Dan Fagre

(This is the second in a series of Q & A's on the Crown of the Continent, a 10-million-acre expanse of land in northern Montana and southern Canada. Dan Fagre is a research ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey who has spent 15 years working to understand how climate change will affect mountain ecosystems like those found in the Crown. To learn more about this wild place and how Earthjustice is working to protect it, check out our Crown web feature.)

EJ: What changes have you seen in Glacier National Park since you first started?

DF: I was hired to start the climate change research program here in 1991. One of the first things that we did is look at Glacier National Park, specifically Grinnell Glacier, to monitor the impacts of climate change through time. So I've sort of had an intimate relationship with Grinnell in particular, and I've seen just without pulling out photographs or maps each year the changes that occur there. When we go up to monitor the size of the glacier we walk across rocks and land that has not been exposed to the atmosphere for probably 500 years because the glacier is retreating. So, in a sense, we're kind of the first people to walk on that in many hundreds of years since it was covered by ice.

EJ: How is a warmer climate impacting native species of the Crown?

Earthjustice attorney Tim Preso

(This is the fourth in a series of Q & As with Earthjustice staff who work to protect our nation's forests and their critical natural resources and wildlife. Protecting our national forests, in particular, is essential for the future of our nation. The Obama administration recently proposed new planning rules that may leave our national forests in peril. National forests are the single largest source of clean drinking water in the United States, serving 124 million Americans. Visit our Forests For Our Future campaign site to learn more. Tim Preso is attorney based in Earthjustice's Northern Rockies office in Bozeman, Montana.)

EJ: How did your fight to protect our forests begin, Tim?

TP: I walked into the Earthjustice office in Bozeman, Montana for my first day of work in March of 2000 and immediately became involved in a controversy over the federal regulation protecting our last national forest roadless lands. That marked the beginning of an 11-year campaign during which I have worked as part of a team of Earthjustice lawyers to defend the Roadless Rule against a variety of challenges. But outside the legal context, protecting our national forest lands has been close to my heart since I developed a love for wild places and wild creatures amid the rugged mountains and canyons of northeast Oregon's Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, near where I was raised. I had the now-all-too-uncommon privilege of growing up near big, open wild country filled with impressive wildlife. I want to make sure that opportunity remains for future generations instead of becoming something that kids can only read about in history books.

Photo: Chris Jordan/Earthjustice

People who suffer from asthma often say an attack feels like breathing through a pool of water or with a pillow covering their face. Unfortunately, millions of Americans know all too well what that's like.

In the United States, asthma is a bona fide public health epidemic: 17 million adults and 7 million children suffer from the disease. Every year, our society pays in excess of $53 billion to treat it. Millions of asthmatics, including hundreds of thousands of kids, make visits to the emergency room for medical attention. And in thousands of severe cases, people die.

The scope of this epidemic, broken down by state, is laid out in a report released yesterday by Health Care Without Harm, The National Association of School Nurses, and The Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments. The report notes that environmental triggers like air pollution can cause and exacerbate asthma, so it's critically important that we defend existing clean air protections and work for new ones.

No argument here, but many of our elected leaders in Congress apparently don't agree.

Californians are eyeballing human waste as a possible source of energy. Photo courtesy of Matt Seppings.

California flushes carbon emissions down the toilet
The California Energy Commission has its head in the toilet, but surprisingly, that's a good thing. Human waste is a huge pollution problem in the U.S. In fact, Californians alone produced 661,000 dry metric tons of biosolids in 2009. But instead of getting rid of the waste by fertilizing crops and filling up landfills—which both pose major environmental problems—the commission recently granted a Bay Area solid waste company almost $1 million to convert biosolids into a "hydrogen-rich gas that could be used in fuel cells to generate electricity," reports Grist. Though the process hasn’t been proven, it could go a long way in adding renewable power to California's alternative energy portfolio. 

BP's environmental hits keep on coming
A recent study by cetacean researchers estimates that the number of whales and dolphins killed by the BP spill last spring could be much higher than previously thought, reports Mother Jones. Though the original count of marine mammal mortalities was approximately 101 dead whales, dolphins and porpoises as of November 2010, that number is misleading since it doesn't factor in the number of deaths that never make it to shore. To come to a more precise number, the researchers unearthed a bunch of historical records to determine whether carcass counts have previously been good indicators of total numbers of cetacean mortality. Sadly, they found that the actual body count only represented about 0.4 percent of total deaths, which indicates that the BP spill's death toll for dolphins and other cetaceans could number in the thousands. That, of course, is in addition to all the other damage that BP has caused, which Earthjustice is currently working to rectify in a number of spill-related lawsuits.