As coal mines proliferate, environmentalists are starting to realize that mining creates major air pollution problems, but federal agencies appear reluctant to regulate it and industry may not have the technology to control it. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.22/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
Archive
Forest Service secrecy serves only confusion
Now that the Forest Service has entered its “evaluation” phase of the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE II), it intends to keep its workings a secret until the final environmental impact statement is completed. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.22/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
Western Election Review
Largely because of pocketbook promises from the candidates, voters in the Northern Plains and Rockies states have apparently stacked the deck against progressive environmental lawmaking in the state legislatures next year. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.22/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
Wilderness loses in RARE II opinion poll
The U.S. Forest Service’s poll of 360,000 people on the subject of wilderness and roadless lands reveals a great deal of anti-wilderness sentiment as the agency retires into secrecy to develop its final proposals for the second Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE II). Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.21/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
Amory Lovins brings good news
Amory Lovins delivers a message that grassroots efforts and individual action can create a transition to “soft technology” — diverse, renewable, relatively simple and matched in scale to their end use needs. To read the full text, click on the “View a PDF from the original” link below, or download a PDF of the entire […]
Congress phases out gas controls, pushes for conservation, solar power
For the first time in history, the United States has a congressionally sanctioned energy policy, which consists of laws outlining natural gas pricing, energy conservation, electric rate reform and coal conversion. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.21/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
Congress passes ‘fantastic’ park and recreation bill
In its final hours, Congress passed a $1.2 billion National Park and Recreation Act that settles several of the nation’s leading environmental controversies, including the fight over Mineral King in California. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.20/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
National Park Service chases squirrels of political popularity
As the National Park Service has expanded to manage new and unusual places, it has grown into a sprawling agency that is less professional than the Forest Service, less dedicated to management principles than the Fish and Widlife Service, and more set in its ways than the Bureau of Land Management. Download entire issue to […]
Woolgrowers, environmentalists find common ideas
Sheepmen and environmentalists often find themselves on different sides of the fence. However, a group of them met together last month in Idaho to try to make peace among their warring factions. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.20/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
Judge halts work on Wyoming’s Grayrocks Dam
A federal judge’s order to halt construction of the Grayrocks Dam in Wheatland, Wyo., could shrink the generating capacity of the 1,500 megawatt coal-fired power plant the dam would have served. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.19/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
Merson flaunts environmental bias
Despite criticism, Alan Merson, recently appointed the regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency in Denver, doesn’t back down from claims that he’s an environmentalist. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.19/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
Schurz preached conservation to a profligate nation
During his tenure as Secretary of the Interior Department, at a time when settlers simply took what they wanted from public lands, Carl Schurz pushed to put into practice the conservation ethic developed by George Perkins Marsh and others. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.19/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
Conservationist offers remedy for Overthrust strife
A Sierra Club member’s attempt to compromise on oil and gas development on potential wilderness lands along the Overthrust Belt — a 60-mile wide swath of high petroleum potential that runs from northwestern Montana south into Utah — has won only mild praise and some criticism from the energy industry. Download entire issue to view […]
Keep railroads out of coal mining, Justice Dept. says
In an opinion that contradicts the U.S. Department of Interior, the Justice Department has advised that companies in the coal transportation business be kept out of the coal mining business in order to avoid “anticompetitive effects.” Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.18/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
Sun offers prosperity without disruption
Members of the Navajo Tribe and local Indian pueblos have formed the Native American Appropriate Technology Action Council as a way to develop and promote technologies like solar that are cheap, decentralized, and that generate a spirit of self-determination. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.18/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
Judge nods to Piceance Basin shale development
A district judge has rejected arguments by conservations groups and held that development of oil shale can proceed on two federal leases in northwestern Colorado’s Piceance Basin. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.17/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
Water board sues critics of the Foothills project
The Denver Water Board has filed suit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory agencies in a Denver federal court, asking $36 million in damages and an end to future interference in the Foothills water treatment project. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.17/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
1978, the year the Senate shortchanged Alaska?
The Alaska National Interest Lands Act, which includes protections for Gates of the Arctic National Park, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and other wild lands, faces a tricky Congress debate and a looming deadline. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.17/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
An observer who inspired reformers
George Perkins Marsh’s seminal book Man and Nature would be his lasting contribution, but it was only a sideline to his lifelong curiosity over man’s role in nature’s changes. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.16/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
Congress, Carter lock horns on water projects
Despite President Jimmy Carter’s warning that he will veto any appropriations bill that includes six contested water projects, Congress has included those projects in the 1979 Public Works Appropriations bill. Download entire issue to view this article: http://country-survey-collabs.info/issues/10.16/download-entire-issue%3C/p%3E
