When the sun set just after 8 pm on March 23, 1989, nothing was amiss in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The ocean lapped at rocky, seaweed-strewn beaches, boats dotted the horizon, and thousands of sea otters floated serenely on their backs.
But all that changed the following morning, when the Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground and hemorrhaged 11 million gallons of crude oil into the sound. The spill not only transformed human and ecologic communities for decades to come, it also upended the world’s understanding of the long-term effects of a marine oil spill. Prior to Exxon Valdez, scientists believed that the biggest impacts were the animals that washed up dead in the immediate aftermath of a spill. They predicted that Prince William Sound would fully recover within 15 years.
In reality, it took much longer. Sea otter populations didn’t bounce back to pre-spill levels until just last summer, and other species may never recover: One group of orcas hasn’t birthed a surviving calf since before the spill. And while the precise cause of these long-term impacts isn’t always clear, there’s little doubt that lingering oil plays a role. “The chronic effects for some species can be of the same magnitude as the immediate effects,” Dan Esler, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey said.
Tribal leaders in the Southwest have outlined a proposal to designate a section of southeastern Utah as a national monument, seeking to become partners with the federal government in managing their ancestral homeland.
The proposed Bears Ears National Monument is named for twin buttes that overlook Cedar Mesa. The 1.9 million-acre area would be bordered to the south by the Navajo Nation and to the west by Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Canyonlands National Park. The Manti-La Sal National Forest would make up part of the eastern boundary.
American Indian and conservation groups say the area is under constant threat by looting of cultural objects, off-road vehicle use and destruction of gravesites — affronts to tribes’ ancestors, they say, and impediments to communities’ ability to heal. A handful of tribes submitted a proposal to President Barack Obama’s administration asking that he use his power under the Antiquities Act to proclaim the area a national monument and honor the tribes’ inherent connection with the land.
“It is not a matter of romanticism or political correctness,” the proposal reads. “Native people always have, and we do now, conceive of and relate to the natural world in a different way than does the larger society.”
Republicans in Utah’s congressional delegation have opposed the use of the Antiquities Act, saying it would undermine a larger effort to resolve disputes over public lands in Utah. Eric Descheenie, co-chairman of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, said the tribes’ views on the land being a source of healing have been overlooked in that discussion.
Land trusts are the underrated stars of Maine’s outdoor landscape. Nearly 90 nonprofit land trust organizations dot the state, from Kittery to Aroostook County. While state and national parks are much more visible and widely promoted, the network of land trusts holds some of Maine’s best hiking.
This panoply of land trusts is aided greatly by the Maine Land Trust Network, a program of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust that was founded in 1995. The organization brings together members of the dozens of Maine land trusts to share information, collaborate and craft programs, services and resources to better all the trusts.
As a hiker on the outside looking in, the MLTN is most useful as a hub of information about Maine’s trusts. The organization’s website – MLTN.org – lists all of Maine’s land trusts alphabetically or by county, and offers a keyword search to find features or locations. From there you can find everything you need to know about outdoor sites.
Finding a list of nearly 90 trusts too overwhelming?
The National Park Service (NPS) is proposing to modernize regulations for non-federal oil and gas rights exercised in national parks. The proposal would update current regulations that are now 36-years-old. The proposed updates will provide greater clarity and certainty to industry while improving the National Park Service’s ability to protect park resources and the values for which the parks were set aside, and to protect visitors from potentially adverse impacts associated with non-federal oil and gas operations located within the National Park System. The updated rule will bring existing oil and gas operations up to NPS standards to protect water quality and water quantity, air quality, night skies and natural sounds, visitor and employee health and safety, fish and wildlife habitat, and meet spill protection and reclamation standards.
“We have a fundamental responsibility to conserve park resources for the enjoyment of future generations and the changes we’ve proposed will clarify the process for oil and gas development in the small group of parks where current operations exist, and for parks who may manage operations in the future,” said National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis.
The proposal seeks to recover the full cost of reclamation resulting from oil and gas development and includes updates to make the regulations consistent with existing policies and practices.
The Southern Environmental Law Center filed a legal action this week on behalf of conservation groups seeking to overturn a controversial $7 million settlement between Duke Energy and the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality over the utility’s extensive coal ash pollution in the state.
The settlement came after Duke appealed a groundwater pollution penalty at the company’s Sutton plant near Wilmington. The state levied a $25 million fine against the company earlier this year over pollution from the Sutton coal ash pits, which have contaminated Sutton Lake, a popular fishing spot. Groundwater monitoring near the plant has found levels of cancer-causing arsenic 27 times higher than safe groundwater standards just a half-mile from drinking water wells.
