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Why the Indian Ocean Tsunami Was So Deadly

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Can Homesteading Save the Planet? - The House & Homestead

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Can homesteading save the planet? Learn how living a more self-sufficient, sustainable lifestyle can help you create a better, healthier world.

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10 reasons why you should go on a camping trip

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Whether you're an experienced RVer or off on your first tent camping trip, there are many reasons why camping is great. From learning about nature and the stars to learning about yourself, camping will take you much further than you ever thought you would go.

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Channel Islands of California, California, USA

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Animal Conservation: American Bald Eagle

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Animal Conservation: American Bald Eagle

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Return Flight: Restoring the Bald Eagle to the Channel Islands

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Birds of prey, also known as raptors, are species of birds that feed almost entirely on meat that they hunt. A new report shows that these birds are dropping in number worldwide.

Researchers from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and BirdLife International studied 557 raptor species. They found that 167 of the bird species are considered near threatened, vulnerable or endangered or critically endangered. Their study also reported that 18 species are critically endangered, including the Philippine eagle, the hooded vulture and the Annobon scops owl.

Gerardo Ceballos is a bird scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He was one of the writers of the study, which appeared earlier this month in the publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He noted that other species are in danger of becoming locally extinct in some areas of the world. That means they may no longer play important parts as top hunters in those environments.

"The golden eagle is the national bird of Mexico, but we have very few golden eagles left in Mexico," he said. A 2016 study estimated only about 200 remain in the country.

Harpy eagles were once widespread throughout southern Mexico and Central and South America. But tree cutting and burning has greatly decreased their range.

The study found that 54 percent of threatened birds of prey that are active mostly during the day - including most hawks, eagles and vultures -were falling in population. The same was true for 47 percent of threatened raptors active mostly at night, such as owls.

Evan Buechley is a researcher at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and a scientist at nonprofit HawkWatch International. He was not involved in the study. He said the biggest threats to birds of prey are habitat loss, climate change and poisonous substances.

The insect-killing substance DDT thinned eggshells and destroyed bald eagle populations in North America, leading to its ban in the U.S. in 1972. But Buechley said other threats remain, including rodent-killing substances and the lead in hunters' ammunition.

Many raptors feed on rodents and dead animals.

Widespread use of a drug used in farm animals led to the fast decline of vultures in South Asia. The birds died after eating animal remains, which decreased the population of some species by 95 percent in recent decades.

In East Asia, many raptor species reproduce in northern China, Mongolia or Russia. They then travel down the eastern coast of China to spend summers in Southeast Asia or India.

"Certain areas of the coast will see 30 to 40 species during peak migration," said Yang Liu. He is an ecologist at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou and was not involved in the study.

He said that areas with thousands of birds passing through them "are important to protect."

Stuart Butchart is chief scientist at BirdLife International in Britain. He said that most of the 4,200 areas identified by conservation groups as critical for raptor species worldwide "are unprotected or only partly covered by protected areas."

A 2018 study in the publication Biological Conservation found that 52 percent of all raptor species worldwide are decreasing in population.

I'm Jonathan Evans.
Christina Larson reported on this story for the Associated Press. Jonathan Evans adapted this story for Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor.
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Words in This Story

species - n. a group of animals or plants that are similar and can produce young animals or plants; a group of related animals or plants that is smaller than a genus

vulnerable - adj. open to attack, harm, or damage

endangered - adj. close to becoming extinct

extinct - adj. no longer existing

range - n. the region throughout which a kind of organism or ecological community naturally lives or occurs

habitat - n. the place or environment where a plant or animal naturally or normally lives and grows

rodent - n. a small animal such as a mouse, rat, squirrel, or beaver that has sharp front teeth

decline - n. to become lower in amount or less in number

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Birds of Prey in Decline with Loss of Habitat

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Birds of prey, also known as raptors, are species of birds that feed almost entirely on meat that they hunt. A new report shows that these birds are dropping in number worldwide. Researchers from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and BirdLife International studied 557 raptor species.

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The photo shows an "inquisitive adult male giant otter approaching the boat. While some individuals are remarkably fearless and will approach to within several yards of the boat, the mood of the group is determined by the breeding female. If she feels threatened the group will normally 'periscope' and disappear," according to Biodiversity Report on Rewa Head. Photo by Robert Pickles.

Anaconda found in Rewa Head. Photo by Ashley Holland.

The jaguar is classified as Near Threatened: a previous six-week expedition to Rewa Head observed ten jaguars. Photo by: Ashley Holland and Gordon Duncan.

World's largest spider, the goliath bird-eating spider , from Guyana's interior. Photo by: Gordon Duncan.

According to biodiversity report: "In the dry season huge sandy beaches are exposed in the Lower Rewa, providing a nesting ground for giant South American river turtles (Podocnemis expansa). The superabundance of eggs laid in these sand banks is a boon which many forest species time their breeding cycle to coincide with." Photo by Ashley Holland.

Brazilian tapir photographed 10ft from the expedition boat. The Brazilian tapir is classified as Vulnerable. Photo by: Robert Pickles.

Schneider's dwarf caiman . Photo by: Niall McCann.

"Hand-axe sharpening grooves and geometric designs below Corona Falls on the River Rewa testify to the fact that there were once indigenous people inhabiting this area," according to Biodiversity report. Photo by: Rob Pickles.

Logging and oil concession in Rewa Head. Map courtesy of Mike Robert Pickles.

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Guyana bans gold mining in the 'Land of the Giants'

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Guyana has banned gold dredging in the Rewa Head region of the South American country after pressure from Amerindian communities. A recent expedition to Rewa Head turned up unspoiled wilderness and mind-boggling biodiversity. The researchers, in just six weeks, stumbled on the world's largest snake (anaconda), spider (the aptly named goliath bird-eating spider), armadillo (the [...]

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A guerilla gardener in South Central LA | Ron Finley

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Alternative Living: Living Off the Land in Hawaii

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Alternative Living: Living Off the Land in Hawaii

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Living Off the Land in Hawaii | Explorer

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Amazon Rainforest - Codajás, State of Amazonas, Brazil

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If safari's history is rooted in hunting, cameras have replaced the gun. Few destinations appear on travel bucket lists as much as the exploration of African parks. Seeing animals in their natural habitat is an awe-inspiring experience, laden with expectation and, rightly or wrongly, it remains one of the most enticing reasons to visit Africa. But is it ethical?

The background of safari is strongly interwoven with hunting; shooting trophy animals such as elephants or lions were considered as high status with colonialists - and consequently Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Clark Gable and Robert Redford - as a luxury yacht is Philip Green. There is, of course, a tasteless repulsiveness in swathes of white men roaming a country that didn't belong to them, killing their animals, while the locals carried their belongings.

"If safari's history is rooted in hunting, cameras have replaced the gun"

Now, in an era where we are more environmentally conscious than ever before, the idea of killing animals for entertainment repels us, and the idea behind safari has evolved. But the idea of it as a fantasy still stands. We still wear the same colonial-inspired khaki garb of our predecessors and we expect, over the course of our dream holiday, to see an animal. Instead of pointing a gun at an animal, we wave our phones and long lens cameras at them.

The former obviously has a more devastating effect than the other, but we are still hunting. We track them through jungles on foot, or we follow them in open-top jeeps with binoculars. We surround them with iPhones as they eat or climb up trees, or sleep with their families. In Africa, we become the paparazzi.

"There's a gut instinct because to be up close to any of these beautiful animals is awe-inspiring, and it's something people 10 years ago wouldn't have even questioned," says Peta's Corporate Project Director Yvonne Taylor. "But now, people are questioning, 'was that right? Why were those animals so happy to sit there and have their photos taken?' It's a question of how did that animal become so relaxed around its predator."

Animal tracking - be it gorillas, lions or wild dogs - has risen with tourism's demand for a more authentic travel experience. Tourists in small groups join guides and rangers in natural parks, jungle and forests to follow animals that have been habituated, ie tamed to be comfortable around humans. Peta reports the number of companies offering activities that use animals as entertainment has fallen, but that tracking could fall under the same umbrella.

"It's not only unnatural, but it's also unsafe to habituate an animal," says Taylor. "These are wild animals; no matter how long they've been in captivity or have been around humans, they still retain a natural instinct. Even animals who have been born and bred in captivity can still attack or kill people in these facilities. This is not something working in their best interest. If the animal's best interest is to live and full and natural life in the wild, it's not to try and have them accustomed to human behaviour so that tourists can take selfies."

"If the animal's best interest is to live a full life in the wild, it's not to try and accustom them to human behaviour so that tourists can take selfies"

Another challenge facing wildlife safari is the risk that the animals have in contracting human illnesses. While, in the case of game drives, humans are kept at a distance from the animals, some organisations offer activities where visitors can take up close-up pictures with them, and sometimes even touching them. There have been examples where docile lions posing with humans were found to have been drugged, or elephants who have been tamed via "spirit crushing means", as Taylor says, but - as safari companies become more ethical in terms of animal treatment - one if the key issues is how to prevent the wildlife from contracting human illnesses.

Bwindi Field Office Manager and Community Health Field Officer Alex Ngabirano, who has been working in the Ugandan field for 12 years, says it's certainly a problem that needs to be addressed.

"Due to close genetic relatedness, gorillas are at risk of contracting human pathogens," he told us, adding that tourists are not permitted to track gorillas when they're sick. "Common colds are among the illnesses and that's why we recommend at least to keep seven metres away while viewing gorillas."

The ethics of safari isn't a clear-cut issue. Both Taylor and Ngabirano agree that responsible safari tourism is crucial to animal protection and survival, and vastly improves the economy of local communities. Ngabirano also stresses that animal habituation, specifically in gorillas, is a sensitively handled issue that takes place over the course of a year. The animals are left in their natural surroundings, and pursue their lives in the most natural way possible.

"Habituation is a process," he says, "whereby the gorillas are slowly tamed to generate revenue for sustainability of conservation. It also improves the livelihoods of communities living around protected forests."

Ultimately, he says, it comes down to whether or not tourists abide by protocol - staying the advised distance from the wildlife, avoiding flash photography, avoiding human contact, keeping a low voice and only spending a limited hour with any animal so as not to cause them any stress. Small groups are also advised to prevent stress - the Uganda Wildlife Authority recommends only eight tourists for tracking a gorilla family each day "as to manage their anxiety levels".

The impact that safari has on national African economies cannot be underestimated. Travel and tourism - largely driven by safari - in Africa is booming, growing 5.6% in 2018 compared to the global average of 3.9% and the broader African economy rate of 3.2%. This places Africa as the second-fastest growing tourism region behind only Asia-Pacific. In Uganda alone, tourism accounted for 10 per cent of the GDP.

Praveen Moman, who grew up in Uganda, established Volcanoes Safaris in 1997, four luxury lodges in Rwanda and Uganda near the great ape parks, Virunga, Mount Gahinga, Bwindi and Kyambura. His goal was to use tourism to boost and empower local communities, as well as conserving and protecting the wildlife.

"If these animals in the forest or savannah do not have economic value, then why should anyone support their existence?"

He says that without the economic benefits of safari tourism, then local communities are unlikely to see the advantages of looking after the animals, especially when they so often roam into neighbouring villages and eat from their farms, and therefore damaging their livelihoods.

"If you are going to try to save the plains, savannahs and the wildlife of Africa, you have to connect then to an economic value," he explained. "People like us, who are privileged in the world, who are able to buy a gorilla permit, or a game drive are helping those parks. That money will directly and indirectly go back to those communities.

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"If these animals in the forest or savannah do not have economic value, then why should anyone support their existence?" he posits. "We can support it because we're privileged, but it's a luxury to be able to do that. Local people and governments do not have that privilege. Unless you link it to the economic supply chain, the local community might say, 'this park is an inconvenience to us, let's clear the bush and use it for local farming. If we can farm, we can afford to feed our kids.' It's deeply important these things produce money for local people."

He also added that the animal safari has led to a fall in poaching, which often stems from poverty. "If you have limited amounts of money and you want meat and the beef in the market is x amount of dollars or x pounds a kilo, and you can kill a hippo, buffalo or something, yourself it'll be much cheaper. Animals can feed you," he says. "Higher up the chain, if you are connected to ivory smuggling for example, it can produce a lot of money. Tourism connects the wildlife and the area to the wealth of the world. International tourists come, they pay money to go on a game drive and to enter a park, they stay in a lodge nearby, the lodge employs local people... If you don't have that, then the temptation is to look for other ways of finding value from those animals."

"It's very important to connect to the community and not to just have luxury ghettos"

A percentage of every gorilla permit sold in Uganda and Rwanda (and prices ranch from $700 and $1500 depending on what country you're in), goes towards the local community and the remainder goes back in the respective government, who in turn look after the parks, pay the rangers, anti-poaching patrols, fund any community work and park management.

"If you left the gorillas in the jungle without habituation, and without economic value, would they survive?" asks Moman. "This is where conservation has to pay for itself. If it's isn't and you just put it on a pedestal, the animals' survival is questionable."

The benefits of safari tourism on the locals runs beyond making money. Many lodges run community projects that empower and offer career opportunities for nearby residents. Volcanoes Safaris, for example, runs a bar and restaurant in the neighbouring village, attached to its Bwindi outpost, which serves as a hospitality training institution for local disadvantaged youths.

At its Kyambura Lodge, Volcanoes operates a women's coffee cooperative, a community-based initiative designed to provide vocational training to women and an alternative, but sustainable, source of income, as well as a café that employs local youths, both male and female, who are disadvantaged as a result of the loss of parents, HIV/AIDS, or physical or mental disabilities. The company also restored the local wetlands, which was previously used as an illegal brick works, now attracting over 200 species of birds, different mammals and primates. It's also used to train members of the community in birding and guiding.

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

"It's very important to connect to the community and not to just have luxury ghettos," he says. We don't want to build things that are separate from our world. We want to be connected to it and that means people and animals. We've seen a number of people who come up within our own management and some whom have gone onto university or the children of staff who have onto university. Advancement has happened in terms of being connected to local lodges."

Ultimately, it comes down to doing your research. Peta's Taylor says steer clear of any companies that guarantee seeing animals up close.

"No reputable establishment that gives animals anything close to a normal life would ever make promises like that," she says. "Photo opportunities with animals, giving them rides or bathing with animals - these aren't normal activities for animals, even ones born in captivity. So, before you visit an establishment, make sure you look at the activities they offer and at comments on what other animal organisations or media outlets have reported about the park."

"Read online information carefully and always choose established operators," says Moman. "Ask why some drives are so much cheaper than another? Be responsible."
Three nights at Volcanoes Safaris Kyambura Gorge and three nights at Bwindi Lodge including a gorilla trek, chimp trek and Kazinga Channel Boat cruise including all meals, drinks, transfers, internal flights and international flights on Kenya Airways from Heathrow would cost from £5,300 per person with Africa Odyssey. Like this article? Sign up to our new newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox.

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If safari's history is rooted in hunting, cameras have replaced the gun. Few destinations appear on travel bucket lists as much as the exploration of African parks. Seeing animals in their natural habitat is an awe-inspiring experience, laden with expectation and, rightly or wrongly, it remains one of the most enticing reasons to visit Africa.

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Social media has opened a portal to the world's most out-there destinations as more and more people share the extraordinary places they visit. This is sowing the seed of exploration in many of us where perhaps it hadn't lurked before, and the travel industry has reacted by opening up routes and giving us more choices than ever as to where to spend our vacations.

