John Muir was one of the earliest advocates of the national park idea, and its most eloquent spokesman. Born in Dunbar, Scotland, he moved with his family to a Wisconsin farm in 1849. Muir's father, an itinerant Presbyterian minister, treated him harshly and insisted that he memorize the Bible. By age 11, he was able to recite three-quarters of the Old Testament by heart, and all of the New Testament.
Muir studied botany and geology at the University of Wisconsin and had a natural flair for inventions. In 1867, after recovering from a factory accident that left him temporarily blinded for several months, he cut short a promising career in industry to walk from Indiana to Florida, creating botanical sketches on his way. From there he sailed to California and then walked from San Francisco to the Sierra Nevada – the "Range of Light" that would transform his life with his "unconditional surrender" to nature.
After working as a sheepherder in the high country for a season, Muir took a job in the Yosemite Valley in 1869, building a sawmill for James Mason Hutchings. In his free time, he roamed Yosemite, where he developed a scientific theory that the valley had been carved by glaciers. Muir felt a spiritual connection to nature; he believed that mankind is just one part of an interconnected natural world, not its master, and that God is revealed through nature.
. . . he traveled to Alaska's Glacier Bay and Washington's Mount Rainier. His writings brought national attention to two more places that would eventually become national parks.
Muir would also champion protection of the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. He was the public voice for setting aside the high country around Yosemite Valley as a national park in 1890, as well as for General Grant and Sequoia national parks.
. . . Muir was a founder and the first president of the Sierra Club; Muir Woods National Monument, a grove of redwoods north of San Francisco, is named in his honor.
It was not the holiday weekend Mayflower resident Ryan Senia envisioned.
"Basically if it doesn't fit in our car we don't have it right now," said Senia.
His once ideal home on South Starlite Road sits vacant as oil fumes permeate the air. His neighbor Joe Bradley said, "Well we could see oil running down the road like a river."
It's all because of a ruptured oil pipeline owned by Exxon Mobile.
"Supposed to be a 20 inch pipeline that runs from Illinois to Texas."
Bradley knew nothing of the pipeline.
"I had no idea and I'm the 4th or 5th house from it," Bradley says.
On Saturday, county, city and state officials, along with Exxon Mobile, met with residents.
"This could have been much worse," said Faulkner County Judge Allen Dodson. Dodson says close to 20 agencies responded within 90 minutes -- stopping the leak. He maintains they did so before any oil reached Lake Conway - a source of drinking water. Exxon and the EPA say they're monitoring air quality - but warn residents with asthma or other breathing disorders to see a doctor. And Resident Darren Hale says there are immediate concerns - like when can residents return home.
"The first one was two days and now I get here and find out two weeks, and finally after taking it to (a state representative), no one knows," said resident Darren Hale.
"We're just concerned about our property values and what Exxon is going to do for us,"
A train carrying crude oil from Canada into the United States derailed in Minnesota, spilling thousands of gallons of oil.
Fourteen tanker cars of a 94-car Canadian Pacific Railroad train went off the tracks near Parkers Prairie yesterday (March 27), according to the Associated Press. Three tanker cars were leaking, and one reportedly spilled most or all of its 26,000-gallon (98,000 liter) load of oil.
Cold weather may have helped minimize the damage from the oil spill, according to Dan Olson, a spokesman for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
A mile-long train hauling oil from Canada derailed, spilling 30,000 gallons of crude in western Minnesota on Wednesday, as debate rages over the environmental risks of transporting tar sands across the border.
The major spill, the first since the start of a boom in North American crude-by-rail transport three years ago, came when 14 cars on a 94-car Canadian Pacific train left the tracks about 150 miles northwest of Minneapolis near the town of Parkers Prairie, the Otter Tail Sheriff's Department said.
Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd, the country's second-largest railroad, said only one 26,000-gallon tank car had ruptured, adding it was a mixed freight train.
CP spokesman Ed Greenberg said he did not know if the crude was from Canada's tar sands or from conventional oil fields.
Kathy Robertson of the Air Pollution Control Bureau said, "We started getting calls about 10 o'clock this morning. By 12 or 12:30 when people were getting out for lunch, our phones were ringing off the hooks."
She said at first it was thought to be a woods fire, "but we didn't smell smoke and the haze was a different color."
Ms. Robertson said she eventually found reports of the dust storm that hit the Midwest and knew that it had arrived here.
It started as a beautiful clear day, but around mid-morning it began to get difficult to see Lookout Mountain or Missionary Ridge from downtown.
Ms. Robertson said it was the same situation in places like Fort Payne, Dalton and Cleveland. "I got a call saying it was even worse in Knoxville."
However, she said local air quality readings remained good. She said the dust should not be a health factor except for those who are sensitive to dust.
Who can forget the profound desperation in Tom Joad’s heart as he and his family leave Oklahoma’s drought-stricken farms in John Steinbeck’s classic "The Grapes of Wrath?"
