Ray Ring

Senior Editor

A rich guy named Wade Dokken, who moved to Montana, has a website for the very high-end housing development he’s putting together (The Ameya Preserve). No offense to Mr. Dokken or his plans, but … the Ameya website is simply TOO FULL OF ITSELF. To get a taste of its excesses, click here.

Websites can be irritating in so many ways, including oppressive ads, mandatory music, and attitude.

Not sure what can be done about irritating websites. Maybe the irritators — those in charge of the sites — will be embarrassed once they’re outed, and maybe they’ll revise their sites.

If you notice irritating websites as you cruise the ‘Net, let us know. Plenty out there. As time goes on, we’ll be outing more, so stay tuned.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Twenty-eight backshop jobs, disappearing at the San Jose Mercury News, and reappearing on the far side of the planet — filled by cheaper, nonunion workers …

The story, very terse, is here.

For previous posts about the apparent growing wave of NewsBiz outsourcing, and other NewsBizBuzz, begin here and scroll down.

Globalization, ho.

Yesterday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced their removal of the bald eagle from the Endangered Species List. In a press release, the service described the remarkable recovery of the species:

After nearly disappearing from most of the U.S., the bald eagle is now flourishing and no longer needs the protection of the Endangered Species Act. The nation’s symbol has recovered from an all-time low of 417 nesting pairs in 1963 to an estimated high of 9,789 breeding pairs today, and will be removed from the list of threatened and endangered species.

For the most part, environmentalists seem to be happy about the decision. An article from The L.A. Times quotes representatives from several environmental groups applauding the decision, or at least the recovery that made it possible. For example, John Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation called it “one of the greatest wildlife success stories” in history.

But the party probably won’t last long, and once it’s over, everyone’s going to go back to fighting each other. The Center for Biological Diversity’s lawsuit over the status of Arizona’s desert-nesting bald eagle is pending in court (see our story, “In the Arizona desert, feathers are flying“). The conservative Pacific Legal Foundation is so upset that the eagles will still be protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, that they say the eagle might as well have not been de-listed at all (that sounds like good news for the eagles). And the L.A Times says the Bush Administration is preparing new regulations that would make it harder to list new species in the future.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Today’s Washington Post has a thoroughly-reported account of the myriad ways in which VP Cheney has undercut environmental protections in favor of big business. From the fourth chapter in their series on Cheney:

By combining unwavering ideological positions — such as the priority of economic interests over protected fish — with a deep practical knowledge of the federal bureaucracy, Cheney has made an indelible mark on the administration’s approach to everything from air and water quality to the preservation of national parks and forests.

The story describes many examples of Cheney’s invisible fingerprints:

• The tens of thousands of salmon and steelhead that died in the Klamath in 2002? Cheney had intervened to send water to farmers instead of leaving it in the river. (See our story “Dead fish clog the low-flowing Klamath“.)
• The problem-plagued push to open the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository? This gift to the nuclear industry came largely at the behest of the vice president. (See our story “Sound science in doubt at Yucca Mountain“.)
• And the Bush administration’s attempts to overturn Clinton’s protection of 50 million roadless acres? Cheney’s influence again. (See our story “Clinton-era roadless rule is back … for now“.)

You can read the rest of the evidence of Cheney’s stealth maneuvers yourself. And add it to the sorry legacy of Steven Griles, Scooter Libby, Julie MacDonald, Gale Norton, and the rest of the crew.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

With a couple hundred homes near Lake Tahoe burned down by a forest fire this week, and other wildfires taking hold in the West, let’s do a multimedia fest:

(1) For the rush of what’s like to battle wildfires, in a raucous 9-minute webvideo, click here.

(2) For a map of today’s wildfires at a glance (and you can click on the hotspots to get specific info), begin here.

(3) For a satellite view of the Tahoe smoke plume, updated regularly, click here.

(4) For satellite views of other states, updated regularly as the fire season continues, begin by clicking here.

For our previous posts on wildfires, with links to global warming, click here and scroll down.