As a result, more and more of us are turning our backs on traditional beach or city breaks and instead opting for more experiential travel, visiting ever weirder and harder to reach places. The Darvaza gas crater deep in the wilderness of Turkmenistan is just such a place.

Variously and evocatively known as the Crater of Fire or the Gate to Hell, the Darvaza crater is a football pitch-sized natural gas crater that's been on fire continuously for more than 40 years. And it's quite a sight. Enough to have lured more than 50,000 visitors to its fiery edges over the past decade, helped by the fantastic wild camping in the surrounding Karakum Desert.

While questions remain over the validity of its 'gateway to hell' status, what we do know is that the crater was created in 1971 by a group of hapless Soviet geologists drilling for oil. Unbeknownst to them, they'd opted to drill into a huge cavern of natural gas which collapsed under the weight of their drilling equipment, plunging it but luckily not them into the depths beneath. The ensuing domino effect in the crumbly sedimentary rock ended with a series of craters pockmarking the landscape, the largest of which stretched 235 feet across and 66 feet deep.

Major disaster seemingly averted, the geologists soon discovered a new problem as the mass methane leak started killing off local Karakum Desert wildlife (methane itself isn't toxic, but it displaces oxygen and so makes it hard to breathe) and also posed a serious explosive risk. The solution then was to set the crater on fire and burn off the gas (a common practise in natural gas drilling, apparently, known as flaring) in a week or two. But no one knew how much gas was there or indeed where it was even coming from, and it's proved to be more than anyone could have imagined as the pit is still burning half a century on.

For a while the crater's future was at risk, as in 2010 the Turkmenistan president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow recommended it should be closed. Subsequently, in 2013, he declared the area where the crater is located in the Karakum Desert a nature reserve.

One of the great attractions is its absolute remoteness. You may see local Teke tribe members who make up most of the 350 people in nearby Darvaza village (Derweze in Turkmen), and even the odd yurt - but that's it. There are no roads and guided paths, no fences to protect at its edges, no souvenir shops and cafes - just desert and fire. The best time to visit is at night, when the flames spewing from thousands of individual gas leaks light the night sky for miles around in a spectacular and unique fire show.

Situated around 160 miles from the capital, Ashgabat, the nearest village with amenities is Erment, 50 miles away. You can organise solo tours with a decent off-road vehicle and a healthy sense of adventure, but an organised trip is a better and smoother option. Book on the ground with agents in Ashgabat or pre-book a tour with a recognised agent, like this one or that take in not only the Door to Hell, but also some of the other many wonders this extraordinary country offers.

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Take A Vacation To The Doorway To Hell -- Because You Can

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Social media has opened a portal to the world's most out-there destinations as more and more people share the extraordinary places they visit. This is sowing the seed of exploration in many of us where perhaps it hadn't lurked before, and the travel industry has reacted by opening up routes and giving us more choices than ever as to where to spend our vacations.

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Biological diversity, or "biodiversity," refers to variability found at all levels of biology. Biodiversity is commonly broken down into three levels or types: genetic diversity, species diversity, and ecosystem diversity. While these types of biodiversity are each interrelated, the forces driving each type of biodiversity vary.

Around the world, biodiversity at all levels is declining. While climate change certainly has a role in these losses, there are a number of other factors at play, as well. Today, scientists are working to better understand biodiversity, its tipping points, and ways to counteract losses.

Even if something catastrophic and unexpected occurs, like a disease that affects an entire species, genetically diverse populations are more likely to carry genetic code that leaves some members of the population less vulnerable. So long as those carrying the genetic benefit are able to reproduce, the disease resistance can be passed along to the next generation to keep the species going.

The Three Types of Biodiversity

Species, ecosystems, and the health of the planet all benefit when there is a lot of variability at each level of biodiversity. Greater biodiversity provides something of an insurance policy for the planet's environment; when disaster strikes, biodiversity can be essential to survival.

Genetic Diversity

Genetic diversity refers to the diversity of the gene pool of a given species, or diversity at the DNA level. Genetic diversity can be inferred from what an animal looks like, but is more accurately determined through direct assessments of a species' DNA.

Populations that are genetically diverse are well-equipped to handle change. For example, if a deadly disease strikes a population, high levels of genetic diversity increase the likelihood that there are members of the population who are less affected by the disease. By protecting a portion of the population, genetic diversity can prevent the population from going extinct.

Species Diversity

Species diversity is not only based on the number of different species present in a community, but also the relative abundance of each species and the role they have in the community. For example, a community may be composed of many different species, but may only have one predator that pursues a certain prey species. When the predator's population levels are healthy, its prey's population numbers remain at a level the community can handle.

However, if the predator's population suddenly shrinks, the prey species' population may explode in response leading it to overconsume its own prey and generate a ripple effect that shakes up the entire community. Instead, if a community has more species diversity, it may have multiple predators that chase the same prey. Then, if one predator population undergoes a sudden change, the community is protected from downstream destabilizing effects.

Ecosystem Diversity

Ecosystem diversity refers to variability in habitats within a geographic area. Unlike genetic diversity and species diversity, ecosystem diversity considers both biological drivers and non-biological drivers of variability, like temperature and sunlight. Areas high in ecosystem diversity create a geographic mosaic of communities that help protect an entire area from drastic changes.

For example, an area of dry vegetation may be susceptible to wildfire, but if it's surrounded by a diversity of less-sensitive ecosystems, the wildlife may be unable to spread to other areas of dry vegetation in the same year, leaving the species that make up the burned ecosystem a chance to move to an unscathed habitat while the burned land recovers. In this way, ecosystem diversity helps to maintain species diversity.

Biodiversity Agreements and Policies

To protect the three types of biodiversity, several policies and protocols are in place that function to prevent species and habitat destruction and foster genetic diversity.

The Convention of Biological Diversity

The Convention of Biological Diversity, also known as the Biodiversity Convention or CBD, is an international treaty between over 190 nations around the world for the international management of sustainable development. Specifically, the Convention of Biological Diversity seeks "the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources." The Biodiversity Convention was signed in June 1992 and went into effect at the end of the following year.

The Convention of Biological Diversity's governing body is the Conference of Parties, or COP. All 196 nations that have ratified the treaty meet every two years to set priorities and commit to work plans. In recent years, the COP meetings have primarily focused on climate change.

The Cartagena Protocol is a supplementary agreement to the Convention of Biological Diversity that went into effect in 2003. The Cartagena Protocol specifically aims to regulate the movements of living organisms modified by modern technology, like genetically modified plants, for safety purposes.

A second supplementary agreement, the Nagoya Protocol, was adopted in 2010 to provide a clear legal framework for equitable sharing of genetic resources between participating nations to help with the conservation of global biodiversity. The Nagoya Protocol also set a goal of cutting the 2010 extinction rate in half by 2020. Unfortunately, the research suggests the global rate of extinction has only increased since 2010.

The Endangered Species Act

On a domestic scale, the U.S. Endangered Species Act, or ESA, is a key federal policy for the protection of biodiversity. The ESA provides protections to species threatened with extinction and establishes species-specific recovery plans. As part of these endangered species recovery plans, the ESA works to restore and protect vital habitats.

Threats to Biodiversity

Even with policies in place, threats still persist and contribute to biodiversity losses.

Habitat Loss

Habitat loss is considered a primary cause of modern declines in global biodiversity. By clearing forests and building highways, human activities destroy what could be vital habitat to a variety of species, damaging ecosystem diversity. These landscape changes can also generate barriers between previously connected habitats, severely damaging ecosystem diversity. In addition to restoring habitat, efforts are underway to create wildlife corridors that reconnect habitats isolated by modern human development.

Invasive Species

Both intentionally and accidentally, humans have introduced species to new habitats around the world. While many introduced species go unnoticed, some become far too successful in their newfound homes with consequences for the biodiversity of the entire ecosystem. Given their ecosystem-shifting impacts, introduced species that dominate their new habitats are known as invasive species.

For example, in the Caribbean, the lionfish was accidentally introduced in the 1980s. In its native habitat in the Pacific, lionfish populations are regulated by predators, preventing lionfish from over-consuming smaller fish on a reef. However, in the Caribbean, the lionfish has no natural predators. As a result, lionfish are taking over reef ecosystems and threatening native species with extinction.

Given the ability of non-native species to damage biodiversity and cause native species to go extinct, regulations are in place to reduce the chance of accidentally introducing new species. In marine environments, regulating ships' ballast water may be essential to curbing marine invasions. Ships acquire ballast water before they depart a port, carrying the water and any species within it to the ship's next destination.

To prevent species within the water from taking over at the ship's next stop, regulations require ships to release their ballast water miles offshore where the environment differs greatly from where the water originally came from, making it unlikely any life within the water will be able to survive.

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3 Types of Biodiversity: Overview and Importance

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Biological diversity, or "biodiversity," refers to variability found at all levels of biology. Biodiversity is commonly broken down into three levels or types: genetic diversity, species diversity, and ecosystem diversity. While these types of biodiversity are each interrelated, the forces driving each type of biodiversity vary.

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Living With the Land: Bee Rescue/Keeping

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Living With the Land: Bee Rescue/Keeping

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Professional beekeeper Erika Thompson takes you inside the hive with exciting educational and instructional beekeeping videos.

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Outdoor Adventures: Zion National Park Overcrowding

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Outdoor Adventures: Zion National Park Overcrowding

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SALT LAKE CITY - With the COVID-19 pandemic driving so many people to the great outdoors in Utah, the great outdoors is becoming not so great in some instances.

At Zion National Park's Narrows, a ranger cleared out 14 pounds of debris - of which 9 pounds was human waste.

The ranger said he'd never seen the graffiti so egregious in an area covering just under a mile that was marred with more than 1,000 handprints or etchings on the rock walls.

"While it hurts to see such a beautiful and unique place treated like this, I feel honored I have the responsibility to protect it," the employee's report said.

Part of the problem was lack of ranger patrols for the canyon's Virgin River and people failing to heed signs to avoid the water due to high levels of toxins or cyanobacteria that can sicken people and domestic animals. The visiting public did not heed the signs to stay out and instead decided to leave their own print on the landscape protected under federal law.

The Narrows' condition was dismaying to leaders of The Zion Forever Project, the park's philanthropic partner.

"This year has challenged all of us, and places like Zion are essential to uplifting us in these difficult times. The Zion Forever Project, as the park's official nonprofit partner, works side by side with the National Park Service to conserve these lands," said Lyman Hafen, the project's executive director.

"When the land is mistreated or marred with graffiti, while devastating, we are only strengthened in our resolve to educate the public about responsible land use, and to ensure the Zion experience remains intact for future generations."

National park officials, state park managers, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management all have been overwhelmed this year with dramatic increases in visitation while at the same time tasked with caring for the land with flat budgets or even a bottom line that has seen sharp reductions.

Bureau of Land Management

Cedar Breaks National Monument, as an example, saw a 35% increase in visitors from 2019 to 2020, and visitation at Zion National Park has more than doubled in the last decade.

While some land managers or volunteer conservation organizations offer wag bags for people - a zip-lock bag to contain feces for proper disposal later - visitors often ignore them or supplies quickly run out.

Even bathrooms at the base of popular hiking trails in the Wasatch Canyons, for example, can become quickly overwhelmed with land managers struggling to keep toilet paper supplies on hand.

Like their counterparts at the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management is seeing similar resource degradation this year due to high visitor counts.

"We do not have any statistics to verify our observations, but we have noted that some of the resource issues associated with high visitation, such as improperly disposed human waste and litter, have been more widespread than normal this year on public lands," said BLM Utah spokeswoman Kimberly Finch.

This fall, the agency launched a new social media campaign to help drive awareness of taking better care of public lands.

Bureau of Land Management

The campaign uses the hashtag #leaveitbetterUtah to address some of what BLM employees are seeing on the ground.

Multiple social media postings detail dumpsters surrounded by litter on the ground, abandoned campsites full of discarded belongings or campfire rings filled to the brim with debris, all of which can cost thousands to clean up.

Earlier this year the BLM discovered an abandoned camper vehicle with household trash on public lands in southern Utah.

The federal agency tracked down the owner, who was charged with hazardous materials dumping and other related offenses.

The bill for removing the abandoned camper came to approximately $13,000, and the suspect was fined and banned from public lands for a year due to being a repeat offender.

The issue of human waste is also a problem for the BLM, which discovered an illegal sewage dump on the lands it manages.

Improperly disposed of human waste is a health hazard, can contaminate water, spread disease and is just plain unsightly for the next visitor to come along.

Finch said fines start at $250 for illegal sewage disposal on BLM lands.

The website, gottagoutah.org offers information on how to properly dispose of human waste.

Bureau of Land Management

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Visiting Utah's public lands? Human feces, trash and debris may await you

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Graffiti and other types of vandalism have long been problems on Utah's public lands, but with the COVID-19 pandemic driving people in record numbers to the outdoors, human waste on trails and in rivers is posing a serious public health risk. One Zion National Park ranger recently cleared out 9 pounds of human feces in the Narrows.

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Man-Made Disasters: Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

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Man-Made Disasters: Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

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Earth Stories - Climate Change Documentaries

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The Devastating Environmental Impact Of BP's Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill | Earth Stories

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Alternative Living: Living in the Coldest Place on Earth

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Alternative Living: Living in the Coldest Place on Earth

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Life in the Coldest Place on Earth (-71°C, -96°F) Yakutia

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Rhinos are in A

AT THE START OF THE 20TH CENTURY

500,000

BY 1970, THE WORLDWIDE POPULATION FELL TO

70,000

TODAY, THE NUMBER OF RHINOS SURVIVING IN THE WORLD IS ONLY

28,000

WHITE RHINO

17,212 - 18,915

GREATER ONE HORNED RHINO

> 3,600

Black Rhino

5,366 - 5,627

Sumatran Rhino

< 80

Javan Rhino

74

4 of 5 species remaining Are
threatened with extinction

3 of those are critically
endangered, which means they
could go extinct in our lifetime

Why is this?

The reasons Why:

Record Poaching

In the last decade, poachers have killed almost 10,000 rhinos across Africa to feed the demand for horn on the black market.

If rhino deaths outpace births, their populations will continue to decline.

The reasons Why:

GROWING DEMAND FOR RHINO HORN

Burgeoning middle classes in China and Vietnam are increasingly able to afford rhino horn, which is illegally traded on the black market. This demand drives record poaching rates. Rhinos are poached for their horn, which is made of keratin - the same as your hair and fingernails. Consumers in Vietnam use rhino horn as purported cures for everything from hangovers to cancer and as a show of wealth. Consumers in China use rhino horn as a status symbol and in Traditional Asian Medicine to reduce fever and treat other ailments

There is no scientific evidence that rhino horn has any medicinal value.

The reasons Why:

Habitat Fragmentation

Human development has chopped up landscapes where rhinos live, leading to small, isolated populations that cannot get together to breed.

Dividing a habitat prevents rhinos from breeding.

The reasons Why:

LACK OF POLITICAL WILL

Range countries and consumer countries alike need to crack down on corruption, enforce their laws, and uphold their commitments to international treaties if rhinos are to survive.

This is crucial if rhinos are to survive.

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Rhinos are in A AT THE START OF THE 20TH CENTURY 500,000 BY 1970, THE WORLDWIDE POPULATION FELL TO 70,000 TODAY, THE NUMBER OF RHINOS SURVIVING IN THE WORLD IS ONLY 28,000 17,212 - 18,915 > 3,600 5,366 - 5,627 < 80 74 4 of 5 species remaining Are threatened with extinction 3 of those are critically endangered, which means they could go extinct in our lifetime Why is this?

