NEWS ROUNDUP
Group Starts 'Give a Hoot For Owls' Campaign This weekend the Center for Biological Diversity launched a nationwide "Give a Hoot" campaign to protect imperiled owls, an event that coincided with the release of the major motion picture Hoot. Based on a novel by Carl Hiaasen, Hoot is an "eco-thriller" about teenagers who take on Florida developers that are destroying habitat for owls. As part of the campaign, more than 100 volunteers in 27 cities and a dozen states educated moviegoers about the real-life plight of vanishing owls and other endangered wildlife, and collected petition signatures supporting their protection. "Unfortunately, destruction of habitat for rare owls is not only part of a novel or Hollywood script. Imperiled owls throughout the country are threatened by bulldozers clearing land for urban sprawl and chainsaws cutting into old-growth forests," said Jeff Miller, wildlife advocate with the Center. "Give a Hoot" volunteers spread the word about the conservation of owls and the opportunities to take action to protect their last habitat. "The Center has been extensively involved in protecting owls for more than a decade. It is our hope that Hoot will help inspire a new generation to join in this effort," said Peter Galvin, Conservation Director with the Center for Biological Diversity. "It's time to stand up for the little guys and give a hoot for owls."....
Project would move brook, brown trout Some of the fish inhabiting the East Fork of the Bull River in northwestern Montana would be captured and moved, under a plan designed to help two sensitive fish species. The proposal advanced by energy company Avista Corp., and supported by federal and state agencies, calls for the capture of brook trout and brown trout in a nearly 2-mile stretch of the East Fork near Noxon. Hundreds of fish would be moved to the main Bull River several miles away. The goal is to help populations of native bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout in the lower Clark Fork River and its tributaries, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks said. The bull trout is on the federal threatened species list, and westslope cutthroat is classified in Montana as a species of special concern. Brook and brown trout, which are introduced species, compete with them. For both bull trout and westslope cutthroat, the East Fork is an important area for spawning. The fish project is part of an agreement for the federal licensing of the Cabinet Gorge Dam in Idaho and Noxon Rapids Dam in Montana....
Webcams: Witness wildlife flourishing The eggs are laid. The annual drama has begun. Across the country, from Karla Scanlon's first-grade Philadelphia classroom to a watcher in Wichita, Kan., people are revving up their computers to learn what's next for two peregrine falcons nesting on a ledge of a Harrisburg, Pa., office building. Will all five eggs hatch? Will the young survive? The answers will come via cameras perched nearby, feeding photos and video to the Internet. Focused so close you can see the birds breathing, the cameras provide an instant fix for wildlife voyeurs. By all accounts, their appetites -- the watchers', that is -- are voracious. And wildlife cams are proliferating. You can click on to a beachful of elephant seals off the California coast who look cool, even if they're only sunbathing. You can set your screen to the panda cam at the National Zoo, where 9-month-old Tai Shan might be munching bamboo. A Web celeb since his debut as a newborn last July, garnering 18 million hits in nine months, the panda gets fan mail from folks around the world, including U.S. soldiers in Iraq....
Utah attacks PFS nuclear waste plan Hundreds of comments about Private Fuel Storage hit the Bureau of Land Management Monday, the last day of a 90-day public comment period. The state of Utah, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and a reported 700 people with environmental concerns filed written statements Monday. Another 300 with environmental comments sent e-mail messages to the BLM through the same group that facilitated the 700. As of Friday morning, more than 4,300 statements had been filed on proposals to build a rail route or a loading facility to service the proposed high-level nuclear waste storage site, said Pam Schuller, planning coordinator with the BLM's Salt Lake Field Office. Among the most massive of Monday's comments was the state of Utah's official response — 40 pages of legal arguments and exhibits. The governor sent a cover letter with the state's formal comments. Huntsman noted that PFS's intermodal operations site would store nuclear fuel casks "next to Interstate 80 and under the low-altitude flight paths of military and commercial aircraft."....
BLM plan would close over 700 miles of road Federal officials with the Bureau of Land Management recently approved a land management plan for Beaverhead and Madison counties that would close more than 700 miles of motorized routes. The BLM’s Dillon office in the resource management plan that covers 900,000 acres throughout the two counties also proposes to increase logging and controlled burns to reduce the risk of wildfire in forested areas and close 138,000 acres of land to snowmobiles, said Rick Waldrup, recreation planner for the BLM in Dillon. The plan would close 760 miles of routes to motorized use out of a total of 2,102 recorded roads and trails. But Waldrup said many of the routes closed were user-created and had little use....
Delicate Arch climb has park chief red in the face For almost 12 years, Dean Potter studied the tiny cracks and crevices in Delicate Arch, searching out potential fingerholds and footholds that could aid his ascent of Utah's most famous icon. On Sunday morning, Potter, a professional climber known for his speed and agility, put that research to the test, successfully scaling the 45-foot monument "free solo" - without the aid of ropes and other climbing gear. But the 34-year-old part-time Moab resident's achievement doesn't sit well with National Park Service officials and some fellow climbing enthusiasts. "I'm very sorry to see someone do this to Utah's most visible icon," said the park's superintendent, Laura Joss. "I would just ask if they think it's a good idea to encourage this." Potter believed that as long as he used no fixed anchors and did not damage the rock, he was free to climb Delicate Arch. Not so, says Joss....
Editorial: Questions for Interior choice The U.S. Senate likely will confirm Dirk Kempthorne as the next U.S. secretary of the Interior, but he shouldn't get a free pass. He didn't fully answer key questions during his confirmation hearing last week, and some of his answers conflicted with past positions. And Kempthorne, currently Idaho's governor, didn't articulate his views on balancing energy production with other values on federal lands. Wednesday, the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee is expected to send Kempthorne's nomination to the floor, so the questions should be put to him today. Under former Secretary Gale Norton, Interior officials proposed eliminating from the National Park Service's core policies several important environmental standards. For example, the proposal would all but require national parks to allow motorized off-road recreation, an activity most parks now ban. Kempthorne said he would review the proposed changes but didn't commit to allowing more public comments. U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., one of the proposal's leading critics, should withhold his support until Kempthorne commits to scuttling the proposal. Salazar also should quiz Kempthorne more closely about whether the nominee understands a need to balance energy extraction with protection of wildlife, water quality and stability of communities affected by energy projects. Those issues are particularly crucial in Colorado, as Interior soon will decide whether to OK any or all of three proposed oil shale projects proposed on the Western Slope....
'Guzzlers' plan back on The on-again, offagain plan to convert wells in the preserve to wildlife watering devices, called "guzzlers," is on again. The move is a surprise to Chad Offutt of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. With the Center for Biological Diversity, PEER sued the National Park Service, which oversees the preserve, in March of last year to stop the expansion of the guzzlers in the preserve. The groups contend the artificial watering harms native wildlife and violates Park Service policy. The lawsuit alleges that guzzlers are "known to adversely affect desert tortoise by attracting predators such as ravens, and by acting as death traps for tortoises that approach the guzzlers to drink ..." In September of 2004, the preserve had announced the guzzlers would be installed, according to Danette Woo, environmental compliance specialist at the preserve. According to Offutt, the National Park Service reversed itself and rescinded the approval of the preserve guzzlers in April 2005....
Killing Of Bear Raises Questions Over Bruin-Free Zones Animal rights groups, environmentalists, hunting organizations and even some state wildlife authorities are questioning a policy in which bears found within urban areas are killed. A 225-pound bear caught in downtown Trenton on Saturday became the first killed under the state Department of Environmental Protection's no-tolerance rules. DEP biologists euthanized the bear after it was found roaming near the department's offices. Some state wildlife authorities criticized the bear's killing, which was done because it was in a "bear exclusion zone" that covers urban northeastern New Jersey and large swaths of the central part of the state....
Big oil beefs up across West in search for gas Big oil companies are flexing their muscle once again in the Rocky Mountains, buoyed by the Bush administration's efforts to open the West to more oil and natural gas drilling. This time, the companies have set their sights on conventional natural gas instead of oil shale, which failed many of them decades ago. The construction of pipelines, which carry natural gas from the Rockies to far-flung markets in the Midwest and on the East Coast where the commodity fetches higher prices, also is propelling the jump in activity. Exxon doesn't disclose its planned investment in the Rockies. But Rio Blanco County officials say the company plans to build a gas processing plant near Meeker that will employ 450 workers at the peak of construction. Meanwhile, Chevron is testing wells on 100,000 acres north of Debeque near Grand Junction to see if it wants to develop that field. Chevron has been in Colorado for more than 75 years and owns the Rangely oil field, which continues to produce oil. BP is set to pour nearly $3 billion into Wyoming and millions more into Colorado. BP is Colorado's largest gas producer. Shell has plans to drill more wells in Wyoming's Pinedale area, where it owns about 20,000 acres....
As Cuba Plans Offshore Wells, Some Want U.S. to Follow Suit In 1977, the United States and Cuba signed a treaty that evenly divided the Florida Straits to preserve each country's economic rights. They included access to vast underwater oil and gas fields on both sides of the line. Now, with energy costs soaring, plans are under way to drill this year — but all on the Cuban side. With only modest energy needs and no ability of its own to drill, Cuba has negotiated lease agreements with China and other energy-hungry countries to extract resources for themselves and for Cuba. Cuba's drilling plans have been in place for several years, but now that China, India and others are involved and fuel prices are unusually high, a growing number of lawmakers and business leaders in the United States are starting to complain. They argue that the United States' decades-old ban against drilling in coastal waters is driving up domestic energy costs and, in this case, is giving two of America's chief economic competitors access to energy at the United States' expense....
An activist-turned-informant The arsonists hit before dawn, laying down fuel-soaked sheets and jugs of gasoline to torch 35 SUVs at a Chevrolet dealership. The communiqué from the saboteurs — acting under the banner of the Earth Liberation Front — proclaimed a new, more militant era, when the sins of the "rich who parade around in their armored existence" would no longer go unchallenged. Federal, state and local officials converged on the scene after the March 2001 attack, sifting through charred wreckage for evidence — just as they had in more than a dozen other major arson attacks around the West claimed by the ELF or the Animal Liberation Front. The investigation hit a dead end. Three years after the Eugene fires, investigators finally got their break: A sinewy, tattooed heavy-metal guitarist named Jake Ferguson agreed to cooperate and donned recording wires to meet with other activists. Soon, the secrets of the underground network thought responsible for the attacks began to be exposed....
For archaeologists, term 'Anasazi' becoming an artifact During a wide- ranging, three-day symposium celebrating Mesa Verde National Park's centennial, one word with deep-rooted ties to the park and to the history of Southwestern archaeology was rarely uttered: Anasazi. More than 30 research talks were presented during the meeting, and none of the titles included Anasazi, a word some American Indians find offensive. During the past decade, the word has been phased out of the park's museum exhibits, its brochures and its interpretive signs. Some even claim that books containing the word rarely make it onto the shelves of the park's visitor center. Today's preferred term - at least among National Park Service employees - to describe the prehistoric pueblo-building farmers of the Four Corners region is Ancestral Puebloan. To many Southwestern archaeologists, the switch has resulted in a sort of professional schizophrenia. They continue to use Anasazi when writing scholarly articles or when speaking with other researchers. But when addressing the general public or a group of American Indians, they revert to Ancestral Puebloans....
Ethanol Takes More Energy Than It Gives The truth about ethanol, the wonder fuel that is supposed to replace U.S. dependence on "foreign oil," is that it takes more energy to produce the ethanol, than the resulting ethanol fuel will provide. And to replace imported oil with ethanol would require covering more than half the land area of the United States in corn or other biomass. One of the strongest arguments against the use of ethanol comes from Prof. David Pimentel of Cornell University, a longtime low-technology advocate. He and a colleague, Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, conducted a detailed analysis of energy input-yield ratios of producing ethanol from corn, switchgrass, and wood biomass. Their findings, published in Natural Resources Research (Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 65-76), are that * ethanol from corn requires 29% more fossil fuel energy than the fuel produced; * ethanol from switchgrass requires 45% more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and * ethanol from wood biomass requires 57% more fossil energy than the fuel produced....
Column: Clouds of Global-Warming Hysteria Ever since the debate broke out over climate change, the world’s attention has been riveted on computer-driven horror stories and the positively silly idea of establishing global-weather control by actively managing the atmosphere’s greenhouse-gas emissions. This focus has gathered up a lethal coalition of people with diverse motivations for promoting it. I call it a lethal coalition because, for nearly 20 years, this coalition has killed off any attempt to look at climate change through a rational lens, and to look at climate policy in a pragmatic way. Environmentalists, who have long espoused a version of humankind as an energy-powered cancer on the Earth, see greenhouse-gas controls as a way to starve out the tumor of humanity. Many scientists, unable to look beyond linear thinking, can’t get past the idea that the only answer to change is to impose stability. Temperance fiends of all stripes--who’ve hated fossil fuels, cars, large houses, urban sprawl, highways, rich people, fat people, industrial economies, airplanes, meat consumption, non-recycled paper, and just about everything else that might make someone smile--see energy rationing via greenhouse-gas controls as the answer to their prayers. One-worlders and other socialist sorts have seen the potential for finally giving the U.N. control over all the “commanding heights” of the world by giving them control of a key driver of development. Hollywood, of course, has always known that disaster sells movie tickets. And rent-seeking companies and governments that compete with the U.S. seek to use greenhouse-gas controls to give them an edge over their competition....
Environmentalists get measure on ballot Moving closer to a November showdown over open space and property rights, environmentalists on Monday turned in nearly double the number of signatures needed to qualify a ballot measure to set strict new development rules for hillsides, ranches and large farms across Santa Clara County. The group delivered 61,906 signatures -- 19 cardboard boxes full -- to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters in San Jose. That virtually assures the measure will appear on the Nov. 7 countywide ballot; it needs 36,040 signatures from registered county voters to qualify. Elections officials will verify the signatures in the coming weeks. The ballot campaign sets up what is expected to be a bruising battle between environmental groups and farmers, ranchers and real estate interests, each with a different basic vision of how the county's open lands should evolve. The environmentalists argue tougher rules are needed to protect the county's remaining rural landscape. Many rural landowners counter that the rules won't help preserve agriculture; in fact, they say the measure will harm them financially and hamper their ability to hand down family farms from generation to generation. Voters approved similar measures in 1986 in San Mateo County and in 2000 in Alameda County after high-profile campaigns. A San Benito County measure failed in 2004....
'King of West' continues to influence local rodeos The Rowell Ranch Rodeo, now an important stop on the professional rodeo circuit, owes its start to a former British seaman who spent nearly half of the 20th century promoting the sport throughout the West. Harry Rowell arrived in the Bay Area in 1912, at 21, and became known as the "Rodeo King of the West" before dying at his camp in the Livermore hills in 1969. The annual rodeo at his Dublin Canyon ranch, between Castro Valley and the Dublin-Pleasanton area, helped set the standards for modern-day rodeos, said friend and attorney, Jack Smith. The Rowell Ranch Rodeo started in 1921, when Rowell herded cattle to the site of the current Burbank Elementary School, just west of downtown Hayward. Later, local cowboys and the mainstays of professional rodeos would come to the ranch for three days of riding, steer wrestling, bronc riding and other events. Rowell was a cattleman and rancher who provided bucking horses and bulls for western rodeos, and was rodeo arena director for the Grand National Exhibition at the San Francisco Cow Palace from 1941 to 1952....
It's All Trew: Water defines local historical events When researching the Panhandle and adjacent areas, it’s interesting to note most historical sites and happenings occur along our creeks and rivers. Our earliest towns of Fort Elliott, Tascosa and Old Clarendon are located alongside streams. The Red River Wars were named after the many tributaries of our largest river. The Alibates Flint Quarries are near the Canadian River. The early Indian ruins of Ochiltree County lie near Wolf Creek and the prehistoric bison and Indian finds near Folsom, N.M., lie alongside Wild Horse Arroyo. Common sense tells us this coincidence is because man and beast need water daily. The various wars, battles, historical happenings and settlements came about because that is where the animals and people gathered. By studying a relief map of our area, we find that all creeks and rivers in the Panhandle mostly run from west to east and are located about 20 to 30 miles apart. This fact was significant to the Indians, comancheros, soldiers, buffalo hunters and trail drivers because they knew if they were going north or south, water was just ahead....
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Monday, May 08, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
Army's Plan To Expand Has Ranchers Fearing Condemnation Jim Walter's family has been raising cattle and farming crops for 30 years on their 7,000-acre ranch about 17 miles east of La Junta. Walter, who also teaches in La Junta, said he and his family are tied to their land not only economically, but more importantly, emotionally. Fort Carson may be targeting a portion of Walter's property as well as lands stretching into three counties, to expand its Pinon Canyon Maneuvering Site. The thought of selling his land to the Army for a possible expansion makes Walter sick to his stomach. "This is what we want to do for the rest of our lives and nothing can change that. I would never want to give this up - not under any circumstances," Jim Walter said, kicking up dirt as he walked around his ranch last week. The Walters and scores of other ranchers who live near Pinon Canyon say quitting the business and selling their property to the Department of Defense for a possible expansion is out of the question. Ranchers say the proposed expansion could involve hundreds of independent ranching operations, some of which have been in families for generations. Fort Carson officials have said they are considering expanding the training area (currently about 240,000 acres) to as much as 1 million acres. They stress that Pinon Canyon gives the Army room to do large-scale joint maneuvers....
