dotearth.blogs.nytimes.comNatural Resources and the Environment - Dot Earth Blog - The New York Times

Sections Home Search The New York Times Dot Earth Search Subscribe Now Log In 0 SettingsSite Search Navigation Search NYTimes.com Clear this text input Go Site Navigation Site Mobile Navigation Supported by Dot Earth New York Times blog Search sustainability Dec 5, 2016 Dec 5, 2016 After Nine Years and 2,810 Posts, a Dot Earth Farewell By Andrew C. Revkin Photo A detail from the "thought map" drawn by Jeremy Zilar as the Dot Earth blog was being developed in 2007. Credit Jeremy Zilar This is the 2,810th and final post in the nine-year inquiry I began here while still a Times news reporter on October 24, 2007 . In my 33rd year writing on global environmental issues, I am moving back to in-depth journalism, which is where I started in the early 1980s as a magazine editor and writer . Starting today, I’ll be reporting for ProPublica , the independent public-interest newsroom honored with everything from three Pulitzer Prizes to a recent shout-out by John Oliver . I can’t think of a better way to describe my beat there than by pasting the reply I offered after a friend asked me over the weekend to come up with a New Year’s resolution related to my work climate change: Read more… activism Dec 4, 2016 Dec 4, 2016 Facing Standing Rock Campaign, Obama Administration Blocks Dakota Pipeline Path By Andrew C. Revkin Photo The Oceti Sakowin camp in a snow storm on Nov. 29 during a protest against the Dakota Access pipeline. Credit Stephanie Keith/Reuters An extraordinary upwelling of activism in support of Indian land rights and expressing environmental concerns — focused on blocking the planned path of the multi-billion-dollar Dakota Access Pipeline — achieved a remarkable victory today. Here’s The New York Times summary: Federal officials announced on Sunday that they would not approve permits for construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline beneath a dammed section of the Missouri River that tribes say sits near sacred burial sites.” [ Read the rest .] The headline on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers statement had no nuance:Army will not grant easement for Dakota Access Pipeline crossing .” The Standing Rock Sioux released a statement including this line: Read more… forests Dec 4, 2016 Dec 4, 2016 Will California Ever Let Sierra Nevada Forests Burn? By Andrew C. Revkin Photo A planned fire burned through needles, branches and logs around sequoias and other trees on June 11 in Kings Canyon National Park. Credit National Park Service/ R. Paterson Photo Legal scholars and philosophers focused on the environment discussed the evolving notion of wilderness at a workshop high in the Sierras. Credit Andrew C. Revkin In this centennial year of the National Park System , it’s been encouraging to see management of the western components of this remarkable ecological patrimony shifting ever so slowly toward incorporating knowledge of natural cycles of fire in maintaining forest health. For forests in California’s Sierra Nevada, particularly, a dangerous and ecologically disruptivefire deficit ” has been built through generations of land policies fixated on fire suppression. In early June, I was fortunate to see an all-too-rare prescribed burn while spending several days in Kings Canyon National Park, mainly at a fascinating workshop hosted by the University of Illinois law and philosophy program focused on the evolving meanings of both wilderness” and wildness” on a planet increasingly shaped by humans. At a hike-in camp” around 8,000 feet up, we read everything from Emerson ( Nature ,” 1836) to Aldo Leopold ( Wilderness as a Form of Land Use ,” 1925) to Jack Turner, a philosopher turned mountaineer and essayist whose self-described rant” from his 1996 book,The Abstract Wild ,” felt (no kidding) like a fierce, but grounded, mix of Hunter S. Thompson and Peter Matthiessen . Click here to get a taste of what I mean. Photo A crew prepared last week for a prescribed fire along a trail in the Redwood Mountain Grove in Kings Canyon National Park. Credit Andrew C. Revkin But we also got to explore, spending some time in the Redwood Canyon section of the park, where several trails wind through the world’s largest grove of giant sequoias. We met up with a Park Service fire crew readying the area for a prescribed burn over the following week. Click here to track how the operation was carried out . The problem? It took 13 years to carry out this one 760-acre planned fire. The state’s stringent air quality rules add vast regulatory obligations to planned a managed fire but don’t apply if the same area ends up burning on its own — as would be inevitable. Read on for more on that issue. Read more… Appreciation Dec 3, 2016 Dec 3, 2016 A Belated Farewell to a Pioneering Polar Bear Researcher By Andrew C. Revkin Photo Linda Gormezano and her scat-sniffing dog, Quinoa, scanning the coast of Hudson Bay a decade ago. Credit American Museum of Natural History Dot Earth often had the feel of an accelerating hamster wheel (see posts marked with the fire hose image ). But it was a wheel of my own creation, given the broad question I chose to pursue starting back in October, 2007 – how do humans navigate this century with the fewest regrets? Countless relevant developments and insights slipped by before I could note them, which is why Twitter and Facebook , in the end, became my real web log – my way of assessing, relating and sharing consequential nuggets crossing my screen. (I hope you’ll continue to follow me there; just click on the preceding links.) Before this blogging adventure ends this weekend, there’s one sad development that I feel compelled to catch up with — the untimely death in August 2015 of Linda J. Gormezano — a tireless Arctic-focused field biologist from the American Museum of Natural History. I first wrote about Gormezano’s innovative work studying coyote and polar bear populations with the help of her scat-sniffing Dutch shepherd, Quinoa, back in 2007. But I kept track of the important batch of studies she produced in subsequent years, and the healthy debate they had prompted. Her work showed that polar bears, while best known for their life at sea or on sea ice pursuing seals, have been able, at least in some circumstances, to gain significant nutrition on land as well, scarfing down geese and goose eggs, grasses and other fare when sea ice is in retreat. There have been substantial, sometimes rancorous, debates among polar bear researchers about this predator’s prospects in a warming climate with less summer sea ice. Robert F. Rockwell , a Museum of Natural History population biologist and ecologist who was one of Gormezano’s mentors since she started at the museum as a grad student, made no secret of his frustration with what he felt was agenda-driven resistance to publishing some of her findings. After her death (from natural causes unrelated to her work), he persisted at finding a home for her final paper, co-written with him and colleagues Scott R. McWilliams and David T. Iles. The paper was published in September in the journal Conservation Physiology. You can read it here:Costs of locomotion in polar bears: when do the costs outweigh the benefits of chasing down terrestrial prey? ” Rockwell has posted an inspiring written and pictorial tribute to Gormezano. I hope you’ll click and read and pass it around. He starts out describing her, as a spirited and talented student, as every professor’s dream.” In this excerpt, you can read how she quickly became much more than that, steering the museum’s research program in new directions: Read more… Anthropocene Nov 30, 2016 Nov 30, 2016 TED’s Science Curator Sees Hope in Earth’s Anthropocene Age By Andrew C. Revkin Photo Credit Earlier this month I had a chat on the fate of the planet and humanity in a Brooklyn bookstore with David Biello, who recently became curator of science at TED ( as in talks ) after many years at Scientific American. The subject was his first...