New West Feature
Grizzlies Only Scratch the Surface of What It Will Mean to Lose the Whitebark Pine
The twisted, threatened symbol of high elevation connects an entire ecosystem. As one biologist puts it, "We don’t know what’s going to happen without whitebark.”By Shauna Stephenson, 8-31-10
 |
|
 | |
| This aerial shot above Union Pass on the northern edge of the Gros Ventre Range in Wyoming shows the "sea of red" among beetle-killed whitebark pines. It's part of a recent report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is suing U.S. Fish & Wildlife to get the tree listed as an endangered species. Photo by W.W. Macfarlane et al. 2010. | |
|
Blame it on their large stature or America’s obsession with bears, but when it comes to the decline of the whitebark pine, the grizzly may be the least of our worries.
“Everyone is thinking grizzly bear, and there’s no question there is going to be some impact on grizzly food supply,” says whitebark expert Diana Tomback. “What they don’t understand or what really hasn’t been well-emphasized is there is a bigger issue here. Whitebark pine is a species that plays a number of important ecological roles in high elevation communities.”
A recent report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says the tree could become functionally extinct within the next decade due to an increase in mountain pine beetle infestation. The increase is attributed to a warming trend that allows beetles to reach areas formerly off-limits due to harsh weather. Surveys conducted by the group showed that in the Yellowstone area, 82 percent of the forests are dead or dying. That report echoes its lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the tree on the Endangered Species Act, a review the service is currently looking at.
“Whitebark pine is basically a sitting duck to pine beetle,” says Louisa Willcox of NRDC.
However, even if the beetle were to disappear tomorrow, trouble would be looming on the horizon for the species says Tomback, a professor and acting chair of the Department of Integrated Biology at the University of Colorado Denver. She says that rates of blister rust are high enough across its range to pose a serious threat. Blister rust, she notes, attacks all age classes of whitebark, not just mature ones.
“Pine beetle outbreaks settle down,” she says. “Blister rust doesn’t give trees a chance. … Everything is vulnerable.”
With the two working in tandem, whitebark is getting hit on both sides. Trees that might have survived the blister rust are now being attacked by mountain pine beetle, causing a trickle down effect in the ecosystem as a whole.
But in the time since that report was released, very little has been said about the bigger picture. While the fateful tree has dominated the news, the explanation of what that actually means has been largely ignored. Perhaps it is because these things make for less than sexy headlines – indeed, who can get excited about words like sublimation or evapotranspiration? But it is these changes that will eventually be felt by the populations as a whole.
It is hard to gauge the specifics of how this change will occur. The fact of the matter is we have never experienced this type of shift on this scale. While there have been both pine-beetle and blister-rust outbreaks in the past, they have not been as broad as this one appears to be. Add to that the multiple other fronts America’s forests seem to be fighting on, and it can become quite hard to comprehend, let alone predict. That said, what is out there, isn’t pretty.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen without whitebark,” Tomback says.
WHITEBARK ECOLOGY
A dead whitebark pine tree near Daisy Pass, MT. Photo by Whitney Leonard for NRDC.
To understand what is happening with whitebark now, we must first take a step back and understand how the tree functions in a healthy ecosystem.
Whitebark is a trailblazer, a trendsetter, an ass-kicker of a tree—a tree Westerners can really relate to, one of the oldest and toughest broads out there. As one of the last trees before the tree line, the widely distributed whitebark leads a harsh and harrowing life.
Given its precarious perch, it serves a few very important functions. It acts as a snow fence in the winter and it provides shade in the spring, slowing runoff and parsing out water to lower-elevation communities well into the summer. After fires, it is one of the first to regenerate in compromised soil, blazing the way for other species to take root behind it.
It is a food source to multitudes of wildlife. Clark’s nutcrackers enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the tree, dispersing its seeds while using them throughout the year as a food source. Red squirrels cache cones in middens, feeding both themselves and the occasional grizzly bear fattening up for winter. Other species such as the Golden-mantled squirrel, chipmunk species, the hairy and white-headed woodpeckers, Williamson’s sapsucker, mountain chickadee, white- and red-breasted nuthatches, Stellar’s jay, raven, pine grosbeak, red crossbill and Cassin’s finch all dabble in whitebark seed consumption at various times of year.
But it also has a softer side. It is individualistic. Unlike the lodgepoles and Douglas firs of the world, each tree has its own personality, twisting and carving its unique niche. It is a long-lived tree: reaching ages old enough to have been around when the Magna Carta was signed, there when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, when America declared its independence, and when Lewis and Clark ventured west.
“They’re kind of symbols of the high elevation. As they decline, we lose their beauty,” Tomback says. “As they’re lost, we lose a sense of ancient presence.”
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE...
For years, fights over water and water rights have raged throughout the West. With the decline of whitebark, those fights are only bound to increase.
As trees die, their ability to both capture snowpack and shade it is reduced. On the other end, live trees also take up a huge amount of water, taking up the most when they are young and then tapering off as they mature. With large stands of trees dying, that ratio is bound to play a role as well.
“It’s going to vary depending on watershed and percentage of tree cover in that water shed,” says Greg Pederson, research scientist with USGS at the Bozeman-based Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center.
He says some areas may see lower snowpacks and earlier runoff, meaning longer, drier summers. Other areas may experience more water in the system, leading to flooding downstream. As trees begin to grow back, short term gains may turn into losses as young trees take up more water.
Some areas may even benefit from the canopy being opened up a bit, allowing more snow to accumulate during the winter. Factors such as erosion and fire will play a role, as will wind.
“At the end of the day the hard part is picking apart what’s happening among those processes,” he says.
Couple all of that with changing temperatures and the difficulty of prediction increases exponentially. Over the years, Steve Gray, Wyoming state climatologist, has seen a trend in the average temperatures going up in the northwestern part of the state. While he says it’s too early to tell if this is a long-term trend, or short-term variability, one thing is for certain:
“The bottom line is that the best guess we have, the majority or all of the forecast predictions we have, say it’s going to be warmer,” he says. “It’s just a matter of how fast that happens and the magnitude of that warming. Even a seemingly small shift in average temperature is going to have significant consequences of regional ecosystems.”
As that shift occurs, it gets passed down the line.
“Lower elevations are intimately connected to what happens up in the high country,” he says. “Changes will have definite and significant consequences for everything that happens downstream. That includes a huge part of the U.S. population.”
ADAPTATION AS A LIFESTYLE
As whitebark declines, the wildlife that depends on it will have to adapt as well.
Grizzlies tend to be at the center of this polarizing debate. While their use of whitebark pine seeds is well-documented, they are also known as a highly adaptable creature, switching over to other food sources when one becomes unavailable. Lawsuits and politics aside, there is no doubt a change in whitebark pine will have an impact on the bear. The question is: To what extent?
Chuck Schwartz, leader of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, says when whitebark pine crops are low, the impact doesn’t necessarily affect bears across the entire population.
“Our data show that bears drop down in elevation about 200 meters in poor-versus-good whitebark pine years in autumn,” Schwartz wrote in an e-mail. “There seems to be some confusion on this movement. All the bears don’t pack their suitcase and move from the mountain tops to the valley bottoms where people live.
“Bears that live in secure habitats--areas with few roads, developments and homes--shift in elevation and use alternate foods and continue to survive just fine. It’s the bears that exist on the edge of the ecosystem that tend to shift closer to humans.”
While it’s the mortality levels in those populations that concern environmentalists, Chris Servheen, grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, says populations have been increasing for years and continue to increase. It is just the rate of that increase that will be impacted.
“There’s not enough mortality to change the overall increase,” he says. “(It is just) a slower increase during the poorer whitebark years.”
But with Clark’s Nutcrackers—the main dispersant of whitebark seeds—a change in behavior could have major consequences.
“Nutcrackers won’t go extinct,” Tomback says. They’ll continue to eat seeds and it’s likely they’ll simply shift to some of the other species in the forest. That shift, however, may have some longer-term implications for their carrying capacity and could spell further disaster for the tree.
This is where things get more complex. Think of the entire system as a business. You have a set number of employees, which is like your carrying capacity, and you have a budget of food that fluctuates based on a number of factors. A reduction in carrying capacity is like nature’s version of layoffs: If there’s not enough money in the budget to pay 10 employees, it will reduce that number to five.
But that number turns around and takes a bite out of the overall health of whitebark pines. Just like layoffs, if there are only five nutcrackers supported by the forest, then there are only five to do the work. And while “do more with less” is all the rage, it doesn’t really work for this tree. As seeds decline, red squirrels get desperate and begin targeting the trees, harvesting entire crops before they are mature and hiding them away in their middens, leaving little for the nutcrackers to cache. Immature seeds won’t germinate and the problem is compounded. Essentially, less work gets done.
As that continues to trickle down, other species will be impacted. While many of the other small mammals and birds, including chipmunks and blue grouse, don’t depend on the tree as a main food source, that contribution is still part of their annual food budget and they have to turn to other sources. Thus, we begin to rob Peter to pay Paul.
“The point is what’s going to happen when we don’t have that many whitebark pine seeds,” Tomback says. “Whenever you remove a food source, there’s always an impact on the rest of the ecosystem.
