Posts Tagged ‘Yellowstone’
Getting away with murder…
There are loopholes, and then there are loopholes…
A panel of Idaho lawmakers is recommending the Legislature ask Congress to fix a legal loophole that has some calling a portion of Yellowstone National Park the “Zone of Death,” where crimes could arguably go unprosecuted.
The vast majority of the 3,471-square-mile (8,990-square-kilometer) park sits in Wyoming, but about 3% of it stretches into Montana and 1% of the park is in eastern Idaho. When Congress created the park in 1872, the federal court in the District of Wyoming was given jurisdiction over the crimes committed within park borders.
Boise Democratic Rep. Colin Nash, an attorney, told the House Judiciary and Rules Committee on Thursday that he first learned about the “zone of death” in law school. The phrase refers to a legal theory advanced by Michigan State Law professor Brian Kalt in 2005, which says a jurisdictional loophole could force the federal government to dismiss charges against anyone accused of committing a federal crime in the Idaho portion of the park.
In an academic paper titled “The Perfect Crime,” Kalt noted the Sixth Amendment says that people charged with crimes have a right to be tried by a jury of their peers, selected from the state and region where the crime took place.
That’s a problem for Yellowstone, because the only beings living in Idaho’s roughly 50-square-mile portion of Yellowstone are grizzly bears, elk and other wildlife — and they aren’t eligible for jury duty. Kalt theorized that someone who committed a murder in Idaho’s portion of Yellowstone could get away with it, since the federal government would be unable to seat a constitutionally sound jury…
The ‘Zone of Death’: “Lawmaker wants federal fix in Yellowstone’s legal blind spot.”
[image above: source]
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As we consider the angles, we might recall that it was on this date in 1931 that Dracula— the first in a line line of “classic” monster movies– premiered in New York. Directed by the great Tod Browning and famously starring Bela Lugosi (in what many consider still to be the definitive portrayal of the blood-thirsty Count), the film was based on the 1924 stage play Dracula by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, which in turn is adapted from the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The film was was both a critical and commercial success on its release, and has earned it’s way into the canon, having been selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
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“What people ought to do is find out what a national park is to begin with”*…
In the beginning, there was Yellowstone: more than 2,000,000 acres of mountains, fields, forests, geysers, and rivers, a place of such commanding beauty that, according to an early account describing the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, “language is entirely inadequate to convey a just conception of the awful grandeur and sublimity of this masterpiece of nature’s handiwork.”
Yellowstone was declared the country’s (and the world’s) first national park in 1872, and by the time the National Park Service (NPS) was established in 1916, the program had grown to include Casa Grande Ruins, Rocky Mountain, Sequoia, and Yosemite, among others. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt reorganized and expanded the NPS in 1933, there were 137 parks and monuments across the country (today, the National Park System includes 417 areas, including the White House)—all of which required, and still require, significant management and planning.
The first master plan—a document packed with maps and recommendations for preserving and monitoring a park and the visitor experience—was drawn up in 1929 for Mount Rainier National Park, 369 square miles in Washington state. It was created by Thomas Chalmers Vint, landscape architect and, from 1933, Chief of the NPS Branch of Plans and Designs. It served as a kind of blueprint for the plans to come, and included proposals for a new hotel complex and an expansion of the facilities on the south slope of the glacier-covered volcano.
Throughout the 1930s, a series of master plans for parks and monuments followed. They became the essential documents for the management of every square mile of protected land…
Learn more about– and peruse some of the artwork from– these gorgeous documents at “The Early Master Plans for National Parks Are Almost as Beautiful as the Parks Themselves.”
* Michael Frome
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As we marvel at the maps, we might recall that it was on this date in 1870 that the members of the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition traveled down the Firehole River from the Kepler Cascades and entered the Upper Geyser Basin. The first geyser they saw that afternoon they named “Old Faithful.” Two years later, the area was officially created as Yellowstone National Park, the nation’s first national park (and some argue, the world’s).
“In a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder”*…
An ancient bear skull sits on the floor of Hoyo Negro, a flooded cave on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula
Some 13,000 years ago in what’s now the Yucatán Peninsula, a deep pit inside a cave became the final resting place for a menagerie of exotic animals.
Now, their exquisitely preserved bones, trapped for centuries under water, are offering some of the first solid clues to how large Ice Age beasts were mixing and migrating between North and South America after the Isthmus of Panama connected the two continents.
“We’re going to go from a place with no records to having the best records for a lot of megafauna from Mexico, Central America, and northern South America,” says East Tennessee State University’s Blaine Schubert, who presented the findings this week at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting in Calgary.
The animal bones are also painting a more detailed picture of the strange world inhabited by Naia, an Ice Age girl found in the cave who is the oldest, most complete human skeleton yet discovered in the Americas…
A remarkable discovery sheds new light on the exchange of life that occurred when the Isthmus of Panama rose from the ocean to connect two continents that had been ecologically separate for tens of millions of years: “Ice Age Predators Found Alongside Oldest Human in Americas.”
* “In other studies you go as far as other have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
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As we re-trim our family trees, we might send illuminating birthday greetings to Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden; he was born on this date in 1829. Trained as a physician (who served with the Union Army during the Civil War), Hayden was a practicing geologist and paleontologist noted for his work in the Badlands in the mid 19th century– it is believed he made the first North American discovery of dinosaur remains (1854)– and for his pioneering surveying expeditions of the Rocky Mountains later in that century, which helped lay the foundation of the U.S. Geological Survey. Hayden is credited with having the Yellowstone geyser area declared the first national park (1872).
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