At Trackways National Monument, experts have excavated the best examples of Paleozoic era plants and animals on the planet.

“These different types of fossils are the best preserved and the most significant of their kind in the world,” said Jerry MacDonald of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History.

MacDonald has made his life’s work searching for and excavating prehistoric fossils in the Robledo Mountains just outside Las Cruces, New Mexico. His discoveries, starting in the early 1980s helped to establish the area as the 5,200-acre Trackways National Monument in 2009.

“It’s a concentrated fossil deposit that not only has track-ways but it has petrified wood, fossil leaves, marine fossils, he said And all of these things represent a window to the past.”

This public land in the American Southwest desert is one of the few places on Earth where evidence of the Permian period is exposed. The creatures who left these tracks in the mud almost 300 million years ago occupy a much different version of New Mexico.

Assignment Earth features compelling video reports from the front lines of major environmental news stories across the globe. These reports are brought to you by the Environment News Trust.

Among the rolling mountains of Southern New Mexico lies Fort Stanton Snowy River National Conservation Area. Once home to Billy the Kid, occupied by both Union and Confederate Armies, the Buffalo Soldiers and the Apache Mescalero tribe, its history and culture are rich. Today it remains largely as it existed 150 years ago, offering new opportunities above and below ground.

Directly beneath this postcard New Mexico Landscape is fort Stanton Cave, an obscure recreational caving site since the 1960s. But in 2001 spelunkers investigating signs of additional caves revealed Snowy River Passage, an endless series of tunnels whose floors are lined with white calcite deposits, the longest formation of its kind in the world.

“At the moment there are about 27 percent of the numbers there were in the 1970s,” said Liz Slooten a marine biologist at the University of Otago. “Many Dolphins you’d expect there to be tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of individuals. But Hector’s Dolphins? There’re just over 7,000 individuals.”

Hector’s Dolphins and a subspecies called Maui’s Dolphins are frequently killed when they are inadvertently trapped in the fine mesh of gill nets. Despite resistance from the fishing industry researches working with the National Institute for Water and Atmosphere aim to create protection zones to prevent the extinction of this threatened species.

Field producers for Assignment Earth arguably have the coolest job in the world. Reporter Rebecca Huntington blends exploring wild places, her favorite pastime, with storytelling to educate the general public on events and issues at the forefront of environmental conservation.

Born in Billings Montana, Rebecca, 38, now lives in Jackson, Wyoming. With a degree in Spanish and Journalism from the University of Montana and as a Ted Scripps fellow of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder she, brings a wealth of knowledge and training to her production work. Reporting for Assignment Earth since 2007 Rebecca connects with researchers and activists to offer viewers an on-the-ground perspective of efforts to protect and preserve the natural world.

What follows is a Q&A interview conducted for Assignment Earth

AE:

What made you decide to become a journalist?

Huntington:

While working on a story about a boarding school on the Blackfeet Indian reservation for the University of Montana’s innovative Native News Project, I realized I could be engaged in the moment and make a difference. The young girl I followed to school, who had been teased in the past, gained some new respect among some of her peers just by having a journalist follow her around for a day. Sometimes just being there is enough.

AE:

But why an environmental journalist?

Huntington:

My parents taught me to love the outdoors. I also love attempting to bridge the gap between what scientists know, what policymakers do and what the general public understands about being stewards of our environment.

AE:

Do you have a journalistic hero, a mentor, or anyone in particular who inspires your work?

Huntington:

Too many to name — but my first newspaper editor, Diane Pettit, would bring my stories back bleeding red with her editing mark-up and yet still leave me feeling inspired and even confident! She was a real teacher.

AE:

What is the most interesting story you’ve ever reported on?

Huntington:

A proposed copper mine in the cloud forest of Peru.  “Peruvians sue former British mining firm over shootings” for the London newspaper, The Independent, published May 9, 2010.

AE:

What is was it about Peru that made is this area so compelling?

Huntington:

You have world-class cultural and ecological resources overlapping with world-class minerals and oil and gas in a place that is extremely vulnerable to climate change. Tension is brewing given the weak environmental regulation; extreme gap between haves and have-nots (rural v. urban populations); and ever-increasing demand for resources ranging from copper to oil.

AE:

What are you working on now?