THE DREADED E-WORD
Tunnels created by mountain pine beetles in the Gros Ventre range, Wyoming. Photo by Whitney Leonard for NRDC.
The forecast for the entire situation has some putting the nails in the coffin for whitebark pine.
Tomback says with climate change being the 900-pound gorilla in the room, this notion that trees will just shift north isn’t as simple as it seems. There have to be viable seeds to do that and processes to distribute them.
“Some people say, well, 50 years from now if the range moves north, what difference is it going to make?” she says. “I need to point out that unless there are healthy populations of whitebark, it can’t move north.”
While solutions have been identified, there is a significant lack of funding in implementing them. Blister-rust-resistant seedlings are being collected and grown in greenhouses to be replanted in their native habitats. But this solution tends to be both difficult and costly.
In the mean time, Tomback is avoiding the big “E” (extinction) and instead, opting for the little “e.”
“At this point, I don’t want to sound alarmist, but from what I’ve seen I can, with confidence, say expatriation from many parts of its range is a real possibility.”
While the fundamental premise of an ecosystem revolves around its ability to evolve and adapt, it’s hard to see how forests are going to adapt their way out of this one – true, they will go on. But picturing that end result is a stretch.
With the introduction of invasive species, change in climate, change in fire regime and countless other factors, ecosystems seem to be facing bigger problems on larger scales more and more often. When blister rust came to America in the early 1900s, it was only the beginning.
“It could have been considered the harbinger of what we’re dealing with today,” Tomback says.
Forests everywhere seem to be at war and, while change is part of the natural process, keeping faith that everything will be O.K. is difficult, even for the most optimistic.
“We are just going to be in a crisis mode,” Tomback says. “I don’t know what else we’re going to do to deal with this [while] struggling to keep our native ecosystems in tact.”
Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.
Comments
Climate change is real, the beetles and the rust issues are real. Responsible managers have been concerned for years about forest management techniques that made the forests vulnerable to these threats.
But I catch a whiff of Chicken Little afloat on the breeze in the current brouhaha. Let's at least get our facts straight before we launch any new lawsuits.
Thirty years experience with the ESA make me wonder how a listing will help the pine. I do know it will make the landscape much harder to manage if we ever do come up with a plan, THAT's what I need explained to me. Meanwhile we're just feeding lawyers and activists, ideas that trouble me as mixed blessings.
Can somebody explain this strategy to me?
In my view the reason the landscape is getting harder to manage is because we the people are making the entire planet a sewer for our waste.
This current deal with an imported rust we got from good old European gooseberries, (current deal--good pun) which went to wild currants, and attacked white pines, and the issue of rampant pine beetle attacks are just Darwin's theory at work. Either resistance arrives or it does not. Something will take white bark's place. The limber pine cones will feed some Clark's nutcrackers. Maybe they will plant seeds enough to make it an ascendant species. The bears will get by because they are omnivores and can eat about anything. The hand wringing will never cease because that is what the designated hand wringers do. Lastly, the Federal land managers will figure out how to incinerate the last of the living white bark pines, as that is their mission now that resource preservation and conservation has been tossed out the door by the New Mother Earth queens of dubious decisions.
In a word, you can care all you want, but you are not going to do a thing about it, as you have done not a thing about it for five centuries. Live with it.
That logging is good for the woods, and ending logging in certain areas caused the demise of the whitebark pine.
In reality our healthiest whitebark stands are found in wilderness and blister rust was transported by not onylgooseberries but logging trucks.
But hey any opportunity to blamer all problems on wildernes and envios.
Honestly the right wing rhetoric coming out of you two is disgusting.
Well done and quite accurate. Having for the last three summers gone hiking and riding through whitebark pine forests in northwestern Wyoming to assess the impact of the mountain pine beetle on WBP, I've seen the ecological impacts of the death of WBP first hand.
Aside from the impact on grizzly bears, nutcrackers, and red squirrels, one critical point you make above needs special emphasis and expansion if we're to get peoples' attention on the problem--the loss of WBP will have a devastating effect on irrigation-dependent agriculture and water dependent development in the Rocky Mountain West.
As you note, WBP provides thermal cover to the snowpack in the mountains. As WBP dies out, we'll see the snowpack (what snowpack we get, due to on again, off again drought) melt earlier and faster. That means: 1) more spring flooding and 2) limited water for irrigation later in the summer. That also means, for example, no or few second cuttings on hay. As water quantities continue to decline, that means perhaps no first cuttings either, at least on ranches or farms with junior water rights.
Here in Wyoming's Upper Wind River Basin, which is in the heart of WBP country, we're already facing another water threat from climate change--melting glaciers. Currently, the Wind River Mountains have the largest number of glaciers of any range in the lower 48 states. With current warming trends, our glaciers will be practically gone within a couple of decades.
In 2003, we saw a sub-glacier lake burst through the weakened ice of Grasshopper Glacier to flood the Downs Fork and Dinwoody Creek, a tributary of the Wind River. This kind of event is called by geologists a "jokulhlaup." https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Jökulhlaup. The Dinwoody ran green with glacial flour for weeks. The flood covered the Downs Fork meadows with white sand and washed out an outfitter camp. Luckily, no one was killed, since the event occurred during the day and everyone was out of camp on horse rides.
The disappearance of WBP and glaciers at the same time and the resulting decline in water quantity will strike a double blow to agriculture in the Upper Wind River Basin and completely disrupt water current allocations. Consequently, water law is in for a revolution.
In the 1980s, when the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes of the Wind River Indian Reservation went to court to exert more control of water allocation within the Basin, tensions between Indians and whites were high. People walked around with baseball bats and shotguns guarding headgates. (See Geoffrey O'Gara's wonderful book, What You See in Clear Water, for the story of the conflicts over the Basin's water). The Tribes eventually won senior water rights in the US Supreme Court, although they lost their bid to have instream flow designated as a beneficial use for fisheries on the Reservation.
As water quantity declines in the basin, the Tribes will exert greater control over water, and tensions will be much higher than they were in the 1980s.
Even where the politics are different, declining water quantities consequent to climate change and warming throughout the West will create extreme political and personal tensions. As we know, the Colorado River is both declining in flows and is oversubscribed. States, cities, and ranchers and farmers are all fighting over what happens to the remaining water. Conflicts can only get worse as water continues to decline.
In short, aside from the ecological impacts from the decline or loss of whitebark pine, glaciers, and overall precipitation, we'll have to deal with unprecedented--for the United States--economic conflicts over water that current political and legal institutions will be unable to manage. It's going to be a wild ride.
RH
It is the enviros stirring things up,most of the information in the article came from the Natural Resources Defense Council,which does happen to be an extreme enviro group.
Logging was not destroying entire forests,like the enviro's made it out with all their lies,half-truths,manipulation of data,and obfuscations.
Not every logging operation was a clearcut,in certain areas,small clearcuts actually helped the overall health of the ecosystem.
Logging has been mainly selective harvest for years.
Sometimes,people have to come before a 3" fish,a kangaroo rat,
a small bird,or a spotted owl.
Species would still go extinct every day-with or with out humans,it's called evolution.
Either the whitebark pines will come back,or another tree will take their place,that also is evolution-the enviros need to just stay out of it.
That alone would save a lot of trees,if they would just stop filing lawsuits for a month.
There is a whole body of thought that says no upright vegetation at elevation, above the elevation of annual winter snow accretion, is watershed friendly, and will produce more water, over a longer time, and that aspect is the best conservator of snow in spring as it shades the snow banks and cornices that last into late spring and sometimes into late summer. Man has no way to alter aspect of the geography, or change the geology. A north slope is a north slope for a long, long time, and the sun moves from low on the southern horizon towards overhead until June 21, and then it drops to the south once again. Shade in mountainous country is mostly about aspect and not trees.
There was a time, not too long ago, that long, narrow clear cuts on north slopes were created to save and hold more snow than the treed cohort spaces between the clear cuts. My only guess is that those clear cuts did what all clear cuts do, and that was become young, tight forests of saplings and whips, and now the snow retention is less than when it was in mature timber. You do have to know that our aboriginal predecessors were likely cognizant of this, and burned accordingly, to keep an open north aspect prairie system on ridge tops to bring ease to travel (it being easier to travel ridge top to ridge top, than to descend into valleys, and then have to ascend to another ridge top or walk for distances on side slopes. So burn off the ridge tops, and over the side, and you had more irrigation on the meadows in spring, and more water in the streams. I do wonder if the whitebark pine die off is just another part of a larger cycle that only is present due to the absence of thousands of years of Native American fire setters who sculpted the vegetation to meet the needs of the plants and animals that provided for their safety, comfort, and food security. Burning to alter climate, vegetation, and the response of vegetation and the critters that come to the type of vegetation they burned to achieve. If this sounds way too sophisticated for our modern sensibilities, we do have to remember they had no lawyers, no litigation, few lobbyists, and every reason to do whatever they needed to provide for their survival, which they did accomplish. We know they were there. We can see that they were there. We can see what they were. That is why science is always looking for the clues of their existence. So why do public land forest managers categorically deny their influence, their impacts, and by Wilderness Designation, deny their past existence? Since white Europeans have stridently denied humans altering forests has ever existed except in the form of evil loggers, and now dumber than a bucket of rock USFS fire policy for a century, all we have to show for it is forests in great peril of dying, burning, and being neglected to their eventual demise. Self flagellation can only take you so far, and then you have to fish or cut bait if you are to survive. This deal is so Pogoesque: We have discovered that we are the problem...by not doing a thing, we unravelled ten or more millennia of forest landscape management, and now the pointy heads are trying to rectify that by not fighting fire in the heat of summer. And hand wringing over dying trees. All the while not having the least desire to address man as a vital part of the husbandry of the kind of forests people visualize and want to enjoy, to wander in, and to find comfort, solace and silence in. We are lost. America is lost. We cannot survive where we are, and we have no consensual idea of how to move on, and where to move on to. So I guess we just enumerate the dead trees, count the bear mortality, measure the lack of water or the ill timing of lots of water, and whine a lot.
