Retired National Park Service employees spoke about the impacts of oil and gas development on some national parks—particularly from adjacent lands overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks sent a letter to U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, expressing concern over the “alarming” number of oil and gas proposals near parks and what they see as overall efforts by the department to reduce protections for national parks in order to encourage oil and gas drilling.
“As former land managers, we understand the need to balance competing priorities,” the former NPS employees wrote. “But we fear the pendulum is swinging too far to the side of development.”
The coalition represents 1,400 retired, former and current National Park Service employees. The letter to Zinke cites concerns about six parks in particular, including Chaco Culture National Historical Park in the energy-rich San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico. (Zion National Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Capitol Reef National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, Hovenweep National Monument, and Fort Laramie National Historic Site.)
Tom Vaughan, who spent decades working for the National Park Service, served as superintendent of Chaco during the 1980s. He said that while driving on Highway 550 last month, he was “flabbergasted” by the rise in development, particularly on the checkerboard of BLM, state and allotment lands on the eastern Navajo Nation.
Climate science predicted a weaker jet stream, and Harvey stalled because of a weakened jet stream.
A 2012 study led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded global warming was driving changes in extreme weather in North America. “Our research reveals a change in the summer Arctic wind pattern over the past six years,” lead author James Overland of NOAA explained at the time. “This shift demonstrates a physical connection between reduced Arctic sea ice in the summer, loss of Greenland ice, and potentially, weather in North America and Europe.”
“Enhanced warming of the Arctic affects the jet stream by slowing its west-to-east winds and by promoting larger north-south meanders in the flow,” NOAA said in a press release. “The researchers say that with more solar energy going into the Arctic Ocean because of lost ice, there is reason to expect more extreme weather events, such as heavy snowfall, heat waves, and flooding in North America and Europe but these will vary in location, intensity, and timescales.”
A 2015 study, “Evidence for a wavier jet stream in response to rapid Arctic warming,” concluded that global warming was driving an increase in the most extreme events because of “more frequent high-amplitude (wavy) jet-stream configurations that favor persistent weather patterns.”
Each large meander, or wave, within the jet stream is known as a Rossby wave. A 2014 study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) further explained that we’re seeing “an exceptional number” of extreme North American weather in recent years because some Rossby waves are stalling out for extended periods of time: “the study shows that in periods with extreme weather, some of these waves become virtually stalled and greatly amplified.”
The Finnish are not ones to brag about their culture. Reserved and stoical, with an appreciation of dry humor, they prefer to keep things discreet. This year, however, the country will break away from its default shy-and-retiring position as it celebrates 100 years since Finnish independence, marking the occasion when the country claimed sovereignty from Russia, during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
After much fanfare about Denmark’s food and Nordic noirs in recent years, it’s now Finland’s turn to take the spotlight. And, fittingly for a country that created Forest Schools, where outdoor pursuits are championed from an early age, the headline centennial event this year is the opening of a new national park, Hossa.
This 27,000-acre patch of wilderness started as an age-old hunting ground for the indigenous Sámi people, who named it Hossa, meaning “a place far away”. In 1979, it became an official hiking area, but in June its status was cemented when it was inaugurated as Finland’s 40th national park.
Hossa is a birders’ paradise, with greater-spotted woodpeckers and golden eagles both common sightings, as well as capercaillie, whose males use the forests for an elaborate courting display, known as “lekking”. For those interested in larger creatures, there are moose, wolves and brown bears.
Reindeer are also abundant, all of which are owned and rounded up twice a year by herders. Some, such as the Hossa Reindeer Park, have developed a sideline in tourism, inviting visitors to learn about farm life or have dinner. The farm’s traditional Lappish hut, illuminated by candles and lit by open fires, is a very welcome after a day outdoors.
Your property includes cascading waterfalls, ancient forests, and the highest mountains in the East. You can go anywhere you like on your property. You can hike hundreds of miles of trails and paddle, fish, and swim in its pristine streams.
