“I am calling a two-year ‘Time-Out’ from all new mining claims in the Arizona Strip near the Grand Canyon,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, “because we have a responsibility to ensure we are developing our nation’s resources in a way that protects local communities, treasured landscapes, and our watersheds,” said Secretary Salazar.

Nearly one million acres of federal lands near the Grand Canyon have been set apart for deliberation for the next two years after careful consideration by the Department of Interior. Over the next two years, the Department of Interior will evaluate the land to determine whether it should be removed from new mining claims for the an additional twenty years.

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1872 saw the birth of a law that has governed American mining for over a century. It is the General Mining Act of 1872. While amendments have been made to the 1872 Act, we are still governed by what some would call “outdated” policy.

“We must find an approach to modernize the General Mining Law of 1872 and ensure that development occurs in a manner consistent with the needs of mining and the protection of the public, our public lands, and water resources,” said Interior Secretary Salazar today Before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

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Oil and gas leases have been a hot topic for a long time, especially since the controversial disruption of a BLM land sale by student activist Tim DeChristopher in Salt Lake City this past December. The sale which, according to some, was a midnight move by the Bush administration found itself floundering when an unknown bidder (DeChristopher) won parcel after parcel of land. Since December the leased parcels have been pulled back and forth between the BLM and the Interior, between developers and nature-lovers.

This story goes back before DeChristopher, back before the rushed lease sale. Yet it shows that the tug-o-war has been going on for years; and it hasn’t stopped. When the Interior Board of Land Appeals (IBLA) recently told the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that it cannot move forward with 11 oil and gas leases without following federal cultural preservation law and consulting with concerned Native American tribes, a sigh was heard coming from Nine Mile Canyon in southern Utah.

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The agreement “gives SUWA certainty that oil and gas development in an important part of the Hatch Point proposed wilderness area will be subject to the applicable Resource Management Plan and additional restrictions,” said Stephen Bloch, Conservation Director and Attorney for SUWA.

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Termed the “stream buffer zone,” the Bush administration ruling would reverse an earlier 1983 regulation that prohibited the dumping of mining waste from mountaintop removal operations within 100 feet of a stream, whether seasonal or perennial.

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The court has ordered the Interior Department, now run by Ken Salazar, to conduct a proper analysis of environmental impacts and risks before moving ahead with any plans for offshore drilling in these sensitive areas. The Chukchi and Beaufort Seas are home to approximately one-tenth of the world’s total polar bear population, along with walruses, seals, and whales.

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Freudenthal says replacing coal with wind “Ain’t going to happen”

In response to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s recent comments that the offshore wind energy resource in the United States could potentially provide 25% of our electricity and replace the need for coal-fired power generation, Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal balked, telling reporters: “Ain’t going to happen.”

At an impromptu press conference in Cheyenne on Wednesday, Freudenthal said Salazar’s comments were a “dumb thing to say,” and said he hoped Salazar would learn the wisdom of “not making gratuitous statements.”

Wyoming is the biggest coal-producing state in the U.S., producing more than 450 million tons of coal in 2007, or nearly 40 percent of the country’s coal.

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The move will restore a longstanding and key protection of the ESA, stripped away by the Bush administration, that required federal agencies to consult with independent federal wildlife experts and scientists to determine how their actions would impact threatened or endangered species.

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Closed to visitors since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, The Statue of Liberty’s crown may be reopening if the new Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, has anything to say about it.

After the National Park Service closed both the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island to visitors back in 2001, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and Liberty Island reopened just three months later. And with significant modifications to the pedestal and the addition of a screening process for visitors, access to the pedestal was re-opened in 2004. But the crown never reopened.

And in a visit to the site last week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar expressed his sincere hope to change that as soon as possible.

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Outgoing Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne issued a Secretarial Order authorizing the Bureau of Land Management to establish offices to expedite the permitting of renewable energy and associated transmission facilities on BLM lands.

The offices will oversee the the siting and permitting of wind, solar, biomass and geothermal projects on BLM-managed lands in the American West. This process will be similar to other energy permitting work the BLM does for coal, oil and gas—like lease auctions, public meetings, comment periods and other tools of stakeholder management—except a lot less contentious.

The offices will be known as Renewable Energy Coordination Offices, and will initially be located in Arizona, California, Nevada and Wyoming.

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This is a guest post by Caitlin Sislin, a public interest environmental attorney in Oakland, California and founder of the Transformative Advocacy program of Women’s Earth Alliance.

On December 22nd, 2008, the U.S. Department of Interior’s Office of Surface Mining granted Peabody Western Coal Company a “life-of-mine” permit for its Black Mesa project. The permit authorizes the Kayenta mine, which generates 8.5 million tons of coal per year to the Navajo Generating Station in Page, Arizona, to continue unabated until 2026.

Navajo and Hopi activists protest this permit as an unacceptable desecration of Black Mesa mountain, regarded as a living, female being and a central component of Native religion. Wahleah Johns, co-director of the activist organization Black Mesa Water Coalition, said that “[t]his decision will uproot the sacred connection that we have to land, water and all things living on Black Mesa.”

Peabody has operated the Kayenta and Black Mesa mines on the sacred Black Mesa mountain since the mid-1960s, to the great detriment of the Navajo nation. Coal extraction destroys the environmental integrity of the mountain, contaminates the air with methane gas, and threatens miners with illness and injury; coal burning is among the most highly-polluting forms of energy production in existence. Navajo land throughout Arizona and New Mexico is littered with coal mines and coal-fired power plants, nearly all of which fail to provide power to Navajo residents, instead exporting the coal and power to far-away urban communities such as Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

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Despite the recent bluing trend in Colorado, the Republican Party still has a strong base in Colorado. Salazar is a centrist, and in a senate seat that is by no means a lock for Democrats, it could be argued that no matter who Gov. Ritter choses to replace Salazar, they will have their work cut out for them defending it. CQ Politics writes:

Salazar would have been decisively favored to win in a state that has trended Democratic in recent elections.

But the seat will be little tougher for the Democrats to hold with Salazar not on the ballot. Whereas Salazar would have run for re-election as a six-year incumbent, the person that Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter appoints will have served less than two years by the time of the 2010 election, when he or she presumably will seek a full six-year term.

That being said, as an environmentalist, I’m far more concerned about losing Salazar as a protector of Colorado’s rivers and streams, its mineral resources, and its public lands, than I am about the job the Senator will do protecting those things as the next Secretary of the Interior.



Image: Hurst

Grijalva is the current chair of the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands which has jurisdiction over Interior Department matters.

The groups praised Grijalva for assembling what is regarded as one of the most “far sighted endangered species protection plans in the nation” and for his “leadership pressing Interior and other federal agencies to integrate global warming issues into their planning and permitting.”

The next Secretary of the Interior will be taking over an rocked by some ethics scandals including, among other things, the imprisonment of its top deputy, losses of tens of billions of dollars from under-collection of oil royalties and, most recently, revelation of sex and drug parties involving key Interior employees and oil company executives.