Nature doesn’t need people. People need Nature.
Human beings are part of Nature. Nature is not dependent on human beings to exist. Human beings, on the other hand, are totally dependent on Nature to exist.
The growing number of people on the planet and how we live here is going to determine the future of Nature . And the future of us.
Nature will go on, no matter what. It will evolve. The question is, will it be with us, or without us? If Nature could talk, it would probably say it doesn’t much matter either way.
We must understand there are aspects of how our planet evolves that are totally out of our control. But there are things that we can manage, control, and do responsibly that will allow us and the planet to evolve together.
This is simply about all of us coming together to do what needs to be done. Because if we don’t, Nature will continue to evolve… without us.
Here’s to the future. With humans.
Conservationists work tirelessly to protect America’s most wild and treasured parks, forests, monuments, wildlife refuges and other public lands. President Obama has responded by protecting natural wonders in California, Nevada and Texas as national monuments, to be cherished and enjoyed for generations to come.
Berryessa Snow Mountain, in California, showcases the Inner Coast Ranges, rich with oak woodlands, clear creeks and fields of wildflowers. It is a haven for outdoor recreation, hunting and fishing and is easily accessible to both the Bay Area and Sacramento.
Southern Nevada’s Basin and Range National Monument features Native American heritage sites in a unique western landscape that is home to bighorn sheep, kit fox and ancient bristlecone pine. Monument status means visitors may continue to hike, bike and hunt in those lands.
The third monument is Waco Mammoth. Wooded parkland along the Bosque River in Texas protects the nation’s first and only recorded fossil bed of a nursery herd of Pleistocene-era mammoths, drawing visitors and renowned scientists from all over the world.
Wild places like Nevada’s Basin and Range, California’s Berryessa Snow Mountain and Waco Mammoth in Texas are exactly the kind of places in our busy, crowded nation that deserve to be permanently protected. These special lands will now be preserved as a legacy for our children’s future.
Fueled by unusually high temperatures, hundreds of wildfires are burning across Western Canada — and they’re sending their smoke south across the United States border.
Wildfire danger throughout Western Canada is “very high,” according to the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System (CWFIS), with the majority of fire activity taking place in three provinces: Saskatchewan, British Columbia, and Alberta. “Nationally,” the CWFIS’ most recent report reads, “fire activity has increased dramatically and is now well above average for this time of year.”
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the wildfires up north are causing a “tremendous amount of smoke,” and it hasn’t stopped at the border: smoke from Canada’s wildfires has been seen across the Midwest and as far south as North Carolina, bringing a haze to the sky and turning sunsets fiery red. But the smoke also brings dangerous fine particles, which can diminish air quality and, in high concentrations, pose a public health threat.
Because of the path of the smoke — which moved primarily east-southeast, air quality in Minnesota was particularly hard-hit. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency said that the wildfire smoke was responsible for the worst air quality levels in nearly a decade — at times, the air quality in the Twin Cities was equal or worse than air quality in places like Beijing, China or Sao Paulo, Brazil, cities known for their high levels of pollution.
Just a couple hours’ drive from Las Vegas, the Basin and Range area comprises Garden Valley and Coal Valley as well as corridors connecting the surrounding Timpahute, Pahroc, Worthington, Mt. Irish, Seaman, Golden Gate, Grant and Quinn Canyon mountain ranges. Among other things, Basin and Range’s rugged landscape is considered a monument to the awesome span of geological time itself.
Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) previously introduced legislation to protect Basin and Range, and there is support in Nevada for protecting the area permanently. Protecting Basin and Range will require an ambitious landscape-scale conservation effort.
Basin and Range is renowned for its biodiversity, with wildlife including greater sage-grouse, bighorn sheep, mule deer, kit fox and a variety of bats and plantlife including elements of Mojave Desert, Sonoran Desert and Great Basin vegetation, like ancient bristlecone and ponderosa pine.
Basin and Range is also beloved by Nevadans and visitors alike who crave opportunities to hike, camp, hunt, bike and rock-climb, and the region boasts traces of both Native American and 19th century settlement culture. The tract known as Basin and Range also surrounds “City,” a gigantic earthen sculpture that artist Michael Heizer has been working on for decades.
The National Forest Foundation (NFF) recently expanded its partnership with the Salt River Project (SRP) to restore imperiled aspen forests on the Kaibab National Forest in northern Arizona.
A leading partner of the NFF’s reforestation efforts, SRP has been supporting landscape-scale reforestation in northern Arizona through their Trees for Change program since 2009. This year, customer contributions collected through SRP’s Trees for Change program will restore aspen stands in northern Arizona.