You share ownership equally with every other American, and you pay your staff—the U.S. Forest Service—to manage the property. They maintain the trails and enforce the rules that you make.
Every 20 years, you write a plan that describes how your estate should be managed. You get together with the other owners to hash it out, and your staff writes it all down. This plan is the most important document of your property. It spells out the rules for your property and decides how your property taxes are spent.
The Pisgah-Nantahala National Forest is the third-most-visited national forest in the country. Its popularity has skyrocketed by 136 percent in the past two decades. Over 6.8 million people visited the forest last year, and most of them came to hike, camp, and enjoy its scenic wonders.
The Forest Service recently released a preliminary draft of their forest plan, which will guide the next twenty years of forest decisions. It’s already mired in bitter controversy.
Brian McMahan and Johnny Nicholson can both remember boyhood days spent in the mountains, hunting the elusive ginseng plant.
Coveted for its myriad medicinal uses, ginseng root harvest is an Appalachian tradition stretching back through generations. McMahan and Nicholson were both taught to dig it in such a way that its numbers would stay strong for generations more — leaving small plants to grow and planting the seed-containing berries of harvested plants in the earth around the dig.
“Most of the time we would ginseng dig to get money to buy a hunting license or something like that,” Nicholson said. “But the old-timers never dug it before the berries got ripe.”
These days, both men work for the Balsam Mountain Preserve in Jackson County, NC — McMahan as chief security officer and Nicholson as operations manager — and they’ve spent untold hours working to protect the Preserve’s wild ginseng from poachers who aren’t interested in harvesting the plant legally or responsibly.
“Today, these poachers just take everything,” McMahan said. “They take the big stuff, they take the little stuff. They even take it before it has berries that are available to plant.”
McMahan’s hoping that a new effort underway at the Preserve will soon keep the poachers at bay. The Preserve is attempting to apply chemical markers to as many of the ginseng plants growing on the Preserve’s 4,400 acres as possible.
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke came to the mountains of Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina on August 25, 2017 to celebrate the 101st birthday of the National Park Service and also lay out the department’s future.
Zinke said the country’s national parks are facing an $11.5 billion maintenance backlog that he wants to close in five years.
This comes on the heels of a proposed budget from President Donald Trump that would cut funds to the department. “Everyone knows you propose a budget, and it’s really Congress that goes to work. But I think we need a discussion on a budget of where we are as a country,” Zinke said. He described the path forward which he said included more money than was initially proposed.
He also said there wouldn’t be any cuts to staffing, instead, restructuring the way the National Parks Service operates. He explained that means moving upper and middle management staffers back to the fields and giving more authority to those at the local level. “You don’t need someone on a simple decision to oversee it seven different layers to get approval,” Zinke said.
In addition to closing the backlog, Zinke said the way people use the park system is changing and it needs to have better infrastructure to keep up with how people use it. He also discussed leveraging public-private partnerships like businesses along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Zinke also said he has authorized payment of an additional $4 million owed to Swain County to pay for the so-called “Road to Nowhere.”
The United States and Mexico have shared their current international border for nearly 170 years. Today they cooperate at multiple levels on issues that affect the border region, although you would not know it from the divisive rhetoric that we hear in both countries. President Trump’s focus on building a border wall threatens to undermine many bi-national initiatives, as well as our shared natural environment.
There is an opportunity for Mexico and the United States to work together on a much larger scale. Rather than spending billions of dollars on a border wall, here is an alternative vision: regenerating the Rio Grande, which forms more than half of the border, to form the core of a bi-national park that showcases our spectacular shared landscape.
Today the river’s volume is decreasing, thanks to climate change and water diversions for agriculture and municipal uses. It is polluted with fertilizers and sewage, and has lost at least seven native fish species. Restoring it would produce immense benefits for wildlife, agriculture, recreation and communities on both sides.
