#Natural resource management

[bones-n-bookles]

Exploring Stone Walls: a Field Guide to New England's Stone Walls, by Robert M. Thorson, 2005

Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources, M. Kat Anderson, 2005

[gubgam]

: ) I hate when this happens I hate when this happens

[nerdyqueer11]

Cw/tw: Possible misogyny in academia

I'm in undergrad in the natural resource management dept . Today I attended a seminar two grad students were presenting their research projects at. I had the time and the seminar was held in the same room as my next class. I was truly interested in their topics which is why I attended in the first place (using goats to control invasive Eastern Red Cedar and the effects of fluctuating water levels on fish is nearby rivers).

The seminars are open to the public and NRM students get an email about them anyway.

I'm sitting in my usual spot for my next class when this guy sits next to me. A few minutes later he asks if I'm in the same department because he doesn't recognize me. I explain I'm in undergrad in this dept and why I wanted to attend. After the presentations he turns to me and asks if I understood what the grad students were talking about and if so how much.

I'm not sure if he meant well or not but it was still irritating. I don't know why he felt the need to ask why I was there or if I understood.

[ifindtaxpro]

Maximize profits and promote sustainability in forestry operations with smart tax strategies! From optimizing timber sales to leveraging sustainable forestry credits, forestry companies can navigate tax complexities while preserving natural resources. #Forestry #TaxImplications #SustainableForestry

[reportwire]

Nevada toad in geothermal power fight gets endangered status

Nevada toad in geothermal power fight gets endangered status

RENO, Nev. — A tiny Nevada toad at the center of a legal battle over a geothermal power project has officially been declared an endangered species, after U.S. wildlife officials temporarily listed it on a rarely used emergency basis last spring. “This ruling makes final the listing of the Dixie Valley toad, ” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a formal rule published Friday in the Federal…

[annieboltonworld]

Carbon and Water Interaction Model in Tropical Peatland

Abstract

As the water issue relates the carbon issue in peatland, carbon and water interrelation has been studying for long term (more than 10 years) in peatland of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. The Soil Moisture Content (SMC) and Ground Water Table (GWT) in long term have been monitoring by auto-monitoring system called SESAME, developed by our team, and Net Ecosystem Exchange (NEE) has been measured by Eddy Covariance on the tower. By these long-term monitoring, it is found that

a) positive correlation with SMC and GWT,  

b) negative correlation with NEE and GWT.  

On the other hand, as global soil moisture data has been provided daily from European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), we developed mapping model on GWT and NEE, applying correlation coefficient of SMC-GWT and NEE-GWT. The NEE mapping in peatland corresponds with Tier 2 and 3 level of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guideline.

Read More about this Article: https://juniperpublishers.com/ijesnr/IJESNR.MS.ID.556099.php

Read More Juniper Publishers Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=4WXzQFMAAAAJ&cstart=20&pagesize=80&citation_for_view=4WXzQFMAAAAJ:_B80troHkn4C

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling Friday that overturned the landmark “Chevron doctrine” may give Wyoming an advantage when mounting court challenges for and against federal regulations and actions on issues ranging from wildlife and land management to energy development and industrial emissions.

Gov. Mark Gordon and Wyoming’s congressional delegation have hailed the ruling as a clear legal advantage in fighting federal agency actions they don’t like. But the ruling doesn’t necessarily hand Wyoming — or anybody else who sues federal agencies — a clear path to victory in court, according to several Wyoming and out-of-state observers.

Wyoming has much at stake. 48% of the land and 68% of the mineral estate are managed by the federal government and the Equality State has many active grievances against federal agencies now active in the courts. Since 2019, Gordon’s administration has initiated or participated in at least 57 lawsuits either challenging federal natural resources policies, or defending federal positions from litigation brought by public health and conservation groups, according to a list of lawsuits his office provided to WyoFile.

THE CHEVRON DOCTRINE

The Chevron doctrine, established by a 1984 Supreme Court ruling, instructed lower courts to defer to the expertise within agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in their interpretation of carrying out laws passed by Congress. Those laws — like the Endangered Species Act and Clean Air Act — frequently do not reach into the weeds on scientific matters such as what qualifies as critical habitat or measuring ambient air quality, for example.

Under Chevron, deference to federal agencies’ interpretation wasn’t automatic, but applied when an agency attempted to reasonably interpret an ambiguous statute.