So, are you going to provide citations for these remarkable scientific studies to back up your claims, or are you going to keep them secret?
All I see here are the ideological claims that 1) the earth just can't get along without humans and 2) humans can make the earth "better."
All one has to do to counter those claims is look carefully at the places we live. The world truly is so much better as a consequence of human action, isn't it? Just where is that?
RH
In my mind, all that humans do is live at the edge of ice for the majority of their time on earth. So the equator is where we always have been, and north and south of that, we are migratory as we follow the ice edges, the snow fields, and the snow shadow valleys scraping out a living. Even the majority of the birds that we have in the northern part of the continent are warm weather creatures that fly to the equator or south to spend what is the northern winter, and then fly back in spring to let their equatorial habitat rest for a while, and breed and raise young here to take advantage of seasonal food sources.
PreColumbian burning of the landscape determined species and species densities. The "natural" fire was limited to what had not been burned seasonally by humans. And of course the "natural" fire was a force in areas that were not being fire maintained to produce the plants and animals that allowed for human survival. I have no idea of how this all worked before Europeans introduced beasts of burden such as horses, oxen, various types of asses. I am certain, afoot, protein from large animals was a very sophisticated hunting process and there had to be some type of food preservation. Buffalo jumps tell us something about hit and miss food availability. You know they had to be shared by great bears sooner than humans would have liked. My guess is a good and provident time for running bison over cliffs was winter. And then you camped next to the freezer until the bears came out of hibernation. But people were adapted to their environment, for thousands of years, and whether or not they "ruined" it is just a judgement call based on what? The pre Columbian people had to live in smoke much of the time. Bad air was a fact of life. And they were burning from sea to sea, at different times of the year, for reasons and purposes that were essential to their survival. The one thing that they could not have and prosper with was European and Asian diseases and genocide. Those factors are paramount in determining how our landscape looks today, for the "fire for resource purposes" they set have been out for two centuries or more, from sea to shining sea. For good of for bad.
Certainly present day human life is a huge impact on the earth. What do you do about? Perhaps it is best to let the Taliban control the population of Afghanistan. Keep women suppressed, their mortality the highest on earth. That also puts a stopper on population. Maybe we best give every third world male an assault rifle and bullets, and let them take care of themselves. Perhaps world wide conservation is best addressed by every citizen having equal means to kill each other, to defend their little piece of the pie. And draw a defensive line around the resources we have here, and live with out resources. Or do we import what we need, and drill, mine, cut, harvest, seine elsewhere in the world, all the while saving what we have?
The mythical gardens of Eden, the far away magical landscapes untouched by humans, are stuff of writing and writers, and sought out by humans, which only is the first step to destruction. Maybe U.S. academics should stay home, and not foul the footpaths of third world natural areas, exposing their fragility to the world. My only fear about hating people is that the people haters always end up with really bloody hands, and millions die for ideology or religion, as interpreted and foisted on them by the True Believers. The environmental movement in the U.S. is becoming the bailiwick of True Believers, and that scares me, frankly. Your strident beliefs in the inherent evil lurking in all mankind really show up when you get riled, Mr. Hoskins. And for your beliefs, there are equal and opposite beliefs held by others, and when both are intractable, all we get is fighting with no solutions.
As an example, I can find no reason to support designation of some tract of land as Wilderness, a permanent designation, for the purpose of "saving" or "protection" some special living "ecosystem", when each summer I see those very same places allowed to be destroyed by fire, or not being able to be fire managed by set fires because that would be the "hand of man" in action. There is no land that was not part of what kept hundreds of generations of people alive as part of their life support system long before yours and my forbearers arrived on this landscape. The "untrammeled by the hand of man" idea codified in law is codified genocide, and that goes against my grain. People used it all, set their fires wherever, saved this vegetation and that, husbanded trees and shrubs essential to their lives, and kept the berry fields burned lightly each fall. Hell, they still raise blueberries that way in Maine. AY, alternate year, harvesting. Harvest half your berries this year, burn them in fall, and harvest the other half next year, burning in the fall. That is a many millennia old practice of landscape management. Renewal by fire. For food, for fiber, for travel expediency, for a multitude of reasons. PhDs are writing about that all the time. All I know is that when 500 year old trees are allowed to burn with no effort to save them, protection of the old growth is a canard of great humor. Then, when fire from private land burns the public lands, US Attorneys show up to sue for damages, and then promptly claim value for timber (can never be logged so has no present or future commercial value), value for "loss of grandeur of the landscape" (which is lost in any "fire for resource benefit"), and loss to the sustainability and immediate past value of the "ecosystem" (which is a "benefit" if the Feds don't make an attempt to put out or control the fire, they claim that is because fire is "beneficial".) I want an accounting, in dollars, of the benefit of fire in the Wilderness. Then, I want a justification of fire allowed its head. If set, prescribed burning is "the hand of man", then by omission of effort of the landscape managers to suppress or put out a small fire that grows to landscape size not also the result of the hand of man? It is to my sensibilities, and it fouls a lot of air, changes a lot of soil chemistry, removes tons of organic matter in soils, makes soil impervious to water and accelerates runoff in storm events and in seasonal snow melts. Those are downside issues. What is the upside?
As a society, we will have sacrificial sites that house us, house our industries, become our transportation routes, our food sources, and even our fiber sources. Order in our society. I want better management, not no management at all. I want preservation over time of landscapes, not moonscapes post fire.
I look at a lot of 18th, 19th and 20th century landscape paintings. I also get to see mid 19th century and younger photos. Lots of young timber, trees, at low elevations, and the higher elevations are burned off in many, many landscape paintings. The fire historians say that aboriginal burning kept the tops of ridges burned off because that is where life and travel in the mountains took place. That is where life was easiest. The flat ground is on ridge tops, tables, and in valleys and deflation plains. Water was a known hazard in the latter two. I don't think we have spent enough time understanding how we got here from there, and by there I mean the waning of the last Ice Age.
The historical record says we are nearing the end of the present inter glacial period, and another Ice Age is imminent. What do we do to prepare for that? Or will the species diversity present, and the mutations and species development in the upcoming multitude of millennia just take care of itself? Or is it just a lot wiser to live in the moment, and understand that forces way beyond our control are always at work in the cosmos, and our fate is NOT in our hands, but in the random events of the universe?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/new-anthrome-maps/
Good time to learn a new word, Todd Fross and BearBait. ANTHROME. It's a brand new term contracted from " anthropological biomes" and is used to describe any biome where the affairs of mankind influence the natural biological/ecological state . [ A Biome is any large naturally occurring community of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat, e.g., forest or tundra. ]
These technical maps in the Wired article are colorful and quite beautiful, but they are also quite ominous. They show how the Earth's surface has been altered by mechanized mobile civilization since 1700, just before the Industrial Revolution to the Present. Only 300 years, which isn't even a heartbeat in geologic time, but the change is quite dramatic. This is what's happened between heartbeats.
I would love to see animated maps going back to the end of the Ice Ages and the beginnings of organized societies, city-states , then empires and finally nation states . In other words, when the Holocene Period of aboriginal humans spreading around the planet became the Anthropocene, where those humans began altering their global environment. The Middle East used to be covered in trees. The Sahara was not a desert....it had great rivers. We had not yet chopped down or burned 98 percent of the Black Forest , nor had we started in deforesting the vast Amazon or Papua New Guinea or killing the upper layers of the ocean with petroleum and huge swirls of plastic trash.
Closer to home, as recently as 200 years ago we still had over 60 million Bison in central North America and 12 million Elk ranging from the Appalachians to the Pacific. Wyoming had Woodland Caribou. There were seven species of Grizzly bear in the 48 States, not just one.
Billions of Passenger pigeons vanished, for what ? Where did all those Gypsy Moths come from ? Snakes on Guam ? Blister Rust ? Smallpox ? The Short Answer: You and Me. Or more accurately , our ancestors practicing something called Manifest Destiny , which continues to this very day. There are presently more species going extinct faster than after the asteroid hit Yucatan 65 million years ago, and humans are the reason why. There can be no denying that .
Like it or not, Todd and BB, we live in the Anthropocene Period and humans are more scourge, blight, and planet-eating virus than a positive force of nature. Watching a time lapse movie of the Earth where the last 2 million years or so are compressed into a few minutes, you would see us humans spreading like ugly grey mold across the skin of an orange .
