Fire Activity Picks Up on the Clear/Nez Fire Zone:

Fire Activity Picks Up on the Clear/Nez Fire Zone:

From the Grangeville Interagency Dispatch, Nez Perce National Forest, Supervisor's Office

http://gacc.nifc.gov/nrcc/dc/idgvc/index.htm

August 6, 2009

Grangeville, Idaho – Last night’s lightning storm sparked several new fires across the Clear/Nez Fire Zone.  More fire starts are expected to flare up as temperatures rise during the day.  

As of noon today, 19 fires were staffed on the zone, 2 of those are resource benefit fires.  

Six Type II initial attack crews, 4 additional helicopters, 14 engines and 12 smokejumpers are enroute to the zone.

Nez Perce National Forest:

Salmon River Ranger District:  The Rough Creek Fire is burning in Rough Creek, approximately four air miles northeast of Heaven’s Gate Lookout, estimated size is 15-20 acres.  A Zone Type III Incident Team is managing the fire.  

The White Bird Ridge Fire, located near the Rapid River subdivision, is 5 acres, and is contained following multiple loads of fire retardant being applied.

Red River Ranger District:  The district picked up 11 new fires, all less than an acre each.  Resource benefit fires Spook is 100 acres, and Warm Springs is 350 acres.

Clearwater Ranger District:  2 new small spots, they are being suppressed.

Moose Creek Ranger District:  2 new fires.

Clearwater National Forest:

North Fork Ranger District:   No new fires – 3 small resource benefit fires at 2-3 acres each.

Powell Ranger District:  4 new fires – 1 suppression and 3 resource benefit.

Lochsa Ranger District:  7 fires – 4 suppression and 3 resource benefit.

Idaho Department of Lands:

Craig Mountain:  7-9 new starts.  Largest is Steep and Deep Fire at 3 acres.

Maggie Creek:  Mile Marker 62 Fire is 15-20 acres on Highway 12.

Clearwater-Potlatch Timber Protection Agency:  2 new starts in Lolo Creek

Global Warming, Western Ranching, and the Bovine Curtain

[reprinted with permission]