Now that the doctrine is overturned, courts may make their own interpretation of congressional intent. But that still won’t erase decades of case law, or statutory precedent, much of which is based on those agencies’ past interpretations and court actions, observers say.

“I think [courts are] going to struggle with it because they don’t have subject-matter expertise in these very intricate, technical aspects of the everyday life of an agency,” Sheridan-based landowner advocacy group Powder River Basin Resource Council Attorney Shannon Anderson said.

POLITICAL REACTION

Gordon, however, hailed what he described as a “victory for common-sense regulatory reform.”

“For years, unelected bureaucrats running federal agencies in Washington D.C. have used [Chevron] ‘deference’ as an excuse to target certain industries based on politics,” Gordon said in a prepared statement Friday. “Wyoming has experienced that firsthand. Limiting their power to overreach is cause for celebration, and this ruling begins that process.”

While not a party to the suit, Wyoming filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which was the basis for overturning the Chevron doctrine. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) and Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyoming) also signed on to another amicus brief in the case.

“I applaud the Supreme Court’s decision to restore decision-making power back to democratically-elected members of Congress just as our Founding Fathers intended rather than allowing D.C. bureaucrats to rule with an iron fist,” Lummis said in a prepared statement.

“Today’s Supreme Court ruling is a major victory for getting Washington out of Wyoming,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) said in a prepared statement. “For too long unelected, unaccountable Washington bureaucrats have gone unchecked.”

Other parties who’ve tracked efforts to overturn the Supreme Court’s 40-year-old precedent aren’t so sure that it’s a clear-cut victory for industry-aligned conservative western states like Wyoming that often rail against federal regulation.

A SMALLER VICTORY?

“I don’t think there’s been a lot of really deep thinking on their side about what [the loss of Chevron] actually means,” said Brett Hartl, an attorney who heads government relations for the Center for Biological Diversity. “They almost were captured by their own ideological premise more than factual reality.”

It’s possible, he said, that the court’s decision will ultimately have the effect of strengthening some environmental laws, though it could be “many years” before the true consequences are made clear.

“Some laws — like the Endangered Species Act — are actually very clear and very strong and have a very obvious meaning,” Hartl said. “Myself … and other organizations would actually argue that, if anything, the Fish and Wildlife Service has interpreted the [Endangered Species Act] weaker than what the law actually requires.”

As courts, instead of federal agencies, take more of a role interpreting environmental statutes, the strengths of the laws themselves may become more important, he said. To illustrate the point, Hartl compared the National Forest Management Act with the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. The former, which is considered a stronger law, governs U.S. Forest Service lands while the latter, perceived as weaker, has bearing on Bureau of Land Management property.

“So the loss of Chevron may make it easier to have protections for Forest Service lands than BLM lands,” Hartl said.

NO IMMEDIATE EFFECTS

Dessa Reimer, a Jackson-based attorney with Holland and Hart, does not foresee “immediate” on-the-ground changes in Wyoming stemming from the high court’s decision. The Chevron standard of review, she pointed out, does not necessarily implicate most federal agency permitting and decision making.

“For example, the Converse County Oil and Gas Project or Chokecherry Wind or the BLM’s Rock Springs RMP: Those aren’t notice-and-comment rulemaking, so when someone challenges those types of agency decisions, Chevron deference was not applied,” she said.

The immediate effect, Reimer believes, relates to how courts review agency rulemaking. “And there has been a slew of agency rulemaking under the Biden Administration coming out this year that’s already been challenged,” she said.

The BLM’s Public Lands Rule is one example. The measure, which puts land conservation on even footing with other land uses, has been targeted by Wyoming and Utah in a legal challenge.

Typically, federal agency rules and actions swing wildly between Democratic and Republican administrations: The EPA’s stance on regional haze and the BLM’s direction on federal coal leasing in the Powder River Basin are prime examples. But within the Supreme Court’s new ruling overturning the Chevron doctrine is the notion that courts might equalize those wild administrative swings in policy direction, according to University of Wyoming College of Law Professor Sam Kalen.

“What SCOTUS did say is, where there has been what’s called statutory precedent that had a court already affirming an interpretation, under a deference standard or not, the court said, ‘We’ll still likely give that stare decisis precedent,'” Kalen told WyoFile. “So it doesn’t automatically mean that all those old cases justify revisiting.”

