Nevada. "We're feeling like we're at least maintaining the population. There is still lots and lots of work to do," he said about the endangered Devil's Hole pupfish that exist in the wild only around a shelf in the water-filled limestone cave, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. For unknown reasons the species began steadily declining in about 1995 after historically numbering about 500 since the mid-1970s. They reached a low of 38 fish in the spring of 2006. But the population, which is in a part of Death Valley National Park within Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, took a sharp turn for the worse in September 2004. That's when a flash flood sent a tub of glass fish traps tumbling into the hole, killing about one-third of the pupfish population at the time, 80 in all. The traps were being used by Southern Oregon University researchers to assess pupfish reproduction....

Feds to use computer chips to foil cactus thieves Anyone thinking of swiping a stately saguaro cactus from the desert could soon be hauling off more than just a giant plant. National Park Service officials plan to imbed microchips in Arizona's signature plant to protect them from thieves who rip them from the desert to sell them to landscapers, nurseries and homeowners. The primary objective is deterrence, but the chips also will aid in tracking down and identifying stolen saguaros, said Bob Love, chief ranger at southern Arizona's Saguaro National Park. "There's probably more of it that occurs than we're aware of," said Love. The largest theft at the park occurred last year, when 17 saguaros were dug up and stashed for transportation later. The culprits were caught but Love said there have been other cases where three to five plants have been taken at a time. Saguaros are unique to the Sonoran Desert, 120,000 square miles covering portions of Arizona, California and the northern Mexican states of Baja California and Sonora. They're majestic giants that can grow to heights of 50 feet, sprout gaggles of arms and weigh several tons. They can take 50 years to flower and 70 years before sprouting an arm. A 2000 census of the two districts making up the Saguaro National Park outside Tucson estimated that there were 1.3 million saguaros there....

Worries aired about Navy test range expansion East Jefferson County residents told Navy officials at a public hearing that they worried that an expanded undersea warfare test range in Hood Canal would result in less recreational and commercial water access. "My concern is that this range expansion proposal may limit recreational opportunities on the waters," said Don Coleman, owner of Brinnon-based Pacific Adventures scuba diving who also works at Pleasant Harbor Marina. Coleman said Navy officials have told him not to enter Quilcene Bay when the range was active. "I am fully against expansion," he said. Under the proposal, three test ranges would be expanded, and two of the three ranges would have a slight increase in the number of days per year that they are used by the Navy....

Humane Society Charged with Illegal Use of Recorded Phone Calls The United Egg Producers filed requests Monday with the district attorneys in Montgomery, Md., and Sacramento County, Calif., alleging that an employee of the Humane Society of the United States "impersonated an egg industry ally" and illegally taped telephone conversations with a UEP staff member by not advising the staff member that the conversations were being recorded and that HSUS then used the illegally recorded information to support a California political campaign. UEP's filings maintain that the calls were made from a phone in Maryland, where recording phone calls without permission of all involved parties is illegal, and that the information obtained in the calls then was disclosed to a former HSUS operative in California, where it is illegal to disclose information that's the consequence of illegally recorded phone calls. The information was used to further the HSUS-led ballot initiative on farm animal housing, known as Proposition 2, or "Prop 2," according to the filings. The former HSUS operative is the spokesperson for the group supporting Prop 2. Prop 2 would make almost all egg production in California illegal....Also see Lawsuit accuses egg producers over humane conditions, pricing

Border ranchers are seeking ‘surge' on fever tick front Texas border ranchers said Thursday they are ready to head to Washington to bring attention to their losing struggle against the cattle fever tick. The tick once decimated the American cattle industry. It now has spread to an area three times the zone where for decades it had been contained. “We are involved in three wars — the war on terror, the war on drugs and the war on ticks,” Zapata County rancher Humberto Vela told colleagues, animal health officials and others gathered here. “We have made some progress, but the ticks have made more progress.” Vela called for a “surge” in manpower and resources to keep the tick from infecting cattle in interior counties. The ticks are considered eradicated in the United States, save for a narrow zone along the Mexican border, where they cross the Rio Grande on the backs of wayward Mexican livestock....

ABC News - Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia. "These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003. Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism." She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and "collected on" as they called their offices or homes in the United States. Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007. "Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another," said Faulk. The accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other's allegations, provide the first inside look at the day to day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance program. "There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect," said President Bush at a news conference this past February. Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer. "Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News. In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are not intercepted. "It's not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organizations who are affiliated with it," Gen. Hayden testified....

