Road Rage and R.S. 2477: Judicial and Administrative Responsibility for Resolving Road Claims on Public Land

The past decade has seen the D-4 Caterpillar bulldozer become a significant tool for those seeking to challenge federal land management agencies\u27 authority to protect resources federal lands by reducing access. The power of the bulldozer is both symbolic and pragmatic. It cuts an iconographic image of local officials standing up against federal control over vast areas of land in the rural west. But it also, in many cases, provokes litigation, allowing claims to property rights to receive judicial attention that might otherwise evade them. Underlying each of these protagonist\u27s legal positions, if not their motivations, is a right-of-way grant enacted as part of the Mining Act of 1866: “The right of way for the construction of highways over public lands, not reserved for public uses, is hereby granted.” For 110 years, from its enactment in 1866 until its repeal in 1976, this obscure statute known as R.S. 2477 granted the right-of-way across unreserved federal public lands for the construction of highways. For most of its lifetime, the terse and obscure grant caused little stir, except for the occasional claim that now private lands are subject to R.S. 2477 rights-of-way established during earlier public ownership. Since its repeal, however, R.S. 2477 has become a flashpoint in the ongoing battle for control over western public lands and the resources they harbor. Throughout the west, states, counties, and even individuals and groups pushing for unrestricted motorized access to remote public lands are using R.S. 2477 to try to frustrate environmentally protective measures imposed by federal land managers. Some of these groups are seeking to establish R.S. 2477 highway claims in order to preclude the potential future designation of public lands for protection under the Wilderness Act of 1964. An overlooked aspect of the R.S. 2477 controversy has been the allocation of responsibility among federal courts and federal land managers--specifically, the Department of the Interior (“DOI”)--for resolving disputed R.S. 2477 claims. Whether courts or federal land managers have primary authority to interpret and apply R.S. 2477 is more than a question of mere procedure or choice of forum. It is central to the ability of federal land management agencies to administer the obsolete land grant in a way that harmonizes the intent of the Congress that created it and the intent of Congresses that have since repealed the grant and mandated the management of public lands for various uses, including protecting their primitive condition. This Article argues that federal land management agencies should replace the courts as the institution with primary responsibility for resolving issues that arise from R.S. 2477 claims. In this view, DOI should be accorded the opportunity to interpret R.S. 2477 and to make an initial determination of the validity and scope of claimed R.S. 2477 rights-of-way. The judicial role, though still substantial, would be limited to that customary in administrative law cases, namely, the review of agency action for abuse of discretion and impermissible resolution of statutory ambiguities. Agency primacy would ensure the consistency and uniformity of R.S. 2477 decisions and, if the process is properly structured, ensure that the unique problems presented by this antiquated grant are, at long last, finally settled in a manner that both permits public participation and interpretation of R.S. 2477 in the proper context of the modern public land management regime

Impartial avoidance games for generating finite groups

We study an impartial avoidance game introduced by Anderson and Harary. The game is played by two players who alternately select previously unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who cannot select an element without making the set of jointly-selected elements into a generating set for the group loses the game. We develop criteria on the maximal subgroups that determine the nim-numbers of these games and use our criteria to study our game for several families of groups, including nilpotent, sporadic, and symmetric groups.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. Revised in response to comments from refere

Impartial avoidance and achievement games for generating symmetric and alternating groups

We study two impartial games introduced by Anderson and Harary. Both games are played by two players who alternately select previously-unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who builds a generating set from the jointly-selected elements wins the first game. The first player who cannot select an element without building a generating set loses the second game. We determine the nim-numbers, and therefore the outcomes, of these games for symmetric and alternating groups.Comment: 12 pages. 2 tables/figures. This work was conducted during the third author's visit to DIMACS partially enabled through support from the National Science Foundation under grant number #CCF-1445755. Revised in response to comments from refere

