Talks under way to speed meat labels, animal ID
It's been five years since Congress passed a law requiring meat to be marked with the country of origin, but shoppers will have a hard time finding those labels. The food industry has succeeded in repeatedly delaying the labeling requirement. It's currently put off until the fall of 2008. But an end to that delay could be in the works. The chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Collin Peterson, wants to marry the labeling program to a plan to require livestock producers to participate in a national animal identification system. Tying the two programs together could win support for both from the packers, producers and other groups that dislike one of the programs but like the other. At least that's what Peterson is betting on. "Bottom line is that country-of-origin labeling is the law. It's been delayed. It will not be delayed anymore. We are going to figure out how to implement it," says the Minnesota Democrat, who has been meeting recently with representatives of key interest groups. Meatpackers and others who oppose the labeling law have good reason to sit down with Peterson. Republican leaders once could be counted on to keep putting off the requirement. But Democrats are now in charge of Congress, and there could be a Democrat in the White House after 2008. Packers also would get a chance to alter the labeling law and get something they want and many farmers oppose - a mandatory ID system. ID tags would not only make it easier to determine the native country of a hog or steer, but they would also allow investigators to quickly track down the farm where a diseased animal originates. That Peterson wants to address both the labeling and ID issues "is welcome news," says David Ray, a spokesman for the American Meat Institute, a trade group that represents packers such as Tyson Foods Inc. and Hormel Foods Corp. "We thought for our industry that we ought to look at how this might work together," says Joy Philippi, a Nebraska farmer who is president of the National Pork Producers Council. "We're willing to take hard looks at these things to come up with solutions that are workable for cattlemen," says Colin Woodall, a lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association....
Monday, March 19, 2007
NEWS ROUNDUP
To the Supreme Court For a man widely viewed as an ungrateful troublemaker and infrequent folk hero, nestled among 100,000 or more pristine acres of ancient tribal lands and dinosaurs graves, there is a primal logic in the fact that Harvey Frank Robbins’ case before the U.S. Supreme Court Monday will beg the justices to excavate the very bones of the Fifth Amendment. Among other considerations, the high court will have to decide whether the 5th Amendment, like the 1st and the 4th, protects citizens from unlawful retaliation for exercising a presumed right. Cheyenne attorney Karen Budd-Falen argues her client has an “embedded” right under the 5th Amendment’s “Takings Clause” to exclude Uncle Sam from Robbins’ property after Robbins declined a land swap offer he judged “unjust,” which prevented the government from regaining a preexisting easement. Court documents show BLM forgot to record the right-of-way before Robbins, 52, bought the land in question. Though the national media tends to view western “get-off-my-land” disputes as another quaint, age-old comedy of manners such ornery contemporaries as Nevada rancher Wayne Hage, and now Robbins, are forcing serious jurists to wring their hands where none so high beforehand have even waved....This can only be described as a hit piece. It variously describes Robbins as "a rubber-flooring scion from a wealthy, well-connected Alabama family", as "a rogue rancher recklessly throwing his money and influence around to gratify his land-grabbing egoism", and as "arrogantly ignoring such homespun virtues as neighborly cooperation". You get the picture, and yet, this appears on the internet edition of the Casper Star-Tribune under the News tab and is unsigned by the author. The least they could have done was place it in the Opinion section. Better yet, why not produce a balanced piece that discusses this important case?
High court to hear rancher's case The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments Monday in a Wyoming case involving a rancher who has sued employees of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, claiming retaliation. Thermopolis rancher Harvey Frank Robbins maintains that BLM workers pulled his grazing permits and otherwise persecuted him to try to get him to give the government road access. The Supreme Court will consider whether the government officials can be sued personally under federal racketeering law for their official actions. If Robbins wins the Supreme Court case, he can then continue with his case in U.S. District Court in Wyoming. "I am very excited and nervous," said one of Robbins' lawyers, Karen Budd-Falen, as she traveled from Cheyenne to Washington on Friday. "The issues in this case are so important." Robbins asserts that BLM agents told him he would get a "hardball education" when he refused to give them an easement across his land. He says they revoked his grazing and business permits, trespassed on his property and filed a frivolous criminal complaint against him. He is arguing that the government violated his constitutionally protected property and due-process rights. The court will also decide whether the Fifth Amendment protects citizens against retaliation for excluding the government from private property outside the process of eminent domain, where the government has the authority to take property for public purposes....
Despite furor, Idaho elk industry won't face new regulations An attempt to boost state oversight of Idaho's $30 million elk-ranching industry is dead after a bill to license elk ranches was killed Friday by an unlikely alliance of anti-regulation Republicans and Democrats demanding stricter rules. The measure deadlocked 5-5 in the House Agricultural Affairs Committee after passing the Senate last month. That means nothing will come of the late-2006 furor after dozens of domesticated elk bolted from a private hunting preserve into the wilds of eastern Idaho near Yellowstone National Park, prompting sportsmen's groups and then-Gov. Jim Risch to call for new measures to protect wild herds from disease and genetic impurities. Friday's three-hour debate featured bickering elk ranchers who criticized the bill -- even though it had been drafted by members of their own industry association. "The industry, regardless of what you've been told, 80 percent is totally against licensing," said Charles Warner, an elk rancher from Kellogg in northern Idaho and a board member of the Idaho Elk Breeders Association....
World's most important crops hit by global warming effects Global warming over the past quarter century has led to a fall in the yield of some of the most important food crops in the world, according to one of the first scientific studies of how climate change has affected cereal crops. Rising temperatures between 1981 and 2002 caused aloss in production of wheat, corn and barley that amounted in effect to some 40 million tons a year - equivalent to annual losses of some £2.6bn. Although these numbers are not large compared to the world-wide production of cereal crops, scientists warned that the findings demonstrated how climate change was already having an impact on the global production of staple foods. "Most people tend to think of climate change as something that will impact the future, but this study shows that warming over the past two decades has already had real effects on global food supply," said Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California. The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, analysed yields of cereals from around the world during a period when average temperatures rose by about 0.7C between 1980 and 2002 - although the rise was even higher in certain crop-growing regions of the world....
Energy companies say they can live with grouse rules Some major energy companies say federal rules advanced to protect sage grouse do not impinge on their operations in northeastern Wyoming, but some drillers and service workers say they're set back by the rules. The Bureau of Land Management's seasonal restrictions ban any surface disturbance on grouse strutting and nesting grounds from March 1 through June 15. Marathon Oil Co. reports it has not seen a dramatic slowdown in its operations as a result. Lee Warren, public affairs officer for Anadarko, said the company isn't drilling at all now, because most of its leases are on federal land. He said the company saw the lull coming. Bill William, owner of Pump Pro, Inc., a pump service and repair company in Gillette, said he's seen business fall because of the restrictions....
Alternate proposal for Piñon Canyon The U.S. Army's plans to acquire as much as 418,577 acres of fragile grasslands in southeastern Colorado may face a bigger "tank trap" than the Pentagon expected when it announced its goal last February. The Army already controls 240,000 acres at the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site. Expanding to 1,000 square miles would displace ranchers who have been good stewards of these lands for generations. The reaction from most of the state's political leaders was originally meek. Gov. Bill Ritter and Sens. Wayne Allard and Ken Salazar urged the Army to only buy land from willing sellers and not to use federal eminent-domain powers. Unfortunately, such pieties are largely beside the point. Most of the land the Army covets is in the Comanche National Grasslands and is already owned by the U.S. government. To be sure, the region is a checkerboard of private and public land. But even without eminent domain, the Army could make most private landowners within or adjacent to the federal holdings an offer they couldn't refuse. The problem for many ranchers is that their private holdings are too small to be viable if they lose their grazing privileges on the adjacent public lands....
State, church "very close" to deal on bison With a congressional hearing set for Tuesday over the government's killing of bison that migrate from Yellowstone National Park, state officials are negotiating to give the animals safe travel through a sprawling, church-owned ranch north of the park. A deal would end a seven-year impasse on about 6,000 acres owned by the Church Universal and Triumphant, a religious sect that gained notoriety last decade for its predictions of impending apocalypse. Church President Kate Gordon said Friday the two parties "are very close" to a final agreement. The purchase of grazing rights on the property would give bison room to move out of the park without possibly being rounded up for slaughter, as mandated by state and federal policies. The policies were created after cattle producers expressed concern their grazing animals would become infected with brucellosis through contact with Yellowstone bison carrying the disease. In cattle brucellosis can cause the abortion of calves. Some Montana ranchers worry brucellosis in their livestock would restrict the cattle trade, including beef exports....
Park snowmobiling rises More people rode snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park this winter than in the past several years, but even the busiest day didn't approach the daily limit of 720 snowmobiles allowed in the park. On average, 299 snowmobiles entered the park between December and March 11, when the winter season ended. Last year the average was 253. Even the busiest day this season -- Dec. 28, when 542 snowmobiles entered -- fell below the daily limit that has been in place since 2004 and is the number that the National Park Service is considering for a long-term rule to reduce air pollution and noise in the park....
Ethanol's Growing List of Enemies Paul Hitch has spent his entire life raising cattle and hogs on a stretch of the Oklahoma panhandle he says is "flat as a billiard table." His great-grandfather started the ranch in 1884, before Oklahoma was a state, and now Hitch, 63, is preparing to pass the family business on to his two sons. But he worries that they'll face mounting pressures in the industry, particularly because of the soaring price for corn, which the business depends on to feed the livestock. In the past year, corn prices have doubled as demand from ethanol producers has surged. "This ethanol binge is insane," says Hitch, who's president-elect of the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. The ethanol movement is sprouting a vocal crop of critics. While politicians including President George W. Bush and farmers across the Midwest hope that the U.S. can win its energy independence by turning corn into fuel, Hitch and an unlikely assortment of allies are raising their voices in opposition. The effort is uniting ranchers and environmentalists, hog farmers and hippies, solar-power idealists and free-market pragmatists....
Industry: Reject water rules The oil and gas industry hopes that Gov. Dave Freudenthal will reject rule changes adopted last month by a divided state Environmental Quality Council that would regulate impacts of coal-bed methane water on soil, vegetation and landowners. The changes are not well defined and create more paperwork for industry and landowners, which could result in slowing down coal-bed methane development in Wyoming, said John Robitaille, vice president of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming. "There's a great deal of uncertainty surrounding these rules," Robitaille said. "Any time you have uncertainty, you most likely have delay." Kate Fox, attorney for the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a Sheridan-based advocacy group that proposed the rule changes, said the rules shouldn't slow down the speed of issuing drilling permits. "I don't see it as onerous at all," Fox said Wednesday. "I don't see how anyone can complain about a requirement of decent science to support their applications."....
Split estates: Mineral, agriculture surface rights clash in field Herbert Vasseur has begun planning his spring farming activities while keeping a close eye on the Montana Legislature's split estate debates, specifically Senate Bill 19 in the current legislative session. Senate Bill 19 is in the House Natural Resource committee and if passed will benefit the surface and landowners in split estates. “Support is needed to pass this bill,” said Vasseur, a farmer, landowner and mineral owners form Chinook, Mont. As a farmer, landowner and mineral owner, Vasseur is one of few Montanans who own both the surface and mineral rights on his farm on which he raises cereal grains. Most Montana landowners aren't as fortunate and live on split estates. A split estates occurs when one person own the surface rights and another owns the mineral rights to a piece of land, explained Vasseur. “There are a lot of ways split estates came about,” he said. “When the homesteaders came to Montana in the 1930s, they would get liens put against their mineral rights to pay their bills because they didn't think they would be worth anything. There were also a lot of split estates made with tax deeds and foreclosures where the counties sold the surface rights and maintained or sold the mineral rights.”....
Whose Ox Is Gored? The media are finally catching up with Al Gore. Criticism of his anti-global-warming franchise and his personal environmental record has gone beyond ankle-biting bloggers. It's now coming from the New York Times and the Nashville Tennessean, his hometown paper that put his birth, as a senator's son, on its front page back in 1948, and where a young Al Gore Jr. worked for five years as a journalist. Last Tuesday, the Times reported that several eminent scientists "argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points [on global warming] are exaggerated and erroneous." The Tenessean reported yesterday that Mr. Gore received $570,000 in royalties from the owners of zinc mines who held mineral leases on his farm. The mines, which closed in 2003 but are scheduled to reopen under a new operator later this year, "emitted thousands of pounds of toxic substances and several times, the water discharged from the mines into nearby rivers had levels of toxins above what was legal." All of this comes in the wake of the enormous publicity Mr. Gore received after his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar. The film features Mr. Gore reprising his famous sighing and lamenting how the average American's energy use is greedily off the charts. At the film's end viewers are asked, "Are you ready to change the way you live?"....
Traffic, water may flow in tunnel The rock samples come up slowly from deep within the Earth, cylinders of stone almost unimaginably old that could be key to a future water supply for thousands of Southern Californians. Amid the peaks that separate Orange and Riverside counties, geologists from San Diego-based Kleinfelder, Inc. are working to drill nearly a half-mile into the mountains' core. Their goal is to find out what kind of rock lies along the path of a proposed Metropolitan Water District pipeline under the Santa Ana Mountains between Corona and Irvine. The pipeline would deliver up to 646 million gallons of water daily, enough to supply 1.46 million people annually. The drilling is also of interest to the Riverside County Transportation Commission, which – along with transportation officials from Orange County – is investigating the feasibility of tunneling under the mountains to link the counties....
Editorial - Equal access to injustice, more like it Americans have a pretty keen sense of justice. For example, most people would agree that the ability to protect your rights shouldn't be limited to the wealthy. We even have a federal law allowing people to recover their legal expenses after they sue the government and win. The purpose of that Equal Access to Justice Act is to level the playing field - to make sure the immense power and wealth of the federal government doesn't prevent people from having their day in court. But if it's justice we want, Congress ought to tweak that act. As the Missoulian illustrated in a March 11 article, “Forest Service struggles to finish restoration,” the Equal Access to Justice Act has become a self-funding mechanism for environmental groups fundamentally opposed to prevailing national forest management direction. As our article detailed, the Lolo National Forest spent more than $1 million in recent years on a proposal to use salvaged timber harvested in the wake of the fires of 2000 to help pay for extensive forest restoration. The proposal called for logging 4,600 out of a total of 74,000 acres burned in 2000. The high cost of trying to launch the project is largely attributable to the extensive planning and detailed environmental analysis required to justify and defend any significant Forest Service undertaking. To make the long story short, the project didn't get far. The Sierra Club and Alliance for the Wild Rockies stole the momentum with a lawsuit objecting to harvesting trees in unroaded patches, and a subsequent lawsuit by a group now known as the WildWest Institute brought the whole thing to a halt. Based on the Equal Access to Justice Act, the Forest Service agreed to pay $75,000 in legal fees to the first two groups and is negotiating over the latter's demand for $110,660 in legal fees. The money will rob from funds the agency could better use managing the forests. This is nothing unusual. That's the problem....
Fighting Vail's future fires Mother Nature can be quite the arsonist. Maybe next summer, maybe in 50 years, she'll get the urge to burn down much of the White River National Forest and clear out hundreds of miles of beetle-killed pine trees. She historically likes a clean slate, and a big burn is inevitable, said Phil Bowden, a wildland fuels management specialist with the U.S. Forest Service. Vail just has to be ready when that happens. This summer, the town and the forest service will continue clearing out dead and dying pine trees surrounding Vail, much like they've done the past three years. The trees shed their needles and branches then fall to the forest floor, contributing to a large and volatile fuel load. The pines, filled with sticky, combustible pitch, make great fuel for wildfires and are dangerous to residents and buildings, especially those on the edge....
Report blames forest supervisors for letting 2006 canyon blaze grow A June fire that led to the voluntary evacuation of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon grew out of control because of errors by fire managers and senior supervisors who let the lightning-caused blaze burn in dangerous conditions, a U.S. Forest Service report says. The Warm Fire ended up charring 59,000 acres on the Kaibab Plateau between June 8 and July 4, with some of the area scalded so badly the soil was sterilized. The report, obtained this week by the Arizona Daily Sun newspaper, blames supervisors and Kaibab National Forest District Ranger Jill Leonard for a series of mistakes, including inaction when the fire flared out of control, making decisions on the fly and allowing the fire to burn unfought during the peak Arizona fire season. A spokeswoman for the Forest Service said Saturday that only a few of the report's findings relate specifically to Leonard, who now is assigned to the Washington D.C. headquarters, and that blaming her alone would be simplistic....
Logging halted on 72,000 acres in Oregon Logging in spotted owl habitat is coming to a halt on 72,000 acres of federal lands in Western Oregon until government biologists come up with a better scientific basis to saying that cutting the trees will not harm the threatened species. Based on an appeals court ruling last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week pulled five documents known as biological opinions that authorized the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to log in owl habitat stretching from Mount Hood to the California border, Fish and Wildlife spokesman Phil Carroll said Friday. The biological opinions gave BLM and the Forest Service authority to kill some spotted owls in the course of logging on the Mount Hood, Willamette and Rogue River-Siskiyou national forests and the Salem, Eugene, Roseburg and Medford districts of BLM and the Columbia River gorge national Scenic Area, Fish and Wildlife spokesman Phil Carroll said Friday. The ruling pertained to a challenge of logging on BLM's Medford District, but the same reasoning was used in all five documents, which are also being challenged in court. Carroll said those were withdrawn in expectation they would be struck down as well....