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Animal Conservation: Panda Breeding Program

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Animal Conservation: Panda Breeding Program

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Raising Cute Pandas: It's Complicated | National Geographic

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Natural Disasters: Australia's Black Summer

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Natural Disasters: Australia's Black Summer

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ustralia's "black summer" megafires were a severe blow to ecosystems already reeling from decades of adverse impacts. Feral predators and grazers, weeds and unsustainable land and water use have reduced the resilience of nature in Australia. So when the unprecedented fires came, they were able to push species to the brink.

Walking the fire grounds it was impossible to miss the immediate impacts: charred bodies of snakes lying among rocks, and dead wallabies floating in waterholes. But some astonishing survivors were also to be seen: small lizards that had waited it out in burrows, and birds that had fled to safety then returned. And with rain, the trees and grasses swiftly resprouted.

In an earlier Australia, these survivors would have kickstarted a process of ecosystem reassembly that would have eventually restored fire-affected areas to their original state. But today, because of great, human-wrought changes, that journey towards recovery is faltering. Climate-fuelled megafires have swept over a land filled with feral predators and pests - a land in which vital refuges have given way to forestry or farming.

The wildfires that swept through many parts of Australia between July 2019 and February 2020 were of a scale and size that is difficult to imagine. By the end of February, they had burned through at least 32,000 square miles (85,000 sq km) of Australian forest, an area the size of Ireland.

Nearly 3 billion animals were killed or displaced by bushfire. The habitat of an estimated 143 million mammals, 180 million birds, 51 million frogs and 2.5 billion reptiles was burned.

The fires came during Australia's hottest year on record and in a country that already has among the world's highest extinction rates because of invasive non-native species such as cats, foxes, deer, horses and various pathogens, along with habitat clearing and fragmentation.

But one year on from the start of those fires, what does the landscape look like today? With state borders closing because of Covid-19, the Guardian took a virtual journey through the blackened path of Australia's summer of bushfires, talking to those who are investigating the state of the continent's surviving flora and fauna.

Thank you for your feedback.

The fires were fed by record-breaking temperatures and drought across southern and eastern Australia. Together these trends led to a step change. Prior to the summer of 2019-20, bushfires burned 2% or less of the nation's temperate broadleaved forests. But over the black summer, 21% burned. That's a tenfold increase in a single season.

A pine plantation forest starting to show post-fire regeneration on Kangaroo Island. Photograph: Quentin Chester/The Guardian

The area that a bushfire burns has an important influence on post-fire recovery. Larger burned areas mean that creatures have farther to travel to recolonise the recovering forest. Koalas are particularly vulnerable in this regard. They live atop their own funeral pyres, so fires kill many.

If the burned areas are small and infrequent, the koala's slow rates of reproduction are sufficient to allow them to recolonise the burned areas, so in the long term the population is maintained. But if the bush burns more frequently than koalas can breed and spread, they will be driven into extinction. The division of koala habitats by roads, suburbs and land clearing hastens their extinction.

Megafires threaten many species. Small mammals may survive the initial blaze, but they often succumb to predation or starvation in the aftermath of the fire, so succeeding generations must come from afar. Because reptiles don't need to eat as often, they have better survival prospects. Even so, the shift from smaller fires to megafires can have a severe impact on them, because predation rates increase in the open habitats that dominate after the fire and vast areas of uniform-aged vegetation offer less varied resources.

Even before the fires, introduced predators such as foxes and cats were having a severe impact on native species. But the fires have supercharged that impact. Cats can travel for tens of kilometres to feast at the fire margin, where the survivors are both concentrated and vulnerable. This predation destroys the populations that would otherwise recolonise the burned lands. Unless numbers of foxes and cats are controlled, they can drive species into extinction.

New shoots amid the charred remains of a plant on kangaroo Island. Photograph: Quentin Chester/The Guardian

The Kangaroo Island dunnart (a mouse-sized carnivorous marsupial) is a prime example. It lost 95% of its habitat to the black summer fires, with just a few hundred surviving in isolated islands of vegetation. Kangaroo Island lacks foxes, but is plagued by feral cats, and in the fire's aftermath they could easily have killed the last of the dunnarts. To prevent this, the Australian Wildlife Conservancy fenced a critical 13.8-hectare refuge in February. As the recovering population of protected dunnarts grows, it plans to create a 150-hectare permanent refuge.

The NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service is making great efforts to control the number of feral animals in the wake of the fires. Baiting to control foxes has increased fivefold, with special emphasis on the areas burned over the summer. In the largest feral animal control programme ever delivered in NSW, 60,000 fox baits will be laid over 2020, giving bandicoots, potoroos and other natives a chance of survival. And by June, more than 8,000 feral herbivores - mainly goats, deer and pigs - had been removed from national parks because their grazing can severely impact post-fire recovery. These efforts will benefit wildlife for many years.

Other threats to biodiversity have become evident in the wake of the bushfires. The flooding rains that doused the fires in February did more damage to some endangered species than the fires themselves. Ponds used for breeding by critically endangered frogs such as the northern corroboree frog were destroyed by infilling with ash. And ash, charcoal and toxins flooded waterways, killing fish and other aquatic life. Even the marine environment was impacted, with toxic runoff damaging nearshore reefs and other communities around Sydney.

Heidi Groffen and Pat Hodgens from Land for Wildlife in a dunnart habitat. The Kangaroo Island dunnart lost 95% of its habitat to the fires. Photograph: Quentin Chester/The Guardian

Recovery will be slow. The fire grounds were once covered by forests of varying ages, with different fire histories. They will be replaced by regrowing stands of uniform age, which will be vulnerable to future megafires. It remains to be seen whether we can restore diversity in vegetation age and fire history to these regions. But the growing interest in indigenous fire management offers one possible way that a mosaic of different-aged vegetation could be created.

In the wake of our black summer, those who care for the nation's biodiversity have done a creditable job. But the ongoing decline of many species, including the koala, demonstrates that we need to do much more. In addition to reducing the greenhouse gas pollution that is driving the megafires, we need to rethink our emergency response to endangered wildlife. There is an urgent need to protect critical habitats, such as wetlands and unburned old-growth forests. And we may need to translocate koalas and other endangered species so that they can expand their distributions, and thus become more resilient, in the face of fires.

There is also an urgent need to increase our knowledge. As I read about the people working to save species from extinction after the fires, I was struck by how few people knew where the last survivors of various species were to be found. In some cases, a single doctoral student was the only person able to locate them. At this time of accelerating threat to Australia's biodiversity, we need to beef up our knowledge base, and that means greater funding to universities and the government agencies that are our first line of defence for endangered species.

Professor Tim Flannery is an author and scientist and one of Australia's leading voices on the climate crisis
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

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Australia's 'black summer' bushfires showed the impact of human-wrought change | Tim Flannery

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ustralia's "black summer" megafires were a severe blow to ecosystems already reeling from decades of adverse impacts. Feral predators and grazers, weeds and unsustainable land and water use have reduced the resilience of nature in Australia. So when the unprecedented fires came, they were able to push species to the brink.

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Solo Hiking Acatenango Volcano in Guatemala

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Appalachian Trail Southern Terminus, Appalachian Approach Trail, Ellijay, Georgia, USA

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Appalachian Trail Documentary: DIXIE TO MAINE

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In the Northern Rockies, tribes such as the Salish, Pend d'Oreille, and others periodically set fire to the land for thousands of years, which had a profound impact on plant and animal communities. Fires were traditionally used to reduce the risk of more serious fires, to nurture the land to support specific vegetation used for food and medicine, to provide better quality grazing land for horses, and more. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes website contains a wealth of information, including information on landscapes shaped by fire and how fire suppression has changed them, elder interviews about fire, a Coyote fire story about the gift of fire, and information about the traditional use of fire by the tribes and how tribes are using fire on the landscape today (CKST, 2021).

Throughout California, Indigenous nations have used fire for thousands of years as a tool to steward the land, and still do today. When Europeans colonized California, they found a garden of redwoods and other lands. Evidence of this stewardship can still be seen on the trees at Muir Woods. Fire scars tell the story of Indigenous cultural burns set by the first stewards of Muir Woods, the Coast Miwok. Cultural burns passed down through generations have benefited both land and people, by improving soil quality, and spurring growth of certain plant species, creating a healthy and resilient landscape.

For more than 4,000 years, American Indians have relied on Yosemite Valley's meadows and oak woodlands to provide food, medicine, and materials for baskets, string, and shelter. Yosemite's early inhabitants periodically set fires to promote the growth milkweed, dogbane, sedge root, and bunch grass. Research on mud cored from Yosemite Valley showed a marked increase in ash deposits after people began living in Yosemite Valley.

Some tribes in the western states also used fire to ensure growth of straight and slender types of specific plants used for making woven baskets, or to provide habitat for certain bird species whose feathers were used for ceremonial dress (Roos, 2021).

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Indigenous Fire Practices Shape our Land - Fire (U.S. National Park Service)

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In the Northern Rockies, tribes such as the Salish, Pend d'Oreille, and others periodically set fire to the land for thousands of years, which had a profound impact on plant and animal communities.

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The Problem With Palm Oil | Fight for the Forests | TakePart

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Why Millennials Are So Obsessed With Houseplants

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First Person To Climb El Capitan Without A Rope Answers Fan Questions (Featuring Alex Honnold)

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast

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The recipe for a wildly successful TikTok account - at least, for Alexis Nikole Nelson - is to post entirely about foraging.

Known on social media as "Black Forager", Nelson has drawn in more than 2 million followers. For those not familiar with the term, Nelson says foraging is essentially "a very fun way to say, I eat plants that do not belong to me and I teach other people how to do the same thing." The videos she posts showcase her collecting and cooking everything from acorns to yellow dandelions to dead man's fingers (AKA the seaweed codium fragile.)

But for Nelson, foraging goes beyond rummaging around in other peoples' shrubbery. It's a way to connect with African American and Indigenous food traditions that many people were discouraged - or actively prevented - from accessing.

Our play cousins at TED Radio Hour spoke to Nelson about foraging, followers, and finding cultural (and literal) roots. Their conversation, hosted by Manoush Zomorodi, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Zomorodi: So when you forage, Alexis, you walk into your backyard or into a forest. What do you see that most of us don't? It's like a supermarket, basically, for you?
Nelson: It's like Disney World, but full of plants and much cheaper food. You walk in and you see this very vibrant ecosystem that we are a part of. And there's something so fulfilling about it, right? You're just like, I pulled this out of the ground, and now it's sustaining me! So I look into natural spaces and I just see wonder.
Do you remember the first time you went foraging as a kid?
I remember gardening with my mother at the house I grew up in. One day stands out in my mind when I was probably not helping at all. And my mom pointed out some grass in our yard that looked different than all of the other grass, which, until she pointed it out to me, I had never noticed. So my mom tells me to go and break some for her. I break it and suddenly, the air is perfumed with garlic. And she's like, "That is onion grass. You know how we sometimes cook with green onions? You can cook with that too." And warning, if you tell a five-year-old that, they will just start breaking plants in your yard and seeing if magical smells emanate from them.
And probably eating them! So your mom was very into plants, clearly. Did you get your love of food and gardening and the outdoors from your parents, do you think?
Absolutely. On my dad's side of the family, his mom is also of an Indigenous ancestry - Iroquois ancestry - so as a kid, he was being exposed to foodways that some of his peers weren't necessarily. And my dad is excellent in the kitchen. It was really this kind of coming together of the two things - cooking and gardening - that I enjoyed doing with my parents most as a kid. And I'm very lucky to be a Black kid who grew up with two Black parents who were also very outdoorsy, because not all of us get that. There's been this cultural separation between a lot of Black folks and the outdoors.

But historically there wasn't that same separation, right? And you've been studying just what happened. Can you explain?
So back when a lot of Black folks were still enslaved, there was a whole lot of knowledge trading between Black folks and Indigenous folks in a lot of the southern states - and a lot of midwestern and northern states, too, actually. And for a lot of people who were enslaved, the way that you beefed up the meager meals or the scraps that you were given was often by supplementing with foraging, with trapping, with fishing. So that knowledge that was a huge part of early Black culture here in the Americas.

After Black people were emancipated, suddenly laws were put in place very rapidly about only being able to reap the benefits of land that you owned. And if you are newly freed, odds are you do not own land. So if you can't hunt and forage on public property, and you don't yet have private property to your name, boom, that is a part of your life that you are not partaking in anymore. And it doesn't take a whole lot of generations passing for that knowledge to just fall away completely.
And is it true, then, that when there was an opportunity to go foraging once again, some people thought, 'Well, I don't have the handed down knowledge, and anyway, only poor people would do that'?
Yeah, you have this really weird thing happen in the 20th century where everyone is, like, wanting to show off wealth. So foraging kind of became taboo even if you did have the knowledge to do it - and that was regardless of race. Foraging very much got looked down upon because the thinking was, why would you be heading down to the creek to gather pawpaws when you can go to the grocery store and get a banana?

And in the 1950s and 1960s, being a Black person out in nature, out in the woods, out in predominantly white spaces was a very scary thing to do. For the sake of your safety, that's not a space that you would want to necessarily be in. So it was kind of like a three-combo punch to us culturally moving away from getting to know our natural spaces. And I am one of myriad people who is actively trying to combat that.
Do you feel like it's working? Like, what kind of feedback do you get from your followers?
One of the best days I think I've ever had in my life, I was out foraging and a girl who also happens to be Black - probably a teenager - she runs up to me and she's like, "You are that girl from Tik Tok!" And I was like, "Oh, my god yes!" And she was so excited. So I got to take her and show her what I was there harvesting. I got to give her and her mom a cut-leaved toothwort leaf so they could taste the spicy brassica-y-ness from it.

And the way that her and her friends and her mom's face lit up, I went home and I cried. I cried for like a solid 20 minutes because that's - oh my gosh it's, like, almost overwhelming. And the thing that stuck with me was she was just like, "You're doing this for the culture." Man, I'm starting to tear up just thinking about it now.
In some ways, through foraging, you are helping people reconnect with their own history and the ways people used to eat off the land, in a seasonal, sustainable way.
Yeah. So many of us have such a fraught relationship with food. A lot of that is due in part to societal pressures. A lot of that is due to how processed food is. And I personally have had a historically very fraught relationship with food. I grew up very overweight, and I was always being pressured to eat less, cook less. I, full disclosure, dealt with an eating disorder in my early and my mid-20s in which food was very much the enemy - in which I trained myself to stop thinking about this subject that I had loved thinking about and dreaming about my entire childhood.

In a way, diving back into foraging was the way that I fell back in love with food. It was not on purpose. I was super poor after college, living in a house with five of my friends and wanting to eat things other than ramen and canned vegetables. And so I was like, well, you know, let me turn to some of that weird knowledge that I had been amassing for no reason as a kid. And it just brought me this joy and this connection to place that I didn't have at that point in time. So much so that I went out and I sought out more information, and I got more bold with my cooking and started being willing to put flour and bread into my food again. And I was willing to make sweet things again. There's something soul-nourishing about caring about how you're nourishing your body.
To hear more of Manoush's conversation with Alexis, visit Please Note: If done incorrectly, foraging can pose serious risks. Those who choose to pursue foraging should conduct thorough research from multiple credible sources, consult experts, and exercise caution. Katie Monteleone produced the audio version of this piece, which aired on TED Radio Hour. The digital version was edited by Leah Donnella. Fiona Geiran contributed to the digital production of this post..

