Though the media were abuzz with President Obama’s announcements about auto industry bail-out conditions on Monday, environmentalists and outdoor enthusiasts were likely to be more interested in this headline:

“Obama Signs Wilderness Protection Bill”

Sunrise in Houston, Texas; Photo: Theodore Scott

The Omnibus Land Management Act of 2009–one of the most ambitious environmental protection bills passed in the past 25 years–will protect a total of 2 million acres in nine states: Alaska, California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Virginia.

River runners across the United States were thrilled to learn that the 1,200 page bill extended to protect some of the nation’s waterways, too: more than 1,000 miles of rivers were designated as wild and scenic.

The designation of the land and waterways as wilderness areas means that commercial development is restricted, keeping the areas pristine for perpetuity.

Community Connection:

Thinking about heading out into the great wide American open? Check out Matador’s recent articles about Montana’s Big Sky country: 9 Montana Backpacking Trips That Will Blow Your Mind; Boating Big Sky: Montana’s Classic River Trips; and 4 More Reasons to Visit Montana Now.

Can’t travel anytime soon? Check out Matador member and regular contributor Ted Scott’s photos of wild places, both in the U.S. and abroad.

For all the aspiring and working travel writers out there: our friends over at BootsnAll have just launched two new paid travel writing outlets.

BootsnAll feature articles will pay $50 — here’s the skinny:

…Your article should potentially appeal to a wide audience, rather than just those interested in going to a particular destination. They also need to be visually appealing, so we need to be able to use photos throughout in order to help tell the story in the text.

We are also interested in new and creative list articles as well as what we call Photo Features where the collection of images itself is the star of the show. There are unlimited ways of being creative, even with lists, so pitch us your best ideas and we’ll tell you what we think.

Meanwhile, BootsnAll expert travel articles will fetch $30. Details:

Expert Articles need to be about something that other travelers are already researching. We will include these articles in our Traveler’s Toolkit, so the audience will have a chance to find them over time…

We appreciate creativity on these, so don’t hold back. If you know a particular aspect of travel very well, chances are your knowledge will really help others out there. We can’t use topics that are widely covered elsewhere (like tips on packing light, for example), but we are open to hearing any ideas.

Check out the complete guidelines, and get writing!

Photo by Advanced Source Productions (Creative Commons)

The New York Times reported on Sunday that a Spanish court has made an initial move to open a criminal investigation into the activities of six Bush administration officials who are alleged to have violated international law “by providing the legal framework to justify the torture of prisoners at [the U.S. facility in] Guantanamo Bay, Cuba….”

Among the officials named as subjects of the investigation are disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the frighteningly arrogant John Yoo, former Justice Department lawyer who gave President Bush the green light to forgo upholding the Geneva Conventions.

The Geneva Conventions, posted in Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, October 2008, Photo by Julie Schwietert

The case, submitted to a prosecutorial office by Judge Baltasar Garzon, may eventually lead to the issuance of arrest warrants for Bush’s cronies, though advocates of the investigatory process note that the wheels of justice are likely to roll slowly in this case.

Notably, Judge Garzon was the official who ordered the arrest of General Augusto Pincohet, the former dictator of Chile. As a result of the order, Pinochet was detained in Britain in 1998 while recovering after surgery at a London hospital, though he never went to trial and died in late 2006.

While some critics view Judge Garzon’s pursuit of Bush administration officials as superfluous and merely symbolic, I’d argue that Garzon’s call for an investigation keeps the important issues of torture and the complete flaunting of the principles of justice on our radar screen– issues we’re all to willing to forget about.

Sign posted in Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, October 2008, Photo by Julie Schwietert

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

To learn more about Guantanamo, read this article from our archives, in which I talk about my October 2008 visit to the US base at Guantanamo, or watch some video footage from the visit.

“You can’t miss the casinos, of course: they tower over the boardwalk in a long-shadowed row, more imposing than Reno’s collection of neon-lit buildings but without the no-holds-barred outlandishness of the Vegas strip…

Behind them, the real Atlantic City is easy to spot. Rows of dilapidated houses and apartment blocks peek out from between the hotel towers, just a few steps away.”

So I wrote in the Matador community blog a few hours after arriving in Atlantic City, NJ.

I’ve since had the chance to explore that “real” side of things, and the city’s glitzy front, too.

The contrast between the two, the immense gap between the frivolous spending at the high rollers’ tables and the daily realities of most of the city’s residents, is stark.

See for yourself:

Welcome to Atlantic City…

Home of the Donald, and his Trump Taj Mahal.

Almost 24% of Atlantic City’s population lives below the poverty line.

“It’s gotten a lot better around here,” a woman in the hotel elevator told me…

“since they knocked all them projects down.”

McMansions along the boardwalk, north east of the casino-hotel strip.

I guess these guys won big?

All photos by Eva Holland

Sure, most of us probably did science fair projects when we were kids.

But I’ll bet yours weren’t nearly as cool as this one….

The U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper is reporting that four Spanish teenagers were able to send a balloon to the edge of space, capturing atmospheric readings and photographs with some fairly simple technology.

Their equipment? A $62 USD latex balloon…

…and an $80 USD camera.

The balloon and its camera made it to 100,000 feet–nearly triple the altitude at which commercial airliners fly–before it returned to Earth with more than 100 images, which you can view here.

