States will be able to count inmates separately from localities, often rural, affecting redistricting

The Census Bureau will give states the option of not counting prison inmates where they are incarcerated, which is disproportionately in rural areas. Inmates are usually counted with the rest of the locality that contains the prison, but in May 2011 the bureau will "identify exactly where group quarters like prisons are and how many people occupy them," Sam Roberts of The New York Times reports. The decision could reduce state legislative representation of predominantly rural districts.

"This removes a technical problem," Peter Wagner, executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative, an advocacy group that favors alternatives to prison sentences and urges that inmates be counted in their hometowns, told Roberts. "The census is going to say where the prisons are and how many people are in them, which will enable states the practical choice of counting them in the wrong place or not counting them at all." He added, "About 100 rural governments currently remove the prison populations manually, but this difficult and error-prone process was impossible to do on a state level. For the first time, state and local governments will have access to prison population counts in time for redistricting."

Florida, Illinois, Maryland, New York, Wisconsin and perhaps other states are "weighing legislation requiring that prisoners be counted at their last known address . . . a change that would likely favor larger and mostly Democratic cities," Roberts reports. One extreme example of prison populations skewing legislative districts is in Anamosa, Iowa, where the three council districts have the same population, but one has all but 58 of its 1,400 residents living in a prison. (Read more)

EPA sets up program for public to play watchdog on natural-gas drilling in Marcellus Shale

The Environmental Protection Agency has launched a citizens' watchdog program to track water pollution and waste disposal related to natural gas production from the Marcellus Shale (which underlies the area shown on map). The program, Eyes on Drilling, "encourages people to report suspicious activity related to federal officials through a toll-free hotline," Tom Wilber of the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin reports.

EPA wants information including location, time and date of problems; materials, equipment and vehicles involved; and observable environmental impacts. The agency lacks direct oversight of drilling, which is handled by states, but does have authority over waste disposal and water pollution, of increased concern because of the hydraulic and chemical fracturing used to break up the deeply buried shale and release its gas.

"EPA wants to get a better understanding of what people are experiencing and observing as a result of these drilling activities. The information collected may also be useful in investigating industry practices," David Sternberg, a spokesman for EPA Region 3, which will run the program, told Wilber. The hotline will also take complaints from residents and forward them to appropriate officials for follow-up. More information about the program is available from its Web site or the toll-free hotline at 877-919-4372. (Read more)

Dodge City reporter ignores subpoena to testify, loses support of newspaper

A Kansas reporter, subpoenaed to testify about a confidential source, has been held in contempt for not appearing in court Wednesday. Clair O'Brien of the Dodge City Daily Globe will be fined $1,000 per day until she appears in court, James Carlson of The Topeka Capital-Journal reports. O'Brien told Carlson that attorneys for GateHouse Media, which owns the Globe, wouldn't pay for her legal representation unless she answered the prosecutor's questions under oath, and have disrupted her attempts to seek help from a national journalism group. The newspaper and O'Brien had tried and failed to get the subpoena quashed.

GateHouse told Carlson it hadn't decided whether to provide legal counsel for O'Brien to continue fighting the subpoena and denies it has blocked her from seeking outside counsel. The company did have an attorney in court Wednesday, but told Carlson that O'Brien has "taken steps to separate herself from the company, including firing her personal attorney paid for by GateHouse." (Read our previous reports on the subject here and here)


"What she did was really stick a thumb in the judge's eye today," Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, who has been speaking with O'Brien for more than a week, told Carlson. "Even if you're not going to answer questions, you still have to go to court." An editor with the Globe and the Kansas Press Association also expressed disapproval. "I feel like I'm being battered by forces more powerful than I," O'Brien told Carlson. "I don't feel that I have the right to make my own choices." (Read more)

Chair of rural school board wins sexual harassment case against road construction firm

Sandra Crouch has spent the last 22 years as a member of the Board of Education in Bath County, Kentucky (Wikipedia map). In January she was re-elected chairman. It is part of her official duties to make sure no one under the board's jurisdiction is harassed, sexually or in any other manner, and that no one is made to work or study in a hostile environment, reports Appalachian author Betty Dotson-Lewis.

"Never in a million years did Sandy imagine she would be the one on the receiving end of those actions -- subjected to sexual harassment while attempting to perform her duties on the job in a hostile environment," Lewis writes. But Crouch filed a lawsuit, and won it a few weeks ago. "Not only is it unusual for a woman to win a unanimous jury verdict of this size, there is something else remarkable about this case: It’s even more unusual for a female chairman of a county school board to win a sexual harassment case while pursuing her day job in a nontraditional field, road construction." Lewis's story is here.

Urban schools could learn from rural counterparts

While rural schools are often shortchanged by current federal education policies, they "routinely use practices that could be useful to boosting student performance in their urban and suburban counterparts," says a new report from the Alliance for Excellent Education. One third of the nation’s high schools are rural, and one in five children attends a rural school, the report says. That finding was part of the report's examination of "Current Challenges and Opportunities in Preparing Rural High School Students for Success in College and Careers: What Federal Policymakers Need to Know."(Fact Sheet)

The alliance describes itself as "national policy and advocacy organization that works to make every child a high school graduate - to prepare them for college, work, and to be contributing members of society." The report explains at-risk students in rural schools are less likely to be overlooked and "successful rural high schools have utilized online courses and other distance learning to expand advanced learning opportunities for their students."

"America’s rural high schools offer solutions, but they also face challenges," Bob Wise, president of the alliance and former governor of West Virginia, said in a news release. "Most of the recent debate on high school reform at the federal level has not involved rural schools, but when one out of every four rural students fails to graduate from high school, it’s not just a ‘local’ issue, it’s a national crisis. No longer can our nation write off large numbers of children, whether by race or by geography, and still meet the steadily growing skill demands of the 21st century." (Read more, from Maureen Downey's blog post for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.)

Case against tomato company is harbinger of feds' new focus on illegal practices in agriculture, food

A possible tomato monopoly is the latest target in the federal government's increased scrutiny of the food sector. Federal prosecutors in Sacramento allege that SK Foods of Monterey, Calif., used more than $330,000 in bribes from 1998 to 2008 to subvert competition and nail down deals to sell the company's tomato paste, peppers and other products, P.J. Huffstutter of the Los Angeles Times reports. The investigation comes on the heels of federal looks into dairy distributors, egg producers, citrus firms and seed developers.

"Behind the push are growing concerns that, as the industry becomes increasingly consolidated, the public's grocery bills are getting bigger in part from corrupt or monopolistic practices among food processors, distributors or farmers," Huffstutter writes. Next month the Justice Department and the Department of Agriculture will hold meetings about lack of competition in the dairy, grain, livestock and poultry sectors. Christine Varney, who leads the administration's antitrust team, promised during her confirmation hearings that agriculture would be a focus.

"Nearly 95 percent of all tomatoes grown in the U.S. are processed by four companies in California," Huffstutter reports. Justice Department investigators say what they uncovered at SK Foods during a 20007 investigation of the California tomato industry was "a scheme designed to trick food makers into buying a lesser-quality tomato paste (which had been mislabeled to appear of a higher grade) and then shut out rivals on deals with big processors and supermarket chains," Huffsutter writes. (Read more)

Pa. to increase natural-gas drilling inspection staff

In December we cited a ProPublica report detailing how states were lagging in regulation of increased natural gas drilling. Now one of the states at the center of the boom is moving to catch up. Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell has "announced that the Department of Environmental Protection will nearly double its enforcement staff, open a new office closer to the drilling action and release new drilling regulations of its own," reports Sabrina Shankman of ProPublica, which has been bird-dogging the issue of hydraulic and chemical fracturing of gas reserves.