Building a wall on a wide, inhabited river corridor with flood risks is a dubious goal. As experts have pointed out, it is more effective to police the border with technology and human power than to build a barrier.
A green vision for the border region could expand this approach into a large-scale urban ecology and planning effort. This initiative could integrate streets, parks, industries, towns, cities, creeks and other tributaries, agriculture and fracking fields throughout the Rio Grande’s entire 182,000-square-mile watershed.
Two years ago, Inside Climate News and Los Angeles Times investigations found that while Exxon Mobil internally acknowledged that climate change is man-made and serious, it publicly manufactured doubt about the science. Exxon has been trying unsuccessfully to smother this slow-burning PR crisis ever since, arguing the findings were “deliberately cherry picked statements.” But the company’s problems have grown to include probes of its business practices by the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Now, science historian Naomi Oreskes and Harvard researcher Geoffrey Supran have published the first peer-reviewed, comprehensive analysis of Exxon’s climate communications that adds more heft to these charges. Exxon dared the public to “read all of these documents and make up your own mind,” in a company blog post in 2015.
The new paper, “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Climate Change Communications,” in the journal Environmental Research Letters, takes up the challenge. Oreskes and Supran systematically analyze nearly 40 years of Exxon’s scientific research, reports, internal documents, and advertisements, and find a deep disconnect between how the company directly communicated climate change and its internal memos and scientific studies.
Their content analysis examines how 187 company documents treated climate change from 1977 through 2014. Researchers found that of the documents that address the causes of climate change, 83 percent of its peer-reviewed scientific literature and 80 percent of its internal documents said it was real and man-made, while the opposite was true of the ads.
An appeals court on August 22, 2017 rejected the federal government’s approval of a natural gas pipeline project in the southeastern U.S., citing concerns about its impact on climate change.
In a 2-1 ruling, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) did not properly analyze the climate impact from burning the natural gas that the project would deliver to power plants.
The ruling is significant because it adds to environmentalists’ arguments that analyses under the National Environmental Policy Act — the law governing all environmental reviews of federal decisions — must consider climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.
The case concerns the Southeast Market Pipelines Project, which is meant to bring gas to Florida to fuel existing and planned power plants. The Sierra Club sued FERC following its 2016 approval of the project.
The environmental impact statement for the project “should have either given a quantitative estimate of the downstream greenhouse emissions that will result from burning the natural gas that the pipelines will transport or explained more specifically why it could not have done so,” Judge Thomas Griffith, who was nominated to the court by President George W. Bush, wrote in the opinion.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced Tony Tooke will serve as the new Chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Tooke has worked for the Forest Service since age 18 and currently is the Regional Forester for the Southern Region.
He is responsible for 3,100 employees, an annual budget exceeding $400 million, 14 national forests, and two managed areas, which encompass more than 13.3 million acres in 13 states and Puerto Rico.
His previous position in Washington, DC was Associate Deputy Chief for the National Forest System; with oversight of Lands and Realty, Minerals and Geology, Ecosystem Management Coordination, Wilderness and Wild and Scenic Rivers, the National Partnership Office, and Business Administration and Support Services.
As Associate Deputy Chief, Tooke was the Forest Service Executive Lead for Environmental Justice; Farm Bill implementation; and implementation of the Inventory, Monitoring, and Assessment Improvement Strategy. Another priority included implementation of a new planning rule for the National Forest System.
Also in the WO, Tooke served as Director for Ecosystem Management Coordination, Deputy Director for Economic Recovery, and Assistant Director for Forest Management.
Prior to 2006, Tooke served as Deputy Forest Supervisor for the National Forests in Florida as well as District Ranger assignments at the Talladega NF in Alabama, the Oconee NF in Georgia, and the DeSoto NF in Mississippi. His other field assignments were Timber Management Assistant, Other Resource Assistant, Silviculturist, and Forester on six Ranger Districts in Mississippi and Kentucky.