Hope you like the Anthrome maps of the Anthropocene. Now learn from them.
Environmentalists are not the enemy , Todd...they are your conscience.
If " conscience" doesn't work , as you say , then we've all lost.
How many wolf killed sheep and cattle have you helped dig the holes for, and bury, how much are you willing to reimburse the rancher for, we know they get approximately 10% of the losses apid for by BOW, whi is no longer even pretending to fund the kills. How many nights have you offered to be with calving and lambing animals to protect them from wolves?
You seem to have lots of things that need doing....by someone else. If enviros was credibility they need to lead the way by example, not lawsuits and demands of sacrifices to be made by other people.
We all really do need to work together to teach ranchers to quit feeding the wolves the slow stupid easy meat. You can't blame the wolves for not taking the ranchers up on their choice offering. Gosh , there just is never a cowboy or herder around when you really need one . How are we ever going to get the wolves to go back to hunting wild elk and deer if the ranchers won't quit stocking the pantry ?
If only the poor tormented ranchers would just watch and work their cows more, and guard their precious property and livelihood-on-the-hoof a little better, they wouldn't be sent to the brink of utter ruin by wolves...its always those damn wolves. Those scapegoat wolves...the root of all rancher woes is wolves, wolves, and more wolves... the environmentalist's lapdogs from Hell. My gosh , there is now one wolf for every 5700 cows in Wyoming. Alarming! They're everywhere. We must be more diligent. Then maybe those 0.0005 percent of Wyoming's 1.4 million cattle that died from wolves last year will not have perished in vain...
Not my problem , Todd. Don't foist your delusions on me. I do not represent any of the environmental groups you so despise. When Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho ranchers whine about wolves and outfitters pout and throw tantrums on a daily basis --- yet refuse to adapt to modern times----the more I relish my plate of good wholesome Argentina beef and that great Wyoming dry cow elk. We have plenty of elk here in Wolf Country , Todd. Are you having trouble find some ? Try hunting a little smarter and harder...and spend less time spreading your delusions about enviros with the barn shovel.
Wolves are NOT:
1. a state's rights issue
2. a property rights issue
3. a hunting rights issue
4. a threat to any industry
5. ATM machines for environmentalist lawyers
What wolves ARE:
1. wildlife , not vermin
2. native
3. necessary ( = genuine conservation , without the politics and bureaucracy and special interests , if left alone to do the job)
4. not your grandad's wolf
Where did I ever say I was advocating throwing ranching over the side in favor of wolves or anything else? Why do you immediately leap to that conjecture? Nobody is wanting to put ranchers out of business, at all, and we appreciate their ( meager) contribution to the Wyoming economy. I'm not for foreclosing on ranching, and wolves are not putting them out of business, either. Au contraire, we all need something like ranching for the forseeable. Especially the wolves.
Your arguments are just the same old Chamber of Commerce schlock rhetoric that goes around and around but goes nowhere. In 2008 , the entire Gross State Product of Wyoming was $ 30.8 billion , and all of agriculture ( farm and ranch and forest products) contributed only $ 365 million. That is a whopping 1.2 percent, Todd. Not even two percent--- for everything grown or harvested or chopped or grazed.
Ranchers just need to learn two things: First , wolves are now back on the list of " Expensable item: Cost of Doing Business - losses of stock to various causes , such as birthing, respiratory , lightning, accidents , disease , and of course predators ( all of them ).
Second, livestock producers needs to realize that the public lands portion of their ranching is not what it once was, and they will have to adjust their grazing programs to accomodate climate change, new predator-prey relationships, economic externals . Ranching needs to evolve and adapt.
It would also be quite nice if the 97 percent of the public that is not involved in agriculture was not obligated to subsidize the marginal high elevation semi-arid cattle and sheep operations that receive so much public resources below cost , at the same time as that public's access to those same resources is rendered difficult by cattlemen who think they own or control public land. The public is not getting it's money's worth from ranching, no matter how much they spend in town or how many times it circulates. Keep it in economic perspective. Ranchers are not larger than life. ( news flash)
It's the 21st century , Todd. So evolve
Fire Near Boulder Most Destructive in Colorado History
Bat-Killing Disease Spreading, Closing Western Caves
Five Ways Motorists Can Defuse Road Rage for Cyclists
Something Is Always Biting in Loma, Montana, In or Out of the River
Land Legacy: Access to Fish Creek, a Recreational Paradise, Preserved For All
New Poets of the American West: Montana
Curry's Write-In Campaign Challenges the Odds
Wyoming First in Nation to Require Public Disclosure of Chemicals Used in Gas, Oil Drilling
Cancer Ended Photographer's Life, But his Images Live On
MEDIA PARTNERSFlathead Beacon Crosscut Seattle SunValleyOnline Headwaters News High Country News KUNC Radio 91.5 Daily Yonder WyoFile
New West Feature
Grizzlies Only Scratch the Surface of What It Will Mean to Lose the Whitebark Pine
The twisted, threatened symbol of high elevation connects an entire ecosystem. As one biologist puts it, "We don’t know what’s going to happen without whitebark.”
By Shauna Stephenson, 8-31-10
This aerial shot above Union Pass on the northern edge of the Gros Ventre Range in Wyoming shows the "sea of red" among beetle-killed whitebark pines. It's part of a recent report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is suing U.S. Fish & Wildlife to get the tree listed as an endangered species. Photo by W.W. Macfarlane et al. 2010.
Blame it on their large stature or America’s obsession with bears, but when it comes to the decline of the whitebark pine, the grizzly may be the least of our worries.
“Everyone is thinking grizzly bear, and there’s no question there is going to be some impact on grizzly food supply,” says whitebark expert Diana Tomback. “What they don’t understand or what really hasn’t been well-emphasized is there is a bigger issue here. Whitebark pine is a species that plays a number of important ecological roles in high elevation communities.”
A recent report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says the tree could become functionally extinct within the next decade due to an increase in mountain pine beetle infestation. The increase is attributed to a warming trend that allows beetles to reach areas formerly off-limits due to harsh weather. Surveys conducted by the group showed that in the Yellowstone area, 82 percent of the forests are dead or dying. That report echoes its lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the tree on the Endangered Species Act, a review the service is currently looking at.
“Whitebark pine is basically a sitting duck to pine beetle,” says Louisa Willcox of NRDC.
However, even if the beetle were to disappear tomorrow, trouble would be looming on the horizon for the species says Tomback, a professor and acting chair of the Department of Integrated Biology at the University of Colorado Denver. She says that rates of blister rust are high enough across its range to pose a serious threat. Blister rust, she notes, attacks all age classes of whitebark, not just mature ones.
“Pine beetle outbreaks settle down,” she says. “Blister rust doesn’t give trees a chance. … Everything is vulnerable.”
With the two working in tandem, whitebark is getting hit on both sides. Trees that might have survived the blister rust are now being attacked by mountain pine beetle, causing a trickle down effect in the ecosystem as a whole.
But in the time since that report was released, very little has been said about the bigger picture. While the fateful tree has dominated the news, the explanation of what that actually means has been largely ignored. Perhaps it is because these things make for less than sexy headlines – indeed, who can get excited about words like sublimation or evapotranspiration? But it is these changes that will eventually be felt by the populations as a whole.
It is hard to gauge the specifics of how this change will occur. The fact of the matter is we have never experienced this type of shift on this scale. While there have been both pine-beetle and blister-rust outbreaks in the past, they have not been as broad as this one appears to be. Add to that the multiple other fronts America’s forests seem to be fighting on, and it can become quite hard to comprehend, let alone predict. That said, what is out there, isn’t pretty.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen without whitebark,” Tomback says.
WHITEBARK ECOLOGY
A dead whitebark pine tree near Daisy Pass, MT. Photo by Whitney Leonard for NRDC.
To understand what is happening with whitebark now, we must first take a step back and understand how the tree functions in a healthy ecosystem.
Whitebark is a trailblazer, a trendsetter, an ass-kicker of a tree—a tree Westerners can really relate to, one of the oldest and toughest broads out there. As one of the last trees before the tree line, the widely distributed whitebark leads a harsh and harrowing life.
Given its precarious perch, it serves a few very important functions. It acts as a snow fence in the winter and it provides shade in the spring, slowing runoff and parsing out water to lower-elevation communities well into the summer. After fires, it is one of the first to regenerate in compromised soil, blazing the way for other species to take root behind it.
It is a food source to multitudes of wildlife. Clark’s nutcrackers enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the tree, dispersing its seeds while using them throughout the year as a food source. Red squirrels cache cones in middens, feeding both themselves and the occasional grizzly bear fattening up for winter. Other species such as the Golden-mantled squirrel, chipmunk species, the hairy and white-headed woodpeckers, Williamson’s sapsucker, mountain chickadee, white- and red-breasted nuthatches, Stellar’s jay, raven, pine grosbeak, red crossbill and Cassin’s finch all dabble in whitebark seed consumption at various times of year.
