"Anyone who knows how to run a household, knows how to run the world."
-- Xilonem Garcia, a Meshika elder in Mexico
There were two articles today on our favourite news collection source, commondreams. The first was about the vast forest die-offs in the western lower 48, and throughout the rest of the World (including here in Alaska, where rapid changes are occurring).
The Great Forest Die-Off
What’s Killing the Great Forests of the American West? A Frightening Phenomenon Happening Across the Globe
by Jim Robbins
For many years, Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana, planned her field season for the same two to three weeks in July. That's when her quarry - tiny, black, mountain pine beetles - hatched from the tree they had just killed and swarmed to a new one to start their life cycle again.
Now, says Six, the field rules have changed. Instead of just two weeks, the beetles fly continually from May until October, attacking trees, burrowing in, and laying their eggs for half the year. And that's not all. The beetles rarely attacked immature trees; now they do so all the time. What's more, colder temperatures once kept the beetles away from high altitudes, yet now they swarm and kill trees on mountaintops. And in some high places where the beetles had a two-year life cycle because of cold temperatures, it's decreased to one year.
Such shifts make it an exciting - and unsettling - time to be an entomologist. The growing swath of dead lodgepole and ponderosa pine forest is a grim omen, leaving Six - and many other scientists and residents in the West - concerned that as the climate continues to warm, these destructive changes will intensify.
"A couple of degrees warmer could create multiple generations a year," she said, as she chopped off a piece of bark on a dead lodgepole pine to show the galleries of burrowing larvae. "If that happens, I expect it would be a disaster for all of our pine populations."
Across western North America, from Mexico to Alaska, forest die-off is occurring on an extraordinary scale, unprecedented in at least the last century-and-a-half - and perhaps much longer. All told, the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United States have seen nearly 70,000 square miles of forest - an area the size of Washington state - die since 2000. For the most part, this massive die-off is being caused by outbreaks of tree-killing insects, from the ips beetle in the Southwest that has killed pinyon pine, to the spruce beetle, fir beetle, and the major pest - the mountain pine beetle - that has hammered forests in the north.
These large-scale forest deaths from beetle infestations are likely a symptom of a bigger problem, according to scientists: warming temperatures and increased stress, due to a changing climate. Although western North America has been hardest hit by insect infestations, sizeable areas of forest in Australia, Russia, France, and other countries have experienced die-offs, most of which appears to have been caused by drought, high temperatures, or both.
One recent study collected reports of large-scale forest mortality from around the world. Often, forest death is patchy, and research is difficult because of the large areas involved. But the paper, recently published in Forest Ecology and Management, reported that in a 20,000-square-mile savanna in Australia, nearly a third of the trees were dead. In Russia, there was significant die-off within 9,400 square miles of forest. Much of Siberia has warmed by several degrees Fahrenheit in the past half-century, and hot, dry conditions have led to extreme wildfire seasons in eight of the last 10 years. Russian researchers also are concerned that warmer, dryer conditions will lead to increased outbreaks of the Siberian moth, which can destroy large swaths of Russia's boreal forest.
While people in some places have the luxury to doubt whether climate change is real, it's harder to be a doubter in the Rocky Mountains. Glaciers in Glacier National Park and elsewhere are shrinking, winters are warmer and shorter, and the intensity of forest fires is increasing. But the most obvious sign is the red and dead forests that carpet the hills and mountains. They have transformed life in many parts of the Rockies.
It has hit home for me on a personal level. Virtually every one of the hundreds of old-growth ponderosa pines on the 15 acres of land where I live near Helena, Montana is dead, and we are surrounded by a valley of dead and dying forest. Most trees have been logged and taken to a pulp mill, where they were turned into cardboard for boxes.
University of Montana ecologist Steve Running says warmer temperatures in the Rockies bring spring earlier and fall later, each by about a week, yet precipitation has remained about the same. That translates into a drought, and stressed trees are highly susceptible to beetle infestations. Wintertime minimum temperatures in the 1950s, meanwhile, ranged from 40 F to 50 F below zero. That's risen to the 30-below range, and there are fewer days when minimums are reached. It's not getting cold enough anymore to kill the beetles, which over-winter in their larval stage and survive the milder temperatures because they are filled with glycol, a natural anti-freeze.
In addition, the past suppression of fire and the fact that many Western trees are reaching the age at which beetles target them - 80 to 100 years - are also factors in the widespread loss of forests.
