In 1964, Congress protected areas where, according to the Wilderness Act, “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Wilderness areas now cover approximately 5 percent of the United States – over 100 million acres.
While the ecological and aesthetic value of these lands is apparent, their economic value is less intuitive. In a review article published in the Journal of Forestry, U.S. Forest Service scientist Thomas Holmes and his colleagues describe the concepts and tools used to analyze the economic value of wilderness. The scientists considered historical studies to identify trends in the use and economic value of wilderness areas as well as the economic impacts that wilderness areas have on gateway communities.
“Once resources are extracted from a wilderness area, wilderness character is irreversibly changed and can never be reproduced,” says Holmes. “This is why it is important to consider the trade-offs inherent in developing wild areas. People are often surprised to learn that the economic value of protecting wilderness areas can exceed the economic value of developing those areas.”
Economists have proposed that people generally become willing to pay more for wilderness protection and use as their income and education increases. Combined with the increasing scarcity of wild lands relative to other land uses, economists have argued that wilderness values will trend upwards as economies develop. Holmes and his colleagues reviewed the economic literature to discern trends in the economic value of wilderness. “Our review suggests that wilderness areas are becoming increasingly valuable to society over time,” says Holmes.
Hundreds of well owners near Duke Energy coal ash pits received letters last spring from state health officials warning them not to drink their own well water. Last week, a letter signed by Randall Williams, the state health director, and Tom Reeder, the assistant state secretary for the environment, lifted the warning.
Now, well owners such as Bonita Queen, Deborah Graham and Gail Johnston, who live near coal ash pits, say they don’t know what to believe. Their wells still contain hexavalent chromium, a man-made carcinogen.
“Nothing has changed,” said Queen, a Salisbury resident who lives near Duke’s Buck power plant. “There has not been any proof showing what has changed from it being not safe to drink 10 months ago to it being safe to drink now.” “The coal ash pond is still there. “My well is still here. “Tell me what has changed — just numbers on a piece of paper,” Queen said.
A Winston-Salem Journal review of emails from staff members within the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Environmental Quality, as well as interviews with environmental experts and sources close to state health staff suggest that administrators at DHHS and DEQ are overriding their own experts as they try to explain why they are lifting some of the do-not-drink warnings.
On a cold January morning, a posse led by a former Army company commander named Matt Shea rolled into the Harney County Courthouse and wanted to speak to the sheriff. But this wasn’t a group of militants, or outlaws. They were state lawmakers from four western states, including Oregon. Most of them were members of a group called the Coalition of Western States, or COWS.
They were hoping to talk directly with Sheriff David Ward and convince him to support the armed militants at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Instead, COWS members would meet that day with a Harney County deputy and a sheriff from another county, an FBI agent and other local officials.
The 90-minute conversation was recorded by participants at the Jan. 9 meeting and given to Oregon Public Broadcasting. On the recording, Harney County Judge Steve Grasty thanks the group for their concern, but asks them to stay away from the refuge. Grasty said the militants were showing signs of fatigue and defeat, and worried that a visit from lawmakers would reinvigorate Ammon Bundy and the rest of the occupiers.
“If we’re getting close (to a resolution), and you embolden Bundy by your presence, and this runs on for weeks and months, it will be awful in this community,” Grasty said.
The FBI agent also asked the lawmakers not to visit the refuge. Those pleas fell on deaf ears. And Grasty’s prediction came true.
COWS representatives visited the refuge, which was closed to the public. The lawmakers acknowledge they fed the militants information gathered from that meeting, and militant leaders talked openly about what they learned from those disclosures.
Read full story and listen to recordings…
In the Yukon, Carcross/Tagish First Nation youth are building world class singletrack trails and ski touring, redefining their people’s mountain culture and leading their elders toward a new future.
The preamble and aftermath of the Gold Rush, and manic rush of the Alaska Highway some 45 years later, changed all of this. Endless streams of people and riches flowed through these valleys, first in a stampede that posed a brief and annoying interruption to daily life, and then as a lingering houseguest who brought with them a highway, guns and trucks full of booze.
