The Forest Service won’t give Alaska Republican Rep.
Don Young information about connections between agency staffers and
environmental groups. In July, Young asked Southwest Regional
Forester Eleanor Towns for a list of employees who are members of
groups like the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity and
Forest Guardians (HCN, 9/14/98). In a Sept. 21 letter, Towns told
Young that keeping such records would violate both the First
Amendment and the Privacy Act. She added, “The Forest Service
encourages its employees to participate in professional
organizations and in their communities.”
Don
Young’s hope of compromise went up in smoke in early October, when
moderate Republicans joined House Democrats to defeat a giant
omnibus public-lands bill, 302 to 123. The bill would have created
a national network of historic trails, expanded New Mexico’s
Bandelier National Monument, and finalized a land trade between the
state of Utah and the Bureau of Land Management (HCN, 5/25/98).
Environmental groups fought the legislation because it would have
restricted the president’s ability to create national monuments and
waived environmental studies to speed up salvage
logging.
Montana’s patience with the mining
industry is wearing thin. In late September, the state Department
of Environmental Quality fined Canyon Resources Corp. $330,000 for
dumping pollutants into streams from its closed CR Kendall gold
mine near Lewiston. That adds to $500,000 the company already owes
the state for a stalled environmental impact study for a proposed
gold mine near the Blackfoot River (HCN,
9/28/98).
Legal fees totaling $54.2 million may
have paid off for the federal Department of Energy. In late August,
a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by thousands of people who
lived near Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington. The lawsuit
from “downwinders’ said Cold War-era plutonium manufacturing at
Hanford left them with widespread health problems (HCN, 1/22/96).
U.S. District Judge Alan McDonald in Spokane ruled that scientific
evidence on radiation injury was too complex for a jury to sort
out, reports the Spokane Spokesman Review.
*
Greg Hanscom
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The Wayward West.
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