Land Management

Kathleen Clarke, the first woman to head the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, has resigned to return to her home state of Utah. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said Clarke had created more recreational opportunities for Americans and sped up "environmentally sensitive" oil and natural gas production on federal lands since taking over the agency in January 2002. "Our public lands, our forests and our landscapes are better off" because of Clarke's service, Kempthorne said.

Plan a camping or road trip to California's northern border with a new recreation map that makes it all so easy. The recently updated Northern California Recreation Map includes routes and facilities at national forests, parks and other public lands from Lake Tahoe in California to Crater Lake National Park in Oregon - and it's free for the asking. The deal: The beauty of this map is that it lists facilities for more than 200 campgrounds, parks, marinas, trails, refuges and recreation areas that span eight public land areas.

When a ranch goes on sale in the West, chances are the advertisement will carry a notation something like this: "For sale: 10,000-acre ranch (1,500 acres deeded)." The 1,500 acres is the land actually owned by the rancher himself. The other 8,500 most likely is land leased from the federal government, primarily from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, usually for grazing livestock and almost certainly at bargain-basement prices. The property belongs to all the people of the United States, but in Western culture and practice, much of this leased land has been used by the same ranch families for so long, it is assumed to be part of the ranch.

Officials in Nevada's isolated Pershing County want to make it perfectly clear: When it comes to the wild-and-wacky Burning Man festival held each year in their midst, they're not going to get burned financially. Not even close. The want to increase their bill for law enforcement and security for the Labor Day weekend bacchanal in the Black Rock Desert, on land overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. So far, state legislators aren't buying any price increase plans. A Nevada legislative panel this week narrowly approved a bill to prevent the sprawling county (population 6,734)

Harold L. Oppenheimer, who turned a small real estate and loan operation into one of the biggest cattle investment and land management firms in the nation, died of cancer Sunday at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla. He had traveled to California from Kansas City to accompany his wife, Daphne, who was receiving treatment at the clinic.

During his two terms, President Clinton created 19 monuments and expanded three others, putting more than 5.6 million acres under protection. Congress also created one. Most of the new monuments are managed by the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management under its National Landscape Conservation System, another Clinton brainchild created in June 2000.

The canyon slopes of Laguna Beach are a bit lonelier and quieter than they were a few weeks ago, when a herd of goats grazed them. In little more than two months, the goats succeeded in clearing firebreaks through the coastal chaparral of Laguna Beach to protect nearby houses from potential brush fires during the summer dry spell. They were shipped earlier this month to Northern California. "They did wonderfully well," said Deputy Fire Chief Rich Dewberry.

Patchwork suburban sprawl is gobbling up some of the nation's most productive farmland, with California's Central Valley and coastal counties among the most threatened agricultural regions, a conservation group warned in a study released Wednesday.

Even before the menacing clouds of smoke above Orange County had cleared, politicians, local officials and homeowners were busy fanning the flames of another storm--the race to place the blame for the worst wildfires in local memory. According to Gov. Pete Wilson, who arrived when the flames were still fuming, the fire was the fault of a "sick animal" arsonist, who could be captured with the help of a $50,000 reward. To Rep.

A federal judge has rejected key provisions of a plan for managing millions of acres in the California desert, saying the U.S. Bureau of Land Management designated roughly 5,000 miles of off-road vehicle routes without properly taking into account their impact on public lands, archaeological sites and wildlife. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston on Monday ruled that the West Mojave plan, which the bureau approved in 2006 after a decade of development, is "flawed because it does not contain a reasonable range of alternatives" to limit the number of miles of off-road routes.

President Obama on Monday established five new national monuments, including one in Washington's San Juan Islands and one in northern New Mexico. The Río Grande del Norte National Monument elevates protections for 242,550 acres of U.S. Bureau of Land Management holdings northwest of Taos. A variety of wildlife, 500-year-old trees and extinct volcanoes are found in the monument, which lies between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges. The monument includes parts of the 800-foot-deep Rio Grande Gorge, carved by the river as it flows across highlands that feature petroglyphs and archaeological sites.