Decades of boom-bust industry have left their mark on Montana Mountain. The daring feats of catskinners are etched across the mountainside, permanent reminders of industry’s dogged pursuit of silver and gold. Far below in Carcross, the scars are more subtle, but equally persistent—the decaying foundation of the former residential school, empty liquor bottles discarded under groves of spruce trees, caught along the stunning, windswept expanse of beach and dunes extending beyond the schoolyard fence.
In 2006, Carcross/Tagish First Nation (C/TFN) undertook a small initiative with a big dream. The Singletrack to Success (S2S) Project’s vision was to “build a destination, one trail at a time,” and to employ its youth in doing so. It was the year before C/TFN signed its land claim agreement with the Yukon and Canadian governments, marking the return of autonomy over its lands, resources, and people. The question of economic self-sufficiency loomed large on the collective conscience of C/TFN citizens. The environmental impacts of mining were deemed too great; no, this Nation needed to find another way. Tourism offered a viable option, and trails—the “paydirt” of the adventure-fueled travelling set—were a tangible starting point.
When Drew Peterson tells people he works as a U.S. Forest Service wilderness ranger, they may assume his job is defined by solitude. But that is not always the case: On a busy summer day, a wilderness ranger may stop to talk with as many as 300 people, such as on a recent day patrolling the popular Green Lakes Trail off the Cascade Lakes Highway.
“It can take up to six hours to hike up the trail,” Peterson said. The trail runs about 4½ miles from trailhead to Green Lakes.
Describing what a wilderness ranger is and what exactly he does quickly becomes complex. Peterson, 32, who now primarily patrols wilderness in the Ochoco National Forest but occasionally helps in the Deschutes National Forest, said the work combines about a dozen jobs, including customer service, trail maintenance and rule enforcement. Peterson’s job is to make sure people are doing the right thing.
The current form of the program, in which wilderness rangers go to wilderness areas around the Deschutes National Forest, started in 2010, said Jason Fisher, who supervises the five rangers in the national forest.
Though the title may bring up notions of adventure and exploration, often the work focuses on educating people about what they should and should not be doing. “It’s not what a lot of people expect,” he said.
Passing through wilderness requires adhering to federal rules and regulations, which Peterson and other wilderness rangers enforce.
Shell Oil released its 2015 annual review last week, and the most surprising thing in it may be how concerned the company is with climate change. It’s hardly what you’d expect from Big Oil, and yet the words “climate change” occur 15 times in the 228 page report. While this may seem minor, it’s a lot more than climate change is discussed by most other oil monsters (Looking at you, Exxon).
Shell, unlike many oil giants, actively acknowledges and even embraces climate action — at least, on paper. “It was encouraging to see governments reach a global climate agreement in Paris in December,” the report reads. “The agreement should now encourage countries to develop policies that balance environmental concerns with enabling a decent quality of life for more people.”
Sounds great, right? But before you get too excited about the prospect of Shell transitioning to a solar company, they go ahead and ruin it: “We know that understanding the world’s future energy needs will help us improve our competitiveness. We have evolved over the last few decades from a company focused almost entirely on oil to one of the world’s leading suppliers of gas, the cleanest-burning hydrocarbon.”
While that may be true that gas is the “cleanest-burning hydrocarbon,” it’s still a hydrocarbon. Not only that, our means of extracting natural gas — fracking — is linked to cancer, earthquakes, and contaminated groundwater.
Global temperatures leapt in February, lifting warming from pre-industrial levels to beyond 1.5 degrees, and stoking concerns about a “climate emergency”.
Unusual warmth in waters off northern Australia also prompted an alert by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Authority about the risk of widespread coral bleaching.
According to NASA analysis, average temperatures last month were 1.35 degrees above the norm for the 1951-1980 period. They smashed the previous biggest departure from the average – set only in the previous month – by 0.21 degrees.
“This is really quite stunning … it’s completely unprecedented,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, from Germany’s Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research. February’s spike is “a true shocker, and yet another reminder of the incessant long-term rise in global temperature resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases”.
“We are in a kind of climate emergency now,” Professor Rahmstorf said, noting that global carbon dioxide levels last year rose by a record rate of more than 3 parts per million.
A stretch of starkly beautiful wildlands in Southeast Utah is at risk due to energy development, looting and vandalism, but a movement led by Native American tribes could lead to its permanent protection as a national monument.
