Stymied by a Republican Congress, Interior Secretary
Bruce Babbitt has borrowed from Broadway to express his opinions.
On May 12, he staged a mock 125th birthday party for the 1872
Mining Law, complete with cake, and gave title to federal land
containing up to $110 million worth of gold to a mining company for
$620. On May 16, he donned hard hat, goggles and fire retardant
clothes to pour fuel on an Idaho mountainside and then ignite it to
show his support for controlled burns …
Further
proof that crime doesn’t always pay on federal land: Pilfering 500
archaeological artifacts from Polar Mesa Cave in Utah earned nine
Moab residents felony sentences, in the largest looting case since
the Archaeological Resources Protection Act was passed in 1979.
Three will serve jail time, while the other six will be confined to
their homes, their whereabouts monitored electronically
…
A Billings, Mont., man who poached a bull elk
in Yellowstone National Park was fined nearly $3,000 and banned
from the park for three years …
After
five-and-a-half years, volatile Al Schneber-ger has left his
position as executive director of the New Mexico Cattle Growers’
Association. In an open letter he commends ranchers such as Kit
Laney and Dick Manning for fighting for private property rights:
“Now I tell you … federal grazing rights are property!!! The only
mistake those who ranch on federal lands made was they trusted in
the contract they had with the federal government …”
After a four-day training in civil disobedience
by the Montana-based Ruckus Society, five Tucson environmentalists
locked their necks together with bike locks on the floor of Kaibab
National Forest ranger station, while two others draped a banner
from the roof. They were protesting a salvage timber sale of 3,500
burnt acres on the edge of Grand Canyon National Park. “People were
shut out of the decision-making process for the forest they love,
and this is our last recourse,” said Michael Robinson, a former
High Country News intern now with the Southwest Center for
Biological Diversity …
In a unanimous vote, the
Sierra Club re-elected its Generation X president, Adam Werbach, 26
… After serving on the boards of directors for the Southern Utah
Wilderness Alliance, the Sierra Club Foundation and the High
Country Foundation, conservationist Bert Fingerhut has been elected
the next chairman of the Wilderness Society’s Governing Council.
His agenda? To solidify the national group’s ties to local and
regional environmental organizations …
*
Heather Abel
After serving on the boards of
directors for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, the Sierra
Club Foundation and the High Country News Foundation,
conservationist Bert Fingerhut has been elected the next chairman
of the Wilderness Society’s Governing Council. His agenda? To
solidify the national group’s ties to local and regional
environmental organizations …
The Forest
Service is wasting time trying to recruit minority workers, says
Idaho Republican Helen Chenoweth in the Idaho Spokesman Review,
because blacks and Hispanics have never liked northern Idaho. “The
warm-climate community just hasn’t found the colder climate that
attractive,” she said, and “we just don’t have that much
agricultural crop harvesting up north.” Accused of perpetuating
northern Idaho’s image as a haven for bigots and racists, Chenoweth
said she won’t apologize, but she “didn’t mean to offend anybody.”
* Heather Abel
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The Wayward West.
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