PRESS RELEASES
Controversial Water Developments Fail to Attract Desert Bighorn in Kofa Wilderness: 9/09
Rod Nash, Author of Wilderness and the American Mind, Speaks in Hamilton September 19: 8/09
Wilderness Watch Files Legal Appeal to Protect Kofa Wilderness: 2/09
Controversial Water Developments Fail to Attract Desert Bighorn in Kofa Wilderness
Wilderness Watch
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
Sierra Club - Grand Canyon Chapter
NEWS RELEASE
For immediate Release: September 15, 2009
Contact:
George Nickas, Executive Director, Wilderness Watch, (406) 542-2048
Sandy Bahr, Chapter Director, Sierra Club - Grand Canyon Chapter, (602) 253-8633
Ron Kearns, Retired Kofa Wildlife Biologist, (928) 916-9682
(Phoenix, AZ) Remote cameras installed to detect bighorn sheep use at two controversial man-made water developments constructed in the Kofa Wilderness in 2007 suggest the tanks have completely failed to provide water for bighorns. The cameras, installed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) at the McPherson and Yaqui Tanks, captured photos of mule deer, hawks, doves, vultures, coyotes and bobcats, but not a single bighorn drinking from the tanks in the two years since their construction.
“Building these artificial water developments in an attempt to artificially inflate bighorn sheep numbers was contrary to preserving the area as wilderness,” stated George Nickas, Executive Director of Wilderness Watch. “We’ve felt all along that the project was wrong from both a legal and ecological standpoint. The camera data bear that out and they completely undermine the USFWS’ argument that the tanks are necessary in Wilderness.”
A coalition of local and national conservation groups, including Wilderness Watch, the Sierra Club, and the Arizona Wilderness Coalition, filed a lawsuit in June 2007 after learning the USFWS had constructed one 13,000-gallon tank within the Kofa Wilderness and was planning to install a second. In 2008, the District Court in Phoenix ruled in favor of the USFWS. The conservation groups have appealed that decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
“The agencies have failed to demonstrate that, despite many years of constructing artificial water catchments, these catchments do anything to help the bighorn sheep,” said Sandy Bahr, Chapter Director for the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter. “They violated the laws that protect wilderness and provide for transparency in the public process all to build tanks that the sheep don’t use. We want to ensure that both the federal and state agencies are taking actions that have had public review and comment opportunity and that are truly in the best interest of wildlife, wilderness, and the greater public.”
The Arizona Game and Fish Department’s (AGFD) McPherson Tank Habitat Enhancement and Wildlife Management Proposal lists species to benefit as: bighorn sheep 90% and mule deer 10%. AGFD’s website also lists both the McPherson Tank and the Yaqui Tank in a table of “waters considered to be critical to bighorn sheep, based on their locations in sheep habitat and documentation of sheep use from waterhole counts, aerial surveys, and remote cameras.” The data, however, clearly fail to support the Department and Service’s claims.
“Bighorn avoidance of these tanks is part of a disturbing failure of Arizona Game and Fish and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to understand critical needs of bighorn on the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge," said ecologist Daniel Patterson, Southwest Director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Patterson is also an Arizona hunter.
“These waterholes were clearly constructed for desert mule deer as any wildlife biologist or hunter familiar with bighorn habitat would understand a priori,” stated retired Kofa biologist Ron Kearns. “McPherson Tank—especially—will artificially inflate mule deer populations that will likely compete for limited forage and finite freestanding water resources where their extensive home ranges overlap with the more restrictive ranges of Kofa bighorn. Importantly, this waterhole could help extend the home ranges and increase densities of mountain lions, while serving as a localized ‘prey trap’ for all predators.”
Congress designated the nearly 550,000-acre Kofa Wilderness in 1990. The Wilderness comprises more than 80 percent of the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 as the Kofa Game Range.