Besides lowering the fine against Duke Energy, the settlement also blocks the state from enforcing groundwater pollution laws at the company’s 14 coal-fired plants across North Carolina. The settlement was reached without the involvement or knowledge of the conservation groups that have played a lead role in pressing for action on coal ash pollution through citizen lawsuits under the Clean Water Act and other laws.
This sprawling parcel of land in northern New Mexico that’s home to vast grasslands and one of North America’s few super volcanoes became part of the National Park Service this past weekend.
U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, members of the state’s congressional delegation, tribal leaders and others gathered at Valles Caldera National Preserve for a celebration to mark the transition.
“This spectacular area tells a story of New Mexico’s rich natural and cultural heritage,” Jewell said. “We are honored to serve as stewards of this land to ensure that it remains cared for and shared with future generations.”
The nearly 89,000-acre preserve is located in the Jemez Mountains, just west of Los Alamos. It protects a nearly 14-mile wide caldera – the collapsed remains of an ancient volcano – known for its scenic beauty and wildlife, and as a place for recreation.
The landscape includes subalpine forests, grasslands, geologic formations, streams and hot springs. It is one of just three supervolcanos located in the United States, and the area is considered sacred land by local tribes.
Millions of Americans once wanted to smoke. Then they came to understand how deadly tobacco products were. Tragically, that understanding was long delayed because the tobacco industry worked for decades to hide the truth, promoting a message of scientific uncertainty instead.
The same thing has happened with climate change, as Inside Climate News, a nonprofit news organization, has been reporting in a series of articles based on internal documents from Exxon Mobil dating from the 1970s and interviews with former company scientists and employees.
Had Exxon been upfront at the time about the dangers of the greenhouse gases we were spewing into the atmosphere, we might have begun decades ago to develop a less carbon-intensive energy path to avert the worst impacts of a changing climate. Amazingly, politicians are still debating the reality of this threat, thanks in no small part to industry disinformation.
Government and academic scientists alerted policy makers to the potential threat of human-driven climate change in the 1960s and ’70s, but at that time climate change was still a prediction. By the late 1980s it had become an observed fact.
But Exxon was sending a different message, even though its own evidence contradicted its public claim that the science was highly uncertain and no one really knew whether the climate was changing or, if it was changing, what was causing it.
Exxon (which became Exxon Mobil in 1999) was a leader in these campaigns of confusion.
When Capt. Moses Harris and his troops from Company M, First Cavalry marched into Yellowstone in August 1886, the world’s first national park was in chaos.
Fourteen years of corrupt or incompetent management by political appointees threatened its existence. There had been little protection of the park’s natural wonders. Congressional funding was an afterthought. But by the time the Army handed Yellowstone’s administration to the fledgling National Park Service 30 years later, it had set in motion policies and procedures that would serve as the model for park management for decades to come.
“The Army went a long way towards protecting an area that had very little protection and turned it into a place of relative tranquility, where tourists could enjoy it while also protecting its wonders.” Without that intervention, “Congress might have thrown up its hands and turned it over to private settlement. There certainly were a fair number of voices yelling for that in Congress.”
Yellowstone was designated as a national park in 1872, and the Department of the Interior was charged with the “preservation, from injury or spoliation, of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities, or wonders within said park, and their retention in their natural condition.”
But prior to Harris’ arrival, rampant poaching so endangered bison, elk, deer and other animals that Buffalo Bill Cody had written a letter to the New York Sun pleading for protections. Timber cutting and grazing left swaths of land devastated. Fires set by angry settlers—there were three large blazes ongoing at the time of Harris’s arrival—destroyed acre after acre. Vandals sliced fragile pieces of ornate travertine with axes to sell as souvenirs and signed their names on geyser formations.
Congress was so angry with the inept administration of the park that it refused to allocate funds. As part of a compromise agreement funding the park, control shifted to the military, under the direction of the Department of the Interior.
For the third time in recorded history, a massive coral bleaching event is unfolding throughout the world’s oceans, stretching from Hawaii to the Indian Ocean.
A group of ocean scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed this bleaching event is being brought on by a combination of a strong El Niño pattern, a warm water mass in the Pacific called “the Blob,” and increasingly warming ocean temperatures brought on by climate change.
This potentially lethal mixture of elements is expected to impact about 38 percent of the world’s coral reefs by the end of this year and kill over 4,633 square miles of reefs. NOAA predicts that by the end of 2015, almost 95 percent of U.S. coral reefs will have been exposed to ocean conditions that can cause corals to bleach.
“This is already an unusually long time” for a coral bleaching event to be going on, said Mark Eakin, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch coordinator. “And El Niño is expected to continue well in to next year, so it is expected to that this will start all over again in 2016 and may get worse.”
A World Wild Life study released last month predicted losing all coral reefs by 2050 due to warming oceans and ocean acidification. Coral reef ecosystems make up only 0.1 percent of ocean area, but nearly a quarter of all marine species depend on them to survive and rely on their habitat.
