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Associated Press
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
New Jersey's Save LBI Urges Large Environmental Groups to Reconsider Support of Offshore Wind & Consider Alternatives for Reducing Greenhouse Gas
LONG BEACH ISLAND, N.J., July 22, 2025 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — Save Long Beach Island (Save LBI), a grass-roots environmental organization dedicated to protecting our ocean and shore communities, is urging the country's large environmental organizations to take a step back and critically examine their support of offshore wind energy. In a letter to key executives at The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Sierra Club, and more than a dozen other national environmental organizations, Save LBI President and Ph.D. scientist Bob Stern challenged the stance that the benefits of offshore wind energy outweigh the environmental impacts, asserting that relying on massive fields of offshore turbines to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is inefficient, environmentally destructive, and the most expensive option on a cost-per-ton-to-remove basis. 'Our membership, like yours, would like to see progress made on the climate change problem, but at the same time we are bitterly opposed to the [Atlantic Shores] offshore wind project we know you support,' wrote Stern, a former manager of the U.S. Department of Energy office overseeing environmental protection related to energy programs and projects. 'We bring our concerns not to create more discord but… to ask you to take the time to consider these concerns, with a goal perhaps of moving beyond offshore wind and looking at better ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 'Like many in and around the Long Beach Island (LBI) community, I was stunned when I learned of the Atlantic Shores plan to develop an industrial complex of 1,000-foot-tall turbines starting less than 9 miles off the coast of Atlantic City and LBI, directly in the historic migration path of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, closer to shore than any similar project on Earth, and near the Brigantine Natural Wilderness Area and Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, both of which are afforded special federal protection under the Wilderness Act and Clean Air Act. It is, frankly, astounding that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) would 1) approve a lease area for commercial wind-energy development adjacent to the shoreline line of a thriving beach community let alone a sensitive nature preserve and 2) grant (without full and proper vetting) the approvals needed to construct the first 200 of a planned 357 super-sized wind turbines that would extend the full length of the island.' Stern urged the environmental leaders to read Save LBI's new report, 'The Benefits and Risks of an Offshore Wind Project,' which cites independent research exposing a series of irreparable environmental, economic, and social consequences that were either ignored or obfuscated in official project documentation from offshore wind developers and government agencies. The report details many negative impacts of offshore wind, reveals how claims of reductions in GHG emissions are oversimplified and misleading, and presents data showing that offshore wind projects cannot stop or reduce sea level rise — only delay whatever is coming by a matter of days. The document also exposes the hypocrisy in Environmental Impact Statements for the Atlantic Shores (New Jersey), Vineyard Wind (Massachusetts), and Revolution Wind (Rhode Island) projects, all of which concede that the impact of these projects on climate change is 'negligible.' Environmental repercussions outlined in the report include: Additional negative impacts include: An Executive Summary and the full 23-page Save LBI report, 'The Benefits and Risks of an Offshore Wind Project,' are available at Click here to download: 'We are certainly not climate-change deniers, nor are we aligned with any political Party,' Stern concluded. 'We are in favor of using common sense practices and well-grounded science to select sources of clean energy that are both reliable and responsible. There are significant opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are far less expensive and environmentally damaging than offshore wind. We welcome the opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue or perhaps collaborate with you to fund new studies to achieve that goal.' About Save LBI Save LBI is a not-for profit, non-partisan organization based on New Jersey's Long Beach Island that has been active in ongoing litigation and other efforts to protect the coastal and marine environment from the senseless industrialization of our oceans. The organization is led by Beach Haven, N.J. resident Bob