Carbon

All Teddy Roosevelt Sites

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The park service commemorates six parks for Teddy Roosevelt, from his childhood home in NYC, to the ranch in North Dakota where he mourned, to his family home on Oyster Bay, to the room where he was sworn in after an assassination, to the DC island that celebrates his legacy and to the monument that rightly places him among our greatest presidents. The carbon crisis threatens to end the environment Teddy Roosevelt saved for us, so he would want us to switch to electric vehicles to enjoy all his parks, as I did.

At least a dozen current National Parks began with Teddy Roosevelt protecting their land, besides his namesake park above. His friendship with John Muir inspired our entire national park system. We owe a debt that we can only repay by continuing his legacy of preservation for the future.

As President, Teddy Roosevelt protected 230 million acres for us in 20+ states, including national forests, rivers, preserves and more, such as around the beautiful San Luis Valley. He’s directly responsible for all the units listed below, plus others, as well as for signing the Antiquities Act by which presidents still designate national monuments.

“The civilized people of today look back with horror at their medieval ancestors who wantonly destroyed great works of art, or sat by slothfully by while they were destroyed.
We have passed that age, but we are, as a whole, still in that low state of civilization where we do not understand that it is also vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature – whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird.
Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds.
We pollute the air, we destroy forests and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals – not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements.
But at last it looks as if our people were awakening.
Above all we should realize that the effort toward this end is essentially a democratic movement!
Now there is a considerable body of opinion in favor of our keeping for our children’s children, as a priceless heritage, all the delicate beauty and all the burly majesty of the mightier forms of wildlife.
Surely our people do not understand, even yet, the rich heritage that is theirs!”

Teddy Roosevelt, 1913

Biosphere 2

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From 1991 to 1993, eight people lived in this huge sealed greenhouse or giant terrarium in Arizona, growing their own food and attempting to live without outside intervention. Built at a cost of some $250 million, the complex includes the artificial ocean above, multiple tropical growing zones, industrial HVAC, and even a unique, massive ‘lung’ to equalize air pressure at different temperatures. Results were mixed, but there are important lessons to be learned.

Humans like to believe we can control our environment and that we have conquered nature. The truth is that we don’t completely understand nature, and when we try to control it, there are unintended consequences.

The most serious problem was a gradual reduction in oxygen, which threatened to kill the participants by around day 500 and required emergency intervention. Despite all the plants, overall, the system produced too much carbon dioxide. Also, the participants complained of constant hunger, unable to eat enough calories per day, which made it difficult to complete their extensive daily chores. Many plants and pollinators did not survive, but stowaways like cockroaches thrived. Still, they survived for two full years. Others later managed shorter stints, but bickering and mismanagement soon ended fully sealed living experiments.

From 1995 to 2003, Columbia University managed the site and completed groundbreaking research here scientifically proving up to 90% declines in oceanic coral due to artificially high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, the coral later died when the site went back on the market, although there are plans to try to reintroduce it. Today the site is run by Arizona State University, which offers both a general self-guided tour and specialized guided tours, in addition to hosting students and researchers. When fully funded, the semi-tropical desert forests are very well controlled and measured, enabling many scientific experiments on micro ecosystems to be carried out under laboratory conditions. Tracers can be added to water and carbon dioxide, so researchers can figure out exactly what plants are doing in different conditions. Unfortunately, the whole complex is extremely energy intensive, and it is run on diesel and natural gas, which both contribute carbon pollution to exacerbate the climate crisis.

Some believe that technology will allow us to adapt to the worst effects of climate change. The truth is that we need to spend our time, energy and money trying to protect Biosphere 1 (Earth) from carbon pollution. This massive, extremely expensive, carefully engineered and scientifically researched project could barely take care of eight people for two years. That’s neither an efficient nor effective use of resources, but it quickly illustrates how difficult it is to scale environmental technologies to the point that they are practical. How big of a terrarium would we need to feed eight billion people? Far better to take care of the Earth, while we still have hope.

Here are my visits to all parks in Arizona.

Forest Wildfires

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I know it’s winter, but we need to talk about wildfires. There is a common, simple-minded view—popular among those who deny climate change—that overzealous park employees unnaturally suppressed fires, causing wildfires today. End of story. Once we ‘catch up’ on the ‘fire deficit’ everything will be fine. This is bunk.

Last year Canada had a record-smashing year of wildfires, and the frequency of wildfires far exceeds what is normal, considering the naturally slow growth rate of trees in boreal forests. Most of these fires were in remote northern Canada, where historic fires were not even reported, let alone suppressed. The estimated number of fires was not too high, but many of the fires were mega fires, burning over seven times as many acres as the modern historic average. There is only one explanation for the scale of the wildfires last year, and it isn’t Smokey the Bear. The primary cause of increasingly severe forest fires is carbon pollution. 

The first humans to change natural fire ecology in North America were natives who for centuries used fires in the valley for agriculture and to attract game with new grass. The most destructive humans by far were loggers who clear cut whole forests. During the Great Depression, roads and campgrounds were developed in both old and regrown forests, bringing millions of visitors who parked their hot cars on dry grass, dropped their cigarettes on pine needles and left their campfires unattended, causing a dramatic increase in forest fires. Firefighters responded by putting out fires when they threatened nearby communities.

