Public Land

Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket. Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors -- each the size of a garage door -- are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.

CADIZ, Calif. - Three decades ago a group of businessmen pored over NASA satellite imagery as part of a worldwide hunt for large groundwater reserves they could tap to grow desert crops. They found the signs they were looking for here in the sun-blasted mountain ranges and creosote-freckled valleys of the Mojave Desert, 200 miles east of Los Angeles. The group, which founded Cadiz Inc., bought old railroad land, drilled wells and planted neat grids of citrus trees and grapevines, irrigating them with water that bubbled out of the desert depths at the rate of 2,000 gallons a minute.

Federal officials Tuesday approved construction of the first two California solar energy projects to be built on public land in the sun-drenched Mojave Desert and Imperial Valley. The go-ahead from U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar could bolster the chances for seven other major solar projects in the state awaiting approval from him and the U.S. Energy Department. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is banking on the building boom to infuse the state with more than $30 billion in new investments in green energy and create more than 12,000 high-paying construction and manufacturing jobs from about two dozen planned wind and solar facilities.

For the birds Re " Seabird rescues up sharply ," March 7 So, oil seeping naturally from the ocean floor off Santa Barbara is to blame for all these oil-soaked birds. I have a hard time believing that's all there is to it. Oil companies have drilled many a hole into the sea floor over the last 60-plus years and have sucked out many millions of barrels of crude. Surely that wouldn't have anything to do with leaks? Growing up in Long Beach and surfing Bolsa Chica in the early 1960s, I got used to cleaning tar off my feet, but it seemed that Huntington was as far south as the oil drifted back then.

I wish to commend your staff writers and newspaper on the series of articles on public land management or mismanagement ("Public Land, Private Profit: Inside the Bureau of Land Management," Part I, May 21-24). Hopefully, it will remind and bring to the attention of the powers that be locally and in distant Washington, D.C., that remedies are in order to correct many of the abuses. In my studied opinion a good beginning would be to: Enact legislation changing the 1872 mining law to a leasing system modeled after the Canadian system that appears to be working well.

"The Great American Oil Rip-Off" (editorial, July 20) confuses two separate issues. The litigation in which California and a number of public-land drillers have been engaged is a disagreement about whether oil companies complied with the law, and it is a matter for the courts to decide. At the heart of the matter is congressional intent to keep a federal regulatory agency from rewriting federal royalty laws that date back to 1920. The Department of the Interior has repeatedly sought to change the basis by which royalties are established.

The slumping economy and high energy costs are prompting a significant increase in the number of people seeking permits to cut their own firewood on public land, federal land managers said. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Carson City District sold more than 75 firewood permits over three days last week, an increase of at least 25% from what would normally be expected, agency spokesman Mark Struble said. "That's quite a bit for October," Struble told the Reno Gazette-Journal.

Poor Bruce Babbitt. The Secretary of Interior was twice a contender for an Associate Supreme Court Justice position but remained in his current post because of his value to President Bill Clinton. But his current job means that he must forever contend with one of the country's most unbending, virulent interest groups: Business people who make money off of Western lands.

Residents are fond of the California coastline, and they want to protect it. Of all the lands in public ownership, the vulnerable shoreline has a unique power to rally residents to fight any threat--either to the beachfront or to public access. In recent days, that point was brought home in three different locales along the Southern California shoreline off Pacific Coast Highway. It ought to be very simple but sometimes isn't: Public land is public land.

On Monday, President Obama signed the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act, placing more than 2 million acres of public land in nine states under Wilderness Act protection. The new legislation preserves remote glacial valleys in Wyoming, fragile deserts in California and dense forests in northern Michigan, making these and other tracts of pristine land permanently off-limits to road building, oil and gas drilling and commercial timber harvesting.

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.

Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket. Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors -- each the size of a garage door -- are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.

The military, like any other government agency, cannot allow people to install large religious symbols wherever they want on public property. Once in place for any length of time, those symbols (and usually that means a cross) tend to be seen as established markers, and proposals to remove them are wrongly viewed as anti-religion and, specifically, anti-Christian. That's what has happened yet again after two large crosses were set on a hill at Camp Pendleton. One was erected in 2003 by Marines who would later be killed in the Iraq war. That cross burned down in 2007 but was replaced a year later.

In a sunny park overlooking the beach in Santa Monica, where a cool breeze blows in from the Pacific, the so-called war over Christmas has found its latest battlefield. Over almost six decades, a collection of Santa Monica's Christian churches have re-created the sprawling, life-sized Nativity scenes of Jesus Christ's birth. But this year, there's no room in the park. PHOTOS: Battle over Christmas displays Atheist groups objected to churches' use of the public Palisades Park to espouse a religious message and applied to the city of Santa Monica for their own spaces.

A federal appeals court Friday upheld a Clinton administration rule that bans road-building and logging on roughly a quarter of the country's national forestland. The unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals could settle one of the most contentious conservation issues of the last decade. The 2001 roadless rule, issued in the final days of the Clinton administration, generated lawsuits, conflicting court opinions and repeal efforts.

National parks and forests will waive entrance fees Saturday in honor of National Public Lands Day . It's a good time to hit the dirt and go exploring or pitch in for trail work or a cleanup somewhere near or far. The deal: The fee-free day means no need to pay $20 per car to go to Yosemite or Sequoia & Kings Canyon national parks or $5 for an Adventure Pass for Southern California's national forests. The free day applies to parks and forests nationwide. When: Free entry applies to Saturday only.

It boggles the mind: An engineering company, a title company and a developer, plus county officials, are all unaware that houses were to be built on public land. To "help" the developer, the Board of Supervisors (gave) up this public land. Considering that Hunsaker made a similar error in Laguna Niguel, it would appear that their engineers are unusually inept or deliberately ignore verification. A title company whose title clearance was meaningless? As an Orange County taxpayer, I wonder if there is any connection between this apparent appropriation of public land by developers and the supervisors' decision to "give" this land to them and the articles a few days ago in The Times indicating that the supervisors' campaigns are largely funded by real estate developers.

A federal judge in Salt Lake City ruled the U.S. Bureau of Land Management can close 250,000 acres of public land near Moab to off-road vehicles, including the popular Factory Butte area. U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins said the BLM had the power to prevent or reduce environmental damage. Jenkins threw out a lawsuit from the Utah Shared Access Alliance, which said the BLM acted in 2001 without taking public comment or holding hearings.

John D. Olmsted, a naturalist who led efforts to preserve Northern California nature areas, open space and trails, died of liver cancer March 8 at his home in Nevada City, Calif. He was 73. Inspired by conservationist John Muir, Olmsted spent more than 40 years pursuing his dream of a trans-California hiking trail ? roughly paralleling Highway 20 ? from Lake Tahoe to the Pacific Ocean. He proposed creating a public-land corridor that would connect a chain of natural landscapes stretching across Northern California.

Hand it to Tim Leiweke and AEG: They know how to whip up support for a project. Last week, Leiweke, the company's president, turned on the afterburners of his campaign to build a downtown football stadium and lure an NFL team back to Los Angeles. He announced that Farmers Insurance has agreed to pay $700 million for naming rights to the proposed 64,000-seat, retractable-roof stadium, and he surrounded himself with political and sports luminaries lending support. Ed Roski Jr., the billionaire developer who has long labored on a separate proposal to build a football stadium in the City of Industry, was left to wonder where his project must stand.