Picture this: Riding your bike to work from Henderson County to Asheville, safely, on a paved path protected from the roar and cars of highways I-26 and U.S. 25.
Or walking on a wide, safe, tree-shaded greenway from Enka to Waynesville instead of driving on U.S. 19/23.
Or actually mountain biking from downtown Asheville to the trails of Bent Creek Experimental Forest without having to drive the bike there in a motor vehicle.
These are all visions of Western North Carolina’s Hellbender Regional Trail.
It’s an idea years in the making by the French Broad River Metropolitan Planning Organization, city and county planners and others advocating for safer, healthier and more environmentally friendly places to live, commute and recreate across a great swath of Western North Carolina.
Rather than starting from scratch, the nearly 150-mile trail system would knit together bicycle and pedestrian paths, or greenways, already on the ground and those in the works in Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson, Madison, and Transylvania counties.
The Trump administration finalized a plan to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, putting it on track to issue decades-long leases in the pristine wilderness area before a potential change in U.S. leadership.
Presidential hopeful Joe Biden and green groups criticized the move as a giveaway to Big Oil that would harm the Arctic’s unique ecosystem and native people.
The Interior Department could hold a sale of oil and gas leases in ANWR by the end of the year, Secretary David Bernhardt said.
A Republican-passed tax bill in 2017 opened the area to oil and gas leasing, a key pillar of U.S. President Donald Trump’s agenda to expand fossil fuel production. However, lease sales in the state have been weak for most of the last decade, and statewide production has dropped steadily for the past 30 years.
If found, oil production could begin in ANWR in about eight years, Bernhardt said, with activity lasting about 50 years.
The 19 million acre refuge is home to wildlife populations including Porcupine caribou and polar bears and has been off-limits to drilling for decades. In recent months, several big U.S. banks have said recently they will not finance oil and gas projects in the Arctic region.
Over the weekend, the Grizzly Creek Fire became the largest in the history of Colorado’s White River National Forest as far as acres burned.
As of Sunday morning, the fire had burned 20,665 acres of national forest out of a total burn area of 25,690 acres in just six days, according to U.S. Forest Service data. The additional acres are on Bureau of Land Management grounds or private property.
White River National Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams said the Grizzly Creek Fire erupted so significantly because of hot, dry and windy conditions and because firefighting in the early stages was so difficult versus the steep, inaccessible terrain.
“Once it left the median of the highway, it was off to the races,” Fitzwilliams said Sunday. “There was no way to fight it.”
The fire started in the median of Interstate 70 on Monday afternoon, August 10, 2020, climbed the steep slopes to the north and later in the week jumped the Colorado River and made a run in the terrain to the south.
It’s ripped through terrain that was inaccessible to firefighters. Air tankers and helicopters dropped numerous loads of retardant and water but that only slowed the growth. The fire is now approaching fire lines on both sides of the river, but there is still potential for extensive growth in acreage, according to Fitzwilliams.
Ed. note: If you’ve ever driven I-70 through iconic Glenwood Canyon west of Vail, CO, you know of the terrible loss of beautiful natural landscape the Grizzly Creek Fire represents. It is said to have burned the forest surrounding the incredibly gorgeous Hanging Lake, high above the canyon floor.
In less than two months Interior Department officials intend to have a plan for attacking the maintenance backlog across the public lands in the nation.
Via a secretarial order a task force was created to look out across the National Park System, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lands to determine a priority for spending billions of dollars set aside through the Great American Outdoors Act for tackling the backlog.
As passed by Congress, the act will send $6.5 billion to the National Park Service to battle deferred maintenance in the National Park System and fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
The challenges with prioritizing Park Service projects is obvious. The roughly $12 billion backlog has been growing at a rate of hundreds of millions of dollars per year in recent years, annual sums that will lessen the impact of the additional $1.3 billion expected to be made available annually through this funding.
Among other activities, the task force will identify an initial list of priority deferred maintenance projects that are ready to be implemented in Fiscal Year 2021 and provide the list to the Secretary of the Interior.
