"Some of you have been inconvenienced by our test operations," the Atomic Energy Commission wrote to residents living near the Nevada Test Site, in Nye County, in 1955. "At times some of you have been exposed to potential risk from flash, blast, or fall-out. You have accepted the inconvenience or the risk without fuss, without alarm, and without panic."

Inconvenience? That's hardly how Nevadans would describe their nuclear legacy today, nor are they "without alarm" about its consequences. When Yucca Mountain was shelved earlier this year, many breathed a sigh of relief that Nye County wouldn't become a nuclear dumping ground—at least for now. But as the LA Times reports, the county is unlikely to shake its nuclear past anytime soon:

Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site, 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each explosion deposited a toxic load of radioactivity into the ground and in some cases directly into aquifers.

...

In a study for Nye County, where the nuclear test site lies, [Nevada hydrogeologist Thomas] Buqo estimated that the underground tests polluted 1.6 trillion gallons of water. That is as much water as Nevada is allowed to withdraw from the Colorado River in 16 years—enough to fill a lake 300 miles long, a mile wide and 25 feet deep.

At today's prices, that water would be worth as much as $48 billion if it had not been fouled, Buqo said.

Joan Nutt, 63, was visiting family in Florissant, Colo., when she got close to a deer “in an attempt to pet it.” The animal attacked, and though Nutt “grabbed hold of an antler to try to fend it off … it knocked her down before she could get away.” Nutt, who suffered numerous lacerations, was saved by a motorist who, seeing the deer “stomping her,” stopped to help. Let this be a lesson, said the state’s Division of Wildlife: Leave wild animals alone and never feed them.

Plans to move forward with what would be the third- or fourth-largest copper mine in the country have been shelved for another year. The U.S. Forest Service has postponed an environmental impact study for a proposed copper mine in the Santa Rita Mountains, 30 miles southeast of Tucson, Ariz., until April 2010 (see our 1997 story). This will push the final decision on the Rosemont mine back to late 2010, six months later than originally planned, according to the Arizona Daily Star:

Last month the Forest Service announced it would have to delay release of the environmental analysis because of complex, controversial issues surrounding the project, including water supplies, water pollution, air quality, traffic, effects on Indian ruins and other cultural resources, and effects on wildlife habitat.

Indeed, the project has caused quite a stir in nearby communities, including Sonoita, Elgin and Green Valley, where residents came out in droves to protest the mine proposal at two public meetings in late October with Jay Jensen, a top USDA official. Concerns ranged from the economic impact on tourist destinations to the destruction of scenic views and local communities, as well as negative environmental effects. Wade Bunting of the Sonoita Community Action Alliance voiced his worries in the Arizona Daily Star:

“It’s a massive industrial project. The mine will be the death blow to our unspoiled natural environment.”

The hunt is on for a new “spud stud” to replace the old reliable Russet Burbank variety long used in McDonald’s French fries. In 2005, reports The Associated Press, a Potato Variety Management Institute was established by Idaho, Oregon and Washington, and though it’s been trying to develop the next hot new potato, no miracle tuber has emerged to rival the 130-year-old Russet Burbank. Rewards will be great for growers of a tater that’s environmentally less intrusive, internally consistent and good for storing: McDonald’s buys more than 3.4 billion pounds of potatoes annually to make its crispy fries.

Are 21- year-old documents adequate to approve reopening a uranium mine about 15 miles north of the Grand Canyon? The Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Grand Canyon Trust say no, and they're suing the Bureau of Land Management for giving the go-ahead, claiming the agency is violating multiple federal laws by using the decades-old environmental assessment to approve the uranium mine.

The Arizona I Mine has changed ownership three times since it was permitted. It is now owned by the Canadian Denison Mines Corporation, which plans to begin mining there in the first quarter of 2010. The company proposes to extract 67,000 tons of ore, enough to produce about 900,000 pounds of yellowcake, from a 1,300-foot mine shaft that parallels an underground formation known as a breccia pipe -- a collapsed cavern filled with sediments and uranium ore.

"The breccia pipe mines are some of the highest grade mines in the United States," Denison CEO Ron Hochstein told the Arizona Daily Sun.

Hochstein told the Canwest News Service that the idea that the mine threatens the Grand Canyon ecosystem can't be justified "by any stretch of the imagination'' because of the site's distance from the park and planned environmental protection measures.

The 1988 documents do not include the southwestern willow flycatcher and four kinds of fish - all native to the Colorado River - that have since been added to the U.S. endangered species list. The conservation groups also claim the mine poses a risk to the seeps and springs at the Grand Canyon.