All photos by meteotek08

Hooters to go in Atlantic City.

And they say NYC is the spot to order any kind of take-away you can imagine…

(Photo by Eva Holland)

Sad news today. One of our heroes, Shane McConkey, died in a ski-BASE jumping accident in the Italian Dolomites.

He had been working on a new line variation off the Val Scura couloir on Sassongher with JT Holmes and a film crew from Matchstick Productions. Initial reports indicate an equipment malfunction prevented him from deploying his pilot chute.

Shane McConkey was a freeskiing legend and pioneer of ski-BASE jumping. By utilizing BASE- jumping techniques and equipment he was able to access lines that previously existed only in people’s imagination.

Shane’s last blog, describing yesterday’s ski BASE-jump, ends with the stoke of someone who lived doing what he loved. Here’s an excerpt:

By SHANE McCONKEY March 25, 2009 at 12:58

Today was quite cool! We finally nailed that line variation off the Val Scura couloir on Sassongher. This was extremely satisfying getting to ski such a unique line. Conditions in the couloir were still very hard and icy in places so the skiing was slow and careful. Traversing/hiking the ramp out of the couloir did not present much of a problem and it was a very cool feeling knowing what we were heading out to.

We called the MSP film crew on the radio and they fired up the heli and it as time to charge off this sucker! I went first and punched it hard into a big ol front flip with as much speed as I was comfortable taking in those conditions. Everything went great and I had an on heading opening. I flew down completely stoked and landed high up on the hillside so I could watch JT from a good angle. No more than 30 seconds after I landed I see JT flying off the cliff with a lot of speed. He yanked his skis off right away and began to fly immediately. It was a perfectly executed wingsuit ski base. Skis off quick and stable and into forward flight with no potato chipping or instability. I was jealous. Today was a good day!

In 2007 I interviewed Shane’s friend Tal Fletcher for an article about the pioneers of sky sports. I’d sent Tal a draft of the article and he laughed when he read how I’d described Shane McConkey as a “freeskiing legend.”

“Shane would laugh if he read that,” Tal said. “He never thinks of himself that way.”

Shane McConkey, is survived by his wife, Sherry, and their 3½-year-old daughter, Ayla. Our thoughts go out to them and friends around the world.

Of course you do.

Which is why our friends at Wend Magazine are offering a one-year digital subscription, which includes access to their adventurous archives, for the obscenely low price of $5.

You can’t even get a coffee and a muffin at Starbucks for five bucks!

Go ahead. Sign up now. That is all.

Photo by donjd2 (Creative Commons)

Oftentimes when I’m planning a trip, I check up on various hotels online and wish it was easier to put them into perspective, location-wise — both in terms of their location in the city and their location in relation to each other.

Well, the internet has a funny way of creating a niche site for your every desire these days: behold, SeeYourHotel.com.

It’s a simple Google Maps-based site. You plug in your destination, and orange pins pop up marking the locations of hotels across the city; blue stars represent the destination’s landmarks and attractions, another handy feature.

Then, you can filter your search by price range or star-rating, or search for a particular hotel name.

Clicking on any given property gets you a detailed description, links to TripAdvisor reviews, pictures and the relevant Google street view, plus the option to book a room or check availability.

Ordinarily I’d have a handful of tabs open to check all these things — SeeYourHotel does it all in one, while remaining uncluttered and easy to use. I’ll definitely be back next time I’m hunting for accommodation.

Photo by Olof S (Creative Commons)

Over in Slate, in a piece titled Terrorists, Dissidents and Copy Editors, Christopher Hitchens tracks the shifting language used by journalists to describe the perpetrators of violence in both Iraq and Northern Ireland.

Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQM), he notes, is now being referred to simply as a “a largely homegrown terrorist group,” when it was once known as “a largely homegrown terrorist group that American intelligence says is foreign-led.”

There is some debate as to whether AQM is a spontaneous local response to the American occupation, or a more calculated, opportunistic group with ties to Al-Qaeda proper — and, as Hitch writes, “at least this ponderous formulation expressed the ambiguity.”

Dropping that ambiguity, he argues, lends the group greater legitimacy.

Similarly, the perpetrators of the recent attacks in Northern Ireland, splinter groups of the IRA who refuse to participate in the peace process, are now being referred to as “dissidents” — a term which, Hitch writes, “describes only attitudes and not actions, and it is most famously associated with the intellectual opposition to Soviet totalitarianism.”

He goes on: “Plainly, something has been lost when such a historic term of honor and respect is loosely applied to homicidal thugs who shoot a Catholic policeman in the head and use pizza delivery workers as human shields.”

…If you want a quick definition of euphemism, this would do: It consists of inventing nice terms for nasty things (perhaps to make them seem less nasty) and soft words for frightening things (perhaps to make them seem less scary). We should have learned by now that this form of dishonesty is also a form of cowardice, by which some of the enemy’s work is done for him.

Fine points, all, and I’m glad to see someone is carrying on Orwell’s mission to monitor the use of language, and its enormous consequences.

But I’d be a lot more convinced that Hitchens really means what he says, if he didn’t refer to the US-led invasion of Iraq as “the coalition intervention” throughout the article.

What was that about “inventing nice terms for nasty things,” again?

Photo by ItzaFineDay (Creative Commons)