White House suspends action on gray wolf delisting

The Obama Administration has frozen the Department of Interior effort to take gray wolves off the list of animals protected under the Endangered Species Act in the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes regions. In a memorandum issued Tuesday to federal department heads, Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, wrote that no proposed or final regulations should be sent to the Federal Register for publication until they have been reviewed and approved by new agency heads appointed by the president. Emanuel added that all regulations sent to the Federal Register, but not yet published, also should be withdrawn for review and approval. Last week, the Department of Interior, which oversees endangered species, had said it expected to delist gray wolves after publishing a new rule in the Federal Register this week. That rule hadn’t been published as of Wednesday, which means it falls under Emanuel’s memo. Hugh Vickery, an Interior spokesman, said he wasn’t sure why the publication had been delayed, although he noted it often takes a few days for the paperwork to go through. Both Monday and Tuesday were federal holidays, which could have slowed the process. Vickery said that after the review, the proposal could go forward as proposed now; it could go forward with some modifications; or it might not go forward at all....

California expects fast Obama move on car pollution

California's top climate change official on Wednesday predicted President Barack Obama's administration would let the state impose its own tough limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars by May, in what would be a victory for environmentalists. If the EPA reverses the Bush administration ruling, more than 12 U.S. states could proceed with plans to impose stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars. California wants to reduce the emissions by 30 percent by 2016 -- the most ambitious federal or state effort to address global warming. Environmentalists have said granting California a waiver that allows it to set its own emissions regulations would signal Obama's commitment to tackling climate change. California wants to require carmakers to use paints that reflect more heat, tires that roll smoother and improved air conditioning to boost efficiency beyond the fuel mileage requirements already facing automakers....

Antarctica not immune to warming

The Earth's lone holdout to climate change, Antarctica, is actually warming, says a new study in today's edition of the journal Nature. Scientists had long thought that while some isolated parts of Antarctica had been warming, much of the continent had been cooling over the past 50 years. But the new analysis found that since 1957, when measured as a whole, the continent's temperature has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit. Perhaps most troubling is that "a fairly large part of West Antarctica is warming more than we realized," says study co-author Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University.Scientists say West Antarctica is the ice sheet most susceptible to a possible collapse in the future due to warming global temperatures. If the ice sheet collapsed, it would cause cataclysmic sea-level rise around the world....

Editorial - Saving the tortoise

Back in 1973, Congress enacted the Endangered Species Act. Fifteen years later, someone looked around and realized there was no way to do a cost-benefit analysis on how much was being spent to "protect" the proliferating list of weeds and bugs in question, so Congress in 1988 added a section to the ESA requiring an annual species-by-species expenditure report. And about eight years later, the appropriate federal agencies finally got around to issuing them. And which endangered species do you suppose these government agencies spend the most tax dollars "protecting"? The grizzly bear? The bald eagle? No. The 2006 report, the latest released by the Fish and Wildlife Service, estimates $884 million were directly spent "protecting" more than 1,100 species on the list. But there's a wide disparity in how money is doled out. The top recipients have been salmon in the Pacific Northwest and the Steller sea lion. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on those species since reporting began in 1996. Another critter ranking high on the list of money spent by state and federal agencies trying to keep it from extinction, according to an Associated Press analysis of the past 11 years of available data, is Southern Nevada's own desert tortoise. From 1996 to 2006, more than $93 million was spent on managing the long-lived reptile, The AP figures. That's more than was spent on the grizzly, the gray wolf or the bald eagle. There are some odd things about the case of the Mojave Desert tortoise, though. For one thing, its "critical habitat" stretches across 9,600 square miles. Jurisdictions include four states, seven military installations, four national parks and scores of federal, state and county agencies. For another, for a supposedly "threatened" species, there seem to be a whole lot of them out there. Roy Averill-Murray, desert tortoise recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Reno, estimates there are 111,000 to 187,000 adult desert tortoises in areas designated as critical habitat. Government agencies spent $10.5 million on the desert tortoise in 2006 and more than $11 million in 2007 -- on monitoring, fences to keep them from wandering onto highways, studies on a respiratory disease and stacks of long-range plans. Problem is, no one's sure if it's done more good than harm....