Just like the old Iron Curtain that squelched any critical discussion of Communism's failures, we in the West live behind a "Bovine Curtain." The Bovine Curtain is-like the Iron Curtain-operated by the state, using taxpayer dollars to continuously broadcast propaganda about the virtues of ranching in the West and suppressing any negative or critical information. The mantra "cows are good" is repeated so often that it has attained cult status, even among many conservation groups-who should know better. Eating meat (domestic livestock), particularly beef, has one of the biggest environmental impacts on the planet. In many ways making a change from a livestock based diet to plants (or wild game) is one of the easiest things that most of us can modify in our personal behavior to lessen our collective burden upon the planet. Producing one calorie of animal protein requires more than 10 times as much fossil fuel input-releasing more than 10 times as much carbon dioxide-than does a calorie of plant protein. In the summer 2007 report, Livestock's Long Shadow, UN researchers concluded that livestock production is one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." According to the UN, livestock contributes to "problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity." But few environmental groups mention this report or its findings, particularly if they are located in the cowboy West behind the Bovine Curtain. They would have to admit that the findings conclusions apply equally as well to the western U.S. In particular the report singled out livestock production as a major contributor to global warming emissions, yet even Al Gore ignored livestock's role in global warming during his Live Earth Concert. I don't want to denigrate Gore's efforts for he has brought much needed attention to global climate change. Nevertheless, while it's well and good to ask people to screw in florescent light bulbs to reduce energy demands, the single biggest change that anyone could do to immediately reduce their contribution to greenhouse gases is to eat less meat. Eating less meat has a surprisingly big bang for effort. Ranch and farm raised livestock produce millions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane annually. These two gases account for 90 percent of US greenhouse emissions. For instance, all the trucks, SUVs, cars, airplanes, trains and other transportation combined accounts for 13 percent of global warming emissions, while livestock production is responsible for an astounding 18 percent of all US greenhouse gases. Not only are there the carbon dioxide emissions from livestock production, but livestock, particularly cattle, are responsible for the majority of emissions of several other greenhouse causing gases. According to the U.N., animal agriculture is responsible for an whopping 65 percent of worldwide nitrous oxide emissions. Bear in mind that nitrous oxide is about 300 times more effective as a global warming gas than carbon dioxide. Methane is another gas produced by livestock. Methane traps 20 times more heat than carbon dioxide. The EPA reports that livestock production is the single greatest source of methane emissions in the US. But when you live behind the Bovine Curtain most people are afraid to speak the truth or have internalized group think so completely that it does not even occur to people to ponder livestock's central role in a host of environmental and health problems. Given their role as obsequious hand maidens to the livestock industry, it's not surprising that federal and state governments hide the connection between meat production and global warming. But it's totally unacceptable for environmental organizations to ignore this inconvenient truth. For instance I recently checked the Sierra Club's global climate change web site. They list ten things one can do to reduce global warming, from driving a more energy efficient auto to supporting renewable energy sources-but eating less meat is not one of them. It's hard to believe that the Sierra Club is not aware of the UN report or other recent research linking livestock production with global warming, but one must assume that saying anything about livestock production is off limits when you live behind the Bovine Curtain. Worse yet, some Sierra Club chapters even promote ranching, despite the obvious impacts on global climate. A recent article the Sierra Club's California/Nevada desert newsletter extolled the virtues of livestock grazing in the Great Basin-a region that is likely to suffer greatly from global climate change. Similarly I reviewed National Parks and Conservation Association's new report, "Unnatural Disaster," which describes the multiple ways that global warming will impact our national parks. The report suggests a host of solutions that range from more efficient energy use to adoption of renewable energy, but I could not locate any mention of eating less meat in the 48 page report. And the Wilderness Society, while advising members to support carbon sequestration, mileage efficiency for vehicles, and other common remedies, did not mention of the role of livestock production and a meat diet in contributing to global warming. Given that these national groups do not appear to see or more likely wish to avoid talking about a connection between diet and environmental issues, it's not surprising that many regional or local environmental groups seldom mention livestock production as a global warming issue. They may express great concern about the decline of whitebark pine or large wildfires due to higher global temperatures, but they don't go the next step to tie these issues to ranching and livestock production. Try to raise any linkage to ranching and livestock and the Bovine Curtain slams down. In the West, we don't talk about cows except to laud the ranchers for being "good stewards of the land" or some other fawning palaver. Global warming is only one reason to end livestock production, particularly western ranching. Production of livestock is the single greatest source of non-point pollution in the West. Livestock are among the prime reasons for the spread of invasive plants like cheatgrass. Producing hay and other irrigated forage for livestock is the reason our rivers are dewatered each summer. Livestock are the reason bison and wolves are killed outside of national parks. Livestock spread disease to wildlife. Livestock are the reason native wildlife like prairie dogs are being slaughtered. The list goes on, but few groups are willing to even list these impacts, much less tackle the source of the problem-cows. The obvious omission of diet preferences among the proposed solutions to global warming is particularly noteworthy, especially when it involves no new technologies, no major policy changes in government, and no significant investment in new infrastructure. Eating less meat won't cure global warming, but it's the easiest and more cost effective mechanism available to ordinary citizens to start us on a new pathway towards global sustainability. If you can't afford a Prius, you can afford to eat less meat. Even if you can't switch to solar energy, you can switch to a reduced meat diet. While most of us can't design a wind mill, we can design a better diet. Eating less meat is not only good for the planet's health, it's good for your health. It's time for all of us to begin to view eating and our choice of diet as more than a culinary decision, but as an environmental act.

LOCAL INTERESTS AND CONSERVATION HISTORY

[reprinted with permission]

What do the Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Glacier National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument all have in common? Besides their common designation as national parks and monuments, all these conservation areas were initially opposed by local people. After the creation of Yellowstone NP in 1872, the Helena Gazette opined “We regard the passage of the act as a great blow to the prosperity of the towns of Bozeman and Virginia City….” Montana’s Congressional representatives were so opposed to the park that they introduced bills into Congress every session for twenty years to undesignate the park. When these attempts to dissolve the park failed, they tried other mechanisms to eliminate the park, including an attempt to split off the northern part of the park so a railroad could be built.

To justify removing this area from the park, Montana’s delegate characterized the Lamar Valley as “wholly unattractive country”, hence not worthy of park protection. Others proposed damming the Yellowstone River just below Yellowstone Lake for hydroelectric power. This too was prevented—but only by the intervention of dreaded “outsiders” from the Eastern United States. When President Teddy Roosevelt established the Grand Canyon as a national monument in 1908, Arizona’s Congressional delegation successfully prevented any federal funding for the park operations and tried unsuccessfully to legally challenge Roosevelt’s monument designation. In 1910 when Glacier National Park was created, the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce went on record opposing the park designation, fearing the park would preclude oil and gas and logging operations. Locals submitted a petition to the federal government in 1914 to dismantled the park, arguing: “… that it is more important to furnish homes to a land-hungry people than to lock the land up as a rich man's playground which no one will use or ever use."

