Rising sea levels are threatening the island homes of Mauritania's Imraguen fishermen. Above, child plays alongside flooded landscape on Nair Island.Tim Bromfield / Atlantic Rising

The Banc d'Arguin, where the Sahara meets the Atlantic in Mauritania, is a staging post for over two million exhausted migratory birds from Europe and Siberia. Terns dive for fish, dolphins raise curious heads to the terrestrial world and crabs promenade through an octopus's garden. This abundance is fed by the coastal upwelling, a wind-driven fountain of life bringing cooler, nutrient-rich water towards the ocean surface.

However, this unique ecosystem is threatened by sea level rise. Antonio Araujo, Director of La FIBA's (Fondation Internationale du Banc d'Arguin) conservation program, says "the catastrophe that is approaching us is a reality now." The Banc d'Arguin is so flat that it is impossible to hold the tides back, already there are visible impacts.

Nair, one of 14 low-lying islands in the Banc, is an important breeding site for spoonbills. In the last 10 years rising sea levels have reduced its size by half. Each year more than half the island's spoonbill nests are flooded and the eggs lost.

La FIBA has built a nesting platform above the high tide mark, but Araujo remains concerned; "it is difficult for ecosystems to survive such physical and biological stress."

The Imraguen fishermen are also affected. In 1997 spring tides divided their village, Iwik, in two. The school and four houses were lost and every year since the sea has eaten more. This is an added hardship in an already harsh environment. The Imraguen's closest source of drinking water is 45km away.

Araujo thinks the village will be forced to move in the next few years. The Imraguen will have to leave their boats unattended on the shore and suffer an additional workload, bringing their catch 500m inland everyday.

The Banc is an important nursery for a large number of species caught by the EU fleet and its loss would be devastating for the industry. Araujo stresses this is not an isolated problem for a remote community. There is no point investing in conservation projects in Europe without conserving birds' wintering grounds in the southern hemisphere. "If the Banc is lost, 40-50% of the waders of the Palaearctic will disappear," he says. Bird watching in Europe will never be the same again.

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New Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis: Friendly.Photo: National Park ServiceOne weekend this summer, my wife and I ferried across Puget Sound to Olympic National Park, chose a hiking route with the help of an awesomely smart and patient ranger, and set forth from the highest trailhead in the park. We crossed alpine ridges, dropped into a lush valley, frolicsome marmots etc., etc.

It wasn’t until we set up camp hours later that we discovered … I had forgotten our tent. Whoops. We slept under a ramshackle lean-to, and, fortunately, it didn’t rain.

Jonathan Jarvis, the newly confirmed director of the National Park Service, can’t do much to prevent boneheaded moves like mine. Truth be told, when we spoke this week I was too embarrassed to tell him about forgetting a tent. Instead, I asked about his 33 years in the park service, starting with a volunteer stint when he was fresh out of college and culminating later this month with an office view of the National Mall when the 56-year-old moves to Washington to assume his new post. Jarvis has been a park ranger and superintendent in parks across the West—in Alaska, Idaho, Washington state, and California. He raised his family in parks and worked most recently as director of the service’s Pacific West Region, based in Oakland.

In taking charge of one of America’s most beloved public institutions, Jarvis confronts a formidable list of challenges. Chief among them, he says, will be readying the parks for the ongoing effects of climate change.

Detailed in a recent report, those threats include more and fiercer wildfires, receding glaciers, a shift from spring rains to fall rains, and more rainfall on snow. The rainfall changes will increase flooding, says Jarvis.

“All of those are disturbing, of course, and they’re changing the parks in significant ways,” he said. “But they’re also teachable moments that allow us to communicate with the American public about how this climate-change thing is not some theoretical thing that’s only affecting the polar bears, but it’s actually affecting us here close to home.”

When he was superintendent of Mount Rainier National Park, visitors would ask what happened to the ice caves they remembered climbing in as kids.

