Yuma Desalting Plant is boondoggle of the decade.
Back at the ranch
Amid all the hoopla about grazing reform, the Bureau of Land Management raised its monthly grazing fees by 12 cents, up to $1.98 per cow-calf pair. Each year the agency adjusts the price from a 1966 base price to reflect lease rates on private land, cattle prices and livestock production costs. Last year the agency…
Jackson’s last letter answered
Activist Leroy Jackson’s last letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hit home. Shortly before his death, Jackson wrote the agency to protest any exemption of Navajo timberlands from the Endangered Species Act (HCN, 11/29/93). The Bureau of Indian Affairs had asked for an exemption based on tribal sovereignty and claimed that the Mexican…
Wise use at Grand Canyon
A Grand Canyon chapter of the People For the West! was formed Jan. 14. Its goals include unrestricted access to public lands, gaining state and county control of federal lands, and preventing federal land managers from interfering with “free enterprise” pursuits such as mining, grazing and logging. The chapter also wants to end federal restrictions…
Yucca Mountain’s fault
Geologists working for the U.S. Geological Survey and the state of Nevada have discovered a new earthquake fault cutting directly through Yucca Mountain, the site slated for the nation’s first high-level nuclear waste repository. Geologists believe the new sheer zone, combined with the already known Ghost Dance Fault, could reduce the underground space available for…
Campbell sides with Telluride
Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (D, Colo.) says he will introduce legislation to condemn a developer’s dream house built in Colorado’s West Elk Wilderness – if the Forest Service rejects a proposed land exchange with the developer. A Campbell spokeswoman said the senator wants to give the Forest Service another tool to deal with Tom Chapman,…
Painting for quieter skies
Artist Wilson Crawford recently painted Thumper Meets the Airport Expansion to protest a proposal to lengthen the runway in Taos, N.M. The painting shows giant airplane wheels squishing a rabbit against a backdrop of purple mountains and blue sky. Along with more than 100 artists, Crawford donated his work to a two-week exhibit, Quiet Skies,…
Chevron gets a go-ahead
The Forest Service is going to let Chevron USA drill an exploratory well two miles north of the boundary of the High Uintas Wilderness in northern Utah. Wasatch-Cache Forest Supervisor Susan Giannettino’s decision allows Chevron to construct a bridge, 2.8 miles of new road and improve 2.1 miles of an existing road, as well as…
Agency reins in Wyoming rancher
After catching a Wyoming rancher illegally subleasing federal grazing permits, Forest Service officials cancelled half his grazing privileges and suspended the remainder for three years. The rancher, George Salisbury, who is also a longtime county commissioner and state legislator, insists he is innocent. “I owned the cattle, I just didn’t have the paperwork to justify…
Public foots DOE bill
The Department of Energy spent millions of dollars over a 32-month period defending its contractors from the public. A DOE internal document says that the agency paid $47 million to private attorneys from Oct. 1, 1990, through May 31, 1993, to defend its private contractors from class action lawsuits. The suits charged firms such as…
Bandelier overrun by hooves
If left unchecked, growing numbers of elk and wild cattle could leave New Mexico’s Bandelier National Monument eroded and overgrazed, park officials say. Nearly 30 cows and over 2,000 elk now trample the park’s fragile hillsides and brittle archaeological ruins and, according to an environmental assessment released Jan. 13, the cattle herd could double in…
Owyhee: On the eve of destruction
The next time you’re looking at a map of the United States, locate what appears to be the largest area without roads in the lower 48. Surprisingly, few people have ever seen or heard of it. Centered around the point common to Idaho, Nevada and Oregon, it is known as the “Owyhee” high desert region:…
State land lease in Idaho goes to the low bidder
In an abrupt turnaround, the Idaho Land Board took away a lease for state grazing land won by an environmentalist, then gave it back to the rancher who has used it for 20 years. At a Jan. 28 auction, Jon Marvel, founder of Idaho Watersheds Project, outbid Challis ranchers Will and Vangie Ingram for rights…
BLM chief Jim Baca leaves amidst cheers and boos
