Tag Archives: NPS

A fifty-river-mile national park and preserve on the Ocmulgee River?

The National Park Service is studying expanding Ocmulgee Mounds National Park down the Ocmulgee River from Macon to Hawkinsville, Georgia. This could set an interesting precedent for other potential park or other initiatives in south Georgia or north Florida.

ONPPI

By March 26, 2021, you can fill in the NPS Survey online. Or send them a paper letter to:

National Park Service
Denver Service Center
Attn: Ocmulgee River Corridor SRS / Charles Lawson
12795 West Alameda Parkway, Lakewood CO 80228

To learn more before you comment, the citizen group ONPPI (Ocmulgee National Park and Preserve Initiative) has a website and a facebook page.

For details, NPS has a 24-page Environmental Context Report and a 64-page Historical and Cultural Context Report. Or you can peruse the 269 pages of the JOHN D. DINGELL, JR. CONSERVATION, MANAGEMENT, AND RECREATION ACT, PUBLIC LAW 116–9—MAR. 12, 2019

If your eyes are extremely tough, you can try the NPS grey-on-black story map.

Protecting bears, birds, reptiles, forests, swamps, river, historical sites, and a sizeable section of the homeland of the Muscogee Creek Nation seems worthwhile to me, and beneficial far beyond the prospective park area.

I am aware that there is some opposition based on potential restriction of hunting in such a new park. If that’s your concern, you can send it in. But please consider the upside: conserving enough river and woods for wildlife to survive, without which there won’t be anything to hunt.

Here is the press release, by Ben West and Charles Lawson, National Park Service, 26 January 2021, National Park Service Invites Public Input into the Ocmulgee River Corridor Special Resource Study, Continue reading →

Ensuring Sabal Trail compliance with LWCF

WWALS signed onto a letter asking for Sabal Trail to be examined for LWCF compliance.

Jonathon Berman, Sierra Club Georgia Chapter, 12 April 2016, Conservation groups call for public parks to be put ahead of corporate polluters’ pipeline plans,

Atlanta, GA — Today, seven groups called on the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) state liaison officers for Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi to ensure that the proposed Sabal Trail pipeline, a joint venture by Duke Energy, NextEra Energy, Inc., and Spectra Energy Corp, and Magnolia Extension, owned by American Midstream, does not threaten public parks and recreation areas.

Map of Southeast Mid-Stream Natural Gas Pipelines The letter highlights the environmental dangers the proposed Sabal Trail and Magnolia Extension projects pose to at least 11 parks and public recreation areas paid for by the LWCF.

Created in 1965, the LWCF is a federal program that provides matching grants and other federal assistance for public parks and recreation areas. The program has safeguards to ensure that lands purchased with its funds are protected for public outdoor recreation. The groups warn that rapidly multiplying planned pipeline projects do not appear to be compliant Continue reading →

Nonpoint Source Pollution biggest water quality problem –EPA

EPA found phosphorus and nitrogen from fertilizers, bacteria and other pollutants from urban runoff, plus mercury, in most U.S. rivers and streams. And they didn’t even mention low dissolved oxygen.

Ian Simpson wrote for Reuters, carried by NBC, EPA: More than half of U.S. rivers unsuitable for aquatic life,

Fifty-five percent of U.S. river and stream lengths were in poor condition for aquatic life, largely under threat from runoff contaminated by fertilizers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday.

High levels of phosphorus and nitrogen, runoff from urban areas, shrinking ground cover and pollution from mercury and bacteria were putting the 1.2 million miles of streams and rivers surveyed under stress, the EPA said.

“This new science shows that America’s streams and rivers are under significant pressure,” Nancy Stone, acting administrator of the EPA’s Office of Water, said in a statement.

Twenty-one percent of the United States’ river and stream length was

Continue reading →