Except for the Brooks Range to the south, the tundra was so flat and empty I could see the curve of the earth as it stretched toward the Arctic Ocean. Caribou and musk ox grazed these lands rather than cattle, but I saw no sign of them. Here the smell of manure was as disconcerting as if one of the bearded scientists had suddenly spoken to me in my mother’s voice.
Seeing where the smell originated intensified my unease. As we walked, a crevice appeared a few yards ahead. The top layer was like a green skin protecting the permafrost below. Now, a few weeks into summer, the skin had cracked open, exposing mud and shards of ice. Dinosaur dung, mastodon manure, and other organic materials that had been trapped in the frozen ground for thousands of years were suddenly exposed to the relentless Arctic sun. The result was just like leaving a freezer door ajar so the food melts and rots. What I smelled was probably hydrogen sulfide gas released from the tundra. Even more disconcerting was what I couldn’t smell: the methane and carbon dioxide rising from the melting permafrost into the atmosphere, adding to the layer of gases that cause global warming.
Poised at the edge of the fresh crevice, I could hear a trickle of water coming from the ground below. The ice was melting into a rank river, like the muddy brook I played in as a child, carving a streambed through half a mile of tundra. What had been frozen was now flowing freely to the sea, ready to add to already rising waters.
Over the past several years I had interviewed scientists about climate change and studied their projections. I knew how high the oceans had already risen. I’d seen the shrinking glaciers. But when I saw the tundra cracks of global warming, what I’d known intellectually punched me in the gut. We have opened a door that will be difficult to close again, because it has set off a cycle of its own. Now, whenever I bring home a bag of manure to fertilize my garden, I’m not comforted by childhood memories but alarmed by the whiff of global warming.
Kristan Hutchison has worked as a reporter and editor for over twenty years, most of that time in Alaska.
Garden of Ghosts
Mark Hixon
IT HAD BEEN THE MOST BEAUTIFUL OF TROPICAL forests, more a garden really, a rainbow garden of so many colors and shapes and sheer variety of life that it boggled my mind as much as it pleased my senses. The multiple layers of the canopy housed more life—more species—than any other ecological community on earth. And the sheer diversity of growth forms and behaviors and life cycles was overwhelming, regardless of how closely I looked or how far back I stepped to take it all in. The people living nearby thrived on the cornucopia of foods provided by this supremely productive ecosystem. Pharmaceutical corporations discovered dozens of natural chemicals with novel medicinal properties in this forest, including anticancer agents.
I had loved andstudied this Edenfor a decade, marveling at its incredible diversity while seeking to understand how so many different kinds of creatures could coexist in such density. I learned that it took many species to regulate the abundance of any one species. The amazingly intricate web of interactions lent credence to the idea that complexity begets stability in nature.
But stability can be tenuous, lasting for millennia and then ending abruptly. This kaleidoscopic potpourri of millions of species, born of millions of years of evolution, was no match for the accelerating rate at which modern humans have been warming the global climate with ceaseless carbon emissions. It happened so suddenly. One day all the trees of this grand garden, many of them hundreds of years old, turned as white as snow. But it had not snowed. Quite the contrary: record temperatures had caused the trees to expel the colorful single-celled organisms living symbiotically within their tissues, rendering all surfaces colorless. Exactly why the mutualism collapsed no one knew for sure, except that extremely warm temperatures were the main culprit. Whatever the exact mechanism, all of the ashen trees soon died. They stood in place for years as pallid ghosts, gradually overgrown and drilled by tiny organisms. Then, storm by storm, the standing corpses crumbled and fell, and with them fell the entire web of life they had supported—the richest of ecosystems reduced to a barren plain of rubble.