Huntington:

Zombie subdivisions and pikas.

AE:

Say what?

Huntington:

Zombie subdivisions — subdivisions that aren’t quite dead, but they’re the walking dead. We are looking at how one rural community in southern Idaho is coping with blight from the housing bubble that burst and has so many vacant lots, experts project it could take anywhere from 70 to 300 years to absorb them all. Some in this community are striving to be a case study for how to rein in rural sprawl and rebuild after the bust in a way that protects natural resources and amenities that could protect land values and attract buyers in the future.

AE:

And the pikas?

Huntington:

Separate story. How will climate change affect pikas, which already live at high elevations so can’t move much further up slope to escape the heat. Reporting from talus slopes in western Wyoming.

AE:

What is the most important thing you want people to know about you as a journalist?

Huntington:

Like the Assignment Earth series, I let the facts tell the stories and the viewers draw their own conclusions.

The Sage Grouse is a candidate for designation as a threatened or endangered species. As the Interior Department considers the bird’s fate, several research projects are underway across the west to study its behavior, movements and nesting patterns.

Wildlife biologist Bryan Bedrosian locates the birds at night. Sage Grouse sleep out in the open so they can see predators coming. But this also blows their cover.

“The way we see them is by a really powerful spotlight we bring out,” Bedrosian said. “And through binoculars we can pick up the shine, the reflection of their eye.”

Using this common technique researchers can spot a group of sleeping grouse for 800 meters. To capture them Bedrosian deploys rock music and what looks like an over-sized butterfly net.

“We go up to them playing loud music so it distracts them, covers up our foot steps, disorients them a little bit to what’s happening,” he said.

With almost 44 percent of Sage Grouse habitat lost to agriculture, urban development, road construction, energy production and other causes, scientists like Bedrosian are providing vital information that may help this chicken-sized desert bird from going extinct.  What researchers discover could restrict future land usage, especially in Wyoming where sagebrush, the birds’ primary environment, covers more than half the state.

Assignment Earth features compelling video reports from the front lines of major environmental news stories across the globe. These reports are brought to you by the Environment News Trust.

The truths discovered in documentary films often reveal far more than meet the eye. In his Oscar winning movie “the Cove” photojournalist Louie Psihoyos takes us on an adventure that perhaps shows us more than we want to see.

“I lead an elite team of activists to penetrate a secret cove in Japan to reveal a dark secret,” Psihoyos said.

The Cove, part action thriller, part nature film is the exciting story behind a covert operation to document one of the most horrific atrocities of the 21^st century, the systematic slaughter of dolphins.

“They kill more dolphins than anywhere on the planet right there at this cove, which incidentally is in a Japanese national park, a marine sanctuary,” Psihoyos said. That’s the irony of this whole thing. But it’s also the scene of the captive dolphin trade. Most of the captive dolphins in the world come from this little cove.”

Louie Psihoyos

Ever since I was a kid I’ve loved dolphins. These smiling marine mammals are the very image of fun and freedom. Growing up in Southern California I used love to see the dolphin and killer whale shows at ocean theme parks like Marine Land and Sea World. But I never really gave any thought to where these animals came from. The captive dolphin industry was started more than 50 years ago by a man named Rick O’Barry.

“Rick O’Barry is the guy who captured and trained the four dolphins who collectively played the part of Flipper, the popular 1960s television series ‘Flipper’,” said Psihoyos. “And (he) spent about 10 years building that industry up and he’s sent the last 40 tearing it down. The turning point for him was when Cathy, the primary dolphin that played the part of Flipper committed suicide in his arms that he realized that they are more sentient, more intelligent than anyone realized including himself and really turned himself around after that, and he’s probably become the world’s best known dolphin advocate.”

One of the greatest ironies in nature is the dolphin’s smile. In captivity that characteristic grin masks a deep sorrow of intelligent creatures that are rounded up and put on display for our amusement. And in the Cove those less suited for the marine mammal sideshow are killed and butchered to be eaten.  But here’s the greatest irony. With high levels of mercury in the world’s oceans brought on by industrial pollution dolphin meat is toxic.

In this interview with Louie Psihoyos recorded at the Mountain Film Festival in Telluride  the Joy Trip Project brings you this incredible story.