Stern, a Ph.D. scientist with experience in environmental planning and environmental law. He is a former manager of the U.S. Department of Energy office responsible for overseeing environmental protection related to energy projects and the Bureau of Air Quality Planning within the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP). For more information on Save LBI and its efforts, please visit Contact: For more information click here: MULTIMEDIA: PHOTO LINK for media: PHOTO CAPTION: Visual simulation of what the Atlantic Shores South project would look from Holgate on Long Beach Island, NJ. Source: BOEM. NEWS SOURCE: Save Long Beach Island (Save LBI) ### MEDIA ONLY CONTACT: (not for publication online or in print) Bob Stern, Ph.D., President, Save Long Beach Island, Inc. +1-917-952-5016 [email protected] ### Keywords: Environment and Ecology, Save LBI, Save Long Beach Island, offshore wind, offshore wind projects, environment, environmental, oceans, protect our oceans, protect the oceans, clean energy, save our ocean, LONG BEACH ISLAND, N.J. This press release was issued on behalf of the news source (Save Long Beach Island (Save LBI)) who is solely responsibile for its accuracy, by Send2Press® Newswire. Information is believed accurate but not guaranteed. Story ID: S2P127908 APNF0325A To view the original version, visit: © 2025 Send2Press® Newswire, a press release distribution service, Calif., USA. RIGHTS GRANTED FOR REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART BY ANY LEGITIMATE MEDIA OUTLET - SUCH AS NEWSPAPER, BROADCAST OR TRADE PERIODICAL. MAY NOT BE USED ON ANY NON-MEDIA WEBSITE PROMOTING PR OR MARKETING SERVICES OR CONTENT DEVELOPMENT. Disclaimer: This press release content was not created by nor issued by the Associated Press (AP). Content below is unrelated to this news story.
Axios
21-07-2025
- Politics
- Axios
When conservationists chose Dinosaur National Monument over Glen Canyon
In the 1950s, conservationists rejoiced in their successful campaign to stop the federal government from flooding swaths of Dinosaur National Monument with a dam on the Green River. The intrigue: It turned out to be a pyrrhic victory — one that environmentalists would be ambivalent about for decades. This is Old News, our weekly float down the currents of Utah history. What drove the news: In the Saturday Evening Post 75 years ago this week, celebrated journalist Bernard DeVoto called the nation's attention to a plan to erect dams that would replace Dinosaur's wild Lodore and Whirlpool canyons with reservoirs. Behind the scenes: The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation quietly developed the plan over several years — without consulting the National Park Service, which manages the canyons. NPS officials were infuriated by their exclusion. Zoom out: If Congress were to allow construction in Dinosaur, it would shift the balance of priorities throughout the nation's protected lands, favoring growth and development over preservation, DeVoto cautioned. He cited similar canceled plans that would have flooded parts of Mammoth Cave, Glacier and Grand Canyon national parks — some of which had been repeatedly revived. "Even when controversies have been formally settled and projects abandoned apparently for good, the park system and the public trust is always under … threat," he warned. What happened: DeVoto's warnings worked; the so-called Echo Park and Split Canyon dams in Dinosaur became conservationists' cause célèbre and letters opposing the dams " poured into Washington" that summer, historian Glenn Sandiford wrote. Federal officials eventually called off the project. Why it mattered: By treating the dams as a point of national interest, DeVoto turned the campaign against them into the catalyzing force behind the modern conservation movement. That unity produced landmark policies like the 1964 Wilderness Act, Sandiford argued. Yes, but: DeVoto had argued the Bureau and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers won Utahns' support by falsely claiming that no other site could facilitate the hydropower and irrigation the region needed. It turned out another site was being considered — and because it wasn't part of the NPS, it got far less attention than Dinosaur did. Friction point: The Sierra Club — the driving force of the newly strengthened conservation movement — was focused on protecting existing parks and didn't initially raise much fuss over plans to build a dam in Glen Canyon. Its director, David Brower, even suggested making that dam taller to replace some of the water storage that was lost to the defeated Dinosaur dams. The bottom line: When conservationists turned their attention to Glen Canyon — a remote area that few outside the Four Corners region had seen — the dam there became widely considered one of the movement's biggest losses of the 20th century.
