Thoreau's Legacy

by Richard Hayes

  I’m one of the lucky ones who can afford to make some financial sacrifices and splurge on a brand-new Porsche Carrera. I test-drove one a few months ago with the serious intention of buying it. The acceleration was thrilling, as was the car’s stability and the soft roar of the engine as I put this amazing vehicle through its paces on straightaways and around corners. Why stop there? I test-drove a hot new BMW, one of the Mercedes sports cars, and the fantastic Audi A5, which made my heart leap in ecstasy. Vroom! Vroom!

  Just as I was about to buy or lease one of these fantastic pieces of vehicular engineering, my hypocrisy hit me in the eye. You see, I’m also an advocate of clean sources of energy, and I talk a lot about the environment to my friends. I take the high road and feel so good about myself and my moral position. I had just finished reading Lester Brown’s Plan B 3.0, a well-researched scholarly book that documents the devastating effects of global warming on our planet, describing in scientific detail how climate change affects everyone, rich and poor alike, and what we can do about it. I’ve told my friends and relatives about the book and even bought copies of it for them to read.

  Sohow the devil could I drivea high-powered gas-burning vehicle spewing exhaust fumes that will contribute to the earth’s demise and ruin this planet before my grandson has a chance to enjoy it, just because I like the sound and feel of a hot car? No way! So I upped and got me to a Toyota dealer and leased the newest Prius hybrid. It drives very nicely, thank you. It gets me where I want to go, in style and comfort. It comes with every conceivable option. It is plenty fast, and its acceleration is more than adequate for any U.S. highway—I’m not racing at Le Mans. One of the benefits of the Prius is that I get around 45 mpg in the city and more than 50 mpg on the highway. Better yet, I backed my words with action, stopped being a hypocrite, made a small sacrifice, and did something to save our planet. I’m proud of me.

  Robert N. Shorin is a psychoanalyst and vice president of the Karen Horney Clinic in New York City. He lives on Long Island with his wife, Alene, who has been his best friend and supporter for forty-eight years.

  Sea Bear

  Blake Matheson

  MASSIVE ANIMAL TRACKS—TWENTY INCHES FROM

  heel to claw—push deep into the blue ice, luminous and crystalline in the gold of the Arctic sun. They are the unmistakable marks of Ursus maritimus—the great sea bear.

  A hard west wind rolls over my back, then ripples out over snow-choked lagoons and frigid reefs. The gray horizon is broken only by a towering crimson spike. When I move closer, I realize it is the nine-foot-long rib of a bowhead whale, slaughtered by Inupiats in September. Each year the ice retreats farther from shore, and soon the leviathans will be out of hunters’ reach for the first time since man came to Barter Island.

  The harsh and beautiful frontier we call the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) lies below me. In the summer months it is an expanse of warm russet tones rolling out from the roots of the mountains to the steely water of the Beaufort Sea. Beyond the Beaufort, few places carry men’s names until the Arctic Ocean transits the earth’s pole.

  Now, in October, the auburn of the tundra has disappeared, succeeded by a white immensity broken only by black veins on the cracked heights of the Brooks Range and by the sun’s ephemeral light.

  I follow the bear’s tracks toward the water’s edge. Atop a whale vertebra the eyes of a snowy owl break the scene’s gravity. Long-tailed ducks drift placidly in the last open water of fall. A flock takes flight, riding the wind to the southeast, the supple sound of air beneath their wings. I watch until they vanish in the opacity of a faraway mist.

  From behind a rocky outcrop the old bear appears. Big shoulders propel his tremendous legs over swaths of gravel and ice, his stride unbending and stiff. Hunting has been difficult for him in recent years, and his blue-black lips hang loosely from a gaunt, tired visage. Aged he may be, but the 1,200 pounds of carnivore before me is no less daunting for all his hard-won years.

