The U.S. Forest Service began paving the way for a sprawling urban development near the southern edge of the Grand Canyon that would include more than 2,100 housing units and 3 million square feet of retail space along with hotels, a spa and conference center. The superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park has called the project one of the greatest threats to Grand Canyon in the 96-year-history of the park.
The proposal, by the Stilo Development Group, would transform the 580-resident community of Tusayan, Ariz.—which sits near the southern entrance to the national park—from a small, quiet tourist town into a sprawling complex of high-end homes, strip malls, and resorts only a mile from the Grand Canyon National Park boundary.
Stilo has partnered with the town of Tusayan in order to obtain the federal permit needed to expand road and utility access through public lands within the Kaibab National Forest so development can proceed. The agency began moving forward with the process to approve that special-use permit.
“The Forest Service is putting Grand Canyon National Park in the crosshairs by considering Tusayan’s dangerous, damaging plan for a mega-resort,” said Kevin Dahl of the National Parks Conservation Association. “This proposal is not in the public interest and is one of the greatest threats Grand Canyon National Park has seen in its history. The Forest Service can and should have rejected it out of hand.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, says he disagrees with the Pentagon’s assessment that climate change is a national security concern.
The Pentagon released a report in October 2014 that assessed the national security implications of climate change. “Politics or ideology must not get in the way of sound planning,” wrote former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in the forward to the report. “Our armed forces must prepare for a future with a wide spectrum of possible threats, weighing risks and probabilities to ensure that we will continue to keep our country secure.”
But Johnson said at an event in Sherwood, Wisconsin, on Nay 9 that he did not concur with the Pentagon’s analysis.
“I disagree with that assessment,” Johnson tells a questioner at the event. “We’re sitting here in Wisconsin. Twenty-some thousand years ago this was covered by about 5,000 feet of glaciers.”
“I do not deny climate change,” he continues. “The climate has always been changing.” He goes on to say that he thinks the United States “shouldn’t spend a dime addressing it because our limited resources are spent better elsewhere.”
Despite Johnson’s take on the issue, there has been growing concern in the national security community about the threats of climate change, including sea level rise and migration caused by droughts or food shortages.
The Dixie National Forest will participate in Kanab’s Amazing EarthFest by hosting geology, history and fire presentations.
Events will be held at the Red Canyon Visitor Center on May 15, 2015, beginning at 1 p.m. and continuing throughout the afternoon.
Geology and history presentations will focus on the colorful red canyon region of the Dixie National Forest. Wildland fire personnel, accompanied by Smokey Bear, will be available for a presentation and discussion on the role of fire in the landscape.
Forest employees and volunteers will also be available to assist visitors exploring the area, and to offer information about hikes and recreation opportunities.
For more information, contact Leslie Fonger at 435-676-9360 or email [email protected]. Directions are available at www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/dixie. Information on the event is at www.amazingearthfest.com.
Glacier National Park, which spans more than a million acres of pristine Montana wilderness, is home to a variety of predators, from cougars to wolves to grizzly bears. Most of the time they pose no danger to hikers, for whom the adage, “They’re more afraid of you than you are of them,” holds more or less true. For more than half a century after the park was founded — on this day, May 11, in 1910 — the park’s native grizzly bear population left its human visitors alone.
That changed in 1967, when two young women, both 19, were mauled to death by grizzlies at separate campsites on the same night. The emboldened bears weren’t discouraged by noise or the sight of bonfires — and they didn’t stop attacking even when the campers played dead.
The attacks, immortalized in the bestselling book Night of the Grizzlies, were provoked in part by the hordes of park visitors who had left a trail of trash behind over the years, acclimating the grizzlies to their presence and making them associate humans with food.
Ten people have been killed by bears in the park’s 105-year history, compared with seven at Yellowstone National Park. The National Park Service points out that more people have died — at Yellowstone, at least — by drowning or from burns sustained when they fell into the park’s thermal pools.
“To put it in perspective, the probability of being killed by a bear in the park (7 incidents) is only slightly higher than the probability of being struck and killed by lightning (5 incidents).”
The National Park Trust and Buddy Bison, their lovable woolly mascot, invite you to join the nationwide day of play by discovering and exploring your local, state, and national parks and public lands on Kids to Parks Day.
Children, families, teachers, cities, towns, and parks are gearing up for this year’s Kids to Parks Day (KTP), a nation-wide day of outdoor play organized by National Park Trust (NPT) in cooperation with a host of local and national collaborators. This year’s KTP Day will be held on Saturday, May 16, 2015.