A lot of litigants will try, however.

“I guarantee you that litigants are going to try to revisit a lot of cases now,” Kalen said. “The way I look at it is as a threat to the administrative state.”

[zvaigzdelasas]

Step 1 to learning anything at all is being willing & capable of messing up without that preventing you from trying again (& potentially messing up again!). You can't get good at anything without starting out bad at it

[geektrashfan]

Poring over my tomes (books and papers on my research topic) to acquire new spells (improve my methodology) so I can perform impressive feats of magic (collect and interpret data). Being a wizard (grad student) is hard work.

[wisdomfish]

The study of nature holds great benefit for mankind (medical, technological, and economical as well as spiritual), and humanity as the crown of creation has a divine imperative to manage the planet’s living and nonliving resources

Samples, Kenneth Richard. ‘Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions.; p. 193

[swmngpools]

yeah so anyway wolves in minnesota are federally protected under the endangered species act and you are only allowed to shoot them in self defense, and if they kill pets or livestock (or people ig) you need enough evidence to prove in court that a wolf did it for that wolf to be killed, you can’t just shoot a pack of wolves because you think a wolf killed someone. so yes tom culpeper of the wolves of mercy falls series by maggie steifvater would go to federal prison for killing wolves without sufficient evidence

[canisvesperus]

Guys… the Eridan keychains are coming.

I will post preorder information within the next few weeks.

[reportwire]

Worker admits dumping raw waste into Jackson water system

Worker admits dumping raw waste into Jackson water system

JACKSON, Miss — An employee of a Mississippi wastewater hauling company pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday for his part in illegally discharging industrial waste into the capital city’s sewer system. William Roberts, an employee of Partridge-Sibley Industrial Services, admitted to supervising the improper disposal of industrial waste at a commercial entity in Jackson. As a result of…

[itsagrimm]

"and then he drank the water from the river / sink in the abandoned house / rain water ..."

listen, i know it's just fanfics. but I keep reading this in fan works and worry that some might actually think it's safe to drink water from questionable sources.

Should you ever be in an outdoor situation where you don't have your usual water access - don't drink water from whatever-seems-fine-source. It can make you really sick. Please rely on locally approved sources of water or filter / test yourself before slurping down liquid cholera.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider overturning a nearly 40-year precedent by taking up a challenge to a regulation affecting fishing vessels in a case that is the latest conservative-led attack on federal bureaucracy.

The court will weigh whether to overturn a much-cited 1984 ruling, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which said courts should defer to federal agencies in interpreting the law when the language of a statute is ambiguous.

Attempts to overturn the ruling, which the court has rarely invoked in recent years, is just one avenue of attack by conservative groups and business interests as part of what has been dubbed “the war on the administrative state.”

"The Supreme Court has an opportunity to correct one of the most consequential judicial errors in a generation," said Ryan Mulvey, a lawyer at the Cause of Action Institute, a conservative group that represents the challengers. The Chevron ruling "has proven corrosive to the American system of checks and balances and directly contributed to an unaccountable executive branch."

The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, is skeptical of broad assertions of federal agency power.

The case itself is a challenge to a government regulation that requires fishing vessels to help fund the collection of scientific data to assist with fishery conservation and management. The court could still rule in favor of the challengers by limiting the scope of the Chevron decision without overturning it entirely.

The court took up an appeal brought by Loper Bright Enterprises and several other operators of fishing vessels that are active in the herring fishery off the Atlantic coast, which challenged the 2020 rule applying to New England fisheries.

The challengers say the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal body that oversees ocean resources, did not have authority to issue the regulation under the relevant law, the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

The rule implements a monitoring program that vessel operators are required to fund. As the challengers put it, operators have to pay up to $710 a day at certain times for independent observers to board their vessels and monitor their operations. The cost is a significant burden on small owner-operators, the challengers say.

The case, backed by conservative groups, is the latest attempt to undermine the power of federal agencies. Lawyers for the fishing vessel operators say a lower court that upheld the rule gave too much deference to the federal agency in interpreting the 1976 law.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected the vessel operators' claims in a decision in August, upholding a similar ruling a federal district judge issued the previous year.

The brief Supreme Court order noted that liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is not participating in the case. She was originally part of the appeals court panel that decided the case before President Joe Biden appointed her to the high court. She heard oral arguments but was not involved in the ruling itself.