New music this week by Chad Farran from his album Another Ride. Find more of his work online at www.chadfarran.com.

This podcast is brought to you thank to generous support of our sponsor Patagonia. We don’t take money from just anyone. Sponsors of the Joy Trip Project support our mission of an active lifestyle through outdoor recreation and community involvement. Support us by supporting them.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast help spread the word by posting a link to it on your Facebook page. Or send it as a tweet to your followers on Twitter. Social media is vibrant exchange of ideas join the conversation by becoming engage. Post your comments the Joy Trip Project blog or send us an email to info@Joy Trip Project.com.

Share your stories. share your passion for outdoor recreation, environmental conservation, acts of charitable giving, and practices of sustainable living. You just might inspire our next Joy Trip together. But most of all don’t forget to tell your friends. Until next time take care.

For millennia, water has spread across the broad expanse of the Florida Everglades. But in the last 100 years or so man has blocked its path with roads and dug canals to drain and reroute its course. Now some parts of the Everglades have too much water and some have too little.

“The problem is the Everglades are our water supply.” said Eric Buermann of the Southern Florida Water Management District. “And there’s only 40 percent of the natural Everglades left after man’s drainage and decimation of the natural environment.”

Investing almost $1 billion the state for Florida has instituted a research program to correct the growing problem. Engineers hope to apply what scientists learn to get water running again where there’s too much of it and let it flow into places where there’s much too little of it, like the Everglades National Park.

“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – Winston Churchill.

When it comes to oil spills no one knows this better than Native Alaskans.  Indigenous Arctic tribes learned their lesson during the Exxon Valdez debacle of 1989. In this edition of Assignment Earth several leaders of the Inupiaq Tribe came south to tour the devastation of the recent British Petroleum disaster that continues to spew toxic crude into the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast.

“We had many miles of our beaches like this,” said Alaskan native Earl Kingik. “ A lot of our shore birds fly away and don’t come back to Point Hope due to this kind of oil activity, this oil spill.”

Native Alaskan/Exxon Valdez survivor Earl Kingik tours the Gulf Oil Spill

Twenty years later badly damaged ecosystems along the Lisburne Peninsula on the Chukchi Sea have yet to recover. When the Valdez struck Bligh Reef on Prince William Sound 10.8 million gallons (250,000 barrels) of oil spilled into the water, creating the largest man-made catastrophe of its type in history. But that was until the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on April 20th.

Mark Schlieifstein and Jaquette White of the Times-Picayune report that three teams of scientists say oil draining into the Gulf is more than triple what BP first estimated more than a month ago.

“The lowest estimate that we’re seeing that scientists think is credible is about 20,000 barrels (a day),” said Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey. “The highest we’re seeing is probably a little over 40,000, and maybe a little bit more,” depending on how much natural gas is also being released from the well.

As of June 3^rd the damaged well has been capped and the cleanup is now underway. An investigation has begun to find those responsible at BP for this fiasco and the Justice Department promises criminal prosecutions. We’ll start assigning blame. The price of seafood will likely skyrocket and members of Congress will make a grand show of talking tough. But once the number of beach front tar balls and oil-soaked bird slowly start to abate and headlines report the world’s latest atrocity, what lessons will we have learned? I was curious so I made a few phone calls to find out.

“The Gulf Coast oil spill is clearly a horrible thing to watch. But we have to realize that it is only the tip of an invisible stream of environmental destruction around the world,” said author and environmental activist Bill McKibben. “If you can imagine that instead it was a stream of acid in the water, the oceans are becoming more acidic due to raising levels of CO2. It’s polluting the environment making it toxic for life on the planet at all levels.”

Bill McKibben

Among the very first to report on the climate crisis in his book “The End of Nature,” McKibben has followed our path of destruction for a very long time. When we spoke he let me know that capping the well and mopping up the oil is hardly the solution we need.

“This event is a reminder of why we need to get off dirty energy right away,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of putting filters on oil wells and keep pumping away. As long as we rely on fossil fuels events like this are just going to keep happening again and again.”

This is certainly not the first time something like this has happened. These are the mistakes we are doomed to repeat. I also spoke to Dr. John Francis, author of the book “Planet Walker” who witnessed another oil spill on the San Francisco Bay back in 1971. That event compelled him to stop riding in motorized vehicles and to walk everywhere he went for 22 years. He also took a vow of silence, hoping to learn valuable life lessons by not talking and listening to others instead.

