NEWS ROUNDUP
Dog fight The Colorado Division of Wildlife last month asked the Colorado Wildlife Commission to ban prairie dog hunting on public land from March 1 to May 31. The DOW proposal is aimed at protecting prairie dog mothers while they have dependent pups, DOW spokesman Randy Hampton said. "If you hunt during that period and the females have dependent young, the dependent young often die, as well," Hampton said. Under current law, hunters on the Western Slope can kill prairie dogs year-round with no limits. Moffat County commissioners on Tuesday signed a letter to the Wildlife Commission saying they oppose limiting prairie dog hunting. The Moffat County Land Use Board, a residents group that advises county commissioners on natural resource issues, also strongly opposes the DOW proposal, Comstock said....
5,000 acres in Catron County protected Some 5,000 acres of the Horse Springs Ranch in Catron County and a vital wildlife corridor that it provides are being protected under a new conservation easement. The easement was arranged by The Trust for Public Land and will protect property at the heart of the 16,000-acre ranch in southern New Mexico, the trust and its partners announced Tuesday. The easement will let rancher Jay Platt and his family work the land, but will protect it from development in the future. The easement was funded with $2.7 million from the state-administered, federally funded Forest Legacy Program and a $900,000 grant from the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. "Some of the things that made this ranch desirable to the Forest Legacy Program the wildlife, the water, the forests are the things that make me love ranching it, and make me proud to one day pass it on to my sons," Platt said....
Army Could Condemn Land For Pinon Site Expansion Army officials said they haven't ruled out the possibility of condemning private land to expand its Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site training grounds in southeastern Colorado. The Army has said it's seeking an additional 418,000 acres to expand the site near La Junta. In a letter to Democratic Congressman John Salazar, Assistant Army Secretary Keith Eastin said the Army might turn to eminent domain as a last resort. Salazar said that's discouraging because officials at the Army's Fort Carson near Colorado Springs have said they were interested only in buying land from willing sellers. Salazar said he will support farmers and ranchers who oppose using condemnation for the expansion and do what he can to prevent it. Several ranchers around the 240,000-acre site have called the Army's expansion plan a land grab. About 400 landowners attended a meeting last Saturday in Pueblo to oppose it....
Author claims first traverse of Comb Ridge These days, when thousands of weekend warriors hike the Appalachian or Continental Divide trails every summer, it seems nearly impossible that there could be a 120-mile long geographic feature in the United States left largely unexplored as late as two years ago. But there is. Or was. And if you drive from Durango to Lake Powell through Blanding, Utah, the highway cuts right through it. The sandstone outcrop named the Comb Ridge rises from the desert on the Navajo Nation near Kayenta, Ariz. and bulges eastward before sweeping north to Blanding more than 100 miles away. The 600-foot-high anomaly slopes gradually up from scrub cedar and piñon to the east, peaks in dramatic fashion in sharp sandstone formations, and drops in sheer cliffs and overhangs on its western face. The first full-length traverse of this unique knife-edge curve, the subject of David Roberts' Sandstone Spine, took place during 18 days in September 2004. Granted, two and a half weeks of hiking through dry washes and over slick cap rock - even with an 80 pound pack and without a single mile of trail to go by - doesn't amount to a major assault on Everest, or even Denali. But Roberts' story of this adventure with two mountaineering and climbing friends, Greg Child and Vaughn Hadenfeldt, squeezes in enough history and culture to compensate....
Salazar calls for inquiry into Wolf Creek project Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., called for a federal probe into whether political influence played a role in the government's review of the proposed Village at Wolf Creek Project. Salazar, speaking to reporters on a conference call, said a former top U.S. Forest Service official has alleged improper political influence and flaws with the way the agency handled an environmental analysis of a development that could house as many as 10,000 people. Ed Ryberg, who retired recently as head of the Forest Service's winter sports program, "believes there was improper political influence," Salazar said. "If that is so, that is wrong," Salazar said. "The only way you get to the bottom of the allegations is if you have an investigation. An investigation is in fact warranted." The Forest Service's review of the Wolf Creek application focused on road access to the village rather than on the overall environmental impact of the development. The agency ruled in April that Texas billionaire and developer Red McCombs must build two routes to his 287-acre village. Bob Honts, chief executive of the Village at Wolf Creek, reacted to Salazar's call for an inquiry by saying: "We followed the appropriate process. I think you're going to find that everything was done the way it was supposed to be done."....
Ex-BLM firefighter's confession allowed in Nevada arson case An ex-firefighter for the Bureau of Land Management says federal agents coerced him into confessing to starting three wildfires in Nevada, but a judge ruled prosecutors can use the admission at his arson trial next month. Mark E. Morgan, 34, had been scheduled to go to trial in U.S. District Court on Tuesday, but lawyers for both sides asked for a delay until June 20 because they are working toward a plea agreement that would include restitution. Investigators allege Morgan started the fires that burned hundreds of acres of national forest land last August because he was bored and needed the money, according to court documents. After repeatedly denying any role, the Reno resident eventually admitted in December that he started two of the fires with a cigarette lighter and the third with a flare gun, which he disposed of in the city dump, according to a transcript obtained by The Associated Press....
Arizona Snowbowl Snowmaking Controversy Continues What do you get when you combine a desert-dwelling ski resort, a sacred mountain range, and proposals to use reclaimed wastewater for snowmaking? If you’re thinking a huge community controversy spanning four years (and counting), over 20 environmentalist and tribal groups, and endless days spent in courtrooms, then you’re right on target. In 2002, Arizona Snowbowl, located about seven miles northwest of Flagstaff, announced plans for resort improvements—including snowmaking—in response to short seasons with little snowfall. Case in point, during the 2001-02 season the resort was open for only four days due to a combined 87 inches of precious white stuff. And although the skies graciously dumped on the resort during the next few seasons, the 2005-06 winter again only allowed a measly 15 days of operation. So what do you do if nature won’t willingly give you snow? You make it. However, Snowbowl’s idea for snowmaking is spraying effluent from a local wastewater treatment plant across 205 of its 777 skiable acres—land that is considered sacred by Native Americans, thus beginning the long journey through the wonderfully complex (not to mention lengthy) world of environmental impact assessments, public comment, and legal battles....
Critics see Tongass as waste of U.S. funds Critics of the government's logging policy in Southeast Alaska are pressing an amendment in the U.S. House that would prohibit government spending to build logging roads in the Tongass National Forest. Rep. Robert Andrews, D-N.J., one of the amendment sponsors, told reporters Monday the Tongass logging program loses an average of $40 million a year. "The taxpayers I represent are investors in the U.S. government," he said. From their perspective, he said, the Tongass is a loser: The government is spending more to build logging roads and administer the logging program than it is receiving from timber sales. "You've got an enormous waste of money," Andrews said. "You've got a policy that makes no sense from the point of view of the environment." He has joined forces with Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, on an amendment to the Interior appropriations bill that could be up for debate on the House floor later this week. Their efforts are backed by a diverse coalition that includes Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Alaska Coalition and other environmental groups....
Rare frogs die from bacterial infection Seven endangered frogs rescued from an Inland mountain creek following the devastating 2003 wildfires for fear looming floods would wipe them out died of a bacterial infection at the Wild Animal Park in Escondido, a veterinary pathologist said Tuesday. The deaths last month of the mountain yellow-legged frogs were a major setback for the amphibian that is nearing extinction, leaving federal and state biologists to consider how best to keep the species going. "There are so few frogs and in so few places, we could end up losing them all together," said Kathie Meyer, a wildlife biologist with the San Bernardino National Forest who helped rescue the frogs. Adam Backlin, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, estimated that 200 frogs remain across the San Bernardino, San Jacinto and San Gabriel mountains, making them one of the Inland region's most endangered species. He and Meyer said a captive breeding program -- a rare step that was undertaken with the California condor -- is still on the table, in which tadpoles or juveniles would be captured in the wild....
Western gray squirrel fails to get federal protection The federal government snubbed the western gray squirrel for endangered species status, but Washington state is outlining plans to save the three remaining pockets of the native tree squirrel in Washington from extinction. The western gray squirrel has been listed as a threatened species in Washington since 1993, when surveys indicated a decline in its populations in its traditional territory. The exact number remaining in the state is unknown. The most recent surveys counted 281 squirrels. State law prohibits killing them or destroying their nests. The state Department of Fish and Wildlife released its recovery plan this month for saving the animals from extinction. The plan calls for improving known habitat, importing squirrels from other areas for genetic diversity and capturing and treating the elusive animals for mange, a skin disease caused by parasitic mites. The state also plans to work with private land owners and other government agencies to protect squirrels from disturbance from logging operations and road building....
Carp in Utah Lake pose health risk for humans The millions of carp causing problems for Utah Lake's native fish also may pose a health threat to humans. Elevated PCB levels have been found in carp collected from the lake, leading state and Utah County officials Tuesday to issue a fish-consumption advisory. The Utah Department of Health recommends that adults eat no more than one 8-ounce serving of carp from the lake per month. The fish should not be consumed by children, pregnant and nursing women, or women who may become pregnant. The advisory will be posted on signs at access points to Utah Lake. PCBs — polychlorinated biphenyls — are man-made chemicals that were used as coolants and lubricants in transformers, capacitors and other electrical equipment, said John Whitehead, a hydrologist in the state Department of Environmental Quality. They're also "probable human carcinogens," according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and can cause harmful health effects such as reduced ability to fight infections, low birth weights and learning problems. "They're not really known to cause cancer in humans, but they can cause cancer in animals," said Jason Scholl, a toxicologist with the state health department. Those cases were the result of prolonged exposure to PCBs, Scholl said. PCB levels detected in the carp from Utah Lake were below EPA screening levels for non-cancer effects, he said, meaning the health risks from eating the fish are minimal....
Grizzly-Polar Bear Hybrid Found -- But What Does It Mean? The animal confirmed last week to be half polar bear, half grizzly bear is certainly weird, scientists say, but he's not necessarily a symbol of global warming or anything else. Last week, DNA analysis confirmed that the bear's father was a grizzly and his mother was a polar bear. The bear's white fur was interspersed with brown patches. He also had long claws, a concave facial profile, and a humped back—all grizzly characteristics. "It's of interest because it's rare, but that's kind of it," said Rosa Meehan, the chief of marine mammal management with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage, Alaska. "I don't think there's more to it than that." Meehan is overseeing a review of how changing environmental conditions in the Arctic are affecting polar bears. The study aims to determine whether the animals warrant federal protection in the U.S. as an endangered species....
Center for Biological Diversity Takes First Step In Lawsuit to Protect Two Native Southwest Fish Today the Center for Biological Diversity filed a formal notice of intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for illegally denying protection to the roundtail and headwater chubs under the Endangered Species Act. In denying protection for the two fish on May 3, 2006, FWS did not find the two species are safe from extinction, but instead denied protection based on technical grounds. FWS determined that the population of roundtail chub in the lower Colorado River Basin is not significant to the species as a whole, and that listing the headwater chub is warranted but precluded by higher priority actions. “The Bush administration has the worst record of protecting the nation’s wildlife of any modern presidency and will go to any length to avoid protecting the nation’s wildlife,” said Noah Greenwald, Conservation Biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “The roundtail and headwater chubs need the safety net of the Endangered Species Act, not political shenanigans by the Bush administration.” The Center for Biological Diversity filed a formal scientific petition to gain protection for the two chubs in April 2003, documenting a precipitous decline in both species....
Case to Protect Hundreds of Wildlife Species Nationwide Moves Forward Judge Gladys Kessler ruled this week that the Center for Biological Diversity, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance and Forest Guardians can proceed in a federal lawsuit that charges the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) with unlawfully delaying protection for 263 wildlife species. All 263 species are currently listed as candidates for protection as threatened or endangered species under the Endangered Species Act, meaning FWS concedes they are sufficiently endangered to warrant protection, but such protection is precluded by work to protect other species. To date, at least 24 candidate species have gone extinct while waiting for protection. "The court's ruling is a victory for the nation's wildlife, bringing literally hundreds of plants and animals one step closer to the protection they need to avoid extinction," stated Noah Greenwald, Conservation Biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity. The Endangered Species Act allows FWS to declare species' protection "warranted but precluded" as it did in the case of these candidate species, but it must demonstrate that it is making "expeditious progress" in protecting other species that are of a higher priority. However, despite an increasing budget for listing, the Bush administration has protected the fewest number of species of any administration since the Act was passed....
BLM's oil, gas lease sale rakes in $54M The Bureau of Land Management's Utah office reaped record-setting revenues from its oil and gas lease sale on Tuesday. The BLM sold leases on 262 parcels for just over $54 million during the day-long auction at its Gateway offices in downtown Salt Lake City, nearly doubling the previous high of $28 million, set in September of 2004. "We had a lot of interest, a lot of spirited bidding," BLM spokeswoman Lola Bird said. That interest was apparent by the fact that the agency sold leases on the bulk of the 295 parcels that were originally offered up - which translated into 392,000 acres out of 438,000 offered. The highest bid was $3,000 per acre. But the sale also underscored that this was perhaps the most controversial energy lease auction the Utah BLM has staged. Nearly $30 million was generated off the sale of parcels that previously had been protested by conservation and outdoor recreation groups. Tuesday's largest single parcel sale, a 1,875-acre tract which went for $3.7 million, was a protested parcel in Carbon County....
Proposals could let nuclear wastes in Utah Utah could see a few forms of nuclear waste come to the state if plans discussed at a Senate hearing Tuesday move ahead. Approval of a federal interim storage facility for commercial nuclear fuel could move fuel rods to the Private Fuel Storage site on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation — and a plan to recycle nuclear waste could make additional waste eligible to be stored at EnergySolutions' facilities. Neither idea has been approved nor given money to proceed just yet, but Congress has options to make either proposal work. At a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing Tuesday, Paul Golan, the government's top Yucca Mountain official, said "the department continues to have an open mind on interim storage." He said the department does not believe it has the authority under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 — the law that guides the government's plan to store nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas — to move ahead with interim storage, but if Congress allowed it, the department would be open to the discussion. "Interim storage is less important than moving Yucca Mountain forward, but we understand that the commercial utilities are running in to a storage situation." Golan said....
Feds OK St. George airport After a decade of review, the Federal Aviation Administration has determined that a new airport near St. George could result in slightly more aircraft noise but won't substantially disturb the serenity at Zion National Park. The decision, in a new environmental impact statement from the FAA, overcomes a major obstacle for the city's airport plan and puts the project on the verge of winning final approval. It also comes despite previous objections from the Grand Canyon Trust, which prevailed in a 2002 lawsuit that claimed the FAA had failed to fully consider noise impacts over Zion National Park and forced the agency back for more study. "It's been over 10 years for us in this process. There's been about $4 million spent, so this is the most comprehensive airport environmental study ever done in the nation," said Larry Bulloch, public works director for St. George. "We feel it has met everyone's needs." According to the FAA analysis, Zion National Park could actually end up quieter overall if the new airport is built. That is because larger jets would be able to land at the new airport, replacing the current smaller, propeller-driven planes. More passengers could travel on fewer flights. In addition, the jets would travel faster, so they would be over the park for a shorter period of time....
Wooly workmanship A sweaty man emerges from a plywood trailer. He is bent at the waist, like a wrestler posed for the start of a match. Wyoming prairie dust swirls in the air around him as he makes his way to a camper trailer for lunch. His fingers are wrapped with tape and smeared with lanolin. The buzz of shearing tools has silenced for an hour, and the wind dominates the ear. After a cold drink and a sandwich, work will begin again. Claudio Pereira, 31, is one of a crew of seven sheep shearers from Uruguay, hired to clip the wool from about 3,500 sheep at Bill Taliaferro’s ranch northwest of Rock Springs. Taliaferro runs the ranch, Green River Livestock, with his family. It takes three 11-hour days for the shearers to complete the task. The men work for Fairchild Shearing of Buhl, Idaho. The Fairchilds and their three shearing crews of Australians, New Zealanders, Uruguayans, and a handful of Americans, travel from February to June and then again from September to November. These crews will see the states of Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming before their work is done....