“Rather than just saying ‘they’re gone’--because they are--there’s an opportunity to tell them that over the last 25 years, the Tahoma Glacier has receded hundreds of yards and the ice caves have disappeared,” he said. “Based on our long-terming monitoring, all the glaciers are receding. There’s strong scientific evidence that this is the result of climate change.”

I asked if climate change would be the foremost message that rangers would teach. That would be silly, Jarvis pointed out.

“There are ways to incorporate climate change into a lot of messages,” he said. “But, you know, it might be hard to have it part of your Civil War battlefield story. You could probably build it in, but it certainly shouldn’t be your predominate story.”

Fair enough. There’s also the issue of shifting habitats—animals and plant species moving in and out of parks in search of cooler or wetter climes, for example. Historically, Jarvis said, the park service has not done well managing at an ecosystem level by working with nearby landowners—private citizens, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service. One exception has been at Yellowstone National Park, where migratory bison have forced the park service to accommodate them. It can learn from this model, he said.

Another top goal, he said, is “to connect all Americans [emphasis his] to their national parks.”

“[Wallace] Stegner’s idea is that parks are democracy at its best,” he said.

I asked him about a fascinating profile of Shelton Johnson, one of a very few black park rangers, who notes that few African Americans visit parks. Jarvis spoke about the EcoHelpers program at Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, which brought nearby urban youth into the park to help with restoration projects. The students then brought their parents to show off their work, in a model Jarvis would like to replicate elsewhere.

By the way, the parks system includes 58 national parks and 333 other units--national monuments, historical parks, battlefields, national lakeshores, seashores and parkways, wilderness areas and other cultural sites.

Does Jarvis’s job still sound fun? Here are a few more challenges:

“You hear stories about kids seeing the Milky Way for the first time, and they didn’t realize that the sky was full of stars, until they got out into these environments,” he said. “It changes them in profound ways. If we can give every American that opportunity … to see the Milky Way, to see wolves in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone, to see natural fire burning, or to see the salmon running freely up a river--all of those things, I think, create a sense of social responsibility that will carry through the rest of their lives and make them better citizens.”

It’s a romantic notion. I guess the parks have that effect. Let’s end on a proper note:

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A re-consecration ceremony was held this past weekend at a damaged Indian mound in Oxford, Ala. As we reported last month, the 1,500-year-old sacred and archaeologically significant site was partially demolished during a taxpayer-funded economic development project, with the excavated dirt to be used as fill for construction of a Sam's Club, a retail warehouse store owned by Wal-Mart.

Following protests, the city appears to be backing away from the destruction, with a local landowner reporting that his property would be the source for the fill instead.

But it turns out the incident in Oxford is not the first time Arkansas-based Wal-Mart has been involved in the controversial destruction of sacred and/or archaeologically significant Native American sites.

Reader Marlin Mackley brought to our attention a similar incident in Fenton, Mo., a picturesque historic town along the Meramec River in the eastern part of the state. Inhabited for over 1,000 years, the area was home to the Fenton Mounds, two earthen burial structures dated between 600 and 1400 A.D. But in 2001, the Fenton Mounds were leveled for a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Mackley wrote on the website he created to document what happened:

As a 15 year resident of Old Town Fenton I watched in tears as the Former Fenton Indian Burial Mounds Mesa as I call it was excavated. Over and above the crimes against human history perpetrated by these preditory developers we in my city have to look at the back of a plain block building set on top of a pile of rocks.

The St. Louis Riverfront Times newspaper reported how workers with SCI, the engineering firm hired to determine whether there were remains at the site, grew short on time so began digging less carefully -- and soon struck human bone. Recalled Debra Magruder, a member of the crew who later filed a complaint with the state:

"The story I heard was that the guy working in that area thought it was a tree root and used some root clippers and snapped it in half. Then, when they figured out it was a femur, they just covered it and left it, half sticking out, and a looter came and ripped it out of the mound." The femur was indeed protruding from within a stone box chamber. On Feb. 17, a survey crew lifted the tarp and found that someone had dug horizontally into the vault and stolen the bone.

