People for the West -Tucson

It must be tough being green, especially if you are a true-believer, scientifically-challenged, enviro-luddite who sees nature being attacked at every turn by modern civilization. There are so many things to be afraid of: invasive species, global warming, global cooling, genetically modified foods, DDT, chlorine, asbestos, and just scads of other chemicals, dirty air, dirty water, meat, wildcat subdivisions, forest roads, plastic toys, SUVs, being too fat, magnetic flux from power lines and cell phones, coal-fired power plants making acid rain, hydroelectric plants (inhibits the fishies), wind power (chops up the birdies), and terror of all terrors, nuclear power.

Why, there is even danger in taking a walk, lest you trample an endangered weed, or crunch through the cryptobiotic crust (Top quarter inch of soil in arid regions bound by cyanobacteria, lichens, mosses, green algae, microfungi and bacteria). And those nasty cows, they just crunch the crust with abandon while emitting noxious gases into the atmosphere.

There’s the threat of overpopulation. We’re running out of space, using up the planet. We’re cutting down our forests; why, with all the building, some people must think wood grows on trees.

There’s too much water. Sea level is rising and threatening to drown swamps, excuse me, wetlands, in Florida. If we fill a reservoir near Phoenix, we might drown habitat for the southwest willow flycatcher.

There’s not enough water. Those thirsty people in Albuquerque prefer to have something to drink at the expense of some poor little fish in the Rio Grande.

And what is it with Mother Nature anyway. She lets some endangered species eat other endangered species, without a section 10 permit to boot. How can you reconcile natural selection?

And now there is a new scourge to worry about: Nanotechnology. That one can really get under your skin, literally. Nanotechnology is the science of building machines and materials at the molecular level, where key components are measured in nanometers, or one-billionth of a meter. Scientists might someday build little robots to search out and destroy cancer cells in our bodies, providing longer life, and hence increasing the population problem. Nanotechnology might be used to make longer-lasting tennis balls. But that would be too much fun; you have to stay serious here, thinking of ways to save the world from Big Macs and Barbie dolls, as you munch your free-range carrots. On the plus side, nanotechnology might be used to make stain-resistant clothing which would not have to be washed as often. You must remember washing? Something your mother probably did for you?

Oh, how you must yearn for the Pleistocene. Maybe that’s why you continue to wage war on efficient energy production, which drives modern civilization. Maybe that’s why you spawn a myriad of frivolous lawsuits to stop or delay commerce. Maybe that’s why you encourage governments to pile regulation upon regulations that serve no real purpose other than to make business harder, less efficient, unprofitable. Maybe they will all just go away if put under sufficient burden.

I know some of you make the great sacrifice of driving SUVs while decrying CAFÉ standards; that some of you have palatial log cabins in the woods, while working diligently to stop logging; that some of you pump oil from your preserves, but fight against Arctic oil production; that some of you raise bison but eschew cattle ranching; and that some of you enjoy the freedom and prosperity provided by our country, and by capitalism, while apparently working to destroy the very things that make that freedom and prosperity possible.

Some might call you hypocrites, or worse. Not me, because I know it must be tough being green. '

How big is the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan (SDCP)? The Pima County Board of Supervisors (BOS) approved a special election for May, 2004 to decide on a $250 million SDCP bond. The bond would fund a minor fraction of unknown costs for a multi-species habitat conservation plan (MSHCP). The MSHCP’s requirements remain unknown. The bond would also partially fund acquisition of an unspecified amount of land beyond MSHCP requirements. The bond would further partially fund an undefined welfare housing program to cover the typical woes that have plagued other MSHCPs.

San Diego County’s MSHCP, approved in 1996, propelled their current housing deficit to 90,000 units. "Affordable housing" means a condominium priced between $182,000 and $259,000. The median home price rose from $186,700 in 1990 to $343,000 last December, and now exceeds $400,000. Median household income is only $47,000, yet major employers potentially moving to San Diego face a dearth of sufficiently large building sites.

Portland, Oregon, having cool weather and its own MSHCP, encourages urban upzoning. Quiet suburbs increasingly convert to concrete jungles. With a median home price of $157,900 and median household income of $41,278, Multnomah County’s population now exceeds 1,518 people per square mile. Compare that to 670 in San Diego County and 92 in Pima County.

