• Lawsuit Filed to Uncover Secret Talks on NW Forest Plan
  
• EPA Chief Signs 13 Final Air Toxics Rules
  
• Bush Unveils Initiative to Preserve America
  
• Website on Aging and Environment Debuts
  
• Chicago Man Guilty of Selling Tigers, Lions as Meat
  
• Diamond Film Enables Postage Stamp Size Bio-Sensors
  
• New Software Uses Satellite Data for Forest Rehab
  
  

Lawsuit Filed to Uncover Secret Talks on NW Forest

The groups say the lawsuit was filed because the federal government illegally withheld records of these negotiations after a request was filed last fall to obtain them. The refusal, the groups say, violated the Freedom of Information Act.

"Today's action is aimed at exposing the behind-the-scenes machinations of the federal government and the timber industry it is supposed to regulate," said Doug Heiken of the Oregon Natural Resources Council, one of the organizations behind the lawsuit. "We intend to bring the real story out into the open for all to see, and hopefully bring an end to this subversion of our democracy."

The records sought relate to government negotiations with the timber industry on ways to weaken the Northwest Forest Plan, the plan enacted by President Bill Clinton in an attempt to settle the Northwest timber wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Northwest Forest Plan requires that the needs of species must be met before the remaining old-growth can be logged.

"Bush administration officials have been engaged in intensive, closed door negotiations with the timber industry over how to gut the Northwest Forest Plan," Earthjustice said Monday. "Out of these negotiations have emerged settlements of several industry lawsuits as well as more comprehensive proposals to eliminate some of the Plan’s most fundamental environmental safeguards."

The timber industry and government officials have announced deals to settle industry lawsuits aimed at stripping federal protections from the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet, two Pacific Northwest bird species that depend upon old-growth forests to survive.

“The Bush administration has honed the art of hiding behind court settlements as a way of turning back the clock on environmental protections,” said attorney Patti Goldman of Earthjustice. “In the guise of settling lawsuits, federal officials have retired to the back room to work out deals that sacrifice our old-growth forests, salmon, and clean water for the sake of increasing clearcutting our public lands.”

Court settlements have weakened the “survey and manage” provisions for protecting old-growth dependent species, Earthjustice says, as well as proposals to weaken salmon protections, known as the aquatic conservation strategy. The Bush administration wants to make the salmon protections optional.

EPA Chief Signs 13 Final Air Toxics Rules

The 13 standards that have been signed will also reduce some 6,000 tons of other air pollutants, EPA officials say, including particulate matter and ozone forming volatile organic compounds.

The final rules apply to the following industries: asphalt processing and asphalt roofing manufacturing, brick and structural clay products manufacturing; coke oven batteries; engine test cells/stands; fabric and other textile coating, printing, and dyeing; flexible polyurethane foam fabrication operations; hydrochloric acid production; integrated iron and steel manufacturing; surface coating of metal furniture; reinforced plastics manufacturing; refractories manufacturing, semiconductor production; and surface coating of wood building products.

With this action EPA has issued final rules to control air toxics emissions from 123 of the 169 categories of industries listed for control in the Clean Air Act.

Bush Unveils Initiative to Preserve America

The executive order jumpstarted a new White House initiative called Preserve America that aims to provide states and local governments and communities with greater support to protect and restore national cultural and natural resources.

The initiative, which will be led by the Departments of Interior and Commerce and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, was announced Monday in a speech by First Lady Laura Bush.

"Our nation's cultural and natural resources are important parts of our heritage," the First Lady said. "Preserve America will promote historic and cultural preservation and encourage greater public appreciation of our national treasures.

The initiative aims to help advance the protection, enhancement and contemporary use of the historic properties owned by the federal government, while promoting intergovernmental cooperation and partnerships for the preservation and use of historic properties, administration officials said.

It will support community efforts to restore cultural resources for heritage tourism, which the administration believes will create jobs and increase property values and tax revenue.