In 1943 when Franklin Roosevelt designated 210,000 acres in the Tetons as a national monument, folks in Wyoming predicted Jackson would become a “ghost-town.” In fact, the Wyoming delegation introduced legislation to undesignate the park. Jackson now is home to more than 16,000 “ghosts.” And even the creation of our national forest system was largely opposed by western interests who wanted to see these lands available for unrestricted development and exploitation. In 1907 Senator Fulton of Oregon added an amendment to the Agricultural Appropriation Bill barring President Teddy Roosevelt from creating any additional national forests in six Northwest states. Roosevelt, knowing he could not veto such important legislation, signed the bill into law, but not before he created another 16 million acres of national forest by Presidential fiat. Today most residents of California, Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Washington are grateful that local interests did not prevail and Roosevelt set aside these lands as national forests. In 1980 when President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Alaska Lands Bill (ANILCA) he was strongly opposed by the entire Alaskan delegation who, like all previous boosters of the West, predicted wreckage and ruin to the local economy if lands were protected from exploitation. So strident was local opposition that residents of Fairbanks burned Carter in effigy to protest park creation. The towns of Eagle and Glennallen each proclaimed opposition to the parks and even offered to shelter anyone from federal authorities who was willing to violate new park regulations. Undaunted, Carter signed ANILCA into law setting aside more than a hundred million acres of federal land as new parks, wildlife refuges, wild and scenic rivers and wilderness areas. Among other things ANILCA established 10 new national parks, including Gates of the Arctic, Lake Clark, and Wrangell-St Elias and expanded three other existing parks (Glacier Bay, Katmai, and Denali). Most Americans—and even many Alaskans—now celebrate these parks and other protected lands as crown jewels of our national park system.

They say history repeats itself when people do not learn from the past, and certainly this appears to be the case once more as seen in the recent flap over NREPA, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act. Montana Senator Max Baucus was quoted as saying “Montanans don’t take kindly to people on the East Coast telling us how to manage our lands.” (Uh, Max, these are federal lands owned by all US citizens). Despite Baucus’ implied message that once again “outsiders” from the East Coast were imposing something on poor westerners, he conveniently overlooked the fact that NREPA was created by conservationists in the region and its chief sponsor, the Alliance for Wild Rockies, is a Montana-based group. Barbara Cubin, Wyoming’s Congressional representative called NREPA a "147-page assault on our Western way of life." She bemoaned that local input and control would be slipping away. Local control, of course, means resource exploitation of public resources for private gain. Montana Congressman, Denny Rehberg, opposed NREPA because he considered it a “top-down” measure rather than a locally-generated proposal. Rehberg favors local “cooperative” approaches like the Blackfoot Challenge and the Beaverhead-Deerlodge Partnership in Montana as the right way to designate wilderness. Of course, Rehberg is enamored with “partnerships,” “collaborative” and other so-called local approaches that are compromises because they usually wind up advocating for the continuation of logging, ORV use, and mining on most of the public land base, and ultimately protect less land from exploitation than landscape-scale and ecologically-driven proposals like NREPA. People like Rehberg and other advocates for such collaborative or compromise approaches to wildlands protection never acknowledge that the starting point for compromise was passed decades ago.

The vast majority of the United States is already committed to industrial uses, and we are now fighting over the last little scraps of wildlands. Conservation history has shown repeatedly that invariably future generations will not complain that we protected too much land; rather they will wonder why we protected so little. What is clear from any review of conservation history is that in nearly all cases even local people come to value the designation of conserved lands after the fact. If you were to ask the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce what is most distinctive and valuable about Kalispell’s location, they would tell you its close proximity to Glacier National Park. And when Newt Gingrich and his Republican majority shut down the federal government in 1995, Arizona volunteered to pay the salaries of Park Rangers so that Grand Canyon NP could remain open. And though residents on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula opposed establishment of Olympic NP and continuously sought to open up the park’s forests to logging, most residents of the Olympic Peninsula today realize that the park’s trees have far more value standing upright in the forest than if they had been cut for two-by-fours The take-home message I get from a broad reading of conservation history is that local opposition to anything worthwhile is to be expected. Trying to accommodate entrenched local interests invariably weakens protective measures and typically reduces the effectiveness of conservation efforts.

