conservation

A first-of-its kind program in the Colorado River basin is paying ranchers and farmers to forgo their water rights in order to conserve the region’s rivers and lakes. Launched in 2014, the $15-million “money-for-water program” was funded “by the four largest municipal water providers in the Colorado River basin (which includes Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and California), along with the Bureau of Reclamation,” says High Country News.

Kenya has passed the strictest plastic bag ban in the world, punishing anyone who sells or uses plastic bags with four years in prison or a $40,000 fine. Proponents of the law say that marine animals often end up strangled by or ingesting plastic. “If we continue like this, by 2050, we will have more plastic in the ocean than fish,” said Habib El-Habr, an expert on ocean trash working with Kenya’s UN environment program.

After a controversial four-month review of 27 U.S. national monuments, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke won’t recommend that the White House do away with any of them. He did say, however, that “a handful of sites” could see their boundaries changed or shrunken, says the Associated Press.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is reviewing catch limits for 11 Alaskan native communities permitted to catch bowhead whales for subsistence hunting. The new quota would cover a six-year period starting in 2018.

The 2018 farm bill should “promote the connection between food production and food access, while ensuring that we take care of the land,” says Karen Ross, the California state agriculture secretary, in releasing the state’s recommendations for the legislation. California is the No. 1 farm state in dollar value of production.

John Duarte, a Northern California farmer, has agreed to pay a $1.1 million penalty to settle a years-long case that started in 2012, after he bought and tilled fallow land within a federally protected wetland.

A new sage grouse conservation plan released by the Interior Department has ranchers and energy developers in the West cheering, while environmentalists worry about the endangered bird’s future.

A new bill introduced by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, and Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat, aims to lower food waste nationally by targeting schools and federal food vendors.

At a time when sustainability carries cachet with consumers, companies known for top-quality products are putting their money into the farms and ranches that provide their raw materials, says Business of Fashion.

In 2010, the contraction of stressed eel fisheries in Europe and Japan touched off a gold rush for U.S. eels, and led to a multi-state smuggling effort that has produced 11 guilty pleas and is still unwinding in the courts, according to the latest story from The Food & Environment Reporting Network, in partnership with National Geographic.

California farmer John Duarte, the poster boy for farm groups complaining of federal over-regulation of wetlands, has high-powered supporters in Congress who are appealing for the government to drop its long-running case against him. The Republican chairmen of the House Agriculture and Judiciary committees wrote Attorney General Jeff Sessions to argue that the case against Duarte is unfounded.

With the release of the 2018 White House Budget proposal, environmentalists and public lands advocates are worried over a $1.4 billion (10.9 percent) cut to the Interior Department. The proposal targets federal lands, opens oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), and cancels money set aside to bring economic opportunities to Appalachia — often in the form of farming ventures.

The Conservation Reserve Program, which pays landowners to take fragile land out of production, is so close to its enrollment limit that the USDA will not admit high-priority land that ordinarily could be enrolled at once.

The outdoor retailer Patagonia says it’s prepared to sue if the Trump Administration tries to revoke any of the country's national monuments. Trump has ordered an unprecedented review by the Department of Interior of all national monuments established under the 1906 Antiquities Act in the last two decades.