Armored in a rain
slicker and floppy hat against guano-bombing waterfowl, Russ
Bradley pokes about for signs of life on a craggy island paradise
just off the California shore. One might expect the search to be
easy, given the hundreds of thousands of common murres, ashy storm
petrels, Brandt’s cormorants, Leach’s storm petrels, Western gulls,
double-crested cormorants, glaucous-winged gulls, black
oystercatchers, pigeon guillemots, rhinocerous auklets, tufted
puffins, bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and Cassin’s auklets that
summer on the Farallon Islands, 27 miles off San Francisco in the
Pacific Ocean.
During the past three years, however,
Bradley has been checking on the breeding sites of the black,
burrow-nesting Cassin’s auklet, and he’s been finding abandoned
eggs; dead, black, cue-ball-sized chicks; and skinny, faltering
fledglings. “Most of the chicks have died,” says Bradley, a
research biologist with PRBO Conservation Science, a nonprofit,
founded as the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, that has spent the
last 40 years counting and observing the hundreds of thousands of
birds that nest yearly on the Farallons. “This was as complete a
failure response as we’d ever seen before. And we’d been following
this species for 35 years.”
The apparent culprit: Ocean
currents, redirected by rising sea temperature, have swept out of
range the millions of tiny krill that the adult birds scoop into
their beaks, chew into purple smelly goo and then spit up for their
young. In other words, this unprecedented starvation wave may be a
result of global warming.
Bradley is one of the experts
who knows most about the auklet die-off. Just the same, he’s
adamant in his belief that he should not attempt to save any of the
dying chicks. To do so, he says, would be considered unnatural and
unscientific. “You definitely grimace when you see the guy next
door who hasn’t done so well and has died at a very young age,”
Bradley says. “We try to maintain ourselves as scientists. But we
really feel for the birds.”
In the world of natural
preservation, it’s not just scientists who take Bradley’s
don’t-mess-with-Mother-Nature stance. Since the 1960s, the idea
that natural preservation consists mostly of letting nature take
its course – absent manmade environmental disturbance – has been
doctrine among public parks bureaucrats, biologists,
environmentalists, rangers and other members of the vast landscape
of individuals and organizations involved in preserving America’s
natural environment. When naturalists have intervened to save
species, as in the 40-year struggle to save the bald eagle, their
efforts have been driven by the goal of returning life to its wild
state, so that a damaged ecosystem can tilt back into balance. For
the most part, naturalists have not sought to save nature purely
from itself. With global warming, however, this hands-off approach
is rapidly becoming quaint and out-of-date.
As the planet
grows hotter, and the consensus mounts that the temperature is not
turning back down, there may be a lot less meaning in the idea of
preserving “naturalness” than has been the case. After all, in the
not-too-distant future, the state of nature will in many cases be
something nobody’s ever seen.
So far, however,
public-land managers have responded by doing almost nothing,
according to a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability
Office, the agency that evaluates federal programs. By and large,
the GAO says, officials who manage U.S. public lands have simply
ignored a 2001 Department of Interior directive ordering them to
identify and protect resources that might be threatened by climate
change.
This is no minor failure. An emerging scientific
consensus says that unless the National Park Service, the U.S.
Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of
Land Management, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, state fish and game departments and private
environmental organizations re-direct their missions to deal with
climate change, they’ll oversee the advance of nationwide
environmental catastrophe. The character of public wildlands will
be drastically – and permanently – altered.
So
professional preservationists, and the environmental movement as a
whole, are left with unnatural choices: They can intervene
aggressively to maintain habitat threatened by planetary warming –
installing sprinkler systems around California’s giant sequoias, to
name one suggestion floated by scientists. In the process they
would become something akin to farmers and pet fanciers.
They can intervene aggressively to provide huge migration paths
northward for heat-threatened plants and animals. Because this
would require them to help dramatically change existing ecosystems,
it would turn the current conservation ethic on its head.
Or they can decide to continue to use the traditional hands-off
approach – and thereby allow millennia-old ecosystems to die off
and be replaced in ways that would never have happened naturally,
if not for global warming.
In January 2001, just
as Bill Clinton handed the White House keys to George W.
Bush, the Department of the Interior issued a broad order to the
National Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the
Bureau of Land Management and the other agencies that manage
one-third of the nation’s surface land as well as numerous marine
sanctuaries. The order was at once simple and fiendishly complex:
The agencies should “consider and analyze potential climate change
effects in their management plans and activities.”