Imagine what we would have had if civil rights activists had tried to work with southern racists to hammer out a “collaborative” agreement on civil rights. If they were lucky, they might have gotten modest accommodations as such as allowing African Americans to sit anywhere on buses, but it is doubtful that we would have the sweeping changes that enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act created, such as ending discrimination in employment as well as segregation in schools and other public places. As citizens and conservationists we ought to learn from these history lessons and look beyond parochial regional interests to advocate what is in the best long term interest of the nation and that best preserves our collective natural heritage. We might not get all what we advocate for, but in conservation, as in civil rights, we ought to strive for what is ultimately best for the land and nation, not what is politically acceptable now.

In 1935, Bob Marshall, on founding the Wilderness Society wrote: “We want no stragglers. For in the past far too much good wilderness has been lost by those whose first instinct is to compromise.” This is advice that many in the West’s conservation movement would be wise to remember when they attempt to work with “local interests” to protect wildlands.

Landfills, Agency Negligence & Lawyer Creek Watershed

Lawyer Creek, almost wholly within the Nez Perce Tribal Reservation boundary, flows south and east of the Clearwater River until both join just east of Kamiah in north-central Idaho. This major tributary is home to endangered Snake River steelhead, recently de-listed bald eagles, and yellow-billed cuckoos – neotropical, migrant songbirds who are rare in the state and an Idaho Fish and Game ‘Species of Greatest Conservation Need.’ The drainage also constitutes some of the originally proposed critical habitat for the federally protected bull trout. Like all lands and waterways within the jurisdiction of the Nez Perce Treaty of 1855, the conditions of Lawyer Creek must not impede upon the ‘usual and accustomed’ rights of tribal members to hunt, fish, and gather in these places. But in 2002, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) placed the creek on the Impaired Water 303(d) list from its source to mouth, for not supporting cold water biota and primary contact recreation. A waste disposal company headquartered in Kamiah, Idaho, illegally operates a Tier 1 landfill, a Tier 2 landfill, and a Tier 2 waste transfer station, all on Lawyer Creek, and refuses to abide by environmental laws and guidelines. Negligent Idaho departments of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and Public Health and an EPA hesitant to enforce environmental standards in Indian Country also currently threaten this drainage.

Public Concerns Not Addressed

For the last four years, Nez Perce tribal member Ken Jones has worked tirelessly out of his Kamiah area home and has spent a considerable amount of his own funds to address problems imposed by these three illegal facilities. Jones was born in Culdesac, Idaho, in 1936 and has resided in the area most of his life. When he retired from his Indian Health Service position with the U.S. Public Health Service, he did not expect that he would be busy convincing environmental and human health agencies to do their jobs. On November 15, 2007, the Clearwater Progress newspaper published a notice soliciting public comments on the waste disposal company’s siting application for a waste transfer station directly adjacent to their Tier 1 landfill and upstream of Kamiah. Jones and several citizens voiced their concerns over the location and operation of the site, false information in previous applications, and lax regulatory enforcement. The EPA and Idaho DEQ have not yet responded to their written comments, although Gayle Westoff, the Lewiston DEQ solid waste inspector, approved the siting application on January 17, 2008.

This negligent water law enforcement and questionable company accountability is nothing new: the company first applied for a permit to construct the transfer station in 1993. In 2004, over 80 local residents petitioned the Idaho DEQ to prevent the company from constructing the Tier 2 landfill. But Hudson Mann of the DEQ dismissed their concerns because the sanitation service stated that the landfill would only contain leaves and limbs. Since then, the landfill has disposed large amounts of illegal waste under leaves and limbs, including railroad ties, boat engines, automobile transmissions, and household waste.

Transfer Station within 100-Year Floodplain

On January 28, 2008, Sam Penney, Chair of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee, sent a four-page letter to Al Latourette in the EPA Tribal Program Office of Air, Waste, and Toxics, describing ten major problems associated with the new transfer station. The letter states that the facility’s “location within the 100-year floodplain of Lawyer Creek, as delineated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1999 documents, [suggests] that floodwaters will inundate the majority of the transfer station.” Penney also warns that its “present location and operation…[are] very probably degrading the groundwater and surface water quality of Lawyer Creek, contrary to Idaho Codes IDAPA 58.01.02.”