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Meet Alexis Nikole Nelson, The Wildly Popular 'Black Forager'

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast subscribe to Code Switch podcast The recipe for a wildly successful TikTok account - at least, for Alexis Nikole Nelson - is to post entirely about foraging. Known on social media as "Black Forager", Nelson has drawn in more than 2 million followers.

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Caprock Canyons State Park & Trail, Caprock Canyon Park Road, Quitaque, TX, USA

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Land Restoration: Prairie Restoration with Prairie Dogs

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Land Restoration: Prairie Restoration with Prairie Dogs

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July 9, 2012

Media Contact: Bryan Frazier, 512-826-8703
Prairie Dog Relocation is Latest Phase for Habitat Restoration at Panhandle Area Park
Note: This item is more than nine years old. Please take the publication date into consideration for any date references.

QUITAQUE, Texas - There's a new town along the Texas Panhandle Plains.

And much like the pioneer predecessors who arrived hundreds of years before, the residents of this new unincorporated settlement arrived with little fanfare, minimal provisions, and will build meager, basic living accommodations for their families. Likewise, they come seeking only a new frontier of freedom and embody a primal spirit of survival.

On June 28, 29 Black-tailed Prairie Dogs were reintroduced to Caprock Canyons State Park's Honey Flat area as part of a prairie restoration project to return the park's landscape and wildlife back to its appearance prior to European settlement.

"This is the latest phase in our attempts to restore this prairie ecosystem," said Donald Beard, Caprock Canyons State Park superintendent. "Restoring the Texas State Bison Herd into the park will probably always be the flagship of our effort, but our plans also include bringing back other animals and native plants to make the land more complete. Adding a prairie dog town is one more part of that, and it will add another popular wildlife viewing opportunity for park visitors."

These transplanted animals were donated by Lynda Watson, a private prairie dog advocate and relocation specialist from nearby Lubbock, who had held the animals in a three-week quarantine before being released into the park. In preparation for their arrival, park staff pre-drilled several holes to encourage the animals to begin making their dens. Bottomless cages filled with hay and food were placed over some of the holes to provide temporary shelter and protection from predators.

Black-tailed Prairie Dogs are an indigenous, keystone species to the Texas Panhandle, but once upon a time, they were hunted, even exterminated to reduce competition for cattle and other livestock. However, recent decades have brought to light information that has begun to change public perception-that prairie dogs can actually play a useful role in the fragile prairie ecology. Grazing by prairie dogs decreases annual and non-native vegetation, such as mesquite trees, while at the same time increasing beneficial perennial grasses such as buffalo grass and blue grama.

Typically, prairie dogs settle in large family groups-called towns-with a labyrinth of interconnected burrows and holes, and also benefit numerous other native species such as Burrowing Owls, Black-footed Ferrets, Ferruginous Hawks and Swift Foxes. A few hundred years ago, these oversized ground squirrels roamed some 700 million acres across the Great Plains of North America with a population estimated to be more than 5 billion animals.

The transplanted prairie dogs at Caprock Canyons will be confined within the interior of the 15,000-acre nature preserve to prevent the animals from leaving the park borders. Environmental boundaries such as heavy brush, steep canyon cliffs and natural funnels along with constant monitoring and population management practices will assist park staff in containing the town within the 200-acre defined habitat enclosure.

"Another part of having prairie dogs on site here in the park is for education for the visiting public," Beard added. "Although prairie dogs can compete with cattle and livestock, it has been found that in healthy pastures, there is sufficient forage available cattle and dogs, even under heavy grazing pressure."
For more information, contact Caprock Canyons State Park at (806) 455-1492.

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black-tailed prairie dogs habitat restoration

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New Residents Arrive at Caprock Canyons State Park

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Prairie Dog Relocation is Latest Phase for Habitat Restoration at Panhandle Area Park Note: This item is more than nine years old. Please take the publication date into consideration for any date references. QUITAQUE, Texas - There's a new town along the Texas Panhandle Plains.

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Pollution & Health | Eco-Cycle Solutions Hub

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Toxic chemicals emitted from dirty manufacturing plants, polluting landfills and incinerators affect the health of every species on Earth, including humans.

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Chippewa National Forest, Bowstring Township, MN, USA

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(De)colonized is a series on the harms of colonialism, and the fierce resistance against it.

You've likely seen the term before, especially if you spend much time on social media, or are interested in saving the environment, climate change, or Indigenous cultures. This term was even featured in the introduction of episode three of the breakthrough Hulu and FX series Reservation Dogs. You may not have fully understood what it meant, but there it was: "Land back."

It's a beautifully simple slogan, a literal call for the return of Native lands to Native peoples, and a profound summation of anti-colonial thought. "'Land back' is a war cry for the liberation of Indigenous people and our land, and it's a pathway forward," Nick Tilsen, president and CEO of NDN Collective, tells Teen Vogue.

According to Tilsen, who is Oglala Lakota, the term was born about a decade ago, when a number of Indigenous artists started using it. Further popularized by memes and social media, the mantra has since evolved to encapsulate and inform the political stances of activists who've been on the front line for a long time, as well as their allies.

Yet the foundation of the land back movement is much older. For Native people of the Western Hemisphere, it started in 1492 with the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the shores of "the New World," followed by other European explorers such as Amerigo Vespucci. During this so-called Age of Discovery, colonial conquest was unleashed on the original stewards and inhabitants of what are now known as the Americas. Native populations were robbed of their ancestral lands and wiped out by genocide.

"Our people have been fighting for land back and to reclaim lands since colonization," says Krystal Two Bulls, director of NDN Collective's land back campaign. The organization's campaign calls for the defunding of police, free and prior consent for decisions that impact Native peoples, and the return of public lands. "This work has been happening for generations and generations and it's something that's simply being handed down to us."

The past few years have seen a spate of land reclamations by Native nations. In 2020, Chippewa National Forest was instructed to transfer 11,760 acres of forest service land to the Department of Interior to be held in trust for the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, thanks to the Leech Lake Reservation Restoration Act. That same year, the Esselen Tribe of central California purchased about two square miles of their land back for just under $4.5 million, assisted by Western Rivers Conservancy. In March, with a grant from conservation charities, the Passamaquoddy Tribe raised $355,000 to purchase Pine Island in Maine, their ancestral land. The removal of dams on the Klamath River is also being praised as a land back victory for Karuk and Yurok Tribes.

On its face, the land back movement involves the physical reclamation of ancestral lands by the Indigenous people who lived there for time immemorial. But to get to the heart of the matter, we must dive deeper.

" Through the treaties, [land] was taken. The American Constitution was violated in the taking of it. So when we say 'land back,' we're talking about actual land return," Tilsen explains. "We're also talking about the dismantling of many of the systems of white supremacy that have been created to maintain our land being stolen from us. So at the same time we're fighting for physical land back, it's not possible for goals to be fully accomplished if we're not dismantling the system."

Tilsen continues, "Land back means so much because the reality is that in the process of taking the land from Indigenous people, they created and built entire institutions - colonial and imperialistic institutions - that were designed for the purpose of taking our land and to maintain the continued theft of our land, and to continue to maintain the extractive relationship with the land. I think that's one thing we have to realize."

Colonial governments stole a lot more than the land. They took away the political and decision-making power of Indigenous nations and our right to consent to what happens to our land, people, families, and even our bodies. Our spiritual beliefs and languages were outlawed, and many of our children were forcibly taken to boarding schools, some never to be seen or heard from again. For these reasons, land back has become a symbol of the reclamation of everything that was taken and destroyed by the architects of colonialism.

"Land back is the umbrella and it's the metanarrative for all of that work to happen," Two Bulls, who is Northern Cheyenne and Oglala Lakota, tells Teen Vogue. "Because once Indigenous peoples reclaim our land, once we reclaim language, once we reclaim our ability to manage the land in a way that is healthy, in a way that we understand and know, I think that is going to be the answer to a lot of these issues that we are running into. And by doing that, we have to dismantle these systems."

"Part of what we're reclaiming when we say 'land back' is our power," says Tilsen. Land back involves an actual shift in the power structure not of just the United States, but the world.

One reason the land back movement has taken hold in recent years is that new research has shown that Indigenous nations are excellent at land management. Scientists have started to join the chorus of "land back" for purposes of land conservation, biodiversity, and slowing the climate crisis. For example, Native knowledge and practices could be particularly useful in fighting the threat from severe wildfires on the West Coast.

The elevation of Native leaders to powerful positions is another positive sign. Secretary Deb Haaland became the first Native woman to head the Department of Interior, which oversees the Bureau of Land Management. Also, the White House has nominated Charles F. Sams III to serve as director of the National Park Service; if appointed, Sams would be the first Native to hold that post. In Canada, the government recently announced that it is allocating $340 million toward supporting First Nations guardians and protected areas. As The Narwhal reported, Canada has committed to conserving 30% of its lands and waters by 2030.

However, Tilsen and Two Bulls are skeptical that real change can occur within the colonial power structure responsible for the theft of Indigenous lands. "We have to recognize that under the management of the federal government and colonial governments everywhere, all of this land has been mismanaged," Tilsen asserts. "It hasn't been taken care of; it has been destroyed. It's been mined. Polluted. It's been used for corporations as [a] playground to make money off of this land, pollute the waterways, and contribute to the growing problem of global climate change."

Tilsen continues, "We're going to get back to prioritizing the relationship between the land and the people, rather than thinking about the land as just something that we should extract from for the purposes of money and power. We're reclaiming our inherent right to assume control, protection, and stewardship of these lands."

Tilsen and Two Bulls are also quick to affirm that the land back movement isn't just for Indigenous people. Its mission and objectives serve the public good and could very well save the existence of life on Earth. "If there's going to be any reparations or repair, healing, moving forward, justice, sovereignty, liberation - whatever the things are that we're working towards - it has to start with land back," Two Bulls says. "It has to go back to the roots of what this so-called country was founded on, of what allowed all of these institutions and systems that oppress us to exist, and that was when we were forced to be removed from our lands. So, to move forward, we have to reclaim our lands." She adds, "[Land back] is for everyone because it impacts all of us."

The movement is one of transcendence. It's a conversation starter about racial equality and equity. It's a verb that invokes action and calls for change. "Land back came from the ceremonies," Tilsen explains. "[It] came from the art, the culture, and spirits of the people.... Land back is something that anybody and everybody has an opportunity to be a part of no matter where you stand politically, no matter what you believe in the world or what your knowledge is, because it touches every aspect of our lives."

In short, says Tilsen, "It's marching orders."

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Colonialism, Explained

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What to Know About The Land Back Movement

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(De)colonized is a series on the harms of colonialism, and the fierce resistance against it. You've likely seen the term before, especially if you spend much time on social media, or are interested in saving the environment, climate change, or Indigenous cultures.

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Alternative Living: Mining an Active Volcano

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Alternative Living: Mining an Active Volcano

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Why Miners Risk Their Lives To Get Sulfur From An Active Volcano | Risky Business

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Yellowstone National Park, United States

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Wolves arrived in Yellowstone National Park via truck on January 12, 1995.
NPS

In the 1800s, westward expansion brought settlers and their livestock into direct contact with native predator and prey species. Much of the wolves' prey base was destroyed as agriculture flourished. With the prey base removed, wolves began to prey on domestic stock, which resulted in humans eliminating wolves from most of their historical range. Predator control, including poisoning, was practiced in the park in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Other predators such as bears, cougars, and coyotes were also killed to protect livestock and "more desirable" wildlife species, such as deer and elk.

The gray wolf was present in Yellowstone when the park was established in 1872. Today, it is difficult for many people to understand why early park managers would have participated in the extermination of wolves. After all, the Yellowstone National Park Act of 1872 stated that the Secretary of the Interior "shall provide against the wanton destruction of the fish and game found within said Park." But this was an era before people, including many biologists, understood the concepts of ecosystem and the interconnectedness of species. At the time, the wolves' habit of killing prey species was considered "wanton destruction" of the animals. Between 1914 and 1926, at least 136 wolves were killed in the park; by the 1940s, wolf packs were rarely reported. By the mid-1900s, wolves had been almost entirely eliminated from the 48 states.

An intensive survey in the 1970s found no evidence of a wolf population in Yellowstone, although an occasional wolf probably wandered into the area. A wolf-like canid was filmed in Hayden Valley in August 1992, and a wolf was shot just outside the park's southern boundary in September 1992. However, no verifiable evidence of a breeding pair of wolves existed. During the 1980s, wolves began to reestablish breeding packs in northwestern Montana; 50-60 wolves inhabited Montana in 1994.

In the 1960s, NPS wildlife management policy changed to allow populations to manage themselves. Many suggested at the time that for such regulation to succeed, the wolf had to be a part of the picture.

Also in the 1960s and 1970s, national awareness of environmental issues and consequences led to the passage of many laws designed to correct the mistakes of the past and help prevent similar mistakes in the future. One such law was the Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973. The FWS is required by this law to restore endangered species that have been eliminated, if possible. By 1978, all wolf subspecies were on the federal list of endangered species for the lower 48 states except Minnesota. (NPS policy also calls for restoration of native species where possible.)

The Issue

The wolf is a major predator that had been missing from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem for decades until its restoration in 1995.

History

Late 1800s-early 1900s: predators, including wolves, are routinely killed in Yellowstone.

1926: The last wolf pack in Yellowstone is killed, although reports of single wolves continue.

1974: The gray wolf is listed as endangered; recovery is mandated under the Endangered Species Act.

1975: The long process to restore wolves in Yellowstone begins.

1991: Congress appropriates money for an EIS for wolf recovery.

1994: EIS completed for wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone and central Idaho. More than 160,000 public comments received-the largest number of public comments on any federal proposal at that time.

1995 and 1996: 31 gray wolves from western Canada relocated to Yellowstone.

1997: 10 wolves from northwestern Montana relocated to Yellowstone National Park; US District Court judge orders the removal of the reintroduced wolves in Yellowstone but stays his order, pending appeal. (Decision reversed in 2000.)

1995-2003: Wolves prey on livestock outside Yellowstone much less than expected: 256 sheep, 41 cattle are killed.

2005: Wolf management transfers from the federal government to the states of Idaho and Montana.

2008: Wolf populations in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming removed from the endangered species list, then returned to the list.

2009: The US Fish and Wildlife Service again delisted wolf populations in Montana and Idaho, but not in Wyoming. A legal challenge results in the Northern Rocky Mountain wolf population being returned to the federal endangered species list.

2011: Wolf populations were again delisted in Montana and Idaho by action of Congress, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed delisting wolves in Wyoming.

2012: Based on a Congressional directive, wolves were delisted in Wyoming.

2014: Wolves were relisted in Wyoming.

2017: Wolves were delisted in Wyoming, and the Northern Rocky Mountain Distinct Population is no longer listed.

Current Status

As of April 26, 2017 gray wolves are delisted in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.

A wolf is released from its cage into the pen in 1995. One of the reintroduction pens remains standing. Park managers are discussing if it should be left as a historic site or taken down to return the site to its natural condition.
NPS

Restoration Proposed

National Park Service policy calls for restoring native species when

1. sufficient habitat exists to support a self-perpetuating population,

2. management can prevent serious threats to outside interests,

3. the restored subspecies most nearly resembles the extirpated subspecies, and

4. extirpation resulted from human activities.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service's 1987 Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Plan proposed reintroduction of an "experimental population" of wolves into Yellowstone. An experimental population, under section 10(j) of the Endangered Species Act, is considered nonessential and allows more management flexibility. Most scientists believed that wolves would not greatly reduce populations of mule deer, pronghorns, bighorn sheep, white-tailed deer, or bison; they might have minor effects on grizzly bears and cougars; and their presence might cause the decline of coyotes and increase of red foxes.

