Wally Smith

Found this momma ’mander & baby ’manders on land wrecked by past surface mining & logging above Dante, VA today. A reminder that the phrase ”Who cares? It’s just an old surface mine” minimizes natural treasures like these that deserve our respect (& more thoughtful planning for post-mining land use)

Really enjoyed this excellent feature from back in April on our lab’s hellbender habitat restoration work…& what we learned when Helene dropped a generational flood on top of it. Check it out at the link, and look for a white paper on the project later this year.

Yeah, I think politics is mostly behind it here in SWVA. Lots of money to be made by some politically-connected VIPs when regs don’t have to be followed (& in some cases, public money changing hands between those VIPs & reg agencies themselves, which further muddies the water…pun intended).

Oh yeah, for sure. In our area, all that is nested in a broader issue of (some, not all) agencies endorsing large-scale unpermitted stream disturbance as a conservation measure. I’ve sat in a mtg where DEQ said stream excavation is a “beneficial use” of public waterways that does not need permitting

Depressing but informative piece on the “we need to clean out the streams” craze gripping #Appalachia in the wake of recent floods. Similar story to what we’ve seen with state-run ATV trail development digging out streams here in VA: regulatory agencies will turn tail & run when politics are at play

Seeing this w/ a (highly-politicized) push to develop nuclear facilities in rural coalfield towns here in #Appalachia. Feasibility studies so far have omitted any analysis or consideration of waste storage/risks, & officials punt to “don’t worry; they’ll just recycle it” when Qs come up from locals.

This situation is precisely what a number of us warned about when TNC bought 250,000 acres of the coalfields to “protect” them, w/o purchasing the underlying mineral rights. Now a portion of that for-profit carbon offset project is getting surface-mined with minimal environmental assessment.

1977: why would the bartender in star wars even care if some robots with artificial intelligence came into his bar

2025: ohhh ok

"This would nuke this creek," a Yale biologist said of a proposed data center in Alabama. The data center is projected to use more water than every home in the state and 90x the electricity of homes in Bessemer, where it's to be located. Full story: insideclimatenews.org/news/1606202...

Because you probably need a timeline cleanse right now, here’s some good news: we surpassed 5 new Virginia populations of Plethodon pauleyi this week for our lab’s new USFWS-funded project. It’s beginning to look like this ESA-petitioned species is (thankfully) much more common than we’d assumed.

I’ve heard the same argument - that dredging is a quick fix to stop flooding in #Appalachia - from local govt officials in recent meetings here in SW Virginia, just across the border from eastern KY. In reality, stream dredging makes flooding worse (see: www.kymitigation.org/wp-content/u...).

Duffield, VA - a town of 73 people covering 0.6 sq mi in the decidedly deep-red part of rural Virginia that I live in - was named to this list. Getting strong “we used AI to populate this list for us” vibes from this.

Goes without saying, but if I or someone in my position did this in a research report, I would (rightfully) end up without a job, despite having tenure. But in our current political moment, it’s just a typical Thursday evening.

Setting aside the obvious ethical & 1st Amendment issues with this, one of the ongoing federally-funded research projects in my lab has now spanned 3 different presidential administrations. Our work, which is apolitical, happens on vastly different timescales from partisan politics.

It is beyond annoying to hear the refrain that inland flooding from Helene was some wildly unpredictable event. Catastrophic flooding across the southern Apps from those setups is such a well-documented phenomenon that we have covered it in my *ecology* class for the past 15 yrs here in SW Virginia

“Life’s hard, man. Like, have you ever been tryin’ to get it on with your lady in a mud puddle and some guy just swims over and sits there, watching you doin’ it, and won’t leave? Some days are like that, man.”

Is it a perfect system without flaws or controversy? Hardly. But to claim that no one knows how policy decisions are made at higher ed institutions is inaccurate to the point of being bizarre.

While arguing that higher ed institutions keep their decision-making processes shrouded in mystery, this piece conveniently omits that - at public institutions like mine, at least - most admin bodies & committees keep public minutes from meetings that are themselves open to the public.

Here comes Brood XIV of Periodical Cicadas, which are emerging from the soil in huge numbers here at the house this evening after 17 yrs belowground. Ready for the squealin’ to commence.

Gorgeous spring hike in the Jefferson NF here in Wise County today. Visible in the background (L side of image) is Brumley Mtn, with Holston Mtn and the Iron Mtns near Damascus, VA & the NC line visible on the far horizon.

Excited to launch a new State Wildlife Grant on the newly-described Plethodon pauleyi. An impressive undergrad team’s habitat analysis from last fall is helping us locate new pops of this enigmatic species, w/ almost 20% of all of Virginia’s known individuals of the species recorded in the last week

EPA cancels $20 million grant for Southwest Virginia projects The grant was slated to pay for energy-efficient housing, child-care center improvements and identifying safe locations for when natural disasters strike, among other projects.

Sad to see this news, but I always had questions about this project. Awarding $ to monitor enviro outcomes in the TN watershed while most of the big-ticket interventions were happening in the Ohio drainage seemed nonsensical to me from a scientific perspective. cardinalnews.org/2025/05/05/e...

Not to be That Guy™, but “direct” & “inverse” are the opposite things from one another in the context of a correlation, making this a nonsensical statement.

But anyway, municipal drinking water standards for fluoride are well below levels of neurological concern.

A moment of zen as spring comes to the highcountry at one of our wetland field sites this afternoon.

Catching up with colleagues and I feel like "have any of your grants been terminated yet" is the new "have you had COVID yet" from 2022 and I hate it.

Legend has it this salamander came from hell. We’re about to send it back. Climate disasters, human sprawl, and now Trump: This is how extinctions happen.

On Earth Day, don't miss @jackiefmogensen.bsky.social 's story about a rare salamander at threat of extinction from climate chaos, sprawl, and Trump—and the passionate biologists determined not to let us turn our backs on it www.motherjones.com/environment/...

Really enjoyed speaking with @jackiefmogensen.bsky.social at @motherjones.com for this piece on Helene's impacts on #Appalachia. The story discusses our long-term river restoration work & how ongoing attacks on science by the Trump admin might impact regional conservation efforts.

The last thing our streams in #Appalachia need post-Helene, esp on “conservation” lands. View last weekend from East TN’s Doe Mtn - a Nature Conservancy-linked property - of a streambed excavated & turned into an ATV trail. In the Watauga River drainage, which is struggling to recover post-Helene.

NCCC was a vital program that has helped with both storm cleanup & economic development work in rural #Appalachia. The development of most of our local parks in SWVA, which are a key component of economic diversification efforts, relied heavily on the program.

You can browse a list of some of these past and ongoing industry partnerships on the USFWS site here: www.fws.gov/partner/cate...