Eavesdropping powers abused without oversight In the most unsurprising revelation imaginable, two former Army Reserve Arab linguists for the National Security Agency have said that they routinely eavesdropped on — “and recorded and transcribed” — the private telephone calls of American citizens who had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. The two former NSA employees, who came forward as part of journalist James Bamford’s forthcoming book on the NSA, intercepted calls as part of the so-called “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” whereby George Bush ordered the NSA in 2001 to eavesdrop on Americans’ calls in secret, without first obtaining judicial approval as required by the law (FISA). That illegal eavesdropping continued for at least six years — through 2007. When Ross showed Kinne a video excerpt of George Bush insisting to the nation that only those with links to Al Qaeda were eavesdropped on as part of his illegal spying program, the following exchange occurred: ROSS: Kinne says she listened to hundreds of Americans simply calling their families …KINNE: Personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything having anything to do with terrorism. It was just personal conversations that nobody else should have been listening to. ROSS: President Bush has reassured Americans again and again: GEORGE BUSH: It’s phone calls of known Al Qaeda suspects making a phone call into the United States. KINNE: I would say that that is completely a lie — I would call it a lie — because we were definitely listening to Americans who had nothing to do with terrorism… ROSS: Kinne says she intercepted, recorded, and transcribed conversations with the military, journalists, and Red Cross and aid workers. Most disturbing here is that these calls were not merely surveilled, but were recorded and transcribed. In whose custody are these recordings and transcripts and what was done with them?....

Telecom Surveillance to Receive Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card The Department of Justice (DOJ) is seeking retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the National Security Agency's (NSA) warrantless surveillance program, utilizing power granted in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. On Sept. 19, the DOJ filed a motion to dismiss Hepting v. AT&T and more than 40 other lawsuits against telecommunications companies that provided data to the NSA. This motion was enabled by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (H.R. 6304). These cases were initially pursued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which has called the NSA program "dragnet surveillance." The FISA Amendments Act states that cases can not be maintained if the Attorney General certifies that the defendant's actions were authorized by the president. Mukasey issued a blanket certification the same day he filed the motion to dismiss. The letter does not specify which telecommunications companies assisted the government because, according to Mukasey, releasing such information "would cause exceptional harm to the national security of the United States." Nor does the public certification specify which one of five provisions of the amended FISA renders the companies exempt from litigation. Mukasey asserted that eavesdropping was narrowly targeted solely to al Qaeda affiliates and not a wider dragnet. Mark Klein, a former AT&T engineer turned whistleblower, disputed this in a 2006 statement about equipment he helped the NSA install that intercepted all of AT&T's Internet and phone traffic, conducting what he called "vacuum-cleaner surveillance." Klein served as a plaintiff's witness for the telecommunications lawsuits....

Judge Excludes Evidence in Alaska Senator’s Trial The federal judge presiding over the corruption trial of Senator Ted Stevens dealt a sharp blow to the prosecution on Wednesday by excluding some evidence because he said Justice Department prosecutors used documents that they knew contained lies. The judge, Emmet G. Sullivan of Federal District Court, declined to declare a mistrial or dismiss any of the seven felony counts, as had been urged by Mr. Stevens’s lawyers. But Judge Sullivan delivered a severe scolding to the prosecution and said he would bar the government from using two categories of evidence central to its case. Perhaps more important, he said he would tell the jury on Thursday that he was excluding some of the prosecution’s evidence because “the government presented evidence the government knew was not true,” an instruction that is likely to undermine the credibility of the prosecution. In a special hearing outside the presence of the jury, Judge Sullivan said, “The government knew the documents were lies.”...So what's new? What's new is they got caught.

Navy may outweigh whales on Supreme Court's scales Whales may simply have to pay the price as the Navy prepares for war, Supreme Court justices suggested Wednesday. In a closely watched environmental case, justices repeatedly sounded sympathetic Wednesday morning to Pentagon officials who want to run large-scale Navy exercises off the Southern California coast. While the resulting underwater sonar storm disturbs marine mammals, it also helps prepare sailors for combat. "I thought the whole point of the armed forces was to hurt the environment," Justice Stephen Breyer said, half-jokingly. "Of course, they're going to do harm." The Pentagon and environmentalists disagree over exactly how much mid-frequency active sonar injures marine mammals, and justices couldn't resolve the conflict Wednesday. An apparent majority of justices, though, did appear ready to defer to military expertise in matters of national security. The technical but crucial legal question in Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council is when a federal agency can sidestep conventional environmental protections by declaring an emergency. A Pentagon victory could make such emergency declarations more common, and on more than just military matters....

