Public Lands

June 1, 2018 by Christina Warburg

Hunting and conservation have a long history together. In today’s world, where natural predators aren’t as common as they used to be, hunting is sometimes necessary for population control of animals such as deer or beaver. These animals can quickly alter an ecosystem if their populations aren’t kept in check by hunting. On the flipside of the coin, it is hunting that cause populations of animals such as wolves, grizzly bears, and bison to die off in the first place. Although hunting is strictly regulated now, that wasn’t always the case and animals have even been hunted to extinction. Basically, the relationship and history between hunting and conservation is a complicated one. One that is still being worked on today. This month, that has become even more evident with new hunting regulations being approved in Wyoming and proposed in Alaska.

May 1, 2018 by Christina Warburg

Several months ago I talked about the proposed peak season entrance fee increase and shared my support for it. The entrance fee increase was proposed to address the National Park Service’s 11.6 Billion Dollar Maintenance Backlog. This month the NPS announced that they indeed would be raising entrance fees, but not as steeply as originally stated.

April 1, 2018 by Christina Warburg

After months of debate, and not one, but two government shutdowns, a spending bill for the federal government was finally passed on March 22^nd. Much to the pleasant surprise of public lands advocates, Donald Trump’s proposed cuts were nowhere to be seen and instead the budget is actually up by over $3 billion. In America’s system of checks and balances, it is ultimately congress that has the power over the budget, and it looks like public lands advocacy is paying off. Let’s take a look at where that money went.

March 1, 2018 by Christina Warburg

This past month there’s been quite a lot going on in the Public Lands world, and so I thought we would spend today catching up on February’s current events.

February 28, 2017 by Christina Warburg

About three weeks ago I moved to Zion National Park. As I was sitting in my office researching the park, so I would be able to answer any visitor questions, I saw something astounding. The visitation in Zion has increased from 2 million to 4.3 million in less than five years. I asked my supervisor why he thought the visitation had increased so much and he answered “social media.” I found this very interesting, about a year ago I wrote a blog entitled “How Social Media is Destroying our National Parks”, on this site and while I still stand by the arguments I made in the blog, today I thought that I would offer a different, alternative viewpoint on how social media is helping save our national parks. This issue is not, and has never been black and white.