A bird with the wingspan of an NBA player seems like it’d be pretty hard to miss. Yet the iconic Golden Eagle has proved so elusive in eastern North America that scientists are only now defining its range and coming up with population stats in the region.
Todd Katzner, a research wildlife biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, says there are a few thousand Golden Eagles that breed in remote portions of Canada—Quebec and Labrador—and winter in the Appalachian Mountains. His latest study, published today in The Condor: Ornithological Applications, shows that within this group, the eagles that breed the farthest north generally spend the winter farthest south, with some migrating all the way to Alabama and Georgia. In doing so, they “leapfrog” over the birds in the middle, which go only as far south as Pennsylvania and New York. (A few don’t even make it out of Canada.)
The study speculates that this leapfrog pattern is the result of a trade-off. Golden Eagles in Pennsylvania and New York, for instance, face harsher winters. But on the other hand, they have an easier migration and might also get the first crack at favorable breeding territories in the spring.
Eastern Golden Eagles are believed to be geographically and possibly genetically distinct from the much larger population of Golden Eagles that spans almost all of western North America. Before the 1930s scientists didn’t realize that this species lived in the East at all, and many birding field guides still don’t mention the smaller population.
More and more people are visiting national parks, media channels are flooding consumer publications with features on the parks, congressional interest seems higher than ususal, and yet parks are struggling to get by, according to the National Parks Conservation Association.
The parks advocacy group points to Olympic National Park as just one example of the funding struggles pulling at the National Park System. According to the group, Olympic “receives only approximately 60 percent of the funds it needs to adequately serve visitors, maintain roads and trails, and protect internationally recognized natural resources.”
The report comes as members of Congress work to strike a spending deal to provide funding for our national parks and other federal programs and agencies with a looming December 11 deadline, and as the National Park Service rapidly approaches its 100th anniversary in 2016, an NPCA release notes.
In a special report, Park on the Edge, NPCA officials say years of inadequate funding “have led to Olympic National Park’s $133 million buildup of maintenance needs for trails, visitor centers and other facilities – contributing to the more than $11 billion backlog across the National Park System.
As Republican leaders herald Congress’ power to hinder a global climate deal, most Americans say the U.S. should join an international treaty requiring America to reduce emissions, according to a new poll.
The New York Times and CBS poll released this week also notes that 63 percent of Americans favor limits on carbon emissions. The poll comes as delegates from nearly 200 countries are meeting in Paris in hopes of negotiating a climate deal that puts the world on a track to limit global warming to no more than 2°C. Many scientists believe that global warming would be irreversible and cause catastrophic effects beyond this threshold.
The survey puts the American public in line with international public opinion. A recent Pew Research Center poll across 40 countries found that 78 percent of respondents “support the idea of their country limiting greenhouse gas emissions as part of an international agreement in Paris.”
Meanwhile, for the past few days Republican leaders have been ramping up attacks against President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which seeks to reduce carbon pollution from power plants. Republicans in Congress expressed their opposition to any international agreement that they say could hamper the nation’s energy industry, and many pledged to oppose financial commitments to help other countries curb carbon emissions.
In the last decade, the hemlock woolly adelgid, a tiny sap-sucking insect native to Japan, has swept through southern Appalachian forests, leaving dead hemlocks in its wake. Hemlock branches no longer shade streams or tower over shrubs, and their loss has affected streamside, or riparian, forests.
“Without hemlock, more sunlight reaches the forest floor,” says U.S. Forest Service scientist Chelcy Ford Miniat. The species that has benefited the most from the increased light is an evergreen shrub, rosebay rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum), which is now growing twice as fast as expected. Although rhododendron’s showy flowers are appreciated by nature-lovers, its unchecked growth in riparian forests is not so welcome.
Evergreen rhododendron grows so densely that flowering plants, ferns, and seedlings are unable to survive beneath its shade. It also stores essential plant nutrients in its leaves for years, and when the leaves fall off and fragment, they decompose very slowly and nutrients remain locked up in forms that are inaccessible to other plants.
SRS scientists and managers from the U.S. Forest Service Nantahala Ranger District worked closely to plan treatments for study sites in the Coweeta Basin and in the White Oak Creek watershed northwest of Coweeta. “Before treatment, rhododendron and dead hemlock trees dominated the study sites,” says Miniat. “After the treatments are complete, we expect to see more diverse vegetation.” Hardwood trees like black birch, red maple, oaks, and tulip poplar are scattered above the rhododendron sub-canopies, but there are very few tree seedlings, ferns, grasses, or flowering plants.
Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy today was awarded $100,000 for its Sitton Creek Protection and Restoration project, which will enhance water quality in the Mills River watershed and expand public access by adding 178 acres to Pisgah National Forest.
CMLC was one of Duke Energy’s Water Resources Fund grant recipients. Duke Energy today announced grant awards totaling $1 million to 13 nonprofit organizations in North and South Carolina.
“We’re excited to receive the Duke Energy grant for our Sitton Creek project,” said Kieran Roe, executive director of CMLC. “The grant will help protect and restore the quality of the Mills River watershed, a source of drinking water serving hundreds of thousands of users in Henderson and Buncombe counties in North Carolina.”
The Water Resources Fund is a $10 million, multi-year commitment from Duke Energy to help nonprofits continue to protect and improve the environment, including waterways used year-round across the Carolinas and neighboring states.
“Drill, Baby, Drill” became a popular campaign mantra back in the 2008 election cycle. But now we’re hearing the opposite call: “Leave It in the Ground.”
Is there a middle ground that can supply the energy we need without causing significant climate damages? Yes. And it doesn’t involve exploiting all available resources, nor banning their use.
What if we continued to lease the rights to access fossil fuels on federal land but required the leases and royalty payments to reflect the full climate damages from these fuels? Doing so would put the market to work by unlocking fossil fuels that have the highest value in relation to their impact on the climate. The bonus: It provides money to pay for some of the damage of climate change.
Luckily, there is a way to determine this. It is called the Social Cost of Carbon (S.C.C.), and the federal government sets it at $40 per metric ton of CO2 emissions. The S.C.C. is used to inform a wide variety of regulations that limit the use of fossil fuels, including emissions standards for vehicles, appliances and power plants. But the S.C.C. has not been used to guide extraction policies. If the S.C.C. were applied as a part of leasing and royalty rates on federal lands, we would unlock resources with the greatest net benefits.
There was a pair of shoes from Pope Francis and sneakers from the United Nations secretary general, Ban-Ki Moon. Most were from ordinary citizens, like Gloria Montenegro, a 65-year-old Parisian, who left two pairs.
All together, 11,000 pairs of shoes were on display in the Place de la République in Paris on Sunday morning in a silent demonstration – in place of cancelled marches and other events – of support for action against climate change. The installation represented “a collection of millions of steps marching toward the same direction,” Ms. Montenegro said.
The installation was one of several demonstrations organized worldwide after the French minister of foreign affairs announced following the atrocious Paris terrorist attacks that the planned Climate March would be cancelled.
The issue can be overwhelming. The science is complicated. Predictions about the fate of the planet carry endless caveats and asterisks.
Beginning today, the countries of Earth will join together in Paris, France in an effort to tackle perhaps the most serious threat to human existence of the modern age. World leaders will meet for 12 days to try to agree on plans to slow global warming and the other effects of climate change.
And so, as the Paris climate talks get underway, the NY Times has provided quick answers to often-asked questions about climate change. If you’ve been paying attention for decades, this is a refresher. If you’ve been wondering the true significance of global warming, here are some answers. Even if you don’t believe the science, it is still your responsibility to understand the questions.
On Monday, November 30, 2015, roughly 40,000 heads of state, diplomats, scientists, activists, policy experts, and journalists will descend on an airport in the northern Paris suburbs for the biggest meeting on climate change since at least 2009 — or maybe ever. The summit is organized by the United Nations and is primarily aimed at producing an agreement that will serve as the world’s blueprint for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the impacts of global warming. This is a major milestone in the climate change saga, and it has been in the works for years.
At the heart of the summit are the core negotiations, which are off-limits to the public and journalists. Like any high-stakes diplomatic summit, representatives of national governments will sit in a big room and parse through pages of text, word by word. The most important part of the document is the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). These are commitments made individually by each country about how they plan to reduce their carbon footprints.
The United States, for example, has committed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, mostly by going after carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. Nearly every country on Earth has submitted an INDC, together covering about 95 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The INDCs will be plugged in to a core agreement, the final text of which will be hammered out during the negotiations. It will likely include language about how wealthy nations should help pay for poor nations’ efforts to adapt to climate change; how countries should revise and strengthen their commitments over time; and how countries can critically evaluate each other’s commitments.
