Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Utah Gov. Mike
Leavitt have agreed to settle a squabble over state-owned school
trust lands isolated by the Grand Staircase-Escalante National
Monument; now it awaits approval in Washington, D.C. (HCN,
5/25/98). The deal means Utah will trade 377,000 acres of state
lands for $50 million and 139,000 acres of federal lands in the
state. Though the Senate has yet to vote on Senate Bill 2146, a
version easily passed in the House.
Mobil Corp. has agreed to pay
$45 million to settle claims that it systematically cheated Indian
tribes and the federal government out of oil earnings. The
corporation will pay $36.9 million to the federal government, the
Navajo and Jicarilla Apache tribes and 10 states to make up for 10
years of underpaid oil royalties. Another $8.1 million goes to
private parties. The Washington, D.C.-based Project for Government
Oversight, which brought the lawsuit against Mobil with the Justice
Department in federal court, said settlements with other oil
companies may follow.
The town
of Portola, Calif., has $9.1 million coming to it from the state of
California (HCN, 5/25/98). The money will help the town recover
from a state project to rid Lake Davis of illegally introduced
northern pike; poisoning the pike left a legacy of polluted waters.
Two million dollars later, the unwelcome fish species is gone, but
tourism slumped and the town lost a source of drinking water for
the summer. The check is not yet in the mail: All criminal charges
against the Department of Fish and Game for the fiasco must first
be resolved.
Chainsaws are
buzzing in Colorado’s Routt National Forest. Environmentalists had
tried to halt 3,000 acres of salvage logging planned after a
windstorm whipped through the forest last year (HCN, 6/22/98). The
Forest Service says the sales will help control an outbreak of
beetles and the threat of wildfire. Environmentalists doubt the
logging will slow the spread of spruce
beetles.
Two predators that
vanished from Colorado’s wilds are coming back, with help from the
Colorado Division of Wildlife. Biologists plan to capture 80 lynx
and 30 wolverines in Alaska and Canada and release them in the Rio
Grande/San Juan and Gunnison national forests this winter, reports
the Denver Post. Environmentalists are pleased with the project.
But they warn that the project’s success depends on protecting
habitat on Forest Service lands.
* Dustin
Solberg
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The Wayward West.
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