Renewable energy permitting process streamlined

Four years ago, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which called for the development of 10,000 megawatts of non-hydropower, renewable energy projects on public lands by the year 2015. Last week, the Bureau of Land Management authorized the establishment of special offices in Wyoming and other Western states to expedite that renewable energy development on federal public lands. BLM officials said Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne issued a Secretarial Order on Friday that will allow the agency to establish coordination offices in Wyoming, Arizona, California and Nevada.
LM officials said those are the states where the greatest interest has been shown in renewable energy projects, most notably wind power projects. The offices will accelerate the permitting of wind, solar, biomass and geothermal energy projects, along with needed electrical transmission facilities, on BLM-managed lands, officials said in a release....

Instead of Glory, the Finder of a Rare Dinosaur Fossil Faces Charges of Theft

In October 2006, a respected amateur paleontologist, Nathan L. Murphy, took a large rock containing the well-preserved bones of a new species of dinosaur to be X-rayed at the Dinosaur Field Station here. He called the fossil, a raptor the size of a wild turkey, Sid Vicious. The find was a coup, bringing Mr. Murphy prestige and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars from the rights to cast the fossil for sale to museums and collectors. But Montana law enforcement officials now say that the fossil Mr. Murphy took to the field station in 2006 had actually been found four years earlier on a private ranch and therefore belongs to someone else. In September, after a yearlong investigation by state and federal authorities, Mr. Murphy was charged with felony theft. Federal agents have also questioned his associates about his other fossil discoveries. The investigations have caused consternation in this small town in the middle of some of the world’s richest dinosaur fields....

Valles Caldera trustees warn preserve may need cash

Trustees who oversee the Valles Caldera National Preserve are acknowledging that becoming financially self-sufficient is a challenge to every aspect of managing the former Northern New Mexico cattle ranch. The trustees said in a report to Congress they may have to request funding for maintenance of existing facilities, to meet requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act and for possible new facilities to support public programs on the preserve. "It is our opinion that without adequate infrastructure, the trust will not be able to meet the financial self-sufficient mandate of the (Valles Caldera Preservation) Act," Gary Bratcher, the preserve's executive director, wrote in the report's cover letter. Purchased by the federal government in 2000 for $101 million, the 89,000-acre former cattle ranch is known for its meadows, streams, forests, volcanic domes and huge elk herds. The preserve is managed not by a federal agency, but by the trustees. It's an experiment in the way public lands are managed — only the Presidio in San Francisco, a military base-turned-park, has a similar governance....Most groups and agencies don't want this concept to work, and are making sure it doesn't.

Group recommends DU land buy be rejected

A group that advises Gov. John Hoeven on land purchases by nonprofits is recommending he reject a proposed 598-acre Ducks Unlimited land buy in Kidder County, saying the land would be better off in private ownership. The Natural Areas Acquisition Advisory Committee voted 6-2 Wednesday against the $335,000 purchase. Should Hoeven follow the group's recommendation, it would be the second time in two years that Ducks Unlimited has been denied the chance to buy land in the nation's prime duck production territory. State Agriculture Commissioner Roger Johnson, who voted to oppose the land deal, said that North Dakota's anti-corporate farming law "presumes that these acquisitions are not to go forward" unless there are special circumstances, such as the land in question having a unique view or unique vegetation or wildlife. That was not the case with the Kidder County land, he said. Kramer said the Natural Areas Acquisition Advisory Committee often follows the wishes of the county governing board. "They are probably more in tune to what is transpiring on that property than we certainly are," he said....I've posted articles about this before. ND apparently has a law that all nonprofit land acquisitions must be approved by the Governor and there is also an advisory board to offer opinions to the Governor. Other states should take a look at this approach.

Could cows heal the West?