Nestled immediately to the south and east of Canyonlands National Park, the region known as “Bears Ears”—named for two sandstone-fringed buttes jutting about 2,000 feet up from the mesa—covers nearly 2 million acres of stunning desert dotted with yucca, sagebrush and red-tinged sandstone carved into dramatic mesas, canyons and arches.
Wildlife that calls the area home includes pronghorn antelope, mountain lions, bighorn sheep, black bears and peregrine falcons.
Hiking, camping, rock-climbing and backpacking are staple recreation activities in Bears Ears, which is bordered by the San Juan River along the southern edge. The natural attractions of the region are evident even when the sun goes down, as the relatively remote, wide-open landscape means night skies dark enough to fully showcase the stars overhead.
The value of Bears Ears isn’t only in its natural wonders. In fact, the movement to protect it has been spearheaded by a coalition of tribes concerned about their cultural heritage. By some estimates, the region contains more than 100,000 Native American archaeological and cultural sites, and some modern tribes in the American southwest trace their heritage back to the area, including the Navajo and Hopi.
Washington, D.C. has been hit with “Justin Fever” as Prime Minister Trudeau is in town to meet with President Obama — and attend the first U.S.-Canadian state dinner in nearly two decades. But the real impact of his visit might be felt less by the capital’s celebrity-starved journalists and more by the polar bears.
Under a new plan for the Arctic — the “shared Arctic leadership model” — the United States and Canada have pledged to work with indigenous groups to make science-based decisions. The plan seeks to protect the fragile Arctic environment, support resilient communities, and build a sustainable economy.
The Arctic is considered ground zero for climate change. With a fragile, often frozen ecosystem, changes in global temperatures — and the accompanying disruptions — can be magnified. Melting glaciers contribute to rising sea levels, while exposing carbon reserves that simply increase the speed of climate change.
Meanwhile, the animals that live in the Arctic are facing food shortages and other habitat changes. Communities in the Arctic have already had to relocate — Yup’ik Eskimo community in Alaska, a state that is warming twice as fast as the rest of the country, began moving their village last year.
A utility company that will legally dispose of coal ash water in two Virginia waterways agreed to treat waste going into the James River to a more stringent standard than the state required, though legal appeals to the controversial plan remain.
The settlement agreement between Dominion Virginia Power and the James River Association comes a day after the company reached a similar deal with Prince William County regarding Quantico Creek, a tributary of the Potomac River located within its borders. Quantico Creek and James River will start receiving discharges as early as April.
Two months ago, the Virginia Water Control Board issued permits allowing Dominion to drain coal ash water into Quantico Creek and the James River in southeastern Virginia, as Dominion follows an EPA mandate to close its coal ash ponds. That entails treating and draining the less-polluted top water from coal ash ponds at the Possum Point power plant by Quantico Creek, and the Bremo Bluff power plant by the James River. In total, Dominion will close 11 coal ash ponds across the state.
Environmentalists have noted that similar permits in North Carolina, which suffered a massive coal ash spill in 2014, are much more stringent and point to the industry’s capacity to do better.
The U.S. Forest Service plans to conduct a 3,100-acre prescribed burn in the Grandfather Ranger District, Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina, starting on Tuesday, March 8, 2016 through Thursday March 10, 2016. The agency will conduct the three-day burn at Roses Mountain, north of Morganton, N.C. and south of Table Rock. The objectives of the burn are fuel reduction and habitat restoration.
The Forest Service is conducting the burn as part of the Grandfather Restoration Project, an 8-year project designed to restore 40,000 acres of the Grandfather Ranger District. The project is restoring fire-adapted ecosystems by enhancing conditions for a variety of native plants and wildlife. The Grandfather Restoration Project also works on controlling non-native species, restoring watersheds, and protecting hemlocks against hemlock woolly adelgids.
Operations will begin Tuesday afternoon and last through Thursday afternoon. The public can expect to see smoke in the area through Friday. Smoke may be visible from Highway 181. The Mountains to Sea Trail from Steels Creek to New Gingercake will be closed during operations. Roses Creek Rd (FS 210) will also be closed.
The safety of the public and firefighters is the highest priority during a prescribed burn. The public is asked to heed signs posted at trailheads and roads and to stay away from burn areas and closed roads and trails.
