Good
Rick Smith
Courthouse News Service
Monday, July 15, 2019
Environmental Groups Sue to Stop Fracking Near Petrified Forest National Park
By BRAD POOLE
(CN) – Three environmental groups sued the Bureau of Land Management Monday to prevent fracking for natural gas and oil in more than 4,000 acres of public land near a national forest in Arizona and the state’s most important aquifer.
When the bureau issued the drilling leases last year near the Petrified Forest National Park, it used decades-old environmental impact data, according to the Center for Biological Diversity and other plaintiffs who filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for Arizona. The plaintiffs claim the agency failed to consider new drilling technologies or environmental science, including predicted effects of climate change.
“It’s reckless and illegal to sell fracking rights on public land without any environmental review,” Taylor McKinnon, senior public lands campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “This lawsuit will force the government to follow its own laws to protect northern Arizona’s water, wildlife and public lands.”
The Coconino Aquifer Leases also encompass land near the Navajo Nation, rural towns and the Little Colorado River.
The plaintiffs, including the Sierra Club and WildEarth Guardians claim the oil and gas leases are a thin veil for the extraction of helium, which has become an important resource as the world faces a shortage of the element and prices rise.
Regulations require lease applicants to agree “not to develop oil and gas wells ‘with the principal purpose of recovering the helium component of natural gas’ without express permission from the Secretary of the Interior,” according to the 38-page complaint.
Helium can be extracted as a byproduct of natural gas drilling, according to the plaintiffs.
Two of the leases went to a Canadian mining company, Desert Mountain Energy, which declared the area potentially “one of the world’s leading sources of helium,” the complaint states.
The BLM did not assess the current potential impact at all, but relied on a 1988 impact study and concluded that there were no new environmental concerns that would require the consideration of alternatives, according to the suit.
“Instead, the agency relied on a thirty-year-old environmental analysis that did not anticipate oil and gas development, and did not take a hard look at such impacts or the significant new information that has arisen about the local environment, wildlife, new oil and gas technologies, and climate change,” plaintiffs said in the suit.
Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter decried the plan to inject acid and water under high pressure to force out oil, gas and helium in the environmentally-sensitive region.
“We need to know the impacts of this proposed acid fracking on the water resources and demand that everything possible is done to protect the aquifer and the Little Colorado,” she said in the plaintiffs’ joint statement. “Unfortunately, the Trump administration is putting them at risk without even evaluating the impacts.”
More than 80,000 people submitted letters in opposition of the leases, according to the plaintiffs.
“In the absence of any environmental analysis, our community and environment are exposed to unquantified risks,” said Erik Test, a founder of the non-profit No Fracking AZ. “Our health, safety, and future demand that we make informed decisions while we still can,”
The plaintiffs are asking the court to vacate the leases because they allegedly violate the National Environmental Policy Act and the Federal Land and Policy Management Act.
The BLM regional office in Phoenix did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
Rick Smith
5264 N. Fort Yuma Trail
Tucson, AZ 85750
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Rick Smith
E&E Daily (Washington, DC)
Monday, July 22, 2019
INTERIOR
Lawmakers to examine political meddling with science
Michael Doyle, E&E News reporter
A House panel this week will put Interior Department science under the microscope.
Pointedly titled "When Science Gets Trumped: Scientific Integrity at the Department of the Interior," the House Natural Resources Committee hearing Thursday will examine alleged political interference with the work of agency scientists.
It's a topic that's worried congressional Democrats, environmental advocacy groups and some scientists since the start of the Trump administration.
"We have little trust in the department's current leadership to faithfully adhere to principles of scientific integrity," Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and three other committee Democrats wrote Interior last October.
The four House members further said that Trump administration officials "have repeatedly tried to manipulate" science to advance energy or other policy agendas. At the time, the Democrats were in the minority and could do little about their complaints.
One of the four — Rep. Niki Tsongas of Massachusetts — has since retired, but with Democrats now controlling the House, Grijalva has become chairman of the resources panel with the power to convene oversight hearings.
A 2018 survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Iowa State University's Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology found that 50% of scientists questioned on average across 16 agencies agreed that "consideration of political interests" hindered science-based decisions.
In particular, 47% of respondents at the National Park Service said they had been asked to omit "climate change" from their work, while more than 30% at the U.S. Geological Survey said they avoided using "climate change" without explicit orders to avoid problems.
Interior's then-spokesperson, Faith Vander Voort, said at the time that "scientific integrity remains intact at the Department of Interior" and that "any assumption otherwise is categorically false."
Some scientific integrity allegations have led to formal complaints, including a 2018 claim that National Park Service officials sought to remove references to human-caused climate change in a report on sea-level rise and storm surge projections at NPS properties.
"Shortly after we opened our investigation, the NPS published the report with all original references to human-caused climate change," Interior's Office of Inspector General later reported. "Because the report was published without edits, we closed our investigation."
Maria Caffrey, who wrote the NPS report as a contractor, is scheduled to testify Thursday.
Last February, now-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt named as his science adviser William Werkheiser.
Werkheiser was previously USGS's deputy director and, earlier, associate director for water. He began his 30-year federal career "as a scientist investigating issues ranging from the impacts of development on water supplies, the movement and fate of pollutants, and the effects of rising sea level on coastal aquifers," according to USGS.
Schedule: The hearing is Thursday, July 25, at 2 p.m. in 1324 Longworth.
Witnesses:
- Maria Caffrey, former contractor, National Park Service.
- Joel Clement, senior fellow, Arctic Initiative, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University.
- Andrew Rosenberg, director, Center for Science and Democracy, Union of Concerned Scientists.
A House panel this week will put Interior Department science under the microscope.
Rick Smith
NEWS RELEASE
Cape Hatteras National Seashore
July 23, 2019
Contact: Mike Barber, 252-475-9032
Case Closed
North Carolina man pleads guilty to vandalizing Cape Hatteras Lighthouse door
On July 8, 2019, Jamie Lester Underwood, 39, of Winston-Salem, North Carolina appeared in federal court before Chief United States District Judge Terrence W. Boyle in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. At his appearance in court, Jamie Underwood pleaded guilty to vandalizing the original bronze door of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and was ordered to pay $1,922 in restitution for repairs and was placed on one year of probation.
Cape Hatteras National Seashore asked for help solving this crime through a Facebook post on June 13, 2018. Shortly after the Facebook post was published, a tip was received that helped National Park Service Rangers focus their efforts on Jamie Underwood. During his visit to Cape Hatteras National Seashore last year, Underwood used a pocket knife to etch the letters “SEF” into the lighthouse’s original bronze door.
Closeup view of the letters etched on the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse door.
Earlier this year, a conservator treated the affected area of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse door. The original bronze door was in-painted with heavy body acrylic paint until a more permanent fix could be made. The conservator will return next month to complete the door treatment.
Conservator Curtis Sullivan applying heavy body acrylic paint to the original bronze door.
The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, completed in 1870, is a National Historic Landmark.
Rick Smith
KOMO (Seattle, WA) radio
Tuesday, July 23rd 2019
Latino Outdoors connects kids with nature while working on Mount Rainier
by Alex Halverson, SeattlePI
SUNRISE, MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK — As Mount Rainier soaks up the sun of a cloudless day, snow melts and trickles into the meadows and a volunteer crew of 11 is just thankful the previous day's rain is a thing of the past.
But the mountain's cold air is still present, so the crew and three trail maintenance workers from the National Park Service are bundled up as they step onto the mountain.
Until just a day prior, some of the volunteers had never been on a mountain. Then they were clad in hiking boots and weather gear, ready to maintain trails for hikers who may never stop to think about who keeps the trails accessible.
And that's the mission statement of Latino Outdoors, an organization started in California.
It's now international, dependent on volunteers who love the outdoors and love mentoring future generations. Members in their communities can grow up outside, being led by people who look like them.
In addition to programs that involve work, Latino Outdoors also provides recreation programs. About 75% of its programs are day hikes, something that regularly includes people who have no experience with outdoor recreation.
"It's a program that's advocating to be outdoors, and we do that with representation," Latino Outdoors Crew Leader Sully Moreno said. "We're a group that's open to any race, language or ethnicity, but there will always be Latina leaders."
It also acknowledges that accessibility is an important part of experiencing the outdoors. So no matter what the socioeconomic level of the participants, the organization uses its resources to give people access to the outdoors, with guidance along the way.
"Even some of the parents of the kids we've worked with tell us getting to these places is difficult for them, being outdoors can be vulnerable," Moreno said. "So we rented a 12-passenger van and took our whole group up to the mountains."
The group -- eight girls aged 14-18 and two assistant crew leaders, Iris Zacarias and Jen Rojas who flank Moreno -- were part of a Latino Conservation Week camp hosted by Latino Outdoors and the Washington Trails Association (WTA). The camp consisted of days spent in the outdoors, camping, learning about the park from rangers and helping with trail maintenance.
To get up to the mountain, the girls load up into the van; until that week, none of them had known each other, besides a pair of sisters.
"I overheard them last night trading phone numbers and becoming friends," Rojas says outside of the warmth of the van, where the rest of the group is huddled up to escape the 8 a.m. cold. "I love that they're all enjoying it."
The friendships made while outdoors is exactly why the group is out there, Moreno said.
Latino Outdoors with WTA presented the Latino Conservation Week camp, a continuation of a partnership that goes back several years. An ambassador from Latino Outdoors took WTA's leadership training back in 2016 and helped forge the connection.
The partnership has gone both ways, with Latino Outdoors helping maintain connections between land managers and WTA, and WTA helping outfit groups from the organization using their extensive gear library.
Other groups from Latino Outdoors have done similar trail work as well.
At the entrance to the trailhead, the crew and three trail maintenance workers stand in a circle, doing their morning stretches while answering the question of the day: If you could be one animal, what would you be?
"It's just a fun thing we do while doing our stretches," Moreno said. "Each person leads a stretch while answering the question."
As limbs are folded over each other and stretched out, the names of several animals fly out.
"I'd be a dolphin," one girl says. Trail maintenance worker Matthew Moore pipes in with a comment on the intelligence of dolphins -- even referencing the animal's supposed supernatural abilities like telepathy which draws a chorus of giggles from the rest of the circle.
After kinks in the muscles from working the previous day and sleeping in tents are worked out, each member of the volunteer crew grabs a bucket of dirt or a quartered log and hikes up the beginning of the Wonderland Trail.
The crew splits into three groups, two of them building check steps on a trail that's suffering from erosion. The volunteers grab tools from a hidden cache in a nearby cluster of trees, dig trenches, place the quartered logs in, then fill in the gaps ensuring it's stable.
"Check the stability," Moore says to the girls. Xiomara Choto-Mueller claps back and tells Moore to check his own. Choto-Mueller's step doesn't budge, while Moore's wobbles a bit with a step on the outside.
Choto-Mueller, a soon-to-be senior from Issaquah, said she'd been hiking around the North Bend area, but had never done anything like this. She also said the trip was better than she thought it would be, a feeling echoed by most of the group.
"I think they feel pretty accomplished after working like this," Moreno said. "Especially building steps, that's something you can see right away."
Kenya Sanchez-Orozco, the only member of the group not from King County, said she didn't quite know what to expect -- her mom had told her she'd be camping and backpacking. Her mom had learned about the trip from her cousin, a member of Latino Outdoors.
When asked if she knew she'd be working during the trip, she smiled and said, "not really, but it's still been great. I wasn't expecting any of this. It's kind of nice to be out here, just off your phone and away from everything."
She was part of a group shoveling snow. A giant block had refused to melt at the start of summer, so instead of shoveling the snow out of the way, the volunteers were cutting steps into it; work not unnoticed by day hikers passing by, thanking the crew for their efforts.
"I'm from Oakland," Sanchez-Orozco said. "So I've never really done this. But I want to come back, I'm kind of sad I have to leave tonight."
The need for representation to introduce people to the outdoors drives the work, and it doesn't end with Latino Outdoors.
Moreno said her and other members of WTA are working to create more "identity trips," including some with Outdoor Asian and an LGBTQ+ group that's made similar trips.
"I see a lot of people on the trails and they look a lot like me," said Kevin Watson, a trail maintenance worker for the National Parks Service. "They're white, and a lot of the times they're older. I'd love to see these trails used by lots of different people."
As for the troop leaders Zacarias, Rojas and Moreno, they hope to inspire a love for the outdoors in those who haven't grown up with it. Through the WTA's gear library, they were able to supply seven girls from around King County -- and one from Oakland -- with hiking and camping gear.
And if you ask most of the girls when the troop leaders were away, the trip turned out a lot more fun than they envisioned it.
Rick Smith
Seattle Times
Thursday, July 25, 2019 2:45 p.m.
Feds look again at reintroducing grizzly bears to North Cascades
Seattle Times environment reporter
The on-again, off-again effort to return grizzly bears to North Cascades National Park is back on.
Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke surprised wildlife advocates last year when he announced he was a fan of the bear and supported reintroduction to the North Cascades. However, he stopped work on the plan last August, with no plan for how it would be resumed.
That changed Thursday when the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the public-comment period has been reopened. A 90-day extension of the comment period on the draft grizzly bear recovery plan and environmental impact statement begins Friday and closes Oct. 24.
Biologists estimate that fewer than 10 grizzly bears remain in the North Cascades, the most at-risk bear population in North America. The last verified grizzly sighting in Washington’s Cascades was in 2011, with more recent sightings in the British Columbia portion of the ecosystem.