Feds aim for more wildlife control The official policy of U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is that brucellosis should be eradicated, not simply controlled in the United States. Judging from discussion during a meeting here last week, that objective could create even further strain between the federal government and the state of Wyoming over the controversial subject of managing brucellosis-infected bison and elk in northwest Wyoming. The greater Yellowstone area constitutes the sole remaining reservoir of brucellosis-infected animals in the country. APHIS veterinarian Bret Combs was asked whether brucellosis could be eradicated without treating wildlife like livestock. Clearly uncomfortable with the question, Combs said that was a policy decision for others -- and at a higher pay grade. He did explain that historically, brucellosis has been eradicated elsewhere only through capturing animals, testing them for the disease and slaughtering those that test positive....
Vets scold Game and Fish The Wyoming Game and Fish Department was taken to task by the state veterinarian and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Thursday for knowing about the commingling of brucellosis-infected elk and cattle but not alerting the Wyoming Livestock Board to the situation. The confrontation took place here during the biannual meeting of the Governor’s Brucellosis Task Force. It grew out of discussions about a Wyoming Livestock Board decision to test a Gros Ventre cattle herd for brucellosis. State Veterinarian Dwayne Oldham and Bret Combs, a veterinarian for the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, maintained that because Game and Fish is responsible for wildlife, the department has the duty to report instances of brucellosis-infected elk mingling with cattle. "There is a law against exposing animals to an infectious disease, and you must report it," Oldham said....
Western driller's gifts scrutinized In early 2002, the Williams Cos., a Tulsa, Okla.-based energy firm, was foundering. For its role in the California energy crisis of 2000-01, Williams was facing government investigations that would end up costing it hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and payments. Its telecommunications subsidiary was sliding into bankruptcy. The firm's stock plummeted so rapidly that trading was temporarily suspended. To reverse the company's misfortunes, Williams placed its bets on the West's natural-gas boom. With the help of key state and federal regulatory decisions, the company sank well after well in western Colorado. It also became a major driller in Wyoming's Powder River Basin gas fields. And it is a player in ongoing efforts to open wild public land atop Colorado's Roan Plateau to drilling. Last year, Williams drilled 1,629 new gas wells, 578 of them in Colorado, making it the second-biggest gas driller in the state. While smaller than such energy conglomerates as Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips, Williams is a large independent operation....
Eagles banded in local project found as far away as Mexico The subject was found dead in a dry creekbed, 125 miles south of the Mexican border. She'd last been seen alive on a windy day near Ovando, hunting birds. “On April 17, I got the phone call,” said Rob Domenech, who is deeply involved in the investigation. “It was an unknown number. I'm thinking it's a telemarketer. Then there's this guy on the other end with a heavy Spanish accent, calling me from Chihuahua, Mexico, saying he has one of our banded golden eagles.” Domenech is president of Missoula's Raptor View Research Institute, one of the most successful eagle-banding operations in the nation. But even he never expected a golden eagle flying through Montana would migrate all the way to Mexico. In fact, he wasn't certain he'd ever hear about a banded eagle again once it was released. “It's so rare to get any kind of band return,” Domenech explained. “Somebody can band 100 birds and they're lucky if they get any information back on one.” Nevertheless, Raptor View birds have been yo-yoing back into the research logs. Last Oct. 15, some University of Montana students spotted a golden eagle with Raptor View wing tags feasting on a road-killed deer just outside of Lincoln. Domenech had banded that bird himself on Oct. 7, 2003, atop Rogers Pass. And once in each of the past two springs, bird-watchers in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico reported seeing golden eagles with the blue wing tags of Raptor View. They couldn't read the ID numbers, but the report was clear enough to confirm the birds had spent time in Montana....
Selling It on the Mountain From the snowy summit of Dyer Mountain, what the developers hail as a blank canvas unfolds with majestic views of Mt. Lassen and dark green timberland crawling up the volcanic slopes of the Cascades. Their dream is to build California's first major ski operation in three decades and transform 7,000 acres abutting Walker Lake, 165 miles north of Sacramento, into a year-round resort with golf, mountain biking, hiking, boating, fishing and several thousand luxury dwellings and hotel rooms tucked amid the trees. If built, supporters say, Dyer Mountain Resort would inject new life into a formerly timber-dependent county that has attracted little new business activity besides the construction of two prisons. Some residents of this onetime lumber company town of 2,000, which has lost about 80% of its population since the mid-20th century, worry about becoming an underclass serving wealthy new residents and tourists — and that real estate speculation will make home ownership unaffordable for their children. Environmentalists, government agencies and hunters question the project's effect on migratory birds that flock to Walker Lake and on threatened bald eagles that nest nearby. Members of the Honey Lake Maidu tribe say the development would desecrate hallowed land....
Rancher: Sempra worth the discussion This is ground zero for the storm that began a year ago when Sempra Energy announced its plan to build a coal-fired power plant just miles from Roy Prescott's property. Prescott remained at the center of the public debate, divulging from day one that he sold options on his water to the San Diego-based energy company. Despite a statewide moratorium on coal plants in place and Sempra looking to sell its project, the former Jerome County commissioner says that for him everything remains the same. In the end, Prescott remains confident that coal-fired power plant will be built at the originally proposed location. Yet, he didn't oppose the two-year moratorium the Legislature enacted on building and permitting such facilities. Idahoans, especially Magic Valley residents, need to feel comfortable about building a coal-fired power plant and this moratorium may help them do that, he said....
Burns' wilderness bill stirs up debate Sen. Conrad Burns wants to provide Bitterroot Valley irrigators rights of way into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness to maintain a series of earthen dams scattered across the Bitterroot Range. But conservationists say the legislation the Montana Republican introduced last week gives away the farm. Irrigators counter that the bill just affirms access they were guaranteed when the area was set aside as wilderness decades ago. Burns' legislation would provide, at no cost, rights of way of up to 60 feet along trails leading into the dams and up to 500 feet in areas adjacent to the structures. Under the bill, dam owners would be able to drive and operate motorized equipment inside the wilderness on those rights of way. Irrigators would not be subject to any federal law for any activity they conducted on the right of way, nor would they be liable for any damage that might occur in their efforts to maintain the dams. Burns said the access is needed to perform maintenance, ensure the safety of people living downstream and conduct normal dam operations....
Sheep being deployed to combat leafy spurge Sheep are being grazed on a small cattle pasture to judge their effectiveness in battling a leafy spurge, a pesky weed in the Sheyenne National Grasslands in southeastern North Dakota. The 57 ewes have been turned loose on 320 acres in the grasslands, which cover 70,180 acres of public land and 64,769 acres of private land in Ransom and Richland counties. About 25,000 acres of public land in the area is infested with leafy spurge. Cattle avoid the weed, but sheep eat it readily, ranchers say. Guy Leedahl, who obtained permission to allow sheep on the pasture, hopes the experiment will show sheep can reduce leafy spurge without forcing major reductions in the number of cattle allowed to graze the land....
Missing the flow: Reservoirs along the Rio Grande predicted at lowest levels since 2002 Across the Rockies, snow is melting fast or is already gone, while the snowpack in other Western mountain ranges remains at or above normal, according to the year-end snow report by the Natural Resources Conservation Service released Friday. Water flows into New Mexico's major reservoirs are predicted at below normal to record lows through July, compared to the 30-year average, according to Richard Armijo, the service's snow surveyor. The Santa Fe Snotel site was registering zero snowpack by May 4, according to Armijo. Flows into reservoirs along the Rio Grande are predicted to be at their lowest since 2002. The forecast is for 31 percent of normal into Cochiti Lake and 11 percent of normal into Elephant Butte Lake, according to the latest report. Flows into El Vado Lake are predicted to top out at 36 percent of normal with 9 percent of normal into Jemez Canyon Reservoir. Santa Rosa Lake is expected to see inflows of only 5 percent of normal, while Navajo Reservoir will enjoy up to half its normal inflow....
Forest Service filling new facility They'll be moving into Albuquerque from all over the country. During the month of May, the U.S. Forest Service will start its transition into a 92,000-square-foot building in the Journal Center development -- the newest significant hub for its human resources department. During the week of May 1, what eventually will be up to 400 employees, hailing from all parts of the U.S., began to filter in to the three-story Class A office building with an estimated value of more than $20 million. Bill Candelaria, a contract specialist and leasing officer for the Forest Service, expects that the entire building will be complete and turned over to it by the end of the month. And by the end of the calendar year, he anticipates that everyone will be present and accounted for, giving the federal agency a total of about 1,200 employees in the city....
'This is the battleground' The Sublette County Commission agreed this week to join local cattlemen in defending the federal government’s position to allow state-administered elk feedgrounds on federal lands in western Wyoming. Pinedale-area ranchers Jon Boroff and Albert Sommers spoke to commissioners Tuesday to request support for defending against a legal challenge to the state’s elk feedground program. The commission was blunt in its agreement to support the ranching industry in defending the feedgrounds, agreeing to contribute to the legal fund as well as expressing interest in becoming intervenors in the case. In February, environmental groups filed a lawsuit in federal court against the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management challenging the authorization for elk feedgrounds on federal lands in western Wyoming. The lawsuit also targets facilities built to capture elk at the Muddy Creek feedground in Sublette County as part of a program to test the animals for brucellosis and kill those that test positive....
Corps raising water to coax spawning Over roughly the next two weeks, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will raise the water level on the Missouri River in hopes of coaxing the endangered pallid sturgeon into reproducing. The plan is the result of a 2003 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service opinion that calls on the corps to protect the fish by attempting to replicate the way melting mountain snow made the river rise each spring before dams were built. Creating a so-called spring rise on the river has been the subject of court battles for years. The corps is going ahead with the latest plan, despite a lawsuit from the state of Missouri to try to stop it. The corps' plan had called for two spring rises this year, but the first was canceled because water levels in reservoirs feeding the river were too low. The corps said the reservoirs now have more than enough water....
Grouse patrol The sky is still inky black when Bob Lanka, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department's wildlife management coordinator in Laramie, loads up and hits the road. To see sage grouse in their spectacular springtime mating rituals, Lanka and other Game and Fish staff and wildlife biologists rise in the wee hours to make it to the leks on time. "We've got to be there a half-hour before sunrise," Lanka says as he pulls away from the regional office at 4:45 a.m. and guides his truck onto a dark ribbon of Interstate 80. The lek, or breeding ground, that Lanka is heading toward is about an hour northwest of Laramie -- 40 minutes on the highway, and 20 minutes on jaw-rattling two-track dirt roads. His main goal is to check to see whether there is activity on the leks in his region -- not whether the population of grouse is up or down. About a dozen other biologists, volunteers and land agency staff are doing the same thing in this region for the next few weeks. Multiply that by the eight Game and Fish regions in Wyoming, and it amounts to about 100 people sacrificing sleep to help check on sage grouse this spring....
Feds refuse to list Imperial County dune beetle as endangered Federal officials won't put a dune-dwelling beetle on the endangered species list. An environmental group that petitioned to add the Andrews' dune scarab beetle to the Endangered Species Act failed to sufficiently back up its claims, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Friday. The group argued that the beetle lives only in the 160,000-acre Algodones Dunes in Imperial County, where large areas are open to off-road vehicles that churn up the sand in which the beetles bury themselves. “We're not saying we do or don't believe them,” agency spokeswoman Jane Hendron said. “In this case, they didn't provide substantial info to support the claims,” she said. The Center for Biological Diversity, which filed the petition, was concerned about efforts by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to reopen another 50,000 acres of the dunes to off-road vehicles....
Counties want out of federal lynx plan St. Louis County is joining two other Northeastern Minnesota counties in seeking exemption from a court-ordered U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan that would designate critical habitat for Canada lynx. "My position is that we are already considering lynx management within all of our lands," said St. Louis County Land Commissioner Robert Krepps. "We have been active in forest management for 25 to 30 years, and we are creating habitat under forest management practices. We know that lynx are there and reproducing on county land." The Fish and Wildlife Service's boundaries plan for Canada lynx critical habitat is to be published Nov. 1. The plan designates nearly 27,000 square miles across several states as key areas for lynx. Included in Minnesota is about 3,546 square miles in St. Louis, Cook, Lake and Koochiching counties....
Land set aside for whipsnake means $500M lost in development opportunity Habitat protection for a rare East Bay snake will cost the construction industry more than $500 million over the next 20 years, but that will have almost no effect on the regional economy, according to an economic analysis released Thursday. The analysis says that 780 fewer homes -- out of the 20,000 houses projected to be built -- will be constructed as a result of protection for Alameda whipsnakes around the edges of Pleasanton, Hayward, Dublin, Concord, Lafayette, Blackhawk and Martinez, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The economic losses are a combination of the cost to the industry of not building houses and the cost of complying with critical habitat rules, including the requirement to offset habitat damage by preserving land elsewhere. The proposal would place an added layer of regulation on more than 200,000 acres in the East Bay, including nearly 25 percent of Contra Costa County and 14.5 percent of Alameda County. Still, the proposed protected area is only half of what was designated in 2000 before it was overturned as the result of a lawsuit brought by developers. A lawyer for the Homebuilders of Northern California, an industry group, said the estimated loss of $500 million, or about $47 million a year, was likely too low because it fails to include the high cost of lawsuits or the uncertainty that critical habitat designations bring....
Alternative mining sites not earmarked While alternatives to a 56.1-million-ton sand and gravel mine in Soledad Canyon are being explored by federal and city officials and Mexico-based Cemex, a federal regulator said no alternative sites have yet been earmarked. In the meantime, Cemex is continuing with its plans to mine the canyon's rich deposits, sand and gravel to feed a voracious construction industry. "We're open to options," said Susana Duarte, a spokeswoman for Cemex. "We're moving forward under every assumption that we will be beginning the project in the next two years." Cemex expects to begin operating in the canyon in 2008 and could mine 70 million tons of sand and gravel over the next 20 years, with up to 1,200 truck trips a day in and out. In the first decade, 2 million tons could be mined each year, increasing to 4 million to 5 million tons a year over the next decade. During the last couple of years, the city, which has spent $6 million fighting the project - and is trying to scale mining down to what it calls "historic levels" of 300,000 tons a year - has been in talks with Cemex to reach a solution....
A dramatic change Looking north from Nipton Road in the Mojave National Preserve, the expansive, dusty valley below is dotted only by a new power plant along with the two western-themed casinos that greet tourists, truckers and gamblers as they cross north into Nevada. In the distance, traffic glides along Interstate 15, bisecting the tan landscape as motorists head to Las Vegas or head back to Southern California. That part of the vast harsh desert separating the megalopolis of greater Los Angeles from the glitzy neon-splashed mecca of Vegas is slated to change dramatically in the next decade. Instead of the gentle rustle of wind, broken now and then by the lonely horn of a freight train or the distant staccato growl of a tractor-trailer's Jake brake, the profound solitude will be pierced by the roar of jetliners taking off from a huge new airport just north of Primm, Nev., sometimes called Stateline. Park officials and Clark County, Nev., planners are working together to minimize the effect of the airport on the preserve, but there's no way to completely isolate the impacts, especially noise and light....
Fans of 4-wheelers take on Moab terrain The small southeastern Utah town of Moab is a haven for off-road enthusiasts -- from families looking for nice desert drives to the hard-core types wanting to test the capabilities of their rigs. Within a short drive of the desert town, there are more than 50 designated off-road trails that crisscross mostly Bureau of Land Management land. Each spring, thousands of off-road enthusiasts flock to Moab for a week of organized trail rides. "I went to Moab and was completely, instantly, hooked," said Charles Wells, author and publisher of a series of guidebooks for four-wheel-drive buffs. "It has spectacular scenery and beautiful drives you can take the family on. But it also has challenging stuff for the hard-core crowd." You don't even have to have your own rig to enjoy the back trails around Moab. Many companies, including Highpoint Hummer, Moab Adventure Center and the Moab Tour Co., offer trail tours in specialized Humvees with expert drivers and guides. Prices start at about $60 per adult for a two-hour tour and about $100 for a four-hour tour. In recent years, a number of companies also have sprung up to rent Jeeps so visitors can take off on their own. Most rentals start at under $200 per day....
