So you want to escape climate change. That’s a reasonable impulse — climate change rivals nuclear war for the greatest threat to human life in the history of our species’ existence. Every survival instinct we’ve cultivated to date should, understandably, make us want to get away from it.
Let’s start by evaluating regions of the U.S. based on the basics of what we expect climate change to bring. We know that the seas will swell and temperatures will go up. So that particularly endangers a host of coastal cities with relatively warm climates, especially in the summer — so Miami, New Orleans, Norfolk, Washington D.C., New York, Los Angeles. A 2017 paper in Nature Climate Change estimated 13.1 million people displaced from those cities.
What’s a nice, temperate place? Never gets too hot or too cold, has lots of water? Aha — the Pacific Northwest. It’s part-rainforest, after all.
But it’s a rainforest that’s seen bigger, hotter, deadlier, and more unpredictable wildfires in recent memory. Even a small increase in temperature has detrimental effects on plant and soil moisture, which will dry out forests and make them into true tinderboxes. And there have been warmer winters, which means less snowpack on the mountains and thus a less reliable water source for the region.
Thefts, break-ins, and odd crimes involving animals have surfaced in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) as rangers take stock of any damages during the government shutdown.
GSMNP spokesperson Dana Soehn said rangers discovered the theft of several tools from a facility in Cosby. The rangers had not determined the total value of stolen items. There was also a break-in at a campground office, but the office was closed for the season and nothing was stolen.
The workers in the Smokies came across what initially appeared to a poaching incident in Cades Cove when three dead deer with gunshot wounds were found near the side of the road. Rangers determined it was actually a case of illegal dumping. The deer were killed legally outside the park and donated to a man who failed to clean the animals before the meat spoiled. He hauled the deer to Cades Cove and disposed of them. Soehn did not have an explanation for why the man chose to dump the rotting deer several miles inside the national park.
Some campgrounds are likely to open later than usual this year due to the shutdown. Otherwise, there are no lasting impacts on visitors to the Smokies.
Other National Park Service properties in East Tennessee reported minimal impact from the shutdown and are yet to discover any cases of major vandalism, theft, or poaching.
Michael Golden has hunted elk on this mountain in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley his entire life. It’s a tradition he shared with his father. But his son is growing up in a starkly different environment.
Montana has warmed 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, considerably more than the United States as a whole. That added heat is contributing to raging forest fires and bark beetle outbreaks, a combination that has devastated the state’s forests.
What Golden and his son have witnessed is part of a broader trend. The forests have seen so much damage that Montana’s trees, which had provided the crucial function of pulling carbon dioxide from the air, are sending the greenhouse gas back into the atmosphere.
And forests that once provided a counterbalance to climate change are at the moment contributing to it, as carbon-rich trees suddenly burn, or die and slowly decompose.
Montana is one of six states in the West where trees have been emitting carbon in the past decade or so, according to an analysis by David Cleaves, former climate change adviser to the chief of the U.S. Forest Service.
The other states are Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. Four of these states’ forests have flipped in recent years to become carbon emitters — with Montana showing the biggest changes of all.
A cubic meter of Tennessee River water contains about 17,000 tiny plastic particles, and scientists’ increasing concern about the health effects of those microplastics when ingested by humans has added urgency to recent cleanup efforts.
Tennessee Riverkeeper last week organized a cleanup effort at Dry Branch Creek, a heavily littered waterway that connects to the Tennessee River, and a dozen volunteers collected almost a ton of plastic and other materials.
“One of the sources of the microplastic pollution is plastic litter,” said David Whiteside, founder of the nonprofit organization. “This is pollution injury by a thousand cuts. With these cleanups, it’s easy to heal a small cut here and there. We can visibly see the results of cleaning that litter, and that’s satisfying.”
The environmental hazards of microplastics in the ocean have been studied for years, but a German scientist focused attention on the Tennessee River in 2017 when he swam the length of the river, collecting water samples as he went.