It was
a reasonable directive. Trees on millions of acres of forests in
Glacier National Park have fallen to a beetle infestation
apparently linked to climate change. At the Florida Keys National
Marine Sanctuary, coral reef bleaching – a phenomenon that, if
prolonged, would undermine the area’s marine ecosystem – may be
connected to warmer sea temperatures. On the 2.6 million acres of
U.S. land managed by the BLM in northwestern Arizona, a recently
intensified cycle of drought, wildfire and flooding has caused
desert scrub and cactus to be replaced by grasslands.
—-
According to a GAO report released this summer, however, the
bureaucracies that manage public land throughout the United States
were provided no guidance of any kind on how to deal with climate
change, and park and other natural resource managers did not
attempt to deal with the problem on their own.
Since
2001, of course, these federal departments have been ultimately
directed by George W. Bush, who has famously not concerned himself
with climate change. But the GAO report, and interviews with
National Park Service scientists and managers around the country,
strongly suggest that government stewards of parks, wildlife and
public land simply don’t understand the problems they face in an
era of climate change. “Resource managers we interviewed … said
that they are not aware of any guidance or requirements to address
the effect of climate change, and that they have not received
direction regarding how to incorporate climate change into their
planning activities,” the GAO report said.
The Department of the Interior, which oversees many of
the bureaucracies that manage public land, seems unclear on the
very concept of addressing the effects, rather than the causes, of
climate change. In its official response to the GAO report, the
department had an associate deputy secretary rebut the criticism
that the agency has “made climate change a low priority” by,
essentially, changing the subject. In its response, the Park
Service highlighted what it viewed as its successes – none of which
were successes in protecting parks, forests and rangeland from
global warming’s effects. Instead, the agency’s response letter
said, “We have made a high priority on developing renewable energy
resources; improving energy efficiency and the use of alternative
energies at our facilities across the nation.”
The
officials who manage America’s natural resources deserved the GAO’s
scathing critique. But there are roadblocks beyond bureaucratic
intransigence that keep naturalists from effectively grappling with
global warming’s effects. Though researchers have identified some
species, regions and ecosystems already threatened by global
warming, science is mostly ignorant of climate change’s impacts;
until recently, there was little experimental research in the
field. Science doesn’t yet have information as basic as how much
heat or dryness it takes to kill a tree, or whether foggy coastal
and less foggy inland California will become warmer or cooler due
to global warming.
Beyond the lack of scientific data is
a fundamental philosophical problem: To preserve public wildlife
during a time of significant climate change, managers will have to
do things that run counter to the current ethic of “natural
preservation.”
“Conservation and land management agencies
like the Park Service are confronted with a collapse of the
paradigm they’ve operated under, which is (that) the future will be
more or less like the past, and nature needs to be managed only on
the margins, where we correct for the minor injustices humans
inflict on the natural environment,” says David Graber, chief
scientist for the Pacific West region of the National Park Service,
whose office is at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park. “We’re
facing a period of dramatic uncertainty. What managing nature would
mean is a dramatic unknown. We don’t know what our goals would have
to be. “We’re literally talking about things that have only been
talked about for months, rather than years.”
Global warming undermines almost all the rules that environmental stewards have lived by.
With a warming
planet, invasive species are no longer merely exotic pests that
hitch ship passage from other continents. They’re native grasses,
shrubs, beetles, bacteria and viruses that have had new “native”
habitat opened for them to invade, courtesy of higher average
temperatures. The millions of acres of forests that have been
recently killed by beetles – which now thrive in the recently
warmer northern winters – are but one apparent testament to this
emerging phenomenon. “The west side of the park used to have much
colder winters, which slowed the beetles. But winters for the past
15 or so years have not been as cold,” notes Judy Visty, natural
resource management specialist at Rocky Mountain National Park.
“Pine beetles are wreaking havoc.”
With planetary
warming, forest fires and droughts in the Western U.S. have
transformed into something more significant than mere components of
a historic cycle of life. Scientists now predict that escalating
droughts, tree die-offs and fires could cause Western forests to
contribute more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than they extract.
Research into California’s giant sequoia indicates that
with warmer average temperatures, these monarchs of the forest may
slow and then stop producing seedlings. And “if the fog, or if the
ocean currents were to change, (the coastal redwood) would be in
real trouble,” says Ken Lavin, interpretive specialist at Muir
Woods National Monument.