Unable to convince members of Maine’s congressional delegation to introduce legislation for a North Woods national park, supporters are now hoping President Obama will use his authority to designate a national monument as a step toward eventual park status.
In June 1916, President Woodrow Wilson accepted the donation of roughly 6,000 acres on Mount Desert Island to create the nation’s first federally owned park land east of the Mississippi River.
The place now known to many Mainers as simply “Acadia” didn’t start out as a national park but was, instead, among the country’s best-known parks that began life as “national monuments.” A century later, supporters of a North Woods national park in Maine are pursuing a similar strategy.
Faced with continued opposition from some local residents and a leery congressional delegation, the groups have pivoted toward bestowing national monument status on the land as a park precursor. It’s a calculated shift motivated both by the political realities – particularly opposition to the proposal among some in the Katahdin region – and President Obama’s willingness to use his executive authority to create new protected areas without going through Congress.
As part of the ongoing, multiyear revision process for the Forest Plan for the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests in Western North Carolina, the U.S. Forest Service is evaluating more than 300,000 acres in the forest for potential wilderness designation.
Wilderness areas are the nation’s highest form of land protection, designed to protect unspoiled areas for future generations. In wilderness areas, roads, vehicles and permanent structures are prohibited, as well as activities such as logging and mining.
Currently, there are six wilderness areas in the two national forests, including Linville Gorge, Shining Rock and Middle Prong in the Pisgah National Forest and Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock, Southern Nantahala and Ellicott Rock in the Nantahala National Forest.
In 2014, the USFS invited the public to provide input on the areas to be included in an inventory to be further evaluated as potential wilderness area additions. After a broadening of the criteria for which areas could be added for wilderness consideration, 362,411 acres were included in the inventory for lands that may be suitable for wilderness, including 88,692 acres in the Grandfather Ranger District of the Pisgah National Forest.
The next step is to evaluate each area on the inventory map for wilderness characteristics, including the degree to which the area generally appears to be affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprints of man’s work substantially unnoticeable; the degree to which the area has outstanding opportunities for solitude or for a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; the degree to which an area may contain ecological, geological or other features of scientific, educational, scenic or historical value; and the degree to which the area may be managed to preserve its wilderness characteristics.
Americans have often been told that meeting scientific climate targets is impossible without threatening jobs and costing a fortune. But a new report shows that the opposite is true.
“The Clean Energy Future: Protecting the Climate, Creating Jobs and Saving Money,” by the respected economist Frank Ackerman and his colleagues at Synapse Energy Economics, shows that the U.S. could dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions and move toward 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 — while adding half a million jobs and saving Americans billions of dollars on electrical, heating, and transportation bills.
Why is this possible? The Clean Energy Future does not depend on any new technical breakthroughs to realize these gains, only a continuation of current trends in energy efficiency and renewable energy costs — but the cost of renewables is falling so fast that they are already cheaper than fossil fuel energy in some places and soon will be in most. And reducing our energy use through energy efficiency is already far cheaper than burning more fossil fuels. The Clean Energy Future shows in detail how we can use these new energy realities to meet our climate goals.
A climate protection strategy can be designed to provide the maximum number of good, secure, permanent jobs with education, training, and advancement. Because some jobs will be lost in fossil fuel–related industries, we need a vigorous program to provide new, high-quality jobs and/or dignified retirement for workers in those industries. Climate protection programs should include job pathways and strong affirmative action provisions for those groups that have been excluded from good jobs in the past.
The Clean Energy Future plan provides a floor, not a ceiling, for what can be accomplished.
The first LifeStraw water filter was introduced by Vestergaard in 2005 for public health use in developing countries. The filter converts microbiologically contaminated water into safe drinking water that meets US EPA standards for water quality. Since then, the LifeStraw brand has expanded to include additional water filters and purifiers with more features (e.g., higher volume, safe water storage) for use in households, clinics and schools. In 2011, Vestergaard began selling its LifeStraw filters to consumers in North America for use in outdoor sports and recreation. Since that time, the brand has expanded the product portfolio for this market. The simple, easy-to-use, durable design that makes LifeStraw products so effective in harsh conditions is also what makes it so appealing to developed world consumers.
