Insects, diseases, droughts, and fire threaten forests. Each year, the U.S. Forest Service assesses threats facing the nation’s forests. Forest managers, scientists, and decision-makers rely on the annual reports.
The U.S. Forest Service Southern Research Station recently published the 2016 Forest Health Monitoring report. The report is the 16th in the annual series, and is sponsored by the FS Forest Health Monitoring program.
Scientists from across the Forest Service contribute to the annual report, as do university researchers, state partners, and many other experts.
“The report is the only national assessment of forest health undertaken on an annual basis. It includes both short-term and long-term evaluations of our forest resources across broad regions.”
The report includes forest health assessments from the continental U.S. as well as Alaska and Hawai’i. It also summarizes the status and trends of a variety of forest health indicators from a national or regional perspective.
In the next five years, millions of acres of America’s public lands and waters, including some national monuments and relatively pristine coastal regions, could be auctioned off for oil and gas development, with little thought for environmental consequences.
That’s according to a leaked draft, obtained by The Nation, of the Department of the Interior’s strategic vision: It states that the DOI is committed to achieving “American energy dominance” through the exploitation of “vast amounts” of untapped energy reserves on public lands. Alarmingly, the policy blueprint—a 50-page document—does not once mention climate change or climate science.
That’s a clear departure from current policy: The previous plan, covering 2014–18, referred to climate change 46 times and explicitly stated that the department was committed to improving resilience in those communities most directly affected by global warming.
Understanding the threat of climate change had been an integral part of the Interior Department’s mission, said Elizabeth Klein, who served as associate deputy secretary at Interior from 2012 to 2017 and was involved in drafting the earlier strategic plan.
That document sought to address a number of the risks associated with climate change, including drought, sea-level rise, and severe flooding. One section referred specifically to the need for more research on erosion along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, which are particularly vulnerable to hurricanes.
While disregarding climate change, the 2018–2022 strategic plan places a premium on facilitating oil and gas development. It calls for speeding up the processing of parcels nominated for oil and gas leasing on public lands.
Tesla has used its solar panels and batteries to restore reliable electricity at San Juan’s Hospital del Niño (Children’s Hospital), in what company founder Elon Musk calls “the first of many solar+battery Tesla projects going live in Puerto Rico.”
The project came about after Puerto Rico was hit by two devastating and powerful hurricanes in September, and Musk reached out about Tesla helping.
Musk’s company announced its success in getting the hospital’s power working again less than three weeks after Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello tweeted on Oct. 6, “Great initial conversation with @elonmusk tonight. Teams are now talking; exploring opportunities.”
The hospital’s new system allows it to generate all the energy it needs. The facility has 35 permanent residents with chronic conditions; it also offers services to some 3,000 young patients. As for who is paying for the power system, the head of the hospital said that for now, it’s a donation — and that after the energy crisis is over, a deal could make it permanent.
The news of restoring permanent power at the hospital comes as millions of people in Puerto Rico continue to rely on generators for electricity. As of Oct. 25, the Electric Power Authority reported that its power service was at 25 percent. The task of rebuilding Puerto Rico’s power grid is expected to take months and to cost as much as $5 billion.
Multiple pollutants found in the air and water near fracked oil and gas sites are linked to brain problems in children, according to a new science review.
Researchers focused on five types of pollution commonly found near the sites—heavy metals, particulate matter, polycyclic aromatic hydrobcarbons, BTEX and endocrine disrupting compounds—and scrutinized existing health studies of the compounds’ impacts to kids’ brains.
“Early life exposure to these air and water pollutants has been shown to be associated with learning and neuropsychological deficits, neurodevelopmental disorders, and neurological birth defects, with potentially permanent consequences to brain health,” the authors wrote.
Since the mid-2000s, as extraction techniques such as fracking became more widespread and refined, oil and gas drilling has taken off. The FracTracker Alliance — a renewable energy advocate organization that studies and maps oil and gas development — estimates there are about 1.7 million active oil and gas wells in the U.S.
The study authors said regulators should increase setback distances between oil and gas development and places where children live or play. They recommend at least a mile “between drilling facility lines and the property line of occupied dwellings such as schools, hospitals and other spaces where infants and children might spend a substantial amount of time.”
