
The Great American Outdoors Act is now the law of the land.
President Donald Trump signed the bill, which passed the Senate and House with bipartisan support, on Tuesday. It is considered a major U.S. conservation milestone.
"You cannot overstate the importance of this bill and what it will mean for national parks, public lands and communities across the country," National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) President and CEO Theresa Pierno said when it passed the House in July. "This is the largest investment our country has made in our national parks and public lands in more than 50 years, and it comes not a moment too soon."
🚨Breaking News: The President has just signed the bipartisan #GreatAmericanOutdoorsAct. It will help: 🏗️ Restore… https://t.co/RPefKPMn7S— Fix Our Parks (@Fix Our Parks)1596554165.0
The bill is important because it secured permanent funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) for $900 million a year, EcoWatch previously reported. This fund uses oil and gas revenue to finance national parks and historic sites, along with local and state parks and recreation areas. The bill also earmarked $6.5 billion over the next five years to address the maintenance backlog currently burdening the National Park System, NPCA pointed out.
Trump claimed the bill signing as a major environmental legacy for himself and the Republicans.
"From an environmental standpoint and from just the beauty of our country standpoint, there hasn't been anything like this since Teddy Roosevelt, I suspect," he said at the signing ceremony, The New York Times reported. "At some point, they'll have to start thinking about the Republican Party and all of the incredible things we've done on conservation and many other fronts."
Trump's remarks overlook the fact that his administration is the only one in history to strip more protections from public lands than it added, the Center for American Progress calculated in May. In fact, the administration has tried to gut protections for 35 million acres, an area roughly the size of Florida. Trump has also moved to roll back 100 environmental rules since taking office, according to a New York Times tracker.
Trump undercut his own conservation bonafides Tuesday when he mispronounced California's famous Yosemite National Park as "Yo-Semites" twice in his speech.
"When young Americans experience the breathtaking beauty of the Grand Canyon, when their eyes widen in amazement as Old Faithful bursts into the sky, when they gaze upon yo-Semites, yo-Semites, towering sequoias, their love of country grows stronger, and they know that every American has truly a duty to preserve this wondrous inheritance," Trump said, according to Business Insider.
The park is one of the most frequented tourist destinations in the U.S. and welcomed 4.5 million people in 2019. However, the lead official at the park's visitors center told The Fresno Bee that Trump's mistake was not uncommon.
"We hear it all the time, especially from East Coasters for some reason," CEO of Visit Yosemite Madera County Rhonda Salisbury said. "I'm always shocked that people don't know how to say Yosemite. I think foreign visitors know how to say it correctly more than American visitors."
Trump's signing ceremony also obscured the bipartisan origin of the new law. Only Republicans were present, and Trump did not mention any Democrats during his speech, The New York Times reported.
In fact, the bill was introduced last year by Civil Rights icon and Georgia Democratic Representative John Lewis, who passed away in July. Trump made no mention of this.
He did credit the man who introduced it in the Senate, Colorado Republican Cory Gardner. Gardner is one of two Republicans who Trump said convinced him to sign the measure. Trump had previously wanted to cut funding for the LWCF by almost 97 percent, according to The Hill. But a more than hour-long meeting with Gardner and Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) persuaded him otherwise.
Gardner told reporters in June how he and Daines persuaded the president.
"I showed him a picture of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and I think Steve showed a picture as well and he looked at the park and said 'it's beautiful' and we pointed up at the picture of Teddy Roosevelt on the wall and said this could be the biggest accomplishment going back to Teddy Roosevelt," Gardner said in The Hill article.
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By David Konisky
On his first day in office President Joe Biden started signing executive orders to reverse Trump administration policies. One sweeping directive calls for stronger action to protect public health and the environment and hold polluters accountable, including those who "disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities."
Michael S. Regan, President Biden's nominee to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, grew up near a coal-burning power plant in North Carolina and has pledged to "enact an environmental justice framework that empowers people in all communities." NCDEQ
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
By Jewel Fraser
Noreen Nunez lives in a middle-class neighborhood that rises up a hillside in Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region.