Climate Point: Public lands get political
Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment. From Palm Springs, I'm Janet Wilson. Big news on federal lands this week.
The Biden administration on Thursday announced new measures to protect lands owned by the public, including by leasing acreage for conservation, just as it offers land for drilling, mining and grazing. The Interior Department regulations will help guard nearly a tenth of America's land base from climate change impacts and enable industries to offset their environmental footprints, the agency said.
The rule was welcomed by conservation groups, but an oil and gas industry group said it was illegal and pledged to sue, and a mining trade group also blasted it. Federal officials said the regulations do not prioritize conservation, but place it on equal footing with resource extraction.
“Our public lands provide wildlife habitat and clean water, the energy that lights our homes, the wood we build with, and the places where we make family memories,” said Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning, whose agency oversees the most public lands in the U.S. “This rule honors our obligation to current and future generations to help ensure our public lands and waters remain healthy amid growing pressures and change.”
BLM considered over 200,000 comments on the proposed rule from a broad swath of individuals and organizations. But there's another public lands push that's also under way.
Act now, before time runs out. Anxious to gain ground ‒ lots of it ‒ well before the November elections, a coalition of conservationists, tribes and members of Congress presented more than 800,000 signatures to President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Tuesday, urging them to quickly protect large swaths of land and historic sites in seven states, including creation of a new Chuckwalla National Monument in the California desert, and an expansion of popular Joshua Tree National Park.
All told, the groups are pushing for new or expanded designations of 11 wilderness and historic sites in California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Illinois and Maryland, including desert washes, swamp woods and river bends, as well as the scene of the Springfield, Illinois Race Riot of 1908 that helped spark the creation of the NAACP.
Advocates point to the rollback by President Donald Trump of numerous monument and wilderness designations made by departing President Barack Obama as reason for Biden not to delay. He and Trump are facing off again in November, with Trump again invoking the mantra "Drill Baby Drill" for public lands. The coalition wants Biden to use his executive powers under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to guarantee strict preservation instead.
But designating lands as wilderness can be politically charged. To placate renewable energy companies, 40,000 acres has been shaved off the proposed Chuckwalla monument map, steering clear of large-scale solar development along Interstate 10. In Florida, hunters, swamp buggy enthusiasts and politicians are opposed to a federal wilderness designation for the Big Cypress National Preserve outside of Naples. Environmental groups support the move, which would likely ban swamp buggy and airboat usage in much of the preserve.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week released a final plan which could allow for the protection of up to 700,000 acres of wildlife habitat along the Texas-New Mexico border as part of Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge.
"It's not dirt to us." So says one worried farmer in Kentucky, which saw half-a-million acres of farm lands converted to suburban tract homes, commercial solar and other uses in five years. Per Connor Giffin with the Louisville Courier-Journal, it takes hundreds of years to form mere centimeters of topsoil. Where land has been converted for other uses, once-prime fields often can never be farmed again.
In the wake of a decimated tobacco industry, Kentucky’s farm communities are facing “the biggest structural change of any state's agricultural base in the United States,” said one expert. At stake is about $50 billion in economic impacts, and consolidation into larger, fewer farms, even as a changing climate has brought an uptick in severe weather events in Kentucky, threatening to wash away topsoil and wipe out crop yields. Kentucky's woes are mirrored nationally. From 2017-22, the U.S. lost more than 20 million acres once used for crops, pasture and grazing — an area the size of Maine.
Going under. Massive coral damage across the world's oceans during recent hot water temperatures was labeled a “global coral bleaching event” by federal officials on Monday. It’s the fourth global coral bleaching overall and the second in the last 10 years, with extensive bleaching and heat stress across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. Scientists have predicted for years that bleaching impacts would increase in frequency and magnitude as the ocean warms.
Dozens of algae types live inside the world’s corals, sharing a relationship that gives the reefs color, nutrition and their signature limestone skeletons, writes Paste BN's Dinah Voyles Pulver. The algae begin to die when water gets warmer than average, disrupting their photosynthesis process and causing the coral to eject them, which leads to bleaching and die offs. A bleaching event doesn't mean all coral will die, but scientists say it's difficult for them to rebound from repeated events.
"What's that perfume you're wearing?" For nearly 20 years, a snot-colored planthopper has killed Florida palm trees, spreading an infection called lethal bronzing. But a landmark study by University of Florida scientists has deciphered a warning signal — a scented SOS of sorts — radiated by sick trees that triggers a protective response in nearby palms, reports Kimberly Miller with the Palm Beach Post. They are now duplicating the morose perfume in the laboratory, hoping that distributing it among healthy trees will let them repel the bacteria without others falling ill first.
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