Land use

Clinton-Era roadless rule resurfaces in Congress

Two Capitol Hill lawmakers have introduced bills to codify a controversial Clinton-era plan to declare over 58 millions acres of national forest off-limits to industrial use. Legislation sponsored by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) and Jay Inslee (D-Washington) seeks to break the legal logjam that has surrounded the roadless rule for almost nine years. The “Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2009” currently has 25 co-sponsors in the Senate and over 150 in the House. In January 2001, just a few days before it left office, the Clinton administration proposed a rule banning road construction and logging, as well as most forms [...]

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Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

|2009-10-04T00:00:00-04:00October 4th, 2009|Comments Off

Supreme Court set to hear major Florida property rights case

Property rights advocates and Florida officials are facing off before the U.S. Supreme Court late this fall in the first takings case to be argued before Chief Justice John Roberts. At issue is a unique situation that arose when beach-front property owners in the Florida Panhandle found their property lines no longer extended to the Gulf of Mexico as a result of state efforts to rehabilitate local beaches. Under Florida’s Beach and Shore Preservation Act, counties and municipalities can restore beaches eroded by hurricanes and storms by adding sand beyond a state-designated erosion-control line – separating private property from what [...]

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Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

|2009-09-21T07:01:23-04:00September 21st, 2009|Comments Off

Tiny fish threatens to turn Californiaâ€™s Central Valley into Dust Bowl

Consumers around the country may soon be facing steeper prices for fruits, vegetables and nuts thanks to an obscure three-inch-long fish, called the Delta smelt, and the Endangered Species Act (ESA). In California’s storied Central Valley, for decades one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, an estimated 250,000 acres of prime farm land are lying fallow or dying. The parched area bears all the signs of a prolonged drought, but the acute water shortage confronting farmers and growers is largely manmade, the result of the Interior Department’s rigorous enforcement of the ESA. Responding to a lawsuit brought by the [...]

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Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

|2009-08-31T09:37:27-04:00August 31st, 2009|Comments Off

Dismal failure of Mexican Gray Wolf recovery program

Eleven years after the Clinton administration launched an ambitious plan to reintroduce the Mexican gray wolf in the desert Southwest, the plan is in shambles -- with dead wolves and cattle attesting to the failure of government biologists and bureaucrats to save the “lobo.” Officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), which administers the Endangered Species Act (ESA), originally projected that, as a result of their recovery efforts, some 100 wolves would be thriving in the area by 2006. But, today, the number of wolves in the designated recovery area in the Gila National Forest along the Arizona-New Mexico [...]

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Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

|2009-07-29T11:45:17-04:00July 29th, 2009|Comments Off

Red Rock Wilderness Bill

Environmentalists and their congressional allies are renewing legislative efforts to have over 9 million acres in Utah designated as wilderness.

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Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

|2014-04-08T17:31:41-04:00July 13th, 2009|Comments Off

More and better (without the) blues

In his 1990 film Mo' Better Blues, director Spike Lee dissects the life of fictional trumpeter Bleek Gilliam as he struggles to find, as described by reviewers Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, a proper balance between work and love. "Work," according to psychiatrist Jay Rohrlich (as cited in their review), "is oriented to the future, to goals; love demands the present." Bill McKibben, in his brand-new book, Deep Economy, hits on this same theme - that more (the result of work) and better (the result of love) may not always be congruent. The Vermont Sunday school teacher (and Middlebury scholar) spent [...]

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|2012-09-16T22:34:42-04:00May 20th, 2007|Comments Off

Reaffirming the cornerstone of freedom

Freedom 21, of which CFACT was a co-founding organization, is a coalition of groups that came together, quite literally, in the waning days of the last century, to build a domestic and international movement that could promote freedom as the guiding principle for the 21st Century and beyond.

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CFACT

|2013-10-17T09:58:38-04:00August 1st, 2004|Comments Off

Defending the bounties of modern farming

If someone were to ask you to rattle off some of the not-so-pleasant thoughts that occupy your mind day to day, nagging back pain, getting the kids to soccer practice on time, your old clunker about to go kaput, or your baseball team being fifteen games back at the All-Star break might be some of the things you would mention. But whether or not there'll be enough food to buy tomorrow -- well, that's hardly something over which you or anyone you know probably loses any sleep.

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CFACT

|2013-10-17T10:11:10-04:00July 1st, 1996|Comments Off