Tooke grew up on a small 200-acre farm in Detroit, AL. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Forestry from Mississippi State University. He was in the Forest Service’s inaugural class of the Senior Leadership Program, and he has completed the Senior Executive Service Candidate Development Program.
For the largest living things standing on the planet, California’s giant sequoias have an unassuming, almost gentle aura to them. The recognizable cinnamon-colored bark is soft and fibrous. Its cones are modest. When cut down, the trees tend to shatter and won’t produce reliably sturdy timber.
These majestic plants have a lineage stretching back to the Jurassic period, but fears over their future have prompted a somewhat counter-intuitive plan presented to the Trump administration – in order to save the giant sequoias, some say, their surrounding area must be stripped of protected status.
As part of the Trump administration’s determination to roll back regulation and open public land to private industry, the interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, is currently undertaking a review of more than two dozen national monuments declared since the 1990s. The stated goal of the review is to reboot extractive industries such as mining and logging. Supporters of the Giant Sequoia monument fear a unique ecosystem is at risk from timber industry advocates who would peel back protections.
“If this were a different administration and there was a push by the timber industry and its allies to shrink the monument, I wouldn’t take it too seriously,” said Chad Hanson, a rangy tree ecologist who has agitated for greater sequoia protections for the past two decades. “But the Trump administration? Oh, yeah. We are taking this threat very seriously.”
Resistance to the Trump administration’s rollback of U.S. climate policy is literally taking root across the globe, driven by climate-savvy campaigners in New Zealand and hundreds of thousands of trees.
Dubbed “Trump Forest,” the project aims to plant enough trees — 110 billion, to be exact — to offset the carbon emissions created by the Trump administration’s climate regression, from repealing the Clean Power Plan to pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.
“It doesn’t matter where you are from, climate change doesn’t recognize national boundaries. Carbon dioxide doesn’t have a passport. Our atmosphere is shared by everyone. So climate ignorance in the U.S. unfortunately impacts all of us, every person is put at risk by Trump’s inability to recognize a global threat.”
The project rests on a simple idea: to soak up excess carbon emissions created by the Trump administration’s rollback of climate policies and devotion to fossil fuels, plant something that absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. To completely offset the climate policies of the Trump administration, Price and his team estimate that they’ll need to plant enough trees to cover an area roughly the size of Kentucky.
Since the project launched in April 2017, more than 130,000 trees around the world have been planted in the name of standing up to Trump.
On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will blaze through 20 national parks and nine national trails in its path of totality across the United States, which begins in Oregon and ends in South Carolina.
And those who were lucky enough to book campsites and hotels in time will be heading into these parks to experience it in gorgeous natural splendor.
While the parks in the path have been making the most of the eclipse — planning special events and festivals, and raising awareness about their offerings — Monday will also be a major test of their ability to handle big crowds at a time when they’re already strained by record numbers of visitors. Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, for instance, anticipates August 21 will be the busiest day in the history of the park.
John Day Fossil Beds in Kimberly, Oregon, is expecting larger-than-normal crowds around the eclipse too, because Eastern Oregon has been hyped as one of the best eclipse-viewing areas in the country.
In a typical year, the Homestead National Monument of America in Beatrice, Nebraska, welcomes about 100,000 visitors. On August 21, it expects several thousand.
The eclipse is arriving in a year when the number of people visiting national parks is at an all-time high. The entire park system saw a record 330 million visitors in 2016. The crowds are increasing so much that some parks have considered restricting the number of visitors.
On top of concerns about the cumulative impact of the growing crowds, parks are now preparing to grapple with what’s expected to be a historic surge around the total solar eclipse. Let’s wish all the rangers and volunteers well.
Once a fighter jet training base critical to the Cold War, little remains of the former George Air Force Base but rows of dilapidated houses, a dismantled military hospital and dangerous chemicals from pesticides, jet fuels and other hazardous wastes that have poisoned the water for decades.