"If there's the potential for the mine to deplete or contaminate aquifers that discharge into the canyon, that's not a risk worth taking," said Taylor McKinnon, public lands campaign director for the Center for Biological Diversity. "... Neither the mining company nor the BLM can guarantee that aquifer depletion or pollution won't happen."

In July the Department of the Interior barred new mining claims on about 1 million acres of federal land around the Grand Canyon for three years. There are as many as 10,000 existing mining claims on BLM and U.S. Forest Service lands near the Grand Canyon. Some 1,100 uranium mining claims are within five miles of the Grand Canyon National Park.

A generation ago Indian Country wasn’t included in the conversation about health care reform. When Congress enacted Medicaid and Medicare it pretended that the Indian Health Service didn’t exist. It was as if it had never occurred to the government, that it, too, ran a major health care delivery system.

Say what you like about health care reform, the fact is that Indian Country is included in a big way this time around. If either the House or the Senate bill becomes law, there will be a significant boost in resources for the Indian Health system.

The largest single line item is the reauthorization of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, included in H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act. The Congressional Budget Office “scores” the cost at $100 million through 2014 and $200 million over a decade. Most of that cost is attributed to the “expansion of payments under Medicare.” This is important because American Indians and Alaskan Natives have the highest percentage of any population over 65 not currently enrolled in Medicare programs.

But the bigger ticket is the expansion of eligibility for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The House approach is to expand Medicaid to individuals, couples and families with incomes up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level or about $33,000 a year for a family of four.

The expansion of Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP is important to the Indian health care delivery system because IHS and tribal or urban clinics can bill the federal government for every eligible patient without regard to federal budgets. If a person is eligible, the money is there. (Contrast that with the contract health care fund that is an appropriation and always short of funding.) This is also significant because single adults will be eligible for the first time based on income. The House legislation would also improve payments made to medical providers under Medicaid and CHIP. That, too, could add dollars to the Indian health system. On top of that there will be new money available to fund urban clinics, including those serving American Indians and Alaskan Natives.

It’s unclear what the legislation would mean to American Indians and Alaskan Natives who earn more than the federal poverty guidelines. The bills provide an exemption from the insurance mandate, so a lot would depend on what type of insurance is offered by their employer.

The House legislation requires employers with payrolls more than $500,000 a year – including tribal governments – to offer insurance or pay a penalty. The Senate bill does not require coverage, but does levy a fee for medium and larger businesses. This could be an issue for tribes with self-insurance programs, depending on the final language.

It’s also worth noting that the Senate bill includes a significant funding stream for education and workforce training. Even tribal colleges are on track to get a share in order to prepare more health professionals.

But beyond Indian Country and beyond the headline material – the public option, abortion coverage and insurance mandates – there are ideas in health reform that really ought to be front and center.

We know that the care of chronic diseases, including diabetes, is increasing faster than the capacity of the system and even now accounts for some three quarters of spending. Nearly four in ten Americans are dealing with at least one chronic illness such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer and arthritis. And if you look at the growth rates for diabetes (and the trend ahead from pre-diabetes) it’s clear there must be a systemic reform. Quickly. The richest opportunity for “bending the cost curve” comes from money spent on programs that prevent these chronic diseases (and their complications).

To say the process ahead is challenging is an understatement. Health care reform remains a difficult sale. But its passage, if it can be done, will signal to Americans, the insurance companies, and the medical community about the inevitability of dramatic change.

Mark Trahant is a Kaiser Media Fellow examining the Indian Health Service and its relevance to the national health care reform debate. He is a member of Idaho’s Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. Comment at www.marktrahant.com

If the American Farm Bureau Federation has its way, the issue of whether herbicide spraying over water requires a Clean Water Act permit will be heard by the Supreme Court. A coalition of agricultural groups led by the Federation has petitioned the nation’s highest court to reverse an appellate court decision which found that such spraying requires an NPDES clean water permit. NPDES permits are required when pollution is delivered to a water body from a point source. What constitutes a point source for Clean Water Act purposes has been a major US legal issue for well over a decade with several previous cases reaching the Supreme Court.

The battle over pesticides and their regulation has been a constant of US environmental politics since Rachel Carson’s landmark Silent Spring was published in 1962. In the West the conflict heated up in the 1970s when a group of women from Alsea, Oregon documented what they believed was an association between spontaneous abortion rates and herbicide spraying in the industrial forests near their homes.  Erik Jansson was working on pesticide issues for Friends of the Earth at the time. He publicized the plight of the Alsea women and helped create a national campaign to restrict aerial herbicide spraying.