But it also has a softer side. It is individualistic. Unlike the lodgepoles and Douglas firs of the world, each tree has its own personality, twisting and carving its unique niche. It is a long-lived tree: reaching ages old enough to have been around when the Magna Carta was signed, there when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, when America declared its independence, and when Lewis and Clark ventured west.
“They’re kind of symbols of the high elevation. As they decline, we lose their beauty,” Tomback says. “As they’re lost, we lose a sense of ancient presence.”
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE...
For years, fights over water and water rights have raged throughout the West. With the decline of whitebark, those fights are only bound to increase.
As trees die, their ability to both capture snowpack and shade it is reduced. On the other end, live trees also take up a huge amount of water, taking up the most when they are young and then tapering off as they mature. With large stands of trees dying, that ratio is bound to play a role as well.
“It’s going to vary depending on watershed and percentage of tree cover in that water shed,” says Greg Pederson, research scientist with USGS at the Bozeman-based Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center.
He says some areas may see lower snowpacks and earlier runoff, meaning longer, drier summers. Other areas may experience more water in the system, leading to flooding downstream. As trees begin to grow back, short term gains may turn into losses as young trees take up more water.
Some areas may even benefit from the canopy being opened up a bit, allowing more snow to accumulate during the winter. Factors such as erosion and fire will play a role, as will wind.
“At the end of the day the hard part is picking apart what’s happening among those processes,” he says.
Couple all of that with changing temperatures and the difficulty of prediction increases exponentially. Over the years, Steve Gray, Wyoming state climatologist, has seen a trend in the average temperatures going up in the northwestern part of the state. While he says it’s too early to tell if this is a long-term trend, or short-term variability, one thing is for certain:
“The bottom line is that the best guess we have, the majority or all of the forecast predictions we have, say it’s going to be warmer,” he says. “It’s just a matter of how fast that happens and the magnitude of that warming. Even a seemingly small shift in average temperature is going to have significant consequences of regional ecosystems.”
As that shift occurs, it gets passed down the line.
“Lower elevations are intimately connected to what happens up in the high country,” he says. “Changes will have definite and significant consequences for everything that happens downstream. That includes a huge part of the U.S. population.”
ADAPTATION AS A LIFESTYLE
As whitebark declines, the wildlife that depends on it will have to adapt as well.
Grizzlies tend to be at the center of this polarizing debate. While their use of whitebark pine seeds is well-documented, they are also known as a highly adaptable creature, switching over to other food sources when one becomes unavailable. Lawsuits and politics aside, there is no doubt a change in whitebark pine will have an impact on the bear. The question is: To what extent?
Chuck Schwartz, leader of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, says when whitebark pine crops are low, the impact doesn’t necessarily affect bears across the entire population.
“Our data show that bears drop down in elevation about 200 meters in poor-versus-good whitebark pine years in autumn,” Schwartz wrote in an e-mail. “There seems to be some confusion on this movement. All the bears don’t pack their suitcase and move from the mountain tops to the valley bottoms where people live.
“Bears that live in secure habitats--areas with few roads, developments and homes--shift in elevation and use alternate foods and continue to survive just fine. It’s the bears that exist on the edge of the ecosystem that tend to shift closer to humans.”
While it’s the mortality levels in those populations that concern environmentalists, Chris Servheen, grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, says populations have been increasing for years and continue to increase. It is just the rate of that increase that will be impacted.
“There’s not enough mortality to change the overall increase,” he says. “(It is just) a slower increase during the poorer whitebark years.”
But with Clark’s Nutcrackers—the main dispersant of whitebark seeds—a change in behavior could have major consequences.
“Nutcrackers won’t go extinct,” Tomback says. They’ll continue to eat seeds and it’s likely they’ll simply shift to some of the other species in the forest. That shift, however, may have some longer-term implications for their carrying capacity and could spell further disaster for the tree.
This is where things get more complex. Think of the entire system as a business. You have a set number of employees, which is like your carrying capacity, and you have a budget of food that fluctuates based on a number of factors. A reduction in carrying capacity is like nature’s version of layoffs: If there’s not enough money in the budget to pay 10 employees, it will reduce that number to five.
But that number turns around and takes a bite out of the overall health of whitebark pines. Just like layoffs, if there are only five nutcrackers supported by the forest, then there are only five to do the work. And while “do more with less” is all the rage, it doesn’t really work for this tree. As seeds decline, red squirrels get desperate and begin targeting the trees, harvesting entire crops before they are mature and hiding them away in their middens, leaving little for the nutcrackers to cache. Immature seeds won’t germinate and the problem is compounded. Essentially, less work gets done.
As that continues to trickle down, other species will be impacted. While many of the other small mammals and birds, including chipmunks and blue grouse, don’t depend on the tree as a main food source, that contribution is still part of their annual food budget and they have to turn to other sources. Thus, we begin to rob Peter to pay Paul.
“The point is what’s going to happen when we don’t have that many whitebark pine seeds,” Tomback says. “Whenever you remove a food source, there’s always an impact on the rest of the ecosystem.
THE DREADED E-WORD
Tunnels created by mountain pine beetles in the Gros Ventre range, Wyoming. Photo by Whitney Leonard for NRDC.
The forecast for the entire situation has some putting the nails in the coffin for whitebark pine.
Tomback says with climate change being the 900-pound gorilla in the room, this notion that trees will just shift north isn’t as simple as it seems. There have to be viable seeds to do that and processes to distribute them.
“Some people say, well, 50 years from now if the range moves north, what difference is it going to make?” she says. “I need to point out that unless there are healthy populations of whitebark, it can’t move north.”
While solutions have been identified, there is a significant lack of funding in implementing them. Blister-rust-resistant seedlings are being collected and grown in greenhouses to be replanted in their native habitats. But this solution tends to be both difficult and costly.
In the mean time, Tomback is avoiding the big “E” (extinction) and instead, opting for the little “e.”
“At this point, I don’t want to sound alarmist, but from what I’ve seen I can, with confidence, say expatriation from many parts of its range is a real possibility.”
While the fundamental premise of an ecosystem revolves around its ability to evolve and adapt, it’s hard to see how forests are going to adapt their way out of this one – true, they will go on. But picturing that end result is a stretch.
With the introduction of invasive species, change in climate, change in fire regime and countless other factors, ecosystems seem to be facing bigger problems on larger scales more and more often. When blister rust came to America in the early 1900s, it was only the beginning.
“It could have been considered the harbinger of what we’re dealing with today,” Tomback says.
Forests everywhere seem to be at war and, while change is part of the natural process, keeping faith that everything will be O.K. is difficult, even for the most optimistic.
“We are just going to be in a crisis mode,” Tomback says. “I don’t know what else we’re going to do to deal with this [while] struggling to keep our native ecosystems in tact.”
Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.
Tags for this article
Tag cloud for all articles
missoula, politics, environment, idaho, colorado, montana, development, bozeman, salt lake city, travel & outdoors, utah, boise, western montana, land use & development, new mexico, outdoor recreation, northern idaho, idaho northern/panhandle, bend, boulder, flathead valley, wyoming, columbia gorge, idaho politics, montana politics, real estate, snow blog, music, community blogs, wildlife, public lands, wildland fire, jackson hole, colorado politics, technology, oregon, featured photo, utah politics, abq / santa fe, wild bill, tourism, washington, climate change, bob wire blog, outdoors, books, transportation, demographics, diary of a mad voter, front range, new mexico politics, wyoming politics, new west blog, planning in the west, fire updates, satire, the new west magazine, panhandle, travel, bob wire,
By Shauna Stephenson, 8-31-10 | comments (25) | email story | print story
NEW WEST FEATURES More>>
Bat-Killing Disease Spreading, Closing Western Caves
By Alex Strickland
Land Legacy: Access to Fish Creek, a Recreational Paradise, Preserved For All
By Jason D.B. Kauffman
Montana’s Melissa Kwasny Crafts Poetry With a Scientist’s Eye
By William Notter
Montana’s Plan to Haul Gold on the Chief Joe Highway Riles Wyoming Officials
By Dewey Vanderhoff and Rone Tempest, Wyofile
Advertisement
Comments
By Gulo, 8-31-10
Ummmm, wasn't it Merriwether Lewis? I don't recall a "Louis" on the expedition. With fact checkers like that how trustworthy is the rest of this? And how can an entire species be a "tough old broad"? Have they closed all the journalism schools again?
Climate change is real, the beetles and the rust issues are real. Responsible managers have been concerned for years about forest management techniques that made the forests vulnerable to these threats.
But I catch a whiff of Chicken Little afloat on the breeze in the current brouhaha. Let's at least get our facts straight before we launch any new lawsuits.
Thirty years experience with the ESA make me wonder how a listing will help the pine. I do know it will make the landscape much harder to manage if we ever do come up with a plan, THAT's what I need explained to me. Meanwhile we're just feeding lawyers and activists, ideas that trouble me as mixed blessings.
Can somebody explain this strategy to me?
By Jule Banville, 8-31-10
Misspelling fixed. Thank you, Gulo.
By John Apel, 8-31-10
I see lots of dead and dying whitebark pine in my part of the world (central Idaho) and the pace is accelerating. Its disturbing to know that ultimately its people that are responsible for this death spiral.