NPT is encouraging children across the country to explore their neighborhood parks and discover science, history, nature and adventure right around the corner or just across town.
On April 30, 2015 the glitzy electric car company Tesla Motors, run by billionaire Elon Musk, ceased to be just a car company. As was widely expected, Tesla announced that it is offering a home battery product, which people can use to store energy from their solar panels or to backstop their homes against blackouts, and also larger scale versions that could perform similar roles for companies or even parts of the grid.
For homeowners, the Tesla Powerwall will have a power capacity of either 10 kilowatt hours or 7 kilowatt hours, at a cost of either $3,500 or $3,000. The company says these are the costs for suppliers and don’t include the cost of installation and a power inverter, so customers could pay considerably more than that. The battery, says Tesla, “increases the capacity for a household’s solar consumption, while also offering backup functionality during grid outages.”
The anticipation leading up to this announcement has been intense — words like “zeitgeist” are being used — which itself is one reason why the moment for “energy storage,” as energy wonks put it to describe batteries and other technologies that save energy for later use, may finally be arriving. Prices for batteries have already been dropping, but if Tesla adds a “coolness factor” to the equation, people might even be willing to stretch their finances to buy one.
Tesla isn’t the only company in the battery game, and whatever happens with Tesla, this market is expected to grow. The major upshot of more and cheaper batteries and much more widespread energy storage could, in the long term, be a true energy revolution — as well as a much greener planet.
Here are just a few ways that storage can dramatically change — and green — the way we get power…
As the West girds itself for what looks likely to be a fierce wildfire season, a bipartisan group of Western senators is pushing a bill to rethink the way the federal government pays to fight catastrophic fires. The idea is that the largest wildfires would be treated like natural disasters. As with big hurricanes or earthquakes, funding for them wouldn’t have to come from an agency’s regular budget.
For seven of the last 12 years, wildfires have been so costly that the Forest Service ran through its fire budget in late summer, long before the season was over and had to raid other programs to keep fighting fires. The problem is so well known it’s got its own nickname, “fire borrowing.”
Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell warned a Senate committee this week that there’s a 90 percent chance his agency will have to do that again this year. The drought and low snowpack across much of the West contribute to the forecast for a bad fire season this year. Tidwell said that with global warming, fire seasons could be expected to be longer — 80 days longer than they were just 15 years ago — and fiercer. Saying that it’s “past time to find a solution,” he reiterated his support for the bipartisan funding bill sponsored by Sen. Wyden, D-Oregon.
Roads and trails and buildings in our national parks are deteriorating, and adequate funding to fix that problem remains elusive.
With so many competing demands for federal dollars, the National Parks Service is often a lower priority, especially for repair projects. The result is that despite user fees the backlog of projects at national parks nationwide is $11.49 billion, according to the agency – a staggering sum in an era when Congress is more willing to cut spending than to find ways to invest in infrastructure. This includes work on roads that bring hikers and tourists into the parks.
This problem of crumbling roads, culverts, lodges and eroded trails is not new.
Deferred maintenance work in the park system is chronic and longstanding. It doesn’t take much searching to find news headlines since the early 1990s that referred to our parks system as being “loved to death.” That’s another way of saying that with a growing population the national parks — which encompass some of our nation’s most spectacular places — get so many visitors that they are being worn out.
A toxic chemical used in the controversial drilling practice known as fracking has been detected in the drinking-water supply of Pennsylvania homeowners, according to a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The chemical—2-Butoxyethanol or 2BE, known to have caused tumors in rodents—showed up as “white foam,” which one researcher “likened to dishwashing suds.”
The PNAS study, Evaluating a groundwater supply contamination incident attributed to Marcellus Shale gas development, suggests that drilling fluid escaped the narrow, vertical borehole while crews were first drilling the gas well, and then moved laterally along intermediate depth fractures to the aquifer used as a potable water source.
“This is the first case published with a complete story showing organic compounds attributed to shale gas development found in a homeowner’s well,” said Penn State geoscientist Susan Brantley, one of the study’s authors. Explaining further, she said: “This is the first documented and published demonstration of toxic compounds escaping from uncased boreholes in shale gas wells and moving long distances” into drinking water.
In other words, “the scientists believe that the pollution may come from a lack of integrity in the well which passes through the drinking aquifer and not the actual fracking process below.”