Environmental Groups Out on a Limb? The Supreme Court justices on Wednesday seemed receptive to government arguments that a coalition of environmental groups lacked standing to bring a challenge to U.S. Forest Service regulations because their claims were not tied to a specific site or project. In the Forest Service case, Summers v. Earth Island Institute, the environmental organizations challenged regulations under the Forest Service's Appeals Reform Act that exempted certain projects from notice, comment and appeal requirements. The challenge initially involved the Burnt Ridge Project in Sequoia National Forest, but after the project was withdrawn and the parties settled the case, the environmental groups continued to pursue a facial challenge to the regulations. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court's injunction against the implementation of the regulations nationwide. Deputy Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler argued on behalf of the government that the environmental groups could only establish standing to challenge the regulations "by showing an imminent injury by virtue of harm to a site-specific activity." Matt Kenna of the Western Environmental Law Center, who represented the environmental groups, told the justices that the facial challenge to the regulations "could have been brought outside the context of the Burnt Ridge Project, as long as we had shown that it had been applied to a project and continued to be applied to the plaintiffs on an ongoing basis." But Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. said the environmental groups had not pointed to any other concrete action implicated by the regulations....

5% of sage grouse habitat protected on US land A new study by an environmental group that wants the sage grouse listed as a threatened or endangered species shows less than 5 percent of what's left of its dwindling habitat across the West is currently federally protected. The new assessment found four-fifths of the chicken-sized game bird's habitat is adversely affected by either livestock grazing, natural gas and oil development or invasive weeds. "Existing threats to sage grouse and their habitat are enormous," said a copy of the report by WildEarth Guardians obtained by The Associated Press. "Livestock grazing, natural gas and oil development, agricultural conversion, roads, fences, power lines and pipelines, off-road vehicle use, urban sprawl, mining, unnatural fire and invasive weeds are destroying or degrading much of what remains," the group said in the report being made public on Thursday. It singled out livestock grazing—permitted on 91 percent of the bird's range—as "the most ubiquitous use of sage grouse habitat on federal public land." Critics of the report, including the head of the Nevada Department of Wildlife and others who oppose federal listing of the bird, said the study places too much emphasis on grazing and drilling while ignoring other threats to the species such as drought and West Nile virus. "Some of the things they are saying are true, but it is an anti-grazing bent. The situation is way more complicated than what they are talking about here," NDOW Director Kenneth Mayer said. "West Nile and wildfires are the issue, not livestock grazing in my mind."....The "anti-grazing bent" is there because their goal is to eliminate grazing, not protect the sage grouse.

Congress probes BLM environmental review process The U.S. Congress is investigating the way the Bureau of Land Management has bypassed environmental reviews when issuing drilling permits for oil and gas in recent years. The BLM’s Pinedale field office is among those under investigation, officials confirmed Wednesday. The Government Accountability Office, which is the investigative arm of Congress, sent auditors to Utah this week, and tentatively plans to have personnel in Wyoming by the end of this month, said GAO Assistant Director Jeff Malcolm. The investigators will examine the way the BLM has implemented a legal but relatively new tool to exempt some oil and gas drilling from environmental review, said Robin Nazzarro, director of the GAO’s natural resources and environmental team. A spokeswoman for the BLM in Wyoming said the agency welcomes the review and looks forward to working with the investigators. Conservation organizations, however — who have been fighting against these “categorical exclusions” for oil and gas drilling since they were implemented in 2005 — said the Congressional investigation indicates that at least some members of Congress believe the BLM has misused these tools.

