It’s safe to say that Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) is no friend of environmentalists. He boycotted Pope Francis’s speech to Congress in 2015 because the pontiff addressed climate change. He received a score of 3 percent that year from the League of Conservation Voters, significantly below the House average of 41 percent.
But his latest move came as a surprise to many. Gosar submitted a resolution this week that threatens to repeal the National Park Service’s authority to manage private drilling for oil, gas and minerals at 40 national parks, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. Under what are known as the 9B rules, the Park Service, which controls the surface of natural parks, can decline drilling rights to parties that own resources beneath the surface if it determines that the operation would be an environmental threat.
“The resolution is just the latest in a series of moves by federal lawmakers to weaken environmental protections for national parks under the Congressional Review Act,” said the association, a nonprofit watchdog for parks. “If these repeals are signed into law … it will not only stop these protections, it will also prohibit agencies from issuing similar rules and protections in the future, unless directed by Congress.”
Gosar, who has received nearly $250,000 in donations from the energy and national resource sector in his four Congressional elections, was recently appointed to chair the House Subcommittee on Energy and Minerals. He claimed that the updated regulation is cumbersome governmental overreach that stifles job growth and energy production.
As president of the nonprofit Friends of Panthertown, Margaret Carton has worked for years to protect her beloved Panthertown Valley in Jackson County.
As the “feet on the ground,” the group has worked since 2005 to maintain trails, install steps around waterfalls to create safe footing, and give educational programs.
With a deal underway with Mainspring Conservation Trust and the U.S. Forest Service, the friends group will get to care for a bigger chunk of Panthertown.
If fundraising is successful, the Mainspring land trust is set to purchase a 16-acre, privately owned parcel known as the Hipp property, at the west entrance to Panthertown Valley. The valley comprises 6,295 acres of recreation area in the Nantahala National Forest. The parcel is a prime piece of real estate.
The 16-acre property contains a knoll that looks into the rugged and rolling hills of the protected Panthertown Valley, which is open to hiking, mountain biking, fishing, camping and horseback riding.
I am disgusted… for dozens of reasons, but let’s talk about the Stream Protection Rule.
The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) of the Department of the Interior studied the effects of mountaintop removal coal mining for nearly the entire length of the Obama Administration, fielding more than 100,000 requests for comment. On December 20, 2016 they released the Stream Protection Rule, a regulation of the industry based on the results of their impact studies.
OSMRE introduced the Stream Protection Rule to improve the balance between environmental protection and providing for the Nation’s need for coal as a source of energy. The final rule better protects streams, fish, wildlife, and related environmental values from the adverse impacts of surface coal mining operations and provides mine operators with a regulatory framework to avoid water pollution and the long-term costs associated with water treatment.
On February 1, 2017 the U.S. House of Representatives voted 228-194 to repeal the rule a mere six weeks after it went into effect.
If you aren’t familiar with mountaintop removal coal mining, here is a brief explaination. Rather than constructing mine shafts to dig deep into the earth to extract coal, the mining companies now simply blow up the top of Appalachian Mountains to get to the coal.
They’ve been doing it for decades. It’s bad enough that this process leaves ugly scars on the beautiful Appalachian Mountains, but all of the trees and dirt and rock from the former mountaintop has to go somewhere. Prior to the Stream Protection Rule, the surface mining operators would fill up the surrounding valleys and hollows with the debris. You know what’s in those hollows? That’s right… streams and creeks, and fish and wildlife.
Water is the lifeblood of the mountains and forests. When you cover it up with tons and tons of dirt and rock it completely changes the ecology for thousands of years. And for what? To make it easier for a dying industry to extract fossil fuel that isn’t even in demand anymore. I call it double pollution, and it’s why I’m so disgusted.
Mountaintop removal mining will continue to unnecessarily provide coal as a source of energy further exacerbating the negative effects on the environment and climate. Plus the disposal of the tailings and other waste from the process destroys the streams and wildlife that are so important to future generations of humans for their existence.
The almighty dollar seems so important to the U.S. Representatives that man’s ability to sustain himself is imperiled by shortsighted decisions like this. The U.S. Senate will be taking up this repeal in the coming days. If you have any hope for your grandchildren’s ability to exist in an environment with clean air and water, please contact your senators. The Stream Protection Rule depends on it.
