Red Lodge Clearinghouse Newsletter #20

March 2007, Newsletter #20

Welcome to THE RED LODGE CLEARINGHOUSE, the full-service information source for collaborative groups throughout the Interior West committed to resolving resource-use conflicts.

The events of the past few weeks have been dizzifying in their variety and implications; a new bunch seems to have arrived in Washington even though many seem to bear the same old faces. Senator Max Baucus has added his considerable influence to legislation just introduced and shaped by Senator Crapo and others. A coalition of environmental groups promise to make this coming session more wilderness aware. Funding remains scarce. Dale Bosworth luxuriates in Missoula.

New Forest Service chief gets rough treatment in Congress
BY MATTHEW DALY, CASPER STAR-TRIBUNE (AP), 02/14/07
WASHINGTON — New Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell received a less than gracious welcome Tuesday as she appeared before Congress for the first time as chief. Defending the president's spending request for the next budget year, Kimbell came under fire from all sides.... Kimbell, the first woman to head the Forest Service, began her new post Feb. 5, the same day President Bush announced a budget request that cuts Forest Service spending by 2 percent and eliminates more than 2,100 jobs in the budget year that starts in October.
SEE FULL STORY >>

Coming home
BY JOHN S. ADAMS, MISSOULA INDEPENDENT, 03/01/07
There are few people whose lives have been so closely tied to a single federal agency as Dale Bosworth, the recently retired chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Bosworth, who returned to Missoula last week after a six-year stint in Washington, D.C., as the Forest Service’s top official, has been connected to the agency since birth.
Independent: What are the biggest challenges facing your successor, Gail Kimbell?
Bosworth: One of the big challenges is the budget. Our budget stayed fairly steady over the last six years, but fire has taken an increasing cut.
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National system could lose one-fifth of workforce
BY ALLISON WINTER, LAND LETTER, 03/15/07
The National Wildlife Refuge System stands to lose up to one-fifth of its workforce over the next three years, according to restructuring plans from the Fish and Wildlife Service that project downsized staffing and fewer resources to fit within tight budgetary constraints. A budget-crunch across the system has forced FWS regional chiefs to develop plans to consolidate staff and equipment. Five of the six regions have turned in their plans so far, which show the refuge system already stands to lose 275 positions.
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Appropriators want to restore watershed funds
BY ALLISON WINTER, E&E DAILY, 03/07/07
Members of the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee indicated their desire to restore funding for watershed programs and local conservation councils zeroed out by the Bush administration in its budget proposal. Restoring the funds would continue the pattern of the past four years, when the administration has tried to cut the programs and Congress has funded them close to previous spending levels. Appropriators from both sides of the aisle blasted Rey and Lancaster yesterday for eliminating funding for watershed operations, flood prevention operations and watershed surveys and planning. Together, the programs received just over $100 million last year to assist local communities with watershed projects.
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Forest Service struggles to finish restoration
BY PERRY BACKUS, THE MISSOULIAN, 03/12/07
Montana's national forests need a helping hand. Every year, thousands of miles of abandoned and ill-maintained roads clog streams with silt. Overgrown timber stands threaten communities. Undersized culverts block the passage of fish. And hungry hordes of insects turn the forest canopy an angry red. Almost everyone who cares about the national forests agrees that something needs to be done. It's a lot harder to find that kind of agreement when it comes time to talk about the funding needed to get abandoned roads recontoured, culverts replaced and overgrown patches of timber thinned.
SEE FULL STORY >>

Deadly roadkill in Wyoming kills 21 pronghorn
BY BRIAN MAFFLY, NEW WEST, 02/17/07
Even by Wyoming standards, the scene of a Jan. 15 wildlife-vehicle collision in a Sublette County gas field was shocking. Game warden Brian Nesvik responded to a report of a wildlife accident to find 21 dead or dying pronghorn strewn along an unfenced service road in the Jonah gas field outside Pinedale. Further research indicates, however, that the deadly encounter was hardly the fluke it initially seemed. At least four other winter-time mass-casualty roadkills have occurred in southwest Wyoming since 2003, including a train incident that killed 41 pronghorn near Granger.
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Groups work together to save bighorn sheep near Highway 200
GREAT FALLS TRIBUNE (AP), 02/24/07
THOMPSON FALLS — At least 25 bighorn sheep were killed by vehicles on state Highway 200 east of here between January and April of last year, prompting an unusual collaboration to help protect the herd. The Federal Highway Administration, Montana Department of Transportation, Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks, American Wildlands and the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep joined forces to address the problem.
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Overfishing imperils fish in deep waters
BY RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, USA TODAY (AP), 02/18/07
SAN FRANCISCO — With declining catches close to shore, commercial fishing is turning to deeper waters, threatening species that live in the cold and gloom of the deep oceans, according to researchers. A panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said Sunday that overfishing in deep waters is putting at risk the least sustainable of all fish stocks. "We're not really fishing there. We're mining there. We're taking what appears to be a renewable resource and turning it into a non-renewable one," said Elliott Norse of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Bellevue, Wash
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Wyoming governor calls for tighter wildlife protection
BY WHITNEY ROYSTER, CASPER STAR-TRIBUNE, 02/28/07
JACKSON — The federal government is jeopardizing wildlife in the West by not assuring adequate reviews of some energy development, Gov. Dave Freudenthal told members of the Western Governors Association this week. On Tuesday in Washington, D.C., fellow Western governors agreed with Freudenthal and approved a resolution calling for an amendment to the federal Energy Policy Act. That amendment would strengthen environmental requirements to assure energy development is not harming big game habitat and migration corridors.
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Western govs seek moratorium on NEPA waivers in sensitive habitats
BY DAN BERMAN, E&E DAILY, 02/28/07
The Western Governors' Association yesterday called on Congress to repeal part of the 2005 Energy Policy Act that allows agencies to issue categorical exclusions for National Environmental Policy Act studies of oil and gas drilling permits in sensitive wildlife habitats. The resolution approved by WGA members meeting in Washington asks for Congress to revise Section 390 of the Energy Policy Act removing the categorical exclusions for "wildlife corridors and crucial wildlife habitat on federal lands."
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READ THE WGA RESOLUTION >>