"I commend the President for urging federal agencies to do everything they can to preserve and properly maintain the thousands of historic properties under their control," said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. "Too often, the federal government has not been the best steward of these properties. This new executive order is designed to correct that."

Website on Aging and Environment Debuts

EPA Administrator Christie Whitman said the new site is part of the administration's ongoing effort to address the issue and to develop a national agenda on the environment and aging.

"For this administration, promoting the continued well being of older Americans is an important priority," said Whitman. "To further protect the health of older Americans, EPA has launched an aging initiative that will study and prioritize environmental health risks to our nation's growing elderly population."

The website, http://www.epa.gov/aging, will serve as a central location for information and events on EPA's initiative, Whitman said.

"As we age, our bodies are more susceptible to hazards from the environment, which may cause or worsen chronic or life threatening conditions. In addition, older persons have accumulated a lifetime of environmental and occupational contaminants which are capable of remaining in the body – such as lead, mercury, and PCBs," Whitman says on the site.

The website includes information about six public listening sessions being held in Florida, Texas, Iowa, Pennsylvania, California and Maryland beginning in early April 2003 to discuss the issue of aging and the environment.

The site offers opportunities for public comment electronically or by mail. Administration officials say these comments will be central to further development of its agenda for the issue.

Chicago Man Guilty of Selling Tigers, Lions as Meat

Richard Czimer, president and operator of Czimer's Game and Seafoods, Inc. in Lockport, pleaded guilty to purchasing the meat of a federally protected black spotted leopard (Panthera pardus) in August 1997.

Czimer entered his plea before Judge Blanche Manning at the U.S. District Court in Chicago. Czimer admitted that between August 1997 and October 31, 1998, he also purchased the carcasses of 16 federally protected tigers, four lions, two mountain lions and one liger - a tiger-lion hybrid.

The animals were then skinned, butchered and sold as "lion meat" at Czimer's Meat and Seafood, realizing a profit of more than $38,000. Czimer said he purchased the carcasses from co-defendants William Kapp of Tinley Park, Illinois, Steven Galecki of Crete, Illinois, and Kevin Ramsey formerly of Oak Forest, Illinois, and now living in Wisconsin

Czimer is scheduled to be sentenced June 27, 2003. As part of his guilty plea, Czimer has agreed to pay $116,000 in restitution to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation's Save the Tiger Fund.

Czimer was among seven men indicted in Chicago in May 2002 on numerous wildlife protection and trafficking charges. A total of 17 individuals and one business in eight states were charged as a result of a lengthy investigation by special agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service into the trafficking of exotic animals.

Service investigators, working closely with U.S. Attorney's Offices in Illinois, Missouri and Michigan uncovered a group of residents and small business owners in the Midwest that allegedly bought and killed exotic tigers, leopards, snow leopards, lions, mountain lions, cougars, mixed breed cats and black bears with the intention of introducing meat and skins into the lucrative animal parts trade.

Tigers are listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act. The law also protects leopards, which are classified as either endangered or threatened depending on the location of the wild population. Although federal regulations allow possession of tigers bred in captivity, the regulations stipulate activities involving their use must be to enhance the propagation or survival of the species. It is unlawful to kill the animals for profit, or to sell their hides, parts or meats into interstate commerce.

Diamond Film Enables Postage Stamp Size Bio-Sensors

The new technology is the brainchild of Robert Hamers, a professor of chemistry at UW-Madison. Hamers worked in collaboration with fellow UW-Madison chemistry professor Lloyd Smith to develop the chemistry for the new diamond surfaces, and with Dan van der Weide, a UW-Madison professor of electrical and computer engineering, to achieve the electronic sensing.

Such sensors, according to Hamers, would be about the size of a postage stamp and could be sprinkled in public places such as airports, bus depots, subways, stadiums and other places where large numbers of people gather. They could act, he says, like a "bio cell phone, where they just sit in place and sniff, and when they detect something of interest, send a signal" to alert security or sound an alarm.

