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.
 

Every bar should have a hitching post; that’s just common sense, right? Or so reasoned a ranch hand in Worland, Wyo., who was cited for allowing his horse to wander through town while he hung out in a bar. According to the Billings Gazette, an indignant William Schellinger told police that “they should spend their time arresting real criminals, not bothering cowboys with wayward horses.”

They’re calling it a “uranium renaissance.”  Wyoming is prepping itself for what is slated to be another boom in uranium mining for the fourth time in 60 years.

Wyoming and the Rocky Mountain West are all too familiar with energy boom and bust cycles. Just ask all the people who lost jobs in the oil bust of the '80s, or in Wyoming’s Cold War-fueled uranium boom and subsequent bust of the ‘50s. 

Nuclear power accounts for about 20 percent of the power generated by the United States.  But this figure is likely to increase - with the green movement, coal-fired power plants aren't as popular as they used to be.  Across the United States, 21 new nuclear power plants have been proposed.  Worldwide, there are 53 nuclear power plants being built right now, with many, many more in the works.  Even Nevada, who held strong to the “we don’t have a nuclear plant so we we’re not taking your nuclear waste,” argument against the Yucca Mountain storage facility, is considering going nuclear.  Overall, the World Nuclear Association estimates a 78 percent increase in uranium demand over the next 20 years.

This is where Wyoming comes in.

On the night of June 16, 2001, Fred Martinez, Jr. was walking home from a party when he was chased into a rocky canyon on the outskirts of Cortez, Colo. The 16-year-old Navajo was cornered in the chasm’s nightmarish shadows and bludgeoned to death. Police found his body five days later. The crime shocked the community.

Martinez was openly gay, and his murder was easy to solve – the murderer, 18-year-old Shaun Murphy of Farmington, N.M., had bragged to his friends that he had “bug-smashed a fag.” The hate crime opened up frank discussions about perceptions of gender among Navajos, says Lydia Nibley, who delves into the topic in her new documentary, premiering Nov. 21 at the Starz Denver Film Festival.

Two Spirits explores the traditional Navajo belief in four genders and how it's changed over time. “Many Navajo people have been acculturated so much to Western ideas that the tradition has very nearly been lost,” Nibley says. “Learning more about who Fred was, we were instantly drawn to this idea of the balance of masculine and feminine.”

The first Navajo gender is a feminine woman, the second a masculine man, the third a male-bodied person with feminine characteristics (nádleehí) and the fourth a female-bodied person with a masculine essence (dilbaa). When Martinez came out to his mother, she identified him as nádleehí.

As everyone knows, bears are quick learners, and thanks to a scholarly article in the Journal of Mammalogy, we now know what vehicles in Yosemite National Park they prefer to rip and rend in their search for fast food. “The bears seem to base their decision on ‘fuel efficiency,’ ” writes Rocky Barker — “that is, which vehicle offers the best opportunity of finding a meal.” The minivan wins top honors as the bears’ “Car of the Year” because it’s more likely to leak odors, it probably hauled kids who almost certainly spilled food on the upholstery, and it has a rear side window that can be popped open by a powerful paw. Of the 908 vehicles studied in Yosemite between 2001-2007, bears attacked minivans 26 percent of the time; SUVs, 22.5 percent; small cars, 17.1 percent; and sedans, 13.7 percent.

“When I saw the night sky for the first time in the Mojave National Preserve I felt like a layer of film had been peeled away from my eyes,” says David Lamfrom, the Barstow based field coordinator for the National Parks Conservation Association.

“I want the kids who live in the high desert to realize how rare and precious it is.”

Lamfrom and his partner Rana Knighten are on a mission to share their love of nature and the Mojave National Preserve with underserved students from California’s High Desert. They’ve created the innovative Tortoises through the Lens Program, which takes diverse youth and teaches them conservation ethics through nature photography and field study. The students take field trips, do volunteer work and go to lectures to learn about the ecology and life history of the threatened desert tortoise.  The planning, photographs and writing they do throughout the course of the year culminate in a published book about Desert Tortoise Conservation and an exhibit of the students’ photography at the Kelso Depot Visitor’s Center in the Mojave National Preserve.

Lamfrom knows the challenges of engaging today’s youth in nature.

“Many children who grow up in highly urbanized and underserved communities - and I’m speaking from personal experience - live in a world of buildings and streets and noise. When they come to wild places they are scared because it’s so foreign to them.”   

I pondered featuring this reader photo a couple weeks ago, but ended up with a different choice. Today, though, the sparkling vermilion of these aspen leaves, now blanketing forest floors across the West, brought me a bright remembrance of Colorado's  autumn moments, which I wanted to share with you.

Across most of the West it's starting to feel like winter. I don't mind holding on to fall a little bit longer, though.

Share your photos (or just enjoy looking at others') on HCN's Flickr pool; we pick one a week to feature on our Grange blog.