Wildlife Conservation

Subaru and the NPCA share five simple things we can all do to help the National Parks reach their historic goal of becoming zero landfill.

This is the quarterly newsletter for the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, a private family foundation that seeks to promote a sustainable society by supporting and funding educational and project-based initiatives that advance knowledge and innovation in sustainability.

Last year, more than 330 million people visited the national parks and with Labor Day weekend around the corner, parks across the country are likely to see a surge of visitor traffic. While everyone is encouraged to visit a national park in their area, with more visitors comes more waste that the National Park Service (NPS) must manage. Each year, NPS manages nearly 100 million pounds of visitor waste nationally, much of which is brought in from outside the parks.

Freeport-McMoRan’s Morenci copper mining operations were recently honored by the Arizona Mining Association with the 2018 Sustainability, Preservation and Diversity in Environment award in recognition of environmental excellence.

Needing to change our visual and professional perspective was the common theme behind several promising low-cost technical solutions reviewed at a recent Coral Reef Restoration Workshop. The workshop sponsored by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Mars, Inc. and Paul G. Allen Philanthropies, convened a unique multi-disciplinary coalition of scientists, NGOs, coral restoration practitioners, Government and business, in Bali, Indonesia. Its aim was to identify promising evidence-based standards to scale coral restoration efforts globally.

Lachlan Copeland, a senior botanist with Eco Logical Australia, A Tetra Tech Company, is based in northern New South Wales (NSW), Australia. His work with plants is varied, but his main interest is in plant taxonomy—the process of classifying, describing, and naming species.

The nation’s 59 national parks (the 60th, Missouri’s Gateway Arch, received an official national park designation in February 2018) saw more than 330 million visitors in 2017, which is a lot of footsteps, noise, waste and selfie poses in some of the wilderness’s most delicate treasures.

A record number of visitors traveled to Interior Alaska's Denali National Park and Preserve last year, but they left behind less trash than a few years before. A push to send less waste to the local landfill is working, officials say.