Doing a little digging of our own, Facing South discovered that what happened in Oxford and Fenton were not isolated instances. There have been numerous cases involving destruction of Native American burial grounds and other culturally significant sites by Wal-Mart:

* An Indian burial site in Nashville, Tenn. was demolished to build a Wal-Mart Supercenter on Charlotte Pike in the late 1990s. The company behind the project was JDN Realty of Atlanta, a developer for Wal-Mart stores since purchased by Developers Diversified Realty Corp. of Ohio. By the time excavations were completed in August 1998, the remains of 154 people including children had been taken from their graves, according to the Alliance for Native American Rights.

* In the mid-'90s, Wal-Mart developer JDN was involved in the relocation of numerous native graves while building a store in Canton, Ga., Wal-Mart Watch reports. The store set up a permanent display of unearthed Indian artifacts next to its layaway counter.

* When an Indian burial ground was discovered during construction of a Wal-Mart Supercenter in the northern California community of Anderson, the company proceeded with the project anyway, opening the store in 2007. In June of this year, to make up for the site's desecration, the store erected a bronze statue of a native Wintu feather dancer that was vandalized before the dedication ceremony.

* In 2004, Wal-Mart opened a store in Mexico within view of the 2,000-year-old pyramids of Teotihuacan despite months of protests by local residents as well as prominent Mexican artists and intellectuals. In an interview with the Associated Press, novelist and poet Homero Aridjis compared the store's opening to "nailing globalization's stake in the heart of old Mexico."

* About five years ago, while building a Sam's Club and Wal-Mart Supercenter in Hawaii, workers unearthed 64 native Hawaiian graves, reports Wal-Mart Watch [pdf]. For at least three years afterward, the bones remained locked in a trailer, awaiting reburial.

"What if they built a Wal-Mart at Arlington? How would people feel?" Hawaiian activist William Aila told the AP at the time. "Those individuals were buried there with the thought that they would be undisturbed for the rest of the eternity."

There were other cases where Wal-Mart would have disturbed sacred sites but was dissuaded by protest:

* In 2001, Wal-Mart relocated a planned store in Morgantown, W.V. because it would have destroyed a Native American burial site, according to the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility [pdf]. The decision came after company shareholders and indigenous leaders wrote letters to Wal-Mart and West Virginia state leaders protesting the chosen location.

* Five years before that, Wal-Mart scrapped a plan to build a store in the Hudson Valley community of Leeds Flat, N.Y. after Mohican remains were found, according to a website about the Stockbridge Munsee Tribe of Mohican Indians. For more on the case, read the account by Mohican historian and educator Debra Winchell.

* In the early 1990s, Wal-Mart canceled plans to bulldoze a large Indian mound in Paso Robles, Calif. after leaders of the Chumash and Salinan Indian nations protested, Wal-Mart Watch reports [pdf]. The company complained the mound was blocking motorists' view of the store.

And it's not only Wal-Mart who's destroying native cultural sites. Others who've been involved in damaging or threatening sacred lands:

* An Indian burial site along the Cumberland River in Nashville, Tenn. was disturbed in the late 1990s by construction of a stadium for the Tennessee Titans, the National Football League team that was formerly the Houston Oilers. Though the project drew protests from local Indian rights advocates, then-Mayor, now Gov. Phil Bredesen defended it on the grounds that part of the site had already been disturbed by previous construction.

* When Whole Foods broke ground for its first store in the state of Hawaii, it discovered the remains of more than 20 indigenous people, according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. But the Texas-based company continued with the construction anyway, storing the bones in a trailer to rebury at the site later.