Livestock deaths linked to milkweed A histopathology study conducted by the University of Arizona Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory indicates that two cows and five pregnant ewes in the Snowflake area died in September from milkweed poisoning. The animals belonged to Pat Wallin, who is employed by Dr. Milton DeSpain at the Cedar Ridge Veterinary Center in Snowflake. Wallin says the milkweed was in baled hay from the Catalyst Paper Mill farms. Her husband discovered the dead cows and sheep when he went out to feed them in the morning on Sept. 11. The Wallins decided to have a necropsy performed to determine the cause of death. Wallin said the animals were kept in clean pens and fed only hay from the paper mill farms and pellets. A veterinarian took tissue samples from the dead animals as well as hay samples and sent them to the University of Arizona laboratory Sept. 16. They saved the remaining hay bales. Mike Reidhead, manager of the paper mill farms, said, "We heard the rumors and we've been looking into it. We've had the hay tested ,and we can't find it [milkweed] in the hay." Reidhead said hay from the paper mill farm was sent to a laboratory for testing and it came back negative for milkweed. "It's all I feed, and I haven't lost any animals yet," Reidhead said. He raises both cattle and horses....

McCain and the Maverick San Antonio Connection So why does McCain have San Antonio to thank for that maverick label? Because the word maverick was born here in San Antonio, though it didn't originally have quite the macho or honest reformer connotation it does today. Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803-1870) is variously described as a land speculator, rancher, merchant and lawyer who was born in South Carolina, went to Yale, then wound up in Texas in 1835 just as the push for independence from Mexico began. Maverick was actually in the Alamo compound in March of 1836 just days before the famous battle and he might have died there with the other defenders. But they happened to elect him a delegate to a convention 150 miles to the east of San Antonio. So he was gone when Santa Anna finally laid siege to the Alamo. Instead, Maverick was signing the Texas Declaration of Independence, then helping write the constitution for the new Republic of Texas. Maverick bought some cattle and here is where the real maverick connection begins-- though there are a few different versions of exactly how it happened. He either refused to brand his cattle or just neglected to do it. Either way, in these years before there were any fences to separate one ranch from another, cowboys would find stray, unbranded calves and came to refer to them as Mavericks. Within a matter of years the maverick label would be applied to all unbranded cattle no longer part of the herd. And later "mavericking" became a not-so-flattering verb meaning to go out and round up any unbranded cattle and brand them as your own. That finders-keepers-losers-weepers meaning morphed into stealing and was outlawed by the 1870's. By the end of the 1800's a maverick also had come to mean a person who refused to be branded or part of a herd. A nonconformist or rebel. Independent, unconventional and unorthodox. Someone who won't be constrained by party labels. Something like Samuel Maverick himself, a lifelong Democrat....

Western Attire “They dream it up, and we make it happen,” Lelan Keffer, leadman of the set-dressing department for the new locally-shot western Appaloosa, tells SFR. The dream that Keffer, who has lived in Santa Fe for 28 years, refers to is the cinematic dream: the dream of a film completed. As a leadman, Keffer sits perched smack-dab in the middle of the chain that, in big-budget films, brings those dreams into physical reality. Well, “reality,” that is, if you can call an entirely fake town “reality.” Keffer leads the set-dressers, who do the actual painting, hammering and, as Keffer says, “whatever it takes.” He answers to the set decorator, who picks out the actual stuff of a film, from the chairs to the paintings that hang on the walls. And the set decorator, in turn, takes his or her directions from the production designer, who conceptualizes the overarching look of a film—the entire spaceship or, in the case of Appaloosa, the entire frontier. The New Mexico town of Appaloosa was created largely on a private ranch an hour from Santa Fe, has a 360-degree civilization-less view and is outfitted with a western set that was originally constructed for 2007’s 3:10 to Yuma. Since our very job as film watchers is to suspend disbelief—to ignore the unreality—it makes sense that we often take the set design and all the hard work that goes into a film’s look for granted. We’re supposed to. But an incredible amount of research and creative energy goes into “making it happen.” Santa Fe-based set dresser Ginger Dunnill [full disclosure: Dunnill is a friend of the Screener], who worked under Keffer, tells SFR about the attention paid to detail in Appaloosa, from making sure the nails were “period” to learning how people used to stack wood on old wood-burning trains. As Dunnill puts it, “You can’t put a lamp or a stove in that was invented in 1860 if the movie is set in 1790.” Appaloosa looks great, from the rugged New Mexican exteriors to the saloon interiors....

New wolf video from High Country News

Hi,
Here at High Country News we're excited about our new video, Still
Howling Wolf. The film describes the 13-year-long effort to reintroduce
gray wolves in the Northern Rockies. The video explores the passionate
and complicated feelings people have about living with wolves in the
Northern Rockies.

Here's the link to the video: http://www.hcn.org/articles/video-still-howling-wolf

We hope you enjoy this piece, and please let us know what you think.