The main threat to grizzly bears in the North Cascades is this small population size and isolation from other grizzly populations in central British Columbia and the Rocky Mountains. Successful restoration of North Cascades grizzly bears would restore a key predator to its home, where it has not roamed since the turn of the 19th century, and bring a healthier ecological balance to the area.
“We are pleased to see recovery efforts for grizzly bears in the North Cascades get back on track,” said Robb Krehbiel, Northwest representative for Defenders of Wildlife, a national conservation nonprofit.
“The science is clear on the ecological benefits of grizzly bears,” Krehbiel said. “Defenders of Wildlife has been proactively working with partners in the region to prevent human-bear conflicts. We know that Washington communities can thrive alongside these bruins. It’s time to bring back the bears.”
Zinke, who resigned in December, had committed to finalizing a plan to return grizzlies to the North Cascades Ecosystem before the end of last summer. He had restarted the North Cascade Grizzly Bear Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process to analyze options to recover this state’s population of bears, allowing agencies to review the more than 126,000 public comments received in 2017.
The North Cascades Grizzly Bear Recovery Zone is anchored by North Cascades National Park. The area includes nearly 10,000 square miles of wild country. The North Cascades were singled out for grizzly bear reintroduction by federal scientists in 1997 after they determined the area had sufficient quality habitat to support a self-sustaining population of grizzly bears — as it did for thousands of years.
Beyond the predator’s historic place in the food chain, grizzly bears contribute to the North Cascades ecosystem by spreading seeds and turning soil while they dig for roots.
The grizzly recovery study was announced in 2014 during the Obama administration as a three-year process. In mid-2017, Interior officials, without clear explanation, halted progress on the recovery efforts. Now the process has kicked back into gear.
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and other ranching groups opposed the reintroduction effort and reacted with just as much surprise to the administration’s announcement last year.
To comment on the proposal, go to https://parkplanning.nps.gov/grizzlydeis. Or, mail or hand-deliver comments to: Superintendent’s Office, North Cascades National Park Service Complex, 810 Highway 20, Sedro-Woolley, WA 98284.
Rick Smith
Long Island Advance (Patchogue, NY)
Thursday, August 1, 2019
Latino Conservation Week
Story By: NICOLE FUENTES
More than 100 people gathered at Fire Island National Seashore for the park’s Latino Conservation Week Celebration Day on July 20. Open to everyone, the National Park Service at Fire Island National Seashore and the Friends of Fire Island teamed up for this day of play on the beach to celebrate the area’s Latino communities and invite them to explore the park.
Families were treated to free ferry rides from Patchogue to Watch Hill, where they were greeted by rangers and volunteers to lead them in a day of hikes, demonstrations, and arts and crafts. “The first time someone experiences a national park can inspire them to keep coming back for more, especially when they realize these special places are in their own neighborhood,” said Fire Island National Seashore superintendent Alex Romero.
The NPS and Friends of Fire Island began the tradition three years ago of hosting multicultural days to encourage the many diverse groups of Long Island and the greater New York City area to experience the park. More than 30 percent of the residents of Patchogue are Latinos, yet many have never visited Fire Island. The Friends group continues to work with local communities on ways to build connections with the many diverse neighborhoods in the area, including an upcoming library pass program for free ferry rides to the island.
Rick Smith
Reuters News Service
Wednesday, July 31, 2019 / 11:35 PM
Alaska natives accuse White House of hiding Arctic oil impact information
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Alaska Natives and environmental groups sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, accusing it of concealing information about the effects of oil development in the long-protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, alleges the U.S. Department of the Interior broke federal law by failing to produce information about how it drew up plans for oil leasing in the refuge. Numerous requests filed under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act have been stonewalled for months, the plaintiffs allege.
“This case is about bringing transparency to what has been a rushed and secretive process to sell out a national treasure to the oil industry,” Patrick Lavin, Alaska policy adviser for Defenders of Wildlife, one of four plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement.
The refuge, in northwestern Alaska, had been off-limits to oil development for decades. But a 2017 tax overhaul signed into law by President Donald Trump included a provision requiring lease sales in the refuge’s 1.5 million acre coastal plain, a region long coveted by the oil industry for its hydrocarbon potential but prized by natives and environmentalists for its wildlife value.
The groups are seeking information about the effect on the Porcupine caribou herd, which roams between Alaska and Canada and uses the area targeted for oil development; the effect of 3-D seismic surveys desired by the Bureau of Land Management, and information about development work that Interior officials were doing during the federal government shutdown early this year.
“We need to know what agencies are doing and reviewing when deciding what happens to sacred lands and our way of life,” said Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, in a statement. The committee represents Gwich’in Athabascans, First Nations people who live largely above the Arctic Circle in Alaska and Canada.
Trump officials have vowed to hold an ANWR lease sale by the end of this year. Alaskan officials such as current Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy support drilling in the refuge, as state oil production has fallen since peaking at more than 2 million barrels a day in 1988.
Output is currently about 474,000 bpd, according to U.S. Energy Department figures.
“The department cannot comment on ongoing litigation,” Molly Block, Interior’s press secretary, said in an email, when asked about the lawsuit.
The case is Gwich’in Steering Committee et al v. U.S. Dept of the Interior et al, U.S. District Court for Alaska, No. 19-208.
Rick Smith
Register-Herald (Beckley, WV)
Friday, August 2, 2019
Active SWV receives funding to expand outreach
By Wendy Holdren The Register-Herald
The National Park Service (NPS) and the Outdoor Foundation have awarded $18,500 to Active Southern West Virginia (Active SWV) to support their work to engage youth and kinship families in partnership with New River Gorge National River.
The funding is part of the 2019 Challenge Cost Share Program, which funds projects that support NPS mission-related projects that also align with the goals of local partners.
The partners selected 20 projects from 97 applications, and will award more than $360,000 that will be matched by an estimated $940,000 in direct and in-kind contributions from recipients, the release said. A wide range of selected projects will improve access and opportunities for outdoor recreation, environmental stewardship, and education.
“These funds and this partnership will allow us to reach more youth and the growing population of grand-families in our region," said Melanie Seiler, executive director Active SWV. "Physical activity, social supports, and connection to parks can improve the quality of life in southern West Virginia. We welcome all those interested to join us in the Get Active in the Park program through August 2020.”
These funds and partnership will help Active SWV reach 20 percent more youth in free programs such as paddle boarding, bicycling, and rock climbing, the release said. Funds will be available for area elementary schools to start hiking clubs. Free programs will be advertised and made available to kinship households. Funds will also support youth specific signature events.
"We are excited to continue to grow our very successful partnership with Active Southern West Virginia," said Julena Campbell, Chief of Interpretation and Education. "The Get Active in the Park activities are some of the most popular park programs we offer for both locals and the visiting public. Expanding the program by targeting grandfamilies is a great example of the multi-generational audiences we are trying to bring into national parks all across the country. We love introducing children and their families to all the wonderful ways they can have fun in and connect with the parks."
The Challenge Cost Share Program supports National Park Service parks, National Trails and Wild and Scenic Rivers aligned with partners improving recreation opportunities, creating access and infrastructure, protecting and restoring trails or rivers/riverside lands, stewardship through public engagement, and increasing public use and awareness.
The initiative requires a 1:1 match by the local recipient, resulting in greater financial leverage and impact.
“The Outdoor Foundation is thrilled to continue to partner with the National Park Service to reconnect Americans to their national parks and engage a new generation of outdoor enthusiasts and stewards,” said Lise Aangeenbrug, executive director of the Outdoor Foundation. “The Challenge Cost Share program continues to be a great program that leverages public and private funds and invests in local partnerships that deliver results.”
Rick Smith
New York Times, page A1
Monday, August 5, 2019
8chan, Megaphone for Gunmen, Has Gone Dark. ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says Its Creator.
By Kevin Roose
Fredrick Brennan was getting ready for church at his home in the Philippines when the news of a mass shooting in El Paso arrived. His response was immediate and instinctive.
“Whenever I hear about a mass shooting, I say, ‘All right, we have to research if there’s an 8chan connection,’” he said about the online message board he started in 2013.
It didn’t take him long to find one.
Moments before the El Paso shooting on Saturday, a four-page message whose author identified himself as the gunman appeared on 8chan. The person who posted the message encouraged his “brothers” on the site to spread the contents far and wide.
In recent months, 8chan has become a go-to resource for violent extremists. At least three mass shootings this year — including the mosque killings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the synagogue shooting in Poway, Calif. — have been announced in advance on the site, often accompanied by racist writings that seem engineered to go viral on the internet.
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Mr. Brennan started the online message board as a free speech utopia. But now, 8chan is known as something else: a megaphone for mass shooters, and a recruiting platform for violent white nationalists.
And it has become a focal point for those seeking to disrupt the pathways of online extremism. On Sunday, critics characterized the site as a breeding ground for violence, and lobbied the site’s service providers to get it taken down. One of those providers, Cloudflare, a service that protects websites against cyberattacks, said it would stop working with 8chan on Sunday night and the site went dark about 3 a.m. Eastern time. And Mr. Brennan, who stopped working with the site’s current owner last year, called for it to be taken offline before it leads to further violence.
“Shut the site down,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview. “It’s not doing the world any good. It’s a complete negative to everybody except the users that are there. And you know what? It’s a negative to them, too. They just don’t realize it.”
Mr. Brennan, who has claimed that he got the idea for 8chan while on psychedelic mushrooms, set out to create what he called a free speech alternative to 4chan, a better-known online message board. He was upset that 4chan had become too restrictive, and he envisioned a site where any legal speech would be welcome, no matter how toxic.
The site remained on the fringes until 2014, when some supporters of GamerGate — a loose reactionary collection of anti-feminist video gamers — flocked to 8chan after being kicked off 4chan.
Since GamerGate, 8chan has become a catchall website for internet-based communities whose behavior gets them evicted from more mainstream sites. It hosts one of the largest gatherings of supporters of QAnon, who claim that there is an international bureaucracy plotting against the Trump administration. And it has been an online home for “incels,” men who lament being “involuntarily celibate,” and other fringe movements.
“8chan is almost like a bulletin board where the worst offenders go to share their terrible ideas,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s become a sounding board where people share ideas, and where these kinds of ideologies are amplified and expanded on, and ultimately, people are radicalized as a result.”
8chan has been run out of the Philippines by Jim Watkins, a United States Army veteran, since 2015, when Mr. Brennan gave up control of the site.
The site remains nearly completely unmoderated, and its commitment to keeping up even the most violent speech has made it a venue for extremists to test out ideas, share violent literature and cheer on the perpetrators of mass killings. Users on 8chan frequently lionize mass gunmen using jokey internet vernacular, referring to their body counts as “high scores” and creating memes praising the killers.
Mr. Brennan, who has a condition known as brittle-bone disease and uses a wheelchair, has tried to distance himself from 8chan and its current owners. In a March interview with The Wall Street Journal, he expressed his regrets over his role in the site’s creation, and warned that the violent culture that had taken root on 8chan’s boards could lead to more mass shootings.
After the El Paso shooting, he seemed resigned to the fact that it had.
“Another 8chan shooting?” he tweeted on Saturday. “Am I ever going to be able to move on with my life?”
Mr. Watkins, who runs 8chan along with his son, Ronald, has remained defiant in the face of criticism, and has resisted calls to moderate or shut down the site. On Sunday, a banner at the top of 8chan’s home page read, “Welcome to 8chan, the Darkest Reaches of the Internet.”
“I’ve tried to understand so many times why he keeps it going, and I just don’t get it,” Mr. Brennan said. “After Christchurch, after the Tree of Life shooting, and now after this shooting, they think this is all really funny.”
Mr. Watkins did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Over the weekend, 8chan’s critics tried a different tack to get the site shut down, by pressuring the site’s service providers, including its web host, to cut off Mr. Watkins.
One of these providers, the security company Cloudflare, initially indicated on Sunday that it would not cut off 8chan’s access to its network. But later in the day, Cloudflare said it would ban the site after all, depriving Mr. Watkins of a critical tool for keeping the site online.
Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s chief executive, said the decision to shut off 8chan’s protections was made after determining that the site had allowed an environment of violent extremism to fester, and that 8chan ignored complaints about violent content in a way that larger platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have not.
“We’ve seen a pattern where this lawless community has demonstrated its ability to create real harm and real damage,” Mr. Prince said of 8chan. “If we see a bad thing in the world and we can help get in front of it, we have some obligation to do that.”
Another company, Tucows, which controls 8chan’s domain name registration, had no plans as of Sunday evening to disable the site’s web address.
“We have no immediate plans other than to keep discussing internally,” said Graeme Bunton, manager of public policy at Tucows.
In the early days of 8chan, Mr. Brennan defended the right of 8chan users to post anonymously, without censorship. And he dismissed incidents of harassment or violence by users of the site as the price of being an open forum.
“Anonymity should not be taken away from everyone just because of a few bad apples,” he told Ars Technica, the technology website, in a 2015 interview.
But more recently, Mr. Brennan, who has begun attending a Baptist church, has tried to persuade Mr. Watkins to shut down the site. He and Mr. Watkins live near each other in the Philippines, he said, and he often drives past Mr. Watkins’s house on his way to church.
Mr. Brennan said that other websites, like Facebook and Twitter, also play a role in spreading the kinds of violent messages that often originate on 8chan. But he said that those sites have been more proactive about removing dangerous content, making them less appealing venues for a would-be terrorist.