San Francisco Chronicle
27-06-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Map: These wild California forests could open to logging under Trump plan
The Trump administration is seeking to undo a 25-year-old rule that shields nearly a third of U.S. Forest Service lands from roads and logging, including large swaths of California, notably areas near Lake Tahoe, Yosemite and Giant Sequoia National Monument. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who announced the plan to rescind the 'roadless rule' this week, called the protections outdated, saying they were preventing responsible timber production and necessary wildfire prevention work. Conservation groups, however, shot back that the move would simply encourage destructive logging ventures in ecologically important areas. They pledged to fight the action as it winds through what promises to be a lengthy and litigious repeal process. The Roadless Area Conservation Rule covers about 59 million acres of Forest Service lands, mostly in Western states. The protections were initiated by President Bill Clinton to try to stop the encroachment of industry in some of the last untouched parts of national forests. Many have criticized the measure, though, as an end run on the Wilderness Act because it establishes safeguards similar to wilderness areas without getting congressional approval as required by the act. In California, 4.4 million acres across 20 national forests are protected by the rule, according to the Forest Service. It's nearly 5% of the state's total lands and includes stretches of such heavily visited forests as the Tahoe, Sequoia, Sierra, Stanislaus and Inyo. Many of the spots that are protected border wilderness areas and national parks. 'Most people think they're in wilderness when they step in,' said John Buckley, executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, a nonprofit that advocates for healthy landscapes. 'People use them as gateways to go through to get to wilderness areas' and to parks. Buckley and others describe some of the protected lands as ecological hot spots where the development of roads and timber operations would fragment sensitive habitat, disrupt wildlife and pollute watersheds. 'It would be short-sighted and arrogant for the American people to support the unleashing of chainsaws and the bulldozing of new roads into the small percentage of our public lands that have managed to stay pristine, wild, roadless areas,' Buckley said. While enterprises such as oil drilling and mining aren't expressly prohibited under the roadless rule, the policy has served as a de facto ban because roads are required for such endeavors. Supporters of the rule say new roads would inevitably bring these commercial activities. Speaking this week at a meeting of the Western Governors' Association, Secretary Rollins said not building roads into these areas is worse. It prevents the Forest Service from ensuring that important firefighting and fire mitigation work is done, she said. She also said it stifles economic development, which is at odds with President Trump's many executive orders calling for greater resource extraction on federal lands. 'This move opens a new era of consistency and sustainability for our nation's forests,' Rollins said. 'It is abundantly clear that properly managing our forests preserves them from devastating fires and allows future generations of Americans to enjoy and reap the benefits of this great land.' The timber trade widely welcomed the proposed rollback, though opening new public lands for private logging is no guarantee of increased timber production. Building roads into these areas will be costly. Under the Trump administration, the Forest Service has cut the staffing that helps plan and oversee logging contracts. The timber industry, especially in California, has lost capacity to harvest wood. Matt Dias, president and CEO of the California Forestry Association, said foresters would be happy to have more opportunities to work with the federal government on projects that can increase forest health and fire safety. 'We are very pleased that they're considering rolling back this particular policy, if it will help us get to where we want to be,' he said. The announcement of the repeal kicks off an administrative process that requires a technical review of what the impact would be as well as inviting public comment. This could take months, a year or even longer. If the rule is changed or eliminated, litigation will almost certainly follow. Environmentalists insist that little good will come of revoking the rule. They say the Trump administration's promotion of the action as a fire prevention measure is simply propaganda. 'Logging, that's what this is about,' said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. 'They don't like anything that puts a stop to commercialization and exploitation. … Stripping protections from these last unfragmented national forests risks our drinking water, plants, animals and some of America's most beautiful wild places.'
