Local news from StateCollege.com and Centre County Partners. Read about State College Borough Council Approves $74,000 Paving Contract with Glenn O. Hawbaker and more from the State College, PA region
This story originally was published by Southerly.
Betty Osceola, an elder of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, lives in Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida, where a small Texas-based oil developer wants to build seven new wells. Burnett Oil Company slipped in its application Jan. 22, days before President Joe Biden signed an executive order pausing new oil and gas leases on public lands. I wasn’t surprised, Osceola said through a bitter laugh she knew it would happen eventually.
Big Cypress is part of the Greater Everglades and spans 729,000 acres a size comparable to Rhode Island across the heart of South Florida. Ecologists describe it as a mosaic of distinct yet interconnected wetland ecosystems: hardwood hammocks, pine flatwoods, sawgrass prairies, marshes, sloughs and gloomy cypress domes with cottonmouths and ghost orchids and endangered panthers.
Credit: (Jon Hurdle)
Larry Niles
Larry Niles has spent the last 25 years trying to ensure the survival of the red knot and the horseshoe crabs the bird depends on at New Jersey’s Delaware Bay beaches. But he says it’s much too soon to declare victory.
Niles, an independent wildlife biologist who once headed New Jersey’s endangered species program, was shocked to find in the late 1990s that the tiny shorebird’s population had plunged by some 80% because the crab eggs it needs to complete a long-distance migration had been badly depleted by an over-harvest of the crabs for the commercial fishing industry.
Plans for a new pump track in Oakmont have been revealed.
Designs by American Ramp Co. of the proposed bicycle recreation attraction were shown at Tuesday night’s council meeting.
A pump track is a continuous loop of berms and mounds that bicyclists can ride on without pedaling. Its name comes from the pumping motion that riders’ upper and lower bodies make as they ride around a track.
The asphalt track is projected to be a little more than 300 feet. It would be installed on about a 8,100-square-foot site in Creekside Park.
Parking spaces will have to be moved closer to the volleyball court to make room for the project.
Democrats Blamed After U.S. Steel Cancels $1.5B Project in Pennsylvania
4 May 2021
Executives with the U.S. Steel Corp. announced days ago that they are canceling a $1.5 billion project in western Pennsylvania that was set to bring thousands of middle-class union jobs to the region, a move that many are now blaming on Democrats and environmental groups.
On April 30, U.S. Steel President David Burritt announced that a $1.5 billion project to majorly improve its Mon Valley Works operation with state-of-the-art steel casting, rolling technology, and a cogeneration plant is being canceled.
The project’s cancelation means that about 1,000 union construction jobs will be lost for the region. Likely thousands more U.S. jobs in supporting industries will be lost as a result.