The NC Forest Service, The Nature Conservancy, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, North Carolina Department of Transportation, and Burke County Emergency Management are assisting in the prescribed burn.
Volunteers removed more than 20 tons of garbage from the Apalachicola National Forest recently. But forest officials say the problem of illegal dumping, of sometimes hazardous materials, continues to grow. Along Highway 319 in Leon and Wakulla counties, near Tallahassee, Florida, volunteers, National Forest staff and others fanned out into the sometimes thick underbrush.
Instead of pine needles and leaves, they encountered household garbage, refrigerators and other appliances, TVs, building supplies, tires and large chunks of asphalt. “You name it, it’s probably out there,” said Apalachicola National Forest Deputy Ranger Harold Shenk.
In years past, cars, fiberglass boats, buckets of motor oil and piles of car batteries have been found during the annual cleanup, Shenk said. This year, two large dumpsters were filled with abandoned tires, which can also become additional breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
Besides the ecological concerns of dangerous trash littering the forest, it takes away from the appeal of its solitude, Shenk said. “When people go out to see the forest, they don’t want to see a bunch of trash,” he said. “It really spoils what people go out to the forest to do.”
So, thanks to the volunteers, but c’mon Florida. Wise up!
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on March 4, 2016 began removing federal Endangered Species Act protections for Yellowstone-area grizzly bears, marking a conservation milestone that’s been four decades in the making.
The federal agency listed the Yellowstone grizzly as threatened on July 28, 1975, when there were perhaps as few as 136 grizzlies left in the ecosystem. Removing federal protection and turning management over to the states comes as the population stands at an official estimate of 717.
“The recovery of the Yellowstone grizzly bear represents a historic success for partnership-driven wildlife conservation under the Endangered Species Act,” Dan Ashe, director of the USFWS, said in a statement. “Our proposal today underscores and celebrates more than 30 years of collaboration with our trusted federal, state and tribal partners to address the unique habitat challenges of grizzlies. The final post-delisting management plans by these partners will ensure healthy grizzly populations persist across the Yellowstone ecosystem long into the future.”
Federal and state plans seek to maintain a stable population of about 674 bears — the average number between 2002 and 2014. They would be counted in a 19,279-square mile “demographic monitoring area” with Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks at the core.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Appalachian Piedmont Zone fire staff plan to conduct a series of controlled burns in Cades Cove on Monday, March 7 through Friday, March 11, 2016. Weather depending, these prescribed fire treatments will take place in four field units totaling 502 acres between Sparks Lane and the Cable Mill Visitor Center area.
The goal of the controlled burn treatments in Cades Cove is to use fire to maintain open meadows, improve critical habitat for wildlife, reduce shrub and tree intrusion and exotic plant species, and to preserve the historic landscape of Cades Cove.
The Cades Cove loop road and historic structures will remain open to visitor use during controlled burn operations; however brief delays and temporary closures of adjacent roads and trails may occur to ensure public safety during fire operations. Visitors should expect to see fire activity and smoke during fire operations. Fire managers ask that motorists reduce speed in work zones. If smoke is present, keep windows up and headlights on. Please do not stop on roadways. Staff members will be present at overlooks to answer questions during the controlled burns.
For more information on fire activity, temporary closures, and safe viewing areas, please visit the park’s website.
The U.S. Forest Service rejected a proposal to widen roads and build infrastructure through the Kaibab National Forest that would have paved the way for a sprawling urban development near the southern entrance of Grand Canyon National Park. Stilo Development Group, an Italian corporation, sought to construct more than 2,100 housing units and 3 million square feet of commercial space including hotels, a spa and a conference center in the tiny town of Tusayan, a plan that would have threatened water resources and put wildlife in harm’s way.
Dave Uberuaga, superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, called the proposal one of the greatest threats to Grand Canyon in the nearly 100-year history of the park. Such sentiment has been broadly echoed by American Indian tribes, local residents, city leaders, and local and national environmental organizations.
“This is a great day for Grand Canyon National Park, and those who love its stunning vistas, abundant wildlife, and rich cultural heritage. The Forest Service was right to say yes to the public interest by protecting one of the most awe-inspiring places on earth, and no to the bloated development plans that threatened the park.”
