The National Park Service Won't Be Silenced

America's Yosemite National Park.

Trump is in power, and one of his first acts has been to gag government agencies. After the National Park Service bruised his ego by retweeting a New York Times tweet showing Trump's inauguration numbers to be lower than President Obama's 2009 crowd, they were ordered to stop all tweets, including scheduled ones.

He then muzzled the EPA, not only prohibiting it from using social media, but also ordering it to remove a critical page on climate change from its website and put a freeze on awarding grants and contracts critical to our nation's environmental health. (In case you're in any doubt as to what a Trump presidency means for climate change and the environment, just consider that one of his first official acts after being sworn in was to announce he'd be eliminating The Climate Action Plan - legislation critical to combating anthropogenic global warming.)

Read Scientific American story by Dana Hunter - “The National Park Service Won't Be Silenced.”

When will the voracious human hunger for fossil fuels stop?

(When will this seemingly out of control human hunger stop? We know it is the wrong thing to do, both morally and aesthetically, science has unquestionably illustrated what we are doing is wrong, both in the destruction of these beautiful and irreplaceable places, and the corruption of Earth’s atmosphere, which we all depend on.

Yes, when will we learn that what we doing is both irresponsible and blatantly thievery from future generations – Robert McLean)

Katie Valentine.

Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve is home to a vast array of plant and animal life, including mangroves, orchids, alligators, and the highly endangered Florida panther.

But that rich biodiversity is one of the key reasons environmentalists were outraged last week when the National Park Service approved Burnett Oil Company’s proposal to explore for oil in the southwest Florida preserve. The Park Service completed an Environmental Assessment of the proposal and found that the oil exploration outlined in the plan wouldn’t significantly impact the preserve.

Environmental groups, however, aren’t so sure. The oil company plans to use “vibroseis” trucks to test for oil in the preserve — vehicles that weigh 60,000 pounds and which send sound waves down through the earth to help discover where oil reserves are located. It’s similar to the seismic testing technique that scientists and marine activists are protesting in the Atlantic, but in this case, it’s being used on land.

“We’re concerned these trucks could do a lot of damage to the ecosystem,” Amy Mall, senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told ThinkProgress.

Read Katie Valentine’s story on ClimateProgress - “Oil Company Gets The Go-Ahead To Explore For Oil In Wildlife-Rich Preserve.”