Colorado wants to follow Utah’s lead
on wilderness rollbacks. In a May 15 letter, Greg
Walcher, head of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, told
Interior Secretary Gale Norton that his state would like to settle
counties’ claims to roads across federal lands (HCN, 5/12/03:
Backcountry road deal runs over wilderness). Walcher made it clear
that Colorado will stand behind RS 2477 claims, even if the
so-called roads are impassable to four-wheel vehicles, or cross
wilderness study areas, national parks and national wildlife
refuges.
Federal officials have shot
their first reintroduced Mexican gray wolf. Alpha female
592, captured in 2001 after killing calves, had been re-released
last month into New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness (HCN, 1/29/01: A
slow comeback for Mexican wolves). But after the wolf killed three
more calves in Catron County at the end of May, a member of the
federal-state wolf management team shot and killed her.
In British Columbia, Hope has
died. Hope was a northern spotted owl chick, born in
2002, and thought to be the last survivor of her generation in the
province. Biologists captured her last fall, and kept her safe
through the winter. She was released into the wild in April, but
died of starvation within five weeks. Canadian officials say there
may be as few as 30 breeding pairs of spotted owls remaining in the
province (HCN, 3/12/01: Will logging save the spotted owl?).
Future oil and gas drilling could tap
big trouble at New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot
Project — so says the Environmental Evaluation Group, an
independent scientific oversight group (HCN, 4/12/99: Nuclear waste
dump opens). Researchers found that waste levels are higher and
more concentrated than the Energy Department had assumed. If oil
and gas drillers punctured storage drums, they concluded, the
accident would release twice the amount of nuclear waste the
department had predicted.
Environmentalists lost a round in the fight
against oil and gas drilling in the Powder River Basin (HCN,
10/28/02: Judges rule gas leases are illegal). In early June, a
U.S. District judge reversed an Interior Board of Land Appeals
decision and reinstated three oil and gas leases that the Bureau of
Land Management had sold to a private company.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Follow-up.
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