From Food Miles to Moneyball : How We Should Be Thinking About Food and Climate

Since Michael Pollan polarized the push to eat local food in his bestseller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the concept of “food miles” has been something of a rallying cry and an organizing principle in the marketing of the local food movement. Among locavores and their sympathizers, the term seems to encapsulate all that is wrong with the food system. Fresh grapes from Chile make their way to supermarkets from Maine to Minnesota, and even California. Major food conglomerates process commodity ingredients like corn, soy, and wheat into packaged food that travels across the country and across oceans before landing on a dinner plate. In a time when climate change is emerging as a widely accepted threat—perhaps the biggest threat—to the world as we know it, the concept of “food miles” alluringly invites us to take satisfying personal action where national and international governance have failed to forge an effective response to the warming planet. The term suggests that by acting locally, by eating locally, we can each do our own small, individual part to confront the enormity of his global problem—that shopping at the farmer’s market is a virtuous act of global citizenship. This Essay seeks to demonstrate the limits of that notion and to suggest a different way of thinking about food and climate. Whether or not it is true that food travels an average of 1,500 miles before it reaches the American table, the concept of “food miles” is not one which we should construct policy around to address the food system’s contribution to global warming. This Essay seeks to bring to the discussion among American legal scholars and local food activists what is becoming increasingly clear to ecologists and other scientists who study the farm, while it may be a part of the climate change puzzle, is not a keystone. Fossil-fueled transportation accounts for a relatively small portion of the food system’s contribution to climate change. Far more important than transportation are the ways that faming is done, particularly the efficient uses of nitrogen fertilizer, the management of manure and livestock, and the clearing of forests for cultivation to provide food and energy (biofuel) to a growing world population. This Essay will proceed in two main parts. In order to choose the most effective policies it is essential to understand what is known about the impact of the food sector on climate change. Part I places “food miles” in context by describing the ways in which agriculture (the cultivation of food) contributes to global warming. It does so not just by looking at today’s emissions from agriculture, but also by considering the climate impact of food production in future decades. Part II suggests a pragmatic policy approach to addressing climate change though the food and agriculture sector. It outlines a series of proposals, primarily to be undertaken on the international scale, that focuses on “low hanging fruit” by focusing on the sector’s most significant greenhouse gas emissions. It identifies five “Moneyball” strategies for smartly addressing the climate impacts of food production in coming decades

From Food Miles to Moneyball : How We Should Be Thinking About Food and Climate

Since Michael Pollan polarized the push to eat local food in his bestseller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the concept of “food miles” has been something of a rallying cry and an organizing principle in the marketing of the local food movement. Among locavores and their sympathizers, the term seems to encapsulate all that is wrong with the food system. Fresh grapes from Chile make their way to supermarkets from Maine to Minnesota, and even California. Major food conglomerates process commodity ingredients like corn, soy, and wheat into packaged food that travels across the country and across oceans before landing on a dinner plate. In a time when climate change is emerging as a widely accepted threat—perhaps the biggest threat—to the world as we know it, the concept of “food miles” alluringly invites us to take satisfying personal action where national and international governance have failed to forge an effective response to the warming planet. The term suggests that by acting locally, by eating locally, we can each do our own small, individual part to confront the enormity of his global problem—that shopping at the farmer’s market is a virtuous act of global citizenship. This Essay seeks to demonstrate the limits of that notion and to suggest a different way of thinking about food and climate. Whether or not it is true that food travels an average of 1,500 miles before it reaches the American table, the concept of “food miles” is not one which we should construct policy around to address the food system’s contribution to global warming. This Essay seeks to bring to the discussion among American legal scholars and local food activists what is becoming increasingly clear to ecologists and other scientists who study the farm, while it may be a part of the climate change puzzle, is not a keystone. Fossil-fueled transportation accounts for a relatively small portion of the food system’s contribution to climate change. Far more important than transportation are the ways that faming is done, particularly the efficient uses of nitrogen fertilizer, the management of manure and livestock, and the clearing of forests for cultivation to provide food and energy (biofuel) to a growing world population. This Essay will proceed in two main parts. In order to choose the most effective policies it is essential to understand what is known about the impact of the food sector on climate change. Part I places “food miles” in context by describing the ways in which agriculture (the cultivation of food) contributes to global warming. It does so not just by looking at today’s emissions from agriculture, but also by considering the climate impact of food production in future decades. Part II suggests a pragmatic policy approach to addressing climate change though the food and agriculture sector. It outlines a series of proposals, primarily to be undertaken on the international scale, that focuses on “low hanging fruit” by focusing on the sector’s most significant greenhouse gas emissions. It identifies five “Moneyball” strategies for smartly addressing the climate impacts of food production in coming decades

