Fight to keep Asian carp out of Great Lakes reaches Supreme Court

The fight to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes reached the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, as Michigan's attorney general filed a lawsuit seeking closure of two shipping locks near Chicago. Claiming Illinois officials have been lax, Michigan Atty. Gen. Mike Cox asked justices for immediate action to seal off the most direct route for fish entering Lake Michigan, in hopes of protecting the region's $7-billion fishing industry. "We don't want to have to look back years later . . . and say, 'What was the matter with us? We should have done something,' " Cox said. Closing the locks, he said, was "the easiest, the most reliable and the most effective" short-term step officials could take. In addition to closing the locks, the lawsuit seeks creation of barriers to prevent carp from escaping the Des Plaines River or neighboring waterways during flooding. Cox also called for a study of Chicago's water system to understand the size and scope of the Asian carp population. The lawsuit comes during a period of heightened anxiety over recent DNA research that hinted the voracious fish may have bypassed an underwater electric barrier system -- and could now be within six miles of Lake Michigan...read more

Study shows 'Green' shoppers more likely to cheat

If buying an organic apple instead of one caked in pesticides eases your conscience, there's a good chance that your next ethical decision might not be a good one. According to the results of a University of Toronto study, participants who assigned more social value to 'green' shopping were more likely to cheat and steal in subsequent tests than those with less stringent shopping habits. The study, to be published in the new year in the journal Psychological Science, is the latest in a growing field of research called "moral licensing."...read more

Video: Undersea volcano erupts explosively

Thieves make off with miles of pipeline

It may not be southeast New Mexico's biggest or most valuable criminal haul, but at 5 miles it's probably the longest. The Eddy County Sheriff’s Office is looking for whoever stole the 5 miles worth of 3-inch inch polyethylene pipe from remote site in the county. "Poly pipe is a conduit," sheriff's Capt. Jeff Zuniga said. "Basically it's like really big plastic pipe, and it's used to move water from one location to another." Two companies and a rancher have come forward claiming to be victims. They estimated a total of $43,000 worth of poly pipe was taken between May and September...read more

Who is that woman?

Etta Place walked into a New York City photo studio in 1901 -- and unknowingly walked into history. There she stands, wearing her fine clothes and gold watch, her dark hair piled elegantly atop her head and her arm brushing the arm of a dapper gent known as the Sundance Kid. The portrait of Etta with her outlaw boyfriend is one of the few scraps of physical evidence that this woman existed. Before and after she turned up in the DeYoung Photo Studio on Broadway, Etta Place -- if that is even her real name -- lived a life now shrouded in mystery. "As much as (historians) have looked for Etta, nobody has ever really pinned her down," says Leo Lyman, a retired historian in Leeds, Utah, who has researched the story of the woman who hung out with Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch in Utah, the West and South America. Exactly where this woman was born, what she did before she rode with the Wild Bunch, and what happened to her after Butch and Sundance reportedly died in a 1908 shootout in Bolivia are all unknown...read more

Clubfoot died after dining on local bull

The grizzly bear you're referring to first was named Reelfoot, which was a reference to the club foot he gimped around on after losing three toes to a trap. After his death, he also became known as Clubfoot. Reelfoot had a taste for prime beef and was indeed the scourge of cattle ranchers in the Southern Oregon-Northern California area. According to a story published in the Mail Tribune in 1957, old Reelfoot finally came to his end in 1890 after inciting the ire of rancher Bill Wright by killing his best bull near Camp Creek, a stream flowing east from Pilot Rock into the Klamath River drainage. Wright recruited a 17-year-old hand, Purl Bean, and the two of them set off in pursuit. They knew exactly which grizzly they were after, because Reelfoot's distinctive footprint was all too familiar to ranchers. He had killed so much livestock and ticked off so many ranchers that a prodigious bounty of $1,800 — a virtual fortune at the time — was placed on his head. Wright and Bean tracked Reelfoot for two days and, on April 10, 1890, came across him in a forest opening, about three miles east of Pilot Rock. After they fired on him from 80 yards, Reelfoot charged them. It took 10 rounds from their big-bore rifles to bring him down for good, by then only about 20 feet from the two men. Reelfoot was huge, standing 8 feet tall and with a chest that measured 40 inches across. Wright estimated he weighed 1,800 pounds, but some suspect that estimate came after he'd spent too much of the reward money at a local watering hole. Others estimated him at 1,200 pounds. Reelfoot was stuffed and mounted on a wagon pulled by mules as an early-day mobile exhibit. The exhibit toured the West and apparently took a few detours, including to the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893...read more

