Sustainability Blog

Tag: extinction

Goodbye glaciers

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The US-IALE conference in Anchorage was short but sweet — great science, wonderful colleagues, and new ideas.

However, as picturesque as the setting was, it was deeply unnerving. This winter was one of the warmest on record for Alaska, and indeed for much of the past winter, Alaska was warmer than much of the eastern US. When I arrived in Anchorage, it was at least 20 degrees (F) warmer than Houghton had been, and the trees were already fully leafed-out and blooming. Several wildfires contributed to a haze around the city that marred views and made our clothes smell like a campfire; the fire season started early and is expected to be a severe one, thanks to warm weather and dry conditions in the forests.

My son and I went on a glacier tour…. truly impressive! The blue hues and striations of black sediment made them far more beautiful than I had imagined. As we watched one of the glaciers calving, I wondered if any of those glaciers would be around for my son to show his children; odds are against it. Many speakers at the conference spoke of the difficulty that our “no analog” future presents us when we try to develop management plans for our ecosystems more than a few decades out. While they were talking about the vast reorganization of species and ecosystems that we are likely to see, I thought about how I might describe things like glaciers and tundra to my grandkids….. I am certain that my words, and even my photos, won’t do them justice.

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Saying goodbye

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Conservation biology is an often-dismal discipline. For every story with a happy ending, there are hundreds with a tragic one – and often beyond that, thousands that end without us ever knowing. The loss of species that endear themselves to us is always a particularly difficult goodbye.

The monarch butterfly is swiftly approaching a sad fate. Robbed of its critical food supply (milkweed) by industrial agriculture in the midwestern region of North America, fewer monarchs are able to reproduce and migrate back down to its wintering habitat in Mexico. This year, surveys of Mexican forests have recorded the lowest number of returning monarch butterflies since these surveys began. The monarch migration is a fantastic spectacle; these butterflies migrate thousands of miles in spring and fall. Their large size and colorful markings make them familiar to most, and hence their declining numbers are likely to be noticed. That is the good news.

In this conservation case, everyone can help. Planting milkweed (the native species to North America, not tropical species such as Asclepias curassavica) in your front and back yard will help replace the feeding stations that the butterflies have lost with agriculture, and allow them to build up their numbers. Large populations help the butterfly persist through late springs (which disrupt their breeding schedule) and extreme weather events that can kill them outright.

For more information on monarch biology and how to help, you can visit the Monarch Watch webpage.

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Loss

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Maya Lin, creator of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C., is developing a lovely and moving web memorial to global biodiversity loss. Moving your mouse to click different dots, you can see single stories of species that have already disappeared, or click yourself into a “wormhole” with a story about once-abundant species now drastically reduced (and – too rarely – on their way back from the brink).

I suspect that for most people, staring at the possible loss of majestic species such as Siberian tigers helps to drive the point home. Stories of flocks of billions of passenger pigeons darkening the North American skies for days succinctly captures the destruction that a million guns can do to even the most abundant of species. But for ecologists, it is the smaller, less grandiose species we have studied that pull on our heart strings. I’ve worked on two species close to the edge (the California gnatcatcher and the Cape Sable seaside sparrow), and if and when they disappear it will be forever (as the failed attempts at saving the Dusky seaside sparrow illustrate). For ecologists, the loss of “our” species inspires a unique feeling of failure among us.

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The Anthropocene epoch

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There is an interesting piece in this week’s Science regarding the discussions that geologists are having at their meeting this week, as to whether the epoch we are in right now should be officially called the “Anthropocene”, and if so, when it should start.

It may seem like one of those nerd debates that doesn’t really matter to normal folks, but this one really does. The article has some excellent graphics and truly frightening statistics to anchor this debate. Consider this: 80% of the Earths’ land area has been altered by humans, and 90% of the biomass represented by mammalian species is currently tied up in either human or domesticated livestock bodies. Think about that…. our bodies and our cows, goats and sheep outweigh all of the lions and tigers and bears out there, not to mention the elephants, whales, and gorillas.

Wow. That one took me a while to process.

So what does this say about our future on this planet, or even the future of our planet? Back in 1986, Peter Vitousek* sounded an alarm regarding our increasingly heavy footprint, estimating that humans soaked up about 40% of the planet’s Net Primary Productivity, a measure of how much sunlight plants convert into biomass. That doesn’t leave much left for the millions of species with which we share this rock. And unfortunately, our fate is tied up with most of those millions; if they go, there is no guarantee that we won’t go too.

*Vitousek P, Ehrlich P, Ehrlich A, Matson P. 1986. Human appropriation of the products of photosynthesis. BioScience 36:368-373.

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