America’s national parks cover nearly 52 million acres — an area roughly the size of Kansas — and contain some of the most incredible natural landscapes in the country. Sweeping valleys, frosted mountain peaks and immaculate waterways host a range of incredible wildlife, many of which are threatened or endangered.
National parks are also public lands, maintained by the federal government with taxpayer money. They are, quite literally, our land. But while national parks are highly protected, the land surrounding them — as well as other public land like national forests and state parks — are much more vulnerable to exploitation under U.S. law. Now, frackers want to take advantage of that. That’s bad news for the wildlife and waterways that cross park boundaries.
Oil and gas companies already have the rights to frack on some 30 million acres of public land in the United States, but they want more. In fact, they’re targeting more than 200 million additional acres of public lands for fracking, much of it in national forests, state parks and the areas surrounding national parks.
These are a few of the places at risk…
Asheville, N.C. Oct 6, 2015 – The U.S. Forest Service is seeking nominations to fill 11 positions on a new Southern Region Recreation Resource Advisory Committee for national forests across the Southeast. The committee will take on the important task of recommending whether forests in 13 southern states and Puerto Rico adopt new recreation fees or change existing ones.
Potential nominees must represent the following forest-related interests:
Recreational uses including: camping, motorized recreation, non-motorized recreation, wildlife and nature viewing/visiting interpretive sites, hunting and fishing;
Environmental groups;
Outfitters and guides;
State tourism interests;
American Indian tribes; and
Local government interests
Members will be appointed for two or three-year terms based on the following criteria:
Which interest groups they represent and how well they are qualified to represent that group.
Why they want to serve on the committee and what they can contribute.
Their past experience in working successfully as part of a collaborative group.
Nominees’ demonstrated ability to represent minorities, women and persons with disabilities will be considered in membership selections. U.S. Department of Agriculture policies regarding equal opportunity will be followed.
Committee members will receive travel and per diem expenses for regularly scheduled meetings; however, they will not receive compensation.
The committee’s jurisdiction will cover the national forests in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Puerto Rico.
More information is available by contacting Caroline Mitchell at 501-321-5318 or r8[email protected]. Completed nomination forms are due by Dec. 31, 2015 to: Recreation RAC Nomination, P.O. Box 1270, Hot Springs, Arkansas, 79102.
Leaders from some of the world’s biggest food companies urged Congress to support a strong global agreement on climate action, in advance of the U.N. climate talks happening in Paris this December.
In a letter published in both the Washington Post and Financial Times, the chief executives from Mars, General Mills, Unilever, Kellogg, Nestle, New Belgium Brewing, Ben & Jerry’s, Clif Bar, Stonyfield Farm, and Dannon asked U.S. and global leaders to “meaningfully address the reality of climate change.”
“The challenge presented by climate change will require all of us — government, civil society and business — to do more with less. For companies like ours, that means producing more food on less land using fewer natural resources. If we don’t take action now, we risk not only today’s livelihoods, but those of future generations,” the letter reads. “We are asking you to embrace the opportunity presented to you in Paris, and to come back with a sound agreement, properly financed, that can affect real change.”
The letter comes at a time when corporations are ramping up their own sustainability goals — just last week, Nike, Walmart, Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, Salesforce, Starbucks, Steelcase, and Voya Financial all committed to transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy. But at a roundtable discussion on Capitol Hill, sustainability representatives from many of the food companies represented in the letter urged their industry to go farther than just internal sustainability commitments.
Visitors marveling at the fall foliage in national forests might find that some of the aspen leaves are brown and blotchy or gone already.
Spores released from leaves and twigs that were infected by a fungus last summer were carried to new leaves by splashing rain and wind this year. The result is that instead of presenting golden yellow colors, leaves in some aspen stands across the Southwest have brown spots and blotches.
U.S. Forest Service officials say visitors shouldn’t fret because the discoloring isn’t widespread enough to ruin leaf-peeping trips.
Arizona cities near national forests where aspen are found at higher elevations got above-normal precipitation this monsoon season, including Alpine and Heber, in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, and Flagstaff, surrounded by the Coconino National Forest.
Grayish areas in the center of the brown and blotchy spots indicate a presence of spores that could perpetuate the infection of aspen leaves if weather conditions are favorable for the disease.
Forest officials say they’re not expecting a die-off of aspen or significant loss in growth. However, successive annual epidemics of the disease can weaken or kill the root systems of aspens.
On Sept. 28, 2015, Shell captured national attention when it announced that the exploratory well it drilled in hopes of extracting the first barrels of oil from Alaska’s Chukchi Sea was a bust. The company didn’t strike enough oil to make further exploration economically viable. Effective immediately, it’s backing out of the Arctic Ocean “for the foreseeable future.”