The one-story brick firehouse at Naval Station Norfolk sits pinched between a tidal inlet and Willoughby Bay. The station houses the first responders to any emergency at the neighboring airfield. Yet when a big storm hits or the tides surge, the land surrounding it floods. Even on a sunny day this spring, with the tide out, the field beside the firehouse was filled with water. “It’s not supposed to be a pond,” said Joe Bouchard, a retired captain and former base commander. “It is now.”
Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, home to the Atlantic Fleet, floods not just in heavy rains or during hurricanes. It floods when the sun is shining, too, if the tide is high or the winds are right. It floods all the time. “It is an impediment to the base accomplishing its mission,” Bouchard said.
Climate change poses an immediate threat to Norfolk. The seas are rising at twice the global average here, due to ocean currents and geology. Yet while the region is home to the densest collection of military facilities in the nation, the Pentagon has barely begun the hard work of adaptation.
A detailed study in 2014 by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center identified about 1.5 feet of sea level rise as a “tipping point” for the base that would dramatically increase the risk of serious damage to infrastructure. But there is no plan to address this level of rise, which scientists expect within a few decades.
The city of Norfolk, which surrounds the base, is also under siege. Sections of the main road that leads to the base become impassable several times a year. Some residents check tide charts before leaving for work or parking their cars for the night.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke moved yesterday to find a way to boost funding to address the National Park Service’s maintenance backlog, proposing to substantially increase park entrance fees during the “high season” for vacations. It’s a move that seemingly would do little to address the backlog, estimated at roughly $12 billion, while hitting families with school students hardest.
“Secretary Zinke would rather take money directly out of the pockets of hardworking Americans instead of coming up with a serious budget proposal for the National Park System,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat. “More than doubling the vehicle entrance fee at Grand Canyon, as this proposal would do, or any other park is not a sustainable funding strategy. We should be encouraging more people to get outdoors and enjoy our great natural wonders instead of discouraging them by raising park entrance fees. Whether it’s healthcare, tax cuts, or now access to our national parks, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress just don’t seem to care about everyday American families.”
Under the fee proposal laid out in a press release, “entrance fees would be established at 17 national parks. The peak season for each park would be defined as its busiest contiguous five-month period of visitation.”
During the peak season, the release explained, a seven-day-long “entrance fee would be $70 per private, non-commercial vehicle, $50 per motorcycle, and $30 per person on bike or foot. A park-specific annual pass for any of the 17 parks would be available for $75.”
Parks to be affected by these rates, if approved, are “Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Denali, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Olympic, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Zion national parks with peak season starting on May 1, 2018; in Acadia, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain, and Shenandoah National Parks with peak season starting on June 1, 2018; and in Joshua Tree National Park as soon as practicable in 2018.”
The Trump administration’s reluctance to confront climate change threatens to create a massive burden on taxpayers, as a lack of planning by federal agencies leaves the government ill-equipped to deal with the fallout from rising temperatures, according to independent congressional investigators.
The report released yesterday from the Government Accountability Office presents a bleak picture in which the economic costs of climate change spiral ever further upward in the coming decades. While the report finds that coordination among federal agencies in confronting climate change has long been inadequate, it now comes at a time when the White House is making an unprecedented retreat on environmental protection.
President Trump’s scrapping of an Obama-era requirement that federal agencies work together to prepare for warming, the report concludes, has left them with no concrete plan of action or indication if there will be one.
The report warns that the failure of federal agencies to work in unison in mitigating the impacts of global warming carries a big price tag. “The federal government does not have government-wide strategic planning efforts in place to help set clear priorities for managing significant climate risks before they become federal fiscal exposures,” the report said. “Given the potential magnitude of climate change and the lead time needed to adapt, preparing for these impacts now may reduce the need for far more costly steps in the decades to come.”
The extreme weather events of the past decade that scientists believe were exacerbated by climate change added more than $350 billion in costs to taxpayers, according to the report, a huge drain on the budget as funds were diverted to cover more disaster relief, crop and flood insurance, firefighting costs, and infrastructure and public lands repairs.
It takes a different kind of patience when you sign up to study a forest. A research project started in one lifetime might not bear fruit until the next generation of scientists comes along.
Across the country, forest researchers are setting the stage for projects they hope eventually will offer insights on management techniques that will help forests of all types make the transition that’s coming as the climate continues to warm.
