Election-Year Environmentaism - Bush Throws Bones To Hunters

[hatrack]

EDIT

"Under George W. Bush, however, the BLM has seen increasing pressure to develop energy resources along the Front. But in early October, Rebecca Watson, a high-ranking Interior Department official, came to Billings, Mont., and announced the agency was halting a study that could have allowed a Canadian company to drill three natural gas wells in the Blackleaf area on the northern end of the Front. "President Bush has met with hunters and anglers and told them there are some places that should not be developed in order to protect wildlife," said Watson, Interior’s secretary for land and minerals management.

BLM spokesman Don Smurthwaite says the agency would have spent $1.5 million on studies for the project, and points out that if the project had been approved, environmentalists probably would have sued to stop it. "We had to ask ourselves, ‘Is this worth it?’ " he says. "This was obviously a huge issue to Montanans and people elsewhere. We listened." Indeed, the BLM received more than 49,000 public comments on its draft environmental impact statement. More than 99 percent of them wanted the Front protected from drilling. Comments came from environmentalists, lawmakers and the Blackfeet Tribe. But some of the most vocal advocates of protection have been hunters and fishermen — a contingent whose support is crucial to Bush in the upcoming election (HCN, 9/27/04: Racetrack).

"Development needs to occur in a fashion that’s compatible with hunting and fishing uses," says James Range, chairman of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a coalition of hunting and fishing groups that has met with President Bush twice in the last two years to discuss energy development on public lands. And, he says, "There are some places that ought not be developed at all."

But Claire Moseley, executive director of Public Lands Advocacy, a Denver-based nonprofit that promotes energy development, says the BLM acted unfairly when it stopped work on the environmental impact statement. "The company went through the (National Environmental Policy Act) process and they had the rug pulled out from under them," she says. "I think (the government) did it just to placate the environmentalists; you could say this is election politics." The Rocky Mountain Front is one of several recent environmental decisions that have folks grumbling about election-time politics. In September, Interior Secretary Gale Norton visited Moab, Utah, to withdraw 192 miles along the Colorado, Dolores and Green rivers from hardrock mining claims. "The Department of the Interior had wanted the secretary to sign the withdrawal … for about a year," says Maggie Wyatt, BLM field manager in Moab. "But it’s difficult to get on her schedule." The withdrawal does not apply to oil and gas leasing."

EDIT

http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=15073

[blindpig]

1. too many will buy this

because they want to. I had hoped otherwise but some of these people will believe anything. In a recent conversation a deer hunter claimed that DNR had introduced coyote to curb deer populations. He also said many members of his hunt club had seen puma, though they were rare! Another lawyer/country squire a few years ago claimed that the feds were introducing olingos(!) to the southern Appalachians.
Conclusion: the UN black helicopters are taking our deer!