So the forests across the West are dying, in such large numbers that U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar called it the West's Hurricane Katrina. In Colorado and southern Wyoming, the U.S. Forest Service has created an emergency management team to cut down dead trees around towns and along roads and power lines. Forest Service campgrounds and trails have been closed because of the hazard from dead trees, and communities surrounded by dead forests have drawn up emergency evacuation plans for residents.
Large-scale die-offs have occurred in the past. Mountain pine beetles are native to the West and are part of the ecosystem. Lodgepole forests regenerate through large-scale "stand replacing events," which include fire and insects. The die-offs now, though, are on a scale unprecedented since the West was settled and are so big that they are having unusual impacts on ecosystems. The whitebark pine, once largely protected from the beetles because it grew at high altitudes and was shielded by cold, is functionally extinct and may no longer be able to feed grizzly bears and other species that love its high-fat nut. In Mexico, bark beetles are beginning to kill oyamel fir trees in a rare 139,000-acre biosphere preserve where the majority of North America's monarch butterflies travel each fall to spend the winter. So far, about 100 acres in a core area of 33,000 acres have been killed by bark beetles.
Tree-killing bugs aren't the only problem. In 2005 Colorado researchers noticed that aspens were suddenly dying in large numbers. That year they found 30,000 acres of dead aspen forest. The next year there were 150,000 acres, and in 2008 it had soared to 553,000. The die-off is called Sudden Aspen Death, or SAD. "It's growing at an exponential rate," said Wayne Shepperd, who researches aspen for the Forest Service. "It's pretty sobering when you see a whole mountainside or whole drainage of aspen forest dead."
Groves at low elevations and facing south are dying fastest, and scientists believe the cause is hotter temperatures and drier weather. It's not only killing mature trees, but the root mass as well. An aspen grove is the offspring of a large single underground clonal mass, which sends up shoots. "The whole organism is disappearing and it has profound implications," Shepperd said. "When the roots die, groves that are hundreds or thousands of years old aren't going to be there anymore."
If the die-offs continue, the loss of the aspen trees would be a blow to goshawks, songbirds, and a number of other species that find food and refuge in the groves.
Perhaps more than anyone, Craig Allen is familiar with these large-scale forest die-offs. A forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Jemez Mountain Field Station in New Mexico, not only are his office and home surrounded by a pinyon die-off, he also is the lead author of the paper - with 19 other authors -published in Forest Ecology and Management, which sought to document and begin to understand what is happening to forests in North America and around the world as the result of climate change.
Coming up with a definitive understanding at this point is impossible, Allen says. Forests are complex, and unfortunately, woefully understudied, and there isn't nearly enough data to draw a conclusion about the reasons behind forest die-offs globally. "There's huge information gaps and uncertainties," says Allen.
What contributors were able to do in the paper is collect anecdotal reports of broad-scale forest mortality from around the world. "The point of this paper is to connect the dots, at least the ones we can connect," says Allen. "We can't even tell you for sure if there's more forest mortality. There's not consistent monitoring."
In 2005 a strong El Nino caused a dramatic drought in the Amazon. It killed forest across the region and is extremely well documented because so many researchers had existing plots there. "The heart of the biggest rainforest in the world turned from a carbon sink to a carbon source," said Allen. "If you have long-term drought you can bleed a lot carbon into the atmosphere."
A lot of beetles can also turn vast tracks of forest from carbon sinks to carbon sources. Take British Columbia, which is ground zero for the mountain pine beetle infestation in North America. Some 53,000 square miles of mature pine forest is dead and the province is projected to lose 80 percent of its mature trees by 2013. The second largest known die-off there occurred in the 1980s and claimed just 2,300 square miles. Bill Wilson - the province's director of Industry, Trade and Economics Research - said he has flown in a plane for hours over the province and seen nothing but dead forest the entire time.
In 2008, so much of British Columbia's forests had died they also went from being a net carbon sink to carbon source.
Diana Six works in Africa where she has seen other die-offs first-hand. "In Africa where I work, suddenly whole hillsides are dropping dead," she said. "It's happening so fast people are in shock. It's a tragedy." Species include the quiver tree, camel-thorn, and the giant euphorbia, a 30-foot-tall succulent. The causes are not known, but the suspects are hotter and drier weather, or shifting rainfall patterns.
All told, the paper that Allen co-authored describes 88 well-documented forest die-offs around the world, going back as far as the 1960s and 1970s, although most are in the 1990s and 2000s.
If there was a way to predict die-offs, Allen said, land managers could take preemptive action, such as mechanical thinning or prescribed burning to increase the vigor of forests.