Aspen forests currently comprise less than one percent of forests on the southern half of the Kaibab National forest and provide particularly high ecological value and diversity.
However, these biodiversity aspen tree hotspots have declined in recent years due to competition from ponderosa pine, browsing damage from elk and deer and fire exclusion. To improve the health of these ecosystems, the NFF and the Kaibab National Forest have partnered on an ambitious two-year long, comprehensive aspen restoration project across 200 acres of the Kaibab National Forest.
Using funding from SRP, the NFF and the Kaibab National Forest are constructing temporary fencing to exclude elk and deer, which will allow aspen forests to regenerate. Additionally, the partners are planting young aspen seedlings to expedite aspen stand restoration. The project, now halfway completed, is expected to regenerate approximately 200,000 young aspen seedlings.
Many crops in the drought-stricken state of California are actually being irrigated with fracking wastewater.
Fracking is the process of drilling down into the earth before a high-pressure water mixture is directed at the rock to release the gas inside. Water, sand and chemicals are injected into the rock at high pressure, which allows the gas to flow out to the head of the well. Wastewater produced from this process is highly toxic and filled with a variety of chemicals.
In the midst of the recent drought in California, it was discovered that fracking wastewater has been used on crops for over 20 years. The Cawelo Water District, a guild comprised of local farmers, has been cooperating with oil firms in the area to recycle their wastewater for food production.
“It’s hard for the oil industry to get rid of, so it’s a win-win for the oil companies when they are able to sell the water,” Chevron spokesperson Abby Auffant said in a statement.
According to the AFP, Chevron’s refineries in Kern River California sell over 500,000 barrels of wastewater per day to the Cawelo Water District. It was also reported that the Cawelo Water District actually gets at least half of the water it uses from Chevron.
The water is allegedly put through a filtration system and cleaned in a variety of ways, but many critics wonder if this is safe enough to be used on food. For the farmers, this wastewater saves them well over a thousand dollars for every acre-foot of food that needs to be irrigated.
Carbon capture will play a central role in helping the nations of the world manage and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Many materials are being tested for the purpose of capturing CO2. New results show that ordinary clay can work just as effectively as more advanced materials.
“It is quite remarkable that clay can capture as much CO2 as other materials that are being investigated,” says Jon Otto Fossum, professor at the Department of Physics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
Clay offers many benefits compared to other materials, particularly because other potential materials can be expensive, difficult to produce, toxic and not particularly environmentally friendly.
A possible practical future use of this discovery could be to include clays in CO2 filters for industrial-scale CO2 emissions reduction.
A good material for capturing CO2 must meet specific requirements. It should have a large surface area and good adsorbtion capability. It should be able to capture CO2 selectively before it captures other molecules, it should not need a lot of energy for it to work, and it must be reusable. Moreover, it must be inexpensive and environmentally friendly.
Prakash Javadekar said that Delhi would submit plans to cut emissions to the UN, but would not announce a target date for when it expected its total carbon emissions to drop. His comments came two days after China told the United Nations that its emissions would peak around 2030. India is the world’s third largest carbon emitter, after China and the US.
Scientists say global emissions need to peak and drop soon if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change.
“The world is not expecting… India to announce its peaking year,” said Prakash Javadekar. “Countries know where India stands and what its requirements [development needs] are and therefore nobody has asked us for [the] peaking year.” The peaking year is when a country’s emissions reach the highest level before they begin to drop.
Beijing went public with its peak year when it submitted its climate plan to the United Nations climate convention. The US has pledged to cut its carbon emissions by 26-28% by 2025.
All 190 plus countries in the convention have been asked to submit their climate plans – known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) – in the UN negotiations. Over 40 countries have submitted them and many eyes are now on India.
If you live in Oklahoma, and you’ve been injured by an earthquake that was possibly triggered by oil and gas operations, you can now sue the oil company for damages.
That’s the effect of a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which on June 30, 2015 rejected efforts by the oil industry to prevent earthquake injury lawsuits from being heard in court. Instead of being decided by juries and judges, the industry was arguing that cases should be resolved by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, a state regulatory agency. The state’s high court rejected that argument.
“The Commission, although possessing many of the powers of a court of record, is without the authority to entertain a suit for damages,” the opinion reads. “Private tort actions, therefore, are exclusively within the jurisdiction of district courts.”
The issue of whether oil companies could be held responsible for earthquakes has been closely watched in Oklahoma, where seismic activity has been steadily on the rise since the start of the fracking boom there in 2009. Right now, the state averages about 10 small earthquakes per day — on June 26, there were 25 quakes. The Oklahoma Geological Survey recognizes this is unprecedented, saying “[n]o documented cases of induced seismicity have ever come close to the current earthquake rates or the area over which the earthquakes are occurring.”