LifeStraw® is manufactured by Vestergaard, a Swiss-based global company dedicated to improving the health of disadvantaged people with game-changing solutions that fight diarrheal disease, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and neglected tropical diseases. In addition to LifeStraw products, the company manufactures PermaNet, the leading long-lasting insecticidal bed net that helps prevents malaria and ZeroFly products to enhance food security.
The launch of Vestergaard’s new LifeStraw Steel product coincides with the second annual mass distribution of high-volume LifeStraw® Community purifiers to schools in western Kenya without access to safe water on school grounds. This distribution is made possible through LifeStraw’s program, Follow the Liters. Through this program, a portion of the revenue from each LifeStraw® consumer product sold is used to provide one school child in a developing country with safe drinking water for an entire school year.
On November 2, 2015, the same day that LifeStraw Steel was launched, this year’s Follow the Liters distribution program began in rural Kenya. Over a seven-day period, 14 teams including trained health workers, visited 330 schools in Kenya’s western province to distribute 2,549 LifeStraw Community water purifiers and educate students and teachers on safe water practices. Combined with last year’s distribution, more than 361,000 school aged children in the region now have sustainable access to safe water.
Vestergaard’s exclusive North American distributor, EarthEasy Sustainable Solutions, has been a valued partner in the Follow the Liters program. EarthEasy is a family owned company that provides products for environmentally sustainable living. EarthEasy is offering readers of Meanderthals a 15% discount on all LifeStraw® products on their website through December 31, 2015. Just use the coupon code SURVIVAL15 at checkout.
Garlic mustard, Japanese stiltgrass, Oriental bittersweet, and other non-native invasive plants are creeping across backyards, parks, forests, and roadsides throughout the southeastern U.S.
Scientists are still trying to understand what drives their relentless spread. Invasions are often assessed by measuring species richness, or the number of non-native species known to grow in a certain area. However, other measurements of plant invasions could offer more insights.
Two measures of invasion were modeled – richness and prevalence. Richness describes the number of invasive species present, while prevalence describes how common invasive plants are, and was defined as the percentage of FIA plots in a county that have at least one invasive plant species present. Invasion was also considered in relationship to the quality of an area’s habitat and its vulnerability to invasion, as well as propagule pressure – the number of viable seeds, fruits, root fragments, and other propagules that non-native plants produced.
On average, eastern forests were more heavily invaded, both in terms of the number of invasive species and how common they were. However, the geographical impact of plant invasions was not evenly spread through the region – forests with the highest number of invasive species were in the Southeast and East, while forests in the North, the Great Plains, and along the Mississippi had the lowest.
Neal Clark has been watching his feet a lot this fall day. The young environmental lawyer chose flipflops for this tour of the Utah desert with the blithe self-assurance of someone comfortable outdoors. Remarkably, he’s stumbled into thorns only once. Now, he cautiously threads a gap between banks of cryptobiotic crust. The castle-like colonies of microorganisms anchor the thin topsoil; no conscientious environmentalist would crush them. But Clark pauses: Just ahead, an oil rig towers on a patch of earth scraped bare to accommodate trucks and equipment. “There’s something ironic about tiptoeing around crust next to something like this,” he says wryly.
That incongruity stretches far beyond this spot. Clark, who works for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, is pointing out Bureau of Land Management parcels that are being developed for oil and gas near Canyonlands National Park, Dead Horse Point State Park and some of the other scenic areas that have made nearby Moab an outdoor recreation mecca.
Fidelity Exploration & Production Company has 31 oil wells here, most drilled in recent years. Though the National Park Service and BLM credit Fidelity with keeping its facilities as low-impact as possible, many feel the development illustrates why the BLM should plan much more carefully where and how drilling is allowed. “This is one of the most spectacular places on the planet,” Clark argues. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to allow oil companies to disturb this landscape.”
Hoping to strike a better balance, in August, the BLM released a draft “master leasing plan” for nearly 800,000 federal acres here that would significantly curtail future development near national parks, trails and other sensitive sites.
Snowed under by an avalanche of empty plastic bottles, in 2011 National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis told the system’s 408 parks, national monuments and historic sites that they could stop selling bottled water at their concession stands and offer public water bottle filling stations instead.
