When it comes time to court the ladies, male
greater sage grouse puff up their chests, displaying
bright yellow air sacs, and fan their tail feathers like a peacock.
But former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior Julie
MacDonald apparently had no taste for crazy mating rituals or, for
that matter, wildlife in general. She did her best to keep the
grouse and several other species from being protected under the
Endangered Species Act, red-penning scientific documents that
supported the listings. MacDonald’s long gone (apparently she had
no taste for investigations by Interior’s inspector general,
either), and her decisions are coming back to bite the current
administration. In early December, Federal District Court of Idaho
Judge B. Lynn Winmill slammed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
for its “tainted” 2005 decision not to list the grouse, saying it
failed to use the best science. He ordered the agency to reconsider
the listing, sans the meddling of folks like MacDonald.
The decision rippled across the West, with some speculating that an
endangered listing could impact sagebrush landscapes and economies,
much as the spotted owl’s listing affected the Northwest by hurting
old-growth logging. A sage grouse listing could hinder oil and gas
drilling, exurban sprawl and grazing. The mere
possibility of listing has been known to bring
out the green in everyone, from ranchers to energy executives; if
they can do enough voluntarily to protect the grouse, they may be
able to convince the feds to forego onerous regulations protecting
the bird.
And protection of any sort would be good news
for the grouse, as well as for hunters and for gourmands: Rumor has
it the bird is delicious, especially when roasted with figs,
chambourcin wine and mushrooms.
A white-tailed
prairie dog may be less appetizing as a meal, but a MacDonald-era
decision to not list the rodent will also be
reconsidered, along with six other similar decisions. The
Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t even need a judge to make it
rethink these rulings, but the agency also isn’t ready to act
anytime soon: The prairie dogs will have to wait until 2009 to
again be considered for listing, and even then it will happen only
“if funding is available,” according to the agency.
Fifty-eight species have been listed during the current
administration, compared to 522 under Clinton.
Also in the Interior-second-thoughts
department: Fran Mainella, National Park Service director
during the first six years of the Bush administration, has
expressed doubts about a plan to up the number of snowmobiles
allowed in Yellowstone National Park. Mainella has been credited –
or blamed – with pushing recreation over conservation in the parks,
and presided over administration efforts to get more sleds into the
park before resigning last year. Recently, however, Mainella
declared herself a signatory of a letter from former NPS directors
that bashes the Park Service’s plan to allow up to 720 sleds per
day in the park.
Californians can keep the
faucets flowing for a while. Water users in the Colorado
River states ratified a new plan that dictates how the river’s
water will be allocated among Arizona, Nevada and California should
drought continue. California won’t have to cut water use from the
river until Lake Mead drops another 80 feet below its current
paltry levels, and Bureau of Reclamation models predict that won’t
happen for at least 20 years, if ever. Other climate
scientists believe Lake Mead could be “operationally empty” as soon
as 2020. Unless more Westerners stay married, that is:
More than 600 billion gallons of water and 734 billion kilowatt
hours of electricity would have been saved in 2005 alone had no one
gotten divorced that year, according to a Michigan State University
study on the environmental impacts of broken marriages.
And in other news: Evel Knievel, a native of
Butte, Mont., died, not from crashing his motorcycle, but from
diabetes at the age of 69. A Salt Lake City physician told an
audience that breathing the city’s polluted air is like smoking
five cigarettes a day and causes 2,000 premature deaths on the
Wasatch Front each year. Utah residents are the most depressed in
the nation. Mitt Romney defended his religion, Mormonism, in a
speech in Texas. “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and
the Savior of mankind,” he said. And, an archaeologist in
New Mexico found evidence that prehistoric Pueblo Indians made beer
from corn.
Cyber border
Down on the southern edge of Arizona, a series of towers
stick up randomly from the mesquite, watching everything that
passes by. The towers, equipped with motion sensors and cameras and
radar, make up a “virtual fence” that is part of the Department of
Homeland Security’s recent push to secure the border. The project,
called SBInet, calls for outfitting agents with technologies like
satellite phones and laptops in addition to the virtual fence. But
the road to hi-tech security has been riddled with setbacks, and
the cost of the project – estimated at $7.6 billion – has come
under fire.
roject 28, designed to
virtually fence 28 miles of the Mexican border south of Tucson, is
months behind schedule, and the price tag is $600,000 more than
expected. It was slated to go online in June, but it was stymied by
software glitches. Boeing, the company that designed the fence,
just recently delivered an updated version, which the Border Patrol
is now testing.
2,000 – miles of
border the U.S. shares with Mexico.
151 – miles of physical border fence currently
in place.
219 – miles of physical
fence Customs and Border Protection plans to add to the Southwest
border by the end of 2008.
73 – miles
of physical fence built this year.
2,400 – length, in feet, of a tunnel under the
border near San Diego that was discovered in 2006.
$1.2 million – average cost per mile of physical
border fence built by government workers in 2007.
$4 million – average cost per mile of physical
border fence built by outside contractors in 2007.
$650 million – CBP’s original estimate for the
cost of expanding the border fence.
$890 million – current expected cost of
expanding the border fence, using contractors.
387 – miles of the Southwest border that CBP
plans to monitor with virtual fence technology by the end of 2008.
28 – miles of the Arizona-Mexico
border covered by “Project 28,” the first portion of virtual fence,
which is still not operational.
6 –
number of months Project 28 is behind schedule.
$20.66 million – amount the federal government
is paying Boeing Corp. to complete Project 28.
378,000 – number of apprehensions of illegal
border crossers in the Tucson Sector in FY 2007.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Two weeks in the West.
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