
President Donald Trump sparked the ire of conservationists earlier this month when he opened the country's only marine national monument in the Atlantic to commercial fishing.
Now, some of them are suing to stop him and preserve the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which protects 5,000 square miles of unique ocean habitat off Cape Cod.
"Trump has once again eliminated critical natural resource protections on a whim, and with no legal authority," Brad Campbell, president of the Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), said in a press release announcing his organization's decision to sue. "This lawless act upends over a century of practice by presidents of both parties, and puts all national monuments on the block for the highest political bidder."
President Trump illegally gutted protections for New England’s marine monument. We’ll see him in court.… https://t.co/UWgRF6P7q8— Conservation Law Foundation (@Conservation Law Foundation)1592511911.0
The monument was created by President Barack Obama in 2016 using the Antiquities Act, CLF said. It protects an estimated 54 species of deep sea coral and hundreds of other marine animals, including endangered species like North Atlantic right whales and Kemp's ridley sea turtles, The Boston Globe reported. It is also home to four underwater mountains and three underwater canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon.
The commercial fishing industry had argued that the creation of the monument was an overreach of federal authority that hurt livelihoods. Before its formation, fisherman said as many as 80 boats fished the area.
"President Obama swept aside our public, science-based fishery management process with the stroke of a pen," Bob Vanasse, executive director of fishermen lobby group Saving Seafood, told The Boston Globe. "That was a mistake, and whatever anyone thinks about President Trump is irrelevant."
But, in a lawsuit filed in Washington, DC Wednesday, CLF, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), and the Natural Resources Defense Council argued that Trump's reversal was the overreach: A president may use the Antiquities Act to designate a monument, but only Congress can undo protections.
"Trump's order was illegal because he can't just declare commercial fishing is allowed in a protected marine monument," CBD attorney Kristen Monsell said in a press release. "The Seamounts monument was created to permanently safeguard this amazing ecosystem and vulnerable species like the endangered sperm whale. Presidents can't be allowed to gut protections by decree as a favor to commercial fishermen."
The Center and allies just filed a lawsuit challenging President Trump's executive order allowing commercial fishin… https://t.co/6vr6gIG7v4— Center for Bio Div (@Center for Bio Div)1592423586.0
CBD pointed out that, before Trump reversed the commercial fishing ban, courts had twice rejected the industry's attempt to challenge it.
Conservation groups also argue that the monument ultimately protects commercial fisheries by preserving the species that support them, according to The Boston Globe.
Further, not all business interests oppose the monument. Zack Klyver, a Maine marine scientist who has led more than 600,000 people on whale watching tours with the Bar Harbor Whale Watch Company, has also joined the suit.
"I spend lots of time on the water so I know how important it is to protect this marine monument. My business depends on a healthy ocean," Klyver, who has also co-founded ocean conservation company Blue Planet Strategies, said in the CBD release. "Trump's attack on New England's prized marine monument is one I take personally. We need to protect our oceans and their abundance of marine life for future generations to experience."
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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.