In a jam packed but complex day for international climate action, Brazil, the United States, and China — three of the world’s top 10 greenhouse gas emitters — all announced new goals on June 30, 2015. The commitments came in different forms and units, ranging from forest hectares to renewable energy gigawatts — but collectively appeared to represent a new and major step forward towards addressing climate change and cleaning global energy systems.
President Obama and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, leaders of the western hemisphere’s two most populous countries, released a statement pledging to pursue strong climate change action and cut their emissions. That included an ambitious joint goal for each country to get 20 percent of their electricity by the year 2030 from renewable sources — not including hydropower. In addition, Brazil pledged to restore 12 million hectares of its forests by 2030 (equivalent to 120,000 square kilometers), even as it pursues “policies aimed at eliminating illegal deforestation.”
The news came even as China extended and solidified the commitments made last November by releasing its own intended emissions reduction target in anticipation of the U.N.’s late 2015 climate meeting in Paris. The world’s largest emitter pledged to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 60 to 65 percent by the year 2030, building on a prior agreement with the U.S. to peak its emissions and start bringing them down by 2030.
In 2009, China had set a goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions per unit of gross domestic product by 40 to 45 percent from 2005 levels by 2029. Those emissions are already down 33.8 percent, China said.
Shell’s plans to bore two wells in the Arctic Ocean this summer may be jeopardized by an obscure permitting requirement that effectively bars drilling operations close to each other in waters off Alaska.
The restriction highlighted by environmentalists opposed to Shell’s Arctic drilling campaign could be a major stumbling block for the company, which has spent $7 billion and seven years pursuing oil in the region.
The provision is embedded in the government’s rules for obtaining a “letter of authorization” allowing companies to disturb walruses, seals and other animals in the region — among the last permits Shell needs to launch activities in the Chukchi Sea next month. Under a 2013 Fish and Wildlife Service regulation, those authorizations are precluded for drilling activities happening within 15 miles of each other. The two wells Shell wants to drill this summer are about 9 miles apart.
A coalition of environmental groups insisted that the requirement should block Shell’s planned Arctic drilling and force the Obama administration to rescind earlier approvals. Any letters of authorization issued to Shell “would violate an explicit condition” of the governing regulations, the organizations said in a letter to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell.
Robert Redford is an actor, director and environmental advocate.
On Monday, June 29, 2015, I’ll have the honor of addressing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and representatives from 193 countries gathered at U.N. headquarters in New York to call for immediate action on global climate change.
This meeting is part of a growing groundswell being felt throughout the world with citizens, cities, religious leaders, corporations and nations demanding real action. And when world leaders meet in Paris this December, the world will be watching.
I believe climate change is the defining environmental issue of our time. It’s hurting our people — around the world — and it’s time to stand up and say we’ve had enough. Enough of rising seas and widening deserts that threaten our homes and our crops. Enough of withering drought and blistering heat that mean more malnutrition and disease. Enough of raging floods, wildfires and storms that threaten people everywhere with one disaster after another.
We’ve got a real chance in Paris to come together and do something about it. But getting it done, and doing it right, will require a powerful public outcry. It’s happening. It’s building.
Every day we don’t act, the crisis gets worse — and the cost of inaction goes up. But there are three things that we can do as a global community.
Researchers who study the Earth’s climate create models to test their assumptions about the causes and trajectory of global warming. Around the world there are 28 or so research groups in more than a dozen countries who have written 61 climate models. Each takes a slightly different approach to the elements of the climate system, such as ice, oceans, or atmospheric chemistry.
The computer model that generated the results for this graphic is called “ModelE2,” and was created by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which has been a leader in climate projections for a generation.
GISS produced the results shown here in 2012, as part of its contribution to an international climate-science research initiative called the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase Five. Phase-5 is designed both to see how well models replicate known climate history and to make projections about where the world’s temperature is headed.
There are more than 30 different kinds of experiments included in Phase-5 research. These tests address questions like, what would happen to the Earth’s temperature if atmospheric carbon dioxide suddenly quadrupled? Or, what would the world’s climate be like through 2300 if we keep burning fossil fuels at the current rate?
Phase-5 calls for a suite of “historical” experiments. Research groups were asked to see how well they could reproduce what’s known about the climate from 1850-2005. They were also asked to estimate how the various climate factors—or “forcings”—contribute to those temperatures.
Alaska, the great northern frontier of America, is being reshaped by climate change. While rising temperatures are altering its character and landscape, they are also bringing the ravages of wildfires.