Update February 2, 2017 @ 3:00 PM: Sadly the Senate just also voted to overturn the Stream Protection Rule 54-45. Now it only awaits the President’s signature.
The People’s Climate March will descend on D.C. with an intersectional coalition of green and environmental-justice groups, indigenous and civil-rights organizations, students and labor unions. The march will take place on Saturday, April 29, 2017, exactly 100 days into Trump’s presidency.
In January, the Women’s March gathered half a million demonstrators in D.C. alone. There have also been talks of an upcoming Science March, which has no set date but almost 300,000 followers on Twitter.
April’s climate march is being organized by a coalition that emerged from the People’s Climate March of 2014, a rally that brought 400,000 people to New York City before the United Nations convened there for a summit on climate change. It was the largest climate march in history — a record that may soon be broken.
“Communities across the country have been working for environmental and social justice for centuries. Now it’s time for our struggles to unite and work together across borders to fight racism, sexism, xenophobia, and environmental destruction.”
On January 25, 2017, the Bureau of Land Management leased nearly 850 acres of land for drilling in northwest New Mexico, netting close to $3 million. The agency offers leases on millions of acres of public land per year, but this latest sale was unusual. Not only was it the first time that the BLM has conducted a lease sale online rather than live in the New Mexico region, the sale had also been postponed three times over the last five years, because its lands are just 20 miles from Chaco Culture National Historical Park (also a UNESCO World Heritage site and an International Dark Sky Park).
While Chaco Canyon and its ruins, such as Pueblo Bonito, are protected from development, as is a 10-mile buffer around the park, surrounding areas are not. Chaco is the core of a much larger Ancestral Puebloan civilization that extended for hundreds of miles in the central San Juan Basin from about 900 to 1150 A.D. The land today is sacred to Navajo, Hopi, Zuni and other Pueblo Indians, and bears remnants of a system of 30-foot-wide roads radiating outward from Chaco Canyon, as well as extensive ruins, artifacts and even lunar calendars etched into boulders. None of those have yet been studied thoroughly by archaeologists.
Nonetheless, about 90 percent of the Greater Chaco area has already been leased for oil and gas development, and Native Americans and environmental groups have fought to exclude the remaining areas. They succeeded in delaying this lease sale multiple times over concerns that hydraulic fracturing and drilling would harm the environment and public health.
A team of scientists has been studying the plant and animal life as regrowth happens following the November 2016 Chimney Tops 2 fire in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The team has investigated 100 different areas and developed detailed maps of the impact by the fire.
“The thing that stands out is the red areas. This is around the Bull Head trail area that a lot of people would be familiar with. These are showing high burn severity areas,” said Troy Evans. “You can see in areas like this that once used to be pretty large trees are now pretty small.”
Of the 11-thousand acres that burned, a small percentage was in the highest burn category. Scientists say this will be the most interesting part to watch recover because new plant and animals could regenerate here.
“As the spring rolls around, I think you’re going to see a lot of green. A lot of growth. New things coming in, maybe where we lost canopy. And see a variety of changes from the fire,” he said.
He says it may only take a few years for the park to look like normal again. But he says there may be a new normal with new plants, animals and familiar ones in new areas of the park. Right now signs of growth are already present with new grass growing and animals already moving back in.
“I have been watching the Trump administration trying unsuccessfully to suppress the National Park Service with a mix of pride and amusement. The NPS is the steward of America’s most important places and the narrator of our most powerful stories, told authentically, accurately, and built upon scientific and scholarly research. The Park Ranger is a trusted interpreter of our complex natural and cultural history and a voice that cannot not be suppressed.
“Edicts from on-high have directed the NPS to not talk about “national policy”, but permission is granted to use social media for visitor center hours and safety. The ridiculousness of such a directive was immediately resisted and I am not the least bit surprised.
“So at Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta should we not talk about his actions to secure the rights to vote for African Americans in the south, or is that too “national policy?” At Stonewall National Monument in New York City, shall we only talk about the hours you can visit the Inn or is it “national policy” to interpret the events there in 1969 that gave rise to the LGBT movement? Shall we only talk about the historic architecture of the Washington, DC home of Alice Paul and Alva Belmont or is it too “national policy” to suggest their decades of effort to secure the rights of women can be linked directly to the women’s marches in hundreds of cities last weekend?
