National Monuments

Adventure Activism, Adventure Media Review, Breaking News, Environmental Journalism, Film preview, National Monuments, National Parks / 15.10.2013

"This is our home. It's where we raised our family. And like other national parks we've worked in it's a place we've worked hard to help people understand, enjoy and feel some ownership of. So it's very hard to make efforts to keep people out when we've worked our whole lives to get people in." ~ Anonymous ranger For nearly 100 years, national park rangers have dedicated their lives to protecting America's most precious places and the millions of people within their boundaries. But when Congress closed the national...

Adventure Activism, Adventure Media Review, Environmental Journalism, Film preview, Life Out Loud, National Monuments, National Parks / 14.10.2013

Now that we’re beginning the third week of a federal government shutdown in the United States it’s about time we start to take a look at what’s at stake when funding suddenly stops. One of the most compelling views of our nation stands to loose can be found in a thoughtful series of videos on the YouTube channel NPS Wilderness: http://www.youtube.com/user/NPSWilderness. More than 400 national parks and monuments are closed today. And though a few will soon be opened thanks to state governments eager to maintain the flow of...

Assignment Earth, Environmental Journalism, Environmental Protection, National Monuments / 20.08.2010

At Trackways National Monument, experts have excavated the best examples of Paleozoic era plants and animals on the planet. “These different types of fossils are the best preserved and the most significant of their kind in the world,” said Jerry MacDonald of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History. MacDonald has made his life’s work searching for and excavating prehistoric fossils in the Robledo Mountains just outside Las Cruces, New Mexico. His discoveries, starting in the early 1980s helped to establish the area as the 5,200-acre Trackways National Monument in 2009. “It’s a concentrated fossil deposit that not only has track-ways but it has petrified wood, fossil leaves, marine fossils, he said And all of these things represent a window to the past.” This public land in the American Southwest desert is one of the few places on Earth where evidence of the Permian period is exposed. The creatures who left these tracks in the mud almost 300 million years ago occupy a much different version of New Mexico.