Wilderness Week | The Verge

Wilderness Week: cool trees, tiny lizards, big parks, and more!

2025-01-22T08:01:52-05:00

This week marks the National Park Service’s 100th birthday, and for The Verge it’s an opportunity to explore spacious skies and majestic mountains. Preservation and conservation don’t begin and end with parks, but this timely anniversary got us thinking about wilderness and all the wild things happening in it around the world. We’re going to look at ways modern human beings can enjoy nature best, and at some of the challenges facing Earth’s most precious spaces over the next century.

The sounds in your backyard are unique, go record them

2016-08-28T16:12:45-04:00

Pristine soundscapes are so important that the National Park Service works to preserve wilderness sounds in many natural parks. There's even federal legislation in the US, like the 1987 National Park Overflights Act, that aims to keep noise from airplanes out of the lands below. Of course, it's impossible to escape noise where I live in New York City, but recently I've been inspired to look for quieter pastures.

After reading Bernie Krause's The Great Animal Orchestra, I took the first chance I had to get out of the city for the weekend and head up to my hometown in Connecticut to listen and record soundscapes from a less industrialized envi …

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Odds are a hawk won’t steal your pet, but you should still be cautious

2016-08-26T11:49:47-04:00

A hawk hunting for house pets in the kempt lawns of suburbia sounds like the making of an urban legend, but the tale has, in recent decades, become a staple of local news. In 2011 a hawk plucked two small dogs from their Boston neighborhood and dropped them from the sky, inflicting serious injuries. A different hawk nabbed a Pomeranian from its home in Beech Island, South Carolina back in 2013; the 10-year-old rescue didn't survive. And then there's the case of the great horned owl, that in 1995, reportedly feasted on the pets of Greenville, Maine.

Evening news packages follow predictable beats: a red-eyed middle-aged man or woman, the stil …

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President Obama just quadrupled the size of a protected marine reserve off Hawaii

2016-08-26T11:37:49-04:00

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A school of chub (Kyphosus sp.). Hawaii, Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument | Claire Fackler, CINMS, NOAA

President Barack Obama will expand the size of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the Pacific Ocean to over 580,000 square miles from 140,000 square miles. The sanctuary, which contains thousands of marine species, stretches across the Midway Atoll and Hawaii, and will become the world's largest protected marine area, The New York Times reports.

Obama will travel to Midway Atoll next week to mark the vast expansion. First, he will address the Pacific Island Conference of Leaders and the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii, and then later in the week he will fly to Papahānaumokuākea to mark the designation and "highligh …

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Meet the Facebook group calling out fake nature photography

2016-08-25T13:48:41-04:00

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A weasel using a woodpecker as its own private convertible; a wolf stuffing its snout in another wolf's mouth; a reindeer comically failing to camouflage itself with some leaves. The internet has an insatiable appetite for bizarre wildlife pictures. But, like anything that brings us joy on the internet, these photos always came with the condition that they might not be entirely real. Truths Behind Fake Nature Photography, a Facebook page created by concerned nature enthusiasts, is trying to educate the public by calling out fakes when they spot them.

The National Park System is turning 100, and The Verge is celebrating with Wilderness W …

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Google Doodle celebrates the diverse beauty of US National Parks

2016-08-25T10:30:55-04:00

The National Park System is turning 100, and The Verge is celebrating with Wilderness Week: a look at the natural world, its freaky critters, and its future.

Today's Google Doodle celebrates the 100th anniversary of US National Parks through a video that beautifully illustrates the wonders of nature. The animation highlights all the ways our national parks inspire awe, from the breathtaking landscape of the Grand Canyon to their role as vibrant ecosystems.

Designated in 1916 by President Woodrow Wilson, the US National Park Service has provided 84 million acres of protected land for the free-spirited to explore.

"The coolest thing abo …

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All Queens Must Die

2016-08-25T10:09:19-04:00

The cows were the first to go because cows are big, and killing them was easy. The ranchers on Santa Cruz Island had been killing cattle for more than century already. Rounded up, marched onto ships and motored 20 miles across the Pacific to mainland California, the cows were slaughtered, just like they'd been slaughtered for a hundred years, or longer even. By the early 1980s, the cows were gone. So were nearly all the ranchers.

All Queens Must Die

On Santa Cruz Island, they killed the cows, sheep, and bees. Now it's time to finish the job

By Ryan Bradley | Photography by John Francis Peters

The cows were the first to go because cows are bi …

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Tour Yosemite in virtual reality with Barack Obama

2016-08-25T10:00:07-04:00

The National Park System is turning 100, and The Verge is celebrating with Wilderness Week: a look at the natural world, its freaky critters, and its future.

If you want to celebrate the 100th anniversary of America's National Parks Service, there are definitely worse ways than with a virtual reality trip through Yosemite narrated by President Barack Obama.

Through the Ages is a roughly 10-minute video shot by virtual reality filmmakers Felix & Paul, in collaboration with the White House, Oculus, and National Geographic. The video was created earlier this summer, when the Obamas visited Yosemite National Park. It's been teased since June, …

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Climate Hackers: One man’s plan to stop global warming by shooting particles into the atmosphere

2016-08-24T08:00:03-04:00

The National Park System is turning 100, and The Verge is celebrating with Wilderness Week: a look at the natural world, its freaky critters, and its future.

This year is already on pace to be the warmest on record, setting off another season of heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires around the world. But it would only be the latest record to fall, as 15 of the 16 hottest years have occurred since 2001. In turn, the ice sheets are melting, oceans are rising, hurricanes are increasing in number and intensity, and climate refugees are pouring over borders.

Climate change is real, so what do we do about it?

So despite what you may have heard abou …

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I trapped lizards in Los Angeles because their DNA holds secrets

2016-08-23T13:00:06-04:00

To handle a baby lizard, you gently pinch its shoulders. This pushes its front arms against its body. If you grip farther back, the lizard wiggles more, and may struggle free. This is what I'm learning a little after 7AM on a Thursday morning in Thousand Oaks, California, just north of Los Angeles. We have already parked in a suburb and climbed onto land protected by the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. I can still see the cul-de-sac from the pitfall traps, where we are gathering lizards. It is early August: baby lizard season. These babies are, quite literally, a glimpse of what the future of the ecosystem looks like - which …

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