The Grid and the Grouse: Cooperative Federal-State Conservation Planning in the Ages of Obama and Trump

This essay reviews two habitat conservation and planning initiatives undertaken by the Obama administration that relied on and envisioned extraordinary cooperation between the federal and state governments in order to overcome, or at least lessen, the disruptive impacts of jurisdictional lines on effective and comprehensive habitat conservation. These initiatives are the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP) in California and the sage grouse conservation planning effort across eleven western states. Both initiatives embraced the common sense goal of coordinating development and conservation management across jurisdictional boundaries. In both initiatives, however, cooperation was motivated and sustained by specific legal and policy imperatives that commanded a joint effort. In the Trump era to date, these imperatives, which are described below, remain mostly unchanged, notwithstanding shifts in federal policy favoring traditional energy development on the public lands. In a rational world unmanipulated by politics, these imperatives should operate to further promote-or, at the very least, to maintain intact-these collaborative conservation efforts

Gene tree reconciliation: new developments in Bayesian concordance analysis with BUCKy

When phylogenetic trees inferred from different genes are incongruent, several methods are available to reconcile gene trees and extract the shared phylogenetic information from the sequence data. Bayesian Concordance Analysis, implemented in BUCKy, aims to extract the vertical signal and to infer clusters of genes that share the same tree topology. The new version of BUCKy includes a quartet-based estimate of the species tree with branch lengths in coalescent units

How large can the electron to proton mass ratio be in Particle-In-Cell simulations of unstable systems?

Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations are widely used as a tool to investigate instabilities that develop between a collisionless plasma and beams of charged particles. However, even on contemporary supercomputers, it is not always possible to resolve the ion dynamics in more than one spatial dimension with such simulations. The ion mass is thus reduced below 1836 electron masses, which can affect the plasma dynamics during the initial exponential growth phase of the instability and during the subsequent nonlinear saturation. The goal of this article is to assess how far the electron to ion mass ratio can be increased, without changing qualitatively the physics. It is first demonstrated that there can be no exact similarity law, which balances a change of the mass ratio with that of another plasma parameter, leaving the physics unchanged. Restricting then the analysis to the linear phase, a criterion allowing to define a maximum ratio is explicated in terms of the hierarchy of the linear unstable modes. The criterion is applied to the case of a relativistic electron beam crossing an unmagnetized electron-ion plasma.Comment: To appear in Physics of Plasma

Lessons from a large scale deployment of DGT in the Seine basin

Diffusive Gradient in Thin film (DGT) is a speciation technique now commonly used in the scientific literature to assess metallic contamination in water. However applications usually take place in a same watercourse or in neighbouring sites. We propose here to present the first results of a large scale deployment of DGTs. The main objective of the project, which is supported by the French water agency of the Seine-Normandie basin, is to evaluate the potential of passive samplers as monitoring tools. DGT devices were deployed in 45 sites, on 30 locations in the entire Seine river basin. The sampling area was 500 km long and 200 km wide around Paris. The total sampling period lasted over the whole 2009 year. Restricted gels of 0.78 were used to measure labile Cd, Cr, Co, Cu, Mn, Ni, Pb and Zn. In parallel, raw and filtered water samples were collected to measure total and dissolved metals. General physico-chemical parameters were also measured. The whole set of measurements constitute a rich dataset including large and small rivers, and reference as well as impacted sites. The results first allow us to draw a map of total, dissolved and labile metal concentrations, representing the spatial variability of metal contamination in the Seine basin. Moreover, considering the temporal variability, different behaviours, depending on the metal, can be identified. The large scale deployment of DGT in the Seine river basin was successful: all the samples have been interpreted and are exploitable, whereas the dissolved metal samples are sometimes under the detection limit. We have then built a representative data set on the water contamination in labile metal of an urban impacted basin. The results are also interpreted as labile percentage, showing the operationally possible values of lability in contrasted environmental conditions. A first approach of the factors influencing the lability highlights the significance of the nature of the organic matter to interpret the lability of the metals