Falsification of Facts

The waste disposal company’s plan of operations for the transfer station, dated October 7, 2004, falsely claims that the facility is not in a floodplain and that neither critical habitat for endangered species nor high groundwater exists on the site. Company processes promoting approval of their Tier 2 landfill application exhibited the same pattern of duplicity. In both their newspaper notice and Idaho DEQ application, the sanitation service submitted false legal descriptions of the site and ignored the presence and flow of groundwater. A professional hydrologist visited the site in June 2005 before construction and confirmed that the landfill leachate would discharge directly into Seven Mile Creek at a single point source – findings completely overlooked by the company, the DEQ, and the EPA.

Diesel Spills and Other Cover-Ups

The waste disposal company has since constructed a pond and dry well within their Tier 2 landfill cell and a French drain outside the cell. They have regularly deposited material not allowed in such landfills, including motors and the 80-gallon, diesel fuel spill exposed by Shane Bytheway, a company employee during November 2007. In his affidavit to Lewis County, he admitted that the company owner and operator ordered covering the spill with waste and silence because reporting it “would be very expensive and [he] didn’t need the EPA breathing down his neck anymore [than] they already were.” In response, a December 10, 2007, company letter assured the Idaho DEQ that the spill had been cleaned up. Gayle Westoff, of the DEQ in Lewiston, visited the site three months later and found no evidence of the spill. The Idaho Department of Public Health has no records of either the cleanup or Westoff’s visit, despite assurances by Westoff to the contrary. The sanitation service supposedly hauled the contaminated material to Missoula, Montana, for proper disposal, although no agency can produce documents to support this claim.

Tier 1 Landfill Exceeds Size and Materials Limits

The approval process for the company’s Tier 1 landfill and closed bark mill, downstream of their Tier 2 landfill, demonstrated similar patterns of negligence by the company and the agencies charged with protecting Nez Perce Reservation water. The waste disposal company falsely claimed that an engineer designed and approved the facility. Construction then proceeded without compliance with engineering standards and Idaho state codes. For instance, Tier 1 landfills cannot exceed 2000 cubic yards of inert material or 600 cubic yards of leachate-producing material. Inert material, such as brick and concrete, poses fewer significant threats to watershed and groundwater quality and thus requires less stringent regulations than leachate-creating material, including but not limited to soil, grass, leaves, limbs, and boiler ash. The Tier 1 landfill not only exceeds its legal size limit, it contains leachate-producing materials. Most dangerous among these wastes in both the Tier 1 and Tier 2 landfills, boiler ash can contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, and zinc as well as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, the byproducts of incomplete combustion. Agencies recommend that boiler ash samples should be tested prior to disposal. If the resulting leachate exceeds threshold values for toxic constituents, the material should be classified as toxic waste. Gayle Westoff told Ken Jones that test results of this material in the two landfills had deemed it safe, but that no test copies were available due to limited DEQ file storage capacity.

Lawyer Creek Needs Immediate, Active, Water Law Enforcement

The EPA and the Idaho DEQ have the responsibility to protect impaired water bodies like Lawyer Creek as required by federal law and implicit in Nez Perce Treaty rights. These agencies should immediately and indefinitely close these Tier 1 and Tier 2 landfills and Tier 2 transfer station until every associated violation has been addressed and accounted for. Moreover, they should devise plans to prevent similar acts of negligence from occurring in the future. The threats to the natural resources and waters in the Nez Perce Reservation and downstream are too great to warrant any more inaction. The infractions that eased the development of these three sites should have signaled the agencies that something was amiss. For example, the engineer who used misleading information to acquire approval for the Tier 2 landfill was the same person who designed the non-functional, pressure sewer system for Valley View Village and the Nez Perce Tribe. Because the DEQ readily accepts engineering plans without proper review from engineers only required to have state licenses, the department bears much of the responsibility for these contaminating facilities. Ken Jones reminds parties involved in Lawyer Creek watershed health that he does not claim to speak for tribal leaders or the Nez Perce Tribe. “I firmly believe this matter violates my treaty rights as well as state and federal laws,” says Jones. For more information about these environmental problems, please contact

Ken Jones of Kamiah, Idaho, at 208-935-2117, or Will Boyd of Friends of the Clearwater at 208-882-9755.

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