Doctor Proctor making his name known among cowboys The first time he displayed his power and prowess, summarily ejecting a would-be rider in Rod Chumley's practice arena, the bull they called K24 got a reputation. "The first time he bucked," says Steve Katich, the Ferry County rancher who raised him, "you knew he was a superstar." The first time he came out of a bucking chute in competition, the bull they called K24 got a name. "Somebody get a doc for Proctor!" people shouted, with the bull's would-be rider, an up-and-comer named Shane Proctor, lying unconscious on the arena floor. Hmm ... Doctor Proctor, thought Chumley, a Wenas-area rancher and one of the bull's owners. That's got a nice ring to it. The first time he got under the bright lights in Las Vegas, at October's 2005 Professional Bull Riders finals, the bull they now called Doctor Proctor let the tour's rookie of the year, Kody Lostroh, stay aboard for all of 4.3 seconds. A month ago, Lostroh got his rematch ... and couldn't even stay on for two seconds. "About a jump and a half," grins Lostroh, one of the top 20 riders in the PBR's premier tour, the Built Ford Tough Series. "Both times I been on him, he jerked the rope outta my hands. Gotta be a pretty strong bull to do that."....
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
FLE
FCC commissioner calls for probe of phone companies working with NSA
The Federal Communications Commission should investigate whether phone companies are violating federal communications law by providing calling records to the National Security Agency as part of an anti-terrorism program, an FCC commissioner said Monday. ``There is no doubt that protecting the security of the American people is our government's No. 1 responsibility,'' Commissioner Michael J. Copps, a Democrat, said in a statement. ``But in a digital age where collecting, distributing and manipulating consumers' personal information is as easy as a click of a button, the privacy of our citizens must still matter.'' USA Today reported last week that AT&T Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. began turning over tens of millions of phone records to the NSA after the spy agency requested the records shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The paper reported that the NSA is building a massive call databank to analyze calling patterns. The telecommunications company Qwest said it refused to cooperate with the NSA after determining that doing so would violate privacy law. An FCC investigation, if undertaken, would be the second attempt this year by the government to explore an aspect of an NSA program. The Justice Department sought to investigate the role of its lawyers in the warrantless eavesdropping program, but it ended the inquiry last week because its lawyers were denied security clearances....
BellSouth denies giving information to National Security Agency
BellSouth said in a statement that it doesn't contract with the National Security Agency to supply customer calling information. "As a result of media reports that BellSouth provided massive amounts of customer calling information under a contract with the NSA," it said Monday, "the company conducted an internal review to determine the facts. Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA." USA TODAY first contacted BellSouth five weeks ago in reporting the story on the NSA's program. The night before the story was published, USA TODAY described the story in detail to BellSouth, and the company did not challenge the newspaper's account. The company did issue a statement, saying: "BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority." In an interview Monday, BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher said the company was not asking for a correction from USA TODAY. Asked to define "bulk customer calling records," Battcher said: "We are not providing any information to the NSA, period." He said he did not know whether BellSouth had a contract with the Department of Defense, which oversees the NSA....
FBI Acknowledges: Journalists Phone Records are Fair Game
The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters' phone records in leak investigations. "It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration," said a senior federal official. The acknowledgement followed our blotter item that ABC News reporters had been warned by a federal source that the government knew who we were calling. The official said our blotter item was wrong to suggest that ABC News phone calls were being "tracked." "Think of it more as backtracking," said a senior federal official. But FBI officials did not deny that phone records of ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post had been sought as part of a investigation of leaks at the CIA. In a statement, the FBI press office said its leak investigations begin with the examination of government phone records. Officials say that means that phone records of reporters will be sought if government records are not sufficient. Officials say the FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek information with what are called National Security Letters (NSL). The NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government....
FCC commissioner calls for probe of phone companies working with NSA
The Federal Communications Commission should investigate whether phone companies are violating federal communications law by providing calling records to the National Security Agency as part of an anti-terrorism program, an FCC commissioner said Monday. ``There is no doubt that protecting the security of the American people is our government's No. 1 responsibility,'' Commissioner Michael J. Copps, a Democrat, said in a statement. ``But in a digital age where collecting, distributing and manipulating consumers' personal information is as easy as a click of a button, the privacy of our citizens must still matter.'' USA Today reported last week that AT&T Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. began turning over tens of millions of phone records to the NSA after the spy agency requested the records shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The paper reported that the NSA is building a massive call databank to analyze calling patterns. The telecommunications company Qwest said it refused to cooperate with the NSA after determining that doing so would violate privacy law. An FCC investigation, if undertaken, would be the second attempt this year by the government to explore an aspect of an NSA program. The Justice Department sought to investigate the role of its lawyers in the warrantless eavesdropping program, but it ended the inquiry last week because its lawyers were denied security clearances....
BellSouth denies giving information to National Security Agency
BellSouth said in a statement that it doesn't contract with the National Security Agency to supply customer calling information. "As a result of media reports that BellSouth provided massive amounts of customer calling information under a contract with the NSA," it said Monday, "the company conducted an internal review to determine the facts. Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA." USA TODAY first contacted BellSouth five weeks ago in reporting the story on the NSA's program. The night before the story was published, USA TODAY described the story in detail to BellSouth, and the company did not challenge the newspaper's account. The company did issue a statement, saying: "BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority." In an interview Monday, BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher said the company was not asking for a correction from USA TODAY. Asked to define "bulk customer calling records," Battcher said: "We are not providing any information to the NSA, period." He said he did not know whether BellSouth had a contract with the Department of Defense, which oversees the NSA....
FBI Acknowledges: Journalists Phone Records are Fair Game
The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters' phone records in leak investigations. "It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration," said a senior federal official. The acknowledgement followed our blotter item that ABC News reporters had been warned by a federal source that the government knew who we were calling. The official said our blotter item was wrong to suggest that ABC News phone calls were being "tracked." "Think of it more as backtracking," said a senior federal official. But FBI officials did not deny that phone records of ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post had been sought as part of a investigation of leaks at the CIA. In a statement, the FBI press office said its leak investigations begin with the examination of government phone records. Officials say that means that phone records of reporters will be sought if government records are not sufficient. Officials say the FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek information with what are called National Security Letters (NSL). The NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government....
NEWS ROUNDUP
Energy development called a threat to U.S. natural, cultural resources The federal government's rush to develop energy on millions of acres of federal land in the West is leaving vast natural and cultural resources languishing, the head of the National Trust for Historic Preservation says. Richard Moe, head of the National Trust, said the nation is in danger of losing a critical part of its heritage as archaeological sites and artifacts in such places as Colorado's Canyons of the Ancients and Utah's Nine Mile Canyon lie undocumented and unprotected. The misnamed Nine Mile Canyon stretches for 75 miles from around Price to Myton, Duchesne County. According to Jerry Spangler, an Ogden archaeologist who is now the director of the Colorado Plateau Archaeological Alliance, a 45-mile section hosts many examples of ancient Indian rock art. Tens of thousands of rock art images are in Nine Mile Canyon, he said. About 1,000 archaeological sites with rock art, granaries or other cultural resources have been documented, Spangler added, "and we estimate that that represents only about 10 percent of the total." In a report to be released today, the National Trust says only 17 million acres of the 262 million acres that the Bureau of Land Management oversees in 12 Western states have been surveyed to identify cultural resources....
Park Service, locals at odds over road's fate The National Park Service has proposed turning a washed-out road in north-central Washington's upper Stehekin Valley into a trail for hikers and horseback riders, but the idea is meeting opposition from residents of the rural community. Stehekin sits at the end of Lake Chelan, accessible by boat, floatplane or on foot. The community is surrounded by wilderness area, the North Cascades National Park and U.S. Forest Service land. The 23-mile Stehekin Valley Road leads away from the lake into the national park, but parts of it have been impassable for months. The Park Service made the lower 12 miles accessible to vehicles, but the upper 11 miles remain closed....
Gila plans to use herbicide to kill salt cedar The Gila National Forest plans to use a herbicide to kill salt cedar along the Gila River of southwestern New Mexico. The U.S. Forest Service has been illing salt cedars, also known as tamarisk, with Darlon 3A for several years in the San Francisco River drainage, and decided to expand the program to three forks of the Gila River. Salt cedars, which are not a native plant, crowd out cottonwoods, willows, alders and other native vegetation. "They really take a lot of water," said Don Luhrsen, a wildlife specialist with the Gila National Forest. "They also produce salt, which makes the area too saline for other plants." The proposal would pull out, roots and all, those salt cedars that have trunks less than 2 inches in diameter, Luhrsen said. Crews would cut down larger ones and paint the chemical on the stump. No spraying is planned....
Owl decision is delayed until June 2 The pygmy owl will stay "delisted" at least until June 2, a federal judge decided Monday. U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton declined environmentalists' requests to put a temporary hold on the federal government's mid-April decision to remove the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl from the endangered-species list. Bolton set a June 2 hearing here on a request from the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife for an injunction blocking the delisting for a longer period. Bolton's reasoning was that environmentalists couldn't prove that any new development in owl habitat is imminent. Six developments — four on the Northwest Side, one near Sahuarita and one near Apache Junction — have all been freed from federal reviews of their effects on the owl by the delisting. But they still must get their federal Army Corps of Engineers permits processed....
Debate: Are Ariz. owls a distinct subspecies? Research that suggested splitting pygmy owls in Southern Arizona, south Texas and Mexico into separate subspecies will be a key point at today's hearing on the future of the Arizona owls' endangered status. Environmental groups and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will argue over whether the Arizona birds represent a significant portion of the entire range of pygmy owls and deserve protection as an endangered species. One issue is whether Arizona's owls are genetically different from those in Mexico. Glenn Proudfoot, a veteran pygmy owl researcher, told the service in a written comment last fall that the pygmy owls in Southern Arizona and the Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa are genetically separate from those in other parts of Mexico, and that those in Arizona and northern Sonora appear to have been separated from those in Sinaloa for some time. Given that, the birds in Arizona and Sonora should be managed distinctly from the others, he said....
Green groups see red over Pombo Web site The long-simmering stew between national environmental groups and Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, has spilled onto the powerful House committee chairman's Web site. Environmentalists contend Pombo is improperly torching his political adversaries and spreading lies on the committee's taxpayer-funded Web pages. "Propaganda is legal," said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, "but the taxpayers shouldn't be paying for it." Pombo argues that his sites -- one titled "Earth Day" and a second focused on reforms of the Endangered Species Act -- shine light on eco-myths and the fund-raising machine behind a movement that spends millions of dollars to block environmental policy reforms. "It's all part of the policy debate," Pombo said. "Hey, these groups can't scream that my site is political and turn around and say their stuff is educational. They can't have it both ways."....
Lined up, ready to fight In anticipation of what could be one of Arizona's worst fire seasons, federal and state agencies have positioned small air tankers throughout the state. At least 14 single-engine AT-802s are in place from Marana to Show Low, waiting for the call. Fred Mascher, Arizona State Land Department single-engine air-tanker manager, said the versatile firefighting planes are at strategic locations and readied a month earlier than last year. "The potential for wildfire is catastrophic this year," Mascher said. The concern is over extremely dry vegetation caused by a record winter drought. In most years, at least some pockets of Arizona get enough rain to lessen fire risk, but this fire season, every inch of the state is susceptible to wildfires....
Groups say BLM can do better Two oil and gas lease sales in Colorado and Utah this month are examples of how the Bush administration's focus on oil and gas is opening hundreds of thousands of acres to drilling at the expense of fish and wildlife habitat, said Brian O'Donnell, director of Trout Unlimited's public lands initiative. An auction in Utah today will be the largest government lease sale in state history. Another in Colorado last week was one of the largest on record there. Both push into sensitive lands, including habitat for endangered ferrets in Colorado and parcels in Utah known for Indian rock art and scenic views. The Bureau of Land Management, an agency within the Interior Department, is responsible for managing energy and mineral rights, wilderness, wildlife habitat and historical and archaeological sites on millions of acres of public lands, mostly in the West. Hunting and fishing groups say energy development shouldn't be the BLM's dominant activity. But while President Bush's proposed 2007 budget asks for $25.4 million in new money for the oil and gas program, including $9.2 million to expedite energy permits, it seeks no increase for caring for riverbanks and other wildlife habitat, they say....
Ex-interior secretary urges activism A former U.S. cabinet member on Sunday gave a cautiously optimistic prognosis for the future of the West, and of the nation’s changing political winds, at a conference in Aspen. But Bruce Babbitt, a former U.S. secretary of the interior, dashed any presidential hopes his fans might have had when asked if there was any chance he would be running to replace George W. Bush in 2008. He was the final speaker at the Sopris Foundation’s weekend conference, “Innovative Ideas for a New West,” which drew speakers from around the nation and the world to the Aspen Institute campus. Babbitt called the conference an “extraordinary Western enterprise,” which he deemed critical to revitalizing political momentum among a segment of the population somewhat demoralized by Bush administration policies, including efforts to sell off an increasing amount of public lands and to expand energy exploration throughout the West and along the coasts....
Az man 1 of 5 indicted for ecoterrorism in Washington A new grand jury indictment returned Thursday alleges that five people were behind the firebombing of the University of Washington's horticulture center in May 2001. Only one of the five, Briana Waters of Berkeley, Calif., had previously been indicted in the case. The new indictment in U.S. District Court in Seattle also named Justin Solondz, 26, formerly of Jefferson County, Wash., and William C. Rodgers, of Prescott, Ariz., who committed suicide in jail after being charged with other acts of ecoterrorism. Two others referred to in the indictment were not identified. The UW fire, one of the Northwest's most notorious acts of ecoterrorism, was set early on May 21, 2001. The horticulture center, which was rebuilt at a cost of about $7 million, had done work on fast-growing hybrid poplars in hopes of limiting the amount of natural forests that timber companies log. The Earth Liberation Front, a shadowy collection of environmental activists, claimed responsibility five days after the fire, issuing a statement that said the poplars pose "an ecological nightmare" for the diversity of native forests....
Utah campground closed because of plague A campground at Natural Bridges National Monument has been closed because of bubonic plague detected among field mice and chipmunks. Plague also has been found this spring in rodent populations at Mesa Verde National Park and Colorado National Monument. National Park Service officials said there never has been a reported human case of bubonic plague originating from the parks or national monuments. "We come down on the conservative side when it comes to closing campgrounds," said Joe Winkelmaier of the U.S. Public Health Service. "We just like to be sure when it comes to plague." Several weeks ago, park rangers noticed a large number of dead field mice at Natural Bridges, about 40 miles west of Blanding. Chief Ranger Ralph Jones showed that tests indicated they died from the plague....
Elk keep aspens from thriving A bundle of scraggly, decrepit sticks poked out of the ground alongside Bear Lake Road. Therese Johnson, a Rocky Mountain National Park biologist, crunched through the dead winter grass to examine the branches. “This aspen is dead,” she said. The sticks never grew to become a full-fledged aspen tree. Their roots could be a decade or more old, but they never grew taller than a couple of feet, Johnson said. Elk have gnawed the branches repeatedly, keeping the tree from thriving. Nearby, taller aspen show the teeth marks of elk — dark gouges in the trunks about 6 feet from the ground. The holes could leave the trees vulnerable to fungal diseases, but that isn’t what worries park employees the most. Around Johnson’s ankles, tiny twigs shoot up from the soil. They should become young trees that replace the older, dying aspen, but their ends have been nibbled by elk. Without natural predators or hunters to keep them moving, the park’s elk herd has grown to as many as 3,000 animals and tends to stay in the same spots, Johnson said....
Historian's DVD shows the Glen Canyon of old W.L. "Bud" Rusho liked Glen Canyon Dam. But while he worked to document the dam construction in the 1950s and early '60s, in his words, "I fell in love" with the amazing southern Utah canyon that the dam eventually drowned. Glen Canyon Dam is seen under construction in 1963, with the Colorado River starting to back up behind it. Last week Rusho released "Glen Canyon Remembered," a DVD that provides a haunting glimpse of the canyons that have been lost beneath the waters of Lake Powell. Running one hour, 10 minutes, with extras such as a historic film, the DVD is available at Ken Sanders Rare Books, 268 S. 200 East. Besides the lore of the river and the beauty of the vanished canyons, the DVD provides stories about the massive archaeological salvage project that attempted to save some of the region's prehistoric treasures. It describes the history of the region, including John Wesley Powell's two explorations; surveys for railroads and dam sites; the "discovery" of Rainbow Bridge, which had been known to Indians in the area; ill-fated gold dredging; river-running; early filmmaking in the canyon; and the mysterious disappearance of the young artist Everett Ruess....