During the fall of 2019, the Department of Homeland Security began pumping large amounts of water from a southern Arizona aquifer to mix concrete for the Trump administration’s border wall. The aquifer is an essential water source for the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, so when the pumping escalated, U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials watched helplessly as the water levels at several ponds — the main habitat for the endangered fish at this Sonoran Desert refuge — dropped “precipitously.”
Since its creation in 1982 the 2,300-acre refuge’s sole mission has been to protect the rare species of the Río Yaqui, including endangered fishes like the Yaqui chub and Yaqui topminnow, and other species, such as the tiny San Bernardino springsnail and the endangered Huachuca water umbel, a plant that resembles clumps of tubular grass. Through a series of artesian wells connected to an aquifer, the refuge has kept ponds filled in this fragile valley for nearly 40 years.
Under normal circumstances, a significant construction project like a border wall would be required to go through an extensive environmental review process as dictated by the National Environmental Policy Act. The Department of Homeland Security says it operates under the spirit of NEPA and solicits public comment.
But with environmental laws — including NEPA, the Endangered Species Act and the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act — waived for the border wall, the refuge lacks any legal protection, either for itself or the endangered species in its care. So wildlife officials have tried to work with the department, sending hydrological studies and providing recommendations about how to reduce water use near the refuge.
Outer Banks Forever, the local nonprofit partner of the three national parks of the Outer Banks – Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site and Wright Brothers National Memorial – has announced its new slate of projects and programs to protect and enhance these special places.
Each project aims to enhance the park experience for locals and visitors, expand education and access opportunities and provide the margin of excellence expected from the Outer Banks national parks. Each project will be implemented as funds are raised through donations, corporate sponsorships, and grants.
Outer Banks Forever will continue its popular Adopt-a-Pony program, which supports the care of the ponies on Ocracoke Island, as well as its involvement in the Love the Beach, Respect the Ocean campaign in conjunction with the National Park Service, Dare County and local EMS and lifesaving services.
New projects include: a series of new educational displays will be installed at Wright Brothers National Memorial along the walkway from the First Flight Boulder to the base of Big Kill Devil Hill; build an ADA-accessible kayak launch at the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center; and build a multi-use path in Buxton at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
On New Year’s Day in 2018, Paul Kehmeier and his father drove up Grand Mesa until they got to the county line, 10,000 feet above sea level. Instead of the three to five feet of snow that should have been on the ground, there wasn’t enough of a dusting to even cover the grass.
The men marveled at the sight, and Kehmeier snapped a photo of his dad, “standing on the bare pavement, next to bare ground.”
Here, on Colorado’s Western Slope, no snow means no snowpack. And no snowpack means no water in an area that’s so dry it’s lucky to get 10 inches of rain a year. A few months after taking the photo, Kehmeier stared across the land his family had tilled for four generations and made a harsh calculation: He could make more money selling his ranch’s water than working his land.
“In all my years of farming in the area, going back to about 1950, 2018 was the toughest, driest year I can remember,” said Paul’s father, Norman, who still does a fair share of the farm’s tractor work at 94.
This cluster of counties on Colorado’s Western Slope — along with three counties just across the border in eastern Utah — has warmed more than 2 degrees Celsius, double the global average. Spanning more than 30,000 square miles, it is the largest 2C hot spot in the Lower 48.
Homes have been evacuated in Courmayeur in Italy’s Aosta valley, after a renewed warning that a huge portion of a Mont Blanc glacier is at risk of collapse.
The measures were introduced after experts from the Fondazione Montagne Sicura (Safe Mountains Foundation) said 500,000 cubic metres of ice was in danger of sliding off the Planpincieux glacier on the Grandes Jorasses park.
Glaciologists monitoring Planpincieux say a new section of ice is at risk of collapse. Homes were also evacuated in September last year following a warning that 250,000 cubic meters of ice could fall. The movement of the glacial mass was due to “anomalous temperature trends”, the experts said… scientific speak for climate change.
