I just read on the great travel blog Jaunted that Scandinavia’s SAS Airlines may try to save on fuel costs by trying gliding landings. Obviously a major airline isn’t going to shut the engines down without running the concept through the normal series of tests, but they may be on to something. SAS has already found that by flying slower–and increasing flight times by a measly few minutes–they save both fuel costs and CO2 emmissions. Maybe Sully–the pilot who successfully landed the plane in the Hudson River–has a future training SAS pilots.

For the first time ever, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill last week to curb global warming. No country understands the issue of climate change more than Greenland. At the same time that some of the country’s coastal sea-ice routes are melting and tundra flowers are blooming earlier than ever, the country has seen an uptick in tourism–perhaps because people want to experience the cold beauty of this country before it is too late. Â

I’ve spent more than 20 years in Minnesota, and I’ve explored all corners of the state. Part of the reason I wanted to take a fellowship for a year of study was my fascination with the state’s forests, and particularly the piney woods of the Arrowhead Region, which is mostly made up of Superior National Forest. It’s an area roughly equal in size to Vermont (which says a lot about how big Minnesota is). SNF includes the biggest Wilderness Area in the Lower 48 (the Boundary Waters) and it includes thousands and thousands more acres that are available for a wider range of uses, from mining to logging to fishing and hunting. I’ve spent a lot of the last semester at the University of Colorado studying the history of the laws that govern the country’s public lands, and I’m going to spend a lot of the next semester focused on researching the history, present and future of Minnesota’s public lands. The nation’s forests are undergoing rapid change. In Colorado and the mountain states to the north and west of it, lodgepole pines are being wiped out by mountain pine beetle. Aspen trees, another iconic trait of Colorado’s landscape, are also struggling mightily with warmer weather and nastier pests. In the East, western hemlock is being wiped out by a tiny Asian bug with no natural predators in North America. Moving from the east, the ash borer is leveling groves of ash trees across the country. Some of these phenomena are linked directly to climate change, while others have more to do with human manipulation of the landscape. In Colorado, biologists blame a variety of factors for the downfall of the lodgepole pines. Climate change may be part of the equation, but the larger issues have to do with overcrowding of trees, and that is linked to suppression of fire. As I move into the next phase of my research, I’ll be updating you on what I find in Minnesota’s forests, but I’m also wanting to hear what you’re seeing and observing. I’ve noticed more burr oak saplings in Voyageurs National Park for example. Are you aware of proposed mine claims? (They’re coming.) New trails? Midnight rule changes? The next months will tell much about the future uses of our public land in Minnesota.

The annual Conference of the Society for Environmental Journalism in Roanoke, Va., last month was not a wellspring of happy news. In panel after panel, scientists reported on the negative impacts of human development on our fragile life support system (the planet, in other words). It has never been more important to live conscientiously, with an eye toward how your actions affect the web of life. Travel is no exception. Many of the steps the casual traveler can take are simple, and one of the easiest ones was outlined by Crawford Allan, the erudite director of TRAFFIC North America, a wildlife trade monitoring program that is part of the World Wildlife Fund. The trade in wildlife is huge business. About 96 million animals from the wild were imported legally into the United States in 2006 and 2007, Allan said. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confiscated about $35 million worth of illegal animals and animal products between 2000 and 2004, but the service has only 114 inspectors at 38 ports in the United States, according to Salvatore Amato of the FWS (who also spoke at the conference). Where do tourists come in? On cruise ships. “We found that out of 650 tourist stores in the Dominican Republic, 90 percent were selling sea turtle products. Those things are being sold to you and me on a cruise ship vacation,” Allan said. The turtles weren’t even from the Caribbean. They were being captured and processed in Southeast Asia and then sold to Caribbean nations to be sold as knick-knacks. Allan said that after his group’s investigation, the Dominican government cracked down on the sale of the items (combs, jewelry, etc.) but that the trade continues. One sure way to stop the trade is to end the demand. If it looks like coral, turtle shell, fur, claw or tooth, don’t buy it.

