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"Water"
The Supreme Court recently ruled in an 7-1 vote (Justice Stephen Breyer recused himself) that the EPA regulations about water pollution as mandated by the Clean Water Act did not apply to sediment and other pollution from logging operations. The timber industry is rejoicing over the ruling. But citizens should be less sanguine than industry. [...]
Continue Reading →Corvallis, Ore. (AP) — A study of mountain streams in the West over the past 60 years finds the hottest temperatures of summer and the lowest water levels of fall are converging — which is bad news for Salmon.
The authors say the convergence gives salmon less time to recover from the stress of warm [...]
Continue Reading →A disgrace for the Salmon Challis National Forest
Basin Creek is a headwater tributary of the Little Lost River drainage in Idaho. It was home to bull trout and had a series of wet meadows which are in the process of eroding away and becoming biological wastelands.
Western Watersheds Project staff and supporters visited this [...]
Continue Reading →Federal judge rejects federal salmon plan once again as he did with Obama’s predecessors-
The judge said Obama’s plan sucks too, and he raises the specter of breaching the pork barrel dams on the lower Snake River (in Washington State). This judicial fight has gone on for a decade. Redden plays the game carefully, however. [...]
Continue Reading →Closed Process Highlights Need For Meaningful State Environmental Review, Public Involvement
With the recent discovery of natural gas in southwest Idaho many residents are concerned about their local watersheds. They should be, fracking is an ugly business :
Before 2005, regulation of fracking took place under the Safe Drinking Water Act. EPA was [...]
Continue Reading →Recently, Western Watersheds Project won a court victory halting corporate livestock ranching on 450,000 acres on the Jarbidge Field Office, BLM in southern Idaho. It was a sweet victory for sage grouse, wildlife, and other environmental values in southern Idaho – but it may or may not be short-lived.
Later this month, the Idaho [...]
Continue Reading →Escalation of Western Water Wars Loom
The finite availability of western water is part of the reason Ralph Maughan previously posed the question : Will the resource sucking “sin city” be reclaimed by the desert ? Perhaps eventually, but in the meantime – despite setbacks, the Southern Nevada Water Authority keeps stretching its [...]
Continue Reading →Wet winter and spring will raise the reservoir for the first time in a decade-
Recently we posted an article how Lake Mead would soon fall to a level that it would no longer be able to generate power. I recently visited (see photo). The drawdown was amazing, but the extreme wet winter and spring [...]
Continue Reading →Secretary of Interior Salazar thinks so-
I don’t think it will, not as the so-called conservatives in office today look at the world. However, back in the world of facts where Lake Mead isn’t far from the level of “dead pool,” there will be enormous consequences for all the Colorado River Basin states: Wyoming, Colorado, [...]
Continue Reading →Survey of Eastern Idaho residents shows them generally against rebuilding-
The deadly collapse of the Teton Dam east of Rexburg, Idaho, in June 1976 was one of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s worst moments. Conservationists had been fighting the dam as a waste of money and destruction of a beautiful fishing stream. The canyon was [...]
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