In my view the reason the landscape is getting harder to manage is because we the people are making the entire planet a sewer for our waste.
By bearbait, 8-31-10
If you are going to talk fire, then do the right thing and go back to Pre Columbian landscape managers using set fires to determine the landscape for 10,000 or more years. Post Columbian, the event was genocide towards those very same landscape managers, by intent, by neglect, by introduced disease, by arrogance, and the fire managers were gone, and the whole of the landscape began to change, and what we have today is the very real result of human extirpation from the landscape, capped by the crown jewel of denial of humans as sculptors of landscapes, the 1964 Wilderness Act. Codification of denial that man was even present, let alone doing quite nicely, using all of the landscape and manipulating it to serve him, the Pre Columbian human, the aboriginals, the Native Americans.
This current deal with an imported rust we got from good old European gooseberries, (current deal--good pun) which went to wild currants, and attacked white pines, and the issue of rampant pine beetle attacks are just Darwin's theory at work. Either resistance arrives or it does not. Something will take white bark's place. The limber pine cones will feed some Clark's nutcrackers. Maybe they will plant seeds enough to make it an ascendant species. The bears will get by because they are omnivores and can eat about anything. The hand wringing will never cease because that is what the designated hand wringers do. Lastly, the Federal land managers will figure out how to incinerate the last of the living white bark pines, as that is their mission now that resource preservation and conservation has been tossed out the door by the New Mother Earth queens of dubious decisions.
In a word, you can care all you want, but you are not going to do a thing about it, as you have done not a thing about it for five centuries. Live with it.
By Todd, 9-01-10
The environment is getting messed up more and more by the "fixers". The "fixers" spend all fo their time figuring out how only they can fix things and it always involves controlling other people. The fact they make matters worse is irrelevant to them. Resource management by timbering was working fine keeping helathy forest, but those who could not deal with the sight of down timber put a stop to it. Worse was the very idea that anyone made a living from it, ESA protection turning it over to the enviros will destroy everything they touch. The bears would not be in trouble if it were not for the introduction of every wolf they could stuff into the area, despite a total lack of any history indicating there had been anything approaching the number of wolves now in Yellowstone itself. The ESA has only caused the proliferation of "non profits" eating up our tax dollars while they destroy whatever they can.
By Baerh, 9-01-10
Bahaha how predictable bearbait and todd blame it all on the wilderness act and enviros.
That logging is good for the woods, and ending logging in certain areas caused the demise of the whitebark pine.
In reality our healthiest whitebark stands are found in wilderness and blister rust was transported by not onylgooseberries but logging trucks.
But hey any opportunity to blamer all problems on wildernes and envios.
Honestly the right wing rhetoric coming out of you two is disgusting.
By Baerh, 9-01-10
and tood do you ever not mention wolves in a single post?
By Robert Hoskins, 9-03-10
Shauna
Well done and quite accurate. Having for the last three summers gone hiking and riding through whitebark pine forests in northwestern Wyoming to assess the impact of the mountain pine beetle on WBP, I've seen the ecological impacts of the death of WBP first hand.
Aside from the impact on grizzly bears, nutcrackers, and red squirrels, one critical point you make above needs special emphasis and expansion if we're to get peoples' attention on the problem--the loss of WBP will have a devastating effect on irrigation-dependent agriculture and water dependent development in the Rocky Mountain West.
As you note, WBP provides thermal cover to the snowpack in the mountains. As WBP dies out, we'll see the snowpack (what snowpack we get, due to on again, off again drought) melt earlier and faster. That means: 1) more spring flooding and 2) limited water for irrigation later in the summer. That also means, for example, no or few second cuttings on hay. As water quantities continue to decline, that means perhaps no first cuttings either, at least on ranches or farms with junior water rights.
Here in Wyoming's Upper Wind River Basin, which is in the heart of WBP country, we're already facing another water threat from climate change--melting glaciers. Currently, the Wind River Mountains have the largest number of glaciers of any range in the lower 48 states. With current warming trends, our glaciers will be practically gone within a couple of decades.
In 2003, we saw a sub-glacier lake burst through the weakened ice of Grasshopper Glacier to flood the Downs Fork and Dinwoody Creek, a tributary of the Wind River. This kind of event is called by geologists a "jokulhlaup." https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Jökulhlaup. The Dinwoody ran green with glacial flour for weeks. The flood covered the Downs Fork meadows with white sand and washed out an outfitter camp. Luckily, no one was killed, since the event occurred during the day and everyone was out of camp on horse rides.
The disappearance of WBP and glaciers at the same time and the resulting decline in water quantity will strike a double blow to agriculture in the Upper Wind River Basin and completely disrupt water current allocations. Consequently, water law is in for a revolution.
In the 1980s, when the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes of the Wind River Indian Reservation went to court to exert more control of water allocation within the Basin, tensions between Indians and whites were high. People walked around with baseball bats and shotguns guarding headgates. (See Geoffrey O'Gara's wonderful book, What You See in Clear Water, for the story of the conflicts over the Basin's water). The Tribes eventually won senior water rights in the US Supreme Court, although they lost their bid to have instream flow designated as a beneficial use for fisheries on the Reservation.
As water quantity declines in the basin, the Tribes will exert greater control over water, and tensions will be much higher than they were in the 1980s.
Even where the politics are different, declining water quantities consequent to climate change and warming throughout the West will create extreme political and personal tensions. As we know, the Colorado River is both declining in flows and is oversubscribed. States, cities, and ranchers and farmers are all fighting over what happens to the remaining water. Conflicts can only get worse as water continues to decline.
In short, aside from the ecological impacts from the decline or loss of whitebark pine, glaciers, and overall precipitation, we'll have to deal with unprecedented--for the United States--economic conflicts over water that current political and legal institutions will be unable to manage. It's going to be a wild ride.
RH
By mountain hunter, 9-03-10
By Baerh
It is the enviros stirring things up,most of the information in the article came from the Natural Resources Defense Council,which does happen to be an extreme enviro group.
Logging was not destroying entire forests,like the enviro's made it out with all their lies,half-truths,manipulation of data,and obfuscations.
Not every logging operation was a clearcut,in certain areas,small clearcuts actually helped the overall health of the ecosystem.
Logging has been mainly selective harvest for years.
Sometimes,people have to come before a 3" fish,a kangaroo rat,
a small bird,or a spotted owl.
Species would still go extinct every day-with or with out humans,it's called evolution.
Either the whitebark pines will come back,or another tree will take their place,that also is evolution-the enviros need to just stay out of it.
That alone would save a lot of trees,if they would just stop filing lawsuits for a month.
By bearbait, 9-03-10
Are there not studies that show a no trees situation produces a snow field with no heat attracting surfaces and no snow hung on limbs to sublimate, sublimation producing no gain to watersheds? And the reflective surface of the treeless prairie at elevation allows heat to dissipate into space at night, without the "thermal cover" of trees. No? And thus the snow gets colder, and more able to retain the occasional winter rain and not lose it and the snow it melts to off season runoff. A net gain of snow melt run off from the now treeless area of the watershed, is that possible? We talk of timing of the runoff and how it is not beneficial to irrigation. Is an earlier, greater and shorter runoff not once the need of fish now imperiled by aforested watersheds and longer lasting, lesser runoffs? I think of Colorado river pike minnows. I think of some spring salmon and steelhead runs. Maybe dying whitebark pine is neccessary. Maybe it is time to renew the watershed at elevation. Maybe pine dying is the answer to better water flows.
There is a whole body of thought that says no upright vegetation at elevation, above the elevation of annual winter snow accretion, is watershed friendly, and will produce more water, over a longer time, and that aspect is the best conservator of snow in spring as it shades the snow banks and cornices that last into late spring and sometimes into late summer. Man has no way to alter aspect of the geography, or change the geology. A north slope is a north slope for a long, long time, and the sun moves from low on the southern horizon towards overhead until June 21, and then it drops to the south once again. Shade in mountainous country is mostly about aspect and not trees.
There was a time, not too long ago, that long, narrow clear cuts on north slopes were created to save and hold more snow than the treed cohort spaces between the clear cuts. My only guess is that those clear cuts did what all clear cuts do, and that was become young, tight forests of saplings and whips, and now the snow retention is less than when it was in mature timber. You do have to know that our aboriginal predecessors were likely cognizant of this, and burned accordingly, to keep an open north aspect prairie system on ridge tops to bring ease to travel (it being easier to travel ridge top to ridge top, than to descend into valleys, and then have to ascend to another ridge top or walk for distances on side slopes. So burn off the ridge tops, and over the side, and you had more irrigation on the meadows in spring, and more water in the streams. I do wonder if the whitebark pine die off is just another part of a larger cycle that only is present due to the absence of thousands of years of Native American fire setters who sculpted the vegetation to meet the needs of the plants and animals that provided for their safety, comfort, and food security. Burning to alter climate, vegetation, and the response of vegetation and the critters that come to the type of vegetation they burned to achieve. If this sounds way too sophisticated for our modern sensibilities, we do have to remember they had no lawyers, no litigation, few lobbyists, and every reason to do whatever they needed to provide for their survival, which they did accomplish. We know they were there. We can see that they were there. We can see what they were. That is why science is always looking for the clues of their existence. So why do public land forest managers categorically deny their influence, their impacts, and by Wilderness Designation, deny their past existence? Since white Europeans have stridently denied humans altering forests has ever existed except in the form of evil loggers, and now dumber than a bucket of rock USFS fire policy for a century, all we have to show for it is forests in great peril of dying, burning, and being neglected to their eventual demise. Self flagellation can only take you so far, and then you have to fish or cut bait if you are to survive. This deal is so Pogoesque: We have discovered that we are the problem...by not doing a thing, we unravelled ten or more millennia of forest landscape management, and now the pointy heads are trying to rectify that by not fighting fire in the heat of summer. And hand wringing over dying trees. All the while not having the least desire to address man as a vital part of the husbandry of the kind of forests people visualize and want to enjoy, to wander in, and to find comfort, solace and silence in. We are lost. America is lost. We cannot survive where we are, and we have no consensual idea of how to move on, and where to move on to. So I guess we just enumerate the dead trees, count the bear mortality, measure the lack of water or the ill timing of lots of water, and whine a lot.