Supreme Court favors state in water dispute over dams Maine won a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision Monday upholding its water regulations such as requiring fish passage as part of federal licensing of dams. The paper company S.D. Warren had argued that the state had no business meddling in licenses of five dams along the Presumpscot River between Sebago Lake and Portland because water simply backed up behind the hydropower dams and spilled over its turbines without pollution being added. But the state Board of Environmental Protection decided the dams provided a "discharge," qualifying for regulations under the Clean Water Act because of the changes in water flow, temperature and oxygen level. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court agreed. The Supreme Court case was the first heard by Justice Samuel Alito and among those heard in the first term of Chief Justice John Roberts, who had each been criticized by environmentalists for past opinions. But the court voted 9-0 in favor of state regulation....
High court accepts Duke pollution case The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to use a lawsuit against Duke Energy Corp. to consider giving federal regulators and environmentalists more power to force pollution reductions. Justices next fall will take up a lower court decision that said power plants don't need permission to release more pollutants into the air when modernizing to run for longer hours. Charlotte-based Duke was sued over improvements at eight plants in the Carolinas. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., said that although the plants would operate more hours and pollute more each year, the hourly rate of emissions wouldn't increase. The dispute may affect pending suits that raise similar issues, including cases against Duke's new Cinergy unit and American Electric Power Co., according to a brief filed by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer on behalf of 14 states and the District of Columbia. "In the 4th Circuit and wherever else the decision is applied, sources of pollution will be able to undertake physical changes that increase actual annual emissions without any scrutiny," Spitzer's brief argued. The suit was filed by the federal government in December 2000, just before President Clinton left office. The Bush administration pressed ahead at the lower court levels, but urged the Supreme Court not to review the 4th Circuit ruling....
Column: How to Think Sensibly, or Ridiculously, about Global Warming The crusade to fight global warming with tough reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions has entered its war-room phase. Already we are seeing the fruits of a multi-million dollar PR campaign: lavish cover stories in Time magazine (“Be Worried, Be Very Worried”), Vanity Fair, and Wired; multiple global-warming scare specials on PBS, HBO, and the network news; and, finally, the imminent release of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Soon the Ad Council will begin airing TV spots pulling on the usual heartstrings: We have to stop global warming for the children! One of these ads--featuring a montage of kids counting down “tick, tick, tick”--is reminiscent of the infamous 1964 anti-Goldwater ad. Unfortunately, the green warriors substitute propaganda for persuasion, insist that there is no debate about the science of climate change, and demonize any scientist who dares dissent from their views. They advocate putting the U.S. and the world on an energy starvation diet, to the exclusion of a wider and more moderate range of precautions that might be taken against global warming. Underlying this effort is a sense of panic over two things: the collapse of the Kyoto Protocol, and frequent polls showing that Americans aren’t buying into global-warming alarmism. The latest Gallup poll on environmental issues found that only 36 percent of Americans say they “worry a great deal about global warming”--a number that has hardly budged in years. Global warming, Gallup’s environmental-opinion analyst Riley Dunlap wrote, puts people to sleep. Even among those who tell pollsters that the environment is their main public-policy concern (who are usually less than 5 percent of all Americans), global warming ranks lower than air and water quality, toxic waste, and land conservation....
Biotech causes uproar with diarrhea treatment A tiny biosciences company is developing a promising drug to fight diarrhea, a scourge among babies in the developing world, but it has made an astonishing number of powerful enemies because it grows the experimental drug in rice genetically engineered with a human gene. Environmental groups, corporate food interests and thousands of farmers across the country have succeeded in chasing Ventria Bioscience's rice farms out of two states. And critics continue to complain that Ventria is recklessly plowing ahead with a mostly untested technology that threatens the safety of conventional crops grown for food. "We just want them to go away," said Bob Papanos of the U.S. Rice Producers Association. "This little company could cause major problems." Ventria, with 16 employees, practices "biopharming," the most contentious segment of agricultural biotechnology because its adherents essentially operate open-air drug factories by splicing human genes into crops to produce proteins that can be turned into medicines. Ventria's rice produces two human proteins found in mother's milk, saliva and tears, which help people hydrate and lessen the severity and duration of diarrhea attacks, a top killer of children in developing countries. But farmers, environmentalists and others fear that such medicinal crops will mix with conventional crops, making them unsafe to eat....
Tegelers hit the trail with authentic chuckwagon It's a “shootout” of sorts. But happily it simply matches the taste of chicken fried steak, beans, biscuits and apricot cobbler among friends of America's western history instead of a deadly six-shooter. There are 70 certified historic chuckwagons - along with many less-aged but authentic chuckwagon competitors - hailing from locales as far ranging as Georgia to California; and a couple from this county, Lonnie and Barbara Tegeler proudly help represent the Lone Star state's Cowboy traditions with his family's historic No. 23 Rocking T Chuckwagon. Here's a little chunk of this sturdy wagon's long/hard-working history: The Rocking T Chuckwagon has been in the Tegeler family for almost a century, originally bought by Lonnie's grandfather Herman before 1910. It was the primary mode of transportation for Herman, wife Dora and sons Raymond and Leroy - including taking corn and cotton crops from the fields, delivering cotton to the Phillipsburg cotton gin and hauling feed and supplies from “the larger community” of Kenney....
Energy development called a threat to U.S. natural, cultural resources The federal government's rush to develop energy on millions of acres of federal land in the West is leaving vast natural and cultural resources languishing, the head of the National Trust for Historic Preservation says. Richard Moe, head of the National Trust, said the nation is in danger of losing a critical part of its heritage as archaeological sites and artifacts in such places as Colorado's Canyons of the Ancients and Utah's Nine Mile Canyon lie undocumented and unprotected. The misnamed Nine Mile Canyon stretches for 75 miles from around Price to Myton, Duchesne County. According to Jerry Spangler, an Ogden archaeologist who is now the director of the Colorado Plateau Archaeological Alliance, a 45-mile section hosts many examples of ancient Indian rock art. Tens of thousands of rock art images are in Nine Mile Canyon, he said. About 1,000 archaeological sites with rock art, granaries or other cultural resources have been documented, Spangler added, "and we estimate that that represents only about 10 percent of the total." In a report to be released today, the National Trust says only 17 million acres of the 262 million acres that the Bureau of Land Management oversees in 12 Western states have been surveyed to identify cultural resources....
Park Service, locals at odds over road's fate The National Park Service has proposed turning a washed-out road in north-central Washington's upper Stehekin Valley into a trail for hikers and horseback riders, but the idea is meeting opposition from residents of the rural community. Stehekin sits at the end of Lake Chelan, accessible by boat, floatplane or on foot. The community is surrounded by wilderness area, the North Cascades National Park and U.S. Forest Service land. The 23-mile Stehekin Valley Road leads away from the lake into the national park, but parts of it have been impassable for months. The Park Service made the lower 12 miles accessible to vehicles, but the upper 11 miles remain closed....
Gila plans to use herbicide to kill salt cedar The Gila National Forest plans to use a herbicide to kill salt cedar along the Gila River of southwestern New Mexico. The U.S. Forest Service has been illing salt cedars, also known as tamarisk, with Darlon 3A for several years in the San Francisco River drainage, and decided to expand the program to three forks of the Gila River. Salt cedars, which are not a native plant, crowd out cottonwoods, willows, alders and other native vegetation. "They really take a lot of water," said Don Luhrsen, a wildlife specialist with the Gila National Forest. "They also produce salt, which makes the area too saline for other plants." The proposal would pull out, roots and all, those salt cedars that have trunks less than 2 inches in diameter, Luhrsen said. Crews would cut down larger ones and paint the chemical on the stump. No spraying is planned....
Owl decision is delayed until June 2 The pygmy owl will stay "delisted" at least until June 2, a federal judge decided Monday. U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton declined environmentalists' requests to put a temporary hold on the federal government's mid-April decision to remove the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl from the endangered-species list. Bolton set a June 2 hearing here on a request from the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife for an injunction blocking the delisting for a longer period. Bolton's reasoning was that environmentalists couldn't prove that any new development in owl habitat is imminent. Six developments — four on the Northwest Side, one near Sahuarita and one near Apache Junction — have all been freed from federal reviews of their effects on the owl by the delisting. But they still must get their federal Army Corps of Engineers permits processed....
Debate: Are Ariz. owls a distinct subspecies? Research that suggested splitting pygmy owls in Southern Arizona, south Texas and Mexico into separate subspecies will be a key point at today's hearing on the future of the Arizona owls' endangered status. Environmental groups and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will argue over whether the Arizona birds represent a significant portion of the entire range of pygmy owls and deserve protection as an endangered species. One issue is whether Arizona's owls are genetically different from those in Mexico. Glenn Proudfoot, a veteran pygmy owl researcher, told the service in a written comment last fall that the pygmy owls in Southern Arizona and the Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa are genetically separate from those in other parts of Mexico, and that those in Arizona and northern Sonora appear to have been separated from those in Sinaloa for some time. Given that, the birds in Arizona and Sonora should be managed distinctly from the others, he said....
Green groups see red over Pombo Web site The long-simmering stew between national environmental groups and Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, has spilled onto the powerful House committee chairman's Web site. Environmentalists contend Pombo is improperly torching his political adversaries and spreading lies on the committee's taxpayer-funded Web pages. "Propaganda is legal," said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, "but the taxpayers shouldn't be paying for it." Pombo argues that his sites -- one titled "Earth Day" and a second focused on reforms of the Endangered Species Act -- shine light on eco-myths and the fund-raising machine behind a movement that spends millions of dollars to block environmental policy reforms. "It's all part of the policy debate," Pombo said. "Hey, these groups can't scream that my site is political and turn around and say their stuff is educational. They can't have it both ways."....
Lined up, ready to fight In anticipation of what could be one of Arizona's worst fire seasons, federal and state agencies have positioned small air tankers throughout the state. At least 14 single-engine AT-802s are in place from Marana to Show Low, waiting for the call. Fred Mascher, Arizona State Land Department single-engine air-tanker manager, said the versatile firefighting planes are at strategic locations and readied a month earlier than last year. "The potential for wildfire is catastrophic this year," Mascher said. The concern is over extremely dry vegetation caused by a record winter drought. In most years, at least some pockets of Arizona get enough rain to lessen fire risk, but this fire season, every inch of the state is susceptible to wildfires....
Groups say BLM can do better Two oil and gas lease sales in Colorado and Utah this month are examples of how the Bush administration's focus on oil and gas is opening hundreds of thousands of acres to drilling at the expense of fish and wildlife habitat, said Brian O'Donnell, director of Trout Unlimited's public lands initiative. An auction in Utah today will be the largest government lease sale in state history. Another in Colorado last week was one of the largest on record there. Both push into sensitive lands, including habitat for endangered ferrets in Colorado and parcels in Utah known for Indian rock art and scenic views. The Bureau of Land Management, an agency within the Interior Department, is responsible for managing energy and mineral rights, wilderness, wildlife habitat and historical and archaeological sites on millions of acres of public lands, mostly in the West. Hunting and fishing groups say energy development shouldn't be the BLM's dominant activity. But while President Bush's proposed 2007 budget asks for $25.4 million in new money for the oil and gas program, including $9.2 million to expedite energy permits, it seeks no increase for caring for riverbanks and other wildlife habitat, they say....
Ex-interior secretary urges activism A former U.S. cabinet member on Sunday gave a cautiously optimistic prognosis for the future of the West, and of the nation’s changing political winds, at a conference in Aspen. But Bruce Babbitt, a former U.S. secretary of the interior, dashed any presidential hopes his fans might have had when asked if there was any chance he would be running to replace George W. Bush in 2008. He was the final speaker at the Sopris Foundation’s weekend conference, “Innovative Ideas for a New West,” which drew speakers from around the nation and the world to the Aspen Institute campus. Babbitt called the conference an “extraordinary Western enterprise,” which he deemed critical to revitalizing political momentum among a segment of the population somewhat demoralized by Bush administration policies, including efforts to sell off an increasing amount of public lands and to expand energy exploration throughout the West and along the coasts....
Az man 1 of 5 indicted for ecoterrorism in Washington A new grand jury indictment returned Thursday alleges that five people were behind the firebombing of the University of Washington's horticulture center in May 2001. Only one of the five, Briana Waters of Berkeley, Calif., had previously been indicted in the case. The new indictment in U.S. District Court in Seattle also named Justin Solondz, 26, formerly of Jefferson County, Wash., and William C. Rodgers, of Prescott, Ariz., who committed suicide in jail after being charged with other acts of ecoterrorism. Two others referred to in the indictment were not identified. The UW fire, one of the Northwest's most notorious acts of ecoterrorism, was set early on May 21, 2001. The horticulture center, which was rebuilt at a cost of about $7 million, had done work on fast-growing hybrid poplars in hopes of limiting the amount of natural forests that timber companies log. The Earth Liberation Front, a shadowy collection of environmental activists, claimed responsibility five days after the fire, issuing a statement that said the poplars pose "an ecological nightmare" for the diversity of native forests....
Utah campground closed because of plague A campground at Natural Bridges National Monument has been closed because of bubonic plague detected among field mice and chipmunks. Plague also has been found this spring in rodent populations at Mesa Verde National Park and Colorado National Monument. National Park Service officials said there never has been a reported human case of bubonic plague originating from the parks or national monuments. "We come down on the conservative side when it comes to closing campgrounds," said Joe Winkelmaier of the U.S. Public Health Service. "We just like to be sure when it comes to plague." Several weeks ago, park rangers noticed a large number of dead field mice at Natural Bridges, about 40 miles west of Blanding. Chief Ranger Ralph Jones showed that tests indicated they died from the plague....
Elk keep aspens from thriving A bundle of scraggly, decrepit sticks poked out of the ground alongside Bear Lake Road. Therese Johnson, a Rocky Mountain National Park biologist, crunched through the dead winter grass to examine the branches. “This aspen is dead,” she said. The sticks never grew to become a full-fledged aspen tree. Their roots could be a decade or more old, but they never grew taller than a couple of feet, Johnson said. Elk have gnawed the branches repeatedly, keeping the tree from thriving. Nearby, taller aspen show the teeth marks of elk — dark gouges in the trunks about 6 feet from the ground. The holes could leave the trees vulnerable to fungal diseases, but that isn’t what worries park employees the most. Around Johnson’s ankles, tiny twigs shoot up from the soil. They should become young trees that replace the older, dying aspen, but their ends have been nibbled by elk. Without natural predators or hunters to keep them moving, the park’s elk herd has grown to as many as 3,000 animals and tends to stay in the same spots, Johnson said....
Historian's DVD shows the Glen Canyon of old W.L. "Bud" Rusho liked Glen Canyon Dam. But while he worked to document the dam construction in the 1950s and early '60s, in his words, "I fell in love" with the amazing southern Utah canyon that the dam eventually drowned. Glen Canyon Dam is seen under construction in 1963, with the Colorado River starting to back up behind it. Last week Rusho released "Glen Canyon Remembered," a DVD that provides a haunting glimpse of the canyons that have been lost beneath the waters of Lake Powell. Running one hour, 10 minutes, with extras such as a historic film, the DVD is available at Ken Sanders Rare Books, 268 S. 200 East. Besides the lore of the river and the beauty of the vanished canyons, the DVD provides stories about the massive archaeological salvage project that attempted to save some of the region's prehistoric treasures. It describes the history of the region, including John Wesley Powell's two explorations; surveys for railroads and dam sites; the "discovery" of Rainbow Bridge, which had been known to Indians in the area; ill-fated gold dredging; river-running; early filmmaking in the canyon; and the mysterious disappearance of the young artist Everett Ruess....
Supreme Court favors state in water dispute over dams Maine won a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision Monday upholding its water regulations such as requiring fish passage as part of federal licensing of dams. The paper company S.D. Warren had argued that the state had no business meddling in licenses of five dams along the Presumpscot River between Sebago Lake and Portland because water simply backed up behind the hydropower dams and spilled over its turbines without pollution being added. But the state Board of Environmental Protection decided the dams provided a "discharge," qualifying for regulations under the Clean Water Act because of the changes in water flow, temperature and oxygen level. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court agreed. The Supreme Court case was the first heard by Justice Samuel Alito and among those heard in the first term of Chief Justice John Roberts, who had each been criticized by environmentalists for past opinions. But the court voted 9-0 in favor of state regulation....