In 1991, Congress provided funds to the FWS to prepare, in consultation with the NPS and the US Forest Service, an environmental impact statement (EIS) on the restoration of wolves. In June 1994, after several years and a near-record number of public comments, the Secretary of the Interior signed the Record of Decision for the final EIS for reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone and central Idaho.

Staff from Yellowstone, the FWS, and participating states prepared for wolf restoration to the park and central Idaho. The FWS prepared special regulations outlining how wolves would be managed as an experimental population.

Park staff completed site planning and archeological and sensitive-plant surveys for the release sites. Each site was approximately one acre enclosed with 9-gauge chain-link fence in 10 x 10-foot panels. The fences had a two-foot overhang and a four-foot skirt at the bottom to discourage climbing over or digging under the enclosure. Each pen had a small holding area attached to allow a wolf to be separated from the group if necessary (i.e., for medical treatment). Plywood boxes provided shelter if the wolves wanted isolation from each other.

Canadian and American wildlife biologists captured wolves in Canada and relocated and released them in both Yellowstone and central Idaho. Wolves were temporarily penned before their release.
NPS

Relocation and Release

In late 1994 and early 1995, and again in 1996, FWS and Canadian wildlife biologists captured wolves in Canada and relocated and released them in both Yellowstone and central Idaho. In mid-January 1995, 14 wolves were temporarily penned in Yellowstone; the first eight wolves on January 12, and the second six on January 19, 1995. Wolves from one social group were together in each acclimation pen. On January 23, 1996, 11 more wolves were brought to Yellowstone for the second year of wolf restoration. Four days later they were joined by another six wolves. The wolves ranged from 72 to 130 pounds and from approximately nine months to five years in age. They included wolves known to have fed on bison. Groups included breeding adults and younger wolves one to two years old.

Each wolf was radio-collared as it was captured in Canada. While temporarily penned, the wolves experienced minimal human contact. Approximately twice a week, they were fed elk, deer, moose, or bison that had died in and around the park. They were guarded by law enforcement rangers who minimized how much the wolves saw humans. The pen sites and surrounding areas were closed to visitation and marked to prevent unauthorized entry. Biologists checked on the welfare of wolves twice each week, using telemetry or visual observation while placing food in the pens. Although five years of reintroductions were predicted, no transplants occurred after 1996 because of the early success of the reintroductions.

Some people expressed concern about wolves becoming habituated to humans while in the acclimation pens. However, wolves typically avoid human contact. Confinement was also a negative experience for them and reinforced their dislike of human presence.

Results of the Restoration

Preliminary data from studies indicate that wolf recovery will likely lead to greater biodiversity throughout the GYE. Wolves have preyed primarily on elk, and these carcasses have provided food to a wide variety of other animals, especially scavenging species. Wolves are increasingly preying on bison, especially in late winter. However, most bison biomass consumed by wolves is through scavenging bison dying from other natural causes. Grizzly bears have usurped wolf kills almost at will, contrary to predictions and observations from other areas where the two species occur. Wolf kills, then, provide an important resource for bears in low-food years. Aggression toward coyotes initially decreased the number of coyotes inside wolf territories, which may have benefited other smaller predators, rodents, and birds of prey.

So far, data suggest wolves are contributing to decreased numbers of elk calves surviving to adulthood and decreased survival of adult elk. Wolves may also be affecting where and how elk use the habitat. Some of these effects were predictable but were based on research in relatively simple systems of one to two predator and prey species. Such is not the case in Yellowstone, where four other large predators (black bears, grizzly bears, coyotes, and cougars) prey on elk-and people hunt the elk outside the park. Thus, interactions of wolves with elk and other ungulates have created a new degree of complexity that makes it difficult to project long-term population trends.

The effect of wolf recovery on the dynamics of northern Yellowstone elk cannot be generalized to other elk populations in the GYE. The effects depend on complex factors including elk densities, abundance of other predators, presence of alternative ungulate prey, winter severity, and-outside the park-land ownership, human harvest, livestock depredations, and human-caused wolf deaths. A coalition of natural resource professionals and scientists representing federal and state agencies, conservation organizations and foundations, academia, and land owners is collaborating on a comparative research program involving three additional wolf-ungulate systems in the western portion of the GYE. Results to date indicate the effects of wolf predation on elk population dynamics range from substantial to quite modest.

The Role of the Courts

Several lawsuits were filed to stop the restoration on a variety of grounds. These suits were consolidated, and in December 1997, the judge found that the wolf reintroduction program in Yellowstone and central Idaho violated the intent of section 10(j) of the Endangered Species Act because there was a lack of geographic separation between fully protected wolves already existing in Montana and the reintroduction areas in which special rules for wolf management apply. The judge wrote that he had reached his decision "with utmost reluctance." He ordered the removal (specifically not the killing) of reintroduced wolves and their offspring from the Yellowstone and central Idaho experimental population areas, then immediately stayed his order, pending appeal. The Justice Department appealed the case, and in January 2000 the decision was reversed.

Wolf watchers at Slough Creek, one of the best places in the world to observe wild wolves.
NPS

Legal Status of a Recovered Population

The biological requirements for removing the wolf from the endangered species list have been achieved: at least 300 wolves and three consecutive years of at least 30 breeding pairs across three recovery areas. The FWS approved wolf management plans in Idaho and Montana, and in 2008 it delisted wolves in these two states and in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. Several environmental groups sued to stop the delisting, however. They successfully argued that the Wyoming wolf management plan was flawed and that genetic connectivity had not been established between the GYE and the other recovery areas. A court decision required the wolf to be listed again as an endangered species. In 2009, the FWS again delisted wolf populations in Montana and Idaho, but not in Wyoming. A legal challenge resulted in the Northern Rocky Mountain wolf population being returned to the federal endangered species list.

In 2011, wolf populations were again delisted in Montana and Idaho by an action of Congress. In 2012, a Congressional directive required the FWS to reissue its 2009 delisting, which stated that "if Wyoming were to develop a Service-approved regulatory framework it would be delisted in a separate rule" (74 FR 15123, April 2, 2009, p. 15155).

On September 30, 2012, wolves in Wyoming were delisted and began to be managed by the state under an approved management plan. However, on September 23, 2014, wolves were relisted in Wyoming following litigation over that management plan. On April 25, 2017, wolves were delisted following an appeal of the previous litigation decision by the US District Court. On April 25, 2017, wolves were delisted yet again following an appeal of the previous litigation decision by the US District Court. Wolves are now hunted in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho during regulated seasons.

The FWS will continue to monitor the delisted wolf populations in Montana and Idaho for at least five years to ensure that they continue to sustain their recovery. The FWS may consider relisting the species, and even emergency relisting, if the available data demonstrate such an action is needed.

Wolves are now managed by the appropriate state, tribal, or federal agencies; management in national parks and national wildlife refuges continues to be guided by existing authorizing and management legislation and regulations.

Outlook

The future of wolves in GYE will depend on how livestock depredation and hunting of wolves outside the park are handled. Wolf populations will also continue to be affected by the availability of elk, deer, and bison, which fluctuates in response to hunting quotas, winter severity, and disease. To what extent wolves may have contributed to the decline in the northern Yellowstone elk population since the mid-1990s, or the possibly related resurgence of willow and aspen in some areas, is an ongoing topic of research.

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Wolf Restoration - Yellowstone National Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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The first wolves in the restoration arrived in Yellowstone National Park in 1995.

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Kayak Camping Texas - the Frio River is Paradise!

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Pompeii, Metropolitan City of Naples, Italy

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When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., a wealthy man of 30 or 40 and a younger enslaved man survived the immediate impact, only to die in a second volcanic blast the following day. Two millennia later, reports Angela Giuffrida for the , archaeologists excavating a villa on the outskirts of the ancient Roman city have found the pair's remains, eerily frozen in their final death throes.

Based on traces of the older man's clothing, which included a woolen cloak, researchers from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii say he was probably a person of high status. The body of the younger man, aged 18 to 25, had several compressed vertebrae, suggesting he was a manual laborer. Likely enslaved by his companion, the second individual wore a short, pleated tunic possibly made out of wool. The team found the remains in an underground corridor of the ruined structure beneath more than six feet of ash.

"The victims were probably looking for shelter in the cryptoporticus, in this underground space, where they thought they were better protected," Massimo Osanna, director general of the archaeological park, tells the Associated Press ' Frances D'Emilio.

Instead, the duo died in a rush of heat and volcanic debris that flowed into the building

"It is a death by thermal shock, as also demonstrated by their clenched feet and hands," Osanna tells Angelo Amante of Reuters.

Archaeologists preserved the newly discovered remains using a variation of a technique developed by Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli in 1863. The process involves pouring liquid chalk into cavities left by decomposing bodies; this plaster fills gaps in preserved bones and teeth, creating a cast of the bodies as they looked at the moment of death.

"It is impossible to see those deformed figures, and not feel moved," wrote Italian author Luigi Settembrini in his 1863 "Letter to the Pompeians," as quoted in a statement from the archaeological park. "They have been dead for eighteen centuries, but they are human beings seen in their agony. This is not art, it is not imitation; these are their bones, the remains of their flesh and their clothes mixed with plaster, it is the pain of death that takes on body and form."

Pompeii now contains the bodies of more than 100 people preserved as plaster casts. Osanna tells the Times that the technique captured fascinating details of the newly discovered bodies, including the "extraordinary drapery" of their wool garments.

"They really look like statues," he says.

The new find is located in Civita Giuliana, about 750 yards northwest of Pompeii's city walls. The villa is on private property, and government-commissioned excavations only began there in 2017, when archaeologists stepped in to help prevent looters from tunneling into the site and stealing artifacts.

This isn't the first impressive find made at the villa: In 2018, archaeologists unearthed the preserved remains of three horses, still saddled and harnessed as if ready to depart at a moment's notice. Research teams also found a whole street of large houses lined with balconies.

The ruins of Pompeii, a city of about 13,000 people at the time of its destruction, have fascinated people around the world for centuries. Roman magistrate Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the destruction from a neighboring city, described it as "an extraordinary and alarming" scene.

Spanish king Charles III of Bourbon began the first official excavations of the site in 1748. Work has continued ever since. (Launched in 2012, the $140 million Great Pompeii Project seeks to conduct the most extensive scientific investigation of the site to date.) The preserved city, with its inhabitants forever caught in the middle of daily activities, has yielded much information about life in ancient Rome, from Pompeiians' culinary habits to their fertility and love rituals.

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Well-Preserved Remains of Two Vesuvius Victims Found in Pompeii

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When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., a wealthy man of 30 or 40 and a younger enslaved man survived the immediate impact, only to die in a second volcanic blast the following day.

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Seventeen days after Hurricane Katrina breached Louisiana's flood levees, President George W. Bush delivered an address from Jackson Square, in the French Quarter of New Orleans. "In the aftermath," Bush said, "we have seen fellow citizens left stunned and uprooted ... looking for meaning in a tragedy that seems so blind and random." Many Americans, New Orleanians and outside observers alike, were not stunned. To them, the devastation that followed the storm, especially for the city's most vulnerable and marginalized residents, seemed in many ways perfectly predictable.

"Storms, of all sorts, were facts of our lives," writes Sarah M. Broom in her 2019 memoir, The Yellow House, about growing up in majority-Black and -poor New Orleans East. "Those images shown on the news of fellow citizens drowned, abandoned, and calling for help were not news to us, but still further evidence of what we long ago knew." Five years before Katrina, the historian Ted Steinberg warned that unregulated development on the Gulf Coast, coupled with disinvestment from federal relief programs, had put the city at great risk of flooding. That a disaster like Katrina would strike, and that its impact would fall disproportionately on the residents the city had long neglected, seemed all but inevitable.

Natural disasters are also social disasters. Social decisions-how we design cities, how we invest money, how we distribute resources-help determine where and whom disaster strikes. But disasters are also social in the sense that humans-not God, or nature, or fate-give them meaning and significance. We decide, in the stories we tell about storms, when disasters begin, when they end, and what makes them distinct from apparently nondisastrous events. Too often, these stories sever storms from their contexts-marking them, as Bush's speech did, as tragic aberrations.

This disjuncture-between disasters' social origins, on the one hand, and the persistence of popular narratives, like Bush's, that attribute those disasters to mysterious or nonhuman forces, on the other-is illustrated in three recent books.

Hurricane Katrina, for example, has historical roots that run a century deep. As Andy Horowitz shows in his book, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015, the devastation caused by the storm resulted in large part from a long cycle of profit seeking and uneven redistribution that began even before the implementation of the neoliberal policies that Steinberg denounced. Those perpetuating such a deadly cycle, Horowitz makes clear, depended on exploiting natural resources and ignoring natural vulnerabilities.

Horowitz disrupts the narrative of disaster as exception. But more often, the stories we tell about storms prevent us from examining the social structures underpinning them. Those stories draw on sources that are both theological, like the Christian beliefs examined in Peter Thuesen's Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather, and secular, like the mass media explored in Susan Scott Parrish's The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History.

When storms challenge our worldviews, these books suggest, we often seek out narratives that reaffirm old orders under threat. If interpreted as tragic aberrations, disasters only facilitate the reestablishment of unequal structures.

But Horowitz, Thuesen, and Parrish all show that by placing storms in their social contexts, we can better understand not only the sources of these natural-social disasters but also the conditions that cause suffering even when skies are calm. Storms, if understood as social, can serve as catalysts for changing the long-standing structures that leave us so vulnerable to the effects of extreme weather.

Rather than narrate Hurricane Katrina as a story that unfolds over days or months, Horowitz places the storm midway through a century of history. A historian at Tulane University, Horowitz casts doubt on the idea that disasters exist apart from the "normal" course of events.

As such, Horowitz's narrative begins concretely, with a 1915 hurricane that killed hundreds of Louisianans and destroyed millions of dollars in property. The tragic event only inspired New Orleans, declaring itself "storm proof," to build bigger, faster, and closer to the shore. Over the next several decades, the city would degrade its coastline further through overdevelopment, oil drilling, and flood-control infrastructure that protected property at the expense of land and people. A growing white middle class benefited from the profits of such endeavors, even as local officials disinvested from city services that benefited Black and poor residents.

The relationship between capitalism, racism, and ecological vulnerability has shaped the history of New Orleans, not always in predictable ways. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Horowitz finds, Black homes were not disproportionately flooded during Katrina. Instead, the devastated and majority-Black Lower Ninth Ward was the exception that proved the rule: that federal redlining policies and private real-estate practices more often segregated Black residents into older areas of the city on higher ground. In fact, midcentury government subsidies made new properties built on flood-prone land attractive to the white middle class. It was these properties that suffered the most direct damage when the levees broke.

The paradox of segregated real-estate development reveals one way in which the response to the flood, more than the flood itself, determined Katrina's racially and socioeconomically disparate impact. In 2006, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to demolish four major New Orleans public-housing projects, though the buildings had suffered relatively minimal flood damage. Locked out of their homes at a time when the city faced record rates of homelessness, some of the project's former residents established a tent city they called "Survivors Village" outside the shuttered apartments. As of 2011, only around 200 of the 3,077 families who had lived in the projects prior to the storm moved into the apartments eventually built on the old site.

