Environmental News

Marketplace just had an interview with the head of the National Park Service. That person said their annual budget is $3 billion and they have deferred maintenance of $12 billion. I'd pay more to visit a National Park, if it were assured the money would go to staffing and running the park.

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That has been a problem in the past, and I don't remember hearing any different since. Some parks I have visited were collecting fees only during peak traffic times, and leaving the entrance booths unstaffed the rest of the time. Entrance fees were funneled directly to the U.S. Treasury, with the individual Parks getting no benefit from incremental collections. So with limited resources, they didn't have any financial incentive to keep the booths staffed for longer hours.

Mt Rainier now has kiosks to pay entrance fees after hours. But when I've entered after hours as part of volunteer park work, there were no checks to separate freeloaders from those entering on annual or volunteer passes.

 

Send robots.

 

at the rate Brazil is burning through their rainforests, for a great cause, there will be plenty of area to look for magnet material. Seems you can get maybe 2 or 3 good rotations out of the virtually sterile rainforest soil (once you strip away the jungles) for corn. You got to feed those cows & make ethanol ya know.
I love people.
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what else is there?

 

It used to be neat to go out at night in summer and catch fireflies ("lightning bugs"). I see them rarely now. They probably got killed off by all the pesticides put on lawns...

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By any chance, have you moved away from their normal geographic distribution?

I have never seen them due to my geography.

 

We are fortunate enough to have thousands of them each year. The channel by the pond lights up, as if there was a miniature concert. It's quite a sight.

 

When I had a house, I used to put sevin around the foundation to keep bugs out of the house, but I never put anything on the lawn.



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Better sealing my house to greatly reduce cold air infiltration, an energy conservation measure, has also greatly reduced spider infiltration.

Most other bugs inside the house have been too scarce to bother with. Exceptions were fleas brought in by cats the very first summer (today's flea collars seem much easier that the fleas bombs / cat baths / carpet spray needed back then), and kitchen fruit flies this year (compost bucket was 'leaking' around lid, had to block that and empty/clean it often enough to interrupt fly reproduction cycle).

 

According to the spouse, they are highly unwelcome.

Having grown up in a very leaky house (air and otherwise) built just before WWI, spiders and various other bugs were simply inevitable, so I had learned to be much less excited about them.

New housemate == new house rules.

 

it's an east of the rockies thing. It wasn't until mid-the 1970's camping in the Ozarks that I saw my 1st batch. Quite a sight to remember - out in the middle of a field at twilight

Hey! A Brown Recluse Spider Bit Me!
These Critters know no boundaries whether east or west of the Rockies. 20 years ago I got bit in the thumb & w/in an hour my thumb looked like a huge tomato. Similarly, back in Nashville, our daughter has to regularly have their house & surrounding yard sprayed as they come in from the neighbors & she fears for her children, all under 9 years of age.

At one time these were only in the southern states, but people move around, and before you know it, voilà ~ hear they are in California.
Do NOT look up pictures of brown recluse bites. It will gross you out.
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I grew up on the fringe of civilized development well beyond this new Idaho Dark Sky Reserve, but still with an essentially contiguous connection to it over US Forest Service lands and protected Wilderness Areas. On one side of dad's farm, on a line towards Stanley, there are no paved roads other than those entering Stanley itself. The biggest 'town' I know about within that region is unincorporated, with a population under 20, accessed only by gravel roads.

Sadly, the nearby community in the other direction pays no attention to efficient lighting, and those 'insecurity' lights have greatly increased over my lifetime. But even with those, arriving on the farm early last week at night, I got a wonderful Milky Way view the moment I stepped out of my Prius (headlight off delay set to zero), without needing any time for additional dark adaptation. And quickly spotted the hazy patch of the Andromeda Galaxy, M31. (That was also the Prius' last trip there until spring. New snow during the visit produced negative ground clearance on the way out.)

The best dark sky I can remember was when camping along Highway 212, somewhere near the Wyoming - Montana border, between Beartooth Pass and the Northeast Entrance to Yellowstone National Park, at nearly 10,000 feet elevation.

Many folks think of the proper night sky as being black. No, it is quite bright from natural airglow, after a reasonable time for the eyes to adapt. It appears black only when (1) one's eyes are still saturated by bright artificial light, (2) very heavy clouds completely block the sky (e.g. during downpours) far away from artificial light and moonlight, (3) beneath a very solid forest canopy, or (4) when the retina is hypoxic at high altitude. When young, I walked back home in the dark (from hunting or hiking) numerous times. The natural light was easily enough to walk on the open bumpy forest roads without turning on a flashlight, though inadequate to navigate trail hazards under the adjacent closed forest canopy.

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Friends spent a week backpacking within this new dark sky zone in August, and we would have joined them if not for a couple other high value activities the same week. Then they stayed over a couple extra days to experience the Great American Eclipse. Some of their lake pictures align with those in the materials sub-linked from #247 above. I need to backpack there too, some year very soon.

I was still able to see the eclipse, having just enough time to drive to Weiser, car camping in town with several thousand other watchers.