In Rawlins, Wyoming (pop. 9,000 ), I interviewed Dan Mika who runs the Parks Department and is on the Tree Advisory Board for the town. Mika said in Rawlins he tries to be ‘hard on grass.’ That is, he said the area topography is high desert and he is adverse to putting in grass lawns which often lead to waste and is quite damaging to the eco-system. He said the waste includes using water to merely keep the grass green and the use of chemical fertilizers, weed killers and pesticides are major sources of ground water pollution. I also met with Mark Williams, a fire expert with the Bureau of Land Management here. Williams majored in Ecology at the University of North Dakota. He said while there are some good parts to the recently passed Healthy Forest Restoration Act, it tries to prescribe a uniform forest mangagement plan for all forests in the country. He said species diversity, and so on, is different for different forests in different parts of the country, and management should be tailored to fit each specific forest region. He also said the continual building of new roads for logging, etc., are also creating ecological problems. For instance, dirty pick up trucks coming from other parts of the country have seeds of weeds and other non-indigenous plants that start to alter, and damage, the existing local eco-system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Rawlins, Wyoming (pop. 9,000 ), I interviewed Dan Mika who runs the Parks Department and is on the Tree Advisory Board for the town. Mika said in Rawlins he tries to be ‘hard on grass.’ That is, he said …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}