Lousy Canyon great for pupfish habitat Lousy Canyon is beautiful and well-named. In a remote corner of the Agua Fria National Monument, about 40 miles north of Phoenix, the canyon is accessible only after crawling slowly in a high-clearance vehicle along several miles of rock and earth that passes for road, trekking across a grassy plain and snaking down more than a mile into the boulder-strewn canyon. It was here that biologist Jeremy Voeltz had come to help save a species. Voeltz was joined by other biologists from the Arizona Game and Fish Department, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management who recently sent teams into Agua Fria's Lousy Canyon and Larry Canyon to give about 400 endangered desert pupfish bred at a Nature Conservancy property a new home. The effort capped a decadelong mission to save one of Arizona's indigenous fish. Historically, the desert pupfish have lived in the Gila River basin and the San Pedro, Salt and lower Colorado rivers in Arizona. But the state's native fish, including Gila chub and Gila topminnow, which have also benefited from similar efforts, have been threatened in recent years....
Reps ask BLM to deny PFS' access Utah's three members of the House of Representatives on Friday joined the chorus of opposition to applications that would facilitate the shipment of spent nuclear fuel to a proposed storage site in Tooele County. In a letter to Pam Schuller of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Salt Lake Field Office, the House members - Rob Bishop, Chris Cannon and Jim Matheson - encouraged the bureau to deny Private Fuel Storage's applications for right-of-way across public lands and for access to public lands for the construction of a train-to-truck transfer facility. "BLM must not act in a way which facilitates the shipment or storage of [spent nuclear fuel] to and in Utah's West Desert," they write. "It is imperative that BLM safeguard the public's trust on this matter. A violation of this trust could have long-standing negative consequences for BLM in the State of Utah." PFS, a consortium of utility companies with nuclear plants, have received a license to build the Skull Valley site from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission....
Firms Harvesting Energy From Public Land May Owe U.S. As soaring prices prompt huge increases in gas and oil drilling on public land, an ad hoc posse of state governments, Indian tribes and individual "bounty hunters" is charging that big energy companies are shortchanging taxpayers by billions of dollars. They say drilling companies and pipeline operators are understating the amount and the quality of the natural gas they pump on public land, and are paying far less in royalties than required by law. State and tribal governments rely on Washington -- specifically, the Minerals Management Service in the Department of the Interior -- to determine what royalties are owed and to collect the money. States and tribes then receive their shares from the federal government. Two organizations -- the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, representing 57 tribes in the nation and Canada, and the State and Tribal Royalty Audit Committee, representing 11 state governments and eight tribes, mainly in the West -- are pressuring the Minerals Management Service and the gas companies for stricter accounting and higher royalty payments. Critics of the Bush administration's management of royalty payments have been looking for ways to circumvent the government and attack the energy companies directly. Some think they have found the right weapon in a federal statute, the False Claims Act, dating to the Civil War. Under the law, anyone can file a civil suit known as a qui tam action, a Latin term that means the plaintiff is acting "on behalf of" the government. The procedure can be extremely costly for a defendant who is found to have cheated the federal government; the statute gives courts the right to assess damages three times the amount owed. The private litigant, in turn, gets a significant share of the damages....
Donkey escapes Ojo Feliz Fire, but ranchers nervous Nobody knows how Andy Alcon's donkey came out of the Ojo Feliz Fire alive, but he did and is doing just fine. Ranchers in the burned area, however, are wondering if they can survive the summer. When the donkey, Shrek, refused to leave his pasture and stayed behind as grassland fire bore down on the northern New Mexico community, Alcon was sure he would never see his donkey again. Officials found the donkey two days later. "He came away a little scorched from the fire," Alcon said. "His ears got burned and his tail was toasted." Alcon said the only things he could think of during the fire were saving his animals and making sure he didn't lose everything. Meanwhile, in a pasture down the road, Andy Alcon was busy trying to gather cattle. He missed the evacuation orders by 20 minutes. By the time he was done, he noticed the had wind shifted, causing the fire to jump a break. It was within yards of homes on the Alcon family ranch. Everyone was gone when Andy got home, but that didn't stop him from doing everything he could to salvage the ranch. He saddled up Sugar, the calmest horse he had, and rode behind the homes to check on the cattle. To protect his horse, Andy said he wrapped a gunnysack around its tail and rode straight into the fire, he said. It took five to six trips back and forth, but he managed to save several newborn calves and cows....
Predators kill fraction of cows Montana ranchers lost 66,000 cattle -- valued at nearly $42 million -- to predators, disease and other causes last year, a federal report issued Friday shows. Most of the losses, 63,000 head worth $40 million, were not due to predators, the report from the National Agricultural Statistics Service found. That was also true nationally. Of the 3,000 cattle killed by predators in Montana, 2,400 were calves. Coyotes were the greatest cause of calf losses by predators, responsible for killing 1,300, the report says. The report doesn't single out wolves in the state summaries, but it attributed a fraction -- 4,400 head -- of the 190,000 cattle killed by predators nationally specifically to wolves. Nationwide, ranchers lost 4.05 million cattle to all causes, the report shows. Those figures do not include Alaska, it says....
Column: The Rise and Possible Fall of Richard Pombo The banner stretched across the entrance to the Crobar a trendy New York nightclub read, "Welcome to the Pombo-Palooza". At the door, members of the Rockettes handed out cowboy hats to the A-list invited guests. Inside, a model clad in rhinestone hot pants and a cleavage-enhancing top that might have chastened a Hooters waitress rode a mechanical bull. On the stage, the Charlie Daniels Band cut loose with fiddle-driven Southern funk as lobbyists and lawyers, politicians and tycoons danced the two-step and drank iridescent blue martinis. Such was the scene in 2003 at Congressman Rick Pombo's coming out party. The young legislator from Tracy, California had just been appointed the new chairman of the House Resources Committee. At 42, he was the youngest chairman on Capital Hill. Bush couldn't attend the hoedown but he sent a herogram congratulating the congressman he calls "Marlboro Man". That night money flowed faster than champagne. Before Charlie Daniels had finished his first set, Pombo's campaign war chest had been fattened by more than $250,000, courtesy of an assortment of real estate barons, oil and mining company executives, timber lobbyists and casino operators....
Rep. Pombo targeted by environmentalists Environmental groups have converged on a California district in an effort to defeat a GOP U.S. House member they claim is in the pocket of corporations. The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund, Clean Water Action and the Sierra Club have joined a coalition against Rep. Richard W. Pombo, The Washington Post reports. His district includes part of rural northern California and an area where commuters to San Francisco and Silicon Valley live. The 14-year veteran of Congress has a million dollars to spend on his campaign, which faces a rare primary rival and a general election opponent with a chance of unseating Pombo. Although most of the state's 53 representatives are seen as nearly unbeatable incumbents, the coalition against Pombo hopes to play on voters' environmental leanings. Their door-to-door, telephone, billboard and radio ads tell of a congressman who reformed the Endangered Species Act, is in favor of offshore drilling and opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for exploration, the newspaper said....
Cowboys call for immigration compromise Bud Strom knows darn well how outsiders have pegged ranchers like him, those whose land serves as America's front porch to illegal immigration. When reporters flock in from their big-city offices, they want to know: Is he packing heat? Can they get the pistol on camera? Then there's Paul Palmer. Feedlot operator. Died-in-the-wool Republican. A good Baptist. "Papa" to the grandson he keeps watch on while sorting cattle. And, oh yeah, he supposes "criminal" is fitting, too. For years, Palmer employed illegal farmhands until their fear of working in a region swarming with Border Patrol agents drove them elsewhere. Now he'll preach to anyone who will listen about America's need to legalize its illegal work force. "I'm conservative right down to the bone," he says, "but I think that sometimes we have to do the right thing." These fellows don't just talk about illegal immigration, they live it by making their homes in the heart of the nation's busiest illegal crossing corridor, the mesas of southern Arizona. They own the land that gets trampled, feed their wives, kids and grandkids from the money they eke out of it. And they'll endure the repercussions of whatever Congress does or does not devise to rectify the problem. They don't care for outright amnesty; the recent migrant marches make their stomachs turn. They also don't want immigrants branded felons, rounded up and shipped out, and insist a sealed-off border isn't the answer either. But they do have a message...
The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indians The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indians was originally published in 1964, but brought back in 2001 by the University of Oklahoma Press, a decision that shows the continuing relevance of the subject in American history. In the work, Ralph K. Andrist examines the wars the Plains Indians fought against the United States government during the latter half of the 19th century. The introduction is by Dee Brown, the author of Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee. In an introductory chapter, “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow”, Andrist presents the historical setting for the wars that would bring an end to Indian resistance on the Plains. He begins his study with the 1862 Sioux uprising in Minnesota led by Little Crow, Chief Shakopee, and Red Middle Voice, entitled “Massacre in Minnesota”, and ends with “The Last Small Wars”, the final defeat of the Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890 in South Dakota. Andrist regarded the Wounded Knee battle as the final chapter in the conflict of the U.S. government with Native American Indians: “When it was over, the Indian wars of the plains were ended, and with them the long struggle of all American Indians … to preserve some portion of their ancestral lands and tribal ways” (p.1). For the period 1862-1890, Andrist discusses the 1862 Minnesota Sioux uprising, the Sand Creek battle, the battle of Washita, “Custer’s First Stand”, the battle of the Little Big Horn, “Custer’s Last Stand”, and the battle of Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. To what degree did the superior numbers and the industrialization on the part of American settlers play a role in the defeat of the Plains Indians?....
Column: NAIS cannot prevent "Mad Cow" disease Shortly after another "mad cow" was discovered in Alabama, there was a rash of articles in the press citing the event as convincing evidence that the USDA's National Animal Identification System should move forward as quickly as possible. Nowhere did any of the articles mention that the NAIS will do nothing to prevent, control, or even slow the disease. Cow Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), widely known as "Mad Cow Disease," is a chronic, degenerative disease affecting the central nervous system of cattle. BSE takes years to develop in cattle, not days or weeks. Moreover, the disease is not contagious. The USDA says: "It's important to note that [BSE and related diseases] are not communicable diseases - they do not spread easily like viruses." If this disease, promoted as justification for the program, is not contagious, why, then, is it necessary for the USDA to construct this massive program to register every premises that houses any farm animal, tag each animal with an electronic monitoring chip, and track every off-premises movement of every animal through a centralized database? There is no legitimate need for the USDA to launch this massive tracking system. Brand laws, ear tags, and sales records already provide an adequate traceback system that has been used successfully for years. If the goal of the USDA is truly to protect the food supply chain, then the focus should be placed on the packing industry, not on the producer. Domestic producers are already required to produce a health certificate supplied by an authorized veterinarian at the point of sale. The risk occurs in the feedlots and factories where imported animals and animal products may be added. Meat packers may incorporate imported meat products into hamburger and other non-choice cuts and still receive the USDA stamp of approval. So far, the meat industry has been able to block all efforts to label such imported meats with even the country of origin, to say nothing of any health certification....
Paniolo museum exhibit to debut at Aloha week nspired by the creation of the new Kona Heritage Ranch and Store exhibit, last year Uncle Jimmy Duvauchelle approached MR CEO Peter Nicholas about creating a Moloka'i Paniolo Museum to preserve the rich history of Moloka'i's cowboys. "Our ultimate goal is to build a museum dedicated to our ranchers and the Paniolo lifestyle," said Duvauchelle. Now Duvauchelle is envisioning a Moloka'i Paniolo Cultural Center located right behind the arena in Maunaloa, so horse displays can be performed regularly for the center̢۪s visitors. Duvauchelle was worried about the disappearance of Moloka'i's Paniolo culture as lifestyles change on our island. "A lady at the Ala Moana center asked me, 'where you from, Texas?'" Duvauchelle said. "I was offended, I almost fell down." Duevauchelle's plan is to spend the next several months collecting stories and history from Kupunas who are still around. Uncle Harry Masashi attended Thursday's meeting, and it was almost impossible to keep him from sharing amusing anecdotes from his life....
Hopalong Cassidy - Ride Along With This Classic Western Hero On DVD William Boyd struck a chord with American audiences wearing his good guy in black cowboy attire and proudly strutting his stuff as Hopalong Casssidy for TV audiences in this popular 1950s Western show. Already a whopping success in 66 feature films, he brought glory to the small screen entertaining and delighting his fans so much so, that it created a kind of manufacturing frenzy for Hopalong Cassidy dolls, watches, costumes, lunchboxes and even a Hopalong Cassidy amusement park. TV offered a fresh new direction for the cowboy hero and here's your chance to relive those good ole times with this *exclusive* Critics Choice collection of fan-favorite episodes! Just jump right in and bring Hoppy back to life with this awesome first set of 26 TV treasures on 4 DVDs and at a killer price!....
On the Edge of Common Sense: Young immigration marchers showing respect Respeto. The Mexican Americans across the country are marching in the streets in defense of Mexicans who have crossed the border illegally to work in the land of opportunity. Prevalent in this mass demonstration is the number of teenagers caught up in the excitement. One of the issues that rears its logical head is how smart is it for Mexican American school kids, who as a group routinely have the poorest scholastic record and the highest drop out rate, to cut classes? But, that is not what causes my heart to sing. What is flowing from these young people is a recognition and respect for their ancianos, their abuelos, their paisanos, their countrymen....
Army's Plan To Expand Has Ranchers Fearing Condemnation Jim Walter's family has been raising cattle and farming crops for 30 years on their 7,000-acre ranch about 17 miles east of La Junta. Walter, who also teaches in La Junta, said he and his family are tied to their land not only economically, but more importantly, emotionally. Fort Carson may be targeting a portion of Walter's property as well as lands stretching into three counties, to expand its Pinon Canyon Maneuvering Site. The thought of selling his land to the Army for a possible expansion makes Walter sick to his stomach. "This is what we want to do for the rest of our lives and nothing can change that. I would never want to give this up - not under any circumstances," Jim Walter said, kicking up dirt as he walked around his ranch last week. The Walters and scores of other ranchers who live near Pinon Canyon say quitting the business and selling their property to the Department of Defense for a possible expansion is out of the question. Ranchers say the proposed expansion could involve hundreds of independent ranching operations, some of which have been in families for generations. Fort Carson officials have said they are considering expanding the training area (currently about 240,000 acres) to as much as 1 million acres. They stress that Pinon Canyon gives the Army room to do large-scale joint maneuvers....
Feds aim for more wildlife control The official policy of U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is that brucellosis should be eradicated, not simply controlled in the United States. Judging from discussion during a meeting here last week, that objective could create even further strain between the federal government and the state of Wyoming over the controversial subject of managing brucellosis-infected bison and elk in northwest Wyoming. The greater Yellowstone area constitutes the sole remaining reservoir of brucellosis-infected animals in the country. APHIS veterinarian Bret Combs was asked whether brucellosis could be eradicated without treating wildlife like livestock. Clearly uncomfortable with the question, Combs said that was a policy decision for others -- and at a higher pay grade. He did explain that historically, brucellosis has been eradicated elsewhere only through capturing animals, testing them for the disease and slaughtering those that test positive....
Vets scold Game and Fish The Wyoming Game and Fish Department was taken to task by the state veterinarian and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Thursday for knowing about the commingling of brucellosis-infected elk and cattle but not alerting the Wyoming Livestock Board to the situation. The confrontation took place here during the biannual meeting of the Governor’s Brucellosis Task Force. It grew out of discussions about a Wyoming Livestock Board decision to test a Gros Ventre cattle herd for brucellosis. State Veterinarian Dwayne Oldham and Bret Combs, a veterinarian for the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, maintained that because Game and Fish is responsible for wildlife, the department has the duty to report instances of brucellosis-infected elk mingling with cattle. "There is a law against exposing animals to an infectious disease, and you must report it," Oldham said....
Western driller's gifts scrutinized In early 2002, the Williams Cos., a Tulsa, Okla.-based energy firm, was foundering. For its role in the California energy crisis of 2000-01, Williams was facing government investigations that would end up costing it hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and payments. Its telecommunications subsidiary was sliding into bankruptcy. The firm's stock plummeted so rapidly that trading was temporarily suspended. To reverse the company's misfortunes, Williams placed its bets on the West's natural-gas boom. With the help of key state and federal regulatory decisions, the company sank well after well in western Colorado. It also became a major driller in Wyoming's Powder River Basin gas fields. And it is a player in ongoing efforts to open wild public land atop Colorado's Roan Plateau to drilling. Last year, Williams drilled 1,629 new gas wells, 578 of them in Colorado, making it the second-biggest gas driller in the state. While smaller than such energy conglomerates as Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips, Williams is a large independent operation....
Eagles banded in local project found as far away as Mexico The subject was found dead in a dry creekbed, 125 miles south of the Mexican border. She'd last been seen alive on a windy day near Ovando, hunting birds. “On April 17, I got the phone call,” said Rob Domenech, who is deeply involved in the investigation. “It was an unknown number. I'm thinking it's a telemarketer. Then there's this guy on the other end with a heavy Spanish accent, calling me from Chihuahua, Mexico, saying he has one of our banded golden eagles.” Domenech is president of Missoula's Raptor View Research Institute, one of the most successful eagle-banding operations in the nation. But even he never expected a golden eagle flying through Montana would migrate all the way to Mexico. In fact, he wasn't certain he'd ever hear about a banded eagle again once it was released. “It's so rare to get any kind of band return,” Domenech explained. “Somebody can band 100 birds and they're lucky if they get any information back on one.” Nevertheless, Raptor View birds have been yo-yoing back into the research logs. Last Oct. 15, some University of Montana students spotted a golden eagle with Raptor View wing tags feasting on a road-killed deer just outside of Lincoln. Domenech had banded that bird himself on Oct. 7, 2003, atop Rogers Pass. And once in each of the past two springs, bird-watchers in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico reported seeing golden eagles with the blue wing tags of Raptor View. They couldn't read the ID numbers, but the report was clear enough to confirm the birds had spent time in Montana....