Many global warming-induced
changes aren’t yet as noticeable as forest die-offs, but are
notable nonetheless. Mountain lakes disappear along with the
glaciers at Montana’s Glacier National Park. The pika, a
cool-weather-loving mountain rodent, is vanishing from the Sierra
Nevada. Rising seawater threatens to salinize the freshwater
ecosystems of the Everglades and submerge beach habitat along the
Northern California coast. And an increasingly hot and dry climate
is projected to kill 90 percent of the trees at Joshua Tree
National Monument.
For most people, these events are the
canaries in the ecological coal mine, portending the far-off day
when climate change may have life-and-death implications for
humanity. For conservationists, however, these embattled plants and
animals – and all the other species global warming will kill or
push to new habitats – are the coal mine.
Conservationists need to think hard and fast
now: Do we rush to rescue climate-imperiled
species before it’s too late? Or do we let nature take its course,
quietly watching the disappearance of species that we have spent
decades restoring and protecting?
“It may be that soon
one-third of the species I’m seeing outside my window might not be
able to find habitat here. Maybe half of them will be new species
that find the new climate here amenable,” says Graber. “Am I going
to fight the new species? Am I going to welcome them?”
The questions are agonizing for naturalists such as Graber. For
nearly a half-century, preserving native species and fighting
invasive ones has been the reason for his existence. That goal is
enshrined in the job descriptions of thousands of people running
the vast natural-industrial complex made up of parks, preserves,
refuges, private nature conservatories, and millions of other acres
of protected U.S. wildlands.
The ecological
movement wasn’t always so sure of itself. There are other
possible, sensible-sounding approaches to maintaining nature
preserves. New York’s Central Park and San Francisco’s Golden Gate
Park are horticultural fabrications, with scant relationship to the
natural world that came before. Locals seem to like them just fine.
In fact, the idea of “preserving” nature as a pleasing aesthetic
spectacle, as opposed to the restoration and maintenance of
authentic ancient ecosystems, drove park management well into the
20th century.
Then, in 1962, the secretary of the
Interior set up a special advisory board on wildlife management,
led by ecologist A. Starker Leopold, that went about researching
and discussing exactly what America’s parks should be. The board
came up with a revolutionary idea, summarized in a pamphlet known
universally in the nature bureaucracy as the “Leopold Report.” It
is best known for five evocative words summarizing what became the
American scientific community’s consensus on what nature preserves
should be: “a vignette of primitive America.”
—-
That phrase has evolved to mean that public-land
managers should endeavor to preserve plants, animals and other
natural features so they remain within the range that they
exhibited before Europeans first arrived in North America. Any
meddling that occurs in protected areas, therefore, must be in the
service of a perceived previous natural order.
“It
instituted in the Park Service in a way a kind of respect for
nature that was apart from gardening,” Graber says. “Before the
Leopold Report, I called it cowboy biology. We made it up as we
went along. If Yellowstone wanted more buffalo, they got it.”
Under the new regime, it became necessary to prove that
such a bison introduction would be “natural.”
Notwithstanding some controversies – such as “natural” wolves
versus “introduced” ranchers in the Yellowstone area – this
approach has met with monumental success. Nearly a century after
Congressman William Kent introduced the legislation that created
the National Park Service, the 295-acre ravine he donated to create
Muir Woods National Monument remains much as it was a millennium
ago, filled with redwoods, ferns and ladybugs.
“We don’t
move anything unless it falls on someone,” notes Muir Woods
interpretive specialist Lavin.
Another impressive legacy
of the new ethos lies 20 or so miles to the west. At the turn of
the century, egg hunters and pelt gatherers had reduced the
wildlife-rich Farallons to a relatively barren state. Since they
became protected as the Farallon National Wildlife and Wilderness
Refuge in 1969, the islands have become the largest seabird colony
outside Alaska and Hawaii. Northern fur seals, which once populated
the Farallons by the tens of thousands, were hunted to extinction
there following the Gold Rush. They, too, have returned in force. A
single pup was born on the islands in 1996. Last year, there were
100 pups.
The starving Cassin’s auklets, however, point
to a possible future when this let-it-be strategy will no longer
produce the desired results.
Strategies that do
something effective – that don’t just let nature succumb
to climate change – are hard to come by.
Two hundred and
fifty miles southeast of San Francisco, new studies resulting from
decades of research show that giant sequoia saplings are thriving
less robustly in the warming central Sierra Nevada. So do officials
in Sequoia National Park build sequoia sapling greenhouses? Do they
install sprinkler systems around the great sequoia monarchs? Or do
they prepare a new habitat farther north, removing other species to
make space for sequoia saplings? Should such moves even be
contemplated, given the still-fledgling nature of predictive
climatology?