“Shutting it down, having these chan sites pushed underground, it wouldn’t totally stop these kinds of things from happening,” he said. “But it wouldn’t happen every few months.”
Mr. Brennan said he doubted that Mr. Watkins makes money from 8chan, since it is free to use and costly to maintain, and since its toxic content has made it radioactive to advertisers. (In a 2017 interview, Mr. Watkins said of running 8chan, “It doesn’t make money, but it’s a lot of fun.”) And Mr. Brennan is hopeful that sustained pressure on Mr. Watkins and his son will get them to change their minds eventually, and take down 8chan for good.
“How long are they just going to allow this to go on?” he asked.
Rick Smith
Washington Post
Tuesday, August 6, 2019 at 3:57 PM
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) appears at Fort Monroe in Hampton in front of the arch that until last week bore Jefferson Davis’s name. (Gregory S. Schneider/The Washington Post)
Jefferson Davis’s name is gone from memorial at site where first Africans arrived
HAMPTON, Va. — One of the most incongruous of all of Virginia’s Confederate war memorials has come down with the removal of Jefferson Davis’s name from an archway at the site where the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619.
It appears to be the first case of Virginia eliminating a Confederate memorial from state-controlled property since the 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville intensified public dialogue about the issue.
And the action was driven by Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who is working to overcome his own race-related scandal.
“It’s past due,” Gaylene Kanoyton, president of the Hampton branch of the NAACP, said Tuesday after a ceremony at the now-blank metal arch. “The first Africans arrived here at Fort Monroe, and it’s important we didn’t have Jefferson Davis up here. I mean, he was literally for slavery. So to have this taken down before the commemoration is monumental.”
This month, the commonwealth will host commemorative events at Fort Monroe to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans — just as it noted the anniversary of representative democracy at Jamestown last week.
The 50-foot ceremonial arch was erected at Fort Monroe by the U.S. Army in 1956 and paid for by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It proclaimed “Jefferson Davis Memorial Park” above the stone casemate where Davis was held prisoner by federal troops after the Civil War.
But the fort — completed in 1834 and not decommissioned until 2011 — occupies even more ancient ground: It was originally Point Comfort, fortified by English colonists in 1609 and used as an arrival point for ships headed up the James River to Jamestown.
In late August 1619, a ship called the White Lion put “20 and odd” African prisoners ashore here, ushering in the era of slavery in what became the United States, according to historic documents.
“To have a memorial glorifying the president of the Confederacy, a person who worked to maintain slavery, on the same site on which enslaved Africans both first arrived here and were later freed, is not just inappropriate. It is offensive,” Northam said Tuesday at the ceremony.
Northam has been under a cloud since February, when a racist photo from his 1984 medical school yearbook came to light. He first took responsibility for the photo, which showed one person in blackface and another in Ku Klux Klan garb, then disavowed it — but admitted to wearing blackface for a dance contest the same year.
Many Democrats have called on him to resign, but Northam vowed to stay in office and work for racial equity. In the months since, he has met with African American leaders and community members, sought funding for areas such as education and affordable housing and drawn attention to issues such as maternal mortality among black women.
“I think it’s a work in progress,” Kanoyton said of Northam, adding that she “applauded” him for leading the effort to remove the Davis memorial. “He’s listening. He’s acting on the requests.”
In his remarks, Northam said the original archway was part of an effort to paint a “revisionist” version of history. “Many Virginians, including me, still have much to learn and relearn about the true and painful history of our commonwealth,” he said.
Northam had written in April to the authority that oversees the site, asking that the archway be taken down. After review and public hearings, trustees decided to leave the decorative arch but remove the letters. They came off on Friday.
New signs near the archway tell how it was built at a time when Virginians were embarking on “massive resistance” to avoid the integration of public schools, as part of an effort to intimidate and to glorify an oppressive past.
“This monument was a way of making a statement about the ‘lost cause’ never being forgotten. In many ways it stopped our efforts to move forward as a nation,” said Rex Ellis, an associate director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture who also serves as a trustee for the Fort Monroe Authority.
Ellis said taking down the Davis memorial was “the first significant” removal of a Virginia Confederate memorial that he was aware of. Virginia has more Confederate monuments than any other state.
The arch at Fort Monroe was especially poignant, Ellis said, because of the importance of the site. Not only did the first Africans arrive here, but their enslaved descendants built the fort itself. And then, in the early days of the Civil War, three black men escaped slavery and came to the federal troops at Fort Monroe seeking sanctuary.
The commanding general refused to return the men — Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory and James Townsend — to the slave owners who came to get them. After that, thousands of African Americans made their way to Fort Monroe to escape bondage during the war.
“That makes this a significant space and site to discuss African American history in a way that few historic sites can,” Ellis said. Honoring Davis in that setting, he said, was “anathema to the history that should be taught here. I think it was a great, great service that [Northam] did” in taking it down.
Members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy had urged the authority to leave the memorial in place. A single protester was on hand to greet Northam on Tuesday, holding a sign that said “Save the monuments.” He called out “Governor Blackface” but was met with silence and slipped away during the officials’ remarks.
Hampton Mayor Donnie Tuck, who is African American, took pains to point out in an interview that the city had nothing to do with the decision to remove the letters from the arch.
“I have mixed feelings about it,” Tuck said. “Only because I represent a city that has 136,000 people, black and white citizens. There are some who feel that . . . there are movements afoot to remove all monuments to the Confederacy and trying to erase their history.”
But what’s important, he said, is to tell “the complete and accurate story” of history, and the monument itself did not do that.
“And, important for me personally,” he added, “had Jefferson Davis and like-minded citizens won the Civil War, then I very likely would not be the mayor of the city of Hampton.”
Rick Smith
NEWS RELEASE
Cape Hatteras National Seashore
August 12, 2019
Contact: Boone Vandzura, 252-475-8307
National Park Service Rangers catch East Lake resident in act of slashing vehicle tires at Cape Hatteras National Seashore
A 62-year-old male resident of East Lake, North Carolina, was caught in the act of slashing vehicle tires at Cape Hatteras National Seashore (Seashore) yesterday. He is scheduled to appear in federal court this afternoon in Elizabeth City.
Additional details:
- At approximately 3 p.m. on August 11, 2019, the suspect was arrested in the parking lot of Ramp 23, which is located south of the village of Salvo, North Carolina. His arrest occurred after National Park Service Rangers and Fish and Wildlife Officers observed him in the act of puncturing tires on a Jeep Cherokee.
- Since the beginning of 2019, at least 66 vehicle tires have been slashed at Seashore parking lots. Additional tires have been slashed north of the Seashore.
- The majority of the vehicles that were vandalized were sport utility vehicles.
- A variety of investigative techniques were used to catch the suspect.
- Dare County Sheriff's Office, Kill Devil Hills Police Department, Nags Head Police Department, Fish & Wildlife Service, Dare County Communication Center, and the National Park Service’s Investigative Services Branch assisted the Seashore with the case.
Slashed rear tire on a Jeep Wrangler.
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About the National Park Service
Since 1916, the National Park Service has been entrusted with the care of America's more than 400 national parks. With the help of volunteers and partners, we safeguard these special places and share their stories with millions of people every year.
Rick Smith
Next-Gen Transportation News
Monday, August 12, 2019
Acadia National Park Adds 21 Propane Autogas Buses
Posted by Betsy Lillian
Acadia National Park’s Island Explorer bus system is celebrating its 20th anniversary this summer with the integration of 21 new propane autogas buses into its fleet.
The Maine park’s Island Explorer is a fare-free transportation system linking hotels, campgrounds and inns with destinations in the park and area villages. Since 1999, the bus system has carried more than 7.7 million passengers and grown from a fleet size of eight buses to 31 buses in operation, plus six spare buses, four vans and two bicycle trailers.
“Acadia National Park continues to lead the way with its commitment to clean air and a better and healthier environment using propane-fueled buses. These propane buses enhance the park experience for everyone because they are cleaner, quieter and efficient,” says Tucker Perkins, president and CEO of the Propane Education & Research Council (PERC). “Propane is an important part of the emerging clean energy economy, and it is an important part of America’s clean energy mix. I want to commend Acadia National Park for its innovative leadership and good stewardship of its economic and environmental resources by increasing propane buses in the park.”
PERC helped Downeast Transportation – operator of the Island Explorer – connect to Hometown Manufacturing, a Wisconsin-based business that built the new buses, which were sold through the distributor, Alliance Bus. Funding for the new buses was supported by the National Park Service and the State of Maine, and the acquisition was managed by the Maine Department of Transportation in conjunction with Downeast Transportation.
“Since 1999, the Island Explorer has provided free and convenient transportation between attractions inside Acadia National Park and the surrounding communities,” says U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. “With 10 bus routes serviced by a fleet of clean, propane-powered buses, the Island Explorer has helped to alleviate traffic congestion and improve the park experience for everyone. The addition of 21 new buses to the fleet marks tremendous growth for the Island Explorer system, which will carry its eight millionth rider this summer.”
Rick Smith
Greenwire (Washington, DC)
Monday, August 19, 2019
| |
Timothy Cama, E&E News reporter |
Eight Democratic presidential candidates are set to take part in CNN's town hall event next month on climate change policy.
The network announced the lineup today: former Vice President Joe Biden; New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker; South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg; Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar; former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke; Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders; Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren; and entrepreneur Andrew Yang.
Those eight met the event's qualification standard: reaching at least 2% in at least four major polls approved by the Democratic National Committee since June 28. California Sen. Kamala Harris was also invited, but declined due to a scheduling conflict.
Each candidate will get a one-on-one questioning session with a CNN anchor in New York City. Since the event is not a sanctioned debate, the candidates cannot appear together onstage.
The moderators will be CNN's Erin Burnett, Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon. Correspondent Bill Weir will also participate. The network said the audience will consist of Democratic voters interested in climate.
The remaining 14 major Democratic presidential hopefuls are not eligible to attend, although CNN said candidates could qualify through Wednesday. Those not invited include Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who has made climate the No. 1 issue in his campaign, along with other candidates who have put forward comprehensive climate change plans, including New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer.
The town hall event will be the first major climate change-focused forum of the primary. Georgetown University will host a second one later in September, along with MSNBC.
Both events come after months of demands from progressive activists, Inslee and other candidates for the DNC to sanction an official debate dedicated to climate change. The party has so far rejected the requests, though party officials will consider a resolution for a debate this month.
Rick Smith
Herald and News (Klamath Falls, OR)
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Man pleads guilty in case involving death of Summer Lake wolf
MEDFORD — Colton Tony Dick, 22, of Oakridge, Oregon, pleaded guilty today to a single count of unlawfully taking an endangered species, according to a news release.
According to court documents, on Oct. 5, 2016, using a rifle and scope, Dick shot at an endangered gray wolf without legal justification as the animal was walking away from him in the Fremont-Winema National Forest. Dick was unable to locate the wolf.
Although Dick did not admit to killing a gray wolf, an investigation began on Oct. 6, 2016 when an adult female GPS-collared gray wolf known as “OR 28” was found dead in the Fremont-Winema National Forest near Summer Lake, Oregon. On Nov. 9, 2016, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensic Lab determined OR 28 died as a result of injuries sustained from a single gunshot wound.
Gray wolves (Canis lupus), located in Western Oregon, are listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.
Unlawfully taking an endangered species carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison, a $100,000 fine and one year of supervised release.
Under a deferred sentencing agreement with the government, Dick has agreed to submit to one-year of supervised release, pay restitution of $2,500 to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, not hunt any wildlife for a period of one year and perform 100 hours of community service.
If Dick complies with these conditions, he will be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea and the government will move to dismiss his charge.
This case was investigated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement and the Oregon State Police. It was prosecuted by Adam E. Delph, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon.
If you or someone you know has information about a wildlife crime, please contact the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement by emailing fws_...@fws.gov or calling 844-397-8477.
Rick Smith
United Press International
Tuesday, August 20, 2019 at 3:12 PM
U.S. national parks boost online messages to reduce risky behavior
By Jean Lotus
DENVER, Aug. 20 (UPI) -- To counteract risky visitor behavior possibly inspired by social media videos, photos and just plain bragging, the U.S. National Park System has released apps and videos to teach hundreds of millions of visitors to stay safe.
An average of six people die every week in the park service's 419 properties -- including 61 national parks -- that total 83 million acres. Half of those deaths are from falls, motor vehicle crashes and drownings, statistics show.
In 2017, Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, with more than 350 miles of hiking trails and 4.3 million visitors, had 165 serious search-and-rescue incidents and five visitor deaths.
In the past two years, a number of solo hikers, many trying to reach the top of 14,259-foot Longs Peak, died in the park. Three were missing for months and one still has not been found, said Kyle Patterson, a park spokesman.
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"We have increased our messaging and are reaching out to the public about Long's Peak so they understand this is not a hike -- this is a climb," Patterson said.
Three men, ages 20, 38 and 70, disappeared in the park while hiking alone last year. Two bodies were found, but James Pruitt, 70, is still missing.
Social media posts, YouTube videos and selfies might give the impression that it's easy to make the 15-mile round-trip climb that ascends 5,000 feet. But those images don't show the planning ahead, altitude acclimation and training that most successful mountain climbers undertake, Patterson said.
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Ice and snow can cover the mountain any time of year.
"There is risk if you don't understand exposure, if you don't realize you're going to be scrambling on hands and knees. And fitness doesn't matter if conditions are horrible. Hypothermia gets everybody, no matter how fit you are or no matter your age," Patterson said.