In 2008 Pennsylvania had just 35 people to oversee 74,774 wells, Shankman reports, but that number increased to 76 in 2009 as the industry grew. Rendell plans to add 68 more people to the Bureau of Oil and Gas Management, Shankman reports, and will pay for the expansion with revenue from drilling permit fees, which it raised last year for the first time since 1984. Rendell also proposed a severance tax on gas in his 2010-11 budget.

Forty-five of the new hires will be on the oil and gas enforcement staff, bringing the state's total to 121. Conversely, Texas, the nation's largest drilling state, "had an enforcement staff of 106 to oversee 263,704 wells, of which 16,569 were new and required the most oversight," Shankman writes. (Read more)

Virginia county says no to wind farm on mountain

A southwest Virginia county has become the latest example of local governments regulating against wind power. The Tazewell County Board of Supervisors voted 3 to 2 to approve "approved an ordinance that prevents wind farm construction on specified locations," Jessica Lilly of West Virginia Public Broadcasting reports. Wind industry supporters told Lilly the decision was the latest example of the "anti-wind agenda" gaining steam.

The conflict centers on a proposed wind farm on East River Mountain, southwest of Bluefield, Va. and W. Va. Dominion Resources and BP Wind Energy announced the $200 million project in January 2009, but several locals spoke out against the project, including friends of a nearby airport, Lilly writes. A representative of the Mercer County Airport, just north of Bluefield, W.Va., said planes using the southwest approach would have to fly higher before dropping sharply to land at the airport. The southwest approach to the airport is used only 10 percent of the time, Lilly reports.

Wind-industry spokesman Frank Maisano told Lilly the decision would be bad for the future of the region: "It’s kind of disturbing to have the very active political anti-wind folks gathering steam and promoting their approach undercutting a message that is good for rural communities." (Read more)

Here's a Google map of the area, with the airport marked. East River Mountain is the largest ridge, in the bottom third of the satellite photo.

Cap-and-trade is all but dead for 2010, but some climate legislation could be part of an energy bill

Cap-and-trade legislation to limit climate change is all but dead for the year, but some climate measures could still pass as part of an energy bill, says the editorial board of The Washington Post. "It fell victim to Senate gridlock, yawning gaps between lawmakers over how and even whether to tackle the issue and President Obama's decision last year to place it third on his list of priorities, after the stimulus and health care," the Post writes. Even the president seemed to admit temporary defeat last week by citing speculation that the Senate might pass a modest bill without cap-and-trade.

"A version of such a scaled-down energy bill passed the Senate Energy Committee last year, and it contains some worthwhile provisions, such as updating building codes and the electricity grid," the Post writes. "It is also incomplete, lacking both much in the way of revenue to pay for its programs and any economy-wide emissions limit." The Waxman-Markey climate bill, which includes cap-and-trade and passed the House in the fall, is "marred by giving away far too many valuable pollution permits to politically favored groups, a scheme of which many senators are rightly skeptical," the Post says.


Despite the dim future of cap-and-trade, the Post explains there are options for legislation that meets somewhere in the middle. The editorial board points to a proposal from Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington and Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine called the CLEAR Act that would "cap the amount of carbon the United States produces and sell pollution permits to those who produce or import dirty fuels" as one option. The senators say 80 percent of Americans would break even under their plan which would raise costs, but would reroute 75 percent of the permit auction revenue back to the public. (Read more)

Next wave of 'clean coal' ads to focus on jobs; how much have the ads influenced public policy?

The next wave of the advertising campaign designed to push "clean coal" technologies is scheduled to start this week, as some evidence suggests the success of previous installments, Anne C. Mulkern of Greenwire reports for The New York Times: "Top policymakers, including President Obama, are echoing a key message from the ads, that technology in the future could reduce coal's carbon pollution and keep coal a part of the energy mix." The new ads focus on the job opportunities from coal and mention previous environmental arguments.

Last week Obama "created a task force charged with advancing five to 10 commercial demonstrations of carbon-capture-and-sequestration technology by 2016," Mulkern writes. Some credit for clean-coal technology's improved prospects could be attributed to promising early reports from a pilot project at an American Electric Power plant in West Virginia. Nevertheless, "There's a reason companies do these campaigns," Kenneth Green, resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told Mulkern. "It's because they tend to work."

However, Josh Dorner, spokesman for the Sierra Club, voiced skepticism about the ads' effect. "The coal industry has a stranglehold over the U.S. Congress more than anything that would be reasonable. Whether that's because of a $120 million in advertising spending," in addition to spending on lobbying, he added, "remains to be seen." (Read more)

The campaign "dates back to the summer of 2007, when Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, a precursor of the coal trade group that later became American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, told its members it needed to commit to a lengthy and expensive effort to protect coal," Mulkern reports. ACCCE has the new ads in addition to previous one on its Web site.

Toyota's Ky. town follows local paper's advice in weathering storm of bad press about recalls

Toyota hasn't received much good publicity in recent week in the midst of a massive recall across several models for sticking brakes, but one small town to which the company brought thousands of jobs is staying positive. Workers at the Toyota plant in Georgetown, Ky., and other U.S. towns with similar facilities are returning to a more normal schedule this week as the company resumes full production, and they maintain the company will thrive again, Mickey Meece of The New York Times reports.

An editorial in the local newspaper, the Georgetown News Graphic, may have helped quell some local fears, Meece reports. Its headline read, "Rest easy, Toyota is on the job," in the editorial's headline. "In many parts of the country, Toyota is a brand,” said the editorial by Publisher Mike Scogin. "But to those of us here in Georgetown and in Kentucky, we know Toyota because we are Toyota. Our friends, neighbors and family members manufacture the cars in question." (Read more)
Meece writes, "For more than a week, Mr. Scogin said, Toyota news has dominated the front page of the newspaper, which is published three times a week. By Saturday, coverage of the murder of a former school bus driver was the top story." Georgetown, about 15 miles north of Lexington, held a population around 10,000 before Toyota opened its plant 20 years ago and has since ballooned to 25,000, Meece reports. (Read more)

Meanwhile, Toyota dealers in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas pulled their ads from ABC-TV affiliates, protesting "excessive" coverage of the company's problems. Here is ABC's report. UPDATE, Feb. 10: Led by Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat, the Republican governors of Indiana, Mississippi and Alabama, all with Toyota plants, have sent a letter to Congress asking for "responsible and fair" treatment for the company, praising its "exemplary citizenship," decrying "aggressive and questionable news coverage," and asserting that "the real story is how quickly Toyota identified the problems, found solutions and delivered those solutions to its dealers." Beware when politicians start telling you what the real story is, but here's the letter.

Broadband funding moves more slowly than hoped

Interest in the economic stimulus package's $7.2 billion for broadband was expected to be high, but the demand has turned out to be so overwhelming that government officials are struggling to meet the program's deadlines. The high demand, coupled with questions from large cable and phone companies such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable and AT&T, has "swamped the agencies in charge and created a bottleneck that might threaten disbursement," David Lieberman of USA Today reports.

After almost a year, only 7 percent of the funds has been assigned to specific projects. "There's significant doubt as to whether the monies can be awarded before the end of September," when the funding authorization expires, Dan Hays, who directs the communications practice at consulting firm PRTM, told Lieberman. Officials abandoned their original plan to assign $4 billion by the end of 2009, and now say "they're poised to hit as much as $2 billion when the first round ends this month, as they begin to consider applications to the second — and last — round up to March 15," Lieberman writes.

