Public land and our natural heritage

I felt this sentiment many times during my two decades as a Pennsylvanian.

And it recurred earlier this decade while holding down a homestead in Vermont. (Actually, it was a condo).

I first experienced this feeling as a youthful hiker, camper and angler in New Mexico. Then the Gregory family moved to Idaho, which is blessed to have big, wide-ranging public lands.

And then came the three years that then-Air Force Capt. Alan Gregory spent in far upstate New York State and took hike after hike in the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, more than half of which is now owned by New Yorkers.

I write about the gift that such public land offers Americans. It’s a legacy for our children and grandchildren.

To find and experience it, just take a walk into and across a wild place; a place that Nature still holds onto despite all that the boosters of using up “natural resources” have done to break it, pave it, pollute it, and build on it.

Walking into the woods on public land brings with it the means of experiencing the kind of solitude and grace and sense of belonging that only a natural landscape can offer.

For me in Pennsylvania, there were hikes along Nescopeck Creek in what became Nescopeck State Park. And the three-mile loop hike on public land atop the high ground overlooking the Lehigh River and Jim Thorpe across the valley below.

The hike in Hickory Run State Park to a cliff overlooking that river was also special. Exploring nature there once yielded the discovery of a nest in progress of Cedar Waxwings.

Across the country, though, opportunities nowadays to see and feel the land as it was shaped by Wild Nature are increasingly hard to come by. All Americans – once the booster hat of “development” is tossed aside – know this.

 That thought was amplified many times for me while living in Pennsylvania. In one instance (there were many case-studies), a butterfly census took me to the remnants of a Pocono cranberry bog, fragmented and degraded when subdivided into housing lots. The ecological heart of that natural place was forsaken to make way for a cluster of trophy homes and McMansions.

(I forget the name of the development, but it’s not far from Long Pond).

These thoughts came rushing back as I stood on public land (our public land!) in southeastern Oregon earlier this June.

Conservationist and friend Dave Foreman calls it the Big Outside. You know you have reached the Big Outside when you stand still for a moment and see only Wild Nature – the flora and fauna that Nature put there – for as far as your eyes, binoculars and telephoto lens can see.

My watching post was next to a U.S. Bureau of Land Management sign bearing the words “your public lands.” Less than a yard away was a grand-daddy Big Sagebrush, a characteristic native plant of the Great Basin Desert. Thousands and thousands more dotted the landscape all the way off to the horizon.

And the crowning touch to that viewscape: No sign anywhere of a human activity. Just Wild Nature

Lay people ask this rhetorical question whenever the topic of the public owning natural land comes to the fore: “But what good is it?”

There are a host of “good things” that come with public land: Open space, hunting and fishing, a good quality of life and sense of community, clean water and air, and the chance to reconnect with Wild Nature in this era of growth for the sake of growth and “progress.”

But this notion comes first: Because that land is part of the foundation for all the life – flora and fauna – we share the planet with.

The more natural land held in public ownership, the better for Wild Nature.

And the better for our natural heritage.

Just what is 'available' land?

Western states like Idaho, which I now call home, are rich in public lands.

And they’re a heritage today’s older generation ought to be protecting at all cost – 100 percent – as a legacy for future generations.

Americans who remember the first Persian Gulf War ought to remember the late Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. A recent visit to the land/water/nature shop operated in Boise by our federal land management agencies yielded a copy of a wonderful poster titled “Wildlife and Wildlands.” It’s focused on quotes and ideas from the historic Army leader on the safe enjoyment of public land and the wildlife that lives on it.

The poster rightly focuses on the Pacific Northwest, but I’ll paraphrase the general, for his words and thoughts apply equally well to public lands in Pennsylvania and the rest of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

Our wildlife in the Northeast – from the Jersey and New York shores across the Delaware and Hudson rivers and on into and beyond the Allegheny Mountains – is a heritage for which we are responsible.

As my Nescopeck-area friend Autumn has reminded me, “wild land is a treasure, not a ‘resource’.”

Schwarzkopf: “I encourage each and every one of you to practice and share with others the responsible stewardship techniques listed on this poster to help make your outdoor activities rewarding and safe for both you and our precious wildlife.”

That wildlife is not represented by just the always-diminishing population of grizzle bears in and around Yellowstone National Park. It’s also the woodland salamanders, wood frogs and American toads and red-eyed vireos of forest environs protected in places like Nescopeck and Ricketts Glen state parks.

Wildlife, though, pays no heed to the artificial boundary lines written on the land by human things like property deeds and the lines of incorporation created by the formal governmental standing of boroughs, townships and cities.

The slogan that appears on many states’ wildlife license plates – “Conserving Natural Resources” – ought to instead read: “Conserving our natural heritage.”

Long-distance walking and hiking are great times to think and ponder. That’s how it was the first time I trekked – both to burn calories and get out and explore a bit – out of Conyngham borough on East County Road.

And it’s the same notion that spurs me to go for long fitness walks today across local sections of the Great Basin Desert at Mountain Home, Idaho.

Among the questions I’ve considered on recent forays is this: What do folks think about as they carve out a new road, driveway and housing pad in what, until a bulldozer showed up, was wild land replete with native flora and fauna?

It would take many an interview and an armful of questionnaires to get anywhere near the point of answering that question.

But it remains something that not only borough council members and township supervisors should consider and think through before blessing more “development” of land that real estate posters describe as
“available.”

"The things I feel very strongly about are education, the war on drugs, the environment and conservation and wildlife,” the general once told People magazine.