The results from Professor Andreas Fath’s samples, released in October, were unexpected. While pharmaceuticals, heavy metals and other harmful chemicals were detected, they were generally at low levels consistent with a 652-mile river without a densely populated watershed. The surprise was the level of microplastics, defined as plastic particles smaller in diameter than 5 millimeters, or smaller than a grain of rice.
Given the oversized role that migration plays in our current political discourse, you’d think there would be more emphasis on the one factor military and security experts believe will affect future migration patterns more than any other: climate change.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan agency that analyzes and audits federal policy to ensure its efficiency and cost-effectiveness, isn’t going to let the topic go unaddressed. In a report to Congress, the GAO criticized the manner in which the Trump administration has sought to remove any acknowledgement of climate change from our foreign policy and diplomatic strategies, keeping experts in the dark about an issue that’s growing only more urgent as a shifting climate—and all that comes with it—displaces millions of people and disrupts societies across the globe.
In the European Union, where the stresses and strains associated with processing large numbers of migrants have already reached crisis proportions, experts predict that the annual stream of those seeking safety within its borders will triple by the end of the century due to climate-related migration.
And a 2018 World Bank Group report estimates that the impacts of climate change in three of the world’s most densely populated developing regions—sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America—could result in the displacement and internal migration of more than 140 million people before 2050. That many people on the move could easily lead to massive political and economic strife and significantly stall development in those regions.
The National Park Service has voluntarily abandoned its defense of the agency’s latest permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to cross the Blue Ridge Parkway. NPS issued the revised permit after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in August 2018, vacated its original authorization for the pipeline.
On January 16, 2019 the Park Service asked the Fourth Circuit to remand the permit back to the agency so that it could vacate the permit and reconsider whether issuing it was appropriate in light of legal issues raised in the appeal. The agency also noted it needed to reconsider the permit in light of the Fourth Circuit’s recent decision that the pipeline could not cross the Appalachian Trail on national forest land, immediately adjacent to the proposed crossing point for the Blue Ridge Parkway. The court has granted the Park Service’s request to remand the permit back to the agency for reconsideration.
“Unlawfully crossing a National Park is just one of the many problems with the dirty, dangerous Atlantic Coast Pipeline. ACP previously lost permits from the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Army Corps of Engineers, and its FERC Certificate is currently being litigated. The ACP is an unnecessary threat to our health, water, climate, and communities and it shouldn’t be built at a time when clean, renewable energy is abundant and affordable,” said Sierra Club Senior Attorney Nathan Matthews.
A perfect collision of forces — an anonymous donor looking for a tax write-off, a failed subdivision that turned out to be a $40 million mortgage-fraud scheme, and strategic purchases by conservationists to protect area caves — paved the way for one of the biggest nonprofit conservation projects in the region.
Nearly 2,400 acres on Lookout Mountain and into Johnson’s Crook in Dade County, Georgia, have been preserved and will be managed by the Southeastern Cave Conservancy Inc. as the new Charles B. Henson Preserve at Johnson’s Crook.
The conservancy is now seeking help from other groups in the area to turn the preserve into a major recreation and conservation area. They plan to add more than five miles of hiking with longer connecting trails going to other preserves in the area. They envision mountain biking trails, picnicking, camping, and most of all, caving.
The property has more than 30 known caves, and the conservancy believes there are closer to 40. It contains one of the highest concentrations of caves in the Southeast, according to SCCi.
The property immediately becomes one of the biggest private conservation projects in the region. If it were a state park, it would be one of the 10 biggest in Georgia.
There’s an easy reason to explain why National Park Service superintendents have suddenly gone mum: They’re scared. That’s according to former National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis.
“In my conversations with folks that are in the field, there is an element of fear that has been conveyed down, that you’ll be punished if you speak out, certainly if you speak to the press,” Jarvis told a group of House Democratic leaders this week. In an interview, Jarvis said the Trump administration wants to keep superintendents silenced to prevent them from describing the widespread damage they’ve discovered in parks during the partial government shutdown.
“This is complete chaos, and superintendents know that — and they don’t want that word out,” said Jarvis, who led the Park Service for eight years under President Obama. “The [Trump] administration is trying to suppress any bad news.”