Bi-partisan effort to remove livestock manure from Superfund Back in 1980 Congress passed the “Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act” (CERCLA - also knows as the Superfund Law) to address the growing concerns about the need to clean up uncontrolled, abandoned hazardous waste sites and to address future releases of hazardous substances into the environment. Lately some environmentalists have been demanding, with some support from isolated judicial cases, that livestock manure should be classified as a hazardous waste and thus come under the Superfund Law. To counteract this move, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation on March 8 that would clarify the Superfund Law that has unintentionally impacted America's farmers and ranchers. The bipartisan “Agricultural Protection and Prosperity Act of 2007” would clarify that livestock manure is not classified as a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant under CERCLA. Those introducing the legislation contend that if normal animal manure is found to be a hazardous substance under the Superfund Law, then virtually every farm operation in the country could be potentially exposed to liabilities and penalties under the Super-fund Law, and this is an outcome that Congress never intended....
Horse-meat export fight resumes in Texas After hearing of reports several years ago that 1986 Kentucky Derby winner Ferdinand had been slaughtered for food in Japan, legions of American horse lovers were outraged. The famed racehorse's death also fanned a battle that was renewed this month in the Texas Legislature and could end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. Not everyone in Texas is opposed to killing horses for food. State Rep. Sid Miller, R-Stephenville, has introduced a bill legalizing the export of horse meat from Texas for consumption in countries such as France and Belgium, where it is considered a delicacy. Miller's filing came after a March 6 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals not to reconsider its own January ruling in which it upheld a 1949 Texas law banning the slaughter of horses in the state for human consumption anywhere....
Artful cowboys (and girls) The Wild West comes to St. Petersburg in two exhibitions opening Friday at the Arts Center. "The Wild Bunch: Cowboys in Contemporary Art" will feature works by contemporary artists that use the iconography of the cowboy in fresh and unexpected ways. The exhibition includes installations and video work as well as paintings and sculptures by artists including Jenny Rogers, Jennifer Zackin, James Michaels, Gordon McConnell, Fort Guerin, William Schenk, David Rathman and Bernard Williams. "Cracker Country: Florida's Cowboy Culture" features works by three local photographers, Beth Reynolds, Carlton Ward Jr. and Rachel Turner, who have documented some aspect of the Florida Cracker cowboy culture....
The cowboy way They just don't make 'em like they used to. That's what Don Walker would say about the machines used to make the kind of cowboy boots ranchers and cattle hands wear day in and day out, swearing they'd never put anything else on their feet. "It's made out of iron," Walker said as he described his prized machine at the 10th annual Cedar City Cowboy Gathering on Friday. "I don't even think you can find one of these anymore." Much like the way his sturdy machine was made, Walker said his boot-making profession is also a dying tradition. But he wasn't alone in his attempt to promote his disappearing craft. Many other vendors tried their best to preserve the Old West during the Cowboy Gathering by selling rare, handmade items you simply wouldn't see in a modern retail store. "It's funny," Walker said. "Our society just doesn't understand custom anymore." Like the bootmaker from Spring City, Dick Levitz, of Cedar City, said he also struggles to earn a living building saddles from scratch. But it isn't about the money, he said. He just likes doing what he does even though the demand for his services isn't what it used to be....
It's All Trew: Coffee history from the West Presenting the history of coffee since its beginnings as a wild berry would require pages. Coffee history in the Great American West could not be told without using the word "Arbuckles," which just might be the most famous name in the West. Before Arbuckles came along, coffee could only be made by roasting raw coffee beans, grinding by some method and then boiling in water. John Arbuckle changed this process. First, he roasted raw beans professionally, coated them with a mixture of eggs and sugar, sealing in the flavor, then placed the beans into paper packages. Customers merely ground the beans and boiled the brew. At first the coated beans came in a sack, and later the already-ground beans were packaged. The Arbuckle Company initiated many new ideas for sales including offering prizes, coupons for trade and even placing "hard rock candy" into the wooden cases holding packages of coffee. None of these incentives quite matched that of a cowboy acquiring the paper sack in which the coffee came packed. At that time, toilet paper was unheard of on roundups and trail drives. The actual taste of country coffee varied because of the many different types of water used....
To the Supreme Court For a man widely viewed as an ungrateful troublemaker and infrequent folk hero, nestled among 100,000 or more pristine acres of ancient tribal lands and dinosaurs graves, there is a primal logic in the fact that Harvey Frank Robbins’ case before the U.S. Supreme Court Monday will beg the justices to excavate the very bones of the Fifth Amendment. Among other considerations, the high court will have to decide whether the 5th Amendment, like the 1st and the 4th, protects citizens from unlawful retaliation for exercising a presumed right. Cheyenne attorney Karen Budd-Falen argues her client has an “embedded” right under the 5th Amendment’s “Takings Clause” to exclude Uncle Sam from Robbins’ property after Robbins declined a land swap offer he judged “unjust,” which prevented the government from regaining a preexisting easement. Court documents show BLM forgot to record the right-of-way before Robbins, 52, bought the land in question. Though the national media tends to view western “get-off-my-land” disputes as another quaint, age-old comedy of manners such ornery contemporaries as Nevada rancher Wayne Hage, and now Robbins, are forcing serious jurists to wring their hands where none so high beforehand have even waved....This can only be described as a hit piece. It variously describes Robbins as "a rubber-flooring scion from a wealthy, well-connected Alabama family", as "a rogue rancher recklessly throwing his money and influence around to gratify his land-grabbing egoism", and as "arrogantly ignoring such homespun virtues as neighborly cooperation". You get the picture, and yet, this appears on the internet edition of the Casper Star-Tribune under the News tab and is unsigned by the author. The least they could have done was place it in the Opinion section. Better yet, why not produce a balanced piece that discusses this important case?
High court to hear rancher's case The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments Monday in a Wyoming case involving a rancher who has sued employees of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, claiming retaliation. Thermopolis rancher Harvey Frank Robbins maintains that BLM workers pulled his grazing permits and otherwise persecuted him to try to get him to give the government road access. The Supreme Court will consider whether the government officials can be sued personally under federal racketeering law for their official actions. If Robbins wins the Supreme Court case, he can then continue with his case in U.S. District Court in Wyoming. "I am very excited and nervous," said one of Robbins' lawyers, Karen Budd-Falen, as she traveled from Cheyenne to Washington on Friday. "The issues in this case are so important." Robbins asserts that BLM agents told him he would get a "hardball education" when he refused to give them an easement across his land. He says they revoked his grazing and business permits, trespassed on his property and filed a frivolous criminal complaint against him. He is arguing that the government violated his constitutionally protected property and due-process rights. The court will also decide whether the Fifth Amendment protects citizens against retaliation for excluding the government from private property outside the process of eminent domain, where the government has the authority to take property for public purposes....
Despite furor, Idaho elk industry won't face new regulations An attempt to boost state oversight of Idaho's $30 million elk-ranching industry is dead after a bill to license elk ranches was killed Friday by an unlikely alliance of anti-regulation Republicans and Democrats demanding stricter rules. The measure deadlocked 5-5 in the House Agricultural Affairs Committee after passing the Senate last month. That means nothing will come of the late-2006 furor after dozens of domesticated elk bolted from a private hunting preserve into the wilds of eastern Idaho near Yellowstone National Park, prompting sportsmen's groups and then-Gov. Jim Risch to call for new measures to protect wild herds from disease and genetic impurities. Friday's three-hour debate featured bickering elk ranchers who criticized the bill -- even though it had been drafted by members of their own industry association. "The industry, regardless of what you've been told, 80 percent is totally against licensing," said Charles Warner, an elk rancher from Kellogg in northern Idaho and a board member of the Idaho Elk Breeders Association....
World's most important crops hit by global warming effects Global warming over the past quarter century has led to a fall in the yield of some of the most important food crops in the world, according to one of the first scientific studies of how climate change has affected cereal crops. Rising temperatures between 1981 and 2002 caused aloss in production of wheat, corn and barley that amounted in effect to some 40 million tons a year - equivalent to annual losses of some £2.6bn. Although these numbers are not large compared to the world-wide production of cereal crops, scientists warned that the findings demonstrated how climate change was already having an impact on the global production of staple foods. "Most people tend to think of climate change as something that will impact the future, but this study shows that warming over the past two decades has already had real effects on global food supply," said Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California. The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, analysed yields of cereals from around the world during a period when average temperatures rose by about 0.7C between 1980 and 2002 - although the rise was even higher in certain crop-growing regions of the world....
Energy companies say they can live with grouse rules Some major energy companies say federal rules advanced to protect sage grouse do not impinge on their operations in northeastern Wyoming, but some drillers and service workers say they're set back by the rules. The Bureau of Land Management's seasonal restrictions ban any surface disturbance on grouse strutting and nesting grounds from March 1 through June 15. Marathon Oil Co. reports it has not seen a dramatic slowdown in its operations as a result. Lee Warren, public affairs officer for Anadarko, said the company isn't drilling at all now, because most of its leases are on federal land. He said the company saw the lull coming. Bill William, owner of Pump Pro, Inc., a pump service and repair company in Gillette, said he's seen business fall because of the restrictions....
Alternate proposal for Piñon Canyon The U.S. Army's plans to acquire as much as 418,577 acres of fragile grasslands in southeastern Colorado may face a bigger "tank trap" than the Pentagon expected when it announced its goal last February. The Army already controls 240,000 acres at the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site. Expanding to 1,000 square miles would displace ranchers who have been good stewards of these lands for generations. The reaction from most of the state's political leaders was originally meek. Gov. Bill Ritter and Sens. Wayne Allard and Ken Salazar urged the Army to only buy land from willing sellers and not to use federal eminent-domain powers. Unfortunately, such pieties are largely beside the point. Most of the land the Army covets is in the Comanche National Grasslands and is already owned by the U.S. government. To be sure, the region is a checkerboard of private and public land. But even without eminent domain, the Army could make most private landowners within or adjacent to the federal holdings an offer they couldn't refuse. The problem for many ranchers is that their private holdings are too small to be viable if they lose their grazing privileges on the adjacent public lands....
State, church "very close" to deal on bison With a congressional hearing set for Tuesday over the government's killing of bison that migrate from Yellowstone National Park, state officials are negotiating to give the animals safe travel through a sprawling, church-owned ranch north of the park. A deal would end a seven-year impasse on about 6,000 acres owned by the Church Universal and Triumphant, a religious sect that gained notoriety last decade for its predictions of impending apocalypse. Church President Kate Gordon said Friday the two parties "are very close" to a final agreement. The purchase of grazing rights on the property would give bison room to move out of the park without possibly being rounded up for slaughter, as mandated by state and federal policies. The policies were created after cattle producers expressed concern their grazing animals would become infected with brucellosis through contact with Yellowstone bison carrying the disease. In cattle brucellosis can cause the abortion of calves. Some Montana ranchers worry brucellosis in their livestock would restrict the cattle trade, including beef exports....
Park snowmobiling rises More people rode snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park this winter than in the past several years, but even the busiest day didn't approach the daily limit of 720 snowmobiles allowed in the park. On average, 299 snowmobiles entered the park between December and March 11, when the winter season ended. Last year the average was 253. Even the busiest day this season -- Dec. 28, when 542 snowmobiles entered -- fell below the daily limit that has been in place since 2004 and is the number that the National Park Service is considering for a long-term rule to reduce air pollution and noise in the park....
Ethanol's Growing List of Enemies Paul Hitch has spent his entire life raising cattle and hogs on a stretch of the Oklahoma panhandle he says is "flat as a billiard table." His great-grandfather started the ranch in 1884, before Oklahoma was a state, and now Hitch, 63, is preparing to pass the family business on to his two sons. But he worries that they'll face mounting pressures in the industry, particularly because of the soaring price for corn, which the business depends on to feed the livestock. In the past year, corn prices have doubled as demand from ethanol producers has surged. "This ethanol binge is insane," says Hitch, who's president-elect of the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. The ethanol movement is sprouting a vocal crop of critics. While politicians including President George W. Bush and farmers across the Midwest hope that the U.S. can win its energy independence by turning corn into fuel, Hitch and an unlikely assortment of allies are raising their voices in opposition. The effort is uniting ranchers and environmentalists, hog farmers and hippies, solar-power idealists and free-market pragmatists....
Industry: Reject water rules The oil and gas industry hopes that Gov. Dave Freudenthal will reject rule changes adopted last month by a divided state Environmental Quality Council that would regulate impacts of coal-bed methane water on soil, vegetation and landowners. The changes are not well defined and create more paperwork for industry and landowners, which could result in slowing down coal-bed methane development in Wyoming, said John Robitaille, vice president of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming. "There's a great deal of uncertainty surrounding these rules," Robitaille said. "Any time you have uncertainty, you most likely have delay." Kate Fox, attorney for the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a Sheridan-based advocacy group that proposed the rule changes, said the rules shouldn't slow down the speed of issuing drilling permits. "I don't see it as onerous at all," Fox said Wednesday. "I don't see how anyone can complain about a requirement of decent science to support their applications."....
Split estates: Mineral, agriculture surface rights clash in field Herbert Vasseur has begun planning his spring farming activities while keeping a close eye on the Montana Legislature's split estate debates, specifically Senate Bill 19 in the current legislative session. Senate Bill 19 is in the House Natural Resource committee and if passed will benefit the surface and landowners in split estates. “Support is needed to pass this bill,” said Vasseur, a farmer, landowner and mineral owners form Chinook, Mont. As a farmer, landowner and mineral owner, Vasseur is one of few Montanans who own both the surface and mineral rights on his farm on which he raises cereal grains. Most Montana landowners aren't as fortunate and live on split estates. A split estates occurs when one person own the surface rights and another owns the mineral rights to a piece of land, explained Vasseur. “There are a lot of ways split estates came about,” he said. “When the homesteaders came to Montana in the 1930s, they would get liens put against their mineral rights to pay their bills because they didn't think they would be worth anything. There were also a lot of split estates made with tax deeds and foreclosures where the counties sold the surface rights and maintained or sold the mineral rights.”....
Whose Ox Is Gored? The media are finally catching up with Al Gore. Criticism of his anti-global-warming franchise and his personal environmental record has gone beyond ankle-biting bloggers. It's now coming from the New York Times and the Nashville Tennessean, his hometown paper that put his birth, as a senator's son, on its front page back in 1948, and where a young Al Gore Jr. worked for five years as a journalist. Last Tuesday, the Times reported that several eminent scientists "argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points [on global warming] are exaggerated and erroneous." The Tenessean reported yesterday that Mr. Gore received $570,000 in royalties from the owners of zinc mines who held mineral leases on his farm. The mines, which closed in 2003 but are scheduled to reopen under a new operator later this year, "emitted thousands of pounds of toxic substances and several times, the water discharged from the mines into nearby rivers had levels of toxins above what was legal." All of this comes in the wake of the enormous publicity Mr. Gore received after his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar. The film features Mr. Gore reprising his famous sighing and lamenting how the average American's energy use is greedily off the charts. At the film's end viewers are asked, "Are you ready to change the way you live?"....
Traffic, water may flow in tunnel The rock samples come up slowly from deep within the Earth, cylinders of stone almost unimaginably old that could be key to a future water supply for thousands of Southern Californians. Amid the peaks that separate Orange and Riverside counties, geologists from San Diego-based Kleinfelder, Inc. are working to drill nearly a half-mile into the mountains' core. Their goal is to find out what kind of rock lies along the path of a proposed Metropolitan Water District pipeline under the Santa Ana Mountains between Corona and Irvine. The pipeline would deliver up to 646 million gallons of water daily, enough to supply 1.46 million people annually. The drilling is also of interest to the Riverside County Transportation Commission, which – along with transportation officials from Orange County – is investigating the feasibility of tunneling under the mountains to link the counties....
Editorial - Equal access to injustice, more like it Americans have a pretty keen sense of justice. For example, most people would agree that the ability to protect your rights shouldn't be limited to the wealthy. We even have a federal law allowing people to recover their legal expenses after they sue the government and win. The purpose of that Equal Access to Justice Act is to level the playing field - to make sure the immense power and wealth of the federal government doesn't prevent people from having their day in court. But if it's justice we want, Congress ought to tweak that act. As the Missoulian illustrated in a March 11 article, “Forest Service struggles to finish restoration,” the Equal Access to Justice Act has become a self-funding mechanism for environmental groups fundamentally opposed to prevailing national forest management direction. As our article detailed, the Lolo National Forest spent more than $1 million in recent years on a proposal to use salvaged timber harvested in the wake of the fires of 2000 to help pay for extensive forest restoration. The proposal called for logging 4,600 out of a total of 74,000 acres burned in 2000. The high cost of trying to launch the project is largely attributable to the extensive planning and detailed environmental analysis required to justify and defend any significant Forest Service undertaking. To make the long story short, the project didn't get far. The Sierra Club and Alliance for the Wild Rockies stole the momentum with a lawsuit objecting to harvesting trees in unroaded patches, and a subsequent lawsuit by a group now known as the WildWest Institute brought the whole thing to a halt. Based on the Equal Access to Justice Act, the Forest Service agreed to pay $75,000 in legal fees to the first two groups and is negotiating over the latter's demand for $110,660 in legal fees. The money will rob from funds the agency could better use managing the forests. This is nothing unusual. That's the problem....