The two agencies with the money, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and USDA's Rural Utilities Service, maintain they will meet the Sept. 30 deadline for allocating it. Finding which places need broadband investment most has also proved difficult. "Because the United States has not taken [broadband needs] seriously until the Obama administration arrived, we don't know exactly how many people are unserved" or precisely where they are, RUS Administrator Jonathan Adelstein told Lieberman. (Read more)

Many of the grants are being made to map where broadband service exists. One example is a $2.1 million NTIA grant accounced today for mapping Kentucky, which was one of the first states to develop a comprehensive broadband map. "While the project fulfilled the requirements at the time, updates are necessary due to the ever-changing technology, growth of households and expansion of broadband providers," said a state press release. Meanwhile, people in the shadow of Pine Mountain in southeastern Kentucky complain about lack of broadband on Dial-Up Rocks, a blog hosted by Democracy in Action.

Genetic engineering may come to Southern U.S. forests in form of non-invasive (?) eucalyptus

Genetic engineering has long been a mainstay in the agricultural sector, but now it may be coming to silviculture, the growing of trees. Forestry giants International Paper Co. and MeadWestvaco Corp. are "planning to transform plantation forests of the southeastern United States by replacing native pine with genetically engineered eucalyptus, a rapidly growing Australian tree that in its conventional strains now dominates the tropical timber industry," Paul Voosen of Greenwire reports for Scientific American.

The companies' joint biotech venture AborGen LLC is hoping to use a controversial gene splice that restricts the eucalyptus trees' ability to reproduce to alleviate fears of the species turning invasive and overtaking native forests. "If such a fertility-control technology -- which has come under fire in farming for fear seed firms will exploit it -- is proven effective, it could open the door to many varieties of wild plants, including weedy grasses, to be genetically engineered for use in energy applications like biomass and next-generation biofuels without fear of invasiveness," Voosen writes.

Already countries like Brazil have used eucalyptus to transform their wood industry. The eucalyptus tree offers a significant upgrade over native southern pines in growth rate, the company told Voosen. Timber consultant Curtis Seltzer, who has studied ArborGen, describes its trees as a "game changer." Currently, only two of ArborGen's experimental eucalyptus stations have been allowed to flower. The company reports little in the way of pollen production, and earlier this month the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently issued a draft approval, subject to public comment, of expansion to 28 sites totaling 330 acres across seven states. (Read more)

3 governors and an aggressive fish: Michigan's chief unhappy with U.S. plan to control carp

A White House meeting about a fish? It happened yesterday, as Govs. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan and Jim Doyle of Wisconsin huddled and talked on the phone with Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn about the threat that Asian carp from the Mississippi River system pose to the fisheries and ecosystems of the Great Lakes. (Associated Press photo by M. Spencer Green: Big carp and smaller white bass in Chicago's Shedd Aquarium)

"Granholm came away from the summit less than satisfied with the results" and the plan for operating the locks in the canal that connects Lake Michigan with the Mississippi watershed, reports the Christian Science Monitor. The Army Corps of Engineers "will open and close [the locks] less frequently, and the water will be treated each time the locks are open to prevent the fish from swimming through to the Lake Michigan side," Mark Guarino writes. Michigan wants the locks permanently closed, but its lawsuit to do that was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. It wants the court to take another look, noting that on the day the court ruled, the Corps "discovered two DNA samples ... showing that Asian carp had breached Lake Michigan."

The Obama administration's role yesterday was to announce "a $78.5 million commitment to deal with the issue," Guarino reports, with "new water sampling, the construction of a concrete and chain-link fence between the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and the Des Plaines River, and the construction of a third electric barrier on the canal." Grahholm said the plan's "objectives are not sustainable and that this is a plan to limit damages, not solve the problem." (Read more) (Illustration by Phil Moy, University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute, from Environmental Protection Agency Web page on Asian carp)

Appalachian Ohio prescription drug trade worsens

Prescription drug abuse in Ohio is escalating, with most of the problem centered on the southeastern region of the state. In 2008, Ohio pharmacists filled 2.7 million prescriptions for narcotics that contain oxycodone and 4.8 million prescriptions for hydrocodone medications, Holly Zachariah of The Columbus Dispatch reports. The oxycodone prescriptions amounted to almost one for every four Ohio residents, while the hydrocodone prescriptions were enough for almost one of every two and one-half Ohioans.

The state's drug abuse is particularly bad in its Appalachian region for a number of reasons, including poverty, location and apathy, state officialsm say. US 23 "provides a pipeline to and from Columbus," Zachariah reports. "Bordering states of Kentucky and West Virginia have significant amounts of prescription-drug abuse." William Winsley, director of the Ohio State Board of Pharmacy, told Zachariah the area also has a track record of limited resources and uncooperative elected officials who have refused to help with drug investigations.

Scioto County in Southern Ohio was named to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration's watch list of the 10 most significant places in the country for trafficking in medications. While government officials brainstorm ways to tackle the problem, a grass-roots movement in Southern Ohio has risen up against the abuse, Zachariah reports. Activists in the region are considering pickets at the pain clinics and want to photograph the cars that come and go. (Read more)

Group has guide to help rural places with census

As the 2010 U.S. Census gets under way, rural communities are in particular need of accurate counts. "Each person represents around $1,200 in federal funding for their community for services such as schools, hospitals and transportation," the Main Street Project, the nonpartisan arm of the League of Rural Voters, reports. "That’s more than $10,000 per person and more than $40,000 for a family of four over ten years."

The Main Street Project "works to document the strengths and challenges facing people in increasingly diverse rural communities, give voice to their hopes and aspirations, and provide creative and practical tools to turn possibilities into realities," their Web site reports. In preparation for the 2010 Census the group has released a guide for helping your community receive an accurate representation. "Communities lose around $1,200 every year in federal funds for each person who goes uncounted," Steven Renderos, organizer with the project, told the Daily Yonder. "Many of the people in these communities will be unlikely to participate unless they get information from organizations and leaders they know and trust." (Read more)

Forum on Friday at the Newseum to discuss meeting the food needs of the next generation

Agricultural experts and stakeholders are joining in a "Town Hall 2.0" forum Friday to discuss the unique challenges associated with meeting the food needs of the next generation as Earth's population grows. The event, "Now Serving 9 Billion: Global Dialogue on Meeting Food Needs for the Next Generation," is hosted by CropLife International, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, and CAST at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

A panel of experts will discuss the challenges facing agriculture the next century, including how to feed 2.5 billion more people by 2050 and how to grow more food on less land. The event will Webcast live with an accompanying Twittercast, under #AgCast. Interested readers can register for the online discussion or in-person forum at the event's Web site.

USPS closing rural post offices across the country under rules meant for suspension of service

Has a rural post office closed near you recently? It's not the only one, and the U.S. Postal Service may be using a loophole to avoid the usual closing procedure. A three-page handwritten letter from an 87-year-old Hacker Valley, W.Va., woman whose post office recently closed has spurred the federal Postal Regulatory Commission to "investigate whether the Postal Service violated procedures or the will of Congress when it shut down Hacker Valley and 96 other post offices in 34 states over the past five years," P.J. Dickerschield of The Associated Press reports.

The cutbacks "have fallen most heavily on poor, rural communities, where the post office is not just a place to buy stamps, but a gathering spot where townspeople trade news and gossip," Dickerschield writes. USPS cited soon-to-be expiring leases as emergency justification for suspending nearly 100 post offices. "Ultimately, 25 were officially closed, five are facing closure, and Hacker Valley and 64 others are in limbo," Dickerschield reports.