When Sid Goodloe bought his ranch half a century ago in south-central New Mexico, it was a dry, desertified mess. The roads leading to homesteads abandoned since the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s had eroded into gullies. Overgrazing had stripped away soil-stabilizing ground cover. Where plowing had occurred, precious topsoil had dried up and blown away in the area’s fierce winds. Years of fire suppression had allowed pinyon-juniper forest to supplant grassland. “There was little here except broom weed, cactus, and pinyon-juniper,” says Mr. Goodloe. “And yet, it had tremendous potential.” The soil quality was good. Native American petroglyphs of beavers suggested that the area once supported a more productive ecosystem. With the proper care, the land could recover, Goodloe thought. But that would depend on bolstering its ability to retain water, the limiting factor in much of the semiarid Southwest. Originally from West Texas, Goodloe didn’t come from a ranching family. He had no one to turn to for advice, and no preconceived notions. So when, in the 1960s, he met Rhodesian land manager Allan Savory, he was receptive to Mr. Savory’s somewhat counterintuitive proposition: To heal the land, put more animals on it, not fewer – but move them after a relatively brief interval. If livestock mimicked the grazing behavior of wild herbivores – bunched together for safety, intensely grazing an area for a brief period, and then moving on – rangeland health would improve, Savory said. Today, Goodloe’s land is often referenced as a model of “sustainable ranching,” a phrase many consider an oxymoron in the West. Wild antelopes bound across his pastures, which are thick with an array of grass and browse species. Water now runs intermittently though a willow-lined creek that once lay dry. And in 2004, Goodloe put a conservation easement on the property, preventing its development in perpetuity. But he nonetheless resists the “environmentalist” label. “I’m what you would call an environmentally sensitive rancher,” he says....

Lack of moisture in Oklahoma withers ag hopes

So far, this is the fifth-driest winter in Oklahoma since 1921. The climatological winter is December through February. And the Oklahoma Climatological Survey has records back to 1921. With those facts in mind, the average precipitation statewide has been 0.93 inches since Dec. 1. That puts the current winter in the top five driest at this point, at almost 2 inches below normal. "Even though it is normally a dry season, winter precipitation is still vital for recharge of moisture in the soil,” said Gary McManus, assistant state climatologist for the Oklahoma Climatological Survey. "Things are getting worse with each dry day.” State Agriculture Secretary Terry Peach said we’re seeing and could continue to see a tremendous impact. "The drought this year could have a bigger impact than in years past,” Peach said, "because of the fact the producers have a significant increase in their input costs, from seed costs to fuel costs to fertilizer costs to the crops they have in the ground to the crops that will be planted this spring. "And this impact is also hitting our ranchers with the same severity because their winter feed costs were so expensive that they bought in the fall, their fuel costs were probably twice what they were last year because of early purchases and the volatility of the markets. "The impact will be felt statewide.”....

Central Texas Facing Severe Wildfire Season

The United States Drought Monitor now says Central Texas is suffering from moderate to extreme drought conditions. The Governor’s Division of Emergency Management says the lack of rain coupled with high winds is setting the stage for a severe wildfire season, especially for Central Texas farm lands. “All the pasture land right now is just bone dry and the grass is extremely dry, I mean it wouldn’t take, as they say, a flick of a cigarette and it would just take off,” says farmer Richard Cortese....

Group Urges Vilsack To Immediately Redress 3 Rulemaking Blunders

Today, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack was confirmed to be this nation’s next Agriculture Secretary, and R-CALF USA wasted no time in sending Vilsack a formal letter not only to congratulate him on his confirmation, but also to seek his immediate assistance in redressing three fundamental rulemaking-related blunders made by the previous Administration and the previous U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). R-CALF USA members have literally expended millions of dollars over the past several years to fund our intense, heated fight against the previous Administration’s efforts to: 1) willfully expose U.S. consumers and the U.S. cattle herd to an unnecessary and avoidable risk of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease); 2) prevent U.S. cattle producers from distinguishing beef produced exclusively from their cattle – born, raised and slaughtered in the United States; and, 3) dismantle historically successful disease prevention and control programs and to substitute them with an unproven, intrusive and ill-conceived National Animal Identification System (NAIS) scheme that constitutes a national premises registration for private property, both personal (i.e., livestock) and real (i.e., land). Specifically, R-CALF USA urged Vilsack to take the following actions within the first few days of President Barack Obama’s Administration....I predict 1) The only changes to the trade policy will be to require additional labor and environmental standards, 2)Vilsack will support the already approved definitions in COOL, and 3) Vilsack was pro-NAIS as Governor and will remain so. Obama may shutdown GITMO, but he will let NAIS stand.

Niman Ranch to merge with Chicago investor

Niman Ranch will still be putting out "all natural" and "raised with care" meat, but its days as an independent company are over. The Alameda company is announcing today that it's merging with its chief investor, Chicago's Natural Food Holdings LLC. It was that or go out of business altogether. Financial and other details were not immediately available, but in a statement I received Wednesday afternoon, Jeff Tripician, Niman Ranch's executive vice president said the deal "will provide our company with a significantly stronger balance sheet and the liquidity to grow and expand our business." In its close to 40-year history, Niman Ranch, originally founded in Bolinas by Bill Niman, built a reputation for its high-quality meat produced by a network of small farmers and ranchers who shared Niman Ranch's commitment to humane and sustainable methods of animal rearing. But the company never turned a profit. In fact, it's been up to its eyeballs in debt and defaulting on loans. Without the merger, its cash would have run out completely by the end of next week....