And what of the rest of the trees in the
West – the ones doomed to die from drought, fire and beetle
infestation?
Scientists studying forest diebacks say one
response to the dying might be to thin forests, so that individual
trees are hardier and more beetle-resistant. It remains to be seen
how well this would go over with an environmental movement
accustomed to opposing logging. Other controversial ideas include
intensive breeding and genetic engineering to create
insect-resistant tree species, combined with the aggressive use of
herbicides and pesticides.
Wildlife managers have long
believed that local plant species should be kept genetically pure.
But climate change may ultimately call for a sophisticated type of
wildlife gardening, in which heat-loving southern plant species are
brought north and encouraged to crossbreed with cold-loving
cousins.
Already, a massive die-off of pinon pine trees
in the Southwest is being called a “global warming type event.”
Again, selective logging might be one answer, scientists say: If
fewer trees share scarce water, they just might survive in the new
climate.
But for plant species that simply can’t survive
in their old habitat, some scientists are floating the idea of a
forced march north.
Animals whose habitat dwindles as the
climate changes might just scurry elsewhere, explains Nathan
Stephenson, a research ecologist at the Western Ecological Science
Center at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. But trees cannot
get up and walk away. “The National Park Service has to decide: Are
we going to assist species migration?” says Stephenson.
Helping plants and animals migrate north isn’t just a matter of
leasing fleets of flatbed nursery trucks. Many species under threat
aren’t easy to dig up and put in a pot. Soil microorganisms, fungi,
butterflies, and other small creatures critical to the functioning
of ecosystems may also find their traditional homes unlivable.
Assisting species migration would mean setting aside broad swaths
of wild land to provide an uninterrupted pathway north for entire
habitats.
“I’ve had a number of conversations with land
managers, identifying all the land in California that could
conceivably be used as refugia, and what would be the appropriate
species to go where. The magnitude of the problem is
mind-boggling,” says Graber, the Park Service scientist. “There is
a vocal minority of people in the conservation community who
believe that things should unfold on their own. The theory being,
we don’t know what we’re doing, and we’re bound to screw things up.
“What we’re talking about is an order of intrusion
greater than anything we’ve done in the past.”
Already
the nonprofit Nature Conservancy is considering buying land and
ecological easements to create north-south habitat-migration
superhighways. “We need to take into account this vulnerability to
large vegetation shifts,” says Patrick Gonzalez, a forest ecologist
who works with The Nature Conservancy under the title “climate
change scientist.” “One way in which we’re using that data is in
the establishing and maintaining of corridors that link areas in
the network.”
Doing this on any sort of meaningful scale,
however, would require making the preservation of American grasses,
trees and rodents an expensive national priority. And it would mean
treating habitat-choking urban sprawl as even more of an
environmental calamity than is currently recognized.
Putting America on this sort of ecological wartime footing – to
prepare for an environmental future that nobody can fully predict –
will likely prove a hard sell in Washington. Almost as difficult
will be convincing the environmental community to abandon a
hard-won national consensus about what it means to preserve the
natural world.
—-
The vast bureaucracies that manage public
land already have to answer to myriad bickering constituencies.
Some of global warming’s greatest impacts will appear without
warning, as ocean temperatures and currents, extended growing
seasons, extinction of microorganisms, or any combination of these
factors cause cascading effects – such as the ones that are
apparently killing the Farallon Islands auklet chicks. Saving
species in such a quickly changing environment may not allow for
policy meetings, comment periods, revised management plans and
alternate implementation strategies. It might just mean deciding at
a moment’s notice to mash up buckets of krill stew and spoon-feed
auklet chicks – now and forevermore.
Although there are reams of conclusive
science on the “whether” of global warming – it is
definitely occurring – there’s very little precise information on
when, and where, and what will happen next. Before park officials
begin loading ferns onto flatbeds or launch the mother of all
tree-thinning operations in the Colorado Rockies, they need
scientific backing to be sure what they’re doing has some hope of
preserving life on earth.
Such science is scarce.
Despite the vast swath of death wrought across the West
by drought, heat and bark beetles, science still doesn’t know
exactly what it takes for nature to kill a tree. At Muir Woods, to
note an extreme example of this area of human ignorance, there’s no
record whatsoever of a mature redwood dying a “natural,”
non-human-induced death.