Editorial note: Wildfires are serious business. The hotshots’ YouTube show is more than a bit of leavening: It’s a window into the hotshots’ psychology, what it takes for some people to get out there and risk injury and death against the flames.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson begins the story:

It’s late June, temperatures have reached triple digits and once again, government and nongovernment agencies have launched into the grim summer routine of prevention and rescue efforts aimed at saving the lives of illegal entrants crossing Arizona’s deadly desert.

Since 2000, when border deaths spiked to alarming levels, taking officials by surprise, much has been done to warn people of the risk and to rescue those who try anyway. But, despite the extensive efforts, the number of bodies found each year reveals a harsh truth — none of it is working.

More than 1,000 bodies have been recovered since 2000 in the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. The deadly toll has topped 130 bodies a year since 2002. Officials found nine bodies in the past 10 days, bringing this year’s total to 105 so far.

Worse yet, there are likely more out there yet to be found.

Amid the wreckage, many admirable people can be found in the story, beginning with those whom we consider illegals: so hungry for jobs, they leave home in Latin America and risk everything.

Sympathetic Border Patrol agents, and “Grupo Beta, Mexico’s special migrant protection force,” try to keep the desperate hikers alive in the lethal desert, according to the Star’s writer, Brady McCombs. So do volunteers, organized in two groups calling themselves Humane Border and No More Deaths:

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

A few details of the latest cuts and buyouts of our region’s experienced journalists, and links to the stories:

The San Jose Mercury News will have half the newsroom it had seven years ago (200 staffers, down from 400).

The San Francisco Chronicle will cut 100 of its 400 news staffers, trying to reduce an estimated ongoing loss of $1 million per week. The Chronicle’s disappearing journalists include the chief of the Washington, D.C. bureau and Jim Finefrock, the editor of the Sunday Insight section. Finefrock has devoted more than 30 years to journalism, and he’s been a friend of High Country News, occasionally running versions of our stories for the big city readers.

The Rocky Mountain News in Denver is losing more than 10 percent of its news staffers, targeting those who are most experienced.

The Denver Post, reducing its editorial staff by several dozen … in its second round of cuts in 12 months, loses a longtime metro columnist, Jim Spencer; and the editor of its Sunday opinion section; and the chief of the Post’s Washington, D.C. bureau — John Aloysius Farrell.

(Read on …)

Like many people, I have a hard time feeling sorry for Republican presidential candidate John McCain of Arizona. He always seems so utterly self-sufficient and confident — even pugnaciously cocksure — of every position he takes that empathy just feels wrong, somehow. He’s withstood the rigors of the Hanoi Hilton, after all, and become a national figure; why would he need my pity or concern about anything?

Still, I do feel for Senator McCain today because it seems increasingly likely that that’s the highest office he’s going to reach in this lifetime — senator. A new Mason-Dixon poll of likely voters in the key early state of Iowa shows McCain tied for 5th among Republican presidential aspirants, pulling just 6 percent of the vote. And when you once were thought of as the man to beat for the Republican nomination, but now are effectivelly tied with knuckle-draggers like Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, who have said publicly they do not believe in evolution, the reversal of fortune has to hurt.

Yes, some of the blame for the low level of public esteem rests with never-to-be-President McCain himself. No one told him to cozy up to plummeting lame duck President George W. Bush or make unswayable support for the despised Iraq War his primary identifying characteristic. But some of the bad things happening to Sen. McCain just aren’t his fault.

Like this, courtesy of the McCain tormentors over at Wonkette:

Yes, those are a bunch of pictures of John McCain’s wife, Cindy, as published in Harper’s Bazaar magazine. And yes, the now-never-to-be-first lady is standing on a tire.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

All I need to do is steer you to a funny, well written story, complete with furry mug shot.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

J. Steven Griles, former Interior Deputy Secretary and leading star of the soap operatic scandals in Bush’s Interior Department, lied to Congress during the investigation of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He could be sent to jail for five years and have to pay up to $250,000, but prosecutors agreed to ask for just five months in jail and five months in a halfway house or home detention, just because he pleaded guilty (he doesn’t even have to cooperate with the investigation).

Now, Griles wants an even easier ride: three months home confinement, a $15,000 fine and 500 hours of community service, half of it served with Wonderful Outdoor World (sponsored by Disney and Interior agencies, among others) where he’d raise money and do PR work. Griles had 91 people write letters to the court supporting leniency, including Marc Himmelstein, an energy lobbyist who threw a very suspicious dinner party for top Interior officials back in 2002, and former Interior Secretary Gale Norton.