The glacier has been closely monitored since 2013 to detect the speed at which the ice is melting.
In August 2018, a heavy storm unleashed a debris flow, killing an elderly couple when their car was swept from the road that is currently closed.
The coronavirus pandemic has drawn increasing crowds to the great outdoors, including many popular hiking trails, swimming holes and recreation areas in the White Mountains. But the burst in popularity has created new problems for the folks who manage New Hampshire’s national forest. The problem is the same throughout national forests in the United States.
Tiffany Benna, who oversees recreation for the U.S. Forest Service, walks through the Lincoln Woods parking lot. “I was like almost holding my breath coming around the corner going, ‘Is it going to be?…Oh, wow, it is – it already is full!’ she says.
There are no spots in the 150 space lot, and there are 80 cars parked on the shoulder of the Kancamagus Highway where it’s now common, on weekends, to find 300 cars parked, and sometimes double parked, on the road.
The Forest Service expected this. Additional porta-potties and dumpsters have been set up in high use areas. What they didn’t expect was the more recent shift in public behavior.
“We’re seeing human waste along trails,” Benna says. “We’re seeing graffiti which we haven’t really seen, on boulders and rocks along the trails, not just on our signs. And we’re also seeing a lot of people, like 100 volunteers go into the forest and pull out 300 pounds of trash.”
The reason for this, Benna says: First time visitors to the forest who just don’t know what’s expected of them.
After spending his presidency denying climate change, placing coal and oil industry officials in top environmental jobs, and weakening dozens of public health and wildlife rules, President Donald Trump reversed course and signed a historic law to pump billions of dollars into long-neglected repairs and upgrades at America’s national parks.
The measure, known as the “Great American Outdoors Act,” is the most significant new federal conservation law in 40 years.
Environmentalists cheered, finally securing a win they have sought for more than 20 years. “The Great American Outdoors Act is a truly historic, bipartisan conservation accomplishment that will protect wildlife habitat, expand recreational opportunities, restore public lands and waters, and create good jobs,” said Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation.
The new law makes two landmark changes. First, it will provide $9.5 billion over the next five years to repair roads, restrooms, trails and campgrounds at America’s 419 national parks — from Yosemite to the Everglades — and at other public lands where facilities have fallen into disrepair after years of neglect and funding shortfalls.
Second and more enduring, the bill would guarantee $900 million a year to the Land and Water Conservation Fund in perpetuity. Congress created the fund in 1964, requiring that up to $900 million a year in offshore oil revenues go to buy new park land and maintain local parks as a way for outdoor conservation and recreation to keep pace with a growing population.
When you head outside to enjoy nature, there are often biting insects waiting to delight in your company. Even if you are a mosquito magnet, you may not like the idea of spraying synthetic chemicals on yourself or your kids to repel pests. Natural bug sprays are safe and can be an effective way to repel bugs instead.
DEET is the active chemical ingredient used in many insect repellents. DEET has been found in products sold since the 1950s and an estimated one in three Americans uses a repellent containing DEET each year. DEET is generally safe if used correctly, but there are effective alternatives for those who wish to avoid it.
Most repellents that are applied to your skin have to be registered with the EPA, which means they’ve been evaluated for safety and effectiveness. The agency also evaluates some unregistered natural ingredients used as bug repellents for safety. They haven’t been tested for effectiveness. They include citronella oil, cedar oil, geranium oil, peppermint and peppermint oil, and soybean oil.
If you don’t want to spray anything on your body to repel insects, there are other natural ways to deter bugs from biting you.
Try placing plants that repel unwanted insects in your garden.
Because mosquitoes are attracted to dark colors, wear whites, khakis, and pastels.
Avoid being outdoors at dusk and dawn when mosquitoes are most active.
Make your yard less attractive to mosquitoes by eliminating standing water, using a fan, and installing bat houses.
Avoid heavily scented perfumes, soaps, lotions, and other personal care products that can attract bugs.