High court accepts Duke pollution case The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to use a lawsuit against Duke Energy Corp. to consider giving federal regulators and environmentalists more power to force pollution reductions. Justices next fall will take up a lower court decision that said power plants don't need permission to release more pollutants into the air when modernizing to run for longer hours. Charlotte-based Duke was sued over improvements at eight plants in the Carolinas. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., said that although the plants would operate more hours and pollute more each year, the hourly rate of emissions wouldn't increase. The dispute may affect pending suits that raise similar issues, including cases against Duke's new Cinergy unit and American Electric Power Co., according to a brief filed by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer on behalf of 14 states and the District of Columbia. "In the 4th Circuit and wherever else the decision is applied, sources of pollution will be able to undertake physical changes that increase actual annual emissions without any scrutiny," Spitzer's brief argued. The suit was filed by the federal government in December 2000, just before President Clinton left office. The Bush administration pressed ahead at the lower court levels, but urged the Supreme Court not to review the 4th Circuit ruling....
Column: How to Think Sensibly, or Ridiculously, about Global Warming The crusade to fight global warming with tough reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions has entered its war-room phase. Already we are seeing the fruits of a multi-million dollar PR campaign: lavish cover stories in Time magazine (“Be Worried, Be Very Worried”), Vanity Fair, and Wired; multiple global-warming scare specials on PBS, HBO, and the network news; and, finally, the imminent release of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Soon the Ad Council will begin airing TV spots pulling on the usual heartstrings: We have to stop global warming for the children! One of these ads--featuring a montage of kids counting down “tick, tick, tick”--is reminiscent of the infamous 1964 anti-Goldwater ad. Unfortunately, the green warriors substitute propaganda for persuasion, insist that there is no debate about the science of climate change, and demonize any scientist who dares dissent from their views. They advocate putting the U.S. and the world on an energy starvation diet, to the exclusion of a wider and more moderate range of precautions that might be taken against global warming. Underlying this effort is a sense of panic over two things: the collapse of the Kyoto Protocol, and frequent polls showing that Americans aren’t buying into global-warming alarmism. The latest Gallup poll on environmental issues found that only 36 percent of Americans say they “worry a great deal about global warming”--a number that has hardly budged in years. Global warming, Gallup’s environmental-opinion analyst Riley Dunlap wrote, puts people to sleep. Even among those who tell pollsters that the environment is their main public-policy concern (who are usually less than 5 percent of all Americans), global warming ranks lower than air and water quality, toxic waste, and land conservation....
Biotech causes uproar with diarrhea treatment A tiny biosciences company is developing a promising drug to fight diarrhea, a scourge among babies in the developing world, but it has made an astonishing number of powerful enemies because it grows the experimental drug in rice genetically engineered with a human gene. Environmental groups, corporate food interests and thousands of farmers across the country have succeeded in chasing Ventria Bioscience's rice farms out of two states. And critics continue to complain that Ventria is recklessly plowing ahead with a mostly untested technology that threatens the safety of conventional crops grown for food. "We just want them to go away," said Bob Papanos of the U.S. Rice Producers Association. "This little company could cause major problems." Ventria, with 16 employees, practices "biopharming," the most contentious segment of agricultural biotechnology because its adherents essentially operate open-air drug factories by splicing human genes into crops to produce proteins that can be turned into medicines. Ventria's rice produces two human proteins found in mother's milk, saliva and tears, which help people hydrate and lessen the severity and duration of diarrhea attacks, a top killer of children in developing countries. But farmers, environmentalists and others fear that such medicinal crops will mix with conventional crops, making them unsafe to eat....
Tegelers hit the trail with authentic chuckwagon It's a “shootout” of sorts. But happily it simply matches the taste of chicken fried steak, beans, biscuits and apricot cobbler among friends of America's western history instead of a deadly six-shooter. There are 70 certified historic chuckwagons - along with many less-aged but authentic chuckwagon competitors - hailing from locales as far ranging as Georgia to California; and a couple from this county, Lonnie and Barbara Tegeler proudly help represent the Lone Star state's Cowboy traditions with his family's historic No. 23 Rocking T Chuckwagon. Here's a little chunk of this sturdy wagon's long/hard-working history: The Rocking T Chuckwagon has been in the Tegeler family for almost a century, originally bought by Lonnie's grandfather Herman before 1910. It was the primary mode of transportation for Herman, wife Dora and sons Raymond and Leroy - including taking corn and cotton crops from the fields, delivering cotton to the Phillipsburg cotton gin and hauling feed and supplies from “the larger community” of Kenney....
Monday, May 15, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
Gator deaths rise to three Two more women were killed by alligators in Florida over the weekend, bringing to three the number of fatal gator encounters in less than a week. When combined with the death of a young college student from Davie killed by a 400-pound gator last week, the number of fatal gator attacks would rise from the 17 confirmed attacks since 1948 to 20. And despite the fearsome reputation of sharks, that's far more than the eight fatal shark attacks in Florida since 1948. An alligator fatally attacked Annemarie Campbell, 23, of Paris, Tenn., Sunday near Lake George, authorities said. Lake George is in the Ocala National Forest in Central Florida. Campbell had been staying at a secluded cabin near a springhead that feeds into the lake, said Marion County Fire-Rescue Capt. Joe Amigliore. ''The people she was staying with came around and found her inside the gator's mouth,'' Amigliore told The Associated Press. ``They jumped into the water and somehow pulled her out of the gator's mouth.'' Campbell was pronounced dead at the scene....
The mines left behind When the Klau and Buena Vista mercury mines west of Paso Robles were added to a federal cleanup list last month, they became a graphic reminder of San Luis Obispo County's mining heritage and the problems it left behind. They are not the only inactive mines in the county that state and federal environmental regulators are keeping tabs on. Three other mercury mines and a cluster of chromite mines near San Luis Obispo are either causing water quality or safety problems, or pose the potential for future troubles. Hundreds of abandoned mines are scattered across the county. The state Office of Mine Reclamation has inventoried 126 of them. Miners dug into the soil of San Luis Obispo County to recover a variety of metals — everything from gold to fool's gold. But mercury and chromite, the base metal for chrome, dominated local mining activity, and were a driving force in the development of the county in the late 1800s. Today these defunct mines can cause a variety of pollution problems, said David Schwartzbart, a geologist with the state Regional Water Quality Control Board. The worst problem is acid mine discharge....
Killing of wolf within law, Idaho says A ranch worker who shot a wolf last week acted within the law, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game has ruled. The rancher reported within 24 hours that the 2- to 3-year-old wolf was chasing cattle on private land when it was shot Monday in southeastern Idaho. "There was nothing the rancher did wrong," Lauri Hanauska-Brown, a wildlife biologist with Fish and Game, told the Standard Journal. "It was very straightforward. The folks involved did everything right. This is a good example of how the process is supposed to work." After investigating, Fish and Game officials notified the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which declined to do a follow-up investigation....
Mountain lion may be killing pets in Silt area A mountain lion may have killed several domestic animals outside Silt in the past few months, according to area residents. The Colorado Division of Wildlife isn’t convinced, though. Two dogs were found dead about two weeks ago in Mineota Estates, south of Silt, according to the owners’ daughter, Eryn Thistle. One dog had lacerations to its throat and the other a broken back, she said. That’s consistent with an attack by any predator, including a mountain lion or a wolf, DOW spokesman Randy Hampton said Friday. “The only report we have from the Silt area is about the sheep,” he said. Hampton was referring to an incident a few months ago, where the DOW reimbursed a rancher on the north end of Silt after a lion apparently killed two sheep. Residents also reportedly saw a lion on a bike path and think one killed a chicken and an old horse several weeks ago on Silt Mesa....
Cloud seeding remains a controversial cure In 2003 the National Research Council issued a lengthy report that found "no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts." That was the first sentence. The second paragraph, however, reported an exception to this sweeping generalization: "strong suggestions" that cloud-seeding in winter - as opposed to summer - works in mountainous areas. Finally, 90 pages later in the appendix, the report explained the basis for the silver lining amid otherwise dark clouds of pessimism: experiments conducted in the 1960s near the Climax Mine, between Leadville and what is now Copper Mountain. Now, even as spring runoff thunders toward Lake Powell and other reservoirs, states in the parched American Southwest are looking more intently at cloud-seeding, wondering if it can forestall the hardest choices of scarcity in the coming years that many climate scientists predict will be hotter and drier....
Does cloud-seeding have side effects? If you manage to wring more snow from clouds as they pass over Vail, does that mean that Breckenridge gets shorted? That and other basic questions about the secondary effects of cloud-seeding have long been asked. In the 1980s, for example, people complained that clouds seeded to benefit the ski slopes of Vail and Beaver Creek were producing snow that was causing them problems. Snow removal costs were escalating, and older people were having a harder time of getting around. Cloud-seeders discount such criticisms. They say they can target areas for seeding. Furthermore, while they claim they can augment snowpacks by 10 percent to 20 percent, they say they take only a tiny amount of overall available precipitation. Arlen Huggins of the Reno, NevadaÐbased Desert Research Institute argues the downwind effect is minor. Only 10 percent of the water vapor in a typical storm is suitable for seeding, he says, and then seeding can only augment by 10 percent to 20 percent. As such, he says, cloud seeding only reduces the water in clouds going downwind by 1 percent or 2 percent. Questions have also been asked about the effects of silver iodide, the most common agent used for seeding. Consider the case of cloud-seeding done in the Steamboat Springs area in the winter of 1978-79....
‘It is our land,’ Army is told More than 400 residents of southeastern Colorado piled into a meeting room designed for half that number Saturday to decry the possible expansion of Fort Carson’s Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site. Even cattle, which outnumber people on the ranches around the training range northeast of Trinidad, made an appearance. Two of the animals, along with a sign reading “Beef not Bullets,” greeted U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., who hosted the meeting at a library in Pueblo. Faced with increasing training demands and responsibility for 10,000 additional soldiers in the next few years, Fort Carson has asked the Army for permission to expand the 23-year-old training area by as much as 750,000 acres, mostly in sparsely populated Las Animas County. The post prepared an expansion study last year that is under consideration at the Pentagon. It was evident Saturday that even if the Army approves the plan, Fort Carson will face an uphill battle against a coalition of ranchers, business owners and local governments, many of which remain bitter about federal land seizures that helped form the training site in the early 1980s....
Ensnared by the law The face of a skinned coyote stares from the hood of the fur cape. Its body and legs hang over trapper Claude Oleyar's shoulders and down his back. "The black-powder, muzzle-loader people love these," Oleyar said, adjusting the $125 novelty. "Dressing up like old mountain men." The coyote cape hangs among the assorted skins collected by a 61-year-old wildlife biologist who has spent most of his life trapping animals. Everything he catches these days is somebody's nuisance: pet-eating coyotes, attic squirrels, backyard raccoons, foxes and skunks, ringtailed cats prowling the bowels of the luxurious Broadmoor hotel. But Oleyar and fellow trappers hope to be skinning some other animals soon. Ten years after voters put a partial trapping ban into the state constitution, the practi tioners of Colorado's oldest trade are calling for a new season on mink, swift fox and other mammals with valued pelts. Their petition to the Colorado Wildlife Commission has reignited a debate between those content to admire wildlife through binoculars and those who see it as something to wear or eat....
Pombo's fishing bill limits power of sanctuaries Deep in a fishing bill before Congress is a clause that would wrest control of fisheries inside marine sanctuaries — such as the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary just west of San Francisco and Marin — away from sanctuary managers. The bill voids the carte blanche managers now have to write rules for fisheries within their waters. Sanctuary managers would still be allowed to develop fishing limits and seasons different from non-protected waters under the new bill, but such regulations would have to comply with the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which governs offshore fishing. Environmentalists warn the switch would hand industry de facto control of the preserves and is akin to letting the U.S. Forest Service write logging plans for the national parks. But the bill's author, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, chairman of the House Resources Committee, calls the measure a middle-ground approach that ensures fisheries within sanctuaries comply with "the most important environmental fisheries law" in the nation, said Melissa Delaney, a spokeswoman for the Resources Committee....
Collaboration on the grassland Several years ago, Roy Liedtke and a partner bought a ranch on Spring Creek north of Gillette. With half deeded and half leased national grassland, some neighbors wondered what the partners were getting into, what with regulatory rules on federal grazing leases and the like. Soon, local Forest Service employees asked to watch as the first truckloads of bison arrived. Liedtke agreed, somewhat skeptically. As it turned out, the Forest Service staff came in handy, helping free a tractor-trailer stuck in the mud and helping corral the anxious buffalo into pens. Their help laid a groundwork for trust to grow between the landowners and the governmental agency, Liedtke said, and that foundation has supported future collaboration that benefits the ranchers, the Forest Service, and most importantly, the land. Farther south in the heart of the Thunder Basin National Grassland, Betty Pellatz and a group of longtime ranchers also discovered that trust is the key element in working with the Forest Service and other governmental partners, she said here Thursday during a panel discussion on coordinated management of national grasslands. “Landowners are very independent,” she said. When the Forest Service started a major overhaul of the grasslands management plan, the ranchers banded together to protect their interests. Of particular concern was the way federal rules for prairie dogs might affect ranchers. The ranchers founded the Thunder Basin Prairie Ecosystem Association, now 25 members strong, including two neighboring coal companies. The association’s goal is to take the lead on conservation using hard science and common sense, in the hope that their work will avoid the necessity of rigid federal rules....
New Mexico "one-ups" Colorado with two fees When I was buying my New Mexico fishing license, the professional behind the counter mentioned the fee for this year had gone up. He didn't know why, and I didn't think much of it. However, that night I decided to read my license and see what made the fee go up. Obviously, anyone who takes time to read the entire fishing license has way too much time on his hands. Anyway, I did notice a required charge of four dollars for a new program called the Habitat Management and Access Validation (HM&AV), and a sometimes-necessary, $5 charge for the Habitat Stamp Program (HSP). My thirst for knowledge sent me to the 2006-2007 New Mexico Fishing Rules and Information pamphlet. In reading the New Mexico pamphlet, I learned the HM&AV fee will be used to lease private land for public use, provide public access to landlocked areas of public land, and provide for the improvement, maintenance, development and operation of property for fish and wildlife habitat management....
Environmental groups sue over roads, winter use Two local environmental groups have filed a lawsuit challenging recent biological opinions related to road management and snowmobiling access on the Flathead National Forest. The Swan View Coalition joined Friends of the Wild Swan in the lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Missoula. It involves legal themes similar to those in two other active lawsuits the groups are pursuing against Flathead Forest. At issue in this case, filed against both the Flathead Forest and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, are two recently released biological opinions — one related to the Flathead Forest Plan Amendment 19 for road management, and the other for the pending Amendment 24, which will establish rules for winter recreation on the forest. The groups claim the Endangered Species Act has been violated by failing to adequately limit motorized access to the forest....
Most Expensive Ranches In America 2005 Looking to unleash your inner wrangler? Want a place to indulge your youthful cowboy (or cowgirl) fantasies? You can get your own home on the range--for the right price. Rope a high-priced ranch, and you'd be among good--or at least prosperous--company. For generations, wealthy families have sought out the rugged environs of the West. "There's been a long tradition of people from other parts of the country coming out and buying ranches," asserts Doug Hart, a real estate partner with Hall and Hall in Billings, Mont. Even in the pioneer days, rich New Yorkers and Bostonians were acquiring large tracts of land out on the frontier, he says. (In 1883, the 25-year-old Theodore Roosevelt invested in a spread in the Dakota Badlands, where he herded cattle.) More recently, it was common for wealthy vacationers to fall in love with the land while visiting a dude ranch. "Obviously, until the last 20 years it was a much quieter affair," Hart says. "It didn't make the news. People didn't have private jets. It didn't have quite the sizzle it has now." The ranch market, like the rest of the real estate industry, is certainly hot. The prices on our list of the most expensive, for example, topped out at a startling $55 million. Still, that's practically a bargain compared with the most costly apartment on the New York City market. And while a $70 million penthouse triplex might be very nice indeed, it doesn't come with 3,000 acres, glistening trout streams, private cross-country trails, vast wildflower meadows and--lest we forget--cows. Scroll to the end of the article and you can click on a slide show of the ten most expensive ranches.