Falls are the most common fatalities in Rocky Mountain National Park, followed by medical incidents such as heart attacks, she said.
The park posts up-to-date weather and trail conditions online and extra trail rangers staff some of the most harrowing trails. But ultimately, and especially when hiking alone, a visitor is responsible for his own safety, Patterson said.
This month, Yosemite National Park in California released a new park app to help visitors explore the park, even if they're out of cellphone range.
In the past 15 years, 290 falling accidents have occurred at the park's 8,000 ft. Half Dome mountain, including 12 deaths. Until a new permit system was put in place, as many as 1,200 people attempted the climb every day. In 2011, the park instituted a permit system that limited climbers to 300 daily.
A new study published in the journal Wilderness & Environmental Medicine suggests that climbers still are taking risks, some because they feel they have one shot to get to the top of a mountain even if they don't feel safe, the authors said.
"If anything, the use of permits appears to have increased the individual risk," the authors said.
Mountain climbing feats such as the 2017 solo climb of 3,000-foot El Capitan granite wall in Yosemite without ropes or safety gear by professional rock climber Alex Honnold can influence amateurs to attempt risky climbs for which they may not be prepared.
About 80 percent of climbing accidents are preventable, Yosemite says in its online messaging.
"In case after case, ignorance, a casual attitude, or some form of distraction proved to be the most dangerous aspects of the sport," said an accident analysis written by Yosemite Ranger John Dill.
"Climbing in Yosemite has inherent risks and climbers assume complete responsibility for their own safety," the park's website says. "Rescue is not a certainty. If you get into difficulties, be prepared to get yourself out of them."
Park deaths uncommon
With almost 318 million visitors a year, "the National Park System mortality rate is very low" at 0.1 deaths per 100,000 visitors compared to the U.S. death rate of 848 deaths per 100,000 people, said Kathy Kupper, a system spokeswoman.
The National Park Service has seen an increase in search-and-rescue incidents, especially in the mountain West and Southwest regions, with 3,377 reported in 2017. Of those, 990 saves were recorded and 179 incidents resulted in deaths.
Some deaths are caused by accidents out of the visitor's control. At Montana's Glacier National Park last week, a 14-year-old Utah girl was killed when boulders from a rock slide struck her family's car on the popular Going-to-the-Sun Road. Her parents and two other children in the vehicle were injured.
In April and May, five visitors died in Grand Canyon National Park, two from falling off the canyon's South Rim. In 2017, 70 percent of search-and-rescue incidents in the park were for "slips, trips and falls combined with fatigue or physical condition," the park website says.
Selfie safety
Snapping Instagram-worthy photos is a tourist pastime in the national parks, but visitors should take care when taking photos, the National Park System says.
The Yellowstone National Park website asks visitors to take the Yellowstone Pledge, including being careful while taking selfies:
- Stay clear of wildlife and snap photos from a safe distance
- Stay on trails and within guardrails
- Don't try to take photos while driving.
- Stay away from closed areas
"We get it -- national parks have some pretty photogenic scenery," the Yellowstone website says. "The views are truly magnificent. While we want you to capture all of the splendor of our amazing parks, do not put your life at risk for a picture."
Rick Smith
Daily Inter Lake (Kalispell, MT)
Friday, August 23, 2019 at 4:48 pm
55 Yellowstone bison moved to Montana Indian reservation
By Matthew Brown, Associated Press
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Yellowstone National Park has transferred 55 wild bison to a Montana Indian reservation under a program that aims to establish new disease-free herds of the animals, park and tribal officials said Friday.
The male bison, also known as buffalo, were transferred in trailers and released onto the Fort Peck Reservation, home of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes. They had been captured in March 2018 and held in quarantine to ensure they don't carry the disease brucellosis.
The relocation program is part of an effort to conserve a species that once roamed North America by the millions. Officials also want to reduce the government-sponsored killing of Yellowstone bison over disease concerns.
More than 10,000 Yellowstone bison were captured and slaughtered or killed by hunters over the past several decades. The animals try to leave the park during winter in search of food at lower elevations.
Officials plan to capture more bison this winter to keep the park's population of about 4,500 bison from growing. They also want to expand the quarantine program, Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly said. But officials say that will require more quarantine facilities because the corrals now in use have a limited capacity.
Fort Peck officials have been trying to increase the size of their bison herd, which now numbers almost 400 animals with the latest additions.
"The return of the bison is a return of our culture," Tribal Chairman Floyd Azure said in a statement.
The 55 newly arrived animals will be held separately for another year as part of disease prevention efforts. Most of the animals eventually will be sent to other tribes that want to grow their existing herds or establish new ones, said Robert Magnan with the Fort Peck Fish and Game Department.
In June, Fort Peck transferred five of its bison to the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming. It has also sent animals to Montana's Fort Belknap Reservation.
Brucellosis can cause animals to abort their young. Its presence in Yellowstone-area elk and bison herds traces back to their exposure to the infected livestock of European settlers.
The disease has since been largely eradicated from domestic livestock. Ranchers in the past have opposed the transfer of Yellowstone bison, but state and federal officials have tried to quiet those concerns by setting up a rigorous testing program.
Rick Smith
Chattanoogan (Chattanooga, TN)
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
Employing Young And Diverse Leaders, Service Corps Benefit National Parks
Lift Up Communities And Provide In-Demand Job Skills Training
Youth service corps crews at work in Tennessee’s Red Trail at Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park
As the National Park Service celebrates 103 years of preserving America’s natural and cultural resources, the National Park Foundation Monday announced a more than $3.5 million investment in expanding young, diverse leaders’ capacity to help protect national parks, lift up communities, and gain in-demand job skills training through service corps programs.
Service corps are locally-based organizations that engage young adults and veterans in projects that address recreation, conservation, disaster response, and community needs.
“Service corps are one of the greatest investments we can make, supporting young, diverse leaders and national parks at the same time,” said National Park Foundation President and CEO Will Shafroth. “The National Park Foundation and partners recognize the power of the service corps program to protect national parks and grow the community of champions who care for them.”
With national parks facing an $11.9 billion deferred maintenance backlog, engaging young leaders through service corps programs to enhance national parks and provide greater access to them is a key tool in the ongoing effort to improve the visitor experience, said officials.
Service corps help national parks with projects ranging from invasive species removal, to historical preservation, to trail restoration. At the same time, service corps provide on-the-job training for its members, developing leadership skills, teamwork, and raising awareness about the myriad of public lands career paths.
“We are grateful to the National Park Foundation for supporting the work of service corps organizations in parks,” said National Park Service Acting Deputy Director for Operations David Vela. “These service corps projects strengthen public access to parks and recreational opportunities. Equally important, they provide young, diverse leaders with incredible work experiences.”
In addition, the National Park Foundation supports efforts to engage service corps members in conversations about racial equity, including the work of The Corps Network and its Moving Forward Initiative, which seeks to expand career exposure and increase employment in conservation and resource management for youth and young adults of color.
"Service corps are proud to partner with national parks to engage young people in maintaining our country's natural and cultural treasures," said Mary Ellen Sprenkel, president and CEO of The Corps Network. "We appreciate the National Park Foundation's investment in meaningful service opportunities, as well as their work to foster important conversations about race. The Corps Network is committed to helping make racial equity the standard in resource management. Through partnerships with organizations like the National Park Foundation, we hope to empower a diverse generation of conservation leaders and advance equity and inclusion."
This year, the National Park Foundation is partnering with the National Park Service, American Youthworks, Conservation Legacy, Groundwork USA, Montana Conservation Corps, Northwest Youth Corps, Rocky Mountain Conservancy, and Student Conservation Association to support a diverse network of service corps crews. Some of the National Park Foundation-supported service corps crews include:
Northwest Youth Corps' LGBTQ+ inclusion crews that are restoring trails in the Carbon River portion of Mount Rainier National Park in Washington
An all-Latinx Student Conservation Association crew from the greater Houston area that is undertaking critical trail restoration work and helping to connect Houstonians to their closest national park, Big Thicket National Park and Preserve in Texas
An all-female Conservation Legacy Southeast Conservation Corps crew that is rehabilitating the Red, Green, Yellow, and Mountain Beautiful Trails at Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park in Tennessee
“Working with Southeast Conservation Corps has increased my interest in botany and plants. It’s helping me find what I want to do for my career,” said Alyssa Dela Cruz, a member of the all-female Conservation Legacy Southeast Conservation Corps crew at Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park. “There’s so many paths I could take now after working for Southeast Conservation Corps.”
Last year, National Park Foundation-supported service corps crews contributed over 74,000 hours of service to 38 national parks, resulting in the building and restoring of nearly 400 miles of trail and the planting of more than 16,000 trees and other plant species.
Thanks to private philanthropy, including support from Find Your Park/Encuentra Tu Parque premier partner Nature Valley and partners Nissan TITAN and REI, the National Park Foundation is investing more than $3.5 million in service corps programs across the country. Select projects are also being matched with federal funds that were authorized and appropriated for the National Park Foundation under the 2016 National Park Service Centennial Act (PL 114-289).
“Restoring our national parks so that they can be enjoyed by future generations has been a top priority for Nature Valley,” said Scott Baldwin, director of marketing for Nature Valley. “This program provides an excellent opportunity for young adults to become involved in these preservation efforts.”
“Our national parks are our shared backyard, our shared heritage and history. These service corps programs create a win for all involved – the participants, the parks and nearby communities,” said Marc Berejka, REI Co-op director of government and community affairs. “We are proud to continue our longstanding support for the corps, as well as our partnerships with the National Park Foundation and National Park Service.”
The values shared by the National Park Foundation and partners help ensure the service corps program will expand for years to come. The collective dedication to youth, job training, and the continued preservation of the National Park System are key to the program’s success, said officials.
Rick Smith
Frederick (MD) News-Post
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
National Museum of Civil War Medicine considers removing Confederate flag from logo in the midst of a rebranding campaign
By Kate Masters kmas...@newspost.com
The logo for the National Museum of Civil War Medicine courted controversy once before.
In 2016, the Washington, D.C. tourism organization Destination DC declined to publish an ad for the local museum in its “Official Visitors Guide,” citing the Confederate flag that shares space with a Rod of Asclepius — a traditional Greek medical symbol — and a 33-starred Union Flag.
“Through that conversation, I remember them saying that the only place where a Confederate flag is appropriate is in a museum,” said David Price, the executive director for the museum. “Well, we’re a museum. So, I said I respected their right not to publish it, but they had to respect my right not to change it.”
Over the past three years, his thinking has evolved.
“A couple of years ago, I felt this was the perfect logo for this place,” Price said.
But the National Museum of Civil War Medicine has evolved, too. In 2005, the organization partnered with the National Park Service to manage the Pry House Field Hospital Museum in Keedysville, Maryland. In 2012, it assumed operational responsibility for the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum in Washington, D.C. Now, the museum encompasses three different sites with three different historical focuses, expanding beyond its initial concentration on the convergence of soldiers and medical personnel in Frederick after the battles of Antietam, Gettysburg and Monocacy.
The Confederate flag has also become a point of national contention as it’s wielded by white nationalist groups, and as a growing list of states remove their Confederate monuments. Price can remember high-level visitors to the museum decline mementos that feature the current logo. He’s received emails that express discomfort with the Confederate imagery.
“It’s the elephant in the room,” he said. “And the worry becomes, ‘Am I actually alienating an entire audience that might have come into the museum otherwise?’”
Changing the logo — or at least the possibility of it — is a new focus as the museum embarks on a rebranding campaign, funded by a capacity-building grant from the Ausherman Family Foundation. The $25,000 gift allowed museum officials to hire the Invictus Group, a marketing organization that’s working to “figure out the identity of the museum,” in the words of creative director Jeff Beck, “and figure out where we’re going to go from there.”
To start, Beck launched a public survey available through the homepage of the museum. The first page of questions largely revolves around the site itself — how guests would rate their experience, what makes the museum unique, and whether they would recommend it to a friend.
But the second page focuses on the logo itself, and especially the battle flags. “Should Union or Confederate battle flags be featured in the logo?” one question asks. “In your opinion, what does the Confederate battle flag stand for?” asks another (respondents can check multiple choices, including “southern heritage,” “history,” “slavery” and “racism.”)
Price emphasized that the museum would be working on a rebranding campaign regardless of the logo. Operating three different sites with three different emblems is confusing, he said, both for guests and from a branding perspective.
“We’d be doing this even if our logo was a circle, a square and a triangle,” he said.
Beck similarly called the logo “dated” and “dysfunctional, at best.” Both men agreed that the best course of action could be to create one unifying logo for all three sites, with the possibility of introducing separate branding later on.
“We’re really looking at whether it’s appropriate to include either of those two flags,” Beck said. “I don’t think it’s a compelling enough visual to tell the full story. What we’ve identified is that the museum’s unique focus is on medicine and what medical advances have meant for our society. And that leaves a lot of room for interpretation.”
Still, the museum’s solicitation for public feedback doesn’t sit well with members of the public who don’t think the logo should be changed at all.
Steven Berryman heads the Frederick-based Confederate Monuments Protection Society on Facebook and called the survey a “gutless move,” especially given the Confederate flag’s prominence in American history.
“It shouldn’t be a public decision,” he said. “I don’t care what public opinion says. Whether something is deemed to be historically significant or not should have nothing to do with whether people find it insensitive.”
Opponents of the current logo, which include the Frederick chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice (or SURJ), the inclusion of the Confederate flag is concerning.
