At national parks across the US, from the peaks of Denali in Alaska to desert backpacking destinations in Utah and Arizona, managers have struggled to deal with this inevitable byproduct of people eager to get outdoors, a desire that continues amid the pandemic. Unlike a discarded Clif Bar wrapper, human waste carries a slew of bacteria and pathogens when left unbagged or otherwise unaddressed.

Colorado’s Rocky Mountain national park has been hit especially hard. There, a surge in visitors meant toilet paper became a more common sight in wilderness areas. But the park is now known nationally for pioneering a solution used at other sites, including Mt Rainier.

Between 2016 and 2019, the 265,000-acre park near Denver saw a 40% increase in visitors hiking and climbing its woods and jagged peaks. In 2019, it was the third-most visited national park in the US.

Rangers were trekking to the toilets and finding repulsive conditions. At its worst, the solid matter would freeze and thaw repeatedly and rise above the seat. Rangers would have to dig the material from the chamber and load it into a five-gallon bucket, place the cargo on to a pack animal and ride down.

Park chiefs poured time and resources into a solution. They settled on a nifty toilet product called ToiletTech. The system separates urine from solid waste, which creates cleaner excrement – and less work for rangers. Beneath the toilet seat, excrement lands on a small conveyor belt, while urine flows through a separate pipe and into a septic field.

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Some of the UK’s most breathtaking landscapes will be turned into national parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) to help protect the country’s rich biodiversity, the government has announced.

As part of their 25-year Environment Plan, the project is expected to restore the equivalent of 30,000 football pitches into wildlife-rich habitats, clean up pollution, create areas of woodland, and restore wetland.

While there are currently 15 national parks around the UK — including the South Downs in Sussex, New Forest, Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales — these ambitious plans will see more come to pass over a period of 25 years, giving everyone the chance to soak up nature.

Brilliantly, too, there are also hopes this scheme will help provide shelter for species such as the curlew, nightingale, horseshoe bat, pine marten, red squirrel and wild orchids.

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Starting next month, veterans and Gold Star families will be able to visit national parks and other public lands for free, under a new initiative from the Department of the Interior.

Active-duty service members and their families are already granted free access to those sites under existing department rules. The new announcement broadens that benefit to more than 20 million more individuals in recognition of their service and sacrifice on behalf of the country.

The policy includes admittance to well-known sites like Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona and Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

Interior officials did not provide cost estimates for the move, but said that the policy change will affect about 2,000 public locations across the country. Fees for the sites can range from a few dollars per person to nearly $100 for some weekly and annual passes.

The policy goes into effect starting on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2020. It is not known at this time how long the policy will last.

Many Americans are rediscovering favorite pastimes during the COVID-19 pandemic, including exploring outdoor areas. Because you can breathe fresh air (so long as you aren’t in a crowd) and get away from enclosed spaces, this can be a great time to plan a hiking trip. Being outdoors is one of the most effective ways to avoid close contact but enjoy exercise and leisure.

It’s possible to explore a natural marvel in your backyard or scratch a national park off of your bucket list. You may also try to find little-known hiking trails to avoid large crowds and to make a memorable road trip.

A local hiking adventure can be a wise move to avoid domestic travel restrictions and potential hotspots. If your state has strict shelter-in-place orders, your only choice might be staying close to home. Some of your options will be local greenways that you might already be quite familiar with. Other options might require a country drive to access.

National parks tend to have the best hiking trails, but state or local parks are hidden gems as well. You may try to explore lesser-known areas to avoid large crowds. You can still enjoy the great outdoors and the views may rival those of the most popular hiking trips.

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“A lot of tourists who come through here, they think it’s unfair that we’re trying to have a lockdown and that we’re trying to keep outsiders out,” says Alberta Henry, a member of Navajo Nation who operates a camping rental business outside the Grand Canyon. “A caucasian man from Tennessee came onto the reservation and told my nephews, ‘Get those effing masks off! What’s wrong with you?’ People are openly racist, even in front of my children.”

Before the pandemic, national parks were already exploding in popularity. In 2019, the National Park Service tallied 327 million visits—9 million more than the previous year, and the third-highest total since record-keeping began in 1904.

Many of these parks briefly shut down once the pandemic hit a crisis point in March and April. But as states began to reopen, so did parks, albeit with some restrictions. But eager recreationists have found a loophole around the restrictions: arriving early in the morning before the regulations are enforced.

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Dragonflies are used to measure mercury pollution in a citizen science program that began over a decade ago.

The national research effort, which grew from a regional project to collect dragonfly larvae, found that the young form of the insect predator can be used as a “biosentinel” to indicate the amount of mercury that is present in fish, amphibians and birds.

Methylmercury, the organic form of the toxic metal mercury, poses risks to humans and wildlife through the consumption of fish. Mercury pollution comes from power plants, mining and other industrial sites. It is transported in the atmosphere and then deposited in the natural environment, where wildlife can be exposed.