Post office closures normally require 60 days notice, opportunities for public comment, an accounting of the reasons for the decision and an opportunity for residents to appeal, Dickerschield reports. A suspension, supposedly reserved for natural disasters, health or safety hazards or unanticipated lease problems, doesn't carry the same requirements. Under suspensions, the office is not technically closed, "but as far as customers are concerned it's not open," Norm Scherstrom told Dickerschield. (Read more)

Residents of some affected communities, including Midland, Ohio; Coralville, Iowa; Crescent Lake, Ore.; Prairie City, S.D.; Laketon, Ind.; and Howell, Utah, are hoping Congress intervenes and rescues their post offices, Dickerschield reports. At least one rural post office has already been saved, reportedly by congressional intervention. USPS officials rescinded the emergency suspension order for the closure of the Clifty post office in Todd County, Kentucky, after urging from Republican U.S. Rep. Ed Whitfield, the News-Democrat and Leader in adjoining Logan County reports. The Todd County Standard also reported the decision; here is its blog item.

EPA releases its assessments of 40 more coal-ash impoundments; index available online

The Environmental Protection Agency Thursday released information on 40 more coal ash impoundments with "high" or "significant" potential to cause loss of human life, environmental damage, or damage to infrastructure. Twenty-two of the facilities "have written action plans to make them safer," Environmental News Service reports.

Mathy Stanislaus, assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, told ENS, "The information we are releasing today shows that we continue to make progress in our efforts to prevent future coal ash spills." EPA has provided an index of the new information about the 40 impoundments, spread across 16 different facilities, in addition to the 22 company action plans on its Web site.

"The assessment reports were written by firms under contract to EPA, who are experts in the field of dam integrity, and who EPA says reflect the best professional judgment of those engineering firms," ENS reports. EPA says if companies fail to take sufficient action to protect the dams, the agency will "take further action and provide additional information to the public on the impoundments and facilities as it becomes available."

Even as the new information was released, one group was launching new complaints against EPA's relations with the electric power industry and coal-ash recyclers. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility maintains "the coal ash industry has been working in concert with EPA behind closed doors to counter state proposals for stricter regulation of coal ash waste and help the industry market this waste as an additive to construction materials and to spread on agricultural land or use in land reclamation," ENS reports. PEER based its accusation on e-mails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. (Read more)

USDA abandons plan for national animal ID system

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is abandoning plans to implement a nationwide animal tracking system. The plan would have developed a system to track livestock from "birth to the butcher shop," Tom Lutey of the Billings Gazette notes. USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack made the announcement Friday, and by noon most of the references to the failed program had been removed from the agency's Web site.

The announcement was praised by ranchers wary of big government, Lutey reports. "It certainly means we have a USDA that is genuinely listening to the concerns of independent producers and is striking off in a new direction to achieve disease trace-back and prevention of communicable diseases," Bill Bullard, CEO of the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America, told Lutey.

Small producers said the system would threaten their businesses. A Kentucky group said at a USDA "listening session" in that state that the plan "would do nothing to improve animal health or food safety, but would annihilate family-scale farms, which are the majority of farms in Kentucky," said a news release from the Community Farm Alliance, which says it is "grassroots membership organization with over 2,000 members in 75 Kentucky counties." Groups like the American Veterinary Medical Association backed the plan because they felt "extensive identification would protect consumers and minimize livestock loss," Lutey writes.

"Vilsack said he will turn to state and tribal veterinarians for a uniform way to track animals shipped across the country," Lutey reports. "Tracking animals moving intrastate will be left up to each state government." USDA had spent over $142 million developing the program, which was criticized for possibly requiring so much cattle information to be reported to meatpackers that ranchers would have difficulty negotiating fair cattle prices and for the plan’s mandatory government inspection requirements. (Read more)

Bipartisan bill would cut sulfur, nitrogen and mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants

Climate-change legislation has been a hot topic in the Senate in recent weeks, but two senators filed a bill Thursday to reduce three chemicals other than carbon dioxide from the air. The bipartisan proposal from Delaware Democratic Sen. Tom Carper and Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander targets coal-fired power plants to cut soot-forming sulfur dioxide (SO2) by 80 percent by 2018, smog-forming oxides of nitrogen (NOx) by 53 percent by 2015 and mercury by 90 percent by 2015, Robin Bravender of Environment and Energy Daily reports.

"We have a number of different things to work out on carbon," Alexander told Bravender. "But there's no excuse for waiting a minute on SOx, NOx and mercury because we have the technology, we know what to do, and we shouldn't be operating coal plants without pollution control equipment." The new bill would codify the Clean Air Interstate Rule program through 2011 and then impose even stricter limits than the Bush-era program.

The bill is co-sponsored by South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham and Connecticut Independent Joe Lieberman, who are also working on a bipartisan climate-change and energy bill. "Environmental groups and utilities applauded the bipartisan bill, calling it a much-needed step forward to ensure emission reductions and regulatory certainty for the power sector," Bravender reports. But Republican Sens. Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma and George Voinovich of Ohio issued a statement saying they had "significant problems with key proposals of the Carper-Alexander legislation." (Read more)

Columnist: Rural youth should leave for a while

The rural brain drain has become a catch phrase to describe the outmigration of high-achieving rural youth, but one rural columnist has a different take. "The rural brain drain is the collective expression of thousands of individuals pursuing their best economic-development strategy.," freelance columnist Curtis Seltzer writes for Landthink.com. "When the reasons that brought people to the countryside no longer exist, it will make economic sense for people to leave and force these communities to find a new — and, admittedly, often lower — level of sustainability."

Seltzer describes the phenomenon reported by Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas in Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America as one of numbers, not quality. "My impression of watching local kids leave over more than 25 years doesn’t square with the finding of Carr and Kefalas," Seltzer writes. "Both stayers and leavers in this county of 2,500 are a cross-section of their group. All the best don’t leave, and all the worst don’t stay—the pattern that Carr and Kefalas report."

Seltzer uses his own daughter's experience in leaving a rural area to go to New York City for a job to reach a provocative conclusion. "I’ve come to believe that all rural kids should leave their hometowns for a while, whether or not they go to college," he writes. "They improve themselves when they function on their own in a broader world. They learn skills and develop networks. They rub intellectual and financial elbows with people unlike themselves. They return better able to make a living and a difference." (Read more)

Outbreak of horse ailment uncommon to U.S. traced to famous ranch in Texas

A famous South Texas ranch is the epicenter of a deadly horse disease with a 20 percent mortality rate. Through Jan. 20, "364 cases of equine piroplasmosis had been confirmed," Jaime Powell of the Scripps Howard News Service reports. "Of those, 289 are on the sprawling King Ranch." The World Animal Health Information System also reports cases in Indiana, Texas, Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Jersey, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin.

The Texas Animal Health Commission has identified the King Ranch, right, between Corpus Christi and Brownsville, as the source of the outbreak. The ranch has sold horses with equine piroplasmosis in 15 states since 2004. "Horses, donkeys, mules and zebras are susceptible to the disease, which is caused by two parasitic organisms," Powell writes. "More severely affected animals can have fever, anemia, jaundiced mucous membranes, swollen abdomens and labored breathing." (King Ranch map)

While the disease has a high mortality rate, no horses in Texas have died yet and the ranch's 300-plus horses have been quarantined. The case marks the first occurrence of piroplasmosis in Texas, Powell reports. The disease rarely appears in the U.S., but it is prevalent in 90 percent of the world and commonly found in Mexico. 1946 Triple Crown winner Assault and 1950 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner Middleground were bred at the 825,000-acre King Ranch. (Read more)

Wild hog proliferation reaches all but six states; hunting preserves may contribute to spread

Wild swine populations are spreading across the country at a record pace, with only six states remaining without documented herds. Researcher Jack Mayer, a wild-hog expert at the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, tells Isaac Wolf and Jason Bartz of the Scripps Howard News Service that the population has doubled in size and range over the last 20 years. In 1982 feral hogs were documented in 17 states; now all but six states have populations.