“And as we scientifically monitor the rapid decline of glaciers in Glacier National Park, a clear and troubling indicator of a warming planet, shall we refrain from telling this story to the public because the administration views climate change as “national policy?”
These are not “policy” issues, they are facts about our nation, it is how we learn and strive to achieve the ideals of our founding documents. To talk about these facts is core to the mission of the NPS. During the Centennial of the National Park Service, we hosted over 300 million visitors (now that is huge) to the National Parks and most came away inspired, patriotic and ready to speak on behalf of the values we hold most dear. The new Administration would be wise to figure out how to support the National Park Service, its extraordinary employees and their millions of fans.”
Jonathan B. Jarvis served during the Obama Administration as the 18th Director of the United States National Park Service, confirmed by the United States Senate on September 25, 2009. He retired from federal service on January 3, 2017.
Thru-hikers discover how environmentally degrading backpacking can be. They find countless coolers and campsites full of trash, and eating individually wrapped packets of ramen and Pop-Tarts generates an uncomfortable amount of waste.
Hikers have ideas for making long-distance backpacking more environmentally sound. Though it’s nearly impossible to avoid creating some amount of trash, many hikers found that making mindful purchases, buying in bulk and adhering to Leave No Trace principles helped mitigate environmental damage.
Here are a few suggestions:
Though hikers are resourceful people, there is still room for improvement in the way we treat the environment. With research and some creativity, future generations will be able to hike these precious wilderness trails as they are meant to be enjoyed.
The evolution of historic Elkmont soon should be taking another step forward.
The historic former logging/resort community in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been in an evolving state since 2009 when the National Park Service announced a plan to preserve part of the community after conducting an environmental impact study from 1992 through 2008.
The plan has been to preserve 19 structures at Elkmont while razing 55. Two of those structures – the Appalachian Clubhouse and Spence Cabin – have already been renovated and preserved. The park has now received funding to preserve four more structures and tear down 29.
Elkmont has been among the park’s most visited attractions. Located off Fighting Creek Gap Road, it began as a logging community in the late 1800s before evolving into a vacation resort. The park allowed owners to keep their cabins there until the early 1990s. It has since fallen into disrepair.
Those scheduled for preservation will be much like the structures in Cades Cove that are stabilized and made safe for visitors to tour.
If anyone should know that it is, as a practical matter, impossible to force a willful individual to stop tweeting, it’s President Donald J. Trump. So perhaps he was least shocked of all to see that, this week, a new handle popped up on Twitter after the president placed a gag order on his own National Park Service: @AltNatParkSer.
By way of introduction, the anonymous founders tweeted: “Hello, we are the Alternative National Park Service Twitter Account activated in time of war and censorship to ensure fact-based education.”
The account is less than a week old. It has issued over 300 tweets — on the Trump White House, on climate change, on the importance of peer-reviewed and factually-accurate science — and racked up 1.24 million followers in the process.
Within days, at least a dozen Twitters claiming to be the rogue employees of the government agencies for which they work appeared, describing themselves as the “unofficial resistance”: @RogueNASA, which already has 628,000 followers; @altUSEPA whose bio reads “Environmental conditions may vary from alternative facts” already has 184,000 followers; @RoguePOTUSStaff, allegedly tweeting from “inside the White House,” has a follower count of nearly 60,000.
The National Weather Service, the State Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Education, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Agriculture, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services,: all have alternative accounts with thousands of followers a pop.
It was a year into his life alone in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains when Billy Barr began his recordings. It started as a curiosity, a task to busy his mind during the winter. By no means did he set out to make a vital database for climate change scientists. “Hell no!” he said. “I didn’t know anything about climate change at the time.”
In 1973 Barr had dropped out of college and made his home an abandoned mining shack at the base of Gothic Mountain, a 12,600-foot stone buttress. The cold winds blew through the shack’s wood slat walls as if they didn’t exist; he shared the bare dirt floor with a skunk and pine marten, his only regular company for much of the year.
Barr had moved from the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains precisely because of the solitude, but he couldn’t escape boredom. Especially that first winter. So he measured snow levels, animal tracks, and in spring the first jubilant calls of birds returning. He filled a notebook with these observations; then another notebook. This has continued now for 44 years.
