after | Environment.org

While Mikaela Balkind was working on her degree at the University of Washington in 2018, she was looking for a way to bridge her two interests in natural resource management and climate science. So when she came across a friend’s Instagram post about a women in wildland firefighting bootcamp, she thought to herself, “Wow, this is perfect.”

Over two weekends in Vale, Oregon, she learned skills like how to dig a fire line and use different tools and equipment during a fire deployment, all part of training she would need for a red card, the main certification a wildland firefighter needs to work.

But the bootcamp offered something else, too — a less intimidating entry point into the male-dominated field where approximately 13 percent of firefighters are women.

“It’s just sometimes easier to take that first step when you feel …

P-22 Death – Celebrity Mountain Lion Dies Aged 12 After Car Strike

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| Wildlife

A mountain lion named P-22, who attained celebrity status after taking up residence in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park, recently had to be euthanized after sustaining injuries consistent with being hit by a car.

Mountain Lions

The mountain lion is a wild cat native to the Americas. The species goes by several other names, including puma and cougar, and is the second-largest member of the cat family found in North America (the largest is the Jaguar, which is exceedingly rare north of Mexico).

You can find out more about mountain lions on this page: Mountain Lion Facts

Arrival at Griffith Park

Mountain lions are usually found in unpopulated areas far from human habitation. P-22’s arrival at Griffith Park in 2012 therefore caused much excitement among Californian wildlife lovers, and led to the cat achieving celebrity status, …

After FEMA overhaul, hundreds of thousands of Americans are forgoing federal flood insurance

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| Pollution

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have dropped their flood insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP, since last October, E&E News found in a review of federal records. The sharp decline in coverage comes after the Federal Emergency Management Agency overhauled the program’s insurance pricing system, a move that was meant to make premiums more accurately reflect the flood risk of a property.

When the agency reviewed the NFIP last year, it discovered inequities in the way that insurance premiums were priced. Homes in the less risky areas of flood zones were overpaying for their premiums, and shouldering a higher burden of the costs of flood risk. The system overhaul was meant to address these inequalities, adjusting premium rates according to level of risk.

“[W]e have a responsibility to make sure that we have actuarily sound, fair, …