As part of the decade-long study, researchers came up with the first-ever survey of mercury pollution in the U.S. National Park System. The research found that about two-thirds of the aquatic sites studied within the national parks are polluted with moderate-to-extreme levels of mercury.

The finding of mercury within park sites is not an indicator that the source of pollution is in the parks themselves. Mercury is distributed widely within the atmosphere and is deposited in the protected areas as it is in other water bodies across the country.

The study also found that faster moving bodies of water, such as rivers and streams, featured more mercury pollution than slower moving systems including lakes, ponds, and wetlands.

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The U.S. government has failed to protect our national parks in these times of disastrous wildfires, drying rivers, and melting glaciers. The parks also contend with pollution issues, budget shortfalls, a scourge of invasive plant and animal species, and now a global pandemic.

In a controversial move made during the spread of COVID-19, Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt waived entrance fees at all national parks, which encouraged visitation in mid-March. By late March—as some park employees tested positive for the virus and rangers could no longer enforce safe social-distancing practices on crowded overlooks and trails—Yosemite, Yellowstone, Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon, and other parks began closing their gates.

Then on Earth Day (April 22), President Trump announced that the parks would soon reopen. Against the judgment of many park employees and officials from around the country, reopenings began in early May, and now most parks are open.

As the parks reopen, humans will once again lead the invasive-species list. Since 2015, a record 300 million-plus visitors have streamed into the national parks every year, and a surge of visitors is expected this summer. The consensus is that many of America’s “best ideas” are being loved to death, as people swarm into places that have their own compromised immune systems.

Years of underfunding and climate change are increasingly threatening the national park system. From the Everglades in Florida to Glacier in Montana, and the Smokies in TN/NC, here are the ones we stand to lose.

Overarching concerns for the health of staff, concession workers, and visitors are complicating the reopening of national park sites shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic. Business won’t return to normal quickly or uniformly, with many parks confronting a unique set of issues they must resolve before they can welcome the public’s return.

Exactly when individual parks will reopen is unknown, with some units of the National Park System already saying they’ll be closed into late June, and others saying they might try staggered openings before summer officially arrives.

Seasonal workforces, thousands of individuals strong, normally are getting their positions for the summer season finalized now. But bringing workers in from not just across the country but possibly from throughout the world and housing them in dormitory settings is a potentially deadly proposition.

“… we cannot predict the exact burden of disease that our workforce and parks will see as the COVID-19 pandemic runs its course, but we can say with absolute certainty that leaving our parks open to the public when social distancing is not being practiced, onboarding employees originating from throughout the country and world, and permitting significant shared housing environments will result in a significantly greater burden of disease and death than if we had taken the proactive measure to continue to close these parks and/or limit operations,” one NPS manager said.

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Josh Berman, a Spanish teacher from Boulder, Colo., had been looking forward to his rafting trip with his 12-year-old for more than a year. As a father of three daughters, he annually alternates taking each one on an outdoor adventure. This year’s 45-mile rafting trip on the Green River from Colorado to Utah was easily the most off-the-grid excursion yet, and he and his daughter could barely contain their excitement.

But when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Berman immediately pulled out of the trip. He knew they would be traveling through tiny communities scattered around Colorado’s Dinosaur National Monument, and he didn’t want to take the chance of bringing harm to them.

“I look at it this way: Instead of thinking about whether or not you’ll get infected, consider whether or not you’ll infect someone else,” he says of his decision. “When you flip it like that, it’s an easy choice.”

As the coronavirus rips across the country like wildfire, it’s easy to be lured by Mother Nature’s charms. And, why not — health experts and government officials have endorsed hiking’s healing power during these trying times.

But as with all things during the age of covid-19, nothing is as it seems. In this case, walking into the wild can be irresponsible — and not the safety net we need it to be.

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There aren’t many places people can go these days to escape completely from the ubiquitous influence of social media, smartphones, Big Tech and telecom companies. The blank spots on the coverage maps are constantly shrinking, though not equally, and not everywhere. In many cases, the expansion of broadband coverage is necessary; telecom providers too often underserve rural areas, tribal nations and Black and Latino communities, for instance. Their exclusion from reliable coverage has a negative impact on everything from local economies to public health.

The United States is struggling to remedy these inequities. At the same time, there are also spaces — national parks, wilderness areas and other public lands — that some believe should remain refuges from the digital world. Such places provide a final opportunity to preserve small pockets of smartphone-free open space in the United States — landscapes where you can still escape the electronic handcuffs. But they are beginning to disappear.

The telecom giants — AT&T, Verizon and more — are pushing to build out infrastructure on protected public lands across the country. These corporations hope to extend their reach into some of the most iconic and remote corners of the United States. And they have found a close collaborator in the federal government, which is working alongside industry operatives to open many national parks and other public lands to commercial wireless service. With a sprawling network of cell towers soon to be installed within its boundaries, Grand Teton National Park is a testing ground.

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