"Andrew Herrington slips on a battered green backpack, stashes a .308 bolt-action rifle under his arm and steps off a boat onto the steep, rocky shores of Great Smoky Mountains National Park."
The U.S. Department of the Interior is not winning many awards for openness. A House subcommittee recently took up the complaint that Interior's Office of the Solicitor would not even honor the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ombudsman's office with a response to repeated letters.
"The Florida Everglades is a swampy wilderness the size of Delaware. .. But beneath the surface a different story is unfolding. Because of climate change and sea level rise, the ocean is starting to seep into the swampland. If the invasion grows worse, it could drastically change the Everglades, and a way of life for millions of residents in South Florida."
"The National Park Service has lost an early round of legal maneuvering over Yosemite National Park’s trademarked names, as a multi-front fight narrows to the court venue preferred by the aggrieved former concessionaire."
"The nearly 88,000 acres were meant to be a gift, donated along with a $40 million endowment so that part of Maine’s pristine North Woods might be protected forever as a national park. But it’s not easy to give away a national park; Roxanne Quimby, the wealthy, polarizing co-founder of Burt’s Bees, has been trying for more than a decade. Her effort has bitterly divided this corner of New England, where shuttered paper mills have led to crippling unemployment and a shrinking population, and where distrust of the federal government runs as deep as the rivers and streams."
"Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent Dave Uberuaga, who has shouldered responsibility for not acting more aggressively in response to long-running allegations of sexual harassment in the park, has announced his retirement rather than accept a move to the National Park Service's Washington headquarters."
"As Donald Trump seeks to win over skeptical Republicans on Capitol Hill and fence-sitting voters, he seems to have wooed one important voting bloc: sportsmen."
"Seven Native American tribes in Oklahoma will provide habitat and food on their lands for monarch butterflies, whose numbers have plummeted in recent years due to troubles along their lengthy migration route."
"Under the threat of another legal battle, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has pulled the plug on a public-private partnership in northern Nevada aimed at shrinking the size of a wild horse herd through the use of contraceptives, according to documents The Associated Press obtained on Tuesday."
"A Coca-Cola Visitor Center will still be off-limits, but an auditorium at Yosemite National Park named after Coke will now be permitted. Naming rights to roads are not up for grabs, but visitors could tour Bryce Canyon in a bus wrapped in the Michelin Man."
