To be officially considered a glacier an ice field must meet three criteria. It must be deep enough to create glacial ice (roughly one hundred feet). It has to be at least twenty five acres in size. And it has to move. When it was first visited by naturalists in the late 1800’s the area that’s now Glacier National Park contained well over one hundred and fifty glaciers. Today the park has less than thirty…and every one of those is a mere fraction of it’s original size. Although the estimates of the early 2000’s were that the park would have some glacial activity until 2030…today it’s expected that within seven years Glacier National Park will be glacier-less.
Climate change has obviously gotten a lot of attention and been the cause of a great deal of debate…especially lately. Meanwhile back at the ranch, climate change has an older cousin who’s just as scary but apparently not quite as sexy… called the disappearing bounty of our planet. You see, everywhere that historical records are to be found they tell us that the wildlife that we’ve fished and hunted are now nowhere near as large in size nor are they as numerous…and…that’s not a good thing. Oh sure…we protect endangered species and all…but we’re pretty selective about it, and it ends up to be more of a popularity contest for those attractive but down on their luck species. Bald Eagles and Humpback Whales and Wolves are one thing but if the cockroach population were suddenly to struggle I seriously doubt we’d see a big push to preserve them.
Here are just A FEW examples of what I’m talking about… bear in mind all of these have happened over just the last two hundred years: In 1822 more than A BILLION fish were pulled from the Potomac River in a single season. The Potomac River barely supports life now, and in 2013 it was declared unsafe to swim, boat, or fish in. In the mid 1800’s twenty pound lobsters were so common in North American they were used to feed livestock, today the average lobster weighs 1.25lbs and twenty pounders are so rare that they create news when they’re caught. In 1883 42,799,000 lbs of salmon are caught on the Columbia, by 1899 – just SIX YEARS later – the yearly catch was more than HALVED to less than18,000,000 lbs. Today every variety of salmon that was indigenous to the Columbia is extinct or endangered. Records from the 1850’s report oyster beds that stretched as far as the eye could see that often formed reefs that blocked ships access to rivers, and herds of wild Bison that extended for dozens of miles. And we’re only talking about US here! Worldwide it’s been no better. The population of whales…the plains of Africa…the rivers of Europe…the fisheries of the world…all sharing the same state.
But this isn’t the typical you’ve got to change your evil ways baby rant. What I think is really important to understand…be it global warming or the diminishing bounty of the land…is that nobody’s done…or is doing it…on purpose. I think the thought that “someone else” is doing it on purpose is a thought of the really dangerous variety…because deludes us into thinking that if we’re members of the “aware” team then we couldn’t possibly be a part of the problem. And that’s simply not true. Not one of the aforementioned environmental catastrophes was perpetrated by a person or a group whose goal was to destroy an ecosystem.
Maybe the best way to explain my point is to introduce you to Don Currey. Don was an environmental researcher in the early 1960’s. In 1964 he was on a research grant from the University of North Carolina doing climate research using the Bristlecone Pines that grow in a grove on the side of Wheeler Peak in the Snake Range in Big Basin National Park. Bristlecone Pines are a really interesting tree. If you’ve never seen one…well…the best description that I can think of is that they look like a visual representation of a tortured soul…gnarled and twisted and bent. They thrive in extremely harsh soils and climates. And they’re…as we’ll soon find out…INCREDIBLY old.
Typically researchers will take a sample from the tree by manually screwing a drill called a “borer” into the tree and pulling out a sample that they can take back to their lab. But the wood of the Bristlecone is extremely dense and as Don was attempting to core the tree…his borer…broke. Now what? The tool…as the story goes…was special ordered and he didn’t have another nor did he have the time to wait for one as his window for research was rapidly closing. So Don goes to the head ranger and explains the situation…tools broke, times running out, important research, not a notable landmark. “No problem Don,” the ranger ultimately says. “We’ll cut it down for you.” No…really…and it get’s better.
The tree’s really dense and apparently it takes them awhile to get it down…but they do. They section the tree and Don takes several of them and heads back to the lab. Once at his lab Don starts counting the rings…but the rings are really tightly packed. In fact, they’re so close together that he needs a magnifying glass to count them. At the end of the first day he’s counted one thousand. Mid way through the second day he gets back to the time of Christ. By the end of the third day he’s counted over four thousand eight hundred rings…and come to the startling realization that he’s just discovered AND killed the worlds oldest living organism…by accident. And I think that it happens like this all the time. We’re just trying to do the best that we can and…OOPS…did NOT see that one coming. And it’s because we’re always operating with just a fraction of the whole story. Unfortunately Don died about nine years before someone discovered…without destroying it…a tree that’s over five thousand years old, and took the heat off of him.
Realizing that we’re only playing with a fraction of the facts is first off…humbling…which is probably why we don’t like to do it. And second…it really limits the play book because it’s impossible to solve a problem when you do know exactly what’s causing the problem. We’ve been trying to control Ma Nature forever and…honestly…she might be a little too complex for us. Especially when our thinking is pretty much starts and ends with “us”. I’m just not too sure that Mother Nature views us as the priority that we think she does. In China there’s a saying: Let me help you or you will drown said the monkey to the fish as he put him high in a tree. We’re seeing a lot of that kind of thinking these days. I think a REALLY good place to start is to see that the wildness is our indispensable life support system…in more ways than one. And to admit that…when push comes to shove…we’re not really sure how that life support system works.