* WMAC radio reports that Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue is using federal economic stimulus funds to build a four-lane highway near the Ocmulgee National Monument, a site of great significance to the Muscogee (Creek) people where human occupation has been recorded for 12,000 years. The road would divide the monument from surrounding traditional cultural property, leading the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association to place the monument among America's most endangered national parks.

Why would the U.S. allow so much of its cultural heritage to be destroyed by development? After all, there's no shortage of federal laws designed to protect sacred and archaeologically significant sites. They include the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, President Clinton's Executive Order on Indian Sacred Sites, the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.

But a fact sheet on sacred sites [pdf] prepared by the Morning Star Institute for the Coalition to Protect Native American Sacred Places during 2002 hearings by the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs points out there are no existing legal protections for certain sacred places -- and "none that provide a specific cause of action to defend sacred places against desecration or destruction."

Unfortunately, until those protections are strengthened, America's ancient sacred places will continue to fall to the bulldozer.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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After editing Grist's recent three-part series on poop, it's sort of hard to stop thinking about all the bodily waste flowing inexorably out humanity's gut and into the streams, rivers and oceans of the world. Six billion people, relieving themselves several times a day, every day ... well, you get the picture.

Yellowstone National Park's yellow-tinted hot springs sure can be tempting...Courtesy jimbowen0306 via FlickrSo with too much poop on the brain, it's easy to explain why the weird news out of Yellowstone National Park caught this writer's attention.

As multiple news outlets have reported, six men were arrested for getting a little too close to Old Faithful geyser last week, and two of them apparently urinated on the geological landmark.

Terrible! How could they! Right?

But is there an eco lesson here? Was their act of public pissing actually a statement about America's self-destructive fascination with the flush toilet -- a water-wasting, river-polluting method for disposing of our No. 1s and 2s? Were the "Yellowstone Six" saying, "We are here today to pee on Old Faithful to draw attention to the need for a sanitation system that returns nutrients to the eco-system"?

Doubtful. These guys were being stupid, of course, and they happened to get caught on the park's live webcam.

But Grist being Grist, we snickered at it and thought to ourselves, "There's gotta be a way to tie this to the environment, right?"

Probably not. Still, it's kinda funny. And we wonder, what other parks are public urination worthy?

(Note to self: When urinating in national parks, check first for webcams.)

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Anyone who's ever lived in a home with a leaky basement knows that during a rainstorm, preventing a flood is the first order of business. Too often, though, it's easy to put off until later the investments necessary to protect your home from future storms that are sure to come.

The same is true with climate change. Right now, the planet is awash in a rising flood of carbon dioxide that threatens to forever change our marine, forest, grassland, desert, and mountain ecosystems. We see early signs of these changes in national parks throughout the country -- the canaries in the coal mine of climate change.

Glaciers are beating a rapid retreat in Glacier National Park, and will be completely gone within 20 years. Heat-sensitive wildlife species like the pika in Yosemite National Park are moving to higher elevations to escape rising temperatures, and may become extinct locally once they can't go any higher. Trout are disappearing as the cool mountain streams of Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks gradually warm.

Cutting the flood of emissions is the first order of business. If we don't act now to drastically reduce greenhouse gases, our national parks, the plants, fish, and wildlife that depend on them, and the thousands of communities that benefit economically from related tourism, could suffer irreversible declines.

But like the homeowner with a leaky basement, we also need a longer-term plan to prevent problems from recurring. Unnatural global warming is happening now, and even if we stopped all emissions today, a century's worth of industrial emissions already in our atmosphere will cause disruptive climate changes for decades to come. That's why we must act simultaneously to cut global warming pollution and prepare for the ongoing consequences of climate change. Doing one without the other is only half a solution.

Fortunately, congressional leaders are on the right track. Earlier this month, Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) released the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, a bill that would lower greenhouse gas emissions, create thousands of clean energy jobs, and safeguard our air, water, land, and wildlife from climate changes already underway.