See recipe for home made repellent here…
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic shook up the oil industry, America was full of defunct oil wells. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions of holes in the ground — no one knows how many there really are — abandoned by their former overseers when oil stopped gushing to the surface or when those overseers went broke. The holes leak methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that’s heats the planet 86 times more than CO2 in the short term, as well as other pollutants. In a world changed by the coronavirus, with bankruptcies among oil and gas producers rising, the problem is expected to get worse.
A report from Resources for the Future, a nonprofit research institution, and Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy asked whether there might be a joint solution to the economic crisis wrought by the pandemic and the ballooning problem of abandoned wells: a federally-funded jobs program that would put oil and gas workers back to work plugging up the holes. The program would be administered by the state-level regulatory bodies that currently oversee well-plugging.
It’s an attractive idea, and the authors are not the first to present it. Similar schemes have been simmering among state leaders, environmental groups, and liberal think tanks over the last few months; a version was proposed in an infrastructure bill that was passed by the House of Representatives in early July; and Canada recently dedicated $1.7 billion to such a program. But it’s not as simple as it sounds.
The scale of the abandoned wells problem and the cost of doing something about it are wildly uncertain. The new report attempts to work within that uncertainty to show what a jobs program could reasonably accomplish, while also warning of the risks of having taxpayers pay to clean up the oil industry’s mess.
People are getting outside this summer to take socially distant walks on the beach or go on hikes – anything to get outdoors. But many people who visit scenic areas are noticing trash is piling up.
More than 100 people worked together to try to change that in the White Mountain National Forest.
“I was seeing a lot of posts about trash,” said an organizer of the event. She called on hiking communities on social media to help clean up New Hampshire’s beloved trails.
Hikers found everything from t-shirts to tires, metal scraps and subwoofers. Teams of up to four checked in at at Mount Washington Observatory Weather Discovery Center in Conway and in Lincoln for a day of trekking and cleanup.
“We chose the more loved areas that are easier to get to because you find, like 3 or 4 miles in 4,000 feet up, you don’t find that much trash obviously and the hikers usually pick that up so it’s great. So we went to the waterfalls and things that get a lot of visitors,” she said. “I would say that we probably had between 275 to 315 pounds collected.”
The hundreds of pounds of trash is off to be destroyed. An incinerator service volunteered to do that for free.
Many national and state parks, supposed to be untouched swaths of time-proof wilderness, have been overrun by first-time visitors seeking refuge from quarantine, joblessness, or the inability to take far-flung vacations. And as people have flooded into the parks, new crises have arisen for rangers and nearby communities, including indigenous populations who were already particularly susceptible to the coronavirus.
“A lot of tourists who come through here, they think it’s unfair that we’re trying to have a lockdown and that we’re trying to keep outsiders out,” says Alberta Henry, a member of Navajo Nation who operates a camping rental business outside the Grand Canyon. “A caucasian man from Tennessee came onto the reservation and told my nephews, ‘Get those effing masks off! What’s wrong with you?’ People are openly racist, even in front of my children.”
Before the pandemic, national parks were already exploding in popularity. In 2019, the National Park Service tallied 327 million visits—9 million more than the previous year, and the third-highest total since record-keeping began in 1904.
Many of these parks briefly shut down once the pandemic hit a crisis point in March and April. But as states began to reopen, so did parks, albeit with some restrictions. But eager recreationists have found a loophole around the restrictions: arriving early in the morning before the regulations are enforced.
There is now more land in DuPont State Recreational Forest (DSRF), including clear trout streams, rare wildflowers and important wildlife habitat. On July 1, 2020 Conserving Carolina conveyed 315 acres to the N.C. Forest Service, south of the main body of DuPont. This is the second phase of the Continental Divide Tract—a long-sought conservation priority that provides the “missing link” between DSRF and a vast conservation corridor spanning over 100,000 acres.
