YELLOWSTONE SNOWMOBILE BAN IN WORKS: The NPS has informed local officials of plans to ban snowmobiles from Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, says the Billings Gazette 3/14. The Park Service cites 35,000 comments, federal air pollution laws, an executive order and laws requiring protection of wildlife and resources as reasons for the ban. Although the NPS has "backed away" from a plan to plow the road into Old Faithful, snowcoaches, large "vans on skis and rubber tracks," would be allowed and the ban is not expected to take effect until 2002-03.

ID GOV VOWS FIGHT ON GRIZZLY REINTRODUCTION: Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne has vowed to use the state's $1 million "constitutional defense fund" to oppose a plan to reintroduce 25 grizzly bears into Central Idaho, says AP 3/11. The proposal was part of a FEIS on grizzly bear recovery in the Selway-Bitteroot and Frank Church-River of No Return wildernesses. Under the plan the grizzlies would be an "experimental population" which was "managed by a committee of citizens" and could be killed by ranchers protecting livestock.

STANDING FORESTS ECONOMIC BOON: A new report finds that logging on national forests is "a money losing proposition" whose economic costs far outweigh any benefits, says ENS 3/13. The report looks at the heavy taxpayer subsidies for public lands logging and analyzes the value of ecosystem services, such as "flood control, water purification, pest control, and pollination" to rural communities. Some three years of research went into the report which consistently found "more jobs, more income and more public revenues associated with forest protection."

MINE TAILINGS DISASTER WAITING TO HAPPEN: Even minor flooding of a "tailings blighted floodplain," on Montana's upper Clark Fork River could poison the river downstream with toxic heavy metals, says The Montana Standard, Butte 3/14. An EPA expert contends that because of a 1908 flood and "over-grazing by cattle," the river has already lost much of its vegetation, has a very destabilized stream bank and could "come apart very easily." Environmentalists want cows removed from riparian areas, and efforts to immediately re-establish "a heavy growth of willows, lush tall grasses, and wetlands" to withstand a hundred-year flood.

POACHERS DEVASTATE CONGO GORILLAS: Poachers, militias, and hungry villagers have decimated the remaining eastern lowland gorillas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Kahuzi-Biega National Park, says Reuters 3/13. Gorilla numbers have dropped to some 70 from 258 just several years ago.