Daily commutes in all three counties average 23-25 minutes.

Before we consider a blindfolded down payment on SDCP, let’s examine what we do know. Eastern Pima County covers 2,482,847 acres east of the Tohono O’Odham Nation. Of that, the Conservation Lands System (CLS) consumes 81 percent. It covers 2,012,003 unincorporated acres and excludes urbanizing areas between towns and cities. More than nineteen existing nature preserves consume over a million CLS acres.

About half the CLS--1,053089 rural acres--could potentially urbanize. That includes 813,317 acres of AZ School Trust Land and 239,772 acres of deeded agricultural land.

Environmental Impact Statement issue papers, published by Pima County staff, favor ranch preservation and acquisition of 20,000 deeded acres from willing sellers.

Ignoring both that and ESI Corporation’s completed economic impact analysis, the Steering Committee approved condemnation and a last-minute proposal from Rob Marshall of Nature Conservancy and Diana Freshwater of Arizona Open Lands Trust. BOS approved the proposal. Involved ranchers unanimously oppose both.

The Freshwater/Marshall plan (FMP) identified acquisition/restriction priorities within CLS including 107,738 acres of deeded parcels greater than 10 acres each; 143,542 acres of AZ School Trust Lands eligible for Arizona Preserve Initiative (API) funding; and 273,879 acres of API-ineligible AZ School Trust Land. Totaling 524,759 acres, the FMP locks up 45% of deeded agricultural land and 51.3% of AZ School Trust Lands. It increases preserves from roughly half to nearly three-quarters of the total CLS acreage.

Remaining deeded lands face prohibitions on use of 95% of parcel area in "Important Riparian" zones; 80% in "Biological Core Management"; 60-75% in "Scientific Research", "Multiple Use", or "Recovery"; and 30-60% in "Urbanizing" areas. Add to those restrictions the Flood plain, Erosion, Hillside, Peaks and Ridges, Public Preserve Buffer and Institutional Reserve zones, where setback requirements can consume entire parcels.

Critical Habitat rules for the pygmy owl will further restrict CLS and non-CLS lands. SDCP will not ease that.

"Priority protection" prescribed in the FMP for Santa Rita Experimental Range, already tightly controlled, implies a goal to severely reduce or outlaw existing ranching in the CLS.

Combining the prevailing carefree attitude toward unlimited land restrictions with a campaign for the taxpayers to fund massive unknown commitments begs the question: How much environmentalism is enough?

___________ Sources: * Ranching in Pima County, map between pages 5 and 6 * US Census data * Pima County GIS department * February 2002 map of CLS system * Map distributed to Steering Committee: Private Parcels in E. Pima County and the Conservation Lands System * Chart and map distributed to Steering Committee with Freshwater/Marshall proposal. '

Our view of reality and the role of government in our lives greatly influence how we view property rights. Americans no longer have the opportunity to learn the foundations of freedom and to understand what it really means to have the God-given right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as penned by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Since the 1970s, we are increasingly following another system of governance that is systematically destroying the very principle that has made America the greatest nation in the history of the world.

America is in a war of world views between the principles of freedom laid down by John Locke (1632-1704) in his Two Treatises on Government (1689) and Jean Jacques Rousseau in his Social Contract (1762) and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754). Government's purpose, according to Locke, is to join with others to "unite, for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estate, which I call by the general name, property." According to Locke, the primary reason for government "is the preservation of their property." (Italics added) This fundamental principle became the cornerstone of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

Rousseau attacked Locke's model, arguing that individuality and property rights divide man by focusing on self-interest and greed rather than the good of society. He claims that property rights bind the poor thereby giving "new powers to the rich" that destroys "natural liberty" and equality and converts "usurpation into unalterable right." He argues for the creation of the common good as embodied through an abstract, public will that he called the 'general will'. In his model, the enlightened state determines the general will of the people through the force of law, including how property will be used. Rousseau provided the foundational philosophy that spawned the bloody French Revolution and inspired the writings of Immanuel Kant, Georg W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx and many others, thereby planting the seeds for the European model of socialism and Russian communism.

