With buddies like Steve Williams, endangered
species don’t need predators, pesticides or
encroaching pavement. In early March, Williams — head of the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — told Congress that money
slated for designating critical habitat for endangered species
could be better spent elsewhere within the agency (HCN, 6/23/03:
Who needs critical habitat?).
Nuclear bomb
builders need more money and less time: In mid-March,
Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security
Administration, asked Congress for $30 million to make sure the
Nevada Test Site could be ready within 18 months. That’s up
$5 million from December, when the agency said it planned to reduce
readiness time to two years (HCN 12/8/03: New nuke studies are in
the works). Meanwhile, Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, is
asking Congress to support his “Safety from Nuclear
Weapons Testing” bill. In Utah, thousands of people have
sued the U.S. government over illnesses resulting from fallout from
nuclear testing in Nevada.
The U.S. Department
of Energy and its contractors might want to slow their “accelerated
cleanup” of the former nuclear bomb factory at Rocky
Flats. Last May, Kaiser-Hill contractors, who were decommissioning
a building, made mistakes that led to a fire (HCN, 9/1/03: Rocky
Flats, the sequel?). The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board,
which oversees nuclear weapons safety issues, found that workers
may have contributed to the fire — by, among other things,
poking it with a metal pole — and that
management impeded the fire department’s investigation of the
incident.
Tiffany & Co. has weighed
in on the U.S. Forest Service’s proposal to mine
for gold and silver under Montana’s Cabinet Mountains
Wilderness (HCN, 2/18/02: Battle brews over a wilderness mother
lode). In a letter to Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, the
jewelry company’s chief executive officer, Michael Kowalski,
chides the agency for ignoring opposition to the mine and for
planning to store mine tailings — “a polite term for
toxic sludge” — in a “holding facility of
questionable durability.” The CEO also criticizes the 1872 General
Mining Act, writing that it “remains a perverse incentive
for mining in wilderness areas, near scenic watersheds,
around important cold water fisheries, and in other fragile
ecosystems — all of which are inappropriate for mineral
development.”
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Follow-up.
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