Land and Water Conservation Fund
Great piece from New Mexico resident Dave Cox, focusing on the role the LWCF plays for anglers, hunters and all who love public lands, in the Santa Fe New Mexican – Reader View: Let’s Save New Mexico’s Public Lands.
More on the LWCF from the Seattle Times editorial Board – Bipartisan Conservation Fund Succumbs to Needless Partisanship. Makes us wonder if it’s not way past time for Utah to reign in their one man conservation wrecking crew – US Rep Rob Bishop.
Saving Blue Creek (CA)
SAVE BLUE CREEK from Western Rivers Conservancy on Vimeo.
The Western Rivers Conservancy (WRC) has cranked up a new fundraising effort to save Blue Creek, a vital cold water trib to the Klamath in California.
Their program actually started back in 2008 with a goal to purchase 47,000 acres to protect and manage the river; they need $5 million to finish with the final 10,000 acres.
Read more here on their Indiegogo site.
A Note from America’s Waterkeepers (Subtitle: Choo Choo Boom)
One of our favorite waterkeepers in the game, Buck Ryan of the Snake River Waterkeeper, cued us in to a study that’s just been released by a national network of Waterkeeper organizations looking at the shameful state of the nation’s rail infrastructure and the threat imposed to the nation’s waterways.
We’re hoping to dig deeper into the report and get a Waterkeeper’s viewpoint on the Snake River dam issue with Buck in the next few weeks.
Read the full rail report here.
Deadbeat Dams, the New Mexico Edition
Dan Beard, author of Deadbeat Dams, will be speaking Saturday in Silver City on Saturday (WNMU Global Resource Center, 7 PM) covering the larger topic of deadbeat dams with a focus on the absurd Gila Diversion Project –
Some water projects are absurd and defy common sense. Take the Gila River Project in New Mexico, for example. You have uninformed local politicians running around trying to figure out how to build a billion dollar water project with $120 million slush fund.
It was an absurd idea cooked up by a few politicians in the 1950s to exact a price out of Arizona politicians over the debates to authorize the Central Arizona Project.
After 50 years of trying, we still don’t what will be built, where and whether it will work. To add insult to injury, it would destroy one of the last free-flowing streams in the Southwest, and would be an overall environmental disaster.
More at link.