“It’s going to keep happening until we realize that (the oil spill) is more than what it looks like.  What I learned and wanted to share when I started talking after walking and not talking for so long is that we are the environment,” Francis said. “The (recent) oil spill and what’s going on in the physical environment, which is a very important kind of spectacular thing that’s happened, overshadows WHY it’s happening. We have a lot to do with what’s happened and why it’s happening. How we treat each other, how we communicate is right at the basis of that.”

Ironically the BP Oil Spill occurred on Earth Day, 21 years to the day that Dr. John Francis end his vow of silence and began speaking on behave of the environment. What both Francis and McKibben have come to realize is that these disasters are of our own making. And they will continue until we take direct responsibility for the impact of our behavior and how our consumption of fossil fuels affects those around us.

“I think that if we had to see the cost in lives of what is required to have oil to do the things that we do with oil, we’d reconsider our oil policies,” Francis said. “We have to ask ourselves. What is the cost?”

Dr. John Francis

Each of us can work diligently to reduce our consumption of energy powered by fossil fuels. We can walk more, ride our bikes, drive less and install compact fluorescents in every lamp socket in our homes. But McKibben said it’s going to take more than that. “Individual action is pleasant but it’s not getting the job done. One light bulb at a time is not good enough,” he said. “It’s going to take a lot of hard work. We have to impose a stiff price on carbon to drive people to invest in renewable systems all over the world. Big Oil is winning the fight and we have to fight back.”

Offshore oil drilling is expected to continue. Despite the harsh lesson of the Gulf Shell Oil is making plans to drill in the Arctic waters off the coast of Alaska. Though not as deep, these new wells will be far less accessible and more difficult to manage in the event of another disaster due to ice, cold temperatures and rough seas. Native Americans along the Gulf Coast trust their Alaskan brethren will take to heart the lessons they have learned.

“My hope is that they would go back to their home territory and do whatever they can to make sure that the footprint the oil industry has there is not expanded.” said Michael Dardar, a member of a tribe from coastal Louisiana “(I hope) that they don’t have to face the things that we have had to face here.”

Moving Mountains symposium on the extiction crisis

I’m sure it wasn’t just the altitude. Over Memorial Day weekend I nursed a raging headache at Mountain Film in Telluride. There was also a deep churning at the pit of my stomach that made me feel a bit uneasy. But at 9,000 above sea level I believe the symptoms I felt were less due to a lack of oxygen than it was the sudden and intense onslaught of complex ideas, passion stirring images and ire-raising conversations that are typically part of the Mountain Film experience. As passionate artists, athletes and activists come together to share their particular view of life on Earth, most who attend are roused to an emotional reaction they can feel in their hearts and minds as well as their bodies.

“With so much going on, the oils spill that just happened, climate change and the extinction crisis, I think we all felt it more intensely this year,” said Peter Kenworthy, executive director of Mountain Film. “Through all the films and speakers we cover a lot of issues that are very important to a lot of people who care deeply about the environment.”

Mountain Film is an event that really makes you think hard about the impact humankind imposes on the natural world. Sometimes it hurts. The very notion that the sixth mass extinction of species on the planet is the direct result of human activity is a tough idea to get your head around. Those like me with small underdeveloped brains can experience physical pain, a throbbing at the temples, just trying to process compelling and detailed information presented by some of the top minds in the world.

Joel Sartore

“We can’t take these complex issues any more,” said National Geographic Magazine photographer Joel Sartore. To put it simply he said during the Moving Mountains symposium on extinction. “We are the ‘Earth-eaters’ and we’re going to chew (everything) up with us.”

Our voracious appetite for energy and natural resources extracted from the Earth are making it difficult for many non-human species to survive. Increasing levels of carbon dioxide are warming the atmosphere melting the polar ice caps, causing seas to rise and making ocean water more acidic. Fish, amphibians and aquatic mammals suffer. Many die disrupting the food chain. Animal habitats and migration corridors are rapidly being destroyed as land around the world is developed for housing or stripped of its plant and mineral resources. More species die.