It's All Trew: Things I bet you never knew - and then some

My continuous research turns up some odd and interesting tidbits of wisdom, recollections or plain old nonsense. Here are a few. # How long has it been since you "dabbed a minor wound with Monkey Blood?" This was once the favored nickname for a medicine called Mercurochrome. Its distinctive red color stopped many a childhood tear without a burn or sting and brought sympathy and hugs to the wounded. #Depending on the area where you lived, the term "grass widow" had different definitions. In some areas, the term meant a discarded mistress. In other areas, it meant a woman alone because of divorce, rejection or separation from a husband who was alive and "still above the grass." # If you are afraid of witches, merely hang a horseshoe above your home entrance. It seems witches are afraid of horses. That's why they ride broomsticks. Heck, makes sense to me. # If you have ever been active in your community and its affairs, you will appreciate this quote: "A committee is a group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit to do the unnecessary." # The word "devout" is explained by the dictionary as "living without sin." An old cowboy friend explains devout as, "A 75-year-old, single, church deacon living in the middle of dry county where the only bootlegger is in jail."...read more

Song Of The Day #205

Ranch Radio brings you another double dose of country Christmas tunes. Today we offer Tennessee Ernie Ford and Tex Williams, singing Rootin' Tootin' Santa Claus and Winter Song respectively.

Both recordings are available on the previously mentioned Christmas on the Range: Cowboy Classics from Capitol Records.

Krahling & Vasquez-Butler: Flooding Us With Contradictions

Diana Alba reports in today's Sun-News that Dona Ana County may lose $8.4 million in unspent capital outlay funds because of the state's budgetary woes.

Commissioner Scott Krahling is quoted:

"The Legislature and governor have put everything on the table to balance the budget, so if that means they cut all the capital outlay for the entire state in order to do it, they have to do it," he said. "I'm optimistic they'll have other options." Krahling referred to proposals that could consolidate state offices to save money and raise taxes to address the budget problems.

Kudos to Krahling for being so straight forward. We now know he supports raising taxes on all New Mexicans.

And the all wise Commissioner Oscar Vasquez-Butler is concerned about flood control projects:

County Commissioner Oscar Vásquez-Butler said he has sent a letter to the state, asking that three Vado projects —a flood control wall, improvements to Swanaack Road and the Presa Storm Drain — be exempted from the cuts. He said flooding in Vado indirectly led to two children's deaths this year, a reason the projects should be allowed to go forward. Also, he said he hopes appropriations for Hatch and other flood-prone areas remain intact.

Krahling also mentioned losing a flood control project in his district.

I could hardly believe what I was reading. Krahling led the pack in having the DA County Commission support the Bingaman bill to create wilderness all over the county and encircling Las Cruces. Vasquez-Butler actually traveled to DC to testify for the NM Wilderness Alliance in favor of the bill.

Both are ignoring the concerns of the local Flood Commissioner and the county soil & water district. There are no motorized vehicles or mechanical equipment allowed in wilderness areas, thus flood control projects are not allowed.

Krahling & Vasquez-Butler support federal legislation which would ban flood control projects on 560 square miles in DA County but go crying to the state legislature about losing similar projects in their districts? On the one hand Krahling would raise taxes on all of us for flood control and on the other hand bans flood control measures on a huge swath of the county?

Makes no sense to me.

Ranchers wary of group’s effort to create wildlife reserve bigger than Yellowstone

When the new West is won, will there be cowboys? In light of what her neighbors are up to, Double O Ranch owner Vicki Olson isn’t so sure. “I guess the point that I keep hammering at is that if they succeed, that means all of us third- and fourth-generation ranchers are gone,” Olson said. She is the average Montana rancher, 56 going on 70, working a spread gouged from the pebbly soil by her grandparents 100 years ago. Her neighbor, the nonprofit American Prairie Foundation, is methodically acquiring ranches and crafting a 3.5-million-acre wildlife reserve out of private property and adjoining federal land. The inconspicuously named Prairie Project could be the largest privately funded conservation land venture on the planet and the biggest free-roaming bison range in the United States. Yellowstone Park, at 2.21 million acres, would be a distant second. You could watch a horse and rider traverse these treeless plains and lose sight of them only when they’re finally eclipsed by the curve of the Earth. Yet conflict here always seems to center on there not being enough room for everyone...read more

New Records Contradict Forest Service Claims On Station Fire

Newly released records contradict a finding by the U.S. Forest Service that steep terrain prevented the agency from using aircraft to attack -- and potentially contain -- the Station fire just before it began raging out of control. Experts on Forest Service tactics also dispute the agency's conclusion that helicopters and tanker planes would have been ineffective because the canyon in the Angeles National Forest was too treacherous for ground crews to take advantage of aerial water dumps. Two officers who helped direct the fight on the ground and from the sky made separate requests for choppers and tankers during a critical period on the deadly fire's second day, according to records and interviews. At 12:49 a.m. on Aug. 27, Forest Service dispatch logs show, a division chief made this call for aircraft: "Fire has spotted below the road, about five acres. Order one helitanker, three airtankers, any type. . . . Have them over the fire by 0700 hours." But the airtankers were canceled and the helitanker was significantly delayed, according to dispatch logs, deployment reports and interviews. The Times obtained the logs, reports and volumes of other documents through the federal Freedom of Information Act. Records of the Day 2 battle do not cite the sheerness of the canyon above La Cañada Flintridge as a reason for withholding the aircraft, which firefighters who were at the scene say might have stopped the blaze from erupting into the disaster that it became. The fire was the largest in Los Angeles County history, killing two firefighters, destroying about 90 dwellings and charring 250 square miles in one of America's most-visited national forests...read more