“Now when I see the base today, areas of it look like a war zone,” said Frank Vera, an Air Force veteran stationed on the base in the early 1970s. “I don’t think people know what to do with some of these areas because they are so contaminated.”
George is among at least 400 active and closed military installations nationwide where the use of toxic chemicals has contaminated or is suspected of contaminating water on bases and nearby communities with chemicals ranging from cleaning solvents and paints to explosives and firefighting foam, according to a News21 investigation.
At 149 current and former U.S. military bases, the contamination is so severe that they have been designated Superfund sites by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, meaning they are among the most hazardous areas in the country requiring cleanup.
“Even though the DOD has made significant strides in identifying and investigating the level of contamination at domestic base sites, the pace of actual cleanup has been quite slow,” according to a research study from the Berkeley School of Law. “As the Governmental Accountability Office (GAO) recently found, ‘most of the time and money has been spent studying the problem.’”
With India experiencing its worst drought in 140 years, Indian farmers have taken to the streets. At a protest in Madhya Pradesh this summer, police opened fire on farmers demanding debt relief and better crop prices.
In Tamil Nadu, angry growers have held similar protests, and lit candles in remembrance of those killed. And at one rally in New Delhi, farmers carried human skulls, which they say belonged to farmers who have committed suicide following devastating crop losses over the past six months.
Beyond exposing failed farming policies, this year’s drought-fueled turmoil also underscores the threat that climate change poses not just to India, but to all countries. As global temperatures rise and droughts become more common, political agitation, social unrest, and even violence will likely follow.
In 2008, when severe weather cut into the world’s grain supply and drove up food prices, countries ranging from Morocco to Indonesia experienced social and political upheavals. More recently, food insecurity has been used as a weapon in the wars in Yemen and Syria.
According to the Center for Climate and Security, failure to address such “climate-driven risks” could lead to increased fighting over water, food, energy, and land, particularly in already unstable regions. CCS identifies 12 “epicenters” where climate change might ignite or exacerbate conflicts that could engulf large populations, and spill across national borders.
Were you to hike nearly nine miles into a wilderness area, paralleling a creek through alpine meadows and woods, you might expect to find solitude. But that’s not the case at Conundrum Hot Springs, an extremely popular area of natural pools at an elevation of over 11,000 feet with views of surrounding peaks in White River National Forest, Colorado. Dozens — and on busy weekends, sometimes hundreds — of overnight visitors hike in. Some even carry speakers and cases of beer. “It’ll be like you’ve gone to someone’s backyard for a pool party,” Karen Schroyer, Aspen-Sopris district ranger, says.
When Schroyer came to this job three years ago, she realized that the time had come to curb Conundrum’s overuse. On a wilderness retreat to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, she learned about the issues rangers were dealing with: human-bear conflicts, trash, trees hacked away for firewood, unofficial campsites too close to water and trails. And, most disturbingly, many visitors were answering nature’s call and neither burying nor carrying out the waste. “I was honestly just blown away,” Schroyer said.
The current situation at Conundrum Hot Springs arose from the overall increase in people recreating on Colorado’s public lands — a trend that will almost certainly continue — and the swift publicity of photos on social media and in glossy magazines. Schroyer said the internet has been “incredibly powerful” with places like Conundrum and Hanging Lake, which have become bucket-list destinations. She sees why people want to come — and they’re going to keep coming. “This is a gorgeous, gorgeous area,” she said. “We just need to do a better job of managing that use.”
Since 1957, the Student Conservation Association (SCA) has been at the forefront of preserving our national parks and forests, with the knowledge that these natural “lungs” act as a critical cooling and cleaning mechanism for our planet, pulling carbon dioxide from the air while releasing oxygen. But in recent years, SCA has expanded beyond preservation work, partnering with other organizations to work more directly on the problem of climate change—the overriding environmental issue of our time.