Barr’s data would likely have remained the tinkerings of an amateur scientist were he not so close to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL), one of the most important phenology research sites in the world. During the last couple decades, scientists at the RMBL have become fascinated with climate change’s impact on plants and animals in the high alpines, hoping to scale their discoveries into broader lessons about life in a warmer earth. But their research suffered from a dearth of long-term records. In Gothic, for example, the spring snow seemed to melt a little earlier. The flowers blossomed a little sooner. But without historical context, these little changes could not be understood for what they really were.
As 2017 is the sesquicentennial year for John Muir’s thousand-mile walk across the southeastern U.S. (1867-68), it is likely that many people will be attempting to trace his path.
Chuck Roe, founding manager of the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program, founding director of the Conservation Trust for North Carolina, and Southeast U.S. Region program director for the Land Trust Alliance, was inspired to retrace the path of Muir’s long walk, but with a different focus—that being by telling the story of land conservation along the route of Muir’s Southern Trek.
An account of conserved lands and protected natural areas along Muir’s Southern walking route fits nicely with the mission of the organization that Roe now serves as president — Southern Conservation Partners — which is dedicated to enhancing protection, restoration, and greater public awareness of the natural heritage of the southern U.S.
Roe took a different perspective on his adventure. He followed Muir’s route largely by personal vehicle, with periodic short walks along the way. He segmented his examination of the route into sections spread over more than a year.
The intent was to observe and describe the publicly accessible parks, nature preserves, forests and wildlife management areas, and other recreational areas along Muir’s walking route, in homage and testimony to the success story of land conservation in the southeastern U.S.
See the results of Roe’s work here…
Prescribed fire is an important and widely used management tool, but the smoke produced can cause air quality issues and health problems. Before conducting prescribed fires, managers typically model the amount of smoke a fire will produce, which is directly related to the amount of fuel available.
“Most fire-effects models were developed in the western U.S.,” says U.S. Forest Service forestry technician Virginia McDaniel. “Their accuracy has not been well-tested in southeastern forests.”
In the southeastern U.S., prescribed fires are used to help restore pine-oak forests to their historic woodland condition. Prescribed fires also consume fuel that could otherwise lead to a catastrophic wildfire. Many plants and animals, such as the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, depend on these prescribed fires to maintain suitable habitat for their survival.
“Maintaining pine-oak woodlands in the Ouachita Mountains is most efficiently done with large landscape burns because optimal burning days are infrequent,” says McDaniel. “However, there are limits to the amount of smoke that can be emitted on a given day. Balancing the ecological benefit of burning with air quality standards is becoming increasingly difficult for fire managers.”
When Congress passed the act creating the National Park Service in the summer of 1916, it instructed the agency to leave park scenery and wildlife “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” The law did not define “unimpaired.” To Stephen Mather, the charismatic borax magnate who served as the first director of the Park Service, it meant simply “undeveloped.” Early park managers followed his lead, striving both to protect and to promote sublime vistas.
But the arguments began almost as soon as the agency was born. In September 1916 the prominent California zoologist Joseph Grinnell, writing in the journal Science, suggested that the Park Service should protect not just scenery but also the “original balance in plant and animal life.” Over the next few decades, wildlife biologists inside and outside the agency echoed Grinnell, calling for the parks to remain “unimpaired,” in ecological terms. But the public came to the parks for spectacles—volcanoes, waterfalls, trees you can drive a car through—and preserving them remained the agency’s primary concern.
In the early 1960s, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall—who would oversee the addition of nearly 50 sites to the National Park System—became concerned about the agency’s management of wildlife in the parks. He recruited University of California wildlife biologist Starker Leopold, the son of famed conservationist Aldo Leopold, to chair an independent study.
The Leopold Report proved hugely influential. Like Grinnell, it called on the Park Service to maintain the original “biotic associations” that existed at the time of European settlement. In the decades that followed, the Park Service got more scientific.
The devastating spruce beetle infestation in the San Juan Mountains has crossed the Continental Divide, and within the next few years, will spread into the high country around Durango and Silverton, leaving in its wake an expanse of dead trees.
“I tell people all the time: you need to get up there before it starts to look different,” said Kent Grant, a Durango-based district forester with the Colorado State Forest Service. “Already it’s increasingly more obvious. It’s just around the corner.”