In five different locations — including Flathead National Forest lands adjacent to the Coram Experimental Forest — researchers are preparing to set up new plots that could offer future scientists insights into whether it’s best to stick with what’s already there or help the transition along by introducing species that will be more tolerant to the new normal.
In western Montana, that change will likely mean warmer temperatures that stay above freezing at night, which could lead to an earlier spring runoff. Along with that, the growing season could be longer, with less moisture in the ground during the hot summer months. Predictions call for more wildfire as the forests dry out.
Flathead National Forest silviculturist Melissa Jenkins said larch has a number of qualities that might help it survive the coming changes to the landscape. Unlike some species of pine and spruce, it’s not in the crosshairs of many destructive insects and disease. If it can live long enough, larch also develops bark thick enough to resist fire.
A landmark new study on the public health impacts of global pollution found that toxic air, water, and soil are responsible for the deaths of nine million people each year, more than the number that die from war, hunger, malaria, and AIDS — combined.
The study warned that pollution is so dangerous it “threatens the continuing survival of human societies.” According to the study, which pulled data from the World Health Organization’s (WHO) ongoing Global Burden of Disease project, pollution accounts for 16 percent of deaths worldwide — 15 times more than deaths from war and conflict, and three times more than deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined.
According to the study, outdoor air pollution from things like cars or industrial activity is responsible for some 4.5 million deaths each year, nearly half of all pollution-related deaths — a number that experts estimate will only increase in the coming years, with air pollution deaths in southeast Asia expected to double by 2050.
Another 2.9 million deaths come from indoor air pollution, from things like wood-burning stoves, which are still used throughout the developing world for heat and cooking.
Toxic water is responsible for another 1.8 million death each year; sewage-laced water, for instance, is often linked to illnesses like cholera or parasitic infections. Workplace pollution — prevalent in industrialized countries — accounts for some 800,000 deaths each year.
The misleadingly named “National Monument Creation and Protection Act,” which narrowly passed the House Natural Resources Committee last week, is an assault on our public land heritage. H.R. 3990 would make it harder to create new national monuments and would authorize presidents to reduce the size of all existing monuments, from the Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado to the Muir Woods in California.
One hundred and eleven years ago, Congress passed the Antiquities Act, empowering presidents to designate national monuments protecting federal lands that contain objects of interest. Congress believed swift presidential action is sometimes needed to protect threatened landscapes from private exploitation. Since then, 16 presidents, Republicans and Democrats alike, have created 157 national monuments on existing federal lands. Congress often followed up to give these lands even more protection, by converting presidentially-designated national monuments into some of our most cherished and visited national parks. These include the Grand Canyon, Zion, Olympic, Acadia, Saguaro, Death Valley, and thirty-two others.
Despite this history, H.R. 3990 would bar presidents from creating monuments that protect “natural geographic features.” Its backers say that Congress never intended presidents to protect these resources. But history shows otherwise. Our first national monument, protected by President Teddy Roosevelt, was the striking geologic wonder Devils Tower. And in 1908, Roosevelt protected the Grand Canyon as a national monument. Under H.R. 3990, neither could have been protected, nor would most of the monuments Congress has later designated as national parks. Dozens of other worthy features like giant saguaro cactus, Joshua trees, and even the majestic Denali (Mount McKinley) wouldn’t have been eligible for protection.
The Supreme Court has twice unanimously confirmed that presidents may create national monuments, including landscape-scale monuments, to protect scenic areas and the geologic formations, plants, and animals they contain.
The wind rips along the Humber estuary in Hull. It’s the kind that presses your coat to your back and pushes you on to your toes. “A bit too windy,” shouts Andy Sykes, before his words are swept away. He is the head of operational excellence at the Siemens Gamesa factory, which supplies blades – the bits that turn – to windfarms in the North Sea. At 75 metres long, they are hard to manoeuvre when it’s gusting.
Inside the vast factory hall, the blades lie in various states of undress. Several hundred layers of fibreglass and balsa wood are being tucked into giant moulds by hand. There are “naked” blades that require paint and whose bodies have the patina of polished tortoiseshell. Look through the hollow blades from the broadest part, and a pale green path, the tinge of fibreglass, snakes down the long tunnel, tapering to a small burst of daylight at its tip.