Rousseau's model of forced compliance has formed the basis of social and environmental laws in America since the 1970s. This is causing a hemorrhage in individual liberties once taken for granted by all Americans, including property rights. Without private property, individuals are powerless to oppose any infringement on their rights due to government control over the fruits of their labor. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the old Soviet Union, where all property belonged to the state. No one could speak out against the government for fear of their family being evicted, or their job taken away, by the local communist commissar.

Environmentalists claim that private property rights and greed are the root problem of pollution and environmental degradation. Yet, the worst pollution and environmental degradation has been on public land, water, or air - not private land. Since no one "owns" the land, water or air, pride of ownership or sense of responsibility to care for these entities is lost. It is called the Tragedy of the Commons. Again, the worst examples of this phenomenon were the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where there was no private property, yet they had the worst environmental record in the history of humanity.

Locke's model recognizes and uses the human trait of self-interest to better oneself. Unencumbered private property provides the catalyst to stimulate individuals to be creative and take risk in finding a better way, product, or service to meet a human need - including protecting the environment. In Locke's approach, only laws and regulations that keep them from activities that clearly cause harm to their neighbors or their property would restrict property owners. I f property is taken for the public good, the public pays just compensation.

Conversely, the Rousseau model places control in the hands of unaccountable, unelected government bureaucrats. Their primary incentive is to make their regulatory jobs easier and more efficient so they can build bigger empires at the people's expense. Nothing is produced. Unless there is strong oversight of bureaucrats - something a politician rarely does - there is no accountability to keep them from administering laws in a corrupt, arbitrary and capricious manner. While Rousseau socialism does not destroy property rights as effectively as totalitarianism or communism, it nonetheless opens the door to corruption and dampens economic and personal freedom in proportion to the amount of regulation imposed.

In his compelling book The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto accurately identifies private property rights as the key to reducing poverty and producing wealth. Legal title to use property represents equity. This equity can be used as collateral for a loan to create the capital needed to start, expand or buy into a business which then yields income and wealth. If strangling regulations encumber property rights there is little to no equity and therefore little to no capital with which to create wealth. Without wealth, the environment cannot be protected. A family whose primary focus is to put food on the table is not going to be interested in protecting the environment.

The most striking example of how socialism destroys the wealth-building capability of property is found in the developing nations of the world. In these nations, the simple act of legally transferring the title to property can take years, even decades in a sea of corruption and regulations. Few people have the time or resources to legally own property and therefore the property has no legal asset value. Hernando de Soto has shown that the total value of property held, but not legally owned, by the poor of the developing nations and former communist countries is at least $9.3 trillion! This is ninety-three times as much as all development assistance to the developing nations from all advanced countries during the past thirty years. There would be no need for foreign aid if these poverty-stricken people could have access to the asset value of their presently dead capital.

The Endangered Species Act, wetlands regulations, the Clean Water Initiative and a host of other environmental laws have one thing in common. Rousseau-type state control of property rights strips or plunders the value of property from rural landowners. It is harming, even destroying the economic foundation of rural communities and counties. Tens of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars of property value has been transferred to the government via regulation.

The plundering of rural America has gotten so bad that a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial on July 26, 2001, called it "rural cleansing." The WSJ claimed that this is the intent of the environmentalists, "The goal of many environmental groups…is no longer to protect nature. It is to expunge humans from the countryside" by suing or lobbying the "government into declaring rural areas off-limits to people who live and work there." This can be done outright or by having "restrictions placed on the land that either render it unusable or persuade owners to leave of their own accord."

Contrary to the popular myth that environmentalists work on a shoe-string for the benefit of mankind, the October 20, 1997, Boston Globe estimated the total funding for environmental activism to be around four billion dollars annually! Using top-dollar Madison Avenue packaging, their Rousseau-oriented environmental message finds willing listeners in urban America.

While we do need to protect the environment, these slick, but distorted or false messages have easily manipulated the largely uninformed urban voters and politicians into believing all kinds of terrible things are happening. The mantra was always included a socialist command and control solution. In response, Congress has created an interlocking web of Rousseau-based laws and regulations that usurp local and state jurisdictions and bestow enormous powers on federal bureaucrats who have little to no accountability to those they govern.

