Energy & Industry

The former environmental manager of Colorado’s bankrupt Summitville mine, one of the worst and most expensive environmental disasters in Colorado history, was indicted June l6 on 35 charges of conspiracy, felony violations of the Clean Water Act, and two counts of falsifying records. EPA investigators charge that in l990 mid-level manager Tom Chisholm knowingly discharged […]

Larry Tuttle, director of the nonprofit Center for Environmental Equity, left his Oregon home on May 10 to go for a walk – an 1,872 mile walk. The mileage represents Tuttle’s impetus for taking to the West’s highways – to support reform of the 1872 General Mining Law. “Pending congressional mining reform is a sham, […]

While other environmental debates rage in Congress, negotiations over reform of the 1872 Mining Law are quietly proceeding behind closed doors in the Senate. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., is at the center of the give-and-take. In March, Campbell and Sen. Bennett Johnston, D-La., introduced a bill, S. 639, that they said is almost identical […]

After waging a defensive battle for more than two years, public-lands ranchers and their allies in Congress have gone on the offensive. The Livestock Grazing Act of 1995, introduced May 25 by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., would kill Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s two-year effort to reform grazing practices on 270 million acres of land overseen […]

A New Mexico-based oil company has shortchanged the government a possible $22 million a year in lost taxes and royalties. Meridian Oil Inc., the country’s largest independent oil company with 1,073 public-land leases in the San Juan Basin, has consistently under-reported production amounts since 1989, according to a Bureau of Land Management investigation. Two years […]

After intensive negotiations, environmentalists, ranchers and the Forest Service settled a lawsuit over cattle grazing on Montana’s Beaverhead National Forest. But compared to an earlier agreement, ranchers gained the upper hand. The dispute began when the National Wildlife Federation sued the Forest Service for failing to assess grazing impacts on the forest, streams and wildlife […]

Facing political pressure and rumblings of violence, the Forest Service retreated in late April from a plan to cut cows from 650 down to 100 on the 227-square-mile Diamond Bar grazing allotment in New Mexico’s Gila and Aldo Leopold wildernesses. Instead, it reduced Kit and Sherry Laney’s herd to 450 through Feb. 28, 1996. Forage […]

On the night of April 14, rancher Tom Kelly says someone sneaked onto his ranch near Deming, in southern New Mexico, emptied a water storage tank, removed bolts from the legs of a windmill and shot 13 cows and seven calves dead with a high-velocity rifle. Kelly says his opposition to Interior Secretary Babbitt’s rangeland […]

Congress isn’t just looking out for the timber industry. In an uncontested voice vote, the Senate approved an amendment to its budget recision bill requiring the Forest Service to reissue grazing permits to ranchers “notwithstanding any other law …” Such legal “sufficiency” language would prevent citizens from challenging permits, even where land has been degraded […]

Blow-up over nuclear dump Nevadans have tried for years to convince the rest of the country that Yucca Mountain, 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is a poor choice for the nation’s only permanent nuclear-waste dump. Now they have some powerful allies. Federal scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory recently disclosed an internal debate about […]