Last fall, I spent a week in Glacier National Park, hiking, using my binoculars to search for any animal I could find, and meeting other travelers. As we made small talk, people would enthusiastically tell me and my friends about the highlights of their trip, share their secrets about where to see the best animals, or tell interesting facts about the park—did you know that the Going-to-the-Sun Road was featured in the opening credits of The Shining? Unfortunately, another common question that came up was how few and small the park’s glaciers are. People who had been there before were sad to see how much the glaciers had shrunk since their last visit.
Glacier National Park warms by almost twice the global average and is on the way to Loss of its namesake glacier as a result. It is a reality that the park does not shy away from – At a viewpoint, an information board informed that the average glacier retreat over the last 50 years was 39%, with some glaciers losing at least 85% of their size
And this trend is not limited to the park. A new mapping of the entire United States found that since the mid-20th century, about 360 glaciers have completely melted or been degraded to less significant landscape features.th Century. Climate change has not only dried up the glaciers, but also dried up the plants in the western United States, leading to a Large fires doubled between 1984 and 2015The rising temperatures also favour a Increase in bark beetles and the resulting loss of trees and biological carbon sequestration. It’s a vicious circle.
It’s hard not to see your place in this world differently when you’re enjoying every beautiful view, or even feeling like you’re part of a grand plan. It’s both awe-inspiring and a call to action: we must fight to protect public lands from climate change.
The burning of fossil fuels is the primary driver of climate change, and a quarter of the United States’ climate emissions come from the extraction, transportation, and burning of fossil fuels on public lands. Our land.
National parks like Glacier are highly protected from exploitation and are managed by the National Parks Service, but a much larger portion of the lands are managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, and other agencies with varying degrees of protection.
These public lands may border national parks, bringing dirty energy drilling companies to the doorsteps of our parks and contributing to a crisis affecting the entire planet. And our public lands are unique places that provide important habitats for wildlife, are of cultural significance to Indigenous peoples, offer outdoor recreation, and provide clean drinking water.
Instead of sacrificing public land to increase oil company profits, it should be part of the climate solution. Earthjustice has successfully challenged numerous lease sales against many governments.
Our fight continues. We must not lose our public lands and the ecosystem of life that depends on these wilderness areas.
