Conservation
Wednesday, April 22, is Earth Day 2015, the 45th celebration of what started out as a true grassroots movement—the environmental likes of which we haven’t seen since. Last year, on Earth Day 2014, I wrote about Americans’ declining concerns about natural resource issues and the slackening of our environmental laws.
Conservation
The world’s tigers face considerable threats today: poaching, habitat loss, depletion of their prey and retaliatory kills by humans when the big cats take livestock. But now, a new threat has surfaced: the canine distemper virus (CDV).
News & More
A trip to Denali National Park is a journey into wild America at its best. This six-million-acre landscape is bisected by only one, 92-mile ribbon of road. Travel along it, and you’ll see low-elevation, taiga forest morph into high, alpine tundra. It all culminates in North America’s tallest peak: the 20,310-foot Denali.
Travel Tales
When you first start exploring beyond your home ground, you tend to see everything in relation to where you live: what’s different, what’s similar, what’s unheard of and what’s exactly the same. I suppose it’s our way of getting a grip on new surroundings and beginning to have them make sense.
Conservation
Gray wolves in the Great Lakes region received some good news last month. In a surprise, unusual ruling on December 19, 2014, United States District Judge Beryl A. Howell ordered that gray wolves in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin be placed back on the federal endangered species list.
Travel Tales
There are a few rare places in the world where time as a linear construct just doesn’t seem to make much sense; places where the past, present and even the future seem to be all jumbled together, like pack ice piled up along a shoreline.
News & More
When we hear news about the declining numbers—and even near-extinction—of some of the world’s largest animals, such as tigers and rhinos, we usually think about that loss in terms of the planet’s diminishing animal biodiversity and what we can do to conserve what’s left of these species.
Videos
Predator meeting prey is part of the circle of life in nature. All living organisms need nutrition to produce the energy required to run their systems.
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.
Nature & Wildlife
As many as 900 Yellowstone National Park American bison may be exterminated in winter 2014-2015. It’s estimated that our nation’s last, pure herd of free-ranging bison that have managed to continuously live on their native grounds currently numbers at 4,900. That means that a fifth of this near-threatened species is soon to be killed.
Nature & Wildlife
While anyone who has traveled to Yellowstone National Park knows that the sights alone are enough to take your breath away, I’m always struck by how unprepared I am for what I would describe as the “timeless sounds” of Yellowstone: the howls of wolves on the wind, the yips of coyotes on the hills…
Conservation
Wildlife Services, part of the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, set off a firestorm of criticism recently when it released data showing that in 2013 the agency killed more than 4 million animals—2 million of which, according to the Center for Biological Diversity—were from native species.