Dave Foreman

“The sixth great extinction has been going on for the last 50,000 years,” said Dave Foreman, co-founder of the environmental protection group Earth First. Referring to the ascendance of humans to the planet’s dominant creature he suggests that our history can be traced through the loss of species cut down in the wake of our progress toward civilization. As we continue to grow we’re pushing them out, depriving countless animal populations of the space, resources and time they need to survive.

“We can not stop the extinction crisis until we give the other Earthlings on this planet more room,” Foreman said.

It’s going to take action on the part of humankind to correct the problems our species as created. Programs like Freedom To Roam, lead by first American K2 climber and environmental activist Rick Ridgeway, work to acquire land and influence policy makers in order to preserve habitats and the pathways between them. Ridgeway’s goal is to encourage species diversity by maintaining the integrity of fragile ecosystems so often thrown out of balance by human industrial activity.

Rick Ridgeway

“I don’t want to leave this planet to my children only with species who have learned to adapt to us,” he once told me in an interview. “Weed species we see around cities like cockroaches, pigeons, rats, coyotes and sparrows will be all that we have left.”

Mountain Film offers both a prophetic vision of a future rife with doom as well as signs of hope for a bright future. Presented with artistically rendered films that illustrate the destruction of our planet, audience members are also shown stories of courageous men and women who work toward the protection and preservation animal species at risk around the world.

Louie Psihoyos

“We have to take action,” said Louie Psihoyos, director of the Oscar-winning documentary “The Cove.” We’re loosing animal species faster than we can record them.”

In his film Psihoyos leads an “Ocean’s Eleven-style” team of activists to infiltrate a secret facility in a Japanese fishing village where 23,000 dolphins are slaughtered every year. Capturing the deaths of these creatures on film, “The Cove” has brought this horrible tragedy to light while inspiring those who see it become better educated and aware of man’s cruelty to other species. Perhaps Psihoyos could inspire a new generation of environmental activist to take up the cause.

“We’re not just making a movie,” he said. “We’re starting a movement.”

That’s the power of the Mountain Film experience. More than just series of action pics set in exotic locales, the festival makes you uncomfortable to point of despair, even illness. Our passions roused, we are compelled by the stories of those brave enough to take a stand and reverse our path toward destruction. Entertaining to be sure, but the filmmakers and other artists at Mountain Film are advocates that craft a narrative of our times to demonstrate to those who watch how they might help change the world.

“As a journalist I never felt comfortable putting myself in the story,” Psihoyos said. “But with this movie I want to influence the news. I want to make people feel uncomfortable. You have to be part of the solution and not just report it.”

Dust that settles on high mountain ice will have a profound affect on the rate at which snow melts and flows into steams below. New research shows that light absorbing particles speed the transmission of sunlight to melt snow much faster than previously thought.

“The effect of dust both in and on the snow pack, particularly when it’s on the snow surface is to radically alter the energy balance on the snow surface by directly absorbing solar energy,” said Chris Landry of the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies. “It really challenges the conventional wisdom that mountain snow melt is driven by air temperature. We’re able to show pretty definitively that the absorption of radiation by the snow pack can be the predominant driver of snowmelt.”

On the drive south to Telluride from Golden, Colorado I could see the brownish tent of dust on snowfields high in the Rockies. In town for the Mountain Film Festival I naturally thought about the impact of particle generating industries that were likely the cause of dust that collects along the range as high 12,000 feet.

Studies have shown that dust deposited by windstorms hundreds of miles away can increase the rate of sunlight adsorption by as much as 40 percent. In this addition of Assignment Earth we take a look at how these new findings will likely change to way water managers and farmers calculate the flow of snowmelt, the primary source of fresh water in many communities throughout the west.

MountainFilm makes you think about your life on Earth in a different way. This wonderful gathering at of artists, athletes and activists share their passion for the natural world and put into context the desperate decline of habitat on our planet. Writers, photographers and filmmakers present their particular view on the world and offer ordinary people the inspiration to prompt their action toward creating change that lasts.

Though there is very little I can personally do to reduce the amount of dust on snow in the Rockies, I can allow my awareness to be raised. Things such as this I must keep in mind while regulating my own consumption of precious resources like drinking water. As snow melts faster and becomes more scarce it becomes more important to exercise conservation and curb my personal use.