What gives researchers pause is that many of these large die-offs have occurred with minimal warming, in just a few years. In the West, for example, the average temperature has warmed on average 1.8 F over the past century. "This is before we put two to four degrees centigrade (3.6 F to 7.2 F) into the system," said Allen, referring to forecasts for warming by the end of this century. Trees across the world are stressed already from fragmentation, air pollution, and other problems, he said. "I don't know how much stress the forests of the world can take," said Allen.
© 2010 Yale Environment 360
Jim Robbins is a veteran journalist based in Helena, Montana. He has written for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and numerous other publications. His fifth book, The Forgotten Forest, about the poorly understood role of trees in the environment, will be published next year by Random House.
This was certainly driven home to me when I went worked on wildfires near Glacier Park, Montana, and Stanley, Idaho, in 2003, and 2006, respectively. I had known both of these areas in the early to mid 1990s as having relatively lush, healthy forest stands of Lodgepole Pine, Englemann Spruce, Subalpine Fir, and Douglas Fir. Things changed drastically in the ten years I was away from those areas. Now, 30-70 percent of all the standing timber in these areas is dead or dying. Heartbreaking to see, really, since I can remember when it was otherwise. The newer trees growing up were mostly Douglas Fir, which is slightly more bug tolerant, and favouring a warmer climate.
Then there was this article, describing the massive garbage gyres in the oceans, but especially the Pacific Ocean, naturally, from a British, not U.S., source.
The Biggest Dump in the World
As large as the USA, the Great Pacific Waste Patch is the biggest dump in the world. Ed Cumming discovers that it keeps getting bigger, and could be poisoning us all
by Ed Cumming
The world’s biggest rubbish dump keeps growing. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch – or the Pacific Trash Vortex – is a floating monument to our culture of waste, the final resting place of every forgotten carrier bag, every discarded bottle and every piece of packaging blown away in the wind. Opinions about the exact size of this great, soupy mix vary, but some claim it has doubled over the past decade, making it now six times the size of the UK.
Dr Simon Boxall, a physical oceanographer at the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, goes even further: “It’s the size of North America. But although the patch itself is extremely large, it’s only one very clear representation of the much bigger worldwide problem.”
This global problem is the motive behind the Plastiki, a 60ft, 12-ton catamaran built from 12,500 recycled plastic bottles, which embarks on its maiden voyage from San Francisco this week. The brainchild of David de Rothschild, the flamboyant British banking heir and environmentalist, the Plastiki will sail right through the middle of the Garbage Patch as part of a campaign to help make more people aware of the Pacific’s threatened communities and of the damage our waste is doing to our oceans.
Plastic is the main issue. Fifty years ago, most flotsam was biodegradable. Now it is 90 per cent plastic. In 2006, the United Nations Environment Programme estimated that there were 46,000 pieces of floating plastic in every square mile of ocean. With its stubborn refusal to biodegrade, all plastic not buried in landfills – roughly half of it – sweeps into streams and sewers and then out into rivers and, finally, the ocean. Some of it – some say as much as 70 per cent – sinks to the ocean floor. The remainder floats, usually within 20 metres of the surface, and is carried into stable circular currents, or gyres “like ocean ring-roads”, says Dr Boxall. Once inside these gyres, the plastic is drawn by wind and surface currents towards the centre, where it steadily accumulates. The world’s major oceans all have these gyres, and all are gathering rubbish. Although the North Pacific – bordering California, Japan and China – is the biggest, there are also increasingly prominent gyres in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. Our problems with plastics are only just beginning.
The Pacific Garbage Patch had been predicted as early as the late Eighties but it was only formally discovered in 1997 by Charles Moore, an American yacht-racing captain sailing home across the North Pacific from a competition in Hawaii. He noticed a large amount of debris in the centre of the gyre, and together with the oceanographer, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, formulated the idea of the Eastern Garbage Patch. Other research revealed a secondary patch to the West, and these two together constitute the Great Pacific Patch, located roughly between 135-155°W and 35-45°N. In 1999, Moore followed up his initial findings with a report showing that there was eight times as much plastic as plankton in the North Pacific. And there is a lot of plankton.