University of Colorado biogeochemist Jason Neff was working on a geological mapping project in Canyonlands National Park in Utah for a period of weeks a few years ago. “Some days we could see for a hundred miles, literally,” he said. “And on other days we couldn’t see for five.” Neff was interested in what was causing the phenomenon, and he set out on a research project on dust in the West that was published earlier this year. He wanted to find out whether the dust in the air was a recent phenomenon or if it was a natural part of the desert atmosphere. He spoke about his research to a group at the Center for Environmental Journalism in Boulder last week.

With a team of other scientists, he took core samples from the sediments at the bottom of alpine lakes in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains; these lakes are downwind from most of the major deserts in the United States. The core samples let him and his colleagues analyze depositions over the past 5,000 years. What they found was startling; in the past 150 years, the amount of dust falling in the alpine lakes was 5 times greater than the average over the past 5,000 years. The study found an enormous spike in the amount of dust immediately following the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, which ushered in the era of settlement and grazing in the West. Neff believes that it is the overgrazing of arid public lands (and most of the West is federal land) that has broken up fragile soils and led to the dramatic increase in soil erosion and resulting dust in the air. “Dust storms are a big issue out there; sometimes they close down I-70 in Utah,” Neff said. “People tend to think it’s just part of being in the desert, but it’s similar to what was happening during the Dust Bowl years in the Midwest.”

The impact on visibility in national parks — an irritant to tourists and residents — is the least of the problems caused by the dust, which carries pollutants, viruses and bacteria, as well as fine particles of clay and silt. Huge amounts of top soil are lost and other impacts range from human health (respiratory difficulties) to increased rates of snowmelt in the Rockies in spring (Dust storms in February often turn whole ranges from pristine white to dingy brown). The report, released in February, made national headlines because the summary pointed out that the West is 500 percent dustier than it was before settlement. Neff said Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update segment parodied the report by suggesting the increased dust was due to a dramatic surge in Hummel figurine collecting.

The mountain pine beetle epidemic is going to change the way Colorado looks for decades, if not longer. The Colorado Forest Service (not known for excitability in these matters) predicts that every mature lodgepole pine in the state will be dead within five years. If you’ve been in Rocky Mountain National Park, you know that lodgepoles are an iconoc part of the landscape.

I attended a talk by University of Colorado professor Jeffry Mitton, an expert on pine beetles. The auditorium at the Boulder Public Library was nearly full. He said that a square that is 1,000 miles on a side, stretching from Colorado to Alberta to British Columbia to Northern California, is under epidemic conditions; within this range, mountain pine beetles are devastating the lodgepole pine forests. “We’re taking more than 1 million square miles of beetle infestation,” he said. “This thing is huge.”

He added some insights to the situation that merit sharing. One, mountain pine beetles are endemic in the Rockies. They’ve been attacking pines for millions of years, he said. “They’re part of the forest ecology.” Two, while climate change is a factor, there are other reasons the pine beetles are so successful at killing off trees right now.

Mitton showed historical photos from the turn of the last century showing a much sparser looking lodgepole landscape. “Once these areas were settled, forest fires pretty much stopped,” he said. That led to thicker forests. The lodgepole pine’s natural defense against beetles is to “pitch them out,” Mitton said. The beetle bore holes into the bark and begin carving galleries in the phloem, the material between the bark and wood that is essentially the vascular system of the tree. Healthy trees kill or force out the beetles by flooding them with pine pitch. But with a denser forest, each tree gets less water, and is thus less capable of defending itself. Drought conditions and hot summers, combined with warmer winters that make life easier on the beetles, have led to this epidemic.

One small bright note: The beetles can’t thrive in trees smaller than 7 inches in diameter. Therefore, once this generation of lodgepoles is gone, the beetle population will crash, and the younger pines will get a chance to fill in behind their dead relatives. For more on how the tiny beetles kill such big trees, check out this link.

P.S., this particular brand of beetles won’t be coming to Minnesota, because we don’t have lodgepole pines. But ash borers and other pests are posing a similar menace to our forests.