Selling It on the Mountain From the snowy summit of Dyer Mountain, what the developers hail as a blank canvas unfolds with majestic views of Mt. Lassen and dark green timberland crawling up the volcanic slopes of the Cascades. Their dream is to build California's first major ski operation in three decades and transform 7,000 acres abutting Walker Lake, 165 miles north of Sacramento, into a year-round resort with golf, mountain biking, hiking, boating, fishing and several thousand luxury dwellings and hotel rooms tucked amid the trees. If built, supporters say, Dyer Mountain Resort would inject new life into a formerly timber-dependent county that has attracted little new business activity besides the construction of two prisons. Some residents of this onetime lumber company town of 2,000, which has lost about 80% of its population since the mid-20th century, worry about becoming an underclass serving wealthy new residents and tourists — and that real estate speculation will make home ownership unaffordable for their children. Environmentalists, government agencies and hunters question the project's effect on migratory birds that flock to Walker Lake and on threatened bald eagles that nest nearby. Members of the Honey Lake Maidu tribe say the development would desecrate hallowed land....
Rancher: Sempra worth the discussion This is ground zero for the storm that began a year ago when Sempra Energy announced its plan to build a coal-fired power plant just miles from Roy Prescott's property. Prescott remained at the center of the public debate, divulging from day one that he sold options on his water to the San Diego-based energy company. Despite a statewide moratorium on coal plants in place and Sempra looking to sell its project, the former Jerome County commissioner says that for him everything remains the same. In the end, Prescott remains confident that coal-fired power plant will be built at the originally proposed location. Yet, he didn't oppose the two-year moratorium the Legislature enacted on building and permitting such facilities. Idahoans, especially Magic Valley residents, need to feel comfortable about building a coal-fired power plant and this moratorium may help them do that, he said....
Burns' wilderness bill stirs up debate Sen. Conrad Burns wants to provide Bitterroot Valley irrigators rights of way into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness to maintain a series of earthen dams scattered across the Bitterroot Range. But conservationists say the legislation the Montana Republican introduced last week gives away the farm. Irrigators counter that the bill just affirms access they were guaranteed when the area was set aside as wilderness decades ago. Burns' legislation would provide, at no cost, rights of way of up to 60 feet along trails leading into the dams and up to 500 feet in areas adjacent to the structures. Under the bill, dam owners would be able to drive and operate motorized equipment inside the wilderness on those rights of way. Irrigators would not be subject to any federal law for any activity they conducted on the right of way, nor would they be liable for any damage that might occur in their efforts to maintain the dams. Burns said the access is needed to perform maintenance, ensure the safety of people living downstream and conduct normal dam operations....
Sheep being deployed to combat leafy spurge Sheep are being grazed on a small cattle pasture to judge their effectiveness in battling a leafy spurge, a pesky weed in the Sheyenne National Grasslands in southeastern North Dakota. The 57 ewes have been turned loose on 320 acres in the grasslands, which cover 70,180 acres of public land and 64,769 acres of private land in Ransom and Richland counties. About 25,000 acres of public land in the area is infested with leafy spurge. Cattle avoid the weed, but sheep eat it readily, ranchers say. Guy Leedahl, who obtained permission to allow sheep on the pasture, hopes the experiment will show sheep can reduce leafy spurge without forcing major reductions in the number of cattle allowed to graze the land....
Missing the flow: Reservoirs along the Rio Grande predicted at lowest levels since 2002 Across the Rockies, snow is melting fast or is already gone, while the snowpack in other Western mountain ranges remains at or above normal, according to the year-end snow report by the Natural Resources Conservation Service released Friday. Water flows into New Mexico's major reservoirs are predicted at below normal to record lows through July, compared to the 30-year average, according to Richard Armijo, the service's snow surveyor. The Santa Fe Snotel site was registering zero snowpack by May 4, according to Armijo. Flows into reservoirs along the Rio Grande are predicted to be at their lowest since 2002. The forecast is for 31 percent of normal into Cochiti Lake and 11 percent of normal into Elephant Butte Lake, according to the latest report. Flows into El Vado Lake are predicted to top out at 36 percent of normal with 9 percent of normal into Jemez Canyon Reservoir. Santa Rosa Lake is expected to see inflows of only 5 percent of normal, while Navajo Reservoir will enjoy up to half its normal inflow....
Forest Service filling new facility They'll be moving into Albuquerque from all over the country. During the month of May, the U.S. Forest Service will start its transition into a 92,000-square-foot building in the Journal Center development -- the newest significant hub for its human resources department. During the week of May 1, what eventually will be up to 400 employees, hailing from all parts of the U.S., began to filter in to the three-story Class A office building with an estimated value of more than $20 million. Bill Candelaria, a contract specialist and leasing officer for the Forest Service, expects that the entire building will be complete and turned over to it by the end of the month. And by the end of the calendar year, he anticipates that everyone will be present and accounted for, giving the federal agency a total of about 1,200 employees in the city....
'This is the battleground' The Sublette County Commission agreed this week to join local cattlemen in defending the federal government’s position to allow state-administered elk feedgrounds on federal lands in western Wyoming. Pinedale-area ranchers Jon Boroff and Albert Sommers spoke to commissioners Tuesday to request support for defending against a legal challenge to the state’s elk feedground program. The commission was blunt in its agreement to support the ranching industry in defending the feedgrounds, agreeing to contribute to the legal fund as well as expressing interest in becoming intervenors in the case. In February, environmental groups filed a lawsuit in federal court against the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management challenging the authorization for elk feedgrounds on federal lands in western Wyoming. The lawsuit also targets facilities built to capture elk at the Muddy Creek feedground in Sublette County as part of a program to test the animals for brucellosis and kill those that test positive....
Corps raising water to coax spawning Over roughly the next two weeks, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will raise the water level on the Missouri River in hopes of coaxing the endangered pallid sturgeon into reproducing. The plan is the result of a 2003 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service opinion that calls on the corps to protect the fish by attempting to replicate the way melting mountain snow made the river rise each spring before dams were built. Creating a so-called spring rise on the river has been the subject of court battles for years. The corps is going ahead with the latest plan, despite a lawsuit from the state of Missouri to try to stop it. The corps' plan had called for two spring rises this year, but the first was canceled because water levels in reservoirs feeding the river were too low. The corps said the reservoirs now have more than enough water....
Grouse patrol The sky is still inky black when Bob Lanka, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department's wildlife management coordinator in Laramie, loads up and hits the road. To see sage grouse in their spectacular springtime mating rituals, Lanka and other Game and Fish staff and wildlife biologists rise in the wee hours to make it to the leks on time. "We've got to be there a half-hour before sunrise," Lanka says as he pulls away from the regional office at 4:45 a.m. and guides his truck onto a dark ribbon of Interstate 80. The lek, or breeding ground, that Lanka is heading toward is about an hour northwest of Laramie -- 40 minutes on the highway, and 20 minutes on jaw-rattling two-track dirt roads. His main goal is to check to see whether there is activity on the leks in his region -- not whether the population of grouse is up or down. About a dozen other biologists, volunteers and land agency staff are doing the same thing in this region for the next few weeks. Multiply that by the eight Game and Fish regions in Wyoming, and it amounts to about 100 people sacrificing sleep to help check on sage grouse this spring....
Feds refuse to list Imperial County dune beetle as endangered Federal officials won't put a dune-dwelling beetle on the endangered species list. An environmental group that petitioned to add the Andrews' dune scarab beetle to the Endangered Species Act failed to sufficiently back up its claims, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Friday. The group argued that the beetle lives only in the 160,000-acre Algodones Dunes in Imperial County, where large areas are open to off-road vehicles that churn up the sand in which the beetles bury themselves. “We're not saying we do or don't believe them,” agency spokeswoman Jane Hendron said. “In this case, they didn't provide substantial info to support the claims,” she said. The Center for Biological Diversity, which filed the petition, was concerned about efforts by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to reopen another 50,000 acres of the dunes to off-road vehicles....
Counties want out of federal lynx plan St. Louis County is joining two other Northeastern Minnesota counties in seeking exemption from a court-ordered U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan that would designate critical habitat for Canada lynx. "My position is that we are already considering lynx management within all of our lands," said St. Louis County Land Commissioner Robert Krepps. "We have been active in forest management for 25 to 30 years, and we are creating habitat under forest management practices. We know that lynx are there and reproducing on county land." The Fish and Wildlife Service's boundaries plan for Canada lynx critical habitat is to be published Nov. 1. The plan designates nearly 27,000 square miles across several states as key areas for lynx. Included in Minnesota is about 3,546 square miles in St. Louis, Cook, Lake and Koochiching counties....
Land set aside for whipsnake means $500M lost in development opportunity Habitat protection for a rare East Bay snake will cost the construction industry more than $500 million over the next 20 years, but that will have almost no effect on the regional economy, according to an economic analysis released Thursday. The analysis says that 780 fewer homes -- out of the 20,000 houses projected to be built -- will be constructed as a result of protection for Alameda whipsnakes around the edges of Pleasanton, Hayward, Dublin, Concord, Lafayette, Blackhawk and Martinez, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The economic losses are a combination of the cost to the industry of not building houses and the cost of complying with critical habitat rules, including the requirement to offset habitat damage by preserving land elsewhere. The proposal would place an added layer of regulation on more than 200,000 acres in the East Bay, including nearly 25 percent of Contra Costa County and 14.5 percent of Alameda County. Still, the proposed protected area is only half of what was designated in 2000 before it was overturned as the result of a lawsuit brought by developers. A lawyer for the Homebuilders of Northern California, an industry group, said the estimated loss of $500 million, or about $47 million a year, was likely too low because it fails to include the high cost of lawsuits or the uncertainty that critical habitat designations bring....
Alternative mining sites not earmarked While alternatives to a 56.1-million-ton sand and gravel mine in Soledad Canyon are being explored by federal and city officials and Mexico-based Cemex, a federal regulator said no alternative sites have yet been earmarked. In the meantime, Cemex is continuing with its plans to mine the canyon's rich deposits, sand and gravel to feed a voracious construction industry. "We're open to options," said Susana Duarte, a spokeswoman for Cemex. "We're moving forward under every assumption that we will be beginning the project in the next two years." Cemex expects to begin operating in the canyon in 2008 and could mine 70 million tons of sand and gravel over the next 20 years, with up to 1,200 truck trips a day in and out. In the first decade, 2 million tons could be mined each year, increasing to 4 million to 5 million tons a year over the next decade. During the last couple of years, the city, which has spent $6 million fighting the project - and is trying to scale mining down to what it calls "historic levels" of 300,000 tons a year - has been in talks with Cemex to reach a solution....
A dramatic change Looking north from Nipton Road in the Mojave National Preserve, the expansive, dusty valley below is dotted only by a new power plant along with the two western-themed casinos that greet tourists, truckers and gamblers as they cross north into Nevada. In the distance, traffic glides along Interstate 15, bisecting the tan landscape as motorists head to Las Vegas or head back to Southern California. That part of the vast harsh desert separating the megalopolis of greater Los Angeles from the glitzy neon-splashed mecca of Vegas is slated to change dramatically in the next decade. Instead of the gentle rustle of wind, broken now and then by the lonely horn of a freight train or the distant staccato growl of a tractor-trailer's Jake brake, the profound solitude will be pierced by the roar of jetliners taking off from a huge new airport just north of Primm, Nev., sometimes called Stateline. Park officials and Clark County, Nev., planners are working together to minimize the effect of the airport on the preserve, but there's no way to completely isolate the impacts, especially noise and light....
Fans of 4-wheelers take on Moab terrain The small southeastern Utah town of Moab is a haven for off-road enthusiasts -- from families looking for nice desert drives to the hard-core types wanting to test the capabilities of their rigs. Within a short drive of the desert town, there are more than 50 designated off-road trails that crisscross mostly Bureau of Land Management land. Each spring, thousands of off-road enthusiasts flock to Moab for a week of organized trail rides. "I went to Moab and was completely, instantly, hooked," said Charles Wells, author and publisher of a series of guidebooks for four-wheel-drive buffs. "It has spectacular scenery and beautiful drives you can take the family on. But it also has challenging stuff for the hard-core crowd." You don't even have to have your own rig to enjoy the back trails around Moab. Many companies, including Highpoint Hummer, Moab Adventure Center and the Moab Tour Co., offer trail tours in specialized Humvees with expert drivers and guides. Prices start at about $60 per adult for a two-hour tour and about $100 for a four-hour tour. In recent years, a number of companies also have sprung up to rent Jeeps so visitors can take off on their own. Most rentals start at under $200 per day....
Lousy Canyon great for pupfish habitat Lousy Canyon is beautiful and well-named. In a remote corner of the Agua Fria National Monument, about 40 miles north of Phoenix, the canyon is accessible only after crawling slowly in a high-clearance vehicle along several miles of rock and earth that passes for road, trekking across a grassy plain and snaking down more than a mile into the boulder-strewn canyon. It was here that biologist Jeremy Voeltz had come to help save a species. Voeltz was joined by other biologists from the Arizona Game and Fish Department, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management who recently sent teams into Agua Fria's Lousy Canyon and Larry Canyon to give about 400 endangered desert pupfish bred at a Nature Conservancy property a new home. The effort capped a decadelong mission to save one of Arizona's indigenous fish. Historically, the desert pupfish have lived in the Gila River basin and the San Pedro, Salt and lower Colorado rivers in Arizona. But the state's native fish, including Gila chub and Gila topminnow, which have also benefited from similar efforts, have been threatened in recent years....
Reps ask BLM to deny PFS' access Utah's three members of the House of Representatives on Friday joined the chorus of opposition to applications that would facilitate the shipment of spent nuclear fuel to a proposed storage site in Tooele County. In a letter to Pam Schuller of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Salt Lake Field Office, the House members - Rob Bishop, Chris Cannon and Jim Matheson - encouraged the bureau to deny Private Fuel Storage's applications for right-of-way across public lands and for access to public lands for the construction of a train-to-truck transfer facility. "BLM must not act in a way which facilitates the shipment or storage of [spent nuclear fuel] to and in Utah's West Desert," they write. "It is imperative that BLM safeguard the public's trust on this matter. A violation of this trust could have long-standing negative consequences for BLM in the State of Utah." PFS, a consortium of utility companies with nuclear plants, have received a license to build the Skull Valley site from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission....
Firms Harvesting Energy From Public Land May Owe U.S. As soaring prices prompt huge increases in gas and oil drilling on public land, an ad hoc posse of state governments, Indian tribes and individual "bounty hunters" is charging that big energy companies are shortchanging taxpayers by billions of dollars. They say drilling companies and pipeline operators are understating the amount and the quality of the natural gas they pump on public land, and are paying far less in royalties than required by law. State and tribal governments rely on Washington -- specifically, the Minerals Management Service in the Department of the Interior -- to determine what royalties are owed and to collect the money. States and tribes then receive their shares from the federal government. Two organizations -- the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, representing 57 tribes in the nation and Canada, and the State and Tribal Royalty Audit Committee, representing 11 state governments and eight tribes, mainly in the West -- are pressuring the Minerals Management Service and the gas companies for stricter accounting and higher royalty payments. Critics of the Bush administration's management of royalty payments have been looking for ways to circumvent the government and attack the energy companies directly. Some think they have found the right weapon in a federal statute, the False Claims Act, dating to the Civil War. Under the law, anyone can file a civil suit known as a qui tam action, a Latin term that means the plaintiff is acting "on behalf of" the government. The procedure can be extremely costly for a defendant who is found to have cheated the federal government; the statute gives courts the right to assess damages three times the amount owed. The private litigant, in turn, gets a significant share of the damages....
Donkey escapes Ojo Feliz Fire, but ranchers nervous Nobody knows how Andy Alcon's donkey came out of the Ojo Feliz Fire alive, but he did and is doing just fine. Ranchers in the burned area, however, are wondering if they can survive the summer. When the donkey, Shrek, refused to leave his pasture and stayed behind as grassland fire bore down on the northern New Mexico community, Alcon was sure he would never see his donkey again. Officials found the donkey two days later. "He came away a little scorched from the fire," Alcon said. "His ears got burned and his tail was toasted." Alcon said the only things he could think of during the fire were saving his animals and making sure he didn't lose everything. Meanwhile, in a pasture down the road, Andy Alcon was busy trying to gather cattle. He missed the evacuation orders by 20 minutes. By the time he was done, he noticed the had wind shifted, causing the fire to jump a break. It was within yards of homes on the Alcon family ranch. Everyone was gone when Andy got home, but that didn't stop him from doing everything he could to salvage the ranch. He saddled up Sugar, the calmest horse he had, and rode behind the homes to check on the cattle. To protect his horse, Andy said he wrapped a gunnysack around its tail and rode straight into the fire, he said. It took five to six trips back and forth, but he managed to save several newborn calves and cows....