LAS VEGAS  - A national animal advocacy group excoriated the federal government, saying it misled the public about last week's removal of 11 wild mustangs that had coexisted for years with residents of a populated area outside Carson City, Nev. The Humane Society of the United States has called for the Bureau of Land Management to return the animals to the wild, rather than following through on plans to put them up for adoption. “The Humane Society of the United States denounces the Bureau of Land Management's decision to remove a small band of wild horses located just east of Carson City, Nev., in the Pine Nut Herd Management Area,” according to a statement released by the group Tuesday.

A study released last week by the Bureau of Reclamation confirms what everyone already knows: We are sucking more water out of the Colorado River Basin than nature is putting in. Like draining a savings account, water users in the seven basin states (Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California) and Mexico have been drawing down Lake Powell and Lake Mead by about a million more acre-feet of water than rain and snowmelt provide each year. According to the bureau, users' plans for yet more pipelines combined with the effects of global warming, will push the annual deficit as high as 8 million acre-feet by 2060, a cataclysmic shortfall.

An investigative journalist who has reported on the federal government's alleged sale of hundreds of wild horses to a known kill-buyer has released a video of a face-off in which Interior Secretary Ken Salazar threatens to punch him during an impromptu interview. Dave Philipps, now a reporter for the Colorado Springs Gazette, conducted a two-minute interview with the cowboy-hat-wearing Salazar, a Democrat, at an event taking place at an Obama campaign office in Fountain, Colo., on Election Day. In September, Philipps' article for the online ProPublica investigative group claimed the Bureau of Land Management, which manages hundreds of millions of acres of public land in 11 states, was knowingly selling wild horses to a middleman who is thought to have taken them to Mexico for eventual slaughter.

Like much else in government, U.S. public land policy is a vestige of the past, established in 1910 when America's population was just 92.2 million and a Western state such as Nevada had only 81,000 residents. Today our needs are much different and much greater. The United States can no longer afford to keep tens of millions of acres of "public" land locked up and out of service. Some of these lands have great commercial value; others are environmental treasures. We need policies capable of distinguishing between the two. Few Easterners realize the immense magnitude of the public lands.

The Obama administration on Thursday unveiled its road map for solar energy development, directing large-scale industrial projects to 285,000 acres of desert land in the western U.S. while opening 20 million acres of the Mojave for new development. The Bureau of Land Management's long-awaited "solar energy zones" are intended to make some of the desert's most sensitive landscapes less desirable for solar prospecting by identifying "sweet spots" that have already passed environmental requirements and therefore promise expedited permitting, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

Officials in Nevada's isolated Pershing County want to make it perfectly clear: When it comes to the wild-and-wacky Burning Man festival held each year in their midst, they're not going to get burned financially. Not even close. The want to increase their bill for law enforcement and security for the Labor Day weekend bacchanal in the Black Rock Desert, on land overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. So far, state legislators aren't buying any price increase plans. A Nevada legislative panel this week narrowly approved a bill to prevent the sprawling county (population 6,734)

LAS VEGAS  - A national animal advocacy group excoriated the federal government, saying it misled the public about last week's removal of 11 wild mustangs that had coexisted for years with residents of a populated area outside Carson City, Nev. The Humane Society of the United States has called for the Bureau of Land Management to return the animals to the wild, rather than following through on plans to put them up for adoption. “The Humane Society of the United States denounces the Bureau of Land Management's decision to remove a small band of wild horses located just east of Carson City, Nev., in the Pine Nut Herd Management Area,” according to a statement released by the group Tuesday.

Is it possible that solar energy — clean, renewable, virtually infinite — could have a downside? As it's being pursued on our public lands, yes. In the name of greening America, the Obama administration is about to open up as much as 21.5 million acres of mostly undisturbed, fragile desert land for potential industrial-scale solar energy development. That means huge swaths of public land in the West could be developed, degraded and effectively privatized. But such degradation isn't necessary.

Slaughtering wild horses for food isn't a viable option for thinning herds that have strained public lands throughout the West, the federal Bureau of Land Management director told supporters of horse processing plants Tuesday. Instead, the agency plans to give mares birth control in hopes of diminishing the need for controversial horse roundups, Bob Abbey said at the Summit of the Horse conference in Las Vegas. The BLM, he said, also will continue promoting adoption and seeking locations to place captured horses other than its holding pens.