What is USDA policy on Boundary Waters?
TRCP
Photo by A. Strakey/flickr
It is a truism that politicians try to have it both ways, telling constituents and donors just what they want to hear while their actions tell a different story. We are seeing this play out in Minnesota, where Sportsmen for the Boundary Waters have been fighting to protect the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness from a proposed copper nickel mine.
In this case, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has made and broken commitments concerning an important environmental review of the proposed mine, which has limited the use of science, the public’s input, and the ability of federal land management agencies to affect the outcome of the project.
In 2017, Secretary Sonny Perdue committed to a two-year environmental review of copper nickel mining upstream of the Boundary Waters during
his congressional testimony
, saying, “We are determined to proceed in that effort and let it run its course. No decision will be made prior to the conclusion of that [review].” But 20 months into the 24-month study, Secretary Perdue
cancelled the study
, calling it “a roadblock to mining exploration.” The BLM and USDA
then renewed the contested leases in 2019
, which cleared the way for mining company Twin Metals to submit a formal mine plan of operation to state and federal officials.
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Sorting out good, bad news about nature
By Brandon Keim/Anthropocene
Photo by Diana Robinson/flickr
How much time should be devoted to celebrating nature’s marvels, and how much to confronting their destruction by people? It’s a question that anyone who makes media about nature can struggle with, from an Instagrammer posting snapshots to the most acclaimed nature documentarian of all.
David Attenborough, whose voice and vision can be found on dozens of programs, including the BBC’s beloved Planet Earth and Blue Planet series, is credited with drawing extraordinary amounts of mainstream attention to the living world. He’s also been criticized for whitewashing nature’s precarious state by focusing on beauty while failing to explain why so many species and natural communities are threatened.
Attenborough has argued that recrimination will only drive viewers away. First comes appreciation; the rest, he reasons, will follow. Nevertheless, the criticisms seem to have stung—and when his latest documentary, the Netflix-produced Our Planet, premiered this year, its promotional language explicitly promised not only to illuminate nature’s wonders but to “reveal the key issues that urgently threaten their existence.”
So how did they do? And what lessons does that hold for nature’s depictions?
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As sea water rises, forests are suffering
The New York Times
Photo by Chesapeake Bay Program/flickr
Up and down the mid-Atlantic coast, sea levels are rising rapidly, creating stands of dead trees — often bleached, sometimes blackened — known as ghost forests.
The water is gaining as much as 5 millimeters per year in some places, well above the global average of 3.1 millimeters, driven by profound environmental shifts that include climate change.
Increasingly powerful storms, a consequence of a warming world, push seawater inland. More intense dry spells reduce freshwater flowing outward. Adding to the peril, in some places the land is naturally sinking.
All of this allows seawater to claim new territory, killing trees from the roots up.
Rising seas often conjure the threat to faraway, low-lying nations or island-states. But to understand the immediate consequences of some of the most rapid sea-level rise anywhere in the world, stand among the
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Blending coffee and birds pays off for farmers
By Gustave Axelson/Living Bird
Photo by Kishore Bhargava/flickr
The Fernández family is the envy of the other coffee farmers when they deliver their burlap sacks to the mill in the mountains of San Ramon above Costa Rica’s Central Valley.
“When we go to the coffee mill and they test to see if the coffee berries are affected by broca, the result is almost zero,” says Richard Fernández, the oldest son. La broca is the coffee borer beetle, a plague of the coffee industry that has caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. “Compared with other farms it is surprising, considering that we have never used a chemical as pest control.”
But by planting thousands of trees throughout their family farm and enveloping their coffee bushes in shade cover, the Fernández family has deployed another, more cost-efficient pest-control agent—birds.
“The difference with other farms could be that the birds have found a home on our farm,” says Richard, who is proud that his father Edgar Fernández, the farm’s patriarch and still owner today, started reforesting their coffee farm in the 1980s.
“Because the habitat is very comfortable and pleasant for birds, we get more profits than other farmers,” Richard says.
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Rare trout
swims again
in California
Associated Press
Photo by California Dept. of Fish and Wildlife/flickr
For the first time in nearly a century, a rare California trout species will swim in a mountain creek that is its native habitat, marking a major milestone that conservationists hope will lead to a thriving population and removal of its threatened status.
About 30 Paiute cutthroat trout were plucked from Coyote Valley Creek in the eastern Sierra Nevada wilderness and hauled in cans strapped to pack mules about 2 miles west into Long Valley. State and federal researchers were on hand as the fish were dumped into a stretch of Silver King Creek at about 8,000 feet elevation, where the shimmering species glided through the cold water for thousands of years below a waterfall before they started disappearing in the 1920s.
Paiute are eye-catching for their “purplish iridescent hue” and a lack of body spots that mark many of the 14 subspecies of cutthroat trout, said Bill Somer, senior environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
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