Source of Salmonella Is Confirmed

The source of a salmonella outbreak that sickened almost 500 people around the country and is linked to six deaths is a peanut processing plant in Blakely, Ga., health officials confirmed. The plant is owned by the Peanut Corporation of America. More than 125 products have been recalled, including cookies, cakes, candy, prepared dinners and even dog treats. A list of recalled products is on the Food and Drug Administration’s Web site, fda.gov. Health officials warned consumers to check the site before eating anything that might contain peanut products. No peanut butter jars sold in supermarkets come from the plant, officials said.

Laura Chester's quirky 'Rancho Weirdo' may cause you to dream of new possibilities

Everything Chester, who lives part-time in Patagonia, does seems a bit off-kilter, which makes sense, since Rancho Weirdo, her new story collection (actually, many of these works appeared in her 1991 book, Bitches Ride Alone), is about as quirky as contemporary American fiction gets. I mean quirky in a good way, of course. The characters who populate Chester's fictional universe break the rules--of literary realism, for instance--and create tension in the reader's mind about what they'll say and do next. Rancho Weirdo clears the aesthetic sinuses, causing you to wonder what else can be done in the literature of the Southwest, so much of which tends to recycle the same tropes, ideology and earnest multicultural stance. This isn't to say Chester eschews multiculturalism; how could she write about the culture-clash that defines Arizona otherwise? But she is definitely more lighthearted, comical and fun than the vast majority of the university press authors who cover similar territory. There are illegal immigrants, Native Americans, cowboys and ranchers in Chester's fiction, but they are unpredictable and darkly humorous....

Obama halts all regulations pending review

One of President Barack Obama's first acts Tuesday was to put the brakes on all pending regulations that the Bush administration tried to push through in its waning days. The order went out shortly after Obama was inaugurated president, in a memorandum signed by new White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Former President George W. Bush's administration moved into overdrive in the last year or so on a host of new regulatory proposals. Now the Obama administration will review everything that is still pending. In doing so, the Obama administration is taking a page out of Bush's playbook from 2001. Within hours after Bush was sworn in, Bush advisers were seeking to reverse some late-term actions of President Bill Clinton, who in his final 20 days in office issued 12 executive orders, including directives on migratory birds and the importation of diamonds from Sierra Leone....

Idaho rancher fights for livelihood

A rancher from Weiser who blames grazing restrictions designed to protect bighorn sheep for blocking his own access to public grazing lands is asking state lawmakers for help. Sheep rancher Ron Shirts told the Idaho Senate Resources and Environment Committee on Monday that restrictions on domestic sheep grazing in the Payette National Forest have caused 60 percent of his grazing area to be closed. The restrictions were put in place to stem potential disease transmission between domestic and bighorn sheep. The federal government began reintroducing bighorn sheep to Idaho in 1997. Shirts asked the committee to help him preserve a way of life for his three small children. Shirts, one of the last domestic sheep operators in southern Idaho, is fighting for access to public grazing lands that have been taken away to protect bighorn sheep in the Hells Canyon area. "It gives me hope to be here so we can let people hear our story and let people understand the hardship and what's happened in this situation, because this should not happen in America," said Shirts, holding his 18-month-old daughter, Ellie. "I make an agreement. I live by that agreement." He referred to a 1997 agreement signed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, among others, that allowed for the reintroduction of bighorn sheep into the region. The agreement, codified by the Legislature that year, declared "the potential risk, if any, of disease transmission and loss of bighorn sheep when the same invade domestic livestock or sheep operations is accepted.".

Payette forest planner Pattie Soucek, 53, said the 1997 agreement does not legally apply to the Payette Forest. Using the 1997 letter to set grazing standards in the forest would be a violation of several federal laws, including the National Forest Management Act....Well then, why did the FS sign the MOU? I'd be willing to bet the FS initiated the MOU. Let all states take notice: You can sign a MOU with the FS, you can have your state legislature codify the MOU, and it means nothing.

