Conservation
One of my favorite things about writing a regular eco-travel and environmental column is getting to read the comments that come in. Sometimes readers are complimentary, sometimes they are critical and sometimes they challenge me. Such is the case with an article I recently wrote on soil and climate change.
Videos
We Earthlings are lucky. While other planets in our solar system are either blistering hot or bitterly cold, the surface of Earth has relatively mild and stable temperatures. We get to enjoy these conditions because of the Earth’s atmosphere, the thin layer of gases that envelop and protect our planet.
Nature & Wildlife
Recently, when a drone crashed in Grand Prismatic Spring in Midway Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park, it sparked a public debate about the use of such devices in our jointly owned, national treasures and the protections for such lands that we currently have in place.
Travel Tales
Running 250 miles down the British Columbia, Canada, coast, the Great Bear Rain Forest is a wild expanse of western cedars, hemlocks and spruce trees. This 21 million-acre area—whose boundaries have never been precisely defined—is the largest coastal temperate rain forest on Earth.
Videos
Forests are important for our welfare for a very long list of reasons, a few of which are: • they provide us with medicines; • they manufacture breathable air: just one adult, leafy tree can produce as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year; • they fight flooding; •…
Nature & Wildlife
Tomorrow, September 3, 2014, will mark the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. In 1964, the bill that created the act passed the Senate by a vote of 73–12 and the House by 373–1.
Nature & Wildlife
Visiting the Grand Canyon is a watershed moment for every American. Whether you gaze upon it from the North Rim or the South, the polychromatic rock walls that stretch away from you a mile down to the Colorado River and the canyon floor play with your sense of time and reality.
Videos
When you read about all of the climate change deniers now serving in the United States Congress, it’s easy to become skeptical that our nation will ever be able to commit to combating the destructive effects our rapidly warming planet is having on the world.
Conservation
One hundred years ago this year, the last passenger pigeon on Earth died in the Cincinnati Zoo. A female named Martha, she has now become an icon for species extinction.
Conservation
It’s been 44 years since Wisconsin’s—as this Wisconsinite is proud to say—Senator Gaylord Nelson inspired the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Modeled on the antiwar protests of the late 1960s, the original Earth Day began on university campuses as a national teach-in on environmental issues.
Videos
In ecological circles, a trophic cascade is a term used to describe a process in an ecosystem that starts at the top of the food chain and works its way down to the bottom.
Conservation
Kudos to California. Last October, it became the first state to ban lead ammunition for all types of hunting. The ban will benefit the state’s namesake condors, which nearly went extinct. In 1982, only 22 California condors remained on the planet.