Fighting Vail's future fires Mother Nature can be quite the arsonist. Maybe next summer, maybe in 50 years, she'll get the urge to burn down much of the White River National Forest and clear out hundreds of miles of beetle-killed pine trees. She historically likes a clean slate, and a big burn is inevitable, said Phil Bowden, a wildland fuels management specialist with the U.S. Forest Service. Vail just has to be ready when that happens. This summer, the town and the forest service will continue clearing out dead and dying pine trees surrounding Vail, much like they've done the past three years. The trees shed their needles and branches then fall to the forest floor, contributing to a large and volatile fuel load. The pines, filled with sticky, combustible pitch, make great fuel for wildfires and are dangerous to residents and buildings, especially those on the edge....
Report blames forest supervisors for letting 2006 canyon blaze grow A June fire that led to the voluntary evacuation of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon grew out of control because of errors by fire managers and senior supervisors who let the lightning-caused blaze burn in dangerous conditions, a U.S. Forest Service report says. The Warm Fire ended up charring 59,000 acres on the Kaibab Plateau between June 8 and July 4, with some of the area scalded so badly the soil was sterilized. The report, obtained this week by the Arizona Daily Sun newspaper, blames supervisors and Kaibab National Forest District Ranger Jill Leonard for a series of mistakes, including inaction when the fire flared out of control, making decisions on the fly and allowing the fire to burn unfought during the peak Arizona fire season. A spokeswoman for the Forest Service said Saturday that only a few of the report's findings relate specifically to Leonard, who now is assigned to the Washington D.C. headquarters, and that blaming her alone would be simplistic....
Logging halted on 72,000 acres in Oregon Logging in spotted owl habitat is coming to a halt on 72,000 acres of federal lands in Western Oregon until government biologists come up with a better scientific basis to saying that cutting the trees will not harm the threatened species. Based on an appeals court ruling last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week pulled five documents known as biological opinions that authorized the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to log in owl habitat stretching from Mount Hood to the California border, Fish and Wildlife spokesman Phil Carroll said Friday. The biological opinions gave BLM and the Forest Service authority to kill some spotted owls in the course of logging on the Mount Hood, Willamette and Rogue River-Siskiyou national forests and the Salem, Eugene, Roseburg and Medford districts of BLM and the Columbia River gorge national Scenic Area, Fish and Wildlife spokesman Phil Carroll said Friday. The ruling pertained to a challenge of logging on BLM's Medford District, but the same reasoning was used in all five documents, which are also being challenged in court. Carroll said those were withdrawn in expectation they would be struck down as well....
Bi-partisan effort to remove livestock manure from Superfund Back in 1980 Congress passed the “Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act” (CERCLA - also knows as the Superfund Law) to address the growing concerns about the need to clean up uncontrolled, abandoned hazardous waste sites and to address future releases of hazardous substances into the environment. Lately some environmentalists have been demanding, with some support from isolated judicial cases, that livestock manure should be classified as a hazardous waste and thus come under the Superfund Law. To counteract this move, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation on March 8 that would clarify the Superfund Law that has unintentionally impacted America's farmers and ranchers. The bipartisan “Agricultural Protection and Prosperity Act of 2007” would clarify that livestock manure is not classified as a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant under CERCLA. Those introducing the legislation contend that if normal animal manure is found to be a hazardous substance under the Superfund Law, then virtually every farm operation in the country could be potentially exposed to liabilities and penalties under the Super-fund Law, and this is an outcome that Congress never intended....
Horse-meat export fight resumes in Texas After hearing of reports several years ago that 1986 Kentucky Derby winner Ferdinand had been slaughtered for food in Japan, legions of American horse lovers were outraged. The famed racehorse's death also fanned a battle that was renewed this month in the Texas Legislature and could end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. Not everyone in Texas is opposed to killing horses for food. State Rep. Sid Miller, R-Stephenville, has introduced a bill legalizing the export of horse meat from Texas for consumption in countries such as France and Belgium, where it is considered a delicacy. Miller's filing came after a March 6 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals not to reconsider its own January ruling in which it upheld a 1949 Texas law banning the slaughter of horses in the state for human consumption anywhere....
Artful cowboys (and girls) The Wild West comes to St. Petersburg in two exhibitions opening Friday at the Arts Center. "The Wild Bunch: Cowboys in Contemporary Art" will feature works by contemporary artists that use the iconography of the cowboy in fresh and unexpected ways. The exhibition includes installations and video work as well as paintings and sculptures by artists including Jenny Rogers, Jennifer Zackin, James Michaels, Gordon McConnell, Fort Guerin, William Schenk, David Rathman and Bernard Williams. "Cracker Country: Florida's Cowboy Culture" features works by three local photographers, Beth Reynolds, Carlton Ward Jr. and Rachel Turner, who have documented some aspect of the Florida Cracker cowboy culture....
The cowboy way They just don't make 'em like they used to. That's what Don Walker would say about the machines used to make the kind of cowboy boots ranchers and cattle hands wear day in and day out, swearing they'd never put anything else on their feet. "It's made out of iron," Walker said as he described his prized machine at the 10th annual Cedar City Cowboy Gathering on Friday. "I don't even think you can find one of these anymore." Much like the way his sturdy machine was made, Walker said his boot-making profession is also a dying tradition. But he wasn't alone in his attempt to promote his disappearing craft. Many other vendors tried their best to preserve the Old West during the Cowboy Gathering by selling rare, handmade items you simply wouldn't see in a modern retail store. "It's funny," Walker said. "Our society just doesn't understand custom anymore." Like the bootmaker from Spring City, Dick Levitz, of Cedar City, said he also struggles to earn a living building saddles from scratch. But it isn't about the money, he said. He just likes doing what he does even though the demand for his services isn't what it used to be....
It's All Trew: Coffee history from the West Presenting the history of coffee since its beginnings as a wild berry would require pages. Coffee history in the Great American West could not be told without using the word "Arbuckles," which just might be the most famous name in the West. Before Arbuckles came along, coffee could only be made by roasting raw coffee beans, grinding by some method and then boiling in water. John Arbuckle changed this process. First, he roasted raw beans professionally, coated them with a mixture of eggs and sugar, sealing in the flavor, then placed the beans into paper packages. Customers merely ground the beans and boiled the brew. At first the coated beans came in a sack, and later the already-ground beans were packaged. The Arbuckle Company initiated many new ideas for sales including offering prizes, coupons for trade and even placing "hard rock candy" into the wooden cases holding packages of coffee. None of these incentives quite matched that of a cowboy acquiring the paper sack in which the coffee came packed. At that time, toilet paper was unheard of on roundups and trail drives. The actual taste of country coffee varied because of the many different types of water used....
Sunday, March 18, 2007
ARE YOU AN ELK HUNTER?
DO YOU TAKE YOUR FAMILY INTO THE GILA?
Mexican Wolves are decimating the Elk herd in the Gila National Forest!
It is not safe to take pets into the Gila!
Everyone must exercise caution and care when visiting the Gila!
BEWARE OF WOLVES IN THE GILA!!!!
The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish is managing all wildlife in the Gila for the benefit of the wolves.
The elk and deer in the Gila belong to the people of the State of New Mexico. The NM Department of Game and Fish and the US Fish and Wildlife Service are sacrificing the people’s large game animals for the wolves.
Livestock, horses and pets are also being attacked by wolves. One dog was attacked by a wolf only yards from the front porch of a home in the Gila in the presence of an 8 year old girl.
The New Mexico State Game Commission meets in Las Cruces on March 28.
Sportsmen Must Unite
Attend an important meeting for Sportsmen who hunt the Gila!
Learn the true impact of the Mexican Wolf in the Gila!
7:00 PM
Thursday, March 22
Las Cruces Elks Lodge No. 1119
3000 Elks Drive
Las Cruces, NM
Byron Delk – 640-3185 Joe Delk – 644-3082
Joe Delk
Field Representative
Paragon Foundation
H 505-524-1233
C 505-644-3082
DO YOU TAKE YOUR FAMILY INTO THE GILA?
Mexican Wolves are decimating the Elk herd in the Gila National Forest!
It is not safe to take pets into the Gila!
Everyone must exercise caution and care when visiting the Gila!
BEWARE OF WOLVES IN THE GILA!!!!
The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish is managing all wildlife in the Gila for the benefit of the wolves.
The elk and deer in the Gila belong to the people of the State of New Mexico. The NM Department of Game and Fish and the US Fish and Wildlife Service are sacrificing the people’s large game animals for the wolves.
Livestock, horses and pets are also being attacked by wolves. One dog was attacked by a wolf only yards from the front porch of a home in the Gila in the presence of an 8 year old girl.
The New Mexico State Game Commission meets in Las Cruces on March 28.
Sportsmen Must Unite
Attend an important meeting for Sportsmen who hunt the Gila!
Learn the true impact of the Mexican Wolf in the Gila!
7:00 PM
Thursday, March 22
Las Cruces Elks Lodge No. 1119
3000 Elks Drive
Las Cruces, NM
Byron Delk – 640-3185 Joe Delk – 644-3082
Joe Delk
Field Representative
Paragon Foundation
H 505-524-1233
C 505-644-3082
Straw hats and new ropes harken to spring
By Julie Carter
Ranchers, ropers, and pretty girls are all getting ready for spring. Fruit trees are bursting in bloom and yes, everybody I know is sneezing and sniffling with the annual pollen attack.
There are a few other signs of the impending season.
Dan has decided the winter wheat horses are about worn out and yearling cattle are about ready to ship.
His top pasture mounts, Slats and Thin Rind, have been used to doctor cattle, ride and work every day all winter.
It's time to take the cattle to town, get a check, rest the winter horses and get down to the business of summer team roping.
Cue Ball is the professional rope horse on the outfit and is entirely too important to use in regular rotation with the wheat cattle.
Having spent the winter unemployed, he's fat and ready to win everything Dan can enter.
The practice arena has dried out, all potential headers and heelers have been invited to practice sessions and they have shown up in every state of readiness.
Some have new ropes, a few have new horses and the dedicated spent the winter watching the champs on roping videos in an attempt to absorb some winning skills while running the remote control from the recliner.
Others simply outlasted the cold months by staying in shape with holding up their end of the cold mountain brewery distribution.
When Dan was looking for a new heel horse, Tex, the horse-trading uncle, told him to find a "blown-up" head horse and they would make a heel horse of him.
When Tex went to look at the horse Dan found, he agreed that Dan had done a find job in the "blown-up" department.
It took Dan all winter riding the new horse the 8-miles roundtrip to and from work every day, tying him to a tractor all day (Dan works at an implement dealer) to get to him to quit rearing in the box.
Miles and wet saddle blankets are quite dependable training methods.
Jeff had a little different worry than the other twine-twirlers. Last year he got caught in a bind, a little short of funds, and had to settle for less than the George Strait-special straw hat.
Everybody gave him a hard time all summer long for wearing this hat with a less-than-becoming crease that fit like a box stuck on his head.
Feeling like his buddies were being unjust with their taunts and jeers, he decided he wasn't going to let it happen again this year.
His friend Grady told him the local flea market had a new shipment of straw hats and were just what he needed at the right price.
Grady was impressively familiar with the local flea market.
Why, just last week he had bought a complete set of bowling pins at a wonderful bargain price. He had put them with the shower seat he had bought just the week before for a ticket price too good to be true.
Jeff recalled that last year his hat, the box-fit special, had blown off in the arena during a roping.
Two ropers, making a fast run at a steer, ran over the hat before Jeff could get it picked up. He also recalled that Grady had been one of them.
With this remembrance, Jeff became quite suspicious that Grady might have an ulterior motive to suggesting the flea market bargain straw.
He decided he would not let spring exuberance get him to just throw away his roping money, so he settled for a gimme-cap to start the season.
This is quite possibly the reason team ropers are traditionally not known for their cowboy fashion sense.
Let Spring begin!
A cowboy's last trail
The bright, dancing eyes behind the big, almost comical smile, stuck on the ruddy face of a perennially tanned rancher will never leave my memory. Neither will I forget the soft, attractive features of a city-girl-moved-west, a woman who fell in love with the image of a man astride a horse, working cattle and telling wild tales, a woman who brought such images to life in her quest for happiness.
I suppose if you analyzed it, it could make your head hurt. He got to Denver once a year in the fall, at shipping time for his cows. He rode in the Rio Grande caboose, just 'cause that's the way it was done. That was back in the days when Denver was a true cow town - the rows of stockyards and meat packing houses located over by the Coliseum. Those were party times, and as a poem more or less says, the days when a "good cowpunch could oil up his insides."
She found his rough life fascinating - the broncs, the wild cows, the mischievous smile and the generations of ranching his family represented in the valley - and it created a romance in her mind that she could not shake. And you have to know that the tender touch of a woman's love, the brush of her soft, blonde hair against his cheek, the pad of her light footsteps through his lonely house, the wetness of her kiss and the sigh of her surrender had to light him up like he was the most important man in the world.
It might have been the whirlwind romance of the area some years ago, something to still be talked about, but routine surgery at a city hospital back home turned into a nightmare for the young woman, leaving her paralyzed on one side. Such rare events are traumatic not only physically, but also mentally, and her recovery required a lengthy residence in the big city, close to her family. It's difficult, especially when the love affair is new and no real commitments have been made, for two people to continue through an illness of such magnitude, particularly with hundreds of miles between them.
But, and as perhaps no one knew, they kept the thread between them alive and didn't let go. It was different afterwards, to be sure, but two people once touched by the unique vibrancy of a burning passion found it impossible to surrender it to the harshness of reality.
In the miraculous continuation of a conversation put on hold 40 years ago, shortly after this story began, the woman recently confided to an intimate lady friend of mine that the relationship was still on, even in their 80s, and that he called her religiously from the ranch every Sunday morning, although he hadn't called for a while now. "Do you think he's OK?" was the tentative query.
As it sometimes happens, an old friend stopped by to see how he was doing, not so much because he liked him, but more from the fact they both belonged to the old-time ranching fraternity, a group so small anymore as to be almost nonexistent, and hell, you've got to take care of each other, if for no other reason than who else will?
It's not pretty, but old cowboys die kind of like their horses - hard and alone, their cries unheard. Oh, his buddy got him to the clinic, all right, bloody head and empty eyes, and although he lived a couple more days in the hospital, it was, in a sense, a tragedy to move him from the horse pasture in which he fell, for that is where his spirit left him.
She'd give a lot for one more Sunday call, I reckon.
Tony Vagneur sometimes wishes he didn't know stories like this. Read him here every Saturday and send comments to ajv@sopris.net.
By Julie Carter
Ranchers, ropers, and pretty girls are all getting ready for spring. Fruit trees are bursting in bloom and yes, everybody I know is sneezing and sniffling with the annual pollen attack.
There are a few other signs of the impending season.
Dan has decided the winter wheat horses are about worn out and yearling cattle are about ready to ship.
His top pasture mounts, Slats and Thin Rind, have been used to doctor cattle, ride and work every day all winter.
It's time to take the cattle to town, get a check, rest the winter horses and get down to the business of summer team roping.
Cue Ball is the professional rope horse on the outfit and is entirely too important to use in regular rotation with the wheat cattle.
Having spent the winter unemployed, he's fat and ready to win everything Dan can enter.
The practice arena has dried out, all potential headers and heelers have been invited to practice sessions and they have shown up in every state of readiness.
Some have new ropes, a few have new horses and the dedicated spent the winter watching the champs on roping videos in an attempt to absorb some winning skills while running the remote control from the recliner.
Others simply outlasted the cold months by staying in shape with holding up their end of the cold mountain brewery distribution.
When Dan was looking for a new heel horse, Tex, the horse-trading uncle, told him to find a "blown-up" head horse and they would make a heel horse of him.
When Tex went to look at the horse Dan found, he agreed that Dan had done a find job in the "blown-up" department.
It took Dan all winter riding the new horse the 8-miles roundtrip to and from work every day, tying him to a tractor all day (Dan works at an implement dealer) to get to him to quit rearing in the box.
Miles and wet saddle blankets are quite dependable training methods.
Jeff had a little different worry than the other twine-twirlers. Last year he got caught in a bind, a little short of funds, and had to settle for less than the George Strait-special straw hat.
Everybody gave him a hard time all summer long for wearing this hat with a less-than-becoming crease that fit like a box stuck on his head.
Feeling like his buddies were being unjust with their taunts and jeers, he decided he wasn't going to let it happen again this year.
His friend Grady told him the local flea market had a new shipment of straw hats and were just what he needed at the right price.
Grady was impressively familiar with the local flea market.
Why, just last week he had bought a complete set of bowling pins at a wonderful bargain price. He had put them with the shower seat he had bought just the week before for a ticket price too good to be true.
Jeff recalled that last year his hat, the box-fit special, had blown off in the arena during a roping.