“We don’t feel like it’s a great thing to have a Confederate flag posted on the outside of a building for any reason,” said member Lisa Bromfield, “even though some people still see it as a historical symbol.”
SURJ members commended the museum for soliciting public feedback and considering a change. But Willie Mahone, the president of the Frederick NAACP, agreed with Berryman that the logo shouldn’t be influenced by public opinion. For much different reasons.
“I’ve found it objectionable for a long period of time,” Mahone said. “And public sentiment doesn’t change that. If the flag is a symbol of racial hatred and white supremacy — which we hold that it is — I don’t think they should make a decision based upon what the public says. There was once public sentiment that women shouldn’t participate in the electoral process. There was once public sentiment that Native Americans should be driven off their land. In the end, it’s a question of morality. And if the public sentiment is amoral, we should not consider it.”
Rick Smith
Oak Ridge (TN) Today
Friday, August 30, 2019 3:12 pm
Oak Ridge hosts Energy Communities Alliance meeting on national park
The City of Oak Ridge hosted visitors from across the country as part of the recent Energy Communities Alliance Peer Exchange focused on the continued implementation of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, a press release said.
The meeting, held on August 14 and 15 in Oak Ridge, had an excellent turnout with many guests from the additional national park host communities of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the cities near Hanford, Washington, making the trip to Oak Ridge, the press release said. Other attendees traveled from Aiken, South Carolina, to learn more about Oak Ridge and the national park, the release said.
Local officials, including Oak Ridge Mayor Warren Gooch, Roane County Executive Ron Woody, Oak Ridge City Council member Chuck Hope, and City Manager Mark Watson welcomed the invitees. National Park Service officials and representatives from tourism bureaus, historical societies, and economic development councils also took part. Oak Ridge Mayor Pro Tem Rick Chinn and City Council members Ellen Smith, Kelly Callison, Jim Dodson, and Derrick Hammond attended sessions as well.
Discussion during the two-day event highlighted the Manhattan Project National Historical Park’s assets across all three sites and ways in which each community is working to market and grow the park.
The Manhattan Project National Historical Park includes Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos. They were three of the primary sites involved in the Manhattan Project, a top-secret federal program to build the world’s first atomic weapons during World War II.
At the ECA meeting, representatives from Oak Ridge and Roane County shared information on new recreational opportunities and national park signage as well as updates on projects like the Oak Ridge Fire Department’s History Center at the Dr. Thomas Howard Scott Manhattan Project Fire House, the memorabilia wall at the Scarboro Community Center, the newly remodeled K-25 Overlook Visitors’ Center, and the Friendship Bell Peace Pavilion project, which recently won a Sister Cities International Award for innovation.
Attendees also learned about the Urban Dynamics Institute at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a division dedicated to observing, measuring, analyzing, and modeling urban dynamics at the city and global scale, the press release said.
The ECA is a nonprofit, membership organization of local governments adjacent to or affected by U.S. Department of Energ activities. ECA’s goals include bringing local government officials together to share information, establish policy positions, and promote community interests to address an increasingly complex set of constituent, environmental, regulatory, and economic development needs, the press release said.
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Rick Smith
Durango (CO) Herald
Sunday, September 1, 2019
Horse roundup plan for Mesa Verde National Park under review
Up to 80 animals would be removed, put up for adoption
By Jim Mimiaga Journal Staff Writer
A plan to round up and remove a wild horse herd from Mesa Verde National Park is in the review process, according to the Colorado Chapter of the National Mustang Association.
The park is partnering with the mustang association for support with the adoption process.
“We have had several meetings with park officials and are getting the plan dialed in,” she said.
In March, the park announced a decision for a phased, proactive approach to remove the horses within five years and improve the park’s boundary fencing over the next 10 years to prevent livestock from re-entering the park.
“We are working on how to humanely remove livestock from the park and identify potential homes for captured, unclaimed livestock,” said Mesa Verde National Park Superintendent Cliff Spencer.
The park plans to remove 65 to 80 horses from the park and put them up for adoption in horse sanctuaries. The horses are in violation of park policy because they are not considered wildlife.
The horses affect cultural sites and compete with elk, deer and bears for limited grazing and water sources. Feral cattle also will be captured.
Tim McGaffic, an expert in low-stress roundup techniques, has been contacted by the park to run the roundup. The park has agreed to use a pilot program of low-stress gathering methods to mitigate animal welfare issues.
“If this gather goes well, the gentler method could be used as model for other horse roundups on public lands,” Schaufele said.
The initial plan was to remove 50% this year and 80% by 2020.
The wild horses will be baited with food and water in advance of the roundup. The process helps acclimate them to people and improves the process for adoption, Schaufele said.
Family bands of the horse herd are identified and rounded up together to reduce stress, she said. The primary capture methods identified in the decision include baited-pen trapping and horseback roundups. Once in corrals, the horses will be cared for and checked by veterinarians. After being removed from the park, they will be gentled, trained and put up for adoption.
The mustang association will coordinate with the park to take title and possession of the gathered unclaimed horses after a holding period of up to 30 days. They will seek appropriate adopters, sanctuaries and trainers who qualify to take horses. Opportunities will be offered for qualified adopters to have their horses gentled and begin their training before taking them.
The National Park Service will coordinate with the Colorado Brand Inspection Division and local brand inspectors to identify possible owners of the trespass livestock and will follow the most humane methods as defined by the American Veterinarian Medical Association, the park said.
For the gentling training of the Mesa Verde horses, the mustang association is working with Mustang Camp, a New Mexico nonprofit organization that trains wild horses for adoption.
For more information about adoptions, email Schaufele at na...@nmaco.org.
Rick Smith
Bakersfield Californian
Wednesday, September 4, 2019
California becomes first state to ban fur trapping after Gov. Newsom signs law
By Louis Sahagun and Phil Willon Los Angeles Times (TNS)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California has enacted a new ban on fur trapping for animal pelts, making it the first state to outlaw a centuries-old livelihood that was intertwined with the rise of the Western frontier.
The Wildlife Protection Act of 2019, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday, prohibits commercial or recreational trapping on both public and private lands.
Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez of San Diego, who introduced the legislation, said it was time to end fur trapping. “It seems especially cruel, obviously, and it’s just unnecessary and costly,” she said.
Although commercial trapping was an early part of California’s economy, opening the San Francisco Bay Area to international commerce even before the 1848 California Gold Rush, its fortunes have waned over many decades.
Gonzalez said that the roughly six dozen trappers still working in the state, down from more than 5,000 a century ago, cannot afford to pay the full cost of implementing and regulating their industry.
The ban also comes as California lawmakers consider more aggressive measures to protect animals and wildlife, often threatening age-old traditions.
Legislators are considering proposals to ban the sale of all fur products, including fur coats, and to outlaw the use of animals in any circus in the state, with the exception of domesticated horses, dogs and cats.
“There’s been a real change in attitudes about how we treat animals,” Gonzalez said.
A total of 68 trappers reported killing 1,568 animals statewide in 2017, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Among the 10 species reported taken were coyote, gray fox, beaver, badger and mink.
Trapped animals are strangled, shot or beaten to death, with care taken not to damage pelts before skinning them.
Under the law, using traps to catch gophers, house mice, rats, moles and voles would still be permitted.
The law followed a 2013 public outcry when conservationist Tom O’Key in 2013 discovered a bobcat trap illegally set on his property near the edge of Joshua Tree National Park.
O’Key stumbled upon the trap chained to a jojoba bush and camouflaged with broken branches just north of the 720,000-acre park, where the big cats are a dominant force in the ecosystem.
He immediately alerted neighbors and contacted the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and Hi-Desert Star newspaper, triggering an angry tide of complaints that put a spotlight on the practice of trapping, killing and skinning bobcats to supply fur markets in China, Russia and Greece.
“I could not have guessed in a million years,” O’Key said in an interview, “that trap would spark an unstoppable movement capable of shifting legislative thinking toward wildlife.”
Democratic Assemblyman Richard Bloom of Santa Monica pushed through his Bobcat Protection Act of 2013, which was in response to petition drives, social media campaigns and telephone calls to lawmakers from wildlife advocates who decried trapping and killing as a cruel trade.
Eight months after O’Key sounded the alarm in Joshua Tree, the California Fish and Game Commission voted 3-2 to ban commercial bobcat trapping statewide.
The Wildlife Protection Act of 2019 argues that the small number of active trappers in the state cannot afford to pay the full cost of implementing and regulating their industry as required by law.
It was backed by the Center for Biological Diversity, and the nonprofit group Social Compassion in Legislation, which spearheaded a recent bill that put an end to the sale of mill-bred dogs, cats and rabbits.
Opponents included the California Farm Bureau Federation, which warned that the bill, if passed, could have significant economic consequences for the agriculture industry.
The trapping industry declined over decades in California.
Before California’s population ballooned to roughly 40 million people, fur trapping played a significant role in the extirpation of wolves and wolverines and the severe declines of sea otters, fishers, martens, beavers and other fur-bearing species.
Over the last two decades, animal protectionists have partnered with mainstream environmental groups to put pressure on state and federal wildlife authorities, and to take their animal-cruelty concerns to the voters. Trappers are anachronistic, they said, and their snares subject wildlife to horrific suffering.
“The signing of this bill into law is the result of compelling data and a change of heart in public opinion regarding animal cruelty,” said Judie Mancuso, founder and president of Social Compassion in Legislation.
Rick Smith
Salt Lake (UT) Tribune
Thursday, September 5, 2019
Retired public lands officials criticize Trump’s plan to move BLM headquarters to the West
By Dan Elliott | The Associated Press
Denver • Former public lands managers heaped criticism Thursday on a Trump administration plan to move the headquarters of the nation’s largest land agency from Washington to the West.
Thirty past high-ranking officials from the Bureau of Land Management said moving the bureau headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, and dispersing managers across 11 Western states could hurt stewardship of public lands.
In a letter to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who oversees the bureau, the retired officials called the move drastic and expensive.
The Interior Department didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
The bureau oversees nearly 388,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) of public land, 99% of it in 12 Western states. It issues permits for oil and gas drilling, mining and ranching, manages outdoor recreation and enforces environmental protections.
The agency has about 10,000 employees, and most are already in field offices in the West. About 400 are in Washington, and the Interior Department said in July it planned to move about 300 of them to the West.
The department said that would lead to better decisions and save money. But those claims have come under fire from formal and informal groups of retired federal land managers.
The Public Lands Foundation, whose members are mostly former Bureau of Land Management employees, wrote Congress a blistering letter on Aug. 20, saying the move would "result in the BLM serving only the short-term wants of locally powerful stakeholders to the detriment of all other constituents and the long-term needs of the public lands."
Later, the National Association of Forest Service Retirees wrote Congress that the move was either a mistake based on a misunderstanding of the bureau, "or worse, it signals a deliberate attempt to weaken the agency."
The Forest Service is a separate agency, reporting to the Agriculture Department, but the association said its members worked closely with the Bureau of Land Management.
Thursday's letter to Bernhardt was not from an organization but a group of former bureau officials ranging from state-level managers to deputy directors.
They contended the move would cost taxpayers, not save them money, because of the expense of relocating executives from Washington and having them frequently travel back to the capital for consultation.
"This is a massive disruption and expenditure of funds for no gain," they wrote.
Others have praised the move, including Democratic and Republican officials in the West who expect to see more federal dollars and a higher profile for their states.
Some energy and ranching interests said they would benefit by closer contact with federal officials.
"Having the BLM out here and closer to the ground, we're going to get better decisions," Utah rancher Mike Noel said in July, when the move was announced.
“There’s a different philosophy out here than there is in Washington, D.C.”
Rick Smith
Sacramento Bee
Monday, September 9, 2019 11:29 PM
California lawmakers challenge Trump’s bid to expand oil drilling and fracking statewide
By PHIL WILLON Los Angeles Times
SACRAMENTO, Calif.
California on Monday sought to block the Trump administration from allowing new oil and gas wells in national parks and wilderness areas in the state.
Any new oil or gas projects approved in federally protected areas would be prohibited from having their pipelines or other essential infrastructure cross state lands, under legislation approved by California lawmakers.
"This bill is all about California fighting the Trump administration's plan to frack and drill in some of our most beautiful federal protected lands and national monuments," said Democratic Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi of Rolling Hills Estates, author of the bill.
That prohibition would include state lands near the Carrizo Plains National Monument in San Luis Obispo County, an area known for its spectacular wildflower blooms and potentially large reserves of oil and gas.
The legislation, AB 342, now heads to the desk of Gov. Gavin Newsom for his consideration. The Democratic governor has been a frequent critic of the Republican president's efforts to expand oil and gas drilling in California.
If signed by Newsom, the new law would add to California's portfolio of laws and litigation aimed at countering the Trump administration's bids to expand oil and gas exploration, relax environmental protections and dismantle Obama-era regulations to combat climate change.
California has filed more than 50 lawsuits over Trump administration actions on a variety of issues, including more than two dozen challenges to policies proposed by the EPA, the U.S. Department of the Interior and other federal agencies responsible for setting energy and fuel-efficiency standards.
During the summer, California circumvented the Trump administration's efforts to relax tailpipe pollution regulations by reaching a deal with four major automakers to gradually increase fuel-efficiency standards.
California lawmakers this week also may approve legislation that would allow state agencies to lock in protections under the federal Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Fair Labor Standards Act and other environmental and labor laws that were in place before President Donald Trump took office in January 2017.
Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law blocking new offshore oil drilling in California by barring the construction of pipelines, piers, wharves or other infrastructure necessary to transport the oil and gas from federal waters to state land.
The legislation approved Monday in essence expands that prohibition to state lands near federally protected lands.
The bill bars any state agency from granting land leases or other conveyance for pipelines and infrastructure for any new oil or gas project on those federal sites. That includes the State Lands Commission, which has jurisdiction over all submerged lands and the beds of rivers, lakes, bays, estuaries and inlets, as well as waters extending three miles off shore.
"It is a big signal to Trump that California is not going to stand by and allow him to expand fossil fuel extraction and contribute to a worsening of the climate change emergency," said Kathryn Phillips, director of Sierra Club California.
Under the legislation, oil and gas companies still would have the right to enter into leases to use privately held land for infrastructure.
Senate Minority Leader Shannon Grove, a Bakersfield Republican, accused the bill's supporters of trying to put California's oil and gas industry out of business, saying the legislation will have an especially harsh impact on the Central Valley.
"This is a blatant attack on the oil industry," said Grove, whose district is in the heart of California oil country.
Grove and other critics said curtailing oil production in California will only lead to an increase in oil imports from outside areas that don't have the state's strict regulations and environmental protections.
The bill would increase the demand for foreign oil, eliminate jobs and will have no environmental benefits, said Sabrina Lockhart, spokeswoman for the California Independent Petroleum Association, which represents approximately 500 independent crude oil and natural gas producers, royalty owners and other industry-related companies in the state.
While the legislation provides an exemption for existing leases for oil pipelines and other infrastructure that cross state lands, the petroleum association says it is not ironclad. The State Lands Commission has the authority to determine what a new lease is, and could classify a renewal application as a new lease and deny it, Lockhart said.
In April, the Trump administration announced details of its plan to open more than a million acres of public and private land in California to fracking, ending a five-year moratorium on leasing federal land in California to oil and gas developers. Trump's plan targets public and private land spread across eight counties in Central California: eastern Fresno, western Kern, Kings, Madera, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Tulare and Ventura.
Some of the parcels in the plan are also adjacent to Los Padres National Forest, Carrizo Plain National Monument and the Wind Wolves Preserve.
In July, the Bureau of Land Management halted plans to drill an oil well in the Carizzo Plain National Monument in San Luis Obispo County, which would have been the first well since the monument was established by President Clinton in 2001, according to the San Luis Obispo Tribune.
"We do not want fracking. We do not want new oil wells in San Luis Obispo County," said Charles Varni of the Coalition to Protect SLO County, which supported an unsuccessful local ballot measure in 2018 that would have banned all fracking and new oil wells.
Rick Smith
The Hill (Washington, DC)
Tuesday, September 10, 2019 07:05 PM EDT
Grijalva eager to subpoena Interior over BLM relocation plans
House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) on Tuesday said he’s considering using subpoena power to force the Interior Department to turn over documents outlining the agency’s plans to relocate the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
Grijalva told reporters he was disappointed to not get more details from acting BLM Director William Pendley during a hearing earlier Tuesday to examine the relocation.
“It proved once again that this has been slapped together as we go along,” Grijalva said.
“The hearing validated some things we had been considering and also justifies us going further in the consideration of a subpoena to get those reorganization papers. I think that’s the next step,” he added.
Interior announced in July it would move 300 D.C.-based employees west to various offices, leaving just 61 people in Washington. But other details have been closely guarded by Interior, with few details passed to BLM employees.
Grijalva said he wants to get a copy of the agency’s reorganization papers, but it’s not totally clear he has the committee staff backing. A committee spokesman told The Hill the subpoena isn’t happening at the moment but didn't clarify whether that could change in the future.
The Arizona Democrat acknowledged that staff had reservations about a subpoena and would need more time to get ready.
“We don’t want to chase something that we won’t be able to win at legally and in terms of content, but I think this one’s pretty obvious. The record is there,” Grijalva said, pointing to Pendley’s references to a cost-benefit analysis and how Interior weighed where to send employees. “It’s an option I think we have to use.”
“I’ve indicated to staff we’ve done the due diligence. It’s time to press the point,” he said. “I don’t want to research ourselves into a coma.”
Interior said Tuesday that it would more fully release its plans for employees and the agency on Sept. 17.
Rick Smith
Fresno (CA) Bee
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Overloaded buses and long waits: Yosemite cracks down on concession operator Aramark
Yosemite National Park
The famed waterfalls were flowing freely at Yosemite National Park this summer, providing a spectacular scene for thousands of visitors daily to the Yosemite Valley.
But the roar of the falls, birds chirping and wind rustling through the trees aren’t the only sounds reverberating in the valley.
In mid-May, even before the Memorial Day holiday that marked the start of the peak summer tourist season, there was grumbling among park visitors and employees about shuttle buses that are supposed to reduce traffic congestion in Yosemite Valley and enhance the visitor experience.
Too few shuttle buses meant long wait times for passengers. In some instances, buses had so many people already aboard that waiting visitors at some shuttle stops around the valley were unable to board for a ride back to their cars or their lodging.
It seemed like this summer could be a repeat of 2018, which park officials described as “the worst year of operation” for the shuttle buses since Aramark, the park’s Philadelphia-based concession contractor, took over commercial operations inside Yosemite in 2016.
There were so many visitor complaints last year – and reports by drivers of verbal or physical abuse and even frustrated passengers forming human chains to force buses to stop – that park officials gave Aramark an ultimatum this spring: improve service on the buses to a satisfactory level or face financial penalties.
So dismal was the 2018 performance of Aramark and its subsidiary, Yosemite Hospitality LLC, that the National Park Service rated its transportation service “unsatisfactory” and gave the company an overall rating of “marginal.”
This summer, the company was able to raise its game and avoid monetary sanctions, a park spokesman said this week. But “it’s not consistent,” said ranger Scott Gediman, Yosemite’s public information officer. “Service has definitely improved. Improvements are in place … but there are occasional lapses.”
‘Substantial’ visitor complaints
Yosemite Hospitality’s annual operating review for 2018, issued in March and released to The Bee recently under a federal Freedom of Information Act request, detailed the concerns of park officials with a lack of compliance with various terms of its 15-year concession contract that runs through 2031. It includes tardiness filing required reports, charging incorrect rates for tours and other services, and operating some services on different schedules than what had already been published.
But it’s the shuttle service – the green-and-white buses that are among the most visible manifestations of the concession operations for many day-trip visitors to Yosemite – that was singled out by Yosemite National Park Superintendent Michael Reynolds for the greatest concern.
“The Visitor Transportation System (VTS) must operate with a high degree of service and reliability going forward,” Reynolds wrote to Robert Concienne, vice president of operations for Yosemite Hospitality, in a March 4 letter accompanying the annual rating. Reynolds added that the park “received a substantial number of complaints” over the service in 2018, “with visitors reaching a point of frustration that would compel unsafe behavior in the form of human chains and other angry behavior toward your shuttle drivers and fellow visitors.“
“This cannot happen anymore,” the superintendent told Concienne. “You must provide sufficient staff to operate and maintain a working VTS to the satisfaction of the National Park Service. …”
That meant getting at least 13 buses running on the Yosemite Valley loop daily – more than double the daily number of vehicles that were frequently operating in 2018 – by June 1 and keeping them running throughout the summer.
The concession contract for Yosemite is the largest in the national park system, Gediman said. Aramark entered the 15-year deal with the National Park Service in 2016 with an estimated value of about $2 billion. It includes operations at the Ahwahnee Hotel, Curry Village, Wawona Hotel, Badger Pass ski area and other stores, restaurants and services inside the park boundaries.
The deal includes the buses on the year-round 7.8-mile, 21-stop Yosemite Valley loop, as well as a parking shuttle, El Capitan shuttle and an after-hours on-demand shuttle for park visitors and employees.
Reynolds’ letter notes ratings of marginal or unsatisfactory indicate that a concession operator be denied rate increases. “Such scores indicate failure for the concessioner to substantially meet visitor service standards and/or administrative requirements,” Reynolds wrote. The park service was allowing conditional rate approvals – if Aramark and Yosemite Hospitality could resolve its contractual deficiencies by June 1. Failure to do so would result in revoking any approved 2019 rate increases and rejecting additional rate increases this year.
Gediman said this week that Aramark and Yosemite Hospitality did enough to satisfy park officials and receive the rate increases. “They’re moving in the right direction,” Gediman said. “We feel they’ve made a very serious effort” to live up to the contractual obligations – but not without hiccups.
“Although we are appreciative of them making the effort to get the number of shuttles up to what’s required of them, since June there continue to be challenges,” Gediman added. “There are days when not all of the required buses are on the road.”
Visitor and driver concerns
Just two weeks before the June 1 deadline, the ability of Yosemite Hospitality and Aramark to meet their shuttle obligation appeared to be in doubt.
“They stink,” said one visitor who was denied boarding on an already-full bus at Yosemite Village in May. “The best way to get around is, No. 1, bicycle; No. 2, walking, and then the shuttle.” The man, a retired police officer from Colorado who didn’t want to share his name, described himself as a frequent visitor to national parks across the country.
“This isn’t summertime; it’s not the busy season yet,” he added. “I’m just a visitor here, but it’s failed me.”
The National Park Service owns 25 hybrid electric-diesel buses available for shuttle routes Aramark and Yosemite Hospitality are supposed to operate; Aramark and Yosemite Hospitality also are responsible for maintaining them.
“One of the reasons for the poor performance was because Yosemite Hospitality failed to hire the appropriate number of drivers to make use of the entire fleet,” the 2018 annual review stated. “They also failed to hire the appropriate number of technicians to adequately maintain the fleet which averaged between 8-10 shuttles being down all year” for the Yosemite Valley loop.
The review also criticized Yosemite Hospitality for not operating the Tuolumne Meadows shuttle service last year after telling the park that it would do so. “The decision to change their mind about the service was relayed to the park after the (2018 season) guide was published so for the entire summer visitors consistently expected this service and were extremely disappointed and angry that it was not offered,” the review stated.
Visitors weren’t the only people complaining. Yosemite Hospitality’s drivers also sought multiple meetings with Yosemite park leadership over the problems with lack of drivers, mechanics and limited number of operable buses.
One of those Yosemite Hospitality employees, Loretta Dooley, has been a seasonal driver in the park since 2011. Dooley told The Bee that she and her colleagues told park officials they worried about the safety of the buses because of lacking maintenance, plus the vehicles aren’t inspected as frequently as required by law.
“We had buses that have the (brake warning) lights on, buses with no proof of insurance, buses with ‘check engine’ lights on, buses that were overdue for inspections, all of these things,” Dooley said. “That puts all of us, guests and drivers, kind of at risk.”
Several other drivers, who didn’t want their names used because of fear for their jobs, agreed with Dooley. She said, “It’s hard. We all love this place and we love our jobs. But now it’s gotten to the point in the summer where we’re being verbally assaulted, we’re having to herd people onto buses like cattle, and then you have to worry about threats to your safety.”
“When you have thousands of people being left behind every day, they’re waiting a couple of hours for a bus when the stops are only 10 minutes apart, it’s insane,” Dooley said. “They need to run an adequate number of buses on the shuttle loop to enhance the visitor experience, and that’s not happening when people are coming to the most beautiful place in the world … and they end up so frustrated because the service is so lacking.”
Ongoing challenges
An Aramark spokesman acknowledged “last year presented some unique challenges” for the shuttle operations, including a government shutdown early in the year and the Ferguson fire that closed Yosemite Valley for about two weeks and forced evacuations of concession employees.
Aramark’s David Freireich told The Bee both incidents affected the company’s staffing in the park, “including skilled licensed bus drivers who sought employment elsewhere” during the closure.
But in the wake of the lackluster operating review, “the Visitor Transportation System continues to receive our full attention.”
Freiriech told The Bee in May the company was in the process of hiring 25 new bus drivers and staff to help it meet the park service’s deadline and the demands of the peak summer season. As of this week, “we have 75-plus drivers and garage support personnel on staff,” Freiriech said. “Even with a beefed-up staff, we recognize work remains to be done, which is why we continue to put resources against recruiting and hiring qualified individuals for these highly skilled positions.”
Gediman, the park spokesman, said another major concern last year was Yosemite Hospitality wasn’t keeping park officials fully apprised of the difficulties in providing enough buses on the Yosemite Valley loop, including a shortage of drivers and mechanics to keep buses rolling. “Last year, as incidents and complaints came to a crescendo, we expressed to them the need to tell us every day how many buses they have,” or why there might be a shortage on a given day.
“If we know they’re going to be one or two buses short, then in the visitor center we can tell visitors” so they’re not surprised by longer wait times, Gediman added. “But mainly, we want those bus counts because they are contractually obligated to run that minimum number of buses, and ensuring that they’re fulfilling the requirements of the contract.” That’s 13 buses each day in June, July and August, dropping down to 12 buses a day in September.
This summer, Aramark has provided those daily bus counts to the park service. But while Yosemite Hospitality and Aramark have managed to satisfy park leaders and avoid the financial penalties over the transportation services, Gediman acknowledged it hasn’t necessarily been smooth sailing. Because Yosemite Hospitality and Aramark have not managed to consistently run the required number of buses daily for the visitor shuttles, “no, they are not meeting their contractual obligation,” Gediman said.
“It’s a contract, so there’s obviously a huge amount of money involved, but we understand there are challenges,” he added. “There have been cases when drivers have been out sick, so on the valley floor tours, the Hiker’s Bus and other services, they’ve had to cut back on those to keep up with the shuttle.”