These were not trees as we know them on land. This cemetery had been my favorite coral reef, the corals being the trees of the ocean rainforest. The reef was killed by the great coral bleaching of 1998, one of the warmest years worldwide ever recorded by humans. Nearly 10 percent of all the coral reefs in the world died in that single terrible year, as did many more in 2005, perhaps the warmest year on record … so far. The remaining reefs face both increased bleaching and ocean acidification, which dissolves the corals’ limestone skeletons as carbon dioxide mixes with seawater and becomes carbonic acid. The rainbow gardens beneath the tropical seas are dying, along with their uncountable goods and services for humans: unparalleled destruction, unseen and unheard, with no end in sight. As a coral-reef scientist, I feel like a caregiver at a cancer hospice.
Mark Hixon, a professor of marine biology at Oregon State University, has studied coral reefs around the world for thirty years. He enjoys surfing, scuba diving, and beach treks.
Clamming
Katherine McLaughlin
When the tide is out, the table is set.
—Alutiiq saying
DIGGING CLAMS ON THE COBBLESTONE BEACHES OF
Prince William Sound, Alaska, isn’t easy. My son and I are out on the exposed beach of a minus tide, flipping over the seaweed-covered rocks and uncovering a scuttling world of tiny crabs, beach lice, and gunnel fish. We look for the oval holes in the black sand that indicate where the clam’s siphon emerges. I do the digging while my little boy picks out the butter clams and littlenecks revealed in the widening hole.
As the ridged white shells, some as big as my fist, drop into the bucket, I can almost smell clam chowder simmering on the stove. But a nagging fear is spoiling the moment. For the first time I have to wonder if the clams are contaminated and not safe to eat.
The community was hit hard by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. The resulting damage to the ecosystem has been substantial and is still continuing. But oil contamination is not what worries me. My fear is of contracting paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP), which develops in shellfish that have ingested a toxic form of algae. The saxitoxin, a type of neurotoxin, in PSP-contaminated shellfish is a thousand times more toxic than cyanide.
PSP has been documented in other parts of the state, but the deep, cold waters of Prince William Sound have been historically free of it. However, with global water temperatures rising, researchers believe it may be only a matter of time before toxicity is documented here.
On Alaskan beaches where clams are harvested commercially, the state tests for PSP. But outside of those areas, no testing is done. There have been efforts to produce a test that rural clam diggers could use to determine if PSP is present, but a kit has not yet been certified.
Other types of pathogenic illnesses are appearing in Prince William Sound for the first time. In 2004 an outbreak of gastroenteritis caused by the bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus made the passengers on a day-tour boat, who ate contaminated oysters from a commercial farm they visited, very uncomfortable for a few days. Tests on shellfish samples taken around the sound showed an uncommonly virulent type of Vibrio that had not been previously documented here. Scientists who study invasive species say this may be a sign of new, more severe outbreaks of diseases caused by pathogens.
Chenega Bay has never experienced a “bad clam” episode, but we are now adopting the rule of thumb used in the southeastern United States: harvest shellfish only in the colder months whose names include an r.
It is a cool fall evening, and the clams we are digging should be safe. And we know the symptoms of PSP, just in case. Digging clams will never again be a worry-free endeavor, but we aren’t going to let that stop us from enjoying the bounty of the sea.
Katherine McLaughlin is an educator and environmental consultant in Chenega Bay, Alaska, where she lives with her husband and son. She is a native of the Gulf Coast of Florida.
III - Open Spaces
A Million and
a Half Acres
Chavawn Kelley
ONE OF THE FIRST T-SHIRTS I REMEMBER MY HUSBAND wearing was a pale blue Beefy-T he’d worn to a holey mess. Above a crude mountain silhouette leered a mean-faced smiling bug. The message read “Feast your eyes on the Wind Rivers.” Shaun loved that shirt because he’d gotten it the year he worked as a backcountry ranger. Only a few were printed, and it was an insider’s joke. Who ever heard of the pine bark beetle munching away at the Wind River Range?