Two ropers, making a fast run at a steer, ran over the hat before Jeff could get it picked up. He also recalled that Grady had been one of them.
With this remembrance, Jeff became quite suspicious that Grady might have an ulterior motive to suggesting the flea market bargain straw.
He decided he would not let spring exuberance get him to just throw away his roping money, so he settled for a gimme-cap to start the season.
This is quite possibly the reason team ropers are traditionally not known for their cowboy fashion sense.
Let Spring begin!
A cowboy's last trail
The bright, dancing eyes behind the big, almost comical smile, stuck on the ruddy face of a perennially tanned rancher will never leave my memory. Neither will I forget the soft, attractive features of a city-girl-moved-west, a woman who fell in love with the image of a man astride a horse, working cattle and telling wild tales, a woman who brought such images to life in her quest for happiness.
I suppose if you analyzed it, it could make your head hurt. He got to Denver once a year in the fall, at shipping time for his cows. He rode in the Rio Grande caboose, just 'cause that's the way it was done. That was back in the days when Denver was a true cow town - the rows of stockyards and meat packing houses located over by the Coliseum. Those were party times, and as a poem more or less says, the days when a "good cowpunch could oil up his insides."
She found his rough life fascinating - the broncs, the wild cows, the mischievous smile and the generations of ranching his family represented in the valley - and it created a romance in her mind that she could not shake. And you have to know that the tender touch of a woman's love, the brush of her soft, blonde hair against his cheek, the pad of her light footsteps through his lonely house, the wetness of her kiss and the sigh of her surrender had to light him up like he was the most important man in the world.
It might have been the whirlwind romance of the area some years ago, something to still be talked about, but routine surgery at a city hospital back home turned into a nightmare for the young woman, leaving her paralyzed on one side. Such rare events are traumatic not only physically, but also mentally, and her recovery required a lengthy residence in the big city, close to her family. It's difficult, especially when the love affair is new and no real commitments have been made, for two people to continue through an illness of such magnitude, particularly with hundreds of miles between them.
But, and as perhaps no one knew, they kept the thread between them alive and didn't let go. It was different afterwards, to be sure, but two people once touched by the unique vibrancy of a burning passion found it impossible to surrender it to the harshness of reality.
In the miraculous continuation of a conversation put on hold 40 years ago, shortly after this story began, the woman recently confided to an intimate lady friend of mine that the relationship was still on, even in their 80s, and that he called her religiously from the ranch every Sunday morning, although he hadn't called for a while now. "Do you think he's OK?" was the tentative query.
As it sometimes happens, an old friend stopped by to see how he was doing, not so much because he liked him, but more from the fact they both belonged to the old-time ranching fraternity, a group so small anymore as to be almost nonexistent, and hell, you've got to take care of each other, if for no other reason than who else will?
It's not pretty, but old cowboys die kind of like their horses - hard and alone, their cries unheard. Oh, his buddy got him to the clinic, all right, bloody head and empty eyes, and although he lived a couple more days in the hospital, it was, in a sense, a tragedy to move him from the horse pasture in which he fell, for that is where his spirit left him.
She'd give a lot for one more Sunday call, I reckon.
Tony Vagneur sometimes wishes he didn't know stories like this. Read him here every Saturday and send comments to ajv@sopris.net.
OPINION/COMMENTARY
New Army Corps Rule Fails To Give Relief To Property Owners
In an effort to discourage developers from building on large areas of wetland by offering them waivers to build on smaller ones without environmental reviews, the Army Corps of Engineers issued new construction rules last week that have upset environmentalists and developers alike. According to H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), this was a missed opportunity to protect property owners and may lead to a slew of law suits. "Undoubtedly this was an attempt to comply with Court rulings striking down their previous interpretation of its power to protect wetlands, without unduly angering the powerful environmental lobby," said Burnett. "Yet environmentalists are likely to portray this as a rolling back on environmental protections, as they do with any change in the status quo that doesn't increase government's control over private property." Burnett predicts that "property owners will wind up back in court arguing that the new rules illegally restrict the lawful development of their property in areas that in fact have little or no connection to navigable waterways as traditionally understood. This won't help the environment but it will continue to hamper economic progress - only lawyers win with these new construction rules."....
PRIUS OUTDOES HUMMER IN ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE
The Toyota Prius, the flagship car for the environmentally conscious, is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America, and takes more combined energy to produce than a Hummer, says the Recorder.
Consider:
* The nickel contained in the Prius' battery is mined and smelted at a plant in Ontario that has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the 'dead zone' around the plant to test moon rovers.
* Dubbed the Superstack, the factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist's nightmare.
* Acid rain around the area was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside, according to Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin.
* After leaving the plant, the nickel travels to Europe, China, Japan and United States, a hardly environmentally sound round the world trip for a single battery.
But that isn't even the worst part, says the Record. According to a study by CNW Marketing, the total combined energy to produce a Prius (consisting of electrical, fuel, transportation, materials and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime), is greater than what it takes to produce a Hummer:
* The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles -- the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.
* The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles.
* That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use almost 50 percent less combined energy doing it.
Source: Chris Demorro, "Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage," The Recorder, March 7, 2007.
For text:http://clubs.ccsu.edu/recorder/editorial/editorial_item.asp?NewsID=188
Our Green ICE Age
All environmentalists should be singing the praises of the internal combustion engine (ICE) instead of damning it for polluting the environment. The environmental advantages of the internal combustion engine have been obvious for a long time. But a recent story in the British newspaper, "The Independent," on the methane from livestock flatulence makes the advantages of internal combustion even more obvious. According to "The Independent," a recent study by the Food and Agricultural Organization finds that "livestock are responsible for 18 percent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together." Global warming became a concern, however, long after the internal combustion engine began improving the environment. In 1900 most of the horsepower we had available really was horse power -- or mule power, or oxen power. As reliance on the internal combustion engine increased in the early 1900s, we began replacing the emissions that came out of the tailpipes of animals with those coming out of the tailpipes of cars and trucks. And the latter emissions were a lot less harmful than the former. Consider the effects of horse emissions in our towns and cities at the beginning of the last century. The air and water pollution from horse manure contributed to a death rate far greater than that generated by the pollution from cars and trucks. No one denies that photochemical smog from gas powered vehicles is a health risk, but it is not nearly the health risk of cholera, typhoid, typhus, yellow fever, diphtheria and malaria. These diseases killed tens of thousands of Americans in the early 20-century and these deaths began to decline as cars and trucks replaced horses and wagons. And the improvements in the environment weren't limited to just the towns and cities. Before gasoline power arrived, beasts of burden were polluting agricultural communities along with meat producing animals such as cows, chickens and pigs. By eliminating horses, mules and oxen on farms, tractors and other types of gas-powered farm machinery greatly reduced the problem of animal waste that environmentalists, with justification, still complain about. This also eliminated the need to grow the food required by millions of farm animals. It has been estimated that it took about 93 million acres of land in 1900 to grow the food to fuel the farm animals that were soon replaced by motorized farm machinery. Much of that land has now gone back to woodlands....
Do as I say, not as I spew
Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," was billed as "a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it." But right after the movie won an Oscar for best documentary, America learned that Gore's crusade ends at his front door. A conservative think-tank, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, released a press release that showed the Gores spent $30,000 a year on energy for their suburban Nashville home -- and burned 221,000 kilowatt-hours last year, or 20 times the national average. The reaction of Gore's spokesperson is instructive. Kalee Kreider told ABC News' Jake Tapper, "I think what you're seeing here is the last gasp of the global warming skeptics. They've completely lost the debate on the issue, so now they're just attacking their most effective opponent." Kreider is right, in a way. Gore is the most effective global-warming advocate in America. Yet somehow Gore has little problem doing a lot of the very thing he tells the rest of the country not to do -- that is, burning more energy than is necessary. The message comes across loud and clear: The Gores are rich, and rich people are going to burn a lot of energy. They won't let their belief in global warming crimp their lifestyle....
The Left-Wing Echo Chamber
Death threats. Harassing phone calls. Threatening e-mails. Such was a day in the life of Drew Johnson a few weeks ago. His crime? Johnson is president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a free-market think tank that broke one of the juiciest stories of 2007. A day after the Academy Awards, on Feb. 26, Johnson’s organization reported details of Al Gore’s enormous utility bill. The former vice president had consumed nearly 221,000 kilowatt hours of electricity in a single year -- more than 20 times the national average. The story skyrocketed to the top headline on the Drudge Report, sending tens of thousands of visitors to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research’s Web site. With Gore facing charges of hypocrisy just a day after winning an Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth," the news traveled fast. Unfortunately for Johnson, it meant enduring days of attacks from liberals -- even though the facts of the story came directly from public records. Last week he visited Washington, D.C., to share his story. Johnson told a group of conservative bloggers at The Heritage Foundation that he heard from hundreds of angry callers, many of whom used profane language. The research center’s vice president, whose phone number was listed on the Web page, eventually had to change her number when the attacks became so persistent and threatening. The phone blitz was only one avenue liberals used to intimidate. Johnson said his organization received thousands of e-mails, the vast majority of them negative and hate-filled. Shortly after the story made headlines, popular liberal blogs Daily Kos and Huffington Post, laid out their plan of attack....
ETHANOL HYPOCRITES
Once the darling energy source of the political left, we now hear how sugar production for ethanol is trashing the otherwise forgotten rain forest and adds to global warming. Others are blaming ethanol for everything from poverty to floods. However, the argument doesn't get the facts right, says Investor's Business Daily (IBD).
Consider:
* Brazil is not growing sugar for ethanol production on rain forest land but in the southern grasslands, making environmentalists' renewed interest in deforestation irrelevant.
* On the grasslands, ethanol production has barely started; Brazil's entire agricultural production is done on only 8 percent of the nation's arable land.
Environmentalists, however, are trying to sell Brazil as one big rain forest in need of "saving" instead of a diverse, rapidly industrializing country whose development is critical to conservation:
* Poverty, not development, is the biggest danger to rain forests, as UC Berkeley professor emeritus Jack Hollander found in a study.
* As Brazil industrialized in 2005, it reforested 553,000 hectares of rain forest, and last year it reduced Amazon deforestation by 11 percent.
* Meanwhile, an even bigger ethanol producer, the United States, leads the world in reforestation, according to Jesse H. Ausubel, director of Rockefeller University's program for the human environment.
Ethanol is no panacea and unlikely to be more than 10 percent of energy production, but it's a viable alternative, says IBD. If President Bush can enrage environmentalists by developing the ethanol they once championed, it is unlikely that any alternative (in the hands of Bush that is) will satisfy them. They simply aren't serious.
Source: Editorial, "Ethanol Hypocrites," Investor's Business Daily, March 9, 2007.
For text:http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=258250203727155
Global Warming Expedition Called Off When Hiker Gets Frost Bite
A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment. "Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey," said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition. On Monday, the pair was at Canada's Ward Hunt Island, awaiting a plane to take them to Resolute, Canada, where they were to return to Minneapolis later this week....hat tip to Allen Estrin
New Army Corps Rule Fails To Give Relief To Property Owners
In an effort to discourage developers from building on large areas of wetland by offering them waivers to build on smaller ones without environmental reviews, the Army Corps of Engineers issued new construction rules last week that have upset environmentalists and developers alike. According to H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), this was a missed opportunity to protect property owners and may lead to a slew of law suits. "Undoubtedly this was an attempt to comply with Court rulings striking down their previous interpretation of its power to protect wetlands, without unduly angering the powerful environmental lobby," said Burnett. "Yet environmentalists are likely to portray this as a rolling back on environmental protections, as they do with any change in the status quo that doesn't increase government's control over private property." Burnett predicts that "property owners will wind up back in court arguing that the new rules illegally restrict the lawful development of their property in areas that in fact have little or no connection to navigable waterways as traditionally understood. This won't help the environment but it will continue to hamper economic progress - only lawyers win with these new construction rules."....
PRIUS OUTDOES HUMMER IN ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE
The Toyota Prius, the flagship car for the environmentally conscious, is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America, and takes more combined energy to produce than a Hummer, says the Recorder.
Consider:
* The nickel contained in the Prius' battery is mined and smelted at a plant in Ontario that has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the 'dead zone' around the plant to test moon rovers.
* Dubbed the Superstack, the factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist's nightmare.
* Acid rain around the area was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside, according to Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin.
* After leaving the plant, the nickel travels to Europe, China, Japan and United States, a hardly environmentally sound round the world trip for a single battery.
But that isn't even the worst part, says the Record. According to a study by CNW Marketing, the total combined energy to produce a Prius (consisting of electrical, fuel, transportation, materials and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime), is greater than what it takes to produce a Hummer:
* The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles -- the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.
* The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles.
* That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use almost 50 percent less combined energy doing it.
Source: Chris Demorro, "Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage," The Recorder, March 7, 2007.
For text:http://clubs.ccsu.edu/recorder/editorial/editorial_item.asp?NewsID=188
Our Green ICE Age
All environmentalists should be singing the praises of the internal combustion engine (ICE) instead of damning it for polluting the environment. The environmental advantages of the internal combustion engine have been obvious for a long time. But a recent story in the British newspaper, "The Independent," on the methane from livestock flatulence makes the advantages of internal combustion even more obvious. According to "The Independent," a recent study by the Food and Agricultural Organization finds that "livestock are responsible for 18 percent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together." Global warming became a concern, however, long after the internal combustion engine began improving the environment. In 1900 most of the horsepower we had available really was horse power -- or mule power, or oxen power. As reliance on the internal combustion engine increased in the early 1900s, we began replacing the emissions that came out of the tailpipes of animals with those coming out of the tailpipes of cars and trucks. And the latter emissions were a lot less harmful than the former. Consider the effects of horse emissions in our towns and cities at the beginning of the last century. The air and water pollution from horse manure contributed to a death rate far greater than that generated by the pollution from cars and trucks. No one denies that photochemical smog from gas powered vehicles is a health risk, but it is not nearly the health risk of cholera, typhoid, typhus, yellow fever, diphtheria and malaria. These diseases killed tens of thousands of Americans in the early 20-century and these deaths began to decline as cars and trucks replaced horses and wagons. And the improvements in the environment weren't limited to just the towns and cities. Before gasoline power arrived, beasts of burden were polluting agricultural communities along with meat producing animals such as cows, chickens and pigs. By eliminating horses, mules and oxen on farms, tractors and other types of gas-powered farm machinery greatly reduced the problem of animal waste that environmentalists, with justification, still complain about. This also eliminated the need to grow the food required by millions of farm animals. It has been estimated that it took about 93 million acres of land in 1900 to grow the food to fuel the farm animals that were soon replaced by motorized farm machinery. Much of that land has now gone back to woodlands....
Do as I say, not as I spew
Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," was billed as "a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it." But right after the movie won an Oscar for best documentary, America learned that Gore's crusade ends at his front door. A conservative think-tank, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, released a press release that showed the Gores spent $30,000 a year on energy for their suburban Nashville home -- and burned 221,000 kilowatt-hours last year, or 20 times the national average. The reaction of Gore's spokesperson is instructive. Kalee Kreider told ABC News' Jake Tapper, "I think what you're seeing here is the last gasp of the global warming skeptics. They've completely lost the debate on the issue, so now they're just attacking their most effective opponent." Kreider is right, in a way. Gore is the most effective global-warming advocate in America. Yet somehow Gore has little problem doing a lot of the very thing he tells the rest of the country not to do -- that is, burning more energy than is necessary. The message comes across loud and clear: The Gores are rich, and rich people are going to burn a lot of energy. They won't let their belief in global warming crimp their lifestyle....
The Left-Wing Echo Chamber
Death threats. Harassing phone calls. Threatening e-mails. Such was a day in the life of Drew Johnson a few weeks ago. His crime? Johnson is president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a free-market think tank that broke one of the juiciest stories of 2007. A day after the Academy Awards, on Feb. 26, Johnson’s organization reported details of Al Gore’s enormous utility bill. The former vice president had consumed nearly 221,000 kilowatt hours of electricity in a single year -- more than 20 times the national average. The story skyrocketed to the top headline on the Drudge Report, sending tens of thousands of visitors to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research’s Web site. With Gore facing charges of hypocrisy just a day after winning an Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth," the news traveled fast. Unfortunately for Johnson, it meant enduring days of attacks from liberals -- even though the facts of the story came directly from public records. Last week he visited Washington, D.C., to share his story. Johnson told a group of conservative bloggers at The Heritage Foundation that he heard from hundreds of angry callers, many of whom used profane language. The research center’s vice president, whose phone number was listed on the Web page, eventually had to change her number when the attacks became so persistent and threatening. The phone blitz was only one avenue liberals used to intimidate. Johnson said his organization received thousands of e-mails, the vast majority of them negative and hate-filled. Shortly after the story made headlines, popular liberal blogs Daily Kos and Huffington Post, laid out their plan of attack....
ETHANOL HYPOCRITES
Once the darling energy source of the political left, we now hear how sugar production for ethanol is trashing the otherwise forgotten rain forest and adds to global warming. Others are blaming ethanol for everything from poverty to floods. However, the argument doesn't get the facts right, says Investor's Business Daily (IBD).
Consider:
* Brazil is not growing sugar for ethanol production on rain forest land but in the southern grasslands, making environmentalists' renewed interest in deforestation irrelevant.