The issue has become a cause for consternation among the media and park advocates alike, who say they’ve effectively been shut out by the Park Service during the long shutdown.
“There’s no outreach at all — in fact, it’s just the opposite,” said Richard Ring, executive council member of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, testifying at a hearing called by Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, and leaders of the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee.
National Parks Traveler, a nonprofit media organization in Utah that covers the parks, called the situation “a blackout on news,” adding that top NPS officials in Washington are “keeping a tight clamp on the flow of information” by gagging the superintendents during the shutdown. “The parks should not be political pawns, and Park Service staff should be allowed to accurately describe how the parks and their resources are being treated,” wrote Kurt Repanshek, founder and editor-in-chief of the organization.
Antarctic glaciers have been melting at an accelerating pace over the past four decades thanks to an influx of warm ocean water – a startling new finding that researchers say could mean sea levels are poised to rise more quickly than predicted in coming decades.
The Antarctic lost 40 billion tons of melting ice to the ocean each year from 1979 to 1989. That figure rose to 252 billion tons lost per year beginning in 2009, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That means the region is losing six times as much ice as it was losing four decades ago, an unprecedented pace in the era of modern measurements. (It takes about 360 billion tons of ice to produce one millimeter of global sea level rise.)
The findings are the latest sign that the world could face catastrophic consequences if climate change continues unabated. In addition to more frequent droughts, heat waves, severe storms and other extreme weather that could come with a continually warming earth, scientists already have predicted that seas could rise nearly three feet globally by 2100 if the world does not sharply decrease its carbon output. Now there’s a concern the Antarctic could push that even higher.
That kind of sea level rise would result in the inundation of island communities around the globe devastating wildlife habitats and threatening drinking water supplies. Global sea levels have already risen 7 to 8 inches since 1900.
Locating an open public restroom in Great Smoky Mountains National Park should be easier starting this week but finding someone to suggest a good spot for a family hike or to replace a washed out trail bridge won’t be.
Workers are reopening limited facilities and in a few locations around the park that had been closed during the partial federal government shutdown, park officials announced Sunday, January 13, 2019.
They include restrooms at Smokemont Campground, located just off U.S. 441 about 5 miles north of the park entrance at Cherokee, and those at Deep Creek Picnic Area near Bryson City.
The changes that began Sunday are part of a National Park Service initiative to reopen some areas or facilities using revenue from user fees. That money ordinarily goes to enhance park facilities, additional visitor services or major maintenance projects.
Damage to parks, overflowing trash cans, litter and human waste have been reported in national parks around the country during the shutdown. People with two nonprofit groups that support the park say those problems appear to be less in the Smokies but there have still been issues.
Creator of the online video game Fortnite, Tim Sweeney, has been captivating audiences for decades by developing intricate and interactive digital worlds for players. However, it is his work away from the screen that is currently grabbing attention from gamers and non-gamers alike.
Sweeney is best known for founding the video and 3-D software company Epic Games in the 1990’s. Epic Games has given us popular video game titles such as Unreal Tournament, Gears of War and, most recently, the massively popular game Fortnite. In addition to these popular gaming titles, the billionaire philanthropist has made good on his promise to protect undeveloped and bio-diverse land in the picturesque western Carolina mountains for future generations.
Since 2008, Sweeney has spent millions on conservation projects in his home state of North Carolina to protect and preserve its forest land. He has purchased nearly 40,000 acres over the last decade, making him one of the largest private land owners in the state. Sweeney has also donated money to several conservation parcel projects, including a 1,500 acre expansion to Mount Mitchell State Park.
In November 2016, Sweeney donated $15 million for a conservation easement to protect 7,000 acres of the The Box Creek Wilderness. The forest, located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, had been targeted by a company that wanted to carve up the land and run power lines through it.
Sweeney has a goal to eventually connect South Mountains State Park to Chimney Rock.
Up to 90 percent of the warming caused by human carbon emissions is absorbed by the world’s oceans, scientists estimate. And researchers increasingly agree that the oceans are warming faster than previously thought.