USFS to approve categorical exclusions for oil and gas permits
BY DAN BERMAN, E&E NEWS PM, 02/12/07
The Forest Service is expected to finalize a rule this week that would let managers streamline environmental studies of small oil and gas drilling projects on national forests and grasslands. In the works since late 2005, the rule would allow the Forest Service to issue categorical exclusions from National Environmental Policy Act analyses for drilling in areas where officials do not anticipate negative environmental effects. The rule only applies to applications for drilling permits in areas already under federal leases.
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Despite a large leap in permits and licenses issued for oil and gas exploration and development, folks in the field are enthusiastically in agreement that a significant political change has occurred — the forming of coalitions based on broadly diverse membership and interest groups. Landmark legislation such as removing Valle Vidal from any further energy development activity is among the fruits that these coalitions have made possible.

We once more make available Dr. Rollin Sparrowe's (board member of Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership) comments from last month which announce that, "we welcome partnership with hunters, anglers, organizations, businesses and everyone else who cares about the future of mule deer and other wildlife affected by energy development." To this we add the comments of Johanna Wald, Land Program Director for the Natural Resources Defense Council who says, "environmentalists have reached out to build coalitions with ranchers, farmers, hunters and anglers that have rarely, if ever, been seen before.... Congress also passed legislation withdrawing New Mexico's Valle Vidal — the result of an extremely diverse coalition's success at convincing the New Mexico delegation to protect that remarkable area."

Finally, Peter Aengst of The Wilderness Society reports that with the support of local groups in and around Pinedale, Wyoming and the patience shown in working with the BLM, much progress seems to be in the offing, including "provisions for major directional drilling from existing well pads, installation of pipelines for water and condensate (reducing truck trips and disturbance dramatically), creation of an off-site mitigation fund that could be used to buy and retire leases in wildlife sensitive areas, and other positive measures."

Baucus supports bill to give tax breaks to landowners who offer wildlife habitat
BY MARY CLARE JALONICK, GREAT FALLS TRIBUNE (AP), 02/28/07
WASHINGTON — Save the species, save a buck. Landowners frustrated by the Endangered Species Act might get a carrot instead of the stick under a proposed revision of the law that would offer them tax incentives to give the critters a home. That approach is emerging as a narrower alternative to a comprehensive overhaul of the endangered species law, a priority for Republicans before Democrats took control of Congress this year.
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Bill would help the Species Act itself recover
EDITORIAL, GREAT FALLS TRIBUNE, 03/07/07
The bald eagle: symbol of freedom. And — 34 years after the birth of the Endangered Species Act — the poster-bird of an American success story. From the brink of extinction in the 1970s, with fewer than 450 nesting pairs in the lower 48, the bald eagle is once again king of the American sky. What rancher hasn't paused to behold the grand bird perched on a fence post? Yet for many of those same ranchers, the Endangered Species Act symbolizes freedoms lost.
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Proposed incentives to aid species conservation
BY MICHAEL BEAN, ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE, JANUARY 2007
Increased tax benefits will also purchase increased conservation benefits for rare species, since the Senate bill (unlike current law) requires both an easement and a habitat management plan to restore or enhance the habitat or to manage it so as reduce threats to the species. This active management requirement, missing from current law, is important to furthering the recovery of imperiled species, many of which cannot be recovered simply by preserving existing habitat.
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There are numerous ongoing resource management issues worthy of attention, including global warming which is sure to dominate headlines for some time to come. Issues we plan to follow include the drive for increased wildlife protection and wilderness designation; the use of lead in hunting; forest and watershed restoration — how we define it, who pays, who monitors and evaluates and reacts; endangered species, improving the act; and the need to adapt land and water management planning to new circumstances and new sensibilities.

The issue of broad access to public lands will remain significant as well. Chris Marchion, president of the Montana Wildlife Federation, and Craig Sharpe, executive director of the same group credit the North American Model of Fish and Wildlife Conservation for Montana's success in ensuring access to public lands and wildlife:

Access is essential to the public's connection to their wildlife; it creates a sense of ownership in these resources. Connectivity and ownership stimulates broad-scale public participation in the management of the resources and has become a necessary ingredient to the success of the model. Democratic access to enjoy and harvest fish and wildlife is the great engine that drives the model for sound public stewardship. Public participation, access and the model are closely tied significant factors to the quality of life that exists in Montana.

Democratic Congress breathes new life into wilderness legislation
BY DAN BERMAN, GREENWIRE, 02/27/07
A coalition of 80 environmental groups urged the large conservation community last fall to stop working with the Republican Congress on wilderness bills that included land exchanges or exceptions for certain recreation activities. Their point: With a Democratic takeover of Congress possible in the November election, why compromise?
SEE FULL STORY >>
READ MORE ABOUT THE WILDERNESS ACT >>

Getting the lead out
BY MITCH TOBIN, HIGH COUNTRY NEWS, 03/05/07
Biologists have known for decades that lead sickens condors, bald eagles and other birds that swallow bullet fragments left inside animal carcasses. Hunting waterfowl with lead shot has been illegal since 1991, but the heavy metal remains the ammo of choice for shooting game and upland birds.
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