Firefighting Under Fire

Though the flames of the Jesusita Fire burned out long ago, the firefighting agencies who battled it are now under attack again, this time by an environmental group that claims the use of airplane-dropped fire retardant killed dozens of endangered steelhead trout. Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE) — an environmental nonprofit focused on protecting whistle-blowers and pushing reform of the Forest Service's land use policy — filed a notice with the U.S. Department of Commerce on December 16 that it plans to file suit against the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the Santa Barbara County Fire Department. FSEEE maintains that the two fire protection agencies used a toxic flame retardant material that killed endangered steelhead trout during the Jesusita Fire last May. In accordance with the Endangered Species Act, FSEEE must wait 60 days before it can file a lawsuit. "That is to give the Department of Commerce an opportunity to do what this lawsuit would do, and that is enforce the Endangered Species Act," said Andy Stahl, FSEEE's executive director. "This lawsuit goes forward only if the government chooses not to enforce this law."...read more

Feinstein to introduce legislation to establish 2 national monuments in Mojave Desert

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says she plans to introduce legislation today to establish two national monuments on roughly 1 million acres of Mojave Desert outback that is home to bighorn sheep and desert tortoises, extinct volcanoes, sand dunes and ancient petroglyphs. Its centerpiece, Mojave Trails National Monument, would prohibit development on 941,000 acres of federal land and former railroad company property along a 105-mile stretch of old Route 66, between Ludlow and Needles. The smaller Sand to Snow National Monument, about 45 miles east of Riverside, would cover about 134,000 acres of federal land between Joshua Tree National Park and the San Bernardino National Forest in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Its diverse habitats range from desert scrub to yellow pine forests 9,000 feet above sea level. The legislation, which had been delayed by efforts to resolve conflicts among environmentalists, off-roaders and renewable energy interests, would also designate 250,000 acres of public land near the Army's training center at Ft. Irwin as wilderness; add 41,000 acres to the southern boundary of Death Valley National Park and add 2,900 acres to northern portions of Joshua Tree National Park. In addition, it would designate as permanent five existing off-highway vehicle areas in San Bernardino County covering 314,000 acres...read more

Otter Creek: Cautionary tale from Wyoming

Our family ranch, homesteaded in 1918, in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin was in two parcels. One consisted of Forest Service leases. When coal mining began we noticed loss of spring water. The Bureau of Land Management acknowledges that our ranch is in a “five feet drawdown area” around the mines. The springs and surface water have dropped five feet. In addition, Wyoming Geological Survey has monitored Powder River Basin wells and reports aquifers in virtually every well have gone down, some by over 600 feet. When mining began, officials informed us land would be restored better than it was before with “good grasses.” After 40 years we have not received one acre of restored ground and have never had a cow get a mouthful of “reclaimed grass.”...read more

Looking Back Two Decades On Managing The Greater Yellowstone Ecoystem

Twenty years ago, a controversy erupted over a mere term and a concept that now, in hindsight, makes all of the resistance and wasted time marshaled by politicians to stop it, seem rather silly. And yet, it marked a turning point in the region that includes America's mother of national parks, as the cut-and-run era of industrial forestry, thoughtless mining, and public-land livestock grazing sometimes conducted at the expense of other values, were coming to a close. In 1989, a year after the Yellowstone forest fires, and six years after the Greater Yellowstone Coalition was founded by conservationists meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, two ideas were advanced. The first was somewhat rhetorical: To get the multiple federal agencies -- National Park Service, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps of Engineers, and state agencies -- to use a common reference point. Indeed, there was a time when “Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem,” based on the recognition of common, interconnected topographical features instead of feudal bureaucratic jurisdictions, was a foreign concept met with resistance. Today, there are still graybeards retired from the Forest Service who refuse to utter the word “ecosystem” and will at best invoke the term Greater Yellowstone “Area.” Why? Because they view it as a rhetorical usurpation of turf and agency mandate. Which leads to the second “controversy,” one inflamed by some congressional delegations to feed the nonsense of there being “a war fought by Washington, D.C. on the West.”...read more

