Collide-a-scape

Sick of lugging Sibley around with you? Here’s a literary writer who’s also an avid birder, explaining why

instead of using a guidebook I used my i-phone, having just downloaded the amazing “i-Bird Explorer Plus” application. Eight hundred and ninety-one birds in my pocket, along with their calls, their range, and a “birdipedia” link to information that could never fit into a conventional guidebook, and certainly not one smaller than my wallet.

I love to hash over climate policy and politics as much as the next peon blogger. And I love biting the ankles of melodramatic bloviators. But I also love reporting, which often means reading documents and talking with people on the phone.

So this week I’ve tried to tamp down my enthusiasm for bloggy smackdowns and do some actual reporting on climate change. I’m especially interested in how society is going to adapt to the very uncertain yet profound climate changes that are anticipated (and in some cases, already happening), no matter what greenhouse gas reduction strategies we embrace next month or next year. That remains to be seen, of course.

But there is a group of people in government who now feel it is important to act swiftly on climate change, even though the efficacy of their actions seem as fuzzy as their outcome. Thats ballsy. And damn admirable.

I’ve focused on the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) because, well, I’m familiar with its mission and the people charged with carrying it out.  Over the years I’ve written a lot about endangered species and conservation biology-related issues. I’ve spent countless hours in field offices and in the field with dedicated and unsung FWS biologists. Long ago I realized that their task as the nation’s principal stewards of wildlife was herculean and thankless. And that was before any of them ever uttered a word about climate change to me.

So after I learned that the Service was undergoing a major strategy shift that embedded climate change as a core concern of its mission,  I started calling two places where I’ve covered ecological issues extensively–Arizona and Florida. (Additionally, I spoke with FWS staff in Virginia and North Carolina.)

I discussed here the two types of adaptive managment likely to be broadly implemented, and some of the specific challenges climate change poses for Arizona wildlife biologists.

When talking with FWS biologists in the southeast, I was struck by how they all expressed the same immediate concern about climate change: sea level rise and storm surges.

And they all voiced the same sense of urgency mixed with frustration, which Howard Phillips, the manager at Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, in Columbia, North Carolina said best:

The big issue is not whether climate change is occurring but how fast is the change happening and how can species deal with it.

Phillip Hughes, an endangered species biologist with FWS in Big Pine Key, Florida, said a day doesn’t go by where climate change isn’t mentioned–either in a meeting, presentation or in passing conversation.

For him, ameliorating some of the fallout from climate change has become a priority. “When I cam here [six years ago], all I would talk about and deal with is habitat destruction and the recovery plans. So that was a fulltime job, including ‘don’t feed the deer’ and ‘drive slowly,’ and that’s still a big part of the job. But now I find myself increasingly focused on these new and ominous threats related to sea level rise and storm surges.”

For example, Hughes told me that storm surges (from hurricanes) in recent years have devastated the key tree cactus. (Yes, hurricanes are a natural shaper of the Florida landscape, but FWS biologists believe that more frequent storms, combined with the creeping sea rise already documented by NOAA–presents a clear and present danger to wildlife and ecosystems.) “The  [key tree cactus] declined 80 percent,” said Hughes, “which for a long lived cactus is tantamount to plummeting towards extinction.” After the storms, FWS salvaged tissue and seeds, what Hughes calls “down and doomed parts.” There is a plan afoot to move the tree cactus to higher ground, using those salvaged materials to propagate a new population.

Will it work? Who knows? But people like Hughes aren’t waiting around for a cap and trade treaty. They’re not even thinking much about the ins and outs of a national climate change policy. They’re already implementing their own version on the fly.

Can any of you Joe “catastrophe” Romm loyalists explain the purpose of the Tom Friedman seal of approval at the top of Climate Progress? I mean, all of you regular Rommians already know how “indispensable”  the blog is, right? Or is the Friedman liplock meant for new tourists? Is that supposed to cinch the deal for them?

Is this a common practice in blogland, to prominently billboard a positive review right under the header? It feels like something you’d see in movie ads, or on the back of book covers.

And no, I’m not jealous. Honestly. I’m way too new at this. I’m happy when I see a few new RSS subscribers each week. (I seem to have lost so many of you right after I dissed Ed Abbey. Come back. It’s not my fault Abbey was a racist misanthrope.)

Anyway, Joe, no worries, I’ll keep coming back for the infotainment. Nobody does primal screeds like you.

This article mentions how local ranchers and conservationists are up in arms about the proposed toxic waste dump that would sit right next to Canyon of the Ancients National Monument.