* On the grasslands, ethanol production has barely started; Brazil's entire agricultural production is done on only 8 percent of the nation's arable land.
Environmentalists, however, are trying to sell Brazil as one big rain forest in need of "saving" instead of a diverse, rapidly industrializing country whose development is critical to conservation:
* Poverty, not development, is the biggest danger to rain forests, as UC Berkeley professor emeritus Jack Hollander found in a study.
* As Brazil industrialized in 2005, it reforested 553,000 hectares of rain forest, and last year it reduced Amazon deforestation by 11 percent.
* Meanwhile, an even bigger ethanol producer, the United States, leads the world in reforestation, according to Jesse H. Ausubel, director of Rockefeller University's program for the human environment.
Ethanol is no panacea and unlikely to be more than 10 percent of energy production, but it's a viable alternative, says IBD. If President Bush can enrage environmentalists by developing the ethanol they once championed, it is unlikely that any alternative (in the hands of Bush that is) will satisfy them. They simply aren't serious.
Source: Editorial, "Ethanol Hypocrites," Investor's Business Daily, March 9, 2007.
For text:http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=258250203727155
Global Warming Expedition Called Off When Hiker Gets Frost Bite
A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment. "Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey," said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition. On Monday, the pair was at Canada's Ward Hunt Island, awaiting a plane to take them to Resolute, Canada, where they were to return to Minneapolis later this week....hat tip to Allen Estrin
FLE
Amid Concerns, FBI Lapses Went On
FBI counterterrorism officials continued to use flawed procedures to obtain thousands of U.S. telephone records during a two-year period when bureau lawyers and managers were expressing escalating concerns about the practice, according to senior FBI and Justice Department officials and documents. FBI lawyers raised the concerns beginning in late October 2004 but did not closely scrutinize the practice until last year, FBI officials acknowledged. They also did not understand the scope of the problem until the Justice Department launched an investigation, FBI officials said. Under pressure to provide a stronger legal footing, counterterrorism agents last year wrote new letters to phone companies demanding the information the bureau already possessed. At least one senior FBI headquarters official -- whom the bureau declined to name -- signed these "national security letters" without including the required proof that the letters were linked to FBI counterterrorism or espionage investigations, an FBI official said. The flawed procedures involved the use of emergency demands for records, called "exigent circumstance" letters, which contained false or undocumented claims. They also included national security letters that were issued without FBI rules being followed. Both types of request were served on three phone companies....
Treasury casts a wide net under Patriot Act
Under a little-noticed provision in the USA Patriot Act, the Treasury Department has ordered severe restrictions against foreign banks or countries for reasons beyond the stated purpose of the law and without producing evidence. Section 311 of the 2001 Patriot Act was drafted to halt terrorist financing and money laundering, but the Bush administration has used it against an alleged source of terrorist financing - a bank in Syria - only once. The Treasury has invoked it more often to punish alleged human-rights abuses or offshore banking havens. Although Congress has yet to examine the Treasury's use of Section 311, the provision is likely to add to the controversy over other sweeping powers the executive branch of government acquired under the Patriot Act. According to a recent audit, the FBI used the act illegally to obtain personal information about U.S. citizens, and the administration has agreed to abandon a provision that it used to replace eight U.S. attorneys for what Democrats charge were partisan political reasons. Supporters view Section 311 as a diplomatic sledgehammer that gets results. Critics - many of whom refused to speak on the record, saying they feared retribution - complain that the provision denies suspects due process and presumes that the accused are guilty rather than innocent. Through Section 311, the Treasury doesn't have to tell accused banks or countries what threat they allegedly pose to the U.S. financial system, and the Treasury has the power to act as both prosecutor and judge....
Aborted DOJ Probe Probably Would Have Targeted Gonzales
Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews. Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work. It is unclear whether the president knew at the time of his decision that the Justice inquiry -- to be conducted by the department's internal ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility -- would almost certainly examine the conduct of his attorney general. Sources familiar with the halted inquiry said that if the probe had been allowed to continue, it would have examined Gonzales's role in authorizing the eavesdropping program while he was White House counsel, as well as his subsequent oversight of the program as attorney general. Both the White House and Gonzales declined comment on two issues -- whether Gonzales informed Bush that his own conduct was about to be scrutinized, and whether he urged the president to close down the investigation, which had been requested by Democratic members of Congress. Current and former Justice Department officials, as well as experts in legal ethics, question the propriety of Gonzales's continuing to advise Bush about the investigation after learning that it might examine his own actions. The attorney general, they say, was remiss if he did not disclose that information to the president. But if Gonzales did inform Bush about the possibility and the president responded by stymieing the probe, that would raise even more-serious questions as to whether Bush acted to protect Gonzales, they said....
Major Second Amendment Decision
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (commonly referred to as the "D.C. Circuit") today (Friday, March 9) issued a very important Second Amendment decision broadly upholding the right of individuals to possess and use firearms, in particular handguns, for self-defense in the home. The case involved a challenge, brought by six residents of the District of Columbia, to the District's handgun laws. These laws largely ban the private ownership of handguns in D.C. Even where such ownership is permitted (e.g., by retired D.C. police officers), the laws impose onerous restrictions on the use of such handguns, including a requirement that all firearms be kept unloaded and unassembled or bound by a trigger lock or similar device. (See Decision at 4.) The plaintiffs wanted to possess "functional firearms" in their homes for purposes of self-defense. The D.C. guns laws, obviously, frustrated these perfectly reasonable aims. The case was heard by a three-judge panel, composed of Laurence Silberman (appointed by President Reagan in 1985), Thomas Griffith (appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005), and Karen LeCraft Henderson (appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990). Judge Silberman and Judge Griffith concluded (in an opinion written by Judge Silberman, in classic originalist style) that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to "keep and bear arms" (as opposed to merely a collective right related to the maintenance of state militias); that handguns are among the types of "arms" protected by the Second Amendment; and that the District's handgun laws violate the Second Amendment insofar as they prohibit an individual from owning and using a handgun for self-defense in the home. Judge Henderson dissented from the decision. This is only the second time a federal appellate court has decided that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms. The Fifth Circuit also has reached this result. In contrast, the First, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits all have concluded that the Second Amendment only protects a collective right. (See Decision at 16.) The Second Circuit (which covers New York, Connecticut, and Vermont) still has not addressed the issue....
Amid Concerns, FBI Lapses Went On
FBI counterterrorism officials continued to use flawed procedures to obtain thousands of U.S. telephone records during a two-year period when bureau lawyers and managers were expressing escalating concerns about the practice, according to senior FBI and Justice Department officials and documents. FBI lawyers raised the concerns beginning in late October 2004 but did not closely scrutinize the practice until last year, FBI officials acknowledged. They also did not understand the scope of the problem until the Justice Department launched an investigation, FBI officials said. Under pressure to provide a stronger legal footing, counterterrorism agents last year wrote new letters to phone companies demanding the information the bureau already possessed. At least one senior FBI headquarters official -- whom the bureau declined to name -- signed these "national security letters" without including the required proof that the letters were linked to FBI counterterrorism or espionage investigations, an FBI official said. The flawed procedures involved the use of emergency demands for records, called "exigent circumstance" letters, which contained false or undocumented claims. They also included national security letters that were issued without FBI rules being followed. Both types of request were served on three phone companies....
Treasury casts a wide net under Patriot Act
Under a little-noticed provision in the USA Patriot Act, the Treasury Department has ordered severe restrictions against foreign banks or countries for reasons beyond the stated purpose of the law and without producing evidence. Section 311 of the 2001 Patriot Act was drafted to halt terrorist financing and money laundering, but the Bush administration has used it against an alleged source of terrorist financing - a bank in Syria - only once. The Treasury has invoked it more often to punish alleged human-rights abuses or offshore banking havens. Although Congress has yet to examine the Treasury's use of Section 311, the provision is likely to add to the controversy over other sweeping powers the executive branch of government acquired under the Patriot Act. According to a recent audit, the FBI used the act illegally to obtain personal information about U.S. citizens, and the administration has agreed to abandon a provision that it used to replace eight U.S. attorneys for what Democrats charge were partisan political reasons. Supporters view Section 311 as a diplomatic sledgehammer that gets results. Critics - many of whom refused to speak on the record, saying they feared retribution - complain that the provision denies suspects due process and presumes that the accused are guilty rather than innocent. Through Section 311, the Treasury doesn't have to tell accused banks or countries what threat they allegedly pose to the U.S. financial system, and the Treasury has the power to act as both prosecutor and judge....
Aborted DOJ Probe Probably Would Have Targeted Gonzales
Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews. Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work. It is unclear whether the president knew at the time of his decision that the Justice inquiry -- to be conducted by the department's internal ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility -- would almost certainly examine the conduct of his attorney general. Sources familiar with the halted inquiry said that if the probe had been allowed to continue, it would have examined Gonzales's role in authorizing the eavesdropping program while he was White House counsel, as well as his subsequent oversight of the program as attorney general. Both the White House and Gonzales declined comment on two issues -- whether Gonzales informed Bush that his own conduct was about to be scrutinized, and whether he urged the president to close down the investigation, which had been requested by Democratic members of Congress. Current and former Justice Department officials, as well as experts in legal ethics, question the propriety of Gonzales's continuing to advise Bush about the investigation after learning that it might examine his own actions. The attorney general, they say, was remiss if he did not disclose that information to the president. But if Gonzales did inform Bush about the possibility and the president responded by stymieing the probe, that would raise even more-serious questions as to whether Bush acted to protect Gonzales, they said....
Major Second Amendment Decision
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (commonly referred to as the "D.C. Circuit") today (Friday, March 9) issued a very important Second Amendment decision broadly upholding the right of individuals to possess and use firearms, in particular handguns, for self-defense in the home. The case involved a challenge, brought by six residents of the District of Columbia, to the District's handgun laws. These laws largely ban the private ownership of handguns in D.C. Even where such ownership is permitted (e.g., by retired D.C. police officers), the laws impose onerous restrictions on the use of such handguns, including a requirement that all firearms be kept unloaded and unassembled or bound by a trigger lock or similar device. (See Decision at 4.) The plaintiffs wanted to possess "functional firearms" in their homes for purposes of self-defense. The D.C. guns laws, obviously, frustrated these perfectly reasonable aims. The case was heard by a three-judge panel, composed of Laurence Silberman (appointed by President Reagan in 1985), Thomas Griffith (appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005), and Karen LeCraft Henderson (appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990). Judge Silberman and Judge Griffith concluded (in an opinion written by Judge Silberman, in classic originalist style) that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to "keep and bear arms" (as opposed to merely a collective right related to the maintenance of state militias); that handguns are among the types of "arms" protected by the Second Amendment; and that the District's handgun laws violate the Second Amendment insofar as they prohibit an individual from owning and using a handgun for self-defense in the home. Judge Henderson dissented from the decision. This is only the second time a federal appellate court has decided that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms. The Fifth Circuit also has reached this result. In contrast, the First, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits all have concluded that the Second Amendment only protects a collective right. (See Decision at 16.) The Second Circuit (which covers New York, Connecticut, and Vermont) still has not addressed the issue....
Friday, March 16, 2007
NEWS ROUNDUP
Eco-warrior Trudie prefers helicopter to an 80-mile train ride It's one rule for them, and another for the rest of us. Trudie Styler, wife of Sting and self-styled eco-warrior, recently took a helicopter to travel 80 miles from Wiltshire to Devon, a journey that would have taken less than two hours by train. The actress and film producer is forever harping on about saving the environment, having set up the Rainforest Campaign in the late 1980s with her pop star husband. The Stings are known for eating only organic food, supposedly grown on their land, although one member of staff recently admitted to serving up nonorganic salad from the supermarket. So what was Styler thinking as she clambered into her gas-guzzling chopper, off to stay with friend and fellow greenie Zac Goldsmith on his organic farm in Devon?....
'Days of Our Lives' plans 'green wedding' for Sami, Lucas "Days of Our Lives" is going green. The NBC daytime serial will feature a wedding with "earth-friendly elements" in a story line that is to begin this month and end in May with the marriage of Samantha "Sami" Brady (Alison Sweeney) and Lucas Roberts (Bryan Dattilo). Ken Corday, the show's executive producer, said last month's Academy Award for the global-warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" may be an indication of "where the world is headed and how urgently we need to address the current environmental crisis." It's important for the soap opera to "fall in step in helping to raise the viewers' consciousness of certain environmental problems and solutions," Corday said in a statement Tuesday. The fictional nuptials will include pesticide-free flowers and biodegradable favors. Among those involved in the ceremony are a wedding Web site and restaurant owner Ben Ford, an organic chef and son of Harrison Ford....
Inside the evangelical war over climate change When James Dobson gets angry, people notice. And, in early March, the influential chair of Focus on the Family fired off a very angry letter to the board of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). Tony Perkins of The Family Research Council signed it. So did Gary Bauer. So did 22 other conservative Christian leaders. Their complaint? It seems that Richard Cizik, NAE's vice-president for governmental affairs, had been sounding the alarm on global warming. For years now, Cizik has ruffled feathers by imploring evangelicals to pay more attention to environmental issues--"creation care," as it's called. But the foray into climate change proved a step too far; the letter-writers called it "divisive and dangerous." A no-no. Cizik's awakening came about in 2002, when Jim Ball, the executive director for the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), dragged him to a conference at Oxford. There, he heard a presentation by Sir John Houghton, an evangelical scientist and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As he listened to Houghton rattle off evidence on melting ice caps and increased droughts, Cizik quickly realized that global warming was a serious threat--an experience he has called "not unlike my conversion to Christ." Like many evangelicals now pushing for action on climate change, Cizik remains a staunch conservative, firmly opposed to abortion and gay marriage. He bristles at criticism by Dobson and Perkins that he's trying to divert attention from red-meat issues. "It's not a zero-sum game," he contends....
Back Burner ot long after George W. Bush proudly declared last year that he had no intention of watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, he told reporters that there was a "fundamental debate" about whether global warming was "manmade or natural." It was an ignorant statement utterly at odds with the scientific consensus. Recently, however, he tried to walk it back. "Beginning in June 2001," read a White House letter released last month, "President Bush has consistently acknowledged climate change is occurring and humans are contributing to the problem." Consider the current raft of climate-change legislation. The only piece that has a chance of surviving a GOP filibuster and Bush veto is one sponsored by New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman. His bill would implement a cap-and-trade regime, setting a national limit on carbon emissions and allowing companies to buy and sell pollution credits--a system that worked with acid-rain legislation in the 1990s. But Bingaman's proposal includes "safety valves" that give companies an out, and it doesn't reduce emissions quickly enough. Unfortunately, stronger bills--such as one sponsored by John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Barack Obama--stand almost no chance, even with the current Democratic majority. (Last time around, that bill netted only 38 votes.)....
Antarctic Glaciers' Sloughing Of Ice Has Scientists at a Loss Some of the largest glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland are moving in unusual ways and are losing increased amounts of ice to the sea, researchers said yesterday. Although the changes in Greenland appear to be related to global warming, it remains unclear what is causing the glaciers of frigid Antarctica and their "ice streams" to lose ice to the ocean in recent years, the researchers said. "In Greenland we know there is melting associated with the ice loss, but in Antarctica we don't really know why it's happening," said Duncan Wingham, an author of the review released today in Science magazine. "With so much of the world's ice captured in Antarctica, just the fact that we don't know why this is happening is a cause of some concern." The Antarctic ice loss, which Wingham said is not caused by melting but rather by the pushing of ice streams into the ocean by several glaciers in the west of the continent, has picked up speed in recent years. But Wingham said that because researchers did not have good measures of the depth of the Antarctic ice shelf until about 10 years ago, scientists do not know whether this is a natural variation or a result of human activity....
Winter Warmest on Record Worldwide This winter was the warmest on record worldwide, the government said Thursday in the latest worrisome report focusing on changing climate. The report comes just over a month after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said global warming is very likely caused by human actions and is so severe it will continue for centuries. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the combined land and ocean temperatures for December through February were 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit above average for the period since record keeping began in 1880. The report said that during the past century, global temperatures have increased at about 0.11 degrees per decade. But that increase has been three times larger since 1976, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center reported....
U.S. WINTER TEMPERATURE NEAR AVERAGE The December 2006-February 2007 winter season temperature was marked by periods of unusually warm and cold conditions in the U.S., but the overall seasonal temperature was near average, according to scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Precipitation was above average in much of the center of the nation while large parts of the East, Southeast, and Southwest were drier than average. The global temperature was the warmest on record for the December-February three-month period. The winter temperature for the contiguous United States (based on preliminary data) was 0.6°F (0.3°C) above the 20th century average of 33.0°F (0.6°C). Statewide temperatures were warmer than average from Florida to Maine and from Michigan to Montana. Cooler than average temperatures occurred in the southern Plains and areas of the Southwest....