Anti-property rights activists use Rousseau's "perceived good result" or the "public good" to attack the basis for constitutional property rights. Since the 1970s, activist courts have been systematically ruling that the use of private property and "the rights of the individual" endanger the rights of all the people. Yet, why should the last owners of wetlands, endangered species habitat, beautiful scenery or many other environmental and social benefits, have to shoulder the entire cost of protection or provision when the problem was created by the activities of thousands of other people? Most Americans would say that they shouldn't. Yet, that is exactly what is happening to tens of thousands of Americans.

Government intrusion into the right to own and use property under the Trojan horse of the "public good" is beginning to cause great harm to American citizens, and is undermining the very foundation that has made America the greatest nation in human history. We can blindly continue to convert to the Jean Jacques Rousseau model of governance by the whim of bureaucrats, or we can return to the model of John Locke where private property is protected by government through law.

It is clear from a myriad of examples that the Rousseau model leads to corruption in government and a decline in the human condition while the Locke model yields freedom, prosperity and environmental protection. Which one would you choose?

Printed with permission by propertyrights.org and the American Land Foundation. Dr. Michael Coffman is president of Environmental Perspectives, Inc. and CEO of Sovereignty International Corporation in Bangor, Maine. '

Tax cut aside, President Bush and Congress will eventually answer to taxpayers for the $2 trillion federal budget. But who answers for the $860 billion -- 8 percent of GDP – that federal regulations now cost on top of official federal outlays?

[The Cato Institute’s] annual survey "Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State," finds regulatory spending equivalent to more than one-third of the entire federal budget itself -- a larger burden than the entire federal budget back in the 1960s. It's greater than Canada's GDP ($701 billion in 2000) and even greater than pretax corporate profits of $699 billion. But regulatory costs draw less popular furor because, unlike income taxes, they are often hidden in the prices of consumer goods.

In today's economy we badly need a new way of thinking about and getting control of the burgeoning regulatory state.

The Federal Register, where new rules are published daily, hit an all-time record high of 75,606 pages this past year (up from 9,562 in 1950, 20,036 in 1970, and 49,795 in 1990). In the pipeline are now 4,187 rules at various stages of completion. Only five agencies are responsible for more than half of this torrent: the Environmental Protection Agency (surprise!) and the Departments of Transportation, Treasury, Agriculture, and Interior.

Recent proposals have included: workplace slip-and-fall hazard and indoor air quality mandates from OSHA; labeling of sausage casings and exported caviar from USDA; acceptable ingredients for bathroom grout from the EPA; smoke alarm location requirements for pre-fabricated homes from HUD; and proposed bans of frowned-upon backyard play sets under consideration by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The Department of Transportation is busy with rules on daytime running-light glare, door retention and brake-hose reliability standards, side and roof crash worthiness, and radiator safety caps.

Many such rules are well intended. Others are questionable. But voters' connection to those who regulate is severed: Congress takes credit for popular regulatory initiatives, but can then blame agencies for costs. Regulatory reform during the Bush administration has a role to play in economic recovery. Phasing out inefficient rules, making regulatory costs as transparent as direct taxes, and making Congress directly responsible for those costs, are crucial to economic health. Congress delegates sweeping lawmaking power to unelected bureaucrats, and that must end.

Sunsetting: For starters, Congress could ask agencies and the OMB to propose rules to eliminate each year, and phase out new regulations every few years unless review finds cause to continue them. To get at some of the low-hanging fruit, an agency might be asked to offset the cost of a new regulation by ending one or more existing rules of roughly equivalent cost, or by persuading another agency to eliminate a regulation on its behalf. Anything that creates more of a need for a congressional nod would tend to force competition among agencies for the "right" to regulate, a culture absent today despite the fact that not all rules are equally beneficial.

As part of the "sunsetting" review process, an annual "Regulatory Report Card" might include historical tables on such measures as total numbers of rules produced per agency; the top rule-making agencies; the number of rules affecting small businesses, or impacting state and local governments. To the extent a report card exposes where agency cost estimates do and do not exist, it can highlight the best and worst agency efforts at disclosure and help ascertain whether the regulatory enterprise does more good than harm. This already seems to be one of the Bush administration's goals with the existing regulatory oversight function at OMB.

