Idaho’s Owyhee Initiative
— a group of ranchers, environmentalists and off-road vehicle
users — has unveiled a wilderness proposal for the
Owyhee Canyonlands (HCN, 12/8/03: Riding the middle
path). The plan would protect 511,000 acres, including 40,000 acres
that would be cow-free. U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, hopes to
introduce a bill in early June to turn the proposal into reality.
U.S. District Judge Dee Benson has
quashed the long-lasting struggle to overturn President Bill
Clinton’s 1996 designation of Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah
(HCN, 4/14/03: Change comes slowly to Escalante country). Clinton
had used the 1906 Antiquities Act to create the monument. In 1997,
the Utah Association of Counties and the Mountain States Legal
Foundation filed suit to overturn the decision, charging that the
Antiquities Act is unconstitutional, and only Congress has the
authority to “withdraw such lands from the federal trust.” Benson
dismissed the case, saying the plaintiffs’ argument “fails on
many levels.”
Envirocare, the company
that parlayed an empty stretch of Utah desert into a
toxic-waste-storage empire, now hopes to hang out a
shingle in Iraq (HCN, 12/8/03: Utahns beat back
radioactive waste). It wants to open a dump in the Iraqi desert to
dispose of hundreds of tons of toxic and radioactive
depleted-uranium shells — and the vehicles they destroyed
— that have been fired by U.S. forces in Iraq during the
first and second Gulf wars. But company representatives say that
the March killing and mutilation of four American security
contractors has caused them to be somewhat more cautious about
their expansion plans.
How do you save
California’s Salton Sea, where salinity levels are
rising to the point at which they’ll doom the lake’s
fish and bird life? Cut the baby in half: In
April, the Salton Sea Authority endorsed a $730 million proposal to
build an eight-mile-long dike across the lake. This would create
smaller, high-quality wildlife habitat on half the lake, while
allowing the other half to dry up (HCN, 9/16/02: The Royal
Squeeze). The plan still requires the approval of California Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, R.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Follow-up.
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