I’d always said I wanted to marry a man who loved the mountains as much as I did. We married in a cottonwood grove, and
for years we lived contentedly, without much trouble from the
pine bark beetle. Eventually we moved to a bigger small town
in Wyoming, one whose skyline encompasses the Snowy Range. When we were joined by an apple-cheeked child in a backpack, sharing the sight of an ice-crusted mountain lake and teaching him to leave a campsite clean became high priorities. He learned to cross-country ski amid sheltering pines, on skis that were barely longer than his father’s forearm.
And now, all across the forest the trees are standing dead. Great swaths of red stain entire mountainsides, miles of forest roads, and views that were green last fall. Dead. And next year there will be more. The outbreak, we are told, is unprecedented. A million and a half acres on a map of Wyoming and Colorado is hardly less comprehensible to me than the present view from Kennaday Peak or the reflection in Silver Lake. Every tree in every direction is dead.
If I tell my son that the pine bark beetle is native to the Rocky Mountains and has long been a part of natural cycles, it does nothing to blunt the loss. Drought and warm winters have set the stage for this attack, which is caused by the insects boring into the bark of their ponderosa and lodgepole hosts to lay eggs and complete their natural life cycle. Nothing about this scale of ruin feels natural. Our forest is a morgue.
The Forest Service publication What’s Eating the Trees? says that during a beetle infestation more than fifty years ago, thousands of men walked the forest floor packing five-gallon tanks with hand-pumps, spraying every infested tree with a combination of fuel oil and insecticide, presumably DDT. “All that work didn’t stop the beetle infestation,” it says. “Cold weather in 1952 finally did.” For us, that very cold weather may never return.
Chavawn Kelley is a corporate communications manager for Western Research Institute. She lives in Laramie, Wyoming, with her bass-playing husband and fiddle-playing son.
An Appalachian Idyll
Lillian Heldreth
I STAND ON AN ANCIENT MOUNTAIN IN THE AFTERNOON of the day and the year, when long, low rays of sun shine through the forest’s leaves. The atmosphere itself seems full of light in every possible shade of gold and green. The quality of this light, passing through these trees I have known for over sixty years, defines my personal idea of the word “glory.”
But coal, the original source of global warming, threatens to destroy my home and countless places like it more quickly than the actual rise in temperature will. Companies brag that “clean coal” can foster a greener environment plus energy independence. But the cheapest way to get coal is by removing mountaintops.
So each time I come here I sense the peril hanging over this place on a crest of Crooked Ridge in West Virginia. The surface of this land has belonged to my family for at least five generations and possibly more.
During my own seventy years, except for trees that might fall on the house, we’ve let this hundred acres grow up in native species—hickory, tulip poplar, maple, black gum, oak, beech, black walnut, and hemlock. I keep turning down offers to buy our timber, which is valuable ecologically and equally precious for its beauty.
To me, as to my father,each growing treeis a living sculpture, its form determined by the mountain’s myriad microclimates and the infinite patterns of forest light. The hundred-year-old black oak in our front yard spreads an umbrella of arms; in deep forest, its sisters grow straight up.
The trees provide their own background music. We arrived the other night in the middle of a lively argument of katydids in quadraphonic chorus. The next night a barred owl checked in with its “who cooks for you?” call.
“Gronk!” cry the ravens as they ride the morning thermals, and a pair of hawks cry “kee-yer,” circling the ridge around midday. A pileated woodpecker has tried to fool me into thinking it’s a flicker, but I have learned to distinguish its lower call. Sometimes the flicker drums on our metal roof—a wake-up call you can’t ignore.
I want to pass these sights and sounds to my sons and grandchildren as a refuge for their spirits, as they have been for mine. But we don’t own the mineral rights. Any day it chooses, a company can come and push our house, our trees, the very bones of the hills, down into the hollows, flattening Crooked Ridge, burying Brackens Creek, wasting the timber, which they don’t even bother to harvest, and destroying at least ten homes on our ridge and in the valley below.
When I was a child, I thought this mountain was “forever.” Now I am old. I do not know if the mountain and the trees will outlive me. I can only breathe to the sky my hope that I will stand here again in this glow of evening light.
