The March Hare: Winter 2008 Issue 55

Cover Page • DR In My Luggage • Crating Change • Thank You Donors! • Nature Corner • Yoga Offsets • Under Your Sink

Nature Corner

by Dan Durica

I listen to a show on BBC radio called Gardener's Question Time, where a panel of experts answers the audience's gardening questions. I've been surprised at how often climate change is mentioned during the show, mostly because in the US it's rare that climate change is talked about in the media, let alone casually mentioned as fact while discussing some other subject. But though these English gardeners seem aware of the issue, they talk about it with a tone of inevitability, with some concerned about whether their fruit trees will die in coming years, and others excitedly inquiring as to whether they will soon be able to grow olives and avocados. Either way, they've resigned themselves to the idea that climate change is happening and they might as well adapt. They have this idea that if they simply grow different vegetable or fruit crops as the climate changes, everything will be alright.

In the US, the government has done everything it can to invalidate the evidence of climate change, and this has contributed to ignorance of the problem here. Unlike Europeans, Americans are not planning for any potential consequences. When Americans are confronted with the issue, there is denial or even, like some British gardeners, the naïve self-assurance that it will be a good thing—"Hey, I'd love to have shorter winters". Ignored in all of the wishful thinking around the globe is the fact that even if humans end up being able to adapt to rapid and drastic changes in climate, natural systems cannot. Climate change will be a disaster.

Last spring we had a late frost that wiped out all the fruit blossoms on our fruit trees here at DR. In fact, most of the fruit blossoms on cultivated fruit trees in the southern half of the country were wiped out last spring. Here wild plums and chokecherries didn't produce fruit either. Members of Sandhill that traveled to southern Missouri told of hickories and other trees fully leafed out being whacked by the frost. These erratic temperature shifts will become more common as climate change becomes more severe.

Although climate change is happening fast on a geologic scale, it is killing wildlife gradually and in ways that we might not notice. It's weakening plants and making them vulnerable to disease. It's effecting pollinators, on whom most of the world's flowering plants depend. It's effecting fruit production and thus reproduction. If it takes a tree ten years to reach the fruiting stage of its life, and by the time it reaches fruiting age its climate has changed such that it can no longer survive, how will it reproduce? How will it move to a more suitable climate, when its only means of migration has been disabled? And to add to the difficulties, most wild things live in small remnants of their former ecosystems with miles of nothing but human landscape between them. How will they migrate to other remnants of wild space hundreds of miles away? Most wild plants are capable of adapting and migrating gradually over millennia, not over decades. We humans may be able to move our crops to different places if the climate changes, but wild plants, or ecosystems, for that matter, can't simply pack up and move hundreds of miles away.

Right now the most obvious places being affected by climate change are the polar regions. Northern forests are dying of diseases they were never exposed to before arctic temperatures increased. Glaciers and the permafrost have been rapidly thawing over the past few decades. The arctic may seem far away, but changes there are impacting the entire globe. Often we assume, "Well those arctic animals may go extinct because there won't be any places on earth cold enough for them, but there will be that many more warm places for life to thrive". But our local wildlife will not be thriving since gradual shifts in climate will lead to the stranding and destruction of local ecosystems. Like it or not, we are dependent on all of earth's natural systems, and if they die, we will as well not long after.

When I ask myself whether it's worth making an effort to change my lifestyle drastically now to prevent a disaster in the future, I think of what it would be like twenty years down the road to be living in a world where every day we live with the consequences of our inaction—a world with fewer songbirds singing in the morning, without the sound of cicadas in the summer, without big trees to sit under in the hot summer sun, without rainforests and mountain gorillas. Is it worth sacrificing these things so we can live convenient, affluent lives now? Obviously we need to try to adapt to climate change as it happens, but not without doing everything we can to prevent or reduce its impact first.

Cover Page • DR In My Luggage • Crating Change • Thank You Donors! • Nature Corner • Yoga Offsets • Under Your Sink

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