But no quotes from archaeologists, which I found odd. Yet the “Outhouse Recycling Facility,” as the 474-acre waste pits are being termed, would be

a stone’s throw away from the Painted Hand Pueblo and would be located alongside a national scenic byway en route to Hovenweep National Monument. In addition, any breaches or leaks in the Outhouse would flow downstream into Canyons of the Ancients.

The Outhouse would contain “exploration and production materials” used by the oil & gas industry in the region. What, pray tell, does that mean? Oh, just those “fracing” fluids injected at high pressure below ground to get the gas out.

One landowner from the area said his main concern

is that the predominant winds come up from the Monument Valley to the Southwest, and this project will be directly upwind of many of these farms,” Wright said. “I know for a fact that the salt brine in the fluid will defoliate our crops. But there are also a bunch of other chemicals in that mixture along with a bunch of unknowns.”

Actually nobody really knows what’s in those chemicals because industry refuses to say. At any rate, seems like one helluva location for a toxic waste dump.

I’ve been chewing over this column by Nicholas Kristof since yesterday. Of course, he’s not the first to observe the central paradox of our revolutionary new medium: it gives us infinitely more and varied perspectives, yet it also abets increasingly polarized debate.

Kristof, in ruing the latter, gets the big picture right. But in making his argument he conflates two very different problems associated with digital media. He writes:

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.

That is certainly true. But it’s important to distinguish between online news and opinion. They are two different avenues of the web. If our current web habits hold, then, yes, they both lead down tunnels of our own making, but they are still two very different tunnels.

Now I will state outright: that the internet gives us more news outlets to choose from is inarguably a good thing. The problem, however, is in how we consume this digital news. A commenter on Kristof’s blog astutely pointed this out:

One of the great pleasures of my day is the daily ritual of reading newspapers vitually cover to cover. I read everything, or at the very least scan articles about topics in which I really have little interest. While my adult children tell me they get the same news online, I know that is not true. They get little blips of information; they don’t click on anything beyond their immediate interests; they seldom read the kind of long investigative reports that can be found in world class newspapers.

Now that’s an entirely different problem than the one Kristof next associates with blogs. He writes:

there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

But this is not really the fault of blogs; that we gravitate to our own echo chambers is a commentary itself on human nature.

The ramifications for healthy public debate–be it on global warming, stem cell research, or a Presidential election–are important to consider, especially as we complete the transition from print to a digital world.

That’s the title of this astonishing story in the current issue of Science News. Antiquities trafficking is the bane of archaeology, yet it appears that archaeologists in the Middle East and elsewhere are playing an unwitting role when they employ local laborers for excavations. (The first generation of southwestern archaeologists learned this lesson the hard way, and unfortunately, they’re still paying for it.)

The article reveals an intricate underworld peopled more by anonymous middlemen than mobsters. Few archaeologists or law enforcement officials rarely see

the chain of secretive relationships that turns looted pieces of the past into scrupulously documented keepsakes for affluent buyers.

When a shoe stand in the middle of Jeruselum is part of an illegal, multi-billion dollar market, then Ebay and a famous auction house aren’t your biggest problems.

As I outlined here, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) is grappling with global warming in a big way. Additionally, federal biologists from Florida to Arizona are currently at work on new long-range plans that factor in the unpredictable effects of climate change on vulnerable species. It’s a complicated task, fraught with many uncertainties.

Yet they are proceeding.  “Among us biologists, climate change is a real issue that we have to deal with now,” Scott Richardson, a FWS biologist based in Tucson, Arizona, told me today. There, in the biodiversity-rich Sonoran desert, where  invasive species and sprawl are already stressing the native ecosystem to a near breaking point, climate change is a devilish wild card.

“Most of the [climate] models out there show the Southwest becoming hotter and drier, beyond what it already is,” says Richardson. “It’s assumed that many species will shift north, but in some places like the Sky Islands–our mountain ranges–you can’t go north. You can go higher, but you can only move up so far.” That means less suitable habitat for at-risk species such as the Mexican spotted owl and mount Graham squirrel.

As if crafting these new recovery plans  weren’t complex enough, federal biologists also have to decide which species have the best shot at making it. Says Richardson, “The really frustrating thing about this is that you have to prioritize because resources and funding are limited. What you hope for is that you’re basing your decision on the best information available.”

Even then, success is far from assured. As described in its draft strategic plan, the FWS identifies two types of adaptive managment for climate change: “reactive” and “anticipatory.”

For example, “combating rising sea level by pumping sand ashore to replenish beaches and maintain habitat for nesting sea turtles and shorebirds” is considered reactive adaptation.