Jim Baca’s nine-month run as the U.S. Bureau of Land Management chief ended Feb. 3. After Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt made it clear in a private meeting that Baca’s services at BLM were no longer desired, the usually outspoken Baca reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a piece of paper containing his resignation.…
Navajo: Portrait of a Nation
Producing Navajo: Portrait of a Nation was a study in perseverance for photographer Joel Grimes. Grimes was a Belagaana, a white man, and his camera was seen as a threat by some Navajos – a way to take another small piece from a culture that has struggled to maintain its traditions. But with the help…
Jim Baca says the Department of Interior is in deep trouble
A few days after Jim Baca was fired from his job as director of the Bureau of Land Management, he said: “I will look into New Mexico political races and maybe run for governor. Maybe it’s the governors who are running policy on public land.” Baca says he did anger several Western governors. “I went…
Las Vegas wheels and deals for Colorado River water
Las Vegas is prepared to give up its controversial quest to pipe underground water from rural Nevada, says the area’s top water official. But only if the booming metropolis can get more water from the Colorado River. That’s a big if, requiring changes in how the Colorado River has been run for most of this…
Will plan save or destroy the grizzly?
A two-month battle between environmentalists and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials over the newly released Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan may end up in court. On Jan. 26, three environmental groups, the Fund for Animals, the Colorado-based Biodiversity Legal Foundation, and the Montana-based Swan View Coalition, gave 60-days’ notice to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife…
Wyoming lawsuit would privatize wildlife
No one owns the sky. At least not yet. But ownership of the land, the water and now the wildlife is continually sought by people with too much money and a lot of greed. This country was founded by people running from kings who only let land-owning aristocrats hunt. Even if they were starving, the…
Why Why? A stark, no-frills retreat from the world
Two highways meet in a “Y” at Why, Ariz. This remote crossroads some 30 miles from Mexico seems an unlikely vacation spot, but for the past three years I’ve made it my winter retreat. At first glance, Why doesn’t seem like much. There are a couple of dozen simple houses, a few dirt streets, two…
Why don’t we think of this?
Why didn’t we think of this? Writing in the Washington state weekly, The Reflector, Marvin Case asks, “Why not create a spotted owl preserve somewhere, plant owl eggs in, say, 5,000 acres in northern Idaho, then let the loggers have the old growth?” This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the…
Ideological schism leads to a personal feud
Randal O’Toole and Jeffrey St. Clair aren’t exactly household names. But tree-huggers know the pair as former publisher and editor of Forest Watch, a now-defunct national monthly. It folded last August after a decade covering the West’s national forests. Forest Watch had been an especially reliable source of information on the crisis in the Northwest…
Draining the budget to desalt the Colorado
YUMA, Ariz. – When people talk about 1990s boondoggles, conversation often turns to the superconducting super collider, the Hubble space telescope or the space station. But consider for a moment a water-desalting plant in the middle of a desert. Make it the largest, most expensive reverse-osmosis plant ever built, and keep in mind that it…
Dear friends
Odds and ends HCN couldn’t live without the U.S. Postal Service, but at times we wonder if we can live with it. On Dec. 26, 1993, we mailed notes, via Third Class mail, to readers in Boulder, 250 miles away, inviting them to the Jan. 21 potluck. Bill Doud of Boulder tells us that his…
Wise-use ordinances suffer legal setback
In a decision that environmentalists hope will reverberate throughout the West, an Idaho district judge ruled that a county wise-use law is unconstitutional. Judge James Michaud said Jan. 28 that Boundary County’s land-use plan asserting local control over all decisions affecting federal and state lands in the county violates both the Idaho and U.S. constitutions…
They’re fed up, and aren’t going to take it anymore
At a tumultuous meeting in late January, the Nevada Association of Counties endorsed a movement to turn control of federal lands over to state government. Cheered on by 70 ranchers and miners, the group approved a letter to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy. It proposed that Nevada assume control of its…