The folks over at that fine organization were kind enough to hook me up with this information to pass along to you:
Dear Mike,
After reading your recent blog posts about hiking and campgrounds, I thought this topic may be of interest to you especially because it affects avid hikers like yourself.
We need your help. Next Wednesday (April 9th), Congress could decide to permanently recognize a conservation system that protects 26-million acres of our West’s wildest lands. Yet thousands of visitors on California’s Pacific Crest Trail or Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument never would realize they have just experienced this system firsthand…….
WASHINGTON - Sen. Barbara Boxer held a hearing Wednesday to find out why the Bush administration has put off deciding whether to list Alaska’s polar bears as a threatened species. But her star witness, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, didn’t show.
A DNA analysis of scat collected near where the feisty predator was photographed last month revealed that the animal is a male that shares genetic traits with wolverines in the Rocky Mountains, but it was not clear exactly where it came from or how it got to California.
Another year, at Glacier National Park in Montana, they did not see another person for the entire winter. “Pretty harsh up there,” Younger said with a laugh.
“We like people, but in very small doses,” she added. “We’re not into the rat race, that’s for sure.”
What makes this sacrifice so senseless is that it’s all to protect roughly 200 domestic cows and steers that graze near the park from the theoretical risk of a disease — brucellosis — that has never been transmitted from bison to cattle in a natural setting.
Bulldozers and construction teams will soon move on to previously protected federal lands with some of the richest and most diverse natural habitats in the US. The resulting barrier, including banks of floodlights to light up the desert sky, will be impenetrable to many mammals but not necessarily to humans.