Not on the list of letter writers: Italia Federici, Griles’ onetime squeeze (who served as a conduit between Abramoff and Griles); nor his wife, Sue Ellen Wooldridge, who secretly dated Griles while she was Interior solicitor and counselor to Norton and then a top level official at the Justice Department. Also not on the list is Don Duncan, the ConocoPhillips lobbyist with whom Wooldridge and Griles bought a beach house.

Griles’ sentencing is June 26.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

A few days ago, we wrote about pigeon hobbyists in Oregon who slaughter falcons and hawks to protect their birds (“Kill a falcon, save a … pigeon??”). Now comes more bad wildlife news from Oregon.

According to the Daily Astorian, at least 10 black bear carcasses were discovered dumped in a remote wildlife refuge. The reason? The bears were killing pine trees on private timberlands by clawing them for sap. So the timber companies hired trappers to dispatch them, Sopranos-style:

.. (T)he bears ranged in age from adult males to cubs and their mothers, said (Gary Ziak, who discovered the carcasses while building logging roads). They had been snared, then shot in the head, months before regular hunting season begins Aug. 1.

“The really bad thing is, there are young cubs there,” Ziak said, noting the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife owns the property. “This is animal abuse in the name of science, or in the name of money.”

… As it turns out, big game carcasses will continue building at this local spot as the state unloads bears killed on private forestland in Clatsop County during “bear damage season,” typically starting in spring months and ending in late June.

While this kind of destructive greed is hardly unique to Oregon, perhaps the state should consider revising its motto. “She Kills all the Wild Things” seems more apt than the existing slogan, “She Flies with Her Own Wings.”

The June issue of Scientific American contains a fascinating and nuanced argument in favor of Pleistocene rewilding — that is, the movement to bring back the horses, camels, cheetahs, lions, elephants and other megafauna that roamed North America (and particularly the West) some 13,000 years ago, but were eradicated, apparently by human hunting. This repopulation effort is not the crazy notion that it might seem on the surface. As the author, Cornell University research biologist C. Josh Donlan, notes:

Pleistocene rewilding is not about recreating exactly some past state. Rather it is about restoring the kinds of species interactions that sustain thriving ecosystems. Giant tortoises, horses, camels, cheetahs, elephants and lions: they were all here, and they helped to shape North American ecosystems. Either the same species or closely related species are available for introduction as proxies, and many are already in captivity in the U.S. In essence, Pleistocene rewilding would help change the underlying premise of conservation biology from limiting extinction to actively restoring natural processes …

The long-term vision includes a vast, securely fenced ecological history park, encompassing thousands of square miles, where horses camels, elephants and large carnivores would roam. As happens now in Africa and regions surrounding some U.S. national parks, the ecological history park would not only attract ecotourists but would also provide jobs related both to park management and to tourism.

I can’t do full justice here to the sophisticated case Donlan makes for the ecological, educational and financial benefits of rewilding, and, unfortunately, I can’t link to the piece, either. It’s behind SciAm’s subscription wall. So you’ll have to buy a copy of the June issue or subscribe at www.sciam.com to read the piece. I recommend the latter course; if you have even a passing interest in science, Scientific American is consistently satisfying and, I’ve heard, it’s an unmistakable signal of virility and/or fertility to science-inflected members of the opposite sex.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Should burned forests be logged and then replanted, or left alone to regenerate naturally? That question has swirled for years in the wake of big fires in the Western woods. Forest managers have argued that forests recover more quickly when they’re salvage-logged and then replanted, but more recent research challenges that conventional wisdom.

Now, a new study from Oregon State indicates that salvage logging and replanting actually increases the severity of later fires:

(The researchers) found that fire severity was 16 to 61 percent higher in logged and planted areas, compared to those that had burned severely and were left alone in a fire 15 years earlier. The study was done in areas that had burned twice – once in the 1987 Silver Fire, and again in the massive 2002 Biscuit Fire, one of the largest forest fires in modern United States history.

(Read on …)