"Wildlife experts say the hogs, which can weigh as much as 500 to 750 pounds, are increasingly running roughshod in rural areas, suburbs and even a few cities, digging up cemeteries, gardens and lawns; causing car wrecks -- and occasionally attacking people," Wolf and Bartz write. Feral pigs cause an estimated $800 million in property and crop damage, and 27,000 auto collisions, and Mayer tells the reporters a federal intervention with enforcement of animal transportation laws is needed to solve the problem.

Much of the spread can be attributed to hunting. Swine are transported from "Southern states like Texas and Florida, where wild hogs have been documented in every county, into backwoods areas several states away where they are let loose on private land for hunters," the reporters write. The pigs that aren't killed by hunters ignore property lines and are prolific breeders. (Read more)

Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute, a fan of this topic, passes along several hog-reporting resources in his "Morning Meeting," including Scripps' state-by-state list of known populations.

Utah governor's office cashed coal company check on same day permit application was fast-tracked

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert's campaign aides cashed a $10,000 check from a coal company on the same day in September that he met with the company to hear complaints about delays in the permitting of a strip mine. State regulators at the meeting listened to Alton Coal Development LLC's pleas and "agreed to fast-track a decision approving the mine near Panguitch, despite opposition from residents," Paul Foy of The Associated Press reports.

Herbert's office told Foy the governor never ordered regulators to give their approval and didn't know about the company's donation. "The decision has some residents of the small tourist town about 200 miles south of Salt Lake City concerned," Foy writes. Environmental groups are claiming the strip mine would raise dust and foul air quality 10 miles from the Bryce Canyon National Park. "This mine will damage the pristine air and water quality and wildlife of the area, increase dangerous truck traffic and have negative impacts on tourism and the visitor experience at Bryce Canyon National Park," Clair Jones of the Utah Sierra Club, told Foy.

AP obtained a 33-page memo from the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining showing the result of the company's meeting with the governor was fast-tracking of a decision by regulators. While a Jan. 11 filing by Herbert's political action committee indicated that the coal company made its $10,00 donation on the same day it met with Herbert, spokeswoman Angie Welling told Foy the check actually arrived four days earlier and was deposited on the day of the meeting. (Read more)

ASARCO bankruptcy settlement will pay for 80 toxic-waste cleanups in up to 20 states

In December, the Justice Department announced the American Smelting and Refining Co. will pay a record $1.79 billion to settle claims for hazardous waste pollution at 80 sites in as many as 20 states. The ruling represents one of the largest environmental bankruptcies in U.S. history, John Burnett of National Public Radio reports. Cleanup at the copper smelter in El Paso, one of ASARCO's most notorious polluters, is scheduled to begin this year.

"A landmark study by the Centers for Disease Control in the early 1970s found that more than half of the children living within a mile of the smelter had levels of lead in their blood four times today's acceptable limit," Burnett reports. Children in Juarez, Mexico, just across the border, were found to have similar blood-lead levels. "We found in these children who seemed to be healthy that they had reduced IQ, slowing of their reflexes, impairment of their motor coordination," Dr. Philip Landrigan, the epidemiologist who led the research nearly 40 years ago, told Burnett. "This was one of the very first demonstrations that lead could cause toxicity on the human brain in children who appeared to have no symptoms." (Read more)

ASARCO toxic industrial sites in Tacoma, Wash., and Omaha, Neb., have been reused for condos, office buildings and a convention center after cleaning. Approximately $1 billion of the settlement goes to the Environmental Protection Agency for cleanup of 26 Superfund sites. Of that $1 billion, $436 million was a cash payment toward future cleanup costs at the Bunker Hill & Metallurgical Complex site in Idaho, the largest "cashout" amount ever for the Superfund enforcement program, EPA reported in a news release.

Study: Climate change will dry up prairie wetlands

A new study reveals the prairie wetlands in the Upper Midwest's "Pothole Prairie" region may be more sensitive to global warming that previously thought, and climate change there could affect millions of waterfowl that depend on the region for food, shelter and raising their young.

The study, published in the research journal BioScience, used a new wetland model that projected major reductions in water volume, shortening of the time water remains in wetlands and changes to wetland vegetation dynamics, Newswise reports. "The impact to the millions of wetlands that attract countless ducks to these breeding grounds in spring makes it difficult to imagine how to maintain today’s level of waterfowl populations in altered climate conditions," Dr. Glenn Guntenspergen, a U.S. Geological Survey researcher and one of the authors, said in a news release. "Parents may not have time to raise their young to where they can fly because of wetlands drying up too quickly in the warming climate of the future." Many wetland species require a minimum time in water to complete their life cycles.

"Unfortunately, the model simulations show that under forecasted climate-change scenarios for this region (an increase of 4 degrees Celsius), the western prairie potholes will be too dry and the eastern ones will have too few functional wetlands and nesting habitat to support historical levels of waterfowl and other wetland-dependent species," Dr. W. Carter Johnson, another study author and a researcher at South Dakota State University, said in the release. (Read more)

Obama publicly acknowledges that Senate may pass energy bill without cap-and-trade system

Last week we reported rumors of the growing chance of Congress moving ahead with a climate bill without a system for capping and trading greenhouse-gas emissions. Yesterday President Obama publicly voiced that possibility for the first time. "We may be able to separate these things out," Obama said at town-hall meeting in Nashua, N.H. "And it's conceivable that that's where the Senate ends up. But the concept of incentivizing clean energy so that it's the cheaper, more effective kind of energy is one that is proven to work, and is actually a market-based approach."

"I think cap and trade has a long road here obviously," New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg told Darren Samuelsohn of ClimateWire and The New York Times. "There's a lot of good initiatives on energy policy that are on a shorter track and will hopefully be pursued aggressively." North Dakota Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan told Samuelsohn he wants the Senate to pass the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee bill, which would establish a nationwide renewable electricity standard along with a host of other energy incentives.

Obama told the crowd his energy agenda is centered on promoting energy efficiency and clean technologies, including renewables, nuclear power and carbon capture and storage at coal-fired power plants. He said going for an energy bill alone is like saying, "let's do the fun stuff before we do the hard stuff." A White House spokesman told Samuelsohn Obama's comments were simply observationsabout the Senate debate, and his views about comprehensive energy and climate-change legislation were made clear in last week's State of the Union address. Advocates of a broad Senate climate bill "were quick to downplay the president's remarks," Samuelsohn reports. (Read more)

Betting on the come, feds say corn ethanol can be produced with a smaller carbon footprint, so is OK

The Obama administration yesterday unveiled a broad new vision of biofuels development to meet the mandate for 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022. Chief among the new strategies is a change of opinion from the Environmental Protection Agency that the corn-based ethanol and soy-diesel industries can have a carbon footprint small enough to be part of the plan, Jessica Leber of Environment and Energy Daily reports. Most of the current 12-billion-gallon biofuel supply comes from corn ethanol, but Leber writes, "much of the remaining mandate will be met by cellulosic fuels that have a smaller carbon footprint and aren't made with food or feed grains."

Biofuel companies were relieved by the long-delayed regulations, which provide some stability for the industry. "Still, the controversial regulation drew simultaneous praise and criticism from special interests on all sides of the issue, from the biofuels industry itself and from environmental groups," Leber writes.

Some environmentalists questioned EPA's decision to include corn ethanol because it relied on improvements in the industry to mitigate water, land and carbon impacts that are not yet in place. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson defended the decision, saying it came after EPA "revised models to incorporate updated crop yield estimates and the use of animal feed co-products" to calculate the carbon footprint, Leber writes.

