Wisconsin & Minneasota are being damaged by Frac Sand Mining

From Frac Sand Sentinel, Issue # 329, April 6, 2020

Pause for a moment or two on April 22, 2020. Earth Day was celebrated 50 years ago!

This is the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day! How will it be celebrated? What memories do you have of past civic action? Did you know that in 1972 nearly 2/3 of the lakes, rivers, and coastal waters had become unsafe for fishing or swimming?

Gaylord Nelson, Governor of WI during the 1950’s had passion for environment/ poverty. Residents of Wisconsin joined his concern with the dilapidated state parks, exploiting of public resources by private industry and State’s polluted waterways. He worked to overhaul the DNR to have them focus on conservation, he established the conservation corps and acquired land to be converted into public parks and wilderness areas.

In the 1960’s he became a U.S. Senator. He again built coalitions, fought for environmental issues and through his tenacity Earth Day was created April 22, 1970.

As a U.S. Senator, Nelson championed the legislation below:

1968: National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (St. Croix River in the original) and by November 2018, 209 Rivers in 40 States protected
1968: National Scenic Trails – There are now 11: WI- *Ice Age and *North Country 4600 miles trek.
1970: Apostle Islands became a National Lakeshore
1972: Clean Water Act
1972: The Federal Pesticides Act was amended
1972: Endangered Species Act was passed.

Currently the Federal Government is focused on rolling back regulations. As of December 19, 2019, 58 rollbacks were completed (16 alone in regards to air pollution and emissions), another 37 in process to make a total of 95 rollback regulations.

Take a moment to pause, think about Mother Earth. How important is clean water and clean air in your family’s life? How important is fishing for you? How about other forms of outdoor recreation and scenic views that you can appreciate? Are you familiar with the Big Blue Marble?

With your family at this particularly vulnerable time, develop a plan to make a difference for our planet that gives life and sustenance, comfort and safe havens for all of us to enjoy. Plant a tree!

Help your children appreciate the value of clean and safe surroundings. Feed the birds! Reduce, reuse and recycle.

Appreciate the works of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Roscoe Churchill, and other great people including Gaylord Nelson who have written about, spoken about and fought through civic participation and for Mother Earth and her inhabitants.

Participate in civic engagement to protect our earth and all forms of life vital to a healthy environment for all.

Enjoy a sunset, a sunrise and various other small surprises like the song of a bird or many to bring appreciation and solitude to all of our souls.

Blessings on this Earth Day, April 22, 2020

HAPPY 50TH ANNIVERSARY!

Patricia Popple, sunnyday5@charter.net

Wisconsin & Minneasota are being damaged by Frac Sand Mining

Welcome to the Frac Sand Sentinel, a newsletter highlighting resource links, news media accounts, blog posts, correspondence, observations and opinions gathered regarding local actions on, and impacts of, the developing frac sand mining and processing industries.

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only. The editor of the Frac Sand Sentinel does not accept any responsibility or liability for the use or misuse of the content of this newsletter or reliance by any persons on the newsletters contents.

CHECK OUT THE WEBSITE: CCC-WIS.COM and for additional information, click here for panoramic aerial views of frac sand mines, processing plants, and trans-load facilities. FracTracker.org is also an excellent source of information.

From FRAC SAND SENTINEL | 561 SUMMIT AVENUE, Chippewa Falls, WI 54729

New Germany State Park, Western Maryland

When:  Saturday May 12, 2018,  10:00 AM – 3:00 PM

Location: New Germany State Park, Garrett County, Maryland

Discover the important connection between native plants, people, and wildlife at the fifth annual Mountain Maryland Native Plant Festival!

A large variety of plants native to the mid-Atlantic for sale all day! (Please contact vendors directly if you wish to pre-order for pick-up at the event. Purchases made the day of the event are cash or check only.)

Primary Sponsors:

1. Evergreen Heritage Center, Mount Savage, MD, www.evergreenheritagecenter.org

1. Go Native Tree Farm, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, www.gonativetrees.com

1. Wood Thrush Native Plant Nursery, Floyd, Virginia, www.woodthrushnatives.com

Scheduled programs & activities highlight native plants & biodiversity!