Japan Today
22-05-2025
- General
- Japan Today
Why protecting wildland is crucial to American freedom and identity
By Leisl Carr Childers As summer approaches, millions of Americans begin planning or taking trips to state and national parks, seeking to explore the wide range of outdoor recreational opportunities across the nation. A lot of them will head toward the nation's wilderness areas – 110 million acres, mostly in the West, that are protected by the strictest federal conservation rules. When Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964, it described wilderness areas as places that evoked mystery and wonder, 'where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.' These are wild landscapes that present nature in its rawest form. The law requires the federal government to protect these areas 'for the permanent good of the whole people.' Wilderness areas are found in national parks, conservation land overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, national forests and U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuges. Earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives began to consider allowing the sale of federal lands in six counties in Nevada and Utah, five of which contain wilderness areas. Ostensibly, these sales are to promote affordable housing, but the reality is that the proposal, introduced by U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei, a Nevada Republican, is a departure from the standard process of federal land exchanges that accommodate development in some places but protect wilderness in others. Regardless of whether Americans visit their public lands or know when they have crossed a wilderness boundary, as environmental historians we believe that everyone still benefits from the existence and protection of these precious places. This belief is an idea eloquently articulated and popularized 65 years ago by the noted Western writer Wallace Stegner. His eloquence helped launch the modern environmental movement and gave power to the idea that the nation's public lands are a fundamental part of the United States' national identity and a cornerstone of American freedom. Humble origins In 1958, Congress established the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission to examine outdoor recreation in the U.S. in order to determine not only what Americans wanted from the outdoors, but to consider how those needs and desires might change decades into the future. One of the commission's members was David E. Pesonen, who worked at the Wildland Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley. He was asked to examine wilderness and its relationship to outdoor recreation. Pesonen later became a notable environmental lawyer and leader of the Sierra Club. But at the time, Pesonen had no idea what to say about wilderness. However, he knew someone who did. Pesonen had been impressed by the wild landscapes of the American West in Stegner's 1954 history 'Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West.' So he wrote to Stegner, who at the time was at Stanford University, asking for help in articulating the wilderness idea. Stegner's response, which he said later was written in a single afternoon, was an off-the-cuff riff on why he cared about preserving wildlands. This letter became known as the Wilderness Letter and marked a turning point in American political and conservation history. Pesonen shared the letter with the rest of the commission, which also shared it with newly installed Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. Udall found its prose to be so profound, he read it at the seventh Wilderness Conference in 1961 in San Francisco, a speech broadcast by KCBS, the local FM radio station. The Sierra Club published the letter in the record of the conference's proceedings later that year. But it was not until its publication in The Washington Post on June 17, 1962, that the letter reached a national audience and captured the imagination of generations of Americans. An eloquent appeal In the letter, Stegner connected the idea of wilderness to a fundamental part of American identity. He called wilderness 'something that has helped form our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people … the challenge against which our character as a people was formed … (and) the thing that has helped to make an American different from and, until we forget it in the roar of our industrial cities, more fortunate than other men.' Without wild places, he argued, the U.S. would be just like every other overindustrialized place in the world. In the letter, Stegner expressed little concern with how wilderness might support outdoor recreation on public lands. He didn't care whether wilderness areas had once featured roads, trails, homesteads or even natural resource extraction. What he cared about was Americans' freedom to protect and enjoy these places. Stegner recognized that the freedom to protect, to restrain ourselves from consuming, was just as important as the freedom to consume. Perhaps most importantly, he wrote, wilderness was 'an intangible and spiritual resource,' a place that gave the nation 'our hope and our excitement,' landscapes that were 'good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.' Without it, Stegner lamented, 'never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.' To him, the nation's natural cathedrals and the vaulted ceiling of the pure blue sky are Americans' sacred spaces as much as the structures in which they worship on the weekends. Stegner penned the letter during a national debate about the value of preserving wild places in the face of future development. 