Predators kill fraction of cows Montana ranchers lost 66,000 cattle -- valued at nearly $42 million -- to predators, disease and other causes last year, a federal report issued Friday shows. Most of the losses, 63,000 head worth $40 million, were not due to predators, the report from the National Agricultural Statistics Service found. That was also true nationally. Of the 3,000 cattle killed by predators in Montana, 2,400 were calves. Coyotes were the greatest cause of calf losses by predators, responsible for killing 1,300, the report says. The report doesn't single out wolves in the state summaries, but it attributed a fraction -- 4,400 head -- of the 190,000 cattle killed by predators nationally specifically to wolves. Nationwide, ranchers lost 4.05 million cattle to all causes, the report shows. Those figures do not include Alaska, it says....
Column: The Rise and Possible Fall of Richard Pombo The banner stretched across the entrance to the Crobar a trendy New York nightclub read, "Welcome to the Pombo-Palooza". At the door, members of the Rockettes handed out cowboy hats to the A-list invited guests. Inside, a model clad in rhinestone hot pants and a cleavage-enhancing top that might have chastened a Hooters waitress rode a mechanical bull. On the stage, the Charlie Daniels Band cut loose with fiddle-driven Southern funk as lobbyists and lawyers, politicians and tycoons danced the two-step and drank iridescent blue martinis. Such was the scene in 2003 at Congressman Rick Pombo's coming out party. The young legislator from Tracy, California had just been appointed the new chairman of the House Resources Committee. At 42, he was the youngest chairman on Capital Hill. Bush couldn't attend the hoedown but he sent a herogram congratulating the congressman he calls "Marlboro Man". That night money flowed faster than champagne. Before Charlie Daniels had finished his first set, Pombo's campaign war chest had been fattened by more than $250,000, courtesy of an assortment of real estate barons, oil and mining company executives, timber lobbyists and casino operators....
Rep. Pombo targeted by environmentalists Environmental groups have converged on a California district in an effort to defeat a GOP U.S. House member they claim is in the pocket of corporations. The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund, Clean Water Action and the Sierra Club have joined a coalition against Rep. Richard W. Pombo, The Washington Post reports. His district includes part of rural northern California and an area where commuters to San Francisco and Silicon Valley live. The 14-year veteran of Congress has a million dollars to spend on his campaign, which faces a rare primary rival and a general election opponent with a chance of unseating Pombo. Although most of the state's 53 representatives are seen as nearly unbeatable incumbents, the coalition against Pombo hopes to play on voters' environmental leanings. Their door-to-door, telephone, billboard and radio ads tell of a congressman who reformed the Endangered Species Act, is in favor of offshore drilling and opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for exploration, the newspaper said....
Cowboys call for immigration compromise Bud Strom knows darn well how outsiders have pegged ranchers like him, those whose land serves as America's front porch to illegal immigration. When reporters flock in from their big-city offices, they want to know: Is he packing heat? Can they get the pistol on camera? Then there's Paul Palmer. Feedlot operator. Died-in-the-wool Republican. A good Baptist. "Papa" to the grandson he keeps watch on while sorting cattle. And, oh yeah, he supposes "criminal" is fitting, too. For years, Palmer employed illegal farmhands until their fear of working in a region swarming with Border Patrol agents drove them elsewhere. Now he'll preach to anyone who will listen about America's need to legalize its illegal work force. "I'm conservative right down to the bone," he says, "but I think that sometimes we have to do the right thing." These fellows don't just talk about illegal immigration, they live it by making their homes in the heart of the nation's busiest illegal crossing corridor, the mesas of southern Arizona. They own the land that gets trampled, feed their wives, kids and grandkids from the money they eke out of it. And they'll endure the repercussions of whatever Congress does or does not devise to rectify the problem. They don't care for outright amnesty; the recent migrant marches make their stomachs turn. They also don't want immigrants branded felons, rounded up and shipped out, and insist a sealed-off border isn't the answer either. But they do have a message...
The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indians The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indians was originally published in 1964, but brought back in 2001 by the University of Oklahoma Press, a decision that shows the continuing relevance of the subject in American history. In the work, Ralph K. Andrist examines the wars the Plains Indians fought against the United States government during the latter half of the 19th century. The introduction is by Dee Brown, the author of Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee. In an introductory chapter, “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow”, Andrist presents the historical setting for the wars that would bring an end to Indian resistance on the Plains. He begins his study with the 1862 Sioux uprising in Minnesota led by Little Crow, Chief Shakopee, and Red Middle Voice, entitled “Massacre in Minnesota”, and ends with “The Last Small Wars”, the final defeat of the Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890 in South Dakota. Andrist regarded the Wounded Knee battle as the final chapter in the conflict of the U.S. government with Native American Indians: “When it was over, the Indian wars of the plains were ended, and with them the long struggle of all American Indians … to preserve some portion of their ancestral lands and tribal ways” (p.1). For the period 1862-1890, Andrist discusses the 1862 Minnesota Sioux uprising, the Sand Creek battle, the battle of Washita, “Custer’s First Stand”, the battle of the Little Big Horn, “Custer’s Last Stand”, and the battle of Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. To what degree did the superior numbers and the industrialization on the part of American settlers play a role in the defeat of the Plains Indians?....
Column: NAIS cannot prevent "Mad Cow" disease Shortly after another "mad cow" was discovered in Alabama, there was a rash of articles in the press citing the event as convincing evidence that the USDA's National Animal Identification System should move forward as quickly as possible. Nowhere did any of the articles mention that the NAIS will do nothing to prevent, control, or even slow the disease. Cow Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), widely known as "Mad Cow Disease," is a chronic, degenerative disease affecting the central nervous system of cattle. BSE takes years to develop in cattle, not days or weeks. Moreover, the disease is not contagious. The USDA says: "It's important to note that [BSE and related diseases] are not communicable diseases - they do not spread easily like viruses." If this disease, promoted as justification for the program, is not contagious, why, then, is it necessary for the USDA to construct this massive program to register every premises that houses any farm animal, tag each animal with an electronic monitoring chip, and track every off-premises movement of every animal through a centralized database? There is no legitimate need for the USDA to launch this massive tracking system. Brand laws, ear tags, and sales records already provide an adequate traceback system that has been used successfully for years. If the goal of the USDA is truly to protect the food supply chain, then the focus should be placed on the packing industry, not on the producer. Domestic producers are already required to produce a health certificate supplied by an authorized veterinarian at the point of sale. The risk occurs in the feedlots and factories where imported animals and animal products may be added. Meat packers may incorporate imported meat products into hamburger and other non-choice cuts and still receive the USDA stamp of approval. So far, the meat industry has been able to block all efforts to label such imported meats with even the country of origin, to say nothing of any health certification....
Paniolo museum exhibit to debut at Aloha week nspired by the creation of the new Kona Heritage Ranch and Store exhibit, last year Uncle Jimmy Duvauchelle approached MR CEO Peter Nicholas about creating a Moloka'i Paniolo Museum to preserve the rich history of Moloka'i's cowboys. "Our ultimate goal is to build a museum dedicated to our ranchers and the Paniolo lifestyle," said Duvauchelle. Now Duvauchelle is envisioning a Moloka'i Paniolo Cultural Center located right behind the arena in Maunaloa, so horse displays can be performed regularly for the center̢۪s visitors. Duvauchelle was worried about the disappearance of Moloka'i's Paniolo culture as lifestyles change on our island. "A lady at the Ala Moana center asked me, 'where you from, Texas?'" Duvauchelle said. "I was offended, I almost fell down." Duevauchelle's plan is to spend the next several months collecting stories and history from Kupunas who are still around. Uncle Harry Masashi attended Thursday's meeting, and it was almost impossible to keep him from sharing amusing anecdotes from his life....
Hopalong Cassidy - Ride Along With This Classic Western Hero On DVD William Boyd struck a chord with American audiences wearing his good guy in black cowboy attire and proudly strutting his stuff as Hopalong Casssidy for TV audiences in this popular 1950s Western show. Already a whopping success in 66 feature films, he brought glory to the small screen entertaining and delighting his fans so much so, that it created a kind of manufacturing frenzy for Hopalong Cassidy dolls, watches, costumes, lunchboxes and even a Hopalong Cassidy amusement park. TV offered a fresh new direction for the cowboy hero and here's your chance to relive those good ole times with this *exclusive* Critics Choice collection of fan-favorite episodes! Just jump right in and bring Hoppy back to life with this awesome first set of 26 TV treasures on 4 DVDs and at a killer price!....
On the Edge of Common Sense: Young immigration marchers showing respect Respeto. The Mexican Americans across the country are marching in the streets in defense of Mexicans who have crossed the border illegally to work in the land of opportunity. Prevalent in this mass demonstration is the number of teenagers caught up in the excitement. One of the issues that rears its logical head is how smart is it for Mexican American school kids, who as a group routinely have the poorest scholastic record and the highest drop out rate, to cut classes? But, that is not what causes my heart to sing. What is flowing from these young people is a recognition and respect for their ancianos, their abuelos, their paisanos, their countrymen....
Sunday, May 07, 2006
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE WESTERNER
I'm a ranch pickup truck
By Julie Carter
I took the online test to find my "true inner vehicle." It was one of those goofy 15 question quizzes that lead to a personality synopsis telling me what kind of "vehicle" I would be if I were a car.
The option wasn't there but should have been. I'm sure I am a ranch pickup.
You know the kind. Not much to look at but it will get you there. It might choke and gasp a little, but it will get you there. It pulls to the left and has a front end alignment problem but it will get you there with a tired right arm.
The fenders don't match, the windows don't work. It's not classy, not elegant, may take a little "herding and handling" to go the right direction, but it'll get you there.
Probably needs some engine work and definitely needs new brakes. The A/C isn't all that good anymore, lots of hot air.
Tough, dependable and functional. The kind that can go through a wreck and look the same as before the wreck. Yes, my inner vehicle is definitely a ranch pickup.
There was a time when driving a pickup wasn't the status symbol it is today. Every ranch woman longed for a car to drive to town. If you were rich, you might even have a Cadillac.
Today the same money will buy you a Cadillac, a single-wide mobile home or a four-door pickup.
Pickups are now called trucks. Back then, a truck was those big things that had the word "semi" in front of it. but we've evolved. They have advertisements that proudly tout the roomy space for five passengers. I remember the days when three adults and four kids rode in a pickup, all in one seat and the guy in the middle did the shifting.
If the radio worked, the driver was in charge of the dial. It was also an opportunity for a conversation. We would actually talk while driving the road. Now the back seat of a pickup affords a view of a television screen with a DVD player and the front seat has a AM/FM radio, tape deck and CD player. No one talks.
Those ads over the past 20 years have been quite effective. People who have never seen a dirt road drive mega-diesel engine four-wheel drive trucks, have them custom detailed, and listen to computers tell them when to fasten their seat belt, change the oil, and fill it with fuel.
The spare tire is now "handily" under the pickup where nobody but a scientist and a linebacker can figure out how to get it off. And walking five miles for help is easier than getting the sissy little complementary jack out from under the seat that is, of course, loaded with groceries, kids, spare parts and a week of accumulated mail.
Then, most certainly in the dark on the side of the road with a flashlight in your teeth, you put that handily engineered rod through a little hole handily located next to the license plate hoping to connect with the handily located crank on the apparatus that handily holds the tire under the truck.
Changing a tire on today's "trucks" has caused more people to lose their religion than anything you would usually associate with sin.
It is a great trip down memory lane to the days when we actually drove 55 mph, had no A/C so the windows were always down and no lights so we had to be home by dark.
The stick shift and lack of power steering precluded the ability to talk on cells phones, put on makeup and check email on a laptop, all while driving.
My inner self that is a ranch pickup is most definitely one of those original models. Almost a collector's item....
Long Riders
Riding to fulfill a dream
By Julie Carter
I just met a man who put his regular life on hold while he followed his dream. I'm old enough to know that is not an easy step for mankind in this day and for most, it never really happens.
Roy Johnson rode his horse through town this week on a 2,000 mile trek that is taking him from Elgin, Texas, to Spokane, Washington. All that ensures his survival is tied to his saddle. For five months he will battle elements, civilization and his own sanity to live the dream of a lifetime.
1,000-mile ride
Long riders, a label given to those that have ridden more than 1,000 continuous miles on a single equestrian journey, reside in dozens of countries around the globe. While the concept is not new, the courage to actually do it is unique.
The inherent bodily perils involved for both the horse and the rider are very real. Meeting Johnson brought a flood of memories of another rider I met a lifetime ago.
As a teen, I was out riding one Sunday on the mountain ranch in Colorado where I grew up. I'd gone arrowhead hunting and was sure I was the only one around for many miles. I wasn't. Down an old two-track road came a man on a horse leading a pack mule.
Things were different in that world. I didn't know I shouldn't so I did.
I struck up a conversation with the man, who was as surprised to see me as I was him. His story fascinated me so much I had him follow me home so Mom could feed him and Dad could hear his tales.
Coast to coast
Jefferson Spivey, now a household name in the long rider circle for his campaign to have trails developed for crossing the nation, his invention of a specially-designed long distance saddle and hundreds of magazine articles and several books, was not yet famous.
Spivey was riding coast to coast on a borrowed Arabian gelding named Mr. Sol.
For whatever reason, his path wandered through the national forest that bordered the ranch where I lived.
He had a non-descript past and an unexciting job history except for his pistol-handling stunts that had landed him some jobs as a Hollywood double in a few B-Westerns, but he had a dream that sparked at the spirit of adventure like flint on dry leaves.
Death defying
He told us about nearly dying on a rocky narrow ledge in the mountains of western Colorado. Following a narrow game trail through a high mountain pass, the granite beneath him began to crumble with only a deep canyon to catch the fall.
The Arabian struggled to stop the backward slide that fed momentum into itself, coming to a halt with one rear foot off the rock ledge. With a life-saving lunge, the horse fought his way back up the trail.
One of the pack mules didn't fare as well. The reality of the danger and the loss of the mule left Spivey shaken and scared. He was humbled knowing that he was alive only because of the remarkable strength and courage of his horse. It was a life changing moment for him and one only he had witnessed.
I never forgot Spivey and only through articles in equestrian magazines did I know he arrived safely in Delaware, a 4,900 mile journey made in seven months.
During the following decades he scored many more long rides including a 3,200 mile ride in 1984 from Calgary, Canada, to El Paso, Texas.
As I watched Roy Johnson ride away yesterday afternoon, I wondered what adventures his journey held for him.
Would he also have a life-changing moment where values are rearranged and priorities slip quickly into their proper order?
Sometimes challenging life is the only thing that breathes life back into us. If I can't grasp the concept of taking the risk, I do certainly admire the courage.
Hats off to the long riders.
© Julie Carter 2006
I'm a ranch pickup truck
By Julie Carter
I took the online test to find my "true inner vehicle." It was one of those goofy 15 question quizzes that lead to a personality synopsis telling me what kind of "vehicle" I would be if I were a car.
The option wasn't there but should have been. I'm sure I am a ranch pickup.
You know the kind. Not much to look at but it will get you there. It might choke and gasp a little, but it will get you there. It pulls to the left and has a front end alignment problem but it will get you there with a tired right arm.
The fenders don't match, the windows don't work. It's not classy, not elegant, may take a little "herding and handling" to go the right direction, but it'll get you there.
Probably needs some engine work and definitely needs new brakes. The A/C isn't all that good anymore, lots of hot air.
Tough, dependable and functional. The kind that can go through a wreck and look the same as before the wreck. Yes, my inner vehicle is definitely a ranch pickup.
There was a time when driving a pickup wasn't the status symbol it is today. Every ranch woman longed for a car to drive to town. If you were rich, you might even have a Cadillac.
Today the same money will buy you a Cadillac, a single-wide mobile home or a four-door pickup.
Pickups are now called trucks. Back then, a truck was those big things that had the word "semi" in front of it. but we've evolved. They have advertisements that proudly tout the roomy space for five passengers. I remember the days when three adults and four kids rode in a pickup, all in one seat and the guy in the middle did the shifting.
If the radio worked, the driver was in charge of the dial. It was also an opportunity for a conversation. We would actually talk while driving the road. Now the back seat of a pickup affords a view of a television screen with a DVD player and the front seat has a AM/FM radio, tape deck and CD player. No one talks.
Those ads over the past 20 years have been quite effective. People who have never seen a dirt road drive mega-diesel engine four-wheel drive trucks, have them custom detailed, and listen to computers tell them when to fasten their seat belt, change the oil, and fill it with fuel.
The spare tire is now "handily" under the pickup where nobody but a scientist and a linebacker can figure out how to get it off. And walking five miles for help is easier than getting the sissy little complementary jack out from under the seat that is, of course, loaded with groceries, kids, spare parts and a week of accumulated mail.
