The Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector
general, Nikki L. Tinsley, plans to investigate
allegations that bunk science led to her agency’s claim that
hydraulic fracturing poses “little or no threat” to drinking
water. “Frac’ing,” a technique pioneered by
Halliburton, increases the production of a gas or oil well by
injecting it with liquid, which can include chemicals such as
diesel fuel and benzene. Last October, EPA scientist Weston Wilson
blew the whistle, saying that agency scientists’
environmental and health concerns were overridden by a peer-review
panel, most of whose members had ties to the oil and gas industry
(HCN, 12/20/04: Conscientious Objectors). Tinsley’s
announcement came after Colorado Reps. Diana DeGette and Mark
Udall, both Democrats, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Sen. James
Jeffords, I-Vt., called for an investigation.
In
California, U.S. District Court judge Manuel Real
dismissed a lawsuit alleging that three Forest Service
employees and a citizen activist conspired to prevent a
real estate development at Big Bear Lake (HCN, 3/7/05: Forest
Service employees and activist face racketeering charges). The
Marina Point Development Associates sued Sandy Steers and the
federal employees for criminal conspiracy after Steers’
group, Friends of Fawnskin, successfully challenged the
company’s condominium-and-marina proposal in court. Marina
Point’s lawsuit was filed under RICO, the Racketeer
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute that was originally
created to break up the Mafia.
The American Civil
Liberties Union has sued Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Bureau
of Land Management Director Kathleen Clarke for leasing
Martin’s Cove, a historic site now managed by the BLM, to the
Mormon Church (HCN, 12/22/03: Mormons win Martin’s Cove).
Nearly 150 Mormon pioneers starved and froze to death at the
Wyoming site while making the trek to Utah in the winter of 1856.
After the church’s initial attempts to buy the land from the
BLM failed, Congress directed the agency to lease it to the church
instead. The ACLU says such an action would violate the
constitutional ban on government endorsement of religion.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Follow-up.
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