Last year, Conserving Carolina added 402 acres to DSRF, in the first phase of the project. Now complete, the Continental Divide Tract includes 717 acres of new public land. The property straddles the Eastern Continental Divide, which separates the waters that flow toward the Atlantic seaboard from those that flow toward the Gulf of Mexico. The Continental Divide Tract protects pristine headwater streams, including tributaries of both the Green River and Reasonover Creek.
The Continental Divide Tract creates a link between DSRF and a vast corridor of conservation land that extends for over 100,000 acres along the North Carolina-South Carolina state line. This includes Jones Gap State Park, Caesar’s Head State Park, Mountain Bridge Wilderness Area, Headwaters State Forest, Greenville Watershed, Jocassee Gorges and Gorges State Park—and, further west, Sumter and Nantahala National Forests. The tract also buffers two large protected summer camps—the 2,600 acre Green River Preserve and the 1400-acre YMCA Camp Greenville.
Dragonflies are used to measure mercury pollution in a citizen science program that began over a decade ago.
The national research effort, which grew from a regional project to collect dragonfly larvae, found that the young form of the insect predator can be used as a “biosentinel” to indicate the amount of mercury that is present in fish, amphibians and birds.
Methylmercury, the organic form of the toxic metal mercury, poses risks to humans and wildlife through the consumption of fish. Mercury pollution comes from power plants, mining and other industrial sites. It is transported in the atmosphere and then deposited in the natural environment, where wildlife can be exposed.
As part of the decade-long study, researchers came up with the first-ever survey of mercury pollution in the U.S. National Park System. The research found that about two-thirds of the aquatic sites studied within the national parks are polluted with moderate-to-extreme levels of mercury.
The finding of mercury within park sites is not an indicator that the source of pollution is in the parks themselves. Mercury is distributed widely within the atmosphere and is deposited in the protected areas as it is in other water bodies across the country.
The study also found that faster moving bodies of water, such as rivers and streams, featured more mercury pollution than slower moving systems including lakes, ponds, and wetlands.
Despite recent upticks in hirings, double-digit unemployment and a slumping U.S. economy have many drawing parallels to the Great Depression, complete with calls for a new Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that provided millions of young men with conservation jobs.
While there are some similarities between now and then, the contrasts are far more glaring. Today, in addition to the prospect of a profound recession, we confront systemic racial injustice, deep societal fault lines and the ongoing risks and uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A modernized CCC would replace age-old barriers with bridges to opportunity, unite young people behind a common cause and equalize the playing field for a new and diverse generation of rising leaders.
Close to 4 million college graduates have entered the most daunting job market in decades, where unemployment among 20-24 year-olds stands at nearly 20 percent. For African Americans, overall joblessness in June topped 15 percent and Hispanics were right behind at nearly 15 percent.
Beyond spurring employment, however, we must ensure that new corps members’ assignments are strategic and impactful. The original CCC planted more than 3 billion trees and built trails and shelters in over 800 parks. Much of their work still stands and benefits recreational users today.
Andrew Wunderley crouches in the sand to pick up a milky white sphere. He pinches the lentil-size orb between his thumb and forefinger. It nearly pops out of his grip. The little pellet is made of brand-new plastic and has all the wondrous qualities of the material—light, smooth, and virtually forever-lasting. Many more are scattered in the high-tide line of the wide, windswept beach, the pride of Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, a barrier island at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. He drops the pellet into a glass jar and picks up another, then another.
Before plastic is formed into forks or garbage bags or iPhone cases, it is born into the world as these orbs. The plastics industry calls them pre-production pellets, or sometimes just resins. Everyone else calls them “nurdles.”
For the past few years Charleston has been transforming into a major plastics export hub. The city is a middle step in the material’s supply chain: Companies receive train cars of nurdles from states like Texas that they then load onto container ships and send overseas.
The challenge is hardly confined to South Carolina; nurdles are turning up in waterways and on beaches all over the world. What’s more, the tiny pellets are just one symptom of a growing trend: larger volumes of cheap plastic being manufactured faster than ever.
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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