Following a decline in the desert bighorn sheep population in 2006, the US Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) issued a Categorical Exclusion (CE) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to construct the tanks. The agency provided no public notice of—or opportunity to comment on—the CE or the decision to construct the tanks. AGFD and the Yuma Valley Rod and Gun Club partnered with the USFWS in the building the tanks.
The conservation groups are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to find that construction of the tanks violated the Wilderness Act by harming the area’s wilderness character and violating the Act’s prohibition on structures, installations and the use of motor vehicles. The groups also allege the USFWS violated NEPA by failing to give public notice of, or prepare a public analysis of, the environmental impacts of building the two tanks. The lawsuit asks the court to reverse the district court’s decision, vacate the USFWS decision to build the water development structures, and order their removal by non-mechanized means.
Wilderness Watch obtained the camera data through two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The data included more than 650 photos taken at the McPherson Tank between October 2007 and July 2009 and more than 3,500 images taken at the Yaqui Tank from March through July 2009.
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Click here to view a few images taken at the tanks
Click here to read an article from the Arizona Daily Star
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Rod Nash, Author of Wilderness and the American Mind, Speaks in Hamilton September 19
NEWS RELEASE: August 26, 2009
Contact: Jeff Smith 542-2048, x1
Roderick Nash, Ph.D., author of Wilderness and the American Mind, will speak at the Civic Auditorium in Hamilton at 7 p.m. September 19. The title of his speech is “The Meaning of Wilderness and the Rights of Nature.”
Now in its fourth edition and 25th printing, Wilderness and the American Mind is Yale University Press’s all-time bestseller. MacMillian Publishing has called it the sixth most important book on the environment (Thoreau’s Walden is number five), and Outside Magazine named it one of the “Ten Books That Changed Our World.”
Nash’s book chronicles the 180-degree shift in America’s perceptions of nature, from the first settlers’ determination to “break the will” of all wildlands, to the first stirrings of appreciation of wilderness by mid-19th century landscape painters and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the great charismatic conservationists such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Bob Marshall, whose activism culminated in the Wilderness Act. After eight years of hearings and debate and 65 rewrites, Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964 with one dissenting vote in the House and only 12 in the Senate.
Nash puts the book in context this way, “We always thought of growth as synonymous with progress but maybe bigger is not better if it creates a civilization that is unsustainable.”
The author of nine other books and over 150 essays, Nash is now retired after 30 years as history professor and founder of the environmental studies program at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
He’s not your stereotypical academic but an outdoorsman and adventurer of considerable accomplishment: He’s a whitewater-rafted more than 40,000 river miles, including more than 50 runs through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River and numerous “first descents” on rivers in Alaska, California, and Peru. In his boat, “Forevergreen,” he’s explored the Pacific Coast from Mexico’s Sea of Cortez to Glacier Bay in Alaska. And he’s a life-long Powder Hound, who skis the highest reaches of the Colorado Rockies from his home in Crested Butte.
Wilderness and the American Mind is a classic and is routinely required reading in college courses throughout the country. Harvard biologist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward O. Wilson has said, “Americans in particular need this historical perspective to come to grips with their relation to nature and hence to the whole world.” Earth First! founder Dave Forman calls the book “a must-read for anyone who wants to understand wilderness” and “a peerless work and irreplaceable for everyone who cares for nature.”
Wilderness Watch, a national environmental organization located in Missoula, is celebrating the 45th anniversary of the signing of the Wilderness Act by sponsoring Nash’s talk. Wilderness Watch is America`s leading citizens` voice for protecting and ensuring the proper stewardship of our nation`s Wilderness and Wild Rivers. Its website is www.wildernesswatch.org
The success of the wilderness idea continued earlier this year when Congress passed the Omnibus Wilderness Bill. In 1964, the U.S. National Wilderness Preservation System started out with nine million acres and now numbers nearly 110 million acres. There are wilderness areas in all but six states, 756 in all, with 3.4 million acres in 15 Montana wilderness areas.