In the past 60 years, Alaska has warmed more than twice as fast as the rest of the country, with average temperatures up by nearly 3°F. By 2050, temperatures are projected to climb an additional 2-4 degrees, with the Arctic region seeing the most dramatic increases. These rising temperatures are expected to increase wildfire risks in Alaska, just as they have in the rest of the western U.S.
Wildfires have been on the rise across the western U.S. since the 1970s, at the same time that spring and summer temperatures have increased dramatically, and average spring snowpack has declined substantially.
Fires in Alaska don’t often make news in the lower 48, but they threaten vast expanses of forest, parkland, and tundra that store immense quantities of carbon. The state’s growing number of large wildfires have the potential to damage these ecosystems, and the people and wildlife that depend on them, while releasing a significant amount of carbon into the atmosphere, further contributing to global warming. Wildfire emissions over these vast areas also threaten air quality in Alaska and beyond.
Sea-level rise puts at high risk more than $40 billion in park infrastructure and historic and cultural resources, including almost $90 million in assets at the Canaveral National Seashore, according to a federal report. The report by scientists from the National Park Service and Western Carolina University is based on a study of 40 parks.
“Climate change is visible at national parks across the country, but this report underscores the economic importance of cutting carbon pollution and making public lands more resilient to its dangerous impacts,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, said in a release. “Through sound science and collaboration, we will use this research to help protect some of America’s most iconic places — from the Statue of Liberty to Golden Gate and from the Redwoods to Cape Hatteras — that are at risk from climate change.”
The report examined LiDAR data flown in 2007. LiDAR is akin to radar, measuring elevations with a laser and analyzing the reflected light.
Sea-level rise projects vary by place and time, but scientists expect a 1 meter rise in the next 100-150 years. In some areas of Alaska, however, relative sea-level is decreasing because as land-based glaciers and ice sheets melt, land is rising faster than sea levels, according to the report.
Vancouver-based company G-Kup has come up with 100 per cent compostable coffee pods as a solution to uneconomical and incredibly wasteful K-Cups.
The plastic single-serve coffee pods designed for Keurig machines have exploded in popularity, but the garbage it creates has become a global problem. A Mother Jones report said the number of K-Cups produced in in 2013 was enough to wrap around the planet 10.5 times.
Even the pods’ creator has said he regrets creating them in the first place.
As an alternative, G-Kups are held together with a bamboo and sugar cane sleeve, with a biodegradable polymer lining that can withstand boiling water. The Vancouver company patented the invention in February.
“The current waste created by K-Cups is unacceptable,” said G-Kup CEO Darren Footz. “Simply put, I want to change the way the world consumes single-serve coffee.”
Make cappuccino in your own home. Here’s how.
Something has been missing from Middle Georgia gardens. Nature lovers may have noticed the lack of monarch butterflies. The familiar orange wings with black veins flutter between Canada and Mexico during annual migration that keeps them from wintering in freezing temperatures.
Milkweed plants in the Southeast and Midwest are the traditional breeding ground, but many butterflies die trying to find increasingly sparse pockets of the plant. A decline in native milkweed on Georgia roadsides and Midwest farms means fewer places to lay eggs. Caterpillars dine exclusively on milkweed.
“It’s easy for anybody to create habitat,” said Deborah Harris, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Evidently the monarchs will find your milkweed if you have it.” With the population down by up to 90 percent, Harris and others are leading valiant efforts to save the monarch.
The push is on to create 100 new habitats across Georgia and the Southeast to link gaps in the Rosalynn Carter Butterfly Trail established in Plains in 2013. Last week in the Carters’ hometown, former President Jimmy Carter and his wife joined the Fish and Wildlife Service to announce a $130,000 investment to expand the trail in public lands, schools and parks.
Will Shafroth, who worked in the Interior Department under former Secretary Ken Salazar, has been hired as CEO and president of the National Park Foundation.
Shafroth fills a void created when former CEO and President Neil Mulholland abruptly left the organization last fall. Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Dan Wenk served in an interim capacity, but returned to his park earlier this year.
Shafroth will oversee the Foundation’s work, including its operations, philanthropic support through individual and foundation giving, corporate partnerships, and its promotion of the National Park Service Centennial celebration. He joins the Foundation on the heels of its launch of the Find Your Park movement – a public awareness and engagement campaign to inspire people to connect with, celebrate, and support America’s national parks.
Shafroth brings more than three decades of experience working to advance conservation and outdoor recreation. In his most recent appointment at the Department of the Interior, he served as Secretary Salazar’s Counselor for America’s Great Outdoors. In that role, he was responsible for developing and executing a 21st-century conservation and recreation agenda for America’s land, water and wildlife. His leadership on the President’s America’s Great Outdoors initiative focused significantly on reconnecting people to the outdoors.
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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