  The bear’s head hangs low, then unexpectedly his eyes lift, meeting mine squarely, resolutely. A black fire burns deep within them, and he steps toward me. In the space between heartbeats, borne by ecstasy and silent terror, I know what it means to be human, to be vulnerable. He, too, knows what I feel. He has seen the terrified eyes of countless prey and savored the sweet, visceral smell of fear on the wind. But I am also aware of something else deep within, a stirring remembrance of man’s ancient place below animals of exquisite and terrible power. After all, it was just such bestial jaws that chased man into witting evolution. To these creatures, as to our shared earth, we humans owe nothing short of everything.

  A gull screams. The bear turns away, and gray cloud eclipses the Arctic sun.

  The old male bear wanders through a maze of bowhead whale remains at Barter Island on Alaska’s North Slope. Photo by Blake Matheson.

  Blake Matheson recently completed law school in Portland, Oregon. He plans to marry and to look for a job working on the legal protection of endangered species and their habitats.

  Tiny Scales

  Curtis Childs

  I ALMOST STEPPED ON IT, IT WAS SO SMALL. IT MIGHT

  have been a stick, lying on the sidewalk as the setting October sun shot red and gold through the oak leaves. But as I bent closer—look! Tiny scales! Could it be? The five-inch-long snake flailed and curled its soft body around my index finger as I picked it up. Every scale seemed flawless, thousands of miniature overlapping plates gliding across each other as the animal’s spine articulated. Carefully lifting my hand, I turned my face to gaze at the orange-red underside, confirming my guess.

  A Michigan red-bellied snake. I hadn’t held one since I was a child. My friends and I could catch two or three of them in a day, setting up bricks and rocks in the baby pool and putting the snakes in there just to watch and enjoy. Woods surrounded our subdivision then, and an hour’s adventuring could lead the three or four of us to cornfields, swamps, and ancient stumps.

  The red-bellies left when the bulldozers came. Even the big black garter snakes, which to my boyhood delight had haunted every corner of our yard, vanished. The wave of suburban development swept north from Detroit to crash over us, leaving in its wake strip malls and a gray satellite view when the froth finally receded.

  I peered more closely at the snake as insects hummed in the field. Somehow, the red-bellies had come back. These tiny, fragile reptiles had survived the overturned fields, the cement trucks, the pollution, and the drained wetlands—cosmic events to a creature this minute. But as I set her down, I looked up at the blue expanse of atmosphere overhead, suddenly aware of the magnitude of what the red-bellies might soon face. A pregnant female might move quickly enough to avoid a car’s tires, but what would she do if statewide rain patterns shifted? Where will she hide if shorter winters trigger an ecosystem imbalance, and the invertebrate prey she needs to survive move away?

  These little animals, so timid that they don’t even try to bite when held, miraculously survived the turbulence of human development. Will that triumph mean nothing in a couple of decades? Can red-bellies, and thousands of other species like them, to whom a football field is a day’s journey, do anything to grapple with the enormity of a changing atmosphere?

  We can’t know for sure, but as I watched the snake slip up over the curb into the grass, I smiled at the perseverance she stood for. Thanks for making it, thanks for the past you gave me, I thought, as scenes from years ago flashed across my mind. Now what future will I give you?

  Curtis Childs has a degree in communication from Oakland University in Michigan. He has been a disc jockey for his college radio station and a performing singer-songwriter.

  American Ruby-Spot Damselfly

  Lea Jane Parker

  I am an educator for a young people’s environmental club in Arizona. As I lead a Nature Quest hike along the Verde River, I delight in seeing young faces light up when they find animal prints, damselflies and other insects, birds, plants, and interesting rocks.
As they listen to the water’s rushing music, they learn about the impacts of global warming and the need to protect ecosystems.

  Lea Jane Parker is a professor at Northern Arizona University, where she developed and teaches in the environmental communication program. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

  An American ruby-spot damselfly alights on a reed above the Verde River in Arizona.

  Photo by Lea Jane Parker.

  The Last Pika

  Daniel T. Blumstein

  I STUDY MARMOTS, BUT I WORRY ABOUT PIKA.