The image of a great floating mound of trash, though evocative, can be misleading. Dr Boxall says: “People imagine it as a kind of football pitch of rubbish you can go and walk on – it’s not like that.” As most of the plastic has been broken down into tiny particles, floating beneath the surface, it is impossible to photograph from aircraft or satellites, or even really to see until you are right in its centre. As a result, it is difficult to convey the grave danger this 100 million tons or so of rubbish – and counting – presents. This is where the Plastiki – named after Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki project in 1947 – comes in. Its crew of six is being skippered by the rising star of British ocean sailing, Jo Royle, 29. Ms Royle is everything you could want at the figurehead of your mission: blonde, vivacious and – behind a Lancastrian burr that survived her upbringing in Devon – a passionate environmentalist. She seems unfazed about sailing slap bang into the middle of the watery skip of the world.
“I can’t wait to get there,” she says. “Being in the middle of the ocean puts you back in your place – if you’re not responsive, you don’t survive. It makes you think hard about how you consume.”
However, she readily concedes that it is easy for the layman to ask: “So what?” Some might be tempted to argue that the rubbish has to end up somewhere, and that the ocean is no worse than landfill. Herein lies the main danger: plastic does not biodegrade, but when exposed to sunlight it photo-degrades, breaking down into smaller and smaller particles, and finally to “nurdles”, the industry name for the tiny grains that are the building blocks of most modern plastics. These tiny particles are not harmful on their own, but they are very absorbent, and soak up waterborne toxins, such as pesticides and cooling agents. These nurdles, now saturated in poisons, are eaten by filter-feeders at the very bottom of the food chain, and then make their way up it.
The scale of the toxin problem is unknown. Although plastics have now been around for a century, their use has only been really widespread for 50 years. Also, the threat is not only from food – marine extracts are used in countless other products too: particularly cosmetics. Since there are so many possible routes for toxins from these plastics to enter our food chain, there has yet to be an in-depth scientific study of their possible effect on humans. But these particles are certainly killing marine life: the UN estimates that more than one million birds and 100,000 mammals die every year from plastics – by poisoning, entanglement and choking. There are also studies under way investigating the possible connection between a rise in fertility problems and cancers, and the proliferation of plastic in the ocean.
The solution is equally confounding – there is just so much junk. Most experts agree that the real change needs to come above ground, from people taking more responsibility for their dumping.
As Ms Royle says: “The four worst-offending plastics – carrier bags, bottle-tops, bottles and styrofoam – are some we could easily do without, with a bit more thought. It’s just about making the effort to change our habits: not getting chips in a styrofoam container, reusing carrier bags – small things.”
There are some – led by the renowned American environmentalist and National Geographic Explorer-at-large Sylvia Earle– who think that we should simply try not to use plastics at all. Ms Royle dismisses this approach: “Plastic is a part of our world, and it’s hugely important.”
Others would like the US government to embark on an operation to clean the ocean manually, using tankers to retrieve the plastic, which could then be used as fuel.
“I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” says Ms Royle. “It would take a tremendous amount of resources to sweep the ocean. If you then burn the plastic, you create a lot of black carbon dioxide, which pollutes the atmosphere. I think the solution has to come from the shore.” She points out that San Francisco, the city closest to the Great Pacific Patch, has successfully implemented policies to stop people using wasteful plastics. “If they can do it, so can we. We just need to stop all this dumb usage.”
Dr Boxall is decidedly less optimistic: “There is nothing we can do,” he says. “It’s too big. It’s here to stay. It’s like nuclear waste. Even an oil spillage, disastrous as it is, eventually breaks down. Plastic doesn’t. We’ve simply got to become better about how we dispose of waste.”
The Plastiki team hopes its voyage can make a difference, however small. But until something drastically changes – particularly in developing countries, such as China and Brazil – the ocean will continue to bear the brunt of our wasteful ways with plastic. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and its growing imitators around the world, will continue to sprawl.
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2010
These are both critical environmental issues. That need immediate attention. One thing overlooked by many, when faced with these looming crises, is overpopulation. We absolutely must reduce the number of people on this Earth, or it will be done for us, by catastrophic means. But, in the bigger picture, changing our spiritual paradigms, about what is really valuable, and right. Do profits for corporations matter more than the health of the planet and it's future carrying capacity for human beings? If the profit motive was removed or regulated strongly enough in different areas, energy, and transportation, for instance, healthier alternatives would be developed and implemented faster. Remember what the deregulation of the energy sector brought California (think Enron) from 2000-2005? Rolling blackouts and higher prices brought about by corporations manipulating the power grid, and deliberately holding back at certain times. Then lying about it. Is that the system that is going to give us the renewable energy network we need to reduce CO2 and methane emissions?
How long can we continue to live under a system that is "out of balance"? Cheers.
p.s. we'll go more into our future vision of 2040 North America over the next few weeks and months.