In retelling the story of Katrina as a cycle of profit-driven and government-sanctioned growth and dispossession, Horowitz takes his cue from local residents. After Katrina, some residents of the Lower Ninth believed that federal agents had bombed the levees intentionally. During the 1927 flood, Louisiana's governor had, in fact, ordered engineers to dynamite the river levee in order to protect urban properties and reassure investors. Though no such deliberate destruction occurred in 2005, the rumor reflected residents' insistence that the consequences of the disaster were not "blind and random."

We decide, in the stories we tell about storms, when disasters begin, when they end, and what makes them distinct from apparently nondisastrous events.

The phrase "act of God" is often casually invoked to describe disasters. But religion itself does not necessarily provide a clear framework for explaining natural events. For religious Christians, argues Thuesen in Tornado Gods, storms confound more than affirm theological beliefs.

Thuesen, a professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, examines how disasters are understood in "Tornado Alley": a loosely defined region in the central United States, known for both its violent storms and its evangelical Christian communities. Over the course of American history, Thuesen finds, tornadoes have challenged religious Christians' understandings of providence. Why should a tornado murder a woman, but not her neighbor? Why should it strike down a church, but not the casino on the next block? For the Christians Thuesen studies, the seemingly arbitrary nature of death and destruction during a storm unsettles the notion of a divinely ordered world.

Of course, as we have seen, the destruction of storms is only random to a certain degree. More than one-third of tornado victims between 1981 and 1997 were mobile-home residents, who were disproportionately poor and elderly. If arbitrariness challenges the idea of a divinely ordered world, then patterns of social inequality, which become especially visible during disasters, do so even more profoundly.

This epistemic challenge is not limited to the religious. American believers and nonbelievers alike have long made sense of disparate suffering-especially across divides of class and race-by drawing on ideas of sin and virtue. The helplessness of storm victims has the potential to disturb the idea that the oppressed bring on their own suffering. For that reason, as the legal scholar Michele Landis Dauber has shown, politicians advocating for New Deal welfare programs compared financial loss during the Great Depression to the hardships brought on by floods and droughts.

But, as Dauber argues, that potential disruption does not guarantee a permanent shift in understanding. When we see that natural disasters strike without regard to individual sin or virtue, we might discard the idea that the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized ever deserve their suffering. Or, we may simply seek to reassert moral orders that justify both sudden tragedy and structural vulnerability. Thuesen largely focuses on his subjects' attempts to grapple with death and destruction within their own communities. Unfortunately, he devotes little attention to differences of class or race within Tornado Alley. But his account of Christian evangelicals' response to Katrina perhaps best illustrates how storms can both challenge and affirm long-held beliefs about social difference.

On the extreme end, televangelists Pat Robertson and John Hagee suggested that Katrina was divine retribution for legalized abortion and homosexuality. (Hagee later retracted his statement.) Other evangelical Christians denounced those remarks, and many traveled to the Gulf Coast to rebuild homes and distribute supplies after the storm. For most, though, the storm neither proved nor permanently falsified the notion that the poor bring on their own hardship. Instead, it seemed to represent an exceptional circumstance that merited an exceptional response. While faith-based relief programs undoubtedly did offer needed help to some New Orleans residents, acts of short-term care left the city's fundamental inequities in place.

For both the religious and the secular, the uncertainty that storms inspire can prompt a suspension of judgment otherwise too easily meted out. Such a suspension can open the door for sympathy and even temporary action but often closes the door for real change.

If the storms only confound real believers, then why invoke the supernatural to explain natural disasters? In tort law, the concept of an "act of God" absolves parties of legal liability for damages resulting from extreme weather events. As Thuesen points out, the concept makes little sense to a believer, for it seems to equate God with randomness. But the casual invocation of religion in a secular context can serve to mark natural disasters as exceptions-ensuring that they do not threaten the belief systems that storms might otherwise call into question.

Theologically, we cannot know what Bush, himself an evangelical Christian, meant when he described Katrina as a "blind and random tragedy." But as in their political context, his words seemed to call for the sort of temporary suspension of judgment that allows for short-term acts of charity but not long-term change. For once, he did not evoke the language of "personal responsibility" that his party had so often used to account for structural inequality. But his words also obscured government's complicity in the suffering of storm victims, as well as government's responsibility for alleviating that suffering.

Nature was never an entity that existed apart from us, unshaped by us, not affecting us. Our natural problems are social problems.

If disaster seems only to disrupt the older order, and does not invalidate it, then the response is, unsurprisingly, a return to the status quo. In Thuesen's account, Western settlers in the 19th century interpreted storms not as divine retribution for their acts of conquest but, instead, as divine challenges that, once surpassed, evidenced their worthiness. A secular version of this tendency to read self-confirming narratives into disasters underlies the media narrative that Parrish, an English professor at the University of Michigan, uncovers in The Flood Year 1927.

In that fateful year, heavy rains overwhelmed levees along the Mississippi River's length from Missouri to the Gulf Coast. Deforestation, meanwhile, intensified the effects of the flood. The disaster left some 637,000 people homeless.

Responding to the disaster, the Red Cross mobilized a "reconstruction machinery," which consisted of both relief aid and propaganda. Its stated goal was to bring each flood victim back to a position "as near like the position he occupied before disaster." Employing mass-communication strategies pioneered during World War I, the Red Cross also promised, implicitly, to reverse the partial gains of racial progress during an earlier "reconstruction." Newspaper illustrations depicting the South as a pale damsel in distress represented the "northern army of relief" as the rescuer of a victimized white South.

The romance of this imagined reunion, Parrish shows, both erased and depended on Black evacuees. At first, many Black flood victims were prevented by their planter employers from fleeing; later, they were forced to labor, under conditions that contemporary commentators likened to antebellum slavery, in Red Cross "concentration camps."

On the surface, the media narratives that surfaced after Katrina seem entirely different from the propaganda of 1927. Far from erasing Black flood victims, Horowitz shows, news coverage made African Americans hypervisible: viewers could easily assume that the flood only affected Black New Orleanians. The news media often represented Black flood victims as criminal, showing scenes of men and women "looting" grocery stores. (When they did show white victims engaged in the same acts of salvage, reporters described them as "finding" food and supplies.) And rather than encourage a return to normalcy, many commentators saw the storm as an opportunity to remake the city "nothing like before," as David Brooks put it in the New York Times. As Horowitz argues, calls to reinvent the city often meant reinventing it without its Black and poor residents, and those calls were realized in policies that made it more difficult for such residents to return.

The disaster fantasy, then, was indeed a fantasy of restoration-as in 1927, it was a restoration of an earlier era, prior to demographic change and (partial) racial integration. As the specter of antebellum slavery shaped the federal response to the flood of 1927, so Jim Crow haunted 2005.

As Parrish argues, however, dominant disaster narratives always produce "counternarratives." In 1927, Southern environmentalists who called attention to federal watershed mismanagement challenged claims of northern rescue. Meanwhile, African American newspapers reported on the atrocities occurring in Red Cross concentration camps. Artists such as Bessie Smith, whose song "Back-Water Blues" became an anthem for the flood year, told a story of collective displacement that reached audiences across divides of class, race, and geography.

After Katrina, both Parrish and Horowitz observe, artists celebrated the rich cultural history of New Orleans, even as politicians questioned which parts of the city were worth preserving. In 2006, the artist Kara Walker's exhibit After the Deluge combined selections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 18th- and 19th-century collections with Walker's signature black cut-paper silhouettes. Paintings such as J. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship and John Warner Barber's engravings of the Amistad uprising told a new history of Katrina, which began with the waterlogged horrors of the Middle Passage. Walker's own contributions, many of which referenced scenes of slavery along the Mississippi River, all predated Katrina.

Walker's work did not represent Katrina, art critic Roberta Smith noted, so much as it "warned of the pathologies that Katrina unleashed." Mixing images from history, religion, and myth, After the Deluge defied the linear chronology that its title implied. The exhibit suggested, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, that the state of disaster is not the exception, but the rule.

Such counternarratives seem more important than ever in this year of so-called "crisis." On the right, many continue to absolve themselves of responsibility for environmental and health catastrophes by invoking mysterious outside forces: antifa starting wildfires, Chinese virus labs unleashing pandemics, the nonexistent Green New Deal causing major power outages.

But the problem isn't just conspiracy theorists. Those who imagine that we can restore ecological health solely through technological innovation or by "rewilding" human-altered environments also imagine climate crisis as an external imposition, one that we can overcome by restoring the harmony of a bygone era. Calls for a return to normalcy after the coronavirus pandemic similarly ignore the endemic social problems that have made it so deadly.

A storm is never just wind or rain. Nature was never an entity that existed apart from us, unshaped by us, not affecting us. Our natural problems are social problems. The solutions to them must be social, too.

This article was commissioned by Caitlin Zaloom.

Featured-image photograph by Michael D / Unsplash

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Seventeen days after Hurricane Katrina breached Louisiana's flood levees, President George W. Bush delivered an address from Jackson Square, in the French Quarter of New Orleans. "In the aftermath," Bush said, "we have seen fellow citizens left stunned and uprooted ... looking for meaning in a tragedy that seems so blind and random."

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Indicator species are living organisms that tell us that something has changed or is going to change in their environment. They can be easily observed, and studying them is considered a cost-effective way to predict changes in an ecosystem. These species are also known as bioindicators.

Scientists monitor factors like the size, age structure, density, growth, and reproduction rate of populations of indicator species to look for patterns over time. These patterns may be able to show stress on the species from influences like pollution, habitat loss, or climate change. Perhaps more importantly, they can help predict future changes in their environment.

Indicator Species Definition

The most commonly used indicator species are animals; 70% of those are invertebrates. However, indicator species can also be plants and microorganisms. Often, these organisms interact with the environment in ways that make them highly sensitive to any changes. For example, they may be at the top of the trophic feeding level, where they would receive the highest amounts of any toxins found in their environment. Or they may be unable to easily move to a new location if conditions become unfavorable.

Scientists choose indicator species for different reasons. The ecological importance of the species is one of the main reasons for using certain organisms as indicators. If a species is a keystone species, meaning the function of the ecosystem depends on them, then any changes in the health or population of that species would be a good indicator of environmental stressors.

A good indicator species should also respond to changes relatively quickly and be easy to observe. Their response should be representative of the entire population or ecosystem. They should be relatively common and have a population big enough to easily study. Species that have been studied extensively are good candidates for bioindicators. Species that reproduce quickly and in high numbers, and have a specialized habitat or diet would make an ideal indicator. Scientists also look for organisms that are commercially or economically important.

Scientists use indicator species to determine a change in an ecosystem based on what they observe in the indicator species. Indicator species are used to show both good and bad environmental changes. These changes can include the presence of pollutants, changes in biodiversity and biotic interactions, and changes in the physical environment.

Bioindicator vs. Biomonitor

Examples of Indicator Species

Because they are often the most vulnerable members of their ecosystems, these indicator species are used in scientific research as a way to easily and efficiently study long-term changes in environmental health. Studying the same species in each ecosystem helps researchers more easily compare data in order to spot small shifts in factors like temperature, habitat destruction, and rainfall.

Lichens are a combination of two separate organisms. A fungus and an alga grow together in a symbiotic relationship where the fungus provides mineral nutrients and a place for the algae to grow, and the algae produce sugars for the fungus through photosynthesis. Lichens are used as bioindicators because of their sensitivity to air pollution. Lichens do not have roots, so they can only get nutrients directly from the atmosphere. They are especially sensitive to excess nitrogen pollution in the air. If scientists start to see a decline in lichen species that are particularly sensitive to nitrogen along with an increase in species that can tolerate nitrogen well, they know that air quality has decreased.

Spotted Owl

The northern spotted owl was first listed as a threatened species in 1990 due to habitat loss. Because these owls do not build their own nests, they rely on mature old-growth forests for tree cavities, broken treetops, and other debris to nest in. Pressure from logging, development, recreation, and disease has left them without safe nesting areas. Declines in the northern spotted owl population indicate further decreases in the quality of the Pacific Northwest hardwood forests. In 1999, the San Francisco Bay Area Network began monitoring the owls as a way to estimate the ecological health of their nesting habitats.

Mayflies are a type of macroinvertebrate insect that is especially sensitive to water pollution. As a juvenile, they live exclusively in the water. Adults live on land or in the air but return to the water to lay eggs. They are used by researchers as indicators of the health of aquatic ecosystems because of their dependence on water and their pollution intolerance. For example, most mayfly species are dependent on habitats with harder bottom surfaces. Excess sediment pollution that settles on the bottom of a waterway may be one reason for population decline. Finding mayflies in an aquatic ecosystem means that the water has little if any pollution.

Salmon is an anadromous species of fish. This means that they hatch in freshwater, then make their way out to the ocean, only to return to freshwater to spawn. If they are unable to move freely between freshwater and the ocean, they cannot survive. Habitat destruction, overfishing, and damming of rivers have caused a significant decrease in salmon populations throughout the world. Researchers in the Pacific Northwest attribute deaths in the coho salmon population to polluted stormwater runoff from urban areas surrounding spawning habitats. Changes in salmon populations can be used to indicate a decline in habitat and water quality, as well as the presence of disease.

Marsh Periwinkles

Marsh periwinkles are a type of snail that can be found grazing on algae that grow on the grasses of salt marshes. They move with the tide, coming down to feed at low tide and moving back up stalks of grass as the water rises. Marsh periwinkles are especially sensitive to pollution and are frequently used to study the health of marsh ecosystems.

Researchers along the Gulf Coast of the United States used marsh periwinkles to show how oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill affected coastal wetland shorelines and predicted that their decline would likely affect other essential ecosystem functions in the marsh. They also consume marsh cordgrass, which is vital to the marsh ecosystem. If the populations of marsh periwinkle predators decline, they can negatively affect the health of the marsh grasses as their grazing increases.

River Otters

River otters are considered apex predators in aquatic ecosystems, so any toxins in their environment will rapidly make their way to the otters through the fish and invertebrates that they eat. Because toxins build up as they make their way up the food chain, river otters receive much larger amounts than other animals in the same ecosystem. They would most likely show signs of toxin exposure before any other plant or animal. Canadian scientists used hair from river otters to test for levels of mercury in a lake next to an inactive mercury mine on its shore. This study showed that river otters can be valuable indicator species to test the health of marine and freshwater habitats.

Salamanders

Salamanders have highly permeable skin that has to be kept moist in order for them to survive. This makes them especially vulnerable to pollution and drought. A decline in salamander health or population size could indicate a negative change in their environment.

USDA Forest Service researchers studied two different types of salamanders to show the recovery of a forest ecosystem that had been commercially logged. The salamander populations grew with the age and health of the forest.

Escherichia coli (E. coli) is a type of bacteria commonly found in the fecal matter of warm-blooded animals. Bacteria are ideal organisms for showing the presence of pollution because they reproduce quickly, can be found everywhere, and are quick to change if there is an environmental stressor.

E. coli is used by the U.S. EPA to indicate the presence of fecal matter in freshwater. Other bacteria are commonly used in brackish and saltwater, as well as in air and soil as indicators of pollution.

Bats are sensitive to changes in environmental quality because of their roles as seed spreaders, pollinators, and insectivores. They are particularly affected by habitat loss and fragmentation. Bats have been used by researchers to study light pollution, heavy metals, urbanization, droughts, and agricultural changes. They have been studied non-invasively and cost-effectively through the use of camera traps, acoustic surveys, and hair collection. Researchers at Yellowstone National Park use bats to study climate change and infectious diseases in bat populations.