Flitner family sees value in ranching as a way of life When Arthur Flitner came to Wyoming, he bought 160 acres in the Shell Valley for $30 an acre, and 160 head of cattle for $24 each. He began operating the Diamond Tail Ranch in 1906. His grandson, Stan Flitner, figures the economics of ranching haven't changed much in 100 years, at least by one benchmark. "That's still about what an acre of land is worth for ranching -- around the same as what you'd pay for a cow," said Flitner. But plenty else has changed, with the ranching business seeing cycles of boom and bust, and four new generations of Flitners working the land. In a modern culture that both idealizes and ignores the struggles of the family rancher, the Flitners continue to do what they've done for the past century -- plan for the worst, hope for the best, and work as hard as they can to leave something worthwhile for the next generation. The Diamond Tail ranch has grown to around 4,000 deeded acres, with about 6,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land and 30,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land. Stan, 66, and his wife, Mary, 64, operate the ranch with their son, Tim Flitner. The cow and calf operation has around 340 head of cattle and 60 horses....
Seeking our past A dozen or so men gathered a few miles south of Prescott Wednesday to honor the first non-Indians to set foot in the area. It was exactly 143 years after the Walker Party just might have gathered at the same exact spot on May 10, 1863, to organize the Walker Prospecting and Mining Company and its camp, where the party accurately anticipated that gold would be plentiful. Twenty-six men agreed to stake off 52 mining claims along the Hassayampa River. Joseph Reddeford Walker, a guide who also discovered the Yosemite Valley, led them. Those familiar with the pine forests of the Prescott Basin are likely familiar with the site, without knowing it could have an important place in Prescott's history. It is along the Hassayampa River at the intersection of the Jersey Lilly Mine and Wolf Creek roads. A prestigious but irreverent pack of Prescottonians thought it would be fun and worthwhile to try to locate the site since, after all, the Walker Party arrived nearly a year before Prescott even became the territorial capital. "It's Prescott's history," said Lance Murray, who with fellow history buff Pete Bochat is among a rare group of native Prescottonians....
On the Edge of Common Sense: Lack of good lips keeps cows behind camels So," I asked Rodney, "Did ya hurt yer jaw?" "Yes," he replied, "It's a camel injury." Turns out Rodney had been the victim of camel retribution. The accidental head butt had loosened a few teeth. Rodney had been breaking and training his camel to ride. This led me to ponder on the difficulty of camel training vs. cow training. It appears that camels are considerably smarter than cows. Of course, I thought, because cows don't have prehensile lips! You students of anatomy know that, unlike the camel, the goat, and the average sheepherder, cows' lips are hard and square. They cannot nibble. More importantly, they cannot purse their lips, which is why cows cannot whistle. Oh, sure, you say, but they could put a cloven hoof in their mouth and hail a cab - something a horse could never do. Yet cows haven't figured it out. This anatomical defect has had a direct effect on the bovine's inability to advance up the evolutionary food chain....
Gator deaths rise to three Two more women were killed by alligators in Florida over the weekend, bringing to three the number of fatal gator encounters in less than a week. When combined with the death of a young college student from Davie killed by a 400-pound gator last week, the number of fatal gator attacks would rise from the 17 confirmed attacks since 1948 to 20. And despite the fearsome reputation of sharks, that's far more than the eight fatal shark attacks in Florida since 1948. An alligator fatally attacked Annemarie Campbell, 23, of Paris, Tenn., Sunday near Lake George, authorities said. Lake George is in the Ocala National Forest in Central Florida. Campbell had been staying at a secluded cabin near a springhead that feeds into the lake, said Marion County Fire-Rescue Capt. Joe Amigliore. ''The people she was staying with came around and found her inside the gator's mouth,'' Amigliore told The Associated Press. ``They jumped into the water and somehow pulled her out of the gator's mouth.'' Campbell was pronounced dead at the scene....
The mines left behind When the Klau and Buena Vista mercury mines west of Paso Robles were added to a federal cleanup list last month, they became a graphic reminder of San Luis Obispo County's mining heritage and the problems it left behind. They are not the only inactive mines in the county that state and federal environmental regulators are keeping tabs on. Three other mercury mines and a cluster of chromite mines near San Luis Obispo are either causing water quality or safety problems, or pose the potential for future troubles. Hundreds of abandoned mines are scattered across the county. The state Office of Mine Reclamation has inventoried 126 of them. Miners dug into the soil of San Luis Obispo County to recover a variety of metals — everything from gold to fool's gold. But mercury and chromite, the base metal for chrome, dominated local mining activity, and were a driving force in the development of the county in the late 1800s. Today these defunct mines can cause a variety of pollution problems, said David Schwartzbart, a geologist with the state Regional Water Quality Control Board. The worst problem is acid mine discharge....
Killing of wolf within law, Idaho says A ranch worker who shot a wolf last week acted within the law, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game has ruled. The rancher reported within 24 hours that the 2- to 3-year-old wolf was chasing cattle on private land when it was shot Monday in southeastern Idaho. "There was nothing the rancher did wrong," Lauri Hanauska-Brown, a wildlife biologist with Fish and Game, told the Standard Journal. "It was very straightforward. The folks involved did everything right. This is a good example of how the process is supposed to work." After investigating, Fish and Game officials notified the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which declined to do a follow-up investigation....
Mountain lion may be killing pets in Silt area A mountain lion may have killed several domestic animals outside Silt in the past few months, according to area residents. The Colorado Division of Wildlife isn’t convinced, though. Two dogs were found dead about two weeks ago in Mineota Estates, south of Silt, according to the owners’ daughter, Eryn Thistle. One dog had lacerations to its throat and the other a broken back, she said. That’s consistent with an attack by any predator, including a mountain lion or a wolf, DOW spokesman Randy Hampton said Friday. “The only report we have from the Silt area is about the sheep,” he said. Hampton was referring to an incident a few months ago, where the DOW reimbursed a rancher on the north end of Silt after a lion apparently killed two sheep. Residents also reportedly saw a lion on a bike path and think one killed a chicken and an old horse several weeks ago on Silt Mesa....
Cloud seeding remains a controversial cure In 2003 the National Research Council issued a lengthy report that found "no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts." That was the first sentence. The second paragraph, however, reported an exception to this sweeping generalization: "strong suggestions" that cloud-seeding in winter - as opposed to summer - works in mountainous areas. Finally, 90 pages later in the appendix, the report explained the basis for the silver lining amid otherwise dark clouds of pessimism: experiments conducted in the 1960s near the Climax Mine, between Leadville and what is now Copper Mountain. Now, even as spring runoff thunders toward Lake Powell and other reservoirs, states in the parched American Southwest are looking more intently at cloud-seeding, wondering if it can forestall the hardest choices of scarcity in the coming years that many climate scientists predict will be hotter and drier....
Does cloud-seeding have side effects? If you manage to wring more snow from clouds as they pass over Vail, does that mean that Breckenridge gets shorted? That and other basic questions about the secondary effects of cloud-seeding have long been asked. In the 1980s, for example, people complained that clouds seeded to benefit the ski slopes of Vail and Beaver Creek were producing snow that was causing them problems. Snow removal costs were escalating, and older people were having a harder time of getting around. Cloud-seeders discount such criticisms. They say they can target areas for seeding. Furthermore, while they claim they can augment snowpacks by 10 percent to 20 percent, they say they take only a tiny amount of overall available precipitation. Arlen Huggins of the Reno, NevadaÐbased Desert Research Institute argues the downwind effect is minor. Only 10 percent of the water vapor in a typical storm is suitable for seeding, he says, and then seeding can only augment by 10 percent to 20 percent. As such, he says, cloud seeding only reduces the water in clouds going downwind by 1 percent or 2 percent. Questions have also been asked about the effects of silver iodide, the most common agent used for seeding. Consider the case of cloud-seeding done in the Steamboat Springs area in the winter of 1978-79....
‘It is our land,’ Army is told More than 400 residents of southeastern Colorado piled into a meeting room designed for half that number Saturday to decry the possible expansion of Fort Carson’s Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site. Even cattle, which outnumber people on the ranches around the training range northeast of Trinidad, made an appearance. Two of the animals, along with a sign reading “Beef not Bullets,” greeted U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., who hosted the meeting at a library in Pueblo. Faced with increasing training demands and responsibility for 10,000 additional soldiers in the next few years, Fort Carson has asked the Army for permission to expand the 23-year-old training area by as much as 750,000 acres, mostly in sparsely populated Las Animas County. The post prepared an expansion study last year that is under consideration at the Pentagon. It was evident Saturday that even if the Army approves the plan, Fort Carson will face an uphill battle against a coalition of ranchers, business owners and local governments, many of which remain bitter about federal land seizures that helped form the training site in the early 1980s....
Ensnared by the law The face of a skinned coyote stares from the hood of the fur cape. Its body and legs hang over trapper Claude Oleyar's shoulders and down his back. "The black-powder, muzzle-loader people love these," Oleyar said, adjusting the $125 novelty. "Dressing up like old mountain men." The coyote cape hangs among the assorted skins collected by a 61-year-old wildlife biologist who has spent most of his life trapping animals. Everything he catches these days is somebody's nuisance: pet-eating coyotes, attic squirrels, backyard raccoons, foxes and skunks, ringtailed cats prowling the bowels of the luxurious Broadmoor hotel. But Oleyar and fellow trappers hope to be skinning some other animals soon. Ten years after voters put a partial trapping ban into the state constitution, the practi tioners of Colorado's oldest trade are calling for a new season on mink, swift fox and other mammals with valued pelts. Their petition to the Colorado Wildlife Commission has reignited a debate between those content to admire wildlife through binoculars and those who see it as something to wear or eat....
Pombo's fishing bill limits power of sanctuaries Deep in a fishing bill before Congress is a clause that would wrest control of fisheries inside marine sanctuaries — such as the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary just west of San Francisco and Marin — away from sanctuary managers. The bill voids the carte blanche managers now have to write rules for fisheries within their waters. Sanctuary managers would still be allowed to develop fishing limits and seasons different from non-protected waters under the new bill, but such regulations would have to comply with the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which governs offshore fishing. Environmentalists warn the switch would hand industry de facto control of the preserves and is akin to letting the U.S. Forest Service write logging plans for the national parks. But the bill's author, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, chairman of the House Resources Committee, calls the measure a middle-ground approach that ensures fisheries within sanctuaries comply with "the most important environmental fisheries law" in the nation, said Melissa Delaney, a spokeswoman for the Resources Committee....
Collaboration on the grassland Several years ago, Roy Liedtke and a partner bought a ranch on Spring Creek north of Gillette. With half deeded and half leased national grassland, some neighbors wondered what the partners were getting into, what with regulatory rules on federal grazing leases and the like. Soon, local Forest Service employees asked to watch as the first truckloads of bison arrived. Liedtke agreed, somewhat skeptically. As it turned out, the Forest Service staff came in handy, helping free a tractor-trailer stuck in the mud and helping corral the anxious buffalo into pens. Their help laid a groundwork for trust to grow between the landowners and the governmental agency, Liedtke said, and that foundation has supported future collaboration that benefits the ranchers, the Forest Service, and most importantly, the land. Farther south in the heart of the Thunder Basin National Grassland, Betty Pellatz and a group of longtime ranchers also discovered that trust is the key element in working with the Forest Service and other governmental partners, she said here Thursday during a panel discussion on coordinated management of national grasslands. “Landowners are very independent,” she said. When the Forest Service started a major overhaul of the grasslands management plan, the ranchers banded together to protect their interests. Of particular concern was the way federal rules for prairie dogs might affect ranchers. The ranchers founded the Thunder Basin Prairie Ecosystem Association, now 25 members strong, including two neighboring coal companies. The association’s goal is to take the lead on conservation using hard science and common sense, in the hope that their work will avoid the necessity of rigid federal rules....
New Mexico "one-ups" Colorado with two fees When I was buying my New Mexico fishing license, the professional behind the counter mentioned the fee for this year had gone up. He didn't know why, and I didn't think much of it. However, that night I decided to read my license and see what made the fee go up. Obviously, anyone who takes time to read the entire fishing license has way too much time on his hands. Anyway, I did notice a required charge of four dollars for a new program called the Habitat Management and Access Validation (HM&AV), and a sometimes-necessary, $5 charge for the Habitat Stamp Program (HSP). My thirst for knowledge sent me to the 2006-2007 New Mexico Fishing Rules and Information pamphlet. In reading the New Mexico pamphlet, I learned the HM&AV fee will be used to lease private land for public use, provide public access to landlocked areas of public land, and provide for the improvement, maintenance, development and operation of property for fish and wildlife habitat management....
Environmental groups sue over roads, winter use Two local environmental groups have filed a lawsuit challenging recent biological opinions related to road management and snowmobiling access on the Flathead National Forest. The Swan View Coalition joined Friends of the Wild Swan in the lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Missoula. It involves legal themes similar to those in two other active lawsuits the groups are pursuing against Flathead Forest. At issue in this case, filed against both the Flathead Forest and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, are two recently released biological opinions — one related to the Flathead Forest Plan Amendment 19 for road management, and the other for the pending Amendment 24, which will establish rules for winter recreation on the forest. The groups claim the Endangered Species Act has been violated by failing to adequately limit motorized access to the forest....
Most Expensive Ranches In America 2005 Looking to unleash your inner wrangler? Want a place to indulge your youthful cowboy (or cowgirl) fantasies? You can get your own home on the range--for the right price. Rope a high-priced ranch, and you'd be among good--or at least prosperous--company. For generations, wealthy families have sought out the rugged environs of the West. "There's been a long tradition of people from other parts of the country coming out and buying ranches," asserts Doug Hart, a real estate partner with Hall and Hall in Billings, Mont. Even in the pioneer days, rich New Yorkers and Bostonians were acquiring large tracts of land out on the frontier, he says. (In 1883, the 25-year-old Theodore Roosevelt invested in a spread in the Dakota Badlands, where he herded cattle.) More recently, it was common for wealthy vacationers to fall in love with the land while visiting a dude ranch. "Obviously, until the last 20 years it was a much quieter affair," Hart says. "It didn't make the news. People didn't have private jets. It didn't have quite the sizzle it has now." The ranch market, like the rest of the real estate industry, is certainly hot. The prices on our list of the most expensive, for example, topped out at a startling $55 million. Still, that's practically a bargain compared with the most costly apartment on the New York City market. And while a $70 million penthouse triplex might be very nice indeed, it doesn't come with 3,000 acres, glistening trout streams, private cross-country trails, vast wildflower meadows and--lest we forget--cows. Scroll to the end of the article and you can click on a slide show of the ten most expensive ranches.
Flitner family sees value in ranching as a way of life When Arthur Flitner came to Wyoming, he bought 160 acres in the Shell Valley for $30 an acre, and 160 head of cattle for $24 each. He began operating the Diamond Tail Ranch in 1906. His grandson, Stan Flitner, figures the economics of ranching haven't changed much in 100 years, at least by one benchmark. "That's still about what an acre of land is worth for ranching -- around the same as what you'd pay for a cow," said Flitner. But plenty else has changed, with the ranching business seeing cycles of boom and bust, and four new generations of Flitners working the land. In a modern culture that both idealizes and ignores the struggles of the family rancher, the Flitners continue to do what they've done for the past century -- plan for the worst, hope for the best, and work as hard as they can to leave something worthwhile for the next generation. The Diamond Tail ranch has grown to around 4,000 deeded acres, with about 6,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land and 30,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land. Stan, 66, and his wife, Mary, 64, operate the ranch with their son, Tim Flitner. The cow and calf operation has around 340 head of cattle and 60 horses....
Seeking our past A dozen or so men gathered a few miles south of Prescott Wednesday to honor the first non-Indians to set foot in the area. It was exactly 143 years after the Walker Party just might have gathered at the same exact spot on May 10, 1863, to organize the Walker Prospecting and Mining Company and its camp, where the party accurately anticipated that gold would be plentiful. Twenty-six men agreed to stake off 52 mining claims along the Hassayampa River. Joseph Reddeford Walker, a guide who also discovered the Yosemite Valley, led them. Those familiar with the pine forests of the Prescott Basin are likely familiar with the site, without knowing it could have an important place in Prescott's history. It is along the Hassayampa River at the intersection of the Jersey Lilly Mine and Wolf Creek roads. A prestigious but irreverent pack of Prescottonians thought it would be fun and worthwhile to try to locate the site since, after all, the Walker Party arrived nearly a year before Prescott even became the territorial capital. "It's Prescott's history," said Lance Murray, who with fellow history buff Pete Bochat is among a rare group of native Prescottonians....