The new technology, which has been reported in a series of articles in scientific journals and at scientific meetings, is centered on a newfound ability to make highly stable, DNA modified diamond films. The ability to build a stable platform that can "constantly sniff" for anything unusual - and that can be integrated with microelectronic devices - has long been a problem of surface chemistry.

"The real advance is getting the needed chemical stability and then combining that with electronic sensing," says "Although there have been many advances in bio-chip technologies, getting a stable platform that can be used for continuous monitoring - not just one-shot analysis - has been a long-standing problem," Hamers says. "And diamond solves it."

Because diamond films can be deposited on silicon, the stuff of which computer chips and other microelectronic devices are made, it provides a bridge between the world of miniature electronics and biology, which requires a chemically stable platform for biosensing.

"This is where we are going and we are almost there. The science is there. We've proven we can make surfaces that are much more stable than anything that existed before," Hamers says. "And we've proven that we can detect the electrical response when biomolecules bind to the diamond surface."

Other materials such as gold, glass and glassy carbon proved either unstable or difficult to integrate with silicon.

Hamers acknowledges that before the new biosensors become practical, significant engineering for packaging and fluid-handling systems for sample introduction must be completed. But while some work remains, he says, "the hardest part appears to be over."

In the past, scientists tried in vain to develop surfaces with long-term stability for use as biosensors. But silicon, the material upon which computer-chip technology rests, tended to defy efforts to harness it as a stable surface for sensing biological molecules.

"A widely recognized problem was that silicon oxide proved not to be a good material to do sensing on," says Hamers. "In the case of silicon, the best available technology did not permit leaving a surface in contact with water for any period of time. It eventually degrades. That was an obstacle to the merging of the microelectronic and biotechnology communities."

New Software Uses Satellite Data for Forest Rehab

The new tool, to be presented in New Orleans on Thursday at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, modifies a computer model developed originally by the U.S. Agricultural Research Service that is used to assess soil erosion in agricultural areas.

"Last year's devastating forest fire season has prompted forest, wildlife and watershed managers to call for better ways of rapidly assessing how fires have impacted soil erosion and sediment delivery in streams," said Chris Renschler, Ph.D., assistant professor of geography in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.

"Right after a fire, landslides, avalanches and mud flows are not uncommon," he explained, "because the upper layer of the soil may become water-repellant and is most vulnerable to being washed away by increased runoff from rainfall or snow melt."

This surface runoff, he added, can be anywhere from 10 to 100 times greater than in an undisturbed forest, potentially threatening camp and recreation sites, residential areas and drinking water sources.

"Ideally, in order to reduce this risk, watershed managers need to quickly plan and implement soil and water conservation measures," Renschler said. "But determining which areas are most vulnerable to damage has been a tedious and labor intensive process."

Typically, Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation teams are dispatched into the field to determine the distribution of burned areas and to evaluate watersheds at risk. These Forest Service personnel then return to their offices to combine these field observations with satellite and aerial imagery, soil maps, topographic data and climate information to estimate the erosion potential.

Renschler's tool, called GeoWEPP (Geo-spatial interface for the Water Erosion Prediction Project), can condense this process into a couple of steps, all done at the computer, with a minimum of additional fieldwork.

It takes advantage of GIS data, topographic data, soil and land cover, and remote sensing data gathered by satellite available on the Internet from federal government websites.

"GeoWEPP estimates the runoff and erosion processes that have occurred or may occur in the years following the fire as a result of the fire and any mitigation measures," explained Renschler.

"It allows forest personnel to complete quickly the initial assessments on the computer, identifying the areas that are most likely to be vulnerable to erosion," said William Elliot, Ph.D., project leader for soil and water engineering with the U.S. Forest Service at the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Moscow, Idaho, which is funding Renschler's work. Elliot is collaborating with Renschler to customize and test GeoWEPP.

"With GeoWEPP, we have created a user friendly interface for natural resource managers to take full advantage of GIS capabilities and data now available on the Web," said Renschler. "The challenge was to make complicated computer models and analysis tools more usable both by managers and even members of the public."

GeoWEPP can be downloaded from Renschler's website.