Best,
Jodi
--
Jodi Peterson
Associate Editor
High Country News

jodi@hcn.org

EDITORIAL: Red Rock fees

If the job is spending money, who you gonna call?

The federal government.

In 2003, the Elko Daily Free Press reported that Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest Supervisor Bob Vaught -- pressed by a local lawmaker and others protesting the Forest Service's actions in closing off access to public lands in Jarbidge Canyon -- admitted spending $15,000 to hire Enviroclean Septic Service out of Twin Falls to swoop in by helicopter and clean a single outhouse at Snowslide Gulch at the end of South Canyon Road, in lieu of accepting an offer by Assemblyman John Carpenter, R-Elko, and local contractor Mike Lattin to arrange for the work to be done by citizen volunteers for free.

Why? Because, to accept that offer, the Forest Service would have had to allow the public to enter its own public lands.

But $15,000 was chickenfeed compared with an expenditure first celebrated by USA Today in late 1987, when the newspaper reported "Sometime in the summer of 1988, in the wondrous high country of Montana's Glacier National Park, construction workers will put the finishing touches on a new federal building. Designed by six architects and engineers employed by the National Park Service, the two-story structure is truly unique: a $1 million, four-hole outhouse that will serve only a few thousand of the 2 million visitors who flock to Glacier each year. ...

"To Ed Venetz, the private contractor who is supervising the job, the rustic, 28-by-19-foot outhouse is a thing of beauty. 'She's just a Plain Jane, like sitting in a prison toilet,' Venetz says of his creation, 'but she will last forever.' "

Bureau of Land management officials now in charge of the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, a few miles west of Las Vegas, have yet to match those kinds of breathtaking expenditures. But they're working on it.

Red Rock is not your high-tech tourist destination. There are no rides, steamboats or miniature railroads -- not even a petting zoo. (Most of that stuff is available down the road, at the private Bonnie Springs Ranch.)

But bureau officials have nonetheless decided the $5 per vehicle and $2 per motorcycle they've been charging since 1997 for those who want to transit the conservation area's 13-mile scenic drive are not enough. The entrance fees are going to be increased, BLM officials said Tuesday -- though they can't yet say by how much.

Fee collections put $1.6 million in the local BLM's coffers in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.

Where does that money go? $178,000 per year now goes to "fee collection expenses." When you add the cost of "interpretative assistance" -- you know, "That's a rattlesnake" -- to that of "fee booth operation," you reach $408,000 per year.

A draft budget planning document shows more than 50 BLM staff members are now involved with "maintaining and operating" Red Rock Canyon's facilities, which include no known moving parts except a couple of gates. Their jobs range from "law enforcement" to "personnel management."

Yep. Personnel to manage the personnel.

What kind of "law enforcement"? Glad you asked. Before the BLM took over, local residents could safely target shoot in a box canyon off Lee Canyon Road, far from any human habitation, 13 miles north of Red Rock Canyon. Today, federal "law enforcement" rangers from Red Rock travel up there to warn locals they can't target shoot in the area, now posted with signs that puzzlingly warn hunting is allowed, but "not shooting."

"I'm not very keen on fees to visit our public lands, our taxpayer-supported lands," comments John Hiatt, conservation chairman of the Red Rock Audubon Society. "In a way, we are getting taxed twice. The public owns the lands, and now we're getting charged to use them."

The Red Rock staff list actually includes 54 job titles. One vacant position is a "budget analyst." Perhaps, if they get their fee hikes, the BLM can hire that analyst ... to help them determine how many more "fee collection stations" they need.

At that point, estimated personnel costs for federal "supervision" of a 13-mile scenic road will run $741,988.81 per year.

Not counting outhouses.

10th Circuit dismisses NM grassland appeal as moot The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver has dismissed an appeal of oil and gas leases in south-central New Mexico as moot since the leases no longer exist. A three-judge panel, in a decision Tuesday, said the termination of the leases in Luna County on the Nutt Grasslands left the court with no case and "no meaningful grounds for relief." It sent the case back to federal court in New Mexico with instructions to dismiss it. The Bureau of Land Management sold the oil and gas leases in contention to Imperial Oil Properties of Wichita, Kan., in January 2003. The New Mexico Wilderness Alliance had asked that areas be withdrawn from the sale, arguing that leases could harm the wilderness value of the grasslands. The alliance alleged the BLM violated the National Environmental Policy Act by not doing certain analyses. The BLM rejected the protest in 2003, saying an environmental impact statement prepared for the 1993 Mimbres resource management plan satisfied the requirement. The Wilderness Alliance, the Chihuahuan Grasslands Alliance and the Sky Island Alliance went to federal court in October 2004, contending the agency violated NEPA and failed to assess the environmental consequences of leasing....