Educational programs geared for adults & teens:

• 10:30 to 11:30 am - Nasty Natives? No! (Fact-checking Common Misconceptions about Native Plants) - Candy DeBerry, Professor of Biology, Washington & Jefferson College
• 12:00 to 1:00 pm - Species Complexity: Species, Subspecies, Variants, Eco-types, and Phenotypes - Ian Caton, Owner/Operator, Wood Thrush Native Plant Nursery
• 1:30 to 2:30 pm - Saving the Planet, One Plant at a Time: How a community’s renewed love of native plants can contribute to large-scale biodiversity conservation - Iara Lacher, Landscape Ecologist, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute

Family-friendly activities:

• 10:00 to 11:00 am - Birds & Blooms (discover birds & wildflowers during this easy walk)
• 2:00 to 3:00 pm - Let’s Pull Together (pull garlic mustard to save an endangered butterfly)
• All day! - Scavenger Hunt (find native plants with special features and win a prize)

Local experts answer questions on native plants & other conservation topics!

• Engage Mountain Maryland - www.engagemmd.org
• Evergreen Heritage Center - www.evergreenheritagecenter.org
• Friends of New Germany State Park –  www.facebook.com/FriendsofNewGermanystatepark
• Frostburg Grows - www.frostburggrows.com
• Maryland Conservation Corps -http://dnr.maryland.gov/publiclands/Pages/mcc.aspx
• Maryland Native Plant Society - www.mdflora.org
• Sierra Club Maryland Chapter - www.sierraclub.org/maryland
• University of Maryland Extension, Garrett County Master Gardeners - www.extension.umd.edu/garrett-county/home-gardening

To get a better idea of why this continues to be such a nice event, view this video created at last year’s festival by our friends at Engage Mountain Maryland:

https://youtu.be/eFkj4lahKcw

New Germany State Park and the Western Mountains Chapter of MNPS are co-sponsoring this FREE event. More details to follow!

Directions: From I-68 take Exit 22 and follow signs for New Germany State Park. Turn left into the park onto McAndrews Hill Road. Signs will direct you to parking for this special event.

We can find ourselves in the mountains!

Science, Solitude And The Sacred On The Appalachian Trail

From an Article by Adam Frank, 13.7 Blog (NPR), August 15, 2017

This week, you can’t reach me by email, or text, or Tweet. This week, I’m not taking anyone’s calls, either.

That’s because I’m walking the Appalachian Trail — alone. And while I am, without doubt, scared of being eaten by a bear, I’ll be out there looking for that most precious of possibilities: solitude.

Solitude can be hard to find in the modern world. Cities are, of course, exactly about mixing it up with our fellow humans. That’s the source of their potent innovation. So, while you can find places in the city to be alone, it is much harder to find true solitude.

The difference between the two — being alone and being in solitude — is the secret many people find the wilderness teaches. Now, for a lot of folks, the idea of being alone can be discomforting — if not downright terrifying. That’s understandable because we are, by nature, social animals. Evolution tuned us to live in groups and be attentive to others.

But being in the wild without others doesn’t mean being alone; in fact, it can be quite the opposite.

I was raised in some of the denser regions of northern New Jersey. I loved every bit of growing up in that true melting pot of humanity. But I was lucky that my parents sent me to a YMCA day camp 40 minutes south of my industrialized home turf. That was my first experience of the wild (such as it was). I still have vivid memories of finding myself (relatively) alone in the forests around the camp. What I remember of those times is the profound sense of peace and calm that could make its appearance.

I’ve been searching for more of those kinds of experiences ever since. Mircea Eliade, the great scholar of human religion, knew about those experiences. For him they were the root of “sacredness.” That’s a word I’ve written about many times before in thinking about science and “spirituality.”

For me, sacredness is an experience that rises above any particular religion and speaks to those moments when we feel the essential, original and irreducible potency of life. It need not refer to anything anyone would call “supernatural” but, instead, is rooted in our very real and very natural experience of the world. In that way, it is also a root of the aspiration to do science. As Eliade wrote: “The sacred is equivalent to a power and in the last analysis to reality. The sacred is saturated with Being.”