Regulatory Reduction Commission: Given that even tough sunsetting would take several years to reduce the existing $860 billion regulatory burden, Congress should consider a proposal, once made by Sen. Phil Gramm, for a Regulatory Reduction Commission. It could work like the Military Base Closure and Realignment Commission, which for a time helped resolve the politically tough task of closing obsolete military bases one at a time by assembling a bundle of them to vote on all at once. (Because everybody's base stood a good chance of getting "hit," the bundling provided some political cover.) Gramm's idea was for a congressionally appointed, bipartisan commission to hold annual hearings and assemble a broad-based package of cuts to be voted on without amendment, thereby making the package politically more difficult to oppose.

End "regulation without representation": Whatever measures Congress uses to address the regulatory state, dealing with the root of the problem requires ending excessive delegation, or "regulation without representation." Congress should not have bureaucrats to blame for regulatory excess that is Congress' fault.

A bill by Rep. J. D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), the Congressional Responsibility Act, recognizes that principle and would require that Congress okay significant agency rules via an expedited process before they are binding. Article 1 of the Constitution grants legislative power solely to Congress. In that vein, major agency regulations should be turned into bills requiring congressional passage and a presidential signature -- no more or less than ordinary legislation. Sensible regulatory policy, as well as constitutional government, demands that every elected representative be on record for significantly costly regulations.

Some might complain that voting on agency regulations would bog down the Congress. But do we want Washington making so many laws that the legislature can't even pass them all on its own during waking hours? The proper time to assess the benefits of regulation is while Congress is contemplating legislation that later will become translated into regulations by agencies. Saving benefit appraisals for some distant time when regulations are written is backward. Those benefits were presumably the reason for Congress seeking legislation in the first place. If Congress thinks regulatory benefits are worth the costs, it needs to say so, and be held accountable. From now on. [This article was published in Investor's Business Daily, July 8, 2003] '

How a Forest Stopped a Fire in Its Tracks

By James Gorman

Where the fire came through Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest [California] last September, the ground is ash and the trees are charcoal. Black and gray are the colors, lightened only by small mounds of red dust at the base of some of the charred trunks the leavings of bark beetles and flecks of green where new growth pokes above the ash.

Through the tall, ravaged columns, however, a living pine forest is visible. And as visitors inspecting the fire damage walk toward the living forest, they come to an abrupt transition.

September's blaze was named the Cone Fire, for the hill where it was first thought to have begun. It burned 2,000 acres of Lassen National Forest, and 1,600 of those were in Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest, a 10,000-acre area within Lassen set up in 1934 for ecological study by the Forest Service.

When the Cone Fire swept through these woods it came to a patch of forest that was different from the rest, and stopped dead, like a mime at an invisible wall. What stopped the fire was an experimental plot that had been selectively logged to thin it, and had been burned in controlled fashion. The result was an open forest, much the way it might have been 500 years ago when regular forest fires swept through the high dry country and no one tried to stop them.

"It just stopped," Carl N. Skinner said, looking satisfied but almost surprised. Mr. Skinner, a geographer with the Forest Service at the Redding Silviculture Laboratory in Redding, Calif., and Dr. Steve Zack, a conservation scientist with the North American Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, along with other Forest Service colleagues, are showing a reporter the results of an accidental experiment that still impresses them each time they visit it.

"If we hadn't treated this it would have just blown right through this area," Mr. Skinner said.

The researchers have been trying different forest management plans on 12 250-acre research plots for about seven years. The point was never to find out how best to stop fires. Instead the research was meant to develop a general picture of how different management techniques affect forest ecosystems.

In the past, many forests were either cut down for timber or left alone. A century of fire suppression resulted in the accumulated underbrush and thick tree growth that can fuel catastrophic wildfires. Parts of Blacks Mountain and the surrounding Lassen National Forest have had enough time to grow thick and brushy.

In the experimental plots, some were selectively logged, either to remove bigger trees, to mimic one lucrative logging approach, or to leave a wide range of tree sizes. The plots that had the large trees removed were so-called low diversity plots.

"So much of this kind of forest has had the large trees removed over the years," Mr. Skinner said, and now "we have very dense forests that need thinning now from a fire hazard perspective. This is what many of them are going to end up looking like."

Other plots were both thinned and subjected to prescribed burns, fires set by the researchers, a management policy that is followed in many national forests.

Finally, some areas were subjected to prescribed burns only. The researchers, fire ecologists, wildlife specialists, botanists, have followed the changes in plant growth, tree growth and wildlife populations in all the different situations.

