ReportWire

Tag: Land environment

  • EPA proposes restrictions to block proposed Alaska mine

    EPA proposes restrictions to block proposed Alaska mine

    [ad_1]

    ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed restrictions that would block plans for a copper and gold mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region that is home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon run.

    A statement from the regional EPA office said discharges of dredged or fill material into the waters of the U.S. within the proposed Pebble Mine footprint in southwest Alaska would “result in unacceptable adverse effects on salmon fishery areas.”

    “This action would help protect salmon fishery areas that support world-class commercial and recreational fisheries, and that have sustained Alaska Native communities for thousands of years, supporting a subsistence-based way of life for one of the last intact wild salmon-based cultures in the world,” regional EPA administrator Casey Sixkiller said in a statement.

    The decision will now be forwarded to the EPA Office of Water for the final determination. That office has 60 days to affirm, modify or rescind the recommendation.

    The EPA regional office also proposed to restrict the discharge of dredged or fill material with any future proposal for Pebble Mine that would be similar in size or bigger than what is currently proposed.

    Mine developer Pebble Limited Partnership, owned by Canada-based Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., called the EPA’s decision a preemptive veto. It described the decision as political and without legal, environmental or technical merit.

    “We still firmly believe that the proposed determination should have been withdrawn as it is based on indefensible legal and non-scientific assumptions,” Pebble CEO John Shively said in a statement.

    “Congress did not give the EPA broad authority to act as it has in the Pebble case. This is clearly a massive regulatory overreach by the EPA and well outside what Congress intended for the agency when it passed the Clean Water Act,” Shively said.

    The debate over the proposed mine in an area of southwest Alaska known for its salmon runs has spanned several presidential administrations. The EPA has said the Bristol Bay region also contains significant mineral resources.

    “After twenty years of Pebble hanging over our heads, the Biden Administration has the opportunity to follow through on its commitments by finalizing comprehensive, durable protections for our region as soon as possible,” Alannah Hurley, executive director for the United Tribes of Bristol Bay, said in a statement.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Fire plan would cut 2.4 million New Jersey Pinelands trees

    Fire plan would cut 2.4 million New Jersey Pinelands trees

    [ad_1]

    BASS RIVER TOWNSHIP, N.J. — Up to 2.4 million trees would be cut down as part of a project to prevent major wildfires in a federally protected New Jersey forest heralded as a unique environmental treasure.

    New Jersey environmental officials say the plan to kill trees in a section of Bass River State Forest is designed to better protect against catastrophic wildfires, adding it will mostly affect small, scrawny trees — not the towering giants for which the Pinelands National Refuge is known and loved.

    But the plan, adopted Oct. 14 by the New Jersey Pinelands Commission and set to begin in April, has split environmentalists. Some say it is a reasonable and necessary response to the dangers of wildfires, while others say it is an unconscionable waste of trees that would no longer be able to store carbon as climate change imperils the globe.

    Foes are also upset about the possible use of herbicides to prevent invasive species regeneration, noting that the Pinelands sits atop an aquifer that contains some of the purest drinking water in the nation.

    And some of them fear the plan could be a back door to logging the protected woodlands under the guise of fire protection, despite the state’s denials.

    “In order to save the forest, they have to cut down the forest,” said Jeff Tittel, the retired former director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, calling the plan “shameful” and “Orwellian.”

    Pinelands Commissioner Mark Lohbauer voted against the plan, calling it ill-advised on many levels. He says it could harm rare snakes, and adds that he has researched forestry tactics from western states and believes that tree-thinning is ineffective in preventing large wildfires.

    “We are in an era of climate change; it’s incumbent on us to do our utmost to preserve these trees that are sequestering carbon,” he said. “If we don’t have an absolutely essential reason for cutting down trees, we shouldn’t do it.”

    The plan involves about 1,300 acres (526 hectares), a miniscule percentage of the 1.1-million-acre (445,150-hectare) Pinelands preserve, which enjoys federal and state protection, and has been named a unique biosphere by the United Nations.

    Most of the trees to be killed are 2 inches (5 centimeters) or less in diameter, the state said. Dense undergrowth of these smaller trees can act as “ladder fuel,” carrying fire from the forest floor up to the treetops, where flames can spread rapidly and wind can intensify to whip up blazes, the state Department of Environmental Protection said in a statement.