For Elide, the experience of sacredness was the source of religiousness. But that experience came before any of our modern religions. In particular, it first appeared in what we now call “the wild.” In their early travels through the world, our ancestors would come to some glade or tree or cliff and have exactly the experience I had as a kid in the forests of my YMCA camp. Call it “awe” or “an overflowing”: Call it whatever you want, but the wild is its first home.

Going alone into the wild is also an ancient tradition. It makes up a common theme in the class of common myths Joseph Campbell called “The Hero’s Journey.” Taking a long journey anywhere alone can be scary. That’s also what makes it exciting.

But going into the wild alone takes us beyond just adventure. The reason, once again, is solitude. In the wild, in solitude, you’re never really alone.

In part, it’s all the life that’s there already. The pillars of individual trees stretch back into the woods and, after a while, you realize it’s the forest that’s really the organism. And then there are the bird calls in the air and frogs crossing the trail. After a few hours on an extended hike, you become just another of the forests’ inhabitants plodding along on your way. That experience of sacredness is enough for me.

But there is more.

When you come to a clearing where the sunlight makes it to the forest floor, or where a stream has cut a steep ravine into the mountainside, you can sometimes catch a hint of something. I don’t know what to call it. Words fail. But it feels something like a root, a core, an unvoiced song of the world’s own presence.

It’s powerful enough to get etched in your memory if you’re there with other hikers. But if you’re alone — if that moment is just between you and the world — then you are lucky indeed. That is when you can understand what Henry David Thoreau, one of the first great interpreters of American wilderness, meant when he said, “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

I’ve been lucky to have been able to do lots of backpacking trips in my adult life. And in the last 10 years, I’ve become fond of solo hiking day trips. But putting the two together is a new thing for me. So I am both excited and a wee trepidatious about this trip (The bears. I have a thing about bears).

In the end, however, it’s all worth it (unless I get eaten by a bear). As a scientist, I’ve spent my whole life trying to get closer to the world and understand its ways more deeply. That means going to the source. But there is no greater source for science, for the inspiration to do science, than the wild. That is where the sense of sacredness — that I think lives at the root of science’s aspiration — lives.

So, as the great John Muir put it: “Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”

Now, if only the bears have read Muir.

>>> Adam Frank is a co-founder of the 13.7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a self-described “evangelist of science.”

MORGANTOWN DOMINION POST editorial Monday 20 April 2015

Can the WV-DEP reform itself?

Environmental well-being is primarily a function of regulatory well-being. That at least is the idea in the state Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) realm.

The DEP is still the principal agency that West Virginia deploys to monitor its hills, rivers and streams and its air. But is that as true as we would like to think?

While some try to portray the WV-DEP as yet another regulatory bogeyman, others call it the Department of Environmental Prevarication.

In the past, we have leaned more toward the latter description. However, in recent weeks, the DEP has taken initiatives that give one reason for hope. For instance, this past week, the DEP ordered more than 90 coal prep plants to disclose potential pollutants that could be dumped into waterways. The DEP said that order will better protect state streams and that any additional costs should not be significant compared to the liability for polluting waterways.

That agency also recently hosted a public hearing on water quality standards, part of one program’s annual quarterly meetings. These meetings agendas also don’t dawdle on fluff, either.

The most recent agenda took up proposed changes to aluminum and selenium criteria and an update on algae monitoring done in 2014. The DEP has also become much more visible in the state’s annual spring highway cleanup, through the Adopt-A-Highway program.

Clearly, for those who take a dim view of the DEP’s efforts — and we often count ourselves among them — there are also reasons to think nothing has changed. For example, the state’s Environmental Quality Board recently said the DEP violated state law when it allowed a company to operate two underground injection wells with a “rule” it issued, instead of a state permit.

Or the WV-DEP’s almost cavalier approach to reports of black water flowing into a Raleigh County stream. Only after it responded in a timely manner on the fourth report was a coal company cited.

There was also the incident of orange rocks in the Cheat River at the mouth of Muddy Creek recently, which the DEP appeared nonchalant about investigating, and no one was held accountable.

No, the DEP has not cast off its bureaucracy and still appears to lean in on industry’s side more often than it does the environment’s. However, because of the DEP’s increased manpower and funding, as well as coal’s diminishing influence, this could change.

In the interest of everyone’s well-being, it should.