By Robert Hoskins, 9-04-10
No BB, it's you who whines a lot.
So, are you going to provide citations for these remarkable scientific studies to back up your claims, or are you going to keep them secret?
All I see here are the ideological claims that 1) the earth just can't get along without humans and 2) humans can make the earth "better."
All one has to do to counter those claims is look carefully at the places we live. The world truly is so much better as a consequence of human action, isn't it? Just where is that?
RH
By Todd, 9-04-10
Gee Robert, you sound like you went to the same idealogy school as that guy that took hostages at Discovery, and insisted we need to get rid of all humans for the earth to be a good place. My question is if you eliminate all humans who is going to judge how good things are and who is going to enjoy the blessings we ahve here now? Have you ever thought thru that position?
By bearbait, 9-04-10
I am not a scientist, but a mere farmer. Interested in soil and soil health, I have read some on terra preta, the anthropogenic soils found in the Amazon basin, a relic of some far past time. It is about the importance of carbon in fertile soils, and how aboriginals managed to create that from the rained washed, pretty much silicates sans nutrition soils of the rain forest by used of charcoal or some other form of man created charred woody material. And then it appears they grew their food on raised beds and used irrigation canals, and had elevated trails, all man made, to access their primitive (?) agricultural venture. I assume they burned a lot of wood to make the soil amendments, which would create openings in the forest, and in those openings the sun hits the raised beds and they grew food. They manipulated the landscape, and did so for quite a while, and none have produced evidence that activity did or did not hamper diversity or climate. But it did change local landscape sites, enough that satellite pictures taken today where logging has been clearing Amazonian jungle in the slash and burn to raise cattle, evidence of prior trails, water pathways, all anthropogenic in origin. One study I just browsed one day said that from slash and burn to abandonment, in rain forest in Panama, the time from first action to return to functioning rainforest with all the attendant plant and animal diversity was 50 years.
In my mind, all that humans do is live at the edge of ice for the majority of their time on earth. So the equator is where we always have been, and north and south of that, we are migratory as we follow the ice edges, the snow fields, and the snow shadow valleys scraping out a living. Even the majority of the birds that we have in the northern part of the continent are warm weather creatures that fly to the equator or south to spend what is the northern winter, and then fly back in spring to let their equatorial habitat rest for a while, and breed and raise young here to take advantage of seasonal food sources.
PreColumbian burning of the landscape determined species and species densities. The "natural" fire was limited to what had not been burned seasonally by humans. And of course the "natural" fire was a force in areas that were not being fire maintained to produce the plants and animals that allowed for human survival. I have no idea of how this all worked before Europeans introduced beasts of burden such as horses, oxen, various types of asses. I am certain, afoot, protein from large animals was a very sophisticated hunting process and there had to be some type of food preservation. Buffalo jumps tell us something about hit and miss food availability. You know they had to be shared by great bears sooner than humans would have liked. My guess is a good and provident time for running bison over cliffs was winter. And then you camped next to the freezer until the bears came out of hibernation. But people were adapted to their environment, for thousands of years, and whether or not they "ruined" it is just a judgement call based on what? The pre Columbian people had to live in smoke much of the time. Bad air was a fact of life. And they were burning from sea to sea, at different times of the year, for reasons and purposes that were essential to their survival. The one thing that they could not have and prosper with was European and Asian diseases and genocide. Those factors are paramount in determining how our landscape looks today, for the "fire for resource purposes" they set have been out for two centuries or more, from sea to shining sea. For good of for bad.
Certainly present day human life is a huge impact on the earth. What do you do about? Perhaps it is best to let the Taliban control the population of Afghanistan. Keep women suppressed, their mortality the highest on earth. That also puts a stopper on population. Maybe we best give every third world male an assault rifle and bullets, and let them take care of themselves. Perhaps world wide conservation is best addressed by every citizen having equal means to kill each other, to defend their little piece of the pie. And draw a defensive line around the resources we have here, and live with out resources. Or do we import what we need, and drill, mine, cut, harvest, seine elsewhere in the world, all the while saving what we have?
The mythical gardens of Eden, the far away magical landscapes untouched by humans, are stuff of writing and writers, and sought out by humans, which only is the first step to destruction. Maybe U.S. academics should stay home, and not foul the footpaths of third world natural areas, exposing their fragility to the world. My only fear about hating people is that the people haters always end up with really bloody hands, and millions die for ideology or religion, as interpreted and foisted on them by the True Believers. The environmental movement in the U.S. is becoming the bailiwick of True Believers, and that scares me, frankly. Your strident beliefs in the inherent evil lurking in all mankind really show up when you get riled, Mr. Hoskins. And for your beliefs, there are equal and opposite beliefs held by others, and when both are intractable, all we get is fighting with no solutions.
As an example, I can find no reason to support designation of some tract of land as Wilderness, a permanent designation, for the purpose of "saving" or "protection" some special living "ecosystem", when each summer I see those very same places allowed to be destroyed by fire, or not being able to be fire managed by set fires because that would be the "hand of man" in action. There is no land that was not part of what kept hundreds of generations of people alive as part of their life support system long before yours and my forbearers arrived on this landscape. The "untrammeled by the hand of man" idea codified in law is codified genocide, and that goes against my grain. People used it all, set their fires wherever, saved this vegetation and that, husbanded trees and shrubs essential to their lives, and kept the berry fields burned lightly each fall. Hell, they still raise blueberries that way in Maine. AY, alternate year, harvesting. Harvest half your berries this year, burn them in fall, and harvest the other half next year, burning in the fall. That is a many millennia old practice of landscape management. Renewal by fire. For food, for fiber, for travel expediency, for a multitude of reasons. PhDs are writing about that all the time. All I know is that when 500 year old trees are allowed to burn with no effort to save them, protection of the old growth is a canard of great humor. Then, when fire from private land burns the public lands, US Attorneys show up to sue for damages, and then promptly claim value for timber (can never be logged so has no present or future commercial value), value for "loss of grandeur of the landscape" (which is lost in any "fire for resource benefit"), and loss to the sustainability and immediate past value of the "ecosystem" (which is a "benefit" if the Feds don't make an attempt to put out or control the fire, they claim that is because fire is "beneficial".) I want an accounting, in dollars, of the benefit of fire in the Wilderness. Then, I want a justification of fire allowed its head. If set, prescribed burning is "the hand of man", then by omission of effort of the landscape managers to suppress or put out a small fire that grows to landscape size not also the result of the hand of man? It is to my sensibilities, and it fouls a lot of air, changes a lot of soil chemistry, removes tons of organic matter in soils, makes soil impervious to water and accelerates runoff in storm events and in seasonal snow melts. Those are downside issues. What is the upside?
As a society, we will have sacrificial sites that house us, house our industries, become our transportation routes, our food sources, and even our fiber sources. Order in our society. I want better management, not no management at all. I want preservation over time of landscapes, not moonscapes post fire.
I look at a lot of 18th, 19th and 20th century landscape paintings. I also get to see mid 19th century and younger photos. Lots of young timber, trees, at low elevations, and the higher elevations are burned off in many, many landscape paintings. The fire historians say that aboriginal burning kept the tops of ridges burned off because that is where life and travel in the mountains took place. That is where life was easiest. The flat ground is on ridge tops, tables, and in valleys and deflation plains. Water was a known hazard in the latter two. I don't think we have spent enough time understanding how we got here from there, and by there I mean the waning of the last Ice Age.
The historical record says we are nearing the end of the present inter glacial period, and another Ice Age is imminent. What do we do to prepare for that? Or will the species diversity present, and the mutations and species development in the upcoming multitude of millennia just take care of itself? Or is it just a lot wiser to live in the moment, and understand that forces way beyond our control are always at work in the cosmos, and our fate is NOT in our hands, but in the random events of the universe?
By Todd, 9-04-10
Very thought provoking bearbait. It is very hard for me to understand how anyone thinks they have all of the answers and therefore should rule over everyone else....and especially that man has the power and ability to alter the universe significantly.
