Sustainability

On Thursday, September 13, the House overwhelmingly approved a six month continuing resolution by a vote of 320-91 to keep the federal government running through March 2013. Tucked away in the stop-gap measure is a small provision to restore cuts inadvertently made by Congress in the transporation reauthorization bill to the abandoned mine lands (AML) program for all states with the exception of Wyoming.

A panel of judges on Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court overturned two key and controversial provisions in Act 13, the state's major re-write of regulations pertaining to hydraulic fracturing that also authorized "shale impact fees" to municipalities in the Marcellus Shale region. The law, which was passed in February 2012, prohibited communities from passing zoning ordnances to limit or restrict oil or natural gas drilling that were more strict than state standards. The judges also struck down a section that allows the state to waive set-back requirements that limit where wells can be located if it approves a driller's resource protection plan.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is nearing agreement with the local Native American tribes in the Flathead Valley of western Montana to manage the National Bison Range - an 18,500 acre wildlife refuge that is home to over 400 bison. Should the preliminary agreement become finalized, it will be the first wildlife refuge to be managed by Native Americans. The decision, however, is opposed by a group of employees from state and federal conservation agencies called the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) because they fear the agreement gives the tribes too much control over wildlife management policies in the range.

Michigan's Governor Rick Snyder recently signed into law a bill which caps the amount of land the state can own at 4.65 million acres until the legislature approves a strategic plan for buying and selling land in the future. 

Federal regulation of fish stocks outside of state waters has been a source of contention between the commercial fishing industry, recreational anglers, and environmental groups for a long time. A group of scientists, state regulators, and fishing interests are developing a new proposal to tailor the federal regulatory model under the Magnuson-Stevens Act to meet the different conditions in each individual state in the Gulf of Mexico.

On Friday, the Vermont House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a ban, by a vote of 103-36, to become the first state to enact an outright prohibition on the use of hydraulic fracturing. Last year, New Jersey's legislature passed a similar fracking ban that was initially vetoed by Governor Chris Christie and a temporary, one-year prohibition was passed in its place. Vermont's Governor, Peter Shumlin, is widely expected to sign the legislation, which was heralded by environmentalists and opposed by industry groups that viewed it as reactionary and unnecessary since there are no active permits to use the fracking process in the state.

The Wall Street Journal features a front page story highlighting that four states and three Native American tribes have received $180 million in federal funding with few strings attached to clean up abandoned mines when their reclamation worries have been largely fixed. At issue is a change made in 2006 to the Abandoned Mine Lands (AML) program and a fund made up of fees imposed on coal companies meant to help clean up old sites and for reclamation efforts. The legislative change  made disbursements to states "mandatory" instead of "discretionary" through the Congressional appropriations process, and consequently there is little funding left for other states with long-term clean up projects that may take decades.