  Although they look like small rodents, pika, known in Eurasia as “mouse hares” and in the United States as “tundra bunnies,” are lagomorphs—relatives of rabbits, as close examination of their teeth reveals. Pika live only on alpine and subalpine talus slopes. If you’re walking in a western alpine boulder field and worrying about twisting your ankle, you may be in pika country. They make a wonderful raspy squeal that sounds like a small squeeze toy. When I’m trapping marmots on the talus slopes, I smile when I hear those squeals, the pika’s territorial signals and alarm calls.

  One part of my research focuses on how climatic factors influence the behavior and survival of yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado. I work with a population of marmots that has been studied continuously since 1962. Some of my colleagues’ recent work has demonstrated that marmots are now emerging from hibernation earlier in the year and that this change is correlated with higher spring temperatures. Climate change may thus influence the timing of the marmots’ emergence. I recently discovered that their social behavior also influences emergence, a factor that may enhance or suppress the climatic effect.

  Because I’m interested in how climate change may affect marmot behavior, people ask me if marmots will be influenced by global warming. My initial answer about the Colorado yellow-bellied marmots is a guarded no. No, because these marmots live in a 10,000-foot range of elevations, from the foothills of the Rockies to the top of almost every 14,000-foot peak I’ve climbed. (There they collect a “summit tariff”—your lunch—from human invaders.) No, because they live in a variety of habitats, and even with a drastic redistribution of habitats, which we anticipate global warming will generate, there will likely still be places for marmots to live.

  By contrast, I tell people that I worry about pika. As the sagebrush climbs up the mountains and as tundra is lost to forest, I worry about where they will live and how they will find others of their species. Pika are habitat specialists, and it’s the specialists that will be most negatively influenced by climate change.

  I worry that my grandchildren will not have the chance to laugh with glee when they hear their first pika, that they will not be able to smile with fond memories of wonderful experiences in high alpine ecosystems, which are as threatened as their habitat-specialist inhabitants. I worry about the last pika.

  Daniel T. Blumstein is an associate professor and vice chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He lives in Los Angeles and Gothic, Colorado, with his wife and son.

  Where Are the Butterflies?

  Susan J. Tweit

  FOR THE PAST MONTH MY HUSBAND AND I HAVE

  hosted an accidental houseguest. She (or he—we can’t tell at this stage) possesses an appetite so insatiable that we named her Gluttonous.

  Her small size and single-minded quest for food allowed Gluttonous to remain unseen among the anise flowers I cut from our kitchen garden, even as she ate them. I spotted her munching on the bouquet several days later, balanced on multiple pairs of stubby legs—clearly a caterpillar, but one I didn’t recognize, dressed as she was in wrinkled black skin speckled with white and red dots.

  The next morning, the empty black gauze of that now-shed skin swung from a branch. Nearby the insect herself—surely plumper already—chewed steadily in her dazzling new skin; the green and black stripes studded with orange dots identified her as an eastern black swallowtail. Watching this unexpected guest pull an anise blossom to her mouth and eat, I remembered a friend’s question: “Where are the butterflies this year?”

  Our high-desert yard and kitchen garden usually attract five species of swallowtails, plus monarchs, sulfurs, painted ladies, fritillaries, western whites, and common blues. Anise swallowtails are normally so abundant that I plant extra anise in order to feed the plump caterpillars.

  But not this year, when every butterfly has been cause for remark. Until this accidental houseguest, in fact, I hadn’t found a single swallowtail caterpillar in the garden. My plants had flourished unmunched.

  What has changed? After a decade of increasing drought, this year’s weather patterns oscillated wildly, bearing out the predictions for global climate change in our region. First came a winter snow pack so abundant that it broke records, and then nothing: no wet spring snow, no summer rain until it was too late to do any good.

  Watching our caterpillar houseguest chew another flower, I counted out the weeks and calculated that she would metamorphose just in time for winter, tricked by abnormal weather.

