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New West Feature
Cutthroat Habitat Faces Collapse
Climate change could reduce the habitat of cutthroat trout, a keystone species already under stress in the West, by as much as 58 percent over coming decades, according to a study published today. Meanwhile, long-term efforts have begun in Colorado to restore selected cutthroat habitats by eliminating other trout.
Today’s paper, in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also predicts that by 2080, rainbow trout, whose native habitat includes Idaho in the Rocky Mountain states, could be reduced by 35 percent. Two introduced trout species in the study will not do well, either: Brook trout habitat could decline by an estimated 77 percent, and brown trout by 48 percent.
New West Feature
Megaloads Opponents May Be in the Driver’s Seat
Against all odds, a swarming legal strategy that has produced more individual defeats than victories seems to have placed the opponents of oversized oil equipment shipments on Highway 12 in the driver’s seat.
ExxonMobil, whose subsidiary, Imperial Oil, has been attempting to gain court permission to truck about 200 so-called megaloads along the pristine byway through Idaho and Montana en route to the Kearl Oil Sands development in Canada, announced Monday that it is pursuing alternative routes for shipment of smaller modules.
[more]New West Feature
Sage-grouse vs. Grazing Comes Down to Idaho Court
The extended legal battle over greater sage-grouse entered what might be a critical phase last week as a federal judge heard a case in Idaho, the outcome of which could have major implications for management of livestock grazing on many millions of acres throughout the West.
The geographic scope of the case, which includes public lands in Idaho, Nevada, California, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana, makes it one of the largest environmental lawsuits in U.S. history.
Even so, Idaho District court Judge B. Lynn Winmill’s decision could be more dependent on procedural considerations than on adjudication of the actual issues.
[more]New West Column
What Can We Make of Multiple Use?
Former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt’s re-entry in the political fray in recent weeks, which he says was precipitated by fears over the future of the nation’s wild lands, brings up the question of what it means nowadays to be a Westerner.
To many people, the answer probably would be the same as it ever has been: wide-open spaces. Even though relatively few of us actually live in undeveloped areas anymore, wild lands remain central to our collective identity.
It’s hard to think of any topic that gets Westerners going more intensely than wild lands and all they contain. Wolves, elk, salmon, sage-grouse, logging, mining, rivers, off-road vehicles, roadless areas, the list goes on and on. Is there a greater number of special interest groups involved in any other aspect of Western life?
[more]New West Feature
New Idaho Megaloads Hearings Address More Than 200 Shipments
The citizens against the oversized oil equipment loads on Highway 12 in northern Idaho are back in the Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) auditorium in Boise again today for the start of a contested case hearing against ExxonMobil’s subsidiary, Imperial Oil.
In December, ITD-appointed hearing officer Merlyn Clark allowed ConocoPhillips to transport four so-called megaloads of equipment from Lewiston to Billings. This time, several key circumstances have changed.
Perhaps the most important difference is that the Conoco hearing concerned only four Conoco loads, and Clark repeatedly said he would not consider any issue concerning future loads on the road. Imperial Oil, on the other hand, intends to truck more than 200 loads to the Kearl Oil Sands development in Alberta, Canada.
The outcome of this case will likely determine whether the state government and oil companies will be allowed to transform the highway into an industrial corridor for many oversized loads of mining equipment that several oil companies want to transport to the Canadian oil sands over the next years.
[more]New West Feature
Is the Forest Service’s Planning Process Broken?
Decades of land use litigation have crippled the Forest Service’s planning process, causing the agency to become over-cautious and vague, according to environmental lawyer and scholar Mark Squillace. A proposed national planning rule, for which public comments close on May 16, is too complex, time-consuming, and fraught with unnecessary choices that invite litigation, says Squillace, director of the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado School of Law in Boulder.
“I really think the forest planning process is broken, and one of the reasons is they spend so much time revising the plan and they don’t really improve it, because it becomes static over time.” he says. “It’s really about monitoring, not assessment. What you want is a monitoring program that’s constantly looking at what’s happening in the forest.”