EPA also included "120 additional countries in their estimates of the international carbon emissions spurred by an expanded domestic ethanol market," Leber reports. Environmentalists want the footprint calculation to include estimates of indirect emissions, caused when farmers abroad clear forests to plant grain, but some in Congress say they will keep fighting the idea. "To think that we can credibly measure the impact of international indirect land use is completely unrealistic, and I will continue to push for legislation that prevents unreliable methods and unfair standards from burdening the biofuels industry," said House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., who this week introduced a bill to that effect. (Read more)

Ken Anderson of Brownfield Network, citing the Nebraska Corn Board, says "EPA estimated that corn-based ethanol reduces greenhouse gases 21 percent over gasoline. Without that penalty, corn ethanol would achieve a 52 percent reduction rating." The board applauded EPA's higher rating for distillers' grains, the leftover feedstock that is fed to animals. (Read more)

Weekly papers decry proposed Postal Service rule

A proposed U.S. Postal Service rule may be the last straw for some weekly newspapers that depend on the mail to reach most of their readers, the editor-publisher of a crusading weekly in the Texas Panhandle wrote in a letter reprinted in this month's newsletter of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors.

"Our number will surely be smaller" because most papers will fail the "droop test," in which a paper is dangled from a flat surface, writes Laurie Ezzell Brown, left, of The Canadian Record. The old rule allowed a paper to droop four inches and still qualify for discount mailing rate; under the proposed rule, if a paper droops more than three inches, its rates will go up 54 to 78 percent, according to the National Newspaper Association, the main lobbying group for weeklies. "NNA hasn’t seen any evidence than one inch of ‘droop’ more or less is going to affect handling costs one iota," NNA Postal Chairman Max Heath told USPS in a letter.

What galls many weekly publishers is that the Postal Service increasingly fails to live up to the last word in its name: "I am interrupted repeatedly by telephone calls from subscribers to The Record in surrounding communities who did not receive this week’s newspaper in the mail today," Brown writes. "Each caller has told us how important the newspaper is to him, and how much he enjoys reading it." She is especially moved by those who refer to it as "my Canadian Record," which to us helps define whether a newspaper is a community paper or not.

The Record is online, but "We find that most of our customers — even the young ones — prefer the more tactile experience of leafing through the pages of their community newspaper," Brown writes. "If there is a last straw, this new and rather aptly named 'droop' test may well be it. Most lightweight periodicals like newspapers will almost certainly fail the new deflection test." And she adds, "The new standards are likely to affect the Postal Service’s delivery standards as well, promising more calls of complaint and more — yes, more — cancellations of subscriptions by readers who alue the product we create but have lost faith in our ability to deliver it."

Brown's letter is a strong case for rural newspapers. The ISWNE newsletter is online here. The comment period for the new rule ended Jan. 13.

Recycling wastewater may be key to tapping tight gas fields in more environmentally friendly way

We've been following the natural-gas "fracking" boom closely, but now the country's largest news agency is on the story. "A drilling technique that is beginning to unlock staggering quantities of natural gas underneath Appalachia also yields a troubling byproduct: powerfully briny wastewater that can kill fish and give tap water a foul taste and odor," Marc Levy and Vicki Smith of The Associated Press report. (AP map by P. Prengman)

Fracking, short for "fracturing," is a drilling method in which "millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals are blasted into each well to fracture tightly compacted shale and release trapped natural gas," the reporters explain. It has opened the Marcellus Shale's deep, vast gas reserves for the first time, but the industry must develop proper wastewater disposal and recycling techniques before moving ahead, Levy and Smith write. "The Marcellus Shale in on its way to being the nation's first gas field where drilling water is widely reused," they predict.

"Many doubt the hard Appalachian geology is porous enough to absorb all the wastewater, and the climate is too humid for evaporating ponds," the reporters write. "That leaves recycling as the most obvious option." Entrepreneurs are currently marketing systems to distill the wastewater at well sites, Levy and Smith report, and Range Resources Corp. in southwest Pennsylvania already "pipes wastewater into a central holding pond, dilutes it with fresh water and reuses it for fracking." Levy is based in Pennsylvania, Smith in West Virginia. (Read more)

Meat industry prepares for a negative report from CBS-TV on antibiotics in livestock production

The meat industry is bracing for what it fears will be an unflatering CBS Evening News two-part series about antibiotic use in livestock production. The story will air tonight and tomorrow after being pushed back from its original scheduled airing by the Haiti earthquake coverage, Rita Jane Gabbett of Meatingplace.com reports. UPDATE, Feb. 4: Looks like it has been pushed back again. Nothing last night or tonight. (Ditto for Feb. 5.)

"Feedback from pork producers suggest the segments will be highly critical of livestock and poultry production," Dave Wamer, National Pork Producers spokesman, told Gabbett. CBS also interviewed Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., sponsor of a bill that would control antibiotic use in livestock. The crew also visited farms where free-range and antibiotic-free livestock are raised. (Read more, subscription required)

Government to amp up biofuel production efforts

To meet the nation's biofuel goal, the government must accelerate the development of biofuel crops and products, says a new report from the White House. In the report to be released today, "An administration task force said the government needs, among other things, to set targets for commercializing new types of fuel crops, such as switchgrass," Phillip Brasher of the Des Monies Register reports. The report also advocates a regional approach that promoted specific fuels to suit particular regions.

Not everything in the report will please the biofuel industry, though. It suggests federal agencies identify "environmental and social issues that may confront biofuels development," Brasher writes, and it says new biofuel refineries must have guaranteed markets. The industry has been outspoken in its belief that such a requirement would make it virtually impossible for companies to obtain federal loan guarantees.

"Past performance and business as usual will not get us there," the report says of the 2022 mandate for the nation to use 36 billion gallons of biofuels. "Today, only 12 billion gallons of biofuels are produced annually." The report did not say how the agency would deal with the 10-percent cap on the amount of ethanol that can be added to gasoline, and greenhouse-gas reduction standards that could limit the increased production of ethanol and biodiesel, Brasher reports. (Read more)

Kansas reporter must testify in murder trial; expected to be asked to reveal confidential source

Last month we reported the Kansas Supreme Court had granted Dodge City Daily Globe reporter Clair O'Brien a stay of a lower-court order preventing her from being forced to reveal a confidential source. Now the court has refused to quash a subpoena ordering O'Brien to testify about her jailhouse interview with murder suspect Samuel Bonilla, Editor and Publisher reports. Ford County Attorney Terry Malone issued the subpoena just days after the initial stay was granted. (Read more)

Obama budget again calls for stopping farm subsidies to wealthy, but prospects remain dim

As part of his proposed fiscal 2011 budget, President Obama has again proposed slashing crop subsidies to "wealthy farmers." Obama targeted those payments last year, but failed to pass the cuts. Charles Abbott of Reuters reports the chances of passage this year may be slim.

The plan would "end crop subsidies to people with more than $250,000 adjusted gross income (AGI) from off-farm sources or more than $500,000 on-farm AGI," Abbott reports. The caps now are $500,000 off-farm AGI and $750,000 on-farm AGI. The budget proposal also calls for reforming "administration of the federally subsidized crop insurance system to end 'huge windfall profits,' Abbott writes.

Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., said she will oppose "cuts that will harm farmers, ranchers and rural communities." House committee chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., added, "It is Congress's job to write the annual budget, and based on my conversations with House leadership, no one is interested in making cuts to the Farm Bill after the battle we just fought to pass it a year and a half ago." (Read more)

Obama's education budget bad for rural schools, National Schools Boards Association says

President Obama has proposed big changes to federal education funding and the No Child Left Behind Act with the unveiling of his fiscal 2011 budget. It includes a 6.2 percent increase in funding for the Department of Education, but most of that money will go to competitively awarded programs, Alyson Klein of Education Week reports. Programs that use set formulas to allocate funding such as Title I, based on the number of poor children in a school or district, received little or no increase in budget.