Last year, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved the Climate Security Act, originally authored by Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.), a bill that would have cut emissions and invested at least $7 billion per year in safeguarding our natural resources from climate change. More recently, the House Natural Resources Committee introduced the Climate Change Safeguards for Natural Resources Conservation Act -- legislation that will create a coordinated national plan for safeguarding the air, water, and wildlife that are critical both for our national parks and for the health and welfare of our communities.

As with our own homes, it takes steady investments to ensure that natural systems continue to function in the face of threats like climate change. To protect a basement from floods, you might seal the walls, divert rainwater runoff, and keep gutters clear. But how exactly do we safeguard plants, fish, and animals from climate change?

There's still much to learn about how climate change is altering our world, but national parks are already working to help wildlife and human communities cope with change. In Everglades National Park, restoration of natural water flow in the "river of grass" is helping many threatened and endangered species like the Florida panther. It is also providing drinking water and enhanced storm protection to many Florida communities threatened by salt intrusion and more destructive hurricanes linked to climate change. In California's Redwood National Park, streams and forests devastated by years of logging are being restored. This will help trees, fish, and wildlife better cope with stresses brought on by climate change, including drought, wildfire, and pests. It will also provide salmon habitat and cleaner drinking water, both important economic values for surrounding communities.

It's tempting to think that we could find a little extra money in the federal budget every year to counter the effects of climate change on our natural resources. History doesn't support this kind of optimism. The national parks, for instance, have been operating with insufficient annual funding and a multi-billion-dollar backlog of maintenance and preservation projects for decades.

Congressional leaders are demonstrating great foresight by writing legislation that would provide dedicated annual funding for dealing with the consequences of climate change. Last year's Lieberman-Warner bill, and this year's Waxman-Markey bill, would invest proceeds from the sale of greenhouse gas emissions permits in a cap and trade system back into urgent needs, such as helping consumers and industry switch to cleaner energy and safeguarding America's communities and natural resources from climate change.

Within the coming weeks, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will determine just how much revenue will be allocated for each purpose. The National Parks Conservation Association, along with dozens of state and federal conservation organizations, tribal organizations, outdoor industries, hunters, and anglers, supports dedicating a small percentage of the permit value to safeguard the natural systems - no less than 5 percent per year out of the estimated hundred billion dollars per year that will be generated on average over the life of the climate bill.

These investments aren't just good for wildlife-they help build local economies. According to a 2006 study by the Outdoor Industry Association, fishing, hunting, wildlife watching, hiking and other outdoor pursuits that depend on healthy ecosystems contribute $730 billion annually to the U.S. economy. One out of every 20 jobs in this country is linked to wildlife related activities, goods, and services and these activities stimulate 8 percent of all consumer spending. Additionally, a 2006 economic study commissioned by the National Parks Conservation Association revealed that America's National Park System generates more than four dollars in value to the public for every tax dollar invested by the federal government.

Most homeowners presented with this kind of return on investment would gladly put a little money aside today to keep their homes secure in the years ahead. Our national parks deserve no less.

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A proposed rule change at the U.S. Interior Department would make it easier for individual national parks to open existing trails to mountain biking, a move opposed by some conservationists and hikers who argue mountain biking can speed erosion and disturb the national-park experience for other visitors. For their part, mountain-biking advocates say that greater access to trails in national parks could, among other things, spur more young people to visit the parks.

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The Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday partially backed off from unpopular plans to open land near Utah national parks to oil and gas drilling. BLM deferred leasing about one-third of the 93 tracts that the National Park Service had objected could contaminate parks with noise, water, and air pollution; the rest will still go on the auction block Dec. 19.

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Florida's intent buy out a giant sugar operation in a move to restore the Everglades is being complicated by a competing offer from the Lawrence Group, a Tennessee farming company.

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The U.S. EPA is continuing its push to weaken clean-air rules near national parks before President Bush leaves office, despite the objection of national-park advocates and many of the agency's own administrators, according to The Washington Post. The rule revision would change the way air pollution is measured near national parks, allowing large pollution spikes throughout the year as long as a source's average annual emissions were below a certain threshold.

