Free Republic

Industry blasts suggestion as harmful to the country. A conservation group that has succeeded in dealing recent legal setbacks to western Colorado coal mines called Thursday for a phase-out of federal coal leasing to help combat climate change. “It’s time for the Interior Department to shut it down,” Jeremy Nichols, Climate and Energy Program director for WildEarth Guardians, said in a news release. The group outlined a plan for ending the federal coal program over 10 to 25 years through a moratorium on leasing publicly owned coal, retiring existing leases that aren’t producing, honestly reporting the climate impacts of the...

Environmental Lawsuits, Judgment Fund, Frivolous Lawsuits Corruption, collusion, or legal thievery By Henry Lamb Tuesday, February 2, 2010 In 2008, the Forest Service issued a land use plan that environmental organizations didn’t like. The Earthjustice Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit on behalf of four environmental groups. The suit took 15 months. The bill to the federal government from Earthjustice was $279,711.40. The Western Environmental Law Center filed another lawsuit challenging the same land use plan. They represented 15 environmental groups and sent the government a bill for $199,830.65. These two outfits claim that seven attorneys spent more than 930 hours...

A Denver-based conservative legal foundation says a federal policy that barred development of about 58 million acres of forests nationwide illegally created de facto wilderness areas. The Mountain States Legal Foundation makes that argument in a brief filed Tuesday in support of the state of Wyoming's fight to overturn the so-called "roadless rule" approved by President Bill Clinton in 2001. Conflicting federal court rulings have upheld and overturned the road-building ban on the national forest land. The California-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August threw out a Bush administration policy that opened some of the roadless areas to...

California and other states that want to ban road-building in large swaths of national forests should have to pay for the resulting increased costs of fighting wildfires on those federal lands, U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey said Thursday. Rey, the undersecretary for natural resources and the environment in charge of the U.S. Forest Service, said the Bush administration has encouraged states and local governments to offer input in the management of federal lands. But he told a Wildland Urban Interface conference that one of the unintended consequences is that state-imposed moratoriums on development in roadless areas boost the cost of...

The words “roadless” and “wilderness” should be of utmost concern to all those whose recreational pursuits include snowmobiling and other activities that require motorized access to public/federal land. Knowing their meanings will help readers understand my concerns as stated in this article. “…there shall be no temporary road, no use of motor vehicles, motorized equipment or motorboats, no landing of aircraft, no other form of mechanical transport, and no structure or installation within any such area.” – The Wilderness Act of 1964. Many elected officials in America’s western states have cast a pall over the 110th Congress, which is ominous...

The federal judge who overturned the Bush administration’s Roadless Rule declared Wednesday that energy companies can’t set up their drill rigs on any undeveloped oil and gas lease issued since 2001 within a roadless area. U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth D. LaPorte ruled in September that President Bill Clinton’s 2001 Roadless Rule be reinstated, protecting 4.4 million acres of roadless areas in Colorado national forests and more than 58 million acres nationwide. Her ruling Wednesday prevents the U.S. Forest Service from approving or allowing any surface disturbance of a mineral lease issued after Jan. 12, 2001, on which drilling or development...

SAN FRANCISCO A federal judge on Wednesday overturned the Bush administration's rules on road construction in untouched areas of national forests and reinstated a Clinton-era ban on new roads in nearly a third of federal forests. U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Laporte sided with states and environmentalists who sued the U.S. Forest Service after it reversed Clinton's "Roadless Rule" that prohibited logging, mining and other development on 58.5 million acres of forest land in 38 states and Puerto Rico. In May 2005, the Bush administration replaced the Clinton rule with a voluntary state-by-state petition process that the plaintiffs claimed violated federal...

The ongoing wildfires that are currently burning, or that have already burned this summer in Washington State and all across the western United States, may be a shock to some people, but isn’t this what some of our appointed public land managers and many of our elected officials have been allowing to happen for quite some time by not properly managing these public lands that belong to all of us? At last count when I wrote this article on 9/8/06 there has been more than 8.5 million acres that have burned nationwide, with Washington State leading the pack with 310,966...

SACRAMENTO Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday plans to ask the federal government to prohibit roads on 4.4 million acres of national forest land in California, with limited exceptions for thinning trees to reduce fire danger. The goal is to protect areas of the forests that currently are not accessible by roads, Resources Secretary Mike Chrisman said Tuesday. Schwarzenegger is acting under a regulation adopted last year by the Bush administration. That regulation replaced a Clinton-era rule prohibiting road-building on nearly a third of national forest land. Clinton passed the road-building ban eight days before he left office in January 2001....

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Twenty environmental groups sued the Bush administration over a decision to repeal Clinton-era regulations that blocked road construction, logging and industrial development on more than 90,000 square miles of the nation's last untouched forests. In the lawsuit filed Thursday, the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society, Greenpeace and other groups challenged the U.S. Forest Service decision earlier this year to reverse the 2001 "roadless rule" that protected 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest. "These are the last wild areas of North America, and there is overwhelming public support for their protection from development," said Kristen Boyles,...

DENVER (AP) - A federal appeals court dismissed an attempt by environmental groups to restore a Clinton-era ban on logging in roadless areas of national forests, saying their appeal became irrelevant when the Bush administration adopted a replacement rule. The Clinton administration's rule put 58.5 million acres of roadless forest off-limits to logging and other development. Under the new rule, those lands, most of which are in the West, are open to road building for potential logging, mining and other commercial uses. A federal judge in Wyoming struck down the Clinton administration's ban in 2003, ruling in a lawsuit filed...

A federal appeals court has dismissed an ethics complaint filed against a judge whose ruling opened up nearly a third of national forests to timber cutting and other development. Two watchdog groups had complained that U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer of Wyoming owns stock or royalty interests in 15 oil and gas companies that could be affected by a July 14 decision invalidating the so-called roadless rule. The rule, issued in the final days of the Clinton administration, limits timber harvesting and other development on 58 million acres of remote forest land controlled by the Forest Service. Brimmer's decision would...

<p>Washington -- The Bush administration proposed on Monday relaxing a Clinton-era rule that barred road-building and logging on 58 million acres of federal forests, giving governors broad new discretion to determine what lands should be set aside as wilderness.</p> <p>The proposal would allow Western governors, many of whom opposed the so- called roadless rule, to petition the Forest Service to exempt federal lands in their state from wilderness designation. The agency also plans to eliminate the ban on road building in millions of acres in two national forests in Alaska.</p>

(click source for full pictoral) Montana: Civil Disobedience Considered To Battle Federal Grizzly Policy Report by J.J. Johnson - Sierra Times.com Flathead County, MT - In a matter that has been brewing for sometime, residents of Montana's Glacier Park area say they are being economically terrorized by federal grizzly policies. The talk has gone beyond just protesting about it. Reports are coming in that Montanans may follow the example of Klamath Falls, and take matters into their own hands. Flathead country residents have spoken to The Sierra Times about taking direct action to removing many of the barricades in Montana,...