There are still complaints about the shuttles, but fewer than last year. “We still hear about visitors who are frustrated by full shuttle buses,” Gediman said. “But this summer is better; it’s not as frequent.”
In terms of some of the “bigger incidents,” like verbal or physical abuse of drivers, or human chains across roadways, Gediman said “that’s being kept to a minimum.”
“From having an ear to the ground, is everything perfect?” Gediman asked. “No. But we’ve seen them make an attempt to get better and they’re having some good results.”
Dooley and a former shuttle driver, retired California Highway Patrol officer Robert Seddon, both said they remain concerned about Yosemite Hospitality’s ability to maintain the mechanical safety of the buses.
“They’ve been running too few buses,” Seddon said. “Is that illegal? No, but it’s stupid.”
Seddon told The Bee that before he stopped driving in the fall of 2017, and during return visits to the park including this summer, he observed buses were routinely operating well beyond their required inspection dates, while open-air tram trailers used for the paid Valley Floor tours were not properly registered for operation in California.
Seddon said because the California Highway Patrol has no jurisdiction within the federal park, responsibility for forcing Yosemite Hospitality/Aramark to properly inspect and properly maintain the vehicles lies with the National Park Service. “The bottom line, I believe, is that the Park Service doesn’t want to do anything about it,” Seddon said.
Gediman acknowledged that it falls to the Park Service to make sure Yosemite Hospitality and Aramark are complying with bus inspection and maintenance, but “we really don’t have the expertise for that. That’s where it gets a little tricky.”
Gediman said he couldn’t definitively discuss allegations by Seddon or current drivers about overdue inspections or unsafe buses. As for registration of the vehicles, Gediman added, “that’s on us” as the Park Service is the owner of the vehicles.
Many of the buses are past their prime. Of the 25 buses in the park’s fleet, 18 are 2005 models that are now 14 years old. Four were built in 2010 and three more are 2011 models. “These are aging buses,” Gediman said. “We do have some new buses on order for gradual replacement, but that has been one of the issues. … If a bus breaks down, sometimes it’s a part that’s not always easy to get.”
Richard Martin
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Rick Smith
Morning Call (Allentown, PA)
Friday, September 13, 2019 | 6:25 PM
Why one Northampton County town is taking action to protect the Appalachian Trail from pipelines and cellphone towers
The Morning Call
In an effort to protect their 1½-mile section of the Appalachian Trail, Plainfield Township officials have approved zoning that will prevent projects like natural gas pipelines, wind turbines, solar panels and cellphone towers from being located near the scenic footpath.
The ordinance, approved unanimously by the Board of Supervisors on Wednesday, also addresses mineral extraction, billboards and mobile homes.
“I think we always need to be vigilant and concerned about how the trail is going to be impacted. You look back 10 years ago and no one would have anticipated explosive growth of warehouses, for example,” said Brooks Mountcastle, an environmental planner with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.
The conservancy provided a $16,900 grant covering the cost of a consultant from the Bethlehem-based Urban Research and Development Corp. to draft an ordinance with the help of the township.
Other municipalities, including Moore Township, Upper Mount Bethel Township and Bushkill Township, also have recently adopted ordinances to protect portions of the trail, but they aren’t as comprehensive as Plainfield’s ordinance, Mountcastle said.
[More News] Police: Missing Upper Perk teen found dead near park »
The ordinance includes guidelines for controlling light pollution, the withdraw of groundwater, digital signs, noise, commercial outdoor recreation, residential developments, solar panels, natural gas pipelines and wind turbines.
The ordinance will be applied to an area along the Kittatinny Ridge above Eighth Street and Constitution Avenue, said township Manager Thomas Petrucci.
Plainfield’s ordinance wasn’t the result of a specific development project, Petrucci said. The township’s Environmental Advisory Council advised creating an ordinance as suggested by Act 24 of the PA Appalachian Trail Act.
Enacted in 2008, the act was prompted by a court case related to the proposal for a country club for car enthusiasts near a section of trail in Monroe County.
The act says municipalities with portions of trail should take action to preserve the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values of the trail, but some municipalities have yet to get on board, Mountcastle said.
“The language [in Act 24] lacks some teeth in that it puts the burden on the township to protect what they view as necessary,” Mountcastle said. In addition to language that’s open to some interpretation, it also takes a lot of time and money to develop such ordinances.
But ordinances to protect the trail are becoming more important, Mountcastle said.
“Economies and landscapes are always growing ... I think we will continue to see creeping of development closer to the foot of the Kittatinny Ridge as development increases,” he said.
Lehigh County was ranked eighth and Northampton County was ranked 11th for the fastest-growing counties by population in Pennsylvania, according to statistics from 2016, Mountcastle said.
The conservancy has concerns about warehouse development which may be visible from the trail, though Mountcastle said there are no immediate threats to Lehigh Valley sections at this time.
There are 58 municipalities in Pennsylvania that are traversed by the Appalachian Trail, with 15 miles spread out over six municipalities in Northampton County and 17 miles in three municipalities in Lehigh County, according to the conservancy.
According to the conservancy, in Northampton County, Moore Township enacted a 1,000-foot buffer from the centerline of the Appalachian Trail and structures are prohibited 100 feet from National Park Service land.
Upper Mount Bethel Township enacted a 500-foot building setback from the trail corridor.
Bushkill Township enacted a 150-foot building setback from the centerline of the trail and a 50-foot setback for cellphone towers. Antennas require a visual impact analysis and coordination with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.
In Lehigh County, Heidelberg Township, Lynn Township and Washington Township rely on previsions in the Blue Mountain Zoning District to offer some protection, Mountcastle said.
Christina Tatu can be reached at 610-820-6583 or ct...@mcall.com
Appalachian Municipalities:
NORTHAMPTON COUNTY
- Bushkill Township
- Lehigh Township
- Moore Township
- Plainfield Township
- Upper Mount Bethel Township
- Wind Gap Borough
LEHIGH COUNTY
- Heidelberg Township
- Lynn Township
- Washington Township
Rick Smith
Spectrum News 1 (El Segundo, CA)
Monday, September 16, 2019 3:15 PM PT
National Park Service Offers Bilingual tours in Santa Monica Mountains
By Tara Lynn Wagner, Calabasas
CALABASAS, Calif. – You don’t need to speak a specific language to understand how awesome a mountain lion is. But if the facts presented by the National Park Service were only in English, a lot of visitors would be left out of the conversation.
“We actually have many different rangers speaking at least two languages," said Xochitl Lopez.
People may not realize it, Lopez says, but many of the programs and guided tours offered in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area are also available in Spanish – sometimes simultaneously.“Instead of having one separate for each language, we’ll kind of just see what our audience is and we will accommodate to them, if it’s purely Spanish or we’ll do bilingual," Lopez said.
As a Park Ranger Interpreter, Lopez loves her office.
"This is basically my backyard now," Lopez said.
She gets to interact with a lot of visitors and wants to spread the word that everyone is welcome here. She stressed that "this is a safe place and that this is their park.”
To that end, this summer the National Park Service held what they are calling the first annual Nuestras Montañas. The message: “Queridos Angelenos, la ciudad es tu casa. Las montañas tu hogar," Lopez read off one of the signs. "In English that is: Dear Angelenos, the city is your house. The mountains are your home.”
Five-year-old Diego certainly he felt at home among the educational activities. In fact, he kind of wanted to take some of the items home with him, like a sample of baby mountain lion fur.
“It’s super-duper soft because I want to snuggle with it in my bed," Diego said.
In addition to programming in Spanish, the National Park Service is also working on translating more of their signage into different languages. It’s on ongoing effort and so is the campaign to let all Angelenos know about the incredible resource.
“Because a lot of people don’t know – especially people from L.A. – that their closest national park is within at least hours drive," Lopez said.
A short enough distance to make the mountains your home away from home.
Rick Smith
Asheville (NC) Citizen-Times
Thursday, September 19, 2019 4:23 p.m. ET
NPS report: Blue Ridge Parkway ranger should be permanently removed from law enforcement
Karen Chávez, Asheville Citizen Times
ASHEVILLE - A rare National Park Service Board of Inquiry, convened to investigate serious misconduct by agency employees, recommended that a Blue Ridge Parkway supervisory ranger should no longer be a law enforcement officer after his arrest on drug charges. And his supervisors agreed.
The board of inquiry stemmed from Greg Wozniak’s arrest on drug possession charges June 12, 2018, in Knoxville, Tennessee, while he was off duty.
The investigation of Wozniak, 46, District Ranger for the parkway’s Pisgah District, which includes the Asheville corridor, was completed March 15. The Citizen Times received the report Sept. 17, six months after it was requested under the Freedom of Information Act.
Although the arrest was expunged from his record, Wozniak’s supervisors found the incident to be serious enough to warrant immediate suspension of his law enforcement duties, according to the documents.
However, Blue Ridge Parkway Chief Ranger Neal Labrie told the Citizen Times on Sept. 18 that he could not comment on whether Wozniak’s commission had actually been revoked.
He said Wozniak continues to work on the parkway in a non-law enforcement capacity, performing administrative and maintenance functions, including cleaning up and reorganizing the firearms range and performing road safety audits.
According to official documents, Wozniak's annual salary is $88,050.
Labrie said Wozniak will maintain that salary while he retains the job title description for Pisgah District ranger. Two different district rangers have been performing his law enforcement and supervisory functions since June 2018.
Agreement with Board of Inquiry findings
According to emails also requested through FOIA, Labrie and Parkway Superintendent J.D. Lee both agreed with the Board of Inquiry’s findings and moved ahead with paperwork to have Wozniak’s law enforcement commission revoked.
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“Federal employees have a right to due process, and there’s no timeline to that," Labrie said. "That process has to work through several level and procedures,” which could include appeals.
RELATED: Parkway ranger remains on desk duty a year after arrest
Wozniak did not respond to a reporter’s question on whether he had filed an appeal.
Labrie ordered a temporary suspension of Wozniak’s law enforcement commission the day after his arrest and also sought an investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, which performs internal investigations.
Wozniak, who has worked at the parkway since 2014 and has been a permanent law enforcement ranger at several national park sites across the country since 1996, has been assigned to desk duty since the June 2018 incident.
Wozniak, who worked in Great Smoky Mountains National Park from 2001-09, had been in charge of all law enforcement, visitor protection, and search and rescue operations along the parkway’s Pisgah District, which runs from Milepost 305 at the U.S. 221 entrance in Linville to the parkway’s southern terminus in Cherokee.
The district includes one of the busiest stretches of the scenic roadway through Asheville, north to Craggy Gardens and south to the Mount Pisgah area.
There are 28 law enforcement rangers, including supervisors, charged with patrolling the 469 miles of parkway, which is the second-most visited unit in the National Park Service with 14.7 million visitors in 2018.
Drinking and doing drugs with friends
According to the OPR report, which was conducted a month after Wozniak’s arrest, on the night of June 12, 2018, Wozniak collided with another vehicle near the I-40 on-ramp on North Hall of Fame Drive in Knoxville. Both vehicles were totaled and needed to be towed.
There were no other witnesses to the crash, and both drivers claimed they had the right of way, the report states, and Wozniak “had been drinking” although no blood-alcohol test was taken by Officer Trisha Ward of the Knoxville Police Department, who investigated the incident.
Wozniak was arrested on two counts of simple possession/casual exchange. The arrest report shows he was jailed on $1,000 bail. Criminal charges were dropped on July 20, 2018, and the arrest was expunged from his record. Repeated calls to the Knoxville Police Department asking why the arrest was expunged, or erased, were not returned.
The NPS Office of Professional Responsibility report states that in a voluntary interview on July 12, 2018, Wozniak admitted to smoking marijuana earlier the evening of June 12, 2018, and purchasing the marijuana and illegal mushrooms in a parking lot, from a friend of a friend, whom he had never met before.
He also admitted that after the two-vehicle accident, he threw the drugs, which were in a tackle box, “over the guardrail into the bushes” when he panicked. The driver with whom he collided witnessed Wozniak disposing of the tackle box and told the police. They retrieved it and found inside 10.1 grams of marijuana, 6.1 grams of mushrooms and six THC gummy edibles, according to the arrest report.
Wozniak also claimed to not have used any illegal drugs “probably since college,” which was “25 years ago.”
Wozniak said he also had been drinking with his friend that night. The Knoxville Police Department crash report, written by Ward, states he had been drinking but no field sobriety tests were taken.
Knoxville PD did not respond to a request for explanation of why no blood-alcohol tests were administered.
Wozniak did not appear to have had any drug test until June 25, 2018, nearly two weeks after his arrest. Those tests came back negative for illegal drugs.
When asked by the investigator if he immediately showed his National Park Service law enforcement badge to the police officers on scene, Wozniak said he did not. He said he didn’t mention he was a law enforcement officer until he was in custody.
The OPR report, completed in August 2018, found that Wozniak violated the Department of the Interior's Code of Conduct with his arrest on drug charges.
Once the OPR report was completed, the park requested a Board of Inquiry through the National Park Service Washington Office. A Board of Inquiry is convened to make recommendations relating to whether a commissioned employee should be allowed to maintain an NPS law enforcement commission.
What the Board of Inquiry found
The Board of Inquiry was convened March 6 in Washington, D.C.
According to Kathy Kupper, National Park Service spokeswoman in Washington, there are fewer than 10 boards of inquiry convened each year.