Ponderosa pine forests are no strangers to fire. Mr. Skinner has taken samples of trees up to 700 years old to find out their fire history. Most trees showed evidence of some sort of fire about every 7 to 10 years. And big, intense fires occurred every 20 years or so, up until a century ago when the idea of fighting forest fires took hold.

Once the natural fires were stopped, Dr. Zack said, the Ponderosa and Jeffrey pine forests from Baja California to British Columbia grew thick. Underbrush, fallen limbs and dry needles accumulated to make fuel to feed fires that would consume the large trees and destroy whole stands of timber.

When the Cone Fire hit, it created a controlled experiment on how different management techniques, at least in this area, affected a big forest fire. The results are clear to the naked eye. The fire started in an area where the woods were thick, and quickly became intense enough to consume the woods that it went through. It was blown south and west, but it was turned away first by a mechanically thinned plot, which it scorched before dying out, and then by a plot that had been subjected to thinning and prescribed burning. The fire did not penetrate that patch at all.

In the thinned area that had no controlled burn, Mr. Skinner pointed to the effects of the Cone Fire. "We definitely changed the fire behavior and made it so the fire dropped to the ground and made it so that from a point of view of putting out fires it's easier to put out," he said, "but still there's sufficient fuel here to cause a lot more damage to the stand that was left here."

Doing controlled burns, with no thinning, worked better. But the best of all was a combination of thinning and controlled burns. The stands of moderate-size trees, what the researchers call "low diversity," stopped the fire cold.

The high diversity stands, which included more large trees, showed some scorching for 30 yards or so, as the fire burned the needle bed that had accumulated over five years since the last controlled burn. Then the fire died out.

Dr. Scott Stephens, director of the Stephens Laboratory for Wildland Fire Science at the University of California at Berkeley, has been to Blacks Mountain Forest and seen what happened when the Cone Fire hit. He said in an interview that this kind of accidental research with rigorous data was very rare.

He would have predicted, he said, that thinning and burning together would stop a fire, but was surprised that the plots that were thinned but not burned survived as well as they did. Many trees died, but enough lived for the stand to recover.

The key, he said, was that when the small trees were cut, they were completely removed, rather than leaving remnants on the forest floor, as was done with the larger trees. That reduced the fuel on the ground.

"It really points to surface fuel reduction," he said, as the most important step to prevent big fires.

Dr. Stephens said the Bush administration's current Healthy Forest Initiative was mainly about reducing regulation and does not specify fire management regimens. He also said he thought that not enough emphasis in the initiative was placed on reducing surface fuels by prescribed burning or other means. Whether large trees were removed or left made a big difference for wildlife, Dr. Zack said. Large trees, and large dead trees, are attractive to woodpeckers and other creatures.

Although prescribed burns are common, they are also controversial, partly because of a fire in New Mexico in 2000 that destroyed 200 buildings in Los Alamos, leaving hundreds of people homeless. That fire resulted from a prescribed burn by the National Park Service that got out of control.

Cost is also an issue. In plots where large trees were removed, timber sales were lucrative enough that the net gain was $1,400 an acre. Where only smaller trees were cut, the Forest Service suffered a net loss of $200 an acre.

Dr. Zack and Mr. Skinner and their colleagues agree that no single panacea will solve the problems resulting from a century of fire suppression. Still, they can point to the evidence on the ground, where you can stand on a line between charred trees and healthy ones. '

Foreign Earthworms Threaten Forest Health!

Something else for enviro-luddites to worry about. Exotic species of earthworms from Europe and Asia are devouring the leaf litter that is so vital to northern forests, altering soil conditions, enabling the spread of invasive plant species and changing the food chain for forest animals.

French Follies: "French Cabinet approves plan for a new environmental charter" - "PARIS — France's Cabinet approved a plan that would modify the constitution to give environmental protection as much weight as human rights. President Jacques Chirac is behind the environment charter, an attempt to make France a world leader in promoting environmental concerns. The bill is expected to go before parliament this fall." [AP]

Federal Court Says No to Center for Biological Diversity: Thwarting environmentalists, a federal appeals court upheld the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's view that the Northern Goshawk don't need federal protection throughout the West.

The 3-0 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals came after 13 years of extensive litigation, in which environmentalists wanted the government to list the large raptor, usually found in the western United States, as endangered or threatened. '