Ninth Circuit rules on conservation groups' standing In an opinion issued today, the Ninth Circuit in Salmon Spawning & Recovery Alliance v. Gutierrez held that a coalition of salmon conservation groups lacked standing to pursue two claims against the National Marine Fisheries Service and other agencies arising out of a 1999 treaty between the US and Canada governing salmon harvests. The groups contended that (1) the Service's failure to consult adequately over the 1999 treaty in a 2005 biological opinion violated the ESA; they also argued that the Service continues to violate the ESA by (2) implementing the treaty's harvest limits, and (3) not reinitiating consultation. As to the first claim, the court held that it could provide no relief to the groups that would redress their injury (excessive take of salmon), because the injury was caused by the 1999 treaty, which the court cannot undo. As for the second claim, the court held that, even though it could overturn the bi-op, that remedy would not be likely to redress the groups' injury: US withdrawal from the treaty might well produce an increase in Canadian salmon takes. But the court reversed the lower court and found that the groups had established standing to pursue their third claim, viz., the failure to reinitiate consultation....

PLF challenges unwarranted polar bear listing On October 2, 2008, PLF filed a complaint in the federal district court of the District of Columbia challenging the listing of the polar bear as a "threatened" species under the Endangered Species Act. PLF represents a wide spectrum of small businesses, food producers, family farmers, property owners, employers and consumers as well the poor and minorities nationwide who would be harmed by restrictive regulations that will likely result from the polar bear listing. This is the first time in the history of the ESA that a thriving species has been listed based entirely on speculative models forecasting future events. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has declared the polar bear to be threatened solely because admittedly unverified and uncertain climate models predict a declining trend in Arctic sea ice, and not because of any current decline in the polar bear population. The final rule repeatedly admonishes that forecasted population numbers and estimated time periods are not to be taken at face value. Instead, the Rule states that the trend in sea ice is worrisome and that the listing is warranted because melting sea ice will negatively affect polar bear populations, perhaps resulting in steady decline in abundance. The problem with this conclusion is three-fold. First. The Service admits that the listing of the polar bear as threatened will not address this concern. According to Secretary Kempthorne, the polar bear is already protected by other laws and treaties and "this listing will not stop global climate change or prevent sea ice from melting" in the Arctic. In other words the listing will not address the very threat on which the listing was based. Second, the climate models relied on by the Service undercut rather than support the listing. Relying on worst case scenarios, these models predict a 78-90% survival rate over the next 40-50 years. The government’s own studies do not forecast an irretrievable decline but anticipate that the polar bear population mid-century will be about 20,000 strong, approximately double the numbers 50-60 years ago. And third, the current demographic data show that while global temperatures have increased over the past century, the polar bear population has also increased. It is now the highest in recorded history: an estimated 25,000. Three-quarters of the nineteen polar bear populations are either increasing, stable, or indeterminate in size....

Dingell, Boucher call for steep greenhouse gas cuts The darkening economic outlook may force lawmakers to delay some public policy priorities, but two House Democrats indicated Tuesday that curbing global warming won’t be one of them. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Energy and Air Quality subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher (D-Va.) released a 461-page bill that seeks to cut greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 80 percent over the next four decades. Environmental groups welcomed that target, but criticized the bill, which Dingell and Boucher refer to as a “discussion draft,” for delaying dramatic emissions reductions until after 2020. The long-awaited legislation relies on a so-called cap-and-trade program to make those reductions. Companies would be able to buy or sell emissions allowances on an open market, depending on whether they met or exceeded emissions caps set by federal regulators. “Politically, scientifically, legally, and morally, the question has been settled: regulation of greenhouse gases in the United States is coming,” Dingell and Boucher wrote to committee members on Tuesday. “The only remaining question is what form that regulation will take.” Part of the impetus for the release of the bill seems to be to head off a separate effort at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to cut emissions through federal regulation, an option made available last year when the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had the authority, under the Clean Air Act, to address global warming....