    A Pinelands commissioner calculated that 2.4 million trees would be removed by using data from the state’s application, multiplying the percentage of tree density reduction by the amount of land affected.

    The department would not say whether it believes that number is accurate, nor would it offer a number of its own. But it did say “the total number of trees thinned could be significant.”

    “This is like liquid gasoline in the Pinelands,” said Todd Wyckoff, chief of the New Jersey Forest Service, as he touched a scrawny pine tree of the type that will most often be cut during the project. “I see a forest at risk from fire. I look at this as restoring the forest to more of what it should be.”

    Tree thinning is an accepted form of forest management in many areas of the country, done in the name of preventing fires from becoming larger than they otherwise might be, and is supported by government foresters as well as timber industry officials. But some conservation groups say thinning does not work.

    New Jersey says the cutting will center on the smallest snow-bent pitch pine trees, “and an intact canopy will be maintained across the site.”

    The state’s application, however, envisions that canopy cover will be reduced from 68% to 43% on over 1,000 acres (405 hectares), with even larger decreases planned for smaller sections.

    And scrawny trees aren’t the only ones that will be cut: Many thick, tall trees on either side of some roads will be cut down to create more of a fire break, where firefighters can defend against a spreading blaze.

    The affected area has about 2,000 trees per acre — four times the normal density in the Pinelands, according to the state.

    Most of the cut trees will be ground into wood chips that will remain on the forest floor, eventually returning to the soil, the department said, adding, “It is not anticipated that any material of commercial value will be produced because of this project.”

    Some environmentalists fear that might not be true, that felled trees could be harvested and sold as cord wood, wood pellets or even used in making glue.

    “I’m opposed to the removal of any of that material,” Lohbauer said. “That material belongs in the forest where it will support habitat and eventually be recycled” into the soil. “Even if they use it for wood pellets, which are popular for burning in wood stoves, that releases the carbon.”

    John Cecil, an assistant commissioner with the department, said his agency is not looking to make a profit from any wood products that might be removed from the site.

    But he said that if some felled trees “could be put to good use and generate revenue for the taxpayers, why wouldn’t we do that? If there’s a way to do this that preserves the essential goals of this plan and brings some revenue back in, that’s not the end of the world. Maybe you could get a couple fence posts out of these trees.”

    Created by an act of Congress in 1978, the Pinelands district occupies 22% of New Jersey’s land area, is home to 135 rare plant and animal species, and is the largest body of open space on the mid-Atlantic seaboard between Richmond, Virginia, and Boston. It also includes an aquifer that is the source of 17 trillion gallons (64 trillion liters) of drinking water.

    “It is unacceptable to be cutting down trees in a climate emergency, and cutting 2.4 million small trees will severely reduce the future ability to store carbon,” said Bill Wolfe, a former department official who runs an environmental blog.

    Carleton Montgomery, executive director of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance, supports the plan.

    The group said opponents are using the number of trees to be cut “to (elicit) shock and horror,” saying that by focusing on the number rather than size of trees to be cut, they “are quite literally missing the forest for the trees. The resulting forest will be a healthy native Pine Barrens habitat.”

    ———

    This story corrects the name of agency in paragraph 13 to New Jersey Forest Service, not Forest Fire Service.

    ———

    Follow Wayne Parry on Twitter at www.twitter.com/WayneParryAC

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • New US plan could lead to federal action on Colorado River

    New US plan could lead to federal action on Colorado River

    [ad_1]

    FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — The Interior Department announced Friday that it will consider revising a set of guidelines for operating two major dams on the Colorado River in the first sign of what could lead to federal action to protect the once-massive but shrinking reservoirs behind them.

    The public has until Dec. 20 to weigh in on three options that seek to keep Lake Mead and Lake Powell from dropping so low they couldn’t produce power or provide the water that seven Western states, Mexico and tribes have relied on for decades.

    One of the options would allow the Interior Department’s U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to take unilateral action, as it threatened this summer when it asked states to come up with ways to significantly reduce their use beyond what they have already volunteered and were mandated to cut.

    “The Interior Department continues to pursue a collaborative and consensus-based approach to addressing the drought crisis afflicting the West,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement. “At the same time, we are committed to taking prompt and decisive action necessary to protect the Colorado River System and all those who depend on it.”