Environmentalists who spent the summer dangling off bridges and forming kayak blockades to protest Shell’s activities were overjoyed. “Here’s hoping Shell leaves the Arctic forever,” cheered Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director for the Center for Biological Diversity.
But even as green groups urge the oil industry to abandon its Arctic dreams, some analysts are predicting the world’s growing population will require an additional 10 million barrels of oil a day between 2030 and 2040. And Alaska’s politicians are determined to get a piece of the pie: Alaska’s Arctic is estimated to hold the largest unexplored reserves in North America, and the state derives 90 percent of its revenue from oil and gas.
In recent years, production in the Alaskan Arctic has fallen at a rate of 5 percent a year. If it continues to decline and the price of oil stays low, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that the Trans-Alaska Pipeline could be decommissioned as early as 2026. And if that happens, existing wells at Prudhoe Bay would be plugged and abandoned, sending the state’s economy into a death spiral. “It’s a huge disappointment,” Gov. Bill Walker said, of Shell’s announcement. “A really big disappointment.”
They are calling it the “most efficient rooftop solar module in the world.”
Residential solar company SolarCity announced that its Buffalo, New York “gigafactory” will be producing solar panels that are more efficient — and 30 percent more powerful — than its previous version.
This is good news for customers. Using more efficient, more powerful modules means homeowners will get more bang for their buck, so to speak. Installation costs go down. Hardware costs go down. SolarCity wins, too, of course.
Keith Emery, a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, called the announcement a “very significant advancement, which should lower their cost, which should at the very least improve their profit — and I assume they will pass that on to their customers.” The module’s efficiency rate is comparable to other leading modules, Emery said.
Solar prices keep coming down. Average installed costs have fallen 9 percent since last year, according to the most recent report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. The cost of residential solar has dropped 50 percent in the past five years. Economies of scale will also help push costs down, Emery said.
It’s no surprise that Duke Energy’s legendary coal ash problems don’t stop at the North Carolina border. As you may remember, Duke pleaded guilty to nine criminal violations of the federal Clean Water Act as a result of a massive coal ash spill in 2014 and mismanagement of dozens of ash ponds in North Carolina.
Duke’s crimes landed the company a $102 million fine and five years of probation. During the probation, Duke must complete environmental audits of all its coal plants—including those in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, South Carolina and Florida—and take cleanup action when problems are found.
Duke Energy is the nation’s largest electric utility, but until the plea deal it had been mum about water contamination at its other plants. This changed during a recent meeting with Indiana state regulators. In a power point presentation, Duke Energy catalogued a long list of coal ash problems at five Indiana coal plants.
Duke gave regulators the run-down of problems at the Gibson, Cayuga and Wabash River power stations, which included dangerously contaminated water in residential wells near both the Gibson and Cayuga plants and a 7-foot diameter corrugated metal pipe in need of repair running under the Wabash River ash pond—much like the one that burst at Duke’s Dan River Plant. Duke also identified four historic coal ash dumps that require cleanup at retired or converted coal plants.
We have reached a new fire normal, a clear signal that a changing climate will inevitably require an adjustment to how we manage our forests if we wish to maintain the benefits they offer, such as providing half of our nation’s water supply.
In response to this unprecedented wildfire risk, for the first time in its history, the U.S. Forest Service will spend more than half of its budget fighting fires this year – three times what they were spending just 20 years ago. By 2025, if nothing changes, nearly two-thirds of the Service’s budget will be spent on putting out fires.
Ironically, this increased spending often comes at the cost of programs designed to prevent devastating megafires in the first place. Fortunately, there are two things Congress can do to improve the situation.
First, they can achieve one immediate fix by passing the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act. If passed, the act would fund the response to emergency fire disasters similar to how we fund responses to other natural disasters, such as hurricanes and floods.
Second, we need to step up to a new way of thinking about America’s forests by implementing the “National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy,” which was released in 2014 by the U.S. Departments of Interior and Agriculture.
The Arizona Trail Association (ATA) was given top honors at Arizona Forward’s 35th Annual Environmental Excellence Awards ceremony in Phoenix.
The ATA was awarded The Crescordia, the highest award given by Arizona Forward, for “their unique approach to fostering long-term environmental sustainability throughout the state” in addition to their Seeds of Stewardship program, encouraging youth engagement, environmental education and stewardship; their Gateway Community program, increasing tourism, business development and eco-linkages within 33 communities; health and wellness challenges for the business community; and supporting Warrior Hikers to “walk off the war” along the Arizona National Scenic Trail.
Arizona Forward initiated the Environmental Excellence Awards in 1980 to recognize outstanding contributions to the physical environment of Arizona’s communities. The awards serve as a benchmark for promoting sustainability, conserving natural resources and preserving the unique desert environment for future generations. To learn more, please visit www.arizonaforward.org.
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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