On the Edge of Common Sense: Lack of good lips keeps cows behind camels So," I asked Rodney, "Did ya hurt yer jaw?" "Yes," he replied, "It's a camel injury." Turns out Rodney had been the victim of camel retribution. The accidental head butt had loosened a few teeth. Rodney had been breaking and training his camel to ride. This led me to ponder on the difficulty of camel training vs. cow training. It appears that camels are considerably smarter than cows. Of course, I thought, because cows don't have prehensile lips! You students of anatomy know that, unlike the camel, the goat, and the average sheepherder, cows' lips are hard and square. They cannot nibble. More importantly, they cannot purse their lips, which is why cows cannot whistle. Oh, sure, you say, but they could put a cloven hoof in their mouth and hail a cab - something a horse could never do. Yet cows haven't figured it out. This anatomical defect has had a direct effect on the bovine's inability to advance up the evolutionary food chain....
FLE
Local agencies' use of U.S. security aid questioned
Arizona public safety agencies have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grant money on equipment they are not certified to use or to pay for projects with only a tenuous link to homeland security. With little initial guidance and flush with money after the Sept. 11 attacks, police and fire departments statewide shored up budget shortfalls and bought things like ATVs, Q-Tips and $50,000 worth of binoculars with nearly $178 million in Homeland Security Department grants. Despite what one small-town official described as a spending "frenzy," many local officials managed to put the money toward security priorities: shoring up communications, buying better protective gear for police and firefighters and purchasing mobile command centers for emergencies. But an Arizona Republic review of thousand of pages of records and receipts found that some local governments made many questionable purchases under the guise of homeland security, including $38 leather wallets for all Capitol Police officers and a $47 hat badge for the police chief. Many small cities and towns that are unlikely targets for a terrorist attack received disproportionate amounts of money, often more per capita than Phoenix, Tucson or Mesa. Consider:....
Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping
In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials. But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001. The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear. By several accounts, including those of the two officials, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks. On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress. On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970's and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans....
Telephone Records are just the Tip of NSA's Iceberg
The National Security Agency and other U.S. government organizations have developed hundreds of software programs and analytic tools to "harvest" intelligence, and they've created dozens of gigantic databases designed to discover potential terrorist activity both inside the United States and overseas. These cutting edge tools -- some highly classified because of their functions and capabilities -- continually process hundreds of billions of what are called "structured" data records, including telephone call records and e-mail headers contained in information "feeds" that have been established to flow into the intelligence agencies. The multi-billion dollar program, which began before 9/11 but has been accelerated since then. Well over 100 government contractors have participated, including both small boutique companies whose products include commercial off-the-shelf software and some of the largest defense contractors, who have developed specialized software and tools exclusively for government use. USA Today provided a small window into this massive intelligence community program by reporting yesterday that the NSA was collecting and analyzing millions of telephone call records. The call records are "structured data," that is, information maintained in a standardized format that can be easily analyzed by machine programs without human intervention. They're different from intercepts of actual communication between people in that they don't contain the "content" of the communications -- content that the Supreme Court has ruled is protected under the Fourth Amendment. You can think of call records as what's outside the envelope, as opposed to what's on the inside. Once collected, the call records and other non-content communication are being churned through a mind boggling network of software and data mining tools to extract intelligence. And this NSA dominated program of ingestion, digestion, and distribution of potential intelligence raises profound questions about the privacy and civil liberties of all Americans. Although there is no evidence that the harvesting programs have been involved in illegal activity or have been abused to reach into the lives of innocent Americans, their sheer scope, the number of "transactions" being tracked, raises questions as to whether an all-seeing domestic surveillance system isn't slowly being established, one that in just a few years time will be able to reveal the interactions of any targeted individual in near real time....
Gathering data may not violate privacy rights, but it could be illegal
The U.S. government's secret collection of Americans' phone records may not breach the Fourth Amendment's privacy guarantee, legal analysts said Thursday, but it could violate federal surveillance and telecommunication laws. More broadly, USA TODAY's report about the National Security Agency's deal with three major phone companies fed a debate over whether the Bush administration is going too far — and setting dangerous precedents — in trying to protect the nation from terrorism. "This may well be another example where the Bush administration, in secret, decided to bypass the courts and contravene federal law," said Georgetown University law professor David Cole. The NSA apparently has not collected the actual content of the phone conversations, just the numbers dialed. That distinction is key in determining whether the program violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable government searches and seizures. The U.S. Supreme Court has drawn a legal line between collecting phone numbers and routing information, and obtaining the content of phone calls. In a ruling in 1979, the court said in Smith v. Maryland that a phone company's installation, at police request, of a device to record numbers dialed at a home did not violate the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment might not be at issue, but legal analysts said the NSA's collection of phone records could be legally vulnerable under federal intelligence-gathering and communication laws. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, adopted in 1978, requires the government to go before a special court and obtain a warrant for electronic surveillance related to international espionage and terrorism. The statute defines the covered communication to include any information about the identity of the parties. A question now is whether that might include the phone numbers someone calls. That law and another criminal statute that requires warrants when authorities seek devices that record numbers dialed on a telephone could prohibit the NSA deal with the telecommunication companies. Cole said such laws generally were aimed at individuals or specific crime networks, rather than massive collections of data....
The Datamining Scare
Let's start by debunking Ms. Cauley's piece of journalistic sleight of hand. President Bush never suggested that domestic call "records" were private. He has said actual warrantless surveillance was restricted to conversations that involved an overseas party: "The government does not listen [our emphasis] to domestic phone calls without court approval." Datamining and wiretapping are not the same thing. So much for the "Bush lied" angle to this story. Yes, Mr. Bush could have volunteered the larger "datamining" details at the time. But no President is obliged to divulge every secret program, especially one central to war-fighting. Had Mr. Bush done so, we doubt Democrats and the press corps would have sat back and said OK, thanks, let's move on--not when they see his poll numbers and sense a chance to take back Congress this autumn. And once it's clear that telephone records are all we're talking about here, the rest of this alleged scandal melts away. Nobody has suggested one single call has been listened to as part of the program reported this week by USA Today. Rather, the datamining appears to keep track, after the fact, of most calls placed to and from a great many phone numbers in the U.S. In other words, the scary government database contains the same information you see on your monthly phone bill--slightly less, in fact, since names aren't attached to numbers and never will be unless government computers detect activity suspicious enough to warrant some being singled out of billions of others. And what might the government do with these records? Well, it might use them to break up a suspected terror plot--presumably after requesting a surveillance warrant for any future domestic calls it actually wants to listen to (nobody has suggested otherwise). As important, the database will enable us to respond much more effectively to the next terrorist attack. Once the ringleader or leaders are identified, this information will make it much easier to track down any remaining comrades and prevent them from committing future crimes. In short, the database is utterly non-invasive in itself and merely provides information for law enforcement to use, with warrants whenever necessary....
Mining data to nab terrorists: fair?
What can the United States government really glean from the phone-call histories - records of who called whom, when, and for how long - of millions of Americans? After all, it's the same information that has long been available to authorities armed with a subpoena, though not sought en masse until after the 9/11 terror attacks. Its value, say computer experts and others, is that it can be used to identify a "social network" of interconnected people - including, perhaps, would-be terrorists. "From phone records you can learn who are my friends - and who their friends are - what services I use, where I shop," says Johannes Gehrke, a computer scientist at Cornell University who has written search algorithms for government analysis programs. "Our social interactions leave a digital trail. [Phone-record analysis] is government learning about human behavior from analyzing that trail." Moreover, they assert, phone records are just one part of a much larger government effort to analyze the digital minutiae of American life in the hope of uncovering terrorist networks buried within it. Potentially invasive, such counterterror activity aims to build databases that can be cross-referenced in the hope of matching patterns, relationships, and activities that bear investigating, experts say. "You should presume that phone numbers are being collated with Internet records, credit-card records, everything," says Bruce Schneier, a security technologist with Counterpane Internet Security in Mountain View, Calif. Cross-indexing phone records can reveal a social profile of friends and acquaintances and a geographic profile. Each individual in that chain might then be cross-indexed against his or her retail purchases, credit history, e-mail, medical records, airline reservations, Social Security number, fingerprints - anything that can be digitized and stored in databases, and assuming that the government has access to them. Such activity is potentially invasive, many experts acknowledge, but will it work?....
Newsweek Poll: Americans Wary of NSA Spying
Has the Bush administration gone too far in expanding the powers of the President to fight terrorism? Yes, say a majority of Americans, following this week’s revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens since the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, 53 percent of Americans think the NSA’s surveillance program “goes too far in invading people’s privacy,” while 41 percent see it as a necessary tool to combat terrorism. President Bush tried to reassure the public this week that its privacy is “fiercely protected,” and that “we’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans.” Nonetheless, Americans think the White House has overstepped its bounds: 57 percent said that in light of the NSA data-mining news and other executive actions, the Bush-Cheney Administration has “gone too far in expanding presidential power.” That compares to 38 percent who think the Administration’s actions are appropriate. According to the Newsweek poll, 73 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Republicans think the NSA’s program is overly intrusive. Details of the surveillance efforts were first reported on Wednesday by USA Today....
Spy Agency Watching Americans From Space
A little-known spy agency that analyzes imagery taken from the skies has been spending significantly more time watching U.S. soil. In an era when other intelligence agencies try to hide those operations, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is proud of that domestic mission. He said the work the agency did after hurricanes Rita and Katrina was the best he'd seen an intelligence agency do in his 42 years in the spy business. "This was kind of a direct payback to the taxpayers for the investment made in this agency over the years, even though in its original design it was intended for foreign intelligence purposes," Clapper said in a Thursday interview with The Associated Press. Geospatial intelligence is the science of combining imagery, such as satellite pictures, to physically depict features or activities happening anywhere on the planet. A part of the Defense Department, the NGA usually operates unnoticed to provide information on nuclear sites, terror camps, troop movements or natural disasters. After last year's hurricanes, the agency had an unusually public face. It set up mobile command centers that sprung out of the backs of Humvees and provided imagery for rescuers and hurricane victims who wanted to know the condition of their homes. Victims would provide their street address and the NGA would provide a satellite photo of their property. In one way or another, some 900 agency officials were involved. Spy agencies historically avoided domestic operations out of concern for Pentagon regulations and Reagan-era executive order, known as 12333, that restricted intelligence collection on American citizens and companies. Its budget, like all intelligence agencies, is classified....
U.S. Argues to Block Suit Against CIA
The government urged a federal judge on Friday to block a lawsuit filed by a German national who says he was illegally held in a CIA-run prison in Afghanistan for four months and tortured. U.S. Attorney R. Joseph Sher said government secrets could be exposed if Khaled al-Masri were allowed to proceed with his lawsuit. "Disclosure of information in the case would jeopardize national security," Sher said during a hearing in which he asked the judge to dismiss the case. Citing the harm he said public disclosure of any information regarding the case could do, Sher said, "We cannot and will not confirm or deny the allegations or diplomatic contact with foreign governments." U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis said he will issue a ruling as soon as possible on whether the case will proceed. The lawsuit was filed against former CIA Director George Tenet and 10 unidentified CIA employees. While the Central Intelligence Agency was not named as a defendant, the agency intervened to uphold its state secret privilege. Al-Masri said he was taken into custody after being mistaken for an associate of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers. He said Macedonian authorities arrested him when he crossed the border on New Year's Eve 2003 and turned him over to the CIA after three weeks. He said he was then flown to Afghanistan where he was "dragged off the plane and thrown into the trunk of a car" and beaten by his captors. He was held at a CIA-run facility known as the "Salt Pit," an abandoned brick factory north of the Kabul business district used for detention of high-level terror suspects, al-Masri says. After Tenet was notified that this was a case of mistaken identity, al-Masri was held for two more months, his lawsuit alleges. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other State Department officials have declined to address the al-Masri case. However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the United States has acknowledged making a mistake in his arrest....
Bush to Propose Guard Troops for Border
President Bush will call for thousands of National Guard troops to be deployed along the Mexico border in support of patrols aimed at keeping out illegal immigrants, White House officials said Sunday on the eve of an Oval Office address announcing the plan. White House aides worked into the night Sunday to iron out details of the proposal and allay concerns among lawmakers that using troops to man the border would further burden an overextended military. Two White House officials said Bush would propose using troops as a stopgap measure while the Border Patrol builds up its resources. The troops would play a supportive role to Border Patrol agents, who would maintain primary responsibility for physically guarding the border. The officials spoke on a condition of anonymity before the address Monday at 8 p.m. EDT. The officials would not say how many troops Bush wanted to use, except that it would be in the thousands but less than an estimate of as many as 10,000 being discussed at the Pentagon....
Mexican president calls President Bush about worries over border plan
Mexican President Vicente Fox telephoned President Bush on Sunday to express his concern about what he called the possibility of a “militarized” border between the two nations. According to Fox's office, Bush told his Mexican counterpart he was considering sending the National Guard to the border but said this did not constitute a militarization. Bush “is analyzing the administrative and logistical support of part of the National Guard, not the Army, to help police on the border,” Fox's office said. The Mexican news release said Bush and Fox agreed that a comprehensive immigration reform is needed in the United States. “In the conversation, President Bush reiterated his conviction that the migration issue can only be resolved with an integral and comprehensive reform,” the release said....
Border troops would be temporary, US tells Mexico
U.S. President George W. Bush assured Mexican President Vicente Fox on Sunday he did not intend to militarize their countries' mutual border, but was considering sending National Guard troops there to temporarily support border control efforts. "The president made clear that the United States considers Mexico a friend and that what is being considered is not militarization of the border, but support of border patrol capabilities on a temporary basis by National Guard personnel," White House spokeswoman Maria Tamburri said, describing a telephone conversation between Bush and his Mexican counterpart. Fox "reached out" to Bush on Sunday to relay his concerns about the plan that is under consideration, Tamburri said....
Backlog At Borders, Cracks in The System
Beefed-up enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border since Sept. 11, 2001, has substantially increased the number of arrests of illegal immigrants, but tens of thousands of captured non-Mexicans continue to be released into the United States because there is no place to hold them, according to experts and immigration officials. The vast majority simply slip away inside the country after being issued "Notices to Appear" for a deportation hearing -- documents known to Border Patrol agents as "Notices to Disappear." The success of border crossers who stay in the United States through this "catch-and-release" process has encouraged others who hope to enter the country the same way. In a dozen speeches since October, President Bush has vowed to replace catch-and-release with the "catch-and-return" of 150,000 "other than Mexican" (OTM) immigrants arrested each year. The goal is to deny court hearings to all but asylum-seekers, speed deportations and make the most of limited detention space in jails, prisons and immigration centers. But as Washington debates the overhaul of the nation's immigration laws and Bush prepares to address the nation tomorrow on border protection, the persistent catch-and-release problem is a reminder of costly and unintended consequences of past enforcement efforts. Even if authorities overcome operational and legal hurdles to curb the flow of people from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and other countries, experts say they will be addressing only a tiny sliver of the illegal immigration problem. The U.S. Border Patrol arrested nearly 1.2 million people last year -- the vast majority of them Mexicans who were promptly returned across the border -- and estimates that 500,000 others evaded capture. "What Congress has built is one of the most expensive revolving doors in the world," said Victor Cerda, former chief of staff of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Without broader changes, he said, "You're going to be here in 10 years, with another 20 million aliens." Since the founding of the Department of Homeland Security, which sought to deter illegal crossings with a show of force, arrests of non-Mexican border crossers have tripled, from 49,545 in 2003 to 155,000 in 2005. But presidents and Congress for 20 years have not shown corresponding support for detention beds, courts, inland enforcement or diplomatic and administrative changes. As a result, the spike in arrests backfired, because there was no place to put the tens of thousands of new detainees. Overwhelmed immigration courts have been unable to keep up. Nor could the Border Patrol immediately send non-Mexicans back to Mexico, which does not accept other countries' nationals, forcing the agency to house them at an annual cost of $35,000 per bed....