And though there’s been vast
observational research on the effects of global warming, there’s
not much experiment-derived knowledge about what a warmer planet
will do to particular habitats. “I think one of the big challenges
of planning, is the amount of uncertainty. We don’t even know if
it’s going to get warmer and drier or warmer and wetter, and if you
don’t even know that, it starts to get really hard,” says
Stephenson, the USGS forest ecologist. “Often people have talked
about desired future conditions. Now, you talk about switching to
undesired future conditions. We know we don’t want to completely
lose our forest; perhaps we don’t care if we don’t have species
abundance. And that does really bring you to a really general
approach to try to increase resilience to ecosystems.”
But it’s hard to talk about making an ecosystem resilient if one
doesn’t know what it takes to kill it in the first place. Science
is just now getting down to the brass tacks of cooking and parching
trees to death on purpose – in a recently christened 500-ton welded
stainless-steel-and-glass habitat-cooking oven.
The oven
used to be known as Biosphere II, an artificial enclosed ecosystem
originally intended for space research. The University of Arizona
recently agreed to lease this giant terrarium near Phoenix from its
owner, a land developer. The university will rededicate Biosphere
II for research on how organisms react to climate change.
Finally, scientists can write an accurate recipe for baked dead
tree.
“Wow, that (must) sound like a really dopey
experiment,” says University of Arizona natural resources professor
Dave Breshears, who’s on the faculty of the Institute for the Study
of Planet Earth. “But we don’t really have the right kind of
quantitative information. We’ve got a drought, and we’ve got bark
beetle infestations, and have higher densities than before and
warmer temperatures. And it’s hard to unravel the effects of
those.”
There are scientists who hold the
reasoned belief that, given the lack of useful
information, any decision to abandon the traditional approach to
natural preservation is bound to be rash. Eric Higgs, director of
the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria,
British Columbia, fears land managers may wreak havoc if they begin
meddling with, rather than preserving, wild habitat.
“How
is it we find respectful ways of intervening, of removing invasive
species, or planting or translocating species? How do we do that in
our deeply respectful way?” Higgs wonders. “We want future
generations to say, “They didn’t get it all right, but they got
some of it right.’ Leopold certainly made many mistakes, but he was
an individual who kind of had it right. I’d like to think that
contemporary restorationists would blaze that kind of trail.”
With that in mind, National Park Service trailblazers all
over America are holding meetings, conferences and symposia to
incorporate climate change into a scheduled revision of overall
park policy. The Park Service has created a Task Force on Climate
Change to figure out what, if anything, to do about threatened park
resources.
Officials with the Golden Gate National
Recreation Area along California’s North Central Coast, for
example, are preparing to study the question with a series of
global warming-themed staff meetings scheduled throughout next
fall.
The agency is still sidestepping some of what’s at
stake, however. When asked what it was doing to preserve wildlands
in the face of global warming, the Park Service’s climate change
coordinator boasted of a program called Climate Friendly Parks,
which seeks to reduce parks’ carbon footprint by doing things like
installing low-flow toilets. Addressing the threat to ecosystems by
reducing parks’ resource consumption is like treating a cancer
patient by telling her to cut back on food additives. Scientists
are well aware of this apparent lack of direction in the agency’s
response to climate change.
“There’s kind of a chaotic
feeling right now. Everyone understands the situation is really
problematic. We need to start. We can’t wait to act until things
start dying,” Graber notes. “But we don’t know what to do.” Leigh
Welling, the Park Service climate change coordinator, puts it a
different way.
“It’s a scary thought,” says Welling,
“Managers are looking at their job and saying, ‘Oh jeez, how do I
do my job?'”
Some naturalists have a one-word
answer to that question: Differently.
One of
the predictions of global warming is that there will be changes in
the wind patterns and ocean currents that move nutrients to places
where creatures can reach them. “In May of 2005, and roughly the
same time of year in 2006, we had highly unusual wind patterns and
ocean currents that were atypical,” said Ellie Cohen, executive
director of PRBO Conservation Science, the organization that
monitors birds on the Farrallon Islands.
If those new
patterns become the norm, some of the bird species that now blanket
the Farallons could perish. Others, however, might thrive. Will
preserving a semblance of the status quo turn conservationists into
something closer to gardeners or zookeepers?
“It may be
that at some point ecologists and conservationists decide the level
of intervention may have to be higher than anything we’ve ever
considered before,” says Cohen. “Are we willing to go on the
Farallon Islands to feed Cassin’s auklet chicks until they’re big
enough to survive?”
And if not, what outcomes are we
willing to accept?
M. Martin Smith and Fiona Gow
are journalists living in San Francisco.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Unnatural Preservation.
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