Monarch Butterfly

Monarch Butterfly numbers have been in steep decline for the last 25 years, likely due to a combination of habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate change. Because they migrate from Canada to Mexico, they are an ideal indicator species to study the health of the entire continent of North America. A researcher at Cornell University believes that the decline seen in the monarch butterfly population cannot be blamed on one single factor, but is an urgent indicator of larger systemic environmental problems.

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What Is an Indicator Species? Definition and Examples

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Indicator species are living organisms that tell us that something has changed or is going to change in their environment. They can be easily observed, and studying them is considered a cost-effective way to predict changes in an ecosystem. These species are also known as bioindicators.

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Ecological succession is the process by which the mix of species and habitat in an area changes over time. Gradually, these communities replace one another until a "climax community"-like a mature forest-is reached, or until a disturbance, like a fire, occurs.

Ecological succession is a fundamental concept in ecology. The study of succession was pioneered at the University of Chicago by Henry Chandler Cowles, who was also one of the founders of ecology as a discipline, as he studied the plants of the Indiana Dunes.

What is ecological succession?

Ecological succession is the process by which natural communities replace (or "succeed") one another over time. For example, when an old farm field in the midwestern U.S. is abandoned and left alone for many years, it gradually becomes a meadow, then a few bushes grow, and eventually, trees completely fill in the field, producing a forest.

Each plant community creates conditions that subsequently allow different plant communities to thrive. For example, early colonizers like grasses might add nutrients to the soil, whereas later ones like shrubs and trees might create cover and shade. Succession stops temporarily when a "climax" community forms; such communities remain in relative equilibrium until a disturbance restarts the succession process.
In this video from the National Park Service, Tim Watkins and Robert Boyd explore the Indiana Dunes, learning about its history as an important case study for the development of ecological succession theory.
Understanding how succession happens in a variety of ecosystems-and what kinds of disturbances and time spans lead to the formation of different plant and animal communities-is important for scientists who want to understand ecosystem dynamics and effectively protect or restore natural communities.

For example, many natural communities in North America have adapted to periodic disturbances from wildfires: This can help maintain prairie or savanna communities that depend on open habitat and nutrient cycling that might occur as a result of fire.

What are primary and secondary ecological succession?

There are two major types of ecological succession: primary succession and secondary succession.

Primary succession happens when a new patch of land is created or exposed for the first time. This can happen, for example, when lava cools and creates new rocks, or when a glacier retreats and exposes rocks without any soil. During primary succession, organisms must start from scratch. First, lichens might attach themselves to rocks, and a few small plants able to live without much soil might appear. These are known as "pioneer species."

Gradually, the decomposition of those plants contributes to soil formation, and more and larger plants begin to colonize the area. Eventually, enough soil forms and enough nutrients become available such that a climax community, like a forest, is formed. If the site is disturbed after this point, secondary succession occurs.

Secondary succession happens when a climax community or intermediate community is impacted by a disturbance. This restarts the cycle of succession, but not back to the beginning-soil and nutrients are still present.

For example, after a forest fire that kills all the mature trees on a particular landscape, grasses might grow, followed by shrubs and a variety of tree species, until eventually the community that existed before the fire is present again.

What is a climax community?

A climax community is the "endpoint" of succession within the context of a particular climate and geography. In the midwestern U.S., for example, such a community might be a hardwood forest with oaks and hickories as the dominant tree species.

A climax community will persist in a given location until a disturbance occurs. However, in many ecosystems, disturbance occurs frequently enough that a matrix of community types may be consistently present on the landscape.

For example, in an area prone to wildfires like the western U.S., mature forests may exist near grassy meadows with fewer, scattered trees. Consistent disturbance and variation in factors like water and nutrient availability over the course of decades thus allows many plant and animal communities to thrive within a particular climatic and geographic niche-not just those adapted to the absence of disturbance seen in climax communities.

What is an example of ecological succession?

Ecological succession can occur in many contexts and over many time spans.

In Hawaii and Iceland, primary succession occurs on lava flows where new land has formed; in Canada's Athabasca Dunes, it happens when new sand is deposited along a lakeshore; in the Andes, it occurs when glaciers retreat.

In many regions, secondary succession occurs where wildfires have destroyed conifer forests, or where former agricultural land is reverting to meadow or scrubland.

What these examples have in common is that the climax community is not the first one present on the landscape after succession begins: First, intermediate communities occupy the space, sometimes for many years, creating ideal conditions for the communities that follow.

Plant succession at the Indiana Dunes

The Indiana Dunes, 40 miles southeast of Chicago and today the site of both a state and a national park, served as the original field site for research on ecological succession in plant communities, and continue to serve as an ideal case study. (If you visit the dunes, you can walk along the Dune Succession Trail, which highlights the different stages of succession in a real-world context.)

In the 1890s, University of Chicago botanist Henry Chandler Cowles noticed that dunes which were further from Lake Michigan had different plants growing on them than dunes closer to the lake. The lakeside dunes had only beach grass, whereas those further from the shore had other plants like cottonwoods that could grow in sandy soil. Dunes still further back had pines, and finally behind them were mature oak forests that did not resemble the grassy dunes near the lake at all.

Through careful observation and comparisons, Cowles determined that the linear succession of these communities in space also represented a linear progression in time. The dunes farthest from the lake were the oldest and had been stable for longest, since sand shifts frequently in the wind without plants to hold it in place.

From this, he inferred that plant communities trended toward oak forests in northern Indiana over decades and centuries, and that each community created the soil and microclimate conditions required for its successor community to thrive: as grasses and cottonwoods stabilized dunes and added nutrients, they were replaced by later successional communities.

How do we understand ecological succession today?

Ecological succession is a foundational concept in ecology, which as a field examines the structure and dynamics of biological communities. Today, the concept of ecological succession continues to be studied from new angles as humans modify the global environment more than ever before. As new nuances have been added to the original theory, insights have emerged that are valuable to humans interested in managing natural resources.

For example, recent studies show that even in "climax" communities, changes in what resources are available may shift the balance of the species composition over time, even without a formal disturbance. Other work has examined the impact of biodiversity loss, invasive species, climate change and other anthropogenic factors in altering the way ecosystems respond to change.

As native species go extinct or become rare, new species enter ecosystems, and climate baselines shift, the communities that once dominated an ecosystem may be less likely to eventually return after a disturbance. However, studying succession can also provide valuable insights for ecologists and wildlife managers interested in restoring those natural systems: through careful management such as controlled burning or invasive species control, people can help ecological communities stay strong.

Henry Chandler Cowles, ecological succession and the University of Chicago

The University of Chicago played a key role in pioneering the scientific study of ecological succession and ecology as a discipline more broadly. Following his pivotal dissertation work in the Indiana Dunes as a UChicago doctoral student, Henry Chandler Cowles went on to become a professor, remaining at UChicago for more than three decades, until the early 1930s. He taught generations of students about the ecology of North America through course field trips across the continent from Maine to Alaska, California and Texas.

The trips-and Cowles' fieldwork-are documented in the University's special collection of American Environmental Photographs, which show Cowles, students, and American landscapes from a century ago in great variety and detail. Cowles' papers are also housed in the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, and can be found here. Additionally, Cowles' student Victor Ernest Shelford became an influential ecologist in his own right and a leader in the founding of the Nature Conservancy, a major conservation nonprofit.

In the early 20th century, the University of Chicago was also home to other noted ecologists and marine biologists, including George Damon Fuller and Warder Clyde Allee, an early expert on social relationships in animals and an important figure in the development of ecology.

Today, the University of Chicago remains a leader in research on ecology and evolutionary biology. The University's Warren Woods Ecological Field Station in Berrien County, Michigan offers students, faculty and staff the opportunity to study and observe ecosystem dynamics in a landscape that includes both remnant (undisturbed) forest, restored prairie and old fields.

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Ecological succession is the process by which the mix of species and habitat in an area changes over time. Gradually, these communities replace one another until a "climax community"-like a mature forest-is reached, or until a disturbance, like a fire, occurs. Ecological succession is a fundamental concept in ecology.

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Man-Made Disasters: Polluted Natural Habitats

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Man-Made Disasters: Polluted Natural Habitats

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Shutterstock

From Thailand to Bali, a huge increase in tourists, many from China and other rapidly developing economies, is straining sensitive ecosystems to the breaking point. Some countries are trying to control the boom, with a few closing popular destinations to allow damaged areas to heal.

Thailand's Maya Bay used to be a quiet cove teeming with marine life, visited by only a handful of tourists each day. Then came the 2000 film "The Beach" starring Leonardo DiCaprio, about a young American adventurer on an exotic island. By 2018, 5,000 tourists were visiting the bay, where the film had been shot, each day. Marine experts reported severe damage to the reef from boat anchors and snorkelers wearing sunscreen that contained a common chemical toxic to juvenile corals. Thailand's national parks department announced that more than 50 percent of the bay's corals showed signs of damage, prompting the agency to close Maya Bay indefinitely "until natural resources return to normal."

In the Philippines, the tiny island paradise of Boracay, covering 4 square miles, was overrun by 2 million visitors in 2017, many of them from cruise ships. Last year, with hundreds of businesses and residences dumping sewage into the sea, authorities closed the island for six months to undertake a large-scale cleanup operation and developed plans to cut the number of visitors by two-thirds.

And in Vietnam, the country's most popular tourism destination, Ha Long Bay, with its thousands of limestone islands of all shapes and sizes rising out of the sea - has experienced a huge increase in tourists whose sheer numbers are fouling the ecosystem. Officials say that in 2017, nearly 7 million tourists visited the bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site; roughly half were international visitors, many of them from China. Hundreds of ships ply the bay each day, often discharging human waste into the sea. Tourists increasingly express surprise not at the landscape, but at the amount of trash in the water or the crowds.

"I would argue that tourism has not only been badly managed, it's not been managed at all," says one expert.

Around the world, burgeoning numbers of tourists - many of them from nations with millions of new middle-class travelers - are putting pressure on legendary natural areas, from the mountains of Patagonia, to the national parks of the western United States, to the Arctic landscapes of Iceland. But nowhere is the problem more acute than in Southeast Asia, famed for its beaches, tropical forests, and far-flung islands. Not only are the economies of Southeast Asian nations heavily geared to, and dependent on, foreign tourism, but the region's vacation destinations are also close to China, whose citizens made an estimated 150 million trips abroad last year - a 15-fold increase from 2000.

Andrew Hewett, with the Thailand-based Phi Phi Island Conservation and Preservation Group, says that the face and mode of tourism in Southeast Asia has changed significantly in the last 10 to 12 years. Most of the region's tourists used to come from Australia, the U.S., Europe, and Japan, with many of them arriving in small groups or as backpackers. Today, China and India dominate the tourist ranks, their travelers often arriving in what Hewett calls "mass charter groups." Larger groups mean bigger boats, with more oil and waste discharged in the water. They also mean more garbage and human waste, and more damage to sensitive marine and terrestrial environments.

Until recently, many Southeast Asian nations, grateful for new jobs and surging revenue, have done little to address the growing threat to the natural environments that attracted tourists in the first place.

"I would argue that tourism has not only been badly managed in general, it's not been managed at all," said Randy Durband, chief executive officer of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council. "Southeast Asia is one of the most dramatic regions in the world for the issues we're talking about."

The sheer number of tourists now pouring into Southeast Asia is "eye-popping," according to Megan Epler Wood, director of the International Sustainable Tourism Initiative at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the president of EplerWood International, a company that helps locales develop sustainable tourism. Thailand, one of the world's top 10 countries for international tourism, welcomed more than 38 million visitors in 2018, a three-fold increase from 15 years ago. From 2016 to 2017, the number of foreign tourists visiting Vietnam grew by 30 percent, and then by an additional 2.5 million visitors the following year, bringing the total number of foreign tourists in Vietnam in 2018 to 15.5 million.

A report released late last month by The Travel Foundation, Cornell University, and EplerWood International found that local capacity to manage environmental impacts from tourism is lacking in much of Southeast Asia.

"The invisible burden is the social and environmental impacts of tourism that are not accounted for when countries look at economic impacts," says Epler Wood, a co-author of the Travel Foundation report. "There's a cost as each tourist comes into a country. It's not equally distributed throughout the economy, and where it fails is in the protection of the environment."

The crush of tourists into areas such as Maya Beach, Ha Long Bay, or Bali extracts an environmental toll in several key ways. One is the handling and treatment of human waste. A second is the mountains of garbage and plastic bags piling up in places that once received thousands of visitors annually and now receive millions. And a third is the damage to the environment as legions of tourists disembark from cruise ships or planes and fan out across fragile ecosystems.

After unregulated discharge of sewage turned Boracay's waters into a "cesspool," authorities closed the island to tourists for six months.

Boracay Island in the Philippines, once named by Travel and Leisure magazine as the world's best island, serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen to a once-paradisiacal spot that finds itself flooded with tourists. As more and more visitors poured onto the island in recent years to enjoy its white sand beaches and turquoise waters by day and raucous party scene by night, the island's environment reached the breaking point. A government survey found that 716 of 834 businesses and residences lacked wastewater permits and many were discharging sewage into the sea. Armies of tourists, sometimes reaching nearly 20,000 a day, were strewing trash about the island and disturbing wildlife, including sea turtles.

Last April, after Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said the unregulated discharge of sewage had turned Boracay's limpid waters into a "cesspool," authorities closed the island to tourists for six months. They limited the number of tourists to 6,400 a day, required hotels and other businesses to install proper sewage treatment systems, mandated that tourists stay in government-accredited hotels with proper sanitation, banned single-use plastics, created steep fines for littering, and required Jet Skis to operate more than 100 meters offshore. The island has been largely reopened to tourists since October, although officials say Boracay's rehabilitation will take at least two years.

"I believe the closure served its purpose of giving Boracay the much needed rest it deserves and allowing for improvements," says John Paolo R. Rivera, associate director of the Andrew L. Tan Center for Tourism at the Philippines-based Asian Institute of Management. "Boracay must only permit quality tourists. [It] should not be positioned as an island that is known for parties, but rather an island that is an example of sustainable tourism."

Similarly overrun, Maya Beach in Thailand remains closed to tourists. Declared off-limits to visitors in June 2018, the government initially planned to reopen the resort by last October, but has decided to keep Maya Beach shuttered for the foreseeable future. The main restoration work involves replanting corals on the resort's badly damaged reefs. With the swarms of tourists gone, some marine life is returning to Maya Beach, including dozens of blacktip reef sharks caught on video last fall.

Another fragile Southeast Asian ecosystem facing growing tourism pressure, and a looming closure, is Komodo National Park in eastern Indonesia. This is the only habitat on the planet for the Komodo dragon, the world's largest lizard, as well as other species such as the dugong, a marine mammal, and 260 different species of corals. The number of visitors coming to Komodo Island to snorkel its spectacular coral reefs, swim beneath waterfalls, kayak through mangrove forests, and see the Komodo dragon has doubled in recent years, from 80,000 in 2014 to 159,000 last year.

A recent upgrade to the airport nearest to Komodo Island will expand the airfield's capacity to 1.5 million passengers annually, putting further pressure on the park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Cruise ships, carrying up to 1,200 passengers, also are calling on the park more frequently. Developers are hoping to cash in on the increasing number of visitors, but conservationists and government officials are concerned about environmental pressures such as pollution, freshwater shortages, and habitat destruction.

Strategies are needed "to conserve the integrity of the destination - the very reason why travelers are drawn to the region."