Rangers in the San Bernardino National Forest call them “red trees.”
Instead of the typical deep green color, large swaths of pine trees now don hues of death, their dehydrated needles turning brown and burnt-red because of the state’s worsening drought.
“Unlike back East, where you have fall colors, here it’s because the trees are dying,” said John Miller, a spokesman for the San Bernardino National Forest.
Years of extremely dry conditions are taking a heavy toll on forest lands across California and heightening the fire risk as summer approaches.
“The situation is incendiary,” William Patzert, a climatologist for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told The Times recently. “The national forest is stressed out.”
A new study by the U.S. Forest Service tried to assess the scope of the problem. Researchers estimated that the drought has killed off at least 12.5 million trees in California’s national forests during the drought.
The scientists expect the die-off to continue. “It is almost certain that millions more trees will die over the course of the upcoming summer as the drought situation continues and becomes ever more long term,” said biologist Jeffrey Moore.
A coalition of big insurance companies, consumer groups, and environmental advocates are urging the United States to overhaul its disaster policies in the face of increasingly extreme weather due to human-caused climate change.
According to a report released by the SmarterSafer coalition, the U.S. needs to increase how much it spends on pre-disaster mitigation efforts and infrastructure protection. That way, it asserts, the U.S. can stop wasting so much money on cleaning up after a disaster happens.
“Our current natural disaster policy framework focuses heavily on responding to disasters, rather than putting protective measures in place to reduce our vulnerability and limit a disaster’s impact,” the report reads. “This needlessly exposes Americans to greater risks to life and property and results in much higher costs to the federal government.”
The SmarterSafer coalition is made up of more than 30 different groups, including some of the biggest insurance companies in the world: Allianz, Liberty Mutual, SwissRe, and USAA, to name a few. Adequately dealing with the risks of climate change is inherently important to the insurance industry, as failure to prepare can lead to increased costs for insurance companies.
California’s old-growth coastal redwoods are the tallest trees on Earth, and the old-timers thrive in the foggy, rainy territory between Mendocino and the Oregon line. For many locals, these trees don’t just dominate the landscape; they connect with matters of life and death — even now, years past the timber industry’s glory days.
Bgin with the 32-mile Avenue of the Giants between Garberville and Fortuna, where the old growth of Humboldt Redwoods State Park alternates with roadside kitsch. Head into the park belt — a long, noncontiguous series of public lands that begin above Orick and stretch more than 70 miles north to Crescent City, including Prairie Creek Redwoods, Del Norte Coast Redwoods and Jedediah Smith Redwoods state parks, which together make up about half of Redwood National and State Parks.
Hiking in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, you will wonder whether the tallest tree in the world was hiding in plain sight. (It’s somewhere in the park, but rangers and serious tree people don’t disclose these things.)
You step into the forest and wade through ferns and ground-hugging oxalis, dodge poison oak, glance at moss-covered maples and Douglas firs. You run your hand along the soft, damp redwood bark — redwoods are related to sequoias but grow taller — you feel the soft floor of fallen leaves and needles underfoot. You consider the tonnage, the fires, the floods, the centuries towering above you.
Unlike its neighbor Yosemite, at Lassen Volcanic National Park there were no crowds at the entrance gate, in the parking lots or on the trails. Only 400,000 people will make their way to Lassen this year; nearly 4 million will visit Yosemite, most of them during the summer.
“Not many people have discovered this park,” said Karen Haner, Lassen’s chief of interpretation and education. That makes the experience nicer for those of us who have discovered it.
Lassen, about a three-hour drive north of Sacramento, features jagged peaks, clear alpine lakes, quiet meadows full of wildflowers and ground that bubbles, hisses and smokes from volcanic activity.
Eruptions have rocked the region for more than 2 million years, but the spectacular landscape visitors see today began to form 100 years ago when a 30,000-foot-high volcanic blast unleashed a 12-mile-long mud flow that mowed down forests and reshaped the land.
Like the Asian volcanoes Krakatoa, Pinatubo and Mt. Fuji, Lassen is part of the Ring of Fire, a zone of mountain-building volcanoes that circle the Pacific Ocean..
Hiking trails have been identified as one of new niche tourism markets aimed at enhancing values of farms around the capital of Namibia that offer unique landscapes.