The spruce beetle epidemic started in Wolf Creek in the late 1990s, and because of the effects of drought, warmer winters and densely stocked forest stands, the insect’s outbreak rapidly intensified.
Over the past nearly two decades, the spruce beetle tore through more than 120,000 acres of the Weminuche Wilderness, which at 488,210 acres, is Colorado’s largest designated wilderness area.
And recently, the infestation has made its way as close as Vallecito Lake, about 20 miles northeast of Durango, mainly feeding on Englemann spruce trees at higher elevations above 9,000 feet.
But within the past year or so, Mountain Studies Institute’s Anthony Culpepper said the spruce beetle finally found a way to cross the eastern flank of the Continental Divide, near Silverton – a natural barrier that had kept the insect at bay.
U.S. national parks remain what American author Wallace Stegner once called America’s Best Idea. Our parks enjoy bi- partisan support and are a model for park systems around the globe. By any measure, the idea is a success. But, as we transition to a new administration, it is timely to ask this question: will the System continue to serve its intended purpose in a new century? Will it remain effective and popular in the next fifty or one hundred years?
We are a different people than we were in 1916, 1966, or even 15 years ago. We communicate differently, use technology differently, learn differently, travel and recreate differently, and our economy has changed in fundamental ways. How will the National Park Service meet these challenges and remain current, responsive, and popular to all Americans?
National parks are valued by all our citizens and are enjoyed by over 300 million visitors; they are proven economic engines generating $16.9 billion annually in visitor spending and $32 billion in impact on the national economy. Yet, today parks are challenged by aging infrastructure. Substantial investments are needed in visitor centers, transportation, water systems, and telecommunications.
Funding is also needed for staff to address issues of public safety, overcrowding, and facility maintenance. The National Park Service is an important partner to both states and local communities providing access to healthy outdoor recreation and revitalizing communities using cost effective partnership strategies. Finally, to continue its tradition of good work, the National Park Service needs reinvigorated leadership and close attention to its work force development.
The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks has prepared three papers with recommendations to address the most critical issues facing our parks in the next four years.
Three men accused of going on a vandalism spree across several western United States National Parks have pleaded guilty and will be banned from all public lands for the next five years.
Before U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Carman at the Yellowstone Justice Center in Mammoth Hot Springs the three Canadian men affiliated with the group “High On Life” admitted to breaking the law in Yellowstone National Park, Zion National Park, Death Valley National Park, and Mesa Verde National Park.
This past summer the men, Charles Ryker Gamble, Alexey Andriyovych Lyakh, and Justis Cooper Price Brown went on a road trip through several different national parks and were accused of leaving a path of destruction in their wake.
The most egregious violation which sparked national outrage was when the High on Life crew were recorded on video walking across Grand Prismatic Springs in Yellowstone National Park, despite signs clearly showing that leaving the boardwalk is strictly forbidden.
Environmental experts will present information about the long-term effects of the Party Rock Fire on the natural environment in Hickory Nut Gorge on Tuesday, January 31, 2017 at 6 p.m. in the Community Hall at the Lake Lure Municipal Building. Experts include Clint Calhoun with the Town of Lake Lure, Marshall Ellis with NC State Parks, and Michael Cheek with the NC Forest Service.
The Party Rock Fire burned more than 7,000 acres in the Hickory Nut Gorge in November of 2016. While there were no fatalities and no structures were lost during the fire, there are other ways that the fire will affect the local community. The local economy relies heavily on tourism; the Hickory Nut Gorge’s natural beauty and unique plant and animal species are a major draw for visitors. The disturbance caused by the Party Rock Fire could create the ideal conditions for non-native invasive plants to thrive, which can lower biodiversity and affect the beauty of the gorge. In contrast, some of the rare and endangered plant species of the gorge are dependent on disturbances to create suitable habitats for them. There are many potential benefits and detriments from the fire.
The panel will present and discuss information about what the possible effects of the fire will be, when we can expect to start seeing them, and what the community can do to ensure the natural environment of the Hickory Nut Gorge stays healthy. The panel will be hosted and moderated by the Weed Action Coalition of the Hickory Nut Gorge (WAC-HNG) and Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy. It is free and open to the public.
I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site. 
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