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Click here to view a poster with event details
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Wilderness Watch Files Legal Appeal to Protect Kofa Wilderness
Wilderness Watch
Arizona Wilderness Coalition
Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club
Grand Canyon Wildlands Council
Western Watersheds Project
NEWS RELEASE
For immediate Release: February 18, 2009
Contact:
George Nickas, Executive Director, Wilderness Watch, (406) 542-2048
Kevin Gaither-Banchoff, Executive Director, Arizona Wilderness Coalition, (520) 326-4300
Sandy Bahr, Chapter Director, Sierra Club – Grand Canyon Chapter (602) 253-8633
Conservation Groups Take Action to Protect Kofa Wilderness
Construction of artificial water tanks violates the Wilderness Act.
A coalition of local and national conservation groups, including Wilderness Watch, Arizona Wilderness Coalition, Grand Canyon Wildlands Council, Western Watersheds Project, and Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club, filed an appeal of the US District Court of Arizona’s ruling in favor of a US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) decision to construct water developments, called “guzzlers,” in the Kofa Wilderness. Conservation groups had filed a lawsuit in June of 2007 after learning that the USFWS had constructed a 13,000-gallon guzzler within the Kofa Wilderness and was planning to install another similar structure.
“Wilderness is a place where natural processes are allowed to operate without human interference, and where motor vehicles and permanent structures are banned,” stated George Nickas, Executive Director of Wilderness Watch. “Constructing artificial water developments in an attempt to artificially inflate bighorn sheep numbers is contrary to preserving the area as wilderness. In doing so, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has clearly violated the Wilderness Act.”
Congress designated the 516,000-acre Kofa Wilderness in 1990. The Wilderness comprises more than 80 percent of the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, which was established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 as the Kofa Game Range. The Refuge is home to such native wildlife as the desert tortoise, white-winged dove, mountain lion, mule deer, and desert bighorn sheep.
Following a decline in the desert bighorn population in 2006, the USFWS issued a Categorical Exclusion (CE) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to construct the guzzlers. The agency provided no public notice of–or opportunity to comment on–the CE or the decision to construct the guzzlers. Arizona Game and Fish and the Yuma Valley Rod and Gun Club partnered with the USFWS in the building the guzzlers. In 2008, the District Court in Phoenix ruled in favor of the USFWS. The court concluded that the USFWS appropriately balanced its refuge management goals with its responsibilities under the Wilderness Act. The ruling contrasts with other courts that have held the agency cannot compromise an area’s wilderness character when conducting its other refuge programs.
“Wilderness is a place for everyone to enjoy, including hunters,” said Kevin Gaither-Banchoff, Executive Director for the statewide-focused Arizona Wilderness Coalition. “But this decision ignores the letter and spirit of two historic environmental laws. The National Environmental Policy Act is meant to hold agencies accountable to the public for their actions, but this illogical ruling essentially says it’s okay to put our public resources into the hands of private interest groups.”
“The Kofa Wilderness is an amazing area with diverse species of plants and animals that thrive under the protection afforded by wilderness,” said Sandy Bahr of the Sierra Club. “The Wilderness Act gives these lands greater statutory and practical protection. The conclusion of the district court judge in this case–that the Refuge’s management guidelines trump the Wilderness Act–weakens those protections and undercuts this critical act.”
The conservation groups are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to find that the action of the USFWS violated the Wilderness Act in that:
1) The water developments fail to preserve the wilderness character of the Kofa Wilderness, as the artificial structures alter wildlife species distribution and the area’s natural hydrology
2) The water developments violate the Wilderness Act’s prohibition against structures, installations, and the use of motor vehicles; and
3) The USFWS violated NEPA by failing to give public notice of, or prepare a public analysis of, the environmental impacts of building the two water development structures.
The lawsuit asks the Court of Appeals to reverse the district court’s decision, vacate the USFWS’s decision to build the new water development structures, and order their removal by non-mechanized means.
The plaintiffs are represented by Peter M.K. Frost of Western Environmental Law Center, and Erik Ryberg, a Tucson, Arizona-based attorney.
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Read the District Court Decision
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