Coal development in the Northern Great Plains already seems to be progressing at a level higher than anticipated when the Northern Great Plains Resource Program completed its draft interim report last fall.
Items by Marjane Ambler
Clifton Merritt, the western regional director of the Wilderness Society, is an atypical environmental leader -- not flashy or full of fire and brimstone, but good at motivating people positively.
In 1986, Anaconda Minerals, a division of Atlantic Richfield Co., signed over to the Laguna Pueblo $43.6 million and the responsibility for reclaiming the Jackpile-Paguate uranium mines.
In 1970, High Country News was born of Tom Bell's passion. For five years its pages thundered with his outrage at ranchers, politicians and corporations that threatened Wyoming's water, wild lands and animals.
Ditch riders on Wyoming's Wind River Reservation work with an aged, deteriorated system, very rough measuring means, and farmers who are quick to assume that they are being shorted.
Lander, Wyo., is still reeling from U.S. Steel's decision last April to permanently close its Atlantic City iron ore mine.
The coal-owning tribes of the West hope to finally escape the regulatory limbo they have been in since passage of the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.
At sites throughout the West, Department of Energy contractors are scurrying to remove uranium tailings from buildings and lots where they have been sitting for 20 years or more.
Navajo Tribal Chairman Peterson Zah told the Council of Energy Resource Tribes members here last month that they should not look at energy resources as the answer to all the problems that exist on their reservations.
Shoshone and Arapahoe Indians in Wyoming have succeeded at gaining protection for instream flows.
The Council of Energy Resource Tribes board has chosen as its new chairman the leader of a tribe that has opposed energy development.
The Wyoming Industrial Siting Council is being prudent in considering requiring the Hampshire Energy Company, which is planning a coal-to-gasoline conversion plant in Gillette, Wyo., to post a performance bond to protect local governments.
After initial victory celebrations, Indian tribes with energy resources on their reservations are reeling from the backlash to the Supreme Court's ruling affirming their right to tax energy production on their lands.
The Powder River Basin federal coal lease sale -- the largest such sale in history -- resulted in the sale of all but two of the 13 tracts offered.
A legal battle on Montana's Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation illustrates the quandary many tribal governments have as they face energy development decisions.
President Reagan's proposed budget would allot more taxpayer dollars to Indian reservations but also impair the tribes' efforts to gain control over energy development on reservations, undermining Indian tribes' efforts to become more self-sufficient.
Indian tribal leaders recently told a Senate committee that they could do a better job of monitoring oil operations on their lands then the federal government.
The Council of Energy Resource Tribes emerged in 1975 with the bravado of a homegrown OPEC, but some tribes are withdrawing as the organization comes under federal scrutiny.
Indian tribes may own one-third of the West's low-sulfur coal and half the nation's private uranium, and the energy industry is trying to connect with these and other resources on Indian lands.
Three Indian tribes in North Dakota have adopted seismic exploration regulations, issued permits and hired Indian guides for oil developers, all to address a lack of authority by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Millworkers helped produce uranium for the nation's nuclear defense program in the 1950s and '60s. Now many are ill from exposure to radiation, but getting compensation is difficult.
For more than 25 Western tribes that hold vast quantities of coal and uranium, the energy crisis is another source of pressure to abandon their cultural identity.
The real danger of the Sagebrush Rebellion is not that the federal lands will be taken over but that the deep sentiments aroused by the effort will drive a wedge between agricultural and environmental interests.
A study, initiated by the Environmental Protection Agency but never released to the public, documents high radioactivity in more than a hundred communities where uranium tailings were used as construction fill material.
Western Nuclear Inc. has agreed to comply with the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality and stop construction of a uranium tailings dam that the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission already permitted, highlighting the gap between state and federal regulations.
Some conservationists trying to increase the amount of designated wilderness object to the regulations that the Wilderness Act places on grazing because those regulations draw opposition from ranchers.
The future of agriculture in the Rocky Mountain states may hinge on a trade-off with energy development spurred by the energy crisis.
U.S. Steel has set Lander, Wyoming, astir by announcing that unless the Environmental Protection Agency relaxes its requirements for air pollution controls at the company's mill in Utah, it will have to close both the mill and its Wyoming mine.
With the unexpected blessing of a wild horse advocate and several environmentalists, a rancher group has filed suit to force the, federal government to thin wild horse herds in southwest Wyoming.
The Three Mile Island nuclear accident has only added to the uranium industry's troubles, which include the erratic price of uranium and pending political decisions.
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