Big news for anyone who’s ever gone sprinting and hollering through the woods after the disappearing rear of an enterprising black bear:

We’ve now got a scientific assessment of bear hazing.

Rachel Mazur, of Sequoia National Park, has a paper in last month’s Journal of Wildlife Management on what the National Park Service likes to call "aversive conditioning" –namely, serious hazing to keep bears away from human food.

Aversive conditioning treatments [include] chasing (without dogs); 3 projectiles of varying impact intensity: rock throwing, slingshots, and rubber slugs; and pepper spray.

During my couple seasons on backcountry trail crews in Kings Canyon National Park, we would leave one cold soul sleeping in our (bear-proofed) outdoor kitchen each night, a pot and ladle handy in case they needed to make some noise. Everyone else was under strict orders to appear at the first shout and go chase off any ursine visitor in our knickers. The goal: total trauma – teaching bears to stay away, and teaching crew members not to leave their vittles out. Effective hazing all around, really.

Mazur and her crew were slightly more scientific. Between 2002 and 2005, they encountered 150 black bears while patrolling near campsites, picnic areas and visitors’ centers, and harassed them, methodically. They tested which tactics got the bears to scoot, which kept them from coming back, and which convinced bears that were already "food-conditioned" to break the habit.

Their conclusion: chasing and shouting works pretty well; shooting rubber slugs from a 12-gauge shotgun is better (well, yeah); some bears just never will learn, and neither will some people.

That last point is the big one.

It's tough being a wolf these days. Despite barely having recovered from being indiscriminately hunted to near extinction during the last century, wolves continue to face the rampant persecution and vitriol of yesteryear from legislators, corporations, citizens and even state and federal governments.
 
Most recently, Utah's Senate has passed a bill that (if enacted) would make it next to impossible for wolves to ever repopulate any of their historic range in Utah. Not that wolves currently pose a problem; only a handful has strayed into Utah in recent years, and none are known to be living there now.
 
The sponsor of the Utah bill, Senator Allen Christensen (R-North Ogden) described his designs by: "Simply say[ing] any wolf within Utah will be captured and killed. We don't want any of them here."
 
The "we" he refers to is unclear, as is much of the reasoning behind such an extreme affront against wolves. In fact, a 2004 poll (Bruskotter, J. T., & Schmidt, R. H. 2006) taken of 700 Utah residents - including landowners and rural residents - shows that the majority are receptive to having wolves in their state.
 
Senator Christensen's bill would, with the stroke of a pen, undo the painstaking and sincere work of the 13-member stakeholder group, including ranchers and sportsmen, who worked for over a year to craft the Utah Wolf Management Plan adopted by the Utah legislature in 2005.

The USDA has released the results of the 2008 Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey. The survey is taken every five years nationwide. Much of the regional information below is based on comparison of the 2003 and 2008 surveys.

Nationwide the number of irrigated acres increased over the five year period from 52.5 million acres in 2003 to 54.9 million acres in 2008. In the Upper Colorado River Basin the number of irrigated acres held steady at about 1.4 million acres. But in California irrigated acreage declined sharply from 8.7 million acres in 2003 to 7.4 million acres in 2008.

Some of the decrease in California may be the result of extended drought. However, the bulk of the decrease is likely due to sprawl which brings housing and commercial development into areas of prime farmland. Increases in irrigated acreage occurred in the Mid-West and South; in the West – including Hawaii – irrigated acres held steady or declined.

WANTED: thrill-seeking gardeners with a love of heights. Experience washing skyscraper windows a plus.

Such an ad might appear in Portland, Oreg., by 2013. Thanks to government stimulus funds, the city's main federal building will be renovated with giant plant-bearing trellises down its western side. These "vegetated fins" will shade the building in summer and let sunlight through in winter. Plus, it means hyper-local produce in the middle of a city.

Vertical farming projects not unlike this one were voted among TIME Magazine's 50 Best Inventions of 2009:

Real estate — the one thing we're not making any more of. That might be good news for landlords but not for the world's farmers, who have finite cropland to feed a growing global population. The answer: build up by farming vertically.

The ultimate vertical farm is the kind proposed by Dr. Dickson Despommier of Columbia University -- 30 floors of grains, vegetables, and fruit inside a skyscraper, complete with water recycling, hydroponic systems and wind turbines on the roof. For now, cost is the major barrier, with some estimates in the billions.

Valcent Products Inc. is piloting a tiny version of Despommier's dream. But the vegetated fins in Portland (even if they're outside and not inside the building), which will cost $133 million, might give a better idea of the potential for serious vertical gardening.

Last week, the Idaho Statesman newspaper published an article about recreational vehicle impacts on wolverines in the Payette, Boise, and Sawtooth National Forests. The piece focused on a study investigating questions about the extent to which snowmobilers and skiers disturb denning female wolverines, and researchers' desire to find out whether winter backcountry recreation really does threaten the animals. Now that the wolverine is up for consideration for listing under the Endangered Species Act, answering this question has become pretty important.

Snowmobilers, backcountry skiers, and advocacy groups all have a stake in the outcome of this study.  The script of the traditional Western endangered species conflict [PDF] calls for outraged recreationists to accuse environmental advocacy groups and the federal government of infringing on their rights, while environmental advocacy groups evoke wilderness and science to enforce their aims. Meanwhile the researchers remain stuck in the limbo of trying to maintain objectivity while taking shots from all sides. Wolves and spotted owls are probably the best examples of this predictable drama, which serves--over and over again, ad nauseum--as a proxy for deeply rooted values conflicts.

If the US Fish and Wildlife Service determines that wolverines are threatened, land managers may have the latitude to make land use changes to remote backcountry in order to protect wolverines--if  researchers determine that human disturbance actually does result in den abandonment.