Multiple studies in the past few years have found that previous estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may be too low. A new review of the research, published this week in Science, concludes that “multiple lines of evidence from four independent groups thus now suggest a stronger observed [ocean heat content] warming.”
Taken together, the research suggests that the oceans are heating up about 40 percent faster than previously estimated by the IPCC. Since the 1950s, studies generally suggest that the oceans have been absorbing at least 10 times as much energy annually, measured in joules, as humans consume worldwide in a year.
While much of the human concern about climate change focuses on its effects over land—rising air temperatures, changes in weather patterns and so on—accurate estimates of ocean warming are deeply important to scientists’ understanding of global warming. Determining how fast the oceans are warming helps scientists calculate how sensitive the planet is to greenhouse gas emissions and how quickly it may warm in the future.
Designated by Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, Arizona’s Montezuma Castle National Monument became one of the first national monuments, preserving cliff dwellings in North America and showcasing the Sinagua culture’s ingenious use of the desert landscape to prosper for generations.
Sixty years later, Georgia’s Ocmulgee National Monument was added to the National Park System to celebrate the many different Native American cultures that comprise over 17,000 years of history at the park. These are just two of the many national parks across the country that interpret the history, culture, and contributions of Native Americans in the U.S.
For many students, a visit to a national park is a way to learn more about their culture and heritage. Saguaro National Park participated in Hands on the Land, a program focused on bringing Native American students to their local national park. During the 2017-2018 school year, more than 100 students from local bicultural schools for Tohono O’odham youth took part in the program.
While at the park, students partook in real life scientific research, collecting data from wildlife cameras to research five rare, small carnivore species native to the area. Along with wildlife programming, students also learned about the park’s biodiversity, famous saguaro trees, and the rich ties of the park’s history to their Tohono O’odham culture.
From culture to science to volunteerism, Native Americans are active stewards, teachers, and participants in national parks, preserving the heritage and history that make this land so remarkable. Programs like these ensure that more people learn this important layer of the American experience.
The government shut down over two weeks ago, leaving nine departments’ operations affected, about 800,000 workers without pay, and some national parks closed to visitors. Other parks were open with limited staffing, or thanks to help from states, but the National Park Service has warned that “access may change without notice.” As the shutdown continues, edging closer to becoming the longest such one on record, several volunteer groups across the country have decided to help clean up trash in national parks.
“All of these National Park Service people are unable to do their job through no fault of their own.”
15 people showed up in Yellowstone to clean on Saturday, but then a local businessman posted about the effort on Facebook and about 40 people showed up on Sunday.
They pulled trash out of the bathrooms, swept the floors, cleaned the toilets and replaced bottles of hand sanitizer. Some volunteers brought supplies from home or bought them along the way.
Other national parks have also received attention from cleanup groups across the country. Dozens of volunteers with the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association, a Maryland-based organization that regularly organizes community service cleaning efforts across the country, were mobilized for cleaning efforts in Joshua Tree National Park, Everglades National Park, the National Mall, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia and Cuyahoga Valley National Park, according to Salaam Bhatti, a spokesman for the association.
Grassroots outdoors lovers have banded together to pick up trash in the Smokies and along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Those who are taking it upon themselves to help their beloved parks in time of need are thankful for the opportunity to live so close.
While families celebrate the New Year, many are getting rid of their Christmas trees this week. With that comes a warning from the Oregon Department of Forestry about an invasive insect that could pose a problem if you don’t dispose of your tree the right way.
Experts say roughly 8,000 Fraser Fir trees shipped from North Carolina to big box stores on the West Coast had elongate hemlock scale, an invasive species not native to the Northwest.
The Oregon Department of Agriculture found the pest and ordered the infested trees destroyed, but not before some had been shipped to big box stores all along the West Coast. The fear is that when Christmas trees are left for weeks or months in a yard or dumped in a park or the woods, eggs laid on them will hatch and the pest may escape into nearby trees.
According to a new release from the Oregon Department of Forestry, if the elongate hemlock scale does get established in Oregon, it could be bad news for the state’s timber economy.