Then, most certainly in the dark on the side of the road with a flashlight in your teeth, you put that handily engineered rod through a little hole handily located next to the license plate hoping to connect with the handily located crank on the apparatus that handily holds the tire under the truck.
Changing a tire on today's "trucks" has caused more people to lose their religion than anything you would usually associate with sin.
It is a great trip down memory lane to the days when we actually drove 55 mph, had no A/C so the windows were always down and no lights so we had to be home by dark.
The stick shift and lack of power steering precluded the ability to talk on cells phones, put on makeup and check email on a laptop, all while driving.
My inner self that is a ranch pickup is most definitely one of those original models. Almost a collector's item....
Long Riders
Riding to fulfill a dream
By Julie Carter
I just met a man who put his regular life on hold while he followed his dream. I'm old enough to know that is not an easy step for mankind in this day and for most, it never really happens.
Roy Johnson rode his horse through town this week on a 2,000 mile trek that is taking him from Elgin, Texas, to Spokane, Washington. All that ensures his survival is tied to his saddle. For five months he will battle elements, civilization and his own sanity to live the dream of a lifetime.
1,000-mile ride
Long riders, a label given to those that have ridden more than 1,000 continuous miles on a single equestrian journey, reside in dozens of countries around the globe. While the concept is not new, the courage to actually do it is unique.
The inherent bodily perils involved for both the horse and the rider are very real. Meeting Johnson brought a flood of memories of another rider I met a lifetime ago.
As a teen, I was out riding one Sunday on the mountain ranch in Colorado where I grew up. I'd gone arrowhead hunting and was sure I was the only one around for many miles. I wasn't. Down an old two-track road came a man on a horse leading a pack mule.
Things were different in that world. I didn't know I shouldn't so I did.
I struck up a conversation with the man, who was as surprised to see me as I was him. His story fascinated me so much I had him follow me home so Mom could feed him and Dad could hear his tales.
Coast to coast
Jefferson Spivey, now a household name in the long rider circle for his campaign to have trails developed for crossing the nation, his invention of a specially-designed long distance saddle and hundreds of magazine articles and several books, was not yet famous.
Spivey was riding coast to coast on a borrowed Arabian gelding named Mr. Sol.
For whatever reason, his path wandered through the national forest that bordered the ranch where I lived.
He had a non-descript past and an unexciting job history except for his pistol-handling stunts that had landed him some jobs as a Hollywood double in a few B-Westerns, but he had a dream that sparked at the spirit of adventure like flint on dry leaves.
Death defying
He told us about nearly dying on a rocky narrow ledge in the mountains of western Colorado. Following a narrow game trail through a high mountain pass, the granite beneath him began to crumble with only a deep canyon to catch the fall.
The Arabian struggled to stop the backward slide that fed momentum into itself, coming to a halt with one rear foot off the rock ledge. With a life-saving lunge, the horse fought his way back up the trail.
One of the pack mules didn't fare as well. The reality of the danger and the loss of the mule left Spivey shaken and scared. He was humbled knowing that he was alive only because of the remarkable strength and courage of his horse. It was a life changing moment for him and one only he had witnessed.
I never forgot Spivey and only through articles in equestrian magazines did I know he arrived safely in Delaware, a 4,900 mile journey made in seven months.
During the following decades he scored many more long rides including a 3,200 mile ride in 1984 from Calgary, Canada, to El Paso, Texas.
As I watched Roy Johnson ride away yesterday afternoon, I wondered what adventures his journey held for him.
Would he also have a life-changing moment where values are rearranged and priorities slip quickly into their proper order?
Sometimes challenging life is the only thing that breathes life back into us. If I can't grasp the concept of taking the risk, I do certainly admire the courage.
Hats off to the long riders.
© Julie Carter 2006
OPINION/COMMENTARY
'Green' Politicians Add to Gas Price Woes
Amid the race between politicians to capitalize on consumer anger at high gas prices, at least one member of Congress, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn), expressed a much-needed perspective on the problem—these same politicians own a share of the blame. During an interview with Larry Kudlow earlier this week about rising gas prices, Rep. Blackburn observed, “If we're going to work toward [energy independence], we’re going to have to do some things differently. Now, I can tell you one of the things that I wish had been done differently is over the past 30 years, we have had environmental extremists driving energy policy in this country, saying no to everything.” Certainly increased demand for oil from the growing Chinese and Indian economies and instability in the Middle East are major pressures on oil prices, but both Republicans and Democrats have added to these pressures by allowing the environmental movement to tie our energy policy in knots. Bowing to environmentalist demands since the 1970s, Congress has blocked oil and gas drilling from sources like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (10.4 billion barrels of oil, according to the U.S. Geological Service) and the Outer Continental Shelf (86 billion barrels of oil, according to the Minerals Management Service). As Cuba works out deals with Canadian, Spanish and Chinese companies to explore for oil as close as 50 miles to Key West, Sen. Mel Martinez (R.-Fla.)—apparently trying to appease the League of Conservation Voters, which has given him a 10% rating—dubbed a proposal by Rep. John Peterson (R.-Pa.) to allow drilling 20 miles off the Florida coast as “crazy.” Sen. Bill Nelson (D.-Fla.) and Rep. Connie Mack (R.-Fla.) also oppose OCS drilling thanks to oil spill hysteria whipped up by the Sierra Club. Environmentalists pressured Congress in 1990 to require “reformulated” gasoline (RFG) supposedly to reduce the formation of ground-level ozone or smog. The RFG process requires use of additives such as ethanol or MTBE. The RFG requirement raised the price of gasoline not only because of the cost of the additives but because different areas of the country require different blends of fuel to address different air quality circumstances. The 17 so-called “boutique” fuels used around the country make the national gasoline supply less fungible, which causes supply bottlenecks. And for all this pain, there appears to be little gain from RFG. A 1999 report from the National Research Council reported that, “the net impact of RFG on ambient ozone concentrations...is a few percent. For this reason, it is difficult to quantify the specific contribution of the RFG program to the apparent downward trend in ozone.”....
How the Energy Bill Boosted Prices at the Pump
Prior to passage of the energy bill, corn-based ethanol enjoyed a number of advantages. Because it has been touted as a domestic and clean-burning fuel additive that can stretch the petroleum-based fuel supply and thus reduce imports, ethanol has for decades received special treatment from Washington. Most significantly, ethanol gets a 50 cent per gallon federal tax credit to help make it competitive with gasoline. Also, tariffs on foreign ethanol keep imports relatively low. Other provisions, such as tax credits for small ethanol producers and assistance to corn farmers, have given ethanol a big advantage in the motor fuels marketplace. Despite the special treatment of ethanol, the ethanol lobby was not happy with the size of the ethanol market, and it persuaded the federal government to mandate ethanol use in the energy bill. The law requires that four billion gallons of ethanol must be added to the fuel supply this year; that number will slowly rise to 7.5 billion gallons in 2012. While the ethanol mandate is good news for Midwestern corn farmers and ethanol producers such agri-business giant Archer Daniels Midland, it is bad news for the driving public. Since the mandate began on January 1st, ethanol has been more expensive than gasoline. Beyond its high price, ethanol also imposes costs in other ways. For example, it is more costly to ship than gasoline, which is especially troublesome now that ethanol use is expanding beyond the industry’s Midwestern base. Ethanol is currently adding several cents to the price at the pump and will likely do more damage in the months and years ahead....
Save Teddy Kennedy’s View
Congress is about to decide whether a developer whom the Senate last year handed the exclusive right to build a 24-square-mile array of 417-foot-high windmills in the middle of the Nantucket Sound—off Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket—should be allowed to proceed. The area’s most famous resident, Sen. Teddy Kennedy (D-Mass.), has teamed up with Alaska’s Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young, both Republicans, to stop it. They’re catching a lot of flak for doing so, but, while it doesn’t happen often, I am forced to the conclusion that this time Kennedy may be right. It is tempting to dismiss Kennedy’s opposition to the windmills as just another example of liberal hypocrisy. He and his neighbors may well be motivated mainly by the thought of anything so tacky being built in their back yards and haven’t expressed much concern with similar projects in other peoples’ neighborhoods. Indeed, Kennedy’s consistent opposition to oil exploration and nuclear power has diverted scarce resources to the development of dozens of even more exotic alternative-energy schemes over the years. On the other hand, while I’ve never opposed people tilting at or even building windmills on their own time and using their own money, I’m continually appalled by the billions of dollars politicians have wrung from taxpayers for such schemes. And it turns out that this one could cost taxpayers plenty. So if Kennedy and his buddies kill it, they’ll be doing all of us a favor and in the process could experience a “teaching moment” that might just convince them it’s time to rethink some of their long-held positions. Cape Wind, the brainchild of Massachusetts millionaire Jim Gordon, will cost over a billion dollars to build, produce an average of 170 megawatts of electricity, or barely 1 percent of New England’s electricity needs, and, if everything goes right, save the average consumer as much as a dime a month. However, since he will build it in the middle of the area’s most fertile fishing grounds and smack up against extremely busy shipping lanes, it will deprive commercial fishermen of their livelihood, create real hazards to sport and commercial vessels transiting the area, disrupt the radar on which the thousands of aircraft that pass through the area depend and, oh yes, ruin the view from the Kennedy compound....
PUBLIC INTEREST LAW FIRM FILES IN REHEARING OF ROAD CASE
A nonprofit, public interest law firm with a history of defending property owners who seek to protect their property from adverse action by the United States today filed a friend of the court brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF) advised the court, as it prepares for rehearing en banc of a case decided earlier by a three-judge panel, that environmental groups may not intervene as parties in lawsuits filed against the United States to determine who owns disputed property. Earlier, MSLF had urged the Tenth Circuit to grant a rehearing after the panel ruled environmental groups, including the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), could be parties in a lawsuit filed by Utah’s San Juan County regarding a road in the Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah. By a vote of 2-1, the panel allowed SUWA to intervene even though it admits it does not hold a property interest in the road but has only an interest in how the road is managed. “Congress allows property owners to sue the United States under the Quiet Title Act to get their property back from the federal government,” said William Perry Pendley, MSLF president and chief legal officer. “However, only two parties are allowed in those lawsuits: the U.S. and the property owner.” On June 14, 2004, San Juan County filed a Quiet Title Act lawsuit arguing that it owns an R.S. 2477 interest in Salt Creek Road, which provides public access to Angel Arch. When environmental groups asked to intervene in the litigation, a Utah federal district court ruled, on October 29, 2004, that, because they claimed no interest in the road, they could not intervene. On August 31, 2005, a Tenth Circuit panel held the groups were interested in the proceedings due to their interest in how the road would be managed and that interest allowed them to intervene. One Tenth Circuit judge dissented. On October 14, 2005, San Juan County filed for a rehearing en banc. On November 30, 2005, Mountain States Legal Foundation filed a friend of the court (amicus curiae) brief arguing that SUWA does not have “an interest relating to the property” at issue in San Juan County’s Quiet Title Act case and thus may not intervene. In fact, several Tenth Circuit rulings have rejected claims similar to those of SUWA’s interest in the management of the road as not an interest sufficient for intervention. On February 24, 2006, the Tenth Circuit granted San Juan County’s petition for rehearing....
Eminent Dominion
You’re at home and the doorbell rings. Two gentlemen are there to greet you, both in uniform. Their grooming is impeccable enough to make you insecure about yours. The head man shows you government authorization and asks to be taken to your personal library. Once there, they go through the titles of your books as you watch: one reading the titles out, the other entering them into a laptop. At the end of the inspection, as you’re frozen into acting like you’re not in your own home, some of the books are taken from your shelves. "Atlas Shrugged? I’m doing you a favor: you’ll read it too many times anyway. Same thing goes for the rest of the Rand.... Oh, you like that kind of economics? Well, it’s got to go too. Well, well – the scholar’s edition! Nice binding..... Yes, even Capitalism and Freedom, though it was iffy for a time there. Same thing with the Chomsky, even if he didn’t mind being the nutcase at times.... Oh! That’s Milton Friedman’s son, isn’t it? A pity he had to be so prodigal..." Lest you think that this is merely an updated version of Fahrenheit 451’s dark vision, consider this ending: "Now...as authorized by law, I am entitled to disburse you $280 for all of these books which are now being sold to the Government of the United States. Once you accept these funds as just compensation for the property you have turned over, they are now the property of the United States Government. What we do with them subsequently is up to us." Yes, Congress does have this power now, even though it is largely confined to real property, not personal property as yet. It’s called eminent domain, and it has been used to confiscate personal property in the past. Refusing to sell your gold coins to the U.S. government back in 1933 made you liable for a felony conviction. The law used to enforce the sale was the Emergency Banking Relief Act of 1933, and it was deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court. The EBR Act extended powers under the Trading With The Enemy Act to times of "national emergency," as declared by the President, which President Roosevelt did in Executive Order 6260. The ultimate source of the authority for it, though, is in the Fifth Article of Amendment in the United States Constitution: "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Note that the Fifth Amendment makes no distinction between real and personal property. This means: if the U.S. government can forcibly buy real property from U.S. citizens, then it can buy personal property also. Your real estate is just as vulnerable to a taking as your books, and vice versa. All it takes for eminent domain to be justified for a taking of personal property is a credible "public use" for it....
Chicagoans Force-Fed Animal Rights Nonsense
Ducking the opportunity to stand up to animal-rights extremists, the Chicago City Council voted on Wednesday to outlaw the sale of the delicacy foie gras. The New York Daily News reported that its own city's council had nothing but mockery for the decision ("I thought we were out of our minds, so I thank Chicago for what they did because it makes our Council look extra ordinary," said one New York councilman), and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had some choice words for the vote against consumer freedom: Someone talks about foie gras this week. What's next week? What's on your menu ... You tell me what's next week we're gonna decide what you should eat and what you should do. Rick Tramonto, executive chef of one of the restaurants affected by the ban, told The New York Times: "Government shouldn't be dictating what we eat ... It's just not right." Gene Bauston of the animal-rights activist group Farm Sanctuary, on the other hand, was clearly pleased at having goosed meat-eaters, promising that the ban's effects "will be felt in other parts of the country." He's right. Beyond the violence already done to restaurants (foie gras seems to make some animal-rights folks a little smashy), activists are more than willing to use the precedent set in Chicago to do violence to our liberties in the name of their pet projects (including restrictions on pet ownership)....
'Green' Politicians Add to Gas Price Woes
Amid the race between politicians to capitalize on consumer anger at high gas prices, at least one member of Congress, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn), expressed a much-needed perspective on the problem—these same politicians own a share of the blame. During an interview with Larry Kudlow earlier this week about rising gas prices, Rep. Blackburn observed, “If we're going to work toward [energy independence], we’re going to have to do some things differently. Now, I can tell you one of the things that I wish had been done differently is over the past 30 years, we have had environmental extremists driving energy policy in this country, saying no to everything.” Certainly increased demand for oil from the growing Chinese and Indian economies and instability in the Middle East are major pressures on oil prices, but both Republicans and Democrats have added to these pressures by allowing the environmental movement to tie our energy policy in knots. Bowing to environmentalist demands since the 1970s, Congress has blocked oil and gas drilling from sources like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (10.4 billion barrels of oil, according to the U.S. Geological Service) and the Outer Continental Shelf (86 billion barrels of oil, according to the Minerals Management Service). As Cuba works out deals with Canadian, Spanish and Chinese companies to explore for oil as close as 50 miles to Key West, Sen. Mel Martinez (R.-Fla.)—apparently trying to appease the League of Conservation Voters, which has given him a 10% rating—dubbed a proposal by Rep. John Peterson (R.-Pa.) to allow drilling 20 miles off the Florida coast as “crazy.” Sen. Bill Nelson (D.-Fla.) and Rep. Connie Mack (R.-Fla.) also oppose OCS drilling thanks to oil spill hysteria whipped up by the Sierra Club. Environmentalists pressured Congress in 1990 to require “reformulated” gasoline (RFG) supposedly to reduce the formation of ground-level ozone or smog. The RFG process requires use of additives such as ethanol or MTBE. The RFG requirement raised the price of gasoline not only because of the cost of the additives but because different areas of the country require different blends of fuel to address different air quality circumstances. The 17 so-called “boutique” fuels used around the country make the national gasoline supply less fungible, which causes supply bottlenecks. And for all this pain, there appears to be little gain from RFG. A 1999 report from the National Research Council reported that, “the net impact of RFG on ambient ozone concentrations...is a few percent. For this reason, it is difficult to quantify the specific contribution of the RFG program to the apparent downward trend in ozone.”....