    The announcement comes more than four months after Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton told Congress that water use must be cut dramatically as drought and overuse tax the river — an essential supply of water for farmers, cities and tribes in the U.S. West, as well as Mexico.

    The seven states that tap the river failed to reach Touton’s August deadline and have been working ever since to reach a compromise. It now appears unlikely a grand deal will be reached. In the meantime, the bureau has offered up billions in federal money to pay farmers and cities to cut back.

    But Interior’s new action marks the first time it’s taking a clear step toward imposing its own, mandatory cuts. The agency anticipates changes to the conditions at which water shortages are declared in the river’s lower basin. Lake Mead and Lake Powell were about half full when the 2007 guidelines were approved and are now about one-quarter full.

    The other two options under the Bureau of Reclamation’s plan are to let states, tribes, and non-governmental organizations reach consensus, or do nothing, which is a standard alternative in environmental impact statements.

    The bureau expects to produce a draft next spring based on public input. A final decision could come in late summer of 2023 around the time the bureau announces any water cuts for the following year.

    The 2007 guidelines and an overlapping drought contingency plan approved in 2019 were meant to give states more certainty in their water supply. For the lower basin states — California, Arizona and Nevada — the agreements set elevation levels at Lake Mead on the Arizona-Nevada border at which they are subjected to mandatory and voluntary reductions. Mexico also shoulders cuts.

    Water users have been delayed in renegotiating the agreements that expire in 2026 because the drought and climate change have forced quicker action.

    Nevada, Arizona and Mexico will have to cut their water use in 2023 for a second year in a row under existing agreements. California is looped in at lower elevations in Lake Mead. Arizona was forced to give up 21% of its total Colorado River supply. Farmers in central Arizona, tribes and growing cities like Scottsdale are feeling the impacts.

    Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, said he’s been hoping the bureau would require cuts from water users rather than rely on voluntary action. But he also warned the prospect of mandatory cuts could make it less likely that farms or cities will choose to give up some of their water, calling it a “zero-sum game” of sorts.

    Still, anything that results in savings is a worthwhile action, he said.

    “The situation in my mind is so dire, we’re so close to the edge,” he said in a recent interview.

    The department declined further comment Friday, and the Southern Nevada Water Agency didn’t respond to a request for comment. Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, said he was still evaluating the announcement but appreciated the bureau taking action.

    Bill Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, said he hopes the threat of cuts will inspire users to offer up more savings now while federal money is available to pay for it. The district supplies water to nearly 20 million people and counts on the river for a third of that water.

    “The more you can do now with compensation is going to reduce the chance of being cut back without it,” he said.

    Under one payment option, water users can be paid up to $400 per acre foot of water (325,850 gallons) left in Lake Mead. So far only the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona has publicly expressed interest in that option, saying it will conserve up to 125,000 acre feet of water (40.7 billion gallons) on its reservation and offer another 125,000 acre feet of water stored underground to cities annually for the next three years.

    Farmers in California and Arizona say that’s not enough money to account to cover losses if they leave fields unplanted or to pay for things like installing more efficient irrigation systems. They plan to apply for money through a different option that allows them to name their price — and justify why they deserve it.

    A third pot of money would offer payment for larger projects aimed at achieving long-term water savings, like ripping up decorative grass in urban areas or building small, on-farm storage systems that make it easier for farmers to bank water rather than lose it to runoff.

    The bureau says water users who take the $400 payments may be prioritized for that money over users who want more for short-term conservation.

    California’s water users have offered to conserve up to 9% of its river water. That’s contingent on adequate payment and help for the Salton Sea, a drying lake bed fed by farm runoff.

    ———

    Ronayne reported from Sacramento, Calif.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • ‘Burn boss’ arrest inflames Western land use tensions

    ‘Burn boss’ arrest inflames Western land use tensions

    [ad_1]

    SALEM, Ore. — When U.S. Forest Service personnel carried out a prescribed burn in a national forest in Oregon on Oct. 13, it wound up burning fencing that a local family, the Hollidays, uses to corral cattle.

    The crew returned six days later to restart the prescribed burn, but the flames then spread onto the family’s ranch and resulted in the arrest of “burn boss” Rick Snodgrass.