The pest attacks not only hemlocks, but several conifer species native to Oregon, like true firs, spruce and Douglas-fir. The scale feeds on the underside of the needles, creating a yellowish-brown waxy layer that is present year-round.
The National Park Service will take the unprecedented step of tapping entrance fees to pay for expanded operations at its most popular sites as the federal government shutdown threatens to degrade some of the nation’s iconic landmarks.
Under a memorandum signed by the Interior Department’s acting secretary, David Bernhardt, park managers will be permitted to bring on additional staff to clean restrooms, haul trash, patrol the parks and open areas that have been shut during the more-than-two-week budget impasse. In a statement, National Park Service Deputy Director P. Daniel Smith acknowledged that the administration’s practice of keeping parks open but understaffed has become unsustainable at some of its most beloved sites.
The move, which some critics said could be illegal, shows the extent to which the Trump administration’s decision to keep the national park system open to visitors is straining its capacity and potentially exposing public lands to long-term damage. During such shutdowns under the Clinton and Obama administrations, the Park Service chose to block access to its sites rather than leave them open with a skeleton staff on board. Trump officials chose the opposite course, and as trash has begun to mount and key habitat has been imperiled, the administration is struggling to manage the problems.
Congressional Democrats and some park advocates question whether the park-fee move is legal, because the fees that parks collect under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act are expressly designated to support visitor services instead of operations and basic maintenance.
Steve Kemp moved to the Great Smoky Mountains in 1987 for what would become a 30-year career with the Great Smoky Mountains Association, and following his 2017 retirement GSMA is looking to honor his contributions to the organization through a new writer’s residency.
“There is a specific skill in writing in a way that engages the reader and inspires curiosity and passion in the reader, and that’s what we want to be able to cultivate,” said Laurel Rematore, executive director of GSMA, “because we’re in the business of helping people to connect with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, connect on an emotional level so they will take care of it.”
Kemp is exceptionally good at that kind of writing, Rematore said, making it fitting that the new program will be called the Steve Kemp Writer’s Residency. Out of those applying, one writer will be chosen to live in park employee housing near Park Headquarters — located outside of Gatlinburg — from March 3 to April 13, 2019.
“It’s access, and it’s the opportunity to focus, focus without being concerned about outside deadlines or requirements,” said Rematore. “I think oftentimes artists are looking for inspiration, and what better inspiration than to come and immerse yourself in this place for six whole weeks?”
The selected writer will have more opportunity available to him or her than just the chance to sit in a cabin for six weeks. The writer will spend time with Kemp to “get a flavor of his view of things,” said Rematore, have access to park archives and personnel and have the opportunity to host events and be published in GSMA works.
After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, Henry X. Finney came home to Virginia to sort out his future. He didn’t know what he would do, or how he would support his young family—until one day he saw a uniformed park ranger. Instantly, the next chapter of his life unfurled before him. He would be a ranger, and spend his career in the outdoors.
“He said, ‘Great, a government job, let me go apply,’” recalled Carolyn Finney, his daughter and the author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. “This was in the 1950s in Virginia, and they told him, ‘Sorry, we don’t hire Negroes.’”
Finney recently shared this anecdote in a room full of prominent outdoors experts and advocates, who had gathered for a brainstorm session in New York City to discuss the lack of diversity in the outdoors. “I can’t imagine how he felt hearing that after fighting for his country,” she added. But her father’s tale only partly explains the issue, which is a thorny and multifaceted one.
According to the most recent National Parks Service survey, about 78 percent of those who visit federal parks are white. Meanwhile, African Americans, Latinos, women, and members of the LGBTQ community often report feeling unwelcome or unsafe in outdoor spaces. Moreover, the outdoors industry workforce—which includes everyone from park rangers to retail sales associates—has minimal representation from these groups.
At the New York brainstorm session, panelists worked through these problem areas and discussed possible solutions. Here are the main ideas and action steps that emerged from the meeting, and from subsequent conversations with outdoors experts from around the U.S.
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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