The raping of our natural heritage

Yes, I know it's not a local, county, state or national "park." That's not the point, though. Most of our natural heritage -- the diversity of life we humans are dependent upon -- exists not on land protected for its conservation value but on the more ordinary places like ridgetop forests in Chittenden County, Vt. Increasingly, that flora and fauna exists in "island" habitats, places that've been cut off from other natural habitat by human artifacts like sprawl development.

I've been walking by this particular land-raping scene for several months now; even watched the earth-moving machines at work.

Saving the wildest of our public lands

I wouldn't cast hope that The Nature Conservancy will do it. These days, TNC is likely to stock the land with cows or set in motion new logging contracts - all in a misguided attempt to raise money from the resourcism-first crowd. So, please give to the Wilderness Land Trust. See this link for a look.

How much is enough?

Whenever I come across another land-changing human activity, I rethink the question asked of passersby at one National Park Service site in the West.

I pondered quietly to myself upon seeing the sign of white lettering on a brown background posted along one heavily trafficked interpretive trail at Bandelier National Monument. The park is adjacent to Los Alamos National Laboratory and it’s a two-hour drive or so to Santa Fe, the capital city of New Mexico. You can learn about Bandelier at http://www.nps.gov/band/index.htm

A brief National Park Service intro: “Bandelier National Monument protects more than 33,000 acres of rugged but beautiful canyon and mesa country as well as evidence of a human presence here going back over 11,000 years.  Petroglyphs, dwellings carved into the soft rock cliffs, and standing masonry walls pay tribute to the early days of a culture that still survives in the surrounding communities.”

Here’s what the sign asks passersby to consider: “Park managers at Bandelier and elsewhere are working to preserve biological diversity in our national parks. But national parks make up only 3 percent of the United States. Even Bandelier’s 33,000 acres are only 3 percent of the surrounding Jemez Mountain Range. Outside national parks, more and more land is being modified by human activities.

“Has enough land been set aside to preserve the wildlife and natural plant communities of our nation?”

The short answer, given the number of plant and animal species listed as threatened or endangered – both at the federal and state level – is no, not enough has been set aside.

The values of our natural heritage, also called biological diversity of “biodiversity,” are “legion,” the Park Service states on its Web site.

Those include: “The value of nature for its own sake, a source of wonder and enjoyment; the value of learning about the workings of nature in places largely free of human influence, for comparison with landscapes dominated by humans; the survival value of multitudes of wild species that flourish as natural systems helping regulate climate, air quality, and cycles of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, mineral elements, and water—all fundamental to life on Earth.”

Many conservationists also are quick to exclaim the “economic value of plants and animals, and their potential as sources of food, medicine, and industrial products. Parks protect the species and their communities that underlie these values—serving if necessary as reservoirs of seed stock for restoring species lost elsewhere.”

But as that trailside message Bandelier asks of passing hikers points out, our natural heritage is not limited to what’s found and monitored inside the boundaries of national parks or wildlife refuges or in units of the National Wilderness Preservation System or Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

It’s also found on the land that highway planners seek to level for a new road.

It also lives and breathes on land that will be consumed by a sprawl subdivision, thanks to the access provided by the new road.

It’s also found the forested hill over yonder – habitat that’ll be turned into an island of same when its connector to other nearby natural lands is built on.

“When most people hear the term ‘endangered species,’ they think of manatees, grizzly bears, whales, and other charismatic species. If these animals don’t live in your area, you might think there is nothing you can do to help endangered species,” states a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fact sheet titled “What you can do to help wildlife and plants.”

(You can read and learn from the fact sheet at http://www.fws.gov/asheville/pdfs/What_You_Can_Do.pdf).

I would add this first step: To ensure the future of your own region’s natural heritage, tell your local, county, state and federal leaders that it’s time – now – to start preserving natural lands, not calling their destruction “progress.”

'Biodiversity' makes it into a headline

That in itself is astounding, given the sorrowful state of most mainstream media outlets in this age of ambulance chasing and not much else. The truly sorrowful thing to consider, as explained in this article, is just how much of Delmarva's original hardwood forests have been lost; lost to road builders, lost to home builders, lost to sprawl, wrecked by ATV cowboys, etc.

Ecology lessons from the Cold War

The headline alone snared me to read this article as I am a Cold War veteran (7 years in Strategic Air Command out of an Air Force career of 26 years). The awful truth is, however, that the losses of biodiversity (our natural heritage) continue to escalate into what is universally called the sixth great extinction crisis. I saw if for myself this morning in the Adirondacks of New York State; and the 6 million-acre Adirondack Park is now more than half public land. But still, even in a concisely protected place like that, the losses continue -- all of them due to the human community's inability to even consider living modestly and in concert with the land.

New scorpion species found, described in Ariz.

New plant and animal species are being found and described in the scientific literature almost daily. But the march to extinction continues at the same moment in time. AZCentral.com reports that a new species of scorpion, dubbed Vaejovis brysoni, has been found in the Santa Catalina Mountains. Rich Ayrey, a Flagstaff nurse and former biologist recognized it as a new species. Ayrey has discovered and named five other scorpion species. This particular scorpion was found by University of Washington post-doctoral scholar Robert Bryson, who spotted it in the Santa Catalina Mountains and sent samples to Ayrey and a collaborator to identify last April. The 2-inch-long, mahogany-colored scorpions were found above 6,000 in the mountains during a hiking trip. This discovery is the 10th known mountain scorpion species in Arizona. View a photo of the newlyh described/named scorpion at this link.