"The focus on competitive grants and the decision to provide no increase to Title I means rural districts and children in the poorest parts of the country will be left behind," said Anne Bryant, the executive director of the National School Boards Association. "Those districts do not have the capacity to compete for grants—unless you want to shift money from teachers to grant writers."

The budget renames the Title I program "College-and-Career Ready Students," but does not provide an increase from the fiscal 2010 budget of $14.5 billion. (Some money was added to the program by the economic stimulus, Klein reports.) "While there is much to applaud in the budget, we are concerned that virtually all of the proposed increase is for competitive grants, while Title I — the lifeblood for our most disadvantaged children — is flat-funded," Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement. "Students with the most needs should not have to rely on how well adults compete for dollars." The proposed budget does include a "substantial boost for the Title I School Improvement Grants, a program that helps districts target interventions to schools struggling to meet the goals" of the law, Klein reports. (Read more)

Hunger up across U.S., especially in Appalachia

An unprecedented number of Americans are seeking charity food, says a new study from the nation's largest domestic hunger-relief organization. Feeding America reports in a news release "more than 37 million people, one in eight Americans -- including 14 million children and nearly 3 million seniors -- receive emergency food each year through the nation's network of food banks and the agencies they serve." The data represents a 40 percent increase from the organization's last comprehensive study in 2006.

The study, "Hunger in America 2010," includes data collected from February through June 2009 from 61,000 face-to-face, in-depth interviews with people seeking emergency food assistance at the organization's network of pantries and emergency feeding programs across the country. One of the regional groups participating in the study was God's Pantry, which reports it now serves one in seven people in Central and Eastern Kentucky.

God's Pantry's report, "Hunger in Central and Eastern Kentucky," says 73 percent of client households reported food insecurity, defined as fear of being unable to provide food to oneself or family. The organization reports 310,170 people in the 50-county service area (See map below) live in poverty and the group serves 12 of the 25 poorest counties in the nation. Among those served: Owsley and Clay counties, which the U.S. Census Bureau ranks as the third and fourth poorest counties in the country.

Wind farm brings neighborhood feud to Wisconsin

Complaints from residents living near wind farms have become more numerous in recent months as the farms proliferate. Now many of those complaints regarding noise, shadows and bird deaths have surfaced in Wisconsin, Scott Williams of the Green Bay Press-Gazette reports. In the town of Byron, some families have given up fighting the turbines and plan to move, while others have embraced them as needed progress.

"I really like them," Rose Vanderzwan told Williams. "I think they're beautiful. And I think it's a good idea to get some cheaper energy." Larry Wunsch disagreed, saying "This is not for me. It's an invasion." Vanderzwan receives $17,500 a year for permitting thre turbines to be built on the family dairy farm, but some neighbors are so angry they won't speak to her anymore. "Every project will have some opposition, as with anything that is new to a community," Invenergy vice president Bryan Schueler told Williams. "For every opponent, there's usually many, many more supporters." (Read more) (Press-Gazette video)

Growth in wind power has added few 'green' jobs

Last week we reported the wind power industry had record capacity growth of 39 percent in 2009, but new "green jobs" haven't necessarily accompanied the surge. "Even though a record 10,000 megawatts of new generating capacity came on line, few jobs were created overall and wind power manufacturing employment, in particular, fell -- a setback for President Obama's pledge to create millions of green jobs," Jim Tankersley of the Los Angeles Times reports.

Green jobs have been slow to materialize, especially "skilled, good-paying, blue-collar jobs such as assembling wind turbines, retrofitting homes to use less energy and working on solar panels in the desert," Tankersley writes. During the 2008 campaign, Obama promised to create 5 billion green jobs over a decade, but administration officials admit they are nowhere near that pace with an estimated 52,000 green jobs created or saved by the stimulus. (Read more)

In rural Tunica County, Mississippi, locals are still waiting for the hundreds of green jobs from the billion-dollar electric and hybrid automobile plant promised by GreenTech Automotive Inc. CEO Xiaolin "Charles" Wang during an October groundbreaking ceremony. Wang is trying to shore up funding for the project, Richard Fausett of the Times reports, but Tunica needs help now after a recession-driven decrease in gambling hurt the nine local casinos. "They done had a bunch of things that's been supposed to come in," one local unemployed man told Fausett. "You hear about it, then after several months you don't hear anything again." (Read more)

Number of jobs lost since 2007 varies widely across rural America, county by county

During his State of the Union address last week President Obama said "small towns and rural communities have been hit especially hard" by the recession, but that may not be the case in all such places. Many rural Great Plains and Midwest farming counties have lost fewer jobs than other rural areas, Bill Bishop and Roberto Gallardo report in the Daily Yonder. Still, only 25 rural counties registered decreases in their unemployment rate between 2007 and 2009. Unemployment in rural areas roughly mirrored urban rates in 2009.

"Fourteen of the 50 rural counties that showed the smallest increases in unemployment were in Kansas," Bishop and Gallardo report. "Another 11 were in Nebraska. And 12 more were in the Dakotas," the reporters write. Alabama, site of 12 of the 50 counties with the largest rise in unemployment rates, and South Carolina, home of nines, were hit especially hard by the recession. (Read more) (Click the map to view a larger version)

Rural weekly writer, larger-media colleagues picked for 9-day health fellowship in Boston area

A reporter for a thrice-weekly newspaper in southeastern Kentucky is among 11 medical journalists chosen for a prestigious fellowship that will take them to the Boston area this spring to study health care and how to cover it.

Tara Kaprowy, right, of The Sentinel-Echo in London was chosen for The Health Coverage Fellowship with the support of her employer and its owner, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., and of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based at the University of Kentucky.

"The fellowship, the first of its kind in the country, is designed to help the media do a better job covering critical health care issues. It does that by bringing in as speakers more than 50 top health officials, policy people, and researchers. It also brings the fellows out to watch first-hand how the system works," says a news release from Babson College. The fellowship is housed at the college's Center for Executive Education in Wellesley and is directed by Larry Tye, former health and environment reporter at The Boston Globe and author of five books.

The eight-year-old program is sponsored by the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, with help from the Maine Health Access Foundation, New Hampshire’s Endowment for Health, Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, and the Texas-based Hogg Foundation for Mental Health. The contributions from outlying states helped create slots for reporters from those states.

Joining Kaprowy will be Robert Weisman of the Globe, Cathy Corman of WGBH Radio in Boston, Shawn Cunningham of WAGM-TV in Maine, Jennifer Huberdeau of the North Adams (Mass.) Transcript, Cynthia McCormick of the Cape Cod Times, Karen Nugent of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Denis Paiste of the New Hampshire Union Leader, Jason Roberson of the Dallas Morning News, Kathryn Tolbert of The Washington Post, Laura Ungar of The Courier-Journal of Louisville.

As states seek to revive horse slaughter, for a floor in the market, a bill in Congress would ban it

We've been following the economic trouble in the horse industry closely, and one common factor cited in the trouble is the closing of the last U.S. horse slaughtering facility, which removed the floor from horse prices. Now some states are considering legislation to reopen slaughter facilities, even as some U.S. lawmakers move to ban the sale of horse meat. In 2006, Congress barred any federal funds from being spent by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on inspecting the nation's three remaining horse slaughtering plants, one factor that led to their eventual closure.