How the Energy Bill Boosted Prices at the Pump
Prior to passage of the energy bill, corn-based ethanol enjoyed a number of advantages. Because it has been touted as a domestic and clean-burning fuel additive that can stretch the petroleum-based fuel supply and thus reduce imports, ethanol has for decades received special treatment from Washington. Most significantly, ethanol gets a 50 cent per gallon federal tax credit to help make it competitive with gasoline. Also, tariffs on foreign ethanol keep imports relatively low. Other provisions, such as tax credits for small ethanol producers and assistance to corn farmers, have given ethanol a big advantage in the motor fuels marketplace. Despite the special treatment of ethanol, the ethanol lobby was not happy with the size of the ethanol market, and it persuaded the federal government to mandate ethanol use in the energy bill. The law requires that four billion gallons of ethanol must be added to the fuel supply this year; that number will slowly rise to 7.5 billion gallons in 2012. While the ethanol mandate is good news for Midwestern corn farmers and ethanol producers such agri-business giant Archer Daniels Midland, it is bad news for the driving public. Since the mandate began on January 1st, ethanol has been more expensive than gasoline. Beyond its high price, ethanol also imposes costs in other ways. For example, it is more costly to ship than gasoline, which is especially troublesome now that ethanol use is expanding beyond the industry’s Midwestern base. Ethanol is currently adding several cents to the price at the pump and will likely do more damage in the months and years ahead....
Save Teddy Kennedy’s View
Congress is about to decide whether a developer whom the Senate last year handed the exclusive right to build a 24-square-mile array of 417-foot-high windmills in the middle of the Nantucket Sound—off Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket—should be allowed to proceed. The area’s most famous resident, Sen. Teddy Kennedy (D-Mass.), has teamed up with Alaska’s Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young, both Republicans, to stop it. They’re catching a lot of flak for doing so, but, while it doesn’t happen often, I am forced to the conclusion that this time Kennedy may be right. It is tempting to dismiss Kennedy’s opposition to the windmills as just another example of liberal hypocrisy. He and his neighbors may well be motivated mainly by the thought of anything so tacky being built in their back yards and haven’t expressed much concern with similar projects in other peoples’ neighborhoods. Indeed, Kennedy’s consistent opposition to oil exploration and nuclear power has diverted scarce resources to the development of dozens of even more exotic alternative-energy schemes over the years. On the other hand, while I’ve never opposed people tilting at or even building windmills on their own time and using their own money, I’m continually appalled by the billions of dollars politicians have wrung from taxpayers for such schemes. And it turns out that this one could cost taxpayers plenty. So if Kennedy and his buddies kill it, they’ll be doing all of us a favor and in the process could experience a “teaching moment” that might just convince them it’s time to rethink some of their long-held positions. Cape Wind, the brainchild of Massachusetts millionaire Jim Gordon, will cost over a billion dollars to build, produce an average of 170 megawatts of electricity, or barely 1 percent of New England’s electricity needs, and, if everything goes right, save the average consumer as much as a dime a month. However, since he will build it in the middle of the area’s most fertile fishing grounds and smack up against extremely busy shipping lanes, it will deprive commercial fishermen of their livelihood, create real hazards to sport and commercial vessels transiting the area, disrupt the radar on which the thousands of aircraft that pass through the area depend and, oh yes, ruin the view from the Kennedy compound....
PUBLIC INTEREST LAW FIRM FILES IN REHEARING OF ROAD CASE
A nonprofit, public interest law firm with a history of defending property owners who seek to protect their property from adverse action by the United States today filed a friend of the court brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF) advised the court, as it prepares for rehearing en banc of a case decided earlier by a three-judge panel, that environmental groups may not intervene as parties in lawsuits filed against the United States to determine who owns disputed property. Earlier, MSLF had urged the Tenth Circuit to grant a rehearing after the panel ruled environmental groups, including the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), could be parties in a lawsuit filed by Utah’s San Juan County regarding a road in the Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah. By a vote of 2-1, the panel allowed SUWA to intervene even though it admits it does not hold a property interest in the road but has only an interest in how the road is managed. “Congress allows property owners to sue the United States under the Quiet Title Act to get their property back from the federal government,” said William Perry Pendley, MSLF president and chief legal officer. “However, only two parties are allowed in those lawsuits: the U.S. and the property owner.” On June 14, 2004, San Juan County filed a Quiet Title Act lawsuit arguing that it owns an R.S. 2477 interest in Salt Creek Road, which provides public access to Angel Arch. When environmental groups asked to intervene in the litigation, a Utah federal district court ruled, on October 29, 2004, that, because they claimed no interest in the road, they could not intervene. On August 31, 2005, a Tenth Circuit panel held the groups were interested in the proceedings due to their interest in how the road would be managed and that interest allowed them to intervene. One Tenth Circuit judge dissented. On October 14, 2005, San Juan County filed for a rehearing en banc. On November 30, 2005, Mountain States Legal Foundation filed a friend of the court (amicus curiae) brief arguing that SUWA does not have “an interest relating to the property” at issue in San Juan County’s Quiet Title Act case and thus may not intervene. In fact, several Tenth Circuit rulings have rejected claims similar to those of SUWA’s interest in the management of the road as not an interest sufficient for intervention. On February 24, 2006, the Tenth Circuit granted San Juan County’s petition for rehearing....
Eminent Dominion
You’re at home and the doorbell rings. Two gentlemen are there to greet you, both in uniform. Their grooming is impeccable enough to make you insecure about yours. The head man shows you government authorization and asks to be taken to your personal library. Once there, they go through the titles of your books as you watch: one reading the titles out, the other entering them into a laptop. At the end of the inspection, as you’re frozen into acting like you’re not in your own home, some of the books are taken from your shelves. "Atlas Shrugged? I’m doing you a favor: you’ll read it too many times anyway. Same thing goes for the rest of the Rand.... Oh, you like that kind of economics? Well, it’s got to go too. Well, well – the scholar’s edition! Nice binding..... Yes, even Capitalism and Freedom, though it was iffy for a time there. Same thing with the Chomsky, even if he didn’t mind being the nutcase at times.... Oh! That’s Milton Friedman’s son, isn’t it? A pity he had to be so prodigal..." Lest you think that this is merely an updated version of Fahrenheit 451’s dark vision, consider this ending: "Now...as authorized by law, I am entitled to disburse you $280 for all of these books which are now being sold to the Government of the United States. Once you accept these funds as just compensation for the property you have turned over, they are now the property of the United States Government. What we do with them subsequently is up to us." Yes, Congress does have this power now, even though it is largely confined to real property, not personal property as yet. It’s called eminent domain, and it has been used to confiscate personal property in the past. Refusing to sell your gold coins to the U.S. government back in 1933 made you liable for a felony conviction. The law used to enforce the sale was the Emergency Banking Relief Act of 1933, and it was deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court. The EBR Act extended powers under the Trading With The Enemy Act to times of "national emergency," as declared by the President, which President Roosevelt did in Executive Order 6260. The ultimate source of the authority for it, though, is in the Fifth Article of Amendment in the United States Constitution: "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Note that the Fifth Amendment makes no distinction between real and personal property. This means: if the U.S. government can forcibly buy real property from U.S. citizens, then it can buy personal property also. Your real estate is just as vulnerable to a taking as your books, and vice versa. All it takes for eminent domain to be justified for a taking of personal property is a credible "public use" for it....
Chicagoans Force-Fed Animal Rights Nonsense
Ducking the opportunity to stand up to animal-rights extremists, the Chicago City Council voted on Wednesday to outlaw the sale of the delicacy foie gras. The New York Daily News reported that its own city's council had nothing but mockery for the decision ("I thought we were out of our minds, so I thank Chicago for what they did because it makes our Council look extra ordinary," said one New York councilman), and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had some choice words for the vote against consumer freedom: Someone talks about foie gras this week. What's next week? What's on your menu ... You tell me what's next week we're gonna decide what you should eat and what you should do. Rick Tramonto, executive chef of one of the restaurants affected by the ban, told The New York Times: "Government shouldn't be dictating what we eat ... It's just not right." Gene Bauston of the animal-rights activist group Farm Sanctuary, on the other hand, was clearly pleased at having goosed meat-eaters, promising that the ban's effects "will be felt in other parts of the country." He's right. Beyond the violence already done to restaurants (foie gras seems to make some animal-rights folks a little smashy), activists are more than willing to use the precedent set in Chicago to do violence to our liberties in the name of their pet projects (including restrictions on pet ownership)....
Friday, May 05, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
Interior pick calls land sale bad idea President Bush's plan to sell off tens of thousands of acres of federal lands in the West is in deep trouble, even drawing opposition from his choice to head the Interior Department. Interior Secretary nominee Dirk Kempthorne, governor of Idaho, came out against an administration plan to sell Bureau of Land Management land to help balance the budget during his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday. The administration planned to sell $1 billion in Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land, but a House budget committee rejected the idea Thursday. Opposition from Kempthorne is yet another blow to a plan that has drawn bipartisan fire and has opponents declaring it dead on arrival....
Interior Nominee Faces a Handful of Holdouts Interior Secretary nominee Dirk Kempthorne appeared headed for a smooth confirmation process Thursday except for a single potential stumbling block: energy. Energy questions dominated a Senate hearing on the Idaho governor's appointment, and at least two senators have threatened to delay his confirmation pending resolution of gas and oil drilling issues in the Gulf of Mexico. Before then, however, Sens. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) have threatened to delay Kempthorne's nomination over different — though related — concerns over gas and oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Nelson is concerned over a bipartisan proposal by Sens. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), the chairman and ranking minority member, respectively, of the Energy Committee, to open for drilling 4 million acres of ocean floor off Florida's coast known as Lease Sale 181. Nelson and Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) want to shrink the size of the drilling area. Landrieu is seeking to have more revenue from offshore oil drilling — including any new projects in Lease Sale 181 — returned to states rather than the federal government....
A cat attack? Ashton rancher Richard Ritz said he discovered the wounds on his white quarter horse early Monday morning. She came gingerly to the oat bucket to feed when he noticed the puncture under her right front leg. He thought perhaps she had caught herself somewhere in the corral, but hers is an all steel corral. There are no wires on which to catch herself. Then Ritz saw the other wounds. Punctures on her hind quarters, shoulder and back. Mauling on her neck and mane all matted with blood and mud. Wounds bigger than a dinner plate on Molly's side. "Something had to be big enough to get up high on her," Ritz said patting the eight-year-old mare's puncture-laden neck. Ritz said he thinks that something was a mountain lion. "It's possible," said St. Paul veterinarian Dan Nielsen, who has been treating Molly. "The wounds are on the sides and neck and show up everywhere. I've never seen anything like it."....
EPA to citizens: Frack you Susan Haire, a former elementary teacher who ranches on a small scale, has lived atop one of the surrounding mesas for nearly a decade. But she says the landscape has been turned against her. When she drives down this stretch of highway, her nose bleeds, her eyes burn, and her head pounds. She's taken to wearing a respirator, even in the car. Haire's doctor blames her health problems on the scenery's relatively recent addition: 600 natural gas wells, drilled by oil companies over the past two years. Every few feet, 150-foot-tall drill rigs, graced with American flags, rise upward into the sky. Compressor stations, banks of rectangular huts with five-foot-diameter fans, sit back from the road and pump the gas into underground pipelines. Scientists and environmentalists say the health hazards of the natural gas wells stem not only from air pollution but "fracking fluid," a mixture of carcinogenic chemicals, used in many of them. Laura Amos, 43, an outfitter who lives 20 miles from Haire, recently developed a tumor in her adrenal gland, which she blames on her exposure to the chemicals. Fracking or hydraulic fracturing is a half century-old process in which a gas company injects water, sand and the chemicals into the wells. Developed by Halliburton, the corporation formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, fracking loosens the rock and maximizes the flow of gas to the surface. At least 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas lie in the tight sand and coal bed formations below Garfield County, according to gas companies and industry geologists. Over the next eight years, energy companies expect to build more than 10,000 additional wells in the county. The most serious problems may stem from fracking. The chemicals pumped into the wells to aid the flow of gas to the surface include known carcinogens such as benzene, naphthalene, arsenic and lead. Several chemicals that may be injected can be lethal at levels as low as 0.1 part per million, according to the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. Up to 40 percent of the fracturing fluids remain in the formation, according to studies conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency and the oil and gas industry; that means that fluids such as diesel and benzene may seep into the surrounding soil, groundwater, and water wells. The wastewater that the industry recaptures after the well hole is drilled often sits in open evaporation pits for upward of a year. Because so many of the chemicals used in the fluid are proprietary, the industry isn't required to disclose their contents or ratios of concentration....
Churches pushing for wilderness In December, the National Council of Churches announced its platform for the year by saying, "Wilderness is one of earth's most precious and most threatened assets, and the call to preserve it will be among the National Council of Churches USA Eco-Justice Program's top issues for 2006." The NCC Public Lands Stewardship Initiative announced it plans to focus on "Wilderness and Wild Landscapes" for its second year and conduct activities focused on the importance of wilderness in Christianity and other faith traditions. "Wilderness was central to the spiritual journeys of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad and in the creation stories of many cultures," said .the Rev. Bob Edgar, NCC General Secretary. "Today public lands are important to many of us as a venue for peaceful reflection and reconnecting with the Creator." "Wild lands are also the connective tissue that holds together the glorious web of life by providing space for wildlife and undisturbed natural cycles," said Christine Hoekenga, NCC Lands Specialist. "But God's gift of wilderness is increasingly threatened by our swelling cities, growing highways, and increasing demand for resources like oil, gas, timber, and minerals. In light of this, we are called to remember and celebrate our Biblical heritage and examine our modern relationships to wilderness."....
Lawyer: Agents tricked firefighter Lawyers for the former commander of an elite wildfire team are asking a judge to suppress two signed statements the firefighter gave to federal investigators last year, one admitting he started two 2004 forest fires. Van Bateman once headed one of the nation's top wildfire teams, helping suppress the Rodeo-Chediski Fire, Arizona's largest wildfire ever. After the 9/11 attacks, he and his incident management team also assisted in recovery operations at the World Trade Center. But now he's trying to prove his innocence of charges that he set two fires in the Coconino National Forest in 2004. A federal grand jury indicted him last November on two counts of setting timber on fire, punishable by up to five years in prison, and two counts of arson on public lands, which could draw a sentence of up to 20 years. In their motion to suppress, Bateman's lawyers argue that Bateman was not told that he could leave an interview with two special agents with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's office of inspector general or that he could have a lawyer present. They said Bateman's statements were involuntary and that he was not warned of his Miranda rights. For both reasons, they contend, the statements are inadmissible....
Arivaca blaze started as immigrants' signal fire A wildland fire burning some 200 acres near Arivaca was started by two illegal immigrants, federal authorities said this morning.
The men started two fires, one a warming fire and the other a signal fire to seek help because one of the men was injured, authorities said. The two were taken into custody, questioned, and voluntarily returned to Mexico, federal officials said. The U.S. Attorney's Office declined to prosecute the men, officials said. The men were returned to Mexico Wednesday night, Border Patrol Agent Sean King said. A Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge employee on his way to work about 7 a.m. Wednesday spotted and reported the fire and Border Patrol agents arriving first at the fire found the two immigrants, one with a sprained ankle, said Dean McAllister, the Coronado's fire management officer.
Project to poison fish in lakes goes forward Plans to poison thousands of fish in 21 Montana lakes and then stock them with westslope cutthroat trout have final approval, and the work, still disputed by some state commissioners, is tentatively scheduled to start this fall. The project is meant to remove hybrid trout from the western Montana lakes, nearly half of them in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Genetically pure westslope cutthroat, the state fish, have been reduced to about 9 percent of their historic range and are threatened by hybrids, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks said. Westslope cutthroat are classified as a "species of special concern" in Montana, and state officials say they want to prevent the fish from requiring protection under the federal Endangered Species Act. Jim Satterfield Jr., regional administrator for Fish, Wildlife and Parks in Kalispell, announced Thursday that he has signed the agency's decision supporting the 10-year project in the South Fork Flathead River area....
Ethics group that targeted DeLay now seeks Pombo The same Washington-based interest group that convinced a Texas congressman to file an ethics complaint against former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is hoping for similar help with a complaint against Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group allied with national Democrats, released a statement Thursday calling for a lawmaker to file its complaint with the House Ethics Committee. Outsiders are not allowed to file complaints with the committee; only members can do so. Pombo brushed off the complaint, calling it election-season partisan politics....
The Border's Pending Fight A showdown looms here, along this innocuous-looking stretch of chaparral near Campo in eastern San Diego County. On this untamed land, where mountain lions still roam, a potentially litigious fight is brewing over a plan to replace the rusty border fence with an impermeable barrier a football field wide. Congress is considering immigration reform legislation that could replace the lone barrier here with two 15-foot tall fences separated by a gravel road for Border Patrol vehicles. And thanks to a law enacted last year, the federal government can build the new barrier wherever it wants without considering its environmental impacts. Near Campo, the barrier could sever migratory routes as old as the land itself. Some are looking to the sage-smelling scrubland as the next battle in the debate between environmentalists and fence proponents....