In its quest to address climate change and increase student engagement in this issue, SCA recently launched a partnership with the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to contribute to a massive, new climate change database for the Americas.
Equipped with a network of 81 field sites across the United States and slated to add even more, NEON is an ambitious 30-year program designed to gather and synthesize data on the effects of climate change, land-use change, and invasive species on natural resources and biodiversity. From aircraft surveillance to field-deployed sensors, NEON engages in a wide range of practices to collect data—but there is still no substitute for on-the-ground field sampling. And this is where SCA interns are playing play a vital role.
By partnering with organizations such as NEON, SCA is actively advancing its commitment to engaging a new generation of conservation leaders in tackling climate change. The combination of on-the-ground and laboratory work complements interns’ classroom learning, providing hands-on experience that will be needed to tackle the challenges that lie ahead.
In celebration of the organization’s 25th anniversary next year, Friends of the Smokies is delighted to announce a milestone capital campaign to fund a critical radio system upgrade in Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP).
The total cost of the radio system upgrade is $2.5 million. “Our target for this campaign is to raise $1.25 million by this time next year, making it our biggest fundraising goal in a decade,” said Jim Hart, president of the nonprofit organization. Federal funding sources and other grants will be used to match donations to Friends of the Smokies dollar for dollar to reach the total cost. “We know our generous supporters will rise to meet this challenge in spectacular fashion, especially when such a significant project is at hand.”
The radio communications system currently used in GSMNP has exceeded its recommended maximum lifespan. Replacement parts are difficult to come by and repairs and maintenance are costly on a tightening federal budget. The proposed project will replace microwave and repeater equipment at nine radio tower sites around the park as well as portable radio units and mobile units in patrol vehicles and fire engines. This will allow park rangers and emergency dispatch to directly communicate with police, fire, and emergency services in jurisdictions outside park boundaries including agencies in North Carolina and Tennessee. The total cost of the upgrade also includes a Computer Aided Dispatch system which allows dispatchers to prioritize and record emergency calls and locate first responders in the field.
Steve Kloster, Chief Ranger in GSMNP said, “The ability to effectively communicate with different agencies in the field can make all the difference in a life-threatening situation where every second counts. A good communications system truly is the backbone of any emergency response and this stateof-the-art upgrade will put the Smokies on par with any unit in the National Park Service.”
In addition to improving emergency response for law enforcement, search and rescue, and wildland fire, this upgrade will provide operable and dependable equipment for day-to-day operations across more than 522,000 acres of the national park. Where before, facility maintenance might share the same channel with an active search and rescue operation, the upgraded communication system will provide dedicated emergency frequencies.
“A new radio system is absolutely vital for responding to emergencies quickly and effectively, preserving the cultural and natural resources of this park, and protecting our visitors and first responders,” GSMNP Superintendent Cassius Cash added. “We are thankful to the Friends for their willingness to tackle this request head on and still provide funding for other needs across the park.”
“Delivery of a large-scale project like this radio system is the perfect way to celebrate our 25th anniversary next year,” said Brent McDaniel, marketing director at Friends of the Smokies. “Big, important projects like this are nothing new to Friends of the Smokies and we are excited to help protect 11 million visitors and keep our park rangers safe.”
Friends of the Smokies has contributed millions of dollars towards milestone projects including matching $2 million from the Aslan Foundation of Knoxville in 2008 to create the Trails Forever endowment. Now grown to more the $5 million, this endowment funds a full-time trail crew that focuses on rehabilitation of the park’s most heavily used trails, including Chimney Tops, Alum Cave, and Rainbow Falls. Recurring support from Friends of the Smokies to GSMNP for programs like environmental education, historic preservation, and wildlife management exceeds $1 million annually.
To make a matching gift to support this critical radio system upgrade, please visit Donate.FriendsOfTheSmokies.org or call 800-845-5665.
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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