Is It Time to Mess with Mother Nature?

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Take the case of California’s celebrated sequoias. New studies resulting from decades of research show that giant sequoia saplings are thriving less robustly in the warming central Sierra Nevada. Should officials in Sequoia National Park build sapling greenhouses? Should they install sprinkler systems around the great sequoia monarchs? Or do they prepare a new habitat farther north, removing other species to make space? Should such moves even be contemplated, given the still-fledgling nature of predictive climatology?

And what of the rest of the trees in the West—the ones doomed to die from drought, fire, and beetle infestation?

Scientists studying forest diebacks say one response might be to thin forests so that individual trees are hardier and more beetle-resistant. Other controversial ideas include intensive breeding and genetic engineering to create insect-resistant tree species, combined with the aggressive use of herbicides and pesticides.

Wildlife managers have long believed that local plant species should be kept genetically pure. But climate change may ultimately call for a sophisticated type of wildlife gardening in which heat-loving southern plant species are brought north and encouraged to crossbreed with cold-loving cousins.

Helping plants and animals migrate north isn’t just a matter of leasing fleets of flatbed nursery trucks. Many species under threat aren’t easy to dig up and put in a pot. Soil microorganisms, fungi, butter­flies, and other small creatures critical to the functioning of ecosystems may also find their traditional homes unlivable. Assisting species migration would mean setting aside broad swaths of wild land to provide an uninterrupted pathway north for entire habitats.

Already the nonprofit Nature Conservancy is considering buying land and ecological easements to create north-south habitat-migration superhighways. Doing this on any sort of meaningful scale, however, would require making the preservation of American grasses, trees, and rodents an expensive national priority.

Putting America on this sort of ecological wartime footing—to prepare for an environmental future that nobody can fully predict—is likely to be a hard sell in Washington. Almost as difficult will be convincing the environmental community to abandon a hard-won national consensus about what it means to preserve the natural world.

Excerpted from High Country News(Feb. 4, 2008), an award-winning newsmagazine that covers the West’s communities and natural resource issues. Subscriptions: $37/yr. (24 issues) from Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428; www.hcn.org.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print