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November/December 2009: Hope Against Hope |
Hope Against Hope
Why Adirondack environmentalists persevere in a world where nothing is the same
by Mary Thill
I arrived here in 1990, the beginning of what turned out to be an optimistic decade in Adirondack Park conservation. Congress had just passed Title IV of the Clean Air Act, mandating reductions in sulfur dioxide emissions from Midwestern power plants that acidify Adirondack lakes and streams. A 100-year recovery was still playing out, evidenced by the return and multiplication of moose, ravens and eagles. The creatures seemed to tell us that this place had truly healed from the persecution and unlimited hunting and logging of the 19th century, and that we could aspire to overcome DDT, mercury and other defilements of the 20th century.
Environmentalists met setbacks in their fight to strengthen Adirondack land-use regulations, but in the meantime land trusts and timberland owners protected hundreds of thousands of acres from ever being broken by paved roads or houses. The 1990s were when the Adirondack Park seemed to grow into its reputation as a model for the world, a place where people from all geographies could study how humans might coexist in balance with nature. Two Adirondack books with the word “Hope” in the title were written. The story of the park was Recovery and the trajectory of environmental progress was Excelsior.
But outside threats were mounting from which another comeback would be less up to us than to people who may never have heard of this place. I distinctly recall a turning point in my own feeling of efficacy. Some staff and trustees of the Nature Conservancy, at whose Adirondack Chapter I worked, returned chastened from an international conference where keynote speaker Ted Turner told them that the organization’s recent purchase of a barrier island off the Georgia coast—a purchase the ardent conservationist, himself, funded—was nice but it wouldn’t stop the ocean from submerging the island.
The Adirondacks “will not have to contend with rising sea levels or thawing permafrost,” Wildlife Conservation Society researcher Jerry Jenkins would write a decade later. “We will probably not suffer violent storms, extended droughts or gigantic fires. Our water supplies are probably secure, and our farms are capable of feeding us if farms elsewhere fail.” But, Jenkins predicts, climate change will affect this region in other ways. “We will lose river ice first, then lake ice, and then ice and snow in the mountains.” We will lose the deep cold that gives us boreal wetlands and forests in the northwestern park and many of the animals and plants that go with them. Under best-case scenario projections, Adirondack temperatures will be something like West Virginia’s by 2100—scientists say that much is irreversible. The challenge before us is to keep them from reaching those of the Gulf Coastal plain.
Climate is just one factor deflating optimism. New invasives threaten to reorder the array of local species even faster. The emerald ash borer, a little beetle from Asia probably imported in wooden packing crates, has been confirmed in Quebec and western New York and is poised to all but wipe out white ash in the Adirondack forest. The pest has killed tens of millions of trees since it was first identified in 2002 as a problem in Detroit. The federal agency in charge of a response is one year into a five-year plan to study the insect, after which it will evaluate which natural enemies of the beetle might be released to control it. It may be too late for all but the most isolated white ash by then. Asian long-horned beetles could decimate maples and, if temperatures warm enough, the wooly adelgid could strip Adirondack hemlocks.
Bats are the mascot of an especially helpless feeling. The ones that hibernate in Northeastern caves have been dying over the past three years. Wildlife biologists who enter the caverns witness piles of carnage. Bird watchers report bats flying on winter days and dropping dead on the snow. To most of us, the catastrophe is only an absence, a lack of dark forms skimming the lake on summer evenings.
The cause of the die-off is tentatively identified as a white fungus growing around the noses of the dead and dying animals, giving the phenomenon the name White Nose Syndrome. The cold-loving fungus was genetically linked this year to one found in Europe. “It looks like what we have here is an exotic from Europe. An invasive species,” says wildlife biologist Al Hicks, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s bat expert.
The graphite mine near Ticonderoga, the largest bat wintering site in the Northeast, sheltered about 200,000 little brown bats, Hicks says. Last winter biologists counted only 3,000. “If we need to be more cheery,” he says, “we have not seen any clear evidence yet of any kind of resistance—that the animals that are surviving from one year to the next appear to be animals that simply got lucky and didn’t become infected.” The abandoned mine was often described as “protected” under measures taken by the Nature Conservancy, landowner International Paper and Bat Conservation International in the 1990s.
The fungus might have been unwittingly introduced to this region by a visitor to Howe Cavern, a tourist attraction west of Albany. It has already spread north to Ontario and Quebec and south to Virginia. “If current trends continue … we can expect the little brown bat, which was 85 percent of our bat population, to be extirpated in the next few years, as well as the northern long-eared bat and the Eastern pipistrelle,” Hicks says. Other species, including the endangered Indiana bat, may follow if cave heaters and other mitigation efforts fail.
Hicks was interviewed this year for a New Yorker article entitled “The Sixth Extinction?” The story explored bat deaths as well as amphibian population crashes in other regions, caused by a different fungus spread by humans moving a species of African frog beyond its range. “It is now generally agreed among biologists that another mass extinction is under way,” author Elizabeth Kolbert writes. There have been five major extinctions over the past half-billion years, the article states, and the next is being accelerated by anthropogenic causes, including climate change. “Though it is difficult to put a precise figure on the losses, it is estimated that, if current trends continue, by the end of this century as many as half of earth’s species will be gone.”
People often ask Hicks what they can do for bats. Not much, he responds, but he urges them to lobby their representatives on another issue. “As bad as the white nose stuff is—and we’re talking about the loss of a large percentage of an entire order of mammals in the United States, worst-case scenario—it absolutely pales in comparison to global warming. Every one of you can participate very actively in this.”