    Repercussions of the singular incident in the remote corner of eastern Oregon have reached all the way to Washington, D.C., where Forest Service Chief Randy Moore denounced the arrest. But the ranching family is applauding Grant County Sheriff Todd McKinley’s actions.

    “It was just negligence, starting a fire when it was so dry, right next to private property,” said Sue Holliday, matriarch of the family.

    The incident has once again exposed tensions over land management in the West, where the federal government owns nearly half of all the land.

    In 2016, that tension resulted in the 41-day occupation by armed right-wing extremists of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in adjacent Harney County to protest the imprisonment of two ranchers, Dwight Hammond and his son Steven, who were convicted of arson for setting fires on federal land.

    In a telephone interview, Tonna Holliday, who owns the sprawling ranch along with her siblings and their mother Sue, said whoever was responsible for burning up to 40 acres (16 hectares) of their property should face justice.

    “How can the Hammonds be held accountable but the United States Forest Service not be held accountable when it’s the same thing?” Holliday said.

    However, the Hammonds were convicted of felony arson for intentionally setting fires on federal land, including a fire set to allegedly cover up their slaughter of a herd of deer. Snodgrass is being investigated for alleged reckless burning, a misdemeanor.

    The practice of mechanical thinning and prescribed fires in overgrown forests is credited with saving homes, for example during a 2017 wildfire near Sisters, Oregon. But some efforts have gone terribly awry, including causing the largest fire in New Mexico’s history earlier this year. Several hundred homes were destroyed, livelihoods of the rural residents were lost and water supply systems were compromised.

    The federal agency acknowledged in a review that it failed to consider the historic drought and unfavorable spring weather conditions as fire managers attempted to reduce flammable undergrowth in northern New Mexico.

    Moore said following the review that the agency must account for its actions. This week he told Forest Service workers that he’s got their backs.

    “Prescribed fire is a critical tool for reducing wildfire risk, protecting communities, and improving the health and resiliency of the nation’s forest and grasslands,” Moore said on the Forest Service website. “I will aggressively engage to ensure our important work across the country is allowed to move forward unhampered as you carry out duties in your official capacity.”

    Forest Service spokesman Jon McMillan said the fencing that was burned on Oct. 13 has already been repaired.

    “We regularly plan and conduct prescribed burns in areas with allotments fences and it’s standard practice to fix any fence posts damaged by the burn,” he said.

    Over the past dozen years, prescribed fire has accounted for an average of 51% of the acreage of hazardous fuels reduction accomplished, or an average of 1.4 million acres per year, the Forest Service says.

    Grant County covers 4,529 square miles (11,730 square kilometers) — four times the size of Rhode Island — and is studded with forests and mountains, blanketed by grasslands and high deserts. Only 7,200 people reside there, many tracing their Oregon roots back to wagon train days. The Hollidays and other ranchers used to drive hundreds of cattle annually through the nearby town of John Day, in scenes reminiscent of the Old West.

    The Holliday ranch covers more than 6,000 acres (2,400 hectares) and has about 1,000 head of cattle. This time of year, before the snow falls, the cattle are being driven from the family’s grazing allotments in the Malheur National Forest onto a large pasture holding area, and then onto the ranch.

    On Oct. 19, dark gray smoke from the prescribed fire loomed over some of the cattle as they grazed in the pasture. Soon enough, the fire jumped onto the Holliday’s ranch. It burned large stands of ponderosa pines that Tonna Holliday’s uncle, Darrell Holliday, said he helped plant two decades ago.

    Grant County District Attorney Jim Carpenter on Tuesday defended the arrest of Snodgrass, who was handcuffed and taken to the county jail before being conditionally released. Carpenter said an investigation into the case could last for weeks or even months and that once it’s completed, he’ll decide whether to charge Snodgrass.

    The Hollidays say they want justice done.

    “We’re just standing up for what we believe in, and this is our land,” Tonna Holliday said. “And that’s really what it comes down to.”

    She dissociated the family from extremists like Ammon Bundy, who led the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge takeover. The Bundy family has a history of opposition to the federal government. Bundy’s father had refused to pay federal cattle grazing fees in Nevada, leading to an armed standoff there in 2014.