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Due to escalating violence, Congolese rangers have been run out of the country's Virunga National Park, threatening the safety of some 200 mountain gorillas that live there. "There are documented cases of the gorillas getting caught in the crossfire and getting killed," says a park spokesperson. "It's the chaos of war and they are right in the middle of it." Only about 700 mountain gorillas remain in the wild.

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A new plan allowing fewer snowmobiles into Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks has been released by the National Park Service which would cut by nearly 40 percent the number of loud, polluting snowmobiles allowed into the parks each day. The previous plan called for allowing up to 540 snowmobiles a day, but that plan was struck down by a judge in September.

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Mountain bikers will have easier access to national parks and other public lands under plans the Biker-in-Chief is trying to push through before leaving office. (Ninety-seven days!) The National Park Service said Tuesday that it will propose a rule by Nov. 15 that would speed up decision-making about mountain-bike trails by putting park managers in charge instead of federal regulators. "We are trying to give superintendents a little bit of latitude especially for non-controversial proposals for bicycling in parks," says an NPS spokesperson. (Get it? Spokes-person?) But green group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility would like to quibble with that "non-controversial" part. PEER blames bikes for increasing erosion, trampling native plants, and disturbing other trail users; it says President Bush has caved to the mountain-bike lobby, which has been advocating for a change to the rules since the early 1990s.

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A National Park Service plan to allow 540 snowmobiles a day into Yellowstone National Park has been tossed out by a federal judge. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled Monday that allowing that many 'mobiles would increase air and noise pollution and be disturbing to wildlife -- conclusions drawn, he noted, by NPS's own data. Increasing the allowed number of snowmobiles "elevates use over conservation of park resources and values," Sullivan ruled, and NPS "fails to articulate why the plan's 'major adverse impacts' are 'necessary and appropriate to fulfill the purposes of the park.'" NPS must go back to the drawing board. Conservationists favor kicking snowmobiles out of the park entirely; a new plan is unlikely to go that far, despite NPS research concluding that a snowmobile ban would have "negligible to minor" economic impacts on local communities.

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When Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced in June that the state would buy 187,000 acres of land from U.S. Sugar Corp. to "jump start" an Everglades restoration effort, environmentalists cheered visions of flowing, fresh water and pristine, untouched habitat. But that may not turn out to be exactly the case. Crist initially said he would use the land to build a flow way between Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, quenching the thirsty River of Grass with water untainted by phosphorus from sugar production. But for that plan to go forward, the state will also have to obtain 40,000 acres owned by a subsidiary of sugar behemoth Florida Crystals. Since the flow way would require less land than what Crist is buying from U.S. Sugar, many expect that the state will orchestrate a swap with Florida Crystals instead of taking the land out of production. Closed-door negotiations are ongoing. Meanwhile, a Florida Crystals spokesperson says the company has cleaned up its act and is not the Everglades' nemesis, as most phosphorus pollution in the region now comes from non-sugar sources.

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Sumatra's Tesso Nilo National Park will be doubled in size in an effort to help out the endangered elephants and tigers that live there. Riau province, which contains the park, houses some 210 elephants (down from 1,250 just a quarter-century ago) and 192 tigers (down from 650 in that same time period). Sixty to 80 elephants and some 50 tigers are believed to reside in Tesso Nilo. The park also has the most biodiverse highland forest plant life on earth, with some 4,000 recorded unique species. The expansion of the park to 212,500 acres "is a momentous decision that offers hope for some of the planet's most spectacular wildlife and forests," says Carter Roberts of WWF. "There is still much to do, however, as Sumatra's forests continue to disappear to feed the growing global demand for pulp, paper, and palm oil." Riau lost 11 percent of its forest cover in just one year between 2005 and 2006, and has 65 percent less forest cover than it did in the early 1980s.

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