Hicks spoke at a meeting of the Nature Conservancy’s Adirondack Chapter this summer. He and author Bill McKibben bookended the agenda. Both cited 2007 as a turning point: that’s when state biologists became aware of White Nose Syndrome and when McKibben says he realized he’d underestimated climate change. McKibben wrote the first book on global warming, The End of Nature, two decades ago at his home in the southeastern Adirondacks. “The only thing I got wrong and that the scientists got wrong 20 years ago was how quickly and on what scale we were going to see change,” he says. “Frankly I thought back then that this would be a problem that would manifest most in the time of my children and grandchildren.…
“Two years ago this summer scientists began to note with some alarm that ice had been melting in the Arctic at really unprecedented rates,” McKibben says. “We were losing an area about the size of Great Britain every week in sea ice.… And this melt was happening 50 years ahead of what the computer models had suggested would take place. Climate change went from being a future threat to a present emergency.
“We will figure out in the next few years whether we get out of that, not in perfect shape—it’s too late for that—not get out of it intact, but whether we get out of it at all,” he says. McKibben has become an activist, urging people to press for drastic cuts in fossil fuel emissions. He founded 350.org, based on a paper by NASA scientist James Hansen and others projecting that the natural systems that gave rise to civilization and the current order of life on Earth are disrupted when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeds 350 parts per million. The planet is now at 390 parts per million.
McKibben was one of the people writing “Hope” stories about the Adirondacks in the 1990s. Even though he’s visited island nations that are preparing for inundation and Asian rivers that are disappearing as feeder glaciers melt, he still does find hope here. “There is no more interesting project going on anyplace in the world that I know of than this attempt to preserve the real core of the Adirondacks. The Finch deal is the greatest outstanding piece of conservation work, not in the Adirondacks, not in New York State, not in the United States, but anyplace in the world that I know of,” he told the Conservancy’s Adirondack Chapter, citing its 2007 purchase of 161,000 timberland acres from Finch, Pruyn & Company.
It was a quiet group that left the meeting. McKibben’s words were heartening but seemed to stretch logic: how could a local land purchase—even arguably the most important one in the history of the Adirondack Park—matter in a world where nothing is quite the same? But McKibben might be right, and Ted Turner might be wrong. Continuing to conserve land could prove to be one of the best hedges against climate change and nonnative species, especially here.
“Scientists tend to shy away from saying very concrete things,” notes Charles Canham, a forest ecologist with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, in Millbrook, New York. Still, he unequivocally agrees with McKibben about maintaining a strong Adirondack core. Big unfragmented landscapes better withstand invasives, Canham says. If white ash is not erased from the list of living things it’ll be in part because of places like this, where scattered, remote trees might escape the ash borer’s notice, just as a few scattered American elms and chestnuts escaped blights of the 20th century. Science has yet to link the extinction of a plant species to an invasive, Canham adds, so holdovers are important in case an effective control is ever discovered.
Conservationists say species will also need unbroken “land bridges” so they can move as climates and habitats change. They speak less frequently about the value of deep forest in and of itself. Canham and a student researcher are about to release a paper concluding that the woods stretching from northern New York to Maine will continue to accumulate carbon for at least a hundred years—“a lot of carbon,” he says. The Earth’s soil and plants are estimated to hold three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. Disturbances such as logging and construction release the greenhouse gas. Young, rapidly growing trees store the most carbon, but even century-old woods are net absorbers, Canham found. No one knows conclusively at what age decay begins to emit more CO2 than a forest takes up, he says, but “from the point of view of carbon sequestration in the forest we can’t find any amount of logging that is better for the atmosphere than doing no logging at all.” Nearly half the Adirondack Park is state-owned Forest Preserve, where timbering is prohibited by the state constitution.
In fact, the next threat here might be the same as the first: logging. Not the sustainable harvesting that’s been going on for the past few decades, where only about a third of the growth is cut. What concerns Canham is that a scramble for renewable alternatives to fossil fuels could create an unappeasable demand for wood. A biofuel boom could puncture the Adirondacks with roads and clearings, and stop private forests—even those under conservation easement—from maturing beyond early successional habitat. He foresees debates over the public benefit of sequestered carbon versus wood-based fuels. A day may come when governments propose paying landowners not to log.
“I do see lots to worry about, but I actually think we consistently underestimate the resilience of nature,” Canham says. “I think the story here is that this has been a very resilient ecosystem. There are a couple of reasons, some of them very nerdy/biogeographic: We don’t have a lot of endemic species here. This was a landscape that was ground over by mile-thick glaciers 15,000 years ago so the species that got here tend to be widespread, tend to be reasonably dispersible. We have relatively few that have really narrow environmental tolerances. We’re also sort of at the geographic heart of the range of the Northern Forest; it goes out to Wisconsin, it goes down to the Smokies and the Appalachians and out to the Maritimes.”
No other piece of this ecosystem is as well preserved as the Adirondacks, and Canham thinks the park’s conservation history will continue to help it hold up better than most places. And the term “Recovery” remains relevant, as the land is still demonstrating. “Yes, if we grabbed a little bit of the forest floor, there’d be lead in it from leaded gasoline, that’s everywhere in the world now, more or less,” Canham says. “Yes, there’s mercury in the lakes and there’s mercury in the soil and in the birds and the otters. But we can solve that problem. Nitrogen is still an issue and so is acidity. We also know how to solve those problems. The lakes will recover, very slowly, but they will. Yeah, I still do feel very optimistic about this landscape.”
Mary Thill wrote about wind power in the 2009 Collectors Issue. She is a former editor of and frequent contributor to this magazine. Thill lives in Saranac Lake.
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