  Over the next few weeks, Gluttonous ate her way steadily through the anise bouquet, growing larger and plumper by the day as autumn flared gold outside the windows. One morning she slung herself under a branch of anise, held by her stumpy pairs of hind legs and one glistening strand of white silk. Forty-eight hours later, her striped skin had hardened into a pale green chrysalis. The miracle of metamorphosis had begun—and snow painted the peaks white.

  We debated what to do with our nascent adult eastern black swallowtail. She has no future inside or out. Yet she is the only butterfly our garden produced this year.

  If this heartbreaking hatch of a single caterpillar, whose maturity comes too late to seed future generations, is the gift of global climate change, I grieve for us all. Because what we are losing is not just a single species but the thread of connection with the everyday wild that secures our place in nature’s community.

  Susan J. Tweit is a plant ecologist by training and the author of twelve books, including her latest, a memoir titled Walking Nature Home: A Life’s Journey. She lives with her husband in a house heated and cooled by the sun in Salida, Colorado.

  A Chambered Nautilus

  Ursula Freer

  Almost all mollusk shells are made of aragonite, a naturally occurring crystalline form of calcium carbonate. If we continue to follow the fossil-fuel-intensive scenario outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by 2060 the oceans will likely become so acidic that aragonite will start to dissolve.

  Ursula Freer is a painter and digital artist working in Sante Fe, New Mexico. Her work is primarily devoted to the beauty of the natural world.

  A chambered nautilus, Nautilus pompilius, phylum Mollusca, class Cephalopoda. Digital collage by Ursula Freer.

  Salmon in Alaska

  Sue Mauger

  I HAVE WATCHED KING SALMON SWIM BY ME ON

  their return to the Anchor River; over Memorial Day weekend the Chinook wend their way past wader-clad fishers at the river mouth as they head upstream to spawn. They swim along a channel that continually reworks itself, shifting gravel bars, moving downed cottonwoods, searching for new angles of repose after the two hundred-year floods of 2002. The sediment-rich waters flow out of the Caribou Hills; snow is still melting from the two-hundred-square-mile watershed, which is virtually undeveloped compared to the Lower Forty-eight.

  The returns of king salmon to the Anchor River have been strong, even though the forest has died. After the warm, dry summers of the 1990s, the bark beetles swarmed in dark clouds and ate their way across 1.4 million acres of the Kenai Peninsula. The dead gray trees that remain after the salvage logging and windstorms are a reminder of the forest that was.

  I first stepped into the Anchor River in 2000, soon after the beetle infestation swept through. I came here in response to concerns from local citizens about the health of the watershed, to answer questions about whether the river could still support s
almon after such dramatic change. I have now been studying this river for eight years, and what is most clear is that the change continues. My data tell me the river is warming.

  Temperature data loggers show that water temperatures on the Anchor River, as well as on other salmon streams in south-central Alaska, are rising as air temperatures rise. Stream temperatures soared above 70 degrees F in the summers of 2004 and 2005. For families and communities that rely on salmon for commercial, sport, or subsistence fishing, this is ominous news, because high stream temperatures make fish increasingly vulnerable to pollution, predation, and disease.

  The thought of warmer weather intrigues Alaskans. Who wouldn’t welcome the prospect of summer walks on the beach without a parka? But the threat of warming winters clashes with the notion of healthy salmon populations. Climate change will eventually reduce our snow pack, shortening the snow-melt period that feeds our rivers. Then, with less water in the channels, summer stream temperatures will rise even faster. Our beloved salmon runs will suffer.

  I moved to Alaska from Oregon, where salmon have succumbed to a long list of harms. Here on the Kenai Peninsula, we have a rare and important opportunity to make smarter decisions about land use and greenhouse gas emissions, decisions that will have a direct impact on the long-term sustainability of Alaska salmon. My work now is focused on providing communities and policymakers with the information they need to ensure that our magnificent stream systems, like the Anchor River, retain as much ecological resilience as possible in this time of unprecedented change.