That dusty image — of flattened fields and beaten-down farmers — can be seen today in most counties in my state and others due to the persistent, unprecedented drought now suffocating America’s breadbasket.
The facts are stark.
In Illinois, we’ve experienced the sixth-driest growing season on record. Of 102 counties, 100 are disaster areas. The latest corn conditions show 74 percent of this year’s crop is “poor” or “very poor”, so the cost of corn products ranging from ethanol to tortillas will soar. Barren grazing pastures are forcing livestock farmers to purchase hay at inflated prices. The drought also affects fisheries, wildlife, water levels in navigable waterways and the entire food chain.
"It has not been properly recognised yet that we are dealing with a food system here. There is a whole chain that is also going to be affected by climate change," Professor Dr John Porter of the University of Copenhagen said.
"It is more than just the fact that there are droughts in the United States that will reduce yields," he said. Like the other experts, he said was giving personal opinions, not those of the U.N. panel.
After harvest, floods could wash away roads or bridges, for instance, between fields and factories processing the crop. Or warehouses storing food could be damaged by more powerful storms. Such factors were likely to hit poor nations hardest.
"There are reasons to expect more frequent (price) spikes, given that it will be more common to see conditions that are considered extreme," said David Lobell, an assistant professor at Stanford University in California.
Not only are more wildfires flaring up in the West this year than last, but the nation's fires have gotten bigger, said Jennifer Smith, of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. As of Thursday, more than 43,000 wildfires had been reported in the U.S. this season, burning a total of nearly 6.4 million acres, or 10,000 square miles, the center said. The 10-year average for the period is 52,535 fires, but covering only 5 million acres, Smith said.
Using instruments on earlier satellites, scientists could see that the area covered by summer sea ice in the Arctic has been dwindling rapidly. But the new measurements indicate that this ice has been thinning dramatically at the same time. For example, in regions north of Canada and Greenland, where ice thickness regularly stayed at around five to six metres in summer a decade ago, levels have dropped to one to three metres. "Preliminary analysis of our data indicates that the rate of loss of sea ice volume in summer in the Arctic may be far larger than we had previously suspected," said Dr Seymour Laxon, of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London (UCL), where CryoSat-2 data is being analysed.
"Very soon we may experience the iconic moment when, one day in the summer, we look at satellite images and see no sea ice coverage in the Arctic, just open water." The consequences of losing the Arctic's ice coverage, even for only part of the year, could be profound. Without the cap's white brilliance to reflect sunlight back into space, the region will heat up even more than at present. As a result, ocean temperatures will rise and methane deposits on the ocean floor could melt, evaporate and bubble into the atmosphere. Scientists have recently reported evidence that methane plumes are now appearing in many areas. Methane is a particularly powerful greenhouse gas and rising levels of it in the atmosphere are only likely to accelerate global warming.
The National Bison Legacy Act introduced in the Senate is backed by lawmakers from Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota and Rhode Island.
The largely symbolic measure would provide no added protections for the estimated 20,000 wild bison in North America. And the bald eagle would still hold a somewhat loftier role as the national emblem, as declared by the Second Continental Congress in 1782.
John Calvelli with the Wildlife Conservation Society, one of the "vote bison" campaign sponsors, said the effort is meant to transcend political concerns and instead mark the animal's place in American cultural history.
"This isn't about getting into the middle of these issues of bison and property rights," he said. "No matter what political stripe you come from, we can all agree on the important role that bison have played."
Other sponsors of the campaign are the Intertribal Buffalo Council, which includes 57 tribes, and the National Bison Association.
Torrance Coste of the Wilderness Committee said consistent budget cuts over the last decade mean park rangers rarely monitor remote sites such as the Carmanah-Walbran Provincial Park, from where the cedar was chopped.
"Whoever's doing this knows that no one's going to have eyes on this park for months at a time so it's exceptionally easy to do what they've done," Coste said Thursday.
Don Closson, who supervises the Cowichan area for B.C. Parks, said Parks officials at the site a year ago noticed that about 80 per cent of the tree had been cut through and that a professional faller was hired to bring it down because it posed a safety hazard.
"On our return this year we noticed that somebody had gone in and cut up a large portion of the butt and dragged portions of it into the parking lot," he said.
Blocks of red cedar are valuable as a roofing product, Closson said, adding officials have little information in the case. "We have no eyewitnesses or licence plates at this time."
This month, researchers from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) in Syracuse, N.Y., are planning to plant 10 chestnut trees with a tweaked gene that they believe will help the trees stave off the pathogen that brought their ruin.Awesome news, and we hope these trees will be around for the next 100 years!
William Powell, a plant biotechnology expert at ESF, and his colleague Charles Maynard, have incorporated a gene into the test trees that they derived from a breed of wheat. The gene has been shown to increase resistance in hybrid poplar trees to fungal pathogens.
. . . The hybrid chestnut trees are slated to be planted at a test site in the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx on April 18. The location is significant. "That's a stone's throw — literally across the street — from where the blight was discovered in 1904," Maynard said in a statement.
