wilderness
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How offshore drilling will affect the Alaskan wilderness
First let me set the scene. Alaska’s Arctic Ocean is vast, even as oceans go. During the summer months, Arctic waters lap up against pebble-lined shores for miles along endless miles. In the winter, that water stops lapping because it turns into ice that is so beautiful and important to the Inupiat Eskimo people, who […]
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Earth Out of Sync – Rising Temperatures Throwing off Seasonal Timing
This piece was written by my colleague Janet Larsen at the Earth Policy Institute. A newly hatched chick waits with hungry mouth agape for a parent to deliver its first meal. A crocus peaks up through the snow. Rivers flow swiftly as ice breaks up and snows melt. Sleepy mammals emerge from hibernation, and early […]
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Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise
The following is a Plan B Update by my colleague Janet Larsen, the Director of Research for the Earth Policy Institute, about the connection between the increase of wildfires and rising temperature. Future firefighters have their work cut out for them. Perhaps nowhere does this hit home harder than in Australia, where in early 2009, […]
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Meet your new national parks chief
New Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis: Friendly.Photo: National Park ServiceOne weekend this summer, my wife and I ferried across Puget Sound to Olympic National Park, chose a hiking route with the help of an awesomely smart and patient ranger, and set forth from the highest trailhead in the park. We crossed alpine ridges, dropped into […]
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Does anyone still care about “the land”?
So earnest it hurts.The new climate anthem is out — you know, the remake of “Beds Are Burning” that features such hip, 21st-century acts as Duran Duran, Bob Geldof, and Youssou N’Dour — and I can’t get it out of my head. Actually, it left my head pretty much as soon as the 4:02 video […]
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Teddy Roosevelt and the search for new ‘wilderness warriors’
Theodore Roosevelt had his delicate spots—he was an asthmatic child and later a naturalist who reveled in birdwatching. But 100 years after his presidency, the image of him that endures is decidedly more swaggering—an outdoorsman who loved to hunt, a mountaineer, a populist who thundered against corporate “despoilers” of the public welfare. He also left […]
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Audio slideshow: Facing climate change — and wildfire
Photographer/writer duo Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele have traveled to the Arctic and back to record the impacts of climate change. And while they realize we are facing a global problem, they’ve found that every community has a local story. Through their multimedia project “Facing Climate Change,” they aim to tell those stories […]
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Terrorism laws are wrongly being used to round up eco-activists, says author Dean Kuipers
Rod Coronado.“Rod Coronado is not a terrorist,” says Dean Kuipers, author of Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save American Wilderness and a longtime writer about the world of eco-activism. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, during Rodney Coronado’s radical sabotage campaigns on behalf of animals and the environment, terrorism was generally considered to […]
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MacArthur Foundation to fund climate change adaptation network
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is providing $2 million to help ecosystems and human communities adapt to the effects of climate change, it announced last week. The gift is part of a pledge the foundation made last October to invest $50 million toward preserving biodiversity in the face of changing climates. Biodiversity […]