Right now, in the conservation movement, a lot of people are fixated on a single number: 30.
The US and more than 50 other countries have pledged to conserve 30 percent of their land and water by 2030 as a means to help thwart the biodiversity crisis.
Biodiversity tends to increase with the area of land or water conserved, yet just 16 percent of global land is in protected areas today (in the US, it’s closer to 12 percent), according to the World Database on Protected Areas. Intact ecosystems also play a major role in mitigating climate change.
As conservationists have recognized the importance of protecting rich ecosystems before they’re bulldozed, drained, deforested, or abandoned, “30 by 30” has become a rallying call for the movement’s most influential organizations, political leaders, and advocates.
Return the National Parks to the Tribes David Treuer
Image above: Glacier National Park, in Montana, as seen from the Blackfeet Reservation, near Duck Lake.
This article was published online on April 12, 2021.
I. The End Result of Dirty Business
In 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native peoples had long referred to as “the place of a gaping mouth.” Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck. “None but those who have visited this most wonderful valley, can even imagine the feelings with which I looked upon the view,” he later wrote. “A peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears.” Many of those who have followed in Bunnell’s foot
By DANA HEDGPETH | The Washington Post | Published: April 12, 2021 OAK FLAT, Ariz. Just as his Apache ancestors have done for centuries, Wendsler Nosie the former chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe led a traditional ceremony on a mountaintop at Oak Flat, about 60 miles east of Phoenix, overlooking a landscape of basins covered in tall grasses, boulders and jagged cliffs. The tradition, called a sunrise ceremony, is a rite of passage for a teenage girl in which she goes through a series of rituals to recognize her transition to womanhood. The girl had collected plants from Oak Flat that have the spirit of Chic chil Bildagoteel, the name of the sacred spot in the Apache language. Plants from anywhere else cannot be used they don t have the spirit that resonates from Oak Flat. And the girl spoke to the spirit of Oak Flat, giving thanks for providing acorns, yucca, cedar and saguaro cactus that the tribe uses.