Advocates of horse slaughtering say plants represent a better option for desperate horse owners who have taken drastic measures in disposing of their unwanted horses since the last plant closed. "It is more humane to dispose of old and unwanted horses in this manner than to just abandon them, dumping them out randomly, with no food, water or protection from the weather, not to mention the hazards of hitting a 1,000-pound abandoned horse standing in the middle of the road," Phil Mills of Zanesville, Ohio, argues in a letter to the editor in the Times-Record.

In Missouri where the ban has "killed the horse industry," says veterinarian Jim Joyce, right, Republican state Rep. Jim Viebrock is sponsoring legislation "aimed at bypassing a federal ban on meat inspectors working in horse slaughtering plants by getting processors to pay for the inspections," Chad Livengood reports for the Springfield News Leader. Even if the bill makes it through the legislature, USDA may not honor the attempt to circumvent the law, Livengood writes. "That is the big hurdle," Viebrock told him. "We'll find out how powerful the animal rights lobby really is if (USDA allows) it." (Read more) (News-Leader photo by Bob Linder)

In April the Illinois legislature voted down a bill that would have authorized horse slaughtering in that state, but Republican state Rep. Jim Sacia has submitted a new bill. Meanwhile, foreign investors considering Hardin, Mont., for a horse-slaughtering plant recently toured the area looking for potential sites, Tom Lutey of the Billings Gazette reports. The tour was arranged by Republican Rep. Ed Butcher, "author of a 2009 state law promoting construction of a horse slaughter facility."

While several states continue to explore horse slaughtering, national lawmakers have started a push to permanently ban the practice with the Prevention of Equine Cruelty Act, Lutey reports. The bill, which is endorsed by the Humane Society of the U.S., would "make marketing horse flesh for human consumption punishable by up to three years in prison." The Senate version is sponsored by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and the House version is sponsored by Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky. (Read more)

Head of rural community foundation wants laws to encourage localized rural philanthropy

Philanthropy has been instrumental in shoring up causes based in metropolitan areas, but not so much in rural America. "Historically urban-centered, wealthy people have created legacies directed at specific regions or institutions, or coveted areas of individual passion. But there aren't many examples of such magnitude devoted to comprehensive community development," Gerry Roll, above, executive director of the Community Foundation of Hazard and Perry County, Kentucky, wrotes in an op-ed piece for the Lexington Herald-Leader and The Courier-Journal of Louisville.

Roll advocates legislation to encourage creation of, and investment in, community foundations. "They are rarely in rural areas, and certainly not in the rural counties of Kentucky," she notes. Rural areas are still the places where many of the state's resources are spent on programs like Medicaid for the poor and disabled, and that's one reason Kentucky ranks near the bottom of most national lists, Roll writes.

"A relatively new national movement in rural development philanthropy is a promising model for helping community foundations and other community-based initiatives engage in convening, fund-raising, endowment-building, grant-making and other community-building opportunities to strengthen and supplement the limited resources provided through state and local general funds for education and other services," she explains, adding that community foundations engage a broad range of institutions and individuals to build stronger and healthier communities. Those include rural expatriates who may want to help their hometowns but don't know of a vehicle that they consider trustworthy.

Roll says 2006 legislation in Iowa to stimulate local endowment building has led to an endowment in every county in the state, "and they are growing exponentially." Roll's foundation started last year, and she writes that it still has a long way to go, but it is "building an endowment, making grants and working with the community to create ways to improve our schools, our environment, our health, our housing and our culture." She calls for the state legislature to encourage donations to local endowments to allow "people to contribute to the communities they love." Roll's article also appeared in the Messenger-Inquirer of Owensboro.

W.Va. wind farm moves ahead after settlement

In October and December we reported about an unusual battle between environmental groups about a proposed wind farm in Greenbrier County, W.Va. The two groups were at odds about the effect the project would have on the endangered Indiana bat, and a federal judge ruled in December the project violated federal wildlife law. Now Chicago-based Invenergy LLC and Mountain Communities for Responsible Energy have forged an agreement that will allow construction to begin immediately, Jessica Y. Lilly of West Virginia Public Broadcasting reports.

The agreement cuts 24 of the 124 proposed turbines that were deemed most harmful to the bat population. The company will start construction at 67 locations now and build 33 more after obtaining an "incidental take" permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. (Read more)

Reports of animal thrill killings up across nation

Poaching reports are up across the country, and some of the new cases have a disturbing twist: animals being killed just for the thrill of killing. "Poachers run down deer with cars or snowmobiles, and chase raccoons, then beat them to death with clubs," Jeff DeLong of the Reno Gazette-Journal reports for USA Today. "They also shoot deer, elk and antelope, sometimes removing valuable antlers but often leaving the carcass to rot on the ground."

Scott Talbott, an assistant division chief with Wyoming's Fish and Game Department, describes the trend as "wanton destruction" that goes beyond shooting. "It's thrill killing — people just going out and killing stuff," Talbott told DeLong. "We have seen a significant increase of that in Wyoming. It's disturbing." State wildlife officials in Wisconsin are working with researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and have determined "the thrill killing usually involves youths ages 14 to 23, who gather in groups with the intent of killing as many animals as possible," DeLong writes.

"These are cases where they're just looking for something to do," Chuck Horn of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources told DeLong. "It seems like in some of these cases kids are looking for instant gratification, like a video game." DeLong also details reports of the same trend in Montana, Pennsylvania and Washington. (Read more)

New feature shows the value of a good obituary

Journalists who place a high value on well-written obituaries and tributes should like a new monthly feature in The Courier-Journal of Louisville, "A Life Well Lived." Lifestyles Editor David Daley says it will "go beyond the obituary page to bring out the full color and dimension of a life. There's an extraordinary tale to tell at the end of every life." We agree, and think everyone deserves a good sendoff.

We're also happy that the first "Life Well Lived" is that of Tommy Dyer, left, whom we knew as the keeper of an old-fashioned general store in flood-prone Boston, Ky., for 65 years. "Dyer's store supplied the necessities for life in a rural community, from slop jars and saddles to the stoves and refrigerators he would deliver, Paula Burba writes. Her key source was Tommy's friend Don Skaggs, who said, "He lived and breathed that store. ... He sold a little bit of everything: Horse collars, televisions, refrigerators. ...They had seeds for the farmers to plant. And he had clothes. ... You don't have enough space in your newspaper for me to tell you the qualities of Tommy Dyer. Tommy Dyer was honest. … There was not a crooked streak in his body at all. He always had a smile and good cheer. Money was never the object." (Read more)

Invasive, exotic species gaining ground, or water, and posing major threat to native U.S. wildlife

Those Asian carp we reported on a few weeks ago have finally invaded the Great Lakes, putting themselves at the top of a long list of invasive species posing a wide range of problems. Sam Hamilton, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, told Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post that exotic species are "probably the single greatest threat in our country to our native wildlife." Eilperin sums up the problem nicely:

"Which is worse? Closing two locks on a waterway that's used to ship millions of dollars' worth of goods from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi basin? Or allowing a voracious Asian carp to deplete the food supply of native fish sustaining a Midwestern fishing industry that nets $7 billion a year? And how do you put a price tag on the damage caused by the Burmese python and other constrictor snakes that are strangling the precious ecology of the Everglades?"

The U.S. Army Cops of Engineers has failed twice to stop the carp with electric barriers in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, but is hoping a third try will be charmed. "The barriers are not surefire," Eilperin reminds readers, "and experts say it's difficult to say how many Asian carp would have to make it through to establish a viable population." She notes that the carp were imported by Southern fish farmers to eat pond algae and escaped during floods, and "Now the fish so thoroughly dominate the Illinois River that communities have annual fishing tournaments targeting them." (Read more)