    “The Bundys, they were extreme,” Holliday said. “They didn’t pay their grazing fees. We believe in paying off grazing fees, running our cows out there responsibly, working with our range management and doing it that way.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • California expands largest US illegal pot eradication effort

    California expands largest US illegal pot eradication effort

    [ad_1]

    SACRAMENTO, Calif. — With California’s four-year-old legal marijuana market in disarray, the state’s top prosecutor said Tuesday that he will try a new broader approach to disrupting illegal pot farms that undercut the legal economy and sow widespread environmental damage.

    The state will expand its nearly four-decade multi-agency seasonal eradication program — the largest in the U.S. that this year scooped up nearly a million marijuana plants — into a year-round effort aimed at investigating who is behind the illegal grows. The new program will attempt to prosecute underlying labor crimes, environmental crimes and the underground economy centered around the illicit cultivations, said Attorney General Rob Bonta.

    He called it “an important shift in mindset and in mission” aimed at also aiding California’s faltering legal market by removing dangerous competition.

    “The illicit marketplace outweighs the legal marketplace” Bonta said. “It’s upside down and our goal is complete eradication of the illegal market.”

    In keeping with the new approach, the annual Campaign Against Marijuana Planting ( CAMP ) program started under Republican Gov. George Deukmejian in 1983 will become a permanent Eradication and Prevention of Illicit Cannabis (EPIC) task force, Bonta said.

    CAMP began in “a very different time, a different era, a different moment during the failed war on drugs and (at) a time when cannabis was still entirely illegal,” Bonta said.

    The seasonal eradication program, which lasts about 90 days each summer, still will continue with the cooperation of other federal, state and local agencies. They include the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, National Park Service, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, California State Parks and the California National Guard, some of which will also participate in the new task force, he said.

    The task force will work with state Department of Justice prosecutors, the department’s Cannabis Control Section and an existing Tax Recovery in the Underground Economy ( TRUE ) task force that was created by law in 2020, all with the goal of filing civil and criminal cases against those behind illegal grows.

    Federal and state prosecutors in California have long tried, without much success, to target the organized crime cartels behind the hidden farms rather than the often itinerant laborers hired to tend and guard the often remote marijuana plots scattered across public and private land.

    The laborers frequently live in crude camps with no running water or sewers and use caustic pesticides to kill animals that might otherwise eat the growing plants. But the pollution they leave behind has spread into downstream water supplies and the pesticides can spread up through the food chain.

    The workers are victims of human trafficking, Bonta said, “living in squalid conditions alone for months on end and with no way out. These are not the people who are profiting from the illegal cannabis industry. They’re being abused, they’re the victims. They are cogs in a much bigger and more organized machine.”

    For example, about 80% of the 44 illegal grow sites found on and around Bureau of Land Management properties this year were connected to drug trafficking organizations, said Karen Mouritsen, the bureau’s California state director.

    “It’s clear that there are big challenges with respect to organized crime,” Bonta said. But he said he expects better results this time because the new year-round effort by multiple agencies “will make a big dent, a bit splash and lots of noise about our common priority to address the illicit marketplace, including at the highest levels.”

    Bonta is running to keep his job from Republican challenger and former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman in next month’s election. He is taking a familiar recent approach by Democrats nationwide in concentrating on dealers who provide illegal drugs rather than the users who support the underground economy. President Joe Biden last week said he is pardoning thousands of Americans convicted of “simple possession” of marijuana under federal law, while San Francisco officials announced a new effort to curb open drug dealing.

    The year-round approach “is long since overdue,” Hochman said. “Only by hitting illegal drug growers where it hurts, by seizing their plants and their proceeds, will California be able to help the legal cannabis industry survive and thrive.”

    For those trying to exist under the legal market approved by California voters in 2016, the problem has been falling pot prices, restricted sales, high taxes despite the recent repeal of the cannabis cultivation tax, and the fact that buyers can find better bargains in the booming underground marketplace.

    Aside from the nearly 1 million plants that Bonta valued at about $1 billion, this year’s eradication program seized more than 100 tons of processed marijuana, 184 weapons and about 33 tons of materials used to cultivate the plants, including dams, water lines and containers of toxic chemicals including pesticides and fertilizers.

    [ad_2]

    Source link