Officials have been contemplating the temporary closure of the island to give the Komodo dragon's realm a chance to recover. After wildlife traffickers were busted in late March poaching 41 Komodo dragons and selling them at $35,000 apiece on the black market, local provincial officials announced plans to close park starting in January 2020. But Indonesia's Environment and Forestry Ministry, which manages the park, said no final decision has been made.

Epler Wood says she and her colleagues believe closures should be considered only as a last resort. "We don't advocate a closing unless it's an emergency," she says. "We recommend balanced management that looks at supply and demand and measured responses based on planning and science that involves regular benchmarking, like water testing, so you can see when they're getting close to a problem, which should trigger action."

James Sano, the World Wildlife Fund's vice president for travel, tourism, and conservation, says the Southeast Asia's travel boom is a clear threat to the region's "natural and cultural resources." He says that all involved, including the travel industry and local and national officials, must develop strategies to deal with environmental, cultural, and economic impacts "to conserve the integrity of the destination - the very reason why travelers are drawn to the region."

Popular tourist spots such as Vietnam's Ha Long Bay are facing growing pressure to do something before millions of tourists debase the breathtaking environments they came to see. In Ha Long Bay, a coalition of government officials, local businesses, grassroots organizations, and international groups such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature are working to improve water quality. These efforts include collaborating with tour boat operators to install waste treatment technologies on their vessels. But whether these efforts will prove effective in the face of growing numbers of tourists clamoring to see Vietnam's iconic tourist destination remains to be seen.

The Indonesian Island of Bali has for years been trying to cope with ever-increasing numbers of tourists. Bali's international airport received more than 5 million foreign tourists in 2018, a five-fold increase since 2001. The scale of environmental problems has grown in parallel with the number of tourists, including overuse of freshwater, air pollution, habitat destruction, and the generation of large amounts of garbage. More than 1,700 acres of land are developed annually in Bali. Each four-star hotel room uses 80 gallons of water a day.

Officials in Bali have proposed a $10 tax levied on international passengers flying through the island's airport, which would be used to fund programs to preserve Bali's culture and environment, with a focus on tackling the island's waste management problem. The island produces 3,800 tons of garbage daily, with only 60 percent of it going to landfills, according to the Bali Environment Agency. Last December, Bali banned single-use plastics, such as shopping bags and straws.

How a surge in visitors is overwhelming America's national parks. Read more.

A number of regions are taking steps to stem the damage from tourism by improving traveler awareness. Facing threats from mass tourism, the western Pacific archipelago of Palau - known for spectacular hiking, bird watching, snorkeling, and diving - now requires visitors to sign an environmental pledge promising not to damage the environment during their stay. Stamped in travelers' passports, it reads, "I vow to tread lightly, act kindly, and explore mindfully. I shall not take what is not given. I shall not harm what does not harm me."

Elisheva Mittelman contributed reporting to this story.
Correction, April 22, 2019: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Komodo National Park will be closing to tourists in 2020. While local officials have called for its closure, no final decision has been made by Indonesia's Environment and Forestry Ministry, which manages the park.

Nithin Coca is a freelance journalist who focuses on social, environment, and economic issues in developing countries. He splits his time between Southeast Asia and California. More →

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The Toll of Tourism: Can Southeast Asia Save Its Prized Natural Areas?

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From Thailand to Bali, a huge increase in tourists, many from China and other rapidly developing economies, is straining sensitive ecosystems to the breaking point. Some countries are trying to control the boom, with a few closing popular destinations to allow damaged areas to heal.

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Habitat Loss: Big Cat Attacks on the Rise

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Urban gardening now has many options to help you grow food wherever you have space, such as with container gardening, hydroponic gardening, and rooftop gardening.

This means you can control the location where you grow the food, and worry less about environmental conditions like drought or cold weather.

You can choose what you want to grow, how you want to grow it, and where you want to grow. This helps you get the food that you want, when you want, without always depending on the seasons.
7. Grow sustainable food
Growing mass-produced food with traditional farming methods takes a lot out of the planet. Beyond the many resources that are used on the farm, the food then has to be transported from where it is grown to a store near you. That requires burning a lot of fuel. On average in the U.S., food is now transported between 1,500 and 2,500 miles to reach the consumer.

Urban gardening helps reduce the carbon footprint of the food system by reducing such fossil fuel consumption. It also makes far more efficient use of water. Hydroponic gardening uses around 90% less water than conventional farming.
8. Grow safe food
We know that mass-produced food has to be transported a long way to reach you. This increases the chances of contamination from bacteria and viruses such as salmonella.

With urban gardening, you grow food locally. You grow it with good soil, water, fertilizer. And you grow the food with care. This all helps improve the quality and safety of your food. Of course, it is also important to test your soil (if using) and other inputs before growing to ensure that your fresh food will be safe and delicious, and to practice basic food safety guidelines.
9. Build community
People who stay in urban areas have forgotten what it means to be part of a community. We tend to be isolated and independent which causes issues like depression, mistrust, and lack of happiness.

Urban gardening can help bring men, women, children, friends, families, and neighbors together for a common purpose. The purpose of growing sustainable food together. This also helps to reduce the disconnect we experience to where our food comes from. It also helps teach our children valuable lessons about nature, our food system, and sustainability.
10. Save money
It can be costly to live in the city. A large part of this cost is the expensive food that you need to buy. Healthy fruits and vegetables cost a lot more than junk food that is so readily available.

When you grow your own food, you can avoid this problem. You don't need to spend a lot of money to get the healthy and nutritious fruits and vegetables that you need. If you're able to grow a lot of food, you can even sell it to other people. This can help you set up a small business and make money. It can also create jobs for other people in your neighborhood.
Why wait?
Growing your own food doesn't have to be hard, even if you live in the city. Urban gardening can help you grow your own fruits and vegetables in a sustainable way.

All you need to do is take that first step. Start learning about urban gardening and before you know it you'll be harvesting your first crop.

Everyone deserves healthy, nutritious food. You do too.

About the author: Kevin Rodrigues is the founder of GardeningMentor. He's also a software developer that wants to transition into a full-time gardener. Kevin plans to grow an organic garden that can help sustain his family. His love for gardening drives him to share tips, guides, and resources on his website.

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10 Reasons You Should Give Urban Gardening A Try - AGRITECTURE

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Urban gardening now has many options to help you grow food wherever you have space, such as with container gardening, hydroponic gardening, and rooftop gardening. This means you can control the location where you grow the food, and worry less about environmental conditions like drought or cold weather.

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96 Hours of Pure Cottagecore | Devin But Better

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Man-Made Disasters: Pacific Garbage Patch

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Man-Made Disasters: Pacific Garbage Patch

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Is Not What You Think It Is | The Swim

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Man-Made Disasters: Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster

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Man-Made Disasters: Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster

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Inside Chernobyl's Abandoned Ghost Town | Pripyat

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Natural Disasters: Icelandic Volcano - Mount Fagradalsfjall

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Natural Disasters: Icelandic Volcano - Mount Fagradalsfjall

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To many people around the world, the all-but-certain prospect of a new volcanic eruption on Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula sounded ominous. But in March 2021, when lava rushed out of a fissure in a valley named Geldingadalur-a comfortable six miles away from the nearest town, Grindavík-those in Iceland were nothing but thrilled.

The public was exhilarated to be able to see an eruption up close-one that posed little danger. Drone pilots flew their contraptions over rivers of molten rock like X-wing pilots. Scientists began forensically studying this once-per-millennium event, which is giving them a window into the part of the country that is quite literally being ripped apart by titanic tectonic forces.

It's the best-case scenario for an eruption anywhere. Everybody's a winner. And because the volcano, known as Fagradalsfjall, looks an awful lot like a school science project come to scorching life, this constantly documented eruption is a great opportunity to explain some of the fundamental features of this sort of miniature magmatic mountain.

If you have a peek at the live webcam footage of the eruption, you'll be greeted with an astounding sight. On the night of March 19, the meandering curtain of lava oozing out of a 1,650-foot-long crack in the Earth became a much more focused affair. Molten rock began gurgling and leaping out of a kind of broken cauldron. At night, the basilica of fire is illuminated by its own radiant streams, as it gives the lava valley a long-overdue fresh coat of Hadean paint.

The tall structure is called a spatter cone. As is common with fissure eruptions, the magma below finds a path of least resistance and begins to gush onto the surface. As it does so, the lava spilling out around it begins to cool and solidify, forming a sort of ring. Blobs of lava-that's the spatter-splash onto the ring of rock over time, eventually forming a cone that looks like a fun-size volcano.

Spatter cones can sometimes reach impressive heights quickly. Back during the 2018 eruption sequence at Hawaiʻi's Kīlauea volcano, a cone at fissure number eight (of two dozen) grew to 180 feet tall. The cone and fissure have since been named Ahuʻailāʻau, after a volcano deity's altar. If this Icelandic cone survives its own eruption, maybe it will get a name, too.

The construction of spatter cones can be chaotic and haphazard, and this baby cone in Iceland is no exception. On March 21, one side of the cone collapsed, causing a small cascade of lava to spill across the valley. At press time, the cone had lava coming out of two separate exits, technically known as vents.

This lava sometimes takes the form of streams, where the lava is cooling slowly and flowing smoothly, referred to as pāhoehoe (thanks, Hawaiʻi!). When the lava keeps moving but gets bunched up a bit and cools more quickly, it rips itself apart and forms rubbly, jagged, thicker flows that scientists call ʻaʻā.

The lava's surface cools quickly on contact with air, forming that distinctive black crust, but you can spy little patches of red here and there. These are skylights, windows into the still-molten rock just below. If this unstable rocky roof collapses, you can sometimes get erratically spreading lava puddles.

Whatever form it takes, this lava is hot. Very hot. You don't need an infrared camera to see that. And its color is an indication of that heat-from scarlet to clementine, corresponding to roughly 1,450 to 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. It's far too hot for a decent barbecue; any food you put on it will burst into flames or get crushed before melting. Best to wait for the lava to cool into a rock that, while still hot, is actually not a bad way to grill sausages, if you're exceedingly careful.

That eruption temperature is typical of this flavor of lava, which is known as a basalt, and that type explains a lot about the sort of eruption we're seeing. Magmas (lava when it's still underground) often have a decent amount of silica in them, molecules that forms a sort of skeleton through the hellish soup that keeps it bound together, sort of like the proteins in an egg white. Lavas with relatively high concentrations of silica are thicker and more custard-like. If they have lots of gases dissolved in them while deep underground, they might suddenly, violently expand as the magma breaks through to the surface, creating explosions.

But basalt doesn't have that much silica, so it is way runnier, more warm honey than custard. Consequently, its gases tend to bubble out fairly calmly, so unless it mingles with ice or a shallow body of water, which can trigger steam-driven blasts and make a lot of ash, big booms are much less likely.

Instead, what you may see from time to time are lava fountains, vertical streaks of molten rock forced into the sky by a collection of bubbles below, just like popping the cork on a shaken bottle of champagne. Gas bubbles formerly confined by pressure escape into a low-pressure environment, and as they rush outside they bring along the delicious champagne or less delicious lava.

The earlier stages of the Fagradalsfjall eruption were a bit gassier and had more oomph, so there were a number of small lava fountains. The ongoing eruption of Sicily's Mount Etna has definitely trounced it in that department; at one point it was blasting its own basaltic lava into the clouds, with individual fountains reaching over twice the height of the world's tallest skyscraper.

Unless you want to know what it feels like to be flambéed or hit by a superheated, fridge-sized cannonball, standing next to that Italian mountain's spectacular summit eruption would be an all-around terrible thing to do. But the adorable paroxysm at Fagradalsfjall is so self-contained that the public-initially advised by the authorities to stay away, but now told the best place to stand-can just waltz on up to a nearby ridge and watch the youngest land on Earth being forged before their very eyes.

It isn't a risk-free activity. It's possible that another eruption could happen suddenly along another fissure in the area and, like the original crevasse opening, it wouldn't provide much warning. The plume of gases that shoot out of the vents can be problematic, too. Much of it is water vapor, but there's also sulfur dioxide, a gas that, even in small quantities, can dangerously aggravate the lungs of people with respiratory conditions such as asthma.

Overall, this eruption is relatively safe and approachable because, even with a runny sort of magma involved, most people can easily outwalk basaltic lava on a flat surface. By sitting uphill, you are placing a natural barrier between yourself and fiery doom. The greatest hazard there at the moment isn't from fire, but from ice. Some onlookers have been parking their cars and then staying until nightfall-and then getting lost in a snowstorm while trying to leave.

No one is sure how long this eruption will persist. But the dimensions of the band of magma fueling it has been estimated from how the ground in the region has changed shape over the past month. It's fairly thin, and is about four miles long, so presuming that modest amount of magma erupts in its entirety, the eruption might last a few more weeks.

But if more magma arrives from deep below, it could keep on going like this months or even years. It's perfectly possible, at its current rate of production, that the lava could eventually fill up the valley. There's no need to fret, because this valley is surrounded by other valleys like it. It would take a long, long time and a lot of lava to become a threat to any towns or people living on the peninsula.

There is a decent chance, though, that this eruption could mark the start of many decades, or even several centuries, of eruptions all across the peninsula, as has happened at least three times in the past few millennia. That this will take place on a sparsely populated strip of land is as ideal a volcanic situation you are going to get.

Like this youthful eruption we are all marveling at, a new era of widespread volcanic pyrotechnics on the Reykjanes Peninsula is something everyone could enjoy. It won't merely reveal to scientists more about the enigmatic, magmatic engines that power this ever-shape-shifting country, but spectators, both in Iceland and elsewhere around the world, will gain a newfound appreciation for this dynamic, beautiful world: a pale blue dot flecked with fire.

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Why Does Iceland's Fagradalsfjall Volcano Look Like a School Science Project?

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To many people around the world, the all-but-certain prospect of a new volcanic eruption on Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula sounded ominous. But in March 2021, when lava rushed out of a fissure in a valley named Geldingadalur-a comfortable six miles away from the nearest town, Grindavík-those in Iceland were nothing but thrilled.

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* The Moynaq Ship Graveyard is literally a ghost town in the middle of the desert.
* It was once home to a busy fishing port as well as one the four largest lakes in the world.
* The lake began to shrink when Soviet irrigation projects diverted the rivers that fed it. While this could be reversed, Uzbekistan doesn't have the funds to do so.

In Uzbekistan, an eerie ship graveyard filled with hauntingly beautiful shipwrecks beckons.

The Moynaq Ship Graveyard is literally a ghost town in the middle of the desert.

It was once a busy Soviet fishing port on the Aral Sea - one of the four largest lakes in the world back in the day - but t oday, nothing but desert remains.

Let's take a closer look and see how these ships came to be stranded in the middle of the desert.

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Incredible photos of an abandoned ship graveyard in the middle of the desert

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The Moynaq Ship Graveyard is literally a ghost town in the middle of the desert.* It was once home to a busy fishing port as well as one the four largest lakes in the world. * The lake began to shrink when Soviet irrigation projects diverted the rivers that fed it.

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Coral bleaching: It's not too late to save the Great Barrier Reef

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​Reports of mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef are devastating to see and serve as a reminder that the impacts of climate change pose a serious threat to coral reefs. But now is not the time to lose hope.

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Outdoor Adventures: Climbing Mt. Everest - Glory or Death

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Outdoor Adventures: Climbing Mt. Everest - Glory or Death

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Glory or Death: Climbing Mount Everest (Full Segment) | Real Sports w/ Bryant Gumbel | HBO