More restrictions on domestic sheep in the Payette National Forest could be on their way. The public has until March 3 to comment on a Forest Service proposal on how to protect bighorn sheep. U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Laura Pramuk said the plan has 12 alternatives ranging from no grazing in the forest to no change in the current plan...Notice the only way grazing can go is down. Twelve alternatives and not one of them looks at an increase in grazing. Let's say an opportunity arose to increase permitted numbers by 5 percent. Wouldn't you want to know the impact of that on the resource, the local economy and the bighorn sheep? Is it because the FS doesn't want a public airing of that kind of analysis or is it because everybody knows the FS will never increase grazing, bighorn sheep or no bighorn sheep?.

Last February, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, under pressure from Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter, instituted a policy to move or kill bighorn sheep when they mix with domestic sheep. I'll bet there was no MOU on that policy. Way to go Governor Otter. I wish more governors had your...er...strong commitment to sound public policy.

Beyond Belief

According to a Rasmussen poll, 44% of U.S. voters blame long-term planetary trends for the (perceived) global warming; only 41% say human activity is responsible. Those are far different numbers than Rasmussen recorded less than three years ago. In July 2006, Rasmussen found that a mere 35% believed the cause of warming to be part of a natural cycle, while 46% said humans were culpable. It's also starkly different from a poll taken last April, when 47% said man was to blame and 34% said long-term global trends were the cause. Since that survey was taken, Rasmussen says, "the numbers have been moving in the direction of planetary trends." These numbers support the findings of a 2008 survey that questioned 12,000 people across 11 countries. It found only 47% willing to change their lives to cut emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. A year earlier, 58% said they would be inclined to change their lives to cut CO2 emissions. That survey, commissioned by financial institution HSBC and environmental groups, also revealed that last year 37% admitted they were willing to increase the time or effort they put into cutting carbon emissions, a drop-off of 8 percentage points from 2007. The waning faith in the church of global warming seems to have sent one of its apostles into a near panic. James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is saying that time to save the planet from a blistering-hot, ice-cap-melting, sea-rising doom is running out....

Ian Tyson's New CD

Stony Plain Records announces a March 24 release date for Yellowhead to Yellowstone, the new album from legendary singer/songwriter Ian Tyson. Yellowhead to Yellowstone is Ian Tyson's 14th album for Stony Plain and first since his 2005 release, Songs from the Gravel Road. The new album was recorded primarily in Nashville, with two tracks recorded in Edmonton, and produced by Harry Stinson, who's worked with a long list of major talents, including George Jones, Marty Stuart, Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle. Tyson's songs on the new disc reflect on his life as a rancher in Alberta, Canada, and the prospect of facing his senior years (Ian is now 75 years old). The most immediate change long-time fans will hear on Yellowhead to Yellowstone is that Ian Tyson has a new voice: a grainy, gravelly, deeply emotional tone dramatically different from the smooth-voiced tenor heard on his classic recordings. The new voice is the result of several factors. "A couple of years ago, " says Tyson, "I played a big outdoor show in Ontario. I fought the sound system — and I lost. I knew I'd hurt my voice, and it was recovering slowly when I was hit with a bad virus, which seemed to last forever. My old voice isn't coming back, the doctors told me, so I've had to get used to this new one. Audiences seem to pay more attention, now, to the lyrics and the stories in the songs. And while I've lost some of the bottom end of my voice, the top range, oddly enough, is still there." The eight new songs by Tyson (of the album's 10) cover a range of emotions and stories relating to Alberta's cultural landscape and the disappearing cowboy, as well as his personal life. The title song of the Cd was co-written by Tyson with Stewart MacDougall, and tells the story of a pack of wolves transported from the Yellowhead Pass to Yellowstone Park, where the species had become extinct — told in the voice of one of the wolves who made the journey. Another remarkable song, contributed by Toronto songwriter Jay Aymar, is about hockey commentator Don Cherry and the death of his beloved wife, Rose. A regular performer at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering held in Elko, Nevada, Ian Tyson will be honored at the 25th annual event in late January with the presentation from his fans of a Lifetime Achievement Award: a custom-made, silver-mounted saddle created by the world-famous Hamley & Company. of Pendleton, Oregon....

If Monopoly Was Invented Today

Radio Free NJ got whupped several times in a row by his daughter, playing the game of monopoly. Then he had a thought: how would the game of monopoly look if it were designed under today's rules?

Here are some of my favorites.






Check out his post at the link above and be sure and read the comments for more great ideas.

Hat Tip to Paul Gessing.