Squillace, who has worked in the Department of the Interior and was director of litigation for the Environmental Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., says monitoring of many conditions, such as the population status of species, soil moisture, and pathogens, should all feed back into the assessment reports of national forests that are compiled every two years, which in turn would be used to alter the national plan. “If it’s done right, you’ll virtually never have to do another plan at all, because it’s constantly changing.”
[more]New West Feature
Will Idaho Join the ‘Campus Carry’ Firearm Trend?
On March 16, the Idaho House of Representatives took its place in a rapidly growing national movement to allow firearms on public university and college campuses, when it voted 41-28 to approve House Bill 222, which would prohibit schools from banning guns except in undergraduate residences. A State Senate committee is expected to hold a hearing on the bill later this week.
Meanwhile, New Mexico has HB 136, which would allow concealed weapons in schools and preschools. Other campus carry legislation being considered includes Nevada’s Senate Bill 231, scheduled to be heard in committee March 18, Arizona’s SB 1467, and bills in a half-dozen states outside the West.
[more]New West Feature
Megaloads, Oil Sands and the Port of Lewiston
Amidst the public and media uproar over trucking so-called megaloads of oversized refinery equipment along the scenic Highway 12 through northern Idaho into Montana, fundamental questions about money remain unanswered. What’s in it for the state governments, which risk damage to successful tourism industries? And what prompted the oil corporations to explore a new overland route to the massive Kearl Oil Sands development in Alberta, which is scheduled to come online late next year?
Last year, the Montana citizens’ group, All Against the Haul, published a polemic against the proposed megaloads penned by noted writers Rick Bass and David James Duncan. Titled “The Heart of the Monster,” it relied on research developed by Oregon journalist Steven Hawley. His new book, “Recovering a Lost River,” concerning the politics and economics of the Columbia-Snake River System, will be out March 15 from Beacon Press, a Random House imprint.
Hawley’s work on his own book had implications on his research for the megaloads book by Bass and Duncan. In the following interview, he explores the idea that trucking oversized loads along Highway 12 could be an extension of a larger economic scheme, which begins with the river system.
[more]New West Feature
As Megaloads Roll, What Two of Three Plaintiffs Learned About Opposition
With the first oversized shipment of ConocoPhillips oil equipment scheduled to leave the Port of Lewiston late tonight on its trek down Highway 12 to Billings, Montana, the cofounders of the Idaho-based citizens’ movement against the shipments have expressed a mixture of fatigue, dismay and resolution.
Linwood Laughy and his wife, Borg Hendrickson, say they’ve learned a lot from the struggle. But not every lesson was uplifting.
“One of the things I’ve learned is that being a citizen activist is challenging, gut-wrenching, exhausting and worth doing,” said Laughy. “It’s shaken my faith, I guess, in the American democracy. It seems to me we’re quickly becoming a plutocracy.”
“I wouldn’t call it a plutocracy, although in part it is,” Hendrickson said. “I would call it a corporatocracy. And we’re getting a first-hand picture of that right here.”
[more]New West Column
When Emotion Drives the Wolf Debate, Research Suffers
Some of the world’s leading scientific research on wolves has come from universities in the Rocky Mountains. One needs to look no farther than Montana State University at Bozeman, where ecologists have produced a complex and subtle picture of elk-wolf interactions.
For years, these researchers studied five elk populations and monitored wolves. Among many discoveries, they learned that concentrations of the female hormone progesterone are lower in elk where wolves are more numerous, and that these lower concentrations correspond to fewer calves born. This revelation, which indicates that the mere presence of wolves can affect elk reproduction, is one of several “risk effects,” which are a unifying theme of the group’s multifaceted research. In this case, the risk effect is that while elk change their behavior to avoid predation by wolves—including where they graze and how much nutrition they subsequently get—these changes also can carry costs to the welfare of the species.
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