“Stilo’s proposal endangers water, wildlife, and wilderness that make the Grand Canyon a landscape revered in America and around the world.”
This month, a drilling platform will rise in the Gulf of Mexico, but it won’t be aiming for oil. Scientists will try to sink a diamond-tipped bit into the heart of Chicxulub crater—the buried remnant of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs, along with most other life on the planet. They hope that the retrieved rock cores will contain clues to how life came back in the wake of the cataclysm, and whether the crater itself could have been a home for novel microbial life. And by drilling into a circular ridge inside the 180-kilometer-wide crater rim, scientists hope to settle ideas about how such “peak rings,” hallmarks of the largest impact craters, take shape.
“Chicxulub is the only preserved structure with an intact peak ring that we can get to,” says University of Texas, Austin, geophysicist Sean Gulick, co–chief scientist for the $10 million project, sponsored by the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program. “All the other ones are either on another planet, or they’ve been eroded.”
At the end of March, a specially equipped vessel will sail from the Mexican port of Progreso to a point 30 kilometers offshore. There, in water 17 meters deep, the boat will sink three pylons and raise itself above the waves, creating a stable platform. By 1 April, the team plans to start drilling, quickly churning through 500 meters of limestone that were deposited on the sea floor since the impact. After that, the drillers will extract core samples, in 3-meter-long increments, as they go deeper. For 2 months, they will work day and night in an attempt to go down another kilometer, looking for changes in rock types, cataloging microfossils, and collecting DNA samples.
In a partnership between the National Park Service (NPS) and Google, Shenandoah National Park will be featured in the Google Cultural Institute, a digital platform which makes hundreds of historically and culturally significant objects in the National Park Service’s museum collection available online. The Google Cultural Institute uses technologies similar to Google’s Street View –providing 360-degree views on Google Maps of locations around the world – to photograph and virtually map important artifacts, photos, records and works of art to share important material with global audiences and digitally preserve them for future generations.
“This marriage of technology and history means that anyone, anywhere can see artifacts and sites that, provide a taste of the rich and diverse story of America,” Secretary Jewell said. “Our hope is that this partnership will not only illustrate and elevate our nation’s history and culture, but inspire more people to visit the wonderfully diverse places that the National Park Service protects and preserves for current and future generations.”
The NPS, celebrating its Centennial anniversary this year, is home to one of the world’s largest museum systems. Over 380 park museums, 45 million objects and 76,000 linear feet of archives help tell powerful stories of America’s land, people, and significant events and ideas that continue to inspire the world.
Celebrate Women’s History Month by reading about Lilla Leach, Oregon botanical pioneer:
The date was June 14, 1930. Botanist Lilla Irvin Leach and her husband John, a Portland pharmacist, were descending a ridge in the Siskiyou Mountains of Curry County, Oregon. With them were two pack burros, Pansy and Violet. The four had camped the night before at a small glacial lake on a bench near the summit of Pearsoll Peak, about 11 miles west of Selma at the boundary of what is now the Kalmiopsis Wilderness.
It was a hot day and the trail was a steep one through rugged country. They had traveled several miles on the bare ridge when they came to a place where the hogback widened out and became Gold Basin, a high plateau with scattered pines. Lilla later described the next moments as follows:
“I was in the lead where I usually walk in order to get the first chance over the burros to anything of interest that might be growing, when suddenly I beheld a small patch of beautiful, low growing, deep rose-colored plants. Because of their beauty, I started running and dropped to my knees… I had never seen anything so beautiful before. John came and started taking pictures while I examined the plant with a hand lens. I believed it was new.”
Lilla Leach always spoke of the discovery of Kalintopsis as her most exciting experience and the thrill of a botanists lifetime. In an interview almost a quarter of a century later. Lilla again described her discovery of the new plant: “I suppose there must have been a little depression in the ridge there, a sort of saddle for moisture to gather in and soil to accumulate, for there beside the trail was a patch of evergreen bushlets simply covered with deep rose-colored flowers, vividly pink in the sun. The patch was about 30 feet square, at a rough guess. Thrilled? We certainly were! I felt sure it was something new. It looked like Kcarnia poltfolia, but it wasn’t. 1 thought it might be a new Kalmia.”
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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