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.

Plant a tree: Here's why

All the way back to my days as a college student in the early 1970s, I pondered Americans’ love affair with the lawn – the greenest, purest, most dandelion-free turf that money (and lots of chemicals) could produce. Earning my tuition by mowing turf farms (a k a city parks) for the city of Pocatello, Idaho, just helped solidify my mental picture of it all.

In two-plus years of living in an on-base house on Robins Air Force Base, Ga., 1980-82) I finally formulated a more pleasing-to-the-eye scene: Urban trees as places liked by fellow creatures of Earth. In the case of that residential duplex, the Georgia wildlife the live oak tree attracted was enough to generate page after page of notes in an early field notebook that still has a prominent place in my home library.

Field naturalists are big note takers, recording a lot more than just the day’s high and low temperatures, but also signs of Wild Nature like the first day of swelling buds, the first early-spring appearance outside its winter burrow of the local woodchuck, and new signs of the spread of kudzu, the non-native vine that ate the South.

By planting trees native to our region of the continent (and the list of plants native to Pennsylvania alone is exhaustive), the homeowner can take pride in accomplishing many objectives.

Trees in the home yard do these things and a whole lot more:

- Trees release oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide to freshen the air.

- They trap dust and dirt, and remove pollution particles from the air.

- Trees increase property values. (Read a Wall Street Journal article about this at http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303722604579113230353966564)

- They provide shade in the summer, protection from wind in the winter.

- Trees give us leaves to make the best compost.

- Trees provide habitat for birds.

-        Trees make your neighborhood a more beautiful place.

-        Trees whose spring flowers show off for humans also offer food to native pollinators.

-        Neighborhoods and homes that are barren are known to have a greater incidence of violence in and out of the home than their greener counterparts. Trees and landscaping help reduce the level of fear.

The organization Tree People (treepeople.org) notes on its Web site: “Average temperatures in Los Angeles have risen 6 degrees F in the last 50 years as tree coverage has declined and the number of heat-absorbing roads and buildings has increased.
“Trees cool the city by up to 10 degrees, by shading our homes and streets, breaking up urban ‘heat islands’ and releasing water vapor into the air through their leaves.”
Most importantly in this age of Earth’s changing climate, trees do this: “Global warming is the result of excess greenhouse gases, created by burning fossil fuels and destroying tropical rainforests. Heat from the sun, reflected back from the earth, is trapped in this thickening layer of gases, causing global temperatures to rise.
“Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a major greenhouse gas. Trees absorb CO2, removing and storing the carbon while releasing the oxygen back into the air. In one year, an acre of mature trees absorbs the amount of CO2 produced when you drive your car 26,000 miles.”
You can read, and ponder, the top 22 benefits of trees at www.treepeople.org/top-22-benefits-trees
So this spring, let’s plant a tree, or, better yet, a whole bunch of trees. You can learn about Pennsylvania’s native trees from the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources at www.dcnr.state.pa.us/cs/groups/public/documents/document/dcnr_003489.pdf

Don't use the drought as an excuse to gut Endangered Species Act

That's the gut-level hope expressed by this American Rivers action alert. Legislators, most of them Republicans, will stoop to any new low in serving the wishes of their campaign contributors.

