Each year Wildlife Services “controls’ about 100,000
lions, coyotes and bears, mostly by killing them. On June 23, the
federal agency lost support when the House of Representatives voted
229-193 to cut $10 million from its $20 million budget. A day
later, however, after the livestock industry mounted an intense
lobbying effort, the $10 million was restored.
Gloria Flora, the forest supervisor who told oil and gas drillers
in Montana that some wild places must be off-limits, is on her way
to another controversial perch. Taking over this summer from Jim
Nelson, who retired in February as supervisor, Flora will run the
Lower 48’s largest national forest, the Humboldt-Toiyabe. It
stretches across Nevada and parts of eastern California, and its
6.5 million acres are home to many ranchers who don’t like being
told what to do with the grazing allotments they lease from the
Forest Service.
For 16 years, Nevada Sen.
Richard Bryan has fought the opening of a national nuclear waste
dump in his state. The Nevada Democrat won another reprieve this
spring by thwarting Alaska Sen. Bill Murkowski’s bill to open the
Yucca Mountain repository. “It’s dead for this year,” Bryan crowed
after the vote, Gannett News Service reports.
Reeling from what had become a politicized program, a presidential
advisory panel recommended only 10 rivers for designation as
American Heritage Rivers. The label was designed to coordinate
protection and conservation (HCN, 3/30/98). Only one Heritage river
runs through the West – Oregon’s Willamette
River.
Wilderness will get another official look
in Utah. In June, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled
for the second time that Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt had the
right to order a re-inventory of possible wilderness on Bureau of
Land Management lands in Utah. The agency had recommended 2 million
acres, while conservationists urged at least 5. 7 million acres as
wilderness. Babbitt had been sued by the state of Utah, along with
the Utah Association of Counties and state school-trust lands
administration. All could still appeal to the U.S. Supreme
Court.
It may not be a comfortable fit, but the
International Mountain Biking Association recently found itself
allied more with drivers of motorized vehicles than with
environmentalists. Mountain bikers said they could not join the
Utah Wilderness Coalition, since if 5.7 million acres were
designated wilderness, bikes would be banned from those
areas.
A bill introduced to build a “lite”
version of the Animas-La Plata Dam in southern Colorado seems dead,
thanks to opposition from the Clinton administration. A Bureau of
Reclamation official told a Senate panel last month that many
questions – environmental, legal and financial – remain unanswered.
The bill’s sponsor, Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, told the
Denver Post that tribes backing the dam should sue for their
long-delayed water rights.
”
Betsy Marston
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The Wayward West.
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