By Dewey, 9-04-10
Todd wakes up every morning with bile frothing out of the corner of his mouth ...it's from the nightmares he had about environmentalists. Todd is apparently trying real hard to become a Professional Environmentalist Hater . (Not much money in that vocation , but great satisfaction , I suppose.) Maybe when he quits quivering and his blood pressure get down to normal and cools to under 100 , both he and Bear Bait can look here:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/new-anthrome-maps/
Good time to learn a new word, Todd Fross and BearBait. ANTHROME. It's a brand new term contracted from " anthropological biomes" and is used to describe any biome where the affairs of mankind influence the natural biological/ecological state . [ A Biome is any large naturally occurring community of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat, e.g., forest or tundra. ]
These technical maps in the Wired article are colorful and quite beautiful, but they are also quite ominous. They show how the Earth's surface has been altered by mechanized mobile civilization since 1700, just before the Industrial Revolution to the Present. Only 300 years, which isn't even a heartbeat in geologic time, but the change is quite dramatic. This is what's happened between heartbeats.
I would love to see animated maps going back to the end of the Ice Ages and the beginnings of organized societies, city-states , then empires and finally nation states . In other words, when the Holocene Period of aboriginal humans spreading around the planet became the Anthropocene, where those humans began altering their global environment. The Middle East used to be covered in trees. The Sahara was not a desert....it had great rivers. We had not yet chopped down or burned 98 percent of the Black Forest , nor had we started in deforesting the vast Amazon or Papua New Guinea or killing the upper layers of the ocean with petroleum and huge swirls of plastic trash.
Closer to home, as recently as 200 years ago we still had over 60 million Bison in central North America and 12 million Elk ranging from the Appalachians to the Pacific. Wyoming had Woodland Caribou. There were seven species of Grizzly bear in the 48 States, not just one.
Billions of Passenger pigeons vanished, for what ? Where did all those Gypsy Moths come from ? Snakes on Guam ? Blister Rust ? Smallpox ? The Short Answer: You and Me. Or more accurately , our ancestors practicing something called Manifest Destiny , which continues to this very day. There are presently more species going extinct faster than after the asteroid hit Yucatan 65 million years ago, and humans are the reason why. There can be no denying that .
Like it or not, Todd and BB, we live in the Anthropocene Period and humans are more scourge, blight, and planet-eating virus than a positive force of nature. Watching a time lapse movie of the Earth where the last 2 million years or so are compressed into a few minutes, you would see us humans spreading like ugly grey mold across the skin of an orange .
Hope you like the Anthrome maps of the Anthropocene. Now learn from them.
Environmentalists are not the enemy , Todd...they are your conscience.
By bigsky, 9-06-10
Nice post, Dewey, a little extreme, but heck....you fail to understand (as most environmentalists, or whatever) that PEOPLE now live here. Sorry, your bison are not coming back. We are not having millions upon millions of them on the plains. The plains are used to produce FOOD for people, and will continue to be used for that purpose. We might have had the 12 million elk before PEOPLE but we won't see that again either. Bottom line, if you cannot work with the people WHO LIVE HERE, whatever aspirations or "conscience" you wish to conjure up will never work. Best to leave it alone and let the people who live here work it out.
By Dewey, 9-06-10
BigSky---I do try to work with people who live around here on the topic of wolves and environmental consequences of a gross consumption lifestyle by emphasizing proactive solutions and sustainability . It's all but impossible to get past the hatred and disinformation. Honestly. They prefer to be part of the Manifest Destiny problem and carp about it than try to reach actually consensuses , in the face of a few epochs of evidence that we humans are in fact wrecking the planet. I only have to step outside my door to see we aren't showing a whole lot of longterm societal wisdom here in America. It's all about money and short term profits and common greed. Bad way to run the planet...
If " conscience" doesn't work , as you say , then we've all lost.
By Todd, 9-06-10
Dewey, tell us what you personally do to make things the way you want them. I don't mean what you try to make other folks do, but you personally.
How many wolf killed sheep and cattle have you helped dig the holes for, and bury, how much are you willing to reimburse the rancher for, we know they get approximately 10% of the losses apid for by BOW, whi is no longer even pretending to fund the kills. How many nights have you offered to be with calving and lambing animals to protect them from wolves?
You seem to have lots of things that need doing....by someone else. If enviros was credibility they need to lead the way by example, not lawsuits and demands of sacrifices to be made by other people.
By Dewey, 9-06-10
Todd---do you ever have even one day of the year when you don't offload all the world's problems onto environmentalists ? It really does not appear so.
We all really do need to work together to teach ranchers to quit feeding the wolves the slow stupid easy meat. You can't blame the wolves for not taking the ranchers up on their choice offering. Gosh , there just is never a cowboy or herder around when you really need one . How are we ever going to get the wolves to go back to hunting wild elk and deer if the ranchers won't quit stocking the pantry ?
If only the poor tormented ranchers would just watch and work their cows more, and guard their precious property and livelihood-on-the-hoof a little better, they wouldn't be sent to the brink of utter ruin by wolves...its always those damn wolves. Those scapegoat wolves...the root of all rancher woes is wolves, wolves, and more wolves... the environmentalist's lapdogs from Hell. My gosh , there is now one wolf for every 5700 cows in Wyoming. Alarming! They're everywhere. We must be more diligent. Then maybe those 0.0005 percent of Wyoming's 1.4 million cattle that died from wolves last year will not have perished in vain...
Not my problem , Todd. Don't foist your delusions on me. I do not represent any of the environmental groups you so despise. When Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho ranchers whine about wolves and outfitters pout and throw tantrums on a daily basis --- yet refuse to adapt to modern times----the more I relish my plate of good wholesome Argentina beef and that great Wyoming dry cow elk. We have plenty of elk here in Wolf Country , Todd. Are you having trouble find some ? Try hunting a little smarter and harder...and spend less time spreading your delusions about enviros with the barn shovel.
By bigsky, 9-07-10
ahhh, Dewey, posting more prowolf propaganda....living in the delusion of "the new world". Sorry bud, but the satire about the ranching community is boring. One wolf eats one cow, then that one wolf should be eliminated, period. If you have a business and I come in and steal from you, would you like that? Same situation, different business. As I stated earlier, if you think we are wrecking the planet now, you should have been around between 1900 and 1950, and putting wolves into the mix to fix anything is utterly ridiculous.
By Dewey, 9-07-10
BS----surely you jest . Public lands cattle ranching in Wyoming and Montana is a failed economic model. If a few wolves threaten a few ranchers by eating a few cows, and this somehow is a big threat to the cattle industry of our fair states , then maybe the cattlemen need to move to town and get honest work , or join the circus."
Are you trying to say this is the way you show your support of the livestock industry. You indicate you would rather have more fossil fuel to bring your meat from elsewhere so you do not have to support the livestock industry. Real smart for anyone claiming to be wanting to "save the environment". Sounds more like a little kid beating his head on the flour in a tantrum.
21st century or not, I am not able to avoid eating and continue to live. Neither do I want lots of fuel burned to get the necessities to me.
The intellectually-challenged poster (Todd Fross, Lander WY ) somehow copied this entire article and half the Library of Congress along with it.
Then perhaps he can write back with fresh brevity and tell us what he really meant to say , hopefully in less than 8,637 words...
“Absence of man from the landscape today?” Where? Designated wilderness which comprises about 5% of our nation’s land area (only 2.7% in the contiguous U.S.) is essentially the only place man's machines are not allowed to scrape, grade, douse with chemicals, log, mine, row crop, build roads, drill for oil and gas and on and on.
Just how much human intrusion is needed to create man's idea of a perfect world? Please folks. Remember that before land man-age-ment was invented, our natural world and its forests were plentiful and healthy according to nature's dynamic equilibrium. For those two syllable limited folks, dynamic equilibrium refers to nature's collective processes (most of which we still do not fully understand) that follow laws of physics and without exception.
When, in our human arrogance, we try to outsmart, out-muscle, or outright destroy a system we do not fully understand we screw it up every time. The only thing we are really attempting to manage under current public land man-age-ment regimes is our own past human mistakes. Nature, in the pure sense, does NOT need man to man-age it any more than God needs humans to exist. Foolish human arrogance, not land, needs management most and just maybe God (as in the universe itself) is the best manager of that. Those paying attention know that “Nature Bats Last.”
Those that fail to see that science and spirituality are not mutually exclusive fail, or should I say… “Refuse to see many things.”
White pines are dying by the millions but not just in Wilderness Areas but in forests of all management prescriptions. Human so-called land management may or may not have contributed to this historical event by protecting polluters and greenhouse gas emitters more than the land water and air they are supposed to be protecting.
No matter how hard we humans will try, human management cannot stop or even slow, bend, twist, circumvent or otherwise avoid the most basic laws of physics and nature. Ignoring these scientific facts while we pass though life entranced like zombies with humankind’s glittering modern technology we sequester arrogance like never before in human history. But wait yet again… this is not true! Human technological arrogance has lead to the certain destruction of many civilizations. Proof? You want proof? It’s called HISTORY folks. It comes in the form of science and religion.
The pesky part about this thing called history is that one must think with one’s brain to decipher fact from fiction.
You're welcome.