We changed forest fire ecology in complex ways over centuries, so the simple ‘fire suppression’ explanation is false. We don’t know exactly what the forest’s natural ecology was like before man started playing with fire here, but man’s brief experiments for a few decades last century—causing wildfires due to camping and suppressing some fires at the edges—all account for maybe 2% of the life of a Giant Sequoia. Yosemite park rangers tracked all fires within the park since the 1930’s, and for decades none of the fires were large enough to matter to the overall health of the forests until recently. Past fires were often 100 or maybe 1000 acres, but recent forest fires are 100,000 or 1,000,000 acres. Our hotter climate has changed everything. Now we need to change our perspective from our recent past to the consequences of our carbon pollution on the future. Extinction is not a mistake we can correct later. 

California has the most national parks with 28 park units, and about 12 of them have some type of large forest, often wilderness. I’ve been in all of those forest parks in the past year or so, and 9 now have huge swaths of dead trees from recent wildfires. 

Only Muir Woods, a small coastal redwood forest park along a creek surrounded by wealthy suburbs, has been spared. Pinnacles has had multiple wildfires in the past three years, but firefighters managed to contain them quickly. Even foggy Redwood park lost 11,000 acres in 2003 due to the Canoe Fire. 

This level of wildfire is not normal; it is out of control, and it is getting worse. Discussing past firefighting efforts and increasing the rate of manmade fires is not going to fix the problem. If we do not stop our carbon pollution, then 100 years of environmentalists’ efforts to save these forests for future generations will be wasted. 

Glacier National Park

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The horizontal line across the Garden Wall on the other side of the valley is the Going-to-the Sun Road, which I finally drove—3rd time’s the charm. This year the dramatically scenic road opened on 13 June with little ice & snow visible in July. Just over the wall in Many Glacier, old photos show the many large glaciers are now very small, rapidly melting glaciers. My son and I rode horseback up in 2018, and the area should be renamed Many Lakes. The wild & scenic Flathead River forms some of the park’s boundaries, and it’s now filled with snowpack runoff more than glacier melt. Combined with its neighbor across the border, Waterton Glacier International Peace Park is still a UNESCO World Heritage Site, despite the obvious melting problem.

Melting ice and glaciers are one of the tipping points that will flip our Climate Crisis into a catastrophe. Consider the Arctic ice cap. Every year recently, the multi-year ice has been shrinking at an accelerating rate. Eventually, the ice will disappear in summer. Then the same energy that currently raises ocean surface temperatures by 1° will raise it by a multiple of that amount. There are two reasons for that. First, the white ice will no longer reflect the sun. Second, the existing ice will no longer be there to act as a temperature break. When you boil water with ice, it takes something like three times the energy as water without ice, because most of the energy goes into melting the ice first. So, not only is it bad that glacial ice is melting due to flooding and dry rivers in the fall, but once the ice is gone, the surface temperature rise will accelerate much more rapidly. Please, reduce your carbon footprint.

Here are my visits to all parks in Montana.

César E. Chávez National Monument

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[N.B. César Chávez’s legacy has been profoundly damaged by evidence of sexual misconduct against vulnerable young women.]

I returned here today to see the exhibits, as they were closed when I visited last year. The black & white photos of the Delano grape strike and Chávez’s hunger strike remarks are particularly moving. Pesticides were not regulated at all then, and labor was denied rights by growers. Chávez’s national boycott of grapes helped change both.

Today, growers drain rivers, lakes, wetlands and water tables, even as the western half of the country suffers in drought. In Kern County, where the Monument is, the Kern River no longer flows to the Kern Lake, due to diversion for agriculture. In order to sell more produce, growers are ruining the environment for fish, animals and people. Climate change and some farming practices also exacerbate Valley Fever, a deadly fungal infection spreading in California & Arizona.

Agriculture is a trillion dollar industry in the US, with $150 billion in exports. But Big Ag prefers to blame Democrats, rather than face the fundamental challenge of the climate crisis. Big Ag needs to convert farm equipment to electric, and they need to stop using fossil fuel to ship their produce around the world. They also need to cooperate to restore wetlands to sequester carbon.

César Chávez devoted his life to raise awareness and lead civil disobedience to make change. He acknowledged that in the struggle against the rich and powerful, poor people only have their lives “and the justice of our cause” on their side. Today, we need more people to be just as devoted to stop the climate crisis.

Wisteria, photographed in my previous visit in 2021.

Click to see my photos of all national park units in California, to Hispanic heritage parks nationally, or click to read an updated site visit here.

Mojave National Preserve

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I wrongly assumed that this preserve was just a flat sandy desert, but it is a varied terrain of mountains, mesas, canyons, and volcanic landscapes, in addition to sand dunes.

The Rings Loop Trail pictured, near the Hole-in-the-Wall visitor center, goes right through a canyon with Swiss-cheese holes in the walls. There are petroglyphs to see, fascinating views, and short ladders of iron rings to climb.

A couple of retired campers asked me about my long range Tesla 3. The recent spike in gas prices ($7 in California) interests people who regularly spend over $100 to fill their tanks. Of course it’s also a very fun car to drive with a low center of gravity and instant acceleration. But too many folks resist change, even when their carbon travel habits contribute to devastating change.

Click to see my photos of all national park units in California.

Death Valley National Park

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Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level. Highest peak, Telescope, is over 11,000 feet and is snow-capped.

Death Valley National Park is a repeat park for me. While famed for being hot and dry, the park contains both the Amargosa and Surprise Canyon wild & scenic rivers with beautiful oases. In February of 2024, there was enough water to kayak in Lake Manly. I last came here with my kids when I still traveled by burning carbon. This time I hiked out into the basin, since the grand scale is difficult to comprehend from the parking lot. While a very few species have adapted to the extreme climate, humans can not live here during the summer. And yet every day we choose continued desertification of our planet over choosing to convert from fossil fuels.

“All in the valley of Death, rode the six hundred”

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Click to see my photos of all national park units in California.