The BOI was comprised of five members, including members of the U.S. Park Police, a national park superintendent from Virginia, an NPS security chief and a human resources specialist.
The report found Wozniak violated federal law in the use of illegal drugs, violated the executive order on a drug-free workplace and also failed to comply with the tenets of the law enforcement code of conduct.
The report noted some other aspects of Wozniak’s case, including:
“When Ranger Wozniak requested to purchase drugs from his friend’s dealer, his friend, without hesitation, agreed to set up a drug deal. Question: ‘He didn’t hesitate at all that you’re federal law enforcement?’ Answer: ‘Nah, I think we’ve just been friends for a while.’”
“Ranger Wozniak conducted a drug deal in a parking lot with an individual he had just met. Ranger Wozniak purchased approximately 10 grams of marijuana, 6 grams of mushrooms and 6 edible THC gummies.”
The report states that these facts were “inexcusable for a law enforcement officer. The Board found the explanations given by Ranger Wozniak on how he first used marijuana with his friend, how the drug transaction occurred, and his lack of a plan on how to use the drugs problematic. The Board also struggled with Ranger Wozniak’s decision to attempt to hide the drugs from law enforcement prior to their arrival at his motor vehicle crash.”
The report also found it “troubling” that Wozniak went from using marijuana with a friend of 15 years, who he claimed had never used drugs, to purchasing drugs from his friend’s dealer. In the OPR investigation, Wozniak claimed he had not used drugs since college, more than 20 years earlier.
“It was the Board’s opinion that Ranger Wozniak’s actions violated the code of conduct and impaired the efficiency of the National Park Service by irrevocably damaging his ability to enforce laws and regulations,” the report stated.
The parkway’s Labrie said he could not say that these findings would necessarily preclude Wozniak from holding a non-law enforcement position with the National Park Service.
“Speaking in general applicability, anyone that commits a federal or state crime, the commission of those crimes and or outcomes of the judgments would not be per se reasons for removal or the inability to have a job at some level at some time,” Labrie said. “That’s for Office of Personnel Management to determine. They’re not necessarily a screen-out.”
Labrie said that Ranger Chuck Hester has been serving in an acting position as the Pisgah District ranger and will do so for the “next couple of weeks.”
After that, he said he is not committed to paying for another acting district ranger, and Wozniak’s responsibilities will be distributed among other district rangers and the deputy chief ranger, Debra Flowers.
“Our work in the field remains committed to the mission we signed up for. Individual changes or lapses in staffing or incidents that occur to individual officers or rangers do not reflect or address any changes to the work we do each day,” Labrie said when questioned if the public should be wary of the park’s law enforcement operation.
“They remain committed to the mission and continue to doing an outstanding job.”
Rick Smith
Minnesota Public Radio
Sunday, September 22, 2019 1:39 p.m.
Pipestone National Monument to stop sale of pipes on park grounds
Beginning later this year, pipes will no longer be sold at Pipestone National Monument in southwestern Minnesota.
The move is the culmination of decades of contention and several years of more-formal talks about whether to continue selling pipes made from the quarries at Pipestone — spiritual objects carved from what many Native American tribes consider sacred ground.
Faith Spotted Eagle is chairperson of the Ihanktonwan Treaty Steering Committee and a member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe. She called pipestone “the blood of our people,” and said the decision to stop selling pipes at the monument is “a generational decision” that was the answer to decades of prayer.
Formal government-to-government discussions among the National Park Service and Native American tribes started in 2013. It’s a complex issue; selling the pipes carved from pipestone supports Native American craftspeople, but others argue that the sacred pipestone should not be sold.
Referring to past efforts to eliminate Native American language and culture — including government actions that took away control of the pipestone quarries — Spotted Eagle said “the paradox is that a place like that which deleted our presence there in the 1892 agreement began to sell pipes. … It was so hypocritical to us and so hard to fathom, with our grieving of the loss of that sacred place.”
She called the decision to end pipe sales on park grounds “a day of celebration that we have someone from the Park Service that can understand that we have a right to grieve what was lost and that we have been heard, that we don't want our sacred items to be sold.”
Under the new policy, pipestone carving will continue as part of the national monument’s cultural demonstration program, giving Native American craftspeople a chance to share their work and history with visitors. The store at the park, operated by the Pipestone Indian Shrine Association, will offer small pipestone crafts with background information on their significance.
The store operators will open a second location in downtown Pipestone, off park grounds and away from the quarries, where pipes carved from pipestone may continue to be sold.
“Ultimately we came to understand that the decision to carry a pipe is a deeply personal, cultural, spiritual responsibility — and that the National Park Service doesn’t have a role in that,” said Lauren Blacik, superintendent of the Pipestone National Monument.
“It’s a complex issue because there are so many different perspectives involved. It was by no means a clear-cut answer,” Blacik said.
She said one of the most important roles of park officials in the process was simply to listen. Monument staff regularly consult with 23 federally recognized tribes on a number of different topics.
“Consulting with tribal nations is a very important part of our management processes, and especially at a place like Pipestone National Monument, where we protect a site that is sacred to so many people and has been for thousands of years,” Blacik said. “It’s very important that tribes have a significant voice in those management decisions.”
The new policy was reached by consensus; not everyone was fully satisfied. Spotted Eagle said she’d like to see the sale of all pipestone objects — not just pipes — to end at the monument.
But she said the decision still represents a victory for generations of Native Americans who have had concerns about how the site is managed.
“We are thankful to all the people that have passed on that didn’t get to witness this,” she said. “But I'm sure they know it in the spirit world, so it is a celebration for them.”
Rick Smith
US News & World Report
Monday, September 23, 2019, at 11:05 a.m.
Lawsuit Over Politically 'Slanted' Trump Wildlife Board Can Proceed: U.S. Judge
By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal judge has rejected the Trump administration's bid to dismiss a lawsuit by animal rights groups seeking to dissolve a wildlife advisory board they said was stacked with politically connected donors and pro-hunting enthusiasts.
U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan said on Monday that the administration has not shown that its International Wildlife Conservation Council served the public interest, having justified it with "boilerplate" language rather than the required "reasoned explanation."
She said the plaintiffs could try to prove that the 17-person board was not "fairly balanced" to incorporate different points of view, reflecting what they called its lack of scientists, economists and wildlife conservation experts.
A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman in Manhattan, whose office defended the government, declined to comment.
The lawsuit was filed in August 2018 by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Humane Society of the United States, and Humane Society International.
These groups said the wildlife board created in November 2017 by then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was "slanted" to promote "trophy hunting" and the importing of body parts from "imperiled species" such as African elephants, lions and rhinos.
They also said the board violated a federal law curbing White House use of "secretive" advisory panels to set national policy, and caused harm by forcing them to divert resources to monitoring the board.
"The Trump administration has provided no reason for creating a trophy hunting council, stacking it with big game profiteers and operating it behind closed doors," the groups' lawyers from Democracy Forward said. "We will press forward in our efforts to shut down this illegal committee for good."
In seeking a dismissal, the administration had said the groups lacked standing to sue, having suffered at most a setback to their "abstract social interests," and could not litigate what was essentially a policy disagreement.
Nathan dismissed one claim involving a recordkeeping issue.
Zinke resigned as interior secretary last December. He had said the wildlife board would advise on the benefits of recreational hunting, including "boosting economies and creating hundreds of jobs to enhancing wildlife conservation."
U.S. President Donald Trump's adult sons are trophy hunters.
Rick Smith
Greenwire (Washington, DC)
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
| |
Jennifer Yachnin, E&E News reporter |
The Bureau of Land Management's acting chief, William Perry Pendley, has recused himself from the legal battle over the Trump administration's cuts to the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the Interior Department's Ethics Office revealed in newly filed court documents.
Organizations suing over President Trump's decision to slash the size of the southwestern Utah monument pressed for Pendley's formal withdrawal earlier this month, pointing to his previous legal work on the case.
During his time as president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, Pendley represented two Utah counties who intervened on behalf of the Trump administration to defend the reductions.
In a response filed yesterday, the Justice Department disclosed documents showing that Pendley has not participated in either litigation or in the planning process for the shrunken monument, including a final management plan released last month.
A Sept. 20 letter from Departmental Ethics Office Director Scott de la Vega said that Pendley signed a recusal agreement prohibiting him from involvement on issues such as litigation, permits, leases or grants that are related to his former foundation or its clients.
"As a result, he has not participated in the litigation ... or the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument planning process since joining the BLM," de la Vega wrote. "He has not requested a waiver under the Ethics Pledge or an authorization from the [Departmental Ethics Office] to participate in either matter."
The Trump administration's ethics pledge prohibits political appointees from interacting with previous employers or clients for a two-year period.
In his reply, DOJ Environment and Natural Resources Division attorney Romney Philpott also criticized plaintiffs for calling for Pendley's recusal and publishing their letter to the Ethics Office.
"It is unclear why the ... plaintiffs believed it necessary or appropriate to file their Informational Notice," Philpott wrote, referring to documents filed earlier this month.
Rick Smith
Salt Lake (UT) Tribune
Tuesday, October 1, 2019
Eco-groups sue feds, allege that Glen Canyon Dam plan ignores climate change
By Brian Maffly bma...@sltrib.com
Lake Powell’s long decline may be on hiatus after this year’s snowy winter, but activists still are raising concerns that climate change could render Glen Canyon Dam inoperable.
This time, they are taking their concerns to court, asking a federal judge to invalidate the federal Bureau of Reclamation’s 20-year operating plan for the towering dam that impounds the lake because it fails to account for shrinking flows on the Colorado Riverand “conceals” the risks that trend poses for the 40 million people who rely on the river for water.
“Precipitation in North America is now coming more in the form of rain than it is snowpack, but our entire water-delivery system, especially for almost every community in the western United States is premised on having a snowpack, and the snowpack will melt, and there’ll be water available for the summer months,” said Dan Beard, former commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation. “Now that’s changing. As a result, they really have an obligation to take climate change into consideration.”
Beard, author of “Deadbeat Dams: Why We Should Abolish the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and Tear Down Glen Canyon Dam,” is a board member of Save the Colorado, one of the groups that sued the Interior Department on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Arizona.
Beard’s group is joined by the Center for Biological Diversity and Moab-based Living Rivers in the suit asking the court to invalidate the bureau’s 2016 environmental study and order a new analysis, this time with dam removal as an alternative. Called the Long-Term Experimental and Management Plan, or LTEMP, the document updates the dam’s 1996 operating plan, with an eye toward maximizing electricity generation, meeting needs of downstream water users and protecting the environment inside the Grand Canyon.
“The Department chose not to fully consider several alternatives, such as Run-of-the-River, Decommissioning the Dam, and Fill Lake Mead First, which would better serve the Colorado River and its millions of users in [the] face of climate change impacts,” contends the suit, which is being handled by pro bono lawyers from the Earthrise Law Center in Portland. “For more than a decade, concerns regarding climate change impacts on declining surface water flows have occupied water management discussions and have been a major subject of scientific inquiry within the Colorado River Basin.”
Last year, lake levels approached historic lows at both Lake Powell and its downstream partner, Lake Mead, before rebounding, thanks to heavy runoff last spring from a damp winter. Long-term projections, however, indicate flows will continue to contract as the climate warms, Beard and others warn.
A Bureau of Reclamation spokesman declined to comment, citing an agency prohibition on discussing pending litigation, but the agency has addressed Save the Colorado’s arguments in publicly available documents.
According to Reclamation’s environmental impact statement, the agency relied on flow projections developed in 2012, which it concluded will remain relevant over the 20-year life of the dam’s operating plan. The plan spells out hourly, daily and monthly release patterns. The environmental review concluded flow uncertainties associated with climate change would not have influenced the agency’s final decision.
"That analysis did not evaluate the complete loss of power generation at Glen Canyon Dam, because decommissioning the dam would not meet the purpose, need, and objectives of the LTEMP," the agency wrote in response to Save the Colorado's comments submitted during the environmental review.
In past interviews, Reclamation officials said Lake Powell plays a vital role in storing water from the Colorado River. The reservoir marks the boundary between the river’s Upper and Lower basins; without it, officials said, the Upper Basin would not have been able to consistently meet its obligations to the Lower Basin.
“We are claiming that there won’t be enough water to release anything, and they blew off the climate-change predictions,” replied Gary Wockner, Save the Colorado’s executive director.
This year, the dam is expected to release 9 million acre-feet of water. The elevation of Lake Powell at the end of August was 3,619 feet above seal level, or 81 feet below “full pool,” holding 13.6 million acre-feet, which is 56% full. That’s up 48 feet from late last year, when it was at 38% capacity.
The environmental groups’ chief complaint is the agency relied exclusively on “historic” inflow data, without considering the lower flows climate-change models forecast. Instead of studying structural changes the groups argue are needed to preserve the Colorado River, the bureau is relying on incremental fixes, such as the recently adopted Drought Contingency Plan, as it hobbles from one crisis to the next.
Some models indicate Powell could fall below the level needed for producing power, and it would reach “dead pool,” at 3,370 feet, under the driest scenario. The suit contends this failure skewed the operating plan toward a “business as usual” approach that may not be sustainable much longer.
“We must throw ‘incrementalism’ out of the toolbox, take climate science seriously, and plan for so-called ‘Black Swan’ drought events on the Colorado River,” said Wockner, referring to the theory developed by scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A black swan is an event that comes as a surprise and carries astonishing consequences but in hindsight seemed predictable.
Denny Hufman
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