Smuggling game gets deadlier
The contraband that crossed the Rio Grande here was once overwhelmingly pot and cocaine. These days, the goods smuggled across are perhaps even more profitable: human cargo. As the U.S. government considers the use of military resources and troops to shore up border security, drug traffickers are increasingly building alliances – often deadly – with coyotes, cashing in on the lucrative human smuggling trade, say agents patrolling the border. That finding is widely buttressed by other U.S. intelligence agents and human rights organizations. "The human trade is so lucrative," said Michael Griego, Border Patrol agent-in-charge of this region near Fort Hancock, southeast of El Paso. "The money is there." Ramiro Cordero, another Border Patrol agent, added, "If we seize their drug loads, the smugglers lose the entire shipment. Humans represent renewable resources, so that makes them more lucrative." That is because immigrants deported to Mexico by U.S. authorities usually cross again within hours, he said. "With renewable resources, smugglers have nothing to lose." While the national debate on overhauling the country's immigration laws intensifies in Washington, the cat-and-mouse games here continue, not with once-trusted smugglers, but with ruthless drug traffickers who view violence as a way of life. The risks are higher for illegal immigrants and nearly everyone else, from local law enforcement, ranchers, armed border vigilante groups, known as Minutemen, to Border Patrol agents....
Local agencies' use of U.S. security aid questioned
Arizona public safety agencies have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grant money on equipment they are not certified to use or to pay for projects with only a tenuous link to homeland security. With little initial guidance and flush with money after the Sept. 11 attacks, police and fire departments statewide shored up budget shortfalls and bought things like ATVs, Q-Tips and $50,000 worth of binoculars with nearly $178 million in Homeland Security Department grants. Despite what one small-town official described as a spending "frenzy," many local officials managed to put the money toward security priorities: shoring up communications, buying better protective gear for police and firefighters and purchasing mobile command centers for emergencies. But an Arizona Republic review of thousand of pages of records and receipts found that some local governments made many questionable purchases under the guise of homeland security, including $38 leather wallets for all Capitol Police officers and a $47 hat badge for the police chief. Many small cities and towns that are unlikely targets for a terrorist attack received disproportionate amounts of money, often more per capita than Phoenix, Tucson or Mesa. Consider:....
Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping
In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials. But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001. The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear. By several accounts, including those of the two officials, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks. On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress. On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970's and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans....
Telephone Records are just the Tip of NSA's Iceberg
The National Security Agency and other U.S. government organizations have developed hundreds of software programs and analytic tools to "harvest" intelligence, and they've created dozens of gigantic databases designed to discover potential terrorist activity both inside the United States and overseas. These cutting edge tools -- some highly classified because of their functions and capabilities -- continually process hundreds of billions of what are called "structured" data records, including telephone call records and e-mail headers contained in information "feeds" that have been established to flow into the intelligence agencies. The multi-billion dollar program, which began before 9/11 but has been accelerated since then. Well over 100 government contractors have participated, including both small boutique companies whose products include commercial off-the-shelf software and some of the largest defense contractors, who have developed specialized software and tools exclusively for government use. USA Today provided a small window into this massive intelligence community program by reporting yesterday that the NSA was collecting and analyzing millions of telephone call records. The call records are "structured data," that is, information maintained in a standardized format that can be easily analyzed by machine programs without human intervention. They're different from intercepts of actual communication between people in that they don't contain the "content" of the communications -- content that the Supreme Court has ruled is protected under the Fourth Amendment. You can think of call records as what's outside the envelope, as opposed to what's on the inside. Once collected, the call records and other non-content communication are being churned through a mind boggling network of software and data mining tools to extract intelligence. And this NSA dominated program of ingestion, digestion, and distribution of potential intelligence raises profound questions about the privacy and civil liberties of all Americans. Although there is no evidence that the harvesting programs have been involved in illegal activity or have been abused to reach into the lives of innocent Americans, their sheer scope, the number of "transactions" being tracked, raises questions as to whether an all-seeing domestic surveillance system isn't slowly being established, one that in just a few years time will be able to reveal the interactions of any targeted individual in near real time....
Gathering data may not violate privacy rights, but it could be illegal
The U.S. government's secret collection of Americans' phone records may not breach the Fourth Amendment's privacy guarantee, legal analysts said Thursday, but it could violate federal surveillance and telecommunication laws. More broadly, USA TODAY's report about the National Security Agency's deal with three major phone companies fed a debate over whether the Bush administration is going too far — and setting dangerous precedents — in trying to protect the nation from terrorism. "This may well be another example where the Bush administration, in secret, decided to bypass the courts and contravene federal law," said Georgetown University law professor David Cole. The NSA apparently has not collected the actual content of the phone conversations, just the numbers dialed. That distinction is key in determining whether the program violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable government searches and seizures. The U.S. Supreme Court has drawn a legal line between collecting phone numbers and routing information, and obtaining the content of phone calls. In a ruling in 1979, the court said in Smith v. Maryland that a phone company's installation, at police request, of a device to record numbers dialed at a home did not violate the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment might not be at issue, but legal analysts said the NSA's collection of phone records could be legally vulnerable under federal intelligence-gathering and communication laws. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, adopted in 1978, requires the government to go before a special court and obtain a warrant for electronic surveillance related to international espionage and terrorism. The statute defines the covered communication to include any information about the identity of the parties. A question now is whether that might include the phone numbers someone calls. That law and another criminal statute that requires warrants when authorities seek devices that record numbers dialed on a telephone could prohibit the NSA deal with the telecommunication companies. Cole said such laws generally were aimed at individuals or specific crime networks, rather than massive collections of data....
The Datamining Scare
Let's start by debunking Ms. Cauley's piece of journalistic sleight of hand. President Bush never suggested that domestic call "records" were private. He has said actual warrantless surveillance was restricted to conversations that involved an overseas party: "The government does not listen [our emphasis] to domestic phone calls without court approval." Datamining and wiretapping are not the same thing. So much for the "Bush lied" angle to this story. Yes, Mr. Bush could have volunteered the larger "datamining" details at the time. But no President is obliged to divulge every secret program, especially one central to war-fighting. Had Mr. Bush done so, we doubt Democrats and the press corps would have sat back and said OK, thanks, let's move on--not when they see his poll numbers and sense a chance to take back Congress this autumn. And once it's clear that telephone records are all we're talking about here, the rest of this alleged scandal melts away. Nobody has suggested one single call has been listened to as part of the program reported this week by USA Today. Rather, the datamining appears to keep track, after the fact, of most calls placed to and from a great many phone numbers in the U.S. In other words, the scary government database contains the same information you see on your monthly phone bill--slightly less, in fact, since names aren't attached to numbers and never will be unless government computers detect activity suspicious enough to warrant some being singled out of billions of others. And what might the government do with these records? Well, it might use them to break up a suspected terror plot--presumably after requesting a surveillance warrant for any future domestic calls it actually wants to listen to (nobody has suggested otherwise). As important, the database will enable us to respond much more effectively to the next terrorist attack. Once the ringleader or leaders are identified, this information will make it much easier to track down any remaining comrades and prevent them from committing future crimes. In short, the database is utterly non-invasive in itself and merely provides information for law enforcement to use, with warrants whenever necessary....
Mining data to nab terrorists: fair?
What can the United States government really glean from the phone-call histories - records of who called whom, when, and for how long - of millions of Americans? After all, it's the same information that has long been available to authorities armed with a subpoena, though not sought en masse until after the 9/11 terror attacks. Its value, say computer experts and others, is that it can be used to identify a "social network" of interconnected people - including, perhaps, would-be terrorists. "From phone records you can learn who are my friends - and who their friends are - what services I use, where I shop," says Johannes Gehrke, a computer scientist at Cornell University who has written search algorithms for government analysis programs. "Our social interactions leave a digital trail. [Phone-record analysis] is government learning about human behavior from analyzing that trail." Moreover, they assert, phone records are just one part of a much larger government effort to analyze the digital minutiae of American life in the hope of uncovering terrorist networks buried within it. Potentially invasive, such counterterror activity aims to build databases that can be cross-referenced in the hope of matching patterns, relationships, and activities that bear investigating, experts say. "You should presume that phone numbers are being collated with Internet records, credit-card records, everything," says Bruce Schneier, a security technologist with Counterpane Internet Security in Mountain View, Calif. Cross-indexing phone records can reveal a social profile of friends and acquaintances and a geographic profile. Each individual in that chain might then be cross-indexed against his or her retail purchases, credit history, e-mail, medical records, airline reservations, Social Security number, fingerprints - anything that can be digitized and stored in databases, and assuming that the government has access to them. Such activity is potentially invasive, many experts acknowledge, but will it work?....
Newsweek Poll: Americans Wary of NSA Spying
Has the Bush administration gone too far in expanding the powers of the President to fight terrorism? Yes, say a majority of Americans, following this week’s revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens since the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, 53 percent of Americans think the NSA’s surveillance program “goes too far in invading people’s privacy,” while 41 percent see it as a necessary tool to combat terrorism. President Bush tried to reassure the public this week that its privacy is “fiercely protected,” and that “we’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans.” Nonetheless, Americans think the White House has overstepped its bounds: 57 percent said that in light of the NSA data-mining news and other executive actions, the Bush-Cheney Administration has “gone too far in expanding presidential power.” That compares to 38 percent who think the Administration’s actions are appropriate. According to the Newsweek poll, 73 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Republicans think the NSA’s program is overly intrusive. Details of the surveillance efforts were first reported on Wednesday by USA Today....
Spy Agency Watching Americans From Space
A little-known spy agency that analyzes imagery taken from the skies has been spending significantly more time watching U.S. soil. In an era when other intelligence agencies try to hide those operations, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is proud of that domestic mission. He said the work the agency did after hurricanes Rita and Katrina was the best he'd seen an intelligence agency do in his 42 years in the spy business. "This was kind of a direct payback to the taxpayers for the investment made in this agency over the years, even though in its original design it was intended for foreign intelligence purposes," Clapper said in a Thursday interview with The Associated Press. Geospatial intelligence is the science of combining imagery, such as satellite pictures, to physically depict features or activities happening anywhere on the planet. A part of the Defense Department, the NGA usually operates unnoticed to provide information on nuclear sites, terror camps, troop movements or natural disasters. After last year's hurricanes, the agency had an unusually public face. It set up mobile command centers that sprung out of the backs of Humvees and provided imagery for rescuers and hurricane victims who wanted to know the condition of their homes. Victims would provide their street address and the NGA would provide a satellite photo of their property. In one way or another, some 900 agency officials were involved. Spy agencies historically avoided domestic operations out of concern for Pentagon regulations and Reagan-era executive order, known as 12333, that restricted intelligence collection on American citizens and companies. Its budget, like all intelligence agencies, is classified....
U.S. Argues to Block Suit Against CIA
The government urged a federal judge on Friday to block a lawsuit filed by a German national who says he was illegally held in a CIA-run prison in Afghanistan for four months and tortured. U.S. Attorney R. Joseph Sher said government secrets could be exposed if Khaled al-Masri were allowed to proceed with his lawsuit. "Disclosure of information in the case would jeopardize national security," Sher said during a hearing in which he asked the judge to dismiss the case. Citing the harm he said public disclosure of any information regarding the case could do, Sher said, "We cannot and will not confirm or deny the allegations or diplomatic contact with foreign governments." U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis said he will issue a ruling as soon as possible on whether the case will proceed. The lawsuit was filed against former CIA Director George Tenet and 10 unidentified CIA employees. While the Central Intelligence Agency was not named as a defendant, the agency intervened to uphold its state secret privilege. Al-Masri said he was taken into custody after being mistaken for an associate of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers. He said Macedonian authorities arrested him when he crossed the border on New Year's Eve 2003 and turned him over to the CIA after three weeks. He said he was then flown to Afghanistan where he was "dragged off the plane and thrown into the trunk of a car" and beaten by his captors. He was held at a CIA-run facility known as the "Salt Pit," an abandoned brick factory north of the Kabul business district used for detention of high-level terror suspects, al-Masri says. After Tenet was notified that this was a case of mistaken identity, al-Masri was held for two more months, his lawsuit alleges. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other State Department officials have declined to address the al-Masri case. However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the United States has acknowledged making a mistake in his arrest....
Bush to Propose Guard Troops for Border
President Bush will call for thousands of National Guard troops to be deployed along the Mexico border in support of patrols aimed at keeping out illegal immigrants, White House officials said Sunday on the eve of an Oval Office address announcing the plan. White House aides worked into the night Sunday to iron out details of the proposal and allay concerns among lawmakers that using troops to man the border would further burden an overextended military. Two White House officials said Bush would propose using troops as a stopgap measure while the Border Patrol builds up its resources. The troops would play a supportive role to Border Patrol agents, who would maintain primary responsibility for physically guarding the border. The officials spoke on a condition of anonymity before the address Monday at 8 p.m. EDT. The officials would not say how many troops Bush wanted to use, except that it would be in the thousands but less than an estimate of as many as 10,000 being discussed at the Pentagon....
Mexican president calls President Bush about worries over border plan
Mexican President Vicente Fox telephoned President Bush on Sunday to express his concern about what he called the possibility of a “militarized” border between the two nations. According to Fox's office, Bush told his Mexican counterpart he was considering sending the National Guard to the border but said this did not constitute a militarization. Bush “is analyzing the administrative and logistical support of part of the National Guard, not the Army, to help police on the border,” Fox's office said. The Mexican news release said Bush and Fox agreed that a comprehensive immigration reform is needed in the United States. “In the conversation, President Bush reiterated his conviction that the migration issue can only be resolved with an integral and comprehensive reform,” the release said....
Border troops would be temporary, US tells Mexico
U.S. President George W. Bush assured Mexican President Vicente Fox on Sunday he did not intend to militarize their countries' mutual border, but was considering sending National Guard troops there to temporarily support border control efforts. "The president made clear that the United States considers Mexico a friend and that what is being considered is not militarization of the border, but support of border patrol capabilities on a temporary basis by National Guard personnel," White House spokeswoman Maria Tamburri said, describing a telephone conversation between Bush and his Mexican counterpart. Fox "reached out" to Bush on Sunday to relay his concerns about the plan that is under consideration, Tamburri said....
Backlog At Borders, Cracks in The System
Beefed-up enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border since Sept. 11, 2001, has substantially increased the number of arrests of illegal immigrants, but tens of thousands of captured non-Mexicans continue to be released into the United States because there is no place to hold them, according to experts and immigration officials. The vast majority simply slip away inside the country after being issued "Notices to Appear" for a deportation hearing -- documents known to Border Patrol agents as "Notices to Disappear." The success of border crossers who stay in the United States through this "catch-and-release" process has encouraged others who hope to enter the country the same way. In a dozen speeches since October, President Bush has vowed to replace catch-and-release with the "catch-and-return" of 150,000 "other than Mexican" (OTM) immigrants arrested each year. The goal is to deny court hearings to all but asylum-seekers, speed deportations and make the most of limited detention space in jails, prisons and immigration centers. But as Washington debates the overhaul of the nation's immigration laws and Bush prepares to address the nation tomorrow on border protection, the persistent catch-and-release problem is a reminder of costly and unintended consequences of past enforcement efforts. Even if authorities overcome operational and legal hurdles to curb the flow of people from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and other countries, experts say they will be addressing only a tiny sliver of the illegal immigration problem. The U.S. Border Patrol arrested nearly 1.2 million people last year -- the vast majority of them Mexicans who were promptly returned across the border -- and estimates that 500,000 others evaded capture. "What Congress has built is one of the most expensive revolving doors in the world," said Victor Cerda, former chief of staff of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Without broader changes, he said, "You're going to be here in 10 years, with another 20 million aliens." Since the founding of the Department of Homeland Security, which sought to deter illegal crossings with a show of force, arrests of non-Mexican border crossers have tripled, from 49,545 in 2003 to 155,000 in 2005. But presidents and Congress for 20 years have not shown corresponding support for detention beds, courts, inland enforcement or diplomatic and administrative changes. As a result, the spike in arrests backfired, because there was no place to put the tens of thousands of new detainees. Overwhelmed immigration courts have been unable to keep up. Nor could the Border Patrol immediately send non-Mexicans back to Mexico, which does not accept other countries' nationals, forcing the agency to house them at an annual cost of $35,000 per bed....