Cars vs. wildlife: Cars keep on winning

It didn’t take long for the new year’s first car vs. wildlife milestone to reach the headline-making point. The Associated Press report: “An endangered Florida Panther (Puma concolor coryi) has been killed in a three-car crash in southwest Florida.
“It's the first recorded Panther death of the year. Wildlife officials say collisions with vehicles pose a significant threat to the rare cats. Roughly 100 to 160 adult panthers remain in the wild. (Read a fact sheet about the species at www.fws.gov/verobeach/MSRPPDFs/FloridaPanther.pdf)
“Darrell Land of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission says the Panther fatally struck by a vehicle Thursday along Interstate 75 in Collier County was a young male that weighed up to 120 pounds. Biologists believe he was the same cat that has been roaming a Naples neighborhood recently.  Florida Highway Patrol officials say minor injuries were reported after the crash.
“Land says 20 panther deaths were recorded last year. Most of the Panther deaths recorded in recent years are caused by collisions with vehicles.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tracks such data because the Florida Panther is among the most critically endangered native mammals and it has management authority through the Endangered Species Act. The Florida FWCC helps simply because it’s Florida.
While in Boise, Idaho, for three weeks of visiting my sister and her family and our mother, tradition called for me to head east to the much smaller city of Mountain Home – first, to visit an aunt and uncle (Bob, like me, is retired from the Air Force; he’s a chief master sergeant, the top enlisted rank), and then to shop at the Mountain Home Air Force Base “Base Exchange” (known to retired and current military people as the BX).
To get there meant driving a stretch of I-84 that’s famous (or is it infamous?) as the place where, just over the last decade alone, dozens of Barn Owls have been hit and killed by passing vehicles.
The Idaho Fish and Game Department collects roadkill data on this owl species because there, like Pennsylvania, it’s a species of special concern, one that demands a conservation strategy of its own.
The plus side: Since moving to Vermont in 2011, I’ve seen only two roadkill white-tailed deer along a highway shoulder. That’s a heartening anecdote since roadkill whitetails were often-times found on this or that street in Conyngham Borough through my two decades of residency there.
A fundamental truth about America’s century of love of the automobile is this: The infrastructure (roads, streets, freeways, highways, driveways) associated with the nation’s automotive fleet is directly responsible for ongoing and deepening reductions in our natural heritage; what conservation biologists call “biological diversity or simply “biodiversity.”
The principal issue is fragmentation – the fragmentation of otherwise quality habitat by the construction of a road and the sprawl development that often accompanies new strips of asphalt.
And for more than two decades now, the tailpipe emission from that fleet of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide has worsened what scientists have warned over those same years is causing our planet’s climate to change.
This isn’t a far-fetched liberal fantasy, or something dreamed up by progressives. It’s real and is happening. The Arctic cold snap that we Vermonters just endured is weather, not climate.
In Boise, the daily  three-mile walk between my mother’s assisted living center and the hotel I stayed in gave me – as walking always does – a chance to see the world one can’t get close to while seated in the cockpit of a car, SUV or truck. I coined the term “carbon dioxide factory” to describe the daily mishmash of traffic jams – some of them extending down Cole Road or Fairview Avenue or Milwaukee Street for two-plus miles at a hack.
An addendum: Boise, like many other municipalities, does a lot and spends a lot to make life better for cars. But what about people who choose to walk or bicycle?
Yes, Idaho’s capital city does seem to have more bicyclists per capita than any metro area in Luzerne County, Pa. And it was especially heartening to watch cyclists riding on snow-and-ice-covered bicycle lanes on the busiest arterial streets (see the list above).
But Boise is especially emblematic of the environmental and societal ills that always accompany a city’s reliance on private automobiles. On each of my three treks to The Peregrine Fund’s World Center for Birds of Prey (10 or so miles south of the metro area), I passed through a space-time continuum known by the nation’s planning and zoning officials as “sprawl.”
The high desert habitat that once widely separated city from a part of the Great Basin  Desert has been paved and built on to the very political (not ecological) boundary of federal public land.
And it was reliance on the private car that made it possible. Our fellow Americans who choose to live in this and other asteroid belts of sprawl must drive their car, SUV or truck to complete the most mundane of household chores, like buying a half-gallon of milk.

Crank your car’s engine to life and it too becomes part of the carbon dioxide emissions factory.

The EPA: “While not regulated as an air pollutant, (carbon dioxide) is the transportation sector’s primary contribution to climate change. Carbon dioxide emissions are essentially proportional to fuel consumption (and inversely proportional to fuel economy) – each 1 percent increase in fuel consumption results in a corresponding 1 percent increase in carbon dioxide emissions.

“About 19.4 pounds of carbon dioxide is produced for every gallon of gasoline combusted.”

For advocates of conservation focused both of habitat (the land) and wildlife,  “Present-day protected areas will not be enough to help wildlife survive the coming impacts of climate change,” states a release from the Wildlands Network. “Conservation biologists now believe that the only way to accommodate the needs of wildlife as unpredictable climate patterns emerge is to protect, restore, and connect a larger mosaic of habitat and vegetation types – much of it outside the outlines of today’s national parks, monuments and wilderness areas.”

Natural Resources Defense Council: “Moreover, the loss of undeveloped landscapes threatens economic as well as psychological values. Over 130 million Americans enjoy observing, photographing, and feeding wildlife and fish, thus supporting a nature-oriented tourist industry in excess of $14 billion annually.

“The National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife Associated Recreation found that 77 percent of the U.S. population enjoys some form of wildlife-related recreation, and a 1987 poll sponsored by the President's Commission on Americans Outdoors found that ‘natural beauty was the single most important criterion for tourists selecting outdoor recreation sites.’ Independent of recreation and tourism, proximity to open spaces has been found to raise the value of residential property by as much as a third in some cases, raising property tax revenues as well.”

If you walk to your workplace and/or walk to the food market, congratulations for doing your part (i.e., burning calories, not a fossil fuel). If you’re walking is limited to, for example, getting from your front door to the garage door, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.