According to Jarvis, the environmental impact of single-use plastic bottles made from petrochemicals and shipped around the world is incompatible with the Park Service’s goal to be a responsible steward of nature. Plastic bottles make up an estimated one-third of all garbage in the parks. And national parks—especially in remote areas—pay a pretty penny to remove and recycle all that plastic waste. The policy doesn’t prohibit guests from bringing in their own disposable water bottles; it simply makes them unavailable for purchase at the parks.
Nineteen parks have signed on so far, including some of the biggest names: Grand Canyon, Canyonlands, Arches and Zion national parks and Mount Rushmore National Monument. Zion National Park was the first to buck the bottle, and since then the park has eliminated the sale of 60,000 plastic water bottles, which equates to 5,000 pounds of plastic waste avoided.
The only group up in arms about the new bottle policy is the $13-billion-a-year bottled water industry, represented by the International Bottled Water Association, whose members include Figi, Evian, Nestlé and Glacier Springs. According to the Washington Post, the association has spent about $510,000 to lobby members of Congress since 2011.
Australia’s Carmichael coal mine project has been under major scrutiny by large conservation groups and prominent Australians for months. Now, progressive think tank the Australia Institute has found just how damaging the emissions from burning coal at the mine could really be.
The coal mine project, which is a backed by India’s Adani Enterprises and approved by the Australian government in October, has the potential to out-weigh annual emissions from entire cities and countries, according to a new report by the Australia Institute.
According to the report, Carmichael will emit 79 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year — more than the annual emissions from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and about equal to the average annual emissions from both Malaysia and Austria. The projects will also emit three times as much carbon dioxide equivalent per year as the city of New Delhi, six times as much as Amsterdam, and twice as much as Tokyo.
“The mine pits themselves would be 40 km [24.85 miles] long and 10 km [6.2 miles] wide, bigger than many capital cities,” the authors write in the report. “At peak capacity the mine would output 60 million [metric tons] of thermal coal per year. Adani expects Carmichael will output 2.3 billion [metric tons] of coal over its lifetime: enough to build a road one-meter thick, ten-meters wide, wrapped around the world five times.”
As the world prepares for the most important global climate summit yet in Paris later this month, news from Greenland could add urgency to the negotiations. For another major glacier appears to have begun a rapid retreat into a deep underwater basin, a troubling sign previously noticed at Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier and also in the Amundsen Sea region of West Antarctica.
And in all of these cases, warm ocean waters reaching the deep bases of marine glaciers appears to be a major cause.
The new fast-moving glacier is the Zachariae glacier or Zachariæ Isstrøm, located in the far northeastern part of Greenland. In a new paper in Science, Jeremie Mouginot of the University of California-Irvine and his colleagues find that the ocean-based glacier, which contains 0.5 meters or a foot and a half of potential sea level rise, has begun a rapid retreat, especially since 2012. The glacier has lost fully 95 percent of the ice shelf that used to help stabilize it, they say, and now sports a 75 meter high ice cliff extending above the water (the glacier also extends hundreds of additional meters below it).
“This is sort of the second major floodgate from Greenland that has opened up,” says Eric Rignot of UC-Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the authors of the study. The first, says Rignot, was the Jakobshavn glacier, Greenland’s “fastest” moving, according to a recent study, which is currently based 1,300 meters below sea level and also retreating into a deep basin.
The U.S. Forest Service ranger station in the Pisgah National Forest within the Grandfather Ranger District in Nebo, North Carolina was renamed the Jason Crisp Forest Service Building during a ceremony on Nov. 10, 2015. U.S. Forest Service Officer Jason Crisp and his K-9 partner, Maros, lost their lives while on a manhunt in pursuit of a homicide suspect on March 12, 2014.
His widow, Amanda Crisp, his two sons, Logan and Garett, other members of the Crisp family, more than 80 State, County, Forest Service, Federal law enforcement officers along with Forest Service officials from Asheville and the Region 8 Headquarters in Atlanta, and Congressional members attended the building dedication.
The stone that holds the plaque came from the Grandfather Ranger District in the Pisgah National Forest according to Nick Larson, District Ranger, Grandfather Ranger District, Pisgah National Forest. Inside the building is a wall honoring Officer Crisp and Maros.
Law enforcement and other Forest employees who knew and worked with Jason Crisp attended the solemn dedication ceremony. “To Officer Crisp’s family, I hope you can understand that the Forest Service employees think about Officer Crisp and you and your family often,” James Melonas, Acting, Forest Supervisor, National Forests in North Carolina said. “Your loss is also our loss.”
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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