'Something will have gone out of us as a people,' he wrote, 'if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed.' If not protected, Stegner believed these wildlands that had helped shape American identity would fall to what he viewed as the same exploitative forces of unrestrained capitalism that had industrialized the nation for the past century. Every generation since has an obligation to protect these wild places. Stegner's Wilderness Letter became a rallying cry to pass the Wilderness Act. The closing sentences of the letter are Stegner's best: 'We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.' This phrase, 'the geography of hope,' is Stegner's most famous line. It has become shorthand for what wilderness means: the wildlands that defined American character on the Western frontier, the wild spaces that Americans have had the freedom to protect, and the natural places that give Americans hope for the future of this planet. America's 'best idea' Stegner returned to themes outlined in the Wilderness Letter again two decades later in his essay 'The Best Idea We Ever Had: An Overview,' published in Wilderness magazine in spring 1983. Writing in response to the Reagan administration's efforts to reduce protection of the National Park System, Stegner declared that the parks were 'Absolutely American, absolutely democratic.' He said they reflect us as a nation, at our best rather than our worst, and without them, millions of Americans' lives, his included, would have been poorer. Public lands are more than just wilderness or national parks. They are places for work and play. They provide natural resources, wildlife habitat, clean air, clean water and recreational opportunities to small towns and sprawling metro areas alike. They are, as Stegner said, cures for cynicism and places of shared hope. Stegner's words still resonate as Americans head for their public lands and enjoy the beauty of the wild places protected by wilderness legislation this summer. With visitor numbers increasing annually and agency budgets at historic lows, we believe it is useful to remember how precious these places are for all Americans. And we agree with Stegner that wilderness, public lands writ large, are more valuable to Americans' collective identity and expression of freedom than they are as real estate that can be sold or commodities that can be extracted. Leisl Carr Childers is Associate Professor of History, Colorado State University. Michael Childers is Associate Professor of History, Colorado State University. The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. External Link © The Conversation
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Researchers make alarming discovery while observing wildlife using infrared cameras: 'A major finding'
It's no surprise that human visitation in national parks where wildlife is abundant can disrupt animals' lives and ways of living. Now, Spartan News Room has reported that a study on how human recreation affects wildlife behavior at Isle Royale National Park in Michigan has discovered alarming news. Researchers were curious about how human recreation in Isle Royale National Park affected the animals living there, particularly after the park saw an increase of 338% in visitors after 2020. They studied wolves, snowshoe hares, red foxes, and moose using 156 infrared cameras over multiple years to determine whether the animals changed their habits to accommodate people being in the area. The study discovered that the more people who showed up at the park, the more these animals changed their behavior, and the greater the tendency to avoid areas where humans were. The study found, "A major finding was that species space use and activity patterns were altered only on-trail while remaining constant off-trail. This suggests that the influence of human activity occurs mostly on trails." Hailey Boone, lead author of this study, explained per Spartan News Room, "Even though humans are technically allowed to recreate in the wilderness areas, the fact that they are potentially changing some sort of behavior from animals goes against the federal Wilderness Act." The Wilderness Act was passed in 1964 to formally designate and protect federal wilderness. Another purpose was to ensure minimally invasive human influences in these areas so local ecosystems were able to change on their own terms. Human recreation impacting wildlife isn't only harmful to the wildlife. While human activity disrupts animals' natural lives, having too many people around is dangerous to animals and humans alike. As more people visit national parks, there are more human-wildlife encounters. In some of these encounters, people get too close to animals, causing conflict, which can result in injury or death to humans and wildlife. Do you think America does a good job of protecting its natural beauty? Definitely Only in some areas No way I'm not sure Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Wildlife behavioral changes may also eventually include moving on to other areas due to too much human activity, which could inadvertently put them into contact with even more people, depending on how close to civilization they get, causing further human-wildlife interactions. This study had a few suggestions for dealing with this issue. One suggestion said, "Reducing visitation during peak seasons or redistributing visitation across a season could reduce mammals' responses to recreational activity while continuing to provide for public enjoyment." So, if visitors go to parks during off-peak times, there's not an overabundance of people, which might help the wildlife. Meanwhile, another similar study suggested limiting human activity to certain areas in parks to offset the problem. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