Wildlife Agency Backs BLM In Wild-Horse Lawsuit

The Nevada Department of Wildlife is siding with federal land managers against a lawsuit that seeks to block the Dec. 28 removal of 2,500 horses from the range north of Reno. The state agency on Thursday filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuit on behalf of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. The wildlife department's filing says its assessment of habitat in the Calico Mountain Complex showed horses have "severely degraded" the range and continue to adversely affect wildlife. In Defense of Animals, based in San Rafael, Calif., and wildlife biologist Craig Downer of Nevada filed the lawsuit last month to halt the roundup. Equine advocates contend the Bureau of Land Management is grossly inflating horse numbers to justify their removal from the range. Ken Mayer, director of the Nevada Department of Wildlife, said more horses than deer are spotted in some aerial surveys...read more

Turning children into Orwellian eco-spies

There is a long and sordid tradition of trying to socialise children by scaring them. The aim of such socialisation-through-fear is twofold: firstly, to get children to conform to the scaremongers’ values; secondly, to use children to influence, or at least to contain, their parents’ behaviour. If you want to know how it works, watch the official opening video of the Copenhagen summit on climate change (see below). Titled ‘Please Help The World’, the four-minute film opens with happy children laughing and playing on swings. A sudden outburst of rain forces them all to rush for cover. The message is clear: the climate threatens our way of life. It then cuts to a young girl who is anxiously watching one TV news broadcaster after another reporting on impending environmental catastrophes. Then we see the young girl tucked into bed, sweetly asleep as she embraces her toy polar bear… but suddenly we’re drawn into her nightmare. She’s on a parched and eerie landscape; she looks frightened and desolate; suddenly the dry earth cracks and she runs in terror towards the shelter of a distant solitary tree. She drops her toy polar bear in a newly formed chasm and yells and screams as she holds on to the tree for dear life. The video ends with groups of children pleading with us: ‘Please help the world.’ You get the picture. Although this video is a product of the gathering at Copenhagen, it is typical of the kind of propaganda that is constantly directed at children these days...read more

Please Help The World Video

The Dirt on Climate Change

Though they have always been prized by farmers, the dark soils of the Amazon were largely forgotten by science for a century after their discovery. They are now re-emerging as an important topic of study, not because they're an ethnographic or historical curiosity, but because they show an exceptional ability to store carbon, which in the form of carbon dioxide has rapidly turned into one of humanity's most pernicious waste products. As a result, they're joining the rapidly growing roster of tactics that might be used to combat climate change. Researchers around the world are considering whether people may, by engineering soils specifically to maximize carbon storage, be able to absorb substantial amounts of our emissions, increase the fertility of agricultural areas and dampen some of the effects of climate change. But it's not just plants and animals that hold carbon. Soils do, too, a lot of it — an estimated 2.5 trillion tons worldwide, or more than three times the amount floating around in the atmosphere and about four times as much as in all the world's living plants. About 60 percent of the soil's carbon is in the form of the organic molecules that compose living things, while the other 40 percent is in inorganic forms such as calcium carbonate, the crusty salt common in desert soils...read more

Ranking Ag Members Have Questions for Vilsack

The Ranking Members of the House and Senate Ag Committees have questions about remarks made by Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack this week regarding USDA's climate change legislation analysis. Senator Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., and Representative Frank Lucas, R-Okla., say the Secretary's statement implies a lack of confidence in the modeling used by his department and the Environmental Protection Agency. "The Department's testimony delivered earlier this month to the House Agriculture Committee is clear and unequivocal; agriculture will undergo significant structural impacts that will change how food, feed, fiber and fuel are produced in the United States," Lucas and Chambliss wrote in a letter to Vilsack. "The disappearance of 59 million acres of cropland, higher food prices and lower exports will undoubtedly shape how farmers and ranchers make a living in the years ahead. While we can disagree on policy, we cannot ignore the facts when they are inconvenient to our preferred narrative." The two are asking both the USDA and EPA to report to their committees on the problems with the economic model in order to reflect realistic scenarios while examining the impact of cap and trade on the ag and forestry sectors. In a separate letter, Senator Mike Johanns, R-Neb., a former ag secretary, wrote," It was confusing to read that you have called into question an analysis produced by your own department." Farm Futures

Forest plan gets the ax at UN climate talks

A plan to protect the world's biologically rich tropical forests by paying poor nations to protect them was shelved Saturday after world leaders failed to agree on a binding deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Burning trees to clear land for plantations or cattle ranches and logging forests for wood is blamed for about 20 percent of the world's emissions. That's as much carbon dioxide as all the world's cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships combined. About 32 million acres (13 million hectares) of forests are cut down each year — an area about the size of England or New York State — and the emissions generated are comparable to those of China and the United States, according to the Eliasch Review. Deforestation for logging, cattle grazing and crops has made Indonesia and Brazil the world's third- and fourth-biggest carbon emitters, after China and the United States...read more