Please invest in Our Daily Planet today, by making a one time or monthly contribution.
We do not charge our readers a subscription fee for our content. We want to continue to grow our readership, particularly among millennials and public servants. Voluntary contributions from readers will help us employ interns and freelance journalists, expand our content, and reach a larger audience.
If you make a contribution of $150 or more, you will become an official “Friend of the Planet” and receive a Friend of the Planet T-shirt or water bottle.
Our Daily Planet is a daily morning email (M-F) to keep you informed of the stories shaping our environment. If these issues matter to you, we’d like to be the best ten minutes of your morning.
BLM Offices in Washington, D.C. Photo: Doug Kapustin, For The Washington Post
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is a small federal agency but it manages 250 million acres of land around the country, much of it in the West, and recently the Trump Administration announced that it wants to move most of its employees from Washington, D.C. to Colorado and other Western states as part of a larger agency re-organization. According to The Washington Post, the move is part of a larger administration-wide effort to shift power away from the nation’s capitol and shrink the size of the federal government. Worse yet, its new “acting” leader, attorney William Perry Pendley, has espoused that the Declaration of Independence calls for all federal lands to be sold into private hands and that he believes the best owners would be fossil fuel and other corporations.
Why This Matters: That is our land they are talking about — it is one of the most significant differences between the U.S. and other countries — we have saved some of our land and natural resources for the benefit of everyone. These national treasures are one of the few remaining things we share as a nation. And they want to sell it off taking away another piece of our common heritage.Moreover, their mismanagement of our federal government is also hollowing out something else that made the U.S. great — our government is a collective organization that could do big things for the benefit of all of us. The BLM move may never happen but the employees whose lives hang in the balance while we fight about it may just walk away, particularly as the Administration turns the purpose of the agency on its head. What a lose-lose proposition.
Pendley’s View – We Did Not Shrink The Monuments Enough
“Pendley wrote in 2016 that ‘the Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold,’ and as recently as this month he lauded fossil fuel extraction as an ‘energy, economic, and environmental miracle.'”
“Pendley has been critical of the Interior Department’s shrinking of Bears Ears and Grand Escalante National Monuments — because he feels the president has not been aggressive enough in offering the public lands for what he views as their sole purposes: ‘ranching, mile, oil and gas, or energy activities,’ according to a 2016 interview.”
New research shows that fertile, carbon-rich topsoil is completely gone from one-third of all farmland in the Midwest, severely impairing crop growth and future harvests.
Why This Matters: Experts say this “growing” problem is mostly due to over-tilling the soil and other unsustainable farming practices.
by Amy Lupica, ODP Staff Writer A new study may reveal the mystery behind violently exploding craters in the Siberian tundra. Last year, a 17th massive permafrost crater cracked open in the Russian arctic; the first was spotted in 2013, leaving scientists searching for a reason as to why it had appeared. The craters, the most recent 100 […]
by Ashira Morris, ODP Staff Writer How much does a city weigh? You can’t put San Francisco on a scale, but new research from the US Geological Service estimates that the number is 1.6 trillion kilograms, about the same as 250,000,000 elephants. This isn’t just a clever math problem, though: all that weight is causing […]
Subscribe to the email that top lawmakers, renowned scientists, and thousands of concerned citizens turn to each morning for the latest environmental news and analysis.
Want the lastest climate news summarized for you each morning?
Our Daily Planet is your daily dose of the stories shaping our world and the ways that you can take action. From the climate crisis to the protection of biodiversity, if these issues matter to you then please subscribe & stay informed!
Your privacy is Important! We promise never to use your email address to send you spam or advertisements.