Noah is a third-year law student from Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated from Tulane University with a B.A. in History and Environmental Studies. He is interested in biodiversity, land use, and international environmental law. Outside of school, he enjoys running, yoga, puzzles, and reading.
The usual biodiversity hotspots in the United States are thought to be Hawai’i, the Rocky Mountains, and maybe even Alaska; however, conservation biologists are looking closer at the Southeastern United States, describing it as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. E.O. Wilson reported that the central Gulf Coast states “harbor the most diversity of any part of Eastern North America and probably any part of North America.”
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, river otters and other Rocky Mountain wildlife faced severe challenges because of the rapid increase in industrialization and development in the region. Mining, agriculture, and ranching significantly polluted and destroyed the clean waterways that otters and their prey, including fish, crustaceans, and amphibians relied on.
When imagining vast, biodiverse, tracts of land in the United States it is easy to imagine the expansive rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, the hard-to-reach peaks of the Rocky Mountains, or maybe even the sprawling deserts in Arizona and New Mexico. However, the southeastern United States from Texas to Georgia and Florida up to Virginia can claim a spot on that list . . . or least they used to.
While plastics have been around for over a century, it was not until 1971 that plastics were discovered in the middle of the ocean. Today, plastic is synonymous with pollution. There is nowhere in the world that plastic has left untouched.