Danish scientist: Global warming is a myth A Danish scientist said the idea of a "global temperature" and global warming is more political than scientific. University of Copenhagen Professor Bjarne Andresen has analyzed the topic in collaboration with Canadian Professors Christopher Essex from the University of Western Ontario and Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph. It is generally assumed the Earth's atmosphere and oceans have grown warmer during the recent 50 years because of an upward trend in the so-called global temperature, which is the result of complex calculations and averaging of air temperature measurements taken around the world. "It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth," said Andresen, an expert on thermodynamics. "A temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system. Furthermore, the climate is not governed by a single temperature. Rather, differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate". He says the currently used method of determining the global temperature -- and any conclusion drawn from it -- is more political than scientific.
Wolves pushing cats from Buffalo Valley Cougars may have met their match in the gray wolf when it comes to defending prime habitat in and around Buffalo Valley, according to local researchers. Craighead Beringia South researcher Howard Quigley presented information at a talk at the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance Thursday night. Quigley also presented research showing the movements of one cougar on East Gros Ventre Butte and said cougars, for some reason, have started eating more mule deer in 2006. According to Quigley, six female cougars that had established territories in the Buffalo Valley have either left or been killed by hunters in recent years. Despite a healthy population of cougars around the Jackson Hole area, no new females have moved in to claim the vacant habitat. The answer to this mystery could be wolves, said Quigley, who leads a team of biologists who track the cats using GPS collars. “One of our theories is that wolves are now pushing cougars into habitat that they used to occupy 200 years ago,” he said. “Cougars may be concentrating themselves in escape territory.” Escape territory is steeper terrain with lots of trees – land where the cats could more easily elude threats....
Wild Horse League hopes to educate public on Open Range laws Members of the Wild Horse Preservation League are launching an ambitious public education effort to inform property owners who live near open range of state law that requires home buyers to fence-out wild horses and livestock that graze or roam on adjacent open range. Speaking at the Silver Springs Advisory Board meeting, members of the WHPL announced their plans to circulate a publication entitled, "Welcome to Wild Horse County," which includes information on state laws governing range land disclosures, open range laws and a range land disclosure form. Wild-horse advocates are urging realtors and county elected officials to enforce state statutes governing range land disclosure and open range laws, which allows livestock and wild horses to roam and graze on open range. The public education campaign comes after residents primarily in the Stagecoach and Dayton areas have complained about livestock and wild horses destroying lawns and vegetation on their properties....
City to pursue ordinance making cattle owners responsible for damages The Fernley City Council had a difficult task: to consider whether to prohibit open grazing in the Fernley City limits, which encompasses 160 square miles. After hearing from residents in the Desert Bluffs subdivision, located south of Fernley High School, as well as, cattle owners, the council agreed by consensus to pursue an ordinance that would make livestock owners responsible for any property damages their animals may cause within the city limits. The Council also agreed to direct the Community Development Department to place conditions on future projects to require developers to fence their subdivisions and provide cattle guards on property that is adjacent to public land....
Home on range to home in refuge A wild bison bound for Colorado didn't see the point of being driven from an open field into a 5-foot holding pen Thursday before boarding a truck for a ride to Commerce City. The reluctant 1,500-pound bull pawed the ground, snorted, bucked its head and cocked a back leg before slamming its hoof against the metal chute. The bison is one of 16 being driven from the National Bison Range in western Montana to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, where they will be released into a 1,400-acre fenced area. "These are definitely wild critters," said Steve Kallin of the National Bison Range. "The guys have been doing everything they can not to get them aggravated. But this one ..." The bison were picked from the national herd of about 350 by their genetics, which show no indications of domestic- cow DNA....
Why the Buffalo Roam Sometimes you have to eat an animal to save it. That paradox may disturb vegetarians, but consider the bison: 500 years ago, perhaps 30 million of these enormous mammals inhabited North America. By the late 1800s, several forces--natural climate changes and Buffalo Bill--style mass killings among them--had slashed the bison population to something like 1,000. And yet today North America is home to roughly 450,000 bison, a species recovery that has a lot to do with our having developed an appetite for them. This year usda-inspected slaughterhouses will kill approximately 50,000 bison for human consumption. In 2000 the figure was just 17,674. Although bison consumption remains minuscule compared to beef eating--Americans ingest the meat of 90,000 cattle every day--bison is by far the fastest-growing sector of the meat business....
Groundwater not an endless resource, environmentalists say More than half of Utah's 2 million-plus residents are dependent on the aquifers beneath them for their drinking and irrigation water, and have been for decades. But a new study by an environmental group suggests that they - and other Westerners - shouldn't take such a resource for granted. In fact, the report released Thursday by Trout Unlimited warns that without serious reforms, the region's explosive growth, coupled with a continuing drought, could end up compromising not only its groundwater supplies, but surface water resources as well. The two are inexorably linked, according to the study, titled "Gone to the Well Once Too Often." But Melinda Kassen, director of Trout Unlimited's Ground Water Project, argues that it is a link that has gone unnoticed for far too long....
Cloud seeding hits snag There may be more questions up in the air over the Wind River Range than the silver iodide particles used in a state-sponsored cloud-seeding experiment. The project has stalled over a U.S. Forest Service-required environmental study and the question of who pays for the study. At issue is whether the cloud seeding -- tiny particles of silver iodide aerosolized into the air to allow ice crystals to form around the particles -- is compatible with the 1964 Wilderness Act or with a Forest Service regulation banning weather changes that affect wilderness areas. The Wyoming Water Development Commission has allocated $9 million for a five-year cloud-seeding research program, designed to increase the snowpack in the Medicine Bow, Sierra Madre and Wind River ranges, for the benefit of irrigators, municipalities and industry. The state has contracted with Weather Modification Inc. of Fargo, N.D., for the project. “I think this is a clear violation of the Wilderness Act and a Forest Service manual regulation,” said Jonathan Ratner, a Pinedale-based conservationist....
Firefighter Supervisors Get Protection New Mexico became the first state with a law that protects wildfire supervisors from criminal liability if a volunteer firefighter under their command dies while battling a fire. Firefighters called on to fight wildfires are supposed to be certified to national standards, but in rural communities, it is often volunteer firefighters without proper training who arrive first on the scene. House Bill 507, crafted by the State Forestry Division, was signed into law this week by Gov. Bill Richardson. The bill was spurred in part by reaction among firefighters over last year's indictment of a U.S. Forest Service boss in Washington state on involuntary manslaughter charges involving a 2001 fire there that killed four firefighters. A subsequent nationwide survey of firefighters found that 36 percent of the 3,362 respondents would make themselves less available to fight wildfires because of liability concerns, and one-fourth said they would downgrade their qualifications to refuse supervisory positions....
Eco-warrior Trudie prefers helicopter to an 80-mile train ride It's one rule for them, and another for the rest of us. Trudie Styler, wife of Sting and self-styled eco-warrior, recently took a helicopter to travel 80 miles from Wiltshire to Devon, a journey that would have taken less than two hours by train. The actress and film producer is forever harping on about saving the environment, having set up the Rainforest Campaign in the late 1980s with her pop star husband. The Stings are known for eating only organic food, supposedly grown on their land, although one member of staff recently admitted to serving up nonorganic salad from the supermarket. So what was Styler thinking as she clambered into her gas-guzzling chopper, off to stay with friend and fellow greenie Zac Goldsmith on his organic farm in Devon?....
'Days of Our Lives' plans 'green wedding' for Sami, Lucas "Days of Our Lives" is going green. The NBC daytime serial will feature a wedding with "earth-friendly elements" in a story line that is to begin this month and end in May with the marriage of Samantha "Sami" Brady (Alison Sweeney) and Lucas Roberts (Bryan Dattilo). Ken Corday, the show's executive producer, said last month's Academy Award for the global-warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" may be an indication of "where the world is headed and how urgently we need to address the current environmental crisis." It's important for the soap opera to "fall in step in helping to raise the viewers' consciousness of certain environmental problems and solutions," Corday said in a statement Tuesday. The fictional nuptials will include pesticide-free flowers and biodegradable favors. Among those involved in the ceremony are a wedding Web site and restaurant owner Ben Ford, an organic chef and son of Harrison Ford....
Inside the evangelical war over climate change When James Dobson gets angry, people notice. And, in early March, the influential chair of Focus on the Family fired off a very angry letter to the board of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). Tony Perkins of The Family Research Council signed it. So did Gary Bauer. So did 22 other conservative Christian leaders. Their complaint? It seems that Richard Cizik, NAE's vice-president for governmental affairs, had been sounding the alarm on global warming. For years now, Cizik has ruffled feathers by imploring evangelicals to pay more attention to environmental issues--"creation care," as it's called. But the foray into climate change proved a step too far; the letter-writers called it "divisive and dangerous." A no-no. Cizik's awakening came about in 2002, when Jim Ball, the executive director for the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), dragged him to a conference at Oxford. There, he heard a presentation by Sir John Houghton, an evangelical scientist and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As he listened to Houghton rattle off evidence on melting ice caps and increased droughts, Cizik quickly realized that global warming was a serious threat--an experience he has called "not unlike my conversion to Christ." Like many evangelicals now pushing for action on climate change, Cizik remains a staunch conservative, firmly opposed to abortion and gay marriage. He bristles at criticism by Dobson and Perkins that he's trying to divert attention from red-meat issues. "It's not a zero-sum game," he contends....
Back Burner ot long after George W. Bush proudly declared last year that he had no intention of watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, he told reporters that there was a "fundamental debate" about whether global warming was "manmade or natural." It was an ignorant statement utterly at odds with the scientific consensus. Recently, however, he tried to walk it back. "Beginning in June 2001," read a White House letter released last month, "President Bush has consistently acknowledged climate change is occurring and humans are contributing to the problem." Consider the current raft of climate-change legislation. The only piece that has a chance of surviving a GOP filibuster and Bush veto is one sponsored by New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman. His bill would implement a cap-and-trade regime, setting a national limit on carbon emissions and allowing companies to buy and sell pollution credits--a system that worked with acid-rain legislation in the 1990s. But Bingaman's proposal includes "safety valves" that give companies an out, and it doesn't reduce emissions quickly enough. Unfortunately, stronger bills--such as one sponsored by John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Barack Obama--stand almost no chance, even with the current Democratic majority. (Last time around, that bill netted only 38 votes.)....
Antarctic Glaciers' Sloughing Of Ice Has Scientists at a Loss Some of the largest glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland are moving in unusual ways and are losing increased amounts of ice to the sea, researchers said yesterday. Although the changes in Greenland appear to be related to global warming, it remains unclear what is causing the glaciers of frigid Antarctica and their "ice streams" to lose ice to the ocean in recent years, the researchers said. "In Greenland we know there is melting associated with the ice loss, but in Antarctica we don't really know why it's happening," said Duncan Wingham, an author of the review released today in Science magazine. "With so much of the world's ice captured in Antarctica, just the fact that we don't know why this is happening is a cause of some concern." The Antarctic ice loss, which Wingham said is not caused by melting but rather by the pushing of ice streams into the ocean by several glaciers in the west of the continent, has picked up speed in recent years. But Wingham said that because researchers did not have good measures of the depth of the Antarctic ice shelf until about 10 years ago, scientists do not know whether this is a natural variation or a result of human activity....
Winter Warmest on Record Worldwide This winter was the warmest on record worldwide, the government said Thursday in the latest worrisome report focusing on changing climate. The report comes just over a month after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said global warming is very likely caused by human actions and is so severe it will continue for centuries. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the combined land and ocean temperatures for December through February were 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit above average for the period since record keeping began in 1880. The report said that during the past century, global temperatures have increased at about 0.11 degrees per decade. But that increase has been three times larger since 1976, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center reported....
U.S. WINTER TEMPERATURE NEAR AVERAGE The December 2006-February 2007 winter season temperature was marked by periods of unusually warm and cold conditions in the U.S., but the overall seasonal temperature was near average, according to scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Precipitation was above average in much of the center of the nation while large parts of the East, Southeast, and Southwest were drier than average. The global temperature was the warmest on record for the December-February three-month period. The winter temperature for the contiguous United States (based on preliminary data) was 0.6°F (0.3°C) above the 20th century average of 33.0°F (0.6°C). Statewide temperatures were warmer than average from Florida to Maine and from Michigan to Montana. Cooler than average temperatures occurred in the southern Plains and areas of the Southwest....
Danish scientist: Global warming is a myth A Danish scientist said the idea of a "global temperature" and global warming is more political than scientific. University of Copenhagen Professor Bjarne Andresen has analyzed the topic in collaboration with Canadian Professors Christopher Essex from the University of Western Ontario and Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph. It is generally assumed the Earth's atmosphere and oceans have grown warmer during the recent 50 years because of an upward trend in the so-called global temperature, which is the result of complex calculations and averaging of air temperature measurements taken around the world. "It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth," said Andresen, an expert on thermodynamics. "A temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system. Furthermore, the climate is not governed by a single temperature. Rather, differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate". He says the currently used method of determining the global temperature -- and any conclusion drawn from it -- is more political than scientific.
Wolves pushing cats from Buffalo Valley Cougars may have met their match in the gray wolf when it comes to defending prime habitat in and around Buffalo Valley, according to local researchers. Craighead Beringia South researcher Howard Quigley presented information at a talk at the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance Thursday night. Quigley also presented research showing the movements of one cougar on East Gros Ventre Butte and said cougars, for some reason, have started eating more mule deer in 2006. According to Quigley, six female cougars that had established territories in the Buffalo Valley have either left or been killed by hunters in recent years. Despite a healthy population of cougars around the Jackson Hole area, no new females have moved in to claim the vacant habitat. The answer to this mystery could be wolves, said Quigley, who leads a team of biologists who track the cats using GPS collars. “One of our theories is that wolves are now pushing cougars into habitat that they used to occupy 200 years ago,” he said. “Cougars may be concentrating themselves in escape territory.” Escape territory is steeper terrain with lots of trees – land where the cats could more easily elude threats....
Wild Horse League hopes to educate public on Open Range laws Members of the Wild Horse Preservation League are launching an ambitious public education effort to inform property owners who live near open range of state law that requires home buyers to fence-out wild horses and livestock that graze or roam on adjacent open range. Speaking at the Silver Springs Advisory Board meeting, members of the WHPL announced their plans to circulate a publication entitled, "Welcome to Wild Horse County," which includes information on state laws governing range land disclosures, open range laws and a range land disclosure form. Wild-horse advocates are urging realtors and county elected officials to enforce state statutes governing range land disclosure and open range laws, which allows livestock and wild horses to roam and graze on open range. The public education campaign comes after residents primarily in the Stagecoach and Dayton areas have complained about livestock and wild horses destroying lawns and vegetation on their properties....
City to pursue ordinance making cattle owners responsible for damages The Fernley City Council had a difficult task: to consider whether to prohibit open grazing in the Fernley City limits, which encompasses 160 square miles. After hearing from residents in the Desert Bluffs subdivision, located south of Fernley High School, as well as, cattle owners, the council agreed by consensus to pursue an ordinance that would make livestock owners responsible for any property damages their animals may cause within the city limits. The Council also agreed to direct the Community Development Department to place conditions on future projects to require developers to fence their subdivisions and provide cattle guards on property that is adjacent to public land....
Home on range to home in refuge A wild bison bound for Colorado didn't see the point of being driven from an open field into a 5-foot holding pen Thursday before boarding a truck for a ride to Commerce City. The reluctant 1,500-pound bull pawed the ground, snorted, bucked its head and cocked a back leg before slamming its hoof against the metal chute. The bison is one of 16 being driven from the National Bison Range in western Montana to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, where they will be released into a 1,400-acre fenced area. "These are definitely wild critters," said Steve Kallin of the National Bison Range. "The guys have been doing everything they can not to get them aggravated. But this one ..." The bison were picked from the national herd of about 350 by their genetics, which show no indications of domestic- cow DNA....
Why the Buffalo Roam Sometimes you have to eat an animal to save it. That paradox may disturb vegetarians, but consider the bison: 500 years ago, perhaps 30 million of these enormous mammals inhabited North America. By the late 1800s, several forces--natural climate changes and Buffalo Bill--style mass killings among them--had slashed the bison population to something like 1,000. And yet today North America is home to roughly 450,000 bison, a species recovery that has a lot to do with our having developed an appetite for them. This year usda-inspected slaughterhouses will kill approximately 50,000 bison for human consumption. In 2000 the figure was just 17,674. Although bison consumption remains minuscule compared to beef eating--Americans ingest the meat of 90,000 cattle every day--bison is by far the fastest-growing sector of the meat business....
Groundwater not an endless resource, environmentalists say More than half of Utah's 2 million-plus residents are dependent on the aquifers beneath them for their drinking and irrigation water, and have been for decades. But a new study by an environmental group suggests that they - and other Westerners - shouldn't take such a resource for granted. In fact, the report released Thursday by Trout Unlimited warns that without serious reforms, the region's explosive growth, coupled with a continuing drought, could end up compromising not only its groundwater supplies, but surface water resources as well. The two are inexorably linked, according to the study, titled "Gone to the Well Once Too Often." But Melinda Kassen, director of Trout Unlimited's Ground Water Project, argues that it is a link that has gone unnoticed for far too long....