“Alice in Wonderland,” Sykes says. “That’s how I feel. That’s the emotion coming through. It’s 75 metres long. We know that. But stood here the perspective is just fantastic. It’s my favourite view.” Down this strange green rabbithole is a glimpse of a greener future, the possibility of a world powered by wind.
The wind energy sector is certainly booming. Across the river from the Siemens Gamesa factory in Hull, in this long windy corridor of development on the east coast of the windiest country in Europe, there’s the Dong Energy hub, the screens of its operation room flickering with the data of wind captured by blades turning in the North Sea.
Electric cars are on the verge of solving the last challenge they face in competing with gasoline cars — speed of recharging. The race to solve this has gotten so heated that Amazon was just granted a U.S. patent to use its drones for charging.
But long before anyone lets Amazon try to dock battery-carrying drones on their car’s roof, it seems likelier that one or more emerging fast-charging technologies — some as quick as five or six minutes — will solve the problem. That’s particularly true because current charging rates are not a near-term barrier to the exponential success of electric cars worldwide.
Modern electric vehicles (EVs) have several key advantages over traditional vehicles, like faster acceleration, much lower maintenance costs, and zero tail-pipe emissions. And because EVs are so much more efficient than gas-powered cars, they are the only alternative fuel car with a much lower per-mile fueling cost than petrol cars — even when running on carbon-free fuel.
Until very recently, the barriers to EVs becoming mass-market cars were primarily due to expensive and bulky batteries: high initial cost, relatively short range, and recharging that took hours.
As soon as the fast-charging problem is solved, electric cars will match or beat gasoline cars in every respect, ensuring the century-long dominance of vehicles powered by liquid fossil comes to an end.
Earth’s oceans have a big plastic problem. They receive roughly 8 million metric tons of plastic waste every year, much of which can drift around for decades or centuries without truly decomposing. Instead, it just crumbles into smaller pieces known as microplastics, which often fatally trick marine wildlife into eating them.
Some ocean plastic is discarded directly into the ocean — from sources like cargo ships, fishing boats and oil rigs — but a large amount washes there from shore, including inland litter carried to coasts by rivers. In the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, for example, about 80 percent of debris began its journey as terrestrial trash.
Like the plastic itself, any solution to this problem will need to come from people all over the planet. That said, some places have more room for improvement than others. According to a new study, rivers carry up to 4 million metric tons of plastic out to sea per year — but just 10 rivers may deliver as much as 95 percent of it.
Eight of those 10 rivers are in Asia, the study found. This also fits with earlier research on plastic pollution by country, which has linked the problem with factors like population density and waste-management infrastructure. According to a 2015 study, 11 of the top 20 countries for plastic pollution are in Asia, with China at No. 1. Other countries in the top 20 include Brazil, Egypt and Nigeria.
Here are the top 10 river systems contributing to ocean plastic…
At the summit, they found a good excuse to set down their packs and stretch their toes: There, a tall, rusty Tinkertoy of a fire tower, known simply as Shuckstack, cast a portentous shadow. Another hiker, having just descended steps that didn’t seem nearly sturdy enough to hold him, brushed past Peter and Brad, declaring, “I might be the last one to climb that tower before it falls down.”
How could Peter let that stand? He scooted up each wooden, partially rotten step on his rear end, bolts rattling under his shifting weight. Steel beams, blemished by decades of corrosion and graffiti, gave the tower an easy, if unsettling, sway. On one flight, the handrails were missing entirely. At 75 steps, Peter’s feet were in the trees, and above that, the physical world seemed to fall away.
A few more steps brought him into the cab, where the keeper once watched for fires from an elevation of 4,000 feet. He could see blue sky through the gaping holes in the roof; underfoot, the wood was so soft his flimsy sneakers could have punched right through it.
Wind rolled in and out of the empty window frames in the 7-by-7-foot room. “I looked out at the Southern Appalachians around me, at where we came from near the dam, and out over the range,” Peter says. “If I can trace one moment where my life took a new direction, that was it.”
Now Peter, the trails coordinator at Conserving Carolina, spends his spare time drumming up the community support, dollars, and muscle needed for restoration projects like the one completed on Shuckstack in 2014. In the process, many dog-eared, coffee-stained copies of his book, Hiking North Carolina’s Lookout Towers, have been passed among hikers.
