Environment-Habitat Preservation
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California gardeners plant native species in parks to prevent wildfire spread – in pictures
by Philip Cheung 26/5/25 The Guardian
Test Plot, a project launched in 2019 by the landscape architecture firm Terremoto, has built eight plots in Elysian Park alone.On a recent Friday morning, volunteers were pulling out invasive grass and black mustard to make room for wildflowers and other drought-resistant, native species.
Even a freeway is redeemable’: world’s largest wildlife crossing takes shape in Los Angeles
by Katharine Gammon 6/4/25 The Guardian
Above the whirring of 300,000 cars each day on Los Angeles’s 101 freeway, an ambitious project is taking shape. The Wallis Annenberg wildlife crossing is the largest wildlife bridge in the world at 210ft long and 174ft wide, and this week it’s had help taking shape: soil.
Native Plants are Flammable Too
by SF Forest Alliance 5/1/19 San Francisco Forest Alliance
Three of the most flammable plants in California landscapes are bay laurels, coyote brush, and chamise – all native. An evenhanded presentation of fire hazard ratings for all plants that does not downplay the danger of native plants or exaggerate the danger of non-native plants would better serve people working to address fire hazards.
by Francis Xavier 10/7/25 UNOFFICIAL NETWORKS
The American Perimeter Trail would connect a network of existing, new and proposed trails. Rue McKenrick has already made the trek and it took him 3-years to complete. Rue McKenrick is dead set on making the new trail a reality and it is still very much in preliminary stages but the ground work has been laid.
‘Even a freeway is redeemable’: world’s largest wildlife crossing takes shape in Los Angeles
by Katharine Gammon 6/4/25 The Guardian
Above the whirring of 300,000 cars each day on Los Angeles’s 101 freeway, an ambitious project is taking shape. The Wallis Annenberg wildlife crossing is the largest wildlife bridge in the world at 210ft long and 174ft wide, and this week it’s had help taking shape: soil.
California shores up beaver protection in nod to their ‘ecological benefit’
by Guardian staff and agencies 26/7/23 The Guardian
California is embracing beavers and the role they play in the ecosystem after years of viewing the animals as a nuisance for chewing down trees and blocking up streams.
‘Even a freeway is redeemable’: world’s largest wildlife crossing takes shape in Los Angeles
by Katharine Gammon 6/4/25 The Guardian
Above the whirring of 300,000 cars each day on Los Angeles’s 101 freeway, an ambitious project is taking shape. The Wallis Annenberg wildlife crossing is the largest wildlife bridge in the world at 210ft long and 174ft wide, and this week it’s had help taking shape: soil.
California shores up beaver protection in nod to their ‘ecological benefit’
by Guardian staff and agencies 26/7/23 The Guardian
California is embracing beavers and the role they play in the ecosystem after years of viewing the animals as a nuisance for chewing down trees and blocking up streams.
In California’s largest landback deal, the Yurok Tribe reclaims sacred land around Klamath River
by Anita Hofschneider 5/6/25 Grist
More than 17,000 acres around the Klamath River in Northern California, including the lower Blue Creek watershed, have returned to the Yurok Tribe, completing the largest landback deal in California history.
When Wind Turbines Become Underwater Forests: America's Accidental Marine Revolution
by Chris Buxton 30/6/25 DAILY KOS
Captain Hank Hewitt moved to Block Island for the fishing, not the renewable energy. When America's first offshore wind farm was still being discussed, he wasn't sure how five 600-foot turbines would affect the fish he'd been chasing since he was five years old. Then the turbines went up in 2016, and Hewitt discovered something unexpected: paradise.
Biden creates a new national monument near the Grand Canyon
President Biden designated a new national monument near the Grand Canyon on Tuesday. The move protects lands that are sacred to indigenous peoples and permanently bans new uranium mining claims in the area. It covers nearly 1 million acres.
Fewer wildfires, great biodiversity: what is the secret to the success of Mexico’s forests?
by Linda Farthing 1/5/24 The Guardian
Dexter Melchor Matías works in the Zapotec Indigenous town of Ixtlán de Juárez, about 1,600ft (490 metres) above the wide Oaxaca valley in Mexico, where community forestry has become a way of life. Like him, about 10 million people across the country live in and make a living from forests, with half of that population identifying as Indigenous.
Nairobi’s lions are almost encircled by the city. A Maasai community offers a key corridor out
by Peter Muiruri 25/6/25 The Guardian
Nairobi national park in Kenya is the only large wildlife conservation area to fall within a capital city. It is hemmed in on three sides by human development, and unfenced only on its southern boundary – this gap providing a crucial wildlife passageway, linking the park’s animals to other populations of wildlife and wider gene pools.
There is a lake in Tanzania that looks like it’s from another planet: it kills everything it touches, except these animals
On the border of Kenya and Tanzania lies Lake Natron—a body of water 58 square miles wide but only about 9 feet deep. It might sound like the perfect spot for a family outing.
The river that came back to life: a journey down the reborn Klamath
by Gabrielle Cannon 7/6/25 The Guardian
Last year, the final of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River were removed in the largest project of its kind in US history. Forged through the footprint of reservoirs that kept parts of the Klamath submerged for more than a century, the river that straddles the California-Oregon border has since been reborn.
In California’s largest landback deal, the Yurok Tribe reclaims sacred land around Klamath River
by Anita Hofschneider 5/6/25 Grist
More than 17,000 acres around the Klamath River in Northern California, including the lower Blue Creek watershed, have returned to the Yurok Tribe, completing the largest landback deal in California history.
Scenic forest trails near Santa Cruz to open to the public for the first time
by Joe Rosato 4/6/25 NBC BAY AREA
Over the last three years, a mix of professional and volunteer labor has worked to carve a network of nine miles of trail through dense woods and steep slopes. When the project opens this summer, it will include nine miles of trails, with nine more to come.
California gardeners plant native species in parks to prevent wildfire spread – in pictures
by Philip Cheung 26/5/25 The Guardian
Kerrigan, 28, landscape designer, and Sam Richman, 31, film-maker and landscape designer, pull out invasive grass and black mustard during a volunteer day to maintain the Elysian Test Plot in Elysian Park
Fighting coastal erosion with a "shockingly" simple solution, and it actually works
by Eric Ralls 20/6/25 earth.com
Now, engineers have found that a trickle of electricity – just a couple of volts, about what a toy flashlight uses – can lock loose coastal sand into a rock-like mass.
These wild lands in California and the West may soon get federal protection
LA Times SAMMY ROTHSTAFF DEC. 10, 20206 AM But that’s not the end of the story. There are still legions of activists working to get the bill across the finish line. They’ll keep at it when the next Congress is seated in January, with an eye toward protecting 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.
The Disappearance of Quitobaquito Springs: Tracking Hydrologic Change with Google Earth Engine
Bellingcat October 1, 2020 Written by Logan Williams
Quitobaquito Springs in Pima County, Arizona, is one of these life sustaining oases. The Quitobaquito Pupfish and Sonoyta mud turtle, which are protected under the US Endangered Species Act, depend on it. So too do desert mammals and millions of migratory birds that travel the North American Flyway.
Yet in the summer of 2020, water levels in the pond fed by Quitobaquito Springs began declining precipitously. Environmental advocates and members of the Tohono O’odham nation, for whom the springs are a sacred site, correlate this with the construction of President Trump’s border wall which is being built nearby under a waiver from standard environmental regulations.
To Manage Wildfire, California Looks To What Tribes Have Known All Along
NPR August 24, 2020 Lauren Sommer
When Western settlers forcibly removed tribes from their land and banned religious ceremonies, cultural burning largely disappeared. Instead, state and federal authorities focused on swiftly extinguishing wildfires.
But fire suppression has only made California's wildfire risk worse. Without regular burns, the landscape grew thick with vegetation that dries out every summer, creating kindling for the fires that have recently destroyed California communities. Climate change and warming temperatures make those landscapes even more fire-prone.
So, tribal leaders and government officials are forging new partnerships. State and federal land managers have hundreds of thousands of acres that need careful burning to reduce the risk of extreme wildfires. Tribes are eager to gain access to those ancestral lands to restore traditional burning.
Indígenas denuncian crisis humanitaria en la Amazonia colombiana por contaminación
<embed>http://eltiempolatino.com/news/2019/dec/01/indigenas-denuncian-crisis-humanitaria-en-la-amazo/</embed> El Tiempo Latino 12/01/2019
La Organización Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas de la Amazonia Colombiana (OPIAC) y la Mesa Regional Amazónica (MRA) denuncian que la Amazonia colombiana, una vasta mancha selvática superior a las 40 millones de hectáreas que hace parte del denominado pulmón del planeta, atraviesa por su peor crisis humanitaria, reseñó Semana.
Según ambas organizaciones, la minería ilegal, uno de los principales protagonistas en la hecatombe ambiental por la que pasan los recursos naturales nacionales, es uno de los mayores detonantes en la actual crisis humanitaria de los pueblos indígenas amazónicos, una etiqueta que “aunque ha sido reconocida por el Estado, es negligentemente desatendida”.
The National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (OPIAC) and the Amazon Regional Board (MRA) denounce that the Colombian Amazon, a vast jungle spot greater than 40 million hectares that is part of the so-called lung of the planet, crosses its worst humanitarian crisis, Semana reported .
According to both organizations, illegal mining, one of the main protagonists in the environmental catastrophe through which national natural resources pass, is one of the biggest triggers in the current humanitarian crisis of the Amazonian indigenous peoples, a label that “although it has been recognized by the State, is negligently neglected. ”
The 66 indigenous groups that are part of these groups base their assertion on the forty-seventh session of the Amazon Regional Board, in which several State entities presented some reports of the actions they have developed on the illicit exploration of gold, in compliance of the prior consultation and consultation agreements of the Ministry of Mines and Energy.
Amazon deforestation 'at highest level in a decade'
<embed>https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/18/amazon-deforestation-at-highest-level-in-a-decade</embed> The Guardian 11/18/2019
Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has hit the highest annual level in a decade, according to new government data which highlights the impact the president, Jair Bolsonaro, has made on the world’s biggest rainforest.
The new numbers, showing almost 10,000 sq kms were lost in the year to August, were released as emboldened farm owners scuffled with forest defenders in Altamira, the Amazonian city at the heart of the recent devastation.
The assault on the planet’s biggest terrestrial carbon sink by land-grabbers, agribusiness, miners and loggers is accelerating. In the year until 30 July 2019, 9,762 sq kms were lost, an increase of 29.5% over the previous 12 months, the Brazilian space agency INPE said.