Cloud seeding hits snag There may be more questions up in the air over the Wind River Range than the silver iodide particles used in a state-sponsored cloud-seeding experiment. The project has stalled over a U.S. Forest Service-required environmental study and the question of who pays for the study. At issue is whether the cloud seeding -- tiny particles of silver iodide aerosolized into the air to allow ice crystals to form around the particles -- is compatible with the 1964 Wilderness Act or with a Forest Service regulation banning weather changes that affect wilderness areas. The Wyoming Water Development Commission has allocated $9 million for a five-year cloud-seeding research program, designed to increase the snowpack in the Medicine Bow, Sierra Madre and Wind River ranges, for the benefit of irrigators, municipalities and industry. The state has contracted with Weather Modification Inc. of Fargo, N.D., for the project. “I think this is a clear violation of the Wilderness Act and a Forest Service manual regulation,” said Jonathan Ratner, a Pinedale-based conservationist....
Firefighter Supervisors Get Protection New Mexico became the first state with a law that protects wildfire supervisors from criminal liability if a volunteer firefighter under their command dies while battling a fire. Firefighters called on to fight wildfires are supposed to be certified to national standards, but in rural communities, it is often volunteer firefighters without proper training who arrive first on the scene. House Bill 507, crafted by the State Forestry Division, was signed into law this week by Gov. Bill Richardson. The bill was spurred in part by reaction among firefighters over last year's indictment of a U.S. Forest Service boss in Washington state on involuntary manslaughter charges involving a 2001 fire there that killed four firefighters. A subsequent nationwide survey of firefighters found that 36 percent of the 3,362 respondents would make themselves less available to fight wildfires because of liability concerns, and one-fourth said they would downgrade their qualifications to refuse supervisory positions....
Thursday, March 15, 2007
NEWS ROUNDUP
Utah may relax eminent domain laws Utah was one of the first states to rein in the use of eminent domain to make sure private development couldn't capitalize on laws intended to serve the public good. Now, the state could be one of the first to relax those rules. A bill before Gov. Jon Huntsman would allow a community to take property deemed blighted from reluctant owners if enough neighboring land owners want the area redeveloped. Eminent domain technically refers to the right of government to take private property for public use. The big question often is, what constitutes public use? House Bill 365 could allow Ogden to push forward with plans to condemn land so a Wal-Mart could be built in an effort to generate more tax revenue. It was the city's efforts to attract Wal-Mart by using eminent domain that drew the wrath of lawmakers in 2005, when a moratorium on the use of eminent domain for redevelopment purposes was put into effect. While the bill would allow a redevelopment authority to condemn land, it makes it difficult to do so. It requires 80 percent of those who live in a proposed redevelopment project area to sign a petition saying they want the land condemned. It would also require a two-thirds vote of a city's redevelopment authority board to approve the condemnation....
World Population to Reach 9.2B in 2050 The world's population will likely reach 9.2 billion in 2050, with virtually all new growth occurring in the developing world, a U.N. report said Tuesday. According to the U.N. Population Division's 2006 estimate, the world's population will likely increase by 2.5 billion people over the next 43 years from the current 6.7 billion - a rise equivalent to the number of people in the world in 1950. The new report estimates 32 million fewer deaths from AIDS during the 2005-2020 period in the 62 most affected countries, compared with the previous U.N. estimate in 2004. This change contributed to the slightly higher world population estimate of 9.2 billion in 2050 than the 9.1 billion figure in the 2004 estimate, the report said. The report also said most population growth will take place in less developed countries, whose numbers are projected to rise from 5.4 billion in 2007 to 7.9 billion in 2050. The populations of poor countries like Afghanistan, Burundi, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger, East Timor and Uganda are projected to at least triple by mid-century. By contrast, the total population of richer countries is expected to remain largely unchanged at 1.2 billion. The report said the figure would be lower without expected migration of people from poorer countries, averaging 2.3 million annually. According to the report, 46 countries are expected to lose population by mid-century, including Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and most of the former Soviet republics....
Carbon confusion Sara Demetry thought she had found a way to atone for her personal contribution to global warming. The psychotherapist clicked on a website that helped her calculate how much heat-trapping carbon dioxide she and her fiance emitted each year, mostly by driving and heating their home. Then she paid $150 to e-BlueHorizons.com, a company that promises to offset emissions. But Demetry's money did not make as much difference as she thought it would. While half of it went to plant trees to absorb carbon dioxide, the other half went to a Bethlehem, N.H., facility that destroys methane -- a gas that contributes to global warming. The facility has been operating since 2001 -- years before the company began selling offsets -- and Demetry's money did not lead the company to destroy any more methane than it would have anyway. Moreover, the project received a "dirty dozen" award from a New England environmental group in 2004 because it burns the methane as fuel to incinerate contaminated water from the landfill, emitting tons of pollution each year in the process....
Sage grouse survival focus of conservationists You'd be hard pressed to call it a fan club. But a pair of embattled Sage-grouse species in Utah has generated a pretty crowded bandwagon. Federal and state government agencies, ranchers and farmers, and conservation groups have teamed up in recent years in a quest to keep the greater sage-grouse and Gunnison sage-grouse off the federal endangered species list. They all gathered Tuesday in downtown Salt Lake City to compare notes, and not surprisingly, concluded that there is still much work left to be done - even if there is unanimity about the bottom line. "Caring is critical to the conservation of the species, but in addition we're going to have to be smart if we still want to have sage grouse in Utah in 100 years," said Joan Degiorgio, a regional director for the Nature Conservancy of Utah. Tuesday marked the beginning of a two-day sage-grouse "summit" sponsored by Utah State University's Extension Services and the state Department of Natural Resources, among others. And what emerged during a morning discussion is that it's going to take more than just good intentions to return the two species to healthy population numbers in the state....
Idahoans eager to thin resurgent gray wolf packs Margaret Soulen measures the success of endangered gray wolves by an annual body count. The first few years after wolves were returned to Idaho in 1995, her sheep losses were small — as recently as 2002, just one head. With the wolf population's remarkable growth, her losses soared: 330 sheep in 2004, 175 in 2005, 200 last year. Soulen and her husband, Joe Hinson, who graze 9,000 sheep over nearly a half-million acres of backcountry, have hired more herders and bought more guard dogs. Herders have taken to sleeping among sheep bands to keep wolves away. When wolves are near, sheep get nervous and don't eat and gain weight as they should, Soulen says. As one of the state's largest ranchers, Soulen has felt the wolves' impact as much as anyone. Yet her attitude about this top-rung predator is at odds with Idaho's anti-wolf image. "I've always said we could live with some wolves, and we can," Soulen says. "But I would like to see the numbers reduced some."....
In the Southwest, recovery of the lobo is going slower As gray wolves thrive and multiply in the northern Rockies, their cousins are having a tougher time in the Southwest. The Mexican gray wolf or lobo, a smaller and rarer subspecies, was hunted nearly to extinction in the early 1900s. After it was put on the endangered species list in 1976, five survivors were caught in Mexico and bred with others in captivity. In 1998, the federal government released 11 wolves in Arizona and New Mexico in an effort to restore them to the wild. Under the official recovery plan, their numbers should have grown by now to 102 animals in 15 packs. An official count in January found 59 wolves and seven breeding pairs. "The plight of the lobo is dire," says Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group suing over management of the Mexican wolf. A bigger challenge may be getting the species off the federal endangered list. The 6,800-square-mile recovery zone can't accommodate the numbers of wolves and packs that would be needed to end federal protection. "It's going to take either expanding the boundaries or finding other suitable areas" for more releases, Morgart says. "Where does that habitat come from?"....
Ads Recognize Environmentally Conscious Farmers Eight farmers, ranchers and landowners will be recognized in a series of ads starting Sunday for their actions to protect farmland from sprawl, conserve wildlife habitats, and maintain clean air and water. The ads are sponsored by Environmental Defense. "The farmers, ranchers and forest landowners featured in these advertisements represent tens of thousands of farmers taking steps to meet our nation's environmental challenges," says Scott Faber, Farm Policy Campaign Director for Environmental Defense. "These farmers, ranchers and forest landowners are 'everyday environmental heroes' who deserve our thanks for their stewardship." The farmers, ranchers and forest landowners from the ads will join other producers from and Environmental Defense staff on Capitol Hill Thursday, to urge Congress to reform farm policies to provide new incentives for land stewardship when Congress renews the Farm Bill....
Miners move step closer to volcano To the chagrin of environmentalists, a Spokane mining company is one step closer to hardrock mining 12 miles from Mount St. Helens' crater. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Wednesday released its environmental assessment on Idaho General Mine's proposal to lease 900 acres of Gifford Pinchot National Forest land north of the volcano in the upper Green River Valley. The BLM found issuing a 20-year renewable lease poses no environmental impact for a 217-acre section, in part because leasing the parcel is a procedural step that doesn't allow any actual mining on the land in question. More information is needed for a determination on the remaining 683 acres, said Michael Campbell, a BLM spokesman, though the agency did not specify what other information it requires....
Mount Baker slalom draws a crowd — of cops In the foothills of the North Cascades, it's become an annual tradition: The Legendary Banked Slalom, a famed snowboard race at Mount Baker Ski Area, draws the world's top talent for a February get-together. When it's over, everyone drives back down the mountain and right into the teeth of the Legendary Cop Shakedown. A push-pull between board riders and badge-wearers has been going on in these parts for most of three decades. But it reached a crescendo last month, when police descended in such force on the Mount Baker Highway that slalom-watchers and hapless bystanders began cursing about harassment. As many as 14 patrol cars from various police agencies were counted at a single time around Glacier, a tiny burg halfway between Bellingham and the mountain, where, on an average day, you might not see 14 cars, period. The cars came from the Whatcom County sheriff's department, the Washington State Patrol, the U.S. Forest Service and the Washington State Liquor Control Board. Everyone short of Homeland Security and the Minutemen, in other words, was patrolling a lonely stretch of highway that rarely sees a blue light. And all those cops were busy beavers. On the slalom weekend, Feb. 9-11, 127 people were issued warnings, many for walking alongside the highway, or crossing it improperly, police records show. And 108 other citations, ranging from speeding to impeding traffic to failing to possess proof of insurance, were issued....The Forest Service has made several claims to the media that it is too shorthanded to police the Federal lands. Yet, they have plenty of time and personnel to hand out traffic tickets on a state highway.
Otters Out Of Exile Sea otters must be celebrating what amounts to a relaxed immigration policy in the works, which will officially allow them to expand their range to southern California—something biologists say is critical to the threatened species’ survival. In 1987 the US Fish and Wildlife Service, responsible for the sea otter’s recovery since its 1977 listing under the Endangered Species Act, created an experimental otter colony on San Nicolas Island, about 60 miles west of Los Angeles. Congress approved the program on the condition that the agency also designate a “no-otter” zone from Point Conception to the Mexican border, including the Channel Islands (with the exception of San Nic). Technically the purpose was to isolate the experimental colony, but USFWS’s Lilian Carswell explains that the no-otter zone was also a compromise to placate shell fishermen, who didn’t like the competition with otters, and oil companies, which didn’t want to be held liable if an oil spill harmed the protected species....
Group sues to have protection for rare marbled murrelets lifted Marbled murrelets -- a robin-sized seabird that lays eggs in old growth woods -- is at risk of extinction in the lower 48, but is it special enough to protect? The American Forest Resource Council, an Oregon-based non-profit representing timber companies, filed suit in federal court Wednesday to undo federal protections for the vanishing birds. The murrelet population has shrunk to about 24,400 birds in Washington, Oregon and California, where they were deemed "threatened" by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1992. In the suit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., the timber group is arguing that the birds are not different enough from populations in Canada and Alaska to merit protection under the Endangered Species Act....
NAHB, Affordable Housing Win in Endangered Species Case Years of legal wrangling have resulted in yet another decision that favors housing affordability and rejects interference from interest groups that would make wide swaths of land unavailable for development, cost millions of dollars and offer no environmental benefit, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). The U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona on March 9 upheld the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to remove the pygmy owl from the list of endangered species, agreeing that the owls living there are not a separate species and rejecting a petition from the Defenders of Wildlife. With that ruling, the Court agreed with NAHB that building new homes will not hurt the population of the owl, which thrives over the border in Mexico. The decision follows a landmark ruling from the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, the most environmentally conscious court in the nation, which determined in 2006 that the initial decision to list pygmy owls was “arbitrary and capricious.” “We’ve been mired in this argument for 10 years. It’s time for everyone to concede that there is no environmental benefit to the listing, and I am glad the Court concurred,” said NAHB President Brian Catalde, a home builder in Southern California....
BALCO's Singing Cowboy Larry McCormack figured the FBI owed him a favor. He'd sold out his friend to the agents, and even wore a wire to help them prove that Troy Ellerman was the long-sought leaker in the BALCO steroids case. In return, McCormack asked them not to move in on Ellerman until the big rodeo was over. They obliged, and on Dec. 10, the day after the National Finals Rodeo ended, McCormack and Ellerman sat down in a steakhouse at the far end of the Vegas strip for their last meal together. Ellerman, a former criminal defense lawyer who was then head of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, talked about the future....
Cook-off a taste of cowboy grub Visitors to the Festival of the West at Rawhide this week will be able to chow some real cowboy vittles at the Pace Chuck Wagon Cook-Off. At 1 p.m. today through Saturday, Tom Perini, who works with Pace, will give talks on how chuck wagons began and cook up samples of how cowboys of old ate. He grew up on a Texas ranch and always enjoyed cooking chuck wagon style, which includes making food over an open flame and in Dutch ovens. "I try to keep the heritage and traditions of these old chuck wagons and trail drives alive," he said. The history started in 1865 after the Civil War, when ranchers returned to south Texas to find millions of wild cattle that had reproduced while they were gone, he said. Cowboys would drive the cattle north through Texas and what is now Oklahoma and Kansas to the railways so they could be sold and shipped to cities in the Midwest. These drives started the Texas beef industry. "The problem is, they would have to feed these cowboys for a two-month period," Perini said. They rigged up a chuck box ("chuck" is an old English word for food) in the back of a wagon with staples such as rice and beans, salt pork, coffee and ingredients to make simple breads. There was no refrigeration....
Got a taste for testicle? Oakdale fete for you It's almost impossible to avoid the puns when talking about the annual Testicle Festival. "You'll have a ball," Christie Camarillo said with a laugh. It has taken years, but that statement is kosher now around the folks who courteously used to call it the Calf Fry. "It started as a good ol' boys thing," said Bob Brunker, a Rotarian who has been frying them up for 17 years. This year's festival is Monday, March 26, in downtown Oakdale. Why Monday? Because it takes 75 cooks and volunteers all weekend to prepare the more than 300 pounds of testicles that will be consumed. "It's real labor-intensive," said Camarillo. One year, a cook tried to save time by not removing the skin. "People were still chewing the next year," Brunker said....
It’s The Pitts: Cowboy Courage The job of a ring man isn’t for sissies. I’m not talking about those guys who wear silk ties, eat free barbecue every day and stand outside the ring taking bids at purebred sales. I’m referring to those brave souls who stand INSIDE the ring at your local auction market. To me there’s nothing more entertaining than watching an agile ring man match wits with a killer cow. Although the auctioneer usually gets top billing we all know the real star is the ring man who risks his life so that the show may go on. I’ve never seen the ring man profession listed as one of the most dangerous jobs but I guarantee it’s a widow-makin’ profession. I’ve never been to a bullfight either but I doubt it could be as entertaining as watching a daring ring man take bids while opening a gate as a mad bull tries to gore him. Unlike a bullfight, the ring man stands a greater chance of getting killed than the bull. Attend a commercial cattle auction and you’ll often see a ring man put himself in harm’s way by acting as a decoy merely to get a raging bull or huffy heifer to vacate the premises. I’ve seen ring men wade into a herd of pairs to sort off a cow and calf without the aid of armor or mandatory ID. I once saw a ring man in Texas walk across the backs of a bunch of steers and I’ll never forget the time in South Dakota when a rancher in the crowd asked if the outlaw horse in the ring was broke to ride and darned if the ring man didn’t answer the question by hopping on that stumpsucker and giving the crowd a six second answer....
Utah may relax eminent domain laws Utah was one of the first states to rein in the use of eminent domain to make sure private development couldn't capitalize on laws intended to serve the public good. Now, the state could be one of the first to relax those rules. A bill before Gov. Jon Huntsman would allow a community to take property deemed blighted from reluctant owners if enough neighboring land owners want the area redeveloped. Eminent domain technically refers to the right of government to take private property for public use. The big question often is, what constitutes public use? House Bill 365 could allow Ogden to push forward with plans to condemn land so a Wal-Mart could be built in an effort to generate more tax revenue. It was the city's efforts to attract Wal-Mart by using eminent domain that drew the wrath of lawmakers in 2005, when a moratorium on the use of eminent domain for redevelopment purposes was put into effect. While the bill would allow a redevelopment authority to condemn land, it makes it difficult to do so. It requires 80 percent of those who live in a proposed redevelopment project area to sign a petition saying they want the land condemned. It would also require a two-thirds vote of a city's redevelopment authority board to approve the condemnation....