Hidden in the Statesman article, however, is a line that suggests that the wolverine case could turn out differently: "The study about wolverines is co-sponsored by the Idaho Snowmobile Association."

 
 
    My part of the world gets way too much wind along with plenty of sunshine. It also has some unusual geology which allows the earth's inner heat to come closer to the surface.
 
    Our wind, despite the window-rattling power of its gusts, is too sporadic to attract much commercial interest in developing this form of "green energy."
 
    But solar and geothermal energy projects have been getting some attention, not all of it positive. No matter how green the energy source, a development can still generate opposition long before it generates electricity.
 
    Solar has already attracted substantial investment with the 8.2-megawatt SunEdison plant in the San Luis Valley, but further development will likely require more transmission capacity -- and the proposed route over La Veta Pass faces opposition from a billionaire landownerr, while local ranchers have questions about one generating site.
 
    The San Luis Valley is part of a bigger geologic structure known as the Rio Grande Rift, which extends south through New Mexico to El Paso, Texas, and north into the upper Arkansas Valley of Colorado.
 
    Put simply, there's a sunken valley floor flanked by mountain ranges. The earth's crust is being pulled apart here; a geologist friend told me that "If you wonder what the Atlantic Ocean looked like 70 million years ago, before North America separated from Europe, just look around."
 
    The process means that there are faults -- big systems of cracks -- in the earth's crust along the sides of the rift. This allows molten rock (magma) to come closer to the surface. If it gets to the surface, it's a volcano, but just getting close often produces a hot spring.
 
    Thus there are hot springs along the Rio Grande Rift, among them Poncha Springs (which sit east of the town), Valley View on the east side of the northern San Luis Valley, and Mt. Princeton along Chalk Creek southwest of Buena Vista.
 
    The same earth energy that produces hot springs might also be put to work generating electricity with a geothermal power plant, and the federal Bureau of Land Management has proposed leasing some geothermal rights in the Mt. Princeton Area, in line with an Obama administration directive to support green energy.
 
    However, this hasn't exactly thrilled residents along Chalk Creek, who have succeeded in delaying the lease, citing a variety of reasons.
 
    But it should be noted that the Chalk Creek valley is hardly pristine. A few miles west of the hot springs there was a century of mining as evidenced by the ghost towns of Alpine, St. Elmo, Romley and Hancock. A coal-fired narrow-gauge railroad served those towns and continued west through the Alpine Tunnel to Gunnison. A dam and hydro-electric plant provided electric power to gold dredges in Taylor Park.
 
    In other words, it was an industrial zone that has, over time, become a scenic rural residential and resort area. And one where there are some valid concerns about further developing the geothermal energy that some residents and businesses already use.
 

It’s been a big week for nuclear power.

First there was the conspicuous nuclear shout-out in the State of the Union last Wednesday, followed by the White House announcement, on Friday, that the Energy Department will explore new solutions for coping with nuclear waste. Then, yesterday, the administration released its budget proposal, with a plan to triple federal loan guarantees for nuclear power plants to $54 billion.

All this comes at a time when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is facing a "tsunami" of applications for new nuclear reactors, according to the Investigative Reporting Workshop's Judy Pasternak. After decades without approving a single application, the NRC has received 17 since 2007, prompted by incentives created during the Bush years. And while many companies want to build new reactors on sites which already host old ones, a handful are proposing wholly new locations, which means that some communities are starting to have debates nobody has had for 25 years.

One of them is Green River, Utah. That's where Blue Castle Holdings Inc. a three-year-old, politically well-connected start-up, wants to build Utah's first nuclear power plant.

I salivate over wide-open spaces. Bliss, for me, is a sprawling view of distant ranges and crisp horizons—or a free, fortuitous curbside parking spot five minutes before a crowded event. Yet my environmental better half knows that "free parking" isn’t free, and that there are plenty of other types of euphoria to be had, like not having to drive at all.

In California, State Senator Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) is working on a controversial bill that, last Thursday, was approved for the full Assembly’s consideration. Its aim? To reveal the actual costs of parking and create incentives for California cities to shift from a pro-parking model to a pay-to-pollute stance that helps to alleviate traffic and save the air. 

The Forest Service and the BLM have just announced the 2010 fee for grazing one cow and calf on public land.

Back in 1966, the fee was $1.23 per month. For comparison, here are the prices of some common items in 1966 and today:

So given those sorts of price increases, what do you think the 2010 grazing fee is? $5? $10? $15? Nope.

An editorial in last weekend’s Arizona Daily Sun described the paper’s "awe" at emergency response to the epic storm that dumped more than four feet of snow on Flagstaff. But while life in the city goes back to normal, stranded residents in Indian country are still digging out.

The West’s recent rash of apocalyptic weather has spread sparse emergency resources on reservations in the Southwest and South Dakota even more thin. According to a report in today’s Arizona Daily Sun, the Arizona National Guard has air dropped almost 22,000 meals to Navajo and Hopi families this week. About 22,000 gallons of drinking water have gone out as well, and "pilots [are] still finding communities they had not known about."

Ice storms have hit the Cheyenne River Sioux in South Dakota equally hard. There, storms brought down thousands of power lines -- bad news for  what was already "one of the U.S.’s poorest communities," according to the Wall Street Journal:

With just 10,000 residents spread across 2.8 million acres, many Cheyenne River families depend on electricity transmitted across hundreds of empty miles to run pumps for drinking water, or to power the ignition modules on natural-gas and propane heaters.
…
Last year the tribe earned $175,000 leasing land to nontribal ranchers and deposited the money in an emergency fund. That fund is now exhausted, the tribal chairman said. A special Wells Fargo account established to help raise funds to evacuate tribal members with medical needs brought in just $450 in donations on its first day, said Eileen Briggs, a Cheyenne River Tribal executive.