Lillian Marks Heldreth is a professor emeritus of English and Native American studies at Northern Michigan University. Born and raised in the mountains of West Virginia, which she still frequently visits, she lives in Marquette, Michigan, on the south shore of Lake Superior.
The Carson Range
Betty Owen
Looking east from the mountains, you see a vast expanse of desert sagebrush and scrub, with a few clusters of piñon pine but none of the thick stands of conifers found at higher elevations. Some may see the desert as colorless and drab, but to me it is a uniquely beautiful place.
I have lived here for almost twenty years and have watched the diminishing mountain snow pack, the long droughts, and the dropping water levels in the lakes.
Betty Owen, who will celebrate her eighty-seventh birthday this year, lives in Carson City, Nevada. She is a widow, mother, grandparent, painter, and avid recorder of her nature walks.
The Carson Range of the Sierra Nevada. Photo by Betty Owen.
Bloomington Canyon
Helen Whitaker
THE BEAUTIFUL MOUNTAIN AREAS OF THE BEAR LAKE Valley in southern Idaho have been my second home since early childhood. The old-growth pine forest of Bloomington Canyon, in particular, with its diverse plant and animal life, has been my nature lab. When I was growing up, the weather patterns and climate conditions remained fairly consistent from one season to the next. People could pretty much count on heavy snowfalls in winter, cold rains in spring and fall, and relatively mild temperatures in summer. Ever since the 1880s, when the area was settled by pioneers, there had not been a dramatic climate change that altered the lives of the canyon creatures and plants, and rarely did a weather event dramatically affect the area. All through the 1970s and early 1980s, when I was exploring the canyon on horseback, the weather patterns and climate conditions remained constant. One main landmark was an ancient Engelmann spruce tree, which scientists had estimated to be more than two thousand years old. I could always count on seeing that majestic beauty towering over the other trees as if surveying its domain.
In the mid to late ’80s, however, the western United States moved into a drought cycle, and ten years into the drought, the weather in Bloomington Canyon changed drastically. There was very little snow during the winters, little to no rainfall in the spring and fall, and the dry, hot summers were 10 to 15 degrees warmer than I had ever known them to be. Water sources for plants and animals were drying up. Trees were dying and beavers were moving out of the canyon, but logging continued, just as it had since the days of the pioneers. I didn’t see how this forest could sustain itself under the drought conditions and continuous logging.
The severity of the situation manifested itself on June 3, 1
998, when a microburst hit the area where the Engelmann spruce stood. Within a few minutes this tree and others, totaling 2 million board feet of lumber, had been felled. In the years since then, the climate of that area has remained much hotter and dryer than it was before the 1980s, and logging is still going on. The old-growth pine forest is giving way to the younger quaking aspens that took root where the pines used to be. How much more will the makeup of this canyon change as logging (which contributes to global warming) and the drought continue? The canyon my daughter knows is very different from the canyon I knew at her age. What will it be like when her children are growing up? I can only pray that nature will find a way to sustain itself in this beautiful place.
Helen Whitaker was born and raised in Salt Lake City. She now lives in rural Lehi, Utah, and works as a paralegal.
Prairie Pothole Wonder
Dorothy Boorse
ON A BRIGHT JUNE DAY I STAND AMID THE SHARP
edges of the rice cutgrass, looking over a prairie pothole wetland. Circles of sedge, cattails, smartweed, and water plantain rim a puddle of muddy water. Green hues wash over me. I breathe the air, hear the call of the red-winged blackbird and the faint popping sounds of trapped air bubbles escaping from mud in the heat. Insects buzz, a goldfinch flicks by. A trickle of sweat on my temple evaporates in the breeze. The beauty of this day and this place stops me in my tracks. It is a holy moment, a moment of prayer. Nothing is more glorious than this wetland, this summer day, the joy of being allowed to do this research project for my Ph.D. I am transfixed.
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