World Population to Reach 9.2B in 2050 The world's population will likely reach 9.2 billion in 2050, with virtually all new growth occurring in the developing world, a U.N. report said Tuesday. According to the U.N. Population Division's 2006 estimate, the world's population will likely increase by 2.5 billion people over the next 43 years from the current 6.7 billion - a rise equivalent to the number of people in the world in 1950. The new report estimates 32 million fewer deaths from AIDS during the 2005-2020 period in the 62 most affected countries, compared with the previous U.N. estimate in 2004. This change contributed to the slightly higher world population estimate of 9.2 billion in 2050 than the 9.1 billion figure in the 2004 estimate, the report said. The report also said most population growth will take place in less developed countries, whose numbers are projected to rise from 5.4 billion in 2007 to 7.9 billion in 2050. The populations of poor countries like Afghanistan, Burundi, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger, East Timor and Uganda are projected to at least triple by mid-century. By contrast, the total population of richer countries is expected to remain largely unchanged at 1.2 billion. The report said the figure would be lower without expected migration of people from poorer countries, averaging 2.3 million annually. According to the report, 46 countries are expected to lose population by mid-century, including Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and most of the former Soviet republics....
Carbon confusion Sara Demetry thought she had found a way to atone for her personal contribution to global warming. The psychotherapist clicked on a website that helped her calculate how much heat-trapping carbon dioxide she and her fiance emitted each year, mostly by driving and heating their home. Then she paid $150 to e-BlueHorizons.com, a company that promises to offset emissions. But Demetry's money did not make as much difference as she thought it would. While half of it went to plant trees to absorb carbon dioxide, the other half went to a Bethlehem, N.H., facility that destroys methane -- a gas that contributes to global warming. The facility has been operating since 2001 -- years before the company began selling offsets -- and Demetry's money did not lead the company to destroy any more methane than it would have anyway. Moreover, the project received a "dirty dozen" award from a New England environmental group in 2004 because it burns the methane as fuel to incinerate contaminated water from the landfill, emitting tons of pollution each year in the process....
Sage grouse survival focus of conservationists You'd be hard pressed to call it a fan club. But a pair of embattled Sage-grouse species in Utah has generated a pretty crowded bandwagon. Federal and state government agencies, ranchers and farmers, and conservation groups have teamed up in recent years in a quest to keep the greater sage-grouse and Gunnison sage-grouse off the federal endangered species list. They all gathered Tuesday in downtown Salt Lake City to compare notes, and not surprisingly, concluded that there is still much work left to be done - even if there is unanimity about the bottom line. "Caring is critical to the conservation of the species, but in addition we're going to have to be smart if we still want to have sage grouse in Utah in 100 years," said Joan Degiorgio, a regional director for the Nature Conservancy of Utah. Tuesday marked the beginning of a two-day sage-grouse "summit" sponsored by Utah State University's Extension Services and the state Department of Natural Resources, among others. And what emerged during a morning discussion is that it's going to take more than just good intentions to return the two species to healthy population numbers in the state....
Idahoans eager to thin resurgent gray wolf packs Margaret Soulen measures the success of endangered gray wolves by an annual body count. The first few years after wolves were returned to Idaho in 1995, her sheep losses were small — as recently as 2002, just one head. With the wolf population's remarkable growth, her losses soared: 330 sheep in 2004, 175 in 2005, 200 last year. Soulen and her husband, Joe Hinson, who graze 9,000 sheep over nearly a half-million acres of backcountry, have hired more herders and bought more guard dogs. Herders have taken to sleeping among sheep bands to keep wolves away. When wolves are near, sheep get nervous and don't eat and gain weight as they should, Soulen says. As one of the state's largest ranchers, Soulen has felt the wolves' impact as much as anyone. Yet her attitude about this top-rung predator is at odds with Idaho's anti-wolf image. "I've always said we could live with some wolves, and we can," Soulen says. "But I would like to see the numbers reduced some."....
In the Southwest, recovery of the lobo is going slower As gray wolves thrive and multiply in the northern Rockies, their cousins are having a tougher time in the Southwest. The Mexican gray wolf or lobo, a smaller and rarer subspecies, was hunted nearly to extinction in the early 1900s. After it was put on the endangered species list in 1976, five survivors were caught in Mexico and bred with others in captivity. In 1998, the federal government released 11 wolves in Arizona and New Mexico in an effort to restore them to the wild. Under the official recovery plan, their numbers should have grown by now to 102 animals in 15 packs. An official count in January found 59 wolves and seven breeding pairs. "The plight of the lobo is dire," says Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group suing over management of the Mexican wolf. A bigger challenge may be getting the species off the federal endangered list. The 6,800-square-mile recovery zone can't accommodate the numbers of wolves and packs that would be needed to end federal protection. "It's going to take either expanding the boundaries or finding other suitable areas" for more releases, Morgart says. "Where does that habitat come from?"....
Ads Recognize Environmentally Conscious Farmers Eight farmers, ranchers and landowners will be recognized in a series of ads starting Sunday for their actions to protect farmland from sprawl, conserve wildlife habitats, and maintain clean air and water. The ads are sponsored by Environmental Defense. "The farmers, ranchers and forest landowners featured in these advertisements represent tens of thousands of farmers taking steps to meet our nation's environmental challenges," says Scott Faber, Farm Policy Campaign Director for Environmental Defense. "These farmers, ranchers and forest landowners are 'everyday environmental heroes' who deserve our thanks for their stewardship." The farmers, ranchers and forest landowners from the ads will join other producers from and Environmental Defense staff on Capitol Hill Thursday, to urge Congress to reform farm policies to provide new incentives for land stewardship when Congress renews the Farm Bill....
Miners move step closer to volcano To the chagrin of environmentalists, a Spokane mining company is one step closer to hardrock mining 12 miles from Mount St. Helens' crater. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Wednesday released its environmental assessment on Idaho General Mine's proposal to lease 900 acres of Gifford Pinchot National Forest land north of the volcano in the upper Green River Valley. The BLM found issuing a 20-year renewable lease poses no environmental impact for a 217-acre section, in part because leasing the parcel is a procedural step that doesn't allow any actual mining on the land in question. More information is needed for a determination on the remaining 683 acres, said Michael Campbell, a BLM spokesman, though the agency did not specify what other information it requires....
Mount Baker slalom draws a crowd — of cops In the foothills of the North Cascades, it's become an annual tradition: The Legendary Banked Slalom, a famed snowboard race at Mount Baker Ski Area, draws the world's top talent for a February get-together. When it's over, everyone drives back down the mountain and right into the teeth of the Legendary Cop Shakedown. A push-pull between board riders and badge-wearers has been going on in these parts for most of three decades. But it reached a crescendo last month, when police descended in such force on the Mount Baker Highway that slalom-watchers and hapless bystanders began cursing about harassment. As many as 14 patrol cars from various police agencies were counted at a single time around Glacier, a tiny burg halfway between Bellingham and the mountain, where, on an average day, you might not see 14 cars, period. The cars came from the Whatcom County sheriff's department, the Washington State Patrol, the U.S. Forest Service and the Washington State Liquor Control Board. Everyone short of Homeland Security and the Minutemen, in other words, was patrolling a lonely stretch of highway that rarely sees a blue light. And all those cops were busy beavers. On the slalom weekend, Feb. 9-11, 127 people were issued warnings, many for walking alongside the highway, or crossing it improperly, police records show. And 108 other citations, ranging from speeding to impeding traffic to failing to possess proof of insurance, were issued....The Forest Service has made several claims to the media that it is too shorthanded to police the Federal lands. Yet, they have plenty of time and personnel to hand out traffic tickets on a state highway.
Otters Out Of Exile Sea otters must be celebrating what amounts to a relaxed immigration policy in the works, which will officially allow them to expand their range to southern California—something biologists say is critical to the threatened species’ survival. In 1987 the US Fish and Wildlife Service, responsible for the sea otter’s recovery since its 1977 listing under the Endangered Species Act, created an experimental otter colony on San Nicolas Island, about 60 miles west of Los Angeles. Congress approved the program on the condition that the agency also designate a “no-otter” zone from Point Conception to the Mexican border, including the Channel Islands (with the exception of San Nic). Technically the purpose was to isolate the experimental colony, but USFWS’s Lilian Carswell explains that the no-otter zone was also a compromise to placate shell fishermen, who didn’t like the competition with otters, and oil companies, which didn’t want to be held liable if an oil spill harmed the protected species....
Group sues to have protection for rare marbled murrelets lifted Marbled murrelets -- a robin-sized seabird that lays eggs in old growth woods -- is at risk of extinction in the lower 48, but is it special enough to protect? The American Forest Resource Council, an Oregon-based non-profit representing timber companies, filed suit in federal court Wednesday to undo federal protections for the vanishing birds. The murrelet population has shrunk to about 24,400 birds in Washington, Oregon and California, where they were deemed "threatened" by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1992. In the suit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., the timber group is arguing that the birds are not different enough from populations in Canada and Alaska to merit protection under the Endangered Species Act....
NAHB, Affordable Housing Win in Endangered Species Case Years of legal wrangling have resulted in yet another decision that favors housing affordability and rejects interference from interest groups that would make wide swaths of land unavailable for development, cost millions of dollars and offer no environmental benefit, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). The U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona on March 9 upheld the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to remove the pygmy owl from the list of endangered species, agreeing that the owls living there are not a separate species and rejecting a petition from the Defenders of Wildlife. With that ruling, the Court agreed with NAHB that building new homes will not hurt the population of the owl, which thrives over the border in Mexico. The decision follows a landmark ruling from the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, the most environmentally conscious court in the nation, which determined in 2006 that the initial decision to list pygmy owls was “arbitrary and capricious.” “We’ve been mired in this argument for 10 years. It’s time for everyone to concede that there is no environmental benefit to the listing, and I am glad the Court concurred,” said NAHB President Brian Catalde, a home builder in Southern California....
BALCO's Singing Cowboy Larry McCormack figured the FBI owed him a favor. He'd sold out his friend to the agents, and even wore a wire to help them prove that Troy Ellerman was the long-sought leaker in the BALCO steroids case. In return, McCormack asked them not to move in on Ellerman until the big rodeo was over. They obliged, and on Dec. 10, the day after the National Finals Rodeo ended, McCormack and Ellerman sat down in a steakhouse at the far end of the Vegas strip for their last meal together. Ellerman, a former criminal defense lawyer who was then head of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, talked about the future....
Cook-off a taste of cowboy grub Visitors to the Festival of the West at Rawhide this week will be able to chow some real cowboy vittles at the Pace Chuck Wagon Cook-Off. At 1 p.m. today through Saturday, Tom Perini, who works with Pace, will give talks on how chuck wagons began and cook up samples of how cowboys of old ate. He grew up on a Texas ranch and always enjoyed cooking chuck wagon style, which includes making food over an open flame and in Dutch ovens. "I try to keep the heritage and traditions of these old chuck wagons and trail drives alive," he said. The history started in 1865 after the Civil War, when ranchers returned to south Texas to find millions of wild cattle that had reproduced while they were gone, he said. Cowboys would drive the cattle north through Texas and what is now Oklahoma and Kansas to the railways so they could be sold and shipped to cities in the Midwest. These drives started the Texas beef industry. "The problem is, they would have to feed these cowboys for a two-month period," Perini said. They rigged up a chuck box ("chuck" is an old English word for food) in the back of a wagon with staples such as rice and beans, salt pork, coffee and ingredients to make simple breads. There was no refrigeration....
Got a taste for testicle? Oakdale fete for you It's almost impossible to avoid the puns when talking about the annual Testicle Festival. "You'll have a ball," Christie Camarillo said with a laugh. It has taken years, but that statement is kosher now around the folks who courteously used to call it the Calf Fry. "It started as a good ol' boys thing," said Bob Brunker, a Rotarian who has been frying them up for 17 years. This year's festival is Monday, March 26, in downtown Oakdale. Why Monday? Because it takes 75 cooks and volunteers all weekend to prepare the more than 300 pounds of testicles that will be consumed. "It's real labor-intensive," said Camarillo. One year, a cook tried to save time by not removing the skin. "People were still chewing the next year," Brunker said....
It’s The Pitts: Cowboy Courage The job of a ring man isn’t for sissies. I’m not talking about those guys who wear silk ties, eat free barbecue every day and stand outside the ring taking bids at purebred sales. I’m referring to those brave souls who stand INSIDE the ring at your local auction market. To me there’s nothing more entertaining than watching an agile ring man match wits with a killer cow. Although the auctioneer usually gets top billing we all know the real star is the ring man who risks his life so that the show may go on. I’ve never seen the ring man profession listed as one of the most dangerous jobs but I guarantee it’s a widow-makin’ profession. I’ve never been to a bullfight either but I doubt it could be as entertaining as watching a daring ring man take bids while opening a gate as a mad bull tries to gore him. Unlike a bullfight, the ring man stands a greater chance of getting killed than the bull. Attend a commercial cattle auction and you’ll often see a ring man put himself in harm’s way by acting as a decoy merely to get a raging bull or huffy heifer to vacate the premises. I’ve seen ring men wade into a herd of pairs to sort off a cow and calf without the aid of armor or mandatory ID. I once saw a ring man in Texas walk across the backs of a bunch of steers and I’ll never forget the time in South Dakota when a rancher in the crowd asked if the outlaw horse in the ring was broke to ride and darned if the ring man didn’t answer the question by hopping on that stumpsucker and giving the crowd a six second answer....
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
ATTENTION ELK HUNTERS
Southwest Elk Hunters, Alert, Elk being decimated in wolf areas: See link for photo's.
It is vital that those of you who value your elk hunting in the Gila come to this meeting on Thursday, March 15th at the Elks Lodge on Elks Drive here in Las Cruces. We will start the meeting promptly at 7:00 pm.
This wolf recovery program in the Gila and Apache Sitgreaves National Forests is a disaster. Ranchers are losing livestock on a daily basis. Horses have been killed and consumed right in the corrals in front of barns. Dogs are being attacked and killed right in the front yards of people's homes. The Superintendent of Schools in Catron County is looking for funding to construct enclosures at bus stops so kids waiting for the school bus can be safe.
Hunters need to know that elk are being killed at an alarming rate. We will hear recorded messages from Mark Miller, Tom Klumker, Jess Carey, Don Gatlin, Jim Haught, Jim Blair, Gene Whetten, Jack Diamond, Becky Campbell, Laura Schneberger and others.
I have asked them to tell you what they think you ought to know about the wolf recovery program and the impact it is having on the elk population in the Gila TODAY!!!!!! Further, I have asked them to project out for the next two to five years and give you their assessment of what will become of the elk if this absurd program is allowed to continue.
The New Mexico Game Commission will meet at the Best Western Mesilla Valley Inn from 9:00 am til 5:00 pm on Wednesday, March 28. Everyone needs to be there and ask the questions you need answered. I hope to create a huge upswell of people who are fed up with this ridiculous experiment with wolves.
Please come to the meeting at the Elks Lodge on March 15 and plan on attending the Game Commission meeting on March 28.
I have attached a flyer for the meeting you can print and pass out to people. I also attached a legislature report produced by Laura Schneberger which we have passed out to 80 or so of our state legislators in Santa Fe. Senator Komadina introduced a bill that will hold the IFT (Interagency Field Team) accountable for managing these wolves. It passed the Conservation Committee today and is headed for Judiciary committee....
Joe Delk
Field Representative
Paragon Foundation
H 505-524-1233
C 505-644-3082
Southwest Elk Hunters, Alert, Elk being decimated in wolf areas: See link for photo's.
It is vital that those of you who value your elk hunting in the Gila come to this meeting on Thursday, March 15th at the Elks Lodge on Elks Drive here in Las Cruces. We will start the meeting promptly at 7:00 pm.
This wolf recovery program in the Gila and Apache Sitgreaves National Forests is a disaster. Ranchers are losing livestock on a daily basis. Horses have been killed and consumed right in the corrals in front of barns. Dogs are being attacked and killed right in the front yards of people's homes. The Superintendent of Schools in Catron County is looking for funding to construct enclosures at bus stops so kids waiting for the school bus can be safe.
Hunters need to know that elk are being killed at an alarming rate. We will hear recorded messages from Mark Miller, Tom Klumker, Jess Carey, Don Gatlin, Jim Haught, Jim Blair, Gene Whetten, Jack Diamond, Becky Campbell, Laura Schneberger and others.
I have asked them to tell you what they think you ought to know about the wolf recovery program and the impact it is having on the elk population in the Gila TODAY!!!!!! Further, I have asked them to project out for the next two to five years and give you their assessment of what will become of the elk if this absurd program is allowed to continue.
The New Mexico Game Commission will meet at the Best Western Mesilla Valley Inn from 9:00 am til 5:00 pm on Wednesday, March 28. Everyone needs to be there and ask the questions you need answered. I hope to create a huge upswell of people who are fed up with this ridiculous experiment with wolves.
Please come to the meeting at the Elks Lodge on March 15 and plan on attending the Game Commission meeting on March 28.
I have attached a flyer for the meeting you can print and pass out to people. I also attached a legislature report produced by Laura Schneberger which we have passed out to 80 or so of our state legislators in Santa Fe. Senator Komadina introduced a bill that will hold the IFT (Interagency Field Team) accountable for managing these wolves. It passed the Conservation Committee today and is headed for Judiciary committee....
Joe Delk
Field Representative
Paragon Foundation
H 505-524-1233
C 505-644-3082
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