meanwhile, back on terra firma.

It has been an interesting week on the environmental front. Former Arizona Governor and Clinton Administration Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt slammed President Obama for his weak stewardship of the environment at the National Press Club on wednesday. The full text of his speech can be read here.

A couple of other things also caught my eye. The State of New Mexico has decided to stop assisting the federal administration in its efforts to restore the Mexican Grey Wolf. Read about it here. There are about 50 wolves extant in the state, according to biologists but that appears to be 50 too many for ranching interests. I have no problem paying them for lost livestock, it is an acceptable payoff for their losses but they need to understand that predators are a vital part of an ecosystem.

...Republicans in Congress have separately proposed legislation to end the wolf re-introduction program, following their successful attempts to end federal supervision of the gray wolf in the northern Rockies.

I also saw this article about wild horses on federal lands. There is a big kerfuffle brewing in Federal Court regarding if horses are truly wild in North America. The stakes are rangeland and the battle pits the Bureau of Land Management against wild horse lovers. The Wild Horse and Burro Act of 1971 directs the Secretary of Interior to designate and maintain public range-lands as a sanctuary for the protection and preservation of these animals in a manner designed to achieve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance on public lands. Yet hundreds of thousands of horses have been removed since 1973.

Archaeologists have proven through the fossil record that horses actually originated on this continent, but ranchers maintain that by once going extinct here they have lost all their rights to roam federal land. Ranchers are now leasing most of the land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the US Forest Service. For this, and other special benefits for ranchers, taxpayers pay some $128 million a year. I have an idea, graze your cows on your own lands. Sounds like socialism to me.

"There are plenty of horses out in the Nevada desert," said Tom Collins, a Clark County commissioner who has a ranch outside of Las Vegas and has run cattle on U.S. lands in Arizona, Idaho and Utah.
"Most of these folks, maybe their father slapped them or their mother didn't love them, so now they are in love with these wild horses that aren't really wild," he said.

What bothers me are ranching and state interests that think that it is their god given right to pillage property owned by the people of the United States of America.  To mine, drill and run their cattle on our federal land for next to nothing.

I applaud Babbitt for speaking up and hope that others will stand tall against the denuding of the American soil by these rapacious and parochial special interests.  President Obama has not been a forceful advocate for the environment, he has caved over and over again, from coal to natural gas.

Speaking of natural gas do you realize that the people responsible for fracking are under no legal obligation to let the federal government know exactly what toxic chemicals they are pumping into the earth's crust. But I am sure that we can trust them, can't we?

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Eight substances have been added to the list of carcinogens by the US Department of Health and Human Services today. The Report of Carcinogens has added formaldehyde, aristolochic acids, o-nitrotoluene, captafol, cobalt-tungsten carbide (in powder or hard metal form), riddelliine, certain inhalable glass wool fibers, and styrene to the list of carcinogens.