Overflowing Port-a-Potties and Trash—This Is What National Parks Are Like During a Government Shutdown
Large groups continue to pour into Joshua Tree National Park despite the government shutdown.Nick Kirkpatrick/Washington Post/Getty Images Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. Since the government shutdown began on December 22, the nation’s 417 parks, battlefields, and monuments have become unsupervised playgrounds—open to the public with few, if any, staffers to rein…
Puerto Rico May Hold the Answer to Saving the Bees
Manuel Giannoni Guzman Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. The quick succession of Hurricanes Irma and Maria knocked out Puerto Rico’s electricity and displaced thousands of people from their homes. The storms also wreaked havoc on much smaller members of the island’s population: Billions of wild and domesticated bees were uprooted…
Exploding Ants, Rainbow Slugs, and Tiny Seahorses: 11 New Species Discovered This Year
Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. Considering there are nearly eight billion people on Earth, and that more and more species are being pushed into extinction by climate change, habitat destruction, and pollution, it may seem like there would be few species left for humans to discover. In fact, there could be up to a…
45 Years After Nixon Signed It Into Law, the War on the Endangered Species Act Continues
The ocelot is an endangered, wild cat native to North America.Leonardo Prest Mercon Ro/Getty Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. Forty-five years ago, on December 28th, 1973, President Richard Nixon, a Republican, signed a piece of monumental environmental legislation, the Endangered Species Act, into law. At the time, Nixon issued a…
Looking Back on Ryan Zinke’s Reign Over 500 Million Acres of Public Land
William Campbell-Corbis via Getty Images Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who is departing Jan. 2 amid multiple ethics investigations, leaves a legacy of widespread attacks on science. Zinke was in charge of balancing protection of national parks, endangered species, waterways and other resources with public uses on 500 million…
Report: The GOP Economic Outlook for Arctic Wilderness Drilling Is a “Pipe Dream”
The report, published Wednesday by conservation nonprofit The Wilderness Society, comes as the Trump administration weighs a proposal to allow seismic surveys in the refuge. The surveys would be a key first step in the administration’s push to approve drilling leases as early as 2019. Late last year, GOP lawmakers passed a wildly unpopular tax…