A Supreme Court decision has stripped as much as one-fifth of the nation’s wetlands of federal protection. The January decision, which ended a legal battle between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a solid waste agency in Illinois, asserted that the Corps has no authority to regulate “isolated” waters unless they are used in […]
Matt Jenkins
Posted inMarch 12, 2001: Divided Waters
Fiddling with FERC
NORTHWEST If you thought renewing your driver’s license was a pain, try being a dam owner. Every 30 to 50 years, privately owned dams must apply for a new operating license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and the process is neither fast nor cheap. On average, the process drags on for about five […]
Posted inMarch 12, 2001: Divided Waters
Washington, unplugged
WASHINGTON The Bonneville Power Administration, which supplies almost half of Washington’s electricity, recently announced that it won’t be able to meet demand over the next five years and may be forced to increase its wholesale power rates 60 percent during the same period. Washington Gov. Gary Locke has a plan that could save the day. […]
Posted inFebruary 12, 2001: Mr. Babbitt's wild ride
Bush hits the brakes
Almost immediately after taking office, President George W. Bush slapped a freeze on Bill Clinton’s last batch of new regulations, giving the new president time to review and possibly overturn those rules. New regulations which have not yet appeared in the Federal Register have been withdrawn for review; those already published but not yet in […]
Posted inJanuary 29, 2001: Power on the loose
Monumental changes
With only three days left before George W. Bush would become president, the Clinton administration pressed forward with its land-protection plans and created seven new national monuments. The Sonoran Desert National Monument in Arizona is the largest of the pack, encompassing over 486,000 acres of desert northeast of Organ Pipe National Monument. The area will […]
Posted inJanuary 29, 2001: Power on the loose
Park Service bans Jet Skis
A recent settlement between the National Park Service and Bluewater Network, a San Francisco-based conservation group, may eliminate personal watercraft from the entire park system by 2002. Last March, the National Park Service banned Jet Skis from all but 21 of its units. The watercraft are now restricted to 11 national recreation areas – including […]
Posted inJanuary 29, 2001: Power on the loose
Swift fox may lose the race
The last days of the Clinton administration haven’t all been rosy for environmentalists. In early January, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dropped the swift fox as a candidate for endangered species listing. Environmentalists petitioned the federal government eight years ago to protect the housecat-sized canine under the Endangered Species Act. But the Swift Fox […]
Posted inJanuary 29, 2001: Power on the loose
Agency will try to track trails
The Bureau of Land Management has a new nationwide strategy for off-highway vehicle management. The plan, released Jan. 19, calls for local environmental analyses of vehicle impacts, saying that some endangered species habitat may need further protection from OHV use. It also broadens BLM’s definition of off-highway vehicles, which will now include snowmobiles, personal watercraft, […]
Posted inJuly 31, 2000: Out of the darkness
Vulgar yet valiant
For most of us, a quick glimpse of a plane as it drones overhead on its way to a wildfire is all we’ll ever see of smokejumpers or the work they do, but Murry A. Taylor’s Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper’s Memoir of Fighting Wildfire in the West, offers insight into their hectic lives. Taylor, who […]