Dear HCN,
I am writing in response
to your article, “A Colorado reality check: lions roam and kill”
(HCN, 8/4/97). The article draws attention to two mountain lion
attacks that took place during July in Colorado. While everyone
would agree these attacks are tragic, your story, and the rather
melodramatic headline, draws too much attention to the cougar, and
not enough to the human factor.
You perpetuate a
myth, which seems to be spreading, that mountain lions are shedding
their natural fear of humans. A Colorado Division of Wildlife
spokesman says: “There’s just no reason for (lions) to be afraid of
us.” This is utter nonsense. As your article points out, Colorado
is hunting mountain lions at well above the previous 10-year
average. In states such as Utah, cougars are being killed at record
levels, 676 so far this year alone!
If anything,
cougars have more reason to fear us than
ever.
Our organization hopes that in the future
you will make a greater effort to encourage people to educate
themselves about the wildlife in the areas they are visiting or
living in, and focus less on the rare isolated incidents like the
ones in Colorado.
Craig
Axford
Salt Lake City,
Utah
Craig Axford is issues
coordinator of the Predator Education
Fund.
Water project
creates
bad
precedent
Dear
HCN,
Heather McGregor’s article on the proposed
sale of the Collbran reclamation project does a good job of making
a complex dispute understandable (HCN, 9/15/97). Nonetheless, there
are a couple of points in the article I need to
address.
I represent a dozen western Colorado,
regional and national environmental groups, as well as the town of
Collbran, in opposition to Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell’s
legislation (S. 725) to direct the sale of the Collbran Project to
local water districts. We oppose S. 725 for two
reasons:
* The bill freezes the public out of the
transfer, and
* The bill waives for 40 years key
provisions of the Federal Power Act and all relevant environmental
laws as they otherwise would apply to the issuance of the FERC
power license for the operation of the project’s two power
plants.
These provisions of S. 725 are bad enough
on the ground in western Colorado, but they would create a terrible
precedent for other areas of the West. The Bureau of Reclamation
has received inquiries regarding the transfer of about 60
reclamation projects in the West. If Collbran transfer proponents,
who wrote S. 725, succeed in keeping the public out of the transfer
process and waiving environmental laws for Collbran, these
inquiries will ripen into a tsunami of proposals to transfer other
federal projects (Hoover? Glen Canyon? Grand
Coulee?).
We seek to avoid such a situation. Ms.
McGregor’s article stated that our primary local environmental
concern is impact on endangered Colorado River fish. Actually, as
long as the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program,
a collaborative effort among Upper Basin states, developers,
environmentalists and federal agencies, continues to operate, the
greatest threat to the environment is not to these fish. Of course,
if the program collapses, as it threatens to from time to time, the
impact of the transfer on these fish could be serious. Barring such
a collapse, the greater threat to the environment from the transfer
is in the Plateau Valley and Plateau Creek (where the project is
located), on Grand Mesa (where storage reservoirs operated partly
for fish and recreation could be harmed) and in the Grand Valley
where the transfer, as directed in S. 725, could fuel more
unmitigated development.
We shall try to block S.
725 or to amend it and, failing that, to ask President Clinton to
veto the bill.
Bruce
Driver
Boulder, Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Humans are more dangerous.
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