New hiking trails are being promoted by the Namplace project, which is mandated to advocate and educate the public about landscape conservation in the identified pilot landscape conservation areas such as Sossusvlei Namib, Fish River Canyon, Waterberg, Mudumu and the Windhoek Green Belt.
“These efforts are to make farms more sustainable and encourage farmers not to deplete natural resources on farms. Rather we recommend they venture into tourism to preserve the natural environment for the future,” said Manini Kandume, project communication consultant.
Farm Godeis, situated approximately 70 kilometres west of Windhoek, in what is known as the green belt, is one of the farms where the hiking trail intervention has been implemented.
The Namplace project in partnership with the Ministry of Environment and Tourism has developed a Khomas-Hochland hiking trail in Windhoek’s green belt landscape, which is a pilot study of the Namplace project stretching 100 kilometres along five farms.
1934 was a big year for conservation in the southern Appalachians. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in June, and in October, on a roadside somewhere outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, The Wilderness Society was born.
The story of The Wilderness Society’s conception has been told different ways, but all versions involve a heated roadside discussion centered on the novel idea of protecting wild places from the growing threat of “recreational motoring” and its associated roads.
In Bernard and Miriam Frank’s car on that October Friday were Benton MacKaye (father of the Appalachian Trail), Harvey Broome (notable Tennessee author and conservationist), and Bob Marshall (namesake for a million acre wilderness area in Montana). This group of five was simmering on a provocative, and at that time new, idea: that some places should be left to their own devices where people could experience nature on its own terms. Setting aside large tracts of land as untrammeled wilderness provided the best way to protect nature’s wildness.
That historic day marked the beginning of The Wilderness Society, the organization most closely associated with the Wilderness Act, establishing a National Wilderness Preservation System that now contains over 100 million acres. These wilderness areas provide the core of a network of wildlands aimed at protecting nature and passing it on to future generations. As conservation science has developed, wilderness designation has repeatedly been shown to effectively protect wildlife and their habitats, clean water, and refuges from many pernicious threats.
77 years after The Wilderness Society was conceived, research ecologists met again in the Smokies to take on a new provocative idea: how do we ensure that future generations will have opportunities to experience nature under increasing pressures from climate change and other threats unknown in 1934?
Late in the day the trucks reached their destination and the four men stepped out into the backcountry of western Arizona. In the back of the trucks, they had enough gear for a few nights of camping — cases of beer, baling wire and tools for repairs, shovels for digging. And they had a body bag, full of dry ice and the corpse of Edward Abbey.
The day was sunny, but it had been a rough week. The men spotted a mesa with a nice view, gathered some tools and walked to the top. When they got there, two of the men, Jack Loeffler and Doug Peacock, started to argue about where to dig the grave.
It was fitting that even in death, Abbey was somehow involved in something just outside the law. Abbey was a writer and anarchist who distrusted big government, big development, big money and the military. He abhorred violence, but was not above mischief. He hiked federal land in the Cabeza Prieta wilderness area without proper permits. He also was said to have done his share of “field research” for one of his more famous books: a novel about a group of environmentalists who cut down billboards and vandalized construction sites to slow development in the desert he loved.
By late in his life, the author of Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang and other works had a reputation as a passionate writer and defender of the wilderness.
But his legacy, really, was only partly written in his lifetime. It would be sealed by his death.
Most of the best-known wilderness areas are out west, but states east of the Mississippi River still contain millions of acres of stunning land protected under the 50-year-old Wilderness Act.
Befitting a pioneer nation, many of our most revered natural landscapes, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite, are in the west. However, the roots of American conservation lie firmly in the eastern half of the country, as do many pieces of extraordinary designated wilderness.
The Wilderness Act of 1964, was authored by Howard Zahniser, an easterner whose love of nature was formed partly in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains. And amid icons like Bob Marshall Wilderness (Montana) and Glacier Peak Wilderness (Washington), the first batch of irreplaceable public land protected that year included three eastern wilderness areas: New Hampshire’s Great Gulf Wilderness, and North Carolina’s Linville Gorge and Shining Rock Wildernesses.
In the east, you can find soaring mountain ranges, lush autumn foliage, exotic coastal wetlands and much more, protecting a wide range of wildlife habitat and offering ample recreation opportunities for hikers, campers, hunters, fishers and sightseers. The close proximity of many of these wildlands to major metropolitan areas makes them all the more delicate, but it also lends them much of their power, as a primal salve to smoggy, fast-paced city life.
Here are just a few notable wilderness areas east of the Mississippi River…
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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