The drive to meet Mark and Ronnie Morris is bumpy. Potholes pepper the roads through the Francis Marion National Forest where the brothers have lived their entire lives. They say the conditions are worse than they’ve ever seen them. “If you don’t have four-wheel drive you can’t make it,” Mark Morris explained.
Ronnie described the roads like something from a war movie. “It looks like planes dropped bombs in here,” he said.
The pair want to know how the money from their hunting licenses is being used since the roads are in such a sad state. Severe flooding in 2015 coupled with Hurricane Matthew in 2016, led to widespread erosion and damage impacting 157 National Forest System roads. Many are closed.
The founder of Facebook group Carolina Wildlife Sydicate, David Strickland, says the roads have been closed far too long. “Tax dollars and hunting licensing dollars are not making it to the resource on the ground,” Strickland said.
“The Francis Marion and Sumter National Forest has been aware of our road system needs and has been taking steps to address this need,” according to Francis Marion National Forest Acting District Ranger Warren Tucker. The agency recently awarded two contracts to fix the biggest problems.
A new scientific study has found that warm ocean water is carving an enormous channel into the underside of one of the key floating ice shelves of West Antarctica, the most vulnerable sector of the enormous ice continent.
The Dotson ice shelf, which holds back two separate large glaciers, is about 1,350 square miles in area and between 1,000 and 1,600 feet thick. But on its western side, it is now only about half that thickness, said a researcher at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the lead author of the research.
The reason is the same one that is believed to be shrinking glaciers and pouring ice into the ocean across West Antarctica — warm ocean water located offshore is now reaching the ice from below.
In Dotson’s case, it appears the water is first flowing into the deep cavity beneath the shelf far below it, but then being turned by the Earth’s rotation and streaming upward toward the floating ice as it mixes with buoyant meltwater. The result is that the warm water continually melts one part of the shelf in particular, creating the channel.
The new study calculates that as a result of this highly uneven melting, the Dotson ice shelf could be melted all the way through in 40 years, rather than 170 years, which would be the time it would take if the melt were occurring evenly.
The Trump administration officially moved to kill the Obama-era climate change rule for power plants, fulfilling a campaign pledge but setting off what is expected to be a bitter legal battle between the EPA and several states, health and environmental groups.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt signed an agency proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan, which would have sped the nation’s shift away from coal-burning power plants and toward renewable power and natural gas, which emits less planet-warming carbon dioxide.
EPA is exploring writing a replacement that would let states set their own standards to require coal plants to run more efficiently, or burn less coal while producing the same amount of power. That would likely achieve few emissions reductions.
The Trump administration has hailed the withdrawal as a victory for coal, but market experts say the outlook for the fuel is still dim.
During President Barack Obama’s two terms, the fracking boom turned the U.S. into a natural gas super power, cutting the cost of the fuel by 75 percent and leading to a boom in natural gas-power generation, which tripled between 2009 and 2016, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Wind power also surged under Obama, tripling in capacity, while solar power grew from virtually zero to become the leading source of new power generation in 2016.
A Utah congressman long unhappy with the authority given presidents under The Antiquities Act to establish national monuments has introduced legislation that would extensively rewrite the century-old act. If enacted, the rewrite would limit the purposes for which monuments could be created, require environmental review of proposed designations, and allow presidents to reduce the size of monuments without congressional action.
Passed by Congress in 1906, The Antiquities Act has been used by presidents down through the decades to designate national monuments to protect “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest” that are found on federal lands. Monuments designated via the act and which later became national parks include Grand Canyon, Arches, Grand Teton, Acadia, Bryce Canyon, and Olympic.
In recent years, though, some Republicans in Congress and some Western states have bristled over the act, claiming it gives presidents too much authority over lands they could better manage. Shortly after he took office this year, President Donald Trump agreed, saying his predecessors had exerted “another egregious abuse of federal power” under the act.
U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, introduced legislation to drastically rewrite the act. As drafted, the measure would affect the purposes for which the act could be wielded, place limitations on the size of new monuments, require National Environmental Policy Act review of proposed monuments and, in cases of monuments between 10,000 acres and 85,000 acres in size, require approval “by the elected governing body of each county (or county equivalent), the legislature of each State, and the Governor of each State.”
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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