The warning from Alsea and Friends of the Earth exploded across the West where an army of back-to-the-land hippies had recently arrived in search of a life free from industrial threats. Here in Northwest California health workers at Native American clinics also took note. On the Klamath River Karuk health advocate Mavis McCovey began tracking miscarriages and birth defects. McCovey found that during the time Agent Orange was being aerial sprayed by the Forest Service there were virtually no normal births among the Indians living along the Klamath River. The vast majority of Klamath River residents drew drinking water directly from streams that originated on national forest land that was being clearcut and sprayed with Agent Orange.   

In NW California’s Humboldt County a group was formed to monitor aerial spraying crews and to inform local residents about when and where spraying was planned. That effort led to the formation of the Environmental Protection Information Center -  the organization which would later spearhead the Headwaters Forest Campaign. EPIC remains one of Northwest California’s leading environmental organizations. 

Farm workers took up the battle in the 1980s. In 1986 Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union launched the "Wrath of Grapes" campaign to draw public attention to the pesticide poisoning of grape workers and their children. At that time it was common for workers to be in the fields when spraying took place. That Campaign and others eventually resulted in the adoption of regulations which prohibit spraying when farm workers are in the fields.  Regulations now also prohibit growers from sending workers into fields which have been recently sprayed.  

It was not until the early years of this century, however, that the pesticide wars began to focus on salmon and Clean Water Act requirements.  That’s when the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides, in partnership with the Washington Toxics Coalition, launched the Clean Water for Salmon Campaign to protect the regions salmon streams and the salmon themselves from contamination. The campaign eventually got the EPA to consult with the National Marine fisheries Service concerning herbicide impacts to ESA-listed salmon. That in turn has resulted in no spray buffers along salmon streams. The struggle over how wide these buffers must be continues.  

Battles over pesticide regulation and the ongoing effort to regulate agricultural pollution discharges under the Clean Water Act are likely to continue. HCN has covered these issues in the past and will no doubt continue to do so. That’s because agriculture is now the major source of pollution in most western river systems.

Here are links to one, two and three of HCN's more recent pesticide features. You can find several more by searching this site using the term "pesticides".

The Clean Water Act still contains a general waiver for agricultural activities. But the ubiquitous presence of agricultural pollution in the nation’s waterways will likely result in continued efforts by environmentalists to extend Clean Water Act protections to agricultural discharges.

What with sensational court cases about forced marriage and the Big Love television series, it was probably only a matter of time before locals cashed in on the fascination with “polygs.” Now you can pay a fee to take “The Polygamy Experience Tour” with guides who once lived under the thumb of Warren Jeffs, the jailed polygamist cult leader. Tours leave daily from St. George or Hildale, Utah, (877-520-9955) and the curious are urged to “come with questions.”

Read more about the experience: "Polygamy Tours? Why not?" by HCN contributor Beth Kampschror.

This week's reader photo is a classic Western image from a great photographer who's shared a bunch of neat shots up on HCN's Flickr Pool. Check them out and add yours!

    Tim DeChristopher won't be allowed to put global warming on trial when he's on trial.
 
    DeChristopher majors in economics at the University of Utah. Last fall, he went into a BLM auction and successfully bid on 13 drilling leases, also driving up prices for other successful bidders. But he didn't have the $1.7 million to pay for the leases -- he didn't even have the intention to pay. In April, he was charged with felonies like interfering with a government auction and making a false representation.
 
    In recent preliminary maneuvering before the trial, DeChristopher tried to raise the "necessity defense" of choosing the lesser of two evils.
 
    That is, committing one crime was the only way to prevent a greater crime. One oft-cited example comes from the movie "North by Northwest," where the crime of drunken driving was allowed because it was the only way to prevent the greater crime of kidnapping. It also appeared in a recent episode of "Law & Order," wherein the defendant claimed that the murder of a doctor was the only way to prevent more abortions, which were murders in the defendant's eyes.
 
    DeChristopher argued that sabotaging the BLM auction prevented more drilling which would have led to more global warming. If the judge accepted that, then the defense could call climate experts during the trial.
 
    Federal Judge Dee Benson ruled against the necessity defense because DeChristopher had other options besides his false bids. He could have filed a formal protest on the leases, demonstrated outside the auction, or joined the environmental groups who sued and kept the leases from proceeding.
 
    In other words, even if the court conceded that global warming was a greater offense than some false bids, DeChristopher had other means at his disposal to oppose that greater offense.
 
    No trial date has been set. If convicted, DeChristopher could get up to 10 years in prison, although the prosecutor, Brett Tolman, said such a long sentence was unlikely.
 
    Although I enjoyed the "monkey wrench" aspect of DeChristoper's actions, I have to say the judge's ruling seemed sound to me. I don't want someone disabling my pickup, then successfully pleading that the vandalism was necessary to deter global warming.