Smuggling game gets deadlier
The contraband that crossed the Rio Grande here was once overwhelmingly pot and cocaine. These days, the goods smuggled across are perhaps even more profitable: human cargo. As the U.S. government considers the use of military resources and troops to shore up border security, drug traffickers are increasingly building alliances – often deadly – with coyotes, cashing in on the lucrative human smuggling trade, say agents patrolling the border. That finding is widely buttressed by other U.S. intelligence agents and human rights organizations. "The human trade is so lucrative," said Michael Griego, Border Patrol agent-in-charge of this region near Fort Hancock, southeast of El Paso. "The money is there." Ramiro Cordero, another Border Patrol agent, added, "If we seize their drug loads, the smugglers lose the entire shipment. Humans represent renewable resources, so that makes them more lucrative." That is because immigrants deported to Mexico by U.S. authorities usually cross again within hours, he said. "With renewable resources, smugglers have nothing to lose." While the national debate on overhauling the country's immigration laws intensifies in Washington, the cat-and-mouse games here continue, not with once-trusted smugglers, but with ruthless drug traffickers who view violence as a way of life. The risks are higher for illegal immigrants and nearly everyone else, from local law enforcement, ranchers, armed border vigilante groups, known as Minutemen, to Border Patrol agents....
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Muchas gracias amigas
By Julie Carter
Right up front and at the top of this missive I want to say a heartfelt "thank you" to my friends.
They have long ago learned that what they tell me will likely end up in print, at some point, and they have been very good sports about it.
These are the women who incite me to write and are very often the subject of what I write.
They tell me their stories and I tell them to you in stand alone fashion or in a woven pattern of threads from all our lives.
These are strong, independent women who can ride, rope, cook, shoot and laugh with the best of them. And they clean-up for town pretty nice too. We like to think there is a calling for bright, beautiful, and brassy ranch women, each with a great sense of humor.
We've all had a job or nine in our lifetimes, other than ranching or during ranching. There is a Karate black belt/cop, a couple of accomplished business women, a horse trainer and me. I'm the one at the keyboard.
Ranch life creates within each of us an ability to view the world from a different angle, usually from the bottom looking up.
It sorts out priorities on a survival rating scale. We don't have much time to spend worrying about things that don't really count.
Our survival gear includes a Bible and the ability to find something to be thankful for daily.
Most days we sooth our souls with laughter, and the best of that, is when we laugh at ourselves.
We have no patience for whiners but will spend our last breath helping someone truly in need.
We get up early each day ready to tackle the next 24 hours, one situation at a time. Rarely do our situations come in single file but we "cowgirl up" and get through it.
We doctor children, pets, livestock and husbands. We have bottle fed babies, birds, puppies, kittens, rabbits, calves, colts and the occasional fawn. We mend fences and britches.
We live in places where the directions to get there include the words miles, last, cattle guard and gravel road.
Our early morning prayers cover rain, cattle, children and 4-H projects.
It is the norm to find our conversations far from the usual "woman talk" of hair color, the latest fashion in pumps and purses or a Saturday night concert. We learn that stuff from the magazines.
Most often we talk about things like feeding cattle, calving heifers, a new baby colt, the veterinarian's last visit, and sometimes the location of the next county fair pig sale.
Occasionally, we regress and share funny books we have read and movies we liked.
Potluck recipes are a given as is the name brand of the most comfortable work boot.
You see, we understand each other. We know that fixing supper and fixing the stock tank float is not an either/or choice.
A knowing nod always follows the first line of a story that begins, "We went to check a gate and he said we would be right back."
I am truly blessed to have these women in my life. Let them not think I ever take for granted their influence in my journey.
They inspire me in ways they know not. May we always find a way to laugh together and may our stories bring laughter to someone that needs it.
Again, I say, muchas gracias amigas.
© Julie Carter 2006
By Julie Carter
Right up front and at the top of this missive I want to say a heartfelt "thank you" to my friends.
They have long ago learned that what they tell me will likely end up in print, at some point, and they have been very good sports about it.
These are the women who incite me to write and are very often the subject of what I write.
They tell me their stories and I tell them to you in stand alone fashion or in a woven pattern of threads from all our lives.
These are strong, independent women who can ride, rope, cook, shoot and laugh with the best of them. And they clean-up for town pretty nice too. We like to think there is a calling for bright, beautiful, and brassy ranch women, each with a great sense of humor.
We've all had a job or nine in our lifetimes, other than ranching or during ranching. There is a Karate black belt/cop, a couple of accomplished business women, a horse trainer and me. I'm the one at the keyboard.
Ranch life creates within each of us an ability to view the world from a different angle, usually from the bottom looking up.
It sorts out priorities on a survival rating scale. We don't have much time to spend worrying about things that don't really count.
Our survival gear includes a Bible and the ability to find something to be thankful for daily.
Most days we sooth our souls with laughter, and the best of that, is when we laugh at ourselves.
We have no patience for whiners but will spend our last breath helping someone truly in need.
We get up early each day ready to tackle the next 24 hours, one situation at a time. Rarely do our situations come in single file but we "cowgirl up" and get through it.
We doctor children, pets, livestock and husbands. We have bottle fed babies, birds, puppies, kittens, rabbits, calves, colts and the occasional fawn. We mend fences and britches.
We live in places where the directions to get there include the words miles, last, cattle guard and gravel road.
Our early morning prayers cover rain, cattle, children and 4-H projects.
It is the norm to find our conversations far from the usual "woman talk" of hair color, the latest fashion in pumps and purses or a Saturday night concert. We learn that stuff from the magazines.
Most often we talk about things like feeding cattle, calving heifers, a new baby colt, the veterinarian's last visit, and sometimes the location of the next county fair pig sale.
Occasionally, we regress and share funny books we have read and movies we liked.
Potluck recipes are a given as is the name brand of the most comfortable work boot.
You see, we understand each other. We know that fixing supper and fixing the stock tank float is not an either/or choice.
A knowing nod always follows the first line of a story that begins, "We went to check a gate and he said we would be right back."
I am truly blessed to have these women in my life. Let them not think I ever take for granted their influence in my journey.
They inspire me in ways they know not. May we always find a way to laugh together and may our stories bring laughter to someone that needs it.
Again, I say, muchas gracias amigas.
© Julie Carter 2006
OPINION/COMMENTARY
Hummer Beats Hybrid
CNW Marketing Research Inc. spent two years collecting data on the energy necessary to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from initial concept to scrappage. This includes such minutia as plant to dealer fuel costs, employee driving distances, electricity usage per pound of material used in each vehicle and literally hundreds of other variables. To put the data into understandable terms for consumers, it was translated into a "dollars per lifetime mile" figure. That is, the Energy Cost per mile driven. The most Energy Expensive vehicle sold in the U.S. in calendar year 2005: Maybach at $11.58 per mile. The least expensive: Scion xB at $0.48 cents. While neither of those figures is surprising, it is interesting that driving a hybrid vehicle costs more in terms of overall energy consumed than comparable non-hybrid vehicles. For example, the Honda Accord Hybrid has an Energy Cost per Mile of $3.29 while the conventional Honda Accord is $2.18. Put simply, over the "Dust to Dust" lifetime of the Accord Hybrid, it will require about 50 percent more energy than the non-hybrid version. For example, while the industry average of all vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2005 was $2.28 cents per mile, the Hummer H3 (among most SUVs) was only $1.949 cents per mile. That figure is also lower than all currently offered hybrids and Honda Civic at $2.42 per mile....
Free-Market Environmentalism Turns 15
With Earth Day having just passed and environmental awareness peaking, it seems appropriate to highlight another important environmental anniversary. Fifteen years ago, an academic publisher quietly released Free Market Environmentalism by Terry Anderson and Don Leal. At the time, few mainstream environmentalists or politicians saw the book. But, since its publication, free-market environmentalism (FME) spurred a quiet revolution in environmental policy. Now its views and policy approaches are starting to be taken seriously in policy circles. FME ideas seem counterintuitive. Take private property rights. Most believe a successful environmental policy and private property rights cannot coexist. But incorporating those self-same rights actually can (and does) help the environment....
To protect and conserve
One controversy roiling the evangelical world is to what extent Bible-believing Christians should be environmentalists. Recently, a group of prominent evangelical leaders, including mega-pastor Rick Warren, launched an environmental movement, urging the National Association of Evangelicals and evangelicals at large to make saving the earth—not just saving the world—a major priority. But other evangelical leaders, such as Charles Colson, opposed the initiative. Now the NAE has put environmentalism on the shelf. But the debate continues, often stirring up enough heat to contribute to global warming (see "Greener than thou," April 22). A big part of the problem is that the current environmental movement has been hijacked by the far left. Go to a Green Party rally and you will find environmentalism being used as a stick to beat up on capitalism, Republicans, and Western civilization. Read the Green Party platform and, amidst the calls to save the earth, you will find the whole agenda of today's socialists, feminists, gays, abortionists, and pacifists. More seriously, today's environmentalism reflects a neo-pagan worldview. Loving nature passes over into worshipping nature. There is, in fact, a new environmentalist religion, the worship of Gaia, the ancient name for the earth goddess. According to its tenets, just as every living organism, including the human body, consists of millions of distinct living cells, the earth is a living, even conscious organism. Each of us, as well as each animal and species and ecosystem, is a cell in the body of Mother Earth. Much of today's environmentalism is also, quite literally, pro-death. For many of the most zealous environmentalists, earth's biggest problem is overpopulation....
Moonshine Mirage
The U.S. should emulate Brazil's "energy independence miracle" declared headlines, editorialists, environmentalists and policymakers all throughout the first half of 2006. The Brazilian "miracle" was achieved in part by substituting ethanol (produced by fermenting sugar cane) for gasoline (made from imported oil). Let's look at the elements of the Brazilian miracle and see if it is possible for the United States to replicate it. First, Brazil's economy is one-tenth the size of ours, and Brazil's motor fleet is about 100 vehicles per 1,000 people. Brazil's cars and trucks consume about 15 billion gallons of motor fuels annually. Also, Brazil produces 1.7 million barrels of oil per day, enough to fulfill about 90 percent of the country's daily requirements. Finally, Brazil produces 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol from sugar cane and blends it with gasoline in a 20 percent ethanol/80 percent gasoline mixture to burn in flex fuel automobiles. In contrast, there are 765 vehicles per 1000 people in the U.S. consuming about 150 billion gallons of gasoline per year. The United States already produces about 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol (about the same as Brazil) which meets only about 3 percent of U.S. transport fuel needs. The U.S. pumps about 5 million barrels of oil per day domestically and imports another 15 million barrels daily. Replacing one-third of our gasoline consumption with ethanol, as Brazil has done, would reduce oil imports—but "energy independence" would remain a mirage. One bushel of corn yields about three gallons of ethanol. In 2004 U.S. farmers harvested 11.8 billion bushels of corn. In other words it would take the country's entire corn crop to produce 35 billion gallons of ethanol, an amount equal to about one-fifth of the gasoline Americans currently burn each year. This would also leave no corn for food and some residues for feed. Burning food for fuel raises some interesting moral questions in world in which 800 million people are still malnourished. Assuming that it would be undesirable to turn our entire corn crop into fuel and feed residues, growing another 12 billion bushels of corn for ethanol production would require plowing up an additional area double the size of the entire state of Illinois. So ethanol produced from corn is not the answer to drastically lowering U.S. oil imports....
Hummer Beats Hybrid
CNW Marketing Research Inc. spent two years collecting data on the energy necessary to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from initial concept to scrappage. This includes such minutia as plant to dealer fuel costs, employee driving distances, electricity usage per pound of material used in each vehicle and literally hundreds of other variables. To put the data into understandable terms for consumers, it was translated into a "dollars per lifetime mile" figure. That is, the Energy Cost per mile driven. The most Energy Expensive vehicle sold in the U.S. in calendar year 2005: Maybach at $11.58 per mile. The least expensive: Scion xB at $0.48 cents. While neither of those figures is surprising, it is interesting that driving a hybrid vehicle costs more in terms of overall energy consumed than comparable non-hybrid vehicles. For example, the Honda Accord Hybrid has an Energy Cost per Mile of $3.29 while the conventional Honda Accord is $2.18. Put simply, over the "Dust to Dust" lifetime of the Accord Hybrid, it will require about 50 percent more energy than the non-hybrid version. For example, while the industry average of all vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2005 was $2.28 cents per mile, the Hummer H3 (among most SUVs) was only $1.949 cents per mile. That figure is also lower than all currently offered hybrids and Honda Civic at $2.42 per mile....
Free-Market Environmentalism Turns 15
With Earth Day having just passed and environmental awareness peaking, it seems appropriate to highlight another important environmental anniversary. Fifteen years ago, an academic publisher quietly released Free Market Environmentalism by Terry Anderson and Don Leal. At the time, few mainstream environmentalists or politicians saw the book. But, since its publication, free-market environmentalism (FME) spurred a quiet revolution in environmental policy. Now its views and policy approaches are starting to be taken seriously in policy circles. FME ideas seem counterintuitive. Take private property rights. Most believe a successful environmental policy and private property rights cannot coexist. But incorporating those self-same rights actually can (and does) help the environment....
To protect and conserve
One controversy roiling the evangelical world is to what extent Bible-believing Christians should be environmentalists. Recently, a group of prominent evangelical leaders, including mega-pastor Rick Warren, launched an environmental movement, urging the National Association of Evangelicals and evangelicals at large to make saving the earth—not just saving the world—a major priority. But other evangelical leaders, such as Charles Colson, opposed the initiative. Now the NAE has put environmentalism on the shelf. But the debate continues, often stirring up enough heat to contribute to global warming (see "Greener than thou," April 22). A big part of the problem is that the current environmental movement has been hijacked by the far left. Go to a Green Party rally and you will find environmentalism being used as a stick to beat up on capitalism, Republicans, and Western civilization. Read the Green Party platform and, amidst the calls to save the earth, you will find the whole agenda of today's socialists, feminists, gays, abortionists, and pacifists. More seriously, today's environmentalism reflects a neo-pagan worldview. Loving nature passes over into worshipping nature. There is, in fact, a new environmentalist religion, the worship of Gaia, the ancient name for the earth goddess. According to its tenets, just as every living organism, including the human body, consists of millions of distinct living cells, the earth is a living, even conscious organism. Each of us, as well as each animal and species and ecosystem, is a cell in the body of Mother Earth. Much of today's environmentalism is also, quite literally, pro-death. For many of the most zealous environmentalists, earth's biggest problem is overpopulation....
Moonshine Mirage
The U.S. should emulate Brazil's "energy independence miracle" declared headlines, editorialists, environmentalists and policymakers all throughout the first half of 2006. The Brazilian "miracle" was achieved in part by substituting ethanol (produced by fermenting sugar cane) for gasoline (made from imported oil). Let's look at the elements of the Brazilian miracle and see if it is possible for the United States to replicate it. First, Brazil's economy is one-tenth the size of ours, and Brazil's motor fleet is about 100 vehicles per 1,000 people. Brazil's cars and trucks consume about 15 billion gallons of motor fuels annually. Also, Brazil produces 1.7 million barrels of oil per day, enough to fulfill about 90 percent of the country's daily requirements. Finally, Brazil produces 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol from sugar cane and blends it with gasoline in a 20 percent ethanol/80 percent gasoline mixture to burn in flex fuel automobiles. In contrast, there are 765 vehicles per 1000 people in the U.S. consuming about 150 billion gallons of gasoline per year. The United States already produces about 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol (about the same as Brazil) which meets only about 3 percent of U.S. transport fuel needs. The U.S. pumps about 5 million barrels of oil per day domestically and imports another 15 million barrels daily. Replacing one-third of our gasoline consumption with ethanol, as Brazil has done, would reduce oil imports—but "energy independence" would remain a mirage. One bushel of corn yields about three gallons of ethanol. In 2004 U.S. farmers harvested 11.8 billion bushels of corn. In other words it would take the country's entire corn crop to produce 35 billion gallons of ethanol, an amount equal to about one-fifth of the gasoline Americans currently burn each year. This would also leave no corn for food and some residues for feed. Burning food for fuel raises some interesting moral questions in world in which 800 million people are still malnourished. Assuming that it would be undesirable to turn our entire corn crop into fuel and feed residues, growing another 12 billion bushels of corn for ethanol production would require plowing up an additional area double the size of the entire state of Illinois. So ethanol produced from corn is not the answer to drastically lowering U.S. oil imports....
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