The second approach manages “toward future, and often less certain, landscape conditions by predicting and working with the effects of climate change.” So to use the same example, anticipatory adaptation would mean sacrificing existing beaches to rising sea level to focus instead on establishing “new shorelines landward for nesting sea turtles and shorebirds.”

And you got pissed off at piping plovers because their seasonal nesting protections cut into your beach volleyball. How does no beach at all strike you?

I jest. What I’m getting at here is that safeguarding vulnerable wildlife from climate change will require many tough calls in the months and years ahead. Land managers and biologists are already agonizing over this.

Tomorrow, Florida FWS biologists weigh in with their titanic climate change quandry.

While public debate in the U.S. swirls over the best and quickest course of action to reduce carbon emissions, another  debate on global warming is quietly unfolding in anonymous government offices across the country: how to manage wildlife and ecosystems that are certain to be greatly impacted by the forces of climate change already underway.

The daunting challenges are broadly spelled out in this 32-page strategic plan put forth in December by the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service (which FWS is careful to label an “internal discussion draft”). As this passage makes clear, there is obvious concern that the “unprecendented scope and magnitude” of climate change may overwhelm the agency’s best efforts:

In the history of wildlife conservation, the Service and the larger conservation community have
never experienced a challenge that is so ubiquitous across the landscape.  Our existing
conservation infrastructure will be pressed to the limit — quite likely beyond its limit — to
respond successfully.

Thus, some tough decisions lie ahead. The FWS envisions

that some populations and species will be lost, and some will only survive in
the wild through our direct and continuous intervention.  We will be especially challenged to
conserve species and habitats that are particularly vulnerable to climate-driven changes, but we
will dedicate our best efforts and expertise to the task, recognizing that we cannot save everything. We will need to make choices, and we will need to apply ourselves where we can make the greatest difference.

In my next post, I’ll describe the two courses of action that will guide federal wildlife management in the years to come. I’ll also speak with several biologists about the most vulnerable habitat and species they see threatened immediately by climate change.

You may not know this but between now and doomsday, there’s still a lot of choices to be made related to climate change. (I’ll get to a few of them in a minute.) That’s because all the news and blog chatter in recent months has focused on how we all of a sudden found ourselves on the fast track to carbon hell.  Let’s quickly recap:

This eye-popping study published in late January, with its headline cut from the tabloids, had an End Times feel to it for environmentalists already convinced that a Final Reckoning was coming due, in the form of Australian wildfires and California drought. The paper (through no fault of the authors) likely set the stage for what came next: an ugly (and to my mind, frivolous) sideshow over the media’s supposed culpability as a facilitator of planetary collapse.

By last week, the dire warnings and urgent call to action that came out of Copenhagen solidified the gestalt on global warming: we’re screwed…unless we act now.

Actually, we’re already screwed no matter what.  It’s time we stopped obsessing primarily on how to avert doomsday and started paying an equal amount of attention to how we’re going to adapt to the many widely anticipated impacts from climate change that are, in fact, just down the road. In terms of our own societal and ecosystem vulnerabilities, Tom Yulsman provides an excellent rejoinder to those who seem to ignore the clarion call for climate change adaptation.

Fortunately, numerous organizations and federal agencies are thinking hard about the game-changing impacts to wildlife, which are expected to occur even if the world changed to a carbon-free economy tomorrow. In November, Defenders of Wildlife issued a report titled, “Protecting wildlife and Ecosystems in a Warming World.” The report urged policymakers to rank ecological adapatation measures on par with that of carbon emission reductions.

In December, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service released a little-noticed draft “Climate Change Strategic Plan,” to be implemented over the next five years. The FWS is currently soliciting feedback from its employees and citizens on the plan, before it releases a final version later this year.

In the meantime, here’s the first graph:

Climate change is the most compelling conservation challenge of our time. Accelerating climate change will amplify current resource management challenges involving habitat fragmentation, degradation, and loss, as well as urbanization, invasive species, disease, parasites, and water management. As rising temperatures affect the dynamics of complex natural systems, the potential exists for mass species extinctions and disruptions.

The rest of this week I’ll be talking to ecologists and scientists at FWS and other federal agencies that are working on incorporating climate change into long-term management plans for ecosystems and wildlife. Check back occasionally to hear how ecological adaptation is being wrestled with in regions ranging from the Sonoran desert to the Everglades.

It’s time the public started wrestling with this issue as well.

Which crisis is more urgent:

the collapsing world economy, the accelerating buildup of greenhouse gases, the growing instability of Pakistan’s governing coalition,  the 29,000 children under five years old that die everyday from causes related to poverty, or the the tottering newspaper industry?

Really depends where you sit, doesn’t it?