Biscayne and Dry Tortugas national parks were among the latest units of the National Park System that closed to brace for Hurricane Milton, a historically large storm that forecasters say could become "one of the most damaging" hurricanes ever to hit Florida.
A long-running effort to designate official wilderness within Big Cypress National Preserve, a landscape of sawgrass prairie and cypress swamps the size of Rhode Island, appears headed to failure again under Republican concerns and tribal opposition.
Fifty years ago, when the federal government bought the Big Cypress Swamp and created the 729,000-acre Big Cypress National Preserve, it left a loophole that makes the word “preserve” somewhat misleading.
When Kurt Repanshek launched the Traveler back in August of 2005, it was primarily to find stories that he could pitch to magazines. But the magazine world took a nosedive, while at the same time readership on the Traveler continued to grow.
It’s been six years since an oil company headed out across the marl prairie of Big Cypress National Preserve with vehicles weighing as much as 30 tons to search for oil reserves. Signs of that work continue to show on the prairie, despite stringent National Park Service requirements for restoring the landscape after the searching was completed.
Six years after an oil company headed out across Big Cypress National Preserve to search for oil, signs of that work still scar the landscape, though National Park Service staff say reclamation of the area has finished.
A spending bill designed to "rightsize" federal agency spending that was approved by the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday would cut the National Park Service's upcoming budget by 12.5 percent, resulting in the loss of more than 1,000 park staff and reduce the agency's maintenance and historic preservation funding, according to the National Parks Conservation Association.