Guns are no longer prohibited in America's national parks. (Photo courtesy of Fenners)
People can now carry guns in national parks. The National Park Service is adapting to the new law. Samara Freemark reports:
Transcript
People can now carry guns in national parks. The National Park Service is adapting to the new law. Samara Freemark reports:
The new policy means a reversal for the nation’s 392 National Park sites. Firearms have been prohibited in the parks.
But now….
Whatever law you were under in that state outside of the park now applies in the national park unit.
That’s National Park Service spokesman David Barna. He says that means that parks everywhere except Illinois and Washington DC will allow firearms.
But different states have different laws about the specifics – for example, whether you can conceal your weapon or not.
Barna says that could get complicated.
Appalachian Trail passes over 14 states. Yellowstone National Park is in 3 states. And the burden is going to be on the public to know those various laws.
Barna says the Park Service will help gun owners out with website updates and postings in park facilities.
But he says they can’t put up notices every time a park trail crosses a state line.
The grizzly bear has a new threat - the Mountain Pine Beetle that's wiping out its food source (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
We’ve heard about a warmer climate affecting polar bears. Now, warmer weather seems to be threatening another kind of bear. Mark Brush reports on some tough times for Yellowstone’s Grizzly bears:
Transcript
We’ve heard about a warmer climate affecting polar bears. Now, warmer weather seems to be threatening another kind of bear. Mark Brush reports on some tough times for Yellowstone’s Grizzly bears:
Researchers say warmer temperatures in the last ten to fifteen years have been messing with the ecology in Yellowstone National Park.
In the fall, the grizzly bears eat pine cone nuts from white bark pine trees. It gives them a lot of nutrition before they curl up for the winter. But those trees are dying.
Mountain pine beetles are killing them. The beetle populations usually get knocked back by cold weather. But it hasn’t been getting as cold. So, there are more beetles killing more trees.
Doug Peacock lives near Yellowstone and has written several books on grizzlies.
“The white bark pine trees, this is the most important grizzly food of all in Yellowstone, they are gone. And we will not see them come back in our lifetime.”
And when the trees are gone, the bears get hungry – they go looking for food – and they run into people.
48 grizzlies out of the 600 in the region were killed last year.
Some environmental groups are suing the government to get the bear back on the endangered species list.
Jennifer Pierce and David Wilkins stand in front of a ponderosa pine forest just outside the city of Boise. They hope to study the relationship between fire and climate here and recreate a snapshot of ancient climate. They are both teach at Boise State University's Geosciences Department. (Photo by Sadie Babits)
Twenty years ago this year, the
country watched its oldest national park
go up in flames. Looking back, scientists
believe the 1988 fires of Yellowstone
National Park were the signal fire of
climate change. Researchers have been
working ever since to understand this
relationship between climate and wildfire.
Sadie Babits reports on two scientists
searching for clues to ancient climates,
using trees as their guide:
Transcript
Twenty years ago this year, the
country watched its oldest national park
go up in flames. Looking back, scientists
believe the 1988 fires of Yellowstone
National Park were the signal fire of
climate change. Researchers have been
working ever since to understand this
relationship between climate and wildfire.
Sadie Babits reports on two scientists
searching for clues to ancient climates,
using trees as their guide:
Jennifer Pierce wears work boots as she plows down a steep slope in a
ponderosa pine forest.
(sound of walking, twigs breaking)
Her blonde hair is tucked up under her Boise State bronco cap, but it keeps
sneaking out. She has to keep brushing it back under. She and her
colleague David Wilkins are professors who work for Boise State
University’s Geosciences Department. They’re in the middle of tall pines in
a forest just outside of Boise, Idaho. Suddenly she’s crashing across the
brambles and heads for this tree.
“Oh that’s a great one! Wow! Sweet!”
She drops to her knees and shows me how this tree has been scarred by
fire.
“You see this little V shaped cat face here at the bottom of the tree that’s
blackened? So during a fire when the bark of the tree gets damaged that
preserves a record of the fire as a scar on the tree.”
Pierce says since the tree has annual growth rings, she can tell when the
tree got burned.
It’s one way Pierce and Wilkins reconstruct the fire history of this forest.
It’s a key to understanding how climate has affected forest fires in the past.
“I think as we move into a likely warmer and drier future, it’s going to be
increasingly important to understand the relationship between climate and
fire.”
She says climate is the primary control for wildfires. As the West warms,
there’s less control. Recently, that’s meant a lot more wildfires.
(popping sound) “There you go!” (sound of a drill bit going through the tree
with sound of birds and forest)
David Wilkins is twisting an auger into the tree.
“It’s a good upper body workout!” (laughs)
It’s a way to take a sample of the rings of this tree. Within a half-minute,
Wilkins’ auger is stuck. The tree is rotten inside. An eight-inch core is all he
gets.
(sound of drill bit coming out of the tree)
Jennifer Pierce takes a look at this sample Wilkins twisted out. The rings –
some light, some dark – reveal just how the tree has responded to moisture
and temperature.
“If you have a tree that kind of is at the edge of its comfort zone so to
speak, it will be more of a sensitive recorder of those environmental
stresses. See this one looks pretty good.”
Tree rings aren’t the only clue these scientists use to reconstruct historic
climates.
(scraping sound)
“I didn’t bring my big shovel. I kind of feel naked without it.”
Pierce scrapes away dirt and she finds bits of charcoal. She can sometimes
use charcoal for radio carbon dating. But these won’t do.
“But, um, I wouldn’t use them for dating because you want to make sure
that the charcoal is stratographicly in place and that you haven’t had
critters burrowing and mixing things up.”
Charcoal can be dated much further back than the tree rings. It helps
Pierce and Wilkins understand what happened here thousands of years
ago. With samples from other scientists, they’ll get a snapshot of ancient
climate and how it affects wildfire.
And possibly determine what climate change will mean for forests in the
future.
Some republicans are fighting to restore the issues of
conservation and environmental protection to the party’s platform. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports… some party
members say republican leadership has too often abandoned
environmentalism:
Transcript
Some republicans are fighting to restore the issues of conservation and
environmental protection to the party’s platform. Some party members say republican
leadership has too often abandoned environmentalism. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Republicans often note with pride that it was a republican president –
Theodore Roosevelt – who championed conservation and preservation. Teddy
Roosevelt pushed for laws to protect Yellowstone Park and to conserve timber
resources.
During this year’s race for president, the top two republican candidates
often invoke the name of Theodore Roosevelt. Here’s John McCain at a news
conference in New Hampshire.
“Teddy Roosevelt was the guy responsible for the national park
system in America… ”
And George W. Bush in a speech found on his website.
“The legacy of Theodore Roosevelt is an America that has made
significant progress in protecting our environment… ”
But, some in the Republican Party say the party’s leadership has neglected
that legacy, among them is Theodore Roosevelt – the fourth. Roosevelt says
it’s impossible to know exactly what his great grandfather would have
thought about his name being bandied about by today’s politician.
“On the one hand, I think he’d be very proud because he clearly
has become a symbol for enlightened, progressive environmental leadershipand he’d be
very proud of that. On the other hand, he believed very clearly
in the idea of being forthright and one of the things that you will see
today in the Congressional leadership and sometimes in Washington, people
who are anything but environmentalists trying to clothe themselves in a
cloak of green and he’d be the first one stripping that false cloak off
them.”
Roosevelt is a republican and active in supporting environmentalism. He is
the chairman of the league of conservation voters. Each year the group
issues scorecards that track politician’s votes on the environment.
Roosevelt says he knows republican politicians who fight for the
environment. But he says too often republican leadership – particularly
Congressional leadership – fails to support sound environmental laws.
“And as a Republican, what just drives me stark raving mad is
when we pursue dumb politics that gets you unelected and bad public policy
at the same time. There’s just no justification for that.”
Roosevelt is not alone. Other republicans make the same complaint. In fact,
in 1995, a new group was formed, calling itself Republicans for Environmental
Protection. It’s grown to three thousand members in forty-seven states. Martha Marks
is the group’s president.
“We believe that the Republican Party has just made up its mind that
this is just not an issue that Republicans care about or should care about
and they’re willing to cede that to the Democrats. We think that’s an
absolutely idiotic position to take given the fact that something like
eighty-percent of the American people routinely say they consider themselves
environmentalists.”
Marks says she’s not sure how the conservative wing of the Republican Party
came to take what she considers to be anti-environmental positions. She says
environmental protection and careful use of natural resources is more
conservative than what she calls squandering for short-term profit.
“We believe that conservation is conservative. It is fundamentally
conservative to be a conservationist. It is not conservative to squander our
resources.”
But one political observer says getting the conservative members of the
Republican leadership to completely redefine their environmental positions
might be asking too much. Alan Lichtman is a professor of history at
American University and the author of books about presidential politics.
“To the extent the Republicans might want to debate the environment, it would have more to do, I
think, with the broader picture of
how we go about enforcing environmentalism. That is, do we rely on the
regulatory approach or do we move more toward a compact with business,
cooperation, and voluntary compliance. And they might want to take on the
broader issue of the economic impact.”
But the group Republicans for Environmental Protection wants to push the
debate further. In 1996, the group was too new and too small to affect any
changes in the national convention party platform. Marks says this time
around the group has met with several staffers and leaders from the
Republican National Committee. Marks says the group has more political clout
now…
“They definitely know we’re out here. They actually wish we would
sit down and shut up. But we are not doing so and we are going to be very
insistent.”
In recent years, the group has been recruiting like-minded republicans,
including people in other conservation organizations, such as Theodore
Roosevelt the fourth.
Roosevelt says he has some political advice for the candidates who are
campaigning across the country. He says the candidates invoking his
great-grandfather’s name should follow a similar path.
“Move toward the center and recognize that this is an issue that
is important to eighty-percent of the American people and do so in a way that
reflects a strong commitment and support clean air, support clean water,
work on having a good public lands policy.”
Roosevelt says his fellow republicans should remember when Richard Nixon won
in a landslide in 1972, he had supported the legislation for clean air and
water. The environmental protection was established during his
administration. Roosevelt says it’s not that Nixon was an environmentalist…
but he was a wise politician.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
A movement inside the Republican Party is working to make the
G-O-P more green. One group is hoping to influence the party’s platform
at this year’s convention. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester
Graham reports:
Transcript
A movement inside the Republican Party is working to make the GOP more
green. One group is hoping to influence the party’s platform at this year’s
convention. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports…
The group, republicans for environmental protection says the party has ceded
the issue of environmental protection to the democrats and it wants to
change that. Martha marks is the group’s president
“We think that’s an absolutely idiotic position to take given the
fact that something like 80-percent of the American people routinely say
they consider themselves environmentalists.”
Marks says that’s bad politics… On top of bad policy…
“There is a use-it-all-up, squander it for the short-term profit and
let the future take care of itself as it can. We think that’s a
fundamentally non-conservative position; it’s an idiotic position. And we’re
trying to return our party to a more basic, bedrock conservative position
which we think is pro-conservation”
Marks says the group is working with the GOP national committee. It hopes
to unveil a more environmentally friendly platform at this year’s republican
convention.
Guns are no longer prohibited in America's national parks. (Photo courtesy of Fenners)