Team to develop spotted owl recovery plan The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has formed a 12-member team to develop a recovery plan for the threatened northern spotted owl, which is protected under the Endangered Species Act. Members represent state and federal agencies and stakeholder groups and people with knowledge of forest management and northern spotted owl biology. A final plan is to be made public by November 2007 after a peer review. Dave Wesley, the service's Pacific Regions Deputy Director, will lead the team, which is to begin meeting this month. The owl was listed as threatened in 1990 and its critical habitat was designated in 1992, closing off vast tracts of federal forests to logging and plunging some timber-dependent regions into an economic slump. The designation led to an 80 percent cutback on logging in national forests and restrictions on private timberlands....
Oil drilling near Capitol Reef draws protest The National Park Service filed objections to federal plans for oil and gas drilling alongside Capitol Reef National Park, saying the rigs would spoil landscape views and bring machinery noise, dust and lights to a backcountry prized for its solitude. Albert J. Hendricks, Capitol Reef's superintendent, said the proposed drilling parcels - a cluster of 18, with some touching the park's northern boundary - also would fall within view of a remote corner of the park awaiting wilderness designation. Hendricks filed a three-page memo with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, recommending no rigs be allowed on three drilling parcels that touch the park's boundary. He took no position on the 15 other, adjoining parcels, except to express misgivings and point out the region's dirt roads can't support heavy trucks. His objections surfaced as other groups filed challenges to some of the 440,000 acres the BLM plans to put up for lease Tuesday in the largest government auction ever held in Utah for oil and gas drilling....
Eco-kids take on corporate scum to save the owls Pancakes or owls? For three middle-schoolers in the fictional Florida town of Coconut Cove, nature always trumps tummy. They give a hoot, which is why these teenage eco-warriors fight the developers clearing an owl habitat to build yet another Mother Paula's All-American Pancake House. In this installment of Smart Kids, Foolish Franchisers, the fight isn't fair, but it sure is funny. Based on the charming young-adult novel by Florida bard Carl Hiaasen, Hoot is a pleasant diversion on the order of a gloriously photographed after-school special. It boasts original songs from Sunshine State troubadour Jimmy Buffett, who also produced the film and has a small role as a laid-back marine-biology teacher....
$4 billion for farmers and ranchers passes Senate Legislation that would provide $4 billion in emergency disaster assistance for farmers and ranchers passed the Senate on Thursday, but the bill faces opposition, including a veto threat from President Bush. The money was added to a massive spending bill designed to pay for the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina. The Bush administration said last week that many crops had record or near-record production last year, and that the proposed level of assistance is "excessive." The bill would pay farmers and ranchers around the country for recent losses due to drought, flooding, disease and other disasters. It also would give many farmers an increase on their current federal subsidy check because of higher energy expenses. National Farmers Union President Tom Buis said the money is badly needed in farm country....
Argentina's Exporters Worried About Beef Stuck At Ports Argentine exporters are growing increasingly worried about the fate of at least 7,000 metric tons of beef exports that are being held by customs officials at local ports, said Pablo Kiryluk, a spokesman for the Argentine Beef Consortium, which represents Argentina's leading beef exporters. "There are about 350 containers beef that are stuck in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, waiting to be shipped to Europe," he said. "Each container has 20-22 tons of beef but they can't be shipped because (Argentine) President (Nestor) Kirchner has made a decision to prevent them from being exported." The containers, which have been stuck for almost three weeks, hold about $55 million of processed, frozen and fresh beef, Kiryluk said. "There is no law that is stopping the meat from being shipped," he said. "It's not even legal to hold the beef, so this is quite problematic. The consequences are terrible for the beef industry."....
A bullet in the back Some people insist the western isn't dead. It's true one seems to come out every couple of years, but they tend to be anything but classic westerns: mad, special-effects sprees such as Wild Wild West, or stories of gay love, or displays of actorly narcissism. And, with the exception of Brokeback Mountain, they are usually unsuccessful. I recently came across a couple of photographs that made me think about this genre, which has, to all intents and purposes, died, and about what killed it. One of the photos was taken on the set of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in Mexico, in 1972. It shows several of the cast and crew, including James Coburn and Harry Dean Stanton, carrying the director, Sam Peckinpah, on a hospital stretcher. One crew member is walking beside the prostrate Peckinpah, holding up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. A drip feed runs from the bottle to Peckinpah's mouth....
Interior pick calls land sale bad idea President Bush's plan to sell off tens of thousands of acres of federal lands in the West is in deep trouble, even drawing opposition from his choice to head the Interior Department. Interior Secretary nominee Dirk Kempthorne, governor of Idaho, came out against an administration plan to sell Bureau of Land Management land to help balance the budget during his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday. The administration planned to sell $1 billion in Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land, but a House budget committee rejected the idea Thursday. Opposition from Kempthorne is yet another blow to a plan that has drawn bipartisan fire and has opponents declaring it dead on arrival....
Interior Nominee Faces a Handful of Holdouts Interior Secretary nominee Dirk Kempthorne appeared headed for a smooth confirmation process Thursday except for a single potential stumbling block: energy. Energy questions dominated a Senate hearing on the Idaho governor's appointment, and at least two senators have threatened to delay his confirmation pending resolution of gas and oil drilling issues in the Gulf of Mexico. Before then, however, Sens. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) have threatened to delay Kempthorne's nomination over different — though related — concerns over gas and oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Nelson is concerned over a bipartisan proposal by Sens. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), the chairman and ranking minority member, respectively, of the Energy Committee, to open for drilling 4 million acres of ocean floor off Florida's coast known as Lease Sale 181. Nelson and Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) want to shrink the size of the drilling area. Landrieu is seeking to have more revenue from offshore oil drilling — including any new projects in Lease Sale 181 — returned to states rather than the federal government....
A cat attack? Ashton rancher Richard Ritz said he discovered the wounds on his white quarter horse early Monday morning. She came gingerly to the oat bucket to feed when he noticed the puncture under her right front leg. He thought perhaps she had caught herself somewhere in the corral, but hers is an all steel corral. There are no wires on which to catch herself. Then Ritz saw the other wounds. Punctures on her hind quarters, shoulder and back. Mauling on her neck and mane all matted with blood and mud. Wounds bigger than a dinner plate on Molly's side. "Something had to be big enough to get up high on her," Ritz said patting the eight-year-old mare's puncture-laden neck. Ritz said he thinks that something was a mountain lion. "It's possible," said St. Paul veterinarian Dan Nielsen, who has been treating Molly. "The wounds are on the sides and neck and show up everywhere. I've never seen anything like it."....
EPA to citizens: Frack you Susan Haire, a former elementary teacher who ranches on a small scale, has lived atop one of the surrounding mesas for nearly a decade. But she says the landscape has been turned against her. When she drives down this stretch of highway, her nose bleeds, her eyes burn, and her head pounds. She's taken to wearing a respirator, even in the car. Haire's doctor blames her health problems on the scenery's relatively recent addition: 600 natural gas wells, drilled by oil companies over the past two years. Every few feet, 150-foot-tall drill rigs, graced with American flags, rise upward into the sky. Compressor stations, banks of rectangular huts with five-foot-diameter fans, sit back from the road and pump the gas into underground pipelines. Scientists and environmentalists say the health hazards of the natural gas wells stem not only from air pollution but "fracking fluid," a mixture of carcinogenic chemicals, used in many of them. Laura Amos, 43, an outfitter who lives 20 miles from Haire, recently developed a tumor in her adrenal gland, which she blames on her exposure to the chemicals. Fracking or hydraulic fracturing is a half century-old process in which a gas company injects water, sand and the chemicals into the wells. Developed by Halliburton, the corporation formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, fracking loosens the rock and maximizes the flow of gas to the surface. At least 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas lie in the tight sand and coal bed formations below Garfield County, according to gas companies and industry geologists. Over the next eight years, energy companies expect to build more than 10,000 additional wells in the county. The most serious problems may stem from fracking. The chemicals pumped into the wells to aid the flow of gas to the surface include known carcinogens such as benzene, naphthalene, arsenic and lead. Several chemicals that may be injected can be lethal at levels as low as 0.1 part per million, according to the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. Up to 40 percent of the fracturing fluids remain in the formation, according to studies conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency and the oil and gas industry; that means that fluids such as diesel and benzene may seep into the surrounding soil, groundwater, and water wells. The wastewater that the industry recaptures after the well hole is drilled often sits in open evaporation pits for upward of a year. Because so many of the chemicals used in the fluid are proprietary, the industry isn't required to disclose their contents or ratios of concentration....
Churches pushing for wilderness In December, the National Council of Churches announced its platform for the year by saying, "Wilderness is one of earth's most precious and most threatened assets, and the call to preserve it will be among the National Council of Churches USA Eco-Justice Program's top issues for 2006." The NCC Public Lands Stewardship Initiative announced it plans to focus on "Wilderness and Wild Landscapes" for its second year and conduct activities focused on the importance of wilderness in Christianity and other faith traditions. "Wilderness was central to the spiritual journeys of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad and in the creation stories of many cultures," said .the Rev. Bob Edgar, NCC General Secretary. "Today public lands are important to many of us as a venue for peaceful reflection and reconnecting with the Creator." "Wild lands are also the connective tissue that holds together the glorious web of life by providing space for wildlife and undisturbed natural cycles," said Christine Hoekenga, NCC Lands Specialist. "But God's gift of wilderness is increasingly threatened by our swelling cities, growing highways, and increasing demand for resources like oil, gas, timber, and minerals. In light of this, we are called to remember and celebrate our Biblical heritage and examine our modern relationships to wilderness."....
Lawyer: Agents tricked firefighter Lawyers for the former commander of an elite wildfire team are asking a judge to suppress two signed statements the firefighter gave to federal investigators last year, one admitting he started two 2004 forest fires. Van Bateman once headed one of the nation's top wildfire teams, helping suppress the Rodeo-Chediski Fire, Arizona's largest wildfire ever. After the 9/11 attacks, he and his incident management team also assisted in recovery operations at the World Trade Center. But now he's trying to prove his innocence of charges that he set two fires in the Coconino National Forest in 2004. A federal grand jury indicted him last November on two counts of setting timber on fire, punishable by up to five years in prison, and two counts of arson on public lands, which could draw a sentence of up to 20 years. In their motion to suppress, Bateman's lawyers argue that Bateman was not told that he could leave an interview with two special agents with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's office of inspector general or that he could have a lawyer present. They said Bateman's statements were involuntary and that he was not warned of his Miranda rights. For both reasons, they contend, the statements are inadmissible....
Arivaca blaze started as immigrants' signal fire A wildland fire burning some 200 acres near Arivaca was started by two illegal immigrants, federal authorities said this morning.
The men started two fires, one a warming fire and the other a signal fire to seek help because one of the men was injured, authorities said. The two were taken into custody, questioned, and voluntarily returned to Mexico, federal officials said. The U.S. Attorney's Office declined to prosecute the men, officials said. The men were returned to Mexico Wednesday night, Border Patrol Agent Sean King said. A Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge employee on his way to work about 7 a.m. Wednesday spotted and reported the fire and Border Patrol agents arriving first at the fire found the two immigrants, one with a sprained ankle, said Dean McAllister, the Coronado's fire management officer.
Project to poison fish in lakes goes forward Plans to poison thousands of fish in 21 Montana lakes and then stock them with westslope cutthroat trout have final approval, and the work, still disputed by some state commissioners, is tentatively scheduled to start this fall. The project is meant to remove hybrid trout from the western Montana lakes, nearly half of them in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Genetically pure westslope cutthroat, the state fish, have been reduced to about 9 percent of their historic range and are threatened by hybrids, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks said. Westslope cutthroat are classified as a "species of special concern" in Montana, and state officials say they want to prevent the fish from requiring protection under the federal Endangered Species Act. Jim Satterfield Jr., regional administrator for Fish, Wildlife and Parks in Kalispell, announced Thursday that he has signed the agency's decision supporting the 10-year project in the South Fork Flathead River area....
Ethics group that targeted DeLay now seeks Pombo The same Washington-based interest group that convinced a Texas congressman to file an ethics complaint against former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is hoping for similar help with a complaint against Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group allied with national Democrats, released a statement Thursday calling for a lawmaker to file its complaint with the House Ethics Committee. Outsiders are not allowed to file complaints with the committee; only members can do so. Pombo brushed off the complaint, calling it election-season partisan politics....
The Border's Pending Fight A showdown looms here, along this innocuous-looking stretch of chaparral near Campo in eastern San Diego County. On this untamed land, where mountain lions still roam, a potentially litigious fight is brewing over a plan to replace the rusty border fence with an impermeable barrier a football field wide. Congress is considering immigration reform legislation that could replace the lone barrier here with two 15-foot tall fences separated by a gravel road for Border Patrol vehicles. And thanks to a law enacted last year, the federal government can build the new barrier wherever it wants without considering its environmental impacts. Near Campo, the barrier could sever migratory routes as old as the land itself. Some are looking to the sage-smelling scrubland as the next battle in the debate between environmentalists and fence proponents....
Team to develop spotted owl recovery plan The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has formed a 12-member team to develop a recovery plan for the threatened northern spotted owl, which is protected under the Endangered Species Act. Members represent state and federal agencies and stakeholder groups and people with knowledge of forest management and northern spotted owl biology. A final plan is to be made public by November 2007 after a peer review. Dave Wesley, the service's Pacific Regions Deputy Director, will lead the team, which is to begin meeting this month. The owl was listed as threatened in 1990 and its critical habitat was designated in 1992, closing off vast tracts of federal forests to logging and plunging some timber-dependent regions into an economic slump. The designation led to an 80 percent cutback on logging in national forests and restrictions on private timberlands....
Oil drilling near Capitol Reef draws protest The National Park Service filed objections to federal plans for oil and gas drilling alongside Capitol Reef National Park, saying the rigs would spoil landscape views and bring machinery noise, dust and lights to a backcountry prized for its solitude. Albert J. Hendricks, Capitol Reef's superintendent, said the proposed drilling parcels - a cluster of 18, with some touching the park's northern boundary - also would fall within view of a remote corner of the park awaiting wilderness designation. Hendricks filed a three-page memo with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, recommending no rigs be allowed on three drilling parcels that touch the park's boundary. He took no position on the 15 other, adjoining parcels, except to express misgivings and point out the region's dirt roads can't support heavy trucks. His objections surfaced as other groups filed challenges to some of the 440,000 acres the BLM plans to put up for lease Tuesday in the largest government auction ever held in Utah for oil and gas drilling....
Eco-kids take on corporate scum to save the owls Pancakes or owls? For three middle-schoolers in the fictional Florida town of Coconut Cove, nature always trumps tummy. They give a hoot, which is why these teenage eco-warriors fight the developers clearing an owl habitat to build yet another Mother Paula's All-American Pancake House. In this installment of Smart Kids, Foolish Franchisers, the fight isn't fair, but it sure is funny. Based on the charming young-adult novel by Florida bard Carl Hiaasen, Hoot is a pleasant diversion on the order of a gloriously photographed after-school special. It boasts original songs from Sunshine State troubadour Jimmy Buffett, who also produced the film and has a small role as a laid-back marine-biology teacher....
$4 billion for farmers and ranchers passes Senate Legislation that would provide $4 billion in emergency disaster assistance for farmers and ranchers passed the Senate on Thursday, but the bill faces opposition, including a veto threat from President Bush. The money was added to a massive spending bill designed to pay for the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina. The Bush administration said last week that many crops had record or near-record production last year, and that the proposed level of assistance is "excessive." The bill would pay farmers and ranchers around the country for recent losses due to drought, flooding, disease and other disasters. It also would give many farmers an increase on their current federal subsidy check because of higher energy expenses. National Farmers Union President Tom Buis said the money is badly needed in farm country....
Argentina's Exporters Worried About Beef Stuck At Ports Argentine exporters are growing increasingly worried about the fate of at least 7,000 metric tons of beef exports that are being held by customs officials at local ports, said Pablo Kiryluk, a spokesman for the Argentine Beef Consortium, which represents Argentina's leading beef exporters. "There are about 350 containers beef that are stuck in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, waiting to be shipped to Europe," he said. "Each container has 20-22 tons of beef but they can't be shipped because (Argentine) President (Nestor) Kirchner has made a decision to prevent them from being exported." The containers, which have been stuck for almost three weeks, hold about $55 million of processed, frozen and fresh beef, Kiryluk said. "There is no law that is stopping the meat from being shipped," he said. "It's not even legal to hold the beef, so this is quite problematic. The consequences are terrible for the beef industry."....
A bullet in the back Some people insist the western isn't dead. It's true one seems to come out every couple of years, but they tend to be anything but classic westerns: mad, special-effects sprees such as Wild Wild West, or stories of gay love, or displays of actorly narcissism. And, with the exception of Brokeback Mountain, they are usually unsuccessful. I recently came across a couple of photographs that made me think about this genre, which has, to all intents and purposes, died, and about what killed it. One of the photos was taken on the set of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in Mexico, in 1972. It shows several of the cast and crew, including James Coburn and Harry Dean Stanton, carrying the director, Sam Peckinpah